You by Joanna Briscoe Page A

trembling as she drove into the car park, as though her mistakes glared, known to all; as though she had no power, even in adulthood, driving a car with her daughter.
    ‘What’s the matter ?’ said Romy, glancing at her.
    Yet she was stronger now. She felt momentarily grateful for the authority age afforded and the knowledge it bestowed, however fallible. She caught sight of herself in the car mirror as she parked and saw in that concentrated slot of reflection how she had changed: her face more refined and her cheekbones more prominent as she had grown through her thirties and then into her early forties, her skin discomfitingly more tired, more shadowed round the eyes, her hair so much darker and browner, the scattering of freckles over her nose quite gone, and that wandering, receptive ability to blush and reflect every indignity thrown at her now mercifully almost controlled.
    At seventeen, she thought, she had been notably naïve.
     
    The path winding through a cluster of conifers – now taller and darker, as befitted the dark and crenellated nature of St Anne’s – was where she had first noticed James Dahl. She had barely let herself think about him over the last years. And yet, she mused, perhaps, perhaps after all she was always thinking about him: always, some tiny strand of her mind flickering with a current that was him.
    A deputy head in A-line taupe shook Romy’s hand, introducing her to members of staff before classes began the following Monday, but Cecilia couldn’t see the sombre formality as anything but a pantomime. The parquet so carefully restored was still covered in her mind with skidding durries and Tipp-Ex, the library they passed where uniformed girls would work with hair-twitching concentration was still the place where pampered children in orange cords smoked and launched themselves off bookshelves. Mr Dahl walked past in her mind, tall and serious, hazed with magic to his observers.
    They were led outside.
    ‘Oh look. How wonderful!’ said Romy with newly patrician vowels, pointing at an art studio, and Cecilia, somewhat alarmed, could perceive her becoming already, in the space of less than an hour, a private school girl.
    The immense geodesic dome that had once bubbled up like a fibreglass buttock in the middle of the grass had simply gone, the sweltering boom of its drama sessions atomised, leaving no traces at all on the lawn. The flagstones on which teenagers had sunned themselves quite legitimately by the pool instead of attending classes now bore railings and notices. Here Furry the school dog, edgy on his diet of tossed vegetarian sausages and magic mushrooms, had humped legs and suffered hairstyles. Now only a pigeon nodded and a recorded string concerto floated through a window. Few teachers were there among the administrative staff until lessons began on Monday, but the two or three who appeared summoned the memory of Elisabeth, Cecilia thought, catching a combination of well-cut wool and silk on a glimpse of back through a door that instantly made her recall the wife of Mr James Dahl.
    Some of the staff, however, seemed young, young enough to be in their early twenties. Cecilia skimmed the hall as she did automatically when she was in a new environment, trying to find the one who slotted into the shadowy outlines of the child – now woman – she called Mara in her mind, following a spool of conjecture. Because, it seemed to her, the only route to sanity was to pursue those fantasies.
     
    Her daughter could be anywhere, she knew. She could be anywhere. But she could be here, in the area where she had disappeared. She could have come back. She could have been here all the time. She was a trace of a person out there somewhere in the world just slipping her grasp. Cecilia was, forever, returning to Mara both in her mind and in notes she scrawled when she was in her study and meant to be working. It kept that imagined girl alive for her.
    Cecilia saw her in cow-pitted meadows,