You

by Joanna Briscoe

  ‘I ask myself that. I often have. I think the answer is – I – I was attached to you.’

  ‘I was obsessed with you,’ she said, shaking her head.

  ‘I didn’t know –’

  ‘You have to be so careful with teenage – young – minds. It’s a monstrous time of turmoil anyway . . .’

  ‘I see that. I do see that.’

  ‘That dangerous vulnerability.’

  ‘You’re right. You’re right. I was blind to some of that. Of course. I had thought I was doing my best in unwise circumstances.’

  ‘I think you were. I think you were in a way,’ she said, pausing. ‘But what madness –’

  ‘We are here. We have decent lives,’ he said.

  ‘We have “decent” lives but –’ Colour flooded her face. She began to breathe rapidly. ‘You, you let me leave like that – here, here, in the gardens! I was lost. What do you think I was going to do with that? You never said anything – not one valedictory thing, any word of regret. Explanation. You said you couldn’t leave your wife – of course you couldn’t, wouldn’t; I could see that later – but then that was it. You never sought me again. You let me leave school saying nothing further about it. For God’s sake, we didn’t even use contraception! What were we – you – thinking of? I knew nothing, nothing! I was the most naïve silly old-fashioned teenager you could imagine.’ She glanced at the table.

  ‘I should have tied it up,’ he said, his mouth set. He met her eye. ‘I didn’t know what to say. What to do. I’m so sorry. I missed you more than I’d ever imagined – after, after you’d left school and we were out of contact.’ A flicker of awareness crossed his face. He looked briefly to one side. ‘. . . Contraception?’ he said.

  ‘I’m going,’ said Cecilia. She pushed her plate away and stood up. She was forced to shuffle sideways along a bench to reach the end of the table. The wood banged into her hips. She almost tripped.

  ‘No. Stop,’ he said.

  She grabbed her bag, shook her head, her throat tight with a lump that stopped her speaking.

  ‘Contra – Are you saying? Surely nothing – ?’

  ‘I’m going now,’ said Cecilia, and she walked quickly out of the French doors into the garden. It came to her with a dazzle of greenery and light. The new grass was bright. Birds seemed to line the branches. They thickened the sky.

  ‘Stop!’ he said, coming after her. ‘You must stop, Cecilia.’

  ‘Leave me now,’ she said, walking on, talking without turning round to him. Warmth hit her cheeks.

  ‘Is there something – I should know?’ he said, catching up with her. His breath was cool and fast on her shoulder. His voice, the movement of his hair, seemed to boom, amplified, right beside her. She jerked away from him.

  She said nothing, her heart racing. A larch soared above her. Rooks were deafening in her ears.

  ‘Cecilia. You have made me worried now. Was there some – unfortunate result?’

  ‘Result?’ she cried. He was beside her, touching her shoulder. She shook him off roughly. His hand returned to her shoulder. She turned round abruptly and hit his upper arm. ‘Result?’ she said and she laughed. ‘A human, a human, a daughter. She was not an unfortunate result.’

  He opened his mouth. He held his upper arm.

  ‘A –’ he said, his mouth still open. He paused. ‘A baby?’

  ‘Yes. A baby. That’s it, isn’t it? A baby.’

  Birds soared above her. They seemed to climb, evaporate beyond sight.

  He was silent. He gaped. His mouth closed. It opened again.

  ‘A baby,’ she said. Her voice rose. It was laughably simple to say it. ‘A baby. My baby.’

  ‘Oh God. No. No.’

  ‘You selfish cunt.’

  ‘I – you – have a child? A girl?’ He took her arm. ‘Are you saying I’ve got a daughter? Are you sure? Where?’ he said roughly.

  She gazed at him with hostility. An expression of denial, of panic, seemed to pass over his face.

  ‘Who is she? When? Where? Cecilia. Good God.’ He was white. His voice was congested. He cleared his throat with a form of growl. ‘Why on earth haven’t you told me this?’

  He stood there. He looked at her. He was a silent statue in his unchanged place in the sun.

  He rotated his head. He said nothing. He looked at the ground.

  He’s going to leave, thought Cecilia in disbelief. This is what he wants. His undisturbed life. He is going to leave.

  ‘Go on then. Go home. Go home. Go home to your marking and Elisabeth.’

  ‘I can’t believe it.’ His expression was entirely impenetrable. He was silent.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said. She began to walk.

  He grabbed her upper arm. She pulled away. ‘My God, Cecilia.’

  ‘Yes. I’m going now.’

  ‘No! No you’re not. This is awful, terrible. A daughter, you said? A girl.’

  She nodded, her mouth slack. There was a shout from across the garden. Crows cried. There was silence.

  ‘Good God, a girl,’ he said. He ran his hands down his cheeks. He looked gaunt. He buried his face in his palms. ‘We had a daughter?’

  Cecilia nodded again, her face crumpling at the sight of him.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Cecilia.

  ‘You don’t – how?’

  She shook her head. She was crying.

  ‘She – she –’

  ‘She’s alive?’

  She gazed at a peacock without seeing it. She turned to him through her tears. ‘I think so. I –’

  ‘Was she adopted?’

  He was crying.

  She nodded. She turned from him and covered her face with her hands.

  ‘No. Come here,’ he said, and he held her and she heard him cry as he stroked her shoulder with rhythmic movements so firm they almost hurt.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he said at last, gently. She heard the effort of his breathing.

  She shook her head.

  ‘I just can’t understand why you didn’t tell me. Good God. You needed to tell me this,’ he said in a groan. ‘How many years ago? So many years ago.’

  ‘I couldn’t –’

  ‘You couldn’t, could you?’ he said into her ear at the same time, holding her head and then pressing it to his mouth, the wetness of his face on her scalp.

  She shook her head.

  ‘I thought you wouldn’t care,’ she said.

  He gazed at her.

  ‘. . . You wouldn’t want to know,’ she said.

  ‘I think,’ he said slowly, ‘I’d have loved a daughter more than anything else in this world.’

  She nodded.

  ‘You should have told me,’ he said more forcefully.

  She nodded, silently.

  ‘Has she gone? When – ? Oh, it’s – she’s grown up. It’s almost twenty-five years. Oh my God, Cecilia. What you . . . Cecilia. You should have told me. What an uptight fucking fool. Me – I mean me. I let you go.’

  ‘I had no choice,’ said Cecilia. She could barely open her mouth.

  ‘Perhaps you didn’t.’

  She cried into his neck.

  ‘And you were pregnant. Good God. What did I expect? Oh, Cecilia.’

  He kissed the top of her head. ‘Poor sweet – Poor Cecilia. Do you know – where? Where she went?’

  Cecilia shook her head. She looked up at him, straight into his eyes, as though she could find sanity there.

  ‘What’s – her name?’

  She shook her head again, still looking into his eyes.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ he said.

  Her shoulders sagged. Sobs shook her body.

  ‘Isn’t it?’ she said. ‘It is.’

  ‘No no no,’ he said, stroking her. ‘It’s my fault. It’s – youth’s. You are so obstinate, courageous – But you should have told me. You should have. Oh my God. What a waste, a tragedy.’

  ‘I thought you wouldn’t
care,’ she said again. Her body felt drained and supple, as though it were not her own.

  ‘I do care,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ she said in a small voice.

  ‘What – whatever I can do to help. It’s too late, isn’t it? What can I do?’

  Cecilia paused. ‘Understand,’ she said.

  He nodded.

  ‘You can understand my – sorrow. Regret.’ She shrugged, exhaling with a small hopeless laugh. ‘It’s – you know, it’s too late to find her. You can help me just –’ She raised her hands in the air. ‘Celebrate her. Mourn her.’ She rested her head against a tree and saliva rose to her mouth.

  ‘I will,’ he said.

  Twenty-three

  March

  ‘You’re pale,’ said Romy when Cecilia collected her from her sculpture society.

  Bracken-scented air flew in from outside. Cecilia glanced at Romy, taking in the long and still ungainly limbs. She was destined to be taller than she was, she saw. She looked like a camping kind of girl: a far more wholesome and restrained teenager than Izzie.

  ‘You’re really pale,’ said Romy.

  ‘Oh,’ said Cecilia abstractedly. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes, darling. Thanks.’

  ‘Have you been crying?’

  ‘No,’ said Cecilia.

  Romy turned and Cecilia saw the smile on her lips reflected in the passenger window.

  ‘What did you do? Did you actually do some sculpture?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh,’ said Romy. ‘I – we. Not yet. She – Ms Dahl – showed us different materials and we just began to work, to choose I mean, one of them.’

  ‘What’s she like?’ said Cecilia after a pause.

  ‘Who? What?’ said Romy.

  ‘Mrs – Ms – Dahl. Is she good? Do people like her?’

  ‘Oh. Yes,’ said Romy, and turned back to the window. A section of her hair was twisted into a clip that raised it into a discreet beehive which lent her a haughty appearance.

  What is it about that bloody woman? Cecilia wanted to ask. What exactly is it about her? What quality? What power? How does she influence people?

  She stopped herself. She felt irritated and uneasy. Or perhaps, she thought, what she was experiencing was simply age-old jealousy of a rival. She and Elisabeth Dahl had given birth to half-siblings. They were linked in antipathy by that hidden fact. What, she mused, would that frosty and determined woman think if she knew that she was teaching the half-sister of the half-sister of her own sons? Hugh and Robin, she mused, Robin and Hugh, and the flavour of those names recalled a different time. Everything, she thought: everything led her to her lost baby.

  That baby, her lips a suckling bow, lived in her mind as a snapshot now turned black and white and crocheted as though it came from a different era. She remembered a little alien, head unbalanced, gazing up at her; she remembered her beauty too, the lock of blue eyes on to hers for seconds before the baby was taken away. Yet she could not grasp the features of her face; all she retained was the knowledge of a gaze.

  I say sorry to you, thought Cecilia, staring out of the window. So very sorry. I would do anything in this life to change that.

  A buzzard stood on a telegraph pole and flapped away in a soar across the windscreen as she drove past, throwing a shadow. The helper Katya was there on the lane as Cecilia and Romy arrived home. She retreated swiftly at the sound of the car, walking the back way that led to Dora’s cottage, her hair with its green tinge from the water’s copper drifting about her small solid body. New leaf thickened the air. The liquid bubbling of skylarks was high above the thatch.

  Cecilia stood in the kitchen with Romy, picked up a cup and put it on the rack by rote.

  He would have wanted our child, she thought, her conversation at Elliott Hall playing past her like a film that hadn’t stopped, and she held on to a section of tongue-and-groove that had always been there at the end of the work surface, Dora’s PVC bags once hanging from its hooks, its varnish layers now toffee dark. The very idea made her stomach plunge. She scrabbled for justification.

  A daughter. I’d have loved a daughter more than anything else in this world, he had said. He had wanted a daughter. The baby she gave to other people.

  She should have told him. They could have brought her up together.

  But it was not true, she thought; whatever he said now, it was not true. Was it? Was it?

  She had been living in her parents’ house, not an unmarried mothers’-and-babies’ home of an earlier era. She should have acted. She could have turned up at Haye House overtly pregnant and made him do something; she could have begged; she could have demanded, got him sacked, told Peter Doran, kept her baby. She felt she might retch.

  She breathed with more effort, warding away nausea. She turned to Ruth. ‘I’m glad Izzie has cooked for you both,’ she said, and she smiled absently at the astonishing mess, the ragged pile of pancakes in maple syrup.

  Ari came back from Exeter at half past eight after another meeting with his future department, walking into the sitting room as he would every evening from October. Cecilia jumped as he arrived through the door, as though her thoughts could be read or the effects of her earlier tears seen, and she moved rapidly towards him and kissed him on the mouth, then awkwardly on the temple.

  Izzie perched near the fire and Romy sat beside her making notes in pencil on a book, the fireplace so large it had always been perceived as a separate room by children. They were regathered, thought Cecilia, trying to calm herself by focusing on the scene: there was no running out with an Oyster card for a night in Camden or a sleepover in Finchley. The intense family dynamic had not yet reshaped itself, with its shifts and hidden meanings, its annoyances and attachments and rituals. How long would it last? She did not know how to begin to explain the existence of James Dahl to Ari.

  She glanced at Ruth who was sitting stiffly and breathing shallowly in the belief that she must remain motionless as Izzie divided her hair to make plaits. Ari fingered Izzie’s scalp while looking over Romy’s shoulder at what she had written. The girls perched around him. Woodsmoke and Izzie’s cheap perfume drifted through the room. Cecilia watched Izzie – her good deed, her salvation, the one who filled her with ferocious protective love – and remembered how her desire to hurt herself, to donate parts of herself, had subsided to more bearable levels when she and Ari had rescued that cross and laughing baby. She had wished with a missionary zeal to save Izzie from a life of foster care.

  Ruth sidled up to Cecilia wearing one of her hand-knitted scarves, its swaying edges and clumped purl heartbreaking. ‘Can you read to me about treehouses?’ she muttered, her hair a fountaining explosion of plaits that emphasised her flat dark eyes.

  Cecilia put her arm round her, pulling her closer and inhaling her childish smell. ‘We could read The Swiss Family Robinson,’ she said, and Ruth nodded.

  ‘I want you to put a treehouse in your book,’ she said, and Cecilia smiled at her.

  ‘What did you do today?’ said Ari, looking up at Cecilia.

  Cecilia glanced instinctively down at her lap. ‘I wrote and – I collected Romy from her school sculpture club. I –’ she said, opening Ruth’s book, and said nothing more.

  Ari seemed to be waiting.

  She looked up at him and smiled briefly and glanced away.

  I’d have loved a daughter.

  Ari ate in front of the fire and talked to Romy about the finding of Mesolithic flint tools on the moor. The fire emphasised the shadows under his cheeks and below his stubbled chin, his narrowness defined by the blackness of his eyebrows. It pleased Cecilia that the man she had met at a party in Edinburgh who had first caught her attention with the word ‘Dartmoor’ – he had just been there, he said; he loved that wilderness, its barrows and reaves and pounds – was now in the place itself.

  ‘Dartmoor . . .’ she had echoed spontaneously in that Georgian basement so long ago, tailing off, because it had been buried for her a
fter her escape. She thought that she hated it.

  ‘A lot of my digs are there,’ said this stranger who was, appealingly, not connected with the university, but the recent boyfriend of a history student.

  ‘Have you ever seen it in deep winter?’ said Cecilia, tilting her face towards him. She was surrounded by people, in the middle of a group of students, but she spoke to him alone. ‘Not in the snow, but in the wettest most lifeless January when the riverbanks burst and the rain falls horizontally?’ She said it challengingly, sifting the tourists from those who knew that its essence lay in its very bleakness, turbulent and gritted, cloud shadow streaming across bog.

  ‘I love it maybe the most then,’ he said. ‘I’ve taken digs out in January and no one wants to come with me, but on those days I return more alive than on any other.’

  ‘Well –’ said Cecilia, pausing.

  ‘You think I’m some day-tripper bussing in for cream teas in Widecombe?’

  ‘Widecombe . . . I went to Widecombe Primary,’ said Cecilia absently, even the name lost to her, unspoken during the last years.

  ‘A Dartmoor girl,’ he said. ‘I’ve never met a real one.’

  The fire shifted now in their house on the moor, lighting Ari’s face.

  ‘I thought I heard something,’ said Cecilia, and she walked towards the hall.

  ‘You’re jumpy,’ said Ari. ‘There was nothing.’

  She’s there, thought Cecilia. She’s in the hall, crawling under furniture, butting her head at corners, waiting and catching the hem of my skirt.

  ‘Ari,’ Cecilia said, coming quickly back into the sitting room. ‘I –’ But she didn’t know what to say.

  James Dahl rang in the morning.

  ‘How do you know my number?’ said Cecilia. A whinchat flew and brushed a branch against the window.

  ‘I looked it up in the school records.’

  She was silent.

  ‘I’m glad you called, though –’ she said.

  ‘I’d like to see you again,’ he said, uncharacteristically interrupting. ‘To continue talking.’

  She paused. ‘OK,’ she said.

  ‘When?’ he said.

  ‘I could do Monday again.’