You by Joanna Briscoe Page A

her bed. Cecilia had come to cook for her that day, and she was still ruffled by the memory. She swallowed.
    It had started: what she had known, and dreaded, and reassured herself wouldn’t happen after years of barely talking. It was not articulated, but Dora knew. Cecilia was hungry, edging towards the subject of the past all over again. She was holding back, tending to a sick mother, being the dutiful daughter, but Dora sensed the banked-up emotion.
    ‘I do wonder . . .’ said Cecilia, looking out of the window at the bleached rise of moor below Corndon Tor.
    ‘Wonder what?’ said Dora before she had had time to think.
    ‘How she is,’ was all Cecilia said, and Dora was silent, and Cecilia was silent in response, and she cooked, and they talked of granddaughters and hospital visits and particular doctors and Dora’s garden plans, but all the while Dora was reminded of the horrible complex mesh of emotions that time and resentment wove. She had been semi-estranged from Cecilia for so long, and she was reminded of why.
    Now Dora felt her armpit and its small scar. Her physical strength was noticeably reduced since surgery, but she would not burden the hardworking Cecilia with household tasks more than she had to, so she had taken a village girl who was between jobs to drive her to radiotherapy and to help at home.
    That day she waited, as she felt she had spent a lifetime waiting, for her beloved to show up.
     
    Early in the morning, Cecilia searched the small lane that ran past the end of the house, largely used by farmers for access, or by villagers conversant with the narrow unnamed cut-throughs that led to the hamlets, although satnav was now directing drivers down there to much local consternation. She glanced at the lane’s loose surface. She wondered what she was looking for. It seemed impossible when morning was pale blue on the fields that anyone could have been there during the night, but the memory made the skin on her arms tighten. She wanted to barricade her daughters inside to protect them.
    She returned to the house, and there, before the light had soothed its wood and stone surfaces and revealed its grace, she sensed sadness in the whiny utility room, in the burpy pits of the boiler room with its sour plumbing and hiccuping. Even the white drift of light in her bedroom was fragrant with a passing flitter of new skin. She sat in the sitting room in the western end of the building and she put her head in her hands, crouching on a step before her family awoke, and cried for her baby.

Eight
    The Pottery Barn
    Cecilia and Nicola arrived early for English and waited outside the room.
    They paused before talking.
    ‘Zeno says he was in his flat yesterday afternoon,’ said Nicola. ‘That’s not on his Tuesday timetable.’
    ‘Was he?’ said Cecilia. ‘I only just realised that if you stand on the Mound, you can see into the other side of his flat.’
    ‘Oh yes,’ said Nicola. ‘His kitchen’s on that side. And what I think is a spare room. I see his witchy wife in there sometimes.’
    ‘Binoculars . . .’
    ‘You can’t do that! On the Mound?’
    ‘We might be able to, hiding behind each other,’ said the bolder Cecilia.
    ‘I’ve seen Annalisa standing there once on tiptoe when she didn’t think anyone could see her.’
    ‘That pathetic bleating girl,’ said Cecilia.
    Nicola started to shake with laughter. ‘Zeno spies on him playing tennis at weekends when he’s here,’ she whispered.
    He appeared. Cecilia’s heart thudded with such force as he rounded the corner that she felt momentarily faint.
     
    Later, she hid in Haye House’s wood, the Copse, where most acts of copulation and inhalation took place and where drug-fuelled classmates were given to swinging on a rope to hurl themselves suicidally into an old quarry thick with decaying beech husk. She crouched there reading a book and watched out for Mr Dahl’s journey from Neill House across the stretch of grass above the