You

by Joanna Briscoe

  But when she put down the phone, an old scene shot back into her mind. She remembered kissing James Dahl when she was seventeen in the dank chlorine-fugged section of garden near the Haye House swimming pool with its dripping evergreens and moss-silled glass. His hands were on her waist; the sexual power of two hands on the dip of a waist caught her now.

  She made the picture blank, and Mara flew at her. Like a figure flying in wind and rain slapping against her. She was where their kissing had led.

  There was a loud sound outside the bedroom on the ground below.

  She ran downstairs, tripping a little. Mara was in the hall, turning to her, moving towards her, disappearing.

  There were no wellingtons by the door so Cecilia ran out in bare feet, drawing in her breath on the garden path. She saw Dan’s figure clearly in the moonlight. She hobbled rapidly, following him towards a feed barn sunken in a pit of nettles and old builders’ sand behind the roofless stables in the river field. Stars stormed. The figure and the sketch of bracken behind him were silhouetted, the summer night like a version of daylight, the moon tipping brightness.

  ‘Wait! Stop!’ she shouted.

  Dan crouched in the hollow of the broken-walled garden that fronted the stables where rat poison and grower bags gleamed. Cecilia glanced at the ground, almost expecting to find the ancient charred remains of Speedy’s Christmas fire among the tangle of dock and grass, then watched him as he stood up, tall and purposeful.

  He turned round; her breathing slowed.

  She could see his face clearly in the spread of dull silver from the moon, and it seemed less threatening now; it was already so very familiar to her from glimpsing him that she felt an unexpected rush of intimacy upon meeting his gaze. She looked into his eyes and she was momentarily moved by his presence in the midst of her rage.

  She paused.

  She gestured at the lane. ‘Leave her alone,’ she said, the fury regathering.

  He didn’t move. He smiled very slightly. He raised an eyebrow and smiled again at her, almost affectionately.

  ‘I’ll get you taken away, I’ll call the police. I mean it,’ she said in a quieter voice.

  A flash of pain passed across his eyes, as though he had been physically wounded. He recovered his equanimity. ‘Would you do that?’ he said.

  She hesitated. ‘Yes. I would.’

  He nodded. He raised his head, and faint pain seemed to linger in his expression, but he looked straight at her. Bats wove and dipped behind him.

  Her heart ticked, and an instinct to hold him came to her.

  ‘You look beautiful when you’re angry,’ he said. ‘That’s what they say in The Railway Children.’

  She stood still. ‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘I know. Phyllis says it in the novel. How do you know that?’ She was suddenly tearful.

  ‘I read it.’

  ‘Did you?’ she said.

  ‘I can read,’ he said in his odd accent.

  He looked into her eyes, then at her mouth. He kept his gaze trained on her, shifting smoothly between her eyes and her mouth, and a smile lifted his lips. He continued to focus on her mouth. She looked at his. James Dahl’s lips came to her in her mind. The air was silent. She stared at that mouth; it filled her frame of vision, a Man Ray mouth in silver bromide, its curves sculpted but strongly male; she could see nothing else; she wanted to kiss it. She leaned very slightly towards him. He moved towards her. James Dahl’s mouth was placed over his, merged, a memory of kissing it.

  ‘You little cunt,’ he said calmly, but still he kept his eyes trained on her, and their lips parted in an echo of each other’s as they stared.

  ‘You can’t call me that,’ she said.

  Sweat broke out on her forehead. She wanted, now, to take it all out on him, all her hidden longing for James Dahl; to couple with him in this rearing garden, her thighs light from suppressed desire, her heartbeat rapid. Her chest rose and fell. She wanted him, in all his sinuous thinness, to take her now, and she would hold him and kiss him and bite his lips.

  ‘Why did you call me that?’ she said, barely hearing what she was saying.

  ‘Because you are.’

  There was silence.

  ‘You stalk us.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘Why? To see Izzie?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Why couldn’t you be more open?’

  He shook his head. He seemed to smile with his eyes.

  ‘The way you speak . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Lots of places. Mishmash. Horrible stew of accents.’

  ‘Army?’

  He laughed. ‘No.’

  Dog daisies glowed. She glanced down and saw that he had been cultivating plants. A row of what she thought were potato leaves lined a dry-stone wall in that little garden so choking and enclosed, it seemed to her now like a Victorian horticultural case, species crammed against species, frothing but tamed. How could she not have noticed? she wondered.

  ‘You’ve been planting,’ she said, her tone still without variation. She felt a pang of tenderness that someone had bothered to cultivate living things in this forgotten knot of a garden where bats gathered.

  ‘I try to pay my way,’ he said.

  ‘But you can’t be here,’ she said, and then she felt the cruelty in her words. ‘Izzie is only fifteen,’ she said, as if in explanation.

  ‘So you’re going to chuck me out? Just chuck me out again?’

  She lowered her head. They caught each other’s eye. The ripple of attraction returned.

  He smiled.

  He came closer and she caught a tinge of unwashed skin and slept-in clothes. Panic bubbled through her brain. The desire to touch him subsided, thinned, disappeared.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  His eyes shone.

  She waited.

  He looked over the wall. He smiled at the horizon.

  ‘I’ll have your daughter first,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t you dare!’ she said, her voice rising, but he turned and began to walk with a fast loping gait across the garden, and she ran after him, her feet hooking woody stems, her toes stubbing on gravel which pressed wincing sharpness into her heels, his walk turning into a run that became faster as she chased him to the lane’s corner and lost him.

  She stood, bending over, trying to catch her breath, then she went inside and checked her girls and left a rapid message for Ari.

  Mara was not there that night, and so she slept.

  Thirty-two

  June

  Dan returned to the house some time later as a rumpled shadow outside the kitchen door. He alerted Izzie, making no attempt to disguise his perturbed state, his eyes restless as they landed on her.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she whispered. He stood stiffly on the doorstep, not entering. She frowned. ‘You stink. Sweat.’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said shortly, but his shoulders dropped.

  ‘Oh babe,’ she said. ‘Something’s wrong. Come to my room. Babe.’ She ran her hand through his damp hair, travelling from his neck down his back and circling his vertebrae with her fingers. ‘I love you.’

  ‘Do you?’ he said. He looked her in the eyes for a few moments, then cut his gaze and followed her silently up the stairs.

  ‘You know I do.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. He lowered his head momentarily, as though pausing to contemplate his actions, then he turned to her. ‘Get on the bed?’ he said.

  ‘Uh?’ she said.

  ‘It’s only what – two weeks?’ he said.

  ‘What? My birthday? Yes. Less.’

  ‘Let’s do it,’ he said. ‘We’re not going to wait any more.’

  ‘What, like, do it?’ said Izzie, sounding stupefied.

  ‘Do it.’

  ‘Oh God. Like, Dan. I’m – Yes.’

  ‘Get your rump up there then. Where did we get to last time? Your left hip. None of this pissing around. You’
re gorgeous,’ he said, reaching up under her night-time T-shirt and feeling her with a fidgety circling movement.

  ‘There’s this – I don’t know? – though –’

  ‘What?’ His breath still emerged unevenly, though his eyes were bright and focused on her face. She felt his sweat cooling in the dew-scented air from the window as she stroked him, sensed the coiled tension of his wide-shouldered back.

  ‘It’s not really me – it’s like it’s not really me you like?’ she said, stumbling over her words. ‘Like you don’t really know me?’ said Izzie, colour travelling up her neck, and she turned away from him. An owl hooted outside, its call returned.

  ‘No princess fits,’ said Dan. His arm muscles were tensed. ‘Do you know me?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Izzie. Smoke twined in the air, the end of her cigarette drifting near Dan’s head. ‘Fuck. Sorry. Yes.’

  ‘Really?’ said Dan, his voice thickening, and he stretched himself out on the single bed beside her, his left leg on top of her, and sank his mouth on to her nipple.

  ‘Yes I do,’ she said, her words disjointed, and as she met his eye and saw anxiety blow across his face, she covered his lips with a series of kisses. ‘I really love you,’ she said.

  He was trembling. He placed his mouth on her neck and his hand curved down her body; she took it, guided it, pressing it harder against her, and afterwards, his head was a dense weight on her shoulder.

  ‘You’ve dribbled over me,’ she said, murmuring little sounds of laughter as she kissed him, and then she saw that it was his eyes and not his mouth that had left her skin wet.

  ‘Don’t,’ she whispered, and felt the spasms of his suppressed sobs, his legs heavy against hers.

  Ruth lay by the river. It was the latest she had ever been out there: past midnight, Tom’s Midnight Garden. Dog daisies glowed, stitchwort, meadow grass, and all those petals could form a radiant nosegay garland when she floated like Ophelia-Ruthelia; but when she lowered herself into the river as she had promised, she could still only swim instead of float. The coldness made tears storm to her eyes. ‘Mummy,’ she muttered but water filled her mouth. She flapped, gasped, floundered and wriggled to the bank in breaststroke. She didn’t float, and floating was what she needed to do to appease, silently and flower-logged.

  He is coming, thought Cecilia, and a beam travelled down the lane. She could see lights arriving, widening and falling through knotted canopy, thinning on to the sky, just as months before they had left. The back of the car was visibly chaotic with books and boxes. Moths swooped towards the headlamps. The door slammed, Ari came into the house and Cecilia walked rapidly into his arms.

  ‘My darly,’ he said.

  His short hair grazed her nose; she smelled the enclosed breath of the car on his comforting skin; she drew him closer to her and they embraced, her head pressed to him so that she couldn’t see him but stared into the room, stiff with a horrified awareness now that he was here and solid and familiar beside her. He put his hands on her waist, and the action felt intrusive.

  ‘It’s my turn to take charge,’ he said airily, though he suppressed a yawn of tiredness. ‘I’ll cook you some massive pastas. Tortillas, paellas. Enough of these country grubs and shrubs.’

  ‘Oh my darling,’ she said, and she buried her face in him. ‘I love you,’ she muttered.

  ‘I love you, missis.’

  An image of a kiss shot through her mind. Heat rose up her neck.

  ‘You’ve been on your own too long. I’ll take my turn now.’

  She kissed him on the lips.

  ‘I want you,’ she said slightly awkwardly, looping her arms round his neck, a foggy pang of guilt rising through her. ‘Come to me,’ she said, trying to correct her breathing.

  ‘I’ll have you,’ he murmured in a whisper into her ear so the girls couldn’t overhear.

  ‘OK,’ she whispered. ‘Then I’ll have you.’

  She froze again. It slammed into her only now, how far she had gone in the infidelity of her thoughts, kisses, the ripeness of her body. Ari hugged her and she looked into the long-known patterns of his eyes.

  ‘It’s different here,’ he said suddenly, turning to survey the room, a trace of discomposure lifting his voice.

  She dropped her gaze, then tried to meet his eye again, but he knew her too well and she saw him detect a stiffness in her expression.

  ‘I think –’ she began, to distract him.

  ‘Perhaps you don’t need anyone else –’

  ‘I do – I –’

  ‘It’s strange. I think what it is, is . . .’ He furrowed his face in contemplation, looking momentarily almost ugly. ‘Is that this is your house, life. Past. You don’t need anyone else in it. Perhaps.’

  ‘Oh I do, of course I do!’

  ‘I sometimes feel here that I’m in someone else’s life. This isn’t my life.’

  ‘Oh Ari, don’t be so melodramatic. You’ve only just got here. Are we going to start debating, arguing immediately?’

  ‘No,’ he said in a low voice, and stroked the base of her back.

  ‘Good God. This is a little heavy the moment you return. You sound like a lecturer with some new construct to propose. Couldn’t you have told me that you’re living “in someone else’s life” when we first decided to come here? . . . Is this some male pride issue?’

  ‘Not everything is about gender politics.’

  ‘Give me strength, you curmudgeon.’

  Her mouth opened. She was heated. She could discern pain in his expression, and it made her swallow.

  ‘Thank you for being so good,’ she said, without knowing quite what she meant. ‘Thank you for standing by me, for being a great father. I love you. I appreciate all of it.’

  There are very few times I don’t think about you, wrote James Dahl in a letter that arrived in the morning, because he had taken to writing to her, even while he saw her daily, and she wondered whether she would ever be able to look at those distinctive cramped loops without recalling how she once would have longed and longed for such words in this very handwriting.

  June dusk was falling, and with a small escalation of energy, Dora wandered across the fields above Wind Tor House, taking a walk to regain her strength. Cancer, she thought, had hollowed out the remaining structure of her life. She stumbled a little over the uneven grass and clumps of hawkweed, but skylarks ran in pairs through the sky, their song bubbling high, meadow pipits dashing past her, and the trees were in full leaf, gathering the first shadows of falling light. Dora wiped her brow, felt the paperiness of her skin, tasted the hay baked by day twined with comfrey on the air, and hastened her pace. She planned a dinner to celebrate Ari’s return; she had asked an old friend from her music group to meet her for lunch at Elliott Hall later in the week, and she was trying to read novels she had never managed before. Vigorously filling in time was a partial solution. Sadness sounded a high thin note at the back of her brain. She had not heard from Elisabeth; nor did she expect to.

  Her mobile beeped in her pocket. She had reached the spot above the depths of the Dewdon valley at which reception was possible on a clear day, and now she glanced at her screen. 1 message Elis it said.

  I’m on the moor and looking for you. Not at home. Where?

  Dora hesitated, returned the mobile to her pocket, and continued to walk where the field wrinkled over the hill’s brow and the earth radiated warmth. She breathed in still air. She would walk further, further away from home, where the houses in the valley were a crumble of thatch against a blur of green. She could hear the roar of oxygen in her ears.

  ‘Dora!’ came the voice of Elisabeth, strained but impatient, and Dora looked up, and there she was by the gate of the field wearing a fitted narrow dress of the kind that suited her small figure, Dora noted automatically, a cardigan slung over her shoulders. Dora waved and continued her walk round the edge of the field instead of diverting straight towards Elisabeth, and for a while, Elisabeth was a dot at the side of her vis
ion, a figure that eventually climbed the gate and came towards her.

  ‘Dora!’ said Elisabeth, taking her shoulders and lightly shaking them. ‘I have looked far and wide for you!’

  ‘I was walking.’

  ‘Good to see it,’ said Elisabeth after a pause. ‘Shall we go back to the cottage?’

  ‘Not now,’ said Dora. ‘Look at the sun.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’d rather not. I’d rather be out here, really.’

  ‘I had some supper for you in the car,’ said Elisabeth, a light frown implying admonishment. ‘It’ll be cold now, or at best lukewarm.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Dora. ‘It’s kind of you, but please don’t. I’m feeling a bit better now. And – I have Katya and Cecilia, who look after me very well.’

  Dora breathed deeply and watched the last sun light a stonechat on top of a gorse bush as she walked past. She looked up at the trees.

  ‘Wait for me,’ said Elisabeth eventually. She caught up. She ran her hand down Dora’s arm. ‘Will you really not go back to the cottage?’

  ‘You sound a little bit Scottish sometimes. What a lovely evening. Who knows how many more of them I’ll have,’ she said matter of factly.

  ‘Oh darling Dora, do you really think that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I have to be on Tamoxifen from now on. It’s likely it will crop up elsewhere in the body.’

  ‘The beautiful body.’

  ‘You haven’t found my body beautiful for months. Years by now – over a year,’ said Dora levelly.

  ‘Oh I do find it beautiful.’

  ‘Because,’ said Dora, smiling at Elisabeth, but barely looking at her, ‘you know you’re safe.’

  ‘Let’s go back,’ said Elisabeth firmly. ‘I want to take you to bed.’