You (49 page)

They both paused.

‘Tell me,’ she said playfully. ‘
Tell me, what is it you plan to do/With your one wild and precious life?
’

‘Be with you,’ he said.

The following afternoon, Elisabeth Dahl let herself in at the gate and walked through the garden of Wind Tor Cottage. Dora was bending over, ineffectually hauling up Japanese knotweed in one of her old denim skirts, while the squat figure of Katya mowed the further section of the garden, her hair floating.

‘I’ve come for you,’ said Elisabeth, her mouth curving into a smile of suppressed exhilaration or agitation. Her hair smelled damp with recent washing, and her movements were subtly jerky as she picked up a dropped key and walked towards Dora.

Dora stood up, easing the base of her back with her palm, and gazed at Elisabeth through the haze of sunlight while high in the sky a buzzard hovered and, momentarily, she perceived it as an eagle. On the lane behind the gate Elisabeth’s car was parked, its back windows obscured with piled-up cases and boxes, sun swarming across its windscreen.

Elisabeth laughed.

Dora paused. She frowned.

‘Take me,’ said Elisabeth, her mouth twitching with a self-conscious irony that threaded the smile. ‘I’m all yours!’

Dora remained motionless.

‘I’m free! I’m truly free,’ said Elisabeth, and caught Dora in her arms. Unusually, Dora could smell her perspiration.

‘You’re not,’ said Dora.

‘I am. He’s gone. He’s leaving me. All yours.’

‘He’s gone? You’re not,’ said Dora, her voice cracking, then trailing into uncertainty.

‘Silly darling! You don’t understand, do you? I really am free.
Yours
. He says he wants to leave. I can’t say that this hasn’t been brewing for some time . . .’ She glanced at the ground and her features seemed to sag, or age, then harden; she smiled again, looking Dora directly in the eye.

‘I can’t believe it,’ said Dora. Elisabeth’s perfume seemed over-heavy in the warmth.

‘We can be together. We can
live
together if you want.’

‘No,’ said Dora thinly. She eased herself into a straighter position.

‘No?’

Dora shook her head, trying to smile, but she was veiled by the shadow of her gardening hat, which seemed to form a barrier between her and Elisabeth.

‘Come on,’ said Elisabeth, smiling with an almost disquieting radiance into Dora’s eyes, and took her hand. ‘Come with me. You’re coming with me.’

‘I’m not,’ said Dora. The sound of the lawnmower rose behind her.

‘You’re not?’ said Elisabeth, a first chill seeping into her voice.

‘No.’

‘You don’t believe me,’ she said. ‘I can see why, my darling, after all these years . . . I can see why!
Mea culpa
.’ She tilted her head in wry acknowledgement and smiled in a softer fashion. ‘I think I’ve pushed you away. I never quite know my own mind. Forgive me. If you can. But truly. We’ve – separated.’

Dora opened her mouth. The lawnmower chattered loudly by the hedge.

‘Come on, darling,’ said Elisabeth. ‘My love! Where shall we go? Shall we go out in the car? To lunch? To celebrate? Or a hotel? For a few days? Or here? I feel like getting drunk on something very good. You tell me.’

‘Nowhere,’ said Dora, taking Elisabeth’s arm gently.

‘Nowhere,’ said Elisabeth.

‘I want to stay here.’

‘Do you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And me? – I?’

‘You – You go back home. Elis – I don’t know. I wish the best for you.’

‘You’re not coming with me?’

‘No.’

‘Oh Dora, you don’t need to play games.’

‘I know. I’m – I’m not. I’m sorry.’

‘You really don’t . . .’

‘No.’

‘Come with me now,’ said Elisabeth more insistently. ‘I’ll make it lovely for you. I know I’ve . . . I’ve, I must have been difficult.’ Shame seemed to pass over her face. ‘But it will be different.’

‘No,’ said Dora, shaking her head, trying to smile at her.

‘I can’t stay here with you? Be with you? My love.’

‘No.’

‘Truly?’ said Elisabeth, her face motionless.

‘No,’ said Dora. Her lip trembled. ‘Really. No.’

All afternoon, she lay in bed. She lay in bed, dreaming, dozing, half-asleep, waking to moments of clarity and then tugging sleep to her again. The past came back to her. Cecilia, little red-headed girl in a mulberry-coloured smock dress, and her boys, her many boys, and Patrick, and the old Elisabeth, and Haye House, the sunbathing flagstones by the pool above Cantaur’s Fields with children lying in a naked heap against Furry the dog. The wobbling depths of that pool seemed to play to her as she lay in bed, reflected in passing refractions on her ceiling, and finally she rose sticky-headed and walked downstairs and fetched lemons from her vegetable rack to make a jug of lemonade for her granddaughters. The afternoon was still hot.

She boiled lemons. She played an old and much-loved recording o
f
Vivaldi’s
Gloria
on her record player, and attempted her arm exercises as she stirred sugar into water, the heat of the Rayburn scorching the already hot day. ‘Gloria, gloria,’ she sang to herself, noting that her voice warbled unpleasantly like an old lady’s.

She heard footsteps on the lane and automatically wandered to her front door to look through her gate, and glimpsed Dan passing. Tentatively, she called his name, having never used it to address him. He glanced up at her, his gaze expressionless.

Dora walked down the garden path. ‘I – I understand you helped to save my granddaughter,’ she said before she reached the gate. ‘I’m more grateful to you than I can say.’ Her voice quivered.

She opened the gate and pushed herself through the aura of faint hostility that surrounded him to give him a brief awkward hug, and to her embarrassment, tears instantly sprang to her eyes. ‘Thank you,’ she said, unable to look at him. His stiffness and his tang of unchanged bedclothes seemed designed to repel.

He shrugged.

‘I can never thank you enough.’

He said nothing. A flicker of awkwardness crossed his face.

‘Come in and have a drink,’ said Dora, and he paused for several seconds and then followed.

He picked up a wooden spoon and began to stir the lemons simmering on the Rayburn. ‘Do you have mint for this?’ he said. ‘Or a tiny bit of ginger will heat it.’ He lowered his head, focusing on the pan, and Dora added a kettle to the hob. There was something defenceless about his back, she thought, as she had thought before, unhooking cups from the dresser and recalling the teenage Benedict’s vulnerable torso as he stood poised to dive into the river at Spitchwick. Dan lowered the heat slightly on the ring, and then silently began to twist a bracket into place on a shelf beside the oven.

‘Do you have a Rawlplug?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Dora. ‘I think that’s been broken for about four years.’ She smiled. ‘I notice it every single day. As – as I cook. But I didn’t know how to mend it.’

He nodded.

‘Give me the tools you’ve got and I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘Proper job,’ he added in a Devon accent, as though obliged to inject mockery.

‘Oh thank you,’ said Dora. ‘What a relief that would be.’

He coughed. There was something about the blinking of his eyes as he coughed that reminded Dora of a different time, of the era that had come to her so vividly in her bedroom and still seemed to rock and settle in her mind as a film of memory. Patrick, she thought.

‘Where do you come from?’ she said.

‘All over,’ he said. ‘Told you, ma’am.’

‘But all over where?’

‘All over these miserable little islands,’ he said.

‘
All
over?’

‘Where do you want me to start?’ he asked, switching to what appeared to be a Welsh accent.

‘From the beginning.’

‘I – This’ll need some Polyfilla.’

‘Why did you come here?’

‘Why not?’ He shrugged, turning from her, and hammered into plaster that spurted crumbs while dust floated thickly on the air until he began to cough, his back arching thinly so that Dora could see the outline of his vertebrae through his T-shirt.

‘I don’t think you should be living in that caravan,’ she said gently. ‘If you’re still coughing like this.’

He shook his head.

‘Though I understand how expensive rents are.’

‘I’m not paying off some tosser’s mortgage for the pleasure of creeping round their worst bedroom while they resent me,’ he said. ‘I’d rather live in Turd Towers.’

Dora paused. ‘Turd Towers?’ she said. She gazed at the shape of his eyes. He coughed, and she watched again. She found heat, unaccountably, flooding to her face.

‘My caravan. May as well live in a swamp,’ he said cheerfully, reverting to his exaggerated Devon speech. ‘Chuck us that chair. It’s going to collapse if you don’t realign the leg.’

He smiled at her for the first time. She gazed at his eyes when they creased, at the grooved channel above his mouth.

‘Where were you born?’ she said suddenly.

‘In Devon,’ he said boldly, then he shrugged and averted his eyes.

She nodded. She sat down.

‘Why are you here now?’

He shrugged once more. ‘– Had to see it again.’

She steadied her hands on her knees.

‘Have you – have you been here before?’ she said, frantically searching for questions in her desire to maintain the flow of conversation.

‘I went to Exeter for a couple of terms. I couldn’t finance it.’ He shrugged again. ‘It was full of braying idiots anyway. No loss.’

‘Why – why there?’

‘I wanted to be near the moors. It seemed the way then.’

‘Oh –’

‘Had enough of buggering about.’

She glanced surreptitiously at the way he moved his mouth while his face was in profile, his expression as he closed his eyes sounding a note in her brain, the ghosts of gestures shadowing the room.

‘How long were you here for?’

‘No time,’ he said gruffly, staring straight at the screw he was turning.

‘But you felt – you felt – you had to see? Where you were born,’ she said, but her voice was beginning to weaken. She stayed sitting, although the kettle was whistling. He reached over and removed it from the ring with one hand while still working with the other.

She gazed at the table. She was trembling steadily. She looked up at him again.

‘You can stay here while you get rid of your cough,’ she said. Her voice was thin and seemed to come from a distance so that she heard it as though someone else was speaking. ‘If you’d like to? I have a spare room.’

Dan said nothing. He began to dismantle the broken chair.

‘It’s empty this summer,’ she said, but she didn’t look at him. Her hands were shaking uncontrollably. ‘Sorry. Could you – could you make the tea?’ she said, but she kept her face turned from his.

‘Coming,’ he said.

‘Did you always – always want to come back?’ she said, and again her voice seemed barely her own.

‘I’ve told you that,’ he said abruptly. ‘I wanted to look. I found out where.’

‘You started out in Wales?’ she said.

‘Why yes,
bach
,’ he said in a theatrical Welsh accent, as though to insert a distance, and she saw again the movement of his mouth. It stiffened as he stopped speaking. He kept his face averted.

Dora’s tears fell through her fingers and she watched them fall, barely registering what she was seeing as they gathered in the grooves of the table and formed beads on the wax.

‘Did they – tell you?’ she said, her heart racing. ‘I mean, where we – where she was?’

He tightened a mug hook on a shelf. He said nothing. The silence continued. Dora froze.

‘I’m sorr –’ she said eventually.

‘They wouldn’t tell me who,’ he said at the same time in a monotone. ‘I knew where. Where they’d lived. And then I found out who.’

‘Please do stay here,’ she said.

He was silent. ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ he said, and made tea. He placed a mug in front of her. She saw that his hand was shaking.

‘Sit down,’ she said.

‘I can’t,’ he said.

‘Sit down. Please.’ She held out her arms to him.

He stood stiffly. He wandered to the window. ‘I came up once to look at the house,’ he said. ‘I heard when she – they – were coming back.’

‘Did you?’ said Dora in a whisper.

‘I used to dream about her.’

‘She dreamed about you.’

He turned round angrily.

‘She didn’t,’ he said. ‘I thought –’

He stopped.

‘You thought what?’ said Dora softly.