Her childhood plans to become a prima ballerina assoluta had collapsed with a few frustrated pliés in a barn; she cantered across the moors on the ponies kept in the fields, but a precocious showjumping career had evaded her; even her novels, completed with love and great effort, had been rejected, and she had failed to provide for her family. She had not even been unwaveringly good like Thérèse of Lisieux. She sometimes thought she deserved to live as an orphan eremite in a cave in the Pyrenees, praying and self-mortifying. Now, she pledged, she would overcome her substandard early years. With her father to support, a married man to seduce, and an extraordinary career to wrest from the mud and youth that hindered her, only self-discipline and raw talent would carry her through.
Dora walked into the staffroom early the next day. She had been sick that morning; now she trembled with the empty-stomached after-effects. Jocasta, a history teacher, arrived in the staffroom balancing mugs of yogi tea whose smell currently made Dora want to gag. Elisabeth Dahl made Darjeeling instead and handed a cup to Dora, who was grateful. The headmaster, Peter Doran, arrived with a 1930s ukulele left to the school by a successful alumna. An old beatnik in crushed-velvet trousers, vaguely lecherous yet radiating a whiff of subdued misogyny, a glitter of homosexuality, he kept a series of largely blonde girlfriends in the headteacher’s house on the grounds, obscuring their existence with a nod at decorum, and ran the school at a lordly distance while his deputy attempted to impose the establishment’s comparatively few rules. Ignoring the timetable, Peter engaged Dora in an amateur musical conversation.
Cecilia made a timetable. She jogged in the mornings, or on the mornings she could force herself outside, almost retching with sleepy coldness as she rose and hobbled along the dawn-dark lanes. She ran up the steps built into the moss-covered wall that bordered the lane and led into a field high above, and there, ice sawing into her lungs, her cheeks fiery, she could see the valley, the blinking lights of others rising, catch a glimpse of Wind Tor and the moorland beyond, horses like rain in fields, thatches hunched, and here she held dialogues with James Dahl. Her hair blew behind her. She ran. Her heart thumped. She said fascinating things to him. He guided her. He was her mentor, her lover. She half twisted her ankle on frozen tussocks of horse dung; sheep clumped; cows lowed with terrible echoes and she was the only living human abroad: only she, she, a milkmaid in the fields, breathless and newly thin when she arrived back in the kitchen, where Dora sleepily stoked the Aga with Tom chatting beside her.
There was anticipation, because a miracle had entered her life. Her attachment to an admittedly unsuitable person anchored her. She went to school each day cushioned with hope, leaving behind disorder to enter a place of tampon sculptures and good-quality hash to collect symbols and evidence of glory.
‘You are looking beautiful, darling,’ said Dora one morning to Cecilia, unable to keep back the thought that came into her mind when she saw the blooming of her daughter, that period of transient splendour she had entered in which youth filled the outlines of womanhood.
Cecilia looked at the ground, her skin flooded. ‘Thank you,’ she said eventually. ‘I’m not.’
‘I think boys –’ said Dora, pausing.
There was silence.
‘Boys what?’ snapped Cecilia to fill it, keeping her face downturned.
‘Boys will want to go out with you.’
‘They don’t,’ muttered Cecilia.
‘I’m sure they will.’
Cecilia was silent.
‘Don’t you like anyone?’ said Dora, aware that she was taking risks.
‘No. I don’t know. No,’ said Cecilia, looking steadily to one side, frantically wishing to obscure her true attachment while unable to explain that boys showed no interest in her; that she couldn’t speak to them; that they viewed her as a scholarly and undesirable yet somehow unattainable oddity who fell outside their mating and companionship radars. And that much as she longed for understanding, and though she was at heart scared of these guitar-strummers and moped-owners grown so tall and stalky, she also scorned them. There was no Heathcliff, no Darcy or Rochester among the student body of Haye House. Whereas she: she lived in a rosy suspended future shortly to storm into perfection. She felt herself step with fawn-like delicacy into the car. She sensed omen and dazzle all around her: in the glare of sky, the blur of leaves; in the twists of hair that fell back off her face, in her fall of eyelashes, the speed with which her hand could write and the blood rush through her body. James Dahl’s eyes were almost perpetually on her through invisible psychic means. She conversed with him. She observed her own face in the car’s side mirror, and rearranged her features and radiated her soul until she saw in that miniature reflection pure beauty. He saw it too.
When she descended from the car at the top of the drive, her certainty was tempered by the reality of the school.
Zeno was, as so often, waiting for her on the step.
‘He asked me how I was today,’ she said.
Cecilia and Nicola gasped.
‘Zoom!’ said Cecilia, taking Zeno’s arm as they made their way to their little room, a former cleaning cupboard with a small window they had appropriated primarily for discussion of Mr Dahl. Here they perched on shelves to interpret the day’s developments. Here they screamed and giggled, planned and theorised.
‘Shhh,’ said Nicola. ‘He might hear on the way to the head’s house. It’s Tuesday morning.’ They collided in a whispering heap. ‘If one of us asks to go to the loo just before quarter past, we might see him. Pass a note. If not, we could look through the sixth-form loo windows at break.’
‘Some of us have already seen him today,’ said Zeno. ‘He’s wearing a greenish jacket, same tweedy stuff –’
‘His hair’s going to be cut soon. I bet you. I think the witch makes him,’ said Nicola, raising her eyes.
‘He looks like . . . someone from A Room with a View,’ said Cecilia.
‘He is quite old . . .’
‘Ancient, yes. Thirty-five. But he looks like a poet! A young war poet!’
‘He does not,’ said Zeno hopefully.
‘He’s so beautiful,’ said Nicola poignantly.
‘I know . . .’ said Cecilia, pain lightly threading her excitement. ‘What does he see in her?’
Zeno shook her head. ‘She’s a hard cow.’
‘She’s got streaks of grey hair,’ said Cecilia, fingering a red wave of her own until it caught the light, and feeling that same indefinable essence of youth flex through her as she stretched. She yawned a little, intentionally, delicately.
‘Do you think she knows? She’s guessed?’
‘She’d be so furious.’
Cecilia blushed in fear of exposure. James Dahl was painstakingly formal in the manner of the public school master he had been and would remain at heart. He limited his interaction with pupils to comments about prep or timetables; his wedding ring was prominent; at school events he sat beside his wife and exchanged solemn conversation with her, observed in a ferment of curiosity by his admirers.
Male voices could be heard overlaid by footsteps outside the cupboard. After a round of hushing, the girls silenced their spluttering and widened their eyes at one another. His voice alone, heard incidentally, was a gift that reverberated through a morning.
‘What’s today’s fact?’ Cecilia asked Zeno, more lightly. She coughed.
‘Well, I’ve got something . . .’
‘What?’ urged Cecilia.
‘His younger son’s called Hugh.’
‘Hugh . . .’ said Nicola.
‘Really? Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ said Zeno, nodding. ‘I heard Jocasta saying, “Elisabeth’s son, Hugh”.’
‘Robin and Hugh,’ mused Cecilia. ‘Robin and Hugh Dahl . . .’
The Dahl family. James, Elisabeth, Robin, Hugh. Had there been cousins, cats, grandparents, friends? A family history, thrillingly mundane? Cecilia longed to discover his birth date and his middle name, the initial letter
of which was ‘C’. She listed possibilities in a notebook containing observations, character studies, quotes both by and about James Dahl, and the scant biographical details attainable about a man who revealed so little. She could only glean information from her mother with the greatest of care, her friends plying her with questions impossible to ask but entertaining to discuss. The fact that this repository of knowledge was resident in her house was a source of painful pleasure, Dora’s friendship with Elisabeth Dahl adding further frustration. How much did Dora talk to the man himself? What was the nature of their staffroom conversation, if it occurred at all? She seemed loath to mention him. When she did, Cecilia feared her own stiff expression was transparent.
Mr Dahl was a complex and large-scale project. The more information Cecilia could absorb about him, the more she would symbolically possess him. Her book contained floorplans of his flat in Neill House based on sightings from the Mound and covert explorations of the utility rooms and showers on the floor beneath, which were movingly scented with baking and other people’s clean washing. In a moment of triumph, Zeno had ascertained his age through an overheard phone call at Neill House in which he had stated the year of his birth. But if no new facts were procurable, Cecilia and her cohorts burnished existing ones, their dialogue weighted with codenames and meaningful intonation. A glimpse of James Dahl was possibly more stimulating for the collectors’ victory it represented than for the experience of the sighting itself, the hasty dissemination of news either by note or hint through the group – descriptions of setting, gestures and clothing repeated and repeated – suffusing the next few hours with satisfaction, or with a poignant feeling of loss because he was at large yet unavailable.
After discussing Mr Dahl all day, the girls rang each other in the evening to discuss Mr Dahl. Cecilia curled up in the cold on the prickly seagrass of her parents’ room and watched her breath above her as if it made shapes of her words. Giggles ran down the stretched curls of the cord. She stifled laughter or exhilarating sessions of analysis as Dora called upstairs and her supper cooled in the kitchen.
At odd moments, Cecilia saw him and was stunned by the knowledge that beneath the commotion of her trio’s worship, she loved him. She studied tennis reports and, because he played the game, effortlessly absorbed the sport’s history. She read Villette; The Professor; To Sir, With Love. She tackled Casino Royale to immerse herself in the name ‘James’ and glanced at her younger brother’s Roald Dahl novels for the electric tingle that swarmed along the letters of their shared surname when glimpsed sufficiently obliquely.
She saw him walking on occasion with his wife over Cantaur’s Fields beside Neill House as she sat by the river, and she watched him bound in conversation, his gait subtly looser outside. Inexpertly, she imagined them having sexual intercourse. Elisabeth with her well-cut hair, her tailored shirts and skirts and strings of pearls, her authoritative manner that could subside into warmth, reduced Cecilia to a state of deference, yet in her near acceptance of her hopeless position she felt the stirring of determination. He, with his downcast gaze, hands deep in pockets revealing tennis-playing arms, his voice with its pleasing pitch, his diffident yet privileged manner; he was the finest thing she had ever encountered. She almost cried. She vowed. The others may be giggling schoolgirls, but she was a future wife. The world, which seemed charged with his name, swarmed with synchronicity that surely, yet barely believably, hinted at a future with him.
‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ said Dora at the end of the month. She was pale-faced as she entered Patrick’s pottery barn. He was sitting on his stool embellishing a grotesque-featured creature with claws which seemed guaranteed never to sell. Why does he have to make them ugly? Dora thought absently.
‘Yes,’ said Patrick, looking up, then returning his gaze to his clay.
‘It’s cold in here,’ said Dora, her voice weakening.
‘It’s OK.’
‘Do you want –’
‘What do you want to tell me?’
‘I’m – I’m. I’m pregnant,’ said Dora.
Patrick paused. His hands stiffened on the animal’s torso. He began dousing it with water. He fetched more water and wrung out a cloth. Clay was smeared over the side of his chin, nestling among his hair.
‘Whose?’ he said, colouring.
‘No. No. It’s not like that. No. It’s –’ said Dora abruptly, blushing a fiery red. Tears came to her eyes.
Patrick turned his back to her.
‘Yours. Ours,’ said Dora. She felt her mouth tremble as she said the words. She feared she might cry. The glazing chemicals made her nose water. ‘Really, Patrick, there is no – no –’
He waited. ‘No –?’
‘No other man.’
Patrick hesitated, his jaw working. His mouth was set and remained motionless. Then its rigidity crumbled and he smiled.
‘There never has been –’ she said, tailing off, the hypocrisy of her words boring into her. She blushed again.
‘Ah, girl,’ he said warmly, as he had said to her a long time ago, and she pictured him coming over to her and holding both her hands and then embracing her with a big kiss on the mouth.
He almost stood, then sat back down.
‘Girl,’ he said again, manifestly at a loss for anything further to say. He stood up, stumbling a little, and embraced her.
‘Yes,’ she said, and for a brief hot moment there in the cold in his arms she almost said, I love you, come and save me, but she couldn’t because she had had what she had had.
‘I’m, I’m,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘I’m delighted. It’s crazy. What a thing. Are you sure, now?’
Dora nodded, not looking at him, and she thought about the hasty compromised coupling that had produced this state: the one time in months: a cunning trick played by fate and biology. It had been her resigned attempt to rescue a marriage. In truth, it had also been a competitive act, undertaken in both retaliation and perverse empathy because if Elisabeth was still unthinkably physically involved with her husband, then so would she be. She would do what she did.
Dora gazed at Patrick through the clear light that bore clay dust, and even though she could not anticipate anything more terrifying at this moment than having another child; even though she spent nights recalculating how many more lodgers she could accommodate if she put up partition walls in some barns and what their rent would come to, she gazed at his old shaving nicks, the clumps of clay stuck to his sleeves and fumbling skilled hands, heard his coughs and bodily rearrangements, saw decades of unbreakable patterns in a gesture, and knew that despite the reality of three children and the prospect of a fourth, she would never really love him again as she once had. His growing passivity made her want to howl in protest. She perceived him as forever the bawling penultimate child in a huge clan: forever a spoilt toddler born to a droit de seigneur charm, strutting through the semi-neglect endemic to large families. She would in effect have five children, she thought.
Patrick had never met Elisabeth, and Dora had carefully omitted to mention her name, assuring herself by rote on sleepless nights that a woman didn’t count, that kissing a woman did not amount to infidelity. Caught unawares, however, she could be felled by guilt; it seemed the strictures of her girlhood remained. The terror of discovery was always present.
Dora and Patrick made uneasy peace. There was an expedient return to life as it had always been. Her period of resistance lay in the air, never acknowledged, but viewed as a beast of unknown hue that had done its savaging and could still leap. Dora feared that Patrick accepted it, whatever it was, with a sort of twitchy knowledge of his own shortcomings and she despised him for failing to fight. He could not win, she knew. But she had married her fortunes with his, and the trajectory of life in that house and the knowledge that she was pregnant propelled her.
A new cynicism hung about her. She compared her bewildering nascent relationship with her daughter’s attachment. Cecilia’s obvious crush on an unknown object amus
ed her. She saw her daughter – over-responsive, attempting to study in the car in the morning with a book held above Tom’s bed-knitted hair; tugging at her cuticles, and so carefully dressed in the limited number of outfits at her disposal – and thought that Cecilia’s experience of love was similar to her own only at a simple level of infatuation, but she felt protective towards her.
Other teachers conversed with pupils about gigs and riffs, parties and motorbikes; about beautiful mathematical equations, grotty classrooms, drama spaces and jazz syncopations. James Dahl did not. Cecilia considered that she had held three proper conversations with Mr Dahl in her life. One was at the top of the school drive while waiting for her mother to collect her, when he had congratulated her on her O level results. She had noticed minute details of his face up close in the outside light: the fissures of adult discoloration on his white teeth as fine as lines drifting across a film; the variegated pigmentation of his eyes with their almost-black dots (she thought how remarkable his simple humanness, his rods and cones and lachrymal glands); the lines radiating from the corners of his eyes when he smiled.
The next was at a local fête downriver that she, Nicola and Zeno had attended purely because his presence was rumoured to be assured. She had borrowed Gabriel Sardo’s telephoto lens for the occasion so that she and her friends could pose, pretending to photograph each other while focusing on a more casually attired James Dahl in the distant background.
She noticed a pair of long-haired pupils from the year below, instantly recognisable as the soulful variety of girl who would excel at English and who was similarly ruffled by his presence. One wore Laura Ashley while the other maintained the passive expression of a Victorian milkmaid, her lips parted, her hair draped becomingly over one cheek. Cecilia watched them in amusement and slight discomfiture. They loitered behind bushes; they shot each other glances; they kept within viewing distance of James Dahl. Competition sharpened her resolve.
‘Cecilia,’ he said later that afternoon when his path crossed hers, the light of sails carelessly playing on his face, his eyes a semi-transparent blue-grey behind the almost childishly dark lashes. ‘How are you?’
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