You

by Joanna Briscoe

  ‘What else do you read, Cecilia?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, thinking, feeling the soaring of daring inside her. ‘Cosmopolitan and Enid Blyton.’

  ‘Surely not!’ he said.

  ‘I do,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I can’t read any more, except for that. My head is spinning. You should try some.’

  ‘I believe Blyton’s novels are said to contain compelling plots,’ he said drily, and she exhaled through her nose in amusement.

  ‘They’re fantastic tales of thieves and smugglers, and deceitful schoolgirls, and dogs who can virtually talk and spiteful letters and things like that,’ she said in a rush. ‘They’re almost gothic in their sensibility. I love them.’

  ‘I see,’ he said, pausing as though digesting the information. He glanced away again, lowering his head with the movement that made him appear to be excusing his height or his maleness, as though he were scrupulously aware of some traditional code of etiquette, and it occurred to her with surprise that he was shy. He seemed self-possessed; he appeared so experienced and quietly authoritative in class, his influence reining in some of the wilder excesses of the school, that the possibility of self-consciousness underlying his reserve had never occurred to her.

  ‘And Cosmopolitan magazine?’

  ‘Cosmopolitan is vaulting rubbish. I love it.’

  ‘My my,’ he said.

  ‘Is lunch – What’s the time?’ she said, looking at her watch in her determination not to be a burden to him.

  ‘I must be going,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and she stood awkwardly, waiting for him to go, half-turning away to indicate her independence.

  ‘Enjoy your reading,’ he said, and he walked down the curved slope towards the hall. She stood on the higher section of garden and watched the back of his jacket, his old-fashioned gravy-coloured cords disappear through one of the arches, his hair a pale gleam. She leaned her head against a tree. She breathed deeply. She let five minutes pass, and then ran, sporadically leaping along high-hedged empty sections of the road, back to school.

  Nine

  February

  Agitated with nerves, Cecilia made herself visit Wind Tor Cottage to see Dora before she started her radiotherapy. Since Patrick’s death, the cottage had been Dora’s sunless retreat, the cello a dark gleam in a dusty corner, crockery gathering spiders on shelves, while Wind Tor House had been let out to lodgers, Dora wearily chasing late rent.

  ‘Oh!’ Dora said, looking up. She was stirring something in a pan.

  ‘Nettles . . .’ said Cecilia.

  ‘Yes. I thought I’d try it again. Remember Food for Free?’

  Cecilia screwed up her nose a little, then smiled.

  ‘I thought you’d be working at this time, darling,’ said Dora.

  ‘I need to. But . . . I need, want to –’

  Cecilia stopped.

  There was something about Dora’s mouth set thinly above a chin with a softening jaw. Something there. A glint of defiance, a coating of self-protection which momentarily halted her.

  I came in to bring you this, she almost said, placing a mother-pleasing tin of Russian tea on the table, but she wouldn’t let herself say it. There was a small silence. She felt, even in the depths of her pity, the old helplessness, the compromised fury rising up towards the person she had once loved more profoundly than anyone.

  ‘You’re looking a bit better,’ said Cecilia, and she swallowed, and tried to disguise the swallow with a smile, and then she made herself stretch out and put her arms round Dora, hoping that Dora wouldn’t feel that she was trembling. ‘How are the scars?’

  ‘Oh, still – still a little sore.’

  ‘Are you taking all your painkillers?’

  ‘Yes. I’m healing up nicely. Mr Kremer did such a fine job.’

  ‘I’m so glad,’ said Cecilia. ‘I’ll take you to your radiotherapy on Monday.’

  ‘Oh no no! I’ve got this girl to do that. Katya. Thank you. She mows the lawn and shops too.’

  ‘God! You didn’t need to employ someone –’ said Cecilia abruptly. ‘Isn’t that expensive?’ She felt her skin flush.

  ‘Oh no. I couldn’t possibly –’

  ‘I’ll take you to the first session and then we’ll discuss it. I wouldn’t dream of letting someone else –’ said Cecilia, shaking her head. ‘How’s the Tamoxifen?’

  ‘Fine thank you. Just a very little bit of bleeding.’

  ‘OK. Good.’

  Dora glanced at her.

  ‘You know,’ Cecilia said, swallowing, ‘one of – the reasons I came here. I wanted to look after you –’

  ‘Thank you, darling. You know I’m more grateful for that than I can say.’

  ‘I’m glad. And –’

  ‘Ari’s marvellous job!’

  ‘Yes. Ari’s marvellous job.’

  Dora paused.

  Cecilia breathed slowly to relax her throat in an attempt to normalise her voice.

  ‘But I also –’ she said eventually. ‘I also came because I needed to come back; I . . . because I have to know what I can, whatever I can in my life about – about her.’

  Dora paused again.

  ‘You know that’s not a good idea.’

  ‘That’s what you think. Yes, I know that,’ said Cecilia, still gently. She struggled against tears.

  Dora was silent.

  ‘But – Please . . . Please.’

  Dora shook her head. ‘You know, you know that I think all this thinking and searching only brings heartbreak, Celie,’ she said, and her voice faltered at the end of her sentence. ‘I think that very strongly. You’re given to it. It’s all very old now . . . all this.’

  ‘Please tell me what you remember,’ said Cecilia. Patrick’s grandfather clock ticked loudly in her ears.

  ‘I’ve told you perhaps a hundred – more – times what I know, which is so very little, Cecilia,’ said Dora, shaking her head, the tremor that so easily scratched her voice rising to the surface.

  ‘What happened?’ said Cecilia directly.

  ‘I –’ said Dora, and she took a step backwards. ‘I can’t remember everything.’

  ‘You must be able to,’ said Cecilia. She drove a fingernail into her own forearm.

  ‘I can’t remember,’ said Dora. A skin of near-incomprehension formed like a cataract over her eyes.

  ‘Please, Dora,’ said Cecilia, holding her mother’s shoulders, and her heart seemed to rise into her voice. ‘You know I’ve spent a – lifetime suffering over this. I blame myself. But I have to . . . to ask you.’

  Dora smiled blankly.

  ‘I had my baby,’ said Cecilia, ploughing on with audible desperation. ‘You arranged the adoption. The de facto adoption. “Informal” doesn’t even – even cover it. There are lots of bits of information missing, aren’t there?’

  Dora shook her head.

  ‘I just want to know now who took her and what her chances of a happy life were.’

  ‘You want to do investigation? More investigation work?’ said Dora weakly, clearly struggling for words.

  ‘Of course I do,’ said Cecilia. ‘Of course I have – always. It got – nowhere. But now I’m here, it seems more pressing, more – possible.’ Tears sprang to her eyes. She blinked them away impatiently. ‘I want to find her, to contact her. I want to love her, to say sorry to her.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ said Dora, shaking her head.

  ‘I do,’ said Cecilia.

  ‘What would that do to your daughters?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . I don’t know.’

  ‘Exactly. It would be dreadful for them, Celie.’

  ‘I don’t think so –’

  ‘I want to protect them,’ said Dora.

  ‘You hardly even knew them for years,’ said Cecilia. She breathed deeply. She calmed her voice. ‘Did you?’

  ‘It wasn’t my choice,’ said Dora, hesitating. ‘This isn’t the way it’s going to be, is it, Celie? That you’ve moved here and you’
re going to start raking all this up again?’

  Cecilia paused minutely. ‘Just tell me what she looked like.’

  Dora moved through the cottage, stumbling determinedly towards a leaf fallen from a ficus. She clutched other leaves in her hand, tugged them from the stem, went to pour water, glanced out of the window.

  Cecilia made herself look at Dora’s back. A urine container sat on the window ledge, and Dora’s hair was thinning. Cecilia moaned very faintly.

  ‘You saw your baby,’ said Dora eventually. She opened her mouth, then shut it.

  ‘For a few minutes,’ said Cecilia.

  Dora said nothing.

  Cecilia waited. Dora dropped her gaze.

  ‘Please,’ said Cecilia.

  Dora hung her head. She stood still, then went and sat in the kitchen.

  Cecilia gazed at Dora for a moment, pain softening her eyes, then turned, walked rapidly to the door and opened it, and Dora let her go in silence.

  Cecilia ran to the house across the vegetable garden, hearing the phone ringing loudly through cold air, and when she spoke to Ari, she told him nothing of what had just passed, because she couldn’t, though tears ran down her face. She was so distracted that he noticed and asked her what was wrong.

  On the Friday of half-term, Cecilia drove her oldest daughter, the red-headed, focused Romy, to St Anne’s girls’ school, established almost a decade previously on the grounds of what had once been Haye House. While still in London, Romy had claimed that she would accompany her family to the bog-stinking sticks only if she could attend the expensive and academically selective St Anne’s, and had secured herself a scholarship with daunting efficiency. Her parents had eventually capitulated, with some reluctance. The middle child, fifteen-year-old Izzie, scorned the very notion of St Anne’s and chose the local comprehensive, while the youngest, Ruth, attended Widecombe Primary.

  St Anne’s rose before Cecilia like a polished, stagy version of Haye House, the buildings and grounds of the now defunct progressive school somehow rendered more aged and august with money. Large urns of flowers flanked the entrance, where once there had been purple-painted steps and twisty fibreglass sculptures. CCTV cameras glinted discreetly above the parapets. Cecilia felt diminished. She was, to her dismay, trembling as she drove into the car park, as though her mistakes glared, known to all; as though she had no power, even in adulthood, driving a car with her daughter.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ said Romy, glancing at her.

  Yet she was stronger now. She felt momentarily grateful for the authority age afforded and the knowledge it bestowed, however fallible. She caught sight of herself in the car mirror as she parked and saw in that concentrated slot of reflection how she had changed: her face more refined and her cheekbones more prominent as she had grown through her thirties and then into her early forties, her skin discomfitingly more tired, more shadowed round the eyes, her hair so much darker and browner, the scattering of freckles over her nose quite gone, and that wandering, receptive ability to blush and reflect every indignity thrown at her now mercifully almost controlled.

  At seventeen, she thought, she had been notably naïve.

  The path winding through a cluster of conifers – now taller and darker, as befitted the dark and crenellated nature of St Anne’s – was where she had first noticed James Dahl. She had barely let herself think about him over the last years. And yet, she mused, perhaps, perhaps after all she was always thinking about him: always, some tiny strand of her mind flickering with a current that was him.

  A deputy head in A-line taupe shook Romy’s hand, introducing her to members of staff before classes began the following Monday, but Cecilia couldn’t see the sombre formality as anything but a pantomime. The parquet so carefully restored was still covered in her mind with skidding durries and Tipp-Ex, the library they passed where uniformed girls would work with hair-twitching concentration was still the place where pampered children in orange cords smoked and launched themselves off bookshelves. Mr Dahl walked past in her mind, tall and serious, hazed with magic to his observers.

  They were led outside.

  ‘Oh look. How wonderful!’ said Romy with newly patrician vowels, pointing at an art studio, and Cecilia, somewhat alarmed, could perceive her becoming already, in the space of less than an hour, a private school girl.

  The immense geodesic dome that had once bubbled up like a fibreglass buttock in the middle of the grass had simply gone, the sweltering boom of its drama sessions atomised, leaving no traces at all on the lawn. The flagstones on which teenagers had sunned themselves quite legitimately by the pool instead of attending classes now bore railings and notices. Here Furry the school dog, edgy on his diet of tossed vegetarian sausages and magic mushrooms, had humped legs and suffered hairstyles. Now only a pigeon nodded and a recorded string concerto floated through a window. Few teachers were there among the administrative staff until lessons began on Monday, but the two or three who appeared summoned the memory of Elisabeth, Cecilia thought, catching a combination of well-cut wool and silk on a glimpse of back through a door that instantly made her recall the wife of Mr James Dahl.

  Some of the staff, however, seemed young, young enough to be in their early twenties. Cecilia skimmed the hall as she did automatically when she was in a new environment, trying to find the one who slotted into the shadowy outlines of the child – now woman – she called Mara in her mind, following a spool of conjecture. Because, it seemed to her, the only route to sanity was to pursue those fantasies.

  Her daughter could be anywhere, she knew. She could be anywhere. But she could be here, in the area where she had disappeared. She could have come back. She could have been here all the time. She was a trace of a person out there somewhere in the world just slipping her grasp. Cecilia was, forever, returning to Mara both in her mind and in notes she scrawled when she was in her study and meant to be working. It kept that imagined girl alive for her.

  Cecilia saw her in cow-pitted meadows, in streets; she saw her hiding in bushes, or swimming in seas, or drowning while she, her mother, called out in despair; she saw her running away from her, turning to wave once more, disappearing across the fields, across the horizon, another horizon, and another, while she followed and followed.

  She saw her in the pub. There was a barmaid in Widecombe who was, surely, around the age of twenty-three, who had a fresh-skinned eagerness and sensitivity, a sweet country look that Cecilia associated with a different strand of the girl Mara she so strongly imagined. There was a teacher at Ruth’s school: a young teacher, just out of college, and Cecilia saw in her red hair remnants of the old colouring, and wondered whether her features bore something of her own. There was the girl who lodged near Widecombe and drove and cleaned for Dora who was about the same age, but whose looks were quite wrong.

  I want you to know that I didn’t give you away lightly, she wrote later in Mara’s book: the book she kept for that first, unknown child, as she did for her daughters Romy, Izzie and Ruth: books recording birthdays and events and observations. But while the others’ albums were filled with photographs and dated entries, the book for Mara was almost entirely composed of speculation. I want you to know that, she wrote, as she so often wrote to her, marking dates and mapping the life she imagined for her, explaining the attempts she had made to track her down, in uncontrolled fragments of writing that managed to disturb her as she wrote them.

  You have grown up believing your mother abandoned you. That’s what I can’t live with. I need you to know the mistake that this was. I want to look after you. I write to you every birthday, but there’s nowhere to send those letters. I’m trying. I’m trying now. I will go on and on and on.

  When you were born, you turned to me for milk. That’s all I could give. And I didn’t even give you that. Milk.

  Ten

  The Garden

  Was it Barnaby who tipped her existence so far into chaos that she had done what she had done? Dora wondered later. Would Cecilia’s baby ha
ve had a different future if it wasn’t for Barnaby? Was life really so random? But an image of Elisabeth always entered the equation when she asked herself the question.

  ‘I would now; I would, I dare,’ Dora had wanted to say to Elisabeth, but it would have amounted to a begging, and she continued to ask herself whether, if Elisabeth attempted to seduce her fully, she would take fright. The idea of an illicit sexual liaison with another woman was so intriguing, she could barely stop herself from ruminating upon it, its repellent aspect enhancing the anticipation. But guilt and fear still dominated.

  Patrick had recently taken to enquiring what she did during her lunch hours, and who her colleagues were, and who she had befriended, his questions apparently casually asked while betraying a tinge of aggression. Dora listed names, Elisabeth’s always linked to her husband James’s, and attempted to fashion anecdotes of them, as though life at Haye House were nothing but a soap opera with a cast of eccentrics whose chief narrative focus was Peter Doran the headmaster. She was, she thought, mid-story, no actress, and yet lies, once started, seemed to proliferate. Not lies, she hushed herself, hearing in her mind the voice of her mother. Omissions.

  And still, Elisabeth occasionally turned to her with the full heat of her gaze, or touched her in passing, or said, quietly imperiously, ‘Come here.’ She stroked her even in public in the guise of relaxed bohemianism, and on rare occasions collided with her in a corridor and found a private place where they kissed, cool-mouthed and urgent.

  What, thought Dora in the evenings, if Patrick were to discover? Discover the kisses, the fantasies that infected Dora’s mind like a disease? What if he were to stumble, somehow, upon proof? Could he gain custody of their children? Of her unborn even? She stroked her stomach with a passing of nausea. He could never cope, but the clannish Bannans would close ranks, wielding wealth and family morals, the idea so terrifying to Dora that she pictured herself killing them one by one with a rifle in defence. She looked askance at Patrick and her mind hardened. She had never intended to be distracted. She had not meant to fall. She was, after all, a married woman and a mother. Patrick was either absent in his studio, or there, there, doggedly remaining in the kitchen as though placing himself as an obstacle to her private life. He was suspicious, watchful, and a streak of unpleasantness began to show as it never had before, making Dora even more careful. Or was she, she asked herself, simply deceitful?