‘I can picture a bab on your lap as you play the guitar,’ she said.
He nodded, and didn’t reply, but he smiled at her again, and her lamp shone in his pupils. She gazed at his cattish pale eyes and graceful body in black clothes faded to patches of brown and silver-green.
On his rare visits to the house, he landed upon her, alerting her from outside her window or scaling a wall and throwing earth at her pane, or he let himself in through the back door and crept socked inch by inch through this house of lengthy creaks. He possessed a tense-shouldered vitality that made him restless.
He eyed her lazily.
She sidled up towards him, glancing almost shyly at his feet. He had brought skunk. He ruffled her hair, and drew her to him, resting his head against her, then he reached out and circled her wrist.
‘Let’s hide you,’ she said in a low voice as she heard her mother on the stairs.
Dora sobbed for two minutes in her cottage. She rubbed an old Bannan tea towel against her eyes, then pressed it harder into the lids until her eyeballs ached.
There was a knock on the door. She had heard no one on the path and she jumped.
‘Elisabeth,’ she murmured as an automatic whisper in her own head, but wearily, the hope weighted with anticipated disappointment. It was Katya. Dora patted her arm and guided her in.
I am lovesick, she thought. I am radiation sick.
‘I’ve got oranges,’ said Katya. ‘Potatoes. And peat.’
‘It’s late,’ said Dora, and put her to bed in the little iron bed made up in the slip of a spare room beyond the bathroom. I wish my boys were here, she thought, a flicker of resentment repressed. I wish she was Elisabeth.
Ruth, with her yellow-dun curls and dark-brown eyes, had woken in the moonlight to lie on her back in obeisance to the week’s spirits and rituals, counting bumps on the tentish plaster of the ceiling as an act of homage to the swarms. She switched on a torch. She worried at night that her mother might be sad. Her father wasn’t sad. He was impatient and fun and he got cross, but he wasn’t sad. She stroked her collection of bogies on page thirty-one of her mother’s old copy of The Borrowers, where they now formed a range of sharp fierce little mountains. Outside on the moor with its battered sheep and ponies, badgers waddled, bracken rearing, trees arching, eyes in hedges, poachers coursing the trout streams, mink hidden in barns. Mist twined over the moor and dripped in the lanes. The mountains slid, like the trees slid towards the Railway Children. If Ruth could faint like Bobbie did, then her mother would never die.
Cecilia knocked on Izzie’s door and pushed impatiently against the lock when she didn’t answer it.
‘Open it,’ she said with an authority that even Izzie found hard to defy.
Izzie had bundled Dan into the back of her wardrobe, snorting with laughter as she piled nightclothes and underwear on top of his head.
‘Where is he?’ said Cecilia, looking at the wardrobe.
‘Uh?’ said Izzie with an exaggerated frown. ‘Who?’
‘Your unwashed friend. Where is he?’
‘You’re hardcore curious.’
‘Tell me.’
‘On the moor?’ said Izzie.
‘I heard him.’
‘I didn’t. Where?’
‘Playing his guitar.’
‘Hey Ma, you look rumply. Flushed and stuff. What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing,’ said Cecilia. ‘Where is he?’
‘I was playing the geetar,’ said Izzie.
‘You?’
‘Yes.’
Cecilia was silent. ‘Well, you’ve become very accomplished. He’s a lot older than you,’ she said, automatically picking up one of Izzie’s tops, shaking it out and folding it. ‘You’re underage,’ she said, and her voice was unsteady. ‘To – to have sex with him.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘I could report him,’ said Cecilia, straightening a school skirt.
‘Do,’ said Izzie lazily.
‘I –’ said Cecilia. ‘Why?’
‘He wouldn’t do it with me.’
‘Should I believe this?’
‘He said I’m too young.’
‘How do I know that’s true?’
‘Do I lie to you?’
‘All the time,’ said Cecilia. She frowned. ‘No you don’t. But you omit. Your omissions . . . amount to lies. But . . . But I’d rather you told me about him than sneaked out to see him.’
‘Where?’
‘Out on the moor. Look at the state of him. He must spend a lot of time outside. How can you, you idiotic girl?’ she said, but gently. ‘If you are seeing him I’m going to start issuing punishments. Groundings.’
‘I don’t even like him that much,’ said Izzie scornfully.
Cecilia looked at Izzie. She said nothing. ‘I’ll think about this,’ she said finally.
She went to her bedroom. She splashed icy water on her face. She dialled Ari’s mobile number, but the phone rang until his voicemail came on. She rang again, but there was no answer.
The following week, Cecilia wrote at home and Ari worked in London. Dora read a biography of Eric Gill, a passion of Elisabeth’s, in some discomfort from radiation. Ruth wrote a story about an ant colony at the village school and felt the thickness of her thighs in the girls’ toilets, while Romy practised fonts and Izzie sat through classes desultorily, reassuring herself that she could feign sickness in the afternoon. Cecilia wrote in a fast nervous swoop with the time pressure of the Monday St Anne’s run, but when she arrived at the school, Romy was full of enthusiasm for a new sculpture society that Elisabeth Dahl was organising. She begged to be able to attend the first meeting, until Cecilia agreed to turn back to school after dropping off the other St Anne’s girls on her shared-lift rota. She rang Izzie, who growled, ‘You owe me, Ma.’
She would go to Elliott Hall gardens for that spare hour, she thought. Spring in the gardens, where her characters would lie in a hollow imagining they could live on out-of-season nuts and petal juices when they shook off their pursuer. She drove quickly to Wedstone and parked and hurried, her heels scraping on gravel, so that she could span the entire garden and make notes, ingrained though its landscape was in her memory. She instinctively put on lipstick in the car mirror in case she bumped into anyone she had known at Haye House or in Wedstone, the urge for self-protection still strong. She was not ready to look up people she had known, and at times she doubted whether she ever would be.
As in Wedstone with its mini-roundabout and flashing Go Slow reminder, all had changed at Elliott Hall: there were signposts to a restaurant and sympathetically designed additional buildings outside; an air of busyness, of restoration and richness, of larger festivals and summer schools. She had to override her faint annoyance: a possessiveness about the place’s shabbier past. Spring covered the gardens with petal light.
She took a shortcut through the café and glimpsed the other side from the window: new roses, perhaps too many roses, falling over the old masonry; yews tamed, and a marquee, testament to a corporate present, rising in one corner. Sections of passed time were clear entities to her, almost visible now in front of her, sealed with nostalgia and a rare sense of her own progress. She stepped into the sunshine with its density of warming stone.
‘Cecilia,’ came his voice behind her and she jumped.
He was standing on the other side of the café, the door closing behind him. She had to narrow her eyes through the light dance to see him. He held a pile of papers and a laptop; his jacket lay over his arm, his car key in his hand. Briefly, caught in a timewarp, she saw him as a teacher, perceived his papers as essays.
He smiled at her. New lines fanned around his eyes.
‘I was going to work here,’ he said, walking towards her.
‘So am I,’ she said.
‘Join me for a coffee.’
He stood in front of her. There was a small hesitation, as though he had considered touching her arm or kissing her in greeting, and then withdrawn the impulse.
> ‘Do you work all the time?’ he said.
She remembered his voice with its natural depth and resonance, the appealing intimacy of his tone. Girls had commented on his voice, all those years ago.
‘I don’t get all the time,’ she said, and her brows drew into a sharper line. ‘I have children.’
‘Of course.’
‘I work during the school day. Like you. Then – I start working again, often into the night.’ She lifted her hand, defensively.
‘How very fine it is that you make a living out of writing. You actually did that, Cecilia.’
‘Very belatedly,’ said Cecilia. ‘ “Fine”?’ She smiled, despite herself. ‘You sound like Julian of the Famous Five.’
He paused. ‘Ah. Well. I think I am such a character after all. You make me nervous. You were not as belated as . . .’ he said, glancing down at his computer.
‘You’re actually writing?’ she said.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, averting his gaze from her. ‘Who knows? Critical theory.’
‘Oh good! Something changes,’ said Cecilia.
‘You are hard on me,’ he said.
She was silent. She made herself maintain the silence. She would not fill it.
He floundered, and still she would not fill it, though it was difficult.
‘I haven’t seen you for over twenty years,’ he said. ‘You know, Cecilia . . . It’s very strange for me to see you here.’ He hesitated. ‘Like a time lapse. I’ve thought about you often.’
‘I was just a shag.’
He winced. He closed his eyes momentarily.
‘You were not that,’ he said, uncharacteristic anger colouring his speech. He turned. ‘I’m getting us coffee,’ he said.
‘I don’t like coffee. Do you remember that?’
The sun caught his hair, his cheekbone, bleaching him as it had once done in the Oxbridge room when she had sat studying with him, floating on the progression of his words.
‘I do,’ he said, frowning. ‘But perhaps I thought that that was because . . .’
‘Because I was virtually a child? Children’s tastes change as they get older,’ said Cecilia. ‘But I prefer tea.’
‘Do you really see me as some monster?’ he said, lifting his gaze slowly to look straight at her. ‘As some – Humbert Humbert who plundered your youth?’
‘Not really,’ said Cecilia, with a semblance of composure. ‘But there are touches of the dirty old man to this story, aren’t there?’
‘Good God,’ he said. Colour rose to his cheeks. ‘There is that view. I suppose. I find it –’ His lips parted. ‘Extremely hard to think of it in this way.’
She pulled a strand of hair away from her forehead. He glanced at her hand as it moved across her face.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I was seventeen. I’ve told you already I don’t think of you as some child abuser. A “kiddie fiddler” as my middle daughter would say.’
‘Good lord, Cecilia,’ he said.
As he fetched drinks, she sat on her own where once there had been a room full of gardening implements instead of a café, on an estate where workmen had burnt leaves in gardens so little populated that walks and hollows had made places for touching, and she watched people coming in: the middle-aged subscribers to the festivals which now seemed to have made a cultural epicentre of this former backwater. They formed a highly strung, self-satisfied rabble at the bar, hailing each other loudly, feigning demotic largesse as they bought four o’clock beer or brown bread sandwiches and chatted about certain conductors with an implied familiarity. They think they have discovered this place, thought Cecilia. She wanted to tell them, those strangers. She wanted to tell them that she owned these gardens in her heart: that in the earth’s history was the wooing and rejecting of a girl by her lover.
He came back.
‘I got you tea and this,’ he said, handing her a cheese scone.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘What are you doing working here – attempting to work – at this time?’
‘My daugh – Romy – is attending a sculpture club. With your wife.’
‘Ah,’ he said. He looked uncomfortable. His face, which had tended towards narrowness, had resolved itself into later, older proportions so that his features were somehow more settled. He breathed slowly, perceptibly composing himself.
‘So you’re married still,’ said Cecilia, toying with the scone on its plate. ‘It lasted.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘But you’ve been unfaithful,’ she said.
Her bald statement sat in the silence. His expression stiffened.
‘She must know,’ she said.
‘I suspect that she does know; but not with whom,’ he said eventually.
‘So what do you two do?’ She heard the richness of her own voice, the adult timbre, noticing it again as she hadn’t for years because she had once attempted to charm and keep this man when she spoke in breathier, darting tones. She paused. She tried to shake off the undertow of remembered despair.
‘Oh,’ he said, with the partial rotation of his head she knew so well, its exact choreography returning to her. ‘Much the same.’ His expression was closed. She glanced at him. It seemed impossible to her that she could have loved him: she felt neither revulsion nor residual attraction, only absolute indifference. Perhaps, she thought, his appeal had been only the product of hormones, of collective hothouse hysteria.
‘Go to Dorset.’
‘Yes.’
‘Read Shelley. Tennyson. Joyce. Gaddis . . . Whitman. Trollope.’
‘Well yes. But –’
‘You don’t still live at Neill House?’
‘Thankfully no. We moved to one of the staff houses shortly after – after you left. Over by Meadowbank Lane, behind the Copse. I’m sure you remember.’
‘I do.’
‘And then we moved to a small house we bought – right near here. By Elliott Hall, towards the moor. We do still go to Dorset.’
She nodded.
‘I thought you would move back there. I was sure you would have done so by now.’
‘Oh yes. Yes. But when the offer of teaching posts at St Anne’s came up . . . And we already had the Devon house, and really, such a school was everything I’d wished – naïvely – that Haye House could be. Well, I was keen to stay.’
‘I see. What else do you do?’
‘Oh, I . . .’ He tapped his fingers on his paper, his wedding ring glinting. It filled her with a tense feeling of recognition.
‘You fish. You play tennis with your boys. Your grandchildren now. Are you a grandfather, James?’ she said, unable to enunciate his name naturally after all these years.
‘I – yes. I am about to be again.’
‘Congratulations,’ said Cecilia.
‘Yes I – We are pleased.’
She prodded him further with questions designed at some subconscious level to reveal the limited nature of his existence, or to prove to herself how well she had once known this man, as though possessing him finally after the event, and then discarding him. Is there always this with old lovers? she wondered. This accounting and mental placing of each other, this pleasure and partisan adherence to the present, to one’s current love?
‘I see I’m unimpressive to you,’ he said eventually, his mouth set in a faintly ironic line.
She lifted her face, hesitating. ‘Do you want to be impressive?’ she said.
‘I’d like that very much,’ he said. ‘But primarily I just want . . . peace.’ He breathed slowly. ‘Resolution if you like.’ He looked strained.
She exhaled through her mouth.
‘Peace?’ she said, her lips barely moving. ‘Resolution? How – how is that possible?’
‘It is possible,’ he said. ‘The nature of my friendship with you –’
‘ “Friendship”! For God’s – It was never that.’
‘I was about to correct that,’ he said, lowering his voice. ‘My relationshi
p – my ill-advised – with you. It was not something I’m proud of. I mean, I’m proud of you, Cecilia. Of your work, of what you’ve – become. Look at you . . . But we have progressed. We have different lives.’
‘Our affair affected lives.’
‘It was folly on both our parts, almost exclusively mine. But life continues. I’m pleased to see that you have had children.’
‘It affected –’
‘We have survived. Flourished even,’ he said, nodding somewhat awkwardly at her.
She struggled for composure. ‘So it’s all good, dried and dusted, then?’
He hesitated. He made a movement with his mouth as if about to speak. ‘There doesn’t seem much more to add,’ he said eventually.
‘You’re like my mother,’ she said.
He paused. ‘I regret the past. I wish it could be forgotten now.’ He glanced at her. He caught her eye, seemingly appealing to her. He looked weary. ‘It was regrettable, but there were no – major ramifications,’ he said. He shifted in his seat. ‘Well there were of course. Emotionally. I do see that. I’m very sorry that I hurt you. But –’
‘You kept your job, your wife, your nice little existence, you mean? You have no idea, do you?’ she said, anger straining her voice. She began to feel the unsteadiness of her heartbeat.
‘What –’
‘What it did to me. It – it did my head in. I couldn’t cope with it at all. You left me. You simply abandoned me. In these gardens. You let me be dropped . . . you barely spoke to me again. After – after our last conversation.’
‘I understood it was a mutual decision,’ he said carefully.
‘I had no choice! Absolutely no choice. You never dealt with it. You just let me go.’
‘I –’ he said, slight alarm crossing his eyes. He bowed his head.
‘Believe me, it fucked up my life in many ways,’ she said. ‘What do you think – ? I was seventeen and eighteen, my mind profoundly disturbed by – by you, you and me. I threw away the chance of Oxford –’
‘I know,’ he said. He bowed his head again. ‘That was regrettable.’
‘It was,’ she said, trying to speak evenly. ‘It was. The least of my problems. A knock to my pride. That was all. What do you think you were doing?’
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