You (13 page)

‘I see,’ said Elisabeth, raising her finely arched eyebrows.

‘The uselessness of men sometimes amazes me,’ said Dora, looking up at Elisabeth wryly and feeling inept under her dark brown gaze.

‘Yes.’

‘Oh Elisabeth . . . Talk to me.’

‘I am,’ said Elisabeth, her face motionless. Then her mouth softened.

‘No.’

‘You chose this route,’ said Elisabeth.

‘I did not choose to become pregnant.’

Elisabeth merely raised one of the eyebrows. ‘There is some choice,’ she said eventually.

Dora shook her head.

‘I miss you,’ she said.

Elisabeth was silent.

‘So –’ said Dora then. ‘Celie helps when she can. She dotes on him.’

‘I hope so,’ said Elisabeth. ‘She’s a very nice girl.’

‘Thank you. She helps more when
Little Women
is on top of one of the book piles by her bed,’ she said, hearing herself astonishingly and outrageously speaking to Elisabeth as though she were simply another colleague. Again, she wanted to protest, or to beg.

Elisabeth’s mouth twitched. ‘And the boys?’

‘The boys . . .’ said Dora, and thought of Tom and the frequently absent Benedict, drumming, skateboarding, reading obscure comics and sitting around jabbing at sticks with carving tools or watching the small grainy telly upstairs in a miasma of farts.

‘They come down to eat.’

You’re beautiful
, thought Dora.

‘Boys eat,’ said Elisabeth.

Dora looked at her watch and remembered Barnaby, who was currently in a studio with the jazz ballet teacher Kasha in a free period between classes. Since his birth, there had been dirty sinks, stacked-up washing, children’s clothes requiring mending that were rotting against a pile of old horse tack in one of the utility rooms. Dora experienced a moment of vibrating panic that here was another mouth to feed, another body to save, another soul not to damage. God, she muttered in her head. Good God, please.

‘Could your husband’s family help with a nanny?’

‘Really I don’t think so. They help with the school fees. They have never offered more, though I sometimes think, privately,
help me
,’ said Dora, shivering, knowing that by now the Bannans were aware of the futility of funding their son and were too astute to feed a bottomless pit. ‘But –’

But she had learnt never to depend on a man, or on anyone else.

‘Really,’ said Dora, looking down at her feet, then glancing at the other teacher, ‘for a while at least, I’ll have to work and use a childminder. She lives in an unpleasant house with expensive breeds of cat.’

‘I do,’ said Elisabeth Dahl slowly, ‘I do wonder at people.’

You, Dora wanted to say, but could not say, you are the person who met my new son and said, ‘They are dull at this stage, aren’t they? Especially baby boys.’ With no apologies, no congratulations, no gift for the baby, only perfume for me. Your nostrils faintly flared with distaste. You, a mother of sons. And you wonder at people.

As the term went on, Dora bit her nails and visited Barnaby at the childminder’s each lunchtime. Instead of masticating wholemeal samosas alongside her colleagues as they discussed performance innovations or Peter Doran’s sex life, Dora ate a cold slice of quiche alone on the lane on the way back, her hems dark with the hedgerows and her arms full of the shape of Barnaby.

Elisabeth was habitually evasive.

When the childminder was ill, Dora begged neighbours; she scrabbled for childcare, ringing home in her lunchbreak to make sure fragile logistics had somehow fallen into place; she occasionally considered asking Cecilia, whom she trusted more than Patrick as a babysitter, to stay at home for the day and look after the baby brother she adored, the teacher encouraging the pupil to play truant, but missed school days were viewed as catastrophic by her scholarly daughter and Dora could not bring herself to ask. Patrick became a better father the older his children grew, but the toddler stage simply failed to engage him.

One lunch hour when Barnaby had gone down for his nap early, Dora took a walk outside the village to Elliott Hall before returning to school. The progressive artistic nature of the place still pleased her at some profound level, the hall’s barn theatre advertising
’Tis Pity She’s a Whore
and a children’s weaving lesson taking place in one of the medieval guesthouses across the courtyard. She thought, for a while, about Walter Gropius and his followers. She thought about all the locations to which the Bauhaus had moved, longing at some level to be in those places. She had discussed them with Elisabeth. She had been reading a biography of Bertrand and Dora Russell when she had discovered she was pregnant. There was a certain form of philosophical and artistic expression that had bloomed earlier in the century, and its ripples, she thought, could be found here. It was this, this far-reaching legacy that had brought her to this area and snared her, while the resident hippies’ less cohesive babbling washed over her. It linked her to Elisabeth, who had such similar interests and aesthetics, while Patrick did not. She felt, now, as though her brain had died since her fourth pregnancy.

She crossed the courtyard and smiled at the heads bent over primitive looms. Smoke trailed across the walls from a bonfire behind the kitchen garden. A man, a timeless man in moleskins and wellington boots, prodded the fire and wheeled a barrow from a pile of branches.

Through the arch on the further side of the courtyard the gardens rolled in rich severity. Berries and evergreens splashed bare lawns. A duck passed in the sky. She followed it with her gaze and wondered whether Barnaby had yet woken. She stood against the arch as a girl ran down the hill and into the arms of her mother, who scooped her up and left. Two figures rounded the corner by the azalea path. Dora watched her own daughter and James Dahl walk slowly along, their bodies in profile as they followed the curve of the gravel. They were so delineated by the late autumn light that the air around the folds of his trousers was almost vibrant with clarity. Cecilia’s hair was brighter, bolder in the muted glare. She wore no coat, Dora noticed, instinctively wanting to dress her. He was talking to her and she was listening. This, then, was who her daughter loved. It was suddenly ridiculously clear. Dora wanted to laugh and laugh; she felt unstoppable mirth, something close to hysteria: a surge of amusement that contained no trace of cruelty, and she leaned against the arch and tried to stop herself shaking. She found she had tears in her eyes.

She had pictured a rangy, pretty-featured upper sixth-former, a quartet of candidates springing to mind. She had briefly considered Daniel the school tennis coach, who attracted a small following. She frequently wondered about Cecilia’s friendship with Gabriel Sardo. She would have assumed, if questioned, that Cecilia viewed her English teacher simply as the type of traditional pedagogue her funny old-fashioned mind seemed to crave.

‘Stop it,’ she snapped at her below her breath. ‘Don’t waste your love.’

Dora watched Cecilia’s nervous lively gestures in the face of James Dahl’s silences. He looked notably older than her unworldly country daughter with her almost dangerously desired vision of a future.

Dora gazed at this man who was loved by her love and loved by her daughter, and was unable, hard though she tried, to see what it was that they saw in him. How could they feel passion for him? He was too conservative, too tightly wrapped in a coating of privacy. His aspect was faintly colourless beyond the sooty contrast of his eyelashes, though he had, she supposed, a gentlemanly sort of male beauty. She preferred something more rough hewn, more expressive in a man.

They had stopped by a rose bush and Cecilia was talking, moving her head and arms rapidly, dropping her gaze to the ground, all movement accelerated. He was nodding patiently. He was a man in his thirties listening to the prattle of an intelligent schoolgirl, mildly enjoying it even and awarding her the respect her enthusiasm deserved. He was a married father perhaps two decades her senior.

‘
Celie
,’ Dora wanted to say, kindly and gently, ‘come here right now.’

She thought of Elisabeth cradled in the arms of this man.

James and Cecilia began to walk again. She has left her coat behind on purpose, thought Dora, observing the waist of her daughter set off by a belt she had pulled in tightly, her legs still somehow childish in over-worn tights though they were meant to be womanly in the heels she wore. She pictured Cecilia that morning almost hopping between dry sections of path and lane, fastidiously pulling those heels away from the boot-wearing crowds in the car.

He leaned as though to hear her, his faded mac falling from straight shoulders. Dora watched her daughter: the formation of her head with its small chin and matching curve of a nose and those flying dark Bannan brows. Dora could hear nothing that they said. She watched a silent film: a man oblivious to the emotions of an infatuated girl.

An agnostic since her teens, she prayed for her children. She rued the wounds she had, inevitably, inflicted with her unknown obsession. She looked at her daughter and she felt love.
Adore someone who wants you
, she pleaded silently, kissing the spray of freckles remaining over her nose, reaching out in her mind to her and pulling her back to her by her hair, as though enacting some Greek myth.

Dora returned to Haye House and covered for a flute lesson, despite her frequent assertions to the school that she was not a wind instrument specialist. As she taught, she began to calculate whether she had enough rusks at home for Barnaby and decided she would have to use crusts. She glanced at her watch and wondered whether she could finish the third year’s music class in time to pick him up before collecting the others.

She saw Cecilia walking alone by the drama department’s geodesic dome, clearly caught in thought. Where was Nicola, her unfavoured best friend? Zeno Dannett, the other member of her old trio, was now viewed as mildly troublesome by the school. Instead of mooning around the grounds in silence, she had joined a gang that smoked by the river and energetically kissed and coupled on its banks. Staff found sections of foil down there, condoms and Rizlas. The nominal librarian, in reality a general studies teacher who occasionally discussed classification systems and spent school money on his favourite authors, laughingly enumerated the paperbacks returned with squares torn from their covers for use as cigarette filters.

Zeno had found passion beyond James Dahl. She had lost her virginity to a classmate with eczema who painted graffiti-influenced murals and expected sex most lunch hours. Her interest in her English teacher was now weighted with condescension: she discussed him from an amused distance, as though contemplating a film star slightly out of fashion. Annalisa the Swede wept and idolised with ever more ardour. Ignored by the boys in her year, Nicola remained virginal and devoted. Ignoring the boys in her year, Cecilia – who had only ever, with a sense of experimental duty, kissed two contemporaries, their adolescent slightness, their pimples and downy growth alienating her – felt her attachment grow even as she eschewed its more obvious manifestations. She was seventeen, and could no longer twitter and cluster like the girls in lower years who imagined themselves invisible as they trailed Mr Dahl.

By November, Cecilia had met James Dahl four times in Elliott Hall gardens. She walked there most blowing November lunchtimes on the chance of a sighting, assuring Nicola that she could study more easily in solitude and feigning oblivion to her hurt response. She glanced at Nicola as she spoke, considering her frowns and her moles, the anxious repositioning of wiry hair behind shoulders, the mind so often overlooked by others, and a shiver at the knowledge of what she could tell her ran through her. She felt the almost sickening power of it; the gathering of repeated temptation. But she couldn’t tell her. It was far too dangerous. Diana was her only confidante, as she had been from early childhood. Fearing Nicola’s presence and terrified of jeopardising in any way the pure thing, Cecilia had retreated into secrecy. She walked it off on the moors instead, bathed in it, wrote hidden page after page.

The third time she had seen James Dahl, there was bonfire smoke: a man throwing leaves, some children like fat-faced fairies pulling wool inside a building. She knew that she would remember all the details of these times.

‘It’s nice to talk to you,’ he said at the end of their walk, and then left her to return to school.

Now she haunted the gardens. She sat huddled in her coat on benches writing notes; she crouched at the foot of the sundial reading with a tighted calf carelessly but elegantly displayed in case James Dahl should come past; she walked and read and drummed quotations into her head using spontaneously fashioned mnemonics, a whole system of visual and verbal links whose oddness would cause great humiliation if revealed. She was attuned to movement through the arches, any winter walker a smear of colour on the corner of her vision. She longed for him to arrive, just as, puzzlingly, she almost dreaded his entrance. He was, she thought, like her own self talking to her; but a better self.

That week, as she mounted the central flight of steps that rose beneath curves of bare branch, James Dahl entered the gardens with his wife.