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.’
‘But look at him.’
James Dahl then arrived, nodding at the girls without looking at them, carrying his briefcase and beginning to hand out the class’s Hardy essays before he sat.
I love you, I love you, I love you, Cecilia thought, jabbing the words into her margin. She glanced at the boys slouching on the desks opposite: pustular and intermittently purple: dismaying creatures she had never touched and barely talked to. She let herself catch a glimpse of the man at the end of the class with his authority and dark lashes and sense of faint, abstracted sadness. James Dahl, she wrote as a pledge.
Seven
February
Someone was there on the lane beside Wind Tor House again that night. Cecilia stumbled to the window, almost asleep, and caught a movement as the trespasser hid among the tangle of teasels and long-dead grass at the top of the river field. She heard a rustle, and then there was silence.
She called Ari in London. ‘I feel weedy for needing you,’ she said, shivering steadily.
‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘Because I’m a man, you mean?’
‘Yes,’ she said. Her teeth chattered. ‘Precisely. A bit pathetic.’
He laughed.
‘One of those despicable creatures. Get over it. Have they gone?’ he said.
‘I think so,’ said Cecilia, her small voice echoing in the large room, her nightdress ghostly around her in the darkness.
‘Right. Call the police if they come back.’
‘It’s a sleepy little in-the-sticks station in Ashburton. They’ll be in their beds.’ Her breath rose as she stood there, her spine tight with the cold. ‘They probably wouldn’t even be able to find this lane. You try being on your own with three children all week,’ she said heatedly. ‘Sorry,’ she said after a moment.
‘It’s only till June. Be patient. Call me and I’ll speak to the police in Exeter,’ he said.
‘I don’t like you being away. What if you fall for someone else?’
‘Oh Cecilia. Don’t be ridiculous. I won’t. You know I won’t.’
‘You’d better fucking not.’
Dora couldn’t sleep. Her breast was tender where her scar lay as she shifted in bed. Her cancer felt, at times, like the most terrifying intruder, so stealthy that an escapee from the prison would be a preferable visitor. She could hear someone walking by her cottage on the lane that led to the back route to Widecombe. A poacher, she conjectured, or one of the roaming dancers and travellers who lived for weeks or months at a time in a converted chapel at the end of the Widecombe lane.
She turned in her bed. Cecilia had come to cook for her that day, and she was still ruffled by the memory. She swallowed.
It had started: what she had known, and dreaded, and reassured herself wouldn’t happen after years of barely talking. It was not articulated, but Dora knew. Cecilia was hungry, edging towards the subject of the past all over again. She was holding back, tending to a sick mother, being the dutiful daughter, but Dora sensed the banked-up emotion.
‘I do wonder . . .’ said Cecilia, looking out of the window at the bleached rise of moor below Corndon Tor.
‘Wonder what?’ said Dora before she had had time to think.
‘How she is,’ was all Cecilia said, and Dora was silent, and Cecilia was silent in response, and she cooked, and they talked of granddaughters and hospital visits and particular doctors and Dora’s garden plans, but all the while Dora was reminded of the horrible complex mesh of emotions that time and resentment wove. She had been semi-estranged from Cecilia for so long, and she was reminded of why.
Now Dora felt her armpit and its small scar. Her physical strength was noticeably reduced since surgery, but she would not burden the hardworking Cecilia with household tasks more than she had to, so she had taken a village girl who was between jobs to drive her to radiotherapy and to help at home.
That day she waited, as she felt she had spent a lifetime waiting, for her beloved to show up.
Early in the morning, Cecilia searched the small lane that ran past the end of the house, largely used by farmers for access, or by villagers conversant with the narrow unnamed cut-throughs that led to the hamlets, although satnav was now directing drivers down there to much local consternation. She glanced at the lane’s loose surface. She wondered what she was looking for. It seemed impossible when morning was pale blue on the fields that anyone could have been there during the night, but the memory made the skin on her arms tighten. She wanted to barricade her daughters inside to protect them.
She returned to the house, and there, before the light had soothed its wood and stone surfaces and revealed its grace, she sensed sadness in the whiny utility room, in the burpy pits of the boiler room with its sour plumbing and hiccuping. Even the white drift of light in her bedroom was fragrant with a passing flitter of new skin. She sat in the sitting room in the western end of the building and she put her head in her hands, crouching on a step before her family awoke, and cried for her baby.
Eight
The Pottery Barn
Cecilia and Nicola arrived early for English and waited outside the room.
They paused before talking.
‘Zeno says he was in his flat yesterday afternoon,’ said Nicola. ‘That’s not on his Tuesday timetable.’
‘Was he?’ said Cecilia. ‘I only just realised that if you stand on the Mound, you can see into the other side of his flat.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Nicola. ‘His kitche
n’s on that side. And what I think is a spare room. I see his witchy wife in there sometimes.’
‘Binoculars . . .’
‘You can’t do that! On the Mound?’
‘We might be able to, hiding behind each other,’ said the bolder Cecilia.
‘I’ve seen Annalisa standing there once on tiptoe when she didn’t think anyone could see her.’
‘That pathetic bleating girl,’ said Cecilia.
Nicola started to shake with laughter. ‘Zeno spies on him playing tennis at weekends when he’s here,’ she whispered.
He appeared. Cecilia’s heart thudded with such force as he rounded the corner that she felt momentarily faint.
Later, she hid in Haye House’s wood, the Copse, where most acts of copulation and inhalation took place and where drug-fuelled classmates were given to swinging on a rope to hurl themselves suicidally into an old quarry thick with decaying beech husk. She crouched there reading a book and watched out for Mr Dahl’s journey from Neill House across the stretch of grass above the river to the English department to teach the fourth form.
Instead, she saw the straight line of her mother’s body against the green as Dora walked beside Elisabeth Dahl, her denim skirt protruding stiffly behind her, her necklace reflecting afternoon light. The two women were engrossed in conversation, both gazing ahead as they talked, paused and gestured. Dora wiped her hand across her face, and Elisabeth placed her palm on Dora’s back, then dropped it. Dora moved away very slightly. Cecilia stiffened. They came closer towards the wood where she was hidden in tree shadow, Dora’s face pale and frowning, her fingers twitching as she walked.
Cecilia, alert for ramifications involving Mr Dahl, absorbed the tone of Elisabeth’s speech without hearing her words, and watched her decisive movements. There was an intensity to her interaction with her mother that was confusing. She wore a black skirt over black boots, a dark red scarf rising and subsiding behind her. Cecilia gazed in utter fascination. This was the body that had been held and, quite astonishingly, penetrated by James Dahl, the head enclosing a mind that contained every detail of him. Cecilia felt almost incapacitated with jealous curiosity.
‘I saw you with Elisabeth Dahl,’ said Cecilia that evening, a statement that had stalled in her mind before prodding at the atmosphere of the kitchen. The lights were low. The catflap banged.
Dora paused. Her skin pinkened. ‘Right,’ she said.
‘I didn’t know you – know you knew her so well.’
‘I don’t,’ said Dora, turning round and facing Cecilia, her expression failing to relax. ‘Not really.’
‘You were walking across the lawn by the Copse. Talking,’ said Cecilia. She focused on the flapjack crumbs on the table. She stood awkwardly by a chair, attempting to lean casually.
The redness rising through Dora’s thin skin was visible even in the lamplight.
‘So why were you talking to her?’
‘I often talk to the teachers. Colleagues.’
‘But you were talking – intensely.’
‘Was I?’ said Dora quietly. She drew in her breath. She turned around and began to put on the hand cream that she kept by the sink.
‘It was about something!’ said Cecilia, stabbing at the edge of the table.
‘Well – We were discussing Gabriel Sardo staying sometimes at weekends. She’s his tutor and will be his housemistress. He . . . he doesn’t want to board at weekends.’
‘Right,’ said Cecilia, pausing.
‘They – Gabriel’s parents are moving to Dublin.’
‘You mean Speedy? Speedy Sardo?’
Gabriel Sardo, known as Speedy throughout Haye House, was a pupil in Cecilia’s year. She had never spoken to him. He was smoulderingly modish: gangling and confidently taciturn. The idea of him at Wind Tor House was so unexpected that she could barely contemplate it.
‘Why – why would she ask you?’ said Cecilia, stumbling now. ‘Why here, I mean? How?’
‘Elisabeth is his tutor,’ said Dora, speaking more calmly. ‘I –’ she said, glancing to one side, ‘agreed, offered. Just weekends he can’t get over to Dublin. Do you mind?’
Cecilia shook her head. ‘I mean – I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know him.’
‘Cool,’ said Benedict, arriving in the kitchen and shrugging.
‘Weedy Speedy,’ called Tom.
‘But I don’t see why you would say yes to that,’ said Cecilia.
‘Why not?’ said Dora.
‘Why? Just because she asks you.’
Dora paused. Cecilia watched her swallow. ‘It’s only occasionally. Gabriel is a nice boy. We could do with the money, Celie.’
‘I know,’ said Cecilia, rifling through employment plans with shame.
‘Don’t worry about it, though.’
‘You were talking to her for a long –’ said Cecilia, tailing off in the face of Dora’s expression. She glanced at the floor.
‘I know that,’ said Dora, and Cecilia glimpsed, as she so rarely did in her mother, a streak of determination, a chip of ice.
After supper, Dora stood by her bedroom window with hands still wetly sore from washing up, and found that she was shaking. She had been seen.
There was evidence there in the world. It wasn’t just in her poor discomposed mind. They had been seen together and the sight of them had bemused their witness. Elisabeth had put her hand on her back out there in the dangerous air, and then they had agreed that they should attempt to minimise such contact and return to the care of their families. It was only when she was inside the school building again that Dora had stood in the staff lavatories and let hot tears emerge. Such intimacy wasn’t sensible, and it wasn’t moral, yet already Dora was hauled in by any hint of indifference or rejection or even lack of persuasion from Elisabeth.
Infatuation had developed in a series of swerves and horrified retreats, but on pausing to consider, Dora realised that she had been mentally seduced for some time, denying all evidence to herself. Elisabeth Dahl had shaken her. She was a force of nature who, for all her severe and sophisticated womanliness, possessed, thought Dora, the mind of a man. It confused her; it excited her. She dismissed it, denied it, pushed it away; and eventually it took root.
‘Come with me to a concert,’ Elisabeth had said only five weeks before, and Dora, steadily trembling and unable to eat all day, had left the children with Patrick for an early supper, then driven back the way she had come: down the river gorge, back past the school to Wedstone where Elliott Hall floated on embers of autumn light. She was thinner. She hadn’t slept. She felt new speed to her blood. She had known as Elisabeth greeted her and they walked almost silently together through a series of doors to the concert barn, to the Rachmaninov followed by Lutoslawski, to the coughing, the bobbing heads and explosion of applause, to hot apple-juice scents, winding corridors, beamed medieval roofs; she had known that she was entering and accepting.
‘So,’ said Elisabeth after the concert, this creature who was so sure and so rarely expressed emotion. She was a shell of certainty: an elegant composition, shielded from mess or unwanted attachment by the fact of her tall husband.
She had guided Dora by the arm to a corridor that led backstage. There was no need to speak, though Dora feared that the speed of her heartbeat might prove fatal; and she had kissed her.
Dora could, even this evening, alone in her bedroom, be felled by recalled desire, images overlaying each other: mouths and hands, shocking little twists that made her weaken as sensations re-entered her body. The absolute self-disgust, the shock at what she had done in simply kissing a woman – and she would allow Elisabeth to do little more than kiss her – eventually followed the chilling of the fantasy, yet when she eased herself into her bed at night she wished with rigid hope that Patrick was snoring so she could hide under the blankets and think, embracing her allotted block of escapism. She shivered. Nothing like this had happened in her life. The sheer novelty of it shimmered through her guilt and shame.
Having decided that perfection was attainable and that she would, through self-denial, aspire to it, Cecilia restricted her food consumption as best she could, aiming for a willowy slenderness that might attract the attention of Mr Dahl. She could never develop anorexia, she thought with a twinge of regret, because she found a state of even semi-starvation impossible, but she was encouraged when her periods became less regular.
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