You

by Joanna Briscoe

  ‘We – mustn’t do this,’ he said, opening his mouth against her hair.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, her face scraping against his stubble, distant panic rumbling beneath her elation. She wondered, unable to regulate her breathing, whether she might have to struggle away from under him after all, to run away and hide.

  ‘I was looking for you – some part of me –’

  ‘Me too,’ she murmured, exaltation hitting her again.

  ‘As I walked along the corridor. I knew I shouldn’t –’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘I – shouldn’t,’ he said, pulling his head back, gazing at her for one moment, his hair disordered, his mouth slack. ‘Absolutely –’

  ‘You should, you can,’ she said, pressing her mouth to him, stopping his words. ‘You’ve already kissed me,’ she whispered. ‘Already.’ And he kissed her for a long time, long and focused, his hand moving over her body towards her hips, and her heart thudded; her body was liquid; she felt arousal move through her thighs in rising heat, spreading its tendrils upwards. Vague sounds from several floors below came to her through some outer skin: doors, passing footfall. A stereo thudded across the night from one of the boarding houses. She wondered vaguely where his wife was, but Elisabeth Dahl was a mere idea.

  ‘You can,’ she repeated almost coquettishly, laughing into his ear and feigning confidence so that she pressed her hand on his chest, lowering him further on to the small sofa, its fabric already blessed, and she lay across him, feeling the stretch of her body, knowing the power of the smoothness of the skin that was gradually exposed, and she kissed him from above, aware that what she felt was the hardness of his penis, and with the very idea – she removed herself mentally at that moment, saw him as her formal English teacher in his corduroys with his stack of Chaucer essays – a kind of delirium hit her. Her head raced. Triumph, rapture after the weeks of abandonment rose inside her, and she kissed him and murmured into his face again, telling him soundlessly that she loved him, she wanted him, she loved him.

  His hand skimmed her breast.

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ he said.

  He was moving faster, his body wrapped with hers. Clothes were coiled or abandoned; the top she had worn under wool now snaked and caught above her bra. With one hand she started to undo his belt, the recalled images lending her certainty laced with self-consciousness, and she felt a flicker of hesitation in his response, but the pause was followed by a quickening of his breath. He said her name. The excitement of that fired her brain. She felt small, and carried by events, and riding over fear. He breathed. He burrowed into her neck. His hands were between her thighs.

  She saw the concentration of urgency in his face: a play of expressions unknown to her. She wanted him inside her now with a fierce longing, and then a returning feeling that she might suddenly, after all, in such excitement, push him away in fear: she was being carried down an icy pitch and saw the ground sliding from her and knew that she would only go faster. It was inevitable. She felt him hard against her, felt him on her thigh, the hollow of her hip.

  ‘Yes,’ she kept saying in his ear, ‘yes.’ And when she said it, she felt an acceleration of his desire, a letting go of last restraints.

  ‘Yes?’ he murmured finally into her shoulder. ‘Cecilia.’

  She hesitated minutely. ‘Yes,’ she said, the sound vibrating against his neck where his skin was damp.

  His hand was gliding over her pubic bone, making her gasp and move. She could feel her wetness, the new heat growing as he stroked her. She was profoundly shocked that he was touching her there. She pushed against his hand, rubbing against him harder. She felt as though her body was a separate entity, swollen and floating, her legs moving instinctively further apart.

  ‘Yes,’ she said again, encouraging him, and she felt the hardness nudging against her, utterly alien and surely large, larger than anything she had conceived of in her graphic yet hazy imaginings. His mouth was against her neck, skimming her skin, talking to her. She opened her legs further and she felt it, a block of flesh, a private thing, a part of him yet surely an entity with its own life. He looked serious, utterly absorbed, his jaw taut. The intensity of his expression in the shadows sent a fresh plume of fear through her.

  I can kiss Mr Dahl, she thought, and, almost testing herself, summoning a picture of him in a lesson, she craned her neck and moved awkwardly towards his mouth, so that after a pause they were kissing. She was kissing James Dahl. His tongue was moving against hers. She pressed her hips more forcefully towards his, and now the hardness was against her, bearing down uncomfortably against her, pulling at her pubic hair, hurting her. She held it, her eyes widening in the dark almost to herself, this object in her hand, and she moved against him. He slipped away. He came back to her, his breath fast in her ear. She moaned. He pressed against her. She drew in her breath sharply. It was hurting, straining, an impossible obstacle.

  ‘No!’ she said.

  ‘No?’ he said, stopping, the sound broken into separate components. He paused.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She swallowed. ‘Now.’

  He hesitated.

  ‘Yes now.’

  He kissed her breast. His hand was on her hip, lightly, his fingers on her buttock. She moaned, and he moved again, began to enter her, but it hurt; her scalp seemed to expand with the pain of it, the sharp stretched stab.

  Panic hit her. She glimpsed shame. Her breath speeded; she shook her head. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong – I –’ she said in a high, rapid voice.

  ‘Shhh,’ he said, nuzzling into her neck, stroking her chest, his hand lingering lightly on her hip. ‘Shhh, my darling.’

  She drew in her breath. He kissed her, murmuring, holding off: she had a sensation of him swimming above her, touching her in a way he understood but that was unknown to her.

  ‘I can’t believe . . .’ she said, feeling the shape of his face.

  ‘I wonder – about you all the time,’ he said, arched above her, touching her, lowering himself to kiss her, his breath uneven. ‘You’re beautiful. Your hair.’ He stroked her breasts, her hips. He moaned. ‘If I don’t see you I wonder . . .’ he drew in his breath ‘. . . where is she?’

  The words filtered into her mind in little grains of amazed pleasure, like a drug settling into her bloodstream. Incredulity sped through her again. He stroked her, and she moved her hips, arched them towards him, encouraging him.

  ‘Slowly, slowly,’ he whispered, the tension subsided.

  Her hips moved against him. ‘Come – on. Now,’ she said.

  ‘Soon,’ he said, his hand trailing joy, alarm hovering in one residual spray in its wake.

  ‘Oh –’

  ‘Slowly,’ he murmured into her ear, and she could hear his voice breaking into fibres of sound.

  She opened her legs, and he stroked her and then he paused, and she felt the straining stretching of her skin again as he partially entered her, and she called out, astounded, the pain of it, the largeness of it beyond all her anticipation or understanding. He stopped. He waited there, and she discerned the rate of his heart, felt his sweat, his desire, his maturity in close proximity. She was impatient for him inside her. She slowed her breathing with an effort of will, and he kissed her gently, their tongues mixing, the different currents of their saliva meeting.

  ‘Very slowly,’ he whispered and she murmured assent. She calmed her breathing. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. Slowly, with infinite patience, he entered her, and they lay there motionless for a short time while she breathed and he kissed her and his words emerged in fragments. That astonishing fullness, that stretched congestion she felt, filling her to her rectum, her abdomen, the base of her spine, nudging all her organs, her hips pinioned back, his weight hard against her, was a shocked revelation; and she thought, so this was what women did: Dora, Elisabeth, Zeno, all those mothers casually walking round school who knew the conspiracy of this, this extraordinary truth.

  They began to move. She rose and drew in her
breath and pressed herself against him. She was, she thought, connected to him for ever, in that merging of pleasure and pain.

  Sixteen

  March

  It was as if they were still camping. There were damp-aired cupboards and crannies, a jigsaw of small and larger rooms to decorate, their walls bulging and drifting; beams and alcoves half sunk in curving plaster, uneven doors on staggered levels. Cecilia could taste the dust of flaking paint as she folded piles of washing while attempting to plot her children’s novel. The deadline was at the end of July, and it suffused her with low-level panic.

  She could barely contain her daughters: they were city girls who, she feared, might become lost on the moor or frightened by the darkness where the trees and lichen knitted. She worried about them in unspecified ways, ways that nagged at her because she couldn’t quite formulate them. Romy scorned anywhere outside London and took refuge in St Anne’s; Izzie put announcements about cowpats and sheep shaggers on her Facebook page; and Ruth still followed her mother like a clinging dog.

  Ruth had seen him again. He – she didn’t know his name, or perhaps he had no name because he was a wild man – had seen her in the fields near school and talked to her. He spoke, just a little; he didn’t expect answers; he asked no questions. Ruth couldn’t talk when people asked her questions. She listened to him. He told her about the parts of the moor where the wind blew and the trees were goblins slipping down the gorse on their root feet to the streams to strangle sheep. He lived there, he said, among ravens and buzzards. There were Hairy Hands on the Postbridge road that caused cars to crash. There was a wronged servant’s grave whose flowers were always kept fresh. There was a prison. Had that been his house? she wondered. Was that meant to be his house? She pictured him coming down to Widecombe, crawling through Dockmell where the badgers ran and rats squirmed in stable drains. He said he would give her a wild baby rabbit to tame if she wanted one.

  In the evening, Cecilia smiled at her eldest child, making herself traverse Romy’s new aura of independence to hug her. Since the day Romy was born – since the day her first baby was born – her children had taken over her mind more forcefully than she could ever have imagined: preoccupying her, Ari informed her wryly, to the exclusion of himself or anyone else. She always laughingly denied this out of love for him, but she knew, as he knew she knew, that it was true.

  ‘Was the scenery painting good?’ said Cecilia, kissing Romy’s cheek.

  ‘Oh yes!’ said Romy. Flames rose above logs behind her. With her bright red hair that fell just past her shoulders, her spray of freckles bridging a small straight nose set in an oval face, she looked, thought Cecilia, like a picture of a girl in a fisherman’s jersey in a children’s book bearing an ice cream and a novel, the sea breeze just lifting her hair, an art nouveau cloud scudding over the horizon. She was an old-fashioned kind of girl.

  ‘And you think the art teacher’s good?’

  ‘Yes. Really. I – yes, very good.’

  ‘I’m pleased, my darling,’ said Cecilia. ‘And your English teacher’s just “old”?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Romy. ‘Yes. An old weirdo.’

  Cecilia laughed. ‘Weird in what way?’

  Romy laughed slightly in response.

  ‘He – he. It’s hard to say,’ said Romy, and colour rose on her neck.

  ‘Why?’ said Cecilia suspiciously.

  ‘He,’ said Romy, glancing at the ground. ‘Sometimes I see him kind of looking at me.’

  ‘Does he?’ said Cecilia. She paused. ‘How?’

  ‘Just – looking.’

  ‘What’s this man’s name?’

  ‘Mr Dahl.’

  ‘What?’

  Romy frowned.

  ‘Mr Dahl.’

  There was a silence.

  ‘Mum,’ said Romy.

  Cecilia opened her mouth.

  ‘Mum –’

  ‘What’s his first name?’ Cecilia asked in a small flat voice, cutting across Romy.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘What kind of old?’ Her skin was pale.

  ‘Quite old. Fifties? I don’t know. Prehistoric. Jurassic? Why?’

  ‘I – I just wondered,’ said Cecilia, her breathing unsteady. ‘Jesus,’ she said, and it was almost a growl. ‘Idiot. Me. I –’

  ‘Mum! What’s the – What do you mean?’

  ‘How does he look at you?’ said Cecilia, turning to Romy. She laid her hand on one of her shoulders, holding it hard. Romy twisted to look at the hand.

  ‘Oh God, Mum, I don’t know. It’s – nothing. Like. I don’t know. It’s nothing. It’s just the way he looks. Stop getting so fiery about things –’

  ‘Well I’m going to the school,’ said Cecilia rapidly. ‘I’m complaining – immediately. He cannot –’

  ‘No! Mum!’ said Romy in a panic. ‘No!’

  ‘I certainly am. How does he look at you?’ said Cecilia.

  Romy jumped. ‘Like – it’s really all right. He just looks at me a bit. I notice because he’s always looking down. He probably looks at everyone like that. You’ve gone mad!’

  ‘I haven’t –’ said Cecilia. ‘I – I – How long has he been teaching there?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Where’s his wife?’

  ‘There. There. She teaches me.’

  ‘What?’ said Cecilia weakly.

  ‘Ms Dahl,’ said Romy.

  Cecilia hesitated. ‘What’s her first name?’ she said.

  ‘Elisabeth. She’s the art teacher. The good one,’ said Romy impatiently, rolling her eyes. ‘Remember? There’s a good one and a pathetic one. You’ve gone crazy!’ she said, laughing.

  Cecilia flushed angrily.

  ‘No teacher can look at you – whatever way it is he looks at you,’ she said, and she walked out of the room.

  ‘James Dahl please,’ said Cecilia, ignoring Romy’s calls of protest from her bedroom door, the very enunciation of his name a disturbing plunge into the past; but some secretary – an officious trained impostor instead of the failed artists and part-time knitwear designers who had once worked in that office – informed her that staff were available to take calls between four and six in the afternoon. Cecilia argued impatiently while the voice repeated rules. Had she, she wondered, at some subconscious level known that he would be here? She doubted it. Then it seemed glaringly obvious. She dismissed it again. A memory of herself as a teenager came to her then: a girl the same age as her daughter Romy now: a man’s mouth kissing her breast, a strong thigh against her smaller one.

  The idea of Ari in close proximity to James Dahl worried her.

  On Saturday morning, Dora heard the garden gate open. She glanced up, her body tuned to hope, but it was the helper Katya.

  ‘I took a phone call for you yesterday,’ said the taciturn Katya in a mumble, the local accent having survived university. ‘Sorry. It was from your friend called Elisabeth.’

  ‘What did she say? Did she say when she’s coming?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘That she’d call again.’

  Dora paused. The air felt cold on her hair. She knew that she would be waiting all day. I haven’t progressed, she thought suddenly.

  She felt frozen, her life an unmoving chunk of matter. She stood quite still as understanding splintered through her. Twenty-five years of intermittent pleasure and torment from Elisabeth Dahl. A quarter of a century. She reeled. Suffering and joy and sexual reunions weeks, months and even years apart. They were supposed to have a friendship – a friendship interspersed by heated moments at Elliott Hall, or by an annual night spent together in which Dora helplessly watched herself losing her year’s worth of pride while her body and mind were relit – and yet, it seemed, they never could quite give each other up. Elisabeth’s bouts of kindness, caring, unexpected vulnerability, always occurred just when Dora thought she had summoned the strength to push her away; because there were of course depths of humanity and even – mo
st affectingly; most disastrously – sadness beneath Elisabeth’s imperturbability. She was more fragile underneath it all than she could begin to know, and it had taken Dora years to understand this.

  And now, since the diagnosis of breast cancer, Elisabeth was being more considerate. She would arrive, unannounced, with food or gardening and opera magazines. Dora felt a new softening. When Elisabeth visited her cottage, she made Dora laugh with her caustic asides and her boldness. She was generous: she brought flowers, always, and meals now that Dora was ill: surprising meals, hotpots and intense pasta sauces that she had, she said, left simmering for most of the day, transported and garnished extravagantly with herbs or edible flowers. The warmth, when it came, was touching. It was simple.

  ‘I will look after you,’ Elisabeth said to Dora, and she did – indeed she did. But intermittently.

  There seemed to be no pattern but randomness.

  ‘Come and drink the tea inside when you’re ready,’ Dora said to Katya, her voice croaking until she coughed. ‘I made us some scones too. Do you mind brown flour in scones?’

  That night, Ruth counted the gods and ghosts that peopled her room with a system to contain them, but shadows haunted the house and feet ran across the loft. When she looked at the river-gurgling blackness from her window, she saw the hulks of the old troughs and broken walls by the barn, like a crumbling city of stone and moss, and she thought about all the animals out there, the bogs and mists and bare-teethed horses creeping down towards her.

  Cecilia slipped out of bed just after midnight.

  ‘Hey gorgeous,’ said Ari, grabbing her hand in his half-sleep.

  Cecilia leant down and kissed him on the lips, then pulled her fingers away.

  ‘Come here,’ he said.

  ‘I have to work.’

  ‘Not now . . . Go and do it, then come back to me.’

  ‘It’s all very well for you to say that,’ she said, then heard her own voice and softened and stroked his forehead. ‘You have all hours all week to work.’