She moved from class to drama practice to staff lunch room to individual lessons, tense and strongly resistant and, despite herself, fascinated – fascinated in the midst of confused aversion – because she knew she was being admired.
‘Your mum’s looking sexy,’ said Diana casually at the house one night.
‘Oh, yuck! She is not,’ said Cecilia. ‘Please. Yuck.’ She shook her head and the waves of her hair clustered with a shine beneath her shoulders. She stretched out her hand. Diana arched her back. They were sinuous with new vanity.
‘She is. Look at her. I’ve never seen her wearing make-up like that.’
‘No,’ said Cecilia, a suspicion prodding at her before it faded. She pressed the sparking flipper on her father’s pinball machine in passing as a guarantee of parental solidarity.
‘Did you used to dread your parents splitting up?’ she said, pausing and leaning on a windowsill.
‘Yes,’ said Diana. ‘I thought it would be like . . .’
‘Like them dying,’ said Cecilia. ‘It almost felt it would be as terrible. Isn’t that strange? I prayed . . .’
‘I did too, at mass.’
She had begun to pronounce it ‘marse’. Cecilia shivered a little in disconcerted admiration. They had entered a new and thrilling snob phase.
‘Parents can do so much . . . and not know,’ said Cecilia.
‘When shall we have our own children?’ asked Diana, leaning on the wide scooped sill and gazing at the tor in the distance. Shouts emerged from outside.
‘When we’re very famous,’ said Cecilia, watching the sky. It was white and lined with recognition like a promise. ‘When hoi polloi acknowledge our achievements; when we’re in Who’s Who. Then we can have some babies.’
‘Yes,’ said Diana, who was going to be an actress. ‘We’ve got to have our careers.’
‘Our brilliant careers.’
‘Yes. I really won’t be bothering with all that rep stuff. What’s the point? You may as well just be famous immediately.’
‘Exactly,’ said Cecilia. ‘What’s the point of doing loads of theatre in education? Mumming. Oh yuck! All those embarrassing failures messing around in tights on barges to a scuzzy towpath audience. Just go to London and become famous.’
They giggled and muttered, spoke of peasants, of rabbles, of inbred commoners. They posed and gestured and laughed until Cecilia had to rest her hurting stomach against the windowsill, her mirth now perforated with guilt.
Diana fell silent. Cecilia gazed at her, at her dark hair flat like a painted doll’s, her clear skin and newly larger mouth and nose seeming to Cecilia to belong to someone else, someone more womanly and cruder-featured.
‘Supper,’ called Dora.
‘Busy,’ shouted Tom from the garden.
The pond had iced over. Children had been skating on its surface, skidding as they anchored themselves to the rushes and hobbled out over frozen hoof furrows.
‘If you don’t come now, you’ll have to do all the washing up,’ called Dora newly impatiently, the end of her sentence tailing off with lack of conviction.
‘Poor Dora,’ said Cecilia. ‘Utterly transparent.’
‘I don’t think she is, quite,’ said Diana, pausing.
‘What do you mean?’ said Cecilia.
‘I think she’s kind of hiding something.’
‘What? What?’
‘I don’t know . . .’ said Diana.
‘Well what?’
‘She’s different.’
‘I know,’ said Cecilia, barely opening her mouth.
‘What is it . . .?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Cecilia.
‘I don’t either.’
They were silent. A robin hopped on the gutter opposite.
‘Who are you looking for?’ Idris the woodwork teacher asked Dora just once as she walked along a corridor shouldering a music stand. She wore her best silk scarf and smock top, cuffs smeared with rosin.
‘No one,’ said Dora, instantly colouring. ‘Have you seen how a few last leaves are clinging on? I loved the bird whistle Tom made in your class last term, by the way.’
‘Cheers,’ said Idris, and gave her a loud kiss on the cheek as he left for class.
‘You’re a graceful creature, our piano mistress,’ said Elisabeth Dahl, coming up to her from behind. ‘Prepossessing in ways you don’t know.’
Dora jumped. She shook her head. She disappeared into a practice room.
She feared that her confusion was readable, she who had always easily slipped behind a cheery social persona. At hometime when there was much milling and chatting, when there were glimpses and blurred encounters, she felt the tendons in her neck stiffen with an embarrassed antipathy she attempted to suppress.
Dora couldn’t tell anyone. It was imperative. Distraction had come upon her and yet she had barely noticed its arrival, its source was so outlandish. Elisabeth Dahl, that wife, mother, new housemistress at the school – above all, that woman – was nagging at her thoughts, staining them, unsettling her. That self-possessed creature appeared, quite inexplicably, to look down from her craggy heights and single Dora out, telling her things, announcing matter of factly in front of a group of colleagues that she was beautiful; that she was endearingly and preposterously naïve; that she held back the best of herself.
Dora was fiercely embarrassed. She walked round in a state of disbelief, certainties and then uncertainties assailing her. She returned to Elisabeth time and time again in her mind, questioning with a quiver of panic whether Patrick had noticed her air of inattention.
She would avoid Elisabeth at school, or simply not see her for some days, and then something of her equilibrium returned and she could only shudder at the memory. At other times, Elisabeth would walk briskly along a corridor and catch her eye and seem to appraise her, not glancing away, but gazing at her with a smile; with an edge, almost, of mockery, as though drinking her in. What an odd effect this person had on her, Dora thought. She, who had never desired women and never even considered the subject, sensed over time a discomfiting buzz of awareness in Elisabeth’s presence that she had only ever experienced in youth with local boys; with Patrick; and briefly, potentially, with his brothers before she had settled upon the one she wanted and who emphatically wanted her. It reminded her of that old intensity of communication, that awareness of self in the glare of admiration, and she was captivated by the sensation. She almost wanted to be Elisabeth Dahl. And then Elisabeth would become less flattering for a period, seemingly less focused upon her, and Dora would thirst, ambivalently, for a renewal of her interest, and wonder what she had done wrong, increasingly certain that she had been discovered to be dull.
In more contemplative moments in the day, or in the heat of a chance meeting, she was, she thought, sporadically possessed, as though by an evil creature.
‘What’s wrong?’ said Cecilia, the only time she directly asked her mother. She didn’t know what she was asking.
‘Nothing,’ said Dora inevitably.
Cecilia shot her a glance. Dora coloured faintly. Cecilia turned away, embarrassed.
‘What are you two talking about?’ said Patrick, rising from his chair and stroking the cat.
Dora hesitated, then didn’t answer.
She could barely look at Patrick. Almost single-handedly, she was required to maintain numerous offspring in what seemed like a series of catacombs sinking into the ground and sucking away her salary the moment it was paid. She could hardly find her children on its different levels with its little wells of steps, its twists and lofts. They were sometimes in the roof, like birds, as she called for them; at other times they were down among the cows, or sodden and shivering in the river. In that overstretched life in which every moment was absorbed by children or work, it was simple to avoid Patrick for several days at a time before tension arose between them, or she was driven by guilty self-awareness to focus her attention back on him.
The children were protective of th
eir father without quite knowing why. Cecilia fetched him drinks and reacted to his jokes with fewer displays of eye-rolling cynicism, detecting something wounded about his narrow chest in his woolly jumper. Even as he teased and pottered, there was a flicker of watchfulness to him in this new less forgiving climate. He seemed deflated, less given to the bursts of enthusiasm that had stimulated his children.
Dora snapped at him. He walked out of the kitchen. Tom’s mouth fell open. Cecilia winced. She ran to her teacher in her mind. She sat in her English class, the trees swaying outside the window, the cream paint collecting condensation, the harmonious well-bred tones of Mr Dahl guiding his pupils through a text, and all was right with the world.
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 absorbe
d – 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.
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