You

by Joanna Briscoe

  She first saw James Dahl one afternoon break when she was standing outside the art department reading, her features still unfocused with a transient plumpness, her mind constricted with her own inadequacies. He was walking through the granular gloom of the drive, dark with pines, that wound its way to the school.

  ‘Who’s that?’ whispered Nicola, a studious outcast who had attached herself to Cecilia in hope of discovering a kindred spirit.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Cecilia. ‘A teacher from a different school?’

  ‘Perhaps he’s a father.’

  He was tall and thin, though his shoulders were broadly angular. He seemed quite emphatically to have emerged from another era, his style inconsistent with his actual age. His hair, a dark blond grading to something more colourless, looked clean in this place of unwashed tangles and fell forward on his forehead in the manner of public school boys who don’t know what to do with their appearance once mothers and matrons have ceased their ministrations, just as his clothes bore the faltering formality of a once privileged boyhood. His eyelashes were conspicuously, thickly dark, contrasting with his essentially fair colouring, and added to the impression of alertness or sensitivity. His nose seemed to Cecilia to be like a statue’s: large and almost perfectly straight, his mouth precisely formed. His trousers, held up with the kind of belt that Cecilia imagined in amusement his father would have worn fighting in India, fell in almost concave creases against his stomach, and his jacket pocket was lined with pens. She saw that his forearm was slimly dense with muscle.

  He seemed so incongruous in this haven of drumming and kite-making that it didn’t occur to her that he could be considering a job there. His wife, as she found out later, was an old friend of the head of art. As Cecilia watched James Dahl making his way towards a side entrance, head slightly bowed as though apologetic for his height, she detected a trace of melancholy or simple seriousness in him that she found interesting.

  I saw him when I was a child, she always thought. I glimpsed him when I was a girl. She liked the fact. She liked the fact that it disturbed her.

  Five

  February

  Dora woke at dawn the morning after Cecilia moved back to her childhood home. As she gazed at the little section of Wind Tor House visible from her bedroom window, tired and weakened by a lumpectomy, a sense of trepidation was followed by a surge of joy. Her barely known grandchildren had arrived. Those beautiful girls.

  Cecilia woke soon after and understood in that bleached dance of light and silence where she was. Despite her apprehension, she felt a rise of happiness: almost bliss, white-clean and shivering, at the thought that she was here, that she had dared to change her existence so utterly that she was on the moor with her three daughters in the place that had weighted her dreams.

  She turned her face towards the mattress into darkness.

  The baby would be in her twenties now. Twenty-three.

  She looked through the window at the field sloping to the river, the late winter sky like chilled sea, and eight-year-old Ruth, her youngest daughter, stormed across the floorboards, her eyes lowered, and threw her arms hard round Cecilia’s waist.

  ‘I got lost in the corridors,’ said Ruth in a series of blowing breaths as Cecilia stroked her and kissed her hair. She pulled her to her and aimed for a cheek still faintly protruding with young childhood with its miraculous skin scent. Ruth succumbed, then wriggled away. She was plump, and shy, and would look no one in the eye.

  ‘You have to remember which way to turn at the top of the stairs. What’s the matter?’ Cecilia said, holding Ruth’s head to see her face.

  ‘It’s haunted.’

  ‘What? What is?’

  ‘Here. Here,’ mumbled Ruth, rubbing her face into Cecilia’s arm.

  ‘Oh you mad girl, lovely girl, it’s not.’

  ‘I heard noises.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Everywhere.’

  ‘The whole house creaks, you know. There are streams gurgling away, floorboards settling. That’s all. You don’t really know the country. That’s the thing; that’s all.’ She wrapped her further into her arms.

  ‘No. But – it was later,’ said Ruth, drawing in her breath. ‘Outside as well,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’ said Cecilia.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A pony,’ said Cecilia. She paused. ‘Wild ponies come down the lane.’

  ‘It was someone walking,’ said Ruth, and began to sob.

  ‘I love you,’ said Cecilia, hugging her. ‘I’m going to drive you all over the moor later and show you round. We’ll have a big trip! A sightseeing tour. And a big fat cream tea.’

  Ruth blushed and scampered, heavy-footed, ahead.

  Cecilia passed a window seat set in a curve of the staircase where she had so often sat to think about James Dahl, and was reminded of him. For years in London, he had been a rare and unwanted memory. Where was he? she wondered. Haye House had bowed under its own troubled excesses at some point in the early Nineties, admissions falling as progressive ideals all but expired, and a more traditional school had taken over the building. He was most likely, she knew, to have returned to the house he had always considered home in his beloved Dorset, but she sometimes wondered, with fleeting unease, whether he could still live and work in Devon. It was possible. She had made herself contemplate the idea before moving.

  She walked downstairs into the main sitting room, beamed and sloping, so low and unevenly plastered with its exposed granite walls and cavernous fireplaces, it seemed to have been caved out of the earth.

  There they were, the three girls, like a noisy spell, alighting on window seats and crates: their heads a cluster of different colours: red, dark and pale. Cecilia went and hugged them all in turn as she always did, physical with them as she continued to be even though they were older and intermittently resisted her. She clung to that image, that storybook trio of girls. She attempted to fix the picture into her head – a portrait, reaching to the edges of the frame – but however hard she tried, an airy space, a shadowy outline that needed to be filled, slid and hovered just behind.

  Six

  The English Room

  Cecilia was almost fifteen when she saw him for the second time. There he was, talking to a woman in the sunken garden, the tall grave-faced man she had once seen as she stood with Nicola while he walked up the drive. She recognised him immediately, though he was a little different from the figure in her memory who had lightly mutated into a 1940s illustration, a wounded silent soldier from a children’s novel. In reality, he was more contemporary, a normal man, yet starkly dissonant in this context.

  He and the woman walked across Cantaur’s Fields to Neill House, and the news rapidly spread that new teachers had arrived. Cecilia could barely believe it to be true.

  ‘Who’s that teacher?’ she asked that evening. ‘I mean, he’s new.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘He’s very tall and thin.’

  ‘You must mean James Dahl,’ said Dora.

  ‘Who is he?’ said Cecilia.

  ‘He’s an English teacher.’

  ‘Oh . . .’ said Cecilia.

  ‘He’s been brought in to control the badly behaved masses,’ said Dora cheerfully, with a glance at Benedict.

  ‘He can piss off then,’ said Benedict.

  ‘Oh, he’s really quite an interesting chap,’ said Dora. ‘A bit serious. His wife’s come too; she’s something of an artist.’

  ‘I don’t want to be “controlled”,’ snarled Benedict.

  I do, thought Cecilia, wishing for homework timetables, lists, prize-giving days, a punishment book. She pictured a volume of rules in glowing leather on a lectern in the main hall. She imagined the serious James Dahl, tall and erudite, teaching her.

  ‘Are there other well-known ghosts, or – metaphorical hauntings . . . in literature?’ Cecilia asked Mr Dahl, her new English teacher, as the class discussed Banquo.

  ‘Woo hoo,’ called out a boy with a pero
xide fringe.

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Dahl, addressing his desk and twisting his head a little away from the row of faces in front of him. His dark lashes seemed to form a protective veil as he looked down. ‘It depends on what one construes as a “ghost”. You could do no better than to start with Wuthering Heights.’

  ‘Seen the film. Crap,’ commented another boy. Cecilia winced. James Dahl ignored him. He spoke, instead, of Henry James and Wilkie Collins, of W.W. Jacobs, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, Shakespeare and Washington Irving, compressing his words into a series of near-stutters followed by short runs of impassioned fluency as he ruminated upon the subject, seemingly forgetting who had asked him the question.

  A former English master at a boys’ public school in Dorset, James Dahl had been brought in as head of the English department to introduce some discipline and to improve the school’s lacklustre results in a subject in which the governors felt it should perform, though its risible science grades were a source of indifference. The former head of English had died, inspiring a predictable flurry of rumours about drug addiction, overdoses and suicide. James Dahl, his style so opposed to the Haye House ethos, was persuaded by a promotion with a considerably raised salary, an ambivalent desire for the first real professional challenge of his life, and the offer of a position for his wife.

  His arrival was treated with disbelief, followed by protest and mirth.

  ‘Jim!’ they called out in class, encountering a quashing lack of response. ‘Jimbo. Jimmy-Boy!’

  English classes, conducted until that point in Haye House’s usual lounging and matey teaching style and dedicated to creating experimental narratives in a variety of media, were now formal sessions, and pupils were indignant that the new geezer should gag them with his offensively prehistoric methods. James Dahl taught as though he were instructing his own desk, holding an ongoing dialogue with its surface, eyes lowered and gestures occluded, his hair falling over his forehead, his manner hesitant and refined. Yet after the initial catcalls and outbursts of rebellion, comparative peace descended on his classes: an air of concentration and even of industry.

  In an atmosphere of such tradition, Cecilia Bannan excelled. She was soothed to almost tearful relief that she had stumbled across a chance of a formal education. She revelled in his observations and comparisons; in the historical contexts he encompassed; in his clearly instinctive understanding of rhythm and scansion; she stored the Latin phrases he occasionally used, scribbling them on a corner and looking them up later. She had already taught herself some Latin; she had learnt the Greek alphabet to exercise her mind. She wondered whether she was a genius. Or hosting a brain tumour.

  The Dahls’ two sons were boarding at school in Wiltshire. Elisabeth Dahl, a trained art teacher who had spent the majority of the previous decade raising her sons, had accompanied her husband to Haye House to fill a position as a housemistress for Neill House, the scuffed and echoing red-painted series of bedrooms, common room and kitchen facing the lower stretch of Dart that meandered past the end of the grounds. She also taught a limited number of sculpture and graphics classes in Haye House’s art department, and a small spare studio was at her disposal. She had studied sculpture at Chelsea School of Art, later specialised in typography, and still produced large canvases incorporating hand-painted lettering. Elisabeth, like James, was an anomaly at Haye House; one who, with her understated elegance and almost chilly expectation of good behaviour, could only instil a modicum of restraint in an institution that occasionally threatened to implode.

  ‘And what does your husband do?’ Elisabeth Dahl, an angular eyebrow raised, asked Dora one day in the staffroom: an underheated section of the school into which pupils were apparently free to wander at will. She wore a dark grey suit and a thick silver bracelet. Dora gazed at her clothes. Elisabeth habitually twisted the classical lines she adhered to, mixing tweeds or precisely cut trousers with bright stones, or large opals, or a weapon of a brooch.

  ‘He – he trained as an accountant,’ said Dora, giving herself time to think. ‘He . . . makes pots. Quite amateur stuff,’ she said hastily, reddening at her own treachery. ‘In comparison with . . .’ she said, nodding at Elisabeth. ‘And we have – we let out lots of the barns around the house and so on to people. Artisans. The unwashed.’

  Elisabeth laughed. She gave Dora a look of open curiosity. Dora went to the staff lavatories, where she pressed her hand to her forehead in shame, self-censure tangling with fury at Patrick, who had recently developed a scheme to make paper from bulrushes and was paying hippies to help him wade into the mud to harvest the plants before hammering and dampening them into dung-hued pulp. He appeared to work ever longer hours while bringing in diminishing profits.

  Every weekday morning, Dora navigated the sunken, scrambling lanes that led from the moor to Haye House, the only classical music teacher in a school that employed the part-time services of four guitar instructors, two saxophonists and one tabla tutor who could double up as a modern-dance coach. Dora collected neighbours’ children on the way, piling them on to laps, stuffing them beside her cello into the luggage space of the ancient estate car whose heater was broken and windscreen wipers limped. This and a mildewed VW camper van were kept at Wind Tor, tax and insurance unpaid. The moment an engine was heard coughing into life in the silent valley, a beard or muddy hem would appear in hope from behind the foliage.

  As the term went on, Dora became increasingly anxious to leave promptly for Haye House.

  Almost ideologically lenient over the years, she started to insist that her children gather on the front path by eight twenty. This changed to eight fifteen. Cecilia stood there trying to neaten Tom’s hair and shivering: Cecilia her transformed daughter, an alarming child-woman who would surely attract boys with this sudden blooming. Benedict was now tall and scabrous, still radiating the gruff self-consciousness of late adolescence.

  ‘Chill out, Mum,’ he said.

  ‘Has the snow plough been?’ Dora asked, looking anxiously up the lane as the moorland snow swept in.

  ‘We can’t tell yet,’ said Cecilia, idly sucking pieces of Tom’s hair.

  ‘Has anyone heard it?’ said Dora.

  ‘Honest, Mum, you can’t hear it from down here,’ said Benedict. ‘It’s a big fucker but we’re too far down the hill.’

  Early on those winter mornings they piled into the car, children’s breath an oat-scented fog, and Dora double-declutched on the snow-covered lane leading up from the valley, grinding up it in first gear, occasionally begging Benedict to sit on the bonnet to weigh down the front wheels; and in the yellow headlamp light and semi-darkness they moved in fits and starts through that ice-changed land towards tabla-playing with Jesse; towards nervous awareness in the corridors; towards The Tempest, The Mill on the Floss and Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy.

  Lodgers, habitually carless in that wilderness where entitlement culture flourished, continued to loiter on school mornings prepared with gentle requests or more indignant assumptions.

  ‘Any chance of a ride, Dors?’

  ‘Any spare space going?’

  ‘My cat really needs some help,’ said an acupressure practitioner one morning, holding a yowling beast in her arms as she stood expectantly by the car door.

  ‘Hitch,’ replied Dora.

  Once at school, she unpacked her instruments, and consulted her schedules. She rubbed cream on to hands that were eternally dry in winter, their soreness exacerbated by rosin, her cello strings pressing into cracked fingertips, and bit at her cold-dried lower lip. She had begun to keep watch, warily: on staffroom movements; on a section of the snow-fringed grounds that was visible from the woodwork room in passing; and on the cars lingering in exhaust billows on the drive.

  She was more aware of her appearance than she had been for half a decade: the plait had gone, lopped inch by inch as she grew older, and her hair’s pale brown ends sat more bluntly on her shoulders. Was she actually attractive? she wondered. Her pigmentation w
as purely English: light-sensitive, delicately freckle-scattered. Her skin was variable, its susceptibility to outside elements flaring and receding, its thin dryness either subdued with cream and scarves or revealed as a semi-transparent display of emotions and capillaries. She had never used cosmetics in her life. She applied a little plum-flavoured lip gloss filched furtively from Cecilia’s room, noticing with the revelation of novelty how it caught light and suggested youth. Her bluey-green eyes seemed to echo that light, that cold light, suggesting cold depths, despite her outer warmth. She wore her long linen smocks, her corduroy skirts and old silk scarves in the bitterest weather as colleagues arrived in boots and mothy woollen layers or army clothes. If she was being noticed, then she felt compelled to dress well out of instinctive pride, even as she wished to repel the attention.

  Teachers, rimy-eyed or yoga-composed, began drifting into the staffroom.

  ‘You’re looking peaky, darlin’,’ said Kasha, a jazz ballet teacher.

  Cecilia, an oval of a face, long dark red hair, passed the staffroom door at that moment. Dora jumped.

  ‘I’m not,’ she said emphatically. ‘I’m really not. Just tired.’

  She went about her day, glimpsing her children at various points: Benedict, favouring eyeliner, who had increasingly retreated into the pulsing curtained world of his boarding friends’ bedrooms, those expensive concrete cells in which pupils dozed and smoked during lesson time; Cecilia, who had begun, she thought, to come into her own as she collected her hard-won A-grades and fretted-over B-pluses, and her colouring settled into something richer and less reactive; and Tom, now in the senior school, who ran around happily in his felty jerseys, barely aware of the basics of the syllabus.