‘Celie,’ Dora wanted to say, kindly and gently, ‘come here right now.’
She thought of Elisabeth cradled in the arms of this man.
James and Cecilia began to walk again. She has left her coat behind on purpose, thought Dora, observing the waist of her daughter set off by a belt she had pulled in tightly, her legs still somehow childish in over-worn tights though they were meant to be womanly in the heels she wore. She pictured Cecilia that morning almost hopping between dry sections of path and lane, fastidiously pulling those heels away from the boot-wearing crowds in the car.
He leaned as though to hear her, his faded mac falling from straight shoulders. Dora watched her daughter: the formation of her head with its small chin and matching curve of a nose and those flying dark Bannan brows. Dora could hear nothing that they said. She watched a silent film: a man oblivious to the emotions of an infatuated girl.
An agnostic since her teens, she prayed for her children. She rued the wounds she had, inevitably, inflicted with her unknown obsession. She looked at her daughter and she felt love. Adore someone who wants you, she pleaded silently, kissing the spray of freckles remaining over her nose, reaching out in her mind to her and pulling her back to her by her hair, as though enacting some Greek myth.
Dora returned to Haye House and covered for a flute lesson, despite her frequent assertions to the school that she was not a wind instrument specialist. As she taught, she began to calculate whether she had enough rusks at home for Barnaby and decided she would have to use crusts. She glanced at her watch and wondered whether she could finish the third year’s music class in time to pick him up before collecting the others.
She saw Cecilia walking alone by the drama department’s geodesic dome, clearly caught in thought. Where was Nicola, her unfavoured best friend? Zeno Dannett, the other member of her old trio, was now viewed as mildly troublesome by the school. Instead of mooning around the grounds in silence, she had joined a gang that smoked by the river and energetically kissed and coupled on its banks. Staff found sections of foil down there, condoms and Rizlas. The nominal librarian, in reality a general studies teacher who occasionally discussed classification systems and spent school money on his favourite authors, laughingly enumerated the paperbacks returned with squares torn from their covers for use as cigarette filters.
Zeno had found passion beyond James Dahl. She had lost her virginity to a classmate with eczema who painted graffiti-influenced murals and expected sex most lunch hours. Her interest in her English teacher was now weighted with condescension: she discussed him from an amused distance, as though contemplating a film star slightly out of fashion. Annalisa the Swede wept and idolised with ever more ardour. Ignored by the boys in her year, Nicola remained virginal and devoted. Ignoring the boys in her year, Cecilia – who had only ever, with a sense of experimental duty, kissed two contemporaries, their adolescent slightness, their pimples and downy growth alienating her – felt her attachment grow even as she eschewed its more obvious manifestations. She was seventeen, and could no longer twitter and cluster like the girls in lower years who imagined themselves invisible as they trailed Mr Dahl.
By November, Cecilia had met James Dahl four times in Elliott Hall gardens. She walked there most blowing November lunchtimes on the chance of a sighting, assuring Nicola that she could study more easily in solitude and feigning oblivion to her hurt response. She glanced at Nicola as she spoke, considering her frowns and her moles, the anxious repositioning of wiry hair behind shoulders, the mind so often overlooked by others, and a shiver at the knowledge of what she could tell her ran through her. She felt the almost sickening power of it; the gathering of repeated temptation. But she couldn’t tell her. It was far too dangerous. Diana was her only confidante, as she had been from early childhood. Fearing Nicola’s presence and terrified of jeopardising in any way the pure thing, Cecilia had retreated into secrecy. She walked it off on the moors instead, bathed in it, wrote hidden page after page.
The third time she had seen James Dahl, there was bonfire smoke: a man throwing leaves, some children like fat-faced fairies pulling wool inside a building. She knew that she would remember all the details of these times.
‘It’s nice to talk to you,’ he said at the end of their walk, and then left her to return to school.
Now she haunted the gardens. She sat huddled in her coat on benches writing notes; she crouched at the foot of the sundial reading with a tighted calf carelessly but elegantly displayed in case James Dahl should come past; she walked and read and drummed quotations into her head using spontaneously fashioned mnemonics, a whole system of visual and verbal links whose oddness would cause great humiliation if revealed. She was attuned to movement through the arches, any winter walker a smear of colour on the corner of her vision. She longed for him to arrive, just as, puzzlingly, she almost dreaded his entrance. He was, she thought, like her own self talking to her; but a better self.
That week, as she mounted the central flight of steps that rose beneath curves of bare branch, James Dahl entered the gardens with his wife.
Cecilia abruptly crouched down behind a cedar with her books, her heartbeat uneven and her breath visible in the air. All the resolve she had drummed into herself – be bold; be daring; push and push yourself – was punctured by this glimpse of reality. She repositioned herself, hiding among the branches that almost touched the ground and resting one knee on the earth so that she could be seen to be adjusting her shoe if found.
He seemed more human; he appeared more unguarded. His stride was faster. He mounted the large grass steps that formed a series of smooth ha-has beside his wife Elisabeth. They were arguing, Cecilia understood with a rush of invigoration that reminded her of being a child overhearing adults.
‘No!’ he said, more forcefully than he had ever spoken in the classroom. ‘I don’t think that’s something we should necessarily even consider.’
‘Don’t try to influence me,’ she said icily. ‘I – I really don’t think you have any right.’
Cecilia watched her intently through the branches. She frowned. Elisabeth’s bewildering friendship with her mother seemed to have subsided some time before, but her own fascination with her love rival only increased as time went on.
‘Christ!’ he said.
Cecilia shivered, more alarmed by the idea of discovery by Elisabeth than by her husband. His hair caught a gleam of light through a gap in the old wall that wound around the stairs leading to a pergola, now disused. She studied him, spinning out the hot stretched seconds of observation available to her.
Elisabeth walked on ahead. She was frosty, dark-eyed, like a fierce but elegant animal, thought Cecilia. A mink. A slender wolf. Today she wore pressed wool trousers with a tight black coat, her hair smooth on the nape of her neck, its sections lying in layers, thick and motionless on her forehead.
‘Darling,’ said James.
Cecilia flinched.
‘Yes,’ said Elisabeth.
‘I really don’t wish to argue with you.’
‘Nor do I wish you to,’ she said as an uninflected statement that carried a dismissal of his words.
‘I think we need to discuss this later,’ he said, sounding weary.
‘If you want to,’ she said, hesitated minutely, and then walked off, fast and unerring, through the arch to the courtyard and out of the grounds.
Cecilia waited. She felt like a dirty, crouching child, measuring her breathing until James Dahl had finishing pacing down the steps and then walked up again. She heard him exhaling in the still air. Leaves crunched under his feet. Every sound and movement seemed private. A spider ran beside her. She stood, moved swiftly to a different section of the garden while his back was turned, and then walked along on the further side of the azalea path.
She heard him coming towards her.
‘Cecilia,’ he said when she rounded the corner.
She held a book in front of her as she walked. She made herself recite quotations under her br
eath, continuing, hot-skinned, after he had addressed her.
‘What are you doing here?’ he said.
‘Oh,’ she said, blushing more deeply. ‘The same as usual,’ she said, gathering her dignity. ‘Working. I’m learning some quotes from Donne today.’
‘So tell me your latest.’
‘These miracles wee did; but now alas,/All measure, and all language, I should passe,/Should I tell what a miracle shee was,’ she said instantly, blushing at the intensity of the emotion expressed.
‘I fear you might have seen me with – with my wife,’ he said, glancing at the ground. ‘I’m sorry if you overheard our conversation.’
‘Oh no!’ said Cecilia. ‘I mean, I didn’t hear you.’
‘I –’
‘Not much,’ she added, speaking across him. She drew herself up. ‘Sorry. Sorry I – interrupted –’
‘Well I’m sorry. It occurred to me you might be here. We silly ad – supposed adults – should conduct our disputes at home.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said in a small voice.
‘No, we should.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m afraid that human nature is terribly flawed.’
‘Oh –’
‘But you don’t have to know that quite yet.’
‘Yours isn’t,’ she said spontaneously, then held her breath.
He smiled, his eyes catching the light. ‘Yes it is.’
She looked down.
‘Think of Milton: Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit . . .’
‘Think of Beth March,’ she countered, instantly embarrassed at her childish reference.
‘Alcott?’
‘Yes.’
‘Doesn’t she die?’
‘Yes –’
‘The meek don’t inherit the earth,’ he said. ‘I used to believe, hope – trust – that they might.’
‘No,’ said Cecilia, and an image of steely Elisabeth Dahl walking out of the gardens came to her. She stood taller and smiled directly, radiantly, at him. She was exhilarated by her own temporary boldness, so long planned, so long promised to herself at night.
He glanced at the ground. ‘Perhaps I’m over-cynical,’ he said. A smile creased his lips. His hair fell over his forehead. His features seemed more relaxed.
‘No,’ said Cecilia, euphoria running through her as she confirmed her pledge that she would possess him, nailing her vow to a certain crack in the bark of a tree she was passing as a symbol of her promise. ‘The meek get nowhere. Nowhere at all.’
‘No –’
‘I have to go too,’ she said, and slightly unsteadily, heady with resolve, she walked out of the gardens and left him standing there.
Eleven
February
During her first English lesson at St Anne’s, the firs through the windows lightly misted with damp from the moors, the teacher, a tall, faded person with an old-fashioned accent, seemed to scrutinise Romy. He looked up at her with dark lashed blue-grey eyes. She caught his gaze; he looked away. His focus was generally fixed on the table or on some unspecified spot on the floor as he talked, his head bowed so that he had to glance up from beneath his eyelashes when he addressed an individual; he spoke in a low note, and guided his class with quiet certainty. Romy caught him appraising her again and she was disconcerted, instantly blushing, because he was ancient, and not overtly lecherous. Eventually she smiled awkwardly, and he rested his solemn gaze on her for one more moment, then looked away.
The rain now came in over Lundy and across the sea, over beaches and boats to swell the Torridge. It soaked the flatter lands to the north of the moor, then rose across Kitty Tor, clattering against the clapper bridges, pouring over clitter, driving the Dart with its weight. Rain filled Burrator Reservoir and sluiced the disused tin quarries near Huntingdon Warren, across Dockmell, Drywall and the Weir, making cows steam and thatches ache. It found the house and battered at the windows.
Ruth lay in bed and prayed for her parents to stay alive now they had come to this wild strange place. What if her mother’s car tipped off a mountain and went flying and tumbling and tumbling into the river below? What if her father crashed into an Eddie Stobart on the motorway? She pressed her flesh as hard as she could bear and prayed. Her mother had kissed her so gently that night to put her to bed. She was her friend who always looked after her. She loved her mother’s smell, the bits of brightness in her hair like red wood colour if she looked; she loved her cuddles, because all was safe as long as she was holding her as she said goodnight. She begged her for more, for more hugs, strokes, holds, couldn’t bear to let her go, she was so soft and smelled of her, and then it was nine o’clock and she would say she must must must go downstairs, but she would beg, and always she’d stay a little longer, stroking her forehead, kissing her ear, chatting to her.
She had begun to walk out of school at lunchtime, because no one noticed, and the man was there, a big strange old man. He was in the fields and among the mossy trees around Widecombe, never on the Green. He offered her a chip, but she was too shy to take it.
Cecilia came downstairs before school. There they all were, her three girls, the flesh-and-blood girls: there was the tall and driven Romy with her back turned to her sisters and her mobile propped against a windowpane in hope, her hair flaring with threads of tiger and green in late February sun. There was Izzie the middle, adopted, child and the most troublesome, alert for stimulation. And there was Ruth, hoarding her Sylvanian Families and dirty dolls’ bedding like a hamster.
Dora’s hospital visit wasn’t until the afternoon, and Cecilia had planned her timing. She would go there after dropping off Romy at school and ask her to the house for tea. After only intermittent contact over so many years, their relationship laden with seemingly irreparable wounds, this most fragile of subjects had to be treated with care and with love even, during a period of ill health with its possible ramifications. The cancer crouched over everything.
‘What are you doing?’ Ari would have snapped had he any inkling of her continued need to find reasons for the abandonment.
‘Looking after my mother,’ Cecilia said in her head, answering smoothly, the subject of that lost baby a tinderbox.
She could get very little past him. If he had been there in the week, he would, she knew, have sensed by now that Mara was haunting her more forcefully than she had ever imagined. That she saw her here in the fields, in the mud, in the river; that she addressed her in her head and in notes; that she chased her, chased her, chased her.
You’re there where the gorse prickles your back, she thought, and she pressed her own nails into her flesh. I think I see you, peeping over the riverbank. Try to find your first home. Come across the bracken. Try.
Twelve
The River Island
James Dahl entered Wind Tor House. He seemed to Cecilia to arrive in slow motion, splinters of him emerging spotlit through the door, then plunged into shadow by an intrusion of heads.
The autumn term had finished, Oxbridge entrance was over, and the Bannans were holding their annual Christmas party. Several neighbours and a group of Dora’s colleagues arrived at the same time as Diana’s family, the cold air in their wake making the fire flare and spit. James Dahl helped Elisabeth out of her coat, then took it back into the hall. The bodice of Elisabeth’s dress revealed the faintest gradation of cleavage, and her habitual string of pearls had been replaced by a single large black pearl on a chain. She scanned the room openly in the fashion of a hawk surveying territory, then dropped her gaze and stood as though waiting to be brought a drink. Strained and wary, Dora obliged. She was aware of where Patrick stood as she greeted Elisabeth, glancing in his direction to ascertain whether he had noticed her. He would not dream that she could love a woman, she knew, but the image of the mighty Bannans returned to her and she glanced round for her children, only satisfied when she could see the faces of all but Barnaby, who was in bed.
Dora had been up late for several nights draping a ceiling-height tree felle
d by Patrick and Tom, clearing the fluff-sticky oil and spider remains from the wooden bowls piled on top of the dresser and filling them with grapes, cheese, roast chestnuts and chocolates already gigglingly filched by children. Lanterns lined the garden path. Christmas lights tangled with holly on beams; candle and log flames left saturated shadows in corners. Haye House staff were uninhibited as they celebrated the end of term. Dora wove through them, cheery yet vigilant in her hostess duties. She caught sight of Elisabeth’s cold fine profile now against a bookshelf.
Cecilia had instinctively failed to inform her two school friends of this year’s larger version of her family’s traditional Christmas party in case, by some gift of fortune that she didn’t dare to expect, her mother might invite her old friend Elisabeth and her husband among her closer circle of colleagues. Here they were. The Dahls. Elisabeth and James.
Friends were pouring in, no longer knocking on the door, jostling, laughing and greeting as they dipped heads under lintels and clapped hands on backs, proffering drinks and dishes in a traditional collective effort, the Bannans’ generosity so openly founded on financial uncertainty.
Cecilia sat beside Diana. She shook with a steady tremble as she and Diana tracked James Dahl’s progress across the room. His presence was almost unbearable.
‘Don’t watch him so obviously,’ Cecilia hissed, gripping Diana’s arm.
Dora refreshed the mulled wine that simmered on the Aga with yet another cheap bottle bought at the Cash and Carry, moved into the sitting room and glanced at her daughter.
‘Look at them,’ she said to her friend Beatrice as she wiped glasses.
‘I know,’ said Beatrice.
‘I don’t know what one does with girls. At this stage.’
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