You (12 page)

I want you to know that I didn’t give you away lightly
, she wrote later in Mara’s book: the book she kept for that first, unknown child, as she did for her daughters Romy, Izzie and Ruth: books recording birthdays and events and observations. But while the others’ albums were filled with photographs and dated entries, the book for Mara was almost entirely composed of speculation.
I want you to know that
, she wrote, as she so often wrote to her, marking dates and mapping the life she imagined for her, explaining the attempts she had made to track her down, in uncontrolled fragments of writing that managed to disturb her as she wrote them.

You have grown up believing your mother abandoned you. That’s what I can’t live with. I need you to know the mistake that this was. I want to look after you. I write to you every birthday, but there’s nowhere to send those letters. I’m trying. I’m trying now. I will go on and on and on.

When you were born, you turned to me for milk. That’s all I could give. And I didn’t even give you that. Milk.

Ten

The Garden

Was it Barnaby who tipped her existence so far into chaos that she had done what she had done? Dora wondered later. Would Cecilia’s baby have had a different future if it wasn’t for Barnaby? Was life really so random? But an image of Elisabeth always entered the equation when she asked herself the question.

‘I would now; I would, I dare,’ Dora had wanted to say to Elisabeth, but it would have amounted to a begging, and she continued to ask herself whether, if Elisabeth attempted to seduce her fully, she would take fright. The idea of an illicit sexual liaison with another woman was so intriguing, she could barely stop herself from ruminating upon it, its repellent aspect enhancing the anticipation. But guilt and fear still dominated.

Patrick had recently taken to enquiring what she did during her lunch hours, and who her colleagues were, and who she had befriended, his questions apparently casually asked while betraying a tinge of aggression. Dora listed names, Elisabeth’s always linked to her husband James’s, and attempted to fashion anecdotes of them, as though life at Haye House were nothing but a soap opera with a cast of eccentrics whose chief narrative focus was Peter Doran the headmaster. She was, she thought, mid-story, no actress, and yet lies, once started, seemed to proliferate. Not lies, she hushed herself, hearing in her mind the voice of her mother. Omissions.

And still, Elisabeth occasionally turned to her with the full heat of her gaze, or touched her in passing, or said, quietly imperiously, ‘Come here.’ She stroked her even in public in the guise of relaxed bohemianism, and on rare occasions collided with her in a corridor and found a private place where they kissed, cool-mouthed and urgent.

What, thought Dora in the evenings, if Patrick were to discover? Discover the kisses, the fantasies that infected Dora’s mind like a disease? What if he were to stumble, somehow, upon proof? Could he gain custody of their children? Of her unborn even? She stroked her stomach with a passing of nausea. He could never cope, but the clannish Bannans would close ranks, wielding wealth and family morals, the idea so terrifying to Dora that she pictured herself killing them one by one with a rifle in defence. She looked askance at Patrick and her mind hardened. She had never intended to be distracted. She had not meant to fall. She was, after all, a married woman and a mother. Patrick was either absent in his studio, or there, there, doggedly remaining in the kitchen as though placing himself as an obstacle to her private life. He was suspicious, watchful, and a streak of unpleasantness began to show as it never had before, making Dora even more careful. Or was she, she asked herself, simply deceitful?

As she made supper, she indulged the infatuation. Her mouth loose, her body heated and unstable, her vision glazed, she barely knew what she was doing as she boiled the pulses that had been soaking since the previous evening. She shivered with what felt like fever through coldness as she thumped out wholemeal pastry pizzas, sheer disbelief that her mind and body could, at least maddeningly intermittently, be desired by someone so sublime, making her mutter yelping clusters of words to herself and replay entire conversations in her head, prolonging the recollections with pauses for full gratification.

When her family began to come in, dropping jackets, chattering, complaining, trailing books and paper piles and rubbish, the fantasies peeled away one by one as every particle of her was demanded. But when she turned, turned towards a shelf to fetch a pan, they slotted back in front of her vision for stretched seconds.

Dora had barely known how to get through the later stages of her fourth pregnancy. In the car on the school run, she had breathlessly shunted the gear stick, her vision obstructed by steam and by the heads of shouting children, staring teenagers, a reading daughter, sheep clumped indignantly on the verges. She was irritated by the darkness of the tree-arched lanes alive with gnats. Newly sensitised, she could smell sour milk on the air. She noticed every chemical bin, every dead baby pigeon, every piece of corrugated iron pooled with puddles on the farm lane verges. She had cramp, and couldn’t find a playing position for her cello. Yet in retrospect the pregnancy appeared as an interlude of free childcare compared with the chaos of the first eighteen months of her baby’s life.

Barnaby had been born in a rush at home, the midwife still stuck on a lane between a French coach lost on the way to Widecombe and a farmer’s van which had energetically reversed to avoid it, laming a pony. The National Parks sent a vet to the scene, exacerbating the traffic jam on the lane whose only landmark was a B&B sign above the hill descending to Ponsworthy. In the valley below, Barnaby emerged suddenly after eight hours of steady labour, assisted only by Patrick and a pair of brown-nailed lodgers, one of whom intoned about the home births she had attended while Dora wailed at the ceiling that she would never go through this again. The baby’s head appeared.

‘Come on, Dora, ’nother push for your midwife,’ the lodger chanted. The grey streak in her hair flopped over her capillary-reddened cheeks.

‘Fuck
off
,’ hissed Dora.

‘I’ve known plenty of women get uppity at this stage. Just relax. Lovely. Breathing . . . In, out now, in –’

‘Get her
out
,’ bellowed Dora, wild-eyed, but moments later her son emerged in a slither and she was smiling, panting, her flesh fiery.

Dora began her maternity leave. She carried Barnaby at all times, feeding him assiduously, but he didn’t gain weight as her others had done with their powdery thighs, their doughy bracelets of fat.

‘He is harder,’ she said with a smile after a day of fitful feeding. His demands, his sleeplessness, his mouth on her nipple, blocked out the now more remote Elisabeth for whole hours at a time: a gift that he brought with him.

‘Each one is different, Mrs Bannan,’ said the health visitor, a woman palpably past retirement age who organised the Widecombe WI children’s Christmas parties at which Benedict and Cecilia had invariably succumbed to parent-shaming fits of giggling; and who negotiated the precipitous hills of the surrounding villages by bicycle, her face grimly set and her white uniform remaining spotless while her stockings were mud-splattered on arrival.

‘He seems to feed all day, but he’s not taking much,’ said Dora, who had become yet thinner.

‘He needs a bottle,’ said the health visitor with a jaw movement that reminded Dora of her mother.

‘Well . . .’ said Dora.

She stoked the Aga with one hand, Barnaby hanging from her breast and grizzling while batting his head back and forth. She often sobbed. She cooked with him precariously tied to her chest since he cried if tilted towards an inanimate surface. She vacuumed with one hand, noticing the stealthy proliferation of animal and vegetable life that encroached: toadstools in the pantry twining from sooty sprays of mould at the base of the walls; birds and mice in the attic; cats slinking into the kitchen; foxes in the back garden.

‘Elisabeth,’ she murmured, almost hallucinating with tiredness.

When Barnaby was two and a half months old, the lodger who had helped with the birth drifted in through the open kitchen door, as lodgers tended to do, bearing a home-manufactured tincture of feverfew. Dora, her spine ringing, plumped Barnaby into her hands and stretched her arms.

‘He’s lovely, isn’t he?’ she said as she relaxed her shoulders.

‘Here, here, baby boy,’ the lodger crooned, cradling Barnaby in the crook of her arm. ‘Whoopsy daisy, little star-gazer, there we are.’ With a cloudy pipette, she eased a few drops of the tincture into his mouth.

‘Oh I’m not sure about that,’ said Dora hastily, snatching her baby back and dabbing at the liquid with a muslin.

‘He’ll be
great
,’ said the lodger. ‘You’ll see. By tomorrow the small one’ll have a great big lion-man’s appetite, won’t you, little boy?’

The baritone cough of a second lodger echoed outside among the foxgloves. A tall root vegetable gardener, a self-proclaimed Communist with a spray of red beard and laced boots, knocked on the open door.

‘Chopped a few logs for you, Dora,’ he said solemnly.

‘Oh thank you. Thank you, Gid,’ said Dora.

The man nodded. He stood there, saying nothing. ‘Bea made this for you,’ he said eventually, and handed Dora a knotty blanket, faintly oily to the touch, that smelled of sheep.

‘Thank you,’ said Dora again. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you all.’

‘Bea says poultices,’ he said, nodding at the freshly grizzling Barnaby. ‘For bringing down a fever.’

‘Thank you,’ said Dora again, and waited for him to leave.

Since Barnaby’s birth, lodgers had arrived in the kitchen with gifts of astrological charts and offers of baby reiki; with papooses, dreamcatchers and a hand-carved rocking crib that, too small for anything but a premature infant, was appropriated by one of the cats; and Dora had accepted such offerings, largely unused, with grace. Moll and her boyfriend Flite, who rented the cottage behind the back garden, volunteered for babysitting, the sole gift Dora really desired. Among Dora’s older children, only Cecilia showed any interest in Barnaby, cradling him and kissing him repeatedly, but she was busy with her schoolwork and still the practical burden was barely alleviated.

That night, Barnaby kept the house awake with his projectile vomiting. He was put on formula milk the next day by the health visitor, an edict that elicited a stream of concerned visits from lodgers bearing herb-based solutions, goats’ milk recommendations and cautionary anecdotes. When Dora went to bed while Barnaby lay in a new daze, she slept to escape her life, to escape Elisabeth.

In September, Dora Bannan returned to work. During the early months of her maternity leave she had indulged in hazy visions of school life: fractious Barnaby metamorphosed into a dungareed doll who was virtually transportable in her cello case, cooed-over by pupils and staff, and who would mutely play a xylophone in a corner while she taught her classes; but as an experienced mother she knew such musings to be rooted in self-delusion. Part-time work was impractical with older children to ferry home and a full salary to earn, and Haye House’s liberal ethos and general turmoil simply did not accommodate the existence of babies.

Elisabeth Dahl and Dilys, a geography teacher, petitioned the governors for crèche provision on Dora’s and future mothers’ behalf, but met with blanket refusals on financial grounds.

‘It’s really, really scandalous,’ said Idris, fingering his facial hair. ‘If there’s anything you need in the way of feeding or jiggling, piggybacks and suchlike, just give us a nod.’

On what seemed the bleakest day of her life so far, Dora went from school to the neighbouring village of Wedstone to interview the childminder who lived in a bungalow surrounded by dying leylandia and plastic trikes. A mattress was propped against a wall, and the garden fence had been repaired with baler twine. Three small faces gazed through the window as she walked down the path and rang the doorbell to discuss hours, fees and nappy provision in a fug of cat.

‘Sorry,’ she muttered to Barnaby on the way out and rested her forehead against his cheek until he began to protest.

When she arrived back at school, she hid in a music room some distance from the staffroom and cried. To her considerable embarrassment, Elisabeth came through the door. Dora turned her face and busied herself restacking sheet music.

Elisabeth hesitated.

‘How can I help?’ she said.

‘You can’t,’ said Dora in a muffled voice, still rifling through paper. ‘Thank you.’

‘I think it’s very hard to leave one’s child when one first returns to work,’ said Elisabeth with the even pitch that had frequently silenced Dora’s entreaties and could defeat the most aggressive dissenter.

‘Yes,’ said Dora with an unwanted sob, followed, to her mortification, by hiccups that wouldn’t stop.

They both turned as another teacher entered the room. Dora moved away and tried to suppress the after-effects of her grief.

‘Can’t your –
husband
do some of the childcare?’ said Elisabeth quietly.

‘Oh,’ said Dora, now attempting to smile through the tears that smeared her vision. ‘I think and think about it, but frankly he’d be bloody useless. He’d – he’d play him songs all day on his blessed guitar, but there’s a risk he’d lose him.’