You

by Joanna Briscoe

  ‘What, sis, like finding moving statues and going all gay about bedknobs? I don’t think so.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Ruth quietly. ‘Can you help me with my island wigwam?’

  ‘Not now,’ groaned Izzie.

  ‘Please. It would be a brilly place to smoke,’ said Ruth.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Izzie, and she bent down, a cigarette in one hand, and gathered long sticks for building the conical shelter that Ruth had begun on a large flat stone a little further downriver where a section of water ran fast and smooth through the ivy-draped ashes, the surface now bright, now black.

  Izzie hopped across from the bank still holding her cigarette, upsetting Ruth’s jumping order that prevented the Dart from becoming the Stygian depths. ‘Libation,’ Ruth mouthed.

  ‘That’s lush,’ said Izzie, nodding at the wigwam.

  Ruth beamed, seeing herself as Bonnie Willoughby skating the river in flying tippets, but she couldn’t say it. Instead, she imagined herself floating with her hair fanned like Ophelia, that dark-light painting with river-soaked flowers, because then she could be beautiful.

  You count the hours and then the days, Dora advised herself. You tick them off, like a substance abuser, and eventually abstinence becomes a habit.

  Would everyone leave her? she wondered. She glanced in the direction of the house. My daughter will leave me again, she thought. She summoned the faces of her sons, none of whom had had children. Benedict was largely silent. Barnaby did visit, irregularly, and Tom’s cards came roughly fortnightly from his monastery; but she sensed duty behind their actions. No one. That chilled realisation. No one. She wondered whether her punishment was to be stuck in time: to be kept forever frozen at the point at which she had made her greatest mistake.

  Her own shortcomings crowded around her now, with their choking wings and stings. She had, she realised, never quite managed to get over both the horror and the perverse excitement of the fact that Elisabeth was a woman. Whereas Elisabeth, it seemed, was blisteringly casual about her own sexuality, uninterested in discussing what she perceived as a perhaps mildly racy yet unsurprising aspect of life: merely nature’s pleasing diversity.

  ‘It’s dull. Get over it,’ Elisabeth had said dismissively. ‘Or back to your husband.’

  ‘Do you have no guilt?’ Dora had said, trying another tack, shuddering at her own terror of Patrick’s discovery. ‘Do you ever think you should tell – James?’

  ‘Goodness me, why would I rock the boat?’

  Dora now walked stiffly up the stairs, her breast sore as she knocked into the newel post, and she summoned the memory of Moll and Flite: the multi-panelled skirts, mud-choked boots, dog, chickens, but no child. Dora had indulged Moll, talking for hour drifting into hour, because Moll was a woman who, even wet-faced and almost ululating about her childlessness, was prepared to hold the squirming Barnaby. Dora would, at that time, do anything to have Barnaby held. To save her back. To free her arms. To be able to drink a cup of tea without him grabbing and spilling.

  ‘Just give me a sign,’ Dora had said to Elisabeth on one of those hot dry summer afternoons.

  She had smiled.

  ‘I love you so much.’

  ‘You don’t,’ said Elisabeth. ‘You love this –’ She gestured. ‘Your house, your family. You are of the moors. I’ve told you. You are the family woman.’

  ‘I’m not,’ Dora said, and even then, before the giving-away, she experienced a twinge, knowing that something in her had been altered. ‘Give me – something,’ she said, quite choked.

  ‘I’m giving you myself.’ Elisabeth smiled again, planted a kiss on her lips, then she began quite easily to talk of something else.

  And all the while, the pregnant Cecilia stayed in her bedroom. ‘The ghost in the attic,’ was how Elisabeth referred to her with casual humour, and Dora defended her, but there was relief in the irreverence. When Cecilia went for walks at night, appearing only as the light fell and the owls emerged, Dora observed that Cecilia seemed to have no fear and it occurred to her that she wished the baby or herself dead. Her days were unchanging. She functioned. She seemed heavy-footed and without expectation.

  Ruth made her way through the kitchen door to the river, clinging to the shadow of the hedge. She dared herself. If she were to float, one day, like Ophelia in the ink-dark flower glow, she had to summon all courage. The place was, Cecilia had told Ruth, like a cavern measureless to man. Ruth had peeped at her novel, and seen that the river had become a tossing torrent spewing rapids. Horses bared teeth; snakes riddled the water; foam threw mergirl shapes.

  Ari returned on Friday. He and Cecilia both frequently said that they missed each other. They emailed several times daily, sent romantic and provocative texts among the practical instructions and day-to-day news bulletins, repeating the message that they wanted each other back and that this period of partial separation was trying and unpleasant. Yet within half an hour of his return that Friday night, they began to argue. Small, unresolved sources of irritation were unleashed by proximity, the romantic haze cast by distance almost instantly dispersed.

  ‘Amazing, isn’t it,’ said Cecilia, her mouth twitching, ‘that within moments of you arriving back, we’re bickering. It’s all your fault, you old bastard,’ she said, thumping him lightly.

  He held her wrists in the air and laughed at her, but she could see that tension tightened the tendons of his neck.

  ‘God, you need handling,’ he said. ‘You’ve gone more untamed in the sticks.’

  ‘I can handle myself,’ she said. She arched her eyebrows at him.

  He looked tired. Shadows formed under his eyes, enhancing their extreme darkness; grey was sprinkled through his almost-black hair. For the first time, she noticed a slackening of his neck as he turned. He was still lean, as he had been in his early twenties in Edinburgh, but faintly filled out, a small stomach forming over his belt.

  ‘Your hair’s like Action Man’s,’ she said.

  ‘The barber went a bit overboard last week,’ he said, running his palm over one side of his chin, a nervous habit of his.

  ‘I like it. You look sexy,’ said Cecilia.

  On Monday morning, the verge choked with hawthorn and stitchwort, speedwell shading the trees on the far end of the field, Ari stood in the porch and swept with exaggerated movements. ‘This will be my last night here for near on four weeks,’ he said in a generic West Country accent. ‘So tell me what you want doing, Mrs Bannan.’

  ‘Nothing, nothing,’ she said, laughing at him. She kissed him thoroughly; she was connected with him again. He banished the stain that was Mara coming to get her.

  They walked along the garden path.

  ‘In four weeks, I’ll live with you,’ he said.

  ‘Under,’ she said.

  ‘Twenty-six days,’ he said, frowning. ‘How can I leave you for twenty-six days?’

  ‘They’ll be the busiest twenty-six days of your life. Packing, marking, sorting your whole department. But I’ll miss you.’

  ‘Be good,’ he said.

  ‘I am,’ she said, and she turned away from him. Swallows soared about them.

  ‘Why,’ said Ari after a pause, ‘are you working in this archive now?’

  ‘I so much prefer it.’

  She had begun to write on her laptop in the small music library built under a slope of roof in Elliott Hall after her morning St Anne’s drop-offs. It soothed her to leave home and work in a carrel among industrious music students and occasional visitors who spoke in muted voices to the librarian or searched the music archives.

  ‘Are you escaping your mother?’ said Ari with a faintly knowing expression.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Cecilia.

  ‘Are you being kind to her?’

  ‘I’m doing what I can for her. I’m here. She’s not the saint you think she is. Not always, anyway.’

  ‘I’m aware of that.’ Ari turned. ‘And why are you wearing those clothes, darly?’

  ‘Because – be
cause I like to dress up somehow here. I don’t know, it’s just an instinct. In case by osmosis I start wearing fleeces and wellingtons like a country person.’

  ‘To show all your old friends and enemies how sophisticated you are, you mean?’ he said.

  She paused. She smiled and took his arm. ‘Something like that,’ she said. ‘A frantic, desperate attempt to show I once left. I wasn’t always a country bumpkin.’

  ‘God forbid – a farmer or a hippie, eh?’

  ‘I have to go. I’m late. Romy!’ she called.

  ‘Well don’t do your mad driving. I wouldn’t want you stuck behind me, revving and then storming past, killing sheep.’

  ‘Well I wouldn’t want to be stuck behind you, my love,’ she said. ‘Crawling along as if you’re in a cul-de-sac with speed cameras.’

  ‘I suddenly realised,’ he said. ‘No wonder your London parking . . . leaves something to be desired. You’ve never had to park. Just grind to a halt in a pile of mud or wait till you run out of pink diesel.’

  She laughed. ‘Your Country Ways talks are very amusing, but I’ve got to go,’ she said.

  He caught her round the waist as Romy appeared at the door. ‘I’ve been missing you.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said, suddenly serious. She kissed his mouth. ‘I’ll miss you. Three and a bit weeks.’

  ‘Then I’m back for ever!’

  ‘For ever!’ she said, and kissed him again, self-consciously.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said.

  ‘ “Nothing”,’ he said at the same time in imitation, pre-empting her.

  She pretended to push him away, smiled at him, hugged him again, and Romy threw herself into his arms to say goodbye.

  James Dahl drove along the upper moorland route that he had taken on those rare occasions when he had walked with Cecilia in the past, and now she looked out of his car window: the air-blue gown she had imagined still there somewhere, moving by itself, time-tarnished like silver; and words, words, words, a young mouth, unformed voice, lips kissed, evaporated in the moorland air.

  ‘Did Elisabeth know? Does she know you’ve been meeting me?’ she said now, pushing him. She had written fast in the music library that morning, her deadline so imminent that it caused intermittent insomnia, yet she had slowed her work by frequently glancing out of the window with a loose expectation of seeing James Dahl in the gardens, illogically surprised that he wasn’t there. Her mobile had vibrated on silent mode. I want to take you out to lunch, he texted.

  ‘Does she know?’

  She turned to him and her hair flew into her mouth.

  ‘No,’ he said flatly, changing gear and driving fast through the sunken shadowed lanes beyond Holne. Spring charged up, toppled over hedges into choking banks, deranged with growth.

  ‘I still don’t understand how this marriage works,’ she said. She glanced at him. ‘Does she dominate you? Make you behave with coldness and – caprice? Or do you control her with stiffness? With reserve and expectation?’

  ‘Do you really expect me to be able to answer that?’

  ‘I have no idea. I just want to know.’ She leaned her head against the side of the car. Ferns rattled against the doors.

  ‘To a certain extent, I suppose we lead parallel lives.’ He frowned as he changed gear. He drove, climbing above the steep-sided valley, old ivy clutching at the trees and making a rush of darkness, of bright air.

  He stared ahead.

  ‘Is it a matter of opposites?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ He paused. ‘But perhaps more a matter of expectations. I expected to be married for life, and it would be dishonourable, wrong I suppose, to do otherwise.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I think it’s about – determination. Doggedness maybe. Do you think I sound appallingly old-fashioned?’ He had to shout above the car’s engine.

  ‘No. Did you fall in love with her?’

  ‘Yes. Oh yes.’

  There was silence. She bit the inside of her lip. A feeling of the past came back to her, of insecurity and rejection.

  ‘I feel I should explain myself to you more,’ he said into the silence. He coughed. ‘I’ve wanted to explain for a while. Since you quite openly believe that I was a heartless old lecher.’

  She gave a murmur of a laugh.

  ‘The point is . . . Never in my life did I think such a thing would happen.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘Really. I knew it was madness. You see. Every minute of it. The feeling of insanity surrounding it was overwhelming. It preoccupied me all the time.’

  ‘Did it?’ she said, recalling the air denting his shirt as he, this adult man, walked calmly past her without a glance.

  ‘It haunted me daily. I would wake up with nightmares, sweating, heart racing, and think, it can’t be true; and I’d go over every room, obsessively, every room I’d – been with you in. There was this empty, all-embracing fear that I’d thrown my life away, for a teenager.’

  She nodded.

  ‘And –’ he said, frowning as he drove, not catching her eye, ‘and yet, despite all that – in its midst – a strand of it seemed like the most exhilarating, extraordinary thing in the world.’ He slowed the car to be heard above the engine. ‘It seemed like living. And . . . fantastically, unwisely, it was as though this had endowed one – me – with a different character. A rash character that I perversely liked. It made me feel young. I know that’s not how you saw me,’ he said, smiling.

  ‘This isn’t how I saw it all.’

  She glanced at him, but he wasn’t looking at her. All she could see was the shadow of his eyelashes, his strong statue’s nose. The light shone through his ear, showing a network of red capillaries. She heard the melody of his voice, its rich pauses and falls.

  ‘Look, James Dahl. I know where we’re going now. The Clapper Inn.’

  ‘You can’t call me James, can you?’

  ‘No. I must have been pregnant by that time.’

  His mouth tensed.

  ‘It was the only time you used a condom.’

  She heard a text arriving and checked it.

  Hello darl, how everyone, what you doing? wrote Ari.

  All fine, not sure re R tho, just having lunch after Rom drop-off, she texted back quickly, and her omission disturbed her. How work?

  Love xxxx she wrote on a new text as an afterthought.

  The road disappeared in front of the car, over fast bowls of land, tors rising in the distances. He parked on a verge. There was the Clapper Inn, huddled on the escarpment and scoured to softness. She stared until she found the window of the bedroom.

  ‘Let’s eat there,’ he said. He was looking straight up at the inn, his profile older in the afternoon light. A military plane stormed overhead, buzzards circling. He dropped his gaze, then looked at her again and smiled. The lines that had radiated even in his thirties from the bridge of his nose when he smiled appeared now, emitting a flicker of what it was that had once bound her.

  ‘I don’t want to,’ she said, ‘– yet.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The window of the bedroom in which they had merged their bodies gleamed blank with afternoon sun, but all those years before, a storm had gathered and thrown itself at the same glass.

  They were concealed together in a bedroom in storm gloom with a fire that turned while thunder shook rain horizontally at the window and tiles shattered outside. A tree was flattened, cloud falling through the sky. The bed loomed, a source of awkwardness.

  He sat down on the bed, and she sat beside him, and they kissed, and they lay down in one movement and kissed more deeply, moving against each other, their hands gliding beneath clothes, his evening stubble hurting her cheek and his bulk unbalancing the mattress with its soft bulges, causing the bed frame to creak. His palm sent a trail of tight trembles over her torso. They pulled clothes off piecemeal, obstructed by the mattress’s squashy dells, until she was entirely unc
lothed beside him for the first time, and quivering and cold and pressed against him, instinctively hiding her face in his chest. He was quite naked, the hair and weight of him, the density of his thigh against hers, so that she drew in her breath at the shock of skin against skin.

  In the chilling air of the room, smoke-streaked by a fire that provided their only light, she could hear the rapid vibration of glass in old wood and she thought, as they moved together, the battering of the wind disguising the creaks and protests of the bed, the fast eddies of air through the window cold against the heat of his breath; she thought that they were out on the moors, fucking in bracken, gorse, lichen as they sailed on their bed of wind.

  She imagined kissing him now. He looked up at the inn and she glanced at him on the seat beside her and examined him as though strongly magnified, followed the exact shape of the bone of his nose, his irises’ confusion of pigmentation, rendered lighter in sunlight; wayward eyebrow hairs, a faint sheen of moisture on his forehead; the outer line of paleness that traced his lips, the strong cleft above the mouth, the sun-shot curve of his ear and a tiny scar on its outer edge. She could see the twitch of his pulse in his neck. He turned and she blushed, and the notion disappeared.

  ‘I found a poem for you,’ he said. ‘Emily Dickinson. You’ll know it – don’t you? You left me, sweet, two legacies –’

  ‘Oh yes. And I have one for you too,’ she said. ‘. . . “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver. It’s the ending that moves me. Tell me, what is it you plan to do/With your one wild and precious life? Do you know it?’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I like it very much. Can you give me a copy?’

  She nodded. They were silent, and the breeze played and ponies toothed at the grass. He turned the ignition.

  ‘I’m glad. I’m so very glad to have found you, met you again.’ He paused. ‘I miss you,’ he said in a straightforward manner.

  ‘When?’ she said, out of slight awkwardness.

  ‘When I don’t see you,’ he said.

  ‘You see me now more than you ever did.’

  He began to reverse the car. High clouds ran reflected in the bedroom window of the Clapper Inn.