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‘How is –’

‘She has had cancer.’

‘Oh, Dora. What bad news. Dora. I’m really very sorry. How is she?’

‘She’s having radiotherapy. As you’d expect.’

‘Please do – please send my very best to Dora. What a very good person.’

‘Yes.’

‘I was always full of admiration for her. I know Elisabeth still sees her sometimes but it’s been some time since I have – She didn’t tell me –’

He was silent.

‘Are your brothers there to help?’ he then said awkwardly.

‘No,’ she said. ‘The youngest sometimes.’

‘You’re living back – back there.’

‘Wind Tor, yes. I bought out one brother’s share, pay rent to the other two. Dora’s next door.’

He breathed heavily. ‘Congratulations,’ he said then, but without warmth, ‘on your novel.’

‘Thank you,’ said Cecilia.

‘I read about it.’

She paused. ‘It’s . . . absurd you’re here,’ she said.

He inclined his head. ‘I thought you might have heard.’

‘How could I know?’ she said.

‘Well,’ he said, and he smiled. ‘There’s a grapevine. Now that you live in a
little one-eyed, blinking sort o’ place
.’

‘Don’t do that,’ she said quickly. ‘Don’t quote at me. It reminds me of – Haye House.’

‘Yes I know,’ he said. He looked at the ground. ‘You know that I’m – truly sorry, don’t you?’

She drew in her breath. She turned to him. ‘I don’t know,’ she said finally. She looked at her watch. ‘I have to go.’

He was momentarily silent. ‘I have a meeting of the English department.’

Cecilia nodded. She left him standing with his briefcase beneath the oak at St Anne’s and with her heart racing she collected her daughter and drove back to her work and her family and a house that contained a past that was unknown to her children.

Nineteen

March

Shaking as she chatted to Romy on the way home, Cecilia returned in her mind with a still-queasy lurch to the moment she had suspected she was pregnant.

She had been out food shopping with her mother and Barnaby one Friday night, noting in the metal strips below the supermarket shelves how blotched she was beneath rain-frizzed hair. Her very posture seemed bowed by alternating despair and euphoria. Her period was late.

They walked up the small high street towards the car carrying their bags, heads lowered in drizzle, and the headmaster’s latest girlfriend, a Belgian dancer, rapped on the window of the wine bar favoured by Haye House staff. She beckoned, projecting her beam through the glass, and as they were ushered with little choice into the bar, Cecilia saw that he was there. The Dahls were sitting beside Peter Doran with Mike, an art teacher who had studied with Elisabeth Dahl, and Serena, the mother of three of Mike’s children.

‘Dora, my dear,’ said Elisabeth, turning. She created a space on the settle.

‘We must be quick,’ said Dora, resisting and then sitting back in that place of dripping red candles and Liberty prints.

‘How enormous that child has become,’ said Elisabeth, gesturing at Barnaby, who snored, his curling ‘M’ of a baby’s mouth glimmering rhythmically.

‘More wine,’ called a drunk Peter Doran with parodic lordliness. ‘What kind of hostelry is this? A grotty dive. I require two more flagons now our music mistress has appeared.’

Cecilia shuddered. Mike tipped back beer from a pewter mug; James Dahl’s sleeves were rolled up, his hair less orderly than it was at school, his jacket hanging from a settle arm.

‘The bloody taxes are prohibitive,’ he was saying as Cecilia sat down, and he raised his eyes and nodded at her, his fringe falling over his forehead. He drank. ‘And basic socialist principles are there to claw you back if the Treasury doesn’t . . . How are you, Dora? And – Cecilia.’

‘Happy to be here,’ said Dora.

‘I –’ said Cecilia. She scraped her chair as she pulled it in.

‘You’re a dinosaur, Dahl,’ called out Peter Doran. ‘Fuck the taxman – sorry, Cecilia, and –’ he said, gesturing at Barnaby, ‘– baby – and polish up your avoidance strategies. Exile? Offshore assets? Short trips to Switzerland? I can see you striding around the Matterhorn, James.’

‘You’re shameless, Doran. Try paying normal taxes once you’ve accounted for the nice little spread of properties this charitable foundation owns in Knightsbridge.’

‘I was there the other day,’ said Elisabeth crisply.

‘Why?’ said Dora.

‘I felt a Harvey Nichols recce was required.’

Cecilia’s skin burned. She attempted to react, looked up, formed expressions that implied understanding, emitted a breathy laugh that elicited no response, interjected the occasional ‘Yes!’ and ‘No!’ that were ignored beyond a slight turn of a head in her direction, and then pretended to be too busy studying the feather motif on the table’s oilcloth to listen. James Dahl took no notice of her. Subtly, she tilted a knife towards herself to check the inflamed patch of skin above her mouth while the adults discussed mortgage relief and educational policy and art world friends of Elisabeth’s with drunken flippancy, interspersing their theories with semi-obscured sexual innuendo. Even her own mother entered this adult world, its codes unknown to Cecilia, who floundered like a retarded infant in her itchy skirt, her knicker gusset pressing against her, every minute creeping round on the forged-iron clock wittily constructed of bicycle parts. She waited for the tug of her period, her nipples sore. She was a child in a woman’s body, her breasts curving grotesquely to mimic adulthood while her mind was unable to produce a single word of interest. A fear leapt at her and subsided.

‘Thank the Lord it’s Friday,’ said James. He drank more wine and played a card game as he talked.

Elisabeth leant against him, nodding at one of his cards, and he smiled in appreciation as he played it while running his hand down her back.

‘I’ll meet you later by the car,’ Cecilia nearly said to Dora, but even that one sentence was impossible to say in this company, catching and halting in her throat. She was only capable of whispering it into her mother’s ear. She rehearsed the words time and time again as she stared at a candle; she arranged her bag on her seat in infinitesimal movements so that she could pick it up when she left without swinging it into a flame. She waited, but it was too noisy or too briefly silent to speak. She could say nothing.

And then later, in Elliott Hall gardens in late spring, when she had avoided thinking about the absence of her period through panicking denial, she had met him and walked along with him.

He smiled at her on the path. He put his hand on her waist – but too high, above its real curve – when they turned the corner where the Madame Isaac Pereire roses grew, and she quivered in response with a small delay in her reaction.

She looked up at this man with his faintly distracted air, his bristling of adult preoccupations, and a realisation came to her as though from nowhere.

‘You’re not ever going to leave her, are you?’ she said.

His hand stiffened. He walked forward slowly.

She pulled away from him.

‘Are you?’ she said. She was suddenly light-headed.

He looked at the ground. She took it all in: his polished brogue, a piece of grass attached with dampness to one side; a frown which aged him; the blossom on the soil between the roses like sodden confetti. She noticed his faint gold stubble, the strong straight bone of his nose. Pain passed over his face.

‘I can’t do that,’ he said.

She heard his words. She refused to hear them. A blanket, almost a smile, came down over her mind.

She made a little noise.

‘How could I?’ he said. His mouth was set in a straight line.

She felt herself tumbling inside. Nausea rolled up her throat and she swallowed it again, breathing its afterburn.

‘You –’ said Cecilia. ‘Please –’ she said, but she could say nothing more.

‘I can’t lose my . . . marriage,’ he said, his voice lowered at the word.

She said nothing.

‘This is my life, my job,’ he said without inflection. ‘My – sons are still at school. You understand that, don’t you? There is no other means of income. Cecilia,’ he said, his breathing uneven.

‘Yes,’ she said. Her mouth was open in a small round hole. ‘No.’

‘I have to apologise. Profoundly,’ he said, pale faced. His eyelashes were soot-coloured in comparison with the pallor. His voice cracked a little. He looked thin, intense, the bones in his face larger. ‘We should –
I
should – never have even considered – never have considered this.’

‘Please –’ she said.

‘You deserve much, much better.’

He looked up at the beech walk. He looked down at her.

‘Do you want me to resign?’ he said. He touched her sleeve very briefly.

‘No,’ she said. She shook her head.

‘There –’ he said, looking up at the trees, taller still in his greater height as he tilted his head, ‘there is no justification . . . I’m – grievously – to blame. I’m deeply sorry.’

She stared at him, her mouth distorting, and then walked away before he witnessed her tears. She knew then, just before she reached the arch that led to the courtyard: she knew as though she knew that she was dying: she was pregnant.

Dora had noticed Cecilia’s changing shape in her last term of school, even marvelled at the fullness of breast, at odds with her increasing slightness. She noticed at the most subconscious level that Cecilia’s curves resembled those of pregnancy, and her mind had scrawled into possibilities; she wondered about Gabriel Sardo – they laughed, those two; they colluded and chattered at night quite audibly – but she dismissed the notion, her naïve daughter with her crush on a teacher and her hours dedicated to books the last imaginable candidate for teenage pregnancy. It had been several more weeks until Cecilia had finally come to her and allowed her to know.

And all these years later, Dora chose not to remember that time if she could avoid it. It helped no one to dwell on it, she thought, yet she lived with sadness.

‘What’s done is done,’ she had said to Cecilia so many times, hearing her own inflexibility. It was as though she couldn’t stop herself saying it, though she hated herself for it every time the words rose like scum to her mouth. ‘What’s done is done.’ She wished she had never done what she had done.

Dora had feared cancer all her life, assuming with a weary acceptance that she, like so many others, would one day find a lump. The only way in which it seemed destined to surprise her was in its timing, and she had been sixty-six, her fear beginning to drift into a blurry unease about strokes and osteoporosis, when cancer’s fibrous grip on her left breast was detected by mammogram. Even then, after a lifetime of low-pitched dread, it managed to shock her. Surgeons in Exeter removed the lump and lymph nodes from her armpit, despite Cecilia’s protests that she should be operated on in London and stay, for the first time, with the family. But it was too soon. Dora had preferred to live where she was, with what she knew.

She was now seeing an oncologist and counsellor and beginning her radiotherapy, but there was still an uncertainty over one of her lymph nodes and still she would have to wait. She knew that Cecilia would not be here if it were not for the cancer: Cecilia who had largely avoided the area since she had left home. Their reconciliation had been taking place in increments over the years, but it was still partial, so liable to incendiary episodes and periods of guilty recompense. She hardly knew her own grandchildren.

Dora lived a quiet life. She entertained occasional friends there in the little cottage, and she helped with a local children’s string quartet. Sloe gin brewed; chick peas soaked; seedlings grew; the radio played. Her cottage was her refuge, the still point in her life. It was like a miniature version of the house, its ceilings yet lower and its staircase a coiling cranny built for stunted people, labourers centuries dead, its hobbled end wall engorged with weed and foxglove. It could have been as dark as some of the local farms with their tiny parlours and tack rooms but she had endowed it with light and old bleached wood, the children’s paintings framed, the dresser in the downstairs room holding her old paraffin lamp, the cello standing polished in a corner of the bedroom.

Here the lodgers Moll and Flite had once lived, their washing dripping on to flagstones from self-plumbed pipes, their aduki bean trays misted with mould. She remembered the smell of must and Indian bazaars, the offerings of hibiscus tea, and the sarongs hung from lintels above listing doors. She had made it her own with her milk jugs and remnants of antique pine from the Wind Tor House days, her oak chests, baskets and Bannan rugs, and her flowers: vases and jam jars full of flowers in every room. Yet compared with the busy wild years of Wind Tor House, there was a silent passing of days. Only Elisabeth threaded time with brightness.

Now Romy and Izzie and Ruth came in to visit, letting themselves through the gate that led from their own back garden. Dora couldn’t even touch upon the loss of years gone by without their company. They came in with youth’s absolute assumption of welcome, and welcome they were: the red, the dark, the dully fair. They draped themselves, put feet on furniture, scoured the cupboard for biscuits – deliberately casual, knowing their informality to be a benison to an old grandmother – and thus they all happily played their appointed roles with this woman they barely knew but accepted as a family member.