‘I sometimes wish we could give up on Nonesuch.’
‘What would you do?’
She shrugged. ‘Sell up, take the loss, move away. I could easily get us somewhere else to live. This is so much more John’s project than mine.’
‘And have you suggested this?’
‘Oh, yes. But I don’t know if I mean it anyway. It’s not so much the house,’ she said, hearing the builders through the wall, ‘it’s all the mess and noise.’ She looked around vaguely. ‘The uncertainty,’ she added. ‘If it weren’t for John and Eleanor—’ Not sure what she was about to say, she sighed, and went on, ‘They’re so close, those two, I sometimes feel there isn’t room for me any more.’
‘You aren’t being very clear.’
‘I’m not, am I?’
In the end, it was half past four, and she hadn’t said anything sensible, and he would soon have to leave. She caught him glancing out of the window again. ‘Francis, you aren’t listening.’
His head moved as if he were following someone’s progress across the empty lawns and he smiled. ‘It isn’t your husband (who strikes me as a very decent man). It isn’t his business associates, who will soon get what they want, or not and go away. It isn’t the house itself. Or the builders, or, really, the money, because you are too strong, both of you, not to overcome irritations like that.’ He looked into the bottom of his cup, swilling the residue around like a fortune-teller. ‘Whom does that leave?’ he asked Anna. ‘Anna,’ he answered for her and gave her a moment to think about it. ‘I wonder if you’ve simply let yourself become dissatisfied with your life. I wouldn’t blame you if you had.’
‘That’s not very helpful,’ Anna reproached him.
‘Isn’t it?’
‘I thought God—’
‘Ah, God,’ he said. He stood up.
Anna stood up too. ‘Francis, don’t go yet.’ She took hold of his hand. ‘Look, I haven’t said half of what I wanted to say. All of a sudden I just feel lonely and not very loved in my own house, that’s all.’
He smiled. ‘It seems like a lot to me.’
‘It does, doesn’t it?’ she agreed. ‘And you’re right, of course. I’ve let things get the better of me. I feel oppressed by the sheer effort of it all, resentful at giving up my career, and from time to time ragingly jealous of my own daughter. Do you suppose that’s normal?’
‘Perfectly.’
Somehow the afternoon pivoted on this one word.
Anna thought, How can you say that? How can you know anything about that?
Suddenly she had no confidence in him, or in herself. In a panic she brought the back of his hand to her lips, kissed it. She knew that this gesture offered more than she had intended. But if she lost his attention, whom would she have left to talk to? ‘Dear Francis,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you.’ Which, as she told herself later, was not something you could say safely to a twenty-six-year-old boy who already had a crush on you. You didn’t need the expression on his face to tell you that.
*
She stood on the front steps to watch the little Rover make its way slowly down the drive – ‘Wave, Ellie. Wave!’ – then went back inside to the kitchen, where she ran warm water on the tea things. The afternoon was almost over. Eleanor sat in her high chair, toying drowsily with spaghetti hoops in ‘tomato’ sauce, then fell asleep quite suddenly.
A little later John came in from the knot garden, bringing with him a smell of waxed cotton, damp air, gathering dark.
‘How was the vicar?’ he asked.
‘Don’t say it like that, he’s never harmed you. Anyway, he was fine. A bit vague. Do you want tea?’
‘Desperate for it.’
‘Well, you know where the kettle is,’ she told him.
He laughed and Anna began to make tea anyway, using the last two Assam teabags and a spoonful of loose China. ‘This is all I ever do,’ she said. ‘Make tea and clean up Coco Pops.’
‘You too?’
‘Piss off, John.’
He hung his wet Barbour jacket on the back of the door. Then he said, ‘It’s the strangest thing.’
‘What is?’ she enquired.
She found the tea strainer and poured the tea into two large mugs, looked in one of the cupboards for biscuits. She could hear him busily emptying the pockets of the jacket, then putting things down on the kitchen table behind her. She arranged three or four stale chocolate digestives on a small plate, picked up the mugs and turned round.
‘Well, look what I found,’ he said.
On the table he had lined up Ellie’s plastic doll’s head; the little lacquered musical box Francis had found in the builders’ rubbish; the Victorian mourning locket with its secret twist of hair. From the musical box issued a few wavering notes of ‘Für Elise’.
Anna stared at it. She stared at her husband. She felt a curious warm weakness in her legs, as if they were reluctant to support her any longer. It was like the rush of sleep when you have been up all night, like an unexpected depression on a November afternoon. She sat down suddenly. ‘Where did you get these things?’ she whispered.
‘Anna,’ he said. ‘The tea.’
She put it down carefully, so as not to spill any more. ‘Where did you get them?’
‘That’s what’s so odd. They were in the knot garden.’
‘Show me,’ she ordered. ‘Take me there.’
‘Now? Why?’
She struggled to her feet, still staring down at the objects on the table. She tried to be calm. ‘Because I threw these things away.’ She separated the pendant from the other items. ‘I don’t even know what happened to this,’ she said wonderingly. She shook her head. ‘I keep throwing these things away and they keep turning up again. They just keep turning up again. Can you explain that to me?’
‘Anna—’
She went over to the kitchen door, opened it and stood there waiting silently for him while rain blew in round her.
He made a fuss about bringing Eleanor, who had to be dressed for outdoors – waking briefly, she looked puzzled, whispered ‘Dada’, fell asleep again with her head lolling against his shoulder – and another about finding her hat. He made a fuss about looking for a torch. He didn’t want to go out again. ‘Don’t you even want your coat?’ he asked.
‘For God’s sake, John, just take me there!’
She followed him along the side of the house in the rain, through the old parterres and rockeries. He wouldn’t slow down for her and there was no comfort in the bulk of him, silhouetted against the torchlight, which illuminated in random, chaotic flashes a mossy brick path; sodden, impenetrable rhododendrons; the leaning orchard wall, its spalled orange lip fringed with the branches of medlar trees and dripping like the lip of a drying waterfall. He stopped to unlock a gate. She felt a terrace open out on her left; smelled smoke.
‘I hate this place,’ she said.
Builders’ rubbish had obscured much of it, but it still made the eye restless, and you could just discern in the clipped lines of germander and box, the knot, the maze, whatever you properly called it: the roiled whorls and spirals, the curves and re-entrants, that disguised Joshua Herringe’s initial – the ‘hidden J’ he had devised in 1482 to celebrate his fortune, impress his new wife, encode his own self-esteem. There were so many ways to describe the knot. A half-solved puzzle, a clock which told only Herringe family time. Anna took one step forward, felt the nausea of her own past well up, saw the house blaze, the madwoman crawl out here to die. Two years might not have passed. She felt her burns again: when she looked down, one hand cradled the other to ease the memory of pain. I don’t want this moment, she said to herself, although she wasn’t sure yet of everything it contained, everything she knew. She made herself take another step and felt the stickiness of the past dissolve, release.
‘They were over here,’ John said.
‘Where? Show me.’
He pushed back part of a box hedge with his foot, so she could see t
he shallow depression scraped at its roots. Torchlight lay in there, like cheap gold paint on twigs at Christmas time. It lay across his boot. ‘I don’t know why I noticed it.’
Anna knelt down and touched the wet ground. Who would do this? she asked herself. Her mind felt completely empty. She stood up and looked around. As her eyes grew used to the gloom, she saw that the smouldering builders’ fires had layered the wet air with white smoke. She examined the tips of her fingers. Only earth.
‘Well?’ enquired John.
She wiped her hands on her skirt. ‘There’s nothing to see,’ she answered. ‘We can go back.’
He gave her a disgusted look and, turning his back on her, carried their sleeping daughter towards the house in the rain and thickening dark. After a moment she ran after him and caught up, and tried to put her arm through his. ‘You’re avoiding me again,’ she said as lightly as she could. He was like a piece of wood, nailed across himself to keep her out. ‘Something is going on at Nonesuch,’ she continued firmly. ‘We just aren’t ready to see what it is.’ When he wouldn’t answer, she made him stop and look at her. ‘John?’ But she couldn’t think how to convince him.
‘It’s a wet night, Anna,’ he said. ‘Ellie should be inside.’
‘John—’
‘Don’t include me in this. Because it’s stupid.’
‘All right.’ Anna’s voice was bitter. ‘Stay in denial, if that’s what you want.’
She bathed Eleanor and put her to bed while he cooked tagliatelle and made a sauce with some leeks and cheese he found in the fridge. ‘This is nice,’ she told him and he said, ‘It could have done with a minute or two less.’ By the end of the evening they were talking to one another again; but true to her word she stayed in the kitchen after he had gone to bed. With a sense that she was taunting something much bigger than herself, she threw the doll’s head back in the dustbin and locked the back door on them both, hid the musical box on the highest kitchen shelf she could find and arranged the necklace in plain view on the table overnight. All three were gone by morning, which was how she came to be certain she was right. She had no idea what she would do next.
10
The way the ‘false’ highway had opened itself only to me – the way it had revealed my sister, trapped in its environs, like a goad or a gift – haunted my every waking moment. Time and again I had been back to look for that elusive road, but it appeared to have removed itself as effectively as if it had never existed, until I was unsure whether it might have been no more than a dream within a dream. At night the dreams of Ashmore – insistent and increasingly strange – kept me so occupied that I soon felt worn thin and ragged in the head.
Eventually I decided I was in need of help, but at whose feet I might lay my parcel of worms I did not know. The dogfox probably knew more about the nature of the wild roads than any other creature alive, but, even if I had known how to find him, I did not feel comfortable taking my concerns to him. His abstruse pronouncements and wicked grin were almost as disorientating to me as the strange road itself, and I felt I needed another cat’s eye upon the matter, one who perceived the same patterns in the world as I did, rather than one who saw more than I ever wished to comprehend.
In the end I decided to see whether the Besom had returned to her cottage, for if the wild road that had appeared at the far western corner of the house had ever existed before, she would surely know of it. I went in search of Millie, as I thought she might like to join me on a visit to the old girl, but there was no sign of her anywhere in the house and no one had seen her in the grounds that morning, so in the end I took Caterina with me. Ever since I had banned her from accompanying me on my last journey she had been so cool and reproachful towards me that I thought inviting her to meet a real female dream-catcher might in some way mollify her. After all, I reasoned, I was hardly the best role model for her in the affairs of the highways, since I appeared to have so little understanding of their mysteries myself.
We walked along the main road through Ashmore, then took a detour through the churchyard, for it was a bright, crisp, sunny day and the leaves of the horse chestnuts were resplendent with colour, each tree afire in the autumn sun. When the chill of November began to bite in earnest, they would all detach themselves and float down through the air like so many great hands; already there was a scattering of gold among the graves. They were so big and slow that even the clumsiest cat could capture them before they hit the ground. Millie said you should make a wish for each one you caught – one for the Great Cat, one for a friend, one for the people who fed you and one for yourself – so we always tried to catch four.
I sat on the gravel path and stared upwards into the maze of branches. The sun punctured the canopy with dazzling shafts of light and the fiery colours burst upon my eyes so that for a moment I was overcome by sensation and could barely make sense of what I saw: so many arms and twigs, so many bifurcations and offshoots; broken limbs, the patchwork bark. Details would fix themselves in my mind, then run together in a blur when the dappled light changed with the passage of a cloud, or the wind stirred the branches and the pattern broke apart again. Nature contained a complexity I could not comprehend. How could a dreamcatcher make sense of the world if he could not even make sense of a tree? But even as I did so, a seven-fingered leaf broke free of its anchor and began to drift down towards me and weightier matters dispersed like a mist.
‘Cat! Quickly! The leaves are falling!’
I looked around.
While I had been staring up into the chestnut’s canopy. Cat appeared bent on some kind of mission. She was nosing around the gravestones in an abstracted way, her tail stiff with concentration, and she did not even look up at my exclamation. The disappointment I felt was brief and rueful, but keen all the same; she might not be a kitten any more, ready for a foolish game at a moment’s notice, but I had hoped at least she would humour me with some small show of interest.
I walked slowly up behind her. ‘Autumn’s here, Cat,’ I said softly.
This time she whirled round, her concentration disturbed. ‘What?’
‘The leaves.’ I gestured vaguely up into the branches above us. ‘I thought you might like to catch them. For luck…’
‘Oh, that,’ she said contemptuously. ‘Don’t be silly.’ And, when I looked crestfallen, added, ‘Come here and smell this. Tell me what you think. I’m sure I recognise it from somewhere, but I just don’t seem to be able to place it.’
I bent to the corner of the grave she had been examining and sniffed cautiously. At once, the scent hit the back of my throat so that I recoiled with the shock of it. Acrid and musty at once, it was that old, familiar smell that had dogged my travels and my dreams for so many weeks now, but somehow – out here in the open, where it should have dispersed by the movement of the wind, with the passage of feet and the traffic of wild creatures, and been mingled with the natural odours of decay, with the leaves and the mulch – it was stronger, more alive. Unnaturally so…
I stared at Caterina and she gazed back, wide-eyed and expectant. ‘Can you smell it, Uncle Orlando?’
I shook my head and the scent seemed to roll around inside me as if now that I had smelled it in this powerful form, I would never be rid of it. A sudden fear came over me. I backed away, on to the sharp pale gravel of the path, my feet digging in so hard that I left little crescents of soil showing through the stones; and from there I ran away into the lych-gate, with its clean scent of new wood and wet tile.
From the corner of the sheltered seat, I watched Caterina coming after me slowly, her paws reluctant, her face contorted with bewilderment. Mad old Uncle Orlando, behaving weirdly again…
By the time she reached me, my skin was trembling with some primal revulsion, though my poor slow brain still seemed unable to tell me exactly what it was that had caused me such a violent reaction. ‘I don’t know what it is. I don’t want to know—’ I stammered, already feeling foolish.
‘It’s the smell from the dream
roads,’ Cat said. ‘I just wondered why it was here, so far from the house.’
The smell from the dream roads. The smell of the black thing with which the baby had hit me; the smell of the hair inside it and of the Long Corridor when last I had been there. The smell of the woman with the sharp green eyes—
I jumped down from the seat and walked smartly out on to the road, hardly caring whether there were vehicles coming or not. ‘We’re going to see the Besom, Cat,’ I said grimly. ‘We’re going to see her now.’
*
We walked swiftly and in silence the rest of the way and by the time we reached the holly hedge that surrounded the old brick-and-flint cottage on the hill my jaw ached from being set in its most determined expression. I was looking forward to being soothed by the wild serenity of the pretty garden I knew was on the other side of the hedge; but when we wormed our way through the cat-sized hole, I was not prepared for the sight that awaited me. What earlier that summer had been charmingly disordered, with its rambling briars and rampant honeysuckle, its twining clematis and windblown roses, was now a wasteland of neglect. Dead flower-heads hung brown and rotten from the bramble runners and rose bushes; the lavenders had grown out all leggy and untidy; the clematis had yellowed and died, and the ferns that had stretched up through the other foliage towards the light were now for two-thirds of their length frondless and woody. Many had fallen back on themselves, their stems too weak to bear the weight of the heads. Goosegrass had strangled every delicate plant in sight, then withered and died back itself. Everywhere you looked was a tangle, a chaos. My heart sank. Where was the Besom? Her trim, groomed elegance surely had no place amid all this disorder.
The answer, when it came, gave me little comfort.
Caterina, upon entering the garden, immediately found a scent and started burrowing her way into the undergrowth, head down, at a crouch. ‘Hello!’ she was calling. ‘Can you hear me? I’m coming!’ And with that pronouncement she disappeared.
I followed her, of course, though the path she found through the dense runners was so narrow and so low as to require me to crawl for much of the way on my belly. In and out of brambles with thorns that caught the skin and grass with burrs that tangled in the fur, between the roots of shrubs and arms of rogue holly, among ground elder and wild mint we went, until at last we reached the end of the tunnel and emerged into a tiny clearing. There, curled into a tight, miserable ball, sat a mangy old creature, at first sight appearing more dead than alive. The bones of its shoulders were hunched about its ears like the elbows of an ancient, leathery bat. It smelled terrible.