You (23 page)

‘Cecilia, can you see me after the class?’ he had said on one of three occasions, as he did to other students, fulfilling one of her most repetitive fantasies, and even then, as she waited for a relief teacher dashing in with an enquiry and stood behind a classmate whose essay was being returned, she had known that she was storing details for a scene that would be replayed during the droughts that would follow.

‘I have a free period on Friday after lunch,’ he said, tapping his pen, appearing to be studying his register before he closed it. ‘I can spend it in the gardens.’

And in the pearlised light of winter at Elliott Hall, she understood at some level that youth carried her, that something in her flexible spine, her legs, her skin, her enthusiasm, was a primitive calling card, and that despite all the periods of self-hatred, the stuttering and blushing, she could at least intermittently radiate charm.

Then after those almost maddeningly rich interludes of dialogue and brushed skin, he would become merely her teacher for stretches – ten days, two and a half weeks even – passing her in the corridor in conversation with a colleague and ignoring her; glimpsed consulting Elisabeth, or stacking essays on his desk without glancing at her. She always felt that she had failed to control the situation effectively: that if she had taken a certain action, or said something, or not said something else, or been an entirely different person altogether, that he would come to her; that her own failure to act was allowing him to slip from her grasp. And so he went about his daily business. Just give me a
sign
, she begged him silently. She hurt her own flesh, punishing herself, and failed to work and sleep. She talked to him, without ever stopping, in her mind. She accepted crumbs.

Cecilia now shuddered. Yet it turned her on, still, that image of a girl and an older man: some remnant of it buried in her brain, hardwired beneath the resistance. Ari was her age; she had had brief relationships before him with men who were both older and her contemporaries; but it was that notion, that dangerous power differential that somehow remained her template for excitement, and combined with the clandestine nature of her affair, it possessed an intensity that had never been repeated. She was the one selected. However terrible its ramifications, there was some aspect she returned to, a time of extraordinary exhilaration that had formed her. It was, she thought, to do with more than age and power. It was to do with being picked out. Yet the truth was that she had been chosen and not chosen.

Eighteen

March

Cecilia decided to drive to St Anne’s early that Monday afternoon while Romy was attending a rehearsal. Feeling some doubts, she left Ruth in Izzie’s care. Izzie’s storm cloud of blackish hair was perfectly framed by the dark-red and green clothes she was wearing, and she seemed restless, and glanced out of the window. Ruth, wearing a dress that clung to her compact pot of a tummy, a row of badges attached just below its neckline, sat and knitted a scarf.

‘That’s beautiful,’ said Cecilia, and went and kissed Ruth again.

‘It’s got holes,’ muttered Ruth.

‘It’s lovely,’ said Cecilia. ‘I’ll be back before supper. Don’t stuff yourselves. Or only on
healthy stuff
,’ she added, parodying herself.

‘Yes, Ma,’ said Izzie, who was hazily friendly and smelled of cigarette smoke. She had settled immediately into her comprehensive in Ashburton, swiftly finding friends and smoking companions, while Romy embraced the culture of diligence at St Anne’s. Ruth, Cecilia worried, spent much time at the primary school in Widecombe sitting on a step where a beetle lived.

‘Phwoargh, you look sexy, Ma,’ Izzie called out.

Ruth blushed.

A dead badger lay rotting on the verge. Cecilia had, changing several times, dressed in the clothes she would have worn in London for a work meeting, out of self-protection and a need to prove herself, and she had not made an appointment so that he would have no warning. Already the idea of Ari meeting him at a future parents’ evening filled her with an uncharacteristic instinct for subterfuge.

The bleached flickering of the hedges above her gave way to glimpses of river beneath oak woods, and an image came to her. She couldn’t help it. It was a photograph in her mind. She had so few. What I remember, she thought, is a hand. It was as small and peaked as a button mushroom.

She walked nervously around St Anne’s, still perceiving the grounds, with the standard adult shift of perception, as notably smaller than she had done in childhood. She saw that Neill House or its present incarnation was no longer his home, the blinds in the flat on the top floor clearly the choice of someone other than Elisabeth Dahl. The formality of the school – the borders and immature pergolas, the signposts in copperplate pointing to the Refectory, to the Beech Walk and other faintly bogus locations – amused her even as purpose increased her pace. The new theatre, in which Romy was supervising scenery, rose richly near the head’s house; a science and technology block stood where boys had once stubbed out their cigarettes; a new clock in an old tower struck the half hour.

After almost fifty minutes, she caught sight of him. She began to shake with a steady tremor. As he walked across the lawn that adjoined the boarding houses, her image of him was realigned with a lurch of recognition. Some remnant of emotion merged with her anger, reminding her of the lost feeling of adoring him, though he was in truth diminished from the figure she had remembered: not so monumentally tall as she had thought, and simply human, and the shine of what she now realised had been comparative youth had gone. She felt relief, even perverse amusement, but she continued to tremble.

He was broader and visibly older, his hair a paleness between white and faded dark blond, his posture straighter, while his eyes, their lashes still contrastingly dark, seemed more blue than grey against the increased colourlessness of his hair. He possessed the suggestion of muscle of an older man who still exercised. At seventeen, she had considered him age itself, yet he had been thirty-six. She now had to adjust her notion of his age. She watched him before he saw her and she remembered how one leg of her tights, her schoolgirl’s black woolly tights, had remained caught with her knickers, still attached to her ankle while they were performing that act that changed things.

He stopped. His mouth opened. He glanced down and looked up at her again.

‘Cecilia,’ he said. Colour washed his skin.

‘Hello,’ she said. He was just a normal man, she thought, almost in confusion.

He stretched out his hands, those square-tipped clean hands, and she lifted hers instinctively to meet his, then pulled them back.

He was wearing a dark-grey jacket with a shirt in a muted cherry colour – the work of Elisabeth Dahl, Cecilia could see with pitying exasperation – and pens lined his pocket, and his briefcase was fuller than it had been in Haye House days, its bulk straightening his arm, and in that moment she felt herself to be immensely tall and composed, her every movement adult and assured as she faced him here.

‘How are you?’ he said, looking her in the eyes as he so rarely had.

‘I’m fine,’ she said steadily.

‘Good –’ He gave her a strained smile.

‘But angry.’ Her voice was rich-toned.

‘Oh –’ he faltered. Blood drained from his skin.

‘Romy,’ she said.

‘. . . Romy,’ he said. ‘Romy Hersch. I wondered –’

‘I can request that you don’t even teach her,’ she said, yet even as she spoke, she knew that he would have no sexual interest in a girl so very much younger. She was, in effect, punishing him for the past.

The sight of girls passing, bearing the blurred lustre and unformed features that she must once have possessed, made her think of herself again then.

‘You have been looking at my daughter,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said, catching her eye and then glancing away. ‘She struck me very quickly as familiar. I wondered – seeing her reminded me of . . . you.’

‘Oh –’ said Cecilia.

‘I couldn’t tell from her surname, but I wondered. Aspects of you came back to me –’ He coughed.

They were silent.

‘I thought I saw you in her,’ he said. ‘It was – strange.’

Cecilia paused. ‘But you’ve made her feel very uncomfortable,’ she said, still maintaining the same cold intonation though she knew that he told the truth.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘I thought, surely you can’t be looking at another girl like – And, you know, if you, anyone, laid a
finger
on her, I’d report them without hesitation.’ She blushed.

He flinched. ‘Of course I would never –’ he said abruptly.

‘Well how should I know?’

‘Cecilia. Cecilia. What do you take me for? Some lecherous old . . . Good God. The girl – your daughter – Romy –’ he paused, lifted his hands ‘– must be forty years younger than I am. I –’ he said, shaking his head. His voice was more raised than she had heard it before.

‘You’re capable of it,’ she said, then paused.

‘Cecilia,’ he said, his colour rising. ‘That is entirely untrue. And you know that.’

He was silent.

‘This is the thing that has haunted me the most,’ he said, his voice faltering.

He raised his head and met her eye. She nodded. The mothers probably fancied him now, she mused; the grandmothers even. She pitied him: the small-town teacher who had never moved on.

‘I sometimes see myself in photos from that time. And I was a child,’ she said. She steadied her breathing. She blinked impatiently. ‘Yes, yes, I was technically of age, but I was in your care: you had power over me.’ She swallowed. ‘I could never perceive you normally. Equally.’ She suddenly wanted to cry. To weep for the first time for years over what she had been through. In her battle against her earlier shyness and vulnerability, she had become determined: demonstrative, expressive, as though any form of reticence or passivity were a sign of weakness to her.

He flinched. ‘I –’ he said, opening his mouth and then closing it again, as though physically unable to speak of the subject.

‘It’s a crime under the Sexual Offences Act.’

‘I’m aware of that,’ he said. ‘I – have had to resolve this with myself. It has been . . . the greatest failure of my professional career.’

‘ “Failure”? Career? Good God, you pompous fool,’ she said. ‘It was a
failure
in so many more ways than that to me.’ She was trembling.

‘I’m sure, I’m sure. I’m sure. It was unforgivable. I’ve tried to apologise to you or explain, but I feel I never have entirely. You –’

‘You were married. You were twenty years older. You had power over me,’ she said.

He looked at the ground, then back up at her, his mouth a set line. He breathed slowly.

‘Did I – did you –’ he said, colouring. ‘Did you feel I
forced
you?’

‘No,’ she said. She shook her head. ‘Definitely not. I wanted to sleep with you. I wanted to be with you.’

His shoulders sagged with palpable relief. His breathing was faintly more audible, his fringe now a sparser fall. He whose every impulse, desire and mistake had once determined her own happiness was an ageing country teacher, and she felt precise, almost fiery, an outsider blown into his little world. It made her want to laugh, suddenly, with newly taken power.

‘Oh God, you never could talk about things, could you?’ she said. ‘Sex, love:
emotion
. Too much the uptight English gentleman. But not too uptight to have an affair with a schoolgirl.’

He moved with his old characteristic quarter-rotation of the head, his features still immobile.

‘You are very angry about this,’ he said in a low voice.

‘Because teachers should not sleep with their pupils, and then expect –’

‘I have never again – never again.’

‘You’ve never seduced a pupil again? I doubt that very much.’

‘Never,’ he said.

‘You’ve been faithful ever since?’

He hesitated.

She nearly spoke. She stopped herself.

‘Once – twice.’ He looked up.

‘It’s all right,’ she said impatiently. ‘No one can hear you. Your
wife
won’t overhear you.’

‘I understand – believe me, I understand this anger. There have been years . . . when I’ve wondered, regretted. Sincerely regretted. But you were the only one.’

‘Really? I really do find that hard –’

‘Truly,’ he said emphatically. ‘There have been a couple – two – other brief, brief . . . but never with a pupil. You have my word.’

‘I –’

She said nothing.

He coughed.

‘Why is your daughter here?’ he said.

‘Because she wanted to come here. Because I had to move back. Because my mother is ill. I need to be here near her. My – my partner, boyfriend: there’s no good word for that; he has a job here from October.’ She heard the uncharacteristic coldness of her voice as she spoke.

‘Your mother –’

‘Yes, my mother.’