You (27 page)

‘If it has . . . it spreads more slowly at her age.’

‘I know. My darly. I know that. But it’s a cloud over the house. Who can relax with this?’

‘OK,’ said Ari gently.

‘I worry about the girls, then – genetically.’

‘So do I. And you.’

‘I know. I know.’

‘You –’

‘And you got the job you’d always wanted to go for. You got it! Relatively easily. It would have been mad to stay in London. What? You think that would have been a logical, sensible move –?’

‘We could have. I begin to wonder about why –’

‘And what is my poor mother to do?’ Cecilia swallowed, determined not to betray panic about Dora. ‘She needs someone, and none of my fuckwit brothers is going to do that.’

‘You can barely bear to speak to her some of the time. Then you’re rushing round for her.’

‘Well I try. At least. I
try
. What can I do? I loved her so much, Ari. I really adored her. She was good to me when I was younger – I don’t want to live with regret –’

‘I know.’

‘And part of me – it sounds silly – part of me wants to look after her for my father, because he loved her. Even though they had a distant, almost sad kind of marriage by the end, he loved her, and I think he’d want me to look after her, and I miss him, and – and – she needs someone to look after her.’

‘I think you wanted to come down here.’

‘I seem to remember that
you
did,’ said Cecilia, warding away the truth that she could not quite repress: that she had come back to take from Dora what she knew, to immerse herself in where it had all happened, because she couldn’t keep away any longer. She needed to pick at it, she thought. It was like stabbing herself to feel alive. She sensed, again, time running out.

‘Of course I wanted to,’ he said. ‘But I warned you not to – become fixated by being here.’

‘I’m not fixated. I’m – Why can’t we even mention her name?’

‘You don’t know her name, Cecilia.’

‘Leave me alone,’ she said.

He stood and he gazed at her impassively. She stared back.

They had talked about the facts of her pregnancy and the adoption almost a year after meeting, when she had begun to realise that she would stay with him. He had accepted her reticence about the most sacred of subjects, but he had been less forgiving of her reluctance to talk about the father: an old boyfriend who had left her, she said, short-lived. He had mentioned this man – ‘the
boy
’ as he referred to him dismissively, in vicious prods intermittently, mid-row, over the years, trying to rile her, at times trying to trick her – but he was not given to extensive probing. It was one of the codes of their relationship, that combustible near-silence and their collusion in protecting their daughters from unnecessary grief. But, she had realised over time, he agreed to it, not even primarily out of consideration for her, but because this baby – or more accurately her continued disguised mourning for it – was a subject that never failed to inspire his discomposure.

She stared at him.

‘Just because,’ she said, breathing carefully, ‘just because your mother was critical of you – and you know I’m sorry about that; you’re the last person who deserves it – doesn’t mean you have to fly off the handle every time Mar – she’s – she’s mentioned. It hits a nerve in you.’

‘Well perhaps it does,’ said Ari, running his hand over his scalp with an impatient gesture. He shrugged dramatically. ‘Let’s not have a therapy session now.’

‘You’ve never really understood this.’

‘Probably not,’ said Ari steadily. ‘It’s likely to be impossible to understand it. It’s a long time ago. I’m now just asking you to be sensible.’

‘For God’s sake, you’re speaking to me as though you’re my
father
.’

‘You have anger-management issues.’ His gaze softened. ‘You need a firm hand.’

‘On what blundering team-building course did you learn that?’

His mouth twitched. ‘You need a firm hand,’ he repeated, showing her his palm.

‘Oh, you’re such a pervert!’ she said, and began to laugh, her shoulders bowing weakly. He moved towards her.

‘It’s like dealing with Medusa,’ he said, putting his arms around her.

By eleven o’clock, Izzie’s music still vibrated from her room, hanging on the breath of the river, and it brought back a memory to Cecilia of the old Wind Tor, with lodgers’ shadows edging through the garden at night, and bass thudding into the small hours, and with it came the unwanted presence of James Dahl. Ruth and Romy were asleep; Ari packed up his papers, frowning. Cecilia could see small, appealing signs of ageing in him.

‘You look . . . distinguished,’ she said lightly.

He glanced up, blinking away tiredness. ‘You mean I look extremely old,’ he said, rubbing his forehead with his arm. His hair, beginning to recede, was a blackish stubble grazed with grey; his eyes were almost blank with darkness.

‘I like you like this. Are you going to bed?’

‘Yes. The alarm’s got to be set for five.’

‘God almighty. Go to bed. I’ll follow.’

She went to check the house. She felt for the hall light switch and couldn’t find it and moved slowly through darkness. The hall chattered and settled, its concentration of woodsmoke and beeswax streaked with night air. On the windowsill she could see pellets of dead wasp granular in moonlight among the drift of plaster crumb. It was the hall that most bothered her and had clawed at her memory. It was where she had laid her head against the wall to think about the fact that she was pregnant. There it was: a stone wall, and here was her own flesh, too solid or too sullied as it was, and once in this very spot there had been human cells multiplying to form a body inside her. Over twenty years before, she had had the choice. Her own body had enclosed the tiny beginning of that human; no one could have taken it away. She lingered for a moment, slipping back to that time, revelling in that moment of free will before her life had darkened.

But she had made the wrong choice, and she had given her baby away.

It was too late. As simple as that: too late. However much her mind might spin into the past and effect muddy rearrangements, the fact of it being
much much much too late
was what hit her like a crack of wood across the cheekbones.

It was too late, yet the baby was still here. That was what she hadn’t accounted for. Her memory was here. A vestige or echo of her physical presence was here: a urine stain, a rush of heartbeats, a snuffled search for milk.

She walked back upstairs. The sound of a window swinging slowly in a movement of air made her stop. It was almost perfectly dark. She crept towards her bedroom. She saw the pool of Ari’s imminent sleep, his easing breaths and clutched duvet, and she couldn’t enter it, couldn’t let herself be immersed in the intimacy of that shared life.

She sat apart, gazing out into the darkness, and remembered the summer of being pregnant with Mara and walking at night, emerging only as the light fell to wander up beyond Dockden and Dockmell to where a horse path led to a stone-strewn stretch of bog with no tors to break the horizons. She had never walked alone at night before, but she was not afraid, not afraid of the smudge of sheep bulk and breath, their lanolin dampness on the stillness; not afraid of the owls and foxes who seemed alone like she was. The summer nights were often high with stars. She needed the water in her shoes and the hours eaten into the dawn to prevent sleeplessness from getting her first.

The labour had begun before sunrise, when the light would have been a dull transparency on the Wind Tor fields and the sky full of tugging movement. After so much suffering and secrecy, the baby emerged sprawling in a bloody rush, Cecilia’s body not split after all but beaten after five hours of labour, and she stared at her once; she saw her, her child, a lock of eyes, the haunting later composed of that one memory. She remembered the eyes, or just the dark sockets of her eyes. They had looked at each other.

Cecilia always claimed there had been no last moment when she was told to say goodbye to the baby. Of course there was, stated Dora. There was not. Others bathed and calmed her child and placed her briefly on Cecilia’s bed for cradling, but Cecilia had no memory of knowing it to be the last time, though she had already signed the papers that haunted her from that moment. The girl was ripped away from her: she wasn’t informed that it would happen so quickly. It was better that she didn’t bond, she was told. She was a cat spayed. She was an injured elephant immobile and lowing, its grief – and soon its love; within days
love
– spilling out through its wound. The adopters were waiting, and very happy with her baby.

Twenty-one

March

Ruth could make herself disappear with silence and willpower, and her teacher never appeared to know her name. She left school at lunchtimes to sit where she was hidden by towering dock leaves as birds like eagles flew above, and no one noticed her absence. She saw the moor man wandering the lanes; he nodded at her, and sometimes he had the baby rabbit in his pocket, and he kept it in straw for her and told her how to feed it. Now she had shown him to Izzie, and Izzie knew where to find him in a caravan.

A note arrived from James Dahl addressed to Cecilia, asking to talk to her. It was on thick white headed card, the writing on the envelope so instantly familiar, it sent her tumbling back with a shock. He had email, [email protected], she noted, the idea of him embracing the century somehow faintly embarrassing. She put it aside, not wishing to see him until she was required to at a school event. She glimpsed it on her desk later and hid it, knowing that she would be unable to explain it to Ari.

She heard a knock on the back door, and went down to open it, but Izzie burst into the kitchen before her, muttering excuses, and snatched at the handle. Romy followed her.

A man stood in the doorway and leaned over Izzie. He was sinewy and unkempt, the brownness of his multi-angled hair and stubble rendering his eyes lighter in contrast. He wore a stained fleece and emanated a dull tang of unwashed body. Cecilia felt a moment of uneasiness as he held her gaze with pale appraising eyes. His smell alone ignited memories from the old days when there was always a travelling stranger in the kitchen, someone who had slept on a lodger’s floor, or one of her brother’s friends. She recognised him from the Friday market, she realised.

Izzie looked like a child drained of colour, but she glowed through the pallor.

Cecilia and the man said nothing. She tilted her head slightly. He was manifestly older than her fifteen-year-old daughter. Dear God, she thought. Protect her.

She turned unsmilingly to the man, ignored all Izzie’s hints about inviting him in, said goodbye to him, and shut the door.

‘You can’t keep having him here. She’ll find out,’ said Romy, sitting in her bedroom in the evening, her chin resting on her knees. A candle burned, curving into the alcoves and drop-angled beams of the room.

‘I don’t keep having him. He doesn’t come that much. He wants to be outside. Like basically live outside.’

‘I just don’t understand how Ruth met him,’ said Romy.

Izzie shrugged. ‘She said she sees him, you know, wandering around. She’s been missing school. At lunchtimes and stuff? You’d have thought she’d be too scared. Anyway, I think she thinks Dan’s a bit creepy, so she took me to meet him when he brought this lush little rabbit to the field.’

‘Which field?’

‘One near her school. He’s really fit, but Ruth just thinks she’s found Stig of the Dump kind of thing. He does live in a dump.’

Going by his descriptions, Izzie had stumbled over muddy tracts to where the moor seemed remote and cold-aired and animal-filled beyond anything she’d ever seen or understood existed, and a streak of uncustomary fear had threaded her breathing. Sudden mulchy gulfs of bog lay among the bracken, and the wind had chilled her ears, coming at her unexpectedly in what seemed like mobile cubes of air, as though boxes of pressure buffeted her from behind hills. She was about to abandon her search when she saw smoke on the air. It flattened and then disappeared. She walked faster towards it and saw a small copse, its alley of stunted trees bent behind a neglected dry-stone wall. A stream seemed to bubble in glassy bulges nearby, then snake among the gorse again, ravens picking around it. Beyond the copse and stream were miles of open moorland.

She had watched him. He kicked the fire on which he was cooking. He settled himself. He scratched his head. Eventually, he stood up and she watched as he pissed in a large windstrewn arc. She puffed on her inhaler, then left it on a rock.

‘I saw him pissing in the wind up there when I skived off school?’ she said, so that Romy had to nod as she was always compelled to do through Izzie’s upwardly inflected speech. ‘Like, I kept thinking of his dick! He had all this hair there. Hardcore.’

Romy laughed, and looked disconcerted. She pulled her duvet further up her chest and shuffled in it. An owl hooted.

‘Shhh, sis!’ Izzie hissed, her eyes widened in amused drama as the sound of their mother’s footsteps made the floorboards whine, a creaking always travelling the length of the house through varying levels. ‘She’ll hear us.’