You (35 page)

Did I get this sweet child as my punishment? she wondered. Is she disturbed because she knows, somewhere, about the missing one I mourn? Does Mara take up the space in my mind?

And she resolved, as she had resolved before, to love only Ruth and Izzie and Romy. She banished the ghost.

Izzie then burst into the kitchen, reeking of a confusion of elements and substances: wind, woodsmoke and alcohol.

‘You’re here,’ said Cecilia. She breathed slowly. ‘You’ve been on the moor.’

‘Mm hmmm,’ said Izzie. Her nails were covered in chipped silver varnish. She gaped at Romy. ‘Why’re you in your dressing gown? Why’s your hair wet? You look like a housewife about to shag the milkman.’

‘Why?’ said Cecilia. ‘You said you would look after Ruth.’

‘She’s cool. Dors is up the garden. So’s her weirdo servant.’

‘You said you were cooking beans for supper. Where is he?’

‘He –’ said Izzie. ‘I don’t know, Ma.’

‘You are
fifteen
,’ Cecilia said, old alarm gripping her as she looked at Izzie in all her youth.

Izzie reached out, squinting, and grabbed an apple.

Ruth watched her teeth: they had become horse teeth chomping and sinking into skin.

‘Eurgh,’ said Izzie.

The abandoned ageing apple rocked on the table displaying its flesh wound. Ruth sent it blessings and medicine in vibrations through the air. Everything is lost, she thought.

In the morning, Dora woke early after a night of deep sleep, satisfied at her continued silence towards Elisabeth, but so very solitary in the light that bounded against her walls.

This longing for Elisabeth would hurry her death, she thought suddenly, tears springing to her eyes and humiliating her. She blinked. The pain of wanting Elisabeth – banished through willpower; returning with vicious teeth – was brutal. She would, would, would, continue the journey away. She promised it to herself as a brand of insurance against death. If she kept herself from this person, the cells would not metastasise.

She looked out of the slip of a window facing Corndon Tor and saw the boy arrive outside. It was the first time Izzie had brought him so close to the house in daylight, though she had been aware of his van sometimes, a vehicle belonging to a Widecombe garden centre, parking in the first light of the morning: early, early, when the cows were tossing heads and shouting at Dockden Farm and the nettles were astringent with dew.

He walked along scuffing stones. In the chill tinged with gold, the flecks of dirt were just visible or imaginable in the peaks of his hair as she watched him. She caught one glimpse of his face and she softened because he looked disquietingly thin and paler than she had remembered. Izzie walked silently beside him, eyeliner smeared, her arm around his waist.

Later in the morning, Izzie took the bus to school, attended registration and first lessons, then wandered the back route over a nettle-choked railway bridge to the market square in town. She thumped Dan’s shoulder in greeting as he stood at his stall subtly mimicking his customers’ nodding speech and weighing up the carrots he had bought in bulk from the large Asda outside Plymouth before spending happy minutes with Izzie immersing them in mud. They added snails to the boxes alongside a display of leafy carrot tops from the garden centre, a rabbit imported on one occasion in a supplementary show of authenticity. He had produced a printout explaining how the carrots were organically produced on his smallholding in accordance with the moon’s phases. Izzie doodled badly drawn crescents and stars on the margins.

In his guise as artisan gardener, Dan nodded earnestly with his captive clientele while Izzie fought back burps of laughter and silently admired. She loved his shoulders. She reeled at his mockery. Mid-conversation, he turned with a conspiratorial smile for her. He had fashioned bowls from straw and horse dung which Izzie baked in the slow oven of the Aga. ‘They look like shit; they are shit; but we’ll call them Aboriginal,’ said Dan, whose stock of carrots, potatoes and cheap cheese disguised with walnuts or wrapped in leaves was bringing in a healthy profit. He sold random pieces of rock as healing crystals, employing a series of delicately parodic gestures as he discussed their ‘properties’. One week he invented a moorland enclosed community which produced objects of wood and clay, eliciting questions and cynical comments, yet still a handful of these knobs and lumps and non-functioning instruments were purchased. On occasion, he wore a sack as an apron or a borrowed medieval outfit with no sign of embarrassment, while Izzie snorted behind him. A regular buyer lost faith, held a carrot up to the sun to examine it, and threatened Dan with a fight.

After visits to a pub off a sharp slant of track behind Widecombe, where a vicious local beer was served beyond closing time to old men who sat silently with their sheepdogs but greeted Dan with handclasps, he was more leisurely and affectionate with her. He curled up against her in her bedroom and they kissed and chatted, and he told her solemnly that she must do her schoolwork.

‘Or you’ll end up like me,’ he said.

‘How?’

‘A wazzock.’

She giggled. ‘Didn’t you go to university?’ she said.

‘Two terms, then couldn’t afford any more,’ he said matter of factly.

‘No way am I going.’

‘Well you should,’ he said, looking her straight in the eye. His mouth had a vulnerable cast to it. ‘You’re clever.’

He stroked her softly, reaching just above the knee, and refused to go further despite her urging. ‘You’re not old enough, missis,’ he always said.

She had found her husband too young, she considered reasonably; but that could be overcome, and they were likely to have a baby soon. On some nights now he was inching up her forearms to her elbow; on other nights, he merely curled up against her and they held each other, murmuring and lazily laughing into the night, and kissed necks and chins as they fell asleep.

Dora’s cottage was cold even after the warmth of the day. The slight dip in which it was built – a workers’ afterthought to service the main house – was, when the light went, a chilled pool, lightly rank, its mosses and rich-earthed succulents overgrown and clinging to the walls.

That evening, Dora sat at her table and watched her daughter, and perceived how over-stressed or burdened she was. She saw the Irish Bannans in her, in the brown eyes, the country colouring beneath the later sophistication. She was reactive and alert, emotion transparent on her face and a barely perceptible trace of freckles across her nose, so strongly reminiscent of girlhood, suddenly visible in the light of a candle that burnt near her. Dora had noticed that she had been wearing make-up more often in the day. Her eyebrows were darker, more emphatic lines, contrasting in repose with the faint look of sadness to her eyes.

‘You need some sleep,’ said Dora.

Cecilia smiled, and shook her head.

She built up the fire. ‘Izzie can bring you logs,’ she murmured. ‘This horrible radiotherapy. It’s hard.’

Dora hesitated. ‘It’s just tiring,’ she said.

‘Poor you, that you had to go through this,’ said Cecilia, her voice unsteady, and hugged her.

She sat down and filled Dora’s glass.

‘Ooh! Enough!’ said Dora, causing Cecilia, despite all her pity, to cringe internally with the primal irritation that could be precipitated by every intake of breath, every tonal variation, every moment of generational behaviour betrayed. She stopped herself. She took a gulp of wine, and took another, only alcohol enabling her to dare to confront her mother this evening.

‘You know I’ve protected you,’ she said then. ‘For a long time.’

‘Cecilia.’

‘You know I absolutely blame myself as much as you. More so, much more.’ Her voice was unsteady again. ‘But you . . . I . . . I think you need to search your memory now and tell me something. Please.’

Dora paused. She tipped back her wine. Her lower lip trembled. ‘Is that a threat?’ she said eventually.

‘No. No. Please. Dora. I need to know.’

‘You do, don’t you?’ said Dora. She fiddled with an old enamel ladybird in a bowl.

‘Yes,’ said Cecilia, her heart speeding at the subtle change of gear she detected. She would not pull back, she pledged. However much Dora filled her with guilt, with duty, with fear even, she would push ahead.

Dora poured more wine into her glass, spilling a sizeable portion on to the table. ‘It has to do with that time,’ she said uncertainly. ‘Nothing,’ her lip trembled, ‘nothing was very formal. Do you remember what it was really like?’

‘Hippies lining the loft, signing on under three identities, growing ten acres of dope, then getting grants for tinpot courses at Torquay Tech they never attended, you mean?’ said Cecilia, still becoming heated even after all these years.

Dora’s mouth twitched. ‘Yes. But seriously. Do you remember? Farmer Hillier’s child wasn’t his, for instance. That boy Timothy was his nephew.’

‘Really?’ said Cecilia.

‘Brought up as his son. Inherited the farm. Everyone knew; no one really commented after a while. It was moorland law. Our own laws, wild, cut off down lanes.’

‘Oh –’ said Cecilia.

‘Yes. You know. People living outside the state in converted cowsheds; wood dwellers, putting up log buildings illegally. And many people around Wedstone had that system of bartering with their own currency instead of tax –’

‘Five acorns equals a back rub,’ said Cecilia impatiently.

‘I know you’ve always scorned these country ways. Well. Anyway. Now there’s a sense of this area being discovered, and known to Londoners – known about, more expensive, desirable. Second homes. Restaurants in Ashburton. It wasn’t like that then, Celie darling. You know that. You could have these big crumbling manors with not so much money, and live off your . . . your ideals, making do. There wasn’t a sense of the state being after you, if you like, then. So – so –’ said Dora, her voice faltering, ‘when – when your baby went to another home, it wasn’t such a strange thing.’

‘ “Strange thing” . . . ?’

‘Oh Celie, you do intimidate me.’

‘I realise,’ said Cecilia sombrely. She shook her head.

Dora paused. Her chest rose.

‘So it was all rather informal.’

Cecilia swallowed. There was silence.

‘But what about the birth certificate?’ said Cecilia. ‘That’s what the adoption support agent I spoke to asked immediately. Where was the baby registered?’

‘They must have – arranged that.’

‘Faked it, you mean. Took my baby, said they gave birth at home, and got her registered as theirs. Or that fucking hippie midwife who kept running in and out signed the documents for the birth certificate under their name. Did she?’

Dora shook her head, her mouth thinning, the old glitter of tears that had silenced Cecilia for so many years coating her eyes.

Cecilia stiffened. She breathed deeply. She gazed at the ceiling. ‘And you know what’s odd,’ she said slowly. ‘This “friend of Patrick’s” you said you arranged it through – after you said the baby went to a “contact”, that is – though odd how I could never find any trace in Ashburton. Well, I don’t recall many friends of Dad’s at all. My Irish uncles couldn’t remember this person either. Where did this “friend” live?’

‘Nearby,’ said Dora stiffly. ‘And – Ireland.’

‘What was his name?’

‘– Aiden.’

There was a brief silence.

‘You said Padraig before,’ said Cecilia.

She hesitated. ‘How could I?’

‘You did. I remembered, very clearly. I wouldn’t forget that anyway. But I particularly noticed because he had the same name as Patrick,’ said Cecilia rapidly.

‘I – I –’ said Dora, her mouth goldfishing in repeated circles. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I . . . I . . . I’m sorry. I just don’t know, I don’t know.’

Cecilia was silent. She breathed slowly.

‘You don’t know?’ she said eventually to Dora, who had her face in her hands.

‘I don’t know,’ said Dora.

‘So you lied to me.’

‘I didn’t.’

Dora sank on to the sofa and then lay against the cushions and pressed her face into them. Cecilia felt her heart plunge with pity. She began to rise, to throw her arms round Dora, to appease her, to withdraw. Forcibly, she stopped herself.

‘Celie, I can’t cope.’

‘You never could, Mummy. That’s what kept me away, kept me from asking. I called you Mummy. Why did I do that? You can never cope. That’s what you always say. That’s what silences me.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Dora’s face was pressed into the sofa, her voice staggered snuffles.

‘Who took the baby?’

‘I think I gave you the wrong impression.’

‘Who?’

‘I – I – I don’t know.’

‘Then I’ll initiate a missing person inquiry.’

‘Oh Celie, you wouldn’t do that,’ said Dora, exhaling with a whistling sound.

‘I wouldn’t have before, but you’ve left me – you’ve left me nothing else I can do. And really.’ She looked around wildly. ‘Why shouldn’t I do that? Izzie’s almost sixteen. After that she can choose, and – and she’ll live with me. There’s not that particular threat over me any more. Even if you’re in the middle of radiotherapy, you can tell me . . .’