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Almost ideologically lenient over the years, she started to insist that her children gather on the front path by eight twenty. This changed to eight fifteen. Cecilia stood there trying to neaten Tom’s hair and shivering: Cecilia her transformed daughter, an alarming child-woman who would surely attract boys with this sudden blooming. Benedict was now tall and scabrous, still radiating the gruff self-consciousness of late adolescence.

‘Chill out, Mum,’ he said.

‘Has the snow plough been?’ Dora asked, looking anxiously up the lane as the moorland snow swept in.

‘We can’t tell yet,’ said Cecilia, idly sucking pieces of Tom’s hair.

‘Has anyone
heard
it?’ said Dora.

‘Honest, Mum, you can’t hear it from down here,’ said Benedict. ‘It’s a big fucker but we’re too far down the hill.’

Early on those winter mornings they piled into the car, children’s breath an oat-scented fog, and Dora double-declutched on the snow-covered lane leading up from the valley, grinding up it in first gear, occasionally begging Benedict to sit on the bonnet to weigh down the front wheels; and in the yellow headlamp light and semi-darkness they moved in fits and starts through that ice-changed land towards tabla-playing with Jesse; towards nervous awareness in the corridors; towards
The Tempest
,
The Mill on the Floss
and
Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy
.

Lodgers, habitually carless in that wilderness where entitlement culture flourished, continued to loiter on school mornings prepared with gentle requests or more indignant assumptions.

‘Any chance of a ride, Dors?’

‘Any spare space going?’

‘My cat really needs some help,’ said an acupressure practitioner one morning, holding a yowling beast in her arms as she stood expectantly by the car door.

‘
Hitch
,’ replied Dora.

Once at school, she unpacked her instruments, and consulted her schedules. She rubbed cream on to hands that were eternally dry in winter, their soreness exacerbated by rosin, her cello strings pressing into cracked fingertips, and bit at her cold-dried lower lip. She had begun to keep watch, warily: on staffroom movements; on a section of the snow-fringed grounds that was visible from the woodwork room in passing; and on the cars lingering in exhaust billows on the drive.

She was more aware of her appearance than she had been for half a decade: the plait had gone, lopped inch by inch as she grew older, and her hair’s pale brown ends sat more bluntly on her shoulders. Was she actually attractive? she wondered. Her pigmentation was purely English: light-sensitive, delicately freckle-scattered. Her skin was variable, its susceptibility to outside elements flaring and receding, its thin dryness either subdued with cream and scarves or revealed as a semi-transparent display of emotions and capillaries. She had never used cosmetics in her life. She applied a little plum-flavoured lip gloss filched furtively from Cecilia’s room, noticing with the revelation of novelty how it caught light and suggested youth. Her bluey-green eyes seemed to echo that light, that cold light, suggesting cold depths, despite her outer warmth. She wore her long linen smocks, her corduroy skirts and old silk scarves in the bitterest weather as colleagues arrived in boots and mothy woollen layers or army clothes. If she was being noticed, then she felt compelled to dress well out of instinctive pride, even as she wished to repel the attention.

Teachers, rimy-eyed or yoga-composed, began drifting into the staffroom.

‘You’re looking peaky, darlin’,’ said Kasha, a jazz ballet teacher.

Cecilia, an oval of a face, long dark red hair, passed the staffroom door at that moment. Dora jumped.

‘I’m
not
,’ she said emphatically. ‘I’m really not. Just tired.’

She went about her day, glimpsing her children at various points: Benedict, favouring eyeliner, who had increasingly retreated into the pulsing curtained world of his boarding friends’ bedrooms, those expensive concrete cells in which pupils dozed and smoked during lesson time; Cecilia, who had begun, she thought, to come into her own as she collected her hard-won A-grades and fretted-over B-pluses, and her colouring settled into something richer and less reactive; and Tom, now in the senior school, who ran around happily in his felty jerseys, barely aware of the basics of the syllabus.

She moved from class to drama practice to staff lunch room to individual lessons, tense and strongly resistant and, despite herself, fascinated – fascinated in the midst of confused aversion – because she knew she was being admired.

‘Your mum’s looking sexy,’ said Diana casually at the house one night.

‘Oh, yuck! She is
not
,’ said Cecilia. ‘Please. Yuck.’ She shook her head and the waves of her hair clustered with a shine beneath her shoulders. She stretched out her hand. Diana arched her back. They were sinuous with new vanity.

‘She is. Look at her. I’ve never seen her wearing make-up like that.’

‘No,’ said Cecilia, a suspicion prodding at her before it faded. She pressed the sparking flipper on her father’s pinball machine in passing as a guarantee of parental solidarity.

‘Did you used to dread your parents splitting up?’ she said, pausing and leaning on a windowsill.

‘Yes,’ said Diana. ‘I thought it would be like . . .’

‘Like them dying,’ said Cecilia. ‘It almost felt it would be as terrible. Isn’t that strange? I prayed . . .’

‘I did too, at mass.’

She had begun to pronounce it ‘marse’. Cecilia shivered a little in disconcerted admiration. They had entered a new and thrilling snob phase.

‘Parents can do so much . . . and not know,’ said Cecilia.

‘When shall we have our own children?’ asked Diana, leaning on the wide scooped sill and gazing at the tor in the distance. Shouts emerged from outside.

‘When we’re very famous,’ said Cecilia, watching the sky. It was white and lined with recognition like a promise. ‘When
hoi polloi
acknowledge our achievements; when we’re in
Who’s Who
. Then we can have some babies.’

‘Yes,’ said Diana, who was going to be an actress. ‘We’ve got to have our careers.’

‘Our brilliant careers.’

‘Yes. I really won’t be bothering with all that rep stuff. What’s the point? You may as well just be famous immediately.’

‘Exactly,’ said Cecilia. ‘What’s the point of doing loads of
theatre in education
?
Mumming
. Oh yuck! All those embarrassing failures messing around in tights on barges to a scuzzy towpath audience. Just go to London and become famous.’

They giggled and muttered, spoke of peasants, of rabbles, of inbred commoners. They posed and gestured and laughed until Cecilia had to rest her hurting stomach against the windowsill, her mirth now perforated with guilt.

Diana fell silent. Cecilia gazed at her, at her dark hair flat like a painted doll’s, her clear skin and newly larger mouth and nose seeming to Cecilia to belong to someone else, someone more womanly and cruder-featured.

‘Supper,’ called Dora.

‘Busy,’ shouted Tom from the garden.

The pond had iced over. Children had been skating on its surface, skidding as they anchored themselves to the rushes and hobbled out over frozen hoof furrows.

‘If you don’t come now, you’ll have to do all the washing up,’ called Dora newly impatiently, the end of her sentence tailing off with lack of conviction.

‘Poor Dora,’ said Cecilia. ‘Utterly transparent.’

‘I don’t think she is, quite,’ said Diana, pausing.

‘What do you mean?’ said Cecilia.

‘I think she’s kind of hiding something.’

‘What?
What?
’

‘I don’t know . . .’ said Diana.

‘Well what?’

‘She’s different.’

‘I know,’ said Cecilia, barely opening her mouth.

‘What is it . . .?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Cecilia.

‘I don’t either.’

They were silent. A robin hopped on the gutter opposite.

‘Who are you looking for?’ Idris the woodwork teacher asked Dora just once as she walked along a corridor shouldering a music stand. She wore her best silk scarf and smock top, cuffs smeared with rosin.

‘No one,’ said Dora, instantly colouring. ‘Have you seen how a few last leaves are clinging on? I loved the bird whistle Tom made in your class last term, by the way.’

‘Cheers,’ said Idris, and gave her a loud kiss on the cheek as he left for class.

‘You’re a graceful creature, our piano mistress,’ said Elisabeth Dahl, coming up to her from behind. ‘Prepossessing in ways you don’t know.’

Dora jumped. She shook her head. She disappeared into a practice room.

She feared that her confusion was readable, she who had always easily slipped behind a cheery social persona. At hometime when there was much milling and chatting, when there were glimpses and blurred encounters, she felt the tendons in her neck stiffen with an embarrassed antipathy she attempted to suppress.

Dora couldn’t tell anyone. It was imperative. Distraction had come upon her and yet she had barely noticed its arrival, its source was so outlandish. Elisabeth Dahl, that wife, mother, new housemistress at the school – above all, that
woman
– was nagging at her thoughts, staining them, unsettling her. That self-possessed creature appeared, quite inexplicably, to look down from her craggy heights and single Dora out, telling her things, announcing matter of factly in front of a group of colleagues that she was beautiful; that she was endearingly and preposterously naïve; that she held back the best of herself.

Dora was fiercely embarrassed. She walked round in a state of disbelief, certainties and then uncertainties assailing her. She returned to Elisabeth time and time again in her mind, questioning with a quiver of panic whether Patrick had noticed her air of inattention.

She would avoid Elisabeth at school, or simply not see her for some days, and then something of her equilibrium returned and she could only shudder at the memory. At other times, Elisabeth would walk briskly along a corridor and catch her eye and seem to appraise her, not glancing away, but gazing at her with a smile; with an edge, almost, of mockery, as though drinking her in. What an odd effect this person had on her, Dora thought. She, who had never desired women and never even considered the subject, sensed over time a discomfiting buzz of awareness in Elisabeth’s presence that she had only ever experienced in youth with local boys; with Patrick; and briefly, potentially, with his brothers before she had settled upon the one she wanted and who emphatically wanted her. It reminded her of that old intensity of communication, that awareness of self in the glare of admiration, and she was captivated by the sensation. She almost wanted to
be
Elisabeth Dahl. And then Elisabeth would become less flattering for a period, seemingly less focused upon her, and Dora would thirst, ambivalently, for a renewal of her interest, and wonder what she had done wrong, increasingly certain that she had been discovered to be dull.

In more contemplative moments in the day, or in the heat of a chance meeting, she was, she thought, sporadically possessed, as though by an evil creature.

‘What’s wrong?’ said Cecilia, the only time she directly asked her mother. She didn’t know what she was asking.

‘Nothing,’ said Dora inevitably.

Cecilia shot her a glance. Dora coloured faintly. Cecilia turned away, embarrassed.

‘What are you two talking about?’ said Patrick, rising from his chair and stroking the cat.

Dora hesitated, then didn’t answer.

She could barely look at Patrick. Almost single-handedly, she was required to maintain numerous offspring in what seemed like a series of catacombs sinking into the ground and sucking away her salary the moment it was paid. She could hardly find her children on its different levels with its little wells of steps, its twists and lofts. They were sometimes in the roof, like birds, as she called for them; at other times they were down among the cows, or sodden and shivering in the river. In that overstretched life in which every moment was absorbed by children or work, it was simple to avoid Patrick for several days at a time before tension arose between them, or she was driven by guilty self-awareness to focus her attention back on him.

The children were protective of their father without quite knowing why. Cecilia fetched him drinks and reacted to his jokes with fewer displays of eye-rolling cynicism, detecting something wounded about his narrow chest in his woolly jumper. Even as he teased and pottered, there was a flicker of watchfulness to him in this new less forgiving climate. He seemed deflated, less given to the bursts of enthusiasm that had stimulated his children.

Dora snapped at him. He walked out of the kitchen. Tom’s mouth fell open. Cecilia winced. She ran to her teacher in her mind. She sat in her English class, the trees swaying outside the window, the cream paint collecting condensation, the harmonious well-bred tones of Mr Dahl guiding his pupils through a text, and all was right with the world.