You by Joanna Briscoe Read Free Book Online

her emotions. Her perspective had realigned itself during the week away with a juddering series of realisations as she had watched her family living their normal lives, her maternal focus altered in ways they could surely sense.
    But once at Haye House – Idris kissing her twice on each cheek, the maths teacher known variously as Blimmy and Blim-Head sending a brownie he had baked spinning into the air for her to catch; once those parents, the rock dinosaurs and psychoanalysts and cabinet makers with their wives, mistresses and au pairs, had converged on the drive, dropped off children and departed; once inside the corridors with their nicotine scents and flimsy balsa installations – she sought Elisabeth’s gaze. The air was more rarefied than she had remembered.
     
    That week, Cecilia looked out for Mr Dahl, as she always did now, but with more impatience. She needed a comment from him, a high grade for her Tempest essay, an encouraging nod or some other, non-specific form of salvation. He understood her. They never spoke outside classes, but with a certainty that was surely drenched in enchantment she knew that he recognised the way her mind worked.
    For the first time, she noticed Mr Dahl’s growing gaggle of admirers with a curiosity beyond her initial amusement. They fluttered unobtrusively around him: Nicola, Annalisa, and Zeno. They too were Haye House oddities. With the exception of herself and a pair of science geeks who tinkered sweatily in the lab and were ignored by teachers and pupils alike, these were the school’s only studious pupils.
    Nicola with her beatific expression and fringed frizz of cellist’s hair, her clear skin sown with moles, already loved Mr Dahl: Cecilia could tell. Zeno, Zenobia, the disappointingly diffident daughter of a celebrity lawyer and his second wife, was more at home in James Dahl’s classes than suffering the expressive anarchy favoured by his colleagues. The final member of that drear trio was Annalisa, a near-silent but marginally more attractive Swede given to flower-print dresses and hairbands who had begun to cling to Mr Dahl as her likely saviour in the pandemonium. Rigorously discouraging any form of personal friendship with his pupils, unlike a sizeable portion of the staff at the school, Mr Dahl was resistant to Annalisa’s needs, and she followed him like an open-mouthed foal, silently crying out for pastoral care that he was unable and unwilling to offer her.
    In the afternoon English class, rain falling softly among the pines on the drive, Cecilia’s consciousness undulated to the rhythm of his voice as he read a speech of Trinculo’s. She could float upon the air of concentration he demanded, an atmosphere that eventually tranquillised the most sneering renegade.
    He spoke to her through her alert daze.
    ‘Cecilia,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you could explain Caliban’s motives here.’
    ‘Oh,’ said Cecilia. And she blushed, and she explained.
    ‘Cecilia,’ he always called her. ‘Cecilia.’
    As no one else did, other than her father in his songs. He made her like her old-fashioned saint’s name, her glassy Italianate name with its wings and flourishes. Celie she had always been to her family and therefore to most of Haye House. Now she was Cecilia, and elevated into blue cloudy saint’s air where she could fly.
     
    At home, she was infected with partial awareness that tension caught the air. Patrick was there at the table for supper, but he didn’t reach for his guitar afterwards. Uncharacteristically, he washed up. Cecilia prayed for him. She read more, hiding within the crooks of her home.
    At times the lodgers gazed at her, catching her outside the bathroom semi-dressed or wrapped in a towel, the sexual egalitarianism they professed quite abandoned as they appraised her with an open moist mouth behind a beard. A naked male hippie had on occasion left his bedroom open as she passed. She had to move swiftly around dark corridors and down steps, and