Brian, sitting on the sofa beside Elizabeth, made a noise, a tiny clearing of his throat, but the rest of us just sat.
“Go on, fuck off now,” you said. For a short while more we waited, but you didn’t move and I wondered if you’d fallen asleep. We gathered our notes, our copies of the novel with pages marked by slips of paper, our bags, our pens and pencils; all of us keeping a wary eye on you in case you jumped up and shouted, “Where are you going? We’ve still got work to do!” But you remained in the same position in the armchair while my fellow students and I shuffled around each other like a sliding-tile puzzle—one of us sitting so another could stand, Elizabeth pressing herself into your desk so Guy could squeeze past. I was the last in the queue to get to the door, Elizabeth disappearing in front of me down the corridor.
“Ingrid!” you shouted, and I jumped, turning towards the room. You were sitting up. “Have a look at this.” In one movement you tilted sideways, plucked a book from a low shelf, and threw it at me. It came spinning end over end and I dropped my bag to catch it, slapping the covers between my palms to stop it just short of the bridge of my nose. “Let me know what you think,” you said, and returned to your previous position, arms behind your head, legs out, and eyes shut. I was dismissed.
Come back to us, Gil.
Yours always,
Ingrid
[Placed in We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson, 1962.]
Chapter 5
Even with her head bent against the wind and the rain, Flora recognised her route through the heath. Seven years ago, the summer she turned fifteen, she had lain in a dip in the sand near this path and these woods, with her eyes and legs open beneath a boy called Cooper.
A group of teenagers—villagers and holidaymakers—would gather in the dunes if the evening was dry and light a bonfire in the sand. One night Cooper had offered Flora a drag on his cigarette and a sip of his beer. He had looked at her expectantly, waiting to see what she would offer in return. She had led him through the sandy paths of the heath to the woods at the far end of Little Sea Pond and pressed him into the muscled trunk of a hornbeam. She hadn’t kissed a boy before and wasn’t sure whether she enjoyed the feeling of his tongue in her mouth. She imagined withdrawing her face and him still standing there with his eyes closed and his tongue out. Flora knew no one cared where she was—not her father, who would be in the pub, and not Nan, on another maternity-ward placement, who had left two plates of dinner in the fridge: a lake of stew separated from the peas by a wall of mashed potato.
After the kiss, on their walk back to the bonfire, Cooper said, “Will you be around tomorrow?”
“Maybe,” Flora said.
The next evening they left the fire early and returned to the tree, which bent its spine to the wind and crouched protectively over a sandy hollow.
Flora couldn’t now bring Cooper’s face to mind and she had never learned his first name, but she recalled the way the silhouetted leaves and thin branches of the hornbeam had swayed against the night sky. They didn’t talk much, but there was a full moon and Flora had brought a sketchbook. She made Cooper take off his jumper and T-shirt although he complained the night was cold, and had him rest against the tree trunk so she could draw him. She tried to look hard and not make assumptions about what was in front of her, like her art teacher had taught her. What she drew didn’t resemble Cooper, but when she had finished she liked how his face blended into the bark of the tree. Afterwards he undid his trousers and she lay back in the sand. She imagined Cooper as a faun or satyr with the legs and cloven hooves of a goat; a half animal performing an act that came from somewhere deeper than his limited ability with conversation and his love of poorly drawn tattoos. She liked to create a picture of the two of them in her head, how they would appear to a bird or someone sitting in the top of the tree: their bodies merging and blending in the moonlight. She put up with roots digging into her spine as the boy became lost in his own rhythm and finished with two or three jerks that ran through the whole of his body.
Flora went on the pill, and she and Cooper visited the tree many times that summer, while she learned what her body was capable of and what she liked. But it was the drawings and the afterwards time she mostly did it for; when he held her and kissed her quietly, his weight heavy until they both felt her body ejecting the soft wetness of his.