You

by Joanna Briscoe

  As she made supper, she indulged the infatuation. Her mouth loose, her body heated and unstable, her vision glazed, she barely knew what she was doing as she boiled the pulses that had been soaking since the previous evening. She shivered with what felt like fever through coldness as she thumped out wholemeal pastry pizzas, sheer disbelief that her mind and body could, at least maddeningly intermittently, be desired by someone so sublime, making her mutter yelping clusters of words to herself and replay entire conversations in her head, prolonging the recollections with pauses for full gratification.

  When her family began to come in, dropping jackets, chattering, complaining, trailing books and paper piles and rubbish, the fantasies peeled away one by one as every particle of her was demanded. But when she turned, turned towards a shelf to fetch a pan, they slotted back in front of her vision for stretched seconds.

  Dora had barely known how to get through the later stages of her fourth pregnancy. In the car on the school run, she had breathlessly shunted the gear stick, her vision obstructed by steam and by the heads of shouting children, staring teenagers, a reading daughter, sheep clumped indignantly on the verges. She was irritated by the darkness of the tree-arched lanes alive with gnats. Newly sensitised, she could smell sour milk on the air. She noticed every chemical bin, every dead baby pigeon, every piece of corrugated iron pooled with puddles on the farm lane verges. She had cramp, and couldn’t find a playing position for her cello. Yet in retrospect the pregnancy appeared as an interlude of free childcare compared with the chaos of the first eighteen months of her baby’s life.

  Barnaby had been born in a rush at home, the midwife still stuck on a lane between a French coach lost on the way to Widecombe and a farmer’s van which had energetically reversed to avoid it, laming a pony. The National Parks sent a vet to the scene, exacerbating the traffic jam on the lane whose only landmark was a B&B sign above the hill descending to Ponsworthy. In the valley below, Barnaby emerged suddenly after eight hours of steady labour, assisted only by Patrick and a pair of brown-nailed lodgers, one of whom intoned about the home births she had attended while Dora wailed at the ceiling that she would never go through this again. The baby’s head appeared.

  ‘Come on, Dora, ’nother push for your midwife,’ the lodger chanted. The grey streak in her hair flopped over her capillary-reddened cheeks.

  ‘Fuck off,’ hissed Dora.

  ‘I’ve known plenty of women get uppity at this stage. Just relax. Lovely. Breathing . . . In, out now, in –’

  ‘Get her out,’ bellowed Dora, wild-eyed, but moments later her son emerged in a slither and she was smiling, panting, her flesh fiery.

  Dora began her maternity leave. She carried Barnaby at all times, feeding him assiduously, but he didn’t gain weight as her others had done with their powdery thighs, their doughy bracelets of fat.

  ‘He is harder,’ she said with a smile after a day of fitful feeding. His demands, his sleeplessness, his mouth on her nipple, blocked out the now more remote Elisabeth for whole hours at a time: a gift that he brought with him.

  ‘Each one is different, Mrs Bannan,’ said the health visitor, a woman palpably past retirement age who organised the Widecombe WI children’s Christmas parties at which Benedict and Cecilia had invariably succumbed to parent-shaming fits of giggling; and who negotiated the precipitous hills of the surrounding villages by bicycle, her face grimly set and her white uniform remaining spotless while her stockings were mud-splattered on arrival.

  ‘He seems to feed all day, but he’s not taking much,’ said Dora, who had become yet thinner.

  ‘He needs a bottle,’ said the health visitor with a jaw movement that reminded Dora of her mother.

  ‘Well . . .’ said Dora.

  She stoked the Aga with one hand, Barnaby hanging from her breast and grizzling while batting his head back and forth. She often sobbed. She cooked with him precariously tied to her chest since he cried if tilted towards an inanimate surface. She vacuumed with one hand, noticing the stealthy proliferation of animal and vegetable life that encroached: toadstools in the pantry twining from sooty sprays of mould at the base of the walls; birds and mice in the attic; cats slinking into the kitchen; foxes in the back garden.

  ‘Elisabeth,’ she murmured, almost hallucinating with tiredness.

  When Barnaby was two and a half months old, the lodger who had helped with the birth drifted in through the open kitchen door, as lodgers tended to do, bearing a home-manufactured tincture of feverfew. Dora, her spine ringing, plumped Barnaby into her hands and stretched her arms.

  ‘He’s lovely, isn’t he?’ she said as she relaxed her shoulders.

  ‘Here, here, baby boy,’ the lodger crooned, cradling Barnaby in the crook of her arm. ‘Whoopsy daisy, little star-gazer, there we are.’ With a cloudy pipette, she eased a few drops of the tincture into his mouth.

  ‘Oh I’m not sure about that,’ said Dora hastily, snatching her baby back and dabbing at the liquid with a muslin.

  ‘He’ll be great,’ said the lodger. ‘You’ll see. By tomorrow the small one’ll have a great big lion-man’s appetite, won’t you, little boy?’

  The baritone cough of a second lodger echoed outside among the foxgloves. A tall root vegetable gardener, a self-proclaimed Communist with a spray of red beard and laced boots, knocked on the open door.

  ‘Chopped a few logs for you, Dora,’ he said solemnly.

  ‘Oh thank you. Thank you, Gid,’ said Dora.

  The man nodded. He stood there, saying nothing. ‘Bea made this for you,’ he said eventually, and handed Dora a knotty blanket, faintly oily to the touch, that smelled of sheep.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Dora again. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you all.’

  ‘Bea says poultices,’ he said, nodding at the freshly grizzling Barnaby. ‘For bringing down a fever.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Dora again, and waited for him to leave.

  Since Barnaby’s birth, lodgers had arrived in the kitchen with gifts of astrological charts and offers of baby reiki; with papooses, dreamcatchers and a hand-carved rocking crib that, too small for anything but a premature infant, was appropriated by one of the cats; and Dora had accepted such offerings, largely unused, with grace. Moll and her boyfriend Flite, who rented the cottage behind the back garden, volunteered for babysitting, the sole gift Dora really desired. Among Dora’s older children, only Cecilia showed any interest in Barnaby, cradling him and kissing him repeatedly, but she was busy with her schoolwork and still the practical burden was barely alleviated.

  That night, Barnaby kept the house awake with his projectile vomiting. He was put on formula milk the next day by the health visitor, an edict that elicited a stream of concerned visits from lodgers bearing herb-based solutions, goats’ milk recommendations and cautionary anecdotes. When Dora went to bed while Barnaby lay in a new daze, she slept to escape her life, to escape Elisabeth.

  In September, Dora Bannan returned to work. During the early months of her maternity leave she had indulged in hazy visions of school life: fractious Barnaby metamorphosed into a dungareed doll who was virtually transportable in her cello case, cooed-over by pupils and staff, and who would mutely play a xylophone in a corner while she taught her classes; but as an experienced mother she knew such musings to be rooted in self-delusion. Part-time work was impractical with older children to ferry home and a full salary to earn, and Haye House’s liberal ethos and general turmoil simply did not accommodate the existence of babies.

  Elisabeth Dahl and Dilys, a geography teacher, petitioned the governors for crèche provision on Dora’s and future mothers’ behalf, but met with blanket refusals on financial grounds.

  ‘It’s really, really scandalous,’ said Idris, fingering his facial hair. ‘If there’s anything you need in the way of feeding or jiggling, piggybacks and suchlike, just give us a nod.’

  On what seemed the bleakest day of her life so far, Dora went from school to the neighbouring village of Wedstone to inter
view the childminder who lived in a bungalow surrounded by dying leylandia and plastic trikes. A mattress was propped against a wall, and the garden fence had been repaired with baler twine. Three small faces gazed through the window as she walked down the path and rang the doorbell to discuss hours, fees and nappy provision in a fug of cat.

  ‘Sorry,’ she muttered to Barnaby on the way out and rested her forehead against his cheek until he began to protest.

  When she arrived back at school, she hid in a music room some distance from the staffroom and cried. To her considerable embarrassment, Elisabeth came through the door. Dora turned her face and busied herself restacking sheet music.

  Elisabeth hesitated.

  ‘How can I help?’ she said.

  ‘You can’t,’ said Dora in a muffled voice, still rifling through paper. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I think it’s very hard to leave one’s child when one first returns to work,’ said Elisabeth with the even pitch that had frequently silenced Dora’s entreaties and could defeat the most aggressive dissenter.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dora with an unwanted sob, followed, to her mortification, by hiccups that wouldn’t stop.

  They both turned as another teacher entered the room. Dora moved away and tried to suppress the after-effects of her grief.

  ‘Can’t your – husband do some of the childcare?’ said Elisabeth quietly.

  ‘Oh,’ said Dora, now attempting to smile through the tears that smeared her vision. ‘I think and think about it, but frankly he’d be bloody useless. He’d – he’d play him songs all day on his blessed guitar, but there’s a risk he’d lose him.’

  ‘I see,’ said Elisabeth, raising her finely arched eyebrows.

  ‘The uselessness of men sometimes amazes me,’ said Dora, looking up at Elisabeth wryly and feeling inept under her dark brown gaze.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh Elisabeth . . . Talk to me.’

  ‘I am,’ said Elisabeth, her face motionless. Then her mouth softened.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You chose this route,’ said Elisabeth.

  ‘I did not choose to become pregnant.’

  Elisabeth merely raised one of the eyebrows. ‘There is some choice,’ she said eventually.

  Dora shook her head.

  ‘I miss you,’ she said.

  Elisabeth was silent.

  ‘So –’ said Dora then. ‘Celie helps when she can. She dotes on him.’

  ‘I hope so,’ said Elisabeth. ‘She’s a very nice girl.’

  ‘Thank you. She helps more when Little Women is on top of one of the book piles by her bed,’ she said, hearing herself astonishingly and outrageously speaking to Elisabeth as though she were simply another colleague. Again, she wanted to protest, or to beg.

  Elisabeth’s mouth twitched. ‘And the boys?’

  ‘The boys . . .’ said Dora, and thought of Tom and the frequently absent Benedict, drumming, skateboarding, reading obscure comics and sitting around jabbing at sticks with carving tools or watching the small grainy telly upstairs in a miasma of farts.

  ‘They come down to eat.’

  You’re beautiful, thought Dora.

  ‘Boys eat,’ said Elisabeth.

  Dora looked at her watch and remembered Barnaby, who was currently in a studio with the jazz ballet teacher Kasha in a free period between classes. Since his birth, there had been dirty sinks, stacked-up washing, children’s clothes requiring mending that were rotting against a pile of old horse tack in one of the utility rooms. Dora experienced a moment of vibrating panic that here was another mouth to feed, another body to save, another soul not to damage. God, she muttered in her head. Good God, please.

  ‘Could your husband’s family help with a nanny?’

  ‘Really I don’t think so. They help with the school fees. They have never offered more, though I sometimes think, privately, help me,’ said Dora, shivering, knowing that by now the Bannans were aware of the futility of funding their son and were too astute to feed a bottomless pit. ‘But –’

  But she had learnt never to depend on a man, or on anyone else.

  ‘Really,’ said Dora, looking down at her feet, then glancing at the other teacher, ‘for a while at least, I’ll have to work and use a childminder. She lives in an unpleasant house with expensive breeds of cat.’

  ‘I do,’ said Elisabeth Dahl slowly, ‘I do wonder at people.’

  You, Dora wanted to say, but could not say, you are the person who met my new son and said, ‘They are dull at this stage, aren’t they? Especially baby boys.’ With no apologies, no congratulations, no gift for the baby, only perfume for me. Your nostrils faintly flared with distaste. You, a mother of sons. And you wonder at people.

  As the term went on, Dora bit her nails and visited Barnaby at the childminder’s each lunchtime. Instead of masticating wholemeal samosas alongside her colleagues as they discussed performance innovations or Peter Doran’s sex life, Dora ate a cold slice of quiche alone on the lane on the way back, her hems dark with the hedgerows and her arms full of the shape of Barnaby.

  Elisabeth was habitually evasive.

  When the childminder was ill, Dora begged neighbours; she scrabbled for childcare, ringing home in her lunchbreak to make sure fragile logistics had somehow fallen into place; she occasionally considered asking Cecilia, whom she trusted more than Patrick as a babysitter, to stay at home for the day and look after the baby brother she adored, the teacher encouraging the pupil to play truant, but missed school days were viewed as catastrophic by her scholarly daughter and Dora could not bring herself to ask. Patrick became a better father the older his children grew, but the toddler stage simply failed to engage him.

  One lunch hour when Barnaby had gone down for his nap early, Dora took a walk outside the village to Elliott Hall before returning to school. The progressive artistic nature of the place still pleased her at some profound level, the hall’s barn theatre advertising ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and a children’s weaving lesson taking place in one of the medieval guesthouses across the courtyard. She thought, for a while, about Walter Gropius and his followers. She thought about all the locations to which the Bauhaus had moved, longing at some level to be in those places. She had discussed them with Elisabeth. She had been reading a biography of Bertrand and Dora Russell when she had discovered she was pregnant. There was a certain form of philosophical and artistic expression that had bloomed earlier in the century, and its ripples, she thought, could be found here. It was this, this far-reaching legacy that had brought her to this area and snared her, while the resident hippies’ less cohesive babbling washed over her. It linked her to Elisabeth, who had such similar interests and aesthetics, while Patrick did not. She felt, now, as though her brain had died since her fourth pregnancy.

  She crossed the courtyard and smiled at the heads bent over primitive looms. Smoke trailed across the walls from a bonfire behind the kitchen garden. A man, a timeless man in moleskins and wellington boots, prodded the fire and wheeled a barrow from a pile of branches.

  Through the arch on the further side of the courtyard the gardens rolled in rich severity. Berries and evergreens splashed bare lawns. A duck passed in the sky. She followed it with her gaze and wondered whether Barnaby had yet woken. She stood against the arch as a girl ran down the hill and into the arms of her mother, who scooped her up and left. Two figures rounded the corner by the azalea path. Dora watched her own daughter and James Dahl walk slowly along, their bodies in profile as they followed the curve of the gravel. They were so delineated by the late autumn light that the air around the folds of his trousers was almost vibrant with clarity. Cecilia’s hair was brighter, bolder in the muted glare. She wore no coat, Dora noticed, instinctively wanting to dress her. He was talking to her and she was listening. This, then, was who her daughter loved. It was suddenly ridiculously clear. Dora wanted to laugh and laugh; she felt unstoppable mirth, something close to hysteria: a surge of amusement that contained no trace of cruelty, and she leaned again
st the arch and tried to stop herself shaking. She found she had tears in her eyes.

  She had pictured a rangy, pretty-featured upper sixth-former, a quartet of candidates springing to mind. She had briefly considered Daniel the school tennis coach, who attracted a small following. She frequently wondered about Cecilia’s friendship with Gabriel Sardo. She would have assumed, if questioned, that Cecilia viewed her English teacher simply as the type of traditional pedagogue her funny old-fashioned mind seemed to crave.

  ‘Stop it,’ she snapped at her below her breath. ‘Don’t waste your love.’

  Dora watched Cecilia’s nervous lively gestures in the face of James Dahl’s silences. He looked notably older than her unworldly country daughter with her almost dangerously desired vision of a future.

  Dora gazed at this man who was loved by her love and loved by her daughter, and was unable, hard though she tried, to see what it was that they saw in him. How could they feel passion for him? He was too conservative, too tightly wrapped in a coating of privacy. His aspect was faintly colourless beyond the sooty contrast of his eyelashes, though he had, she supposed, a gentlemanly sort of male beauty. She preferred something more rough hewn, more expressive in a man.

  They had stopped by a rose bush and Cecilia was talking, moving her head and arms rapidly, dropping her gaze to the ground, all movement accelerated. He was nodding patiently. He was a man in his thirties listening to the prattle of an intelligent schoolgirl, mildly enjoying it even and awarding her the respect her enthusiasm deserved. He was a married father perhaps two decades her senior.