You (39 page)

‘Do you really expect me to be able to answer that?’

‘I have no idea. I just want to know.’ She leaned her head against the side of the car. Ferns rattled against the doors.

‘To a certain extent, I suppose we lead parallel lives.’ He frowned as he changed gear. He drove, climbing above the steep-sided valley, old ivy clutching at the trees and making a rush of darkness, of bright air.

He stared ahead.

‘Is it a matter of opposites?’

‘Perhaps.’ He paused. ‘But perhaps more a matter of expectations. I expected to be married for life, and it would be dishonourable, wrong I suppose, to do otherwise.’

‘Yes.’

‘I think it’s about – determination. Doggedness maybe. Do you think I sound appallingly old-fashioned?’ He had to shout above the car’s engine.

‘No. Did you fall in love with her?’

‘Yes. Oh yes.’

There was silence. She bit the inside of her lip. A feeling of the past came back to her, of insecurity and rejection.

‘I feel I should explain myself to you more,’ he said into the silence. He coughed. ‘I’ve wanted to explain for a while. Since you quite openly believe that I was a heartless old lecher.’

She gave a murmur of a laugh.

‘The point is . . . Never in my life did I think such a thing would happen.’

‘I can imagine.’

‘Really. I knew it was
madness
. You see. Every minute of it. The feeling of insanity surrounding it was overwhelming. It preoccupied me all the time.’

‘Did it?’ she said, recalling the air denting his shirt as he, this adult man, walked calmly past her without a glance.

‘It haunted me daily. I would wake up with nightmares, sweating, heart racing, and think, it can’t be true; and I’d go over every room, obsessively, every room I’d – been with you in. There was this empty, all-embracing fear that I’d thrown my life away, for a teenager.’

She nodded.

‘And –’ he said, frowning as he drove, not catching her eye, ‘and yet, despite all that – in its midst – a strand of it seemed like the most exhilarating, extraordinary thing in the world.’ He slowed the car to be heard above the engine. ‘It seemed like living. And . . . fantastically, unwisely, it was as though this had endowed one – me – with a different character. A rash character that I perversely liked. It made me feel young. I know that’s not how you saw me,’ he said, smiling.

‘This isn’t how I saw it all.’

She glanced at him, but he wasn’t looking at her. All she could see was the shadow of his eyelashes, his strong statue’s nose. The light shone through his ear, showing a network of red capillaries. She heard the melody of his voice, its rich pauses and falls.

‘Look, James Dahl. I know where we’re going now. The Clapper Inn.’

‘You can’t call me James, can you?’

‘No. I must have been pregnant by that time.’

His mouth tensed.

‘It was the only time you used a condom.’

She heard a text arriving and checked it.

Hello darl, how everyone, what you doing?
wrote Ari.

All fine, not sure re R tho, just having lunch after Rom drop-off
, she texted back quickly, and her omission disturbed her.
How work?

Love xxxx
she wrote on a new text as an afterthought.

The road disappeared in front of the car, over fast bowls of land, tors rising in the distances. He parked on a verge. There was the Clapper Inn, huddled on the escarpment and scoured to softness. She stared until she found the window of the bedroom.

‘Let’s eat there,’ he said. He was looking straight up at the inn, his profile older in the afternoon light. A military plane stormed overhead, buzzards circling. He dropped his gaze, then looked at her again and smiled. The lines that had radiated even in his thirties from the bridge of his nose when he smiled appeared now, emitting a flicker of what it was that had once bound her.

‘I don’t want to,’ she said, ‘– yet.’

‘I understand.’

‘Yes.’

The window of the bedroom in which they had merged their bodies gleamed blank with afternoon sun, but all those years before, a storm had gathered and thrown itself at the same glass.

They were concealed together in a bedroom in storm gloom with a fire that turned while thunder shook rain horizontally at the window and tiles shattered outside. A tree was flattened, cloud falling through the sky. The bed loomed, a source of awkwardness.

He sat down on the bed, and she sat beside him, and they kissed, and they lay down in one movement and kissed more deeply, moving against each other, their hands gliding beneath clothes, his evening stubble hurting her cheek and his bulk unbalancing the mattress with its soft bulges, causing the bed frame to creak. His palm sent a trail of tight trembles over her torso. They pulled clothes off piecemeal, obstructed by the mattress’s squashy dells, until she was entirely unclothed beside him for the first time, and quivering and cold and pressed against him, instinctively hiding her face in his chest. He was quite naked, the hair and weight of him, the density of his thigh against hers, so that she drew in her breath at the shock of skin against skin.

In the chilling air of the room, smoke-streaked by a fire that provided their only light, she could hear the rapid vibration of glass in old wood and she thought, as they moved together, the battering of the wind disguising the creaks and protests of the bed, the fast eddies of air through the window cold against the heat of his breath; she thought that they were out on the moors, fucking in bracken, gorse, lichen as they sailed on their bed of wind.

She imagined kissing him now. He looked up at the inn and she glanced at him on the seat beside her and examined him as though strongly magnified, followed the exact shape of the bone of his nose, his irises’ confusion of pigmentation, rendered lighter in sunlight; wayward eyebrow hairs, a faint sheen of moisture on his forehead; the outer line of paleness that traced his lips, the strong cleft above the mouth, the sun-shot curve of his ear and a tiny scar on its outer edge. She could see the twitch of his pulse in his neck. He turned and she blushed, and the notion disappeared.

‘I found a poem for you,’ he said. ‘Emily Dickinson. You’ll know it – don’t you?
You left me, sweet, two legacies
–’

‘Oh yes. And I have one for you too,’ she said. ‘. . . “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver. It’s the ending that moves me.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do/With your one wild and precious life?
Do you know it?’

‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I like it very much. Can you give me a copy?’

She nodded. They were silent, and the breeze played and ponies toothed at the grass. He turned the ignition.

‘I’m glad. I’m so very glad to have found you, met you again.’ He paused. ‘I miss you,’ he said in a straightforward manner.

‘When?’ she said, out of slight awkwardness.

‘When I don’t see you,’ he said.

‘You see me now more than you ever did.’

He began to reverse the car. High clouds ran reflected in the bedroom window of the Clapper Inn.

The girls from the school run were loitering at St Anne’s, waiting for their lift. Cecilia walked swiftly towards the sculpture studio, apologising for her delay, but Romy remained inside. Cecilia saw her through one of the tall windows, her ponytail soaked in light, Elisabeth Dahl holding a sculpting tool in her left hand and showing her and another girl a photograph in a book while reading out loud to them. Cecilia absorbed the navy artist’s smock smeared in paint, a faintly absurd quasi-turban on her head, the flesh on her face still clinging tightly to the bones, and realised that she looked like a mannequin from a different era, her frame as slight as a child’s, though that small body had produced sons who rose in manly height above her. She should somehow, thought Cecilia, have had daughters.

When she emerged, Elisabeth merely nodded at Cecilia; Romy smiled while still talking, and Cecilia found herself awkwardly following, as she once might have done, right there near the drive. She would not have it.

‘We have to go now,’ she said in a clear voice, and Elisabeth paused for a fraction of a beat, then inclined her head.

‘Why are you late?’ said Romy with a frown in the car.

‘I had to drive somewhere. The garage,’ said Cecilia, colouring, and when she spoke to Ari later, she assented to his assumption that she had worked as she waited.

She snapped at him, in guilt.

Ari snorted. ‘Don’t do that to me,’ he said. ‘This isn’t good, all this separation.’

‘I know, I know. Sorry,’ said Cecilia, and her lip wobbled. ‘I know.’ She caught her breath. ‘I think you need to come back to me,’ she said. Her voice sounded vulnerable.

‘It’s only weeks now.’

Twenty-eight

May

That night, the first of Ari’s longer absence, Cecilia heard the voice of Dan along the passage. She tugged open her bedroom door with a violent movement, then stopped, turned, and ran back to ring Ari.

His voicemail came on.

‘Oh!’ she said in distress. ‘Where are you? Fuck shit you’re not there. There’s that man in the house again – Izzie’s man. He’s – he’s much older. Look, look – this is the one thing I
can’t
deal with without you. Ring me as soon as you get this. Love.’

She heard Dan’s voice at full volume again, walked rapidly from her bedroom with bare feet and caught sight of his back disappearing towards the stairs.

‘You!’ she shouted. She tripped on the landing step in her haste. Izzie stood slack-mouthed in a long T-shirt just outside her bedroom. Cecilia ran towards Dan, catching his shoulder with her hand at the top of the stairs and absorbing his sweet-musty odour in proximity. Beneath the light, she saw details of tendon and hair on the back of his neck, skin that was palpably rougher and dirtier than her daughter’s. She thumped him, awkwardly glancing the side of his shoulder blade and hurting her own knuckles without hitting him as hard as she had initially intended, detecting in that tiny interim some vulnerability or human appeal that curbed her. ‘Get out,’ she hissed.

‘Bitch,’ he said with force as he turned and looked directly at her. There was a sideways sliding of faint implication in his holding of her gaze, the corner of his mouth tilted.

She paused for a fraction of a second.

‘Get out!’ She pushed him, shocked yet invigorated; he stumbled at the top of the stairs mid-escape and ran, light-footed, down the steps two at a time.

‘What were you doing outside, scaring us?’ she called after him, her voice breaking up, but he had left.

Dora couldn’t sleep. She didn’t sleep.

The dawn seeped scented with dog roses and damp grass and she yawned through the film of nausea of an unslept night, thought of Elisabeth, and put her away. The emptiness was almost unbearable.

She lay in bed and dozed, thick dribble on her pillow.

‘I don’t think I can do this,’ she murmured through the window to an unhearing Katya, who had arrived early and was gardening, and she dressed and gathered a shawl around her, drove slowly to Widecombe and waited for a café to open and sat with her chin in her hand and a newspaper unread, observing the first tourists, watching the jumping children who were like lambs to her and remembering. When she returned to the cottage through her tangled arch of honeysuckle whose beauty only saddened her, there was a risotto sitting on the doorstep. There was no note, though she searched, but she instantly recognised the pan as one of Elisabeth’s from Cadiz.

‘Elisabeth,’ Dora murmured.

Should she throw it away or use it? What, she wondered, were the rules of her attempted exile from her half-life with Elisabeth? She barely knew the answers. She microwaved a portion and ate it. She put Bach’s
Magnificat
on the record player, an anachronism that caused amusement in Romy and Ruth and professed admiration from Izzie. She had managed weeks away from Elisabeth, a cruel and grinding apprenticeship; an experiment in a different form of pain. The jasmine that grew in a too-small pot outside the front door was turning rank and spreading a strange scent, of urine or of old Chinese takeaway, through the house. She counted off each day in her head with a sickened sense of accomplishment and went to bed early to foil the temptation of the evening.

The voices in the
Magnificat
merged and rose; Thérèse Raquin experienced passion in an attic with her lover; an O’Keeffe reproduction that Elisabeth had given her glowed, picked out by a shaft of sunlight in the shadows beside the fireplace, and she could have her, Dora realised. Her hand trembled. She could have her.
I can have Elisabeth
, Dora thought, tears pricking her eyes.
I can be with my lover
. She is a joy, an extraordinary thing, a one-off in this world, she thought in a rush. Why should I deprive myself of that? Why am I doing this? Relief tumbled into excitement. She put her hand on the phone receiver, violently trembling. It was a revelation. She put down the phone. She picked it up again, her mind ricocheting. She started to press the buttons. Her heart hammered. She slammed it down. The devil was talking to her. She saw him glowing close to her ear with his scarlet-forked temptations. She swayed. It was addiction speaking. She lowered her head into her hands and gripped her scalp, pressing it harder and harder with her fingertips.