The Knot Garden Read online

  ‘I won’t hurt you.’

  The animal got slowly to its feet, its green eyes fixed on hers. When she picked it up, it bowed at once to the inevitable. It seemed stunned. It purred in its pain and confusion. It was warm and so frail she could feel every bone. It was just a lot of heat and bones in her hands.

  ‘There,’ whispered Anna. ‘There you are.’

  She was thinking: They always know when a human being is their last chance.

  *

  At first the tabby seemed to have no will of its own. Wherever she put it, it stayed. At the same time it would not rest or relax. It crouched awkwardly on the kitchen table, caught halfway between standing and sitting, while Anna found a cardboard box. Occasionally, it turned its head to one side, as if listening. It peered over the edge of the table at the quarry-tiled floor, and a shiver went through its hindquarters as if perhaps it meant to jump down. The moment passed; it stared ahead again. This uncertainty was transmitted to Anna, who, after lining the box with newspapers and lifting the cat carefully into it, could think of nothing to do but boil the kettle, with some idea that she might need hot water. She turned the central heating as high as it would go (for some reason she had been unable to understand when it was explained to her, the oil-fired Aga remained unconnected to this system, and therefore could be used only for cooking), and placed the box near the kitchen radiator.

  ‘There,’ she said. ‘You’ve been in the wars, but you’ll be safe here.’

  The tabby blinked up at her. She could see now exactly how ill-cared for it was. Its fur was matted and spiky, falling out in patches to reveal, under greyish skin, ribs as thin as a fish’s. It smelled. It was starving. It was female.

  It was pregnant.

  ‘Oh you poor thing,’ Anna said.

  She took down a little blue-and-white saucer – orphaned from a set which had come to her on her grandmother’s death and one of the few possessions she had felt it worthwhile to bring with her from London – and poured milk into it. The cat lapped at the milk for a moment, licked one of its paws in a disconnected way, then fell asleep. Reassured, Anna crept off to make herself a cup of tea and consult the list of useful telephone numbers her predecessors had left pinned to the kitchen wall above the Aga. Heat and steam had curled the card like a dead leaf; most of the numbers, having been written in pencil, were faded and illegible: but she found ‘Vet’, followed by something in brackets she couldn’t read. When she rang the number there was no answer, so she consulted the card again. This time she was able to decipher the appended instruction: ‘Not Sundays’. She was on her own.

  Anna, who had – to balance a cheerful faith in her practicality – only the vaguest idea of what might be useful in the circumstances, went round the cottage gathering up cotton wool, antiseptic and an armful of old towels, just in case.

  ‘Kittens!’ she thought.

  She went back to the kitchen and had a peep inside the box. The milk remained, but the tabby had vanished.

  *

  At the turn of the century, the ground floor of Pond Cottage had consisted of a single room barely bigger than its own fireplace, with a low oak-beamed ceiling, walls of bare local stone, and a scullery at the back. In the thirties someone had plastered the walls, extended the scullery into the garden and added mains drainage. After this, the pace of improvement had slowed; but by 1975, when the rush to the country began in earnest, successive owners had added a lean-to ‘breakfast’ room and a garage. Further extension gave rise to a proper kitchen, while internal remodelling discovered space for the microscopic study and, upstairs alongside the second bedroom, a bathroom which would have delighted a doll.

  The result was higgledy-piggledy, rather poorly lit and sometimes hard to keep clean. Anna had to watch her head on the beams. But the core of the house had a satisfying sense of history. On winter afternoons, with the firelight flickering off the leaded-light windows and ducks quarrelling sleepily on the village pond across the road, it was all you could ask from a cottage in the country. And if nothing else, Anna reflected, its size made it easy to search.

  ‘Puss?’ she called. ‘Come on, puss!’

  While she was out of the kitchen, the cat had found its way quietly upstairs, levered open the door of the tiny eye-level airing cupboard next to the bathroom and settled itself on the top shelf along her warm, clean, sweet-smelling pillowcases. They stared at one another.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Anna. ‘Are you sure that’s where you want to have them?’

  The cat purred.

  Anna went downstairs, thinking: Cassoulet! We can both eat that! She looked at her watch. ‘I’ve still got time to get the beans on,’ she said aloud.

  2

  All cats reminded her of her old cat Barnaby, who had shared her life for fourteen happy years. Barnaby had worked his way up from the smuggled, illegal existence of a kitten in a university hall of residence to part-ownership of a garden in one of the leafier parts of West London, developing from a ball of marmalade fluff – pampered half to death by young women rich with suppressed maternal hormones – into a cat of considerable dignity. Along the way, he had survived some bizarre flat-shares – left to himself all day with the smells of spilt face-powder and ten-minute pasta, content to play with the strap of a bra drying on a hall radiator or blink patiently down at the dogs in the street, the very picture of a metropolitan cat. Barnaby had loved prawns, cream and people, perhaps not in that exact order, and in later years the fruit of these affections was a girth to match his fine, broad English head. ‘Tommed-off,’ was how Max Wishart had described it when he and Barnaby were first introduced: ‘And hasn’t he such a nice, round, tommed-off head!’

  They were friends immediately. When you thought of Barnaby, you couldn’t help but think of Max too. Max Wishart had all his twenty-eight years stored in his amused green eyes. His talents were various: he had made a successful career as a violinist specialising in Early Music, but he loved to cook, too – anything French, as he said, anything with shellfish. Relaxed, happy, made for pleasure. Max had wandered into Anna’s life with a sense that he might leave at any time – as if his attention was already distracted. In the end he had stayed long enough for her to forget that, so that when he wandered out again, with a bemused look at her pain and an almost cheerful, ‘But you didn’t seem to need me,’ she thought she would die of it. Barnaby, she allowed herself to believe, had died of it: wandering into the street one sunny afternoon a month or two after Max left, straight under the wheels of someone’s BMW. However hard she tried to be sensible – after all, cats are run over all the time in busy London streets – she couldn’t help thinking that Barnaby’s attention had been fatally distracted.

  In her best memory of Max and Barnaby, they were sitting, the pair of them, reflected in the polished floor of the music room of her house in Barnes, lost in amiable contemplation of the Baroque. The morning sunlight streamed in around them. Eventually Max put down his bow and sighed regretfully, ‘Well I’ll never be the fiddler of my generation, then. Let’s go and find some fish,’ after which they strolled into the kitchen, the cat looking up at the musician, and ate fried whitebait together.

  ‘You two!’ she complained.

  ‘Ah but you love us,’ Max said. ‘You love our pretty ways.’

  In this memory there was a bouillabaisse on the stove for later, salty and garlicky and full of the things all three of them liked to eat. Hake for Anna, moules for Max, unpeeled prawns for Barnaby. In all her best memories of Max Wishart, he was stroking her cat behind the chin, the tips of his fingers eliciting a purr so magistral she could feel it resonating in her own chest. I’m a cat too, she wanted to say. Stroke me.

  *

  Anna thought about these things. She gave the cat a small portion of cassoulet, ate a larger portion herself, drank a glass of red wine and went to bed. ‘How could you. Max,’ she asked the bedroom wallpaper, ‘when he loved you so? He was such a survivor until you came. If you couldn’t stay for me, you
might have stayed for him.’

  Later, still unable to sleep, she looked in on the airing cupboard, just to be sure. It was dark, she couldn’t see anything. There was a smell of linen, and cutting across that the smell of the sick cat. Cheap-rate electricity ticked away in the silence at the back of the shelves, heating the water for tomorrow.

  ‘Hello,’ she whispered. ‘Has anything happened yet?’ Green eyes opened suddenly, lambent with some emotion she couldn’t put a name to, and stared out at her.

  Nothing had happened yet.

  Anna went back to bed. When sleep came at last, it was a turbulent dark stream, out of which slowly coalesced shapes she did not recognise. The woman in the dream was Anna, but not Anna. A telephone rang, but when this woman picked it up no one was at the other end. She put down the handset as if burnt, but the telephone continued to ring helplessly: and, ringing, seemed to float away into the distance. In another act of the same dream, Anna found herself back at university. She recognised everything, everyone. The difference was that she wasn’t old enough to be there. She was a girl – a bad little girl – and Barnaby had got himself locked in a storage cupboard, high up in the narrow communal kitchen with its clever hospital-coloured fitments from the 1930s. Who could she turn to for help? After all, she had no right to be there. When she managed to climb up to the cupboard and open it at last, the cat wasn’t Barnaby at all. It wasn’t even a cat.

  *

  Anna woke, happy to be herself again, to another cold morning. The Aga was reluctant, the kettle slow to boil. The radio yielded only Saint-Saens’ ‘Symphony with Organ’, and then, when she changed the station, a man’s voice which said: ‘I think the real problem here is agriculture itself.’ At that moment the milkman delivered the milk. Anna went to the door in her dressing gown; stood for a moment on the doorstep with the milk bottles in her hand. The front garden path – worn old brick in a herringbone pattern – looked spongy and waterlogged. The clouds were grey and low over what she could see of the village of Ashmore, and a wet mist clung to the earth the other side of the pond.

  ‘Brr,’ said Anna.

  She had closed the door and was turning towards the kitchen when she heard the faintest of noises from upstairs.

  ‘Oh no!’ she said.

  She called: ‘I’m coming. I’m coming!’

  In the airing cupboard, which was full of a thick, pungent smell at once coppery and animal, a disaster was in the making. When her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she saw that three kittens had arrived. Two of them, though they looked bedraggled and hardly the size of mice, were moving about quite strongly, making small piping cries. The third, Anna thought, had only just been born. Its mother, licking and tugging with a kind of distracted, undependable energy, was still trying to help it out of its birth sac. Every so often she abandoned this task to sniff nervously at the still-unsevered umbilical cord, or stare up at Anna in a puzzled way, as if she wasn’t sure why these things had happened to her. She was exhausted. There were too many things to do. Her fur looked damp, her eyes milky with stress. As Anna watched, she made one more attempt to free the youngest kitten, then gave up. The other two pulled themselves towards her, mewling, and nuzzled at her swollen nipples. She fell back heavily and shut her eyes.

  ‘Don’t sleep yet,’ urged Anna, staring helplessly at the unbroken cord, the kitten trapped in its cloudy grey membrane. ‘Please. We have to do something about this.’

  No response.

  She fled down to the study, where she found Everything You Need to Know About Your Cat or Kitten, purchased when Barnaby was tiny enough to hold in the palm of one hand. Barnaby, blessed with the constitution of a donkey and the digestion of a dustbin, had repaid this forethought by never being ill in his life, leaving the book to gather dust on a succession of home-made shelves from Kilburn to Barnes and thence to Ashmore, its unconsulted pages yellowing steadily with age. Anna recalled clearly the bookshop in which she had bought it. For a second she felt the whole weight of the fifteen years that had passed since then. ‘My life’s going by,’ she told herself with surprise.

  The book had a rather old-fashioned tone, firm without being entirely reassuring. ‘If a queen fails to rupture the birth sac, you must do it yourself. The umbilical cord should never be severed too cleanly. Use your thumbnail to make a ragged cut. Always be calm.’

  ‘Easy enough for you to say,’ said Anna, staring nervously into the airing cupboard then back down at Everything You Need to Know About Your Cat or Kitten. She was used to step-by-step photographs.

  ‘Don’t wait too long,’ the book advised.

  Anna gritted her teeth, picked up the odd little bundle in its translucent membrane, and did what was necessary. The third kitten breathed in suddenly, mewing at the wash of air against its face, and, drawing up its back legs, began to wriggle. Anna felt elated. Relief washed over her. ‘You’re alive!’ she said. She stripped off the rest of the membrane, blotted the kitten with a bit of old towel, and, ignoring the advice of the book, tied off the umbilicus and cut it neatly with a pair of sterilised scissors. The kitten squeaked. ‘Yes,’ said Anna, holding it up and staring into its tiny blind face. ‘Yes, you’re here!’ She placed it carefully against its mother’s side. The tabby opened her eyes and purred suddenly.

  ‘Your turn now,’ Anna told her.

  *

  Darkness and warmth: then a rush of air, chill against a skin still slick from my recent journey. The touch of something vast and alien. I recall that much; yet how could I have known more? Blind as a stone, I was, and not much more aware. And though the images that came rushing up to meet me as I came into myself might be evidence of the nine lives we are said to possess, I cannot say for sure whether they came from an earlier existence, or whether I was being welcomed into a shared dream of life.

  For certainly, life had started to pour itself into me: like light or water, it has a way of seeping through the tightest cracks in the world, and I was hungry for it.

  *

  The tabby drank milk. The kittens suckled busily. Anna ate some toast. After breakfast she moved her new dependants out of the airing cupboard. ‘You live here,’ she explained, introducing them to the cardboard box by the kitchen radiator. ‘This is where you live.’ The tabby, who seemed rather tired now, eyed Anna dubiously; while her family burrowed about in the newspaper, bumping into one another. ‘You see?’ said Anna. ‘You like it.’ She dumped the soiled linen in the Hotpoint, made herself a second cup of tea, and, finding that the morning post had arrived, took it with her into the study to open.

  There was a Visa bill, an offer from BT, and a change-of-address card from her old friend Ruth Canning, who, as part of an unlikely but long-running love affair with the Borough of Hackney, had been moving happily around the same four or five cheerfully shabby streets since she first arrived in London at the age of eighteen. (Almost as an afterthought, she had collected three rowdy children and a man called Sam who seemed to work in solid state electronics, although he would shyly reveal, when you knew him well enough, that his real love was Queen’s Park Rangers football club.) Ruth was a financial journalist, whose days were spent tracking the scandals, the insider deals, the international economic pressures that lie behind the stock market headlines. Call us, she had scribbled across the printed part of the card. Or we’ll send you the kids. This is not an empty threat. Anna laughed. She owed Ruth and Sam a visit; she owed them a lot more than that.

  She propped the card up on her desk where she and sat down in front of it with a sigh. In the year before she left London, her last year with TransCorp Bank, Anna had discovered a talent for Internet stock trading. Soon she had found herself managing several share portfolios as well as her own: day-trading for fun had turned naturally into a new career. It was hard but exciting work, using many of the skills – and all the financial intuition – she had developed at TransCorp. She liked the freedom of it, the edge of risk.

  All morning, as she worked on the strings of figures that fi
lled the screen, Anna could hear the kittens rustling tentatively about in their new home. It was hard to keep her hands off them. They were stone blind. They smelled of milk. One of them, she thought, was going to be marmalade in colour, just like Barnaby. The tabby comforted and encouraged them with drowsy little maternal chirrups. Anna felt comforted and encouraged too.

  Lunch was soup. Leafing through Everything You Need to Know About Your Cat or Kitten while she ate, Anna wondered if the tabby was less recovered than she should be. She had a look in the box. ‘Didn’t you want your food, then?’ On an impulse, she dialled the vet’s number. Nothing, not even a ringing tone. When she looked out of the kitchen window it was raining again.

  At five o’clock, work being over for the day, she put on her Barbour and Wellington boots and announced to the inhabitants of the box:

  ‘I always have a walk about now.’

  The kittens ignored her. They were fast asleep in a pile, stunned by the maternal heartbeat. The tabby, who still hadn’t eaten anything, struggled up and rubbed her head against Anna’s hand. The effort seemed to exhaust her, and she fell down again immediately. This woke the kittens, who milled about piping for a moment or two before they fell down too. Anna stroked the tabby’s head.

  ‘I worry about you,’ she said.

  *

  Two hundred yards from the front gate, a green lane gave access to woods. Anna crossed the stream and climbed up briskly between the trees until, a little out of breath, she came to the summit of a ridge from which she could see the village spread out below.

  Ashmore had evolved, like Pond Cottage, by addition. From a core of wood-framed dwellings tucked under the breast of the downs, later structures trailed away south and west. There was a bit of an old castle on a knoll, quite a nice church with a sixteenth-century lych gate, and – rather a long way from the modern centre of the village, with its three pubs and single tiny, all-purpose shop – a manor house you could buy a booklet about. Though the effect was marred here and there by a 1970s porch extension or a row of bungalows with imitation stone fascias, it was still possible to find buildings which retained their original ‘cat slide’ thatched roofs and pocket-handkerchief orchards. Ashmore was protected from a more general development by its inaccessibility. To the south, the bed of an old railway ran alongside one of James Brindley’s first canals. The canal still hosted a seasonal traffic of peeling houseboats and shabbily converted barges, but no train had pulled into Ashmore station since the branch line cuts of 1965. And while there were plenty of lanes here on the north side, the steep swell of the downs cut them off from the area’s only major road, giving the village a picturesquely secret air. At this time of day its honey-coloured local stone and attractively spalled brickwork seemed to glow in the late sun. Everything had an ambered quality, as if it had been preserved in light. Anna could hear a dog barking. She could see smoke rising from a chimney.