You

by Joanna Briscoe

  Cecilia now shuddered. Yet it turned her on, still, that image of a girl and an older man: some remnant of it buried in her brain, hardwired beneath the resistance. Ari was her age; she had had brief relationships before him with men who were both older and her contemporaries; but it was that notion, that dangerous power differential that somehow remained her template for excitement, and combined with the clandestine nature of her affair, it possessed an intensity that had never been repeated. She was the one selected. However terrible its ramifications, there was some aspect she returned to, a time of extraordinary exhilaration that had formed her. It was, she thought, to do with more than age and power. It was to do with being picked out. Yet the truth was that she had been chosen and not chosen.

  Eighteen

  March

  Cecilia decided to drive to St Anne’s early that Monday afternoon while Romy was attending a rehearsal. Feeling some doubts, she left Ruth in Izzie’s care. Izzie’s storm cloud of blackish hair was perfectly framed by the dark-red and green clothes she was wearing, and she seemed restless, and glanced out of the window. Ruth, wearing a dress that clung to her compact pot of a tummy, a row of badges attached just below its neckline, sat and knitted a scarf.

  ‘That’s beautiful,’ said Cecilia, and went and kissed Ruth again.

  ‘It’s got holes,’ muttered Ruth.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ said Cecilia. ‘I’ll be back before supper. Don’t stuff yourselves. Or only on healthy stuff,’ she added, parodying herself.

  ‘Yes, Ma,’ said Izzie, who was hazily friendly and smelled of cigarette smoke. She had settled immediately into her comprehensive in Ashburton, swiftly finding friends and smoking companions, while Romy embraced the culture of diligence at St Anne’s. Ruth, Cecilia worried, spent much time at the primary school in Widecombe sitting on a step where a beetle lived.

  ‘Phwoargh, you look sexy, Ma,’ Izzie called out.

  Ruth blushed.

  A dead badger lay rotting on the verge. Cecilia had, changing several times, dressed in the clothes she would have worn in London for a work meeting, out of self-protection and a need to prove herself, and she had not made an appointment so that he would have no warning. Already the idea of Ari meeting him at a future parents’ evening filled her with an uncharacteristic instinct for subterfuge.

  The bleached flickering of the hedges above her gave way to glimpses of river beneath oak woods, and an image came to her. She couldn’t help it. It was a photograph in her mind. She had so few. What I remember, she thought, is a hand. It was as small and peaked as a button mushroom.

  She walked nervously around St Anne’s, still perceiving the grounds, with the standard adult shift of perception, as notably smaller than she had done in childhood. She saw that Neill House or its present incarnation was no longer his home, the blinds in the flat on the top floor clearly the choice of someone other than Elisabeth Dahl. The formality of the school – the borders and immature pergolas, the signposts in copperplate pointing to the Refectory, to the Beech Walk and other faintly bogus locations – amused her even as purpose increased her pace. The new theatre, in which Romy was supervising scenery, rose richly near the head’s house; a science and technology block stood where boys had once stubbed out their cigarettes; a new clock in an old tower struck the half hour.

  After almost fifty minutes, she caught sight of him. She began to shake with a steady tremor. As he walked across the lawn that adjoined the boarding houses, her image of him was realigned with a lurch of recognition. Some remnant of emotion merged with her anger, reminding her of the lost feeling of adoring him, though he was in truth diminished from the figure she had remembered: not so monumentally tall as she had thought, and simply human, and the shine of what she now realised had been comparative youth had gone. She felt relief, even perverse amusement, but she continued to tremble.

  He was broader and visibly older, his hair a paleness between white and faded dark blond, his posture straighter, while his eyes, their lashes still contrastingly dark, seemed more blue than grey against the increased colourlessness of his hair. He possessed the suggestion of muscle of an older man who still exercised. At seventeen, she had considered him age itself, yet he had been thirty-six. She now had to adjust her notion of his age. She watched him before he saw her and she remembered how one leg of her tights, her schoolgirl’s black woolly tights, had remained caught with her knickers, still attached to her ankle while they were performing that act that changed things.

  He stopped. His mouth opened. He glanced down and looked up at her again.

  ‘Cecilia,’ he said. Colour washed his skin.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. He was just a normal man, she thought, almost in confusion.

  He stretched out his hands, those square-tipped clean hands, and she lifted hers instinctively to meet his, then pulled them back.

  He was wearing a dark-grey jacket with a shirt in a muted cherry colour – the work of Elisabeth Dahl, Cecilia could see with pitying exasperation – and pens lined his pocket, and his briefcase was fuller than it had been in Haye House days, its bulk straightening his arm, and in that moment she felt herself to be immensely tall and composed, her every movement adult and assured as she faced him here.

  ‘How are you?’ he said, looking her in the eyes as he so rarely had.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said steadily.

  ‘Good –’ He gave her a strained smile.

  ‘But angry.’ Her voice was rich-toned.

  ‘Oh –’ he faltered. Blood drained from his skin.

  ‘Romy,’ she said.

  ‘. . . Romy,’ he said. ‘Romy Hersch. I wondered –’

  ‘I can request that you don’t even teach her,’ she said, yet even as she spoke, she knew that he would have no sexual interest in a girl so very much younger. She was, in effect, punishing him for the past.

  The sight of girls passing, bearing the blurred lustre and unformed features that she must once have possessed, made her think of herself again then.

  ‘You have been looking at my daughter,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, catching her eye and then glancing away. ‘She struck me very quickly as familiar. I wondered – seeing her reminded me of . . . you.’

  ‘Oh –’ said Cecilia.

  ‘I couldn’t tell from her surname, but I wondered. Aspects of you came back to me –’ He coughed.

  They were silent.

  ‘I thought I saw you in her,’ he said. ‘It was – strange.’

  Cecilia paused. ‘But you’ve made her feel very uncomfortable,’ she said, still maintaining the same cold intonation though she knew that he told the truth.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘I thought, surely you can’t be looking at another girl like – And, you know, if you, anyone, laid a finger on her, I’d report them without hesitation.’ She blushed.

  He flinched. ‘Of course I would never –’ he said abruptly.

  ‘Well how should I know?’

  ‘Cecilia. Cecilia. What do you take me for? Some lecherous old . . . Good God. The girl – your daughter – Romy –’ he paused, lifted his hands ‘– must be forty years younger than I am. I –’ he said, shaking his head. His voice was more raised than she had heard it before.

  ‘You’re capable of it,’ she said, then paused.

  ‘Cecilia,’ he said, his colour rising. ‘That is entirely untrue. And you know that.’

  He was silent.

  ‘This is the thing that has haunted me the most,’ he said, his voice faltering.

  He raised his head and met her eye. She nodded. The mothers probably fancied him now, she mused; the grandmothers even. She pitied him: the small-town teacher who had never moved on.

  ‘I sometimes see myself in photos from that time. And I was a child,’ she said. She steadied her breathing. She blinked impatiently. ‘Yes, yes, I was technically of age, but I was in your care: you had power over me.’ She swallowed. ‘I could never perceive you normally. Equally.’ S
he suddenly wanted to cry. To weep for the first time for years over what she had been through. In her battle against her earlier shyness and vulnerability, she had become determined: demonstrative, expressive, as though any form of reticence or passivity were a sign of weakness to her.

  He flinched. ‘I –’ he said, opening his mouth and then closing it again, as though physically unable to speak of the subject.

  ‘It’s a crime under the Sexual Offences Act.’

  ‘I’m aware of that,’ he said. ‘I – have had to resolve this with myself. It has been . . . the greatest failure of my professional career.’

  ‘ “Failure”? Career? Good God, you pompous fool,’ she said. ‘It was a failure in so many more ways than that to me.’ She was trembling.

  ‘I’m sure, I’m sure. I’m sure. It was unforgivable. I’ve tried to apologise to you or explain, but I feel I never have entirely. You –’

  ‘You were married. You were twenty years older. You had power over me,’ she said.

  He looked at the ground, then back up at her, his mouth a set line. He breathed slowly.

  ‘Did I – did you –’ he said, colouring. ‘Did you feel I forced you?’

  ‘No,’ she said. She shook her head. ‘Definitely not. I wanted to sleep with you. I wanted to be with you.’

  His shoulders sagged with palpable relief. His breathing was faintly more audible, his fringe now a sparser fall. He whose every impulse, desire and mistake had once determined her own happiness was an ageing country teacher, and she felt precise, almost fiery, an outsider blown into his little world. It made her want to laugh, suddenly, with newly taken power.

  ‘Oh God, you never could talk about things, could you?’ she said. ‘Sex, love: emotion. Too much the uptight English gentleman. But not too uptight to have an affair with a schoolgirl.’

  He moved with his old characteristic quarter-rotation of the head, his features still immobile.

  ‘You are very angry about this,’ he said in a low voice.

  ‘Because teachers should not sleep with their pupils, and then expect –’

  ‘I have never again – never again.’

  ‘You’ve never seduced a pupil again? I doubt that very much.’

  ‘Never,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve been faithful ever since?’

  He hesitated.

  She nearly spoke. She stopped herself.

  ‘Once – twice.’ He looked up.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said impatiently. ‘No one can hear you. Your wife won’t overhear you.’

  ‘I understand – believe me, I understand this anger. There have been years . . . when I’ve wondered, regretted. Sincerely regretted. But you were the only one.’

  ‘Really? I really do find that hard –’

  ‘Truly,’ he said emphatically. ‘There have been a couple – two – other brief, brief . . . but never with a pupil. You have my word.’

  ‘I –’

  She said nothing.

  He coughed.

  ‘Why is your daughter here?’ he said.

  ‘Because she wanted to come here. Because I had to move back. Because my mother is ill. I need to be here near her. My – my partner, boyfriend: there’s no good word for that; he has a job here from October.’ She heard the uncharacteristic coldness of her voice as she spoke.

  ‘Your mother –’

  ‘Yes, my mother.’

  ‘How is –’

  ‘She has had cancer.’

  ‘Oh, Dora. What bad news. Dora. I’m really very sorry. How is she?’

  ‘She’s having radiotherapy. As you’d expect.’

  ‘Please do – please send my very best to Dora. What a very good person.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I was always full of admiration for her. I know Elisabeth still sees her sometimes but it’s been some time since I have – She didn’t tell me –’

  He was silent.

  ‘Are your brothers there to help?’ he then said awkwardly.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘The youngest sometimes.’

  ‘You’re living back – back there.’

  ‘Wind Tor, yes. I bought out one brother’s share, pay rent to the other two. Dora’s next door.’

  He breathed heavily. ‘Congratulations,’ he said then, but without warmth, ‘on your novel.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Cecilia.

  ‘I read about it.’

  She paused. ‘It’s . . . absurd you’re here,’ she said.

  He inclined his head. ‘I thought you might have heard.’

  ‘How could I know?’ she said.

  ‘Well,’ he said, and he smiled. ‘There’s a grapevine. Now that you live in a little one-eyed, blinking sort o’ place.’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ she said quickly. ‘Don’t quote at me. It reminds me of – Haye House.’

  ‘Yes I know,’ he said. He looked at the ground. ‘You know that I’m – truly sorry, don’t you?’

  She drew in her breath. She turned to him. ‘I don’t know,’ she said finally. She looked at her watch. ‘I have to go.’

  He was momentarily silent. ‘I have a meeting of the English department.’

  Cecilia nodded. She left him standing with his briefcase beneath the oak at St Anne’s and with her heart racing she collected her daughter and drove back to her work and her family and a house that contained a past that was unknown to her children.

  Nineteen

  March

  Shaking as she chatted to Romy on the way home, Cecilia returned in her mind with a still-queasy lurch to the moment she had suspected she was pregnant.

  She had been out food shopping with her mother and Barnaby one Friday night, noting in the metal strips below the supermarket shelves how blotched she was beneath rain-frizzed hair. Her very posture seemed bowed by alternating despair and euphoria. Her period was late.

  They walked up the small high street towards the car carrying their bags, heads lowered in drizzle, and the headmaster’s latest girlfriend, a Belgian dancer, rapped on the window of the wine bar favoured by Haye House staff. She beckoned, projecting her beam through the glass, and as they were ushered with little choice into the bar, Cecilia saw that he was there. The Dahls were sitting beside Peter Doran with Mike, an art teacher who had studied with Elisabeth Dahl, and Serena, the mother of three of Mike’s children.

  ‘Dora, my dear,’ said Elisabeth, turning. She created a space on the settle.

  ‘We must be quick,’ said Dora, resisting and then sitting back in that place of dripping red candles and Liberty prints.

  ‘How enormous that child has become,’ said Elisabeth, gesturing at Barnaby, who snored, his curling ‘M’ of a baby’s mouth glimmering rhythmically.

  ‘More wine,’ called a drunk Peter Doran with parodic lordliness. ‘What kind of hostelry is this? A grotty dive. I require two more flagons now our music mistress has appeared.’

  Cecilia shuddered. Mike tipped back beer from a pewter mug; James Dahl’s sleeves were rolled up, his hair less orderly than it was at school, his jacket hanging from a settle arm.

  ‘The bloody taxes are prohibitive,’ he was saying as Cecilia sat down, and he raised his eyes and nodded at her, his fringe falling over his forehead. He drank. ‘And basic socialist principles are there to claw you back if the Treasury doesn’t . . . How are you, Dora? And – Cecilia.’

  ‘Happy to be here,’ said Dora.

  ‘I –’ said Cecilia. She scraped her chair as she pulled it in.

  ‘You’re a dinosaur, Dahl,’ called out Peter Doran. ‘Fuck the taxman – sorry, Cecilia, and –’ he said, gesturing at Barnaby, ‘– baby – and polish up your avoidance strategies. Exile? Offshore assets? Short trips to Switzerland? I can see you striding around the Matterhorn, James.’

  ‘You’re shameless, Doran. Try paying normal taxes once you’ve accounted for the nice little spread of properties this charitable foundation owns in Knightsbridge.’

  ‘I was there the other day,’ said E
lisabeth crisply.

  ‘Why?’ said Dora.

  ‘I felt a Harvey Nichols recce was required.’

  Cecilia’s skin burned. She attempted to react, looked up, formed expressions that implied understanding, emitted a breathy laugh that elicited no response, interjected the occasional ‘Yes!’ and ‘No!’ that were ignored beyond a slight turn of a head in her direction, and then pretended to be too busy studying the feather motif on the table’s oilcloth to listen. James Dahl took no notice of her. Subtly, she tilted a knife towards herself to check the inflamed patch of skin above her mouth while the adults discussed mortgage relief and educational policy and art world friends of Elisabeth’s with drunken flippancy, interspersing their theories with semi-obscured sexual innuendo. Even her own mother entered this adult world, its codes unknown to Cecilia, who floundered like a retarded infant in her itchy skirt, her knicker gusset pressing against her, every minute creeping round on the forged-iron clock wittily constructed of bicycle parts. She waited for the tug of her period, her nipples sore. She was a child in a woman’s body, her breasts curving grotesquely to mimic adulthood while her mind was unable to produce a single word of interest. A fear leapt at her and subsided.

  ‘Thank the Lord it’s Friday,’ said James. He drank more wine and played a card game as he talked.

  Elisabeth leant against him, nodding at one of his cards, and he smiled in appreciation as he played it while running his hand down her back.

  ‘I’ll meet you later by the car,’ Cecilia nearly said to Dora, but even that one sentence was impossible to say in this company, catching and halting in her throat. She was only capable of whispering it into her mother’s ear. She rehearsed the words time and time again as she stared at a candle; she arranged her bag on her seat in infinitesimal movements so that she could pick it up when she left without swinging it into a flame. She waited, but it was too noisy or too briefly silent to speak. She could say nothing.

  And then later, in Elliott Hall gardens in late spring, when she had avoided thinking about the absence of her period through panicking denial, she had met him and walked along with him.