In the kitchen they were having grapes.
Eleanor liked grapes. Her idea of eating them was brutal, direct, inefficient. She made a fist round the grape, then stuffed the fist in her mouth. Much of the grape fell out. John never seemed to tire of this. ‘Oh,’ he would say, picking up bits and popping them back in again, ‘you like that, do you?’ Occasionally he would try to get her to eat a piece of apple instead. This she would give back to him instantly, glaring at him until he made a face and ate it himself. Breakfast time was fun for them and not the grim struggle Anna often faced. They got on so well together. She watched them for a moment, then said in a voice of amused despair, ‘What am I doing wrong?’
‘Oh, she loves her father,’ John replied. He pulled Eleanor’s nose. ‘Doesn’t she?’
‘That’s very helpful advice, John.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
Anna banged some pots about in the sink. ‘I was serious,’ she said, even though she knew she hadn’t been. ‘Sometimes I don’t know where to turn with her.’
When he didn’t respond to this, she threw the washing-up cloth into the water and stared indignantly out of the window.
Eleanor chose this moment to speak again. ‘John,’ she said. She paused for a moment to appreciate her father’s astonishment, then, squirming around in the high chair, reached her hands up ecstatically towards him. ‘John.’
‘My God,’ said John. ‘She can talk. Anna, she can talk.’
Anna gave him a blank look. ‘I told you that.’
He seemed disconcerted for a moment; then laughed. ‘Ah yes, but that was different.’ Sweeping his daughter out of the high chair, he lofted her above his head until she giggled and squirmed. ‘Now she can talk.’
Anna repeated, ‘I told you she could talk. I heard her talk.’
‘Well, I’m not sure about that,’ John said.
‘Oh, I see. You’re not sure. Why, John? Because I was the one to hear her? Because she didn’t say her first word to her daddy? Because she didn’t say your name?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Why don’t you believe me, then? Because you obviously don’t.’
He had Eleanor high up in the crook of his arm now and she was pulling at his ear, trying to stand up so that she could blow into it. ‘John?’ she said and, when he replied, ‘What?’ only shrieked with laughter and pulled his hair. They played this game – ‘John?’ ‘What?’ ‘John?’ ‘What?’ – for a round or two. Then, appearing to tire of it, Eleanor turned away and caught Anna’s eye. As soon as she was sure she had Anna’s attention, she put her arms round her father’s neck and gave him a wet, possessive kiss. ‘Dada,’ she said.
John chuckled. ‘You can’t argue with that. Two words in a morning.’ He looked more delighted than Anna had ever seen him. He held out his hand to Anna. ‘Come on. Come and give us both a hug. You should be happy.’
Anna was astonished to find tears in her eyes. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘I think the washing’s finished.’
She darted past him, dragged a huge damp tangle of sheets out of the washing machine and buried her face in them, breathing in the cheap, strong, comforting smell of fabric conditioner. She would have done anything at that moment to cram down her feelings of rage and jealousy and exclusion. But it was too late for that. She thought of her recent conversation with Martha Russell. ‘How can you be so stupid?’ she heard herself demand. ‘Not to see it? Your precious daughter is a manipulative little cow.’
She dropped the clean washing on the kitchen floor in front of the two of them and stormed out.
8
The dogfox had said some interesting things, though it took me a while to make sense of many of them. Sitting there, on Ashmore Common, by the weird yellow light of the hunter’s moon, with Caterina by my side grooming the last viscous traces of the dream out of her fur, it had seemed edgy and strange to be in conversation with the great russet creature. To an onlooker we must have appeared a bizarre group, much like two mice listening to the counsels of an owl; or lambs curled close beside a wolf. For all his care, I never was able to forget that he was a potentially dangerous predator who might turn upon the two of us like a dog: that long jaw was made for cracking bones, I found myself thinking more than once, he’d snap through a cat’s neck with a single bite. Yet he showed no sign of such intent. All he did was offer his advice, rather than his teeth, and for that I was grateful – he was a wise beast and experienced in the odder ways of the world. He certainly had the years for it and the eyes, too, deepset, pale and penetrating: eyes that had seen too much. I found I could not look away from them, however much I might have wanted to, and the advice he gave me while I was held by that unwavering tawny gaze, though cryptic, haunted me for days.
‘Look to your own,’ Loves A Dustbin had said. ‘The threat is close to home.’
But when I questioned him further all he would say was, ‘It’s coming back, Orlando. Quarter your own ground; check your own territory. Go to all four corners of the knot and take the path that gyres. Dig deep; then deeper still. Seek it out and run it down. We’re none of us safe until you do; least of all the ones you care most for, the ones who are already adrift.’
He fixed me with that unsettling gaze, then he grinned: quick and sly. Those sharp white teeth glimmered for an instant in the starlight and a moment later he was gone, loping silently into the tangle of nettles and bramble runners from which he had emerged.
*
‘What did he mean by that stuff about “quartering your own ground”?’ Caterina asked me distractedly as we padded back to the house. She was limping, her injured foot held bobbing in front of her, but she appeared determined not to complain. Sometimes she tried so hard to be grown-up that it made my heart ache.
I shook my head. ‘I can only take it literally.’
Neither of us knew what he meant by ‘the path that gyres’ and I had not liked to ask.
We walked in silence for a time. It was a still night and scents hung heavy on the air, but I was too preoccupied to pay them much heed. The fox’s mention of my sister had ambushed me, coming as it had out of nowhere. Vita. My nestmate, my fellow orphan, my poor, despised, neglected sister. I had not been very nice to her when I thought myself an important dreamcatcher’s apprentice and she was nothing but a silly kitten, forever tagging around after me in the hope of some game or another. I felt guilty that she had been lost on the wild roads in her attempt to impress me. Millie had left me in little doubt as to that.
‘So where is this “white, cobwebby place” where you saw my sister, the tabby cat?’ I asked yet again.
Cat sighed. ‘I don’t know. I sort of fell into it when I was following the dream thing. One minute I was chasing it down what looked like the Long Corridor, the next—’ She stopped, frowning.
‘What?’
‘It all went… freaky.’
‘How?’
‘The house. It looked… the same, but different. It was sort of light and… fuzzy, and it smelled… foul…’
‘Foul? In what way?’
Cat gave me a melancholy look. ‘Stop asking me. I don’t know.’
‘Bad? Rotten?’ I persisted.
‘Oh, I can’t remember. Uncle Orlando. Dusty and old. And some sort of nasty human smell, all salty, like blood.’
We were both quiet after that. At last we turned into the lane that led up to the gates of Nonesuch and threaded ourselves beneath them. We made our way up the long, soft lawn, skirting the rhododendrons, and headed for the dark kitchen.
Caterina said no more till we arrived at the cat door. This she sniffed with interest. ‘Mum’s back,’ she declared and, butting the flap open with her head, manoeuvred her injured paw, and then the rest of her, carefully into the house.
I sat outside for a little while to collect my thoughts. Liddy had returned, of her own accord, it seemed, though I had searched for her assiduously up and down the village. Then I had quartered the ground, as the fox put it, the
physical ground of Ashmore. I had run back and forth along the lanes, skirted the main road, sniffed my way between every tombstone in the churchyard. Had she watched me, I wondered, sheltering behind the yew, or perched upon a roof, and said nothing? Had she even laughed at my anxious efforts? She had called me a fool and worse, and all the while she had been gone I had been plagued by the sense that she had withdrawn herself from me as a form of punishment for my failings. So it was with some apprehension that I insinuated myself inside the cat door, braced for a confrontation. Instead, I was greeted by a tableau of almost excessive domesticity. In the warmest spot in the kitchen – directly in front of the Aga – was Lydia, submitting like a weary empress to the ministrations of her attendants. She lay there with her head tilted back, golden eyes reduced to hazed slits of pleasure, as Millefleur licked carefully around her ears and neck, and two of her daughters applied themselves to her feet and tail.
No one even looked up as I entered.
‘So,’ Lydia was saying to her audience, ‘then it started to rain and you know how much I hate that, so I ran along the road till I found a likely refuge. Of course, I went straight past all those rather dilapidated council houses on the hill – you could hardly trust the people in them, could you? – until I came to that imposing place on the junction with Pond Lane; you know, the one with the ivy and the shutters, and I jumped straight up on to the windowsill and looked in. Such a smart drawing room; they even had a fire burning, which I always think is such a good sign, don’t you? So I tapped on the window; not too hard, I didn’t want to look too indigent, you know, and their little girl – smartly dressed, no jeans – came straight to the front door and held it open for me. Polished wood in the hall; very clean, and in the drawing room three big white sofas – gold fur always looks so good against white – and those lovely silk rugs that you can really get your claws into. I knew I should like the inhabitants right away. I could just see myself there. Do you know what I mean?’
She leaned her head back to look up at Millie, but the tabby and white gave her a flat-eyed look and stopped grooming. ‘I thought you said you’d had a nightmarish time,’ she accused.
‘Oh, but I did,’ Lydia cried. ‘Do you know, they had no proper cat food in the house at all? I ended up having to eat salmon straight out of the tin…
By the time she had recounted how they had made her up a bed of mohair sweaters spread in a wicker wash basket; how she had been fed properly from then on – fish boiled just so, with a little butter – and how she had met the extremely handsome and well-to-do cat next door, whose name was Tarquin and who had the most exquisite duelling scars around his ears, I could take no more.
I left the room, as unregarded by Lydia as I had been when I arrived. Millie flicked me a glance, then got to her feet and followed me out.
‘So have you had a lovely vacation from Nonesuch as well?’ I asked waspishly.
‘Take no notice of Lydia, she’s just enjoying boasting to us of how she’s won herself a whole new cast of admirers,’ Millie replied mildly. ‘You know how she is: she loves being the centre of attention. For all her arrogance, she’s really quite insecure, you know.’
I could hardly believe my ears. ‘Insecure? Lydia? She’s got more self-regard than a peacock!’ I did not add and no wonder. I could not help looking past Millie and through the open door into the kitchen. Seeing Lydia lying there still, the buttery light of the kitchen lamp infusing her fur with subtle brilliance, made the blood run like fire through my veins. I felt suddenly dizzy with longing…
When my focus came back again, Millie was watching me, her eyes bright with hurt intelligence. Her chin came up and she looked me squarely in the face. ‘As for me. I’ve been travelling around to see where best I might live.’
I stared at her stupidly. ‘What do you mean?’
Millie dropped her head and began to clean a perfectly dirt-free paw. ‘It’s time I moved on,’ she said simply. ‘I can’t just hang around here like a sort of surrogate mother. I want kittens of my own and I’m getting no younger.’
I sat down with a thud, as if someone had just sliced the sinews in my legs. ‘Leave Nonesuch?’ My voice sounded as if it were coming from someone else, someone far away down the tunnel of a long wild road, fighting against an icy compass wind.
‘Leave Ashmore entirely. I thought of going south, actually, towards the coast; maybe even as far as Cornwall. I’ve heard it’s nice there. A fishing port, perhaps. Eat fresh mackerel off the harbour wall—’
‘Millie, you can’t!’ Now I sounded agonised.
‘I only came back to tell you my plans… and—’
‘Yes?’
She lifted her head from her grooming and held me with her amber gaze. It was an honest look. It pierced me to the heart and suddenly I knew what I had always known, what I had tried so hard to forget ever since that night when she had first accompanied me on to the highways and made me catch a dream for her. That night when she had offered herself to me, without games or duplicity: a generous gift which I had rudely spurned, obsessed with Lydia as I had been. As I still was. Despite it all, I had hoped we would be friends for ever, that we could all stay in our cosy group here at Nonesuch, watching Lydia’s kittens grow to adulthood, sharing their education, unruffled by jealousies and passions.
‘And to say goodbye,’ she finished sadly.
‘Ah,’ I said inadequately, shocked into incoherence.
For a moment there I had been sure that she was going to ask me to go with her to this seaside paradise. An image – as bright as a butterfly – had flickered through my mind’s eye: the two of us asleep in a pool of sunlight in the crook of a granite wall patched with orange lichen, seagulls wheeling overhead against an endless blue sky, a greasy newspaper pushed to one side – two or three gleaming crumbs of battered fish still adhering to it – a long line of sparkling surf marking the margin between land and sea…
But you have never even seen the sea, came a voice in my head.
It was true: I hadn’t, except in others’ dreams and Millie’s descriptions of the places she had visited on her journeys down the wild roads. Besides, that grim, sensible voice went on, you have your duties here; you cannot just up and leave like some gypsy cat with no cares or responsibilities.
And I realised that of all cats, Millefleur knew the enormity of a dreamcatcher’s task and would never ask such a thing of me. She was just telling me her intentions; not asking me to join her, or even to dissuade her. I felt as if my world had suddenly folded in on itself.
*
We didn’t speak much to one another over the course of the next few days. I watched her with Lydia and the girls, as friendly and as gentle as if nothing had changed; and for them, I suppose it had not. Millie was at best an itinerant visitor in their lives, a bearer of news and teller of stories, and to Belly, Cat and Letty she was exactly what she had described herself as: a surrogate mother. They would miss her, I thought. But not half so much as I would.
This realisation came to me one afternoon as I lay upstairs in one of the unused rooms, trying to keep out of everyone’s way. The baby had been tormenting me till I had grown tired of her insistent proddings and pokings; the builders were hammering away downstairs and there was dust everywhere. The girls kept squabbling and Liddy had snapped at me when I had tried to intervene, so here I was, feeling rather sorry for myself as I lay stretched out on the floorboards. There was a perfectly good rug on the floor beyond me, but somehow the bare wood against my limbs felt more appropriate, as if my internal discomfort should be echoed by my body being uncomfortable, too. Why was Millie leaving? I kept asking myself. Wasn’t she happy here at Nonesuch? It was a large house and the food was good, the people, for the most part, attentive and friendly. Lydia – well, Liddy was Liddy: self-centred and greedy, beautiful and charming and chilly in equal measure. Everyone who knew Lydia knew this about her and accepted her as she was; even I had got used to the unpredictability and mood swings. I knew Millefle
ur loved the girls; she was so good with them, especially when their mother was oblivious or otherwise occupied, which was much of the time. But they were nearly full-grown cats now and less inclined to listen to others. Perhaps Millie was feeling superfluous here. The Great Cat knew I did, much of the time, when I was not hunting the dreams. I mused upon this unsatisfactory problem for a time, until I felt my eyes get heavy and my head grow soft. I was just drifting off into a listless doze when I heard footsteps in the corridor outside.
It was Anna. I could tell by the sound of her footfall. I heard her walk into the next room and cross to the window. A rattling noise meant she was fiddling with the window and a few moments later her footsteps came back out on to the landing. She entered the room in which I lay, shoes clacking first on the bare wood, then cushioned by the old rug. I pretended to sleep while she wandered about, examining the few dusty items left in the desk – books and papers, pens and oddments – and a few moments later, almost against my will, I found myself sliding into a dream.
In it, I had taken Anna’s place and was myself walking the corridors of the house, lonely and alone. It was twilight; or maybe the hour just before dawn. The light was undependable, a sort of glassy grey that slicked off the surface of things but gave back little illumination or comfort. I had the sense that I was looking for something, but what that thing could be eluded all my mind’s attempts to corner it. Anxiety burned cold at the back of my neck. I thought someone might be following me, but whenever I turned round there was no tangible sign of another presence, although little eddies of dust, transfixed by the grey light, swirled up behind me. No sign – except a smell.