‘Oh, Orlando,’ Vita wailed. ‘Don’t let her boil me.’
I opened my mouth to tell her all would be well, that she mustn’t worry, for I would find some way of rescuing her, when the room started to spin once more, and harsh laughter and foul smells, light and dark, and up and down all became mixed into a sickening whirl and I found myself falling through a vortex. I fell and fell until the sensation of falling seemed endless, and then, quite abruptly, I was lying panting on the bare floorboards of the Long Corridor and someone was standing over me, mewing with distress.
‘He’s had one of his strange turns,’ I heard one voice say. ‘Fetch Millie; she’ll know what to do.’
‘No way,’ the other said, ‘she’s with that mangy old thing Uncle Orlando and Squash brought in this afternoon. Have you seen her? Her fur’s all falling out. I might catch something.’
‘She’s not a “mangy old thing”,’ came an outraged third voice. ‘She’s a poor old cat who’s dying of starvation and you should have more respect. Besides, Uncle O’s not having one of his turns; he’s been chasing dreams. Leave him to me.’
It was with some relief that I heard Letty’s and Arabella’s voices receding away down the corridor.
Caterina nudged me vigorously. ‘Wake up. Uncle O,’ she hissed. ‘You were shrieking; something about being boiled. It upset them.’
I opened my eyes, then gingerly sat up and looked around. Oblongs of bright daylight fell across the far end of the Long Corridor, where the door to the courtyard stood open. When I had entered the wild road in pursuit of the dream it had been barely midnight.
11
Anna’s nights grew strange, coagulated. She no longer woke up in the hot room, with sleep still like curtains drawn inside her head. Instead, she was unconscious past dawn and dreamed all sorts of things. (John slept, too. They felt better for it, they told each other in the mornings, but not as much as they had hoped.) She dreamed she was in London, beside the Thames. John ran past her and jumped in. Once the water had closed over him he neither sank nor swam. She could see him down there under the water in a kind of wavering bubble, his arms clasped round his knees. It seemed clear he needed help, but she couldn’t make herself act. He hung there for a long time, while she stood on the bank not knowing what to think, her feelings shifting slowly from irritation to dread, a voice in her head whispering, ‘I have to save him from himself.’
She dreamed she was fat, fat and hard like an armadillo or half a barrel. She dreamed she was dead. After death, everything was a knotted wet mass. There was chaos – a life she did not recognize, clothes she had never worn – then flashes of light on a knotted wet mass.
Nightmares were nothing new in Anna’s life, but these were so disorientating they hardly seemed to qualify as her own. Then one night she dreamed she was in California with Alice and the physicist, who – in the dream anyway – had blond hair and was teaching her to swim while Alice looked on, strong with approval. His hands touched her under the water and she could see that Alice approved of that too. She was embarrassed and amused to find a card from Alice in the post next morning. On one side was a photograph of the surf rolling in on some southern Californian beach. On the other side was written in a careless hand—
Hi its really good here, David says surf is the physics of pleasure, you ought to come out xxxs
Guess Who?
It was a message from the dream, full of sunshine and music and sex, everything missing from Anna’s waking life. She propped it against the rice jar on the kitchen counter, where its raw, optimistic colours signalled to her until mid-morning, when she left Eleanor with John for an hour and took the Volvo out just for the sake of it, driving round the lanes on her own and uncharacteristically fast. Eleven thirty: she parked below Cresset Beacon, walked to the top and sat in the cold strong sunshine, watching for a fox, a deer, a dragonfly, something special. Eventually, she realised she was looking out for Alice; or for some of Alice’s qualities in herself. As if youth and durability and happiness could fly to her out of the air.
When she got back, she found John in the kitchen. He looked excited. ‘The builders are starting to demolish the old cattery,’ he said. ‘I thought you might want to watch.’
*
Down in Ashmore, Francis Baynes was going about the work of the parish. Thursday: his day for feuds and buildings. This week it was Hetty Parker, who had placed poinsettias in big displays inside the church, and the Hewlett sisters, who thought them vulgar. Meanwhile, the parish hall, a wooden building two doors down from the Green Man, had been designated a fire hazard. After lunch the telephone made him late for a meeting with his archdeacon in Drychester. Later, he stopped off to sit with old Mrs Evans in the Daffodil Ward of Drychester General, whose flesh had the transparency of candlewax and who looked unlikely ever to return to her cottage outside the village. Margaret Evans – ninety-two years old and with an indestructible local accent – had been a follower of Bertrand Russell for much of her life and an atheist for all of it. Francis held her hand, which had the weight and papery feel of birds’ bones, while she breathed stertorously for a bit, then warned him, in case she might have caught him praying, ‘None of that rubbish here, thank you.’
All this left him feeling, in his mild way, savage.
‘I can’t see what I’m for,’ he tried to explain to the woman in his bedroom. Her hair was down over the pillow, thick, black, oily with life. She hid whatever she had been doing and put it up again. ‘All these people’ – Francis gestured around, as if Hetty Parker, the Hewlett sisters and old Mrs Evans were all somehow present in the room – ‘I can’t see why I was brought to the Church if it wasn’t to open their lives to something wonderful.’
She gave him a smile from the side of her mouth. ‘If you want to see something wonderful, follow me.’
She led him through his own lych-gate, into the church – where Hetty Parker’s disputed poinsettias raged like fires up and down the nave – and into the tower. She filled the narrow spiral staircase, her dry brown skirts, which she had gathered up to make the stairs easier, brushing against the walls. Her feet were large, bare and dirty, her calves white, her thighs were round. Trudging reluctantly up behind, Francis could see the blue veins in her flesh. She was as pregnant – as massive – with herself, he thought, as she might have been with child. Her powerful smell came back to him in the confined space.
‘Now!’ she said, bursting out on to the top of the tower like a mare released into a field. ‘Look! All this could be yours!’
Francis looked. A cloud like a tower of smoke was beginning to spill over the edge of the downs and roil out towards Ashmore, its gilded underside, carmine and Japanese black, discharging great rods and beams of afternoon sunlight. ‘It’s beautiful,’ he said.
‘Not that!’ She was contemptuous. ‘This.’
Two blowflies, borne up from the graveyard below on some updraught of which they were barely aware, had settled on the worn stone parapet and begun to copulate. Francis studied them with revulsion. Locked together in the horizontal light, they looked like an iridescent enamel brooch. Every so often they buzzed groggily and lurched into a new position. He looked away. Then he turned back deliberately and crushed them.
‘Ah dear,’ said the woman from the graveyard and shivered as if she felt a cold breeze around her. At the same time her eyes were full of triumph. ‘Ah dear, vicar, you’re a fastidious man. Was their pleasure too great for you? I show you the mystery and you look at clouds instead.’
Francis rubbed his fingers together. ‘Why have you come here?’ he whispered.
‘Oh, I’m here to help.’
‘But why me? Why visit yourself on me like this?’
‘What? Do you think I’m here on your behalf? Is that what you think, my cherub? You’re a sideshow for me. You’re the entertainment. I never come for the men.’ Her great coarse laugh rang out across the churchyard, driving two or three surprised rooks from the branches of an adjacent yew. ??
?The men always want me, but it’s the women I come for.’
*
The Nonesuch cattery – centre for the breeding and commodification of generations of animals – occupied the site of a pleasant little courtyard constructed by Joshua Herringe in 1482 so that his fragile second wife, Elizabeth, could enjoy the sun.
With his death a few years on its use had changed beyond recognition. Clara de Montfort had roofed it over. In his turn, William Haut-Herringe, a sly and overweening man, hid it from his peers behind a triumph of trompe l’œil art in what came to be called the Painted Room. By the time Stella Herringe took up the family traditions it was open to the sky again – but her regime was the least forgiving. A ribbed, unfinished-looking concrete surface drained into a central grating. The pens themselves were little more than galvanised metal shelves, enclosed and partitioned with rusty wire. Two years after her death, the courtyard remained saturated with the sad, ammoniac smell of trapped animals. Two or three nights in every month its former inhabitants abandoned their new lives in the Nonesuch shrubberies and returned in search of their half-forgotten kittens and, failing to find them, sat among the shadows with their eyes hard and narrowed until dawn.
‘We’ve got problems here,’ John told Anna. He seemed pleased. A problem gave him something to work against. ‘Stella seems to have had the floor poured to Ministry of Defence specifications.’ He had borrowed a yellow site helmet from the builders, along with some hardened safety glasses which made him look boyish and studious. ‘So we got this stuff in.’
They had brought in a compressor and two heavyweight pneumatic drills. The courtyard was thick with diesel fumes. Air lines snaked between the ripped-out cages, pulsing with each cycle of demand. The builders strode about covered with cement dust, sweating hard as they bellowed at one another over the roar and hiss of the compressor. Anna stared down into this throbbing pit for a while, hoping to feel something of John’s energy, some sense of justice being done. But there was still something sour and unpleasant about the place, and she experienced no relief.
It had been a mistake to watch from the Painted Room. Too much had happened to her there. She had been made a fool too many times by that room, right up until the moment, temper gone and caution to the winds, she had smashed through the depicted courtyard of the painting and into the real courtyard beyond. She had ignored for six months the faint cries of the trapped cats. She had watched Stella Herringe, dressed in kitten-heel shoes and a three-thousand-pound frock, triumphantly serving rotten medlar for supper a hand’s breadth from her victims. Staring now at the remains of the trompe l’œil, with its curiously stiff, awkwardly lit rendering of Joshua Herringe’s original vision – a place of tranquillity and meditation, a place to sit in the sun – Anna was left with the feeling that nothing had ended. Perhaps nothing ever ended, perhaps the consequences of things just kept ringing on and on, poisoning the life that came after.
Leaving, she heard herself say, ‘I want this destroyed too.’
John began to argue, but by then she was in the corridor where the picture of Clara de Montfort had once hung and she didn’t hear him.
*
Later, they argued again.
Unable to afford more than twenty-four hours’ equipment hire, John had asked the builders to work under arc lights until the job was done. Breaking through the concrete at about half past eight in the evening, they made a curious find in the sour earth beneath: a little mud-coloured drawstring bag of chamois leather, so hardened and distressed that it could no longer be opened but had to be pulled away from its own contents in strips. It was obviously very old. They switched off the compressor – silence pressed up against their ears – and stood, passing the bag puzzledly from hand to hand; then shrugged and called for John Dawe, who arrived with his daughter riding on his shoulders.
Eleanor stared around the courtyard with a kind of sleepy hauteur, taking in the workmen, the ploughed-up concrete, the dust drifting about under the glaring lights. ‘Poo,’ she said. But she was fascinated by what they had found and, by the time John carried her back into the kitchen half an hour later, he had already given it to her.
‘I wish you hadn’t done that,’ Anna said. ‘I really do.’
John looked mulish. ‘What harm can it do?’
‘We haven’t got any idea what it is or how it came to be there—’
They persuaded Eleanor to swap it temporarily for two squares of organic chocolate, so that Anna could turn it over in her hands – the figure of a squatting woman, three or four inches high, carved in cream-coloured bone, feet placed squarely apart as if for purchase on an invisible floor, her thighs, pelvis and partly exposed vulva massively proportioned, crudely worked yet detailed enough to have an immediate impact on the viewer. Everything else seemed unfinished, sketched-in, as if the sculptor had lost interest – everything, that is, but the expression on the face, which was both disturbing and inexplicable. The mouth opened as wide as it would go to admit some formless cry, the lips pulling themselves back and down, the eyes staring but unfocused. What had she been designed to signify, this icon of some vanished culture? Not anguish, precisely. Not pain, not effort, not rage, not sexual exultation. Something without a name, something that bore a resemblance to all those things. In the end you were left with those two impressions – the open thighs and planted feet, the enduring roar of… what?
Loss, Anna thought. Some kind of triumphant loss. Can you have that? How appalling. She weighed the figure in her hand. It seemed, on reflection, too heavy to be bone. She thought it might be flint, a coated flint, creamy white, out of the chalk downs. But how would you carve flint? Unless, she thought, it hadn’t been carved at all—
She made up her mind suddenly. ‘I don’t want her to have it.’
‘Oh, come on, Anna. It’s ugly, but she doesn’t know that.’
‘That’s not the point,’ Anna insisted. ‘She gets these things, she keeps them for a while, then they turn up in the knot garden, John. What’s happening to them? How are they getting there? Don’t you want to know?’
He opened his mouth, then shook his head as if he couldn’t think what to say. ‘Anna—’
‘You don’t,’ she said, ‘do you? You don’t think this is important.’
He put his arm round her and tried to calm her down. ‘The things that happened in this house are finished. All that ended two years ago. You’re right. I don’t want to think about Stella, or reincarnation, or what that might mean for us. But it’s not denial. It’s that I have a wife and a child and a house to look after. Look at me, Anna. No, look at me. I love you and I love Eleanor. There isn’t a day on which I don’t puzzle over everything that happened to us here. What we learned was wonderful and strange. But how can we go forward if we let it fill our minds? And how can we ever be free of Stella if all we do is see her in every little thing that happens?’
‘John—’
‘Anna, these are just objects Eleanor picks up and puts down, like any kid. They’re just toys. While you’re worrying yourself sick about them, someone has to look after the ordinary stuff, someone has to do the real work. And I think you’re in danger of forgetting that.’
Anna stared at him in disbelief. She pulled away. ‘That’s so unfair,’ she said. ‘That’s just so bloody unfair!’ She threw the figure down on the table in front of him. It fell oddly, spinning and flickering in the kitchen light, making a noise like the rattle of dice. Anna blinked and reached out her hand to stop it. ‘You’re the dreamer, not me.’
*
I learned how Izzie’s other name is the Fat Lady from Under the Earth, and how important she is for everything around here.
This is how it came about: it’s night and I’m busy, busy, busy about the place – what’s new? – hiding a secret here, a secret there, and I see how the corridors are suddenly elongating in the shadows, elongating and opening out until they don’t look like corridors any more but like roads. (What do you know about roads my sweetling, Izzi
e says, but she doesn’t see everything I do, and I know, I know.) In a flash they lead everywhere these roads, outwards, outwards, outwards. It would be a crazy ride on any one of them, you would speed like in your dreams.
This is it, though:
I see where they lead outwards from, these roads. I see the big knot under the garden maze, trapped and pulsing, the knot that Izzie made a million years ago, before this was a house at all.
No one sees my knot, Izzie says, except those who will benefit. Those who see without permission soon see no more, she says, and they welcome that, because I put the knot in their bowels, tightening and tightening, and everyone covers their ears against that scream they make trying to push it out again, too late for that.
Poo, I say to that. You won’t catch me trying to expel a knot in my bowels.
Hoity-toity, says Izzie to that, also Little Miss Know-all. You know what happened to Little Miss Know-all. Little Miss Know-all soon came to grief, she caught a disease.
Best be careful you don’t catch a disease.
So I’m very careful when I crawl between the hedges, where the Parts of Izzie I got will soon be the Parts of me, and she will go and I will stay and that will be the end of her, with her hoity-toity. That’ll be the end of her all right, the day I know who I am.
*
Anna continued to dream. Her dreams were full of strange anxieties. She dreamed she was a white bird flying out, a black bird flying home – she had been the same bird all along. She dreamed she had gone up to the Beacon so John could show her a fox; neither of them turned up. She dreamed of Francis Baynes, standing in the middle of the vicarage kitchen with his trousers down round his ankles, his mouth open on a kind of vacant sigh—
This dream caused her to start awake with a noise in her ears.
She thought it was Eleanor. She thought it was someone in the house.
‘Did you hear that?’ she asked John.
‘It was you, Anna,’ he answered. ‘You called out.’ He leaned over her to look at the alarm clock and groan. ‘It was more of a scream, actually,’ he said. ‘Can we go back to sleep now?’