‘You know what I mean,’ said Dora.
There was silence. Dora habitually broke such silences. The silence continued. Dora said nothing.
‘What is the point of unearthing this?’ said Elisabeth eventually. She was visibly ruffled.
‘Because it has become clearer to me, the mistake.’
The air was restless, blowy in sudden gusts. They stood in silence.
‘I don’t need you here,’ said Dora. ‘I don’t want you here. I need to do this now.’
‘Oh Dora,’ said Elisabeth, and pulled her to her and held her for a long time, running her hand from her brow and kissing her head. The breeze lifted their hair.
‘You know it’s – it’s – let alone others’ lives – it’s – it’s pretty much wrecked my life,’ said Dora clearly into Elisabeth’s chest, breathing in that remarkable individual scent. She felt paralysed by it. ‘That’s an exaggeration, but it’s also not.’
‘What has?’
‘What what?’
‘What has wrecked your life?’
‘You really don’t know?’
‘Me? You mean me?’ said Elisabeth, raising her eyebrows, her mouth twitching. She sounded humbled, or vulnerable.
‘No. Well yes, that too. But I blame no one but myself for that. That has been my choice; my . . .’ she trembled ‘. . . failing.’
Elisabeth was motionless.
‘It’s the other . . . this other . . .’ Dora stumbled over her words. ‘The fact of not keeping Celie’s baby. It was a monumental mistake.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’ said Elisabeth. ‘Good God. Isn’t that all buried and past? It must be what – I have no idea. A good twenty, twenty-five years. She has three others!’
‘It was a catastrophic mistake. This is what has become clear to me.’
‘Oh of course it was not a mistake to give a decent home to the child of a child! Good lord, the house was overrun with babies. What did you want to do? Set up a nursing home? Drown in nappies? You would have been left with that baby. Yet another baby. Don’t indulge your delusions, Dora.’
‘You really don’t understand,’ said Dora, hearing Cecilia’s own phrases coming to the fore. ‘You don’t understand at all, do you?’
‘I don’t think I do.’
‘Well you should,’ said Dora in a strangled voice.
‘And why is that?’
‘I did it for you,’ said Dora.
‘Me –’ said Elisabeth. ‘You did it for me?’ Her eyebrows shot into a disdainful arch. ‘Don’t be utterly ridiculous.’
‘I did,’ said Dora, beginning to cry.
‘It was your decision, your –’ Elisabeth said with icy distance ‘– family’s. I made no demands. Nor could I have.’
‘ “I loathe babies, especially of the male variety” was how you greeted Barnaby’s birth,’ said Dora.
‘And?’
‘I’ve never told anyone,’ said Dora steadily. ‘I’ve never told anyone. I can barely tell myself . . . But I did this because of you.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘I did. It was my weakness. I take all responsibility of course. No one made me do anything, but I did it for you, because I loved you so much. And yes, I was very worried that it would be too much for Celie. But . . . really, it was that I wanted you so much. I wanted to be with you. Nothing else.’
‘Oh Dora, I cannot believe you would say –’
‘Don’t you remember all the things you said about babies? As though you’d never had one yourself. “Boy babies are the worst.” Mother of sons. There was poor snotty Barnaby. You were vile to him.’
‘You didn’t want that child either.’
‘I know, I know,’ said Dora in a half-wail. ‘But I loved him. I suffered for him but I loved him. And . . . I wanted him once he was there, of course. But I wanted you. You, you.’
‘This is irrelevant now.’
‘It’s all I can think of.’
Elisabeth raised one eyebrow.
‘That, and you. Which is an awful – sinful – waste of time.’
Elisabeth said nothing, a flicker of pain passing her eyes, but she drew Dora into her arms again. She was motherly and caring; she was wearing her perfume; her strokes, skimming and kneading over Dora’s back and shoulders, were firm and comforting. She held her against skin warmth in a shelter of intimacy. Dora felt, at that moment, that she could die from having wanted this so much.
‘I thought you would leave with me and we’d be together,’ said Dora. ‘It’s shameful to admit. But – I don’t care what I tell you now, really. Everything you said indicated that. Didn’t it? All those plans we made.’
Elisabeth gazed at the horizon as though remembering, or denying.
This was my world, thought Dora. Into that, that child-friendly world, a baby came and went.
The baby had grown upstairs. Its mother stayed up there in hibernation. It was fed: a slow, sweet feeding like a spider dopey in its web. Speedy had gone by that time. Patrick was shocked into near-silence, yet love for his only daughter who adored him underlay his deep disapproval, and he and Cecilia would hug without speech for minutes on end while he continued to ignore the pregnancy and never once asked about the baby. He absorbed Dora’s assurances that the matter was in hand with the passive acceptance that was increasingly his recourse. Dora watched the baby bump’s progression through the late summer and autumn with exhausted dread while lodgers detained her, children required feeding, and Barnaby’s demands began at dawn.
There was one incident that settled it, a routine accident that made the decision slot into place like a seal over a hatch. It had all been creeping towards a conclusion for some time, the tentative discussions becoming more frequent, their patina of pure fantasy now taking on a tangible reality. The childless couple, considerate and desperate, waited at the back of the garden. That morning, at breakfast, the tray of Aga ashes was over-filling. Benedict had occasionally emptied it; Patrick usually forgot; Cecilia could no longer be relied upon. An excess had built up at the back and Dora had to kick the Aga door hard to secure it over the container’s front, attempting to crash it into place. Strong kicks no longer worked. Growling, Dora started to empty the tray, but hot ashes spewed out on to the floor, and Barnaby, grizzly with one of the bouts of tonsillitis that increasingly kept him awake at night, grabbed at them, pressed them to his mouth, and screamed.
‘Barnaby!’ Dora cried.
Barnaby shrieked, more ash captured in a fist and retained with a furious grip despite its heat. He wiped it over his mouth. It stuck to the snot running beneath his nose, fell over his hands, his face and the floor while he screamed. Dora grabbed him, doused him with the dirty washing-up water that remained in the sink, his screaming instantly amplified to a level of hysteria. His clothes were soaked with cereal-logged water that now dripped over the floor creating runnels through the ash, while the moment he was released he bolted towards the open Aga door. Dora caught his ankle, fought him physically to remove his clothes as he roared and kicked, fresh ash attaching itself to his wet body, and with a sudden movement that made his head fall back, she picked him up, swearing out loud, and ran with his struggling, wailing form up the garden path. As she stumbled, she saw Cecilia, hollow-eyed, behind a window. This was motherhood. Her daughter would not go through this at eighteen – as a child – she thought with a tearful determination.
Dora made for the cottage, panted a word, barely distinguishably, to Moll and Flite, and bent over by their kitchen door to catch her breath, Barnaby now flailing with fury. ‘I’ve decided,’ she shouted above the caterwauling.
Elisabeth was due at one.
The breeze now blew through the dying jasmine, dispersing its worrying scent. Dora returned with Elisabeth to the cottage. Elisabeth linked her arm with Dora’s and, passively, Dora allowed her to.
‘You’re very thin,’ said Elisabeth.
‘The radiotherapy somehow makes me not want to eat.’
&nbs
p; ‘Poor sweetheart. I will look after you.’
‘No you won’t.’
‘You know I’m very good at that,’ said Elisabeth.
‘You are, you are. In the moment. But not in the long term.’
‘Oh –’ said Elisabeth, silenced.
There was a pause.
‘I can’t see you any more,’ said Dora in a voice that seemed to sway and snag.
‘Don’t cry,’ said Elisabeth rapidly.
‘I think,’ said Dora, carrying on, ‘I think – I know – Cecilia thinks I’m hard. Callous. I can’t express anything that I really feel about it at all. That’s all I want now, really.’
‘Well –’
‘With her, it’s dangerous to admit anything about it. It’s too – too, much too dangerous. But she thinks I don’t care. I do care. I do care. So much. I can never tell her that. Isn’t that pathetic, really?’
‘Oh Dora.’
‘Why can I not explain my regret, my sorrow, offer my sincere and everlasting apologies to her? Why can’t I just do that? It feels as if it would kill me to do that. I just – I just can’t. And I’m – a coward. I’m too scared of losing her, of losing those lovely girls again.’
‘Oh sweet Dora, how can I help you? Just tell me how I can help you.’
‘You can’t. You can help me by keeping away.’
‘You don’t want that,’ said Elisabeth, smiling.
‘I do. I do,’ said Dora.
‘Oh I –’
‘Think of all the lies I had to tell Celie to protect her,’ said Dora, swinging round wildly. ‘I – I wrecked her life – unwittingly wrecked my life in the process – by doing the wrong things. By attaching myself to someone who cannot be pinned down. And you know,’ she said, jabbing at a stained ball of Blu-Tack from the table, ‘you know, my own weakness in this astounds me. I think I was half afraid of Moll and Flite. I was afraid that if I enabled Celie to start a real search, it would unleash the terrible anger of Moll and Flite. That they would be my nemesis.’
‘Moll and Flite?’ said Elisabeth mildly, as though it were obligatory for her to ask.
‘Don’t you dare say that,’ said Dora, her voice thick with gathering rage. ‘You know very well who they were.’
‘I –’ said Elisabeth, unusually silenced.
‘I thought that all I wanted to do was save Celie’s youth. I thought it was for the best.’
‘It was,’ said Elisabeth firmly.
‘It wasn’t,’ said Dora, and she took Elisabeth’s arm, half-grabbing it, half-punching it. ‘It’s my own fault, of course, my own fault that I took that decision. But you encouraged it, in your silent, proud – haughty – way. You can’t deny that. You were a force too behind the – the giving away.’
‘I had good enough reasons!’ said Elisabeth.
‘What reasons?’
‘I –’
‘What reason could be good enough?’
‘Surely it’s perfectly obvious to you whose that child was?’ said Elisabeth, her mouth a tight line. She trembled almost imperceptibly.
Dora turned to Elisabeth. The world – the tors, the jostling treetops, the clouds – seemed to roll around her in a speeding globe, all understanding accelerated and crystallised.
The certainty went.
She shook her head dumbly.
‘Surely –’
‘Speedy,’ said Dora. ‘Gabriel Sardo. It wasn’t?’ Fire rose in her cheeks.
‘Oh you poor sweet innocent. You sweet fool. I thought – truly thought we both knew. I assumed we both knew.’
‘What?’
‘That it was my husband’s.’
‘It was your husband?’ echoed Dora.
‘James.’ Elisabeth smiled, wryly.
‘Oh God,’ said Dora.
‘Yes. Inconvenient.’
‘Do you – do you – know that?’ said Dora, stumbling. She felt spots of colour coming to her cheeks, precise and burning as welts. ‘How – how?’
‘How do you think?’
‘But she was – she was eighteen. Seventeen.’
‘I know. It was regrettable. A period of madness, I always thought. But I suppose the poor chap had to misbehave at some point.’
‘Misbehave,’ said Dora. ‘He told you?’
‘No of course he didn’t,’ said Elisabeth sharply.
‘Well how?’
‘You only had to use your eyes.’
‘How do you – know?’ said Dora with a croak.
‘Your naïvety is astonishing, Dora. It was not hard to guess.’
‘Oh God,’ said Dora, whiteness now drenching her face.
‘What?’ said Elisabeth. ‘Dora.’
‘And – that’s why you wanted the child out of the way?’ Dora swallowed. A thin surge of vomit burned in her throat.
‘It was not an insignificant factor,’ said Elisabeth in her ironic voice.
‘So it was nothing – I mean . . . It was not to do with – us?’ said Dora with awful slowness. ‘With us – us being together?’ Even now she blushed as she said it at her own infatuated presumption. She gripped her own thigh. ‘It was because it was – his?’
‘Yes, yes, of course it would have been easier – more pleasant – if we could have been left in peace,’ said Elisabeth.
‘Oh God,’ said Dora. She felt dizzy. ‘I thought – I thought – We talked so many times of running away together. Being together. Almost endlessly.’
Elisabeth nodded, a slight smile on her lips that seemed to indicate that this was now a faintly onerous fact. ‘A fantasy life can . . . help.’
‘So,’ said Dora, glancing out of the window, looking at the table, feeling around for something to press or bend. ‘So you had even more reason to encourage me.’
‘I never did encourage you.’
‘You did. Oh you did. With silence.’
‘I can hardly be accused of encouraging with silence.’
‘You can. Poisonous silence. And with the odd well-placed word. Amounting to a demand. You’d say these damning things, then fantasise about our home together. Our home of sculptures and music and forbidden love, do you remember? Alternative. Golden.’
‘I remember. But not like you do. This is quite skewed.’
‘You wanted that child away and made it quite clear. You could only just tolerate Barnaby. But then you didn’t leave with me after all. After – the baby. After all that, you didn’t leave with me.’
‘And how could we? Where would we live, exactly? Up in the roof in Elliott Hall in accordance with your endless fantasies? Playing the lute for a living?’
‘We – we –’
‘And what would you have done with Barnaby?’
‘Taken him with me.’
‘And with the older son?’
‘Taken him . . .’ said Dora dumbly. ‘He was getting older.’
‘I couldn’t have stood it frankly,’ said Elisabeth. ‘I’d already done that. Two sons. Dear. But quite enough.’
Dora breathed in with a suddenness that left her coughing against the intake of her own saliva. ‘Well why didn’t you tell me at the time?’ she said, and broke off in a volley of coughs, swallowed, and spoke through strained muscles. ‘Why, why did you lead me to believe? Give me hope? Good God, I’d have changed my whole life for you. I did change my life. And ruined my daughter’s –’
‘How much clearer could I have been? You expected me to be encumbered with all those children? I was supposed to bring up my husband’s child by his teenage mistress?’
‘He was Cecilia’s teacher,’ Dora hissed suddenly.
‘I know. It was hardly commendable –’ Elisabeth lifted one eyebrow. ‘It’s easy to judge. I’m sure she was all over him like a rash.’
‘Don’t speak about my daughter like that.’
Elisabeth’s mouth curved into a thin-lipped smile. ‘Well – they all were. Are. They masturbate over the IT master now.’
‘You should have disabused me. And not given m
e hope. So much hope.’
‘Well I’ve always loved you, Dora. Been attracted by you. Cared for you.’
‘That is not love.’
‘You’re in my life for ever, my Dora.’
Dora’s mouth trembled. ‘Do you remember?’ she said abruptly. ‘Barnaby wet himself, all through his clothes, just as the baby was born?’ Her voice faltered. ‘His trousers soaked. I remember the stain on the stripy cushion in there. I was helping Celie give birth while thinking, I must change him, must change him. As though further proof were needed that I couldn’t cope.’
‘I don’t remember. No.’
‘The baby went – that very afternoon.’ Dora swallowed. ‘And then you didn’t stay with me – didn’t commit to me. After all that. And I realise now that I have wasted my life. That I will never be rid of you, even if I never see you again. All I want now is peace.’
Thirty-one
June
There was Mara in the hall; the air, heat, breath of Mara. She was under the oak chest, Cecilia was certain. There was an uneasiness to the air, a stain there, spilling fingers and retreating. If she wasn’t under the chest, she was in the bedroom with Cecilia as a pool of light, but the pool had claws. I am going mad, thought Cecilia, and when she saw James, he spilled into Mara and into sleeplessness and loss of appetite. She held James in her mind at night, just sometimes, when she let herself, as she once had so long ago, remembering him with her; but it was Mara who melted into him and clung to her and grew cold.
June heat burned her skin. Insects were a rabble of sawing and scratching. She and James sought the shade of the willows where the water meadows were bright and sodden, and he kissed her, and she hesitated, unnerved, his taste and scent shockingly familiar, and it came rushing back to her, the memory of desire and the old leaping response.
In the night, she moved about in bed. She couldn’t sleep. She called Ari, and chatted and laughed with him in what she noticed was a slightly hysterical fashion. She pressed her eyes to the window and watched bats pour from the fern-choked trees in the river field to circle the barns. She felt tearful as she spoke to him, her fingers taut, guilt alternating with defensiveness, and she could speak normally only by hurting herself in the dark with her nails. Hearing his known voice, she could barely understand how she could have done what she was doing. Thank God I haven’t slept with him, she thought, an icy fall of relief that she used as a warning to herself seeming to pin her to the bed, and she was loving with Ari, her awareness of hypocrisy intensified in all her affection.
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