You

by Joanna Briscoe

  ‘This is my father’s pottery barn,’ she said. ‘A passage runs behind it. I used to think I’d find ingots down there, and that from the roof you could glimpse a secret garden. Full of Edwardian children.’ She suddenly heard her own voice emerging, warm and animated into the night.

  A laugh murmured in his throat. She walked close to him. She didn’t pull away.

  She opened the gate that led to the pond field. They began to talk as they had at Elliott Hall, the flow and intensity that had begun to develop there now deeper, flooding into the spaces and easing the sense of propriety. The night was still. She showed him places; she told him anecdotes; he laughed at what she said.

  ‘How very wild it is here, Cecilia,’ he said. ‘You could almost be living at Haworth for all the human company there must be.’

  ‘Just a few hippies in barns,’ she said airily. ‘I’d rather sheep. I’d rather parsons and women in attics and the odd ghost than those phoney beardies.’

  ‘I can see they may be preferable,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me about your childhood.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Very, very conventional. Nothing like this.’

  ‘No childhood is conventional,’ she said. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least. William Gaddis.’

  ‘Yes. But what was it like, really? Yours.’

  ‘I grew up – in a big brick house in Suffolk –’

  ‘A vicarage?’

  ‘It was once.’

  ‘How I longed for a vicarage. A vicarage boyhood!’ She dared herself. ‘You’d have to be a poet or a relic if you were born in a vicarage. And?’

  He paused. ‘I grew up there,’ he said, amusement tangling with possible discomfort. ‘Prep school. I boarded at seven –’

  ‘Malory Towers or Tom Brown’s Schooldays?’

  ‘There were no midnight feasts. Tom Brown.’

  ‘Poor you,’ said Cecilia emphatically. ‘Poor little Mr Dahl –’

  ‘James.’

  ‘I can’t call you James!’ She shivered and pulled her coat tighter.

  ‘You can here at a party, I think. I know your mother.’

  ‘Poor little James. Oh, I can’t! You are Mr Dahl.’

  ‘And I will die Mr Dahl. For eight years I was “Sir”. At Haye House, God only knows what else I am.’ He cleared his throat. His breath was visible in the air. ‘It was a mistake, essentially, Cecilia, coming here.’

  ‘Don’t you like Devon?’

  ‘Oh yes. Of course. The wildness, the moors. But my heart and home lie in Dorset. We still have our house there. We often go there to spend weekends with our boys.’

  ‘Do you?’ said Cecilia with disappointment, her memory spooling back to Zeno’s reports of the Dahls’ weekend absences.

  The fields were scored with sounds and airborne shadows. A fox ran past and disappeared near the hump where badgers lived. The sky was liquid in its darkness, sections of hedge rustling.

  ‘You don’t like it then,’ she said dully. She saw his ring again. Her intermittent surges of hope, so heady and assured, descended with equal rapidity into humiliation.

  ‘It was a brand of teaching – in Dorset – I understood. My wife – Elisabeth – enjoys the artistic element of her job, but I . . . I fear death of the soul here, frankly.’

  ‘Oh but I’m so glad you came!’ said Cecilia with spirit. ‘Truly I am. You saved us. What would Nicola and I have done? We couldn’t . . . you know, we couldn’t really learn before. I was so miserable. You saved our souls!’ She coloured, obscured by the dark.

  He paused. ‘If I feel I can have been of any help at all, then I’m gratified,’ he said, his voice audibly moved. She could see planes and shadows of him, tiny details of him palpable in sounds and scents beside her.

  He smiled, and threw his shoulders back and gazed up at the sky. ‘How vast it is,’ he said. He strode over the stream that ran in front of them with a slight jumping movement. Cecilia hesitated. He held out his hand and helped her as she landed, then let it go. She felt the brief passing of warmth of his hand on hers. They walked up the hill towards the sallow on the other side of the stream. Stray party noises drifted up there, smoke twining from the house.

  ‘From here,’ she said, catching her breath, ‘you can see the tors. Corndon Tor. Wind Tor. Ravens and kestrels nest there.’

  ‘Look at their immensity against the sky,’ he said. ‘I remember reading The Hound of the Baskervilles under my blankets and longing, longing to get out of that dormitory to see this strange wild place.’

  ‘Strange and wild,’ murmured Cecilia. ‘Do you remember the atmospheric tumult of Wuthering Heights? The pure, bracing ventilation? I love that.’

  A horse appeared almost silently beside her as a breathing shadow spilling on the night, then edged away. An owl flew over the pond. There was a silence. Her heart sped with urgency into the pause. She had a new sense, rising sharply through her body into a pitch of certainty that seemed almost to hurt her, that she could move him, attract him, possess him. The stars rolled in a dome over the valley. Carpe diem, she thought. Carpe noctem. Do what others would do. Which others? What?

  She felt sick. Nerves beat through her body. It hurt when she breathed in.

  ‘Come to the river,’ she said quickly. ‘The last part – of your tour.’ She blushed. She blessed darkness. To hazard all, dare all, achieve all, she quoted to herself, but she could not hold on to the words.

  He hesitated.

  ‘It’s down here,’ she said smoothly, almost laughing at her own boldness, and she descended the stone steps cut into the side of the wall that led from the field into the lane. They rounded a corner. His feet were noisy on the gravel. She heard the rhythm of his breath.

  Speedy was huddling before a fire beside one of the river field’s roofless stables with the teenage sons of a neighbour. They were stirring something in a pot on the flames, crouching in a clump of ferns, now dried, that reared and choked the entrance to the stable in summer.

  ‘Hey! Mr Dahl. Celie,’ said Speedy. ‘Try some of this.’

  He added liquid from a bottle that Cecilia recognised as her parents’ Stone’s Ginger Wine, and scooped some of the drink from the pan into one of her mother’s earthenware mugs. Cecilia took a sip, then another. It was thickly alcoholic.

  ‘Go on,’ said Speedy, dipping another mug into the liquid and handing it to James Dahl.

  ‘I’m just showing him round the grounds,’ said Cecilia unnecessarily.

  ‘We must be getting back,’ said James, tentatively consuming Speedy’s beverage. ‘This is rather good, Gabriel,’ he said.

  ‘It’s fucking great stuff,’ said Speedy. ‘More.’

  He took the mug, dipped it into the pan and brought out steaming liquid, spilling some on the grass and throwing his head back with uninhibited laughter as he handed it to James.

  ‘The river,’ said Cecilia.

  ‘Where is it?’ said James. He stumbled slightly; there was amusement in his voice.

  ‘Just down here,’ said Cecilia, leading him round a corner past the stable and climbing a gate. The voices of Speedy and his friends merged behind them, thinning into the silence of the field and the approaching fall of the river.

  ‘Where? I can barely see a thing.’

  ‘Down there,’ said Cecilia, lurching as she jumped off the gate. ‘In a cavern measureless to man.’

  ‘I see,’ he said slowly. ‘Is it, then, a savage place? Holy and enchanted?’

  ‘It has a mazy motion,’ said Cecilia.

  ‘I can’t beat you or even, possibly, match you,’ he said, listing as he climbed over the gate. ‘And you are,’ he said, his voice hesitant, ‘a fraction of my age.’

  ‘It’s only famous stuff,’ she said.

  ‘And Enid Blyton.’

  ‘Oh, I could quote to you very easily from The River of Adventure.’

  He stumbled. The earth was soft, matte
d with growth, netted with the streams that traversed the field.

  She slid on a slope of mud and let out a small scream. He caught her arm. She laughed as her feet sank into chilled liquid.

  He slipped again. Mud slapped against his trousers as he walked. Water pooled into her shoes. The river glittered, ribboning at the end of the field. Cecilia looked up and saw it, like a live entity waiting for them beneath the density of the trees. The shifting weight of him was beside her as he slithered and helped her stay upright. He skidded; he mildly cursed and laughed. Her pulse seemed to burn just below her ribcage. Carpe noctem, she reminded herself, gathering her resolve.

  The tumble of the river rose like mist. The orange-lit house crouched across the field. She wondered whether she could hear it boom, then realised that it was silent beyond the river’s rush. Diana was in there waiting for her, she thought. Her mother. Elisabeth. All sealed from them.

  She turned to him. The dampness of rock and chilled water lined the membranes of her throat.

  ‘There’s a little island,’ she said. ‘In spring it’s full of bluebells and wild garlic.’

  ‘It’s beautiful; so beautiful. Listen to the sounds. We could be by the sea.’

  ‘I think that at night sometimes.’

  ‘You come down here at night?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘On your own?’

  ‘Well yes. To think – I think about – people.’

  The water threw a glow of foam where it fell over rock into rapid curves. It streamed past the island that was almost tethered to the bank, caught in a pausing spiral where its path was narrowest.

  ‘You can jump on to it from here,’ she said. She raised her voice above the flow. ‘I always land on that rock first, and then sit against the tree.’

  He stood, a leaning angle bent towards the river, the stars and moon rocking on its surface.

  He jumped. He leapt in two movements, on to the stone, on to the island.

  She swallowed as he went: a streak shifting through the night away from her into the river, his shoe squeaking on the grass by the bank. She leaned as she stood, the wine rolling darkly in her head. She jumped.

  ‘Oh God,’ she said. She caught her shin on the stone, felt it clatter and tug; she tilted, then twisted herself upright and launched herself from the stone on to the island, tugging at grass as she landed.

  ‘Shit,’ she muttered.

  ‘Here,’ he said, standing and helping her. Water stormed around them, its surface close to their feet, its noise amplified.

  ‘God,’ said Cecilia.

  He didn’t hear her. She feared she would vomit.

  ‘Sit,’ he said, clearly unaware that she had hurt herself, and she lowered herself beside him against the birch that grew there.

  She swallowed. Her calf bone was ringing with soreness, layer washing over layer. Tears of simple pain had sprung to her eyes. Now they fell, invisible to him.

  ‘It’s a very mild, clear night,’ he said, his head tipped back against the tree as he looked at the sky.

  She nodded. She said nothing. She could feel blood running through her tights.

  ‘We should go back, perhaps,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said. Her voice wobbled.

  He glanced at her. ‘Are you all right?’ he said.

  She paused. ‘My leg,’ she said.

  ‘Your leg?’

  ‘I – hurt it.’ Her breath was uneven. ‘On the rock.’

  ‘Cecilia,’ he said. ‘Where?’

  ‘Here.’

  He lowered his face nearer her leg, widening his eyes in the darkness. He pulled out his handkerchief and laid it over her. He began to knot it. He stopped. ‘Tie it,’ he said. ‘Tie it tightly at the back.’

  ‘Oh God,’ she muttered.

  ‘Can you do it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We should go back,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she said as the wound pulsed beneath his handkerchief.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he said in a concerned voice.

  She nodded.

  She couldn’t speak. The pain in her leg was so strong, her emotions towards him so overburdening, that she couldn’t regain her breath.

  ‘How is it now?’ he said, the water’s movement loud beneath them. There was cool river mist in her mouth, flecks of leaf or insect in the darkness, the sharpness of winter against her lungs. The grass was cold. Her leg was swelling. She shivered with an uncontrollable tremor.

  ‘It hurts,’ she said, and she was relieved when she said it, and tears flowed hotly over her skin. She averted her face from him, her hair obscuring her. She cried in silence with pain and the misery of longing.

  ‘Does it hurt still?’ he said. He was holding her arm.

  ‘No,’ she said. Her voice was a shameful squeak.

  ‘Cecilia?’

  She was silent. Involuntary shivering still gripped her body. She was aware of it in the space of air between them.

  ‘I’m all right,’ she said. A sob rose through her, humiliating her.

  He put his arm round her. ‘Cecilia,’ he said, ‘you’re hurt.’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘We really ought to get back.’

  She shivered more violently. His arm was curved over her shoulder. She was pressed against his ribcage.

  ‘No,’ she said, tears flattening over her cheeks. She lay her face against him.

  ‘You’re crying,’ he said, looking at her.

  ‘Sorry,’ she murmured. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Does it still hurt?’

  ‘Yes. No.’

  Her tears heated her face, scoring her skin with irritation.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ he said in a gentler voice.

  ‘Because –’ she said. ‘Because –’

  She shook her head. Her hair was pushed upwards, rumpled against his arm as she moved. ‘I can’t say. I can’t say it to you.’

  ‘Can’t you?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Why?’

  She was silent.

  He said nothing.

  She waited. She rested against him, breathing him in. She trembled still, unable to stop.

  ‘I think I understand,’ he said.

  ‘Do you?’ she said after a while.

  ‘I think so,’ he said with no detectable emotion.

  She looked up at him. He gazed straight ahead. She looked again. He didn’t glance down at her. Her mouth was open; her face was prickling with the after-effects of tears, small starbursts of soreness tightening her skin. She could feel his pulse through her hair. She was aware of the smell of his neck, traces of others’ tobacco smoke, clean skin, mature male scents. He looked down at her for a fraction of time and pulled back from her slightly, jerking his body away from her. She shifted. She turned to him. He looked away. He turned back to glance at her and she murmured as their faces moved closer, and there was a noise from him, a vibration in his throat, the half-heard sound of relinquishment, and she pressed her mouth to his. For a moment, he was still. She drew in her breath.

  His harder lips moved against hers. His stubble burned her. His cool mouth was on hers; she felt the edge of his tongue; she moved her mouth and she lay down, lay on the grass beneath him. She opened her mouth further, the inner surface of her lip catching his teeth, his tongue, his taste, and she felt the hardness of his body, the pain of his coat and weight against her, the animate scents of him.

  ‘No!’ he said, pulling his head away from her. He jolted upwards with a clumsy rearrangement of his body, hurting her hip. ‘Absolutely not.’

  River air spiralled over her neck.

  She rose from where she lay, her vision seeming to follow her with a delayed movement. She murmured in confusion, her hair falling over her cheek. Fragments of dead leaf stuck to her coat.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said rapidly. He caught his breath. ‘Good God.’

  ‘No!’ said Cecilia.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, his voice
higher, strained. ‘I – it’s unforgivable.’

  ‘It’s not!’ she said, propping herself awkwardly, holding his arms.

  ‘Absolutely – unacceptable,’ he said with an abrupt shaking of his head.

  ‘No. Please.’

  He stood, his height an immense shadow above her. He bent over and reached firmly and almost roughly under her arms, making her stand. ‘I must take you back home,’ he said.

  Thirteen

  The Window Seat

  When Dora opened the staircase door, she heard her baby’s cry as a keening blanketed by floorboards. The sound entered her brain with a hiss of panic. She ran up the stairs. He might have been crying since she had last looked in on him, she thought, but no one else would dream of extricating themselves from the warmth and music to negotiate their way through the corridors and check on him.

  ‘Dora . . .’ called someone as she tried to find a light above the staircase. She heard the crash of glass breaking.

  ‘Barnaby,’ she called, guided to his cot by his bee-shaped nightlight.

  He was wet and hiccuping. She lifted him and pressed her cheek to the heat of his face.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ she murmured, stroking him.

  He gasped against her neck. She kissed the mucus on his face, tasting the salt of his tears, murmuring apologies and comfort to him. He had wet through his nappy.

  ‘Dora!’ called Patrick up the stairs, his roar a distant vibration. ‘More glasses?’

  ‘Go away,’ she muttered, her mind automatically roaming the pantry in search of spare glasses and landing on enamel mugs whose spider remains she wiped as she peeled the sleepsuit from Barnaby. Cannabis smoke edged along the corridor into the room and she questioned its effect on babies. Perhaps it would make him drowsy, she hoped guiltily.

  He held out his arms to her when she settled him back into his cot, initiating a chug of protest while the party thumped through the floor, and she moaned through clenched teeth, producing a sound of frustration that was, to her ears, satisfyingly demented. She repeated it in a less pleasing echo. She went back and stroked his head. He sat up. She considered taking him downstairs: an infant plump in a sleepsuit to hand around. She hesitated. She knew it would cause chaos.