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Ballet practice – 1 hour night. 3 hours Sat and Sun
, she wrote on the timetable above her bed.

Her father did not seem to have a regular job, like other people’s fathers.

Be good
, she wrote in secret mouse writing on a corner of her timetable, because if Beth March could be so good, so very, very good, she could attempt to rein in her flawed nature.
‘Do better and be better’ – Emily Brontë
, she wrote on the other corner.

Help mother
, she added. Sara Crewe had slaved among coal scuttles for Miss Minchin and held her head like a princess all the while, so she herself could help sweep the Aga ashes for her poor overworked mother and devote an hour a day after her homework and ballet to scrubbing, brother care and log carrying.

Circus studies
, she wrote tentatively, for perhaps she could make a bob or two as a circus girl. She had no idea where one learnt the skills or found a circus with which to run away, but the majority of the lodgers could teach her juggling and she would practise her somersaults.

Ice skating
, she wrote. A white-muffed girl from
Bunty
, her elongated sketch of a leg raised in star-spangled air, sailed past her. If she studied hard and showed aptitude, like Harriet of
White Boots
, she should be able to take her inter-silver before the year was out. ‘No carpet knight,’ she murmured, but what was a carpet knight?

Piano practice – 1hour; 4 hours weekends
, she wrote, and this she could do, for an old woman thumped out scales in Widecombe church hall for those who cared to learn, and care to learn Cecilia did. Her own mother supplemented her lessons, and had begun to teach her the cello.

Her father seemed to knead and fire in his pottery barn, but where did he sell the pots?

Wares
, she wrote, uncertain of how to express her commercial imperative. She could produce her own bowls, make taffy, tap maple syrup or sell lemonade from her window to passing cyclists.

Wolves howled outside, savage and yellow-eyed on the wolds. Water poured off the fields, bubbled beneath the lane and rushed along the gully in front of the garden. The fogs rolling down from the moors could smother lambs and young children. Spirits and demons followed the Dart and smugglers signalled from among the gorse at night. It would be best if she could unearth some ingots. How else would they fend off penury? What if they had to make shoe polish with soot and dresses from curtains? She shivered in delighted martyrdom. She saw herself standing stiff in the classroom, unable to sit in her cone of brocade as children laughed, poked and pulled her hair, while shortly thereafter the headmistress summoned her to her study to inform her that her parents were dead.

At Wind Tor House, chaos reigned: spare rooms, utility rooms, potting sheds, cottage and barns were filled to capacity with tenants renting, scrounging, bartering. Nine neighbouring children would appear for tea, parents uncertain of their whereabouts; in the summer, caravans sloped in the mud, packed with students seeking work in the artists’ barn, trailing patchouli and damp clothes. Patrick’s stereo system thumped across the valley with no one to complain, cottages dozing by the river; birds crying; the Beatles booming. There were parties: a Christmas celebration, guests arriving on horses, skidding in old Land Rovers; a summer gathering that spilled to the river, adults naked in the water, draped over fields; Patrick picking up his guitar, drunk children catching the ponies at night. It was, Cecilia feared sometimes, too rich, too wild, too free.

‘I’ve got news,’ said Dora one summer evening, brightness disguising weariness.

‘Oh yes?’ said Patrick, looking up, his mouth twitching in apprehension, then straightening with tangible effort.

‘I’ve got a job. Music teacher. Haye House.’

‘A regular income,’ said Dora when he failed to respond.

He was silent. He exhaled. ‘That’s great,’ he said.

Patrick, now in his mid-thirties and already emanating strands of disappointment, was almost openly reduced. The confidence that was rooted in his birth family’s prosperity and his own charm butted daily against reality, resurrected only at night with music, with company, or among the children who were his loyal companions. In an attempt to escape the industry that supported three generations of his family, he had incongruously trained as an accountant in Dublin, but had never practised. Unlike his taller red-headed brothers with their unquestioning participation in the family business, he, the physically slighter but mentally faster rebel, was now beginning to flounder, a sense of embarrassment as perceptible as nervous sweat beneath his old boyishness, his essential philanthropy. His brown hair was patched with grey. He knew that he lacked purpose and that he should have persisted with his earlier career, but it felt too late already. His wife was by this stage infinitely more practical.

‘Subsidised fees for teaching staff’s children,’ said Dora in a controlled manner, glancing at the three alert faces at the table. ‘Considerably subsidised.’

‘Haye House?’ said Cecilia suspiciously.

‘Haye House,’ said Dora, unable to contain her satisfaction.

Haye House, the progressive school some eleven miles to the south, where the Dart spread and gave rise to water meadow and sheltered garden, was the institution almost uniformly aspired to by the Bannans and their more bohemian acquaintances scattered across the moor. Haye House was the social and scholastic ideal. Patrick’s parents, embracing an expedient solution to a private education, had already offered to pay the reduced fees.

The school was famous, or infamous: fading rock stars’ love-children mingled happily with their extravagantly monikered legitimate half-siblings; scions of attenuated European dynasties and colonial offspring mixed and mated with the children of more local wealthy families of an artistic or educationally opinionated bent, or with those simply imbued with the latitudinarian values of the time. Cash-strapped hippies with the right connections and subtly defined credentials – a tone of voice, a way with a plectrum, an invisible but dogged instinct for nepotism – managed to secure themselves healthy subsidies for their dirty-haired broods, to the puzzled irritation of their more industrious contemporaries. Over the years, accidents, precocious record deals, drug addictions and frequent recourse to child psychologists had further ruffled the turbulence of academic life.

Cecilia caught sight of the circles under her mother’s eyes as she talked to her family. ‘You’re tired,’ she said, and Dora slumped a little before she gathered herself and kissed the head of the daughter who had always assumed responsibility for fragile family harmony as though she were the oldest child while the real firstborn happily shirked it.

‘You’re a lovely girl,’ said Dora quickly. ‘What do you think? I think you’ll love it.’

Cecilia dropped her gaze. She spent her evenings plotting to apply for a scholarship to a school such as Malory Towers: a school with a uniform, prefects, medals and flying colours. She hadn’t so far dared to tell her parents of her wishes.

‘Do I have to go to Haye House?’ she asked so quietly that no one heard.

‘I – I –’ said Cecilia on their first journey to Haye House, still wishing to explain that she treasured other, more navy-blue desires. But she could barely form the words. It would be akin to expressing a preference for Sunday School over Drama Saturday or Battenberg cake instead of flapjack. Because Haye House was what she wanted, of course. It was what all children wanted: smoke and jam smears, kayaks and wall hangings. Down they plunged, gripping each other in the car, along high-hedged lanes frequently blocked by snow and wild pony-jams, through tunnels of green that led to the Dart. Cecilia looked out of the window, a red-haired, clear-skinned person pressing her face to a rush of leaves with all the opportunities in the world awaiting her.

‘Hey you guys, walk around, soak in the place, take your time, hang out,’ a teacher called Idris, originally named Ian, said to the new pupils on arrival. ‘Make merry,’ he added.

James Dahl was not yet teaching at the school by then, but Cecilia wondered later whether she might, by some tiny chance, have glimpsed him that day, visiting his wife’s friends in the Art Department. She often dredged her memory, searching for a flicker of him between the trees and stripey jumpers, as though running and running after a disappearing figure in a dream.

Three

February

On the
evening of her return to Wind Tor House, Cecilia held Ari, the father of her children, for a long time. She was darker now, her redhead’s complexion with its ability to freckle given to shadows, the skin settled more tightly on her bones, so that the structure of her face only faintly resembled that of childhood. She rested her head on Ari’s shoulder, unable to express to him or to anyone else the claustrophobic, somehow
shaming
aspect of stepping backwards and coming home. There was an indefinable sense of failure. She instinctively wanted to avoid her contemporaries who lived locally, as though she still had something to prove.

She had chosen to do this, she reminded herself. Circumstances had conspired, but she had made the choice to come back here. Yet the country seemed alien, making her newly afraid of its remoteness, its overwhelming silence, and the proximity of her mother, who lived in a cottage on a bank beyond the back vegetable garden. Now that she was here, she was hit by a jittery dread of what she would ask Dora, and when. It had been easy to devise her approach in London, but even a glimpse of Dora in the garden made her stiffen with guilt and antipathy.

Cecilia led Ari through the dully lit passages, nudging open doors, teasing him as he ducked and tripped on uneven slopes and steps while the girls thundered about downstairs.

‘This was my parents’ room; this was my room . . . this was the baby’s,’ she said, stepping into a small bedroom at the end of the house.

‘What?’ said Ari brusquely, turning to her in the gloom.

Cecilia looked at him in momentary confusion.

‘Please don’t start,’ he said. His expression tightened.

She hesitated. ‘Ari . . .’ she said. ‘I meant my youngest
brother’s
room. When he was a baby.’

Ari paused. ‘OK, OK,’ he said, putting his palms up in front of him. ‘Big apologies. Come on.’

‘God, Ari,’ said Cecilia.

‘Sorry.’

They walked in tense silence.

‘This is
weird
, hick girl,’ said Ari more lightly, bowing his head beneath a lintel on a landing where pine smoke suffused the air and small panes chattered with wind. ‘Where are the sirens? Hoodies? Where’s the Thursday recycling van? The deafening chucking of glass and cursing?’

Cecilia was silent.

‘Well?’

‘I don’t know if I can do this,’ she said in a rush, stopping and taking his arm and stroking it, pulling at the hairs distractedly. ‘It’s very, very strange. Have we made a mad mistake?’ She caught sight of Dora’s cottage hunched behind a hedge beyond the back garden, and swallowed. ‘Am I in fact a lunatic to have come here? Have I dragged us all?’

‘Too late, too late . . . It’s fine,’ said Ari, and pressed the back of her neck.

‘I need to look after her,’ she said, glancing at the cottage again. ‘I really don’t know if she’s going to be OK, whatever she says . . .’

‘She will be.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘Be brave.’

‘I am,’ she said heatedly.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘If anything – you’re that. Brave. Stroppy.’

‘I’m not.’ She rested her head hard against him. Her hair fell over her cheekbone, its waves still gathering at her shoulder in a shadowed reddish brown. She wore dark pink and much black, and in this place of leaking barns and damp plaster, she looked decidedly urban; more defined and drawn than the bright blurry child she had been.

‘I have to go,’ said Ari reluctantly as the light fell.

‘I know,’ said Cecilia.

She felt an instinct to tug him back, or simply to ask him to stay, but he had to return to London during the week for work until June, and then he would take up the post he had long contemplated at the University of Exeter. She would stay with the girls and write her latest children’s novel at home. She waited by a sitting-room window and watched his headlights disappear, standing there after the beam had been swallowed by trees until all she could see was lichen-draped branches knitting darkness. The radiators clanked and remained tepid, and furniture shrank in corners, newly insubstantial in such large rooms.

‘Come back,’ she murmured.

She went to bed long after her daughters, creeping and shivering and feeling for light switches, and pictured Ari in the car on the motorway. It was shockingly cold.

A creak seemed to echo her words near the end of the room. She felt, already, as though she was shoring back animals and ghosts.

She had forgotten that country darkness was absolute. The house was animate with settling plaster and contracting beams, dense with condensation and stone. As a child here, she had kept her head under the blankets in terror, the place too alive with shadows and the accumulated drifts of human history to contain nothing but air.