by Patrick Gale
As Alice finally wandered off and began to amuse herself, Rhoda felt a chill breeze across her heart and suffered an insidious fancy that her life was no more than an unimportant fiction and that any instant an impatient hand would turn the page and she and her crossness and her compendium of facts and her lack of charm would be gone.
She resolved to be a sweeter sister, at least for what remained of the summer.
SAVING SPACE
‘Is this place taken?’
‘No. Not at all.’
Although the church porch was quite empty, he instinctively rose slightly and slid along on the stone bench to make room for her. Shyness had become a philosophy with him. Throughout their marriage, his wife had always talked to strangers for him, filling the air with words enough for two. Since her death he had developed tactics for evading conversation. On a train or aeroplane or in a dentist’s waiting room, he would read or summon up an appearance of such profound concentration as to offer a mute rebuke to any who might think to interrupt his chain of thought. Formalized exchanges with waiters or ticket sellers were easily got through but he had learned to dread the formless conversation of strangers; one never knew where it might lead.
Settling back on the bench, he faced slightly away from her, towards the closed church door. He had not thought to bring a book and clutched only a cushion. His wife had always said that part of the fun of concerts at Trenellion was the lack of seat reservations. Places had to be reserved with cushions, an hour before each festival concert began. This task had always fallen to his wife, who relished the conversations she initiated while queuing and would season each interval in the concert with pinches of information she had gleaned.
‘That one there. In the purple. On her second marriage. He’s a bone-cracker from St Tudy.’
‘See that one? No. Over there by the organ bench. With the funny teeth? Three children in the orchestra this year. Just imagine. Three! Wife not musical at all, apparently. Odd how that happens sometimes. Like vicars with wives who don’t do flowers.’
This was his first time back since her death. For four summers in a row he had preferred to let the cottage throughout the season and stay put in Barrowcester, weathering the heat and the tourists. This year, however, his teenage granddaughters had expressed a wish to learn to surf. He had been perfectly willing to let his son and his family have the place to themselves but had been hectored into coming too. His daughter-in-law, who worked as a bereavement counsellor in her spare time, accused him of avoiding memories.
‘They’re happy memories,’ he said. ‘Why should I want to avoid them?’
So he had come, clinging at least to the independence his own car afforded, and found his quiet, seaside cottage turned into a kind of purgatory. The bathroom was rarely free when he needed it, the radio had always been tuned away from Radio 3 when he turned it back on, his son kept cornering him with grotesque expressions of hangdog sympathy, his daughter-in-law had a way of ruining perfectly good food by cooking it with fashionable herbs that all smelt more or less of tomcat, and his granddaughters, tall, tanned, muscular creatures like athletes from a Nazi propaganda film, only with less manners, persisted in holding open house to all manner of nouveau-louche youth they attracted on the beach.
The festival’s fortnight of nightly concerts was proving his salvation. Playing on the family’s aversion to classical music, he bought a fistful of single tickets, cheap at the price, and escaped every afternoon at five-thirty to wait at the front of the queue. He then enjoyed a reassuringly plain, unvarying picnic of boiled eggs, pork pies, tomatoes and red wine before the concert and returned home after it able to face his son’s patronage and granddaughters’ partying with a measure of equanimity. There were just three concerts to go, three more nights of sanity after which he would make good his escape.
‘Excuse me.’
She was a young-old girl, hair in slides, in an ill-fitting floral frock. From its dusty quality and fifties style, it might have come from one of the charity shops he gathered the young now frequented.
‘Yes?’
‘I know it’s an awful cheek but would you mind taking this and bagging a seat for me?’ She held out a cushion as faded as her dress, saw his hesitation. ‘It’s just that I so want a good seat but I ought to be helping in the car park.’
‘Oh. Yes. Of course.’ He took the cushion and was charmed by her smile. Music student, he thought. Nice, old-fashioned kind of girl. The sort who would play the viola from choice.
He saved her a seat across the aisle from him, so she would not feel bound to make grateful conversation later on. He looked out for her as he ate his solitary picnic but the only car park attendants he saw were girls like his granddaughters, in shorts, sharing a bottle of wine and making fun of drivers who disliked reversing. Perhaps she had chosen to guard the lay-by, a solitary job.
He grew mildly anxious as the church filled and still she failed to appear. When a festival official came to stare at the offending, sought-after space and he explained it was for a car parker, the cushion was briskly whisked away.
‘She can stand at the back like the rest of us,’ the official said and gave the seat to a tall man with a cough.
Worried, he looked for her in the interval after the first piece, a jubilant Bach motet, but the people standing at the back were unfamiliar. Then he reflected that her face was so quiet he would probably look straight through her if he saw her again. He gave himself over to the pleasures of music and thought nothing more of it.
That night he could not sleep. His room felt airless and seemed haunted by a sweet smell whose source he could not place.
The next concert was chamber music – two string quartets and an obscure Swiss piece involving trombones. The crowd would not be large, therefore, but chamber concerts tended to involve extra competition for a pew with a view, so he came early and once again found himself one of the few people in the porch. He remembered to bring a book as defence, a guide to seventeenth-century bench ends.
‘Excuse me?’
A middle-aged woman with a defeated air, she had on a oatmeal-coloured trouser suit of the kind he recalled his wife wearing under Heath. He was irritated at the interruption but no sooner met her eye than he felt oddly protective towards her.
‘Yes?’
‘I wonder if I could rely on you to save a space for me with this.’
He felt one of the momentary qualms that had become so frequent since he became a widower; did he know her? He had never been good at remembering people, especially women. This was partly his wife’s fault, of course, because she remembered absolutely everyone and, like an ambassador’s private secretary, would second-guess when he was at a loss and would discreetly murmur a name in his ear as an unfamiliar face approached. Matters weren’t helped by the way Trenellion drew on such a shallow pool socially that concerts were full of men and women of a similar age and type. The women tended to be nicely weather-beaten, gardening, dogwalking sorts with unfussy, undyed hair, many of whom looked remarkably alike to his eyes.
‘It’s my mother, you see,’ the woman continued. ‘I can’t leave her for long. I mean I can, obviously, for the concert, but the friend who’s mummy-sitting won’t arrive until half-past.’
‘Of course,’ he told her and smiled in case he did know her. ‘I’ll do my best.’
He saw the way other people in the queue glared at him as he took the old cushion off her. Queue-bargers, they were thinking, quislings, but their glares hardened his resolve. His wife’s mother passed her last eight years in their spare room. He knew what it cost to ask for help.
Sure enough, the audience was not large, but the seat he had saved her beside him was put at threat by a lively clutch of people who expressed a wish to sit by their friends.
‘Tell you what,’ said their ringleader. ‘We’ll sit and chat till she gets here and then when she comes we can all bunch up.’
He was on the point of saying that the pews only sat four in any comf
ort when he thought he recognized one of the group as a schoolfriend of his son. Inhibited, he fell to reading programme notes and let them annex the pew. The later the woman was, the wilder his pledges to himself, until he reached the point of being prepared to give up his seat for her. She never returned, however, and her cushion went from being merely squeezed to being sat upon by a stranger. Perhaps the mother had taken a turn for the worse, he thought.
The trombone piece proved surprisingly beguiling.
Driving home, dazzled by headlamps in his rearview mirror, he could not rid himself of the sense that he was not alone in the car. Even with the window wide, the sweet smell in his room was more powerful than ever. Ridiculously unnerved, he stayed up to party with the granddaughters and their ghastly friends and woke in an armchair in the small hours with a crick in his neck and a strange dog on his lap that showed its teeth when he made to move.
The final concert of the season, a Mozart triple bill, drew a huge crowd, far more than could fit in the church. Many would content themselves with lolling against tombstones near the open doors. Even leaving the cottage at five-thirty he found the end of the queue outside the porch already. He drew up a plastic chair like the others but kept himself aloof from the prevailing Dunkirk spirit with the aid of J.T. Blight’s Churches of West Cornwall.
‘Excuse me.’
One could see at a glance she was frail, with legs like matchsticks and a shakiness to the hand that grasped the cushion. She began to explain that she had promised to collect a friend but he cut her short, taking the cushion from her with a smile, won over by a nostalgic waft of Yardley’s English Lavender.
He moved with low cunning and secured two of the best seats in the house. He took the precaution of cutting his picnic short, stinting on the red wine so as to be back at their cushions in good time. He defended her place from all comers. When, at the eleventh hour, the chorus and orchestra already in place, an imperious woman in black satin said, ‘I really must ask you to give up that seat. Seven-thirty is the absolute cut-off point for reservations and we still have a queue,’ his reaction took him by surprise.
‘It’s my wife,’ he told her. ‘She is coming, she’s desperate to, but she’s very ill you see and can’t queue for long. She’ll be here any second, I’m certain of it.’
To his amazement the woman melted and was almost placatory. ‘Of course she will,’ she said. ‘That’s quite all right.’
He realized to his horror that she had been a friend, if not quite an intimate, of his late wife and plainly thought he had lost his reason to grief. Shamefaced, he turned swiftly to face the front again, praying no one else had overheard his words who knew the truth of the matter and might report the story back to his son.
As the conductor swept through the applause to his podium and still the old woman had not appeared, he noticed her cushion for the first time. It was a sun-bleached affair in dog-worn chintz. An honourable, holiday cottage sort of cushion, that spoke of long afternoons and sweet, familiar pleasures. The same cushion he had taken from strange, female hands the night before and the night before that.
Instinctively he withdrew his hand from it and sat to one side, giving it space.
‘As some of you may realize,’ the conductor was saying, ‘tonight’s performance is dedicated to Betty Pearson, who cheerfully dubbed herself spinster of this parish and was for four decades a crucial, modest, background figure in keeping the festival ticking over. She died last week. Dear Betty, we know you’re listening. This one’s for you.’
As the overture to Così bubbled around them, he became aware of the smell again, the sweet smell that had twice invaded his bedroom. He heard the unmistakable rustle of cellophane and the muffled clunk of happily sucked boiled sweet bumping tooth. No one else seemed to be bothered by it and before long the music had cleared all other thoughts and sensations from his head. Hours later, however, rinsing out his picnic things, he was so startled that he stumbled back and sat on the kitchen stool, tap still running.
In the small Tupperware box where he had left no more than an uneaten tomato and some salt in a small twist of foil, someone had tucked an unopened bag of barley sugars.
PETALS ON A POOL
Edith was only at the festival because of an administrative error. It was the other Edith Chalmers they’d wanted. She knew it, her agent knew it and so – rapidly – did the festival organizers but two decades of such slights at last gave rise to a small demonstration of bloody-mindedness and she affected not to have understood, which duly shamed everyone else into saying nothing.
She was the first Edith Chalmers. She wrote quietly devastating studies of a quiet sort of English character: thwarted people too well bred to fight, people who numbered priests among their friends, people who not only noticed split infinitives but found them morally troubling. The other Edith Chalmers, who had no such qualms, wrote bestsellers about illegitimate girls of no account who rose to positions of tediously itemized wealth and high status. She only bothered to call herself Edith P. Chalmers for her first offering, To Boldly Sin. The sales of this eclipsed all those of her namesake in less than two weeks and the P. was dropped from the second edition. It was the kind of effrontery that she celebrated in her heroines.
The first Edith naïvely thought her publishers might sue but they merely resorted to a suitably quiet sort of branding, thereafter announcing her as Edith Chalmers (Author of Sad Cypresses) or Edith Chalmers (Author of A Corner Table).
‘You’ve been invited to the Bali Book Festival,’ her agent said warily. ‘All expenses paid. They want you for a spotlight session and then a panel on romantic fiction. Shall I let them down gently?’
Edith would usually have sighed and said yes but she thought of her late best friend Margaret, who had written whodunits about a dog breeder and said yes to everything. Margaret was a tireless attendee of readers’ days and book festivals and regarded each and every train ticket, hotel bed and feast of mini-bar chocolate as just compensation for the failure of her publishers to see that her lengthy backlist took fire. Margaret remained a shameless freeloader until her recent death. Edith missed her keenly.
‘No,’ she told her agent. ‘Say yes for a change. Tell them I’d be delighted.’
She assumed the organizers would find a way to cancel once they’d seen their mistake but perhaps, being oriental, they were too strenuously polite. They e-mailed gushingly to say how wonderful, what fans they were and so on. Then they e-mailed again, rather more coolly, to say how unexpectedly difficult they were finding it to gather sufficient stock of her titles for the festival bookshop. They sent her aeroplane ticket with nothing more enthusiastic attached than a compliment slip. It was only an economy ticket – the other Edith lived in a tax haven and passed much of her life in first class – but this Edith was slight and would be perfectly comfortable. It would be a free holiday with only a little work attached, it would be interesting and it would offer some correction to the disparity in her and her namesake’s fortunes.
As she fought through the airport crowds into the stifling evening air of Denpasar, Edith faced humiliation by taxi driver. Ranged along a crowd barrier was a three-deep line of drivers, all holding cards with the names of the passengers they were there to collect. She could see her name nowhere but some of the writing was small. She unearthed her glasses then walked along the line squinting at the names, a process made no easier by the way each driver waggled his card as she drew close, blurring its lettering. She walked up and down four times, melting in the heat, bitterly regretting her decision to come, and was at last reduced to perching on her sagging suitcase, in full view of all the drivers, to wait.
Her name appeared at last, wildly misspelt, behind all the others, waggled by a driver who explained, entirely without apology, that they had still to wait for someone else.
‘Might I sit in the car at least?’ she asked but he only smiled and repeated,
‘We have to wait, lady. Very important guest.’
&
nbsp; This proved to be a formidable journalist from Hong Kong, Lucinda Yeung. Lent height by heels, soignée to the point of agelessness, she made Edith conscious of the crumpled hours she had just passed in travelling. She had a set of immaculate suitcases, of a shade that toned with her cream suit, and left their driver to cope with them while she consulted her little kid-bound agenda and quizzed Edith. As soon as she’d ascertained that she wasn’t the other Edith Chalmers, she relaxed and confessed to having ‘stitched her up once’. She broke off to grill the driver in quickfire Bahasa then turned back with a feline smile. ‘Turns out we’re staying in the island’s best hotel,’ she said. ‘You’re very lucky. The drive will take around thirty-five minutes. Do you mind if I conduct a little business? I’m chairing several events and I’m way behind as always.’
Edith said that would be quite understandable and Ms Yeung spent the rest of their blissfully air-conditioned journey on her telephone, greeting a succession of authors with virtually identical praise for their latest books and the bluntly delivered instruction that they were not to turn up for their events with prepared speeches.
‘The public comes to see you interact, not reading your homework. And they don’t want readings either; they can read your book themselves once you’ve convinced them to buy it.’
The end of each call was softened by some variant of the praise that had opened it and some regally personal touch, an enquiry about a garden or husband or pet made after a rapid glance at the notes she had made alongside the names and addresses in her agenda. A call completed, a name was scratched off a list. Ms Yeung’s professionalism was so astonishing it did not occur to Edith to be offended or to make any effort not to listen in.
The last author was dealt with as they finished passing through Ubud, roughly five minutes before their arrival at the hotel. Ms Yeung put away her agenda and gave Edith her full, interested attention.
