Nonesuch

  John slept on. The cats had gone.

  So had Eleanor.

  *

  Anna called her daughter’s name. She looked under the chair, behind it. She looked under the desk. She bit her lip. It was a room too small to hide in.

  The passage outside had an institutional look, acquired during the Second World War, when two or three tall drab rooms along its length had housed for a short time the officers of a local bomber squadron. Anna had never entered those rooms willingly, even before the fire, because they had still seemed to her to smell of the boot polish, hair oil and thin beer of that earlier occupation. But there was no sign of Eleanor in the passage and now one of the doors hung open just far enough to admit a toddler. Anna stopped and listened. She could hear a voice from inside, diminutive, pitched high, oddly conversational.

  She pushed the door. ‘Ellie?’

  Stella’s things were piled up against the walls, Jacobean chairs, a cracked slate dining table from Heal’s, bits of chrome and bolts of water-damaged brocade, a senseless jumble of furniture and fittings thick with the reek of scorch and damp. Left to herself, Anna – still unnerved by anything that reminded her of the fire, or the events preceding it – would have had this dismal stuff destroyed. Eleanor Dawe had no such qualms. She was sitting in the middle of it all, her legs straight out in front of her, the musical box clutched firmly in one little fist, looking up at everything with wide delighted eyes. She was chattering away to herself just as she did in the mornings – except that now the stream of lalage rushed and bubbled with real words. She seemed to have remembered everything anyone had ever said to her.

  ‘Naughty girl,’ she said; and, ‘baby, baby, little baby.’

  Several times she said, ‘What a pretty girl.’

  Anna, who recognised many of these phrases because they were her own, stood by the door, as much entranced as disconcerted by the accuracy of the imitation, not daring to interrupt in case Eleanor lost the hang of it. Eleanor, though, wasn’t in need of help. She paused magisterially. There was a sense of a gear shifting and she was off on a kind of sing-song recital, picked up effortlessly in midflow, ‘an to the big hole in the wall, an oops a daisy, oops a daisy, the little girl’s fell, oh she’s fell over, an it’s a big hole…’ Suddenly her tone changed again and she said, ‘I’ve been down to Portsmouth today. The traffic was vile.’ She added, ‘When we got there it was full of people in cheap sports shoes.’ This, with its effect of a conversation between two dull middle-aged men in the bar at the Green Man, was bizarre to hear in the light, high voice of a toddler.

  ‘Eleanor!’ Anna said. ‘Eleanor?’

  ‘…an dark places an light – haughty-taughty, naughty girl – an up we go little girl, up we go… an oh do pay attention Alice… an such a lot of stairs, lot of stairs, people on the stairs…’

  Anna felt something like panic. ‘Eleanor, stop now. Stop!’

  It was too much. It was too soon. But Eleanor just kept on talking as if Anna weren’t there – as if, now she had the hang of it, she would never stop – and eventually Anna walked up to her and picked her up and shook her. ‘Eleanor!’

  ‘—and berries,’ finished Eleanor with satisfaction.

  She gave Anna a sideways look. Then she shook herself suddenly. Her face turned red and large tears rolled down it. A ripe smell filled the room.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Anna. ‘Nappy alert, I think.’ She turned Eleanor over. There was no need to sniff. ‘Come on,’ she continued, relieved to have something ordinary to deal with, ‘let’s clean you up and show you to your daddy.’

  Eleanor, unable to see anything in it for her, took this gloomily.

  ‘Cheer up,’ Anna advised her. ‘You can talk. You can talk!’

  Eleanor blinked and offered Anna the music box which, all along, had been trickling its sweet, distant rendering of ‘Für Elise’ into the dusty air.

  *

  They found John sitting on the floor of his office, engagingly crumpled and bleary, rubbing his jaw and yawning with the air of a man who has only just woken up. He had fastened his grey Levis and Oxford cloth shirt, but they looked as though he had slept all night in them. He needed a shave. Anna’s heart went out to him, in a rush of love and excitement. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘I mean, listen!’

  ‘You should make up your mind.’

  ‘Go on, Eleanor!’ urged Anna. Eleanor, somewhat recovered, smiled blandly, pointed at her father, then held out her arms to him. She remained resolutely silent. ‘Oh, Eleanor, how disappointing!’

  John eyed them both. ‘What’s disappointing?’

  ‘John, she can talk. I found her chattering away to herself—’

  ‘Found her?’ asked John.

  Anna blushed. ‘She must have crawled off while we were—’

  ‘Ah.’ He smiled. ‘That. What responsible parents we are.’ He rubbed his face again, looked down at himself puzzledly, then round the room. ‘Have I been asleep?’

  ‘Oh, John!’

  He examined Eleanor. ‘Well, she’s not doing it now,’ he stated. ‘Are you sure? It’s easy to mistake that babble for words.’

  ‘Gidgie poes,’ Eleanor contributed obligingly; and to that she would add nothing.

  ‘Oh, well,’ said John. ‘You must have misheard.’

  ‘I suppose I must,’ said Anna, who knew she hadn’t.

  *

  On the way back to the kitchen to make tea, Anna poked her head round the door of the storeroom. Some of the furniture she remembered from her very first visit to Nonesuch. She had rather admired it then, but now it filled her with the same disgust as the concrete pens of the experimental cattery, which had been awaiting demolition since Stella Herringe’s death. She shivered. It was so hard to escape the past. And then, she was still puzzled by the afternoon’s turn of events – though less now by the suddenness of Eleanor’s plunge into language than by her subsequent retreat from it.

  6

  Night after night I woke and felt that phantom cat beside me. I smelled it in the air; I felt its hot breath on the back of my neck. And while I never sensed that it meant me harm, I was beginning to dread letting go of consciousness, for fear it would show itself to me, after which I knew I would never be able to sleep again. It was a dead cat, of that much I was certain, for it left no footmarks, it took no food, it made no sound. It was a ghost from my past and it was haunting me.

  Millie did not return, in all those nights, nor in the long days afterwards. I had taken, on occasion, to hanging around the wild roads down by the gate, sniffing for her scent; at other times, isolated without her and bored with my own company, I would go out in search of her, knowing it to be pointless, but driven by a powerful, unspoken need. I could not talk about my fears with Lydia, who regarded all I did and said with imperious indifference; and anything to do with dreams and dreamcatching as my own personal madness. And I dared not involve the girls, especially Caterina, who had started to pester me about taking her on the highways to learn my skill. I had been an unwilling apprentice, myself, and that had been before I had known the horrors I had in store. Now that I was well apprised of the worst that dreamcatching had to offer, I would not wish it on another living being, particularly one I held so dear.

  So I wandered the house and its environs listlessly, taking in all new changes: how the moorhen chicks down on Ashmore’s pond had grown to fit their absurdly large feet and now scuttled everywhere, obsessed by the search for food so that they might grow larger still; how the midges swarmed at twilight and the dragonflies quartered the heavy, humid air to hunt them down; how the hard green berries on the bramble bushes gained a blush of colour that attracted the little birds, the finches and sparrows; how the grass on the common grew increasingly sere and scorched as the hot weather continued, till it was as tawny as the fur of the new rabbits who fled across it in the hot summer nights, pursued by a russet creature who looked very much like a fox I had once known. I watched with interest how Anna and John put up white metal
gates at the entrance to all the stairways in the house; but if they were meant to keep us out, they were entirely ineffective: for the girls who, though lithe, were still too large to squeeze through the rails, merely treated the gates as a means of providing them with many hours of hurdling entertainment and somewhere to stage fights in which the bars made for interesting obstacles to batting paws.

  The only visitors to Nonesuch in this time – other than the builders – were the young woman who rode a loud, noxious-smelling machine and clumped around in huge leather boots (we all kept out of her way, though she was not deliberately clumsy) and the man from the church, who kept turning up, it seemed, when John was not here. The last time he had come, he had given the baby an object, a small thing all shiny and black with flowers on it, that chimed and clanged when its lid was lifted; but despite the gift, I could tell it was not the baby that drew him here; I saw how his eyes followed Anna’s every movement, especially when he thought she was not aware of it. Cats are very watchful of their humans – ‘jealous as a cat’ was not phrased without reason – so I, in turn, observed him closely, for as far as I was concerned he had no place at Nonesuch, nor with Anna. If she belonged to anyone, I reasoned, it was to me, for I had come before all the rest; it was me she had fed every night of my life; it was with me she curled up when the baby was asleep and John was working. And it was I who had led her rescuers to her in the midst of the fire, and not without some risk to myself. My whiskers have never been straight since.

  One day as I stood my watch at the gates, other visitors arrived, and this time neither on foot, nor on the noisy two-wheeled monster; no, these visitors came in a huge silver car which growled its way slowly up the drive, crunching the gravel under its great wheels, until it came to a halt in front of the house. I scampered across the lawns in time to see two men in identical clothing climbing out of it, to be greeted by John, who seemed pleased to see them. I was less sure; the smell of them was vaguely familiar: a scent found once and never since identified. It was so faint as to be illusory; but I have a good nose. I followed them in, intrigued. They were quiet and polite, and appeared to offer no threat as they strolled around the house with John, peering into this room and that; but then another car came up the drive and John left the men and went downstairs to meet it. He stayed outside for some time talking with the new arrival, his voice drifting up to us as if from a great distance. As soon as he had gone, the men changed their demeanour, much as cats do when entering a wild road, taking on their primal, wild forms to suit the inimical environment in which they find themselves, a place which demands the precise deployment of every natural sense to ensure survival and well-being. Their identical smiles faded away and they became alert and watchful. They fairly bristled with anticipation; I could almost imagine that their features had become sharp and weaselly, as if trying to sniff out something that was lost.

  One of them said something softly to the other, who turned at once and walked quickly away, disappearing down the long corridor and round the corner. Of course, I followed him at once. This was my domain and he was trespassing. Even so, he appeared to know his way around, despite all Nonesuch’s mazelike passages, half-landings and little stairways, and soon we were down on the ground floor again, in the room that gave on to the knot garden. The scent of the witch was still strong in here, even though all her furniture and belongings had been removed. I watched him as he walked the bare boards, patting the walls here and there, as if he expected something to be concealed there. He opened the solitary remaining wardrobe that had been too large to get through the doors but, finding it empty, closed it again, furtively quiet, as if he had no wish to be found. I heard John’s voice, closer now as he led the latest visitor into the great hallway. The man stiffened at the sound and his head came up, like an animal sensing threat; then he walked quickly across the witch’s chamber, slipped out into the dark corridor and doubled back to the upstairs room, in which he and his companion had been left, by a different route from the one John was taking even now, moving so swiftly and silently all the time that I found it hard to keep him in sight. By the time I arrived, he and the man who looked so like him were standing together at the window as if innocently admiring the view over the knot garden; and John arrived a second or two later with a large man in a brown suit.

  ‘Ah, Orlando,’ John declared with a grin, sweeping me up in his arms. ‘My little tiger.’ He turned to the men at the window. ‘I think he’s keeping an eye on you,’ he said, laughing.

  I heard him laugh and it annoyed me. I do not like to be picked up. I struggled and squirmed out of his grip. As I did so, I looked up: the two men were watching me intently, their eyes narrowed and calculating; but by the time my paws had hit the floor, they were laughing, too.

  As I walked off down the corridor I could feel them all watching me, their gaze a crawling weight on my back, their laughter like the bark of hounds. The fur along my spine twitched with the sound of it. It was all I could do not to run; but dignity is important in such circumstances. I made it to the top of the stairs, where the new white gate had been left ajar; then, knowing myself to be out of their sight line, I fled down the stairs and into the kitchen. There I found Lydia lying on the rug before the stove, which Anna kept going even in the hottest weather, as if for our comfort alone. She lay on her side, exposing the pale golden fur of her belly, her eyes half closed, her pink tongue just visible; the very picture of somnolence. I threw myself down beside her and wished for the thousandth time she would let me lay my head down on that great, soft expanse and show me a little kindness. Sometimes all you need in life is just a touch of comfort.

  Liddy, however, was not going to provide it. She sat up in a huff and looked at me down her long nose. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ she asked, though the tone of her voice implied she was far more irritated at being interrupted than interested in my state of mind.

  ‘Some men just arrived,’ I told her lamely.

  ‘I saw them,’ she said, surprising me. She did not look as though she had stirred from her lazing spot all day. ‘The two who look like one.’

  I nodded. ‘I don’t like them. They do not belong here.’

  She laughed, a short cough of a sound with no mirth to it. ‘Ah. You’d be surprised at how well they belong here,’ she said cryptically, but she would not explain her remark further, and after a few moments turned her back on me to signal that my audience was at an end, settled herself comfortably and went back to sleep.

  *

  The next week they were back; and for several days after that. I could smell them throughout the house, for wherever they went they left a scent trail that was both attractive and repellent at the same time. Humans have distinctive odours and, though they wash in water and spray themselves with chemicals to disguise them, they cannot hide their true scents from the nose of a cat. John’s smell was strong and complex; salty and tangy when he had been working hard; warm and peppery the rest of the time. Anna’s changed from day to day, depending on her mood. When she was angry she smelled hot and sharp, like the ground after a lightning strike. When she was contented she smelled a little like Lydia: aromatic and heathery, with a healthy underscent of warm earth. But when she and John mated her scent became rank and musky. Then the pheromones would get into the bones of my head and buzz there like a message.

  The baby’s smell was different again: elusive and deceptive. I could never quite keep it in my head, nor fix it in the scent map Hawkweed had tried to teach me as a way of making sense of these things. When she had first been born, Ellie had smelled as sweet and buttery as a just-opened hazelnut; but some time in the weeks afterwards that aroma had gone, to be replaced by some-thing less wholesome – not the usual small-creature whiffs of faeces and urine they have not yet learned to clean themselves of – but a faint scent redolent of age and must, like something that has been kept for a long time in a closed and airless place. Then that, too, was gone; or if not entirely gone, faded into the background as t
he baby’s new scent formed; and this new scent was a strange half-echo of Anna’s at mid-moon, when her blood was hot and she moved as sinuously as a queen on heat. It was a disturbing scent for a child to have. And it affected others more than it did me.

  I watched the two men who looked like one admiring her as John carried her around. She would show them her new toy – the black tin box that Anna’s friend had given her – stretching out her hand to them, then, when she had their full attention and they reached out to join in the game, she would take the toy away, burying it between her and her father, as if it were their prize, their secret. She giggled. I saw how she watched them over his shoulder when he walked away, how she enraptured them all.

  She did not smell the same when Anna held her, I noticed. The musky scent would recede, as if she could exude and retract it at will. I never felt very comfortable in her presence and not just because she liked to hit me with her toys.

  *

  One week, the hot weather gave way to steady, driving rain. I sat on the windowsill of the upstairs room in which John spent much of his time clacking away at a desk and divided my attention between watching the girls chasing the crumpled balls of paper John had obligingly thrown around the room for them and observing how the raindrops were so heavy that they made even the big leaves of the rhododendrons bounce under their weight. Poor Griz, I thought, not much shelter under there from weather like this. I had just jumped down from my perch with the idea of showing Grizelda and whichever others of the cattery survivors were under the bushes with her the way into the shed with the broken door – shouldered just so, the door would swing open a few inches; enough to admit a quick cat, though getting out was always rather more of a palaver – when Anna came into the room, carrying the baby.