You

by Joanna Briscoe

  Dora groaned now, into her hands. ‘Celie,’ she murmured. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Twenty-nine

  May

  The next afternoon, Dora saw Dan appear in the kitchen yard of Wind Tor House. She had glimpsed him more frequently in the last few days as he slipped in among the shadows by the back gate at night with a strained vigour that tensed his shoulders while his movements had the grace in nervousness of an overgrown adolescent. Now he was clearly waiting for Izzie to arrive home from school on the bus ahead of Cecilia and Romy in the car, bending over and coughing.

  Dora almost ran out of the front door. Wild garlic pulsed through the air, making her breathe through her mouth. She longed for company, she always realised when someone appeared: Katya, a neighbour, above all a granddaughter. She couldn’t think what to say to a young man who seemed so guarded and self-contained. ‘Are you unwell?’ she called through the gate to the yard, where he was cutting logs.

  ‘A few sniffles,’ he said in a strange high voice, and she wondered whether he was mocking her. He chopped wood with flimsy movements.

  ‘Are you making a fire in this weather?’ said Dora.

  ‘I’m freezing my –’ He stopped himself with theatrical exaggeration. ‘’Scusin’ me, ma’am,’ he said in his parodic Devon accent.

  Dora’s mouth twitched. ‘You can sit by my Rayburn,’ she said. ‘And I’m cooking soup.’

  He unbent to his full height. He hesitated.

  ‘It’s quite warm today. You must have a terrible temperature. Your name’s Dan, isn’t it?’

  He nodded, his shivering subsiding a little. Dora nudged the kitchen door back in place.

  ‘Let me get you a lemon and honey.’

  ‘This needs bay leaves,’ Dan said, leaning heavily against the Rayburn and stirring Dora’s soup. ‘Pinch of thyme. There’s plenty of other things growing out there you could add to this.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh. Nettles. Wood sorrel. Germander. Garlic leaves.’

  ‘Well how fascinating,’ said Dora approvingly. ‘We used to eat these things, or think we did – at least we bought books about it!’

  He said nothing. She detected the edge of sarcasm in his expression.

  ‘So,’ she said, caught awkwardly and floundering for something to say. ‘You’re Izzie’s boyfriend?’

  ‘I’m her friend,’ he said shortly. ‘She should be doing her schoolwork.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Dora. ‘Yes, I agree. She’s a wild spirit, our Izzie.’

  ‘Not as wild as she thinks.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Dora again. ‘You are an outspoken young man,’ she said somewhat testily. She paused. ‘Where do you come from?’

  ‘Last place was Doncaster.’

  ‘I can hear some northern.’

  ‘Ay,’ he said. ‘Coal pits. Whippets. Incest.’

  Dora smiled uncertainly. ‘So what finds you – here?’

  ‘I only ever wanted to be here,’ he said, still in a convincing northern accent. ‘I heard about it, always wanted to come ’ere,’ he said, now switching back to broad West Country. ‘My dad took me here once when I was thirteen, like, and proper job I thought it was. Dark day I rememory, ’em bleak great moors spreading out, ooh argh.’

  He dropped his gaze. He looked cold and unwell. There was something endearing about his narrow back, Dora thought.

  ‘Would you like a jersey or a blanket?’

  ‘No ta, ma’am.’

  ‘And what have you been doing recently? I see your garden centre van.’

  ‘Making shoes,’ he said.

  ‘Really? How fascinating.’

  ‘Any pillock can do it,’ he said, banging the spoon on the edge of the pan. ‘Easy. Shoot a cow, skin it, tan its hide, sew it together with brightly coloured thread.’

  ‘I am not sure when you’re mocking me,’ said Dora carefully.

  ‘I don’t know myself,’ said Dan cheerfully in his Devon accent.

  ‘Don’t you – didn’t you – want to go to university?’

  He raised his shoulders stiffly so that he looked long-armed and large-handed, stirring the soup again. ‘I did a couple of terms. Couldn’t afford it.’

  ‘I suppose that is the case these days,’ she said. ‘When my children – they got student grants. Though only one of them went,’ she said slightly ruefully. ‘What date is it?’ she said, looking at her calendar and changing the subject. ‘I’m glad to say my son-in-law is about to come back.’

  ‘Where’s he been? Out shagging his students?’ he said.

  Dora said nothing.

  He gazed straight at her. ‘I wouldn’t stray if I had that at home.’

  Dora paused. ‘I think I’m going to go and do some filing now,’ she said. ‘You can sit on this chair if you wish to. I think the others will be back soon.’

  ‘I’ll pep up this here soup, ma’am, and then I’ll be off,’ he said.

  Dora opened the door, turned round and glanced at the back of his head with its random, flopping spikes of hair as she started to walk upstairs. She noticed the dull sheen of the telephone as she went, the fact that it hadn’t rung.

  ‘I’ll have you as the clock strikes midnight,’ said Dan to Izzie in her bedroom. He absent-mindedly moved his fingers in a soundless clicking movement and gazed around the room until he seemed to become aware of his own lack of focus and turned and smiled at her, his eyes crinkling.

  ‘I was born in Israel,’ said Izzie. She lay back. ‘Is it, like, midday there or something?’

  ‘It’ll be a couple of hours ahead,’ he said. ‘Find out for me, and I’ll do something to you every minute between midnight there and here,’ he said, spreading rapid kisses with little suction movements over her body until she laughed, uncertainly.

  ‘Nothing else happening here,’ she said. ‘I look forward to it.’

  ‘Bored, are you, my brat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t know you’re born. Just a pretty little spoilt sap who wants adventures. You’ve got a fucking girt great roof over your head,’ he said, suddenly stroking her hair back from her brow. ‘You’ve got a family that thinks that the world revolves around you.’ He paced back to the window, and threw a beta-blocker at his mouth with a swiping movement.

  Izzie winced. ‘You look like you’re hitting yourself.’

  ‘I’m going.’

  ‘Don’t go now!’

  ‘I’m off.’

  ‘No don’t,’ implored Izzie.

  ‘Why not?’ he said, hesitating.

  ‘Because Mum might see you.’

  ‘Mum might see me,’ he said in imitation. ‘Mum might see me and kick me up the arse for laying a hand on Princess. I’m going.’

  He left the room, walked through the house with his usual silent lope, and opened the door. ‘Stop!’ shouted Cecilia from her bedroom window. ‘Not again, not again,’ she groaned.

  Dan slipped through the front gate, a tall streak darting past the garden wall. He turned slightly, ran, keeping close to the wall, and disappeared beneath the tumble of foxgloves at the end.

  ‘Get out of here,’ she called, hurting her throat. Rage seemed to grip her scalp. She felt as though she were shouting at a dog.

  ‘I’m going,’ he said contemptuously, re-emerging and staring up at her through the darkness near the gate.

  ‘I think you want to be seen by me!’ shouted Cecilia.

  ‘Shhh!’ said Romy, running into the bedroom.

  ‘You’ve come out of the front gate when you could go through the back,’ called Cecilia in a garbled shout, leaning out of the window. ‘You’re just rubbing my nose in it.’

  ‘I could rub your snooty nose in worse,’ he said.

  ‘Get away and stay away,’ said Cecilia. ‘Or I’ll call the police.’

  He snorted with laughter. ‘And they’ll come down the lanes sirens a-blaring to handcuff your brat’s man friend, will they?’ He disappeared round the corner of the lane.

  Cec
ilia cursed. She put her arm round Romy’s shoulder and swiftly murmured reassurances to her as she ran along the passage to Izzie’s room.

  ‘Izzie!’ she called. She rattled at her door until it was opened. ‘This has got to stop! You are fifteen!’ she said in a rush. ‘You cannot have an affair. Must not. Can’t. It will wreck your life.’

  ‘Chill, Mum!’ exclaimed Izzie.

  ‘If you’re going to do this, I’m going to have to give you contraception now,’ said Cecilia rapidly. She shrugged with a defeated gesture. She was pale-faced. ‘That is not permission to do it.’

  ‘I told you,’ said Izzie dully. ‘He won’t shag me.’

  Cecilia paused. ‘Good. But we don’t know how long that will last. Is that true? I’m going to put some bloody condoms in your room. I’m not encouraging you. But don’t get pregnant, don’t – don’t get diseases. Don’t get pregnant. You know that you could, don’t you?’

  ‘Duh,’ said Izzie.

  Cecilia shut the door abruptly.

  There was more time by the river now that the weather was warmer and bird-strewn. Cuckoo pints grew, herb robert, bacon-and-eggs; celandines marked the way in scattered ghee, thought Ruth. Ram Das had never transformed her bedroom, but the living world was outside, and she could eat wild strawberries now from the hedgerows. She went to a hidey-place of coppiced hazel and dawdled and she was happy; Ophelia was in the water, and the water was black. It gleamed black, green, white, black through the trees. Ruthelia, she thought. I am Ruthelia, Rothelia, Rophelia. It sat on her tongue and almost choked her, autochthonous Ruthelia, and the damselflies pressed bubbles into the surface.

  Thirty

  June

  ‘You don’t answer my calls,’ said Ari, a recent repeated theme.

  ‘I do,’ said Cecilia, her pulse speeding. ‘When do I not? When don’t I?’ She caught sight of her reflection in the window and saw that she had coloured, and tensed her fingers against the phone.

  ‘Not for hours. And I texted you today – at lunch. You didn’t answer for a couple of hours.’

  ‘There’s not always reception. I told you.’

  ‘Well Romy texts me from school. You work right near.’

  ‘I’m trying to work hard. To finish,’ said Cecilia. Shame hit her, followed by rapidly manufactured indignation. Thistledown drifted past her. She grabbed at it. ‘My deadline is just a few weeks.’

  ‘You text less.’

  ‘Don’t be a moron,’ said Cecilia in affectionate tones, although guilt seemed to filter through her and crystallise in her head. ‘Sweetheart,’ she said after too big a pause.

  Later in bed when the darkness smelled for the first time of summer nights, of cuckoo spit and grass dew, and her guilt was stifled by surges of irrational excitement, she had a certainty, almost a knowledge, that she would see James Dahl almost daily until Ari came home. She knew that she needed to carry on with that ceaseless, time-travelling talk, that sharing of blame, the first halving or unburdening in her adult life.

  In the day, she wrote in a kind of semi-productive trance, only her deadline fuelling her, sensing, time and time again, the shoulder tapped before it was. She wanted him there. She refused to want him. She couldn’t stop thinking about the astonishing fact that he had kissed her. It brought it back: the Clapper Inn, embraces in hidden corners, his mouth moving against hers, exhilaration overriding caution. In a daze, she wrote of brooks, haystacks, secret passages through the meadows. The children’s hunting buzzard circled while they searched for their mother, and they encountered wolves, foundlings, slips in time. Always in Cecilia’s mind, a baby hidden in a basket appeared in the depths of the story, bobbing, almost swept away in the dark-reeded waters like Tom the water baby. She inserted it; she excised it; she reinstated it; she deleted it again, wracked with superstition.

  He would arrive at varying times, postponing all work that could possibly be completed in the evening, and in the short time carved out, with challenge and ingenuity in the devising, they found different places to go, sitting on banks and bridges and hollows as the late spring turned to summer.

  In a boat, a sharp breeze scudding across the water, he said, ‘I always wanted to do this with you.’

  ‘We are doing it now. Now is now.’

  They took a trip to Danver Sands, almost unfeasible in the lunch hour, merely to glimpse the sea.

  ‘You are taking me away from my work,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll make it up in the evening,’ she said, and she wrote at night, but through a filter of distraction, finding sand in her sleeves.

  On Tuesdays and Fridays he had a free period after lunch, and they drove fast to the moor and lay on sprung prickling ground and followed the clouds racing, the meadow pipits and the skylarks ascending and he teased her and called her a blithe Spirit and she called him a star of Heaven, and she lay on his arm on purple moor grass, and sometimes they looked at each other straight in the eyes for seconds, heard the insects crackling by their ears, the rush of sap, the leaves, the mosses, and she knew that they would kiss if she leaned very slightly towards him. She almost moaned to herself, made herself look at the buzzards circling in the sky to resist kissing, and then let it happen in her fantasies later instead. The days soaked into one another in a green blur of time; she was very young again: she remembered it, he brought that back to her.

  ‘How can you get away with this?’ she said as they wandered through the moss of Becka Falls.

  ‘I cut down my teaching hours – to live. What a non-life it would be confined to a classroom.’

  Ari texted more frequently or rang unexpectedly, and despite her former resolve, she continued to answer him with semi-lies in the form of omissions and evasions; or to ignore his calls but to text him more vigilantly, implying that she was in the archive where she couldn’t speak. She began to create fabrications more instantly and easily, the damage already done, while clinging to some superstitious understanding that this would be limited – a finite holiday, a self-indulgence – and she would pay penance, or absorb it, with time, seamlessly into their lives. Remorse flared up when she least expected it.

  ‘Come out with me in the evening,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ she said. She paused. ‘How?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said.

  And she realised that with no Ari at home, she could meet him during an evening with Romy supervising. So she lied to her girls and to her mother. She was seeing Diana, she said: Diana was in Devon. She went to dinner with James Dahl, her one-time lover, for the first time in her life.

  She was learning. Since her moment of clarity and the promise to herself that accompanied it, Dora was learning to live with gut-tightening emptiness, her resolve punctuated with seethes of outrage that Elisabeth did not defy her by contacting her, and at weaker moments she moaned audibly with an appalled sense of desertion. The loss of hope was what gradually came to her. A glimpse, a glimpse only, of comfort that she had chosen the better option. That she could, after all, manage this and survive. It had to become a habit. A lesser life, a better life.

  A car stopped outside on the lane; the gate to Wind Tor Cottage opened, the honeysuckle shaking, and Elisabeth Dahl walked across the garden. She stopped, even today, to bend and examine some campions that had seeded themselves, and she appeared to be absorbed in the scents of flowers as she wandered up the path. She was like a mirage, but the apparition was sharply outlined and over-vivid.

  Relief and excitement tumbled through Dora. She wanted to cry. She hardened herself.

  ‘Hello,’ she said uncertainly. She glanced at her watch. It was almost five o’clock.

  ‘Hello, darling,’ said Elisabeth, and kissed Dora on the cheek, then pulled her into a hug.

  ‘Come in,’ said Dora, without meaning to say it.

  ‘How are you?’ said Elisabeth, openly surveying the cottage.

  Dora cursed the habitual mess, the jars of
old flower water, the spots of shadiness and nests of unexamined clutter. Only now did her eye land on dead flies from the previous year on the window frame, on a mousetrap just visible beneath the crockery cupboard, on piles of seed catalogues, hoarded bags, newspaper cuttings, reading glasses and post-surgery exercise sheets. In truly not expecting Elisabeth, she was unprepared. She ran a hand through her hair. She searched ineffectually for wine that might suit Elisabeth’s exacting tastes. Then she stood up abruptly. She took in a deep breath that seemed to hurt her chest with tiny barbs.

  ‘I asked you not to come here,’ she said.

  ‘You didn’t.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘I don’t recall this.’

  ‘As good as. I asked you not to call.’

  ‘And I believe I haven’t. I’m here instead. I was on the moor. I thought I would see you.’

  ‘Well –’ Dora held her hands up. She walked to the door, opened it, went out into the garden with its settling light. Her shadow was alarmingly elongated on the grass; death’s companion. She looked up at the tor and Elisabeth lifted her head in an echoing gesture. Romy was in a field below, a flare of hair against the green.

  ‘She looks like her mother at that age,’ said Elisabeth.

  ‘Do you even remember her mother at that age?’ said Dora sharply.

  ‘Of course,’ said Elisabeth after a slight hesitation.

  ‘Because I am realising that what happened to her at that age has halfway wrecked her life.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Elisabeth, her features barely moving as she spoke, her eyes occluded, still trained on the tor.