You by Joanna Briscoe Read Free Book Online Page A

she put a lock on her door.
    She fought the iced air of the bathroom with kettles and the east side tank’s entire supply of hot water, steam billowing into the stillness as she squeezed out the system’s every drop of warmth. The moor blew out there, a scarred bowl to run over, a never-ending wildness. Was the howling the sound of gales, spirits, or the large cats rumoured to roam and hide in the gorse? Ice furred the frame of the window; the copper in the spring water that supplied the area stained enamel and fair hair blue-green, so she stretched out in the rare heat and imagined mermaids and swimming pools. She thought of Mr Dahl. She ate a small stack of penny sweets she had brought into the bathroom, and alternated Anna Karenina with Fifth Formers of St Clare’s .
    She saw in a passing moment what her childhood had been, perceived that it was about to end, and felt the weight of adulthood upon her. She seemed very old now. She picked up The Mystery of the Spiteful Letters , went on to Middlemarch , then settled back to think about Mr Dahl. Drips ran through the condensation inside the window that reminded her of his handwriting. Large-footed creaks started up in the passage and a lodger tried the door handle. She frowned in indignation and wondered what the indolent hippies would think when they heard that she’d become famous. She had almost finished writing a novel, and her body was elongating.
    She arched her back, watching water run down her new astonishing curves. She could see a smudged impression of her features in a mirror: an oval-shaped face; her mouth now fuller; her precise eyebrows much darker than her hair; her hair and skin no longer discordant. With a surge of embarrassed excitement, she wondered whether she could one day turn beautiful, like Bathsheba, like Eustacia, like Anna Karenina, or the lovely Angela Favorleigh of St Clare’s.
     
    The next morning she looked out again for Mr Dahl, who was tall and considerate and affectingly sombre. At first Tess seemed to regard Angel Clare as an intelligence rather than as a man , she remembered. How could she have perceived him during his first weeks at the school only as a mind that guided her, an authority who wrote comments? When she saw him with his fringe falling over one eyebrow, the deprecatory posture of one accustomed to stooping beneath doorframes too low for him, her pulse changed its rhythm. It was the first sensation of anything approaching exhilaration she had ever experienced in that place.
    She caught moley Nicola’s eye. The possibility of future triumphs bubbling up into an irrepressible smile, she returned her gaze with a beam.
     
    ‘I should like to go somewhere else with you,’ said Elisabeth to Dora below in the staffroom, her words characteristically delivered as an announcement. ‘Away from these stifling corridors. Are you free on Friday evening?’
    ‘My husband. Patrick,’ said Dora. ‘I mean – I think he’ll be at the pub. The children –’
    ‘The pub,’ said Elisabeth reflectively. Her lips slowly parted. She appeared to think about this, and was silent in a way that left Dora flustered.
    ‘He has a group of friends – locals – there. Singing nights on Fridays.’
    ‘Singing nights,’ said Elisabeth again in an echo.
    ‘Perhaps,’ said Dora. ‘Perhaps,’ she said, floundering, ‘you and – James – could come over for dinner?’
    ‘Perhaps,’ said Elisabeth lightly, and seemed to smile to herself.
    There was, later, something of Elisabeth’s smell – the spicy fig-like scent she wore, or a trace of the frosty rustle of her blouses against her skin – something known and familiar and subconsciously absorbed – that Dora detected on herself, because Elisabeth, always, stood close to those she was talking to; and it made Dora recoil with a spin of confusion in the kitchen. No woman had ever looked at her in this way, with that appraising eye contact, laced though it was with pride, with something