You

by Joanna Briscoe

  ‘Fine thank you,’ she said, blushing. His face was lightly tanned, turning his hair fairer. She saw golden stubble like sand on his jaw over his summer-coloured skin. She found him almost unsettlingly beautiful. He was discreet, she thought. In his reserve, he was statue-like; in the multi-coloured tones of his voice, he was human. The ear followed his voice.

  ‘I was just musing upon various descriptions of events such as this in literature,’ he said.

  ‘Oh!’ said Cecilia, her mind spinning into a search for references. ‘Elizabeth and Leicester/Beating oars,’ was all she could think of to say in a mutter, swallowing his wife’s name in embarrassment, but he didn’t appear to hear.

  ‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘I hope you enjoy yourselves,’ he added as he walked on, and she glimpsed the hardness of his arm muscle pressing against his shirt as he turned towards Elisabeth who was accompanied, in a satisfying biographical touch, by a teenage boy likely to be the younger son.

  Mr Dahl was not so old after all, Cecilia had thought for the first time. Thirty-six. It could have been twenty-six or forty-nine as far as she was concerned: a meaningless adult figure. Seeing him with his shirt ruffled by the water breeze, with no tie, his hair somehow informal in its sun-touched movement, he seemed not age itself, but simply a male figure imbued with hormones and body hair and effortless height. He laughed at something Elisabeth said and they looked together at a spot in the river.

  In their third conversation, the one most treasured, most dreamed of in advance and then so lovingly recollected that the reality had almost disintegrated, he had stopped her one morning after class. ‘Cecilia, could you stay for a moment?’ he said matter of factly.

  Her heart had hammered as she conjured all possible misdeeds on her part. Simultaneously, she wondered whether he was about to tell her that her literary talent now needed careful nurturing.

  The dark trees swayed. A lark was out there, she fancied in her endless repetitions of the scene; an engine on the drive – whose? Two boys, Jason and Diego, were talking outside the door in their inauthentic London accents.

  Mr Dahl wore his cream shirt, perhaps partly linen. He barely looked up at her.

  ‘Cecilia,’ he said calmly, gathering together the pens on his desk in a single sweep, then straightening his papers in one experienced movement, ‘you wrote an admirable essay for me here, thank you. I think we should talk about university.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Cecilia. ‘I . . . yes.’

  ‘I would suggest you should be thinking about Oxbridge.’

  Her pregnancy progressing to the point where she could no longer conceal it from her employers, Dora walked up the stairs towards the sheet-music cupboard. She kept to herself, frequenting the lesser-used corridors. As she approached the landing, she heard the voice of Elisabeth Dahl, so freshly lost to her even as she was still resisting her. She paused before she turned the staircase corner. Elisabeth stood beside the opened door of a stock cupboard, her leg and a section of fitted grey wool skirt visible to Dora. She was speaking to Cally Cooper, one of the science teachers, her voice rapid and lightly dismissive. Elisabeth’s calf in its sheer grey stocking – and it would be stockings, Dora was sure – was almost as familiar to her as her face, and the shape filled her with pained desire. She leaned against the wall. It was almost unbearable.

  ‘But,’ said the science teacher, ‘we haven’t really discussed our last discussion . . .’

  ‘I must love you and leave you,’ said Elisabeth still rapidly but in a richer tone Dora recognised, a tone Elisabeth had used when she had murmured words that merged into kisses through her hair. Elisabeth’s hand reached out towards the science teacher’s as she turned away, the familiar nails glancing stubbier fingers.

  Dora stood in the stairwell and had to catch her breath. She cursed the alien inside whose existence had confirmed for Elisabeth the unsuitability of their liaison, turning her cold in one moment, and then apologised to it, stroking her abdomen.

  ‘I should have thought, then, that you have made your choice,’ Elisabeth had said when Dora, floundering and stuttering, had broken the news of the pregnancy to her. ‘You’re a family woman to the end, my Dora.’

  ‘It’s not like that –’ said Dora, but feebly, still ambivalent, aware of the rounded ache of the tears undoubtedly to come.

  ‘The fact is there!’ exclaimed Elisabeth richly. ‘Let’s not be naïve. And . . . and, really, we can’t continue to behave like schoolgirls sneaking into corners when we have families at home. Frankly, it’s beneath my dignity.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Dora and yet already it was a sacrifice she would willingly have made: she would now have crawled into those hiding places, just to be kissed by this small assured woman.

  She stared at the legs of Cally, who lingered as she closed the cupboard door.

  The small room set aside for Oxbridge English was blue, curtained and abnormally unscuffed. There Cecilia began to study twice a week in the first term of the upper sixth. A teacher named Jane Greaves held the Tuesday lunchtime session, while James Dahl taught for ninety minutes every Thursday. In that room at the top of the school, Cecilia, Nicola and Annalisa studied alongside Lilith, the sneering and notably intelligent daughter of a retired actress and an accountant; and Nick, a German-speaking, oboe-playing self-appointed intellectual who resembled a middle-aged man in all but complexion. The teacher and five pupils sat around two desks pushed together while children shrieked operatically, rollerskated and sulked on floors below. The room, used for occasional staff or parents’ meetings, was furnished with a small sofa and lamp, a framed Klimt in place of the usual batik hangings, and a ficus instead of the cheese and spider plants that swamped bedrooms and corridors beneath.

  If she was happy in the A level English classroom with its trees floating to Mr Dahl’s voice, now she was ecstatic. The experience was almost disturbingly joyful. During the period in which she, Nicola and Zeno had stalked, hidden, analysed, and collected sparse information, she had become accustomed to relying upon her imagination. Now she had been granted two double classes and one extra ninety-minute session a week with James Dahl himself. Amidst such excess, the desert that was the weekend came as something of a relief in the opportunity it afforded to digest and anticipate anew.

  At home, Gabriel Sardo, that barely known boy from a frightening stratosphere, loped around the house and slept in the bottom bunk in Tom’s room three weekends in four; Patrick no longer stayed the night in his pottery barn; Benedict had left school and appeared to be doing very little; Dora was exhausted; Cecilia walked the moors in order to talk to James Dahl in her mind, and otherwise she confined herself to her room.

  By Monday mornings, she was dazed with reading, glutted with thoughts of Mr Dahl.

  ‘Cecilia,’ James Dahl often said. ‘What do you think?’

  And, sitting feet or even inches away from him, able to see the hairs on his knuckles, smell the cleanness of him, she spoke.

  ‘Can you read for us?’ he asked. ‘Can you interpret that differently? See it, if you can, from a persecuted Puritan’s point of view.’

  The sun splashed from the metal of their ring binders and bleached sections of his skin, lay transparently on his fingernails or grew shadows from his pen. The leaves began to fall. Rain slanted outside the window that October; fogs drifted in from the moor and gathered in the gardens. Up in their afterthought of a room, sealed from the clamour of the school below, Cecilia often fantasised that term that if she blocked out Nick and the harsh stares of Lilith, she could be in an Edinburgh academy, a conservatoire, a Kensington seminary. It was as though she practised in a dusty studio in gelatine-coloured tights, her feet bleeding through her block shoes, her limbs fiery as she extended her tendons and pushed and pushed herself, her maestro Mr Dahl coming across her stretching herself to exhaustion in the half-light when others had retired. Or she was a monk girl in a monastery by the sea studying all night until rose-fingered dawn touched her pallor. She was a hollow-e
yed prodigy flirting with nervous exhaustion. She felt chosen; she felt fraudulent.

  ‘Oxford and Cambridge set high academic standards,’ said James Dahl. ‘This can’t be emphasised too much. Without wishing to put undue pressure on you all, you’ll have to be extremely single-minded this term.’

  His right forearm lay on the table, the hairs at his wrist visible. Cecilia glanced, as she sometimes did without meaning to, at the folds of material around where his penis must be, and blushed.

  ‘Hardy’s poetry incorporates some – some aspects of the late-nineteenth-century Gothic revival aesthetic, but in many ways it rejects it,’ he said. His small class dutifully made notes.

  ‘You don’t need to write what I’m saying word for word,’ he said. ‘Just use it as a starting point for your own reflections on the work. Your examiners and interviewers will reward a combination of scholarship and original thought.’

  ‘But sir,’ said Annalisa in alarm, ‘we do in class.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Take down what you say.’

  ‘That’s fine at A level. This is a different standard.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Annalisa, her eyes and mouth matching circles.

  By mid-October, her hand-wringing suffering magnified to unquenchable levels, Annalisa had dropped out of the Oxbridge class. In a wet outpouring of grief, she summoned her parents from Stockholm to the school for unnecessary discussions over the decision, while her love for Mr Dahl became ever more wiltingly forlorn. Eating-disordered and self-harming, drifting around the school in her flowery dresses and baggy Scandinavian tights, she began to talk about becoming a nurse or nursery teacher, voicelessly pleading with Mr Dahl to persuade her against such squandering of promise. He failed or refused to respond. Eventually she was sent to the expensive psychologist frequently employed by the school and assigned Dora Bannan as her pastoral tutor, a fact which inspired cruel mirth in Nicola and Cecilia. Cecilia begged her mother to reveal details of their discussions, but Dora smilingly refused.

  With Nick, Nicola, Lilith and Cecilia left labouring in the little room, lugging up books in their lunchtimes to avoid a library in which pupils smoked and caterwauled, the focus intensified. Cecilia felt purified. She was thin, fine, tuned to a pitch. Nothing else mattered but Oxbridge and James Dahl. The clouds scudded past the window, the room suspended high in the sky; the words were black and brilliant on the page, imprinting themselves on her mind with growing rapidity as her grasp of her subjects coalesced before unravelling again when a new layer of understanding deepened her vision. She read The Hand of Ethelberta in one night, skimmed The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads on the way to school, dipped into Metamorphoses and The Golden Bough, and took notes from a book of essays on Marvell in her first break.

  One lunchtime in late October, Cecilia could read no more. She walked around the grounds, then left the school, as all seniors were entitled to do, and made her way to the nearby village with its local landmark, a medieval estate. Unaccompanied schoolchildren were banned from Elliott Hall and its spread of gardens, but Cecilia had been there on occasion with her mother and younger brother during lunchbreaks in earlier years. She mentioned Dora’s name, and the woman at the entrance, all civility and patrician vowels, let her in.

  The Garden! she thought, on glimpsing green through the weather-slubbed arches that led to the courtyard and slopes of lawn beyond. She began reciting Marvell’s poem in her head and she was soothed. The tightness in her brain seemed to subside. How vainly men themselves amaze/To win the palm, the oak, or bays, she thought, walking along the courtyard path. Why did she strive so?

  The winding lawns with their paths and topiaried borders sloped towards a herb garden, a sundial, a copse where bluebells grew in May. After the anarchy of Haye House, this place with its last herb scents, its birds and walls seemed to embody an ancient and more refined civilisation. She imagined James Dahl as he must have been in his college gardens in Oxford. A quadrangle. A slope to a punting river. A thin, fair young man playing tennis and loving unknown girls.

  ‘Resting from uncessant labours?’ said James Dahl, appearing on the path that led from the Japanese garden.

  Cecilia gasped, tried to swallow the gasp, turning it into a small suppressed burp which even in that moment she knew she would spend years assessing for volume, persuading herself of its inaudibility and then waking to the hammering certainty that he had heard her.

  ‘Uncessant labours?’ she said dumbly.

  He began to speak. ‘Crowned –’

  ‘Crowned from some single herb or tree,’ she said, quoting the same words a fragment of time after him and creating a jangling overlapping of speech.

  She blushed.

  ‘What do you like best in that poem?’ he asked gently in an obvious attempt to save her from further embarrassment.

  ‘I like – I like –’ she said, coughing, ‘the verse starting: What wondrous life is this I lead!/Ripe apples drop about my head.’

  The sky seemed to rotate as a speeded-up film, clouds flying, birds large dark apparitions. His solemnity and height seemed enhanced in the white autumn light. The cedars of Lebanon rose in black behind him. She wished she had put on lip gloss and brushed her hair. Her coat was newly thin; she could feel air moving down her back, as though her clothes hung badly. She rubbed her tongue across her top teeth in case any remains of food lay there.

  ‘The luscious clusters of the vine/Upon my mouth do crush their wine,’ he recited. He swung the heel of his shoe against the path as he spoke. Stones scraped. All sound was amplified.

  ‘The nectarine and curious peach/Into my hands themselves do reach,’ said Cecilia, accelerating her speech into a gabble in case she had now overstretched the theme. ‘I just came here for a bit of a break,’ she added, to demonstrate that she understood that they had stopped quoting. She pushed her hair over to one shoulder.

  ‘I’m resting – too,’ he said.

  ‘Oh! I’ll leave you – let you –’ she said, feeling blood pumping into her already flushed complexion.

  He said nothing.

  ‘This delicious solitude,’ she blurted into the silence, following it with a small laugh, but he didn’t take up the quote, and she jabbed at herself hotly in her mind for marring what had gone before.

  ‘I wonder if Marvell had any inkling that his work would be known three hundred years later,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Cecilia. ‘Well,’ she said after a pause. She pushed herself. ‘He probably had intimations of immortality. But then so does every guitar-plucking fifth-former in Russell House.’

  He smiled. They turned slowly. She walked beside him, uncertain of what else to do. She could see the tiny bobbles on the weave of his jacket. The movement of his arm in his sleeve as he walked beside her was visible, strangely intimate in its human normality. Her brain seemed to vibrate with the effort to find something to say. She heard her own breathing.

  ‘So how are you finding the Oxbridge class?’ he asked, turning away from her as he spoke with the curious tilting quarter-rotation of the head he employed when he asked a question or replied to an enquiry, as though avoiding unwanted focus. His lashes seemed to form an extra screen. ‘Is it too hard?’

  ‘No,’ said Cecilia. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘It is strenuous. Demanding. But that’s the only way it can be. I suppose. It’s such a short time. It’s for such a short time, I mean.’

  He paused. She occupied herself with staggered intakes of breath to divide his silence into smaller sections as a method for dealing with her embarrassment.

  ‘I worry that pupils work very hard, but the truth is that they have to. There’s so much competition –’

  ‘And from far more academic schools,’ said Cecilia passionately. ‘From proper schools,’ she said more fervently, not intending to show such emotion.

  He glanced at her. ‘Well, yes,’ he said carefully. ‘That’s true. I believe that during most years Haye House has had no Oxbridge applications at all, or
the odd pupil seeking tuition. It does need to be more specialist than that, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Most people here want to take bongo classes or – or go to stained-glassmaking school!’ said Cecilia. ‘They want to travel round India or make experimental films.’

  ‘Indeed,’ he said.

  ‘What an outrageous squandering of an education,’ she exclaimed, kicking a pebble on the path.

  His mouth moved slightly.

  Cecilia blushed. ‘I mean –’

  ‘I fear it’s not my place to comment,’ he said.

  ‘But I can,’ she said in spirited tones. ‘I find it inexplicable.’

  He stopped. In the corner of her vision she caught his hair falling forward as he looked down. She couldn’t see his expression. He rested his shoe on a plinth, and she noticed the crazing on its polished surface reflecting the light. ‘Here’s the fountain’s sliding foot,’ he said.

  ‘At some fruit-tree’s mossy root,’ she said, and he laughed, and she thought how much she loved the rare sound of his laughter, and in its wake she felt a moment of intense happiness.

  ‘You know those set texts by heart,’ he said. ‘You need something more – muscular now. Read The Prince by Machiavelli. Read as much of Tristram Shandy as you have time for.’

  ‘I have,’ said Cecilia with secret pride.

  ‘Well that’s good. Tackle a few of Donne’s contemporaries? Lovelace and Rochester. They’re not for everyone, but . . . Also I’d recommend Milton’s Comus. It’s very beautiful. In fact, it has echoes of The Garden: Bacchus that first from out the purple Grape/Crush’t the sweet poyson of mis-used Wine . . .’

  ‘. . . Gosh,’ said Cecilia. She cringed at herself. ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘It is, isn’t it?’

  They walked towards the outer courtyard, rooks calling as they passed through smoke drifting white in the white sky, and as she paced beside him focusing on the path, her speech became more relaxed, dialogue now eased by the rhythm of their footfall, just as conversation with friends took on a new fluency when oiled by night.