I could not reach it. Even the mightiest jump in my ordinary form would take me less than halfway up the wall. I stared up at it, then turned to Caterina. Her eyes gave back a doubled image of the dream and she started to growl. Little flecks of froth formed at the corners of her mouth; then suddenly she sprang up and ran at the wall, bubbling and spitting with fury. The plaster in the Painted Room was broken and uneven, little ripples and outcrops playing across its pale surface. To a lightly built cat – especially one borne up by the power of an almost supernatural loathing – it offered sufficient foothold to enable Caterina to reach high enough to snap at the lowest bulge in the dream’s sac. She caught it between her teeth, then tumbled to the floor, dragging the dream, swollen and reluctant, down with her. Without a moment’s thought I leapt upon it, pinioning it beneath my hindquarters, where it lay as senseless and unresponsive as a punctured football.
I raked at it with all four sets of claws. I ripped my teeth into it, but the membrane was strong. I pushed my head blindly into it, but the sac simply gave under the pressure and re-formed itself around my shoulders. At last I managed to hook a thumb claw into it and tear a small hole. I bit and bit at this, enlarging it so that I could wedge my head into the ghastly opening, but as soon as I did so the dream rose with a whoosh, as if it had felt the wound. It jagged its way across the room and out into the Long Corridor, where it melted through the wall and disappeared from view. I followed it, feet skittering on polished wood, down the corridor and in and out of all the rooms on that side of the house. To no avail.
Outside, clouds had drifted over the moon, rendering the darkness complete. But a cat can see even in the pitch-black and I could see the dream. It was tottering over the orchard wall, heading for the knot garden. My heart sank, but I knew I had to catch it. Up and over the wall I went, my feet barely touching the old brick in my haste. Once on the other side, it skirted the straggling box hedges and veered to one side, as if trying to keep close to the house. At the corner it wobbled uncertainly, then made the characteristic dash of a dream entering a wild road, a sudden, elongating motion, followed by a pleating, as if it had met resistance, then it was gone.
I stared after it, puzzled. There was no highway where it had vanished – at least none that I knew of and it was my job to know every wild road in Ashmore.
I ran to the spot where it had disappeared and sniffed cautiously at the ground. About a bird’s height above the gravel, my nose met a familiar resistance: the skin of a wild road. This was most bizarre, for surely there should never have been a wild road here, so close to the house. Nevertheless, I pushed my head inside and gazed around, eyes narrowed against the sudden icy blast. There was nothing about the interior of the highway that indicated it was anything less than a natural road, but even so I was taking no chances. Pulling my head out again, I found Cat sitting behind me, watching my performance with interest.
‘Stay there,’ I said sternly. ‘Whatever happens, just stay there and wait for me.’
She made a face. ‘I could help.’
‘I know, but your best help would be waiting here.’
‘What if it’s too strong for you?’ She got up hopefully.
‘It’s not.’
‘But how do you know? It might be and then I could help.’
‘Caterina, I haven’t got time for this.’
The use of her proper name had its effect. She sat down again, looking hurt.
‘If I don’t reappear, fetch Millie. She’ll know what to do.’ I wondered even as I said this just how long I could rely on my old friend being around. Then, with a final apologetic glance at Cat, I leapt into the new highway.
At once, the winds caught at me, whipping my mane back and forth across my eyes in a confusion of cross-currents. I stood for a while, trying to take my bearings. There was something recognisable about this road, but at the same time something warped. I could have travelled every highway, each lane and tributary of the wild roads of Ashmore and its environs with my eyes shut; but now I had the discomfiting sense of being entirely lost, as if one false step would carry me over an unseen cliff edge, or down into the deepest pit. I trod warily.
Up ahead, dimmed by the ice flurries and a sort of swirling mist, I could just make out the fiery red of the dream, diffused to a radiant glow, like an autumn sunset. It was drifting away from me. I increased my pace. Beneath my feet I could feel solid ground, which was dry and soft and almost warm, unlike the frost-bound earth that always hurt my pads whenever I ran the highways. And the scents of the wild that helped me to orientate myself – the loam and mulch, the standing water, the tang of life – seemed muted and far removed, as if someone had shut a door against the outside world and trapped this road inside.
I turned a corner and found myself in the place Caterina had described. It was a tunnel, or a corridor, and it was dark. The mist was not mist but cobwebs, great hanging swathes of them, though of their makers there was no sign. The dream had suspended itself in the thickest part of them, as if settling itself into a nest. Fear came down on me then like a cold hand, for it seemed to me that the dream was in its natural element and I was not. Perhaps, I thought, I should leave it to destroy this strange highway and take myself back to the world I understood. It would be so easy to walk away and relinquish this hunt. I could almost feel myself begin to step backwards towards my point of entrance, but just as I was about to do so a movement behind the dream caught my eye. I craned my neck. Illuminated by the dream globe’s carmine light I saw Vita.
I had not seen my sister for some six or seven seasons, ever since the highways had swallowed her, and she was much changed. But those white socks against her tabby coat were unmistakable; as was the reproach in her eyes. She sat upon what appeared to be a tall chair of black wood, and the light from the dream was in her eyes, as if a fire were raging inside her skull.
‘Eat the dream, Orlando,’ she said softly, though her voice carried easily to me across that open space. ‘You must eat all the dreams she sends, or I will be trapped here for ever.’ She stared at me for a moment or two more as if imprinting me with her fiery gaze, then she jumped down from the chair and ran away from me. In the gloomy light, all I could see of her as she fled was the flash of her white feet, the recurring image I had seen in my sleep time after time. Then I realised who it was I had sensed beside me all those nights as I dozed, whose hot breath I had felt upon my neck, whose scent had surrounded me when I awoke.
‘Vita!’
My voice echoed hollowly in that place and I knew from the sound that I was somewhere in Nonesuch, but it was not a part of the house I recognised, or at least the house as I knew it, for there were silken runners on the floor beneath my feet, rather than the dark polished wood that was there now; and when I ducked under the white shrouds to run after my sister, the old portraits were back, rich with colour as if freshly painted. This was disconcerting, but I refused to be put off my pursuit of Vita. However, before I had gone more than a few yards down this odd version of the Long Corridor I found myself back where I had started, with the dream looming red before me.
I ran past it again, for surely I had missed my way. But even as I ran, I knew I could never have turned a full circle and not noticed it. And indeed, a few seconds later I was back where I had begun once more. Was I dreaming, too? But the dream I pursued here was real; I had felt the heat from it scorching my fur as I passed. I could see the shadows its fiery corona cast. My image loomed huge and attenuated upon the walls of that highway: a gigantic lion stalking its prey. Except that I had run past my prey twice and given it not a thought.
Eat the dream.
I did not know what she meant by the rest of what she had said, but I would eat this dream and every other dream I found. I would do my job as Ashmore’s dreamcatcher. I reached up and pulled the fiery dream down from its nest of webs, and it came almost willingly into my paws, as if ready to give up the half-life it had found here. It did not resist me even when I bit into it and start
ed to gnaw a head-sized hole.
Beyond the viscous membrane the dream contained one of the clearest scenes I had ever seen in any globe. I was inside a room panelled in dark wood, a gloomy effect only heightened by the lengths of black muslin that had been draped across the single mullioned window. Candles, tall and yellow, burned at intervals along the mantelpiece and from two ornate wall sconces, and these gave off the scent of burning tallow I had smelled in the Painted Room. No modern candles these, with their synthetic wax and clean tapers: instead, plumes of dark smoke coiled in lazy spirals from these towers of animal fat, to leave greasy spirals on the beamed ceiling. I was in Nonesuch, in one of the downstairs parlours, I realised, recognising the pitted wainscoting, the carved pattern of ivy and roses along the central rail. But where this wood was dark with age, the wood in the room I knew had been lightened and limed to an almost buttery finish, and again I felt disorientated, as if someone had picked me up and spun me round many times before setting my feet back on the floor. The room swam. I turned round. Against the back wall stood a tall, ladder-backed chair in ebony wood and upon this was curled a small tabby cat with all its paws tucked neatly beneath its tail.
In the centre of the room a tall woman in a long dark dress – her glossy black hair pinned up into an elaborate knot – stood over the body of a man in a long wooden box. She was facing towards me and when I turned to regard her she looked up briefly. Her eyes flashed at me, green and dangerous, then she bent to her task again. A silver implement flashed in her hand as she worked and when she straightened she held a small twist of dark hair between her fingers, and this she first laid against her cheek, then stowed inside the pendant of the shiny black necklace she wore. Again that sense of disquietude came over me; for surely the woman was holding in her hand the same black necklace the baby had thrown at me that very afternoon? I began to feel distinctly queasy and, as I did so, the perspectives shifted eerily again, so that I was almost floating in mid-air; for when I looked down I found that I could see the man in the box. He was very like John: dark-skinned and thin in the face, though this man was older and tireder than the John I knew, his cheeks withered and fallen in, his hair greying at the temples. A high, stiff collar supported his lolling head and his hands were crossed upon his chest. I could see small cuts and abrasions on his knuckles and wrists. His eyes were open and staring.
They say a cat, staring into the eyes of a dead man, can make out the last image that the man saw, imprinted upon his retina. I do not know if this is true; but what I did see in the eyes of John-not-John was unmistakable.
It was terror, pure and simple.
I gagged as I ate the dream down, piece by piece, though for once the occupants went quietly, without a fight, as if this were the last, most peaceful, scene in a long and destructive dream. But as I swallowed the dream woman, the cat on the chair opened one eye, then winked at me and slipped away. I could not see her feet, but I knew that it was Vita all the same, checking to ensure I was carrying out my appointed task.
*
‘You were ages; where have you been?’
As soon as I exited the strange highway, I found Cat waiting for me exactly as I had asked her to, though the gravel in front of her paws was churned up into little heaps and lumps as if she had dug her toes into it in frustration and impatience.
‘I’m not sure it’s a matter of where,’ I said softly, ‘but rather of when.’
9
‘The thing about a relationship’, Anna explained to Alice, ‘is that you patch things up. Everyone tries harder.’
John’s idea of trying harder was to concern himself as much as possible with the repairs. He missed meals and she found him eating with the builders. Or he took the Tank into London and spent the afternoon looking at fabric samples in the V&A. In the evenings they kept off the subject of Eleanor and confined themselves to the day’s other events. He was trying to assess the damage to the Long Gallery. He had saved some sixteenth-century oak panelling and ten walnut chairs in the style of Daniel Marot; but it looked as if water damage had rendered the famous Brussels tapestries unsalvage-able. ‘Not that I’ll miss them,’ he claimed. ‘They always smelled of mothballs.’
Anna laughed and turned a page of Mansfield Park.
Eleanor, meanwhile, had new shoes. She tottered about in them matter-of-factly sweeping the books from the shelves and stuffing small things into the tape slot of the VTR; or toddled sturdily along the corridors of Nonesuch, leading her mother by the hand. She cared nothing about relationships, but out of some native shrewdness now encouraged Anna to join the fun at breakfast time. She had adopted two more words – ‘ca’ and something which might have been ‘Orlando’ had the first and last syllables not been so obviously absent. Most of what she said was nonsense, eked out with an amazing penetrative shriek used to signify anything from impatience to delight. This was so loud it often drew the builders from their work to scratch their heads over her. They seemed fascinated.
‘She’s a proper little girl all right,’ Alice Meynell told Anna, as if there had been some doubt. ‘Twenty-two months old and she’s already got that lot wrapped round her little finger.’
But it is always nice when people find your child engaging; and as most of the workmen had children of their own, Anna found herself reassured by their goodwill. There couldn’t be too much wrong with her daughter if these ordinary and decent men liked her so. When Eleanor turned up to visit them one day without her necklace, they unearthed for her a silver spoon of obscure purpose and uncertain provenance. It had been a bit bent, they explained, when they found it, down between two of the huge old floorboards in the Yellow Dining Room, and a bit blackened with age, but it had polished up well. Would she like it?
She would.
It was as long as Anna’s middle finger, with a small deep oval bowl curving into the elegant upward sweep of the handle. Wear had given it a soft, blurry sheen, a deeper colour than you would expect from silver, and – as John said – the feel of something properly old. He thought that it might be from the Regency, or perhaps a little later; he had no idea what it was for. Eleanor loved her spoon; and no one regretted the loss of the necklace, with its tawdry Victorian glitter and hidden twist of hair.
*
St Mary’s vicarage, a cavernous structure built in 1912 in patent brick glazed to resist weathering, looked less like a house than the annexe of some Edwardian junior school in Birmingham. Arriving there mid-morning to find the front door open, Anna propped her bicycle against the wall and, entering without a thought of what she would do next, pushed her way past the coats and along the narrow hall where a row of Francis’s shoes lay motionless at the base of the wainscoting like very large black beetles.
‘Francis?’ she called.
She knew he was at home, because she could hear him upstairs somewhere, talking. When he didn’t answer she waited irresolutely in the kitchen, looking from time to time at her watch. Finally, she went to the bottom of the stairs and stood with her hand resting on the mahogany banister, listening. She could hear his voice, modulated and rhythmic, argumentative and hesitant by turns. It never rose louder than the buzz of a fly trapped in a bedroom on an October afternoon. She gave him a moment more, then called, more loudly than she had intended, ‘Francis? Hello?’
His voice stopped immediately. In the silence that followed, faint sounds filtered in from outside.
‘Francis!’
Nothing.
Just as she was beginning to turn away, she heard him begin to talk again, picking up, it seemed, exactly where he had left off, his voice still rising and falling conversationally though, quite clearly, he was alone up there.
Anna had no idea about religion. She had no clue what a vicar might do when he was on his own. Perhaps he was praying. She formed a sudden image of him kneeling on a bare floor, his hands locked together in front of him, the expression on his face not one she associated with Francis. She took her hand off the banister as if it had been burned an
d stepped quickly back into the kitchen, which greeted her with ingrained smells of carbolic soap and vicarage cooking. Everything spoke of an unlikely dedication. The Formica-topped table was littered with squares of crumpled butchers’ paper on which Francis had been trying to draft a sermon. Even the kitchen appliances had the worn-down air of women who give their lives to the Church.
Anna smoothed out the first bit of paper that came to hand, wrote hastily on it in pencil, ‘Why don’t you come to tea any more? I do miss talking to you,’ and left as quickly as she could.
Passing them in the hall, she averted her eyes from his shoes.
*
When he heard Anna’s voice, Francis Baynes felt himself stop speaking. He felt the kind of spasm go through him that goes through old plumbing when a tap is turned off and he raised his head to meet the amused smile of the woman who lay on his bed.
She had laughed at him from the beginning. She found endless ways of teasing him: she took up the position of an effigy on a tomb, hands praying on her chest; she threatened to raise her skirt or show him a nipple (which, he knew, had a wide brown aureole surrounded by faint downy black hairs). Francis was afraid of her. Her level gaze, with its frank will to power, reminded him of something he couldn’t quite remember. Her rank sexuality attracted and repelled him. She continued to smile at him for a minute, perhaps more, in the silence in the room; then, looking towards the open door, shrugged abruptly, as if to say, ‘So what?’ While from the bottom of the stairs, where she stood trembling, Anna Dawe called out, ‘Francis!’
The woman on the bed smiled and shrugged.
Francis Baynes, relieved, smiled back and spoke again. ‘ – the mystery of it,’ he continued, as if he had never left off.