My intestines went cold.
‘And they were doing that strange thing with their mouths like humans do —’ Caterina closed her eyes and made loud sucking noises, like a landed trout. ‘You know. That thing. And then this woman comes by and I couldn’t see who she was, because she had her back to me, but she was very angry and she stood there and shouted at them, and then ran away crying with her hands over her face. And the man got up and looked all uncomfortable, and he reaches into his pocket and gives the black-haired woman something, and then he runs off after the other woman.
‘And then the dream came to a halt and I managed to grab it and stand on it; and when I looked into it, I could see exactly the same thing, except this time it was as if I was the woman on the bench, because all I could see were her big human hands and this little black box thing in them. And then the hands opened the lid and it started to make this horrible chiming noise – like the church bells only not as loud – and she started to cry. I could see the tears falling all over her hands and staining her dress. Then the fox came and helped me hold it down while I ate it up. It tasted awful, but I knew I had to do it because you weren’t here.’
I knew that box thing: it was the baby’s new toy. I shuddered. An unpleasant pattern was beginning to emerge, but I didn’t know what it could mean.
I turned to the fox. ‘Thank you,’ I said inadequately. ‘Thank you for rescuing Caterina and helping to run down the dream. I should have been here.’ I paused, as something occurred to me. ‘You haven’t recently happened upon a golden-furred cat by the name of Lydia, have you?’
Caterina looked very serious. ‘I asked him exactly the same question as soon as we got off the highway,’ she said. ‘But he said “not a whisker”.’
The fox shook his head. ‘Not a whisker,’ he repeated.
Cat looked up at him adoringly. ‘Will you carry me home, Loves A Dustbin?’
‘No chance of that, you fat little squab. It was all I could do not to chew you right up there and then. I might not be able to resist again.’ He lunged his sharp muzzle at her and she recoiled with a giggle.
I stared at the dogfox. ‘Loves A Dustbin?’
The fox nodded. ‘It’s what many of my friends call me. A throwback from my urban past, though I’ve learned to eat better now.’ He mused, then after a moment added, ‘Or should I say, more healthily. Even now I’ve acquired a taste for fresh food, it’s still hard to beat licking out a tinfoil tray of vindaloo. I don’t suppose…’
I had no idea what he meant by any of this. All I could think of was that in all the time in which I had been acquainted with him – when he had pulled me away from the scene of my grandfather’s desperate demise and had helped me and Millie run the dream to ground in the heart of the knot garden on that awful night; when he had lectured me on my lack of native wit – I had never thought to ask his name. He was just ‘the fox’ to me, as if all the vulpine race were indistinguishable from each other.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Don’t suppose there’s much you can do about the lack of take-aways on the Crowbury Plain, son.’ He grinned.
‘I’m sorry that I never asked what you were called.’
‘It’s only names, Orlando,’ Loves A Dustbin replied. ‘Here’s a name for you, though.’ He paused to make sure he had my attention.
I looked back, narrow-eyed, wondering what he had in store for me next.
‘Vita.’ He quirked his head at me.
‘Vita? My sister?’
The fox nodded. ‘A little tabby with white paws and pretty eyes; and a ragged little hole in one ear.’
My heart stopped. Then, ‘But she’s been gone for seasons past, lost, dead to us all—’ I cried.
‘Be that as it may,’ the fox said, ‘I’ve seen her.’
‘And I saw her too,’ crowed Caterina, not to be outdone. ‘She was in the old place, the knot in the house where time gets caught up and everything is white and cobwebby.’
I sat down hard, feeling dizzy. It was as if the world had just changed shape.
7
‘I just felt a sort of dread,’ Anna admitted to Alice, a few days after Eleanor’s curious first words.
‘Most people would be proud,’ was Alice’s opinion.
‘I know.’
‘Then what’s the problem?’
‘I can’t explain it. There she sat, in that awful room with its rubbishy old furniture, chattering away to herself, and all I felt was that it was wrong.’
It was a nice day and they had decided to get Ellie out into the fresh air. Anna, in her cautious and cumbersome way, drove the Volvo up to Cresset Beacon, where the three of them settled themselves on a lawn of sheep-cropped turf and sat gazing out across Ashmore, compact as a model village in its curve of pasture land. Behind them the downs rolled away into bracken dells, feathery woods, hidden villages with names like Lower Highmore and Gallowstree Common; and Anna went on, in the voice of someone still unable to account for her own puzzlement, ‘The articulacy of it was astonishing.’
Alice considered this. ‘Wittgenstein didn’t speak until he was seven.’
‘Who?’
‘You know. Wittgenstein, the philosopher.’
‘Ah,’ said Anna. ‘Him.’
‘He didn’t speak until he was seven, then he said, “We appear to have run out of marmalade.” Those were his first words.’
Anna stared at her. ‘And—?’
‘Those were his first words. His pronunciation was perfect. An adult could have been speaking, his parents were clear on that. “We appear to have run out of marmalade.”’
‘Alice, she’s not two yet.’
Alice shrugged. ‘What do I know?’ she admitted.
‘It’s not so much what she said,’ Anna tried to explain. ‘It’s that she seemed to turn on and off like a tap. Just like a tap.’
Eleanor pulled up a handful of grass and examined it judiciously. She had allowed herself to be bundled into a warm jersey and tights, and was wearing her woollen cap askew. This, combined with cheeks reddened and shiny from the outdoors, helped give her the look of some amiable but mad old woman. Eventually, after making sure that everyone was watching her, she gave a coy little gasp and sprinkled the grass into the air to watch it fall.
‘Very nice,’ said Alice. ‘Show us your music box, then.’
Eleanor looked vague.
‘That’s another thing,’ Anna told Alice. ‘We lost that some time ago. I can’t think where.’
‘She doesn’t seem to miss it,’ was Alice’s opinion.
‘After all those tantrums!’
It was a perfect day on the downs, blowy, with a bright blue sky across which clipped vast white cumulus clouds. The sandy heath was at its best, dry, warm in sheltered spots; bracken and birch trees hummed with insects. They stayed for perhaps an hour and saw a hare – ‘Look, Eleanor! Look. No, that way! Oh dear. That way,’ but too late, Eleanor had missed it – then went off to get lunch at the Crooked Billet in Cockley Cleye, where an aunt of Alice’s, all of twenty-eight years old, kept the bar. There, Eleanor made an exhibition of herself over the little paper sachets of tomato sauce and a worse one when they wouldn’t give her chips.
*
Nonesuch was the largest space Anna had ever occupied – although the term ‘occupied’ didn’t seem exact enough to describe the present circumstances – and the most complex. Pleased with what he thought of as her success in deciding what to keep and what to throw away, and determined to push on with the clearance work as fast as he could, John now sent her almost daily to look at this or that and bring back an opinion on it. The result was that, despite her two-year relationship with the house, she often found herself in rooms she had never seen before. It was in one of these, some mornings later, that she came upon Orlando sleeping in the two long bars of light from a casement window.
He looked so tired, sprawled out on the wooden boards, that she sat with him a moment or two. ‘You do have a bit of
a life with her, don’t you?’ she whispered, not knowing quite whether she meant Eleanor or Lydia. Then, out of a rush of feeling in which love and regret seemed equally mixed (because, after all, from the day of his birth – from before that day – Orlando’s existence had been shaped, whether he chose it or not, by the perils and pleasures of her own) she said, ‘You’ve had a bit of a life of it all along, haven’t you?’
If this was an apology, Orlando seemed willing to accept it. He opened his eyes, purred suddenly, slept again. For a moment he was safe from both his tormentors – though Anna thought he would pine if Lydia really had finally wandered off.
Reassured, she looked round the room.
A shabby old carpet in faded pinks and greens. A single upright chair, across the seat of which rested a broken violin bow trailing festoons of horsehair. There was a nice walnut bureau, its writing desk hinged down to reveal bundles of papers, dusty old pens and pencils, a jar of perished elastic bands, a few shabby books. Anna left Orlando to his dreams and poked about among these things. She was leafing through one of the books – Alchemy, written by someone calling himself Johannes Fabricius – then out of its pages dropped first a tinted Victorian picture postcard, then a piece of writing paper of the same age, folded in four, stiff and faded at the creases, and covered on both sides with handwriting which must, in its day, have been thick and black, but which had long ago faded to a brownish tint barely darker than the paper. She could make out only the words—‘…the Great Light. I am not to tell you this, but Dance itself comes from the Light.’
Anna examined the picture postcard, which showed a half-clothed boy with flowers in his hair, holding up a violin; behind him a balcony, sea, ships, two doves kissing on a balustrade. She turned it over. ‘Orpheus,’ explained the minute printed text, ‘by Domenico Frilli Croci, first half of the seventeenth century.’ In the blank space above this were two or three lines of much more modern handwriting she recognised instantly.
God, John, I don’t think I can stand here looking out of this bloody window at the endless bloody gardens and the bloody, bloody rain for a minute longer. If you—
There it stopped. There was no address. There was no stamp. It had never been posted. Anna shivered, hearing the voice of an intelligent, passionate young woman, trapped in a house which had turned from an opportunity into a prison, someone so unable to contain her own frustration that she would write it down on the back of a Victorian postcard to send to a teenage boy—
Stella Herringe, twenty-two years old.
And ‘John’, of course, was John. By then, he would have been at Marlborough, a quiet boy barely in his teens, decentred by the deaths of his parents, not really a Herringe but already fiercely excited by his new life at Nonesuch, where his cousin had begun to open out sexually for him like a flower. ‘What do you think happens between a bored, power-hungry woman and an adolescent boy?’ he had once asked bitterly. Although Anna often reassured him – ‘I don’t mind, honestly. I know what you felt for her. I just feel sorry for her now’ – she still wasn’t sure she had forgiven him those shaping experiences. She tore up the postcard in a methodical way and put the pieces out of sight. ‘ “This bloody, bloody rain,” ’ she whispered to herself. Orlando, sleeping curled up like a shell, responded with a comfortable little chirruping noise.
She glanced around. Something caught her attention, glittering in the floss of dusty, rosin-impregnated fibres from the broken violin bow. Anna went over to have a look. Tangled up there, as if it had been deliberately woven into the horsehair, was a necklace of small, black, multifaceted beads – each facet polished to a mirror finish – from which depended some kind of locket.
As she reached out to take it, Orlando got up and left the room.
*
When she followed him out a few minutes later, the necklace was wrapped round her fingers. She found John in the kitchen, playing some ridiculous game with Eleanor in which he pretended to hide his face behind Round the World with Ant and Bee, while Eleanor made a noise like a duck. Anna put the necklace on the kitchen table in front of her husband. ‘Present for you,’ she said.
She left him looking puzzled and went to do the weekly shop.
*
On the way back, the sky turned the colour of tobacco. Lightning flickered. A steady drenching rain began to fall. As if in response the Tank, so long a byword for reliability, coasted slowly to a halt and would not go again however hard she banged the steering wheel with the heel of her hands. There was petrol. There was oil. The battery worked, but the engine did not.
‘Damn,’ said Anna.
She wished she hadn’t broken the mobile phone, which had been as useful to her as it was to John. Behind her the lane stretched away down a gentle incline between unkempt hedges and empty fields; not far ahead it turned abruptly right beneath the branches of an old chestnut tree, which spread out across the road in the wet light like the groined vaults of a church ceiling. She sat there waiting for the rain to stop. If anything, it came down harder. After five minutes or so a movement caught her eye and she was startled to see a silent white-faced figure standing in the shelter of the tree. For a moment she had no idea what to do. She rolled down the side window and called loudly, ‘Hello? Excuse me?’ and then, understanding suddenly who it was, ‘For God’s sake, Francis, what are you doing here?’
He stood awkwardly beside the front passenger door while she leaned over to open it. He was holding his old tweed jacket together at the neck with one hand. His trousers were black with water. He ducked his head into the car and said vaguely, ‘I was out walking. I’m soaked, I’m afraid.’
Before he would get in, she had to tell him it didn’t matter. ‘Really, Francis. It’s only a car. Just get in. Have you been here all along? Why didn’t you come over when I stopped?’
He considered this. ‘I was trying to sort some things out,’ he said, with the air of someone answering a different question. ‘Life is never quite what you think it is, is it?’
‘Francis?’
He sneezed. ‘Sorry. Do you know, I think the sky’s brightening over there.’
It was. As the rain slackened and the thunder grumbled off towards Drychester like an old dog tired of barking at the front gate, Anna tried the Volvo again. To her surprise the engine turned over, coughed, caught. Yes’, she thought. To Francis she said, ‘You’ll be ill if you don’t get dry. I’ll take you back to Nonesuch—’
‘Oh no. Really. I’d rather go home.’
‘Suit yourself.’ She banged the Tank into gear. ‘You’re being very eccentric.’
‘Do you believe in life after death?’
She stared at him. ‘Don’t you?’ she asked.
‘Of course—’
‘Then why ask me? You’re the Christian here, Francis. I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous.’
He didn’t reply to this and they drove the rest of the way in silence; but as she dropped him outside the vicarage something prompted her to touch his hand and ask, ‘What’s the matter? Really?’
He smiled. ‘Oh, you know.’
‘But I don’t. I don’t see what it is you want.’
‘From you?’ he said quickly.
She hadn’t meant that at all. He had the air of someone about to make an admission. To forestall him – because she knew better than him how difficult it could make things for them – she said firmly, ‘From anyone. From me or anyone else. From life.’ Remembering his white face, passive and blurred with rain beneath the tree, she added, ‘You mustn’t be unreliable or too demanding, Francis. That’s not what people want in a friend.’ She tried to soften her voice. ‘Now go in and get out of those clothes, and have a hot bath.’
He waited for her to finish and turned away, smiling painfully.
Oh well done, Anna! she congratulated herself as she drove away. That was really well done.
*
When she got back she found the silver-grey Mercedes drawn up on the gravel apron by the main doors, a
nd Mark and Oliver poking about in their graceful, slightly futile way in one of the rooms along the corridor from John’s office. They were wearing pastel-coloured polo shirts with faded designer jeans, boat shoes without socks, classic Swiss airline-pilot watches. Their wrists and ankles were tanned and slim, as if they had just come back from a month sailing in the Aegean. They had managed somehow to open the padlocked door of a white Kelvinator freezer cabinet John used to store out-of-date paperwork and were eyeing its cluttered shelves disappointedly. Every so often one of them pulled something out and put it back again. They had the air of people who, their agenda having received a setback, were uncertain how to proceed.
Anna stood in the doorway with her arms folded, watching them. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she enquired after she had let a minute or two go by.
They looked up, then at each other.
‘Ah,’ said Mark. ‘Mrs Dawe. I wonder if you could help us.’
She had expected them to be down the corridor in the office itself, talking about business plans in bland voices, pausing every so often to consult John’s computer screen or the tiny display of a WAP phone; not going through their old employer’s things like a pair of Fulham antique dealers. ‘Does John know you’re here?’ she asked. ‘Do you think you have a right to be here, rummaging about like this? Because you haven’t.’
Before he could answer she warned him, ‘There’s nothing of hers left.’
‘Mrs Dawe, we—’
‘The freezer’s not even plugged in, you can see that. Everything that survived the fire we buried. Even if you dug it up, it wouldn’t be any use to you now.’
She remembered a smoky winter afternoon, failing light, a trench in the garden, the barely healed palms of her hands blistered by the shovel. Then all those freezer bags going into the ground, labelled in Stella’s careful handwriting as if they were pots of jam. The worst thing to remember was how the contents of each bag had softened as they thawed. John had turned away and cried; but Anna, thinking she must bear witness to the deaths of so many animals, had watched with dry eyes. They were both just out of hospital at that time and still not well. Anger had kept them going. Anna’s anger was boundless, but what can you do with anger like that? You cannot vent it on the past. The past is beyond your sense of justice.