Free You by Joanna Briscoe Page B

present.
    Dora and Patrick made uneasy peace. There was an expedient return to life as it had always been. Her period of resistance lay in the air, never acknowledged, but viewed as a beast of unknown hue that had done its savaging and could still leap. Dora feared that Patrick accepted it, whatever it was, with a sort of twitchy knowledge of his own shortcomings and she despised him for failing to fight. He could not win, she knew. But she had married her fortunes with his, and the trajectory of life in that house and the knowledge that she was pregnant propelled her.
    A new cynicism hung about her. She compared her bewildering nascent relationship with her daughter’s attachment. Cecilia’s obvious crush on an unknown object amused her. She saw her daughter – over-responsive, attempting to study in the car in the morning with a book held above Tom’s bed-knitted hair; tugging at her cuticles, and so carefully dressed in the limited number of outfits at her disposal – and thought that Cecilia’s experience of love was similar to her own only at a simple level of infatuation, but she felt protective towards her.
     
    Other teachers conversed with pupils about gigs and riffs, parties and motorbikes; about beautiful mathematical equations, grotty classrooms, drama spaces and jazz syncopations. James Dahl did not. Cecilia considered that she had held three proper conversations with Mr Dahl in her life. One was at the top of the school drive while waiting for her mother to collect her, when he had congratulated her on her O level results. She had noticed minute details of his face up close in the outside light: the fissures of adult discoloration on his white teeth as fine as lines drifting across a film; the variegated pigmentation of his eyes with their almost-black dots (she thought how remarkable his simple humanness, his rods and cones and lachrymal glands); the lines radiating from the corners of his eyes when he smiled.
    The next was at a local fête downriver that she, Nicola and Zeno had attended purely because his presence was rumoured to be assured. She had borrowed Gabriel Sardo’s telephoto lens for the occasion so that she and her friends could pose, pretending to photograph each other while focusing on a more casually attired James Dahl in the distant background.
    She noticed a pair of long-haired pupils from the year below, instantly recognisable as the soulful variety of girl who would excel at English and who was similarly ruffled by his presence. One wore Laura Ashley while the other maintained the passive expression of a Victorian milkmaid, her lips parted, her hair draped becomingly over one cheek. Cecilia watched them in amusement and slight discomfiture. They loitered behind bushes; they shot each other glances; they kept within viewing distance of James Dahl. Competition sharpened her resolve.
    ‘Cecilia,’ he said later that afternoon when his path crossed hers, the light of sails carelessly playing on his face, his eyes a semi-transparent blue-grey behind the almost childishly dark lashes. ‘How are you?’
    ‘Fine thank you,’ she said, blushing. His face was lightly tanned, turning his hair fairer. She saw golden stubble like sand on his jaw over his summer-coloured skin. She found him almost unsettlingly beautiful. He was discreet, she thought. In his reserve, he was statue-like; in the multi-coloured tones of his voice, he was human. The ear followed his voice.
    ‘I was just musing upon various descriptions of events such as this in literature,’ he said.
    ‘Oh!’ said Cecilia, her mind spinning into a search for references. ‘ Elizabeth and Leicester/Beating oars ,’ was all she could think of to say in a mutter, swallowing his wife’s name in embarrassment, but he didn’t appear to hear.
    ‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘I hope you enjoy yourselves,’ he added as he walked on, and she glimpsed the hardness of his arm muscle pressing against his shirt as he turned towards