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Elisabeth’s fig scent was detectable now in traces on an old paper hankie that Dora placed in a drawer. Her face was hot as she pressed her forehead to the window and she cried soundlessly, aware only of liquid spreading over her skin, its flow effortless. The hush and rattle of trees scored the river. An owl called. She was beginning to understand that she would never see Elisabeth as much as she longed to.

Having decided that perfection was attainable and that she would, through self-denial, aspire to it, Cecilia restricted her food consumption as best she could, aiming for a willowy slenderness that might attract the attention of Mr Dahl. She could never develop anorexia, she thought with a twinge of regret, because she found a state of even semi-starvation impossible, but she was encouraged when her periods became less regular.

Her childhood plans to become a prima ballerina assoluta had collapsed with a few frustrated pliés in a barn; she cantered across the moors on the ponies kept in the fields, but a precocious showjumping career had evaded her; even her novels, completed with love and great effort, had been rejected, and she had failed to provide for her family. She had not even been unwaveringly good like Thérèse of Lisieux. She sometimes thought she deserved to live as an orphan eremite in a cave in the Pyrenees, praying and self-mortifying. Now, she pledged, she would overcome her substandard early years. With her father to support, a married man to seduce, and an extraordinary career to wrest from the mud and youth that hindered her, only self-discipline and raw talent would carry her through.

Dora walked into the staffroom early the next day. She had been sick that morning; now she trembled with the empty-stomached after-effects. Jocasta, a history teacher, arrived in the staffroom balancing mugs of yogi tea whose smell currently made Dora want to gag. Elisabeth Dahl made Darjeeling instead and handed a cup to Dora, who was grateful. The headmaster, Peter Doran, arrived with a 1930s ukulele left to the school by a successful alumna. An old beatnik in crushed-velvet trousers, vaguely lecherous yet radiating a whiff of subdued misogyny, a glitter of homosexuality, he kept a series of largely blonde girlfriends in the headteacher’s house on the grounds, obscuring their existence with a nod at decorum, and ran the school at a lordly distance while his deputy attempted to impose the establishment’s comparatively few rules. Ignoring the timetable, Peter engaged Dora in an amateur musical conversation.

Cecilia made a timetable. She jogged in the mornings, or on the mornings she could force herself outside, almost retching with sleepy coldness as she rose and hobbled along the dawn-dark lanes. She ran up the steps built into the moss-covered wall that bordered the lane and led into a field high above, and there, ice sawing into her lungs, her cheeks fiery, she could see the valley, the blinking lights of others rising, catch a glimpse of Wind Tor and the moorland beyond, horses like rain in fields, thatches hunched, and here she held dialogues with James Dahl. Her hair blew behind her. She ran. Her heart thumped. She said fascinating things to him. He guided her. He was her mentor, her lover. She half twisted her ankle on frozen tussocks of horse dung; sheep clumped; cows lowed with terrible echoes and she was the only living human abroad: only she, she, a milkmaid in the fields, breathless and newly thin when she arrived back in the kitchen, where Dora sleepily stoked the Aga with Tom chatting beside her.

There was anticipation, because a miracle had entered her life. Her attachment to an admittedly unsuitable person anchored her. She went to school each day cushioned with hope, leaving behind disorder to enter a place of tampon sculptures and good-quality hash to collect symbols and evidence of glory.

‘You are looking beautiful, darling,’ said Dora one morning to Cecilia, unable to keep back the thought that came into her mind when she saw the blooming of her daughter, that period of transient splendour she had entered in which youth filled the outlines of womanhood.

Cecilia looked at the ground, her skin flooded. ‘Thank you,’ she said eventually. ‘I’m not.’

‘I think boys –’ said Dora, pausing.

There was silence.

‘
Boys what?
’ snapped Cecilia to fill it, keeping her face downturned.

‘Boys will want to go out with you.’

‘They don’t,’ muttered Cecilia.

‘I’m sure they
will
.’

Cecilia was silent.

‘Don’t you like anyone?’ said Dora, aware that she was taking risks.

‘No. I don’t know. No,’ said Cecilia, looking steadily to one side, frantically wishing to obscure her true attachment while unable to explain that boys showed no interest in her; that she couldn’t speak to them; that they viewed her as a scholarly and undesirable yet somehow unattainable oddity who fell outside their mating and companionship radars. And that much as she longed for understanding, and though she was at heart scared of these guitar-strummers and moped-owners grown so tall and stalky, she also scorned them. There was no Heathcliff, no Darcy or Rochester among the student body of Haye House. Whereas
she
: she lived in a rosy suspended future shortly to storm into perfection. She felt herself step with fawn-like delicacy into the car. She sensed omen and dazzle all around her: in the glare of sky, the blur of leaves; in the twists of hair that fell back off her face, in her fall of eyelashes, the speed with which her hand could write and the blood rush through her body. James Dahl’s eyes were almost perpetually on her through invisible psychic means. She conversed with him. She observed her own face in the car’s side mirror, and rearranged her features and radiated her soul until she saw in that miniature reflection pure beauty. He saw it too.

When she descended from the car at the top of the drive, her certainty was tempered by the reality of the school.

Zeno was, as so often, waiting for her on the step.

‘He
asked me how I was today
,’ she said.

Cecilia and Nicola gasped.

‘Zoom!’ said Cecilia, taking Zeno’s arm as they made their way to their little room, a former cleaning cupboard with a small window they had appropriated primarily for discussion of Mr Dahl. Here they perched on shelves to interpret the day’s developments. Here they screamed and giggled, planned and theorised.

‘Shhh,’ said Nicola. ‘He might hear on the way to the head’s house. It’s Tuesday morning.’ They collided in a whispering heap. ‘If one of us asks to go to the loo just before quarter past, we might see him. Pass a note. If not, we could look through the sixth-form loo windows at break.’

‘
Some
of us have already seen him today,’ said Zeno. ‘He’s wearing a greenish jacket, same tweedy stuff –’

‘His hair’s going to be cut soon. I bet you. I think the witch makes him,’ said Nicola, raising her eyes.

‘He looks like . . . someone from
A Room with a View
,’ said Cecilia.

‘He is quite old . . .’

‘Ancient, yes. Thirty-five. But he looks like a poet! A young war poet!’

‘He does not,’ said Zeno hopefully.

‘He’s so
beautiful
,’ said Nicola poignantly.

‘I know . . .’ said Cecilia, pain lightly threading her excitement. ‘What does he see in her?’

Zeno shook her head. ‘She’s a
hard cow
.’

‘She’s got streaks of
grey
hair,’ said Cecilia, fingering a red wave of her own until it caught the light, and feeling that same indefinable essence of youth flex through her as she stretched. She yawned a little, intentionally, delicately.

‘Do you think she knows? She’s guessed?’

‘She’d be
so
furious.’

Cecilia blushed in fear of exposure. James Dahl was painstakingly formal in the manner of the public school master he had been and would remain at heart. He limited his interaction with pupils to comments about prep or timetables; his wedding ring was prominent; at school events he sat beside his wife and exchanged solemn conversation with her, observed in a ferment of curiosity by his admirers.

Male voices could be heard overlaid by footsteps outside the cupboard. After a round of hushing, the girls silenced their spluttering and widened their eyes at one another. His voice alone, heard incidentally, was a gift that reverberated through a morning.

‘What’s today’s fact?’ Cecilia asked Zeno, more lightly. She coughed.

‘Well, I’ve got something . . .’

‘
What?
’ urged Cecilia.

‘His younger son’s called Hugh.’

‘Hugh . . .’ said Nicola.

‘
Really?
Are you sure?’

‘Yes,’ said Zeno, nodding. ‘I heard Jocasta saying, “Elisabeth’s son, Hugh”.’

‘Robin and Hugh,’ mused Cecilia. ‘Robin and Hugh Dahl . . .’

The Dahl family. James, Elisabeth, Robin, Hugh. Had there been cousins, cats, grandparents, friends? A family history, thrillingly mundane? Cecilia longed to discover his birth date and his middle name, the initial letter of which was ‘C’. She listed possibilities in a notebook containing observations, character studies, quotes both by and about James Dahl, and the scant biographical details attainable about a man who revealed so little. She could only glean information from her mother with the greatest of care, her friends plying her with questions impossible to ask but entertaining to discuss. The fact that this repository of knowledge was resident in her house was a source of painful pleasure, Dora’s friendship with Elisabeth Dahl adding further frustration. How much did Dora talk to the man himself? What was the nature of their staffroom conversation, if it occurred at all? She seemed loath to mention him. When she did, Cecilia feared her own stiff expression was transparent.

Mr Dahl was a complex and large-scale project. The more information Cecilia could absorb about him, the more she would symbolically possess him. Her book contained floorplans of his flat in Neill House based on sightings from the Mound and covert explorations of the utility rooms and showers on the floor beneath, which were movingly scented with baking and other people’s clean washing. In a moment of triumph, Zeno had ascertained his age through an overheard phone call at Neill House in which he had stated the year of his birth. But if no new facts were procurable, Cecilia and her cohorts burnished existing ones, their dialogue weighted with codenames and meaningful intonation. A glimpse of James Dahl was possibly more stimulating for the collectors’ victory it represented than for the experience of the sighting itself, the hasty dissemination of news either by note or hint through the group – descriptions of setting, gestures and clothing repeated and repeated – suffusing the next few hours with satisfaction, or with a poignant feeling of loss because he was at large yet unavailable.

After discussing Mr Dahl all day, the girls rang each other in the evening to discuss Mr Dahl. Cecilia curled up in the cold on the prickly seagrass of her parents’ room and watched her breath above her as if it made shapes of her words. Giggles ran down the stretched curls of the cord. She stifled laughter or exhilarating sessions of analysis as Dora called upstairs and her supper cooled in the kitchen.

At odd moments, Cecilia saw him and was stunned by the knowledge that beneath the commotion of her trio’s worship, she loved him. She studied tennis reports and, because he played the game, effortlessly absorbed the sport’s history. She read
Villette
;
The Professor
;
To Sir, With Love
. She tackled
Casino Royale
to immerse herself in the name ‘James’ and glanced at her younger brother’s Roald Dahl novels for the electric tingle that swarmed along the letters of their shared surname when glimpsed sufficiently obliquely.

She saw him walking on occasion with his wife over Cantaur’s Fields beside Neill House as she sat by the river, and she watched him bound in conversation, his gait subtly looser outside. Inexpertly, she imagined them having sexual intercourse. Elisabeth with her well-cut hair, her tailored shirts and skirts and strings of pearls, her authoritative manner that could subside into warmth, reduced Cecilia to a state of deference, yet in her near acceptance of her hopeless position she felt the stirring of determination. He, with his downcast gaze, hands deep in pockets revealing tennis-playing arms, his voice with its pleasing pitch, his diffident yet privileged manner; he was the finest thing she had ever encountered. She almost cried. She vowed. The others may be giggling schoolgirls, but she was a future wife. The world, which seemed charged with his name, swarmed with synchronicity that surely, yet barely believably, hinted at a future with him.

‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ said Dora at the end of the month. She was pale-faced as she entered Patrick’s pottery barn. He was sitting on his stool embellishing a grotesque-featured creature with claws which seemed guaranteed never to sell. Why does he have to make them ugly? Dora thought absently.

‘Yes,’ said Patrick, looking up, then returning his gaze to his clay.

‘It’s cold in here,’ said Dora, her voice weakening.

‘It’s OK.’

‘Do you want –’