Benedict was calling up the stairs now, hunting her down and demanding her. She pulled Barnaby to her chest and sat there rocking. All she wanted to do was to lie in the bath and hide from them all, breathing slowly.
Someone walked along the passage outside Barnaby’s room. Dora kept her head bowed, anticipating a lodger or Benedict, impatient for whatever it was he wished her to provide. There was a pause as the person negotiated the semi-darkness between the corridor and the bedroom, footfall muffled by the shufflings of the water tank.
‘Dora,’ came Elisabeth’s voice softly.
Dora heard it with a delay. It was so unexpected, so outside her sealed cavity of misery that it was momentarily unwanted. She emitted a murmur.
Elisabeth was blurred in the shadows. Barnaby stiffened, straightened his legs hard against Dora’s torso, and grinned.
‘He’s really rather sweet,’ said Elisabeth absently.
Barnaby began jiggling on Dora’s thighs, shifting his weight painfully from one side to another. He gurgled and laughed. He began to bounce.
‘Oh God. Not now,’ muttered Dora.
‘Poor darling,’ said Elisabeth in the rich old voice that recalled so many complexities.
Dora breathed slowly. Elisabeth’s presence was now filtering through to her, stinging her with an erotic charge and its accompanying pain.
‘Did you have to do this to yourself?’ said Elisabeth lightly.
‘It was – a mistake,’ said Dora, biting her lip at the word. ‘You know that. But I love him. So he wasn’t. Just wait a minute.’
She lifted Barnaby, hesitated, the instinct to put him in someone else’s arms forestalled in the presence of Elisabeth, and she went off to the bathroom where she dropped a Junior Disprin in a glass of water. Trembling, she fed Barnaby a full dose and then a dribble more. He licked his mouth, and let her stroke his forehead and lower him back into the cot. With uncharacteristic swiftness, he fell asleep.
Elisabeth looked at him and breathed through her nose with a cynical exhalation as if to say, Really, what have you done?
‘Don’t,’ said Dora, kissing Barnaby’s cheek.
‘Don’t what?’
‘I know he put you off me.’
She heard her own statement, baldly expressed. The darkness covered her face.
‘And what of your own endless shilly-shallying, my darling? Your ladylike horror? Your fits of duty?’
‘It was my pregnancy that really put you off me,’ said Dora steadily.
‘Nonsense.’
‘Nonsense back – really,’ said Dora. ‘What did you say when you heard? When you guessed in fact? You said – Our coffin nail. Our exit strategy. This is a message to us.’
‘Well a torrid Sapphic liaison is barely compatible with domestic life as a mother of four. Of a newborn,’ said Elisabeth, spelling their situation out so that Dora cringed.
‘Much as I loved you. He’s a little older now,’ said Elisabeth, glancing at Barnaby. ‘One tends to forget and forgive when they’re sleeping sweetly.’
She took Dora’s arm and guided her to the wide window seat with its brown cushions home-sewn in early days, its curtains forming a hiding place to the children who had played houses when younger; and she laughed and kissed her.
‘Patrick – could come up,’ hissed Dora. She wriggled away and pushed the bedroom door as far as it could go, but it was warped like most doors in the house, and she could not even kick it into place.
‘He won’t come up,’ said Elisabeth, her lips closing decisively over her teeth. ‘He’s far too busy plucking that guitar.’ She closed the curtains, enclosing them. ‘Why am I thinking of Boccaccio?’
Dora shook her congested head.
‘And of you,’ said Elisabeth, and bit Dora’s neck.
Dora sat very still, her skin flooding. She slowly breathed out to stop herself panicking, to prevent herself from protesting again. Her heart leapt. ‘Cally . . .’ she murmured.
‘Her,’ said Elisabeth impatiently, and kissed Dora hard on the mouth again. ‘A temporary diversion. Barely even that –’
‘Oh,’ said Dora, unable to say anything else. ‘Patrick,’ she added once more, trying to stop herself, her inability not to fill a silence an affliction to her. The name hung between them, the child-snatching Bannans crowding into her mind until she was unable to gauge the ratio of terror to overwhelming excitement in the speed of her heartbeat.
Elisabeth looked at Dora through the moonlight that phosphoresced their created room and raised one eyebrow. Dora paused, then leaned forward and kissed her in return. It was the first time she had moved towards Elisabeth. Kissing her felt extraordinary. Was she actually going to have sex with a woman now, she wondered, so light-headed she worried that she might faint.
Elisabeth was hard and definite with her; swift, skilled; she made no allowances for her inexperience; she shocked and stupefied her. Barnaby slept. There on the window seat, Dora sank into Elisabeth’s perfume smell, so intimately known to her, and felt the hardness and the skimming and was brought to a height at which all else subsided to irrelevance. A strand of panic sounded even while she relinquished, knowing the wrongness of such savage temptation. It felt almost too strange after so much longing, inevitably different from the softness she had conjured in her mind: spiky and veering towards awkwardness yet entirely necessary. Her pleasure rose in sliding steps. She dreaded the following days, the time in her life apart from her.
‘Oh Dora, I don’t know what to do with you,’ said Elisabeth lightly.
‘You do,’ mouthed Dora into her hair, wanting not to be heard.
James Dahl had insisted on accompanying Cecilia home across the field, barely speaking as she struggled along beside him. They had entered the house in tense silence, Cecilia instinctively lagging behind in the hall, and when she emerged from hiding in the downstairs lavatory, she saw the back of him as he addressed his wife. The music and shouted speech was more ragged now, fracturing into hysteria. She knew that the Dahls would soon leave and she needed to escape him before he went.
She limped her way back down to the river in her soaked tights, the pools of water that fountained into her shoes pleasing through her electrified daze. She stood on the riverbank, looking across to the island in moonlight for evidence she knew she wouldn’t see: for bent grass or blood from her leg.
She lay on her stomach close to the surface of the water with its hissing ogees of foam and tried to breathe slowly. Invisible from where she lay, she watched the shapes of people going home, saw rectangles of hall light widen and narrow, heard distant car engines. She stared and stared at the low swell and heave of the house and wondered whether she saw him. She played the scene back, watched herself with him from above. She was a girl in a dress with hair falling night-dark over white skin: a girl embraced and kissed for long seconds by an adult man, older and tall and heavy in a coat. She saw herself pressed beneath her teacher, her mouth being kissed, and elation soared through her, followed by disbelief.
Her heart beat powerfully against her chest. She was trembling. The need to vomit took hold of her more forcefully. She put her fingers into her mouth, the back of her hand skimming the river, and heaved. She tried again, and made herself sick, spewing alcohol and turmoil into the Dart’s waters.
Fourteen
March
She was hungry, Mara was hungry, Cecilia was sure. The baby Mara who lived in her head and haunted her. She saw her as a muddy baby. Her belly was swollen. Dark whorls of silt patterned her back and her focus was dark. She turned her head unevenly towards the woman who had been her mother, catching her hem as she passed.
Stop, stop, Cecilia told herself, pressing her hands into her scalp, but Mara was here haunting her. Mara was here, as she had never been in London: more raw and vicious and starving.
Cecilia glimpsed Dora setting off towards the bracken-clumped riverbank the other side of Wind Tor land, and wondered whether she might catch her on her way back. For the firs
t time since she had returned to live in Wind Tor House, she made her way to the river island. She walked through the mud-sprung grass with less sureness of footing than she had possessed in that girlhood spent tramping about the moors, her body only marginally fuller than in those days, though pregnancies had taken their toll.
The field’s foaming of new foliage was black-green beside the hazel and alder that lined the riverbanks, and she decided that perhaps the protagonists in the book she was writing could camp there on their way up the tributary. She entered the moss-brown shade so often suspended with gnats and saw that a baby tree now grew beside the original birch, arching away at an angle from its trunk and crowding the tiny island. She pulled up the leg of her jeans to look at her scar, examining it as she hadn’t done since her teens, and saw the thin curve of paleness cut by the rock on to which James Dahl had jumped ahead of her over twenty years before. She pressed her nail into it and could feel nothing. She noticed how her leg looked older. She leapt on to the rock and then on to the island, the movements automatically known, and sat there while the water ran past her.
She leaned back against the tree and thought about James Dahl.
She remembered stumbling back to the island after kissing him and seeing herself as if from above, and replayed it now, but the picture was quite different. She saw how youthful she had been and had not known it. Photos of her from that time resembled a quaintly dated archive: a blur of freckles and health and unformed features, simple youth like a drug flushing the surface of her skin. That girl, that child in love, had lowered herself to the ground beneath her teacher. Antipathy rose inside her. Underlying it – always – twisted an old, primitive flare of excitement. She strongly and strenuously disapproved. Her feelings towards that long-estranged figure had periodically moved her to pure fury, the faintest notion of her daughters with a man so much older or more powerful inspiring rage. Yet she had never really got over it. It had been, at some intrinsic level, the most exciting time in her life.
She thrust the vision quite violently from her. She leant against the trunk, felt the remains of dew soaking through to her thigh, saw a tickling of water by the bank and an early vole. She fell half-asleep briefly, the sun touching her as catkins rippled above her, and wondered where he was now.
The house appeared sunken in its valley: a crusted hump of landscape cradled by new leaves. She wondered – when would the intruder come back? She shivered slightly. Her ghosts tangled, as they always had, warmth now rising with the riverbank.
When you were a baby a few hours old, you left here – left by the front door or the kitchen door? I don’t know; I have no way of knowing. I was still lying on Dora’s bed. You left with strangers whose smell was different and whose voices were not those you had heard in the womb. They fed you formula milk and you started your new life away from your parents. Where was it? Where are you? My little girl, you are somewhere in this world.
Dora was walking along beside the river field, a tall figure now bent and reduced, as though the sky itself might blast her. She wore red denim beneath a coat that was decades old. Her pea coat, thought Cecilia, and complacency somehow nestled in Dora’s continued use of the term, in her general refusal to move with times, and made Cecilia twitch with automatic annoyance. She wished her brothers would visit their mother more.
Mara was still there, a layer of presence among the trees.
A goose called. The sound was as harsh as a newborn’s cry.
Cecilia sat up quickly and ran across the field, its clumps and water-filled hoof pits making her stumble as she had beside James Dahl.
‘Where did they take her from?’ she said barely audibly, coming up behind her mother.
‘Sorry?’ said Dora.
Cecilia could smell Dora’s breath.
‘Did they take her out of the front door or the kitchen door? Or the door near the boiler room?’
‘Celie, what is all this about?’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know.’
Cecilia paused. ‘You do,’ she said.
Dora closed her lips tightly, and Cecilia refused to fill in the silence.
There was continued silence.
Cecilia’s heartbeat was painful.
‘Please,’ she said eventually.
Dora gazed at her with her look of mild bewilderment.
‘Look Dora,’ said Cecilia. ‘I can’t do this. Don’t you see what it’s doing to me?’
Dora hesitated. ‘Yes, darling,’ she said.
Fifteen
The Drama Hall
Misery veined with hope seemed to soak into Dora’s body, making her exhausted. She walked about school in a frenzy of anticipation: she had given in to her state, because she could do nothing else.
Patrick was evasive, spending evenings pottering around the house fixing the surface manifestations of far greater structural problems or driving to the pub in Leusdon where he sat barely drinking alongside farming men. She was aware that he was avoiding her in silent protest. She didn’t know him any more; she knew him too well. Her guilt reared and receded in regular cycles, repressed during flares of excitement. Out of habit she viewed the decline of their marriage as a temporary phase: as something that could be mended, at least to a functional level, one day when she was no longer in love with Elisabeth Dahl. With a woman. An astonishing fact that she could still barely absorb, let alone understand.
Patrick avoided Elisabeth’s name with what Dora sensed was a barely conscious disgust rooted in religious morals or simple disbelief. A rigidity came to both his and Cecilia’s faces on the rare occasions that the Dahls were mentioned. He was more perceptive than she thought, Dora reminded herself, and anger sharpened his intelligence. Dora wished he would go away. During the times when Elisabeth was busy or caught by duty or simply fickle, Dora mourned until the absence tired her to sleep. The inconsistent intoxication of her relationship was like a glittering blackness in black January when the skies froze at four and Barnaby wet through his clothing to his frayed miniature duffel.
She felt she wanted to live now elsewhere: near lights and concerts, beside notices about book sales and lost cats, among echoes of exquisite-smelling skin. She pictured herself living in Wedstone with its shimmer of civilisation; in Elliott Hall even, tucked away with her love in a forgotten cell up in the hammer-beam roof where they would do nothing but absorb each other’s limbs and urgently converse: two minds and bodies attuned in a haven of centuries-old wood. She thought of tangling with Elisabeth’s small body with such urgent need that it conquered confusion and guilt: the almost ruthless sex in snatched hours at Neill House or in an office behind the sculpture studio. She knew already that she was the one who loved more, and that that would prove to be her curse.
Much as she loved Barnaby, she wanted him grown up, as the first three now were. She was waiting, and dreaming of a more manageable age. When Barnaby was four, even three, perhaps she and Elisabeth would consolidate what it was they had.
A fortnight after the spring term started, students performed a Lorca play they had been rehearsing since the previous autumn.
Speedy Sardo sat by his mother and waved in affectionate fashion at Dora across an audience that consisted of almost the entire school and parent body, adults crowding on the steps that served as seats, teenagers excitable on bleachers behind. Elisabeth entered. Her clothes, the rightness of them; her carriage, even when picking her way to a seat, made Dora’s abdomen contract. Dora could barely contemplate the suspicions she surmised circulated through her colleagues’ minds. What if the people surrounding them had seen what she did with Elisabeth? What would they think? The brushing of mouths, limbs, genitals? What would they all think? A hot fall of horror drenched her.
The fibreglass dome’s rough inner surfaces were clung to by condensation that ran down the panels to pool on its metal ribs as the building boomed with such unstable echoes that it seemed as though it might explode like a toadstool. Its acoustics, the drama department u
nanimously agreed, were ‘dodgy’, and now the building screamed and reverberated as the band sporting crownless hats and pirate scarves tuned up. The keyboard player wore dungarees over a bare torso with one strap undone although it was early February. Dora watched them all: the band; Cally Cooper; Peter Doran, accompanied by a craggy, carmine-lipped girlfriend; the Dahls: James murmuring to Elisabeth, who sat very still in her coat. Flanked by colleagues and children, Dora felt lonely. Barnaby was with Patrick; she hoped he had put him to bed. The thought of her youngest child made her tighten with a guilt that she tried to soothe, but panic always cut into whatever comfort mechanism she summoned when she considered him: a difficult baby, the hardest of them all; her beloved accident. She was barely coping. At this moment, her shoulders bowed, she admitted it to herself. And her mind was flooded with distress.
Cecilia Bannan looked strained. Her eyelash vibrated with an underslept tic. She sat on the same side as Dora, pressed beside Nicola and another upper sixth-former at the bottom of the bleachers, taking vague comfort in the fact that her mother was there, reachable by crawling or shouting. She could be saved by her mother.
The band tuned up again, its discordance sawing at the air, and rows of hands covered ears.
‘Shut the fuck up, man!’ a boy called out to the trombonist, the silence in reaction followed by whistles. Stamping and catcalling delayed the opening scene, sound ricocheting off the ceiling and spreading into a muddy boom.
Cecilia closed her eyes. Diana’s school was rehearsing Iphigenia at Aulis and had performed Leben des Galilei in German at the end of the previous term; Diana’s school possessed cloisters, French clubs, debating societies, Latin classes; its Greek society organised orations. Haye House, which so often presented self-penned musicals and anarchic social commentaries, had now seen fit to mangle The Billy-Club Puppets.
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