You (43 page)

‘Moll and Flite?’ said Elisabeth mildly, as though it were obligatory for her to ask.

‘Don’t you dare say that,’ said Dora, her voice thick with gathering rage. ‘You know very well who they were.’

‘I –’ said Elisabeth, unusually silenced.

‘I thought that
all
I wanted to do was save Celie’s youth. I thought it was for the best.’

‘It was,’ said Elisabeth firmly.

‘It wasn’t,’ said Dora, and she took Elisabeth’s arm, half-grabbing it, half-punching it. ‘It’s my own fault, of course, my own fault that I took that decision. But
you
encouraged it, in your silent, proud – haughty – way. You can’t deny that. You were a force too behind the – the giving away.’

‘I had good enough reasons!’ said Elisabeth.

‘What reasons?’

‘I –’

‘What reason could be good enough?’

‘Surely it’s perfectly obvious to you whose that child was?’ said Elisabeth, her mouth a tight line. She trembled almost imperceptibly.

Dora turned to Elisabeth. The world – the tors, the jostling treetops, the clouds – seemed to roll around her in a speeding globe, all understanding accelerated and crystallised.

The certainty went.

She shook her head dumbly.

‘Surely –’

‘Speedy,’ said Dora. ‘Gabriel Sardo. It wasn’t?’ Fire rose in her cheeks.

‘Oh you poor sweet innocent. You sweet fool. I thought – truly thought we both knew. I assumed we
both knew
.’

‘What?’

‘That it was my husband’s.’

‘It was your husband?’ echoed Dora.

‘James.’ Elisabeth smiled, wryly.

‘Oh God,’ said Dora.

‘Yes. Inconvenient.’

‘Do you – do you – know that?’ said Dora, stumbling. She felt spots of colour coming to her cheeks, precise and burning as welts. ‘How – how?’

‘How do you think?’

‘But she was – she was eighteen. Seventeen.’

‘I know. It was regrettable. A period of madness, I always thought. But I suppose the poor chap had to misbehave at some point.’

‘Misbehave,’ said Dora. ‘He told you?’

‘No of course he didn’t,’ said Elisabeth sharply.

‘Well how?’

‘You only had to use your eyes.’

‘How do you – know?’ said Dora with a croak.

‘Your naïvety is astonishing, Dora. It was not hard to guess.’

‘Oh God,’ said Dora, whiteness now drenching her face.

‘What?’ said Elisabeth. ‘Dora.’

‘And – that’s why you wanted the child out of the way?’ Dora swallowed. A thin surge of vomit burned in her throat.

‘It was not an insignificant factor,’ said Elisabeth in her ironic voice.

‘So it was nothing – I mean . . . It was not to do with – us?’ said Dora with awful slowness. ‘With us – us being together?’ Even now she blushed as she said it at her own infatuated presumption. She gripped her own thigh. ‘It was because it was – his?’

‘Yes, yes, of course it would have been easier – more pleasant – if we could have been left in peace,’ said Elisabeth.

‘Oh God,’ said Dora. She felt dizzy. ‘I thought – I thought – We talked so many times of running away together. Being together. Almost endlessly.’

Elisabeth nodded, a slight smile on her lips that seemed to indicate that this was now a faintly onerous fact. ‘A fantasy life can . . . help.’

‘So,’ said Dora, glancing out of the window, looking at the table, feeling around for something to press or bend. ‘So you had even more reason to encourage me.’

‘I never did encourage you.’

‘You did. Oh you did. With silence.’

‘I can hardly be accused of encouraging with silence.’

‘You can. Poisonous silence. And with the odd well-placed word. Amounting to a demand. You’d say these damning things, then fantasise about our home together. Our home of sculptures and music and forbidden love, do you remember? Alternative. Golden.’

‘I remember. But not like you do. This is quite skewed.’

‘You wanted that child away and made it quite clear. You could only just tolerate Barnaby. But then you didn’t leave with me after all. After – the baby. After all that,
you didn’t leave with me
.’

‘And how could we? Where would we live, exactly? Up in the roof in Elliott Hall in accordance with your endless fantasies? Playing the lute for a living?’

‘We – we –’

‘And what would you have done with Barnaby?’

‘Taken him with me.’

‘And with the older son?’

‘Taken him . . .’ said Dora dumbly. ‘He was getting older.’

‘I couldn’t have stood it frankly,’ said Elisabeth. ‘I’d already done that. Two sons. Dear. But quite enough.’

Dora breathed in with a suddenness that left her coughing against the intake of her own saliva. ‘
Well why didn’t you tell me at the time?
’ she said, and broke off in a volley of coughs, swallowed, and spoke through strained muscles. ‘Why, why did you lead me to believe? Give me hope? Good God, I’d have changed my whole life for you. I did change my life. And ruined my daughter’s –’

‘How much clearer could I have been? You expected me to be encumbered with all those children? I was supposed to bring up my husband’s child by his teenage mistress?’

‘He was Cecilia’s
teacher
,’ Dora hissed suddenly.

‘I know. It was hardly commendable –’ Elisabeth lifted one eyebrow. ‘It’s easy to judge. I’m sure she was all over him like a rash.’

‘Don’t speak about my daughter like that.’

Elisabeth’s mouth curved into a thin-lipped smile. ‘Well – they all were. Are. They masturbate over the IT master now.’

‘You should have disabused me. And not given me hope. So much hope.’

‘Well I’ve always loved you, Dora. Been attracted by you. Cared for you.’

‘That is not love.’

‘You’re in my life for ever, my Dora.’

Dora’s mouth trembled. ‘Do you remember?’ she said abruptly. ‘Barnaby wet himself, all through his clothes, just as the baby was born?’ Her voice faltered. ‘His trousers soaked. I remember the stain on the stripy cushion in there. I was helping Celie give birth while thinking, I must change him, must change him. As though further proof were needed that I couldn’t cope.’

‘I don’t remember. No.’

‘The baby went – that very afternoon.’ Dora swallowed. ‘And then you didn’t stay with me – didn’t commit to me. After all that. And I realise now that I have wasted my life. That I will never be rid of you, even if I never see you again. All I want now is peace.’

Thirty-one

June

There was Mara in the hall; the air, heat, breath of Mara. She was under the oak chest, Cecilia was certain. There was an uneasiness to the air, a stain there, spilling fingers and retreating. If she wasn’t under the chest, she was in the bedroom with Cecilia as a pool of light, but the pool had claws. I am going mad, thought Cecilia, and when she saw James, he spilled into Mara and into sleeplessness and loss of appetite. She held James in her mind at night, just sometimes, when she let herself, as she once had so long ago, remembering him with her; but it was Mara who melted into him and clung to her and grew cold.

June heat burned her skin. Insects were a rabble of sawing and scratching. She and James sought the shade of the willows where the water meadows were bright and sodden, and he kissed her, and she hesitated, unnerved, his taste and scent shockingly familiar, and it came rushing back to her, the memory of desire and the old leaping response.

In the night, she moved about in bed. She couldn’t sleep. She called Ari, and chatted and laughed with him in what she noticed was a slightly hysterical fashion. She pressed her eyes to the window and watched bats pour from the fern-choked trees in the river field to circle the barns. She felt tearful as she spoke to him, her fingers taut, guilt alternating with defensiveness, and she could speak normally only by hurting herself in the dark with her nails. Hearing his known voice, she could barely understand how she could have done what she was doing.
Thank God I haven’t slept with him
, she thought, an icy fall of relief that she used as a warning to herself seeming to pin her to the bed, and she was loving with Ari, her awareness of hypocrisy intensified in all her affection.

But when she put down the phone, an old scene shot back into her mind. She remembered kissing James Dahl when she was seventeen in the dank chlorine-fugged section of garden near the Haye House swimming pool with its dripping evergreens and moss-silled glass. His hands were on her waist; the sexual power of two hands on the dip of a waist caught her now.

She made the picture blank, and Mara flew at her. Like a figure flying in wind and rain slapping against her. She was where their kissing had led.

There was a loud sound outside the bedroom on the ground below.

She ran downstairs, tripping a little. Mara was in the hall, turning to her, moving towards her, disappearing.

There were no wellingtons by the door so Cecilia ran out in bare feet, drawing in her breath on the garden path. She saw Dan’s figure clearly in the moonlight. She hobbled rapidly, following him towards a feed barn sunken in a pit of nettles and old builders’ sand behind the roofless stables in the river field. Stars stormed. The figure and the sketch of bracken behind him were silhouetted, the summer night like a version of daylight, the moon tipping brightness.

‘Wait! Stop!’ she shouted.

Dan crouched in the hollow of the broken-walled garden that fronted the stables where rat poison and grower bags gleamed. Cecilia glanced at the ground, almost expecting to find the ancient charred remains of Speedy’s Christmas fire among the tangle of dock and grass, then watched him as he stood up, tall and purposeful.

He turned round; her breathing slowed.

She could see his face clearly in the spread of dull silver from the moon, and it seemed less threatening now; it was already so very familiar to her from glimpsing him that she felt an unexpected rush of intimacy upon meeting his gaze. She looked into his eyes and she was momentarily moved by his presence in the midst of her rage.

She paused.

She gestured at the lane. ‘Leave her alone,’ she said, the fury regathering.

He didn’t move. He smiled very slightly. He raised an eyebrow and smiled again at her, almost affectionately.

‘I’ll get you taken away, I’ll call the police. I mean it,’ she said in a quieter voice.

A flash of pain passed across his eyes, as though he had been physically wounded. He recovered his equanimity. ‘Would you do that?’ he said.

She hesitated. ‘Yes. I would.’

He nodded. He raised his head, and faint pain seemed to linger in his expression, but he looked straight at her. Bats wove and dipped behind him.

Her heart ticked, and an instinct to hold him came to her.

‘You look beautiful when you’re angry,’ he said. ‘That’s what they say in
The Railway Children
.’

She stood still. ‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘I know. Phyllis says it in the novel. How do you know that?’ She was suddenly tearful.

‘I read it.’

‘Did you?’ she said.

‘I can read,’ he said in his odd accent.

He looked into her eyes, then at her mouth. He kept his gaze trained on her, shifting smoothly between her eyes and her mouth, and a smile lifted his lips. He continued to focus on her mouth. She looked at his. James Dahl’s lips came to her in her mind. The air was silent. She stared at that mouth; it filled her frame of vision, a Man Ray mouth in silver bromide, its curves sculpted but strongly male; she could see nothing else; she wanted to kiss it. She leaned very slightly towards him. He moved towards her. James Dahl’s mouth was placed over his, merged, a memory of kissing it.

‘You little cunt,’ he said calmly, but still he kept his eyes trained on her, and their lips parted in an echo of each other’s as they stared.

‘You can’t call me that,’ she said.

Sweat broke out on her forehead. She wanted, now, to take it all out on him, all her hidden longing for James Dahl; to couple with him in this rearing garden, her thighs light from suppressed desire, her heartbeat rapid. Her chest rose and fell. She wanted him, in all his sinuous thinness, to take her now, and she would hold him and kiss him and bite his lips.

‘Why did you call me that?’ she said, barely hearing what she was saying.

‘Because you are.’

There was silence.

‘You stalk us.’

He said nothing.

‘Why? To see Izzie?’

He nodded.

‘Why couldn’t you be more open?’

He shook his head. He seemed to smile with his eyes.

‘The way you speak . . .’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Where are you from?’

‘Lots of places. Mishmash. Horrible stew of accents.’