‘Hey you guys, walk around, soak in the place, take your time, hang out,’ a teacher called Idris, originally named Ian, said to the new pupils on arrival. ‘Make merry,’ he added.
James Dahl was not yet teaching at the school by then, but Cecilia wondered later whether she might, by some tiny chance, have glimpsed him that day, visiting his wife’s friends in the Art Department. She often dredged her memory, searching for a flicker of him between the trees and stripey jumpers, as though running and running after a disappearing figure in a dream.
Three
February
On the evening of her return to Wind Tor House, Cecilia held Ari, the father of her children, for a long time. She was darker now, her redhead’s complexion with its ability to freckle given to shadows, the skin settled more tightly on her bones, so that the structure of her face only faintly resembled that of childhood. She rested her head on Ari’s shoulder, unable to express to him or to anyone else the claustrophobic, somehow shaming aspect of stepping backwards and coming home. There was an indefinable sense of failure. She instinctively wanted to avoid her contemporaries who lived locally, as though she still had something to prove.
She had chosen to do this, she reminded herself. Circumstances had conspired, but she had made the choice to come back here. Yet the country seemed alien, making her newly afraid of its remoteness, its overwhelming silence, and the proximity of her mother, who lived in a cottage on a bank beyond the back vegetable garden. Now that she was here, she was hit by a jittery dread of what she would ask Dora, and when. It had been easy to devise her approach in London, but even a glimpse of Dora in the garden made her stiffen with guilt and antipathy.
Cecilia led Ari through the dully lit passages, nudging open doors, teasing him as he ducked and tripped on uneven slopes and steps while the girls thundered about downstairs.
‘This was my parents’ room; this was my room . . . this was the baby’s,’ she said, stepping into a small bedroom at the end of the house.
‘What?’ said Ari brusquely, turning to her in the gloom.
Cecilia looked at him in momentary confusion.
‘Please don’t start,’ he said. His expression tightened.
She hesitated. ‘Ari . . .’ she said. ‘I meant my youngest brother’s room. When he was a baby.’
Ari paused. ‘OK, OK,’ he said, putting his palms up in front of him. ‘Big apologies. Come on.’
‘God, Ari,’ said Cecilia.
‘Sorry.’
They walked in tense silence.
‘This is weird, hick girl,’ said Ari more lightly, bowing his head beneath a lintel on a landing where pine smoke suffused the air and small panes chattered with wind. ‘Where are the sirens? Hoodies? Where’s the Thursday recycling van? The deafening chucking of glass and cursing?’
Cecilia was silent.
‘Well?’
‘I don’t know if I can do this,’ she said in a rush, stopping and taking his arm and stroking it, pulling at the hairs distractedly. ‘It’s very, very strange. Have we made a mad mistake?’ She caught sight of Dora’s cottage hunched behind a hedge beyond the back garden, and swallowed. ‘Am I in fact a lunatic to have come here? Have I dragged us all?’
‘Too late, too late . . . It’s fine,’ said Ari, and pressed the back of her neck.
‘I need to look after her,’ she said, glancing at the cottage again. ‘I really don’t know if she’s going to be OK, whatever she says . . .’
‘She will be.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘Be brave.’
‘I am,’ she said heatedly.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If anything – you’re that. Brave. Stroppy.’
‘I’m not.’ She rested her head hard against him. Her hair fell over her cheekbone, its waves still gathering at her shoulder in a shadowed reddish brown. She wore dark pink and much black, and in this place of leaking barns and damp plaster, she looked decidedly urban; more defined and drawn than the bright blurry child she had been.
‘I have to go,’ said Ari reluctantly as the light fell.
‘I know,’ said Cecilia.
She felt an instinct to tug him back, or simply to ask him to stay, but he had to return to London during the week for work until June, and then he would take up the post he had long contemplated at the University of Exeter. She would stay with the girls and write her latest children’s novel at home. She waited by a sitting-room window and watched his headlights disappear, standing there after the beam had been swallowed by trees until all she could see was lichen-draped branches knitting darkness. The radiators clanked and remained tepid, and furniture shrank in corners, newly insubstantial in such large rooms.
‘Come back,’ she murmured.
She went to bed long after her daughters, creeping and shivering and feeling for light switches, and pictured Ari in the car on the motorway. It was shockingly cold.
A creak seemed to echo her words near the end of the room. She felt, already, as though she was shoring back animals and ghosts.
She had forgotten that country darkness was absolute. The house was animate with settling plaster and contracting beams, dense with condensation and stone. As a child here, she had kept her head under the blankets in terror, the place too alive with shadows and the accumulated drifts of human history to contain nothing but air.
The river’s flow was audible; the buckled thatches of cottages dripped in the tuck of the valley; Wind Tor House was hemmed by streams, pouring off the fields, bubbling under the lane. With the exception of her mother and one old couple by the bridge, the neighbours in this remote hamlet were now unknown to her.
She lay down and tried to sleep. It was after midnight. She thought about the big mortise keys for the house and the country habit of leaving doors unlocked. Time glowed on her clock, fifty minutes passing in shaking jolts. Fragments of her childhood came to her in distorted images, and it felt once more like a form of madness to be here again, whatever Ari’s job and her mother’s state of health, and, underlying it all, her own compelling need to lay ghosts. Her mind, she had sometimes thought over the years, would never rest until she returned. Despite motherhood and adult experience, she realised that she was, in some small but tenacious way, arrested in that time, her emotions still caught in her late teens, the values and sources of excitement of that period affecting her to this day.
She stared upwards to find the ceiling through the shifting darkness. A layer of grey began to settle on her consciousness. Then she heard footsteps outside on the lane that was barely more than a loosely surfaced track running between the front garden and river field, and she wrapped the sound into her half-sleep, too warm to move.
She heard the steps again. She sat up, remaining motionless, and waited. Minutes passed.
Rising, shivering, she made herself creep blindly towards the window where she pulled back the sheets that she and Ari had hitched over curtain poles and sat on the sill, pressing her eyes to the glass, detecting shreds of blowing cloud among the blue-blackness. She caught the noise again. Was it a dog? A wild pony? Feet were lightly dislodging small stones on the lane as they moved. She widened her eyes against the night until they hurt. Could she be seen herself, the whiteness of her nightclothes a dull glow behind the glass? The thought made her shiver. She was able, perhaps, to detect the palest glimmer among the spaces between the fence railings on the river field. There was silence outside, her own blood pulsing in her ears.
She made herself return to bed, the irregular beat of her heart hurting her. The house settled and scratched; there were mice and pigeons in the loft, she remembered, and she longed for the warmth and the comfort of Ari in bed with her. This place was too big, the children too far away, the river rushing audibly.
And one question kept running through her mind, however hard she tried to banish it as she edged towards sleep.
One thought: will she come back to find me?
Four
The School
&n
bsp; At Haye House, Cecilia’s brothers flourished on a regime of nicotine and collage-making while she rebelled by attempting to work. She was a freak, she thought increasingly as time went on. She didn’t want to smoke or mix vodka-based drinks with Valium. She couldn’t talk to people in the required casual manner in which understatement was threaded with mockery. She couldn’t even pretend to relax in a school where class attendance was voluntary and children swarmed naked across the lawns. She couldn’t pluck at a guitar; wear scarves on her wrist; launch herself, black-coated, on a rope into a pit in the woods; don a bowler hat or a dress made of lavatory paper, or doodle Jimi Hendrix lyrics on her margins. She couldn’t not care.
She begged to leave. She would settle for the indifferent girls’ grammar near Plymouth with its pudding-faced daughters of local industry clad in ink-uniforms; she would board in another county; she would attend her best friend Diana’s entirely delightful-sounding Catholic school just north of the moor where girls attended daily mass and studied Greek. At Haye House, she truly suffered. She was a monstrous misfit in a place where she tried so hard to absorb the dominant culture and was simply unable to do so. As soon ask the lame to walk.
‘Of course you’ll be staying, darling,’ Dora said, for there was in her mind simply no alternative to that lush and scruffy sanctuary where pupils were addressed as ‘kids’ and ‘people’ and teachers were called Karim and Dobbo, Blimmy and Jocasta. In Dora’s world, in which, ideally, Cecilia would wear her embroidered jacket to join other children for door-to-door wassailing on ponies and spend evenings of improvisation in Haye House’s theatre, dissent was simply an affectation.
After a time, Cecilia realised that Dora, who had been given as rigidly and conventionally English an upbringing as it was possible to experience in post-war times, and whose method of rebellion was to merge Sixties progressive thinking with a sensibility attuned to the Arts and Crafts movement, held theories on education, aesthetics and childrearing that were as coaxingly draconian as they were apparently liberal. But Dora was so kind, so busy, so patently exhausted, that Cecilia barely dared to bother her. And so she endured her enforced and expensive schooling. She pretended that she was Sara Crewe or Tom Brown or a pupil at Lowood while her contemporaries jammed, played bongos, called themselves Communists, hugged or ignored in greeting, and girls in tight waistcoats wore so much black eyeliner that Cecilia caught merely an appraising glint as she passed, her back stiff with self-consciousness.
Dora Bannan taught music O level, cello and piano at Haye House, fetched little Tom from the junior school, returned to collect Cecilia and Benedict, then drove them home and wrestled with the gritty fumes of the Aga to cook supper. Patrick would meanwhile have fixed a dripping tap, dug the foundations of a drainage system at the suggestion of a lodger, planned to repair the thatch himself, and possibly fired his kiln. Pots and decorative beasts stacked up on the windowsill of his barn were admired by the rare passers-by who wandered down that lane, a sole sale often involving a long chat over a coffee and flapjack with a tour of the grounds thrown in.
His passions, thought Dora, looking at herself in the mirror one day – her light-brown hair still long; her mouth full; some sex and spirit still to be detected, she thought cautiously, beneath the tarnish – were his guitar and his children and the life that they had created: the existence that had adhered itself to them and their house over the years: children’s plays performed with a weekend’s notice, requiring the night-sewing of velvet capes and owls’ ears; her own Saturday-morning music groups that sprang up, unpaid for, involving virtually unknown children with pageboy haircuts ferried to the house; charades on smoky evenings scattered with slumbering toddlers and teenagers and loud hilarity that kept out the battering winds, the bogs, the cows shifting in the lane while the Aga hissed with potatoes and Patrick sang tunes learned in youth and, as the evening wore on, Irish rebel songs. It was what she had wanted so fervently upon meeting Patrick’s large family; it was the opposite of her own buttoned-in Kentish childhood and she was still, she told herself, learning to accommodate the chaos, to live with the exhaustion.
The tabby was joined by two strays, horses chomping in the fields, the children petitioning for a dog.
‘Who’s paying?’ said Dora to Patrick, uncharacteristically.
Dora had once been entranced by him. She had gone to Dublin in nervous youth – her first trip abroad after music college; her escape from small-town life and parents who still called her Dorothy – to take up a job she had seen advertised in The Times for an assistant in the Bannan family’s outlet shop. There, selling rugs and tweeds in a lavender-scented converted cottage, she, like many an enthusiastic young summer worker before her, had been enveloped by Bannan hospitality as she was chatted to in passing, fed soda bread and carrageen, included as a matter of course in their evenings of unbridled entertainment in the family house outside Dublin. She never wanted to leave. She watched August passing with anxiety; she let her plaited hair loose for the first time and caught that summer’s sun. She longed to belong to that family, that spiralling Catholic dynasty with its offshoots and in-laws, its much-mentioned touch of Huguenot ancestry, its traditions and largesse.
Patrick Joseph, PJ, one of eight, played guitar and banjo, could improvise any song request, segued from classic Spanish melodies to tunes from the Burren, and was cheerfully determined to forge his own path. Dora – thin, a little colourless, musical, repressed but hopeful of change – had suspected within days of arrival in Ireland that she would fall for one of those sons, and found the second-youngest hypnotic, experiencing love as certain and destined the moment it occurred. Patrick’s modest height was offset by his strength. He was sinuous, fast-moving, showing amusement and displeasure with equal rapidity; he was eternally busy, could shoulder a vat of dye or carve her a ring out of the ancient Bannan ash as easily as he could hum complex harmonies to background music while collating figures. Dora’s own parents were suitably ruffled by this alliance with an Irish Catholic, however moneyed, and Dora enjoyed her first act of rebellion more than she had predicted.
It took over a decade of marriage for her to understand a simple fact: it was a family she had fallen in love with: a well-meaning but domineering and ever-expanding clan that now annoyed her as much as it, or the idea of it, had once enraptured her. She had begun to realise that the family slipped injections of cash to Patrick in addition to the school fees, recognising another truth she had ignored: that PJ Bannan, loving father adored by children and cleaved to by friends, born on a pad of wealth, was unlikely ever to be financially independent.
She tried to calculate when she had begun to tolerate him.
When winter drew in with its fogs that killed hikers while ponies drowned in the mires and children lost fingers in farm machinery, all three Bannan children maintained more forcefully that the ancient warren of a house was haunted, even the older and more rational Benedict avoiding the boiler room in darkness and the section of the upper floor that led along a passage to the loft of a barn. For Cecilia, there were places where she held her breath as she ran through shadows. There were pools of darkness and fitful spirits to appease.
Cecilia – surrounded by the slow-moving hippies whose ruminations she soon scorned; by Haye House pupils who inhabited a different planet, and by village children who ran in packs and knew how to turn sheep from their backs – had few companions other than her old confidante Diana, the daughter of Dora’s childhood friend Beatrice.
‘Diana is my best friend in the entire world,’ Cecilia said in solemn tones when Dora hesitantly touched upon her isolation. ‘We are blood sisters. We’re like Jane Eyre and Helen Burns,’ she said grandly. ‘There is no one else on this moor, after all. Nothing but absolute heathenism.’
‘Why heathenism?’
‘Emily Brontë. Wuthering Heights,’ she said.
‘Oh,’ said Dora.
‘You see,’ said Cecilia.
She wished so fervently to be good, to look af
ter unwanted children; she read orphan books, mused upon water babies, ragamuffins, upon foundlings and motherless mites. She begged her mother to adopt an African baby and Dora considered the practicalities.
Home was her escape from school, her haven of crouching ceilings, old floorboards and fireplaces as big as rooms, of settles and ledges and window seats where she could tuck herself with her legs wrapped in curtain and read and read like the girl Jane Eyre.
‘What are you reading, Celie?’ her father enquired, and she told him. He, like Dora, always shortened her name, despite Cecilia’s protests that this made her sound like a seal.
‘What are you writing?’ he asked, and she hesitated.
‘A children’s book,’ she replied.
‘Ah great. For your brothers?’ he asked.
‘. . . Maybe,’ said Cecilia, royalties swimming in front of her mind; thoughts of glory, revenge, money for roofs and heating and clothes; money to send Dora, bountifully, on a holiday.
She was now writing for an hour and a half each evening about Gabrielle Blanche Chevalier de la Dupont, the French orphan educated in Paris who was fluent in English and brilliant at ballet, resident with her guardian in a house of polished antiques and mysteries: a girl whose piled-up hair snaked to below her knees when unravelled, and whose excessively thin body and dark-blue gaze alerted concerned neighbours to her dreaming nature. She hoped fervently to sell the novel to Penguin, London.
‘I need – I need – to leave Haye House,’ said Cecilia, falteringly, to Dora that night, and Dora smiled.
‘How would you travel elsewhere?’ she asked gently.
Cecilia was silent. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, guilt tangling with helplessness, and she leaned her head against the shutters, inhaling the pine and praying for continuance, pressing her forehead harder, sending thoughts and tightly muttered pleas for family safety vibrating through the wood and the glass and into the constellations beyond. She stroked her future babies, somewhere up there in the dark infinite sky.
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