Nonesuch Read online

  John Dawe stared at her for a second, then knelt down quietly and began collecting up pieces of phone. There seemed to be a lot of them. He wrapped them in newspaper and put them carefully into the kitchen pedal bin. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It was unforgivable of me.’

  ‘I’m sorry too,’ Anna said miserably.

  But the accident had frightened her, so she let him leave the room, and fought down the impulse to run after him and make up; and for the rest of that day they avoided talking to one another.

  *

  Anna woke from a dream of loss, into the ancient silences of Nonesuch. It was some time after three. She was sweating. The room felt close and airless, as if someone had hung it with coarse black fabric – as if the dream had come back into the world with her. The heat made her sit up and call out, ‘John? Eleanor?’

  No answer.

  ‘Eleanor!’

  She jumped out of bed and looked in the Moses basket. It was empty. The baby was gone. She put her hand up to the side of her head. Oh God, she thought. Now we’ve lost her! I can’t believe this, I can’t believe it – ‘John!’

  She shook him. She switched on the bedside lamp, ‘John, for God’s sake!’

  Anna looked in the Moses basket again. Empty. A search of the room revealed nothing. A search of the room. What did that mean? Only that she went round and round until she blundered into a wicker chair, draped with cast-off clothes, which bounced across the floor and into the bed. ‘John!’ Even that didn’t wake him. It was like a nightmare. It was like a charmed sleep. She had the feeling that everything was happening in a very small space of time, that suddenly she would find the baby and realise that only two minutes had passed since she opened her eyes. Soon she had been round every wall, opened every cupboard. She had looked under the bed. She had pulled out drawers. Back to the cot. Nothing. She stood there swaying, thinking, this room is so hot, it’s so hot. Then she was out in the corridor, calling ‘Eleanor! Eleanor!’ and there was nothing there either. ‘Eleanor?’ Temporary low-wattage bulbs, strung on loops of heavy rubberised cable dimly illuminated the sixteenth-century panelling. There were stepladders at intervals; a dust sheet moved in a draught.

  I don’t know what to do, thought Anna dully. How could you lose a baby? And after everything else that had happened!

  ‘Oh John,’ she called, going back in, ‘please wake up!’ She shook him.

  He groaned and flung out one arm. ‘What time is it?’ he asked.

  ‘John, the baby!’

  This got him out of the bed, yawning and rubbing his eyes. ‘What’s the matter with her?’ he enquired. ‘She looks perfectly normal to me.’

  Anna stared into the Moses basket. There was Eleanor, exactly as she always looked at night: the doll’s head clutched to her cheek, her thumb in her mouth, a frown on her face as if sleep was an effort she might at any minute begin complaining about. ‘But—’ said Anna. ‘John, I—‘ She was so puzzled she could barely speak. Then she laughed. ‘Do you know. I’ve spent the last five minutes looking for her everywhere.’ She shook her head. ‘I must have had a dream.’ She shivered. ‘It was very real.’

  John stared at her. ‘I had nightmares too,’ he admitted. Then, to her surprise, he took her in his arms. ‘I’m sorry Anna. I’m sorry about the row.’

  ‘I’m sorry too. I didn’t—’

  ‘I know—’

  ‘I didn’t mean to—’

  Their relationship – begun in unique circumstances, then driven through its first few months by an edginess and anger that could only be described as historical – had suffered more than its fair share of reverses. But nothing as bad-tempered as yesterday’s encounter had happened between them before. They weren’t used to disliking one another so thoroughly. It was hard to get back from that. In the end he pulled her on to the bed and suddenly, Eleanor or no Eleanor, they were kissing frantically in the hot room.

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘I love you too. Hold me. Hold me.’

  *

  Next day it was dull and damp, the kind of weather that makes you feel uncomfortable inside your skin. The cats eyed Anna as if it were her fault; they hogged the Aga. The builders trudged from room to room, opened their newspapers and argued listlessly over the transfer of this or that footballer. Even Eleanor seemed subdued. At breakfast she allowed herself to be fed without a struggle, but if there were no tantrums, neither were there any of those sudden delighted smiles, which so illuminated Anna’s day and which sometimes seemed to her the only real reward of motherhood. By eleven o’clock Anna found herself at a loose end for once, wandering about the house with the baby in her arms, saying fatuous things like, ‘And this is a clock.’

  At lunch, John asked, ‘Could you go through the stuff from the Small Wardrobe? I doubt there’s anything worth keeping, but someone ought to look at it, just in case.’

  Anna was glad to have something to do. ‘But if they’re family things,’ she suggested, ‘you should find time to go through them yourself.’ She wasn’t even sure where the Small Wardrobe was, though she thought it might be on the third floor. ‘There may be decisions I can’t make.’

  ‘Oh, just put aside anything that looks interesting.’

  ‘Could you be a bit less specific?’

  He received this irony with a vague look. ‘I think the builders have already cleared most of it out into the corridor,’ he said.

  They had.

  On a line of graceless 1950s dining chairs, the moquette-covered seats of which had been the sport of many a long-vanished cat, Anna found piled a set of velvet curtains stiff at the folds with dust, an old Dansette with its accompanying collection of thoroughly unmemorable 45rpm records still in their dog-eared paper sleeves. If you wanted incomplete board games, empty photograph albums, or a broken Fred Perry tennis racket forty years old, this was the place to come. Careless of the perished electrical flexes and faux-crystal glasses wrapped clumsily in yellowed pages of the Daily Herald, Anna put Eleanor on the floor, where she could introduce her doll’s head to the joker from half a pack of playing cards, and began to sort through the junk, picking up an item here, another there. It didn’t seem much. Ten minutes later she was wondering if the builders had moved everything out of the Small Wardrobe after all.

  ‘Play nicely,’ she instructed Eleanor and popped her head round the door.

  The Small Wardrobe – annexe of some eighteenth-century bedchamber long remodelled and absorbed into the body of the house as two or three other rooms – turned out to be larger than many an Ashmore cottage parlour. It was empty but for some scraps of carpet in a corner and a crushed-looking Bally shoebox from the 1970s, which had been left behind on the beautiful uneven old wooden floor among scuff marks from the builders’ boots. Anna stared around. ‘If there was ever a Large Wardrobe,’ she would tell John later, ‘it must have been the size of a tennis court—’ then bent down quickly and picked up the shoebox. Its lid was secured by brittle old Scotch tape the colour of tobacco, and it rattled when she shook it. One way or another it fitted the criterion ‘anything that looks interesting’, so she tucked it under her arm, separated Eleanor gently from the rubbish in the corridor and took both of them back to the kitchen, where she set them on the table together.

  ‘Gargh,’ said Eleanor, beaming sunnily. She belaboured the shoebox with her doll’s head, as if it were a kind of inanimate version of Orlando.

  ‘Gently now,’ Anna told her, snipping the Scotch tape carefully with kitchen scissors. Up came a faint smell of dust and old paper; a fainter smell of perfume. Inside she found three black-and-white Kodachrome prints and the semi-naked, headless body of a child’s doll. ‘Good grief,’ she said.

  The photographs were yellowed, stiff, curled up as if they had been left too long on a windowsill in the sun. The first two featured a small, elegantlooking convertible, parked at the side of a country road. Fields stretched away to gently rolling chalk downs, into the high flank of which had been cut long ago a whit
e horse. The car was a Mercedes. There was no one in the view and as a result it had a kind of bland tranquillity.

  Two adults and a little girl looked out at Anna from the third print. Their feet were firmly on the churned-up sand of some sunny yet deserted English beach, but everything behind them was bleached to grey: not even the faintest horizon line remained. They didn’t seem disorientated. The woman wore a full-skirted dress with polka dots; the man a white shirt and flannel trousers. Their child – she assumed it was theirs – stood between them, sodden swimsuit sagging round its plump little thighs, its stare bold and direct. One hand shaded its eyes, while with the other it offered to the camera the doll whose body now lay in the shoebox. Anna turned the print over. Alan and Joan, someone had pencilled on the back long ago, then another name, then, Southsea. There was a date too faint to read, although the year might have been 1952.

  Anna put down the picture and took the body of the doll out of the shoebox. Something made her lift it to her nose – she expected the smell of salt, but there was nothing. She turned the doll over, moved its limbs, rubbed her thumb across the plastic. It was like all those old toys – dimpled, plump, articulated at shoulder and groin. The manufacturers had smoothed off the other joints to a gesture, so that its limbs were a collection of approximate, babyish shapes, and coloured it a flesh tint no flesh had ever achieved. It wore, with a modesty difficult to understand, a pair of knickers originally white and now grey with dust. Anna examined it thoughtfully, then held out her hand to her daughter. ‘Ellie,’ she said, ‘will you lend Mummy your baby a minute?’

  Eleanor, recognising this ploy as the beginning of a hundred desperate bedtime skirmishes and wondering perhaps how evening had crept upon her with such stealth, looked round puzzledly, clutched her doll’s head and gave a desolate howl.

  Anna sighed. ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘Mummy doesn’t really need it.’

  Mummy didn’t. The head so clearly belonged to the body and she had known that since she opened the shoebox. The question was, how had they become separated? The question was, how had Eleanor found one and not the other? The question was, what were the odds against them turning up together again like this, in her and her daughter’s life? History, thought Anna, as she considered the photographs again, is certainly a strange old business. There was the doll, fluttering eyelashes and all, on Southsea beach in 1952, whole for perhaps the last time. Anna had the idea it might have been the last time the family were whole, too. She couldn’t say why. Alan and Joan, whoever they were, owners of a Mercedes convertible, stood awkwardly together in the sunshine, looking very 1950s and middle class. The doll was endlessly offered to the camera. An offshore wind, brisk and impersonal, had got under its gingham dress. It still had all its flossy nylon hair. The question was, perhaps, who are these two people, with their strained smiles and expensive car?

  There was no question about the child. The child was Stella Herringe, seven or eight years old.

  Anna rubbed her eyes.

  After a while, trying and failing to remember when the doll’s head had first turned up in her daughter’s sticky hand, she asked, ‘Ellie, where did you find your baby?’

  Eleanor, always glad to be included in things, cocked her head on one side. ‘Ootie!’ she said with a wide smile.

  *

  Some places are realer than others, Izzie says, and we have to learn the difference between the two (she means me). Look at me, Izzie says, and tell me what you’ve seen. Because if I can’t trust you mark my words I’ll never tell you who you are. Then it’s coddled egg again and my little shallot and so on until she says to me, have you found it yet? and I say no. I say, I’m tired of things, and Izzie says, a raw little tadpole like you? You’ll not get tired of things until I tell you to. Cross me and I’ll slip you down like an oyster don’t ever think I won’t. When Izzie is angry her voice gets right inside you.

  Things. There’s so many of them. I’ve known about them since before Izzie came although I didn’t know what they were. I didn’t know anything then. I didn’t know I was alive. (You don’t know you’re alive now, Izzie says. She says, be glad of that.) Most things are only one thing but not these. They are all different shapes and some of them shift about in front of you like water. The beauty of them, Izzie says, is that they’re never the same twice. It’s what frightens me about them too. They’re not the same twice. And they’re not the same Here as they are There. (If you know where There is. Izzie knows, and soon I will. I have to find them so I will know things. I have to find them so I will know who I am.) How will I find the right ones? I ask. You look through all the things in this house, and you try them all she says. You try them all my little naked oyster until you find the right ones. The right ones are the real ones they have shadows in the other place. They’re the ones we need. Off you go now.

  So I’m off again up and down round and about looking this way and that for all the different parts of Izzie.

  And Izzie is often with me as I go.

  *

  Night.

  Francis Baynes stood motionless in his bedroom – which, it had recently occurred to him, was as bare as a cell – with his dog collar off and his hands raised to his neck. The top half of his body was swivelled awkwardly towards the window, while the lower half faced the tallboy where he kept his clothes. He had on his reading spectacles. The bedside light projected his shadow on to the white wall, where it seemed frozen and graceless. After some time Francis moved. His hands dropped. He turned fully to the window and stared out at whatever had caught his attention. For a moment it seemed he would rap on the glass, pull up the sash, call out. Instead, he quickly and quietly left the room.

  A minute or two later he was looking out over the graveyard from the darkness at the back of the lych-gate. Dirty moonlight fell on the Herringe graves and on the bent back of the woman he had seen there. She was planting flowers. That was what he thought: she was planting flowers at the base of one of the old headstones.

  ‘Excuse me?’ he called.

  She straightened up. He felt her white face focus on him as emptily as a satellite dish. Her eyes were as reflective as a cat’s. She began to raise her left hand, in which she held a pair of grey gloves. It was a gesture preliminary to speech.

  Francis stepped out of the shadows, vibrating like a wire. ‘Yes?’ he said.

  She was turning her whole body towards him, as slowly as the dancer on the lid of a musical box, when a motorcycle burst into the village from the direction of Drychester. The sound of its engine, compressed by the cottages on either side, funnelled down towards St Mary’s, echoing off the front of the church as a jittery, coughing roar. Its headlights sent the shadows of the gravestones racing nervously across the grass. The machine itself was in view for less than a second, boring down on its front suspension as the driver braked heavily, threw it round the corner of Pond Lane under the astonished gaze of two cats on a wall and accelerated away hard enough to lift the front wheel off the road. Francis glimpsed narrow shoulders slick with coloured leather, a twist of stainless-steel exhaust pipes. Then it was gone.

  When he turned his attention back to the woman in the graveyard she wasn’t there either. The motorcycle had pulled the darkness apart and it was as if she had vanished into the hole it made. He approached the grave, knelt down and placed his palm flat to the damp grass, not knowing what to expect. It was the same as ever. The earth was unturned. What had he interrupted? What was going on in his graveyard? He got to his feet, rubbing his hands on the sides of his trousers.

  If he tilted his head he could still hear Alice Meynell’s huge yellow Ducati, already a mile away in the lanes up towards East Owler. Otherwise, the night was empty.

  He looked at his watch.

  Half past two.

  *

  Up at Nonesuch, Anna slept fitfully, between dreams of an old Mercedes convertible. The black-and-white photographs, the shoebox, the doll, the things she had found that afternoon, had kept her awake long aft
er John drifted off. She had watched him – noting how he gave himself up to sleep like a boy, quickly and at an odd angle, one leg tucked up – until at a little after midnight she slipped into an unconsciousness the internal architecture of which was a single large empty space. By 3 a.m. the headless body of the doll had begun to turn over and over just behind her eyes. She snapped awake.

  Anna Dawe had had enough of the past and the things she knew about it; events had made her feel that, generally, the world would be better off without a past. The room was hot again, she was sweating and she could also feel sweat on John’s bare back where they touched. She propped herself up and greedily drank some water from the glass by the bed. As soon as she had had enough, she let herself fall back under the weight of sleep as if she were falling underwater. In her second sleep she dreamed less specifically, but woke not long afterwards in the grip of a fierce anxiousness, as if something had been going on down there under the water she would rather get away from.

  Oh no, she thought, not again. She jerked upright, threw off the sheet. ‘Ellie!’

  The bassinet was empty.

  ‘John! John!’

  This time he woke instantly. He groaned and fumbled with the water glass, but Anna had emptied it. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What is it now?’ But this time Eleanor had gone and they could both see that, and neither of them could find her. They turned on the bedside lamp and blundered round the bedroom in its yellow wash of light – independently, but each with the numb methodicalness of someone who doesn’t really know what to do, saying, ‘Well, she’s certainly not here’ and, ‘It seems stupid but have you looked in the wardrobe?’ This speech wasn’t really addressed to each other. They were caught up in their separate anxieties and if they felt anything for each other it was the kind of impatience people feel when they are in a panic.

  ‘She’s not here,’ said John eventually.

  ‘I know that. I said that. Oh John, what can have—’

  ‘I’m going to look around,’ he interrupted, as if he didn’t want her to ask the rest of that question, couldn’t see the point of having it asked at that moment. ‘You stay here. I’m going to look around, because she must just have crawled out into the passage.’