You (16 page)

He stood on the path with his hands in his pockets, his fringe slanting over his forehead, his body tall against the long low house, looking as displaced as a soldier freshly billeted to an estate. The coldness, mild as it was for December, constrained their speech as the party boomed through the windows at one remove, the garden echoing with space to be filled. Guests stood shivering in groups on the front lawn, their cackles pricking the tension of the cold in a self-conscious attempt to transport the mood of the party into the garden.

Cecilia walked with James Dahl down the path to the gate. She heard her own chat as a chirruping in the silence.

He said nothing.

She talked on. Her voice echoed and trailed into the airy distance. She pressed her teeth into her lip and attempted to terminate her babbling.

He was silent still, walking tall beside her across the lane to the fence of the river field.

‘Look,’ he said finally, lifting his head, ‘at the stars. Extraordinary. More than you ever see on the edge of the moor where I am. They light the sky,
the wings of night
.’

‘
Take him and cut him out in little stars,/And he will make the face of heaven so fine/That all the world will be in love with night
,’ said Cecilia in a rapid monotone.

‘I look at the stars and think of that,’ he said. ‘And wonder who’s up there. Who did someone – love – who’s not here?’

‘Wait,’ she said suddenly. ‘Promise you’ll wait? Look – look at the river there. I’ll be one minute.’

She ran back into the house. Ducking and burrowing through bodies, she pushed past guests, heads turning as she passed, and she grasped the handle of the door to the staircase, muttering apologies to force it open. She ran up two steps at a time, tripping, and sped into her room where she grabbed a book from under a pile of papers inside her desk. She kicked off her high heels, found other shoes and checked her appearance in the mirror: almost maddened with nervous anticipation, she made faces in the glass, widening her mouth and eyes as though expressing frantic, cartoonish incredulity to herself, her only audience.

‘Celie!’ called Dora, but Cecilia hurried to the hall.

James was still standing there, leaning against the fence and facing the river. The blot of a cow patterned the fields beyond. Night furred the thatches of the hamlet.

‘This,’ she said breathlessly, ‘I got this for you.’ Her feet scraped gravel in a small skid as she stopped beside him. She handed him the book. ‘It’s – I saw it. I thought you’d like it. Thank you. It’s to say thank you for all that – all our teaching, those extra classes. Well . . . Thank you.’

Her breath flared, wine-tinged beneath her nostrils. She shivered.
Calm down
, she told herself. She cursed him for making her shy.
Charm him
, she told herself. She made a promise. She dug her nails into her palm.

‘
Lyrists of the Restoration
,’ he read. ‘Collected by Masefield . . . 1905. This is a first edition. Are you sure it’s for me?’

‘Yes,’ said Cecilia.

‘What a fine and lovely book,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I’m – I’m very touched.’

‘I thought you might like – the Rochester, and the Abraham Cowley – and the Marvell.’

‘I’ve never been given a present like this,’ he said, turning the book over and smiling.

‘Oh,’ said Cecilia. She returned his smile; she shrugged. She felt the velvet of her sleeves rubbing against her coat lining. She drew in her breath and pulled her shoulders back.

‘Thank you,’ he said solemnly, his head slightly bowing.

She laughed. ‘Come on!’ she said. ‘I have to show you.’ She walked ahead. She turned to him. ‘Here’s where the stream goes under the lane to meet the river. Over here – look, over there – are the stables. I used to think I would keep Dalmatians in them.’ She pulled her coat to her.

‘Which Dalmatians?’

‘Oh, stray Dalmatians kicked from Dartmoor farms – found in winter snows and rescued and groomed by me. They’d emerge all plumply silken from the mud of neglect, of course. Cadpigs would be kept inside.’

‘A children’s novel?’ he said, and he smiled.

‘Dodie Smith. This is the dove barn,’ she said. ‘I used to think I’d . . .’

But she couldn’t say it. She was unable, with anxious superstition, to say that here she had planned to house orphans. Orphans scuttling round in faded floral prints, rescued, reading her books, eating the flapjack she would deny herself and hide in there with stolen milk. The proposed orphans had once almost merged with animals in her mind: large-eyed infants covered with grime or fur, in heartbreaking need of petting and shelter.

‘This is my father’s pottery barn,’ she said. ‘A passage runs behind it. I used to think I’d find ingots down there, and that from the roof you could glimpse a secret garden. Full of Edwardian children.’ She suddenly heard her own voice emerging, warm and animated into the night.

A laugh murmured in his throat. She walked close to him. She didn’t pull away.

She opened the gate that led to the pond field. They began to talk as they had at Elliott Hall, the flow and intensity that had begun to develop there now deeper, flooding into the spaces and easing the sense of propriety. The night was still. She showed him places; she told him anecdotes; he laughed at what she said.

‘How very wild it is here, Cecilia,’ he said. ‘You could almost be living at Haworth for all the human company there must be.’

‘Just a few hippies in barns,’ she said airily. ‘I’d rather sheep. I’d rather parsons and women in attics and the odd ghost than those phoney beardies.’

‘I can see they may be preferable,’ he said.

‘Tell me about
your
childhood.’

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Very, very conventional. Nothing like this.’

‘No childhood is conventional,’ she said. ‘Tell me.’

‘
It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least
. William Gaddis.’

‘Yes. But what was it like, really? Yours.’

‘I grew up – in a big brick house in Suffolk –’

‘A
vicarage
?’

‘It was once.’

‘How I longed for a vicarage. A vicarage boyhood!’ She dared herself. ‘You’d have to be a poet or a relic if you were born in a vicarage. And?’

He paused. ‘I grew up there,’ he said, amusement tangling with possible discomfort. ‘Prep school. I boarded at seven –’

‘
Malory Towers
or
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
?’

‘There were no midnight feasts. Tom Brown.’

‘Poor you,’ said Cecilia emphatically. ‘Poor little Mr Dahl –’

‘James.’

‘I can’t call you James!’ She shivered and pulled her coat tighter.

‘You can here at a party, I think. I know your mother.’

‘Poor little James. Oh, I can’t! You are Mr Dahl.’

‘And I will die Mr Dahl. For eight years I was “Sir”. At Haye House, God only knows what else I am.’ He cleared his throat. His breath was visible in the air. ‘It was a mistake, essentially, Cecilia, coming here.’

‘Don’t you like Devon?’

‘Oh yes. Of course. The wildness, the moors. But my heart and home lie in Dorset. We still have our house there. We often go there to spend weekends with our boys.’

‘Do you?’ said Cecilia with disappointment, her memory spooling back to Zeno’s reports of the Dahls’ weekend absences.

The fields were scored with sounds and airborne shadows. A fox ran past and disappeared near the hump where badgers lived. The sky was liquid in its darkness, sections of hedge rustling.

‘You don’t like it then,’ she said dully. She saw his ring again. Her intermittent surges of hope, so heady and assured, descended with equal rapidity into humiliation.

‘It was a brand of teaching – in Dorset – I understood. My wife – Elisabeth – enjoys the artistic element of her job, but I . . . I fear death of the soul here, frankly.’

‘Oh but I’m so glad you came!’ said Cecilia with spirit. ‘Truly I am. You
saved
us. What would Nicola and I have done? We couldn’t . . . you know, we couldn’t really
learn
before. I was so miserable. You saved our souls!’ She coloured, obscured by the dark.

He paused. ‘If I feel I can have been of any help at all, then I’m gratified,’ he said, his voice audibly moved. She could see planes and shadows of him, tiny details of him palpable in sounds and scents beside her.

He smiled, and threw his shoulders back and gazed up at the sky. ‘How vast it is,’ he said. He strode over the stream that ran in front of them with a slight jumping movement. Cecilia hesitated. He held out his hand and helped her as she landed, then let it go. She felt the brief passing of warmth of his hand on hers. They walked up the hill towards the sallow on the other side of the stream. Stray party noises drifted up there, smoke twining from the house.

‘From here,’ she said, catching her breath, ‘you can see the tors. Corndon Tor. Wind Tor. Ravens and kestrels nest there.’

‘Look at their immensity against the sky,’ he said. ‘I remember reading
The Hound of the Baskervilles
under my blankets and longing, longing to get out of that dormitory to see this strange wild place.’

‘Strange and wild,’ murmured Cecilia. ‘Do you remember the
atmospheric tumult
of
Wuthering Heights
? The
pure, bracing ventilation
? I love that.’

A horse appeared almost silently beside her as a breathing shadow spilling on the night, then edged away. An owl flew over the pond. There was a silence. Her heart sped with urgency into the pause. She had a new sense, rising sharply through her body into a pitch of certainty that seemed almost to hurt her, that she could move him, attract him, possess him. The stars rolled in a dome over the valley.
Carpe diem
, she thought.
Carpe noctem
. Do what others would do. Which others? What?

She felt sick. Nerves beat through her body. It hurt when she breathed in.

‘Come to the river,’ she said quickly. ‘The last part – of your tour.’ She blushed. She blessed darkness.
To hazard all, dare all, achieve all
, she quoted to herself, but she could not hold on to the words.

He hesitated.

‘It’s down here,’ she said smoothly, almost laughing at her own boldness, and she descended the stone steps cut into the side of the wall that led from the field into the lane. They rounded a corner. His feet were noisy on the gravel. She heard the rhythm of his breath.

Speedy was huddling before a fire beside one of the river field’s roofless stables with the teenage sons of a neighbour. They were stirring something in a pot on the flames, crouching in a clump of ferns, now dried, that reared and choked the entrance to the stable in summer.

‘Hey! Mr Dahl. Celie,’ said Speedy. ‘Try some of this.’

He added liquid from a bottle that Cecilia recognised as her parents’ Stone’s Ginger Wine, and scooped some of the drink from the pan into one of her mother’s earthenware mugs. Cecilia took a sip, then another. It was thickly alcoholic.

‘Go on,’ said Speedy, dipping another mug into the liquid and handing it to James Dahl.

‘I’m just showing him round the grounds,’ said Cecilia unnecessarily.

‘We must be getting back,’ said James, tentatively consuming Speedy’s beverage. ‘This is rather good, Gabriel,’ he said.

‘It’s fucking great stuff,’ said Speedy. ‘More.’

He took the mug, dipped it into the pan and brought out steaming liquid, spilling some on the grass and throwing his head back with uninhibited laughter as he handed it to James.

‘The river,’ said Cecilia.

‘Where is it?’ said James. He stumbled slightly; there was amusement in his voice.

‘Just down here,’ said Cecilia, leading him round a corner past the stable and climbing a gate. The voices of Speedy and his friends merged behind them, thinning into the silence of the field and the approaching fall of the river.

‘Where? I can barely see a thing.’

‘Down there,’ said Cecilia, lurching as she jumped off the gate. ‘In a cavern measureless to man.’

‘I see,’ he said slowly. ‘Is it, then, a savage place? Holy and enchanted?’

‘It has a mazy motion,’ said Cecilia.

‘I can’t beat you or even, possibly, match you,’ he said, listing as he climbed over the gate. ‘And you are,’ he said, his voice hesitant, ‘a fraction of my age.’

‘It’s only famous stuff,’ she said.

‘And Enid Blyton.’

‘Oh, I could quote to you very easily from
The River of Adventure
.’

He stumbled. The earth was soft, matted with growth, netted with the streams that traversed the field.

She slid on a slope of mud and let out a small scream. He caught her arm. She laughed as her feet sank into chilled liquid.