You

by Joanna Briscoe

  ‘Of course,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t knock, don’t knock, the kids are in bed,’ she said rapidly. ‘I’ll look out for you and come down.’

  She paced the bedroom, tensing her fingers as she heard herself speaking clusters of words out loud, the floorboards straining with every movement until she feared her daughters might wake, and she attempted to quell her panic as anger bolted through her agitation, leaving her nauseated. With a jolt, she recalled her impulsive voicemail message to Ari. She couldn’t talk about it to him, she realised with fresh clarity. It had only ever been productive to mention the baby in the early years; his gruff sympathy turning into resistance over time. She scrabbled for another reason for her call, conscious of how her lies proliferated.

  Moll. Flite. Wales. Midwife. Adoption, she Googled frantically, making no progress. She searched blogs, tumbling into a barely literate netherworld featuring the ramblings of self-justifying dropouts, elaborate conspiracies, theories on festivals, raves, drugs, without success, and listened for James Dahl’s car as she tapped in further futile entries. She would walk in the river field with him, she decided, hidden from the girls’ bedrooms by a barn, but sufficiently close to check the house. She waited, emailing all her brothers to ask them if they remembered who had lived in Wind Tor Cottage, barely able to write the lodgers’ names and enclosing them in inverted commas.

  She heard a car engine and ran to the window. The phone rang behind her.

  She stopped. She hesitated, waiting for several more rings. She snatched it up to answer it, aware that Ari would continue to call and become concerned if he couldn’t reach her.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, her own sudden huskiness taking her aback.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Oh darling, sorry, I – I overreacted. I had a horrible row with Dora. I –’

  The sound of the car was audible, the engine cutting, the door closing. Cecilia stiffened. She covered the phone with her hand and pressed it to her ear.

  ‘What was it about? Was that a car?’

  ‘Oh – usual stuff. Sorry. I was upset,’ said Cecilia, walking back to the window. She opened it. ‘Very upset. I – I got all flustered.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I –’ she said. James stood outside the gate, a pale-tinted shadow. She tried to gesture to him through the darkness of the lane but he was looking in the direction of the front door. ‘Oh I – someone’s out there,’ said Cecilia, trailing off. She put her hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Just a moment!’ she called softly out of the window.

  ‘Who is out there at this time of night?’ said Ari, amusement lifting his voice.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Cecilia, unable to think. ‘It’s – oh, it’s the neighbour.’ She cringed.

  ‘What’s he-she want?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Which neighbour?’

  ‘He’s . . . I think he’s the one with the lost dog.’ Her voice weakened. She blushed, alone.

  ‘What?’ said Ari.

  ‘– Oh golly, I think he’s that weird one – farmer. There’s an advert about his dog.’

  ‘ “Golly”. Since when have you said “golly”?’

  One minute, she mouthed at James, holding her finger up.

  ‘Why’s he – now?’ said Cecilia.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Ari, amusement now tangling with hostility.

  ‘He is,’ said Cecilia weakly, unable to stop. She widened her eyes.

  ‘In the middle of the night?’

  ‘I think he wants to ask me about his missing dog. It might be in the barns? I’ve got to go. Coming,’ she called.

  ‘This is ridiculous. Why are you saying this? Phone me back,’ said Ari brusquely.

  ‘Yes yes, I will. Thank you for calling. In a – minute.’

  Ari said nothing.

  ‘OK – OK, darling?’ gabbled Cecilia. ‘In a minute. Oh please, Ari. Please don’t go all silent on me. Thank you. A few minutes.’

  ‘This is just stupid. You don’t need to talk to him now, whoever he is.’

  ‘I’ll – darling. In a few minutes.’

  She ran downstairs in bare feet, wincing at the creaks that pursued her, and she and James instinctively moved forward to embrace. He held her; she rested her head on his shoulder and talked in fragments of speech, and they walked through the field, Cecilia glancing with almost metronomic movements at the house and making no attempt to hide her tears.

  ‘I think this will only torment you,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Help me,’ she said, closing her eyes quickly, looking abruptly to one side.

  ‘I will find this daughter for you if that’s what you want,’ he said, and he placed his hand on her back and held it there steadily. ‘I’ll spend the rest of my life doing that if that’s what you want, and I’ll find her. But I –’ He shook his head. He raised his arms.

  ‘. . . it’s too late?’ said Cecilia.

  ‘That’s what I think.’

  They were silent, the tumble of river at the end of the field increasingly loud.

  ‘There it is,’ he said, turning to the island.

  ‘I know,’ said Cecilia, but she moved away from it. They circled the field, picking through tiny streams interspersed by spongy sections of grass.

  She caught her breath. ‘James, somewhere a girl bears my – our – genes. And the loss that I caused in her. The rejection lying somewhere in her.’

  He stopped.

  ‘It’s likely she was loved and looked after,’ he said. ‘However you perceived the parents. Or their type.’

  ‘Is it? Is it?’

  ‘If people want a child so much . . . They usually – not always – do their best by the child, don’t they? She’s twenty-three.’

  ‘Well into adulthood. You think it’s too late. I keep saying that.’ She glanced at the house. She remembered, with vague concern, that she hadn’t phoned Ari. ‘The investigator I found. And the adoption support agent,’ she said dully. ‘They both said that without a legitimate birth certificate or known adoptive parents’ names, there is no search worth doing. Do you think she wouldn’t want to be disturbed now?’

  He paused. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘She never contacted me.’ She felt unobtrusively in her pocket for a tissue. ‘She might be too hurt or wounded or angry, and if I found her now I would disturb her life. She could find me, I think, if she wanted to.’

  ‘I have to say that that has occurred to me.’

  ‘Do you think she could?’ she said, her delivery more rapid.

  ‘More easily than you could find her. Her – par – adoptive parents would have friends she could ask, I assume, given – who they were. They themselves would possibly be willing to tell her at this age.’

  ‘I think she’s chosen not to,’ said Cecilia in a monotone.

  ‘It is, well – my conclusion too,’ he said, and he drew her towards him. ‘But she doesn’t know you. It’s not you. Don’t ever take it personally. Absolutely not.’

  ‘You’re kind to me.’

  ‘I think it would be cruel, perhaps – to pursue her.’

  Cecilia nodded. ‘I just need to know,’ she said. She bit her lower lip, hurting herself until the pain brought relief. ‘I just need to know. I have to know, that’s all. Have to know if she was all right. That’s all I’m desperate to know. I don’t think I’ll ever be calm until I know.’

  ‘You must protect yourself. Not hurt yourself so – so brutally. Remember . . . which cost Ceres all that pain/To seek her through the world.’

  ‘I told you not to quote at me.’

  He paused. ‘What happens when your husband’s home?’ he said lightly.

  ‘He’s not my husband. Then I can’t reflect, I can’t search, I can’t pursue Dora like this.’

  ‘You need to stop now,’ he said.

  Twenty-six

  April

  The following night, Dan threw leaves from the bay tree outside the ho
use at Izzie’s window. Izzie smiled, ran down along the low-ceilinged passages with steps that still made her stumble, and let him in through the kitchen door, which Cecilia now kept locked.

  In her bedroom, Dan made a brew of magic mushrooms on his small stove. He coughed and shook.

  ‘You’ve got flu,’ said Izzie.

  ‘Man flu,’ he said dismissively, but he put his arms around her and rested his head against her shoulder, and she stroked him as though he were a large animal who softened under her hands.

  ‘You’re really huddled over that lame little stove,’ she said.

  ‘Well we don’t all have an Aga,’ he drawled.

  He wore Izzie’s towelling dressing gown unselfconsciously, his legs knobbly and defenceless beneath it, his body long and shivering. Izzie glanced at the bottom of the dressing gown from time to time.

  ‘Come to the radiator,’ she said. ‘I’ve put it full on even if they’re stingy with heat.’

  ‘It costs a fortune,’ said Dan in an aristocratic falsetto.

  ‘Shhhh . . .’ said Izzie, Cecilia audibly walking to the bathroom, pausing outside her room. ‘I think she’s in debt or something because of this house?’

  ‘Your mum is well hot,’ he murmured in a growl, raising one eyebrow.

  ‘Oh gross. You total perv. She really really is not.’

  ‘She is. I’d give her one.’

  ‘Dan!’ said Izzie. ‘Are you serious?’

  He shook with laughter, arching over his stove, then began to cough, his back trembling.

  ‘There’s a fit nanny goat on that there hilltop too,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry.’ He softened, and kissed her for a long time. ‘You’re my girl.’

  ‘Why won’t you – do it?’ said Izzie in a small strained voice. She blushed a fiery red.

  He stroked her hair. ‘You know I’m not going to run around with a schoolkid. You need protecting from yourself, my girl . . .’ He said it solemnly, twisting her hair round his finger.

  ‘I’m sixteen in June.’

  ‘We’ll move up your body inch by illegal inch till then.’

  ‘And then?’ said Izzie, turning away from him.

  ‘We’ll do it as the clock strikes. I’ll have your mum first, though. See how you lot go. It must be in the blood.’

  She hesitated. ‘It isn’t though.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘In the blood. I’m adopted,’ she said in a quieter voice.

  ‘I forgot that bit. Poor little orphan. Not. Southern softie. You’re a milk-fed princess!’

  ‘Fuck you –’ began Izzie automatically, but she stopped. His eyes had their faint threatening cast to them.

  She swallowed. He held her to him, and stroked her.

  Cecilia and Ari spent the day engaged in snatched conversations between voicemail messages, their arguments curtailed by Ari’s timetable. ‘What kind of buffoon is going to believe there was a man outside after midnight looking for his dog when he’s already advertised its loss?’ he said in incredulous tones in his lunch hour. ‘Do you think I’m a total idiot?’

  ‘He was,’ persisted Cecilia, now unable to invent an alternative scenario, shame battling with indignation as she temporarily persuaded herself of her story for a show of veracity. She promised herself, ritualistically and guiltily, not to lie to him again. ‘I – I think he was drunk.’

  ‘Dogs to rescue,’ boomed Ari later down the phone.

  She laughed, then disarmed him by inventing ever more improbable situations that inspired further merriment, but still he returned to the subject, and returned again. She shuddered. She bit her lip between her words.

  How are you? James emailed as she talked.

  Later, after work and the school run were completed and supper cleared, she sat by the fire and heard the wind tugging its blackness against the panes, stirring the air into a storm, and she remembered a time she had never fully allowed herself to return to. A time when she had walked across many miles of countryside at the age of seventeen.

  I drove past the Clapper Inn, he had emailed. Do you remember it?

  She recalled it very clearly, the logs now radiating idly in the fireplace as they had once in an inn that spring night on the other side of the moor. She had plotted the visit to the inn, the only time she had ever known in advance where Mr Dahl would be outside the school. Even later, in those years when the grief had abated and she thought about him quite infrequently, the night in the Clapper Inn on one of the bleakest stretches of the moor towards Princetown, where the prison was situated, remained unrevised in her mind as a bright stretch of exaltation.

  ‘The Clapper Inn . . . Do you know it?’ he had said to her in Elliott Hall gardens. She had concocted an elaborate tale about staying with Diana at a friend of Diana’s, and once there, she had set off alone with a map. On her own, on foot, the moor seemed a place of impossible dimensions: tropical, rank, yet desolate enough on its higher stretches to batter any human who approached it in fog or storm. Terrible doubt assailed her as she traversed it. Had he been telling her intentionally? Had he been hinting? Knowing him as she did, she was certain that he had been. Confusion then hit her again. She thought of nothing else as she walked those miles, a kind of madness fuelling her. She wondered and analysed, and finally she was sure that she could not tolerate it if he had been hinting to her and she had thrown away her opportunity. She would risk all. No coward soul is mine.

  She could barely find the way when she came to smaller crossroads, unmarked and leading to farm tracks. Damp air rose as the light fell, and she walked and walked, travelling with a torch through a land of fog and silent sheep, tors jagged on the horizon, her footfall muted and wet, only her own breath thunderous in her ears. She changed torch batteries; she applied deodorant from her bag intermittently; she was fluent and sinewed with purpose. It was an eleven-mile journey, she worked out later by obsessive map gazing, though she had walked considerably further by losing her way. He may not be there, she warned herself repeatedly, preparation for disenchantment by now automatic. He may be horrified by her arrival. The entire event seemed impossible to believe: one of her more garish fantasies. If he wasn’t there, how would she return? She imagined walking back all night in the dark alone. She pictured herself with a broken heart, curling up on the roadside.

  I remember it, she emailed him. Of course.

  He had been there. A storm was beginning, the wind stirring, as she arrived. She had entered the tunnelling porch and emerged into a warren of lintels and panelled half-rooms silhouetted by three fires, her tights mud-splattered, hair scrawled with mist.

  He was sitting by the fire in his country clothes: his sepia-coloured trousers, his dark-blue jumper, his face somehow ageless in the firelight. He was writing. He frowned a little and looked down, paused and wrote. He was to rise at dawn to find the source of the Dart at Cranmere Pool, he had told her. She wanted to run out of the inn, exhaustion coming to her as a blanket. She stood a few feet from him and still he didn’t see her. James, she could not say. Mr Dahl, she could not say.

  His bedroom, when they finally went to it, was up a tiny staircase sealed behind a door. There was a high bed with a wool cover, a Victorian etching of Exeter Cathedral framed on one side, a stained watercolour of bluebells on the other, a window set in a three-foot-thick wall, and an old fire that dreamed in the grate. They stood looking out at the storm over that bleak expanse, at how it tore at the windows, slammed doors below, shrieked and vibrated through a building that stood solidly still.

  ‘I could have been out in that,’ she said airily to him. He shuddered quite openly.

  She was awkward with him. She didn’t know how to touch him, or whether she should. They fitted themselves into the windowsill and watched the storm throw branches, twigs, leaves, as though gazing at a screen, pressed against each other.

  Twenty-seven

  April

  ‘Cecilia!’ called Ari up the stairs. ‘Darly!’

  ‘Yes, darly?’ she said,
and she heard herself and noticed how absurd their old habits seemed.

  ‘Can you come here?’

  ‘Why?’

  He paused. ‘Because I need to ask you – how this boiler works.’

  ‘It’s complicated,’ she called down.

  ‘I’m going to put it on the automatic setting.’

  ‘No!’ she said. ‘It takes for ever to put that back if you get it wrong. Please, Ari,’ she called in a sharp tone.

  ‘You have your routines,’ he said stiffly.

  ‘What choice have I had?’ she sang down the stairs.

  She landed in his arms at the bottom with a bump and he hugged her. She pulled away and went to set the boiler.

  ‘Just wait till I come back and I’ll sort you all out,’ he called in a parody of manliness designed to provoke. She paused, then laughed appropriately, but as she looked around that little series of linked utility rooms, washing still toppling, walls damp with sections crumbling, doors shut against leaks and old lawnmowers, she knew that she liked this independence. It was living and rawness and a fight with elements, and it brought it all back in a rush: the intensity of young life.

  ‘You’re . . . a bit wired,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not. Please can we not talk about this now?’ said Cecilia in an intentionally weary voice.

  ‘You’re becoming more remote from me,’ he said, appearing outside the door and speaking flatly.

  ‘I’m not,’ she said. She paused. ‘Well, we don’t share a life,’ she said. She softened her tone. ‘It’s that – it’s the daily story that bonds people.’

  ‘Does everything have to be a story with you?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I want us to be us again when I get back,’ he said, and she nodded.

  ‘People,’ said Ruth to Izzie in the river field by the alders. ‘They live in wigwams and tepees. Charles and Carey and Paul, they went to the South Sea Islands, all on their flying bed.’

  ‘Nerdy people in books,’ said Izzie.

  ‘But it must be – it must be because you can do those things.’