You (38 page)

April

‘Cecilia!’ called Ari up the stairs. ‘Darly!’

‘Yes, darly?’ she said, and she heard herself and noticed how absurd their old habits seemed.

‘Can you come here?’

‘Why?’

He paused. ‘Because I need to ask you – how this boiler works.’

‘It’s complicated,’ she called down.

‘I’m going to put it on the automatic setting.’

‘No!’ she said. ‘It takes for ever to put that back if you get it wrong. Please, Ari,’ she called in a sharp tone.

‘You have your routines,’ he said stiffly.

‘What choice have I had?’ she sang down the stairs.

She landed in his arms at the bottom with a bump and he hugged her. She pulled away and went to set the boiler.

‘Just wait till I come back and I’ll sort you all out,’ he called in a parody of manliness designed to provoke. She paused, then laughed appropriately, but as she looked around that little series of linked utility rooms, washing still toppling, walls damp with sections crumbling, doors shut against leaks and old lawnmowers, she knew that she liked this independence. It was living and rawness and a fight with elements, and it brought it all back in a rush: the intensity of young life.

‘You’re . . . a bit wired,’ he said.

‘I’m not. Please can we not talk about this now?’ said Cecilia in an intentionally weary voice.

‘You’re becoming more remote from me,’ he said, appearing outside the door and speaking flatly.

‘I’m not,’ she said. She paused. ‘Well, we don’t share a life,’ she said. She softened her tone. ‘It’s that – it’s the daily story that bonds people.’

‘Does everything have to be a story with you?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I want us to be us again when I get back,’ he said, and she nodded.

‘People,’ said Ruth to Izzie in the river field by the alders. ‘They live in wigwams and tepees. Charles and Carey and Paul, they went to the South Sea Islands, all on their flying bed.’

‘Nerdy people in books,’ said Izzie.

‘But it must be – it must be because you can do those things.’

‘What, sis, like finding moving statues and going all gay about bedknobs? I don’t
think
so.’

‘Oh,’ said Ruth quietly. ‘Can you help me with my island wigwam?’

‘Not now,’ groaned Izzie.

‘Please. It would be a brilly place to smoke,’ said Ruth.

‘I suppose,’ said Izzie, and she bent down, a cigarette in one hand, and gathered long sticks for building the conical shelter that Ruth had begun on a large flat stone a little further downriver where a section of water ran fast and smooth through the ivy-draped ashes, the surface now bright, now black.

Izzie hopped across from the bank still holding her cigarette, upsetting Ruth’s jumping order that prevented the Dart from becoming the Stygian depths. ‘Libation,’ Ruth mouthed.

‘That’s lush,’ said Izzie, nodding at the wigwam.

Ruth beamed, seeing herself as Bonnie Willoughby skating the river in flying tippets, but she couldn’t say it. Instead, she imagined herself floating with her hair fanned like Ophelia, that dark-light painting with river-soaked flowers, because then she could be beautiful.

You count the hours and then the days, Dora advised herself. You tick them off, like a substance abuser, and eventually abstinence becomes a habit.

Would everyone leave her? she wondered. She glanced in the direction of the house.
My daughter will leave me again
, she thought. She summoned the faces of her sons, none of whom had had children. Benedict was largely silent. Barnaby did visit, irregularly, and Tom’s cards came roughly fortnightly from his monastery; but she sensed duty behind their actions. No one. That chilled realisation. No one. She wondered whether her punishment was to be stuck in time: to be kept forever frozen at the point at which she had made her greatest mistake.

Her own shortcomings crowded around her now, with their choking wings and stings. She had, she realised, never quite managed to get over both the horror and the perverse excitement of the fact that Elisabeth was a woman. Whereas Elisabeth, it seemed, was blisteringly casual about her own sexuality, uninterested in discussing what she perceived as a perhaps mildly racy yet unsurprising aspect of life: merely nature’s pleasing diversity.

‘It’s dull. Get over it,’ Elisabeth had said dismissively. ‘Or back to your husband.’

‘Do you have no guilt?’ Dora had said, trying another tack, shuddering at her own terror of Patrick’s discovery. ‘Do you ever think you should tell – James?’

‘Goodness me, why would I rock the boat?’

Dora now walked stiffly up the stairs, her breast sore as she knocked into the newel post, and she summoned the memory of Moll and Flite: the multi-panelled skirts, mud-choked boots, dog, chickens, but no child. Dora had indulged Moll, talking for hour drifting into hour, because Moll was a woman who, even wet-faced and almost ululating about her childlessness, was prepared to hold the squirming Barnaby. Dora would, at that time, do anything to have Barnaby held. To save her back. To free her arms. To be able to drink a cup of tea without him grabbing and spilling.

‘Just give me a sign,’ Dora had said to Elisabeth on one of those hot dry summer afternoons.

She had smiled.

‘I love you so much.’

‘You don’t,’ said Elisabeth. ‘You love this –’ She gestured. ‘Your house, your family. You are of the moors. I’ve told you. You are the family woman.’

‘I’m not,’ Dora said, and even then, before the giving-away, she experienced a twinge, knowing that something in her had been altered. ‘Give me – something,’ she said, quite choked.

‘I’m giving you myself.’ Elisabeth smiled again, planted a kiss on her lips, then she began quite easily to talk of something else.

And all the while, the pregnant Cecilia stayed in her bedroom. ‘The ghost in the attic,’ was how Elisabeth referred to her with casual humour, and Dora defended her, but there was relief in the irreverence. When Cecilia went for walks at night, appearing only as the light fell and the owls emerged, Dora observed that Cecilia seemed to have no fear and it occurred to her that she wished the baby or herself dead. Her days were unchanging. She functioned. She seemed heavy-footed and without expectation.

Ruth made her way through the kitchen door to the river, clinging to the shadow of the hedge. She dared herself. If she were to float, one day, like Ophelia in the ink-dark flower glow, she had to summon all courage. The place was, Cecilia had told Ruth, like
a cavern measureless to man
. Ruth had peeped at her novel, and seen that the river had become a tossing torrent spewing rapids. Horses bared teeth; snakes riddled the water; foam threw mergirl shapes.

Ari returned on Friday. He and Cecilia both frequently said that they missed each other. They emailed several times daily, sent romantic and provocative texts among the practical instructions and day-to-day news bulletins, repeating the message that they wanted each other back and that this period of partial separation was trying and unpleasant. Yet within half an hour of his return that Friday night, they began to argue. Small, unresolved sources of irritation were unleashed by proximity, the romantic haze cast by distance almost instantly dispersed.

‘Amazing, isn’t it,’ said Cecilia, her mouth twitching, ‘that within moments of you arriving back, we’re bickering. It’s all your fault, you old bastard,’ she said, thumping him lightly.

He held her wrists in the air and laughed at her, but she could see that tension tightened the tendons of his neck.

‘God, you need handling,’ he said. ‘You’ve gone more untamed in the sticks.’

‘I can handle myself,’ she said. She arched her eyebrows at him.

He looked tired. Shadows formed under his eyes, enhancing their extreme darkness; grey was sprinkled through his almost-black hair. For the first time, she noticed a slackening of his neck as he turned. He was still lean, as he had been in his early twenties in Edinburgh, but faintly filled out, a small stomach forming over his belt.

‘Your hair’s like Action Man’s,’ she said.

‘The barber went a bit overboard last week,’ he said, running his palm over one side of his chin, a nervous habit of his.

‘I like it. You look sexy,’ said Cecilia.

On Monday morning, the verge choked with hawthorn and stitchwort, speedwell shading the trees on the far end of the field, Ari stood in the porch and swept with exaggerated movements. ‘This will be my last night here for near on four weeks,’ he said in a generic West Country accent. ‘So tell me what you want doing, Mrs Bannan.’

‘Nothing, nothing,’ she said, laughing at him. She kissed him thoroughly; she was connected with him again. He banished the stain that was Mara coming to get her.

They walked along the garden path.

‘In four weeks, I’ll live with you,’ he said.

‘Under,’ she said.

‘Twenty-six days,’ he said, frowning. ‘How can I leave you for twenty-six days?’

‘They’ll be the busiest twenty-six days of your life. Packing, marking, sorting your whole department. But I’ll miss you.’

‘Be good,’ he said.

‘I am,’ she said, and she turned away from him. Swallows soared about them.

‘Why,’ said Ari after a pause, ‘are you working in this archive now?’

‘I so much prefer it.’

She had begun to write on her laptop in the small music library built under a slope of roof in Elliott Hall after her morning St Anne’s drop-offs. It soothed her to leave home and work in a carrel among industrious music students and occasional visitors who spoke in muted voices to the librarian or searched the music archives.

‘Are you escaping your mother?’ said Ari with a faintly knowing expression.

‘Perhaps,’ said Cecilia.

‘Are you being kind to her?’

‘I’m doing what I can for her. I’m
here
. She’s not the saint you think she is. Not always, anyway.’

‘I’m aware of that.’ Ari turned. ‘And why are you wearing those clothes, darly?’

‘Because – because I like to dress up somehow here. I don’t know, it’s just an instinct. In case by osmosis I start wearing fleeces and wellingtons like a country person.’

‘To show all your old friends and enemies how sophisticated you are, you mean?’ he said.

She paused. She smiled and took his arm. ‘Something like that,’ she said. ‘A frantic, desperate attempt to show I once left. I wasn’t always a country bumpkin.’

‘God forbid – a farmer or a hippie, eh?’

‘I have to go. I’m late. Romy!’ she called.

‘Well don’t do your mad driving. I wouldn’t want you stuck behind me, revving and then storming past, killing sheep.’

‘Well I wouldn’t want to be stuck behind you, my love,’ she said. ‘Crawling along as if you’re in a cul-de-sac with speed cameras.’

‘I suddenly realised,’ he said. ‘No wonder your London parking . . . leaves something to be desired. You’ve never had to park. Just grind to a halt in a pile of mud or wait till you run out of pink diesel.’

She laughed. ‘Your Country Ways talks are very amusing, but I’ve got to go,’ she said.

He caught her round the waist as Romy appeared at the door. ‘I’ve been missing you.’

‘Goodbye,’ she said, suddenly serious. She kissed his mouth. ‘I’ll miss you. Three and a bit weeks.’

‘Then I’m back for ever!’

‘For ever!’ she said, and kissed him again, self-consciously.

‘What?’ he said.

‘Nothing,’ she said.

‘ “Nothing”,’ he said at the same time in imitation, pre-empting her.

She pretended to push him away, smiled at him, hugged him again, and Romy threw herself into his arms to say goodbye.

James Dahl drove along the upper moorland route that he had taken on those rare occasions when he had walked with Cecilia in the past, and now she looked out of his car window: the air-blue gown she had imagined still there somewhere, moving by itself, time-tarnished like silver; and words, words, words, a young mouth, unformed voice, lips kissed, evaporated in the moorland air.

‘Did Elisabeth know? Does she know you’ve been meeting me?’ she said now, pushing him. She had written fast in the music library that morning, her deadline so imminent that it caused intermittent insomnia, yet she had slowed her work by frequently glancing out of the window with a loose expectation of seeing James Dahl in the gardens, illogically surprised that he wasn’t there. Her mobile had vibrated on silent mode.
I want to take you out to lunch
, he texted.

‘Does she know?’

She turned to him and her hair flew into her mouth.

‘No,’ he said flatly, changing gear and driving fast through the sunken shadowed lanes beyond Holne. Spring charged up, toppled over hedges into choking banks, deranged with growth.

‘I still don’t understand how this marriage works,’ she said. She glanced at him. ‘Does she dominate you? Make you behave with coldness and – caprice? Or do you control her with stiffness? With reserve and expectation?’