You (26 page)

She took terrible risks with Patrick, she realised later. Even her guilt was blanketed that summer. In the insanity of her fixation, she told lies as a matter of course, and the more she succeeded, the more fluently she misled. She buried her head, as though the fact of Elisabeth’s gender threw a cloak of invisibility over their activities. It did not.

‘You have your own life,’ Patrick said to her, with ominous variations, and Dora had learnt how to answer. As the principal wage-earner, she possessed some power, she realised over time. She was the provider. The exhausted cash cow. But the Bannans continued to terrify her.

Of Elisabeth’s own marriage, she was not permitted to enquire.

‘Your husband –’ she had ventured with absolute lack of response. ‘James – does he – ?’

Elisabeth had barely ever spoken of him. She referred to him with moderate regularity; she explained nothing; she offered no details. As a man he was not real to Dora: he was like a portrait: unbending, formal, unchanging.

Cecilia was in hiding, a madwoman in the attic, reading the same novels over and over with a new lassitude. She slept in the mornings and ate sugary food and became fatter and moved through that twilight place between girlhood and womanhood in near-silence. And although Dora discussed Cecilia and the pregnancy with her one confidante Beatrice and agonised for her daughter, her mind was not fully engaged by it. Years later, she was forced to admit that to herself. Whatever happened, her thoughts returned to one beacon. Had her house been on fire, she would have wondered about the conflagration’s effect on the chance of contact that week.

When the pregnancy could no longer be concealed from Elisabeth and Dora had stumblingly revealed the secret, Elisabeth had said, ‘
More
babies?’ with a raised eyebrow. ‘Will this household ever stop reproducing? What do you expect if you keep a reasonably good-looking member of the male sex in the house?’

‘
You
asked me to take him in,’ said Dora.

It was not her conventional Kentish background that had made her do what she did in arranging for the baby’s adoption. A roar of anger against Elisabeth, and against herself, now grew inside her.

‘You’re not well,’ said Elisabeth, turning to Dora.

‘I am not well,’ said Dora, stating a fact, and her throat hardened with vulnerability. She, who always blessed her good fortune, felt sorry for herself. No wonder the cancer had found her, she thought.

It had never really changed. She had tried to look elsewhere, but no woman had ever hauled her in like this: they were too wholesome or homely or politically motivated, causing just a twitch of interest or a manufactured attraction, never acted upon. She had dated a few men after Patrick’s death, without success.

Looking at Elisabeth now, Dora wondered who she was seeing, since Elisabeth never referred to her other relationships, or more accurately her discreet liaisons: brief and vivid, and quite extraordinary to Dora. They were so hurtful to her, she couldn’t dwell upon them. Dora was aware that Elisabeth, progressively immersed in the Catholicism to which she had converted at some point in her forties, attended retreats in the school holidays; and there, Dora suspected, in those centres of self-denial, she indulged in intrigues of the mind and even of the flesh: contained liaisons that were disposable.

Elisabeth would never leave her husband. The workings of that relationship were an absolute mystery that Dora had long puzzled over, but the marriage was clearly more necessary to Elisabeth than anything else in her life. Dora had no doubt that Elisabeth’s love for James was, despite routine infidelity and an assumption of independence, unquestioning. As her anchor and refuge, he had done what no one else had achieved: won the commitment of a woman who seemed to spend her time both inspiring and avoiding intimacy. Dora knew it couldn’t be easy. She knew that James must, at some level, have detached himself from her in order to avoid the torment she would otherwise impose. In letting her fly, he secured her, but what of his own happiness in the marriage? Dora couldn’t begin to know. Perhaps, she thought, he expected and required little.

‘You’re really not looking well,’ said Elisabeth now, with almost clinical detachment. And Dora knew that she was not, her English-coloured hair thinned by age and hormone levels, her skin so dry after the bullying of cancer, her breast and armpit burnt.

‘Yes. It’s – I’m – not right,’ said Dora, who so very rarely complained, catching her breath awkwardly. ‘They’re not quite sure about one of my lymph nodes. I’m tired. I’m meant to be feeling better by now, and I don’t.’

Elisabeth nodded.

‘It’s just a matter of time, I suppose,’ said Dora, minutely brighter.

‘And at least your daughter’s here,’ said Elisabeth carefully. She rarely referred to Cecilia by name, Dora noticed.

‘Yes, yes, I’m so
glad
,’ said Dora, and smiled. ‘And these –’ She nodded at the next room. ‘I used to see them perhaps twice a year, in recent years, in London. Now look. What a treasure. It’s a gift.’

‘Three girls. I can’t imagine,’ said Elisabeth. ‘They’re striking. Does she – their mother – look after you well?’

‘Oh yes, yes, absolutely. But she’s under such pressure . . . she’s often writing after they’re in bed.’

‘She was always committed. I hope she provides you with some company.’

‘My relationship –’ started Dora. She felt her mouth stiffen, almost physically sensed the lines around it deepen in an unpleasant manifestation of age and grief ‘– will never be the same with her. Really, our falling out amounted – it amounted to an estrangement. You know that. I can’t rely on her totally. I don’t want to.’

‘I do know,’ said Elisabeth. The sounds of girls squabbling mildly, debating the identity of some animal seen through the window, grew louder next door. She glanced in that direction. ‘What’s this?’ she said, delicately inserting her nail beneath a small section of peeling white paint beside the light switch. ‘There seems to be some aubergine glaring beneath.’

Dora laughed, gulping a little, still constrained by unwanted emotion.

‘I’d forgotten. The kitchen used to be dark. Dark and gleaming with condensation.’

‘Gruesome.’

Dora gazed at the paint. She peeled a further flake away. ‘I’ll get Izzie to Tipp-Ex it,’ she said. She paused. ‘Does Tipp-Ex still exist?’

‘Who did that?’

‘Remember those lodgers?’ said Dora. She glanced at the ceiling. ‘Much as you tried to avoid them all. Hippies. True hippies who lived in this cottage when the children were growing up. On barely any rent. They were meant to fix the tumbledown parts instead. Moll and Flite. You remember them. They used to wander around naked on the lawn. But they were kindly souls.’

‘They somewhat blur into one. I certainly remember that frightful fire thrower.’

‘Oh, Stefania. I know who you mean.’

‘What happened to them all?’

‘They all left. They were all rootless, all those people who lived in the outbuildings here. I never stop thinking about them. About the past, really.’ She pressed her fingernails into the wax wrapper of a Baby Bel discarded by Ruth, her nail tips meeting and bending.

‘Oh Dora darling, you’re so emotional. You think about everything too much.’

Dora paused. She felt flat, picturing a subsiding balloon, a drying mushroom. Her chest was like that: the lumpectomy had left a partially empty breast. I am dying, she thought. Am I?

‘Do I?’ she said with a catch in her voice.

‘I think so.’

‘Perhaps you think – not enough?’

Elisabeth coloured, unusually, the pink quickly contracting to two points on her cheeks that seemed to indicate displeasure.

‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘But you should be kinder to yourself, Dora. And I have to go.’

The aubergine paint now scabbed the wall, and again Dora thought of mildew, of a past that revealed itself even now, painted over but pushing through like malignant cells.

Twenty

March

Cecilia sat in her room writing for a snatched half hour in the evening, but she put her work down.
It took me a long time, but I came back
, she wrote in Mara’s book
. I look for you everywhere.

In that book was the history of it all: letters from the private detective she had used, a copy of her enquiries to the social services, to the Salvation Army, charities, intermediary services; entries scrawled after fights with Dora: all evidence of her long search. There was the letter she had written to Mara on her eighteenth birthday but had been unable to send. There were newspaper cuttings on the overhaul of the adoption laws in 2005. There were postcards and objects and tokens instead of the photographs the others had had taken on their birthdays and glued into their books. For the adopted Izzie, Cecilia had included early photos given to her by her birth mother’s father, who had died when Izzie was five. Mara’s imagined existence was charted in sketches like a smaller echo of her other daughters’ known lives.

She dreamed and pictured her first daughter’s body quite beaten by battling through the uplands of the moor, where there was barely air: just liquid and cloud and ponies’ breath, branches and birds flying through cataracts of rain. She held her soaking figure in her arms.

‘Oh God,’ she said, stopping herself. She turned instead back to Mara’s book.

When you were born
, she wrote,
facts could be obscured. A lot could be hidden in those days. Histories, records, people, could disappear, just as footways could vanish beneath the bracken; just as sheep were rustled, ponies stolen, farmers’ children missed for days and barely questioned. The country had its own laws. There were no CCTV cameras, little centralised information, rudimentary computer systems, no internet. It was not so long ago, yet it was different.

‘You’ve been much more moony lately. Melancholy,’ said Ari with the abruptness of a practised statement when Cecilia returned to the kitchen. He had arrived home from a meeting at Exeter University to spend the night before returning to London.

‘You took up with a raving neurot,’ said Cecilia matter of factly.

The son of an Israeli father and an English-Spanish mother, Ari was thin; narrowly, almost wirily built, and dark: there was an element of Gabriel Sardo to his appearance, Cecilia had thought when she met him, though his face was bonier. He wore glasses with dark rectangular frames that echoed his dark hair. With such closely cut hair hugging an elegantly shaped skull, grey-olive shades of skin, and emphatically brown irises, he could never appear English, a fact that appealed to Cecilia in a land of watery hues. She wondered whether she had first been attracted to him by his very contrast with James Dahl. He was more intense, more bristlingly energetic. Despite his wit and his sporadic grumpiness, his moods were consistent compared with hers, his level-headedness steadying her. The traces of pensiveness that she detected in him tended to be channelled into capability.

‘You knew what you were getting,’ said Cecilia. ‘I was a basket case when you found me. The woman who thinks too much.’

‘Yes I know,’ said Ari. ‘But still. What’s going on? You’ve been in a strop. More moody.’

She hesitated. ‘Have I?’ she said.

‘Much. You’re distracted. Preoccupied.’

‘You sound accusatory, you horrible man,’ she said, her mouth moving into a smile.

He was silent. His jaw tightened in the manner that always made her body stiffen.

‘Well,’ she said then, heatedly. ‘I can hardly be the life and soul of the party, can I? With three children to look after on my own and an ill mother to worry about? I –’

‘Understood, understood,’ said Ari.

‘Don’t do that thing of holding your palms up.’

‘It’s peacekeeping.’

‘It’s passive-aggressive. As though I’m going to hit you.’

‘Well you look like you might. Cecilia.’

‘I am not a husband batterer!’

‘And I’m not your husband.’

‘Woah!’ said Cecilia. She took a deep breath. ‘I can’t believe you say it like that.’

‘Well I’m not.’

‘Is it so important?’

‘To me. Yes.’

‘To Mummy, you mean.’ She winced at herself.

‘That’s not fair.’

‘What are we arguing about? Are we arguing about something else?’ said Cecilia, her voice rising, but, catching his repressed agitation, she stopped herself. After so many years she could read emotions that he seemed barely aware of himself.

‘It’s amazing, isn’t it?’ she said more gently. ‘How we go straight back into exactly the same patterns. The same old arguments. They’re often about
nothing
, essentially. Tone of voice. Or some – some imagined injustice.’

‘I think you’re disturbed by being here,’ he said. His mouth was a line shadowed by stubble.

‘Your voice is cold,’ she said.

‘Not cold. Concerned.’

‘Well don’t sound so stern then. You sound – heartless.’

‘For God’s sake, Cecilia! I did warn you. I warned you very strongly about coming here.’

‘Well what was I supposed to do? Dora’s ill. This might kill her, Ari.’ She began to tremble. ‘We don’t know for sure yet if it’s spread. Do you know how much this hangs over me? How much it must haunt her all the time?’ Her shoulders dropped. He reached out and held her arms, and she shook him off.