Read Online You by Joanna Briscoe - Free Book Online Page B

couldn’t speak to them; that they viewed her as a scholarly and undesirable yet somehow unattainable oddity who fell outside their mating and companionship radars. And that much as she longed for understanding, and though she was at heart scared of these guitar-strummers and moped-owners grown so tall and stalky, she also scorned them. There was no Heathcliff, no Darcy or Rochester among the student body of Haye House. Whereas she : she lived in a rosy suspended future shortly to storm into perfection. She felt herself step with fawn-like delicacy into the car. She sensed omen and dazzle all around her: in the glare of sky, the blur of leaves; in the twists of hair that fell back off her face, in her fall of eyelashes, the speed with which her hand could write and the blood rush through her body. James Dahl’s eyes were almost perpetually on her through invisible psychic means. She conversed with him. She observed her own face in the car’s side mirror, and rearranged her features and radiated her soul until she saw in that miniature reflection pure beauty. He saw it too.
    When she descended from the car at the top of the drive, her certainty was tempered by the reality of the school.
    Zeno was, as so often, waiting for her on the step.
    ‘He asked me how I was today ,’ she said.
    Cecilia and Nicola gasped.
    ‘Zoom!’ said Cecilia, taking Zeno’s arm as they made their way to their little room, a former cleaning cupboard with a small window they had appropriated primarily for discussion of Mr Dahl. Here they perched on shelves to interpret the day’s developments. Here they screamed and giggled, planned and theorised.
    ‘Shhh,’ said Nicola. ‘He might hear on the way to the head’s house. It’s Tuesday morning.’ They collided in a whispering heap. ‘If one of us asks to go to the loo just before quarter past, we might see him. Pass a note. If not, we could look through the sixth-form loo windows at break.’
    ‘ Some of us have already seen him today,’ said Zeno. ‘He’s wearing a greenish jacket, same tweedy stuff –’
    ‘His hair’s going to be cut soon. I bet you. I think the witch makes him,’ said Nicola, raising her eyes.
    ‘He looks like . . . someone from A Room with a View ,’ said Cecilia.
    ‘He is quite old . . .’
    ‘Ancient, yes. Thirty-five. But he looks like a poet! A young war poet!’
    ‘He does not,’ said Zeno hopefully.
    ‘He’s so beautiful ,’ said Nicola poignantly.
    ‘I know . . .’ said Cecilia, pain lightly threading her excitement. ‘What does he see in her?’
    Zeno shook her head. ‘She’s a hard cow .’
    ‘She’s got streaks of grey hair,’ said Cecilia, fingering a red wave of her own until it caught the light, and feeling that same indefinable essence of youth flex through her as she stretched. She yawned a little, intentionally, delicately.
    ‘Do you think she knows? She’s guessed?’
    ‘She’d be so furious.’
    Cecilia blushed in fear of exposure. James Dahl was painstakingly formal in the manner of the public school master he had been and would remain at heart. He limited his interaction with pupils to comments about prep or timetables; his wedding ring was prominent; at school events he sat beside his wife and exchanged solemn conversation with her, observed in a ferment of curiosity by his admirers.
    Male voices could be heard overlaid by footsteps outside the cupboard. After a round of hushing, the girls silenced their spluttering and widened their eyes at one another. His voice alone, heard incidentally, was a gift that reverberated through a morning.
    ‘What’s today’s fact?’ Cecilia asked Zeno, more lightly. She coughed.
    ‘Well, I’ve got something . . .’
    ‘ What? ’ urged Cecilia.
    ‘His younger son’s called Hugh.’
    ‘Hugh . . .’ said Nicola.
    ‘ Really? Are you sure?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Zeno, nodding. ‘I heard Jocasta saying, “Elisabeth’s son, Hugh”.’
    ‘Robin and Hugh,’ mused Cecilia.