You (9 page)

‘What do you want to tell me?’

‘I’m – I’m. I’m pregnant,’ said Dora.

Patrick paused. His hands stiffened on the animal’s torso. He began dousing it with water. He fetched more water and wrung out a cloth. Clay was smeared over the side of his chin, nestling among his hair.

‘Whose?’ he said, colouring.

‘No.
No
. It’s not like that. No. It’s –’ said Dora abruptly, blushing a fiery red. Tears came to her eyes.

Patrick turned his back to her.

‘Yours. Ours,’ said Dora. She felt her mouth tremble as she said the words. She feared she might cry. The glazing chemicals made her nose water. ‘Really, Patrick, there is no – no –’

He waited. ‘No –?’

‘No other man.’

Patrick hesitated, his jaw working. His mouth was set and remained motionless. Then its rigidity crumbled and he smiled.

‘There never has been –’ she said, tailing off, the hypocrisy of her words boring into her. She blushed again.

‘Ah, girl,’ he said warmly, as he had said to her a long time ago, and she pictured him coming over to her and holding both her hands and then embracing her with a big kiss on the mouth.

He almost stood, then sat back down.

‘Girl,’ he said again, manifestly at a loss for anything further to say. He stood up, stumbling a little, and embraced her.

‘Yes,’ she said, and for a brief hot moment there in the cold in his arms she almost said,
I love you, come and save me
, but she couldn’t because she had had what she had had.

‘I’m, I’m,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘I’m delighted. It’s crazy. What a thing. Are you sure, now?’

Dora nodded, not looking at him, and she thought about the hasty compromised coupling that had produced this state: the one time in months: a cunning trick played by fate and biology. It had been her resigned attempt to rescue a marriage. In truth, it had also been a competitive act, undertaken in both retaliation and perverse empathy because if Elisabeth was still unthinkably physically involved with her husband, then so would she be. She would do what she did.

Dora gazed at Patrick through the clear light that bore clay dust, and even though she could not anticipate anything more terrifying at this moment than having another child; even though she spent nights recalculating how many more lodgers she could accommodate if she put up partition walls in some barns and what their rent would come to, she gazed at his old shaving nicks, the clumps of clay stuck to his sleeves and fumbling skilled hands, heard his coughs and bodily rearrangements, saw decades of unbreakable patterns in a gesture, and knew that despite the reality of three children and the prospect of a fourth, she would never really love him again as she once had. His growing passivity made her want to howl in protest. She perceived him as forever the bawling penultimate child in a huge clan: forever a spoilt toddler born to a
droit de seigneur
charm, strutting through the semi-neglect endemic to large families. She would in effect have five children, she thought.

Patrick had never met Elisabeth, and Dora had carefully omitted to mention her name, assuring herself by rote on sleepless nights that a woman didn’t count, that kissing a woman did not amount to infidelity. Caught unawares, however, she could be felled by guilt; it seemed the strictures of her girlhood remained. The terror of discovery was always present.

Dora and Patrick made uneasy peace. There was an expedient return to life as it had always been. Her period of resistance lay in the air, never acknowledged, but viewed as a beast of unknown hue that had done its savaging and could still leap. Dora feared that Patrick accepted it, whatever it was, with a sort of twitchy knowledge of his own shortcomings and she despised him for failing to fight. He could not win, she knew. But she had married her fortunes with his, and the trajectory of life in that house and the knowledge that she was pregnant propelled her.

A new cynicism hung about her. She compared her bewildering nascent relationship with her daughter’s attachment. Cecilia’s obvious crush on an unknown object amused her. She saw her daughter – over-responsive, attempting to study in the car in the morning with a book held above Tom’s bed-knitted hair; tugging at her cuticles, and so carefully dressed in the limited number of outfits at her disposal – and thought that Cecilia’s experience of love was similar to her own only at a simple level of infatuation, but she felt protective towards her.

Other teachers conversed with pupils about gigs and riffs, parties and motorbikes; about beautiful mathematical equations, grotty classrooms, drama spaces and jazz syncopations. James Dahl did not. Cecilia considered that she had held three proper conversations with Mr Dahl in her life. One was at the top of the school drive while waiting for her mother to collect her, when he had congratulated her on her O level results. She had noticed minute details of his face up close in the outside light: the fissures of adult discoloration on his white teeth as fine as lines drifting across a film; the variegated pigmentation of his eyes with their almost-black dots (she thought how remarkable his simple humanness, his rods and cones and lachrymal glands); the lines radiating from the corners of his eyes when he smiled.

The next was at a local fête downriver that she, Nicola and Zeno had attended purely because his presence was rumoured to be assured. She had borrowed Gabriel Sardo’s telephoto lens for the occasion so that she and her friends could pose, pretending to photograph each other while focusing on a more casually attired James Dahl in the distant background.

She noticed a pair of long-haired pupils from the year below, instantly recognisable as the soulful variety of girl who would excel at English and who was similarly ruffled by his presence. One wore Laura Ashley while the other maintained the passive expression of a Victorian milkmaid, her lips parted, her hair draped becomingly over one cheek. Cecilia watched them in amusement and slight discomfiture. They loitered behind bushes; they shot each other glances; they kept within viewing distance of James Dahl. Competition sharpened her resolve.

‘Cecilia,’ he said later that afternoon when his path crossed hers, the light of sails carelessly playing on his face, his eyes a semi-transparent blue-grey behind the almost childishly dark lashes. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine thank you,’ she said, blushing. His face was lightly tanned, turning his hair fairer. She saw golden stubble like sand on his jaw over his summer-coloured skin. She found him almost unsettlingly beautiful. He was discreet, she thought. In his reserve, he was statue-like; in the multi-coloured tones of his voice, he was human. The ear followed his voice.

‘I was just musing upon various descriptions of events such as this in literature,’ he said.

‘Oh!’ said Cecilia, her mind spinning into a search for references. ‘
Elizabeth and Leicester/Beating oars
,’ was all she could think of to say in a mutter, swallowing his wife’s name in embarrassment, but he didn’t appear to hear.

‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘I hope you enjoy yourselves,’ he added as he walked on, and she glimpsed the hardness of his arm muscle pressing against his shirt as he turned towards Elisabeth who was accompanied, in a satisfying biographical touch, by a teenage boy likely to be the younger son.

Mr Dahl was not so old after all, Cecilia had thought for the first time. Thirty-six. It could have been twenty-six or forty-nine as far as she was concerned: a meaningless adult figure. Seeing him with his shirt ruffled by the water breeze, with no tie, his hair somehow informal in its sun-touched movement, he seemed not age itself, but simply a male figure imbued with hormones and body hair and effortless height. He laughed at something Elisabeth said and they looked together at a spot in the river.

In their third conversation, the one most treasured, most dreamed of in advance and then so lovingly recollected that the reality had almost disintegrated, he had stopped her one morning after class. ‘Cecilia, could you stay for a moment?’ he said matter of factly.

Her heart had hammered as she conjured all possible misdeeds on her part. Simultaneously, she wondered whether he was about to tell her that her literary talent now needed careful nurturing.

The dark trees swayed. A lark was out there, she fancied in her endless repetitions of the scene; an engine on the drive – whose? Two boys, Jason and Diego, were talking outside the door in their inauthentic London accents.

Mr Dahl wore his cream shirt, perhaps partly linen. He barely looked up at her.

‘Cecilia,’ he said calmly, gathering together the pens on his desk in a single sweep, then straightening his papers in one experienced movement, ‘you wrote an admirable essay for me here, thank you. I think we should talk about university.’

‘Oh!’ said Cecilia. ‘I . . . yes.’

‘I would suggest you should be thinking about Oxbridge.’

Her pregnancy progressing to the point where she could no longer conceal it from her employers, Dora walked up the stairs towards the sheet-music cupboard. She kept to herself, frequenting the lesser-used corridors. As she approached the landing, she heard the voice of Elisabeth Dahl, so freshly lost to her even as she was still resisting her. She paused before she turned the staircase corner. Elisabeth stood beside the opened door of a stock cupboard, her leg and a section of fitted grey wool skirt visible to Dora. She was speaking to Cally Cooper, one of the science teachers, her voice rapid and lightly dismissive. Elisabeth’s calf in its sheer grey stocking – and it would be stockings, Dora was sure – was almost as familiar to her as her face, and the shape filled her with pained desire. She leaned against the wall. It was almost unbearable.

‘But,’ said the science teacher, ‘we haven’t really discussed our last discussion . . .’

‘I must love you and leave you,’ said Elisabeth still rapidly but in a richer tone Dora recognised, a tone Elisabeth had used when she had murmured words that merged into kisses through her hair. Elisabeth’s hand reached out towards the science teacher’s as she turned away, the familiar nails glancing stubbier fingers.

Dora stood in the stairwell and had to catch her breath. She cursed the alien inside whose existence had confirmed for Elisabeth the unsuitability of their liaison, turning her cold in one moment, and then apologised to it, stroking her abdomen.

‘I should have thought, then, that you have made your choice,’ Elisabeth had said when Dora, floundering and stuttering, had broken the news of the pregnancy to her. ‘You’re a family woman to the end, my Dora.’

‘It’s not like that –’ said Dora, but feebly, still ambivalent, aware of the rounded ache of the tears undoubtedly to come.

‘The fact is there!’ exclaimed Elisabeth richly. ‘Let’s not be naïve. And . . . and, really, we can’t continue to behave like schoolgirls sneaking into corners when we have families at home. Frankly, it’s beneath my dignity.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Dora and yet already it was a sacrifice she would willingly have made: she would now have crawled into those hiding places, just to be kissed by this small assured woman.

She stared at the legs of Cally, who lingered as she closed the cupboard door.

The small room set aside for Oxbridge English was blue, curtained and abnormally unscuffed. There Cecilia began to study twice a week in the first term of the upper sixth. A teacher named Jane Greaves held the Tuesday lunchtime session, while James Dahl taught for ninety minutes every Thursday. In that room at the top of the school, Cecilia, Nicola and Annalisa studied alongside Lilith, the sneering and notably intelligent daughter of a retired actress and an accountant; and Nick, a German-speaking, oboe-playing self-appointed intellectual who resembled a middle-aged man in all but complexion. The teacher and five pupils sat around two desks pushed together while children shrieked operatically, rollerskated and sulked on floors below. The room, used for occasional staff or parents’ meetings, was furnished with a small sofa and lamp, a framed Klimt in place of the usual batik hangings, and a ficus instead of the cheese and spider plants that swamped bedrooms and corridors beneath.

If she was happy in the A level English classroom with its trees floating to Mr Dahl’s voice, now she was ecstatic. The experience was almost disturbingly joyful. During the period in which she, Nicola and Zeno had stalked, hidden, analysed, and collected sparse information, she had become accustomed to relying upon her imagination. Now she had been granted two double classes and one extra ninety-minute session a week with James Dahl himself. Amidst such excess, the desert that was the weekend came as something of a relief in the opportunity it afforded to digest and anticipate anew.

At home, Gabriel Sardo, that barely known boy from a frightening stratosphere, loped around the house and slept in the bottom bunk in Tom’s room three weekends in four; Patrick no longer stayed the night in his pottery barn; Benedict had left school and appeared to be doing very little; Dora was exhausted; Cecilia walked the moors in order to talk to James Dahl in her mind, and otherwise she confined herself to her room.

By Monday mornings, she was dazed with reading, glutted with thoughts of Mr Dahl.

‘Cecilia,’ James Dahl often said. ‘What do you think?’

And, sitting feet or even inches away from him, able to see the hairs on his knuckles, smell the cleanness of him, she spoke.