You (32 page)

‘What’s she like?’ said Cecilia after a pause.

‘Who? What?’ said Romy.

‘Mrs –
Ms
– Dahl. Is she good? Do people like her?’

‘Oh. Yes,’ said Romy, and turned back to the window. A section of her hair was twisted into a clip that raised it into a discreet beehive which lent her a haughty appearance.

What is it about that bloody woman? Cecilia wanted to ask. What
exactly
is it about her? What quality? What power? How does she influence people?

She stopped herself. She felt irritated and uneasy. Or perhaps, she thought, what she was experiencing was simply age-old jealousy of a rival. She and Elisabeth Dahl had given birth to half-siblings. They were linked in antipathy by that hidden fact. What, she mused, would that frosty and determined woman think if she knew that she was teaching the half-sister of the half-sister of her own sons? Hugh and Robin, she mused, Robin and Hugh, and the flavour of those names recalled a different time. Everything, she thought: everything led her to her lost baby.

That baby, her lips a suckling bow, lived in her mind as a snapshot now turned black and white and crocheted as though it came from a different era. She remembered a little alien, head unbalanced, gazing up at her; she remembered her beauty too, the lock of blue eyes on to hers for seconds before the baby was taken away. Yet she could not grasp the features of her face; all she retained was the knowledge of a gaze.

I say sorry to you, thought Cecilia, staring out of the window. So very sorry. I would do anything in this life to change that.

A buzzard stood on a telegraph pole and flapped away in a soar across the windscreen as she drove past, throwing a shadow. The helper Katya was there on the lane as Cecilia and Romy arrived home. She retreated swiftly at the sound of the car, walking the back way that led to Dora’s cottage, her hair with its green tinge from the water’s copper drifting about her small solid body. New leaf thickened the air. The liquid bubbling of skylarks was high above the thatch.

Cecilia stood in the kitchen with Romy, picked up a cup and put it on the rack by rote.

He would have wanted our child
, she thought, her conversation at Elliott Hall playing past her like a film that hadn’t stopped, and she held on to a section of tongue-and-groove that had always been there at the end of the work surface, Dora’s PVC bags once hanging from its hooks, its varnish layers now toffee dark. The very idea made her stomach plunge. She scrabbled for justification.

A daughter. I’d have loved a daughter more than anything else in this world
, he had said. He had wanted a daughter. The baby she gave to other people.

She should have told him
. They could have brought her up together.

But it was not true, she thought; whatever he said now, it was not true. Was it? Was it?

She had been living in her parents’ house, not an unmarried mothers’-and-babies’ home of an earlier era. She should have acted. She could have turned up at Haye House overtly pregnant and made him do something; she could have begged; she could have demanded, got him sacked, told Peter Doran, kept her baby. She felt she might retch.

She breathed with more effort, warding away nausea. She turned to Ruth. ‘I’m glad Izzie has cooked for you both,’ she said, and she smiled absently at the astonishing mess, the ragged pile of pancakes in maple syrup.

Ari came back from Exeter at half past eight after another meeting with his future department, walking into the sitting room as he would every evening from October. Cecilia jumped as he arrived through the door, as though her thoughts could be read or the effects of her earlier tears seen, and she moved rapidly towards him and kissed him on the mouth, then awkwardly on the temple.

Izzie perched near the fire and Romy sat beside her making notes in pencil on a book, the fireplace so large it had always been perceived as a separate room by children. They were regathered, thought Cecilia, trying to calm herself by focusing on the scene: there was no running out with an Oyster card for a night in Camden or a sleepover in Finchley. The intense family dynamic had not yet reshaped itself, with its shifts and hidden meanings, its annoyances and attachments and rituals. How long would it last? She did not know how to begin to explain the existence of James Dahl to Ari.

She glanced at Ruth who was sitting stiffly and breathing shallowly in the belief that she must remain motionless as Izzie divided her hair to make plaits. Ari fingered Izzie’s scalp while looking over Romy’s shoulder at what she had written. The girls perched around him. Woodsmoke and Izzie’s cheap perfume drifted through the room. Cecilia watched Izzie – her good deed, her salvation, the one who filled her with ferocious protective love – and remembered how her desire to hurt herself, to donate parts of herself, had subsided to more bearable levels when she and Ari had rescued that cross and laughing baby. She had wished with a missionary zeal to save Izzie from a life of foster care.

Ruth sidled up to Cecilia wearing one of her hand-knitted scarves, its swaying edges and clumped purl heartbreaking. ‘Can you read to me about treehouses?’ she muttered, her hair a fountaining explosion of plaits that emphasised her flat dark eyes.

Cecilia put her arm round her, pulling her closer and inhaling her childish smell. ‘We could read
The Swiss Family Robinson
,’ she said, and Ruth nodded.

‘I want you to put a treehouse in your book,’ she said, and Cecilia smiled at her.

‘What did you do today?’ said Ari, looking up at Cecilia.

Cecilia glanced instinctively down at her lap. ‘I wrote and – I collected Romy from her school sculpture club. I –’ she said, opening Ruth’s book, and said nothing more.

Ari seemed to be waiting.

She looked up at him and smiled briefly and glanced away.

I’d have loved a daughter.

Ari ate in front of the fire and talked to Romy about the finding of Mesolithic flint tools on the moor. The fire emphasised the shadows under his cheeks and below his stubbled chin, his narrowness defined by the blackness of his eyebrows. It pleased Cecilia that the man she had met at a party in Edinburgh who had first caught her attention with the word ‘Dartmoor’ – he had just been there, he said; he loved that wilderness, its barrows and reaves and pounds – was now in the place itself.

‘Dartmoor . . .’ she had echoed spontaneously in that Georgian basement so long ago, tailing off, because it had been buried for her after her escape. She thought that she hated it.

‘A lot of my digs are there,’ said this stranger who was, appealingly, not connected with the university, but the recent boyfriend of a history student.

‘Have you ever seen it in deep winter?’ said Cecilia, tilting her face towards him. She was surrounded by people, in the middle of a group of students, but she spoke to him alone. ‘Not in the snow, but in the wettest most lifeless January when the riverbanks burst and the rain falls horizontally?’ She said it challengingly, sifting the tourists from those who knew that its essence lay in its very bleakness, turbulent and gritted, cloud shadow streaming across bog.

‘I love it maybe the most then,’ he said. ‘I’ve taken digs out in January and no one wants to come with me, but on those days I return more alive than on any other.’

‘Well –’ said Cecilia, pausing.

‘You think I’m some day-tripper bussing in for cream teas in Widecombe?’

‘Widecombe . . . I went to Widecombe Primary,’ said Cecilia absently, even the name lost to her, unspoken during the last years.

‘A Dartmoor girl,’ he said. ‘I’ve never met a real one.’

The fire shifted now in their house on the moor, lighting Ari’s face.

‘I thought I heard something,’ said Cecilia, and she walked towards the hall.

‘You’re jumpy,’ said Ari. ‘There was nothing.’

She’s there, thought Cecilia. She’s in the hall, crawling under furniture, butting her head at corners, waiting and catching the hem of my skirt.

‘Ari,’ Cecilia said, coming quickly back into the sitting room. ‘I –’ But she didn’t know what to say.

James Dahl rang in the morning.

‘How do you know my number?’ said Cecilia. A whinchat flew and brushed a branch against the window.

‘I looked it up in the school records.’

She was silent.

‘I’m glad you called, though –’ she said.

‘I’d like to see you again,’ he said, uncharacteristically interrupting. ‘To continue talking.’

She paused. ‘OK,’ she said.

‘When?’ he said.

‘I could do Monday again.’

‘I’d like it to be sooner.’

‘No,’ said Cecilia with certainty. ‘Monday.’

Dora knew that more would be said. Every day she sensed her increasingly fragile grasp on the concealments and evasions that had shored up her life. For the first time, she had taken to locking her door when she needed privacy.

She heard the movements of Cecilia’s family: the car starting up as Ari drove to London on Sunday evening or Monday dawn; the exhortations to hurry in a morning chaos of sports kits and instruments and packed lunches. She heard her granddaughters’ clear voices rising in protest and mockery through the valley, their scents – their urgent teenage hormones, their deodorants and foundations and canned drinks – clashing with the rinsed air of the moor. She wondered whether they were running wild, these city girls let loose. She had spotted Izzie, sometimes, on the lanes in school hours, Izzie’s answers to her questions disarmingly persuasive. Once she had seen Ruth alone in Widecombe. Ruth sat in a field with her legs drawn up in her anoraked coldness like a fat little tepee, so Dora had gone to the National Trust shop and bought her an expensive rug of the Bannan factory variety that cost half a week’s pension, and lowered it over the wall with some biscuits, an apple and a bottle of water. She never saw the rug again.

She was lonely.

How it all changed, she thought. People had left her: Patrick had died so prematurely of emphysema followed by pneumonia, their marriage having never recovered but settled instead into increasingly fond compromise once they accepted each other’s limitations, so that over the years she loved him again, quite calmly, almost cynically, through the guilt – he was destined to be her life companion, she realised – and his death had unexpectedly devastated her. Gabriel Sardo, to whom she had rarely spoken after the birth of Cecilia’s baby, was now living with a long-term girlfriend and employed as a camera operator in London. Her great friend Beatrice had died at fifty-nine, cancer claiming her before it migrated to Dora. Beatrice’s daughter Diana was still in almost daily contact with Cecilia in a friendship that had remained intense, living in London, unable to conceive and enduring her fourth bout of IVF. How Beatrice would have loved the almost preposterously delightful reward for living that was grandchildren, Dora thought, and she felt such pity for her friend: love beyond death, an awareness of the wrongness of the world.

Katya, at least, came in to help, her hours erratic in a way that suited them both because uncertainty afforded Dora stimulation. Dora was caring towards her, would take her in for tea and speak to her in the cheerful compassionate manner under which her Haye House tutees had flourished: even Annalisa the lachrymose Swede had sent her chocolates from Stockholm for almost a decade after leaving the school. Dora saw many things: she saw the movement of the sky and birds, watched for hours; she saw Dan on the lane one dawn; she glimpsed Cecilia working into the night, the light of her study smudging the back garden.

‘We have fifty minutes almost,’ said Cecilia on Monday afternoon, looking at her watch. She glanced around. She still felt a nervous alertness in the school grounds, her need for self-protection strong in the face of James Dahl. She had changed her clothes several times before meeting him, frustrated by her sudden inability to put an outfit together.

‘So tell me –’ he said.

‘Not here,’ she said. Even the sight of what had once been Neill House, and Chase House where Zeno had lived, made her skin tighten. Could you ever be natural with ex-lovers? she wondered. Was it possible to behave without an awareness that before this time of polite greetings, the two of you had been pinioned together, mouths, hands, genitals linked?

‘Let’s go along the water meadows and follow the river down,’ he said, guiding her, the familiar muscle beneath his shoulder visible as he moved, and he began to walk ahead, noticeably more assertive than he had been.

‘I have thought about little – almost nothing – else,’ he said as they reached the boundary of the St Anne’s grounds and climbed over a fence into fern and long grass leading to the Dart’s more tranquil reaches.

She was silent.

‘Oh Cecilia,’ he said suddenly, turning to her, putting his arm briefly around her. Colour appeared on his cheekbones. ‘I can’t bear it that you went through that.’

He reached out to her and then seemed to change his mind and dropped his hand.

‘I think of this girl,’ he said, and his chin tilted downwards. ‘I do keep wondering how she is.’

‘I’m surprised by your reaction,’ she said eventually.