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Ruth in a series of blowing breaths as Cecilia stroked her and kissed her hair. She pulled her to her and aimed for a cheek still faintly protruding with young childhood with its miraculous skin scent. Ruth succumbed, then wriggled away. She was plump, and shy, and would look no one in the eye.
    ‘You have to remember which way to turn at the top of the stairs. What’s the matter?’ Cecilia said, holding Ruth’s head to see her face.
    ‘It’s haunted.’
    ‘What? What is?’
    ‘Here. Here ,’ mumbled Ruth, rubbing her face into Cecilia’s arm.
    ‘Oh you mad girl, lovely girl, it’s not.’
    ‘I heard noises.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘Everywhere.’
    ‘The whole house creaks, you know. There are streams gurgling away, floorboards settling. That’s all. You don’t really know the country. That’s the thing; that’s all.’ She wrapped her further into her arms.
    ‘No. But – it was later,’ said Ruth, drawing in her breath. ‘Outside as well,’ she said.
    ‘Really?’ said Cecilia.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘A pony,’ said Cecilia. She paused. ‘Wild ponies come down the lane.’
    ‘It was someone walking,’ said Ruth, and began to sob.
    ‘I love you,’ said Cecilia, hugging her. ‘I’m going to drive you all over the moor later and show you round. We’ll have a big trip! A sightseeing tour. And a big fat cream tea.’
    Ruth blushed and scampered, heavy-footed, ahead.
     
    Cecilia passed a window seat set in a curve of the staircase where she had so often sat to think about James Dahl, and was reminded of him. For years in London, he had been a rare and unwanted memory. Where was he? she wondered. Haye House had bowed under its own troubled excesses at some point in the early Nineties, admissions falling as progressive ideals all but expired, and a more traditional school had taken over the building. He was most likely, she knew, to have returned to the house he had always considered home in his beloved Dorset, but she sometimes wondered, with fleeting unease, whether he could still live and work in Devon. It was possible. She had made herself contemplate the idea before moving.
    She walked downstairs into the main sitting room, beamed and sloping, so low and unevenly plastered with its exposed granite walls and cavernous fireplaces, it seemed to have been caved out of the earth.
    There they were, the three girls, like a noisy spell, alighting on window seats and crates: their heads a cluster of different colours: red, dark and pale. Cecilia went and hugged them all in turn as she always did, physical with them as she continued to be even though they were older and intermittently resisted her. She clung to that image, that storybook trio of girls. She attempted to fix the picture into her head – a portrait, reaching to the edges of the frame – but however hard she tried, an airy space, a shadowy outline that needed to be filled, slid and hovered just behind.

Six
    The English Room
    Cecilia was almost fifteen when she saw him for the second time. There he was, talking to a woman in the sunken garden, the tall grave-faced man she had once seen as she stood with Nicola while he walked up the drive. She recognised him immediately, though he was a little different from the figure in her memory who had lightly mutated into a 1940s illustration, a wounded silent soldier from a children’s novel. In reality, he was more contemporary, a normal man, yet starkly dissonant in this context.
    He and the woman walked across Cantaur’s Fields to Neill House, and the news rapidly spread that new teachers had arrived. Cecilia could barely believe it to be true.
    ‘Who’s that teacher?’ she asked that evening. ‘I mean, he’s new.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘He’s very tall and thin.’
    ‘You must mean James Dahl,’ said Dora.
    ‘Who is he?’ said Cecilia.
    ‘He’s an English teacher.’
    ‘Oh . . .’ said Cecilia.
    ‘He’s been brought in to control the badly behaved masses,’ said Dora cheerfully, with a glance