You

by Joanna Briscoe

  ‘Certainly not a baby any more.’

  ‘But he was,’ said Dora, bowing her head. Her hair fell forward and she pulled a strand from her mouth, lifting it impatiently from her tongue. ‘And I never ever forget. That face.’

  ‘You know I’ve never particularly cared to talk about this. And I don’t care now,’ said Elisabeth. ‘It was unpleasant. It was done. We have to move on.’

  ‘You’re hard,’ said Dora slowly. ‘But then I . . . it’s true that I couldn’t talk about it either. Not to Celie, who was the only one who did want to talk about it. For years, she did, and – does. I used to think, I’d rather die than address the big things.’

  ‘My Dora,’ said Elisabeth, putting her arm round Dora’s shoulder. ‘You really do think too much sometimes.’

  ‘Do you remember?’ said Dora, turning round and shrugging off Elisabeth’s arm with a small movement as she did so. ‘Remember the day the baby was born? How I was just after? Wild. Mad. You arrived in the afternoon; I remember. How do you think Celie was? Do you think I ever stop thinking about that bundle disappearing through the back door?’

  It was that, that bundle, held by the woman who had just assisted the birth and who was now suspended in some luminous daze of gratification, Cecilia alone in bed: it was that one image that came back to her, the blanket-wrapped baby a little breathing package, a fuzzy sad picture as though caught on CCTV. It was the last time Dora had seen her grandson. She watched them leave, Moll and Flite, their tears falling; watched their backs as they went out through the door, across the yard up to the cottage, and then left, as arranged, in their van that very afternoon: the new mother arriving in Wales having ostensibly just given birth. She looked the part, Dora always thought, the solid Moll in her layers of skirts – the baby in its sling, bottle feeding due to early mastitis, the ruffled glow and tentative movements of the new mother. Moll would say that she had given birth at home in England, register the baby as hers and Flite’s, producing documentation from a midwife friend of hers, and start their new life as parents in Wales. And then – as Dora knew now – beyond Wales: beyond, and beyond.

  ‘I was such a fool,’ said Dora, her head in her hands.

  ‘Let’s go to bed,’ said Elisabeth.

  ‘No!’ said Dora.

  Elisabeth breathed sharply through her nose.

  Dora smiled. She shook her head. She breathed deeply. ‘I think it was only ever sex that could make me stop thinking about this,’ she said. ‘You and sex, I mean. Love, what I thought – sometimes – was love. They were the only time I could escape the truth.’

  ‘I did love you. Do. You’re my sexy maternal calmness. I tell you so often. The opposite of me in so many ways. And yet not.’

  ‘Maternal,’ said Dora bitterly.

  ‘You were. You are. Too maternal for me – for my liking, I mean,’ said Elisabeth and kissed Dora suddenly, briefly, on the lips. ‘Can you please try to get over this? I had absolutely no idea you continued to feel like this. My darling one, it’s years ago. You were a sweet fool to give it to those unpleasant hippies, of course. If you’d have discussed it with me . . .’

  ‘You didn’t want to know. You resisted, didn’t want any of the details.’

  ‘I just wanted it out of the way, frankly. Like you did. Let’s not kid ourselves. But it was terribly home-knitted of you to arrange that adoption yourself!’ She laughed with a nervous awkwardness. ‘You’d be clapped in jail now . . .’

  Dora flinched.

  ‘You know, it was only over the years I realised that,’ she said with something like a small gasp.

  Elisabeth rubbed the back of Dora’s head, alternating light fluttering movements with harder strokes, and Dora pressed her eyes into the ridges of the knitted cotton on her shoulder and in her mind she saw Cecilia’s face – as it had been; as it was now – the two faces merging.

  ‘Where is she?’ Cecilia had said, waking and confused, when Dora and Moll had returned from bathing the new baby and dressing him in a nappy and sleepsuit.

  Dora hesitated.

  ‘She?’ she said.

  Cecilia held out her arms.

  Dora glanced at the baby, wrapped up.

  ‘Here,’ she said.

  Cecilia stared down at the baby’s head, blinking. She kissed it, nuzzled it. The baby started to turn to a nipple, and Dora moved quickly towards the bed.

  ‘Say goodbye,’ she said quietly, not looking at Cecilia; or she thought she’d said it.

  ‘I never said goodbye,’ said Cecilia time and time again over the years. ‘She just left.’

  She, Cecilia called the baby from the beginning, having, Dora surmised, misheard, or simply assumed. Throughout the pregnancy, Dora noticed, she had instinctively and then increasingly unquestioningly believed that the baby would be a girl.

  ‘You cuddled – cuddled . . . her,’ said Dora, staggering over words the first time.

  ‘I didn’t!’ said Cecilia. ‘Only for seconds! I wanted to say goodbye to her.’ She wailed square mouthed like a red-faced child, her breasts full and, to Dora, alarming, spilling out of her nightdress. ‘I’d been asleep. I didn’t know you were taking her then.’

  ‘She . . . her,’ Cecilia continued to say, within days expressing regret and asking barely rational questions, and Dora had allowed the mistake to prevail as a further disguise, another level removed from the truth, along with her hazy official adoption story. She would not, could not, engage with the facts.

  ‘I honestly hadn’t planned to lie,’ said Dora now, tears running from the corners of her eyes and flattening sorely over her face.

  ‘You did it in panic,’ said Elisabeth soothingly.

  ‘And then I couldn’t get out of it. I told her wrong things about the parents. I thought she might be less attached if it wasn’t a real person in our lives.’

  Elisabeth patted her.

  ‘I never corrected her on the girl thing . . .’

  ‘Sweetie.’

  ‘I wanted her not to be able to find him. Do you think I was a coward?’

  ‘No,’ said Elisabeth, shaking her head as she stroked Dora’s shoulders. ‘It’s getting colder out here.’

  ‘I was. I was a terrible coward.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I was afraid of them – Moll and Flite,’ said Dora. ‘But I wanted to save Celie’s youth, wanted to – protect us all. But oh God, Elisabeth, she has built this myth of this daughter. This mythical daughter. I would never know how to . . . I didn’t expect her to be so relentless about it. Ever.’

  ‘Could you tell her now?’

  ‘My God, she would never speak to me again,’ said Dora, and cried loudly into Elisabeth’s chest. Elisabeth palpably stiffened, and then softened, against her. ‘And worse – I admit worse than that – I’d lose the three girls.’ Her speech faltered between tears. ‘After it took me so many years to begin to know them. I love them so much.’

  Elisabeth shook her head.

  ‘There is no need now.’

  ‘I tried and tried to track Moll and Flite down,’ said Dora weakly. ‘Once I really understood the grief of Celie.’ She swallowed. ‘One of their friends threatened me once when he came past here and I asked after Moll and Flite and the baby. He kept talking very aggressively about “their kid”. About, I don’t know, “people leaving them and their kid alone”. I used to be afraid of arson.’ She shrugged hopelessly. ‘Threats, exposure, of all sorts of revenge. They were quite scary, some of those people.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Elisabeth.

  ‘And I was always terrified – for the future – of Celie being declared an unfit mother,’ said Dora, her words now tumbling in a barely coherent stream. ‘What if they put her on an At Risk register or something? I don’t know how these things work,’ said Dora, tailing off.

  ‘You were protecting her,’ said Elisabeth gently.

  ‘The worst thing is, I failed them both so badly, but Celie has no idea I’ve spent a lifetime grieving and hoping,’ s
aid Dora. ‘Once she said to me, very coldly, “All I need to know is that you cared about her.” And I wanted to say to her, “I can’t tell you how I cared, can’t tell you.” But I knew that I would break down. And all I said to her was, “It’s over.” My mouth was a small tight hardness. I know it. And the grief on her face. I just couldn’t – could not – talk about things. Oh Elisabeth, why are we such fools?’

  ‘Enough now, enough,’ said Elisabeth, stroking Dora harder.

  ‘I really –’ Dora shook her head. ‘I – Why could I never tell her I truly, truly did care? I was sorry? It was a mis –’

  ‘Well tell her then.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tell her that,’ said Elisabeth. ‘Tell her just that. What you just said to me.’

  ‘What?’ Dora’s mouth was open.

  ‘I truly did care. I’m sorry. It was a mistake. Just say that.’

  ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘Yes you could.’

  ‘I could – Could I?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Elisabeth, taking Dora’s shoulders.

  ‘I don’t think I –’

  ‘I challenge you.’

  ‘Oh –’

  ‘If you do anything, tell her that. Tell her it was a mistake, you regret it. I challenge you,’ said Elisabeth briskly. ‘If I can give you anything, I can give you that. The courage to do it if you want to – that’s my challenge to you. I’ve had enough of this now.’

  Dora was silent. ‘Thank you,’ she said. She lowered her head. Her shoulders sank. She exhaled with a loud rush of air.

  ‘Hush hush hush now,’ said Elisabeth firmly. She kneaded Dora’s shoulders hard. ‘It’s a little cold.’

  The day had fallen into a flimsy summer darkness, the thatches of the hamlet humped in uneven ridges in the tucks of the valley.

  ‘Sit in here,’ said Dora, indicating the summerhouse at the back of the garden.

  Elisabeth hesitated and glanced at the cottage. Dora opened the summerhouse door. The breath of still-warm wood and tomato plants enveloped them comfortingly, remains of spider and leaf skeleton crumbled in corners. They sat on a bench.

  ‘I can show you late love,’ said Elisabeth.

  ‘What does that mean? “Late love”?’ said Dora.

  ‘I think I can commit to you . . .’

  Dora smiled. ‘I can’t even be bothered to laugh,’ she said, without emotion. Elisabeth’s arm was round her; she sat back against it. ‘Just think of all that time.’

  ‘I didn’t want to rock the boat.’

  ‘There has been no boat to rock for years.’

  ‘I want you.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dora. ‘You only want someone who hasn’t got long.’

  Elisabeth glanced at her knees.

  ‘I don’t know why I always – push people away,’ she said, her voice minutely uneven.

  ‘Oh Elisabeth,’ said Dora with affection. ‘You will never be fathomed. Let’s not try now.’

  Elisabeth paused. She shook her head and looked at Dora with a small crooked smile. ‘I won’t,’ she said. ‘Come here.’

  ‘Any time I’ve got left, I just want to dedicate it to my grandchildren,’ said Dora in an unsteady voice. ‘Helping them and loving them. I’ll be on my own and look after my grandchildren. That’s what I’ll do.’

  ‘Oh my Dora,’ said Elisabeth, and was silent, then moved towards her lips, and Dora allowed her to. Elisabeth kissed her harder. Dora opened her mouth.

  She knew, as she had known earlier that day by the river, that she would let Elisabeth make love to her once more. She was cynical; she was fully aware; she was safe. She would use her even, she thought, her mouth twisting with the notion. She knew that this would probably be the last time she had sex in her life; it would certainly be the final time with Elisabeth. She swallowed against a tightening of her throat.

  Together they found her pile of camp bed mattresses beneath a bench, damp with the incense-tinged grime of the drifters who had slept there over the years. Dora felt a fierce desire returning for sex: pure sex, animal sex. Their bodies were light-sculpted under early-summer stars as she glanced in momentary wonder at their entangled limbs; the dent in her breast smoothed over, the skin seemingly ageless.

  I’ve had this, I’ve known this, I’ve had this richness, thought Dora with exquisite pain as Elisabeth bit on her nipple and her thighs were stroked, and the old fire, the almost unbearably hot rising began to spread through her, her breathing shallowing and her nerves swarming to alertness. She took her pleasure. There was nothing to lose, all circumspection gone. Elisabeth stroked her hard, almost brutally, but she could touch her only with this heat, this buoyant burning. As she shuddered down those long hot steps, she turned her face into the mattresses to soak away the tears that came afterwards.

  Thirty-four

  June

  The night grew cooler, foxes crying out from near the river with their strange child-like call, and a bird singing that Cecilia recognised as a nightjar because in a different time, Patrick had taught her their song; she remembered hearing the nightjar in early summer as she prepared for exams in this very room, and it brought her father back to her again. It summoned a feeling of the house as it was, the retreating to her room after school, winding past the wax surface of old pine and oak furniture so cold to the touch, its fragrance twining after her, past fires, glimpses of bright sky or snow, along twists of passage and stair by low-lintelled doors towards her bedroom, Dora creating big meals downstairs and much shouting between rooms. She sank her head in her hands as she remembered it all, and Mara came to her. The created Mara, with her fair hair. In Cecilia’s mind, she had hair that was not quite blonde, but of a light rained-on straw colour, falling over a thin face, a strongly sculpted arrangement of features. On haunted days, she saw her crouching on the moor trying to get back to her, the poor colourless hair a mass of knots and pony scurf. Instead of working, she wrote to Mara.

  Tears pressed against her eyes; she made herself flick between documents and focus on her children’s novel. She pressed her right fingernails under those of her left hand, then threw herself into her work.

  The river rushed, loud in the hushed night. Her characters sailed. The Water Babies; The Little Mermaid; The Selkie Girl, she thought. She must check on Ruth. She worried about Ruth and was unable to subdue the anxiety, no matter how she tried, because there seemed reason for it. She walked along the passage and opened Ruth’s door. Her bedroom was empty.

  ‘If you were adopted,’ said Izzie, stroking Dan’s hair, ‘where’s, like, your real parents? The ones that brought you up, I mean.’

  He lay against her chest, his lips parted against her breast after sex, his breathing snagging with early sleep. She prodded him and he grunted.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘On the other side of the world . . .’ he said in a sleepy voice, rolling his eyes.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They went to bum-fuck nowhere. New Zealand. Classic,’ he said, lifting his head in stages, his hair flattened into sweat peaks where he had slept against her. ‘They followed a couple of their moaning mates to live up some mountain.’

  ‘And you didn’t want to go with them?’ Izzie tickled the back of his neck.

  ‘Mmm,’ he said. ‘More. More. I like it.’ He lifted his shoulders towards her. ‘What?’ he said through a new yawn. ‘You think I’m likely to go and shear farting sheep and catch a flat-as-a-cowpat accent?’

  Izzie laughed. ‘Do they talk like that? Don’t you like them?’

  ‘Not like,’ he said into her breast. He kissed her and blew a raspberry against her skin.

  ‘Eurgh!’ said Izzie. ‘You soaked my tit. What then?’

  ‘My old man’s quite a nice geezer. She’s a bit of a harridan underneath the earth-mother bit she does. She’s OK, she fed me and everything, but well –’ he said, turning stiffly beneath her and catching her eye, his pupils blankly reflecting the bedside lamp.

  ‘You want
to find your first mum,’ said Izzie, drawing on a cigarette.

  He stood up, shaking Izzie off him, and opened the window until it jammed against the eaves, scattering straw. ‘Yes,’ he said shortly. The river’s tumble poured into the room with a stream of cool air. ‘Water’s quite high,’ he said. He pushed the frame harder, scraping away further clumps of straw.

  ‘Hey!’ objected Izzie, sounding puzzled.

  He stared out into the night.

  ‘I’ll help you,’ said Izzie.

  Dan was silent.

  ‘I knew where she was.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I wanted to see her, always.’

  ‘What do you mean? Like –’

  ‘See her. Shake things up a bit for her, maybe. What –’

  ‘Have you got other kids in your family? You’ve never told me all that stuff.’

  He yawned. ‘They sprogged years after they took me. Just me and my so-called brother. Zeb. He’s cool.’ He shook his head. ‘He’s gone to New Zealand.’

  ‘Where’s your mum? The old one, I mean?’

  Dan was silent again.

  ‘Babe,’ said Izzie, getting up. She stroked his back. ‘Come on, babe. Come away from the window.’

  ‘I knew I’d see her. When they’d tell me where she was.’ He was shaking minutely but perceptibly beneath her fingers. ‘I thought she might want me. Miss me. I can’t –’

  ‘Babe,’ said Izzie again, and strenuously, half toppling, she pulled him down until he sat against her on the bed. ‘You’re all shivery. It’s cool, it’s cool. When did they tell you?’ she said, holding him. She kissed his eyelids. He kept them closed.

  ‘Well, after Zeb was born. Made sense. But I knew anyway.’

  ‘How, sweetie?’ said Izzie, kissing him again. ‘How?’ He lay across her and she held him in her arms, almost cradling him. ‘It’s freezing in here now. How?’

  ‘The oldsters said they were planning to tell me when I was eighteen. Eighteen? Why the fuck, man? But I heard one of their flyblown old relatives referring to it when I was about fourteen –’

  ‘Like how?’