held back. It filled her with exultation and repugnance in turn.
Yet for all Dora’s aversion, she sometimes wanted to convey something else to Elisabeth. ‘Don’t see me only as a married woman,’ she wanted to say. ‘I am me. Perhaps I’m different things too.’ But she could no more put the sentiment into words than crystallise it for herself.
‘There is a woman,’ she said tentatively to her friend Beatrice.
‘Yes?’ said Beatrice.
‘She’s at – the school. She works there. And she seems to look at me!’ she said in a blurt, rising into hysteria.
‘Look at you. Like a – ?’
‘Yes,’ said Dora.
‘Oh, isn’t that part and parcel of that school?’ said Beatrice calmly. ‘Anything goes. I don’t really understand, but I’m sure it’s connected to that liberal atmosphere.’
‘Perhaps it is,’ said Dora.
‘Does she look at all manly?’
‘Well she has short hair – properly short hair. Hard – how can I put this? Hard edges. But she is very feminine in a way. She’s married to the head of English.’
‘There have always been married homosexuals, I understand. But I don’t know about women.’
‘Nor do I,’ said Dora, shaking her head, and she never referred to the subject again to Beatrice, her very closest friend in life, or to anyone else. Years later she thought that that was the principal legacy of her tightly sewn childhood: the ability to keep secrets; the necessity to conceal. Her parents had stitched that into her very fabric.
Patrick worked later each night in his pottery barn, and sometimes he failed to return to the house. Cecilia waited for him, listening from her room for the knocker’s sequence of reverberations as the front door shut. She wondered how he could survive there in the winter storms that blew straight in from the higher reaches of the moor. The stream beside the barn frequently overflowed and flooded across the lane, gouging chunks of tarmac, carrying banks of pebble and mud. Fogs slid down and settled thickly in that river valley. She pictured him dying like an animal, just as her own hamster had expired of underfeeding and hypothermia, a fact that had tormented her for almost five years. Tears sprang to her eyes every time the merged hamster-father image rose to her mind. Patrick locked the barn door: he wouldn’t allow his children to witness his occasional accommodation, but Cecilia balanced a stool on a hay bale outside the window and peered through the grime and twisted pottery animals, and what she saw broke her heart: a bed, neat, piled with duvets and blankets, cover after cover in a precarious puffed heap, an electric heater close to the mattress, a kettle and packet of biscuits. She thought then of his stories of all the times he had been picked up by the police when he had first come to England merely for being Irish; of all the times he had been assumed to be a labourer because of his accent alone. Anger merged with the sorrow.
Cecilia slotted against Mr Dahl’s sketchily drawn figure in her mind. She brought him to her, a tall body, a broad chest, strong arms, sheltering her.
I will make myself perfect, she promised, tears streaking her cheeks until they itched. I will study under Mr Dahl and make myself a brilliant creature in his image, and very thin. I will become successful. I will buy my father a house by the time I reach the sixth form.
In the morning at Haye House, students were making loud music in the science corridor, sitting cross-legged on piles of bags. Amps vibrated on lockers. Nicola stood outside the top English room.
Cecilia stopped there. She had just been offered a choice between a canoe-making class, Brazilian dance and martial arts. She and Nicola glanced at each other.
‘He’s not well today,’ said Nicola tentatively. ‘Mr Dahl.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I heard Jocasta saying something that I thought meant he’s got a cold.’
‘Right,’ said Cecilia, the prospect of missed lessons