You

by Joanna Briscoe

  ‘Yes yes yes. I know. I’m sorry. Let’s not have a fucking argument about it now.’

  ‘I’ll argue with you in the morning instead.’

  ‘How I look forward to that,’ said Ari, and groaned and pulled the duvet over his ears, and she walked away, ruffled. Words of self-justification ribboned through her mind.

  She sat down in what was her old bedroom, now her study, and tried to clear her thoughts. Into the space flooded James Dahl the St Anne’s teacher, followed by Romy, by Dora’s radiotherapy, by the coal for the Aga, the draughts and leaks and scrabbling animals, and the needs of three uprooted girls. Had she, then – somehow, unwittingly, unknowingly – put herself back where she would be forced to encounter him again? She felt like a fool. Her face heated, she opened the file containing The House on the Moor and drove herself to plan her characters’ journey up the Dart: three children with their pet wolves, their complex quest and their escape from a deranged butler. The door of her old bedroom bore Gallery Five stickers covered over in layers and layers of paint, their plump mouse and cat figures just detectable under cream gloss, and she thought how fitting but disconcerting it was that the writing of children’s books had partially bought her back her own childhood home.

  She forced herself to write, but she heard a noise as faint above the river rush as a scratching. The sound was not on the road this time: it was in the plants outside the window, nearer to the house.

  Someone was outside again.

  She didn’t look. She made herself imagine a fox. She considered disturbing Ari and asking him to explore the foliage in his practical male way to tell her that the intruder was a product of her imagination, a chimera of weather and animal movement, but she couldn’t, because she knew that someone was there.

  ‘Darling,’ she said, and she didn’t know who she meant.

  She tried to stop thinking. She attempted to write. Perhaps, she thought, she didn’t want Ari to interfere because she was clinging to irrational hopes. People couldn’t just disappear from this earth. The baby had gone somewhere.

  Someone was out there. There was someone or something – a pony, perhaps? A hedgehog? – rustling in the tall grass that obscured part of the front wall and needed removing. She went to the window and made herself open it, the frame catching on the thatch, the stillness lining her lungs. She could see nothing. She turned off the light, knelt on the window seat and stretched out through the narrow opening into the night where she could taste the rinsed chill of the air. There was someone there. Mara, Mara. Was she coming across the river, reed-battered, hungry?

  ‘Hello?’ she called out urgently, but her voice broke into a croak.

  She caught sight of a sleeve in the light angling from the landing window above the porch, saw a hand passing behind the bushes and grass near the house, a streak of paler substance as the figure moved swiftly away, crossing the garden and disappearing from sight on the lane.

  ‘Oh God,’ Cecilia said, holding the windowsill. ‘Wait!’ she called.

  The person had gone.

  She couldn’t tolerate it. She rose clumsily and ran to the nearest upstairs landing window that faced the back garden, but all she could see was the ridge of Dora’s thatch with no lights beneath it, the wind slicing through a loose pane onto her neck.

  Seventeen

  March

  When Cecilia woke, Ari had risen and it was almost ten o’clock. The sound of his voice fusing with Ruth’s came to her, the rush of a game in the garden floating to the window.

  A cluster of tortoiseshells moved sleepily, hibernating in a corner of the windowsill. Cecilia remembered then, those half-dead butterflies of childhood that had always slept in the house in winter, waiting in a drugged state for spring. However much you believed you remembered, there were always forgotten things; there were distortions.

  She stretched, idling in the unaccustomed relaxation, and with the warmth of the sheets and the sudden unwanted intrusion of James Dahl into her life, she was reminded of the Saturday morning after the Lorca play all those years before when she had woken up in Zeno’s room at school. She had stumbled in there in the night, Chase House, Zeno in a smoke haze asking little, and made a bed on the rug. As she turned on the floor on waking late in the morning, the overextended pull of her inner thighs had filtered into her consciousness and informed her in her half-sleep of what had happened. A kind of bliss had filled her mind. She later thought that that moment, that drowsy waking passage of time on the sunlight of Zeno’s floor when she remembered that she had had sex with Mr Dahl, had encapsulated the purest happiness she had ever experienced.

  She had gone home that afternoon and walked over the moors for most of the day, all evidence there in the tugs and tendernesses of her body. She was loose-jawed, wide-eyed. She paced about in a disbelieving trance near Wind Tor, past Foxworthy and over the Ball, fast-breathed and careless, and she caught the scent of him on her arm, warm and private beneath the wind, her faint residual fear at the reality of sex overlaid by a progressively enhanced memory of arousal. He would be in Dorset from the morning, he had told her, solemnly and straightforwardly, and she had accepted that prearranged fact as she must, because she knew that he would contact her, though how she wasn’t sure, and she felt wind-battered and alchemised as she ran, jumping over tussocks and marshy stretches, the tendons at the top of her thighs pulling as she leapt. She flew. She had never experienced such elation. She felt the soreness inside her every time she clenched her muscles – repeatedly, deliberately, nudging at the entrancing pain – a reminder that she had made love, that she had a lover.

  The wind blew, and she carried on walking out there into the stirrings of evening, away from the phone, though he couldn’t call. She played back moments in a disordered rush, certain she had remembered everything; and then images, as yet unexamined, would come to her with a vividness of recollection that made her emit small shouts as she ran that sounded mad even to her own ears: memories of his hand brushing her nipple; a word he had murmured to her; his finger lingering on the back of her neck. She was imprinted by him. An electric current seemed to shoot from the top of her thighs through her abdomen, and then again, and again, as she recalled scenes. She lowered herself on to a stone in a hollow with the wind tugging at her front to remember with enforced slowness, every prefatory detail arranged in sequence, the moment of penetration. She thought of their wedding, of how they’d plot it, and when they would run away. He would have to divorce Elisabeth first. Or could he become effectively engaged and then divorce afterwards? She was uncertain.

  She pictured herself beside him in a carriage pulled by sturdy cobs making for Yorkshire or Scotland. They would stop at an inn on the way with her trunks compressing rustling layers, springing and starched and laced, and blood on her wedding night though she was no virgin now. Returning to school his wife. Would she do that? Facts seemed burdensome and muddling. Could she marry him without anyone knowing, and then on the day, the very day she’d finished her A levels, there would be an announcement and she would drive off, a bride in old ivory in a carriage being gazed at open-jawed by her schoolmates and wished well by the farming folk lining the lane. But then what of university? Would he accompany her? She saw herself taking notes in lectures wearing her wedding ring, the existence of her grown man of a husband known by contemporaries as she spurned drinks and student frivolity while he waited for her in their modest married quarters. Logistical vagueness set in. She looked at the bracken-choked Ball rearing above her and focused on the present. They would soon talk of the future, and then she’d know, again, that pleasure, that edge of pain.

  And Dora had understood nothing when her daughter, deflowered by her teacher, had returned to Wind Tor House after pacing the moor all afternoon. She glanced at her, later hugged her in passing to acknowledge her return, and asked her above the sounds of Barnaby crying if she’d enjoyed the school play.

  By early Monday morning, fear had begun to nibble at Cecilia’s euphoria. She
had found and reread suitably exalted passages of Madame Bovary, of Anna Karenina, of Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Villette; she had cried and felt her own skin where he had touched it and, afraid of being overheard at home, walked the mile and a half to the telephone box in Ponsworthy just to tell Diana, her only confidante, in a series of soaring, gabbled runs of speech. She felt as though she were drunk. She was agitated with ecstasy followed by waves of disbelief. She visualised the Mr Dahl of the classroom handing back essays; and then, in deliberate sudden contrast, summoned him entering her and whispering to her, the juxtaposition repeated and repeated with subtle variation.

  Speedy had smiled slyly at her at supper as though he knew, yet actual knowledge was impossible. He grinned at her, raising his eyebrow in enquiry. She laughed, unable to stop herself, her overexcitement bubbling up like a dizzying series of steps rising higher and higher and emerging as a childish cough that ended in a snort of crumbs on to the surface of the table, causing him to wink at her when her parents weren’t looking. But by Sunday evening, she had developed a stomach ache that wouldn’t go away. She pulled her knees to her chest in bed and tried to squeeze the pain into submission. It was past two in the morning and she couldn’t contemplate school. The suspicion that he wouldn’t discuss marriage immediately after all, that he would be awkward and might even hide behind his teaching role, fanned coldly through her mind as a growing fear, and by four in the morning she wanted to lie barricaded in her bedroom and go back, back to her childhood, back to the time before this had occurred. She wished with panicking sincerity that it had never happened. She read some Enid Blyton to numb herself with descriptions of teas provided by cheerful cooks, with coastal paths and cornflowers and boys called Sooty Lenoir. Terror ticked through her. By the time Dora called outside her room, she had slept for just over two hours and had to be shaken awake.

  And now Cecilia, lying in the same house over twenty years later, spring air tensing on plaster curves, daughters in varying states of frenzy or adolescent languor in the garden, looked back on that period with James Dahl more fully than she had ever wanted to – having been unable to contemplate it in its entirety; viewing it only in fragments of recalled joy or anger or regret – and wondered exactly how that relationship – if a relationship was what it had been, rather than a lopsided attachment or a series of colliding desires and misunderstandings – still informed her to this day. It was there as a flare that receded and returned at the periphery of her consciousness.

  Poor girl, she thought now, feeling sorry for herself as she so rarely did. The poor buffeted eager creature that she had been. All the energy and obsession she had poured into literature, into studying, and into love for James Dahl, had, after that first night, been dedicated to him alone. She had seen her schoolwork through an obsessed daze. The affair with him had brought her very close to breakdown, she thought now.

  Looking back, she realised that she had been, if anything, particularly inexperienced, raised on seclusion and bohemian ideals. She had never paid a bill or eaten a takeaway; she had barely been to London, hardly travelled; rarely even went, unlike so many of her school contemporaries, to a pub, while her sexual education was derived from The Valley of the Dolls and Dora’s well-meant speeches about ‘lovemaking’. Perhaps, after all, there was something dangerous, clotted, in that idyll that the Bannans and their contemporaries had attempted to create. And she, the seventeen year old with her denim skirts, her clogs and her hair clips, she the bluestocking virgin, had negotiated single-handedly the emotions of an affair with a married man.

  ‘How are you? How are you?’ he had asked rapidly when he found her alone by the lockers the Monday after the play. This moment, vividly prefigured as a series of arrangements for elopement, was now taut with anguish. She had avoided him, just as she had looked out in agony for him. The sleeves of his palely striped shirt were rolled up in distracted fashion although it was February. He breathed quickly through his nose.

  ‘Fine,’ she said, glancing at her feet, then meeting his eye with a smile crooked with irrepressible radiance. ‘Oh – very well!’ she said. She blushed.

  ‘No.’ He shook his head and exhaled loudly through his mouth, tension darkening his face. His sand-coloured stubble glinted in the landing-window light. ‘That – that – should never have happened. Christ,’ he said, sweeping his hand over his forehead. His breath was faintly sour. ‘I’m appalled. I’m so deeply sorry –’

  ‘No,’ she said steadily. ‘No. Please don’t say that.’

  And the next time he had seen her – and she had been repeatedly sleepless, had picked at her skin until she bled – he had apologised again in a strained and self-blaming speech, but he had asked more kindly after her, with audible concern. He had resumed walking to Elliott Hall gardens at lunchtimes, and she saw him there among the mulch and darkness and snowdrops, the occasional gardener marking horizons, and they began to find each other again. She knew, could see him trying to resist her, knew beneath all her despair that there was a compulsion that bound them; that she held some strong attraction for him; that he battled with himself over that. And so the affair had carried on even through the weeks of apparent indifference or propriety: the snatched talks and pretexts and assignations, the skimming of skin and flaring nerves with nowhere safe to go, and the rare, rare sex, snatched from normal rhythms of time and place.

  On weekends, she had walked up high on blustery days, the wind and gorse scratches more alive than the slow dripping hours at home. Yonder a maid and her wight/Come whispering by;/War’s annals will fade into night/Ere their story die, she had thought, her mouth moving rapidly with imagined dialogue. She would be glimpsed by him, she was certain, as he sped along that moorland road, and they’d walk together, a tall figure with a younger woman in an air-blue gown blown against him like a tethered spinnaker, his hand caught round her waist. ‘Hail! Bright Cecilia,’ he would greet her, as he sometimes did.

  Only twice in reality – once in March, once in May – she still remembered the months, even in adulthood – had he walked with her on the moors, hinting that he would pass the back route to Widecombe on a Sunday, and they had walked, talking in the sweet-smelling wind among the tormentil, skylarks calling, bracken rankly unfurling, ponies tugging grass.

  Those walks were the exception: he seemed unwilling to extend the affair beyond the boundaries of Elliott Hall, since he would rarely do anything intentionally: it had to happen by chance, a collision of time and place in which events were driven by temptation rather than forethought. It had taken her months to understand this. So strong was his resistance to his own actions, his acceptance of any relationship at all only functioned if events occurred spontaneously.

  It was illicit, apparently suspected by no one. Sometimes in her nervous exhaustion Cecilia even wanted her mother to know. ‘Can’t you see? Can’t you see?’ she wanted to shout at her, throwing herself at her feet so that Dora could put a stop to it, force an end to it entirely, immure her safely in a nunnery to sleep and recover and dedicate herself to her books – the books now neglected, the history and French sliding from her grasp, the English so unevenly studied – but she was simply too addicted. She was in a state of love.

  ‘Mum!’ Ruth called now. The light slid over the plaster, quickening on the silver of the mirror. Cecilia wanted to lie there unfound.

  ‘Mama!’ Izzie followed, some injustice demanding attention, the floorboards jittering the length of rooms. ‘Ma!’

  She would behave so differently now, Cecilia thought, and felt very old and knowledgeable with that realisation.

  She remembered somehow, in some hidden sensory chamber, the smell of the school: the old-fashioned standards – wax, chalk, cleaning fluids – beneath the patchouli and damp Afghan coats, and James Dahl in those parqueted classrooms, teaching her – still her A level teacher with his formal patterns of speech, his exacting ways, his rows of pens, teaching her for two double periods a week – and the surreal awareness burning insid
e her that she knew what that wide-shouldered figure in a jacket was like uncontrolled, his breath in hot spurts on her shoulder. What if they saw it, the kohl-eyed cynics splayed over their desks? She was engorged with this secret. It swarmed through her. She felt chosen and illuminated.

  ‘Cecilia, can you see me after the class?’ he had said on one of three occasions, as he did to other students, fulfilling one of her most repetitive fantasies, and even then, as she waited for a relief teacher dashing in with an enquiry and stood behind a classmate whose essay was being returned, she had known that she was storing details for a scene that would be replayed during the droughts that would follow.

  ‘I have a free period on Friday after lunch,’ he said, tapping his pen, appearing to be studying his register before he closed it. ‘I can spend it in the gardens.’

  And in the pearlised light of winter at Elliott Hall, she understood at some level that youth carried her, that something in her flexible spine, her legs, her skin, her enthusiasm, was a primitive calling card, and that despite all the periods of self-hatred, the stuttering and blushing, she could at least intermittently radiate charm.

  Then after those almost maddeningly rich interludes of dialogue and brushed skin, he would become merely her teacher for stretches – ten days, two and a half weeks even – passing her in the corridor in conversation with a colleague and ignoring her; glimpsed consulting Elisabeth, or stacking essays on his desk without glancing at her. She always felt that she had failed to control the situation effectively: that if she had taken a certain action, or said something, or not said something else, or been an entirely different person altogether, that he would come to her; that her own failure to act was allowing him to slip from her grasp. And so he went about his daily business. Just give me a sign, she begged him silently. She hurt her own flesh, punishing herself, and failed to work and sleep. She talked to him, without ever stopping, in her mind. She accepted crumbs.