You (40 page)

Ruth watched Izzie slipping through the garden and on to the field above the pond at dusk where the hawthorn clouded. Izzie loved him now, that man, more than she loved her, just as their mother loved Izzie the fairy child she had found the most: most most most because she hadn’t grown in her tummy and that had to be made better for ever. After Izzie, she was a runt, a mute, a wriggly cadpig like in the novels her mother read to her. Her mother told her in half-sleep that she loved her when she wasn’t supposed to be listening, but she knew that a different daughter would have been a better daughter. Someone like Sara Crewe or Laura Ingalls. She prayed to the ceiling that her parents would never die.

Izzie met Dan in the grass where wild poppies grew, and he murmured into her ear. He had brought a tape measure and, laughing so much that he and Izzie rolled around on the field together joined in mirth, he measured her body, and swiftly drew an outline of it with calculations on paper, working out how many days were left until her birthday and sketching plans with arrows of intent on his diagram.

‘Are you having an affair?’ said Ari with husky, freshly woken abruptness the next morning as Cecilia picked up the phone.

‘God, Ari! Of course not!’

‘Really?’

‘
Yes!
’

‘Well I . . . detect . . . there’s some kind of unhealthy obsession.’

‘Do you?’ said Cecilia. ‘Don’t be silly, my darly.’

She lay back in bed for the few warm minutes available before Ruth ran in carrying her clothes, thrushes and blackbirds sang through the open window, and she was back at the Clapper Inn, where the weather had been quite different, and her body much younger, and her mind barely her own. He had kissed her deeply there, as rain heaved by wind was pitched against panes, and murmured words of love that she had never heard before, and in their unprecedented leisure, he lingered.

In his half-sleep afterwards, he was seemingly bothered by guilt, moaning little questions to her in mutters and sudden twitchings. He woke with a jolt and gazed at her. ‘Shh shh,’ she said and they kissed, their lips sticking together, and he moved his hand over her and caressed her until she juddered in sharp pain and sharp pleasure, and only then did she sleep, in that last partial hour before dawn, and he had to wake her through her thick drowsiness, through the dawning consciousness of his lips on hers, into a cold room.

She rose now as Ruth came scuttling in, and nervously changed her clothes several times the moment Ruth had left for the kitchen. Once Romy was dropped off, she wrote in the music archive with clouds clinging to the cedars across the lawns below, and then read what she had written with a fuzzy dissociation, the memory or anticipation of him swimming over her words so that she drifted and wasted time. When she heard his footsteps, slotting them into a sense of recognition in her desire that they should be his, she continued writing as she once would have done as a teenager, then resisted her own behaviour and stood and raised one eyebrow.

He put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Let’s go out somewhere different,’ he said in a low voice as they walked outside the room. ‘I’ve got my deputy to cover my next class.’

‘I need to work,’ she said automatically.

‘Have life outside this too,’ he said calmly. ‘Writing’s not living. I can meet you some lunchtimes. Or other free periods.’

‘Aren’t you catching up with – preparation – then?’

He shrugged. ‘I talk to you in my head every day.’

‘I do –’ she said, but she stopped.

‘You’re not angry with me any more?’ he said as they walked downstairs, his feet drumming loudly on the wooden steps.

She shook her head. ‘No. Or yes, yes, always. A bit of me. But I forgive you now.’

‘Then we can be friends.’

They stood in the entrance of Elliott Hall in grey brightness. She laughed. Blossom shivered against the sky’s glare. She was glad she had worn the skirt she had chosen. She could only deal with him in certain clothes.

‘We are friends,’ she said.

‘I’m always prepared – steeled – for you to turn round and suddenly –’

‘Look, the sky is full of rain about to fall.’

‘– feel a vigorous need to defend yourself. A desire to punish me for the past.’

‘I have. I’ve done that. A line has been drawn under it,’ said Cecilia. ‘You want more?’ She smiled at him.

They huddled together in the porch where the air was close and smelled of grass clippings and the walls had taken on a slatey darkness. Petals trembled. Large raindrops began to fall and flatten in explosions on the steps in front of them.

‘Let’s sprint to the tree there, then we’re halfway to the car,’ he said, shouting above the rain and grabbing her hand and running so that she stumbled a little on the step. They stood below a cherry tree breathing fast and the rain slid over the blossom in a perfumed fall about them and dripped in fatter strands on their heads.

‘My hair is soaking,’ she said.

He looked. ‘It reminds me of when you were younger and it was curlier,’ he said.

‘Would you like that?’

‘No. Of course not,’ he said. ‘I find you more beautiful now.’

‘Oh –’

The rain churned earth into puddles and splashed up against their ankles, blossom weighting branches like snow clumps in the green shadows. The world beyond the tree seemed to have disappeared behind a curtain of falling water, but a young woman of about Mara’s age passed them in a dark blur through the rain and smiled directly at Cecilia, and Cecilia turned her head in a billow of irrational hope as the girl passed and went on walking towards the hall.

She watched her back. She was silent.

‘Oh Cecilia,’ he said. ‘You’re crying.’

‘I’m not.’

He cradled her in his arms. Their breath rose as steam. He kissed the top of her head.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Something – set it off.’ He stroked her. ‘She was warm,’ she said into his shoulder. ‘After they bathed her. I just lay there.’

‘You’d just given birth.’ His shirt clung darkly to his shoulder blade.

‘And now . . . Do I keep on battering my mother, even though her cancer may return? . . .’

‘Leave it, Cecilia. Or keep her with me. We will always –
always
– talk about her.’

‘Yes,’ said Cecilia and tears spread into cool rain on her cheeks. People ran from cars emitting muffled laughter, cries barely audible behind the downpour.

He put his arm on her back. ‘I’ll talk to Dora,’ he said. ‘I’ll see how much she will tell me.’

‘What!’ said Cecilia, jolting her head up. ‘She – you can’t do that. She doesn’t know. Elisabeth – Good God. You could lose your job even now?’

‘I don’t care,’ he said, shrugging. ‘I’m happy to talk to her. I can drive there right now. The sixth form can wait!’

‘Oh no no. Thank you. No, I don’t want – I want you to be safe. I want to protect you.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘It does to me. You won’t get more out of her. I begin to think she really doesn’t
know
where those fuckwits are. There’s not much she’s hiding.’

Petals tumbled and stuck to her skin. She lifted her hand and smelled them, wanted to eat them. The cleanness of him rose to her nose, the subtle laundered-shirt scent of him, his freshly bathed old-fashionedness. His eyelashes were wet.

More cars arrived in the car park, their wipers frenetic. Blossom fell in sopping clumps on to the gravel.

‘Let’s make a run for it,’ he said.

‘No.’ She shook her head. Rain trickled over her eyebrows and into her eyes. She licked it. She could hear only his breath and the sheets of rain.

‘I have to kiss you,’ he said suddenly, and he leaned over and kissed her, his mouth warm against the chill of the wet air.

‘My little chickadee,’ said Dan, lazily stroking Izzie. ‘No – not yet.’ He scrabbled in his pocket, tipped back his head and swallowed a beta-blocker, and kissed her lingeringly. He smiled down at her, then he scrambled up, and went to the window, watching the arrival of Cecilia and Romy below through the rain.

‘Is it my sister you fancy?’ said Izzie suspiciously. The downpour was noisy on the thatch.

‘No,’ he said, laughing and giving her a wide kiss on the mouth, his nose knocking into her cheek. ‘Wait your time.’

‘You’re cold,’ said Izzie, touching his hand.

‘I’m always an ice block,’ said Dan, and he curled up against her, embracing her, holding her so that her back was pressed hard against his torso, and she felt his shakes and tremors against her skin.

I return a kissed woman, Cecilia thought in bemusement. She drove back through hedgerows and hawthorn that toppled and tangled with rank growth, arrived light-headed at the house and regathered her expression. Her lips had been kissed, illicitly. She felt disbelief. Did it show, unfaithful kissing? How did it change one? She glanced at Romy and Izzie, but all seemed ominously normal. She went to the bathroom to look at herself in the mirror in silence without Ruth’s presence. She gazed at her own face. In almost twenty years, she had never kissed anyone but Ari. She contemplated her kissed mouth and she seemed to sleepwalk into the kitchen to arrange supper for her daughters.

The phone rang. A plunge of dismay hit her at the thought of Ari calling, of the simple fact of speaking to him with a mouth that had kissed someone else’s, and she banged her hand on the sideboard in her agitation, but the call was for Izzie, and she floated, both dazed and hyper-alert, through the evening, the flavour of being seventeen, and kissed and incredulous, returning to her.

It came true
, she thought now of her longing followed by her affair with him, the concept like a slide of mercury inside her all those years later.

Dora pondered over the tension that hung like a forcefield between the cottage and the house. She stood for a few minutes, her mouth pursed, then she began to write Cecilia a note. She wrote three lines and surveyed the stilted sentences that Cecilia might despise for their lack of grace, then she read some more of
Thérèse Raquin
in front of the fire, finding, these days, that she craved the cloying torture of romantic entanglements, wallowing in the mistakes and disastrous exultations of someone else’s love life to take her away from her own.

But there were limits to how far she could be distracted. She put her head in her hands. She could only remember, and justify.

‘Where’s my baby?’ Cecilia had said at the age of nineteen, the voice of the gentle daughter vicious.

It had taken Cecilia nine months to turn into a hellcat, a spitting creature denuded of her child. Only then did Dora, in trepidation, contact the adopting parents; but they had gone, they had already taken off, living outside the system with no National Insurance numbers, no property owned and no benefits claimed. Various travellers had assured her they would track them down at the fairs and in the lanes and on the fringes of a loosely formed society on which they collided – she had something belonging to them that she must urgently give them, she said – but they were elusive. They had gone to Wales, then Ireland; they had returned to Wales; they had disappeared.

The lies had started at the beginning. Oh, what a tangled web we weave . . . Dora had let the words snake through her mind again and again down the years, cringing at her own use of cliché. The lies escalated, in desperation, out of necessity. A month after Cecilia’s fury had emerged, Dora had found a private investigator through contacts of friends of Beatrice’s in London. She had blundered into the process barely considering the legal ramifications, assuming that names would provide sufficient information; but once the questions started – her own rapid fudging in response, her ability to lie increasingly easily first shocking her, then shaking her and eventually hardening her – she scarcely knew any more which was the truth and which was her invented version of events. The detective had quite palpably been aware of omissions and distortions, but he could extract nothing more from her, and in panic, Dora had paid the bill for the entire, truncated search out of a cobbled-together loan from her in-laws, and hastily withdrawn before the travesty could progress. It was only over the years, with her slowly growing awareness of what she had done, that she realised that a missing person inquiry could have been instigated at that point.

Dora groaned now, into her hands. ‘Celie,’ she murmured. ‘I’m sorry.’

Twenty-nine

May

The next afternoon, Dora saw Dan appear in the kitchen yard of Wind Tor House. She had glimpsed him more frequently in the last few days as he slipped in among the shadows by the back gate at night with a strained vigour that tensed his shoulders while his movements had the grace in nervousness of an overgrown adolescent. Now he was clearly waiting for Izzie to arrive home from school on the bus ahead of Cecilia and Romy in the car, bending over and coughing.

Dora almost ran out of the front door. Wild garlic pulsed through the air, making her breathe through her mouth. She longed for company, she always realised when someone appeared: Katya, a neighbour, above all a granddaughter. She couldn’t think what to say to a young man who seemed so guarded and self-contained. ‘Are you unwell?’ she called through the gate to the yard, where he was cutting logs.