You

by Joanna Briscoe

  He smiled at her on the path. He put his hand on her waist – but too high, above its real curve – when they turned the corner where the Madame Isaac Pereire roses grew, and she quivered in response with a small delay in her reaction.

  She looked up at this man with his faintly distracted air, his bristling of adult preoccupations, and a realisation came to her as though from nowhere.

  ‘You’re not ever going to leave her, are you?’ she said.

  His hand stiffened. He walked forward slowly.

  She pulled away from him.

  ‘Are you?’ she said. She was suddenly light-headed.

  He looked at the ground. She took it all in: his polished brogue, a piece of grass attached with dampness to one side; a frown which aged him; the blossom on the soil between the roses like sodden confetti. She noticed his faint gold stubble, the strong straight bone of his nose. Pain passed over his face.

  ‘I can’t do that,’ he said.

  She heard his words. She refused to hear them. A blanket, almost a smile, came down over her mind.

  She made a little noise.

  ‘How could I?’ he said. His mouth was set in a straight line.

  She felt herself tumbling inside. Nausea rolled up her throat and she swallowed it again, breathing its afterburn.

  ‘You –’ said Cecilia. ‘Please –’ she said, but she could say nothing more.

  ‘I can’t lose my . . . marriage,’ he said, his voice lowered at the word.

  She said nothing.

  ‘This is my life, my job,’ he said without inflection. ‘My – sons are still at school. You understand that, don’t you? There is no other means of income. Cecilia,’ he said, his breathing uneven.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. Her mouth was open in a small round hole. ‘No.’

  ‘I have to apologise. Profoundly,’ he said, pale faced. His eyelashes were soot-coloured in comparison with the pallor. His voice cracked a little. He looked thin, intense, the bones in his face larger. ‘We should – I should – never have even considered – never have considered this.’

  ‘Please –’ she said.

  ‘You deserve much, much better.’

  He looked up at the beech walk. He looked down at her.

  ‘Do you want me to resign?’ he said. He touched her sleeve very briefly.

  ‘No,’ she said. She shook her head.

  ‘There –’ he said, looking up at the trees, taller still in his greater height as he tilted his head, ‘there is no justification . . . I’m – grievously – to blame. I’m deeply sorry.’

  She stared at him, her mouth distorting, and then walked away before he witnessed her tears. She knew then, just before she reached the arch that led to the courtyard: she knew as though she knew that she was dying: she was pregnant.

  Dora had noticed Cecilia’s changing shape in her last term of school, even marvelled at the fullness of breast, at odds with her increasing slightness. She noticed at the most subconscious level that Cecilia’s curves resembled those of pregnancy, and her mind had scrawled into possibilities; she wondered about Gabriel Sardo – they laughed, those two; they colluded and chattered at night quite audibly – but she dismissed the notion, her naïve daughter with her crush on a teacher and her hours dedicated to books the last imaginable candidate for teenage pregnancy. It had been several more weeks until Cecilia had finally come to her and allowed her to know.

  And all these years later, Dora chose not to remember that time if she could avoid it. It helped no one to dwell on it, she thought, yet she lived with sadness.

  ‘What’s done is done,’ she had said to Cecilia so many times, hearing her own inflexibility. It was as though she couldn’t stop herself saying it, though she hated herself for it every time the words rose like scum to her mouth. ‘What’s done is done.’ She wished she had never done what she had done.

  Dora had feared cancer all her life, assuming with a weary acceptance that she, like so many others, would one day find a lump. The only way in which it seemed destined to surprise her was in its timing, and she had been sixty-six, her fear beginning to drift into a blurry unease about strokes and osteoporosis, when cancer’s fibrous grip on her left breast was detected by mammogram. Even then, after a lifetime of low-pitched dread, it managed to shock her. Surgeons in Exeter removed the lump and lymph nodes from her armpit, despite Cecilia’s protests that she should be operated on in London and stay, for the first time, with the family. But it was too soon. Dora had preferred to live where she was, with what she knew.

  She was now seeing an oncologist and counsellor and beginning her radiotherapy, but there was still an uncertainty over one of her lymph nodes and still she would have to wait. She knew that Cecilia would not be here if it were not for the cancer: Cecilia who had largely avoided the area since she had left home. Their reconciliation had been taking place in increments over the years, but it was still partial, so liable to incendiary episodes and periods of guilty recompense. She hardly knew her own grandchildren.

  Dora lived a quiet life. She entertained occasional friends there in the little cottage, and she helped with a local children’s string quartet. Sloe gin brewed; chick peas soaked; seedlings grew; the radio played. Her cottage was her refuge, the still point in her life. It was like a miniature version of the house, its ceilings yet lower and its staircase a coiling cranny built for stunted people, labourers centuries dead, its hobbled end wall engorged with weed and foxglove. It could have been as dark as some of the local farms with their tiny parlours and tack rooms but she had endowed it with light and old bleached wood, the children’s paintings framed, the dresser in the downstairs room holding her old paraffin lamp, the cello standing polished in a corner of the bedroom.

  Here the lodgers Moll and Flite had once lived, their washing dripping on to flagstones from self-plumbed pipes, their aduki bean trays misted with mould. She remembered the smell of must and Indian bazaars, the offerings of hibiscus tea, and the sarongs hung from lintels above listing doors. She had made it her own with her milk jugs and remnants of antique pine from the Wind Tor House days, her oak chests, baskets and Bannan rugs, and her flowers: vases and jam jars full of flowers in every room. Yet compared with the busy wild years of Wind Tor House, there was a silent passing of days. Only Elisabeth threaded time with brightness.

  Now Romy and Izzie and Ruth came in to visit, letting themselves through the gate that led from their own back garden. Dora couldn’t even touch upon the loss of years gone by without their company. They came in with youth’s absolute assumption of welcome, and welcome they were: the red, the dark, the dully fair. They draped themselves, put feet on furniture, scoured the cupboard for biscuits – deliberately casual, knowing their informality to be a benison to an old grandmother – and thus they all happily played their appointed roles with this woman they barely knew but accepted as a family member.

  ‘Hello!’ called Romy, who was so like the adolescent Cecilia, Dora thought, but a brighter-coloured, elongated version, her body tall and uncoordinated. Dora recalled Cecilia, already largely estranged from her, stiffly informing her of the existence of Ari Hersch, with whom she had – stunning Dora with its unexpectedness, its inappropriateness – seemingly deliberately become pregnant before she had graduated.

  ‘Greetings, Doreen,’ said Izzie. She raised her hand. Dora, who had been taught to respond, lifted her palm, and Izzie slapped it, then pretended to tickle her grandmother with her other hand. She took out her lighter as she folded herself on to the sofa and called to Ruth to fetch her an ashtray.

  ‘Your asthma,’ said Dora mildly.

  Ruth, the youngest, her squat figure contrasting with Romy’s effortless height, sidled into the room unable even now to catch Dora’s eye. Dora touched her shoulder in passing and knew that she might, or she might not, unfurl over sweet biscuits with bright monologues that contained no questions.

  They chatted. Izzie fiddled with her iPod and rolled a row of cigarettes but planted smoky kisses on Dora
as she passed her and urinated loudly with the bathroom door open, still talking at elevated volume into the sitting room with her earphones attached. Ruth gazed through biscuit crumbs as Romy talked earnestly about the history of art, asking her grandmother about the composers contemporaneous with the artists she was studying, her small nose and her many freckles neatly and touchingly arrayed on her face. It was clear to Dora that Romy was making an effort, that she was likely to be bound in a web of altruism and superstition about her illness, just as Cecilia’s impulses of kindness and duty were similarly apparent to her. Such concern embarrassed her, but it was preferable to her sons’ varying degrees of neglect. Benedict was now in Turkmenistan, Tom gardening for a monastery in Scotland, and Barnaby, the most frequent visitor of the three boys, taking a belated diploma in childcare studies at a college in Bath and turning up whenever he could hitch a lift. Tom wrote regularly, his large writing filling up postcards with spiritual content and news of apple crops, while Benedict’s occasional emails from internet cafés would be followed by months of casual silence in which Dora fretted about him and studied the political situation in whichever country she believed him to be visiting. His hints for money sometimes changed to open requests, and she helped with the little she could.

  She glanced at the sink. Katya had washed up and was now driving Dora’s old car to Newton Abbot for its MOT. A movement caught her eye. She saw Elisabeth Dahl open the gate on the lane side of the cottage and enter the garden. She rose unsteadily and reached the door as Elisabeth was knocking.

  ‘How nice of you to come,’ said Dora. She smiled. ‘That pasta you brought me was delicious.’

  ‘Good. I rather hoped so. I have apples. You need more fruit.’

  ‘My granddaughters are here.’

  Elisabeth nodded. Romy stiffened at the sight of a teacher in her grandmother’s house.

  ‘Romy – of course . . .’ said Dora, gesturing at her. ‘These are her sisters Izabel and Ruth.’

  ‘Cool coat,’ said Izzie. ‘Where from?’

  ‘Extremely ancient Jaeger,’ said Elisabeth, turning her gaze on Izzie, pausing very slightly, and letting it swivel away with the same momentum.

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘I’ve brought you these,’ said Elisabeth to Dora. ‘I thought you might appreciate them. I don’t think I’ve ever seen lilies of such a vibrant red. They brought to mind Emil Nolde.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Dora, colouring in the presence of her grandchildren. ‘How lovely. How lovely.’

  ‘There are flowers everywhere . . .’ said Elisabeth. ‘Perhaps even more than usual.’

  ‘Just cottage garden stuff. Just the flowers of spring.’

  ‘I’m going to start bringing you shopping, music. Books,’ said Elisabeth. ‘You need distraction. You need looking after.’ She began to stack together some of Dora’s Royal Horticultural Society publications with brisk movements.

  ‘I have the nurses, and a part-time helper. And Celie now. Thank you.’

  ‘I was very surprised,’ said Elisabeth with a delicate pause, ‘that she has come back.’

  Dora held out her hands in a small shrug. ‘This was the catalyst,’ she said, glancing down at her chest. ‘Her partner will follow later to take up a new post. He has a professorship in Bronze Age archaeology at Exeter.’

  ‘Of course.’ Elisabeth paused again. She walked into the kitchen and Dora followed her.

  ‘I –’ said Dora.

  Elisabeth was silent. Was she going to touch her? Dora wondered. She never knew. Sometimes she did, embracing her or on rare, rare occasions kissing her deeply against a wall or holding out her hand and guiding her up to bed. Then for several visits in a row, she would not, avoiding even social kissing. Dora cursed her own acceptance.

  Elisabeth Dahl was impenetrable, yet predictably that obdurate self-possession veiled, as Dora knew, defensiveness. Its origins possibly lay in the fact, inferred by Dora over time, that she was not from the background she would have chosen; her upbringing in the south-east suburbs of London was not exactly what the modulations of her faintly aristocratic inflections seemed to suggest, though some sense of entitlement was naturally hers. Yet in a fashion, thought Dora, they’d all reinvented themselves, those women who had flourished in the South West in the Seventies. With their crumbling houses, their alternative educational establishments, they had cleaved to a doctrine that involved a certain laissez-faire, a cultured class ease that she herself had never quite fully inhabited either.

  Sunlight fell in smeared segments through the window with its deep-set old glass. Crocuses crowded and browned beside a pot with a Russian doll’s face that Cecilia had made for her as a child.

  ‘You deserve the best care,’ said Elisabeth. ‘The very best care in the world. You know that, don’t you?’ She looked directly at Dora until Dora flushed a humiliating dark red. She grabbed a bottle of wine by the neck though it was only mid-afternoon and, flustered, began to look in a mustard pot of pewter teaspoons and pens for a corkscrew.

  ‘I’m just tired,’ said Dora. ‘How’s – St Anne’s?’

  ‘Adequate. Stuffy,’ said Elisabeth, frowning at the wine, on whose surface floated a speck of cork.

  Dora smiled. ‘I miss Haye House.’

  ‘You,’ said Elisabeth, smiling back and catching Dora round the waist so that Dora jerked her head in the direction of the girls lying around in the sitting room, ‘you were born to play a lute in a pine studio with fine acoustics and children running round naked outside. You Arts and Crafts beauty.’

  Dora laughed abruptly. She reached out and scooped some hand cream from its pot near the sink. She smeared a little on her lips when she had rubbed it in. Her hair was shorter now, her eternally dry skin sapped of life, it seemed to her. Her eyes, surrounded by wrinkles, were still fine and sea-coloured. Was there anything left? She saw cheekbones. Little else.

  She avoided Elisabeth’s gaze, but Elisabeth was looking straight ahead, only her profile visible, suggesting that she was now caught in some other line of thought. She was always darker than Dora remembered, shades of Italy or Portugal passing over the English and Scottish. She had dark eyes, a beak of a nose, the air of a small eagle. Aquila, thought Dora. Aquila Dahl. Mountain air. She was so familiar, and all the pain and glory that that implied stung Dora with a feeling almost of repulsion. Her stringy legs. Her sharp fierce ego.

  ‘You were very lovely, I’ve always thought,’ said Elisabeth as though delivering a factual statement, returning her direct eye contact. ‘That long plait . . . Your cello case . . . I always imagined that you could hide anything you wanted to in there.’

  Dora smiled crookedly. Is this what her other lovers feel? she wondered. Do they treasure these compliments of hers? Jewels glimpsed unexpectedly, then whisked away again.

  Dora looked back at the young Elisabeth – surely different from today; hair a darker charcoal; fewer lines; but barely, it seemed, distinguishable from now – and saw her own younger self with something approaching anger: eager to please and impressionable, eternally trapped by the smell, voice, edge of the woman in whose presence she seemed to breathe oxygen, and who rendered others lifeless. Dull, dead, dull.

  After the Christmas party when they had begun, so unevenly, that alarming fully sexual relationship, she had fallen into emotional servitude, and her life and her marriage to Patrick had never regained its equilibrium. Elisabeth was uncharmed by Barnaby with his tantrum-splattered toddlerhood, openly sighing at the interruptions he caused. He was so frequently ill with tonsillitis, summer colds, stomach upsets, it seemed at that time as though he were rarely entirely well, Dora wrestling with the contents of his nose, his discontented wrigglings, his snuffles and protests. Elisabeth had, it seemed, forgotten the most basic needs of young children and viewed babies as either dolls or monstrous obstacles to enjoyment. Dora – again, she cursed herself for this now – became pragmatic, compromising, occasionally neglectful of Barnaby in her efforts to secure time and location a
nd harmonious mood.

  Overlooking the chilled silences inspired by her little son, she had devised a future with Elisabeth. It held an element of fantasy, she knew – running away to create some kind of demi-relationship that embraced all aspects of her life – but it was driven by something more substantial, by a link that had kept them returning to one another over all those years.

  ‘You are my calm maternal inspiration,’ Elisabeth would say. ‘My tranquillity. My sexy tranquillity. I need you.’

  ‘I need you too,’ said Dora. She looked away. ‘It’s exciting being with you.’

  ‘Is it?’ said Elisabeth and smiled, and sent a trail of quivers up Dora’s arm simply by touching her.

  They would build a female fastness. It would be like a Rossetti painting, Dora thought: all straw and gold and tapestry. So they plotted in ellipses their bright life together.

  When Cecilia had wordlessly let her know about her pregnancy, her listlessness and bowed body compelling Dora to edge towards the subject, her reaction was not what she would have expected of herself. The Kentish Anglican village upbringing returned to her: the lives lived behind tended hedges, the fear of neighbours’ talk. Pulling Cecilia to her in sorrowful sympathy even as a part of her wanted to slap her across the face as her own mother might have done, Dora ran out to the pottery barn and told Patrick. That was her immediate instinct. To share this family disaster with her husband. And Patrick’s own Catholic past came rearing up in condemnation and humiliation, the two liberals bound by shock. He and Dora shouted at each other for a while in the barn. Who was the father? he always wanted to know, infuriated by Cecilia’s stubbornness, but Cecilia persistently refused to talk about it, so eventually he pretended to ignore the subject instead, disturbed and unable to catch her eye through the entire pregnancy.

  ‘Never mind who the father is,’ Dora shouted at Patrick. ‘What are we going to do?’