Nonesuch Read online

  ‘Oh, you are, are you?’

  ‘—and I have to consider their views. Mark and Oliver want to lease Nonesuch as a management training centre for their people. As part of the deal they’ll split the cost of the renovations with the Estate. It’s a good solution. The bank gets its money. The Estate feels it has an asset again. And most of the year you and I have most of Nonesuch to ourselves.’

  ‘You mean we’d be caretakers in our own house.’

  ‘Let’s see what else we could do.’ He sounded angry. ‘Sit in it until it falls down?’

  ‘Give me six months in the City and I’ll buy us another house,’ she promised. ‘Do you think I couldn’t?’

  He touched her hand. ‘No,’ he said with a smile. ‘I think you could.’

  She pulled her hand away. ‘Then for God’s sake let me! I mean it. I won’t take a penny from Engelion. And neither will you.’

  ‘Anna, they were prosecuted and they cleaned up their act.’

  ‘They got off scot-free, the way all those companies do. A fine they can easily pay, some minor board member sacked at a press conference, a convenient name change. People forget, business goes on as usual. You’ve seen the same TV footage as me.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want justice.’

  ‘Anna—’

  ‘I don’t want paltry fines followed by crocodile tears and repositioning of the product in the market. What do they call themselves now? English Garden House of Beauty?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s that bad. I think they called it “English Lion” or something. They left me a brochure—’

  ‘Oh, shut up, John. You know this isn’t right.’

  He knew. He looked crestfallen. Eleanor – who, bored since the departure of her admirers, had squirmed impatiently throughout the whole exchange – offered him her music box, then burst into tears when he didn’t seem to notice the gesture. In the rather quiet and strained few days that followed, she kept it as close by her as she could. She continued to refuse to have it wound up. Any music that came from it now was fragmentary, incidental. Anna, meanwhile, sure that nothing was as it seemed, acted exactly like a cat whose territory had been disturbed. Her fur was up, her skin twitched. Rehearsing these anxieties, she prowled the corridors as if she suspected Mark and Oliver were still around and hoped to catch them unawares. As anyone who has been burgled will report, none of this was necessarily conscious. Later, Alice Meynell disturbed her in the kitchen, orating fiercely while she ironed perfect little baby clothes of Eleanor’s, ‘I despise you and everything you stand for.’

  It was a moment before she noticed Alice. She shrugged, as if to say, ‘Everyone talks to themselves. So what.’ Then something caused her to ask, ‘Which would you prefer, Alice, freedom from the past or freedom from the future?’ As if it were possible to have either. ‘I hate the past,’ she added, when Alice only stared. ‘I bloody hate it.’ As if that could explain anything.

  ‘Cup of tea?’ suggested Alice.

  *

  Izzie says I must be careful where I put things. Putting things away is almost as difficult to learn as finding them in the first place. You’re here and there waiting and listening on the stairs sitting in some moonlight on a landing with the smells of mice coming up between the boards. There are a lot of places to put things. A lot of boltholes, says Izzie, a lot of rat holes but only one safe place for each one thing. It isn’t just a matter of hiding them my little onion. I should know (and she laughs) I put the safest thing away and you’ll be older than you are before you find that my girl. Older and wiser, she says, and laughs again.

  Won’t you have a shock, too, she says. I did. When I saw what I had to do.

  When Izzie comes her voice is beautiful. She is often singing a song. She is telling me something already so I miss the beginning of it. She tells it as a story, she sings it as a song. One song is about a very beautiful woman who was forced to kill her own baby.

  *

  Ashmore, early morning. Sunshine lay weightless on the fronts of the Victorian almshouses. Eaton Terrace smelled of fresh bread and cut grass. Rooks, up early to see what could be had, planed in widening circles against a clear blue sky. Francis Baynes stood with his hand on the lych-gate to watch Anna Dawe’s marmalade cat, its fur full of light, slip across the churchyard on some business of its own. ‘Hello, Orlando,’ he murmured and clicked his tongue.

  The cat, halting for a fraction of a second, looked back over its shoulder at him, blinked its intelligent yellow eyes and disappeared among the headstones.

  Francis smiled and went on into St Mary’s. There, he put on his vestments and prepared for Early Communion, which he had reinstated along with the old Book of Common Prayer when he took over the parish. No one had complained because no one ever came. Although he regretted this, Francis rarely allowed it to depress him. He was less a traditionalist, he knew, than a romantic. He had never regretted that, either.

  This morning, when he had finished, and put away the cup and paten, the church seemed filled for a tantalising moment with a kind of liquid gold, some glorious substance that permeated the spaces between the very molecules of the air. He loved St Mary’s when it was lit like this, from within. Its bareness seemed elegant, willed, proper. Its emptiness made of it a vessel. But after a moment or two it always reverted to the church he knew, smelling strongly of lilies and wholesale wax polish, and echoing to the faint sound of a tap dripping in the vestry. Ordinary light cut across its columns and pews. Francis sighed, tidied the pamphlets in the rack by the door, and – casting one more glance towards the east window before he turned to leave – saw he was not alone after all.

  While he was busy with the pamphlets, she had slipped quietly past him and now stood at the other end of the nave, at the base of one of the great cylindrical Romanesque piers. He had not heard her at the door. Yet here she was, unspeaking, tall, dressed in brown, carrying her grey kid gloves in one hand and a few flowers in the other. The light from the side windows fell across her. She brought to the cool air of the nave the smell of earth and St Mary’s was suddenly resonant with a faint full chord, as if someone had played barely audible notes on the organ.

  ‘What do you want?’ whispered Francis Baynes, while some inner voice leapt to answer, ‘The mystery! The mystery!’ and the woman from the graveyard turned her face towards him and vanished.

  *

  All the rest of the day he went about his parish business puzzled and frustrated. By midnight, returning tired yet restless, he found it impossible to settle to anything. The weather had turned and it was raining. He put on his coat, stood for a few minutes in the empty graveyard as if waiting for something; then, getting into his little Rover, hurried it up on to the downs, where he parked and stared out across the rain-dark valley at the Queen Anne chimneys and curiously angled gables of Nonesuch, thinking and thinking, while the wind raced the clouds through a moonlit sky the colour of fish scales.

  ‘Quite dark,’ he whispered to himself.

  When he got back, the door of the vicarage was blowing open and someone had turned on a nightlight in one of the upper rooms. He stood there at a loss in the darkened hall. He could hear someone moving about up there.

  ‘Hello?’ he called.

  No answer.

  He started to climb the stairs, but caution made him stop again a few steps up. ‘Hello?’ Though it was electric, the nightlight seemed to flicker momentarily, as if in a draught. This is ridiculous, thought Francis Baynes. If I’m not afraid of God, I shouldn’t be afraid of anything else. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hello!’ said the woman in the brown muslin dress.

  When he looked up, she was standing at the top of the stairs looking down at him. There was a welcoming smile on her face – she was welcoming him to his own house – and her gloves and flowers were nowhere to be seen. The gloves were off. It was almost dark. He felt that she had changed in some way since the morning. Her body seemed heavier, untidier; her face was less et
hereal. Francis found himself thinking she looked more real. Almost, he said to himself, more alive. And then, for no reason he could think of, more established.

  He made his way uncertainly up towards her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I—

  What had he meant to say? He had no idea why he should apologise to her. But as soon as he got close to her, a wave of heat seemed to roll across him and he forgot all that. She smelled of earth, flowers, musk. He saw now how low the brown muslin dress was cut; how it seemed to offer him her breasts, heavy in the half-dark. She smelled of sweat. She held out her hand, but he couldn’t take it and only stood there as shy as a boy. Because what did he know about her? And anyway, he had an erection suddenly hot and painful in his trousers and he felt that she knew it. He didn’t know where to look.

  ‘Francis!’ she said. ‘That’s your name. Francis.’ She laughed. ‘Isn’t it? Well, look, Francis,’ she said, holding out her hand again, ‘I don’t bite. Not always.’

  Her hand was hot and dry. She led him into his own bedroom. There he saw, in the dim illumination of the nightlight, that she had taken the entire contents of his kitchen cupboards and refrigerator – a week’s groceries bought guiltily at Waitrose that morning – and strewn them over the bed. Two large tin loaves and half a dozen eggs. Fair Trade tea bags and Cafe Direct. A pound of mild cheddar cheese. Eight pounds of potatoes. Pork pies. Tomatoes, celery, peppers. Rhubarb and gooseberries. Liver and kidneys. Dried pasta shells. Two doughnuts.

  Francis stared.

  ‘I’m afraid I started without you,’ she said. ‘Oh, Francis, isn’t it wonderful, just to be alive?’

  There was salt everywhere. She had ripped open the milk cartons, and spilled HP sauce and raspberry jam over his bedspread. She had stripped the plastic off the wrapped stuff.

  She had taken a bite out of every single item.

  ‘I’d forgotten quite how wonderful it was,’ she said.

  Francis stared at her. He saw now that she had food round her mouth. Plum juice and ketchup had trickled down her neck and on to the upper part of her breasts. The smell of her had become overpowering. He felt more and more like an adolescent. At the same time he felt like himself, angry, confused, more sexually aware than he ever wanted to be. He stared up at her in the constantly flickering light. Somehow, he managed to do that. ‘Who are you?’ he made himself ask.

  She answered, ‘You know me. I was in the groves when they murdered Actaeon. I was in Egypt and Persia. I starred in The Golden Bough. They called me Diana, they called me the Moon. Later they burned my followers all across Europe. I’m earth to your fire, Francis. If you have any. I’m from far away and long ago; and I’m from around here too. They know me on the downs. This village knows me. The family know me, they always knew me very well – I was on their ground before they built there. You needn’t worry.’ She went on, ‘I’m the answer to your mystery.’ Then she laughed. ‘Or not so much the answer, Francis, as the mystery itself. You do want to know, don’t you? Haven’t you always wanted to know? That’s why you need me. That, and—’ Here she looked meaningfully down at the front of his trousers. ‘That’s why I chose you. That’s why you’re so lucky.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘You were waiting for me. You were always waiting for me.’ She crooked her finger. ‘Come here,’ she said. ‘Come to Izzie.’

  *

  When Eleanor Dawe woke in the mornings, a little chuckling delightful stream of lalage woke with her, a commentary on her life and doings. Listen from a distance and you could be fooled, until you realised that the words were not words at all, but only the sounds that words are made from, timed perfectly to the rhythms of the voices around her. You recognised her mother’s voice; her father’s. Then, with a little start of surprise, the intonations of Alice Meynell or even Francis Baynes. In the mornings, Eleanor teetered on the edge of speech but never quite jumped in. John and Anna encouraged her by talking to her endlessly. Anna read to her from her favourite book. Around the World with Ant and Bee.

  John greeted her, ‘Hello Eleanor,’ forming every syllable with exaggerated care. ‘It’s Eleanor. Hello, Eleanor!’

  Unsure how to respond, his daughter looked dubiously from one expectant parental face to the other, then down at her Lion King dish where it lay on the kitchen table ready to be filled with Rice Krispies. Breakfast, she saw, might depend on humouring them. She managed a placatory smile.

  ‘Gidgie,’ she said, pointing to the spoon.

  ‘Spoon, Eleanor. Spoon.’

  They were delighted and disappointed by turns. They marvelled at how close she got to language, without quite discovering it. Ironically, they remained frozen in their attempts to communicate with each other.

  Mark and Oliver had returned to Nonesuch more than once. But so had the bank manager and, although negotiations continued and the building work slowly recovered momentum, it was clear no deal had yet been struck. John kept the details to himself. This enabled Anna to maintain an uneasy truce on the subject. Underneath, though, she was still raw. They both were. Nonesuch was rarely mentioned, but they quarrelled over everything else – politics, Eleanor’s bedtime, whose turn it was to put petrol in the Volvo. Then John refused to take the Magpie off the market.

  ‘You’re doing this to spite yourself,’ Anna accused him. ‘And me. You don’t really want to sell her.’

  ‘“Her”?’ he said. ‘It’s a boat, Anna.’ And then more gently, ‘I don’t see what other choice I have.’ He passed one hand tiredly across his face. ‘I’ve thought and thought about it. We just need money, any money we can come by.’

  She looked at the floor. ‘You don’t want this,’ she persisted. ‘What would you get for her? Peanuts. Enough to fund a week or two’s work. You’re just angry with everything.’

  ‘And you’re just being sentimental,’ he accused.

  She didn’t know how to answer that. All she had achieved was to make him more angry and lose the ground she had gained. Eventually she whispered, ‘Someone has to be.’

  ‘Things move on, Anna.’

  The bleakness of this upset her further. ‘I loved our time on that boat!’

  He shook his head. ‘I loved it too,’ he said. ‘You know I did. But—’ He held her gaze for a moment, looking helpless and miserable. Then he shook his head, folded up the Guardian and pushed back his chair. He was always going somewhere else. That was how their life was now. ‘Don’t you remember?’ he asked. ‘We did nothing but fight.’ He stopped in the kitchen doorway as if he might find some way to soften this, then shrugged. ‘Nothing changes, does it?’

  ‘John!’

  When he had gone she whispered, ‘You don’t believe any of that.’

  She couldn’t stop trying to fetch him out of himself, though she knew these panicky acts only drove him further in. The builders, meanwhile, began some of the exterior work, with a corresponding increase in mud and noise; and Mark and Oliver wandered elegantly about, looking at ordinary household items as if they were brand new and rather clever. Anna heard their voices. She stayed in the kitchen until she could watch their car float away down the drive; while John, temperamentally incapable of sharing his rage and guilt, took refuge in his ‘office’, an old linen press on the second floor where he had telephone, fax machine and Anna’s two-year-old desktop computer set up in a litter of estimates, invoices and half-empty cups of coffee. Anna was reluctant to pursue him there because other rooms on the same floor had been used to store salvaged fittings from Stella Herringe’s apartment. Nevertheless she went up one rainy, lonely afternoon, and took Eleanor too because when he was like this Eleanor was the only lever she had.

  She found him with his chair tipped back, stroking Orlando’s three daughters – who, housebound by the rain, were padding about on the desk, purring and knocking down anything that looked important. Orlando, meanwhile, sat on the windowsill, looking detached and a little forlorn.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said and opened her mouth to say more.
<
br />   ‘No,’ he said. ‘Don’t. Don’t. I’m sorry too.’

  They studied one another uncertainly.

  ‘I brought Ellie to visit her grumpy father.’

  He smiled. ‘So I see.’

  ‘But she fell asleep.’

  ‘I can see that too.’ He cleared some files off an old leather armchair. ‘Do you think she would be comfortable here?’

  ‘I think she would be very comfortable there.’

  ‘Because it seems a pity to wake her up.’

  ‘It does. It does seem a pity.’

  They looked down at her together. ‘She’s ours,’ he said, in tones of deep proprietary satisfaction. He gestured towards the desk. ‘And what do you think of these cats?’ It was as if he had just found them.

  ‘I think we have the most beautiful cats in the world.’

  ‘Hm,’ he said. ‘Come and stand by the window.’ They stood by the window for a moment looking out. ‘This garden—’ he began.

  ‘It’s a beautiful garden, John.’

  He put his arm round her shoulders, and – when she turned in towards him to feel his steady warmth, which always made her want to curl into his chest like a cat – looked down at her and concluded gently, ‘So. Between us, you and me, we’re in danger of spoiling a very good thing.’

  Anna hid her face against him. ‘I know,’ she admitted.

  He smelled of Pears soap. She could feel his heart beating. ‘Hold me,’ she begged. Then a little later she said something less distinct, which made him draw in his breath and lay her down on the chilly floorboards. The cats purred and trod around them. Anna pulled up her skirt; the wind threw a handful of rain against the windows; the Nonesuch cedars bent their heads. The light was pale grey, gentle but merciless, encouraging clarity in all things. ‘Fuck me, John,’ she heard herself whisper in a rush of love and bleakness. ‘Oh yes, fuck me.’ And she wondered, in the instant before she slipped into the willed oblivion of it, how much longer they could use this to heal themselves.

  *

  Anna woke suddenly, lying on her side. John had spooned himself round her while he slept. Her hip was sore. She detached herself gently from his enclosing arm and stood up to look out of the window while her hands busied themselves independently about – adjusting, dusting down, tugging at her skirt and cardigan. The rain was heavier; the sky darker and racing with cloud. Something grumbled over the horizon. A storm was on its way, but it was the room that had the thundery look, a kind of brown tint to the air which hung around the computer console, the littered papers and half-empty cups. The computer fan hummed, though the screen was dark. The telephone rang once, then stopped.