You (47 page)

‘Yes,’ said Elisabeth.

‘And I was always terrified – for the future – of Celie being declared an unfit mother,’ said Dora, her words now tumbling in a barely coherent stream. ‘What if they put her on an At Risk register or something? I don’t know how these things work,’ said Dora, tailing off.

‘You were protecting her,’ said Elisabeth gently.

‘The worst thing is, I failed them both so badly, but Celie has
no idea
I’ve spent a lifetime grieving and hoping,’ said Dora. ‘Once she said to me, very coldly, “All I need to know is that you cared about her.” And I wanted to say to her, “I can’t tell you how I cared, can’t tell you.” But I knew that I would break down. And all I said to her was, “It’s over.” My mouth was a small tight hardness. I know it. And the grief on her face. I just couldn’t –
could not
– talk about things. Oh Elisabeth, why are we such fools?’

‘Enough now, enough,’ said Elisabeth, stroking Dora harder.

‘I really –’ Dora shook her head. ‘I – Why could I never tell her I truly, truly did care? I was sorry? It was a mis –’

‘Well tell her then.’

‘What?’

‘Tell her that,’ said Elisabeth. ‘Tell her just that. What you just said to me.’

‘What?’ Dora’s mouth was open.

‘
I truly did care. I’m sorry. It was a mistake
. Just say that.’

‘I couldn’t.’

‘Yes you could.’

‘I could – Could I?’

‘Yes,’ said Elisabeth, taking Dora’s shoulders.

‘I don’t think I –’

‘I challenge you.’

‘Oh –’

‘If you do anything, tell her that. Tell her it was a mistake, you regret it. I challenge you,’ said Elisabeth briskly. ‘If I can give you anything, I can give you that. The courage to do it if you want to – that’s my challenge to you. I’ve had enough of this now.’

Dora was silent. ‘Thank you,’ she said. She lowered her head. Her shoulders sank. She exhaled with a loud rush of air.

‘Hush hush hush now,’ said Elisabeth firmly. She kneaded Dora’s shoulders hard. ‘It’s a little cold.’

The day had fallen into a flimsy summer darkness, the thatches of the hamlet humped in uneven ridges in the tucks of the valley.

‘Sit in here,’ said Dora, indicating the summerhouse at the back of the garden.

Elisabeth hesitated and glanced at the cottage. Dora opened the summerhouse door. The breath of still-warm wood and tomato plants enveloped them comfortingly, remains of spider and leaf skeleton crumbled in corners. They sat on a bench.

‘I can show you late love,’ said Elisabeth.

‘What does that mean? “Late love”?’ said Dora.

‘I think I can commit to you . . .’

Dora smiled. ‘I can’t even be bothered to laugh,’ she said, without emotion. Elisabeth’s arm was round her; she sat back against it. ‘Just think of all that time.’

‘I didn’t want to rock the boat.’

‘There has been no boat to rock for years.’

‘I want you.’

‘Yes,’ said Dora. ‘You only want someone who hasn’t got long.’

Elisabeth glanced at her knees.

‘I don’t know why I always – push people away,’ she said, her voice minutely uneven.

‘Oh Elisabeth,’ said Dora with affection. ‘You will never be fathomed. Let’s not try now.’

Elisabeth paused. She shook her head and looked at Dora with a small crooked smile. ‘I won’t,’ she said. ‘Come here.’

‘Any time I’ve got left, I just want to dedicate it to my grandchildren,’ said Dora in an unsteady voice. ‘Helping them and loving them. I’ll be on my own and look after my grandchildren. That’s what I’ll do.’

‘Oh my Dora,’ said Elisabeth, and was silent, then moved towards her lips, and Dora allowed her to. Elisabeth kissed her harder. Dora opened her mouth.

She knew, as she had known earlier that day by the river, that she would let Elisabeth make love to her once more. She was cynical; she was fully aware; she was safe. She would use her even, she thought, her mouth twisting with the notion. She knew that this would probably be the last time she had sex in her life; it would certainly be the final time with Elisabeth. She swallowed against a tightening of her throat.

Together they found her pile of camp bed mattresses beneath a bench, damp with the incense-tinged grime of the drifters who had slept there over the years. Dora felt a fierce desire returning for sex: pure sex, animal sex. Their bodies were light-sculpted under early-summer stars as she glanced in momentary wonder at their entangled limbs; the dent in her breast smoothed over, the skin seemingly ageless.

I’ve had this, I’ve known this, I’ve had this richness, thought Dora with exquisite pain as Elisabeth bit on her nipple and her thighs were stroked, and the old fire, the almost unbearably hot rising began to spread through her, her breathing shallowing and her nerves swarming to alertness. She took her pleasure. There was nothing to lose, all circumspection gone. Elisabeth stroked her hard, almost brutally, but she could touch her only with this heat, this buoyant burning. As she shuddered down those long hot steps, she turned her face into the mattresses to soak away the tears that came afterwards.

Thirty-four

June

The night grew cooler, foxes crying out from near the river with their strange child-like call, and a bird singing that Cecilia recognised as a nightjar because in a different time, Patrick had taught her their song; she remembered hearing the nightjar in early summer as she prepared for exams in this very room, and it brought her father back to her again. It summoned a feeling of the house as it was, the retreating to her room after school, winding past the wax surface of old pine and oak furniture so cold to the touch, its fragrance twining after her, past fires, glimpses of bright sky or snow, along twists of passage and stair by low-lintelled doors towards her bedroom, Dora creating big meals downstairs and much shouting between rooms. She sank her head in her hands as she remembered it all, and Mara came to her. The created Mara, with her fair hair. In Cecilia’s mind, she had hair that was not quite blonde, but of a light rained-on straw colour, falling over a thin face, a strongly sculpted arrangement of features. On haunted days, she saw her crouching on the moor trying to get back to her, the poor colourless hair a mass of knots and pony scurf. Instead of working, she wrote to Mara.

Tears pressed against her eyes; she made herself flick between documents and focus on her children’s novel. She pressed her right fingernails under those of her left hand, then threw herself into her work.

The river rushed, loud in the hushed night. Her characters sailed.
The Water Babies
;
The Little Mermaid
;
The Selkie Girl
, she thought. She must check on Ruth. She worried about Ruth and was unable to subdue the anxiety, no matter how she tried, because there seemed reason for it. She walked along the passage and opened Ruth’s door. Her bedroom was empty.

‘If you were adopted,’ said Izzie, stroking Dan’s hair, ‘where’s, like, your real parents? The ones that brought you up, I mean.’

He lay against her chest, his lips parted against her breast after sex, his breathing snagging with early sleep. She prodded him and he grunted.

‘Where?’

‘On the other side of the world . . .’ he said in a sleepy voice, rolling his eyes.

‘What do you mean?’

‘They went to bum-fuck nowhere. New Zealand. Classic,’ he said, lifting his head in stages, his hair flattened into sweat peaks where he had slept against her. ‘They followed a couple of their moaning mates to live up some mountain.’

‘And you didn’t want to go with them?’ Izzie tickled the back of his neck.

‘Mmm,’ he said. ‘More. More. I like it.’ He lifted his shoulders towards her. ‘What?’ he said through a new yawn. ‘You think I’m likely to go and shear farting sheep and catch a flat-as-a-cowpat accent?’

Izzie laughed. ‘Do they talk like that? Don’t you like them?’

‘Not
like
,’ he said into her breast. He kissed her and blew a raspberry against her skin.

‘Eurgh!’ said Izzie. ‘You soaked my tit. What then?’

‘My old man’s quite a nice geezer. She’s a bit of a harridan underneath the earth-mother bit she does. She’s OK, she fed me and everything, but well –’ he said, turning stiffly beneath her and catching her eye, his pupils blankly reflecting the bedside lamp.

‘You want to find your first mum,’ said Izzie, drawing on a cigarette.

He stood up, shaking Izzie off him, and opened the window until it jammed against the eaves, scattering straw. ‘Yes,’ he said shortly. The river’s tumble poured into the room with a stream of cool air. ‘Water’s quite high,’ he said. He pushed the frame harder, scraping away further clumps of straw.

‘Hey!’ objected Izzie, sounding puzzled.

He stared out into the night.

‘I’ll help you,’ said Izzie.

Dan was silent.

‘I knew where she was.’

‘What?’

‘I wanted to see her, always.’

‘What do you mean? Like –’

‘See her. Shake things up a bit for her, maybe. What –’

‘Have you got other kids in your family? You’ve never told me all that stuff.’

He yawned. ‘They sprogged years after they took me. Just me and my so-called brother. Zeb. He’s cool.’ He shook his head. ‘He’s gone to New Zealand.’

‘Where’s your mum? The old one, I mean?’

Dan was silent again.

‘Babe,’ said Izzie, getting up. She stroked his back. ‘Come on, babe. Come away from the window.’

‘I knew I’d see her. When they’d tell me where she was.’ He was shaking minutely but perceptibly beneath her fingers. ‘I thought she might want me. Miss me. I can’t –’

‘Babe,’ said Izzie again, and strenuously, half toppling, she pulled him down until he sat against her on the bed. ‘You’re all shivery. It’s cool, it’s cool. When did they tell you?’ she said, holding him. She kissed his eyelids. He kept them closed.

‘Well, after Zeb was born. Made sense. But I knew anyway.’

‘How, sweetie?’ said Izzie, kissing him again. ‘How?’ He lay across her and she held him in her arms, almost cradling him. ‘It’s freezing in here now. How?’

‘The oldsters said they were planning to tell me when I was eighteen. Eighteen? Why the fuck, man? But I heard one of their flyblown old relatives referring to it when I was about fourteen –’

‘Like how?’

‘Some unsubtle reference to “biological offspring”, meaning Zeb, thinking I was as thick as they were.’

‘You’re not thick.’

‘I know, my little princess.’

‘You’re one of the cleverest people I know.’

‘Well let’s not push it too far,’ he said. ‘But – yes, well, I knew I was a bit more switched on than those thick-as-pigshit dipsticks.’ He started to laugh, coughing with exaggerated sounds. ‘Brains fried.’

‘Don’t do that! You spook me sometimes. They’ll hear. What else happened?’

‘We moved everywhere, and I was always yanked from these smelly village schools, these pits, just as I’d started a halfway interesting project or something. Drove me mad. Then they tried to “
home school
” me,’ he said in a stronger version of the accent he adopted for the clientele of his market stall. ‘But they couldn’t teach me the first basic thing. Oh well.’

‘It must be really, really weird not to know always who your parents were,’ she said, and she stroked his cheek, his unshaved skin rough against her fingers. ‘My mum told me right away.’

‘I always guessed,’ said Dan, ‘always kind of knew I was adopted, must have come from somewhere else, but turned out so did half the other people at school. We couldn’t all be little unwanted bastards.’

‘So where is she? Your mum?’

He shook his head and suddenly looked weary, his mouth a tight line that gave his face an unfamiliar expression.

‘You don’t want to tell me? OK, babe,’ said Izzie, running her hand through his hair and watching its tufts spring back up in the wake of her strokes. ‘Who was your dad?’

‘No idea. I used to dream about her, never him. Some cock. Someone who fucked her when she was a kid.’

‘My real dad was a randy waiter! Ha ha.’

‘Who can just
give away
their baby?’

‘Mine was a teenager,’ said Izzie, fiddling with her tobacco pouch.

‘Mine was a whore.’

‘Dan,’ said Izzie. ‘Babe. Come on. You get all harsh. You’ve got me to look after you now. No one else matters.’ She kissed him. ‘You’re a bit shaking still.’ She stroked him. ‘Babe?’

‘Ruth!’ shouted Cecilia. ‘Ruth!’

She swerved out of Ruth’s bedroom into the bathroom on the children’s side of the house, but she could see in the moonlight that it was empty. She rapped on Izzie’s door, and when there was no answer, she pushed her body against it and tripped into the room, wrenching away the lock that Izzie had carelessly attempted to hammer into place. She looked blankly at Izzie and Dan lying in a tangle on the bed, the tang of sex on the air.