A Sweet Obscurity Read online

  She was swiftly smitten with Giles because he was beautiful, the first truly beautiful man she had known and because he needed her. But she only became emotionally involved when she recognised him as a fellow refugee from disorder, damaged first by his appalling mother, then by Eliza. The moment Dido first appeared, in tights with holes in them and without a sensible coat, the child similarly awakened in her a desire to rescue her from an unregulated life.

  This was odd because, if questioned closely, she would have admitted to being godless and selfish, still enough the refugee for her principal instinct to be self-preservation rather than the succouring of others. When she thought about them however, the anomalies pleased her as small but significant proofs that she had a heart.

  It had occurred to her recently, when obliged to attend a colleague’s wedding and thus made party to the envies and recriminations of single girlfriends on such occasions, that she was happy. It was an astonishing, even risky conclusion to draw but she was happy, she realised, because for the first time in her life she wanted for nothing.

  She had an interesting, fairly well paid job with good benefits, a beautiful, talented lover, an attractive house. She was not married to Giles, but what would marriage have added? They had each seen enough of marriage to know the disorder it could bring. She was not yet a mother either but in a way she was. Dido was in their lives just enough to gratify parenting instincts but not enough to overwhelm with a sense of responsibility.

  When she first encountered Dido’s sharp mind and suspicious nature she saw the temptation to be a wicked stepmother, to begrudge the emotional territory the girl had invaded and to waste no opportunity to highlight Eliza’s deficiencies and undermine her standing. Her heart was snared, however, so she took the other way.

  Dido reminded her so much of herself at that age. She was so cross and plain and funny, her face in a state of awkward transition. She wanted longer hair but became impatient with the effort of keeping it clean and under control so she tended to wear it twisted at random into uneven pigtails, fastened with whatever came to hand: Julia’s scrunchies but also rubber bands or even coloured pipe-cleaners.

  It was a real pleasure to make subtle, flattering changes to her appearance, to buy her clothes and to teach her things. Eliza had no computer so Julia set Dido free on hers before finding her one of her own, encouraging her to explore her creativity (without mess) in the computer’s paint-box and to broaden her horizons through the Internet. Eliza went outside her immediate district so rarely she might as well have been living in a remote village as in London so Julia made a point, when Dido was with them, of arranging regular excursions into town for doses of high and low culture. In a sense she was arming Dido, preparing her for battle and she thought of her as a comrade rather than a stepdaughter. Dido returned the compliment, coming to treat her with the respect and guarded affection she might show an older sister.

  When the three of them went out together Julia was aware, as Giles was not, that they were only playing at being a family. She could see what a good father Giles could make and had no doubt that he watched her with Dido and assessed her in the same way, but it was always a relief to let Dido go again and return to their quietly selfish selves. She secretly loved it when waitresses or sales assistants mistook them for mother and daughter but had no desire to lose her freedom and figure in the chaos of real, blood parenthood.

  Weekends like this one, when Giles took Dido to his mother’s house, left Julia vulnerable to doubt however. She had gone home with him once but had not seen eye to eye with Mrs Easton so had hastily agreed when Giles suggested she might prefer not to go next time. For all her insincere parade of welcoming curiosity, Trudy Easton could not forgive her for not being Eliza, so whenever Giles went to Winchelsea without her, discretion felt ever so slightly like ostracism.

  Weekends on her own in town would have offered any other woman an ideal opportunity to catch up with old friends. Julia had no close friends, however, had never acquired the knack of charming women without arousing their suspicion. Such times tended to begin with a sort of nervous collapsing in on herself, an instinctive grasping at the easy pleasures of chocolate and alcohol. But her habit of control was so ingrained that bad behaviour swiftly gave rise to good. She would devote the rest of her free time to self-maintenance – hair, nails, feet, to self improvement – mugging up on a new client’s repertoire, going to hear old ones perform. Or to snooping.

  In the name of tidying up she had been through most drawers and cupboards in the house but she continued to feel a near-erotic excitement on sliding her hands into the pockets of trousers and jackets Giles had recently worn. Occasionally she would come across a mystery, a photograph of him with someone she did not know, a restaurant bill or some entirely unnamed, unitemised till receipt and would pass the time by chafing at it, feeding her mental itch with supposition.

  She abhorred hoarding and was so instinctive in her throwing out of scraps of paper and old diaries that she routinely had to check herself, to retain those documents the Inland Revenue liked kept. It amazed her how reckless Giles was, not only in the things he kept but in the casualness with which he left them lying about. He had always been especially careless with photographs people gave him. She would find them tucked into coat pockets or muddled up with people’s holiday postcards in the kitchen or they would spring out at her from half-read books in which he had been using them to mark his place.

  Were they married, she sometimes thought, she would have met all these smiling mysteries at their wedding reception, all the ones that mattered. Being what she was, less than wife, more than mistress, she made do with meeting them in dribs and drabs. When introduced she would say something like, ‘No, we haven’t met, but I know you so well from that photograph, the nice one with the sundial,’ partly to break the ice, partly to see a person’s small glow of gratification at knowing themselves remembered and discussed.

  Today was to have been different. She had planned there would be no snooping, no sad hanging around the house in fact. She had plans to take herself into town for lunch at one of the Tates and then, perhaps, unless it seemed a waste of good weather, to an afternoon screening. The trouble with her job was that she saw countless operas and heard five or more recitals a week which rarely left time or energy for plays or films, once a passion of hers. Never mind the good weather, she decided. If she went into town early enough, she could fit in an exhibition in the morning, watch two matinees back to back and still be home in time for supper with Giles and Dido.

  But then Eliza arrived with the dog and the day’s plans uncurled.

  It was so typical of Eliza to think nothing of calling so early. She had that selfishness and one-track mind that came so easily to depressives. It was a squandered ruthlessness, if one thought about it cynically. She was so relentlessly superior, too; whenever they had to meet, usually because of Dido, she managed to make Julia feel not only less clever but, more woundingly, less sensitive and artistic. If a woman found time to brush her hair before answering the door it made her unfeeling. If she took care of herself it meant she could not care for others.

  It was hard to believe Giles’ mother had ever been fond of her. They could have had little in common. Some mothers regarded loving their son’s wives as a necessary but ennobling form of martyrdom. Perhaps now the marriage had collapsed, Trudy continued to support the estranged daughter-in-law out of guilt, believing Giles and his behaviour to be all a mother’s fault? Julia suspected Trudy Easton’s dislike of herself was inevitable even had she been the first and only woman Giles had brought home; it was the gut reaction of one wary, self-created woman for another. Some kindred spirits could not afford to get on.

  Having seen Eliza off, Julia dealt with the dog. She began by throwing on some old clothes and walking into the garden with a spade. But it was July and there was nowhere obvious she could dig a grave without disturbing plants in flower and she had taught herself just enough about gardening to know that
this was the one time not to trouble them. Then irritation seized her. Why should she suddenly play host, sexton indeed, to someone else’s canine corpse? Eliza’s effrontery had been disguised in such tearful ditheriness it had taken a few minutes to sink in.

  She smacked on a pair of rubber gloves, slid the dog – which stank – into a black bin liner then slid two more around that before binding the grisly package with parcel tape. Still gloved, she carried it to the wheelie bin, then remembered there was no collection until midweek. The stink would grow still worse in the heat, even through bags. There would be flies. Worse, Dido might find it.

  She thanked God the chest freezer in the utility room was not particularly full. They were nearing the stewy end of half an organic bullock from Islington Farmers’ Market so she was able to make a few rearrangements and stash the dog at one end where its packaging could not touch even the plastic surrounding something else.

  She slammed shut the lid, clicked the thing onto superfreeze, threw away the tainted gloves then hurried into the lavatory to be sick. After that the house seemed to be full of things that smelled bad – a vase of stagnant flower water, a box of liquefied camembert, a load of washing Giles had forgotten to take out of the machine, her hair which smelled of last night’s second-hand smoke.

  So she stayed home to clean, then to brood, then to eat lunch because vomiting had left her ravenous, then to brood more deeply because, in the name of tidiness, she had finished a bottle of Merlot with her lunch.

  She had not killed the wretched animal so why did she feel as though she had? Experience had immunised her against animal-love. She had grown up in a household where there was always a dog or a cat suffering the incontinence of extreme youth or age, always an infestation of fleas in warm weather, always the lingering smells of ancient teeth, dirty dog beds, the tripe her mother boiled in bulk to save money on tinned feed and the clouds of evil gas this drew from whichever creature ate it. Only the canaries did not smell – there were always two or three canaries – but they made up for the shortfall by showering the carpet with their seed, filling the air with nervous fluttering and scratching sounds and by capping any mechanical or human outburst with their ear-scouring song.

  When Julia met Giles there was no dog in his life. At first. When Carlo had so rudely re-entered it, never walking when he could bound, shaking himself on newly washed walls, chewing, with sinister accuracy, only those shoes that really mattered, she was nearly driven away by the stress he caused her.

  Then something Giles let slip struck home, something light-hearted but flattering, said to the dog in her hearing, about knowing what side his bread was buttered. Carlo, she realised, was just another pitiful refugee from disorder. She had found him a trainer and a walker so that he was too exhausted to be bad. She had borrowed a colleague’s baby gate to confine him to the kitchen and arranged for fortnightly visits from a mobile dog-washing service. The shoe-chewing, the trainer told her, was a sign of respect, even love towards an alpha bitch. Won over, Julia began to admit that he was quite sweet, for a dog. Had he not started to make her sneeze, she would have been sad to see him go.

  She was not superstitious but when she found the pictures they linked with the dog in her mind and made her think of the sudden arrival of the corpse on her doorstep as a bad portent. She truly found the pictures. She was tidying, not snooping, in Giles’ office. It was their office really. She used the computer more than he did. She kept his books and filled out his tax return. But because she had a desk and computer at work and did not want him to feel emasculated, the room was always referred to as his.

  The photographs startled her so badly she had to sit down. She had long made a habit of thinking of her life as unconnected episodes and had lived it so as to minimise the risk of people and events from one section spilling over into another. The pictures before her were as damaging an overspill from her unhappy youth as the dead dog’s stink had been from her childhood.

  Guiltily she hid them back precisely where she had found them. It would not do for Giles to know she knew, not before she had decided how to deal with the situation.

  Then she pictured Eliza, maddeningly, effortlessly pretty, like some Hardy waif in her down-at-heel floral clothes and unwashed hair, and suddenly understood things about her that had mystified her before. Perhaps she should have gone to the cinema after all and watched the wildest piece of escapist nonsense she could find? Its narrative might have provided useful confusion and driven out the storylines now unspooling in her head.

  By the time Giles and Dido returned from Kent, the house was spotless and Julia was composed. But her calm was wafer thin. Helping Dido through their Sunday night ritual, washing and drying her hair, indulging with tongs and mascara the child’s covert desire to be beautiful, she felt burdened by secrets, torn between the urge to love and the cruel impulse to enlighten.

  4

  The steers were ready to be moved. Pearce could always tell at a glance. Often they would tire of a particular field even though there was still plenty of grass for them to crop. There was no point forcing them to stay put or their boredom would register itself as restlessness or destructiveness. In this case they had tried to destroy a water trough. The concrete lid of the ballcock chamber had been cracked through on an earlier occasion. Now one of them must have nudged the two parts around until one of them fell inside, pressing the ballcock hard down and causing a small flood.

  He waded into the muddy puddle, pulled up his overall sleeves, reached into the water, heaved out the piece of concrete slab and set it back in place alongside its neighbour. For now a rock from the hedge would serve to hold the thing in place.

  His mobile rang, startling him. Molly had insisted he buy one after the twin horrors of their father’s death and a character in The Archers being run over by his own tractor. If he left it on its bracket in the tractor cab it enraged her.

  ‘You can’t call an ambulance if you can’t reach the thing, you lummock,’ she had shouted. ‘Pocket. Always in a pocket, okay?’

  It took him a few minutes to find the phone as it was in a shirt pocket, not an overall one. His niece, Lucy, had fiddled with it and changed the ringing tone from a snatch of Mozart to some pop tune he could not name.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘You’ve forgotten, haven’t you?’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Pearce!’

  ‘Half an hour. I’ll be there in half an hour.’

  ‘You know I don’t like leaving her on her own.’

  ‘She’ll be okay for half an hour. We were always on our own at that age.’

  ‘On a farm. Not here. Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in the yard,’ he fibbed. ‘I’m just headed in for a shower.’

  ‘Half an hour. You promise?’

  ‘Promise.’

  He hung up and called the cattle, in the same way his father used to, a wordless shout somewhere between ‘Come on’ and ‘Hiya’. Inquisitive and hopeful, several were already making their way towards him. More lumbered, mooing, round a hedge to join them from the field beyond. As always the burly Angus-Limousin cross was in the lead. As always they followed the eccentric line of a cattle path. He waited, standing on a hedge for a better view, until they were in a close, hard breathing mass below him and he had counted all seventy-two, then he opened the gate.

  They needed no calling through and several soon broke into a short-lived charge. The last one safely through, he doubled back to fix the gate shut with the tangle of barbed wire that looped every gate post on the farm. Then he walked amongst them, leading them as much as driving them to a temporary holding field nearer the house. Looking back he saw the stragglers, one of them with a limp that would need investigating tomorrow, calmly following the cattle path, nose to tail.

  The paths traversed the farm and were a mystery. They did not always offer the most direct route but had been trod down hard by so many generations of animals that they seemed to represent rights of way as fixed in traditio
n as any church way or bridle path. Whereas rabbits or foxes ran at will across open grassland where there was no route trodden out, cattle seemed incapable of moving from field to field without following a track their forefathers had made. At several points a marked wiggle took the path out of true by several feet and every time they would follow it religiously, each wiggling in turn. During the BSE crisis and, more recently, during the last outbreak of foot and mouth, there had been a few weeks when the farm was unstocked. When new animals were introduced to the fields they found the paths immediately and followed them. When grass fields were ploughed up for a few years of other crops – potatoes or barley – then resown with grass, he could have sworn the cattle re-established their path along the same line.

  Odder still, if you walked with your mind on other things you soon looked down to find your boots had found the line of impacted soil a few inches below the level of the more comfortable grass.

  As a boy Pearce had once been taken to a hill above Barrowcester. The purpose had been to admire the view of the cathedral and Tathams, the city’s ancient school, and to examine Iron Age fortifications. His attention had been entirely absorbed however in an old turf maze cut into a flat expanse on the hill’s crest. While the others in the school party had been taking photographs of the distant buildings, he had been occupied with treading out the maze, understanding instinctively how its simple pathways were designed to still and thereby free the busy mind.

  He loved walking with cattle about him. It amused him that such heavy, powerful creatures should be so playful, acting out a grandmother’s footsteps pantomime close behind him, hitching lewd rides on one another’s haunches, occasionally kicking up their heels in sheer joy at a fresh piece of pasture. He liked their warm, beery smell, less pungent than cows, and their reassuring snorts of breath on his hands and back.