You (6 page)

After half-term, Dora returned to Haye House determined to excise her emotions. Her perspective had realigned itself during the week away with a juddering series of realisations as she had watched her family living their normal lives, her maternal focus altered in ways they could surely sense.

But once at Haye House – Idris kissing her twice on each cheek, the maths teacher known variously as Blimmy and Blim-Head sending a brownie he had baked spinning into the air for her to catch; once those parents, the rock dinosaurs and psychoanalysts and cabinet makers with their wives, mistresses and au pairs, had converged on the drive, dropped off children and departed; once inside the corridors with their nicotine scents and flimsy balsa installations – she sought Elisabeth’s gaze. The air was more rarefied than she had remembered.

That week, Cecilia looked out for Mr Dahl, as she always did now, but with more impatience. She needed a comment from him, a high grade for her
Tempest
essay, an encouraging nod or some other, non-specific form of salvation. He understood her. They never spoke outside classes, but with a certainty that was surely drenched in enchantment she knew that he recognised the way her mind worked.

For the first time, she noticed Mr Dahl’s growing gaggle of admirers with a curiosity beyond her initial amusement. They fluttered unobtrusively around him: Nicola, Annalisa, and Zeno. They too were Haye House oddities. With the exception of herself and a pair of science geeks who tinkered sweatily in the lab and were ignored by teachers and pupils alike, these were the school’s only studious pupils.

Nicola with her beatific expression and fringed frizz of cellist’s hair, her clear skin sown with moles, already loved Mr Dahl: Cecilia could tell. Zeno, Zenobia, the disappointingly diffident daughter of a celebrity lawyer and his second wife, was more at home in James Dahl’s classes than suffering the expressive anarchy favoured by his colleagues. The final member of that drear trio was Annalisa, a near-silent but marginally more attractive Swede given to flower-print dresses and hairbands who had begun to cling to Mr Dahl as her likely saviour in the pandemonium. Rigorously discouraging any form of personal friendship with his pupils, unlike a sizeable portion of the staff at the school, Mr Dahl was resistant to Annalisa’s needs, and she followed him like an open-mouthed foal, silently crying out for pastoral care that he was unable and unwilling to offer her.

In the afternoon English class, rain falling softly among the pines on the drive, Cecilia’s consciousness undulated to the rhythm of his voice as he read a speech of Trinculo’s. She could float upon the air of concentration he demanded, an atmosphere that eventually tranquillised the most sneering renegade.

He spoke to her through her alert daze.

‘Cecilia,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you could explain Caliban’s motives here.’

‘Oh,’ said Cecilia. And she blushed, and she explained.

‘Cecilia,’ he always called her. ‘Cecilia.’

As no one else did, other than her father in his songs. He made her like her old-fashioned saint’s name, her glassy Italianate name with its wings and flourishes. Celie she had always been to her family and therefore to most of Haye House. Now she was Cecilia, and elevated into blue cloudy saint’s air where she could fly.

At home, she was infected with partial awareness that tension caught the air. Patrick was there at the table for supper, but he didn’t reach for his guitar afterwards. Uncharacteristically, he washed up. Cecilia prayed for him. She read more, hiding within the crooks of her home.

At times the lodgers gazed at her, catching her outside the bathroom semi-dressed or wrapped in a towel, the sexual egalitarianism they professed quite abandoned as they appraised her with an open moist mouth behind a beard. A naked male hippie had on occasion left his bedroom open as she passed. She had to move swiftly around dark corridors and down steps, and she put a lock on her door.

She fought the iced air of the bathroom with kettles and the east side tank’s entire supply of hot water, steam billowing into the stillness as she squeezed out the system’s every drop of warmth. The moor blew out there, a scarred bowl to run over, a never-ending wildness. Was the howling the sound of gales, spirits, or the large cats rumoured to roam and hide in the gorse? Ice furred the frame of the window; the copper in the spring water that supplied the area stained enamel and fair hair blue-green, so she stretched out in the rare heat and imagined mermaids and swimming pools. She thought of Mr Dahl. She ate a small stack of penny sweets she had brought into the bathroom, and alternated
Anna Karenina
with
Fifth Formers of St Clare’s
.

She saw in a passing moment what her childhood had been, perceived that it was about to end, and felt the weight of adulthood upon her. She seemed very old now. She picked up
The Mystery of the Spiteful Letters
, went on to
Middlemarch
, then settled back to think about Mr Dahl. Drips ran through the condensation inside the window that reminded her of his handwriting. Large-footed creaks started up in the passage and a lodger tried the door handle. She frowned in indignation and wondered what the indolent hippies would think when they heard that she’d become famous. She had almost finished writing a novel, and her body was elongating.

She arched her back, watching water run down her new astonishing curves. She could see a smudged impression of her features in a mirror: an oval-shaped face; her mouth now fuller; her precise eyebrows much darker than her hair; her hair and skin no longer discordant. With a surge of embarrassed excitement, she wondered whether she could one day turn beautiful, like Bathsheba, like Eustacia, like Anna Karenina, or the lovely Angela Favorleigh of St Clare’s.

The next morning she looked out again for Mr Dahl, who was tall and considerate and affectingly sombre.
At first Tess seemed to regard Angel Clare as an intelligence rather than as a man
, she remembered. How could she have perceived him during his first weeks at the school only as a mind that guided her, an authority who wrote comments? When she saw him with his fringe falling over one eyebrow, the deprecatory posture of one accustomed to stooping beneath doorframes too low for him, her pulse changed its rhythm. It was the first sensation of anything approaching exhilaration she had ever experienced in that place.

She caught moley Nicola’s eye. The possibility of future triumphs bubbling up into an irrepressible smile, she returned her gaze with a beam.

‘I should like to go somewhere else with you,’ said Elisabeth to Dora below in the staffroom, her words characteristically delivered as an announcement. ‘Away from these stifling corridors. Are you free on Friday evening?’

‘My husband. Patrick,’ said Dora. ‘I mean – I think he’ll be at the pub. The children –’

‘The pub,’ said Elisabeth reflectively. Her lips slowly parted. She appeared to think about this, and was silent in a way that left Dora flustered.

‘He has a group of friends – locals – there. Singing nights on Fridays.’

‘Singing nights,’ said Elisabeth again in an echo.

‘Perhaps,’ said Dora. ‘Perhaps,’ she said, floundering, ‘you and – James – could come over for dinner?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Elisabeth lightly, and seemed to smile to herself.

There was, later, something of Elisabeth’s smell – the spicy fig-like scent she wore, or a trace of the frosty rustle of her blouses against her skin – something known and familiar and subconsciously absorbed – that Dora detected on herself, because Elisabeth, always, stood close to those she was talking to; and it made Dora recoil with a spin of confusion in the kitchen. No
woman
had ever looked at her in this way, with that appraising eye contact, laced though it was with pride, with something held back. It filled her with exultation and repugnance in turn.

Yet for all Dora’s aversion, she sometimes wanted to convey something else to Elisabeth. ‘Don’t see me only as a married woman,’ she wanted to say. ‘I am me. Perhaps I’m different things too.’ But she could no more put the sentiment into words than crystallise it for herself.

‘There is a woman,’ she said tentatively to her friend Beatrice.

‘Yes?’ said Beatrice.

‘She’s at – the school. She works there. And she seems to look at me!’ she said in a blurt, rising into hysteria.

‘Look at you. Like a – ?’

‘Yes,’ said Dora.

‘Oh, isn’t that part and parcel of that school?’ said Beatrice calmly. ‘Anything goes. I don’t really understand, but I’m sure it’s connected to that liberal atmosphere.’

‘Perhaps it is,’ said Dora.

‘Does she look at all manly?’

‘Well she has short hair – properly short hair. Hard – how can I put this? Hard edges. But she is very feminine in a way. She’s married to the head of English.’

‘There have always been married homosexuals, I understand. But I don’t know about women.’

‘Nor do I,’ said Dora, shaking her head, and she never referred to the subject again to Beatrice, her very closest friend in life, or to anyone else. Years later she thought that that was the principal legacy of her tightly sewn childhood: the ability to keep secrets; the necessity to conceal. Her parents had stitched that into her very fabric.

Patrick worked later each night in his pottery barn, and sometimes he failed to return to the house. Cecilia waited for him, listening from her room for the knocker’s sequence of reverberations as the front door shut. She wondered how he could survive there in the winter storms that blew straight in from the higher reaches of the moor. The stream beside the barn frequently overflowed and flooded across the lane, gouging chunks of tarmac, carrying banks of pebble and mud. Fogs slid down and settled thickly in that river valley. She pictured him dying like an animal, just as her own hamster had expired of underfeeding and hypothermia, a fact that had tormented her for almost five years. Tears sprang to her eyes every time the merged hamster-father image rose to her mind. Patrick locked the barn door: he wouldn’t allow his children to witness his occasional accommodation, but Cecilia balanced a stool on a hay bale outside the window and peered through the grime and twisted pottery animals, and what she saw broke her heart: a bed, neat, piled with duvets and blankets, cover after cover in a precarious puffed heap, an electric heater close to the mattress, a kettle and packet of biscuits. She thought then of his stories of all the times he had been picked up by the police when he had first come to England merely for being Irish; of all the times he had been assumed to be a labourer because of his accent alone. Anger merged with the sorrow.

Cecilia slotted against Mr Dahl’s sketchily drawn figure in her mind. She brought him to her, a tall body, a broad chest, strong arms, sheltering her.

I will make myself perfect, she promised, tears streaking her cheeks until they itched. I will study under Mr Dahl and make myself a brilliant creature in his image, and very thin. I will become successful. I will buy my father a house by the time I reach the sixth form.

In the morning at Haye House, students were making loud music in the science corridor, sitting cross-legged on piles of bags. Amps vibrated on lockers. Nicola stood outside the top English room.

Cecilia stopped there. She had just been offered a choice between a canoe-making class, Brazilian dance and martial arts. She and Nicola glanced at each other.

‘He’s not well today,’ said Nicola tentatively. ‘Mr Dahl.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I heard Jocasta saying something that I
thought
meant he’s got a cold.’

‘Right,’ said Cecilia, the prospect of missed lessons filling her with disproportionate distress.

‘He’s very clever, isn’t he?’ said Nicola in a tiny voice.

‘Oh,’ said Cecilia. ‘Yes. I think so. Very.’

‘I think he went to Oxford.’

Cecilia paused.

‘What do you think of his wife?’ she said, demonstrating her lack of concern by appearing to study the lockers.

Nicola screwed up her face. ‘Horrible,’ she said. ‘Bossy. Stern.’ She was silent. ‘I don’t think he likes her very much.’

Cecilia almost laughed. ‘Poor him,’ she said.

‘Yes, poor him,’ said Nicola fervently. ‘He’s so . . . He’s such a good teacher, isn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ said Cecilia, loitering. She caught Nicola’s eye again and hesitated, Nicola blushed, and then they burst into simultaneous laughter. Cecilia couldn’t stop. Tears began to run down her cheeks. Nicola laughed in quiet gulping gusts. Cecilia held on to the door, and every time she tried to stop, she could not catch her breath, her abdomen ached, and fresh laughter caught her. In a moment of silence, unable to breathe, she saw that Nicola’s laughter also bled into tears.

‘How long?’ she said when she could finally speak, and then laughed again.

‘Always,’ said Nicola. ‘Zeno too . . .’

‘From the beginning of term?’

Nicola nodded, her fringe obscuring her eyes as she looked at the floor. She shook her head. ‘Since we saw him on the drive.’

‘We were only children.’