Nonesuch Page 9

  ‘What?’

  ‘I saw the new vicar in the graveyard the other night. It was quite late and he was hanging about out there on his own.’

  ‘It’s his graveyard,’ Anna pointed out.

  ‘He was talking to himself.’

  ‘I’m sure he wasn’t,’ said Anna, who thought him capable of it.

  ‘Excuse me, I had him bang in the headlights. I could see him talking quite clearly and there was nobody else there. I’d have seen more,’ she admitted, ‘but things got a bit out of shape on the bend into Pond Lane. If you come off the throttle too quick the Ducati just seems to stop dead. I haven’t entirely got the hang of that yet and I didn’t want to bin it in front of him. Well, you don’t, do you?’ She chuckled. ‘Out there with his dog collar half off, chattering away to himself.’ She concluded with a kind of confused piety, ‘I suppose you have to expect it of a vicar.’

  ‘Poor Francis.’ Anna sounded vague. ‘You probably frightened him to death. I must get him round for tea this week.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Alice confirmed. ‘Invite me too.’

  Anna was amused. ‘Find your own vicar, you barefaced slut. You’re not sharing mine.’

  ‘Ooh,’ said Alice to Eleanor. ‘Hark at her.’

  Anna allowed herself the dry smile of motherhood. ‘By the way,’ she advised, ‘that nappy’s on back to front.’

  ‘Oh. Damn.’

  Eleanor cackled and wriggled about.

  *

  Anna really didn’t intend to share Francis with anyone.

  What the friendship offered her wasn’t clear. She certainly had no religious faith. In the end, she had to admit, it was the attention she liked. She liked having him as a confidant. What’s wrong with that? she asked herself, but she knew the question wasn’t honest. She was perfectly aware of his vulnerability where she was concerned – he was attracted to her but barely even knew it himself, which for a man is always the hardest kind of attraction to manage. In the end she pretended it didn’t matter. Francis needed someone to talk to and so did Anna.

  He turned up that same afternoon. ‘Just on the off-chance’, he said, ‘that you were here.’

  ‘Where else would I be, Francis?’

  She sat him down on the lawn and made him hold Ellie while she buttered some cheap scones he had bought from the village shop. ‘You can read to her. She sometimes likes that.’

  Francis said ‘Ah’ and stared rather helplessly at Ant and Bee. Eleanor, who had seen through him the moment he arrived, squealed with laughter and clutched at bits of his face.

  ‘Don’t let her do that,’ Anna advised him. ‘Look, I’d better take her. Pour the tea if you want something to do.’

  This didn’t fit Eleanor’s plans. She opened her mouth to let them know about it. She held on quite hard to Francis’s cheek.

  Francis, at a loss, fumbled about in his pockets for something to distract her. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Look!’

  It was a shiny black lacquered box, about three inches by two, with complicated formal designs of intertwined flower stalks in a cream-coloured inlay. He offered it to Eleanor. ‘It’s a music box,’ he told her. And indeed, when he opened the lid, a faint, tinkly rendering of ‘Für Elise’ filled the air, like someone playing the piano a long way off. ‘I found it in some builders’ rubbish by the front door,’ he told Anna. ‘It’s rather too nice to throw away, I thought. Well?’ he asked Eleanor. ‘What do you think?’

  Eleanor stared. Acquisitiveness struggling with caution in her expression, she released her grip on his cheek and allowed herself to be taken away. ‘Für Elise’ wound itself down, the last notes dripping into the air with a reluctant sweetness. Anna felt for a fraction of a second as if she were in a sepia photograph of some late-Edwardian afternoon, saw herself with some surprise as a sweet-faced girl with a cloud of dark hair under an enormous hat. Eleanor stared up at Anna, then back at Francis, who continued to hold out the music box until it was silent. Eventually she reached out for it, but even then she looked puzzled and shy.

  ‘Say thank you to Francis,’ Anna recommended. ‘Oh, thank you, Francis.’

  Eleanor, finding this hilarious, gave a brief raucous laugh and banged herself with the box. Two or three more notes of music issued from it, then it was silent again.

  Francis was in a strange mood. ‘I love St Mary’s,’ he said. ‘But it’s a waste. Empty, day after day. It ought to be sold off.’

  ‘Francis!’

  ‘It’s what my bishop would say.’

  ‘He doesn’t believe it any more than you do.’

  ‘No,’ Francis was forced to admit, ‘I don’t suppose he does.’

  ‘Then you’re both being silly. Pour the tea.’

  ‘Still, it’s a way of acknowledging a truth about the Church. Every stone in one of these old buildings is impregnated with the mystery of religion. But people don’t want that any more – not even bishops want that. The blood, the body, the act of sacrifice, the strangeness that sits so firmly at the centre of Christianity. All that’s gone. And once you secularise the Church, what’s left?’

  Anna, who had hoped for one of their quiet afternoon chats about her life, was bemused and a little irritated. ‘I don’t know. Helping people.’

  ‘Helping people is social work, not religion.’

  ‘What do you want, Francis?’

  He spread his hands. ‘I want the mysteries,’ he said.

  ‘You’re alive in the wrong millennium. Eat your scone.’

  ‘The heart of what we believe is unfathomed,’ he persisted. ‘Still quite dark and unfathomed. No one wants to admit that any more. Their lives are too comfortable.’ He shrugged. ‘I’d prefer atheism to comfort.’

  Anna, who had no idea what he was talking about, glanced at the sparks of sunlight falling through the branches of the cedar. She looked at her daughter, who sat on the picnic blanket gnawing half an unbuttered scone. She looked closely at Francis Baynes and sighed. The expression of dissatisfaction that turned down the corners of his mouth made him seem even younger than usual. Relationships, she thought, especially these kinds of relationships, have their responsibilities as well as their rewards.

  ‘What’s made you feel like this?’ she asked.

  *

  That evening she complained to John, ‘Francis is in a very odd mood. Alice says she saw him talking to himself in the graveyard. And I couldn’t get the slightest sense out of him today.’

  ‘Only today?’ John enquired.

  ‘Don’t be cruel.’

  They turned on the television to catch the early news.

  In the morning John had a letter to say that the bank had changed its mind about funding the renovations further. He stared at it for a long time, then balled it up in a sudden but controlled gesture of disgust and placed it on the table. ‘Well, that’s that, then,’ he said, staring at the Aga.

  When Anna tried to uncrumple the letter, he added, as if he were talking to a child, ‘Oh, for God’s sake just leave it alone.’

  Anna drew back her hand, but not before she had read the words ‘business plan’.

  *

  When Anna arrived for her appointment, the television was on in Martha Russell’s office. It was hard to know what to make of the blurred, rainy, hand-held-camera images that came and went hesitantly across the screen. People, including the doctor herself, carried things to and fro. Someone held up a theodolite, someone else a spade. There was a jerky change of scene and a deep hole appeared on the screen, its sides chocolatey and steep. Then a close-up of someone’s hands, big male fingers with dirty nails offering to the camera two or three small pieces of dried-up-looking wood or leather. From this the camera moved to a kind of sieve, full of similar objects, the wet sheen of which made them look even more unpleasant.

  ‘What on earth is this?’ Anna wanted to know.

  Dr Russell laughed. ‘Some of the contents of an Iceni lavatory,’ she said. ‘A midden, really. Part of a site at Barton Orcas up ne
ar Waverham on the downs. There’s some quite exciting stuff there. It’s a just pre-Roman settlement, but we’re finding religious objects much, much older. It looks as if the locals had quite different beliefs from the rest of the Iceni.’

  Something about this made Anna shiver. ‘I hate the past,’ she said. ‘All those things hidden in the ground. I’ve seen it on Time Team, of course.’ Suddenly she heard herself say, ‘Dr Russell, I think my baby has been wandering about the house for weeks at night, while she pretends to us that she can’t walk.’

  Martha Russell gave her patient a long and considering look. ‘You’d better sit down and tell me what happened.’

  This Anna did. ‘I don’t know where to turn,’ she finished. ‘It seems so unnatural.’

  ‘Not at all rare, though,’ Martha Russell told her. ‘Children can be frighteningly manipulative. They hide their development for all sorts of reasons. I have a friend forty years old who still remembers quite clearly keeping it to herself that she could walk. When you ask her about it, she says, “I knew that if I admitted I could do it, I would have to do it all the time. They would stop carrying me about.” She kept it up until she was four years old. She made them carry her about until she found her own reasons for walking.’ She gave Anna a careful look. ‘That isn’t some case history in a book, dear, it’s a real event.’

  Anna stared at the TV screen, where the rain had begun to fall harder and, in long shot, three or four people were seen struggling without much success to erect some kind of temporary cover above the excavation. She watched their efforts for some time. She had dreams like that, where life was a struggle in the rain and mud for purposes you couldn’t quite understand.

  Dr Russell let the silence linger for a moment, then lit one of her American cigarettes and turned off the TV. ‘You know that you aren’t the first mother to feel this,’ she suggested.

  ‘I know. I do know. Ellie is a perfectly normal little girl. She’s headstrong, a bit tantrumy, the way lively and intelligent children often are. I love her, don’t mistake me. Even her difficulties can be rewarding.’ Anna shook her head. ‘And she’s so beautiful. And most of the time she’s so lovely to be with. It’s just that sometimes—’

  ‘You’d like a little more help.’

  That wasn’t what Anna had meant at all. She seized on it anyway. ‘John should help me more. Yet when he does, I resent him. He makes it seem so easy to be with her. They get on so well together. I do all the work—’

  ‘—and then they shut you out,’ said Martha Russell with gentle irony, ‘and never a word of thanks for your sacrifice?’

  Anna shrugged helplessly. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I suppose that’s what it is.’

  Later, they talked about Francis Baynes.

  ‘He’s a dear friend, but he thinks he’s in love with me,’ Anna said. ‘I try to keep him at arm’s length, keep the relationship light, but sometimes it’s hard.’

  ‘Do you feel it’s entirely healthy to encourage him?’

  ‘Of course I don’t!’ Anna snapped. Then she continued more quietly, ‘Of course I don’t. But I need him. I need someone to talk to.’

  ‘You talk to me,’ Dr Russell reminded her.

  ‘A friend,’ Anna said. ‘I need a friend.’ She knew this was evasive. She had Alice Meynell as a friend. That wasn’t what she lacked, not really. ‘Oh, I don’t mean you’re not a friend.’

  The doctor smiled. ‘Yes you do,’ she contradicted. ‘But there’s nothing wrong with that.’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Anna. ‘Now he’s acting rather oddly and I’m beginning to feel responsible for that too.’ She made a gesture with her shoulders, as if trying to free herself from a net someone had thrown over her. She looked down at her lap, then up at the doctor. She felt her lip quiver. Was she going to cry? ‘Everybody depends on me—’ she heard herself say suddenly.

  ‘Yes?’ Martha Russell encouraged.

  Anna shrugged and would not go on.

  But on the way home, dithering in the face of the fast local traffic, she completed the sentence she had begun ‘—when all I want is someone I can depend on. When all I want to feel is safe and loved!’

  *

  The next week saw him increasingly withdrawn. He avoided the builders, rarely answered the phone and came to bed only after he thought Anna was asleep. During the day he spent his time staring at the screen of his laptop, or pottering around aboard the Magpie, which he had put on the market. About everything else he was bitter and resentful. She found it hard to comfort him. At the beginning of their relationship this would have bewildered her; now she saw that withdrawal helped him process his frustration and left him to it. Herself she comforted with domestic tasks. Nonesuch was suited to that kind of therapy. Filled with a dreaminess amounting to melancholy, she washed up, made beds, sorted linen, wrote lists, told herself I must buy stamps and bread.

  One morning at eleven o’clock she looked out of the bedroom window to see a large car making its almost silent way up the drive towards the house. It was the silver-grey colour of the rain and there were two men in it. The way they sat, or perhaps the way they dressed, reminded her of something, though she couldn’t think what. She watched the car – a Mercedes – until it slipped from view. She heard tyres on the gravel as it pulled up in front of the house; the discreetly engineered European slam of doors; then voices raised in greeting, one of which she thought was John’s. A gust of wind shook the cedars, small rain pattered on the window.

  ‘Your daddy’s got visitors,’ Anna said over her shoulder to Eleanor. ‘I wonder who they are.’

  Eleanor, dependably a chatterbox in the mornings though she never said anything recognisable or coherent, chose not to answer. She had been too quiet for some time, except for the heavy catarrhal breathing which signified deep and often deplorable involvement. Anna turned from the window to put a stop to whatever was going on and found her daughter sitting in the middle of the great bed, bent over Francis Baynes’s musical box. She was staring at it as if she had never seen it before, struck dumb perhaps by the perfection of it, while with a tentative finger she traced the inlays on its polished black lid. Her expression was one of such concentration that Anna felt she had no right to speak: it would be like breaking into the private moment of an adult. Children are amazing, she thought. They’re such people.

  After a moment Eleanor looked up. ‘Aaaah,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. And it would be even better if you let me wind it up.’

  Eleanor produced a brilliant foxlike smile; clutched the box firmly to her narrow little chest. No chance of that. Possession, she indicated, was worth more than music. Anyone could tell that.

  Anna sighed and looked at her watch. ‘Well, I want to know who the visitors are even if you don’t.’ She held out her arms. ‘Come on, let’s go and see. It’s nearly lunchtime anyway.’

  *

  In the event, John kept his guests busy. They went round the house, floor by floor. Then a second, slightly less expensive vehicle arrived, proving to contain John’s bank manager and everyone went round again. This took an hour. By the time Anna bumped into them, hands were being shaken in the hall and you could already imagine the cars speeding off, quiet and wraithlike, to Drychester and beyond. Indeed, the bank manager had gone out to his, leaving John to finish his goodbyes to the two tallish young men from the Mercedes. They were polite, quietly spoken, dressed in identical charcoal-grey suits tailored downstairs at Paul Smith in Covent Garden. They smiled at Anna with the ease conferred by a good education.

  ‘Mrs Dawe. Hello. I’m Mark and this is Oliver. I’m sure you remember us.’

  Anna ignored the outstretched hand. ‘I’m sure I do,’ she said. ‘Tortured any animals for profit lately?’ No one seemed to hear that, so she raised her voice. ‘John, what’s going on here?’

  ‘And this is Eleanor, is it?’ asked Mark.

  Oliver said, ‘What a lovely baby.’

  Eleanor simpered at him; overcome by faux shyn
ess, she buried her face in Anna’s chest and clung like a limpet. Anna stared at John in horror over Eleanor’s head. He made some sort of temporising gesture, which Mark and Oliver could hardly have missed. ‘She’s certainly that,’ he told them, walking them through the big doors. ‘Are you sure you won’t have some lunch?’ Anna wanted to scream but common sense made her hang back and watch, inarticulate with anger, until he had got the two of them down the steps and into their vile car. She felt as if her home had been violated, her baby threatened in some unspoken way. She sensed something coming towards her purposefully from a long, long distance off. Her skin crawled with that feeling.

  ‘How dare you?’ she said, after John had watched the Mercedes drift off down the drive. ‘How dare you have those two in here?’

  John was defensive. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I know how you must feel—’

  ‘No, you don’t, John. Or they wouldn’t have been here.’

  ‘—but they came with a perfectly good offer.’

  ‘Offer?’ She had to sit down. ‘What do you mean? You haven’t—’

  ‘I haven’t said yes to anything.’

  ‘Good, because you’re not going to. Everything awful that happened in this house, they were in it up to the hilt. They helped Stella Herringe turn foetal material into cosmetics. God knows what else they helped her do. And it didn’t stop with her death. Engelion still exists and they still run it. Or had you forgotten?’

  He rubbed his eyes as if she had made him tired. ‘Of course not. But they represent the Herringes, too,’ he said patiently. ‘They came here with Estate backing and a rescue package that might suit everyone.’

  She stared at him. ‘The Estate? What’s it got to do with them? You own this house!’

  ‘Like it or not I’m a member of the family—’