Nonesuch

  ‘Mrs Dawe—’

  ‘I know what you want,’ she said.

  Oliver, who was standing nearest the Kelvinator, quietly pushed it closed. ‘What have you got there?’ she cried. Even to herself, she sounded shrill and panicky. ‘Have you got something there? Give it to me!’

  ‘It’s my phone, Mrs Dawe. It’s just my phone.’

  She swept it out of his hands and stared at it. Eventually she gave it back. They were looking at her as if she were mad; as if her attitude were too inexplicable and too unreasonable to deal with.

  ‘We’re here on behalf of the Estate, Mrs Dawe—’

  ‘I know what you want,’ she repeated. ‘Even if John doesn’t.’

  ‘—just to make an inventory.’

  ‘I’m going to tell him,’ she said.

  It was an empty threat. She had already told him and he didn’t want to know. John understood as well as she did that something was going on. But he didn’t want to remember the events that had led up to the fire, or the things they had found out about themselves then. That was how he had decided to deal with it all. He was in denial and she couldn’t dent the hard shell that he’d made around him.

  *

  Seven in the evening. Eleanor Dawe, who could barely keep her eyes open but wasn’t quite ready to give up on the day, yawned and blinked at the ceiling lamp. She had refused to leave her high chair, or have her Lion King crockery removed. Her parents sat, waiting her out with a kind of torpid patience, on opposite sides of the kitchen table. While Anna tried to read a novel, John played with the necklace she had found that morning, running it repeatedly back and forth across his palm. Anna found this vastly irritating. To make him stop, she put down her book with a sigh and asked, ‘What do you make of it, then?’

  He stared at her. ‘What?’

  ‘Wake up, John. The necklace.’

  He rubbed his eyes. ‘Oh, this,’ he said. ‘It’s really quite a find. Early Victorian mourning jewellery.’

  Anna took it from him. The necklace itself was made from alternating black beads and lozenges, all highly faceted so that they glittered under the kitchen light. The pendant, however, was a single flat teardrop half the size of a hen’s egg, unfaceted, polished to a mirror finish. It lay heavy and cold in the hand.

  ‘It’s Whitby jet,’ John continued, ‘very good quality. And look!’ He showed her two minute gold hinges, and a catch so small that Anna had to work it with the end of a fingernail.

  ‘God, John,’ she said. ‘That’s disgusting.’

  ‘What?’

  The pendant had swung open suddenly in her hand, revealing an oval cavity into which was sealed a small lock of thick black hair, tied into a curl with the most minute piece of blue ribbon.

  ‘This.’ She held it up. ‘Why have you put this in here?’

  He looked hugely amused. ‘Nothing to do with me. It’s not mine, though I can see how you might think it was.’

  On closer inspection, the hair had a dull, desiccated look. It was far too old to be John’s; the ribbon that secured it was faded and brittle. Still, the shock of recognition remained, mixed up with an unreasonable distaste for – what, precisely? Anna didn’t know. It was a distaste for the very act of memory the locket implied, grief and loss overacted, allowed to spill out inappropriately, on to an inappropriate object. No one mourned anyone that much, surely? You tried to leave the past behind and get on with your life. Memories were one thing, but deliberately to make a setting for someone’s hair, then wear it so near your skin…

  ‘I wish I hadn’t found it,’ she said. ‘I don’t like it.’

  John stared at her, holding the necklace out to him, her face turned away as if she couldn’t bear to look at it. ‘Are you all right?’

  When she didn’t answer, he took it from her and turned it over in his hands. ‘It is a bit necrophilic, I suppose,’ he admitted. ‘They were an odd lot, the Victorians.’ He opened the locket again and stared into it. ‘Some family story attached, I expect. The hair of a favourite child. Or a lost lover.’ He touched the ribbon. ‘Blue for a boy.’ He smiled. ‘I hope you don’t find my hair disgusting,’ he teased her. Then he snapped the locket shut. ‘It’s only a necklace. And’ – dangling it in front of Eleanor – ‘I know who’d like to play with it. Don’t I?’

  ‘John, no!’

  Too late. Eleanor, who had followed this exchange with growing interest, wasn’t going to turn down a gift from the man in her life. In any case, she enjoyed the way the light glanced and glittered off the faceted jet. ‘Gidgie,’ she said in hushed and breathless tones, and snatched it from him quickly before he could change his mind.

  Anna was appalled. ‘John, we’ll never get it off her!’

  He was too amused to hear the exasperation in her voice. ‘Did you see that?’ He pretended to blow on his fingers. ‘She’s got the reflexes of a barracuda, your daughter.’

  Anna scraped her chair back from the table. ‘How could you be so stupid? You know how difficult she is. She’s too young to have anything that small! And to give her something with a dead person’s hair in it, that’s just—’ Words failed her. ‘How could you?’ Then she went on, ‘Mark and Oliver were in the house again today, rooting through Stella’s things. I don’t want them here. I don’t want them here, John.’

  John’s smile faded and he turned away.

  *

  What’s in a name? says Izzie. And I say, how should I know?

  Up and down the stairs I go. I find a thing here, a thing there. The nights are soft, the passages shift and turn.

  Moonlight brushes the walls like fingers. I know what walls are now, I know what stairs and passages and doors are. I look out of the windows, I see the gardens in the rain or sun. I see the sundial. I see the light creep across the grass. I find the things, I hide them carefully where I’m told.

  Good girl, Izzie says. You’re a fine quick study. You and me, we’re nothing like the rest of them and you can believe that or not just as you like.

  Let’s have a christening, she said, so she took me up under the roof, and we had a christening, up there with all the old abandoned things and spiderwebs like wedding dresses draped across corners. We were as secret as women among those old used things. Izzie put dirt on me. She put wax and said some words.

  One word came towards me, faster and faster, out of the moonlight, out of the earth where Izzie lives and everyone else goes. One word rushing out of the Nonesuch gardens and the sundial, the passing clouds. One familiar word shook this old house.

  That word’s my name, it came to me from a long way off. I could taste it on my tongue before I said it. I know my name now, bid that doesn’t mean I know who I am. (On the Nonesuch lawns at night, you can see a darker stripe in the moonlight, water flowing underground.) What’s in a name? Not much, Izzie says, but it’s a start. You know your name now, but there’s a lot more to do a lot more things to find, before you’re you again. Oh and another thing she says: woe betide you if you fail. Your name’s at stake, my little; one of those things gets out of place and you’ll lose it again.

  And we don’t want that.

  *

  ‘I hated her after she was born.’

  Anna Dawe sat in Dr Russell’s consulting room, looking down over the little garden with its careful architectural values. Rain was falling softly on the leaves. The air was darkening visibly. Soon there would be a storm, the Drychester streets would empty of women while the cafes and teashops filled with steam and damp coats and laughter.

  ‘Everything seemed to change between the two of us the moment I got her home from the hospital. Now I don’t know what I feel, except that I’m a little afraid of her. She seems too… formed, somehow. Too adult. She learned to walk without bothering to tell us and wandered about the house in the dark. Now it looks as if she learned to speak as well. We feel shut out.’

  Anna thought for a moment, then corrected herself. ‘I feel shut out. John just seems to love her whatever she does.’
She shook her head ruefully. ‘He gives her unconditional love. I can’t and I feel guilty about that too. Am I just a bad mother?’

  Martha Russell stubbed out her cigarette. ‘I can’t abide self-pity, Anna,’ she said with some asperity and then went on more gently, ‘Look. Children, even the best, even the nicest, even the most beautiful – come to think of it, especially the most beautiful – children, are manipulators. How could they be anything else, when they rely so completely on adults for the most basic, the most fundamental of things? Ellie’s found a good way to play the two of you off against one another, that’s all.’

  ‘But she was such a lovely, uncomplicated little thing when she was born! I remember looking down at her and feeling the most happiness I’ve ever felt in my life—’

  ‘Children are people, Anna. They aren’t dolls. They have a will of their own.’

  ‘She was never wilful until she got to Nonesuch—’

  Martha Russell thought for a moment. ‘You know, something else changed then. That was when you had to begin dealing with her on a day-to-day basis.’ She leaned forward. ‘She didn’t stop being ideal, Anna. That was when you realised she wasn’t ideal. Do you see?’

  ‘No,’ said Anna. ‘I don’t. I don’t want to see her like that. In fact, I don’t want to see anyone like that, young or old.’ She stared mutinously at Martha Russell for a moment, then looked away. Rain beaded the leaves of the hostas in the little garden; the beads ran together suddenly and dripped off on to the stones. ‘Your TV’s not on today. I quite miss it. I quite miss the digging.’

  The doctor gave her a sideways smile and waited.

  ‘All right,’ said Anna. ‘I’ll think about it. I promise.’ She got up to go. ‘How is your excavation going?’ she enquired. ‘Have you dug up any more lavatories on the downs?’

  *

  John had been putting off his confrontation with the knot garden. His plans for the space were grand and perhaps because of that he lacked the confidence to see them through on his own. He needed advice. His expert – a local man, tall, grey-haired and rather elegant in an old-fashioned way, whose only gardening qualifications seemed to be a Barbour jacket and an Oxbridge Classics degree – turned up a couple of mornings after the incident with the necklace. By eleven, the two of them were still out there in the drizzling rain, waving their arms at one another and energetically scuffing up the ground between the box hedges with their Wellington boots, while the builders – who had taken to using Joshua Herringe’s pride and joy as a rubbish tip – worked around them and a desultory fire of ancient lath sent smoke signals into the wet air.

  ‘Will you take them their tea?’ Anna asked Alice Meynell. ‘Otherwise they won’t get any. I’m damned if I’m going out there.’

  Alice had arrived at the same time as the rain. It was one of those days when she seemed to fill the kitchen. Her motorcycle leathers creaked. Her boots clumped on the tiled floor. She made bacon and egg sandwiches and cups of instant coffee; propped up her feet on the Aga and checked her phone for text messages; leafed through the latest issue of Superbike Monthly magazine, saying ‘What crap!’ in a voice of contemptuous authority. Eleanor gazed at her with undisguised wonder; while Orlando’s children followed her about, begging for scraps of bacon. Now, her curiosity piqued, she put down Superbike Monthly and asked, ‘What’s he like, the gardener?’

  ‘Find out for yourself. Kettle’s boiled, tray’s over there. I’ve put some digestives out too.’

  Alice got up and touched Anna’s cheek. ‘There’s no need to feel—’

  Anna brushed her hand away. ‘I don’t feel anything, Alice,’ she said defensively.

  For a year after the fire she had dreamed nightly of flames – to wake with a cry, her partly healed burns sore and red, remembering something she couldn’t possibly have seen: Stella Herringe, her skin charred, her beautiful face ruined, flopping and weeping and dragging herself towards the centre of the knot garden, hands scraping at the earth like blackened claws. Anna shivered. She had avoided the place ever since. It made her feel strange, it made her feel sick. Even in death, Stella had somehow polluted the ground she touched. ‘I don’t feel anything.’

  ‘Hey,’ said Alice gently. ‘Come on.’

  Anna tried a smile. ‘Sorry Alice.’

  ‘No need to apologise. Where’s this tray, then?’

  ‘Over there. On second thoughts, don’t take him any biscuits. I’m still angry about that damned necklace.’

  *

  Alice was gone for about half an hour. In the meantime Orlando slipped into the kitchen and took up his place by the Aga. Anna picked him up and stroked his head. He didn’t seem lonely without Lydia; in fact, he seemed relieved. Anna, now a little worried, whispered, ‘Where’s your wife, Orlando? Where’s she gone?’

  Eleanor, who sat in her high chair with a rag book, two Lego bricks and a gnawed piece of bread in front of her, held up the jet pendant in her sticky fist, turning it against the light like an item of food she enjoyed but didn’t entirely trust. ‘La la la la,’ she said dreamily.

  The door banged open on a gust of wind. Alice stood grinning and scrubbing her feet on the sisal mat while the rain blustered in around her. ‘Recognise this?’ she asked. She held out her hand. In it was an old-fashioned plastic doll’s head.

  Anna’s heart beat suddenly. She was too hot, but her skin felt cold. ‘Alice, where on earth did you get that?’

  ‘From the knot garden. Don’t you think that’s amazing? Ellie’s favourite thing! We all thought it was lost!’

  ‘But how—’

  ‘It was so weird,’ Alice said. She had dropped a teaspoon. When she bent down to pick it up, there was the head, tucked in among the roots of one of the little box hedges, with some other stuff the builders had dropped. ‘They must have come across it in the house and decided it was rubbish.’

  ‘It is rubbish,’ said Anna more definitely than she had intended.

  ‘I was only down there for a moment and there it was.’

  ‘Alice, give it to me.’

  ‘I thought Ellie—’

  ‘I don’t want her to have it. It’s just rubbish and she’s forgotten all about it now. Let’s just get rid of it.’

  Alice looked disappointed. ‘Oh well. Fair enough.’

  An old galvanised dustbin lived outside the kitchen door. Smelly, heavy, coated inside with ancient household ashes, it had been the servants’ dustbin when there were still servants. Anna went out, lifted the lid quickly and dropped the head in on top of a layer of potato peelings. It lay looking up at her, cheeks beaded with rain, worse for wear than ever, as if another fifty years had passed since Eleanor lost it. Beneath the shiny surface of its jaw – pink as a scar – lay material of a fibrous grey consistency. The bland blue eyes rocked open and shut, open and shut. Anna touched the eyelids lightly, felt herself recoil. She was still staring down at it when she heard her daughter shrieking. She banged the lid back on the dustbin and went inside, to find Eleanor straining back in the high chair away from Alice, making pushing motions with her hands. Tears were rolling down her face.

  ‘What’s the matter now?’ Anna wanted to know.

  ‘I offered her this, but she doesn’t seem to want it. Listen, Ellie! Listen!’ A tinny, reluctant rendering of ‘Für Elise’ filled the kitchen. ‘It’s your music box.’ Eleanor only shrieked louder.

  Anna took the offending item out of Alice’s hands. ‘Oh, do shut up, Eleanor,’ she ordered. ‘No one’s going to make you have it if you don’t want it.’

  She sat down weakly at the table. In the silence that followed, Alice looked at Anna. Anna turned the music box over in her fingers. Eleanor regarded them both with a kind of miserable wariness.

  ‘Did you find this in the knot garden too?’

  ‘Right next to the head,’ Alice confirmed. ‘Isn’t that weird?’

  *

  That night Anna was restless. If she dozed, it was only to start awake from some dream disturbingly c
lose to real life and discover that no more than two or three minutes had passed. Too hot, she pushed the quilt away from her; too cold, she drew it back up again. Never fully asleep, she was never fully awake. At two in the morning she got up, retrieved the music box from her dressing-table where she had placed it that afternoon and, after assuring herself that Eleanor was asleep, left the room.

  She had intended to go to the kitchen, make hot chocolate, eat a piece of toast; she ended up sitting in front of the IBM in John’s cold untidy office, remembering her life in Ashmore as it had been before she met him. She switched on the computer, dialled up one of her old financial connections, then, as soon as the screen filled with figures, switched it off again. A brief, light squall of rain pattered against the window. She realised that she had been listening all night. What for she hardly knew. It was listening so hard that had kept her from sleep. My daughter, she thought, hides her own development from me. My husband has thrown in his lot with people whose actions are at best unethical. While Francis Baynes, who was such a good friend, talks to himself, and lurks under a tree in the rain and, if I am not careful, will soon nerve himself up to some declaration that embarrasses us both. When she considered these events she could make nothing of them, but she had begun to think that they were all one thing.

  She raised the lid of the music box and let the wavering, unbearably sweet notes of the ‘Für Elise’ fill the room, reminding her of some childhood music teacher at the piano on a Saturday afternoon. Almost immediately she began to feel drowsy and, obscurely comforted, took herself back to bed.

  *

  The next morning she found that some animal – a fox or a dog perhaps, because what cat would be big enough? – had tipped over the old dustbin in the night, ransacked it for whatever seemed edible and scattered everything else over the small kitchen garden. Anna put on a pair of yellow rubber gloves and wasted half an hour picking it all up again, stopping every so often to massage the small of her back, stare round at the scattered eggshells and sodden orange peel and shake her head. It was a morning of absolute stillness. The clouds were down. Fine rain hung in the air, beading the washing line and the branches of the Bramley apple tree in the corner of the garden. Distances slipped into the mist, yet she could hear everything – the call of a rook circling above the tower of St Mary’s; a car making its way up to Cresset Beacon; then, from inside the house, the scrape of a chair leg on the floor, the clatter of Eleanor’s dish. The radio played light classical music, the new washing machine moved smoothly into its spin cycle, Eleanor laughed suddenly and Anna went in.