But it turned out he couldn’t sleep, so after an hour’s irritable tossing and turning he got up to make a cup of tea, sit stunned in front of the Aga for a few minutes, then go back upstairs to confront his financial problems. That was how, already in a difficult mood, he discovered Mark and Oliver Holland making themselves at home in his office. They had pulled out all the drawers of the old steel filing cabinet so that it leaned perilously away from the wall. They had scattered coloured folders everywhere. The computer was on and a search programme loaded from an unmarked CD was busily munching its way through John’s secure files.
John looked at his watch: 7.30 a.m. on a wet Friday. ‘This is a little bit out of business hours,’ he commented.
‘Ah,’ said Mark.
Oliver added, ‘We thought it would be all right.’
‘I don’t think it is, you know,’ John pointed out.
The first Anna knew about the situation was when, ten minutes or so later, standing by the front door in a grubby white towelling robe, she glanced up from the morning’s crop of junk mail to see him escorting them towards her. They looked as discomfited as she had ever seen them.
‘You could regret this,’ Oliver said.
Mark began, ‘The Estate—’
John bunched up the lapels of Mark’s suit jacket and used them to push him against the wall. He was really much taller than Mark, Anna noticed, and his face was dark with anger. ‘Fuck the Estate,’ he said quietly. ‘Fuck them all. They knew as well as you did what was going on here in Stella’s day. It just wasn’t quite profitable enough to keep their attention.’ He let Mark go. ‘You won’t be coming to this house again. Will you?’ He thought for a moment. ‘In fact, before you go, you can give me whatever keys you have in your possession.’
Mark adjusted his jacket, some buttons of which had come off. He and Oliver exchanged a quick glance. ‘I’m not sure the arrangement would have suited us anyway,’ he said.
Oliver added, ‘I don’t think, given the figures, we can support your business plan.’
‘Get out. Just get out.’
Anna went outside to watch them drive away.
When she came back John was sitting at the bottom of the stairs, looking dejected. ‘That’s fucked that then,’ he told her.
She sat next to him and took his hand affectionately. ‘You were brilliant and I love you dearly, even when you give me lectures about parental responsibility.’
He looked comforted for a moment. But then he said, ‘Was I brilliant? The next time the phone rings it will be the bank manager, to review the loans. Or someone from the Estate, congratulating me on having the courage to go it alone.’ He shrugged. ‘How brilliant is that?’
She put her arms round him and hugged him fiercely. ‘It was the right thing to do.’
‘I found them going through my office,’ he said tiredly. ‘You can’t have people doing that. The rest of it – all this other stuff about them and the Engelion cream – well, you might be right and you might be wrong.’ He stood up. ‘I think you’re wrong.’
‘John—’
‘At least we’ve seen the last of them,’ he said.
*
But even that was too much to hope for.
Walking Eleanor slowly around the grounds two or three days later, on a morning so quiet you could hear the traffic miles away on the main road, Anna witnessed an event curious enough to seem like something from a film.
The sun, pushing through a layer of pearly cloud, had melted the night’s frost. Fine beads of moisture were left on every blade of grass, turning the lawns into silver carpets – stretching away from Nonesuch in magically heightened perspective – on the receptive surface of which every passing footprint stood out clear and delineated. The little tracks of birds beginning and ending in nowhere. The wincing, fastidious trudge of cats. A narrow meandering swathe like the spoor of a small mechanical digger, punctuated every so often by an abandoned stick – Ellie Dawe in her red Wellington boots.
Eleanor was collecting sticks. She was practising her new word. ‘Norty!’ she shouted.
An echo flew back off Nonesuch like a white bird.
‘Norty norty norty!’
Echo echo echo.
Eleanor’s technique when she saw a new stick was to approach it with a fast, cumbersome, tottering motion; then, breathing heavily through her mouth, plant her feet, rock forward with one arm outstretched and, overcompensating, fall over backwards on to her bottom. The effort caused her face to become as red and shiny as her Wellington boots. ‘Oh, dear!’ said Anna, who had never seen a funnier thing in her life. ‘Upsy daisy!’
‘Norty.’
They were making their way across the Great Lawn in this manner when several cats shot out of the thick bank of rhododendrons fringing the drive. For a fraction of a second they paused as one animal, haunches down, fur up, to look back the way they had come. Anna drew back nervously. Eleanor had no such qualms. ‘Wor,’ she said. She brandished her latest stick. ‘Ca’!’
This was too much. Hissing and spitting and falling over one another in their anxiety to escape, the cats scattered in all directions. Shortly afterwards the figures of Mark and Oliver Holland burst out on to the lawn. They had caught one of the cats and were trying to force it into an old fertiliser bag. Seeing Anna, Oliver stopped to brush at his clothes, while Mark continued to struggle with the cat. After a moment they turned and ran back into the bushes.
Anna, suddenly terrified they had taken Orlando, abandoned her daughter without a thought and flew after them shouting, ‘How dare you!’
The rhododendrons were a nightmare. Branches whipped at her face. She fell to her knees in the sodden, fibrous earth. Every time she found an easy way through the tangle, it led back to the lawn. Filthy and out of breath, she burst out on to the drive an instant too late and had to watch the silver Mercedes pulling away right under her nose, one Holland dragging the rear offside passenger door shut even as the other floored the accelerator pedal. The stolen cat, meanwhile, had escaped the bag but not the car, and was throwing itself desperately against the rear window. It wasn’t Orlando: she had time to see wild eyes, scrabbling claws, a pink nose pressed up against the glass – then a little crest of tabby fur.
They had taken Tufty.
Anna watched car and cat get smaller and smaller. She dabbed at her cheekbone where the rhododendron branches had cut her. ‘You bastards,’ she whispered. ‘You absolute bastards.’ Then she pushed her way through the rhododendrons and back on to the Great Lawn where her daughter sat, a picture of misery. ‘I’m coming,’ she called. ‘I’m coming.’
‘Norty, norty,’ wailed Eleanor.
*
With Tufty gone the dynamics of the household changed. The kittens missed her and could be found at all times of day sitting where she usually sat. They were bad-tempered with one another, although not perhaps as bad-tempered as Orlando and Liddy, who had to be separated by Anna after a confrontation in the kitchen.
Anna felt unsettled and irritable too. She was reluctant to tell John what had happened; he would only look patient and long-suffering, and somehow hold it against her. How could Mark and Oliver be pursued anyway? Even if she could get him to confront them, they would simply deny it. The question she asked herself again and again was. Why would they do this? In her heart she already knew. They had failed to find Stella’s formula and now, with the house closed to them, they were after the next best thing: the bloodlines, the genes, the most recent subjects of the four-hundred-year Herringe experiment – the cats who lived in the shrubbery. They had got Tufty by accident. It was an example less of their malice than their futility.
Two or three days later, events drove the incident out of her mind. Eleanor’s latest toy went missing. One minute Eleanor was clutching it as forcefully as ever while she sat on the floor, breathing heavily over the counters for a game of Flounder, the next – Anna had turned away to pull a saucepan off the Aga – she was empty-handed. She didn’t seem
to have noticed. A search of the kitchen revealed nothing. The unpleasant little bone figure, with its obese thighs and indescribable expression, might never have been. Anna nodded to herself. ‘Right,’ she whispered.
*
Midnight: she made sure that John and Eleanor were sleeping soundly. Then she got out of bed, dressed and made her way downstairs. In the kitchen she set the kettle on the Aga. While the water was heating up, she collected her old fleece jacket from the hall and put that on too. From a downstairs cupboard she took the goose-down sleeping bag she had last used as a student. It looked a bit crushed and smelled faintly of damp, but when she shook it out it seemed perfectly warm and dry inside. The kettle boiled. Anna filled John’s steel Thermos flask with hot chocolate, to which she added two or three good measures of dark rum. Then she shrugged into her oiled-cotton jacket, and provided herself with gloves and a torch. She opened the door and stood there staring out, the sleeping bag under her arm and the flask stuffed into one of the pockets of the Barbour. ‘Come on,’ she told herself. ‘The sooner it’s done the sooner it’s over.’
It was a bright cold night in the knot garden, with a promise of frost. The contrails of airliners sketched themselves high up across Orion and his dog. There were no builders’ fires tonight. Much of the rubbish had been hauled away. Everywhere else in the grounds the chiaroscuro was fluid, shifty, moon-driven; here, the light fell across the sharp outlines of the box hedges in such a way as to bleach them white, at the same time strengthening the shadows so that things stood out with hallucinogenic clarity.
Making her way to the centre of the maze, the only moving thing in a static landscape, Anna looked like a silent paper cut-out, a strange, gliding figure waist-high in hedges. She bent down, scraped with her foot in the loose cold soil, then shone the torch on what she had uncovered. They were all there. The doll’s head, its blue eyes rocking open-closed, open-closed, open-closed, gazed up at her, bland and babyish. Torchlight glittered off jet necklace and silver spoon. From the music box came a ghostly flutter of noise, ‘Für Elise’, incredibly distant yet receding even further as she listened.
For a moment something in her tried to follow it. There was a brief vertigo, a sense that she was being drawn down into this nest of meaningless but significant objects. She felt the presence of something, another world perhaps, somewhere she had never been and yet knew as well as Nonesuch, somewhere central to her life. She heard a voice call – it was her own! – then it was gone and she was herself again. She shivered. Nothing would persuade her to spend the night sitting next to this ill-starred stuff. In the end she found a corner from which she could watch over it uninterrupted. She shook out the sleeping bag, poured herself a drink from the Thermos and settled down to wait for whoever would arrive to bury the bone figurine.
‘Someone must be doing it,’ she told herself. An hour later she was asleep.
*
The dreams were senseless, debilitating. She woke into them as if they weren’t really dreams at all, just another way of being awake. The house – it was Nonesuch but not quite the Nonesuch she knew – was dark and hot, and she never had any idea where she was. The corridors seemed to lengthen away from her in all directions, though she didn’t know how. The stale air wrapped itself around her like an unwashed blanket. Nevertheless, she was making progress and always to the same appalling place. All the time she could hear a voice she half recognised, childish and unformed, murmuring things like. Busy, busy, busy and Up and down, up and down the stairs. On and on it went, in a pleased sort of way – Seven secrets, only two to go. I put these parts together and they’re the parts of me – while Anna struggled to identify it. As soon as that seemed likely, fear overcame her and she dragged herself awake with a shout, only to find herself still in the same house, the same endless dark corridor, tilting up and back on itself. She had woken into the same dream, only she was a little closer to the knotted, throbbing heart of it. Seven secrets under the maze, the little childish voice congratulated itself. Seven secrets to make me who I am.
She opened her eyes. The moon was down. The knot garden looked vague and brown, cobwebbed with the residue of the dream. Anna lay fuddled and exhausted, her left arm, trapped beneath her, useless with pins and needles. She looked at her watch: a quarter to five. Soon it would be light. She pulled herself feverishly out of the sleeping bag. Two strides and she was shining the torch under the box hedge, hacking at the earth with the heel of her shoe—
Too late. The figurine was already there, nested among all the other stuff, its awful little face wrenched into the configurations of a loss no one alive now could understand.
‘Damn,’ said Anna.
At the sound of her voice the garden seemed to shift, gather itself, settle. There was a rustling noise, quite close to her. She swept the torch across the hedges, calling, ‘Hello? Orlando? Liddy?’ As soon as she spoke, the noise stopped. She switched off the torch, tilted her head to listen. Nothing. She toured the maze, shining the torch into every corner. It was empty. But for a moment she had gained the clear impression of something small pushing through a hedge, then moving away, trying to be as quick and silent as possible. This impression stayed with her even after she had taken herself tiredly back to the house and fallen asleep without even checking Ellie’s cot.
She had been so close! She thought about it all morning, then, leaving Eleanor with John for half an hour around noon, returned to the knot garden, which lay deserted under a brittle gold light. Anna stood for a moment at its centre, trying to feel the things she had felt in the night. But it was just a garden, a bit scruffy and uncared-for. Now that the rubbish was cleared away, you could see the clever, cursive lines of it. In a day or two, Joshua Herringe’s curiously enduring monument to himself would be gone for ever, four hundred years of history grubbed up and hauled away in an afternoon. John had already ordered the mechanical digger. Anna sighed. She remembered the first time she had come to Nonesuch in the company of Stella Herringe, how she had fallen in love with the house, the light, the soft heaviness of the air beneath the cedars. A shadow flickered briefly across the knot garden. Anna looked up. Three wood-pigeons flew over in a long, banking arc – she could hear the creak and quiver of their wings.
After a moment she found the right place, stirred the earth around the box roots with her foot, then bent down and quickly sifted it through her fingers. It was greyish, dry and crumbly, mixed up with bits of leaves, bleached sticks, a feather. She stared at this innocuous stuff for a moment, thinking. Why aren’t I surprised? She dusted her hands. She thought. At least I know I’m not mad. That’s something. I don’t know what I’m up against yet, but I know I’m not mad.
The hole was empty.
Everything had gone and that was the last time anything appeared there.
*
A growing panic sent her to Dr Russell’s consulting room. There, of course, she could admit nothing. She needed to talk. But of her daughter she would only allow herself to say, ‘I’m sure she still gets out at night,’ as if they were discussing some problem pet. All this accomplished was to cover up the fears Anna desperately needed to share. Martha Russell’s psychiatric toolkit barely penetrated the surface of Anna’s world, where the hidden strata of the personality were little more than a superficial membrane stretched over the nightmarish truths of reincarnation and death. The knot garden and its contents were packed tight behind everything she said, like the stuff in some overloaded cupboard, ready to fall out the moment the door was opened…
Her relationship with John was safer ground, so she talked about that, while the afternoon drifted away with the smoke of Martha Russell’s cigarette and in the corner of the room images of weekend excavations in the damp, receding downland flickered across the flat wide screen of the Sony television.
‘I wonder if I should leave him now,’ she said. ‘I wonder if it’s weak of me to stay.’
Martha Russell considered this. ‘You aren’t someone who gives up,’ she reminded
Anna. ‘You said that yourself.’
‘You can love someone too much.’
‘Can you? Even if that’s true, it isn’t weakness that keeps you there. It’s strength.’
‘This desperation,’ Anna said, ‘to recoup what you’ve invested? When really you’d be better to cut your losses and walk away? In business they used to call it “sunk cost error”. My grandmother was more direct: “Anna,” she would advise me, “never throw good money after bad.”’ Anna laughed sadly. ‘I didn’t expect to be thinking about my life in those terms.’
‘Never do!’ the doctor said with a certain energy. She lit another cigarette. ‘Perhaps there are good, constructive reasons for leaving John,’ she added. ‘But the better they are the more important it is not to couch them in the language of defeat. Do you see? You are a strong person.’
‘Am I?’
‘I think so. You remain undefeated.’ Martha Russell thought for a moment. ‘You remain. That in itself counts for a lot.’ She blew smoke towards the television screen. ‘I want you to look at this.’ She did something with the remote control and the tape reversed itself with a gentle whine. ‘Here’s something we found this weekend.’ Thick male hands again, this time in fingerless mitts. Thumbs working at a clod of earth until it broke apart suddenly to reveal an ivory-coloured shape. It was the figure of a crouching woman, perhaps two inches high. At first it seemed to be carved from bone or ivory. Then you saw it was flint and not carved at all. ‘It’s the local Iceni goddess. Isn’t she impressive? Now there’s a metaphor for persistence in the face of things! Loss or gain, birth or bereavement, love and death: it’s all one to her, she just digs in and endures. We’ve been finding her all over the downs this summer, at every excavation. She goes all the way back to the early paleolithic. And yet you don’t see her worshipped anywhere else in Britain. Ashmore’s own goddess!’