You (19 page)

Cecilia Bannan looked strained. Her eyelash vibrated with an underslept tic. She sat on the same side as Dora, pressed beside Nicola and another upper sixth-former at the bottom of the bleachers, taking vague comfort in the fact that her mother was there, reachable by crawling or shouting. She could be saved by her mother.

The band tuned up again, its discordance sawing at the air, and rows of hands covered ears.

‘Shut the fuck up, man!’ a boy called out to the trombonist, the silence in reaction followed by whistles. Stamping and catcalling delayed the opening scene, sound ricocheting off the ceiling and spreading into a muddy boom.

Cecilia closed her eyes. Diana’s school was rehearsing
Iphigenia at Aulis
and had performed
Leben des Galilei
in German at the end of the previous term; Diana’s school possessed cloisters, French clubs, debating societies, Latin classes; its Greek society organised orations. Haye House, which so often presented self-penned musicals and anarchic social commentaries, had now seen fit to mangle
The Billy-Club Puppets
.

She watched the collective breath sweat down the walls, wondering about the composition of DNA that swarmed in a sole drop. She skimmed the auditorium to establish where he was, relieved that she could look straight ahead at the stage without her gaze splashing against his. He was a blur pulsing on the other side of the room to the right of her eye line. He spoke to Elisabeth, both of them gazing abstractedly ahead, her nodding, listening and occasionally commenting.

He was wearing a chambray shirt without a tie beneath a jacket: his version of relaxed Friday night dressing. He looked tall, wide-shouldered, noticeably large sitting on the steps, his legs sharply bent. Elisabeth, so much smaller, sat beside him, her grey-black head indefinably challenging. Her gaze was occluded, as though she had no need to meet anyone’s eye.

Two trumpets sounded and a boy entered the stage talking about ‘the theatre of the bourgeoisie’ in tones of privilege softened by the standard mock-London accent favoured by Haye House. Cecilia groaned internally. Her misery seemed composed of physical pain. She had spent the remainder of the Christmas holidays waiting for a call, a sign, a visit from the man who had kissed her. As time ground past unoiled by sleep, she had picked at sections of her body – scalp, heels, nails, cuticles – excavating and attacking. She wandered, sometimes, with Gabriel Sardo when he returned from his parents’ house, telling him nothing yet soothed by his talk, up to the frozen moors where she thought James Dahl’s old navy Saab might appear over the horizon.

A girl dressed as a puppet now sat embroidering on the stage. She sewed each stitch with loose jolting movements. The audience laughed. Cecilia remained silent. He had never driven on to the moor that Christmas. She had cut more holly in the woods, pricking her fingers, bringing branches home cradled in wool-gloved hands itchy with blood. Dora and some neighbours arranged a wassailing tour with lanterns for their children while she stayed at home listening for the phone. She had conversations with him in her mind with the frequency of a nervous tic: her thoughts tugged and flickered that way, so that she was forever talking to him, explaining herself, even as she railed against his silence.

The puppet-girl on the stage referred to her desire to be married, her head tick-tocking from side to side, and Cecilia froze, sliding her eyes further from where James Dahl sat.

Days had gone by. Dora had stuffed stockings with presents, welcomed her children’s friends, cooked wholemeal mince pies, completed jigsaw puzzles with Tom while yanking Barnaby from the electric sockets. Gales poured along the valley. The phone cables were down for two days. ‘What’s the matter, darling?’ Dora had asked as though incidentally, eclipsed by the demands of Barnaby.

The puppet was now singing, rolling her eyes, lifting her patched layers of skirt as she sang about breezes and sighs in a pure voice. Children in the front joined the chorus. On some days, Cecilia had woken in terrible excitement. The light was white on the curving plaster of her walls, the morning late and warm – they put the central heating on at Christmas, her parents; the only time because of the cost – and she was drugged with brief sleep after an interrupted night, and she woke and thought,
he kissed me
. She hugged it to herself in her bed.

Children from the younger classes now scattered glitter on to the audience’s heads from a platform above, its drift scored with the heavier fall of cigarette ends and lollipop sticks and pellets of paper hankie.

He had written her a letter. The third of January, it arrived: a formal typed letter on Haye House paper that could have been written by a teacher regarding schoolwork, requesting that she phone him at three o’clock that Thursday.

She waited until three and a half minutes past three and rang from the phone in her parents’ room. She trembled violently as she dialled.

‘Cecilia,’ he said. ‘Thank you for telephoning me. I should –’

He was silent.

‘Yes –’ said Cecilia, interrupting him as he began to speak again.

‘– felt I should call you to find out – establish how you are.’

As she absorbed the formality of his tone, she felt as though sand sank through her chest cavity, dark and sludgy, falling and falling and leaving an empty space.

‘Oh!’ she said breathily, audibly a teenager. ‘I’m fine.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’m glad.’

He paused.

‘So . . .’ he said.

He stopped. He seemed to be about to terminate the call.

No
, thought Cecilia, clinging on to the phone connection with knuckles and nails in her mind, knowing the self-lacerating regret that would ensue if she said nothing.

‘How are you?’ she asked simply.

The audience was clapping now as Time, represented by a boy dressed in a yellow bustled frock, skipped on stage and sounded the hour. Cecilia caught sight of a flash of blue shirt, an electric imprint of familiar features facing the stage from the other side of the room.

‘How are you?’ she had said on the phone, and he had hesitated, and she heard his breathing change.

‘Cecilia,’ he said, audibly coughing hesitation from his throat. ‘I do regret – I wholeheartedly apologise to you for –’

‘Don’t,’ she said, her voice dull.

‘I do. I’m very concerned that –’

‘Yes –’

‘That you should be all right. In fact. Not upset. I mean –’

‘Oh I – Can. When –’
When can we meet?
she wanted to say, but the sand was now at the pit of her body, almost weighting her to the ground and unbalancing her, and she could say nothing after a little further hesitant exchange but a polite goodbye. She cried against her parents’ bedside table, knocking her head on its side several times intentionally.

Skeletons in luminous body suits darted on and off the stage as a boy stood playing cymbals attached to his knees, the performance veering further away from Lorca’s text into the realms of the experimental.

He was never in Elliott Hall gardens any more: he kept away, just as she, to avoid him at school, a twist of hope still tormenting her, routinely went there.

The stage darkened as a group of smugglers carrying balsawood blunderbusses over-acted, inspiring faintly embarrassed merriment among the audience.

She could barely work; she could do nothing but work. Her essays were stiff, her handwriting altered; her reading was obsessive. She had lost weight. She sat in his classes, said nothing, and was not addressed. Rage rose inside her.

Children playing urchins now rushed from the stage on to the steps dabbing powder on to the audience’s faces with brushes to screaming hilarity.

He had talked directly to her just once, on the stairs that led to the room where she studied French.

He had paused. He seemed to be about to say something. ‘I –’

She smiled at him, fearing that she was baring her teeth into a grotesque grin. Her gaze alighted on the curves of a mouth that had touched hers, the jaw with its shaving shadow, and confusion coloured her face.

‘I hope – you’re well, Cecilia,’ was all he managed to say. He looked tired. He looked more poignantly beautiful to her in his strained state. He smiled slightly and turned, hesitated, then went off to teach a class, his head lowered.

Speedy’s laugh was now sounding through the auditorium among mounting hysteria as Furry the school dog tore round the stage with wings attached, representing a bird. Pupils screamed and called his name, whistling and competitively beckoning him. A parent from a formerly celebrated rock outfit sauntered on stage apparently unbidden and performed a drum solo to further appreciation.

How was she supposed to hand in essays referring to love in Shakespeare? He had smiled at her courteously as she passed him in the corridor. He smiled with similar restraint at Nicola and Nick.

A drama teacher wound the handle of a hurdy-gurdy as the skeletons launched into a dance of death on stilts, the audience whooping without reserve. Cecilia groaned, and at that moment her gaze met James Dahl’s across the auditorium. They rolled their eyes to the ceiling in simultaneous derision. They smiled. Time halted. They looked at each other in a tunnel. It was a violet tunnel, filled with bright dusk. No one else was there. The raucous cheering was outside. She laughed. He broke into a bigger smile, looking directly at her. They glanced back at the stage again at the same time, Cecilia’s mouth still twitching.

Nicola, sitting beside Cecilia, remained unaware.

The audience fell into a frenzy as the play ended and children cartwheeled across the stage with Furry storming among them.

‘I’m going to stay with Zeno,’ said Cecilia decisively, struggling down the steps, weaving through parents and touching her mother’s arm.

‘Oh!’ said Dora. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, yes. I’ll call you tomorrow,’ said Cecilia, and kissed Dora. She detected the exhaustion in the thinness of her face against her lips and felt a pang.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked softly.

‘Oh yes,’ said Dora, and smiled at her.

Cecilia walked from the damp heat into the contrast of night where students gathered in groups shivering and chattering loudly. Lights went on in boarders’ rooms. Guitars could be heard. Solipsistic hysteria still reigned, thinning out in the cold.

Cecilia walked across the lawn, faces bobbing palely over the night grass, and there was camaraderie in the exchange of half-smiles with people who were still linked by the same recent experience. Voices sounded louder outside, clustered shadows walking, their delivery a controlled hush in the expanse of night. Laughter broke out across the lawns; two bicycles wobbled through the darkness. Cars were starting up on the drive in a clatter of exhaust.

She entered the main school building where corridors were lit and classrooms long-darkened, and pupils ran, skidding with their arms in surfing positions, around the hall. She walked unthinkingly from room to room, an unspecific sense of purpose driving her. Teachers and parents chatted, their children lingering in groups and unwilling to leave. She walked along corridors, glimpsing the lights of the boarding houses and the spread of trees through windows; she passed Idris talking to Speedy, Annalisa’s parents, and her French teacher Lavinie. Further lights snapped blinkingly off, making her jolt, and the school became quieter, its daytime atmosphere shifted.

She entered the corridor containing the cupboard in which she had so often sat in earlier days with Nicola and Zeno, and James Dahl appeared from the other direction. He almost passed her with the speed of his gait. He stopped, his footfall ringing on the linoleum as he paused mid-step. He turned, and his hand rested spontaneously, fleetingly, on her arm.

‘Hello,’ he said, surprise in his voice.

‘Hello,’ said Cecilia with a smile she couldn’t repress.

‘What are you doing here?’ He smiled at her. Lines fanned pleasingly from the top of his nose, as they did when he smiled, his eyes catching hers.

‘Just walking,’ said Cecilia. ‘Where are you –?’

‘Walking. Thinking – I’ve been thinking about that performance.’

‘What wankers.’

‘What wankers.’

She snorted. He laughed quite openly. She laughed more, hysteria rising inside her. He looked at her, slightly wonderingly, hesitating.

The bell of the church outside Wedstone sounded from a long distance.

‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ he said.

She could hear all the colours of his voice, the workings of air and tendons close up in the quietness of the building.

‘I used to look at it sometimes during – Oxbridge. You could just see the tip of the spire from where I sat,’ she said.

‘Could you?’

‘Yes. Just the highest point, right in the sky. I used to see clouds near it and think they were snagging.’

‘That’s lovely. I never noticed.’

‘Your back was to it. I’ll show you,’ she said with a rush of boldness.

‘Oh –’ he said almost sharply, pausing. He stood still. The strangeness of being in the school building at night with its festive sense of abandoned routine dissolved the constraints of the day. Cecilia began to walk, and he walked beside her. He stopped; she walked on, then he walked again.