You (21 page)

‘Very slowly,’ he whispered and she murmured assent. She calmed her breathing. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. Slowly, with infinite patience, he entered her, and they lay there motionless for a short time while she breathed and he kissed her and his words emerged in fragments. That astonishing fullness, that stretched congestion she felt, filling her to her rectum, her abdomen, the base of her spine, nudging all her organs, her hips pinioned back, his weight hard against her, was a shocked revelation; and she thought, so
this
was what women did: Dora, Elisabeth, Zeno, all those mothers casually walking round school who knew the conspiracy of this, this extraordinary truth.

They began to move. She rose and drew in her breath and pressed herself against him. She was, she thought, connected to him for ever, in that merging of pleasure and pain.

Sixteen

March

It was as if they were still camping. There were damp-aired cupboards and crannies, a jigsaw of small and larger rooms to decorate, their walls bulging and drifting; beams and alcoves half sunk in curving plaster, uneven doors on staggered levels. Cecilia could taste the dust of flaking paint as she folded piles of washing while attempting to plot her children’s novel. The deadline was at the end of July, and it suffused her with low-level panic.

She could barely contain her daughters: they were city girls who, she feared, might become lost on the moor or frightened by the darkness where the trees and lichen knitted. She worried about them in unspecified ways, ways that nagged at her because she couldn’t quite formulate them. Romy scorned anywhere outside London and took refuge in St Anne’s; Izzie put announcements about cowpats and sheep shaggers on her Facebook page; and Ruth still followed her mother like a clinging dog.

Ruth had seen him again. He – she didn’t know his name, or perhaps he had no name because he was a wild man – had seen her in the fields near school and talked to her. He spoke, just a little; he didn’t expect answers; he asked no questions. Ruth couldn’t talk when people asked her questions. She listened to him. He told her about the parts of the moor where the wind blew and the trees were goblins slipping down the gorse on their root feet to the streams to strangle sheep. He lived there, he said, among ravens and buzzards. There were Hairy Hands on the Postbridge road that caused cars to crash. There was a wronged servant’s grave whose flowers were always kept fresh. There was a prison. Had that been his house? she wondered. Was that meant to be his house? She pictured him coming down to Widecombe, crawling through Dockmell where the badgers ran and rats squirmed in stable drains. He said he would give her a wild baby rabbit to tame if she wanted one.

In the evening, Cecilia smiled at her eldest child, making herself traverse Romy’s new aura of independence to hug her. Since the day Romy was born – since the day her first baby was born – her children had taken over her mind more forcefully than she could ever have imagined: preoccupying her, Ari informed her wryly, to the exclusion of himself or anyone else. She always laughingly denied this out of love for him, but she knew, as he knew she knew, that it was true.

‘Was the scenery painting good?’ said Cecilia, kissing Romy’s cheek.

‘Oh yes!’ said Romy. Flames rose above logs behind her. With her bright red hair that fell just past her shoulders, her spray of freckles bridging a small straight nose set in an oval face, she looked, thought Cecilia, like a picture of a girl in a fisherman’s jersey in a children’s book bearing an ice cream and a novel, the sea breeze just lifting her hair, an art nouveau cloud scudding over the horizon. She was an old-fashioned kind of girl.

‘And you think the art teacher’s good?’

‘Yes. Really. I – yes, very good.’

‘I’m pleased, my darling,’ said Cecilia. ‘And your English teacher’s just “
old
”?’

‘Oh,’ said Romy. ‘Yes. An old weirdo.’

Cecilia laughed. ‘Weird in what way?’

Romy laughed slightly in response.

‘He – he. It’s hard to say,’ said Romy, and colour rose on her neck.

‘Why?’ said Cecilia suspiciously.

‘He,’ said Romy, glancing at the ground. ‘Sometimes I see him kind of looking at me.’

‘Does he?’ said Cecilia. She paused. ‘How?’

‘Just – looking.’

‘What’s this man’s name?’

‘Mr Dahl.’

‘What?’

Romy frowned.

‘Mr Dahl.’

There was a silence.

‘Mum,’ said Romy.

Cecilia opened her mouth.

‘Mum –’

‘What’s his first name?’ Cecilia asked in a small flat voice, cutting across Romy.

‘I don’t know.’

‘What kind of old?’ Her skin was pale.

‘Quite old. Fifties? I don’t know. Prehistoric. Jurassic? Why?’

‘I – I just wondered,’ said Cecilia, her breathing unsteady. ‘
Jesus
,’ she said, and it was almost a growl. ‘Idiot. Me. I –’

‘Mum! What’s the – What do you mean?’

‘
How
does he look at you?’ said Cecilia, turning to Romy. She laid her hand on one of her shoulders, holding it hard. Romy twisted to look at the hand.

‘Oh God, Mum, I don’t know. It’s – nothing. Like. I don’t know. It’s nothing. It’s just the way he looks. Stop getting so fiery about things –’

‘Well I’m going to the school,’ said Cecilia rapidly. ‘I’m complaining – immediately. He
cannot –
’

‘
No!
Mum!’ said Romy in a panic. ‘No!’

‘I certainly am. How does he look at you?’ said Cecilia.

Romy jumped. ‘Like – it’s really all right. He just looks at me a bit. I notice because he’s always looking down. He probably looks at
everyone
like that. You’ve gone mad!’

‘I haven’t –’ said Cecilia. ‘I – I – How long has he been teaching there?’

‘
I
don’t know.’

‘Where’s his wife?’

‘There.
There
. She teaches me.’

‘What?’ said Cecilia weakly.

‘Ms Dahl,’ said Romy.

Cecilia hesitated. ‘What’s her first name?’ she said.

‘Elisabeth. She’s the art teacher. The good one,’ said Romy impatiently, rolling her eyes. ‘Remember? There’s a good one and a pathetic one. You’ve gone crazy!’ she said, laughing.

Cecilia flushed angrily.

‘No
teacher
can look at you – whatever way it is he looks at you,’ she said, and she walked out of the room.

‘James Dahl please,’ said Cecilia, ignoring Romy’s calls of protest from her bedroom door, the very enunciation of his name a disturbing plunge into the past; but some secretary – an officious trained impostor instead of the failed artists and part-time knitwear designers who had once worked in that office – informed her that staff were available to take calls between four and six in the afternoon. Cecilia argued impatiently while the voice repeated rules. Had she, she wondered, at some subconscious level known that he would be here? She doubted it. Then it seemed glaringly obvious. She dismissed it again. A memory of herself as a teenager came to her then: a girl the same age as her daughter Romy now: a man’s mouth kissing her breast, a strong thigh against her smaller one.

The idea of Ari in close proximity to James Dahl worried her.

On Saturday morning, Dora heard the garden gate open. She glanced up, her body tuned to hope, but it was the helper Katya.

‘I took a phone call for you yesterday,’ said the taciturn Katya in a mumble, the local accent having survived university. ‘Sorry. It was from your friend called Elisabeth.’

‘What did she say? Did she say when she’s coming?’

‘No.’

‘Nothing?’

‘That she’d call again.’

Dora paused. The air felt cold on her hair. She knew that she would be waiting all day.
I haven’t progressed
, she thought suddenly.

She felt frozen, her life an unmoving chunk of matter. She stood quite still as understanding splintered through her. Twenty-five years of intermittent pleasure and torment from Elisabeth Dahl. A quarter of a century. She reeled. Suffering and joy and sexual reunions weeks, months and even years apart. They were supposed to have a friendship – a friendship interspersed by heated moments at Elliott Hall, or by an annual night spent together in which Dora helplessly watched herself losing her year’s worth of pride while her body and mind were relit – and yet, it seemed, they never could quite give each other up. Elisabeth’s bouts of kindness, caring, unexpected vulnerability, always occurred just when Dora thought she had summoned the strength to push her away; because there were of course depths of humanity and even – most affectingly; most disastrously – sadness beneath Elisabeth’s imperturbability. She was more fragile underneath it all than she could begin to know, and it had taken Dora years to understand this.

And now, since the diagnosis of breast cancer, Elisabeth was being more considerate. She would arrive, unannounced, with food or gardening and opera magazines. Dora felt a new softening. When Elisabeth visited her cottage, she made Dora laugh with her caustic asides and her boldness. She was generous: she brought flowers, always, and meals now that Dora was ill: surprising meals, hotpots and intense pasta sauces that she had, she said, left simmering for most of the day, transported and garnished extravagantly with herbs or edible flowers. The warmth, when it came, was touching. It was simple.

‘I will look after you,’ Elisabeth said to Dora, and she did – indeed she did. But intermittently.

There seemed to be no pattern but randomness.

‘Come and drink the tea inside when you’re ready,’ Dora said to Katya, her voice croaking until she coughed. ‘I made us some scones too. Do you mind brown flour in scones?’

That night, Ruth counted the gods and ghosts that peopled her room with a system to contain them, but shadows haunted the house and feet ran across the loft. When she looked at the river-gurgling blackness from her window, she saw the hulks of the old troughs and broken walls by the barn, like a crumbling city of stone and moss, and she thought about all the animals out there, the bogs and mists and bare-teethed horses creeping down towards her.

Cecilia slipped out of bed just after midnight.

‘Hey gorgeous,’ said Ari, grabbing her hand in his half-sleep.

Cecilia leant down and kissed him on the lips, then pulled her fingers away.

‘Come here,’ he said.

‘I have to work.’

‘Not now  . . . Go and do it, then come back to me.’

‘It’s all very well for you to say
that
,’ she said, then heard her own voice and softened and stroked his forehead. ‘You have all hours all week to work.’

‘Yes yes yes. I know. I’m sorry. Let’s not have a fucking argument about it now.’

‘I’ll argue with you in the morning instead.’

‘How I look forward to that,’ said Ari, and groaned and pulled the duvet over his ears, and she walked away, ruffled. Words of self-justification ribboned through her mind.

She sat down in what was her old bedroom, now her study, and tried to clear her thoughts. Into the space flooded James Dahl the St Anne’s teacher, followed by Romy, by Dora’s radiotherapy, by the coal for the Aga, the draughts and leaks and scrabbling animals, and the needs of three uprooted girls. Had she, then – somehow, unwittingly, unknowingly – put herself back where she would be forced to encounter him again? She felt like a fool. Her face heated, she opened the file containing
The House on the Moor
and drove herself to plan her characters’ journey up the Dart: three children with their pet wolves, their complex quest and their escape from a deranged butler. The door of her old bedroom bore Gallery Five stickers covered over in layers and layers of paint, their plump mouse and cat figures just detectable under cream gloss, and she thought how fitting but disconcerting it was that the writing of children’s books had partially bought her back her own childhood home.

She forced herself to write, but she heard a noise as faint above the river rush as a scratching. The sound was not on the road this time: it was in the plants outside the window, nearer to the house.

Someone was outside again.

She didn’t look. She made herself imagine a fox. She considered disturbing Ari and asking him to explore the foliage in his practical male way to tell her that the intruder was a product of her imagination, a chimera of weather and animal movement, but she couldn’t, because she knew that someone was there.

‘Darling,’ she said, and she didn’t know who she meant.

She tried to stop thinking. She attempted to write. Perhaps, she thought, she didn’t want Ari to interfere because she was clinging to irrational hopes. People couldn’t just disappear from this earth. The baby had gone somewhere.

Someone was out there. There was someone or something – a pony, perhaps? A hedgehog? – rustling in the tall grass that obscured part of the front wall and needed removing. She went to the window and made herself open it, the frame catching on the thatch, the stillness lining her lungs. She could see nothing. She turned off the light, knelt on the window seat and stretched out through the narrow opening into the night where she could taste the rinsed chill of the air. There was someone there. Mara, Mara. Was she coming across the river, reed-battered, hungry?