Nonesuch Read online

  Francis only smiled.

  ‘I mean, cow dung,’ she persisted.

  ‘Just look at those cats,’ said Francis, refusing to rise to the bait. ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’

  ‘Francis, you’re so transparent!’

  Nevertheless, he was right. They were beautiful. And odd.

  After the fire. Nonesuch had become home to a score of cats, many of whom had known no other life than that of the laboratory animal. Exhausted perhaps, by the effort of escape, the majority of them had fled no further than the grounds of the house where they avoided human beings and kept a kind of cat parliament in the rhododendrons that flanked the curving drive. You saw them running pell-mell across the moonlit lawns at night. Who knew what they were up to there? You surprised one of them stalking a wood-pigeon in the herb garden in the early morning – it treated you to an unafraid measuring, somehow ironic look, as if to say ‘I know you’ and then it was gone.

  They were characters and Anna loved them. But without doubt the most notable of the Nonesuch cats were Lydia, a lovely, large, ornamental-looking beast with dense gold fur, who belonged to John Dawe, Lydia’s three almost-grown kittens and a long-legged tabby female, which seemed to come and go at will, and which, because of the characteristic crest of fur on its head, Anna called Tufty. Tufty helped with the childcare, while Lydia endlessly groomed herself (or allowed herself to be groomed). Together they made a sort of family and Nonesuch seemed to hold no terrors for them – though you never saw them anywhere near the ruins of the Painted Room or the old hidden courtyard. It was this ensemble that had drawn Francis’s attention. They came stalking across the lawn in a line, swinging their heads from side to side like big savannah cats, Lydia at the front and Tufty bringing up the rear. Somehow this didn’t look as comical as it might have. The kittens walked with a louche swagger. Their mother’s body was long and gleaming in the horizontal light. Orlando blinked with pleasure and got up to greet her. She let him touch noses, but as soon as he tried to rub the side of his head against hers he was cuffed round the ears for his pains. Her stand-offishness was a family joke.

  ‘Poor old Orlando,’ Anna said. ‘He’s taken such beautiful care of those kittens and this is all the thanks she ever gives him. They don’t even look like him.’

  ‘Are you sure he’s the father?’

  Anna, who sometimes wondered the same thing, said with a certain asperity, ‘I don’t see who else it could be, Francis. Anyway, he loves them and they love him.’

  ‘We haven’t seen much of the tabby lately,’ he said.

  ‘She’s away for days at a time now. I wondered if she had a new interest somewhere in the village. But she always comes back. It’s curious, but she still seems closer to Orlando than his wife.’

  Francis looked amused at this. ‘Is wife quite the right word here, I wonder?’

  Just then, Eleanor woke up and began to howl. The cats, including Orlando, melted away as if they had never been. Anna hauled her child out of the buggy, turned it over and sniffed its nappy. The message was clear.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Francis, and looked at his watch He could be comically uneasy around the baby. ‘I think perhaps I’d better go, too.’ Having said it, he seemed reluctant to get up.

  Anna felt sorry for him. He had not had his talk and now he would go off and eat baked beans or toast for supper in the kitchen of a vicarage as draughty and unwelcoming as an aeroplane hangar She suspected she was his only friend in Ashmore. She said impulsively, ‘Stay to dinner! Won’t you?’

  He seemed tempted for a moment, then shook his head. ‘I must be off.’

  ‘Well, if you must.’

  With the baby tucked firmly under her arm, like someone securing a piglet, she saw him to his Rover.

  From the driving seat Francis craned his neck to look into the sky. The air towards Ashmore was full of liquid silvery light, but despite that he shivered suddenly. He wound the window down. ‘It will be a cold night,’ he said.

  Anna waved the Rover down the drive. ‘Say goodbye,’ she told the baby. ‘Wave!’

  Eleanor howled.

  *

  I can only come at night, Izzie says, away from the eyes that pry. Little walls have big ears, she says, oh yes they listen all the time don’t think they don’t. So that’s when she comes and I go to her then. I’m not to mind the night and I don’t so it’s busy busy busy looking for her in all the hidden places I know and some of the ones that aren’t hidden at all. Busy busy, I’m in the long place or the short one. I’m up, which can be an effort, and down, which can be an adventure. Busy busy busy. I’m out there smelling the smells in the dust. The night is your friend, Izzie is always saying. I ask why but I only get wait and see, wait and see. Izzie says I am going to find out one day who I really am. Then we’ll see what happens, she says. We’ll see what happens then. (We’ll see what happens to her.)

  Some hidden places are more difficult to reach than others. They are a long way. They’re shadowy and scary. They smell bad too. I say, I can’t go here I’ve honestly tried and tried Izzie I really have but she says, do you want to be a cooked thing in a pot, or be given diseases, so up I go as fast as I can. Izzie says there, you see, you could do it after all, but we don’t find anything anyway and she goes away for a long time and won’t speak. It will soon be light and I don’t know what to do. Izzie? Izzie? It’s cold and no answer and I have to find my own way back. Izzie says you stupid thing, listen to me never do that again, then she says well done you are my coddled egg, you are my perfect quince (which I don’t know what that is). One day you’ll know, she says, my quince, my perfect little shallot. You’ll know.

  *

  The Long Corridor was plastered, more or less authentically and only a day or two behind schedule. The bank said yes, the work could go on, though they were, they had to admit, a little worried by some of Mr Dawe’s figures… Eleanor, meanwhile, grizzled. She sucked the doll’s head and made flirty eyes at her father. When he wasn’t there, which was most of the time, she grew increasingly difficult to manage. Changing a nappy became a nightmare; feeding, always a tussle of wills, left the kitchen looking like a Jackson Pollock. ‘Well, don’t eat your bloody Moulinexed vegetables then,’ said Anna who, seeing her husband only at breakfast and when they fell exhausted into bed at night, had become sexually frustrated and short of temper. The cats got under the feet of the builders and came back covered in plaster dust. The builders traipsed mud and lime and sand along the hall from the big main doors. It was bedlam. Anna rejected it all and on the comforting hotplates of her Aga boiled the kettle to make tea for her friend Alice Meynell, who had come down for the afternoon from Cambridge.

  Alice looked around at the dust and disarray. ‘I’m impressed,’ she stated. Then, ‘Come and have a drink at the Green Man.’

  Anna looked at the kitchen clock. ‘Perhaps not,’ she said. ‘Ellie will wake up in a moment and I’ll have to feed her.’

  ‘Do it at the pub.’

  ‘Alice, I still breastfeed her in the afternoons.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Anna. ‘Tits out in the Green Man. The Women’s Institute will love that.’

  ‘You don’t want to take any notice of them,’ advised Alice, who at twenty years old had no need to.

  Alice’s cropped tops and pierced navel were rarely seen now behind the bar at the Green Man. Cambridge took up her time and for the holidays she had a boyfriend in New York. He was twenty-three, a physicist from the Santa Fe Institute who gambled on Wall Street in his spare time. Her recent affair with Max Wishart, a concert violinist, had ended amicably, both parties feeling rather pleased with themselves. Alice developed a taste for baroque music. Max bought a motorcycle. (Alice promptly exchanged hers for a faster one. When their visits to Nonesuch coincided, which was quite often, they could be heard from miles away, racing one another along the Drychester Road to the dismay of sensible people everywhere.) Neither of them talked about the day they had pulled
Anna and John out of the fire, burned and suffering from smoke inhalation – although on the first anniversary of that event Max had brought with him some bottles of Pol Roger and all four of them had lifted their glasses in a solemn, companionable silence. Remembering this – and remembering how the face of the dying Stella Herringe had seemed to swim away from her into madness and smoke, down into the bitter reek of burning varnish, the fatty smell of melted cosmetics and that other smell, which came perhaps from the very fabric of the Herringe identity and could only be described as that of time itself being consumed – Anna thought how good it was to be alive, even though your daughter was sometimes a bit careless with your nipples.

  ‘Anyway,’ Alice was saying, ‘if you don’t like it, get her on to the bottle properly.’

  ‘She won’t let me stop.’

  ‘Won’t she, now?’ Alice bent over Eleanor’s carrycot. ‘I wouldn’t have that,’ she said softly. Alice, you sensed, wouldn’t have anything she didn’t want. Life was too short. ‘Not from you, you rum little bugger,’ she told the baby. Then she said in amazement, ‘Look at those little fingers!’ and, ‘Hey, I think she smiled at me.’

  ‘No,’ said Anna. ‘You’re wrong there. She only smiles at her father. Later she will marry him and they will live happily together, having first confined me to an attic.’

  ‘That’s her plan, is it?’

  ‘Yes. Luckily for me she’s a late walker. Actually, I’m a bit worried about that too. She can crawl well enough to make Orlando’s life a misery, but however hard we encourage her she doesn’t seem to be interested in anything else. All the other village toddlers are, well, toddling. We must be doing something wrong.’

  Alice wasn’t willing to accept this. ‘Kiddies sometimes don’t walk until they’re two or three,’ she said. ‘Others are at it as early as eight months. It’s the same with talking – the books tell you stuff, but that’s only a guideline. My sister’s boys were prattling on before they could crawl. It’s the TV. God knows when they first said the words “Ryan Giggs”.’

  ‘Oh Alice, are you saying she’s a late talker too?’

  ‘The last thing you want to do is get competitive about it.’

  Anna sighed. ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ she agreed. ‘At least she sleeps well. Touch wood, we’ve got past those awful nights when all she did was scream and scream when we tried to put her down.’

  ‘Sip of whisky cures that.’

  ‘Alice!’

  ‘That’s what my old gran used to say.’

  ‘We would never do that nowadays,’ said Anna primly. ‘Nowadays we give them a spoonful of Calpol instead. That is, if we haven’t drunk it ourselves.’ And, while Alice was laughing at that, ‘Come on, then, if you can put up with my driving we’ll go down to the Green Man.’

  John had always refused to own a car, but when Eleanor was born and it became plain they couldn’t manage without one, he had reluctantly bought an ancient Volvo 244 which they called ‘the Tank’. Its paintwork, originally bronze, had weathered to a dull brown colour and it went round corners like a narrowboat; but as he said, it was dependable and you could move building materials in it too. It was amazing the loads you could ask that suspension to take. It was all heart. Anna, conventional enough to doubt that material things had hearts, fetched the shopping home in it twice a week. She used it to take Ellie to the clinic in Drychester. Eleanor gurgled to herself whenever she saw the Tank. She loved it.

  ‘Which is a good thing,’ Anna explained to Alice, looking both ways and then both ways again as she inched out of the drive and into Allbright Lane, ‘because I don’t. I’m happier on my bicycle, really.’

  ‘I can see that,’ said Alice. A little later she added, ‘Even a Volvo’ll go faster than this’ and was silent then until they passed the rectory at St Mary’s. ‘Wasn’t that the new vicar?’

  ‘He’s been here two years, Alice.’

  Alice craned her neck to look back through the rear window. ‘I think he wanted you to stop. Weird bloke, but quite fanciable in a way.’

  ‘Is there anyone you don’t fancy?’

  ‘I’m not that keen on Ryan Giggs.’

  Eleanor chortled and smiled, and waved coyly out of the window at imaginary passers-by.

  *

  Francis Baynes had indeed been trying to attract Anna’s attention. Something odd had happened to him and he wanted to talk about it—

  He had woken early, to one of those still, wet mornings when even the birds are thoughtful and silent. Rain was hissing down quietly on the knapped-flint walls of the rectory garden. Everything seemed to be meditating. From his bedroom window Francis could see the church, a ship anchored on a quiet green swell, graves bobbing peacefully around it like rowing boats. Pausing between the dresser and the bed, he caught sight of a figure beneath the yew. It was Anna Dawe, tidying the little pot of flowers at the foot of Stella Herringe’s grave. His heart lifting, he wrestled with the sash window, which had been painted shut by a previous incumbent.

  ‘Anna!’ he called.

  No reply; and when he looked again he saw it wasn’t her. He felt foolish. How had he made such a mistake? The air was soft with rain, but perfectly clear. His eyes were good. Not twenty yards away, the unspeaking figure was caught as if in a photograph: a woman in early middle age, of healthy appearance, taller than she had first seemed, dressed in brown, head tilted alertly to one side. Suddenly she seemed to look straight at him, and this brought him back to himself. He leaned precariously out of the window. ‘Can I help you?’

  Instead of answering the woman drew herself up and began to walk away along the side of the church, her gait somehow stiff and graceful at the same time. Francis hurried downstairs. The rectory hall, gloomy despite its gloss-white wainscoting, smelled of floor polish and mice. He opened the door; light poured round its edges like a chord played on an organ. By the time he reached the churchyard it was empty. He stared down at Stella Herringe’s grave. Something brought that woman here, he thought. She came for some kind of help. Though it had no basis whatsoever, this idea returned to him with different levels of force throughout the morning, filling him with nervous energy, so that when Anna drove past and he failed to catch her attention, he found it hard to go back into the rectory and work on his sermon. Composition, though, is demanding and some time during the long afternoon it wore the edge off his excitement. Towards tea, he thought briefly of calling Anna to ask if some Herringe relative, staying at Nonesuch, had visited the grave that morning. But other things intervened and he forgot.

  *

  Night.

  Anna Dawe woke up suddenly, convinced that something was wrong with her daughter.

  She was unable to do anything about this for a moment. Her limbs didn’t seem to be connected to her brain, ideas were slow to transcribe themselves as action and a dull buzzing filled her head. She felt as if her dreams were unfinished. They had been full of rain and high winds, costumes she did not recognise from her waking life, encounters which, unresolved in sleep, now seemed to animate the room she slept in, passing like smoke across the walls and the looming Jacobean furniture. They were ancient dreams. If she went back to sleep they would slip back into her head and begin again.

  ‘Eleanor?’ she said eventually. Her own voice seemed gluey and distant. ‘Ellie?’

  ‘I’d prefer walnut inlays,’ said John. Flinging out one arm, he turned over. ‘It’s a problem,’ he admitted.

  ‘John?’

  He chuckled. He was fast asleep.

  Anna got up and went to look in the cot, where Eleanor lay awkwardly, body facing one way, head the other. She had kicked off her covers. Her skin was hectic, her breathing stertorous, her hands hot to the touch. Perhaps she had a light infection. She clutched the old doll’s head so tightly to her cheek that it had left a faint indent there.

  ‘Hush,’ said Anna absently. She removed the top blanket, rearranged the others. After a moment, the child gave a small sigh, moved one hand as if p
ointing, relaxed.

  Anna folded up the blanket. It’s too warm in here, she thought. It made all three of us dream. In a room too warm you thought of fire. After the things that had happened to Anna in this house, the idea of fire was never very far away from her, day or night. She looked down at her hands and saw the faint scars in the moonlight. I healed well, she thought. John healed well, too. Considering what we went through, we both healed well. When she bent over the cot again, the doll’s head caught her attention. Bland, pretty features barely broke the rounded symmetry of its face; its counterweighted eyelids opened and closed fractionally with the child’s breathing; a few blond nylon hairs still adhered to its pink scalp. It must be forty years old, she thought, I wonder whose it was. She stared at it for some time and then, back in bed, tried to remember when she had last owned a doll of her own. In the effort of this her anxiety ebbed slowly away and with it the memory of her dreams.

  The next morning at breakfast she said, ‘You know, the weird thing is this: when I first woke up I thought she wasn’t there. I thought that when I looked I would find the cot empty.’

  She wasn’t sure she had his attention. Both of them were exhausted in the mornings, just from the wear and tear of it all. He had drunk three cups of coffee and now he was trying to read the editorial page of the Guardian.

  ‘John?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, when I first woke up I was sure she wasn’t there.’

  He laughed. ‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ he said. He leaned over to where Eleanor, trapped in her high chair and growing bored with breakfast, had begun to insert chocolate Rice Krispies into her eye. ‘Chance would be a fine thing, eh, Ellie?’

  Eleanor offered him a smile of monstrous bonhomie, then opened her mouth to let him see its half-chewed contents, by which he dutifully pretended to be appalled. ‘Kidgie,’ she said.

  Anna said, more loudly than she had intended, ‘John, you might listen.’

  He put down the paper. ‘I was listening,’ he said. ‘It was just a dream. You woke up from a bad dream.’