‘I’d like it to be sooner.’
‘No,’ said Cecilia with certainty. ‘Monday.’
Dora knew that more would be said. Every day she sensed her increasingly fragile grasp on the concealments and evasions that had shored up her life. For the first time, she had taken to locking her door when she needed privacy.
She heard the movements of Cecilia’s family: the car starting up as Ari drove to London on Sunday evening or Monday dawn; the exhortations to hurry in a morning chaos of sports kits and instruments and packed lunches. She heard her granddaughters’ clear voices rising in protest and mockery through the valley, their scents – their urgent teenage hormones, their deodorants and foundations and canned drinks – clashing with the rinsed air of the moor. She wondered whether they were running wild, these city girls let loose. She had spotted Izzie, sometimes, on the lanes in school hours, Izzie’s answers to her questions disarmingly persuasive. Once she had seen Ruth alone in Widecombe. Ruth sat in a field with her legs drawn up in her anoraked coldness like a fat little tepee, so Dora had gone to the National Trust shop and bought her an expensive rug of the Bannan factory variety that cost half a week’s pension, and lowered it over the wall with some biscuits, an apple and a bottle of water. She never saw the rug again.
She was lonely.
How it all changed, she thought. People had left her: Patrick had died so prematurely of emphysema followed by pneumonia, their marriage having never recovered but settled instead into increasingly fond compromise once they accepted each other’s limitations, so that over the years she loved him again, quite calmly, almost cynically, through the guilt – he was destined to be her life companion, she realised – and his death had unexpectedly devastated her. Gabriel Sardo, to whom she had rarely spoken after the birth of Cecilia’s baby, was now living with a long-term girlfriend and employed as a camera operator in London. Her great friend Beatrice had died at fifty-nine, cancer claiming her before it migrated to Dora. Beatrice’s daughter Diana was still in almost daily contact with Cecilia in a friendship that had remained intense, living in London, unable to conceive and enduring her fourth bout of IVF. How Beatrice would have loved the almost preposterously delightful reward for living that was grandchildren, Dora thought, and she felt such pity for her friend: love beyond death, an awareness of the wrongness of the world.
Katya, at least, came in to help, her hours erratic in a way that suited them both because uncertainty afforded Dora stimulation. Dora was caring towards her, would take her in for tea and speak to her in the cheerful compassionate manner under which her Haye House tutees had flourished: even Annalisa the lachrymose Swede had sent her chocolates from Stockholm for almost a decade after leaving the school. Dora saw many things: she saw the movement of the sky and birds, watched for hours; she saw Dan on the lane one dawn; she glimpsed Cecilia working into the night, the light of her study smudging the back garden.
‘We have fifty minutes almost,’ said Cecilia on Monday afternoon, looking at her watch. She glanced around. She still felt a nervous alertness in the school grounds, her need for self-protection strong in the face of James Dahl. She had changed her clothes several times before meeting him, frustrated by her sudden inability to put an outfit together.
‘So tell me –’ he said.
‘Not here,’ she said. Even the sight of what had once been Neill House, and Chase House where Zeno had lived, made her skin tighten. Could you ever be natural with ex-lovers? she wondered. Was it possible to behave without an awareness that before this time of polite greetings, the two of you had been pinioned together, mouths, hands, genitals linked?
‘Let’s go along the water meadows and follow the river down,’ he said, guiding her, the familiar muscle beneath his shoulder visible as he moved, and he began to walk ahead, noticeably more assertive than he had been.
‘I have thought about little – almost nothing – else,’ he said as they reached the boundary of the St Anne’s grounds and climbed over a fence into fern and long grass leading to the Dart’s more tranquil reaches.
She was silent.
‘Oh Cecilia,’ he said suddenly, turning to her, putting his arm briefly around her. Colour appeared on his cheekbones. ‘I can’t bear it that you went through that.’
He reached out to her and then seemed to change his mind and dropped his hand.
‘I think of this girl,’ he said, and his chin tilted downwards. ‘I do keep wondering how she is.’
‘I’m surprised by your reaction,’ she said eventually.
He shook his head. ‘I’m intensely shocked.’
‘No,’ she said, looking to where the river curved and a jay drank from its shallows. ‘I thought you’d be – awful. To be honest. Terrible. Uptight. I thought you might even say nothing about it again.’
‘On the contrary –’
‘I find I do want to punish you all the time.’
‘I know,’ he said, then shrugged slightly defensively. ‘But you deserve – relief. Some kind of abatement. No one, no one, could blame you for this. For what happened later,’ he said gently, taking her arm and holding it. ‘You know that, don’t you?’
She said nothing. The grass beneath her shone with bright green clarity, daisy sewn.
‘I gave her away,’ she said.
‘I’m sure you had no choice. You were extremely young. Eighteen?’
‘I did the wrong thing. Exactly the wrong thing.’
‘You couldn’t help it.’
She hung her head. Tears sprang to her eyes. She concentrated on minute fissures and bobbles of earth. She stumbled slightly as she walked.
‘Did you –’ he said, a rush of waterfowl curving from the river, ‘did you think of telling me?’
‘No,’ said Cecilia.
She steadied her breathing. He put his arm out, laid it on her back, then dropped it.
‘You were entirely happy for me to remove myself,’ she said.
He paused. He looked down. ‘I was – relieved – guiltily relieved you made no fuss,’ he said slowly. ‘I admit it. I was . . .’ he frowned ‘. . . grateful. But I always felt guilt and I always missed you.’
She was silent.
‘But of course I’d have wanted to know. I wish I’d known. I really do strongly wish that you’d told me,’ he said, in a less conciliatory manner.
‘You’d have wanted me to later, perhaps. I don’t think, I really don’t think you would have liked it at that time.’
‘I think you should have given me the choice.’
‘I think now that I should have. But at the time – well,’ she said, and her voice faltered, ‘I was in denial anyway until – until it was too late. Too late for an early abortion,’ she said. ‘I just felt dropped by you. I didn’t really care what happened to my life. I wanted to die, a lot of the time. I just wanted to disappear. In a way, you were the last person I’d have told,’ she said more combatively.
He was silent. ‘Yet I wish you had.’
‘What exactly would you have done? Installed your schoolgirl mistress with illegitimate offspring in a cottage in the grounds? Don’t lie to yourself,’ she said. ‘You would – I suspect – have agreed with Dora. There is no way you’d have wanted me to keep my child. You’d have lost everything! Don’t lie to yourself. It makes me angry.’
‘I wish you’d told me,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘But I suspect – fear – you’re probably right.’
‘I couldn’t tell you,’ said Cecilia. ‘I kept my head down; I hid. I barely saw you in those last weeks,’ she said tonelessly. ‘I can’t really tell you what that was like. I left after the last exam.’ She paused. ‘I didn’t even collect my things from my locker. Then I stayed at home for the summer and autumn.’
She breathed slowly, warding off that remembered abandonment, that hot panicking knowledge of a pregnancy that wasn’t yet showing. In the weeks after their last meeting in Elliott Hall gardens she had studied and taken her exams in a daze, and only forming letters
on a page, the bleeding of ink on paper fibre, the rumblings of her own intestines through the perpetual grief, had possessed any sort of physical reality.
‘How did you do it? How did you manage?’ he said, and a pained expression passed over his face.
‘I don’t know. There was a kind of scary passivity. I was pregnant, but I couldn’t believe I was pregnant. I was relieved – pathetic, malleable – when Dora took the situation out of my hands. There was no question about the solution in her eyes. I thought, my mother will clear up the mess.’
‘If only it were not so –’
‘What I’ve never understood is how I, as the baby’s mother – her own birth mother – could have –’
‘Cecilia, is it so terrible to allow a child to be adopted? In certain circumstances, I mean? Many – many women did it in the Fifties and Sixties. The men gone. The world doesn’t view it as you do.’
‘I think of that. I know. I tell myself that. I did the wrong thing.’
‘Families have always done this,’ he said gently. ‘Standard practice even. Think of Jane Austen’s brother, given away –’
‘Don’t talk to me now about Jane Austen,’ she begged.
He paused. ‘What was she like?’ he said. He stopped by a fallen tree, and his face was grey shadowed.
‘I hardly even saw her,’ she said guardedly, because she was not going to share her one vision: that dissolving gaze. ‘Less than minutes.’
She stopped. She stood back.
He nodded slowly, his mouth stiff. He gazed back at her, standing still by the river in his pale trousers, his faded blue jacket, his eternal tie. The movement of air above the water lifted his hair. She still loved him, she thought, then the notion disappeared, replaced by blankness and that resistance to him that so swiftly flared into anger. She gazed at a fish basking by the brown-slimed stones underwater. ‘I have to go back soon.’
He nodded.
‘I read about you after your second novel was published,’ he said. ‘I read about your – new life. Your family. It was very strange. I felt a . . . surge of possessiveness, of jealousy. After all that had happened.’
‘Did you?’ said Cecilia, raising one eyebrow. She looked uneasy. ‘You know, I fear, I fear that talking to you will somehow mess up my head,’ she said in a rush. She played rapidly with her fingers. ‘It took me so long to stop being devastated by you and angry with you. I think it’s . . . dangerous for me to see you again. It stirs up the past. It took me so many years to get over that.’
‘It won’t be dangerous,’ he said. ‘We need to talk about these things.’
‘I don’t know what to tell Ari.’
‘Ari is –’
‘Yes. He doesn’t even know . . . of your existence, really.’ She smiled. She looked down. ‘I don’t want to be late for Romy. I need to go,’ she said, and she turned abruptly and began to leave. She wanted to look back and wave, but she stopped herself, and left him walking along the riverbank, in her wake.
Twenty-four
April
You grew to fear your children, Dora realised. You sensed what they must secretly feel about you. With their generation, you were aware that they could at any moment turn and accuse you of primal psychological damage, and you danced to their tune, both villain and encumbrance.
Since their argument, Dora had begun to acknowledge that she was, indeed, afraid of her own daughter. For all her knowledge that Cecilia’s strength had been gained through grief and earlier powerlessness, she was still intimidated: by her apparent certainties, her urban style, her Londoner’s over-fast way of speaking. She feared too that the delicate structure of her own life could be dismantled by her enquiries. Had she clung to consistency – to Wind Tor, to Elisabeth – to prevent that edifice from collapsing?
Because here she was, still waiting for Elisabeth. Today, this very morning, in early April, when the ash gleamed lime and she had gently probed her armpit until it hurt in her dawn bath; today when she would fetch a new supply of inhalers for Izzie from Newton Abbot and set aside baking recipes for Ruth; pay bills, tread down smaller weeds from the path, bank some outstanding lodgers’ cheques from Wind Tor House, though many would never pay in her lifetime; take a phone call, perhaps, from the String Society: today her mind was still set in the direction of Elisabeth Marianne Dahl, née McGill.
‘Come to me,’ Dora sometimes murmured in the garden. ‘Keep away from me. Come to me,’ she had muttered in a hospital bed, tender-skinned with radiation. ‘Come on,’ she murmured today, a recent phone call from Elisabeth indicating a proposal to meet.
The phone rang. It was not her.
‘One of us needs to move away,’ Dora had once said to her, wearily.
‘One of us needs to move away,’ Elisabeth had echoed, turning to Dora chilly with implication.
She will come tonight, she thought. Would she?
‘I’m sick of this,’ she said out loud to the mirror in a growl full of coughs, so unused to speech was she in her cottage. Next time, she thought, sitting down and weeping very suddenly, she would tell her to go away. Go away, go away, go away, she thought, muttering it to herself. Somehow, that day, she had had enough. The very idea of Elisabeth faintly nauseated her. Nothing had happened to cause it. No event. No epiphany even. Just an end of her tolerance. From past flurries of effort followed by capitulation, she knew that it would be grindingly hard, but, almost superstitiously in illness, she promised herself that she would try. She would try to end it.
There was silence behind loud birdsong.
The phone rang.
‘It’s me,’ said Elisabeth.
Dora paused.
Elisabeth paused.
‘My love,’ Elisabeth added lightly in her opulently layered voice. ‘How are you?’
‘Hello,’ said Dora.
‘I can’t come over till later. I’m sorry, my darling. It’ll be late. It will be after supper now. Nine thirty?’
‘Don’t,’ said Dora, faltering, softening, driving herself. ‘I mean, don’t come over.’
Izzie pulled on her inhaler, wheezed a little, saw that her hair was roping rather than curling and doused it with products, then dressed up. Having not seen Dan for some days, she walked north of Wind Tor and stormed across a section of the moor where military planes shot overhead and tors were merely falls of broken rock. This time, he flicked his eyes up to her, pointed to an adder in the gorse, chewed on a burnt sausage, and told her he might feel her up to her shoulder if she was lucky.
Ari was back in London after spending some of the Easter holiday at home. Cecilia walked with James Dahl to the spread of willows beside the river, the weather unseasonably warm, but she projected a small figure in the space between them, the river casting swelling discs of light.
This is the secret of my baby, she thought. I gave her away. I gave her to strangers. She lives with me, strapped to me as she would have been.
‘Come and see where the badgers walk in summer before dusk,’ he said.
She hesitated, and he walked ahead, his gait more relaxed than it had been in his thirties, his body more upright, as though he accepted the advantage of his height and no longer apologised for it. He still emanated a faint sadness, a suggestion of vulnerability at odds with his size that had once pulled her to him.
‘I did some research,’ he said. His shirt was open, with no tie. ‘I found out about the local adoption agencies, the council’s policy, various facts about that time.’
She gazed at the ground.
‘I did all that too,’ she said with a smile, but she avoided his eyes. ‘I looked into it early on. I know all Norcap can ever tell you.’
He was different again from the man she remembered, or remembered in her imagination: more three-dimensional, betraying edges of a febrile nervousness beneath his apparent calm, but she was projecting her earlier vision, she realised. There was a defensiveness to his reserve; something less assured than she had imagined in all those times when he had app
eared to her at Haye House as a professional talking to colleagues or as a teacher who taught her in a classroom with no flicker of communication.
‘I don’t know you, do I?’ she said. ‘It’s just occurred to me. I think I know you.’
‘Perhaps you shouldn’t investigate too far.’
‘You look discomfited! I’ll find out about you . . . I have no idea how your marriage works, for example.’
‘I’m not sure I do either.’
‘I always wondered. I always wondered. Now you can tell me.’
He stood in the sun among blossom and plant filaments, watching the water, the light from the spaces between the trees landing like flames on his skin.
She smiled to herself. ‘Let’s walk along the other side,’ she said.
‘It’s not school property,’ he said.
‘Why does that matter? You think we’ll get prosecuted? Shot by the military? Have you never swum here?’
‘At night . . . Perhaps I’ve done more than you imagine since you consider my life tremendously limited,’ he said. He looked up at the trees, then turned to her again.
‘Well, if you would tell me about it –’ she said, heatedly. ‘Tell me where you’ve been in all these years.’
‘Here of course and Dorset, and visits to London and France –’
‘Where else?’ she said.
‘After Haye House ended, we had a year or so of pay, and we stretched it to two. So Elisabeth and I travelled –’
‘Did you?’
‘Yes. Sometimes together, sometimes separately. When we were offered jobs here, I wanted to stay – more than she did.’
‘Why? More your type of school?’
‘Yes,’ he said, catching her eye with a glance that reminded her of their time of shared mockery. ‘St Anne’s – the ease, the relief of it! Working here was almost a holiday after Haye House. I’d taught at boys’ schools before, never girls’, and that was different. And after two years away, I was ready to come back to Devon. I think it’s my home now. Finally.’
‘Where did you go?’
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