Nonesuch
Anna Dawe got to her feet so hastily that her chair fell over. ‘I have to go,’ she said.
‘Anna! What’s the matter?’
Anna indicated the TV screen. ‘Dr Russell, you’re wrong about that thing. I have to go.’
She stumbled out of the consulting room and drove back to Nonesuch at what was, for her, a reckless pace. When she parked the car she was still shaking. To calm herself before she faced her husband, she walked back through the grounds of Nonesuch. How would she convince him? How would she make him understand that all these events were linked? In the end, she didn’t have to, because things got worse and her new fears were driven away by older ones.
*
Pale sunshine fell across the herringbone paths, dusty brick walls and espaliered fruit trees. The kitchen garden was full of a faint, familiar musky smell Anna couldn’t quite identify. At first she thought it was drifting in over the orchard wall, where the medlars had been left to rot on the ground every year since Stella’s death; then she realised it was coming from the open kitchen door. When she left, the kitchen had been full of shouts of laughter. Now it was quiet. Anna thought nothing of that. John often took Eleanor on a tour of the renovations in the afternoon. Eleanor liked to inspect the workmen and it gave Anna a rest.
Alone at last, thought Anna. Beans on toast and a quiet cup of tea.
But what she found inside drove that out of her head. Eleanor Dawe was sitting square in the middle of the kitchen table, breathing heavily and talking to herself in a little sing-song voice of absorption and self-congratulation. Open in front of her was the pot of Engelion cream Anna had thrown in the dustbin and she was smearing it confidently if haphazardly over her pudgy face. It was in her hair. Her hands were thick with it. The kitchen reeked. Her father was nowhere to be seen.
‘Eleanor!’
Eleanor gave a girlish laugh. ‘Gidgiee!’ she said in her most affected voice. She offered the pot to Anna, then, seeing immediately the inappropriateness of the gesture, pulled a face instead and began to sob.
Anna swept her up, carried her to the sink, turned on the cold tap and ran the water over her head as hard as it would go. Eleanor, who had never experienced anything like it, took a huge breath and choked. Her arms and legs, emerging plump and reddened from her sodden dungarees, jerked disconnectedly. The wetter she got the more difficult it became to hold her. She writhed out of Anna’s grip and fell into the sink. ‘Oh no, you don’t,’ said Anna, reading this as an attempt to escape. ‘Oh no, you don’t.’ Eleanor’s screams redoubled for a minute or two; then the fight went out of her. Anna sat her down and used the washing-up liquid as shampoo. ‘Well, close your eyes, you stupid thing,’ she said mildly. ‘If it hurts. There now. That’s got it off. You’re all clean now.’ Eleanor, seeing that the threat was past, remembered her dignity and began to howl again.
That was how John Dawe found them – Eleanor slumped sobbing in two inches of cold water in the sink; while Anna, soaked from the waist up, rocked her daughter to and fro, saying over and over again, ‘All clean now. All clean now.’
‘What’s happened?’ he asked.
Even the sound of his voice made Anna want to hit him. She indicated Eleanor, slumped unhappily in the sink. ‘This is your daughter,’ she said. ‘I came back and found you had left her here on her own.’ She snatched up the almost empty pot of Engelion cream and brandished it at him. ‘I found her with this. She had it all over her face. You were in charge of her, John. How could you leave her? How could you?’
‘It was only for a moment. The builders—’
‘ “The builders”,’ she mimicked, ‘ “the builders”.’
‘It’s quite important at the moment that we—’
‘Oh God, John, just shut up. There isn’t any excuse. Don’t you see that?’
He turned away from her angrily. ‘At least I didn’t leave that foul stuff around for her to get hold of.’
This was too much for Anna. ‘I threw it away! I know I did. I’ve told you; I keep throwing these things away and they keep coming back again!’
‘Things don’t just “come back”, Anna,’ he said. ‘That can’t happen.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The rest of us live in a world of cause and effect,’ he replied. ‘For you, things just “come back”. I think you should see someone. I think you should ask Dr Russell to refer you to someone. I think you need help.’
‘What?’
There was shocked silence. Then she said, ‘You can’t imagine how useless that makes you sound—’ at exactly the same time as he said, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—’
But they both knew he had gone too far. They stared at one another mutely, wondering if this was how things broke for good and could never be mended. Anna began to cry quietly. He knew what had happened to them at Nonesuch in the terrifying moments before the fire. He knew what they had learned from Stella Herringe, about themselves, about the nature of the world. He had been a dreamer himself when she met him, someone prepared to believe he had lived other lives, to acknowledge what Francis Baynes would call the ‘mystery’ of things. Now he was denying all that in the cheapest way she could imagine. She had a sudden vertiginous sense of her whole life leading here, to this moment of blank, willed, nauseous misunderstanding.
‘Is that what you think?’ she asked. ‘That I’m mad?’
‘No,’ he answered. ‘I suppose I don’t.’ Then he said, ‘One of us ought to dry her and find her some clothes. Would it be better if I did it?’
‘Don’t you dare touch her, John.’
‘Anna—’
‘I’ll take her away, John. Something’s happening here. I’ll take her away if that’s the only way to save her.’
12
Dusting and dusting: the dust never stopped accumulating. Even as Mrs Parker has finished cleaning the china, making the mantelpiece spick and span, down it comes, spiralling in the sunlight, each mote sentient, intent, determined to settle and stay. She sweeps here and there with the duster, until her hand is a blur of movement, but it just keeps coming; more and more, until there is a scurf of it on every surface and more snowing down from the ceiling, billowing in through the window. Ankle-deep, now she runs for the Hoover; but it is already up to her knees before she reaches the cupboard; thigh-deep as her hand touches the handle. She staggers to the door, opens it, only to admit an avalanche of the stuff, rolling down from the bedrooms. The children, upstairs, have gone ominously quiet…
*
Thunder, rolling heavy overhead: a storm come out of nowhere. At the general store, Reggie Candleton watches the lightning it has generated flicker intermittently over the pond, making nightmare shapes of the willows; looming super-real, then gone back into the darkness. Orange clouds have started to gather to the north, orange as if lit by fire. No sooner has he thought this than he hears his cat outside (a cat he has not shared a house with for twenty years or more) howling piteously. He runs downstairs and opens the door to it. In it rushes, fur alight with flame, which he beats out with an old coat. When he takes the mackintosh away, the fur comes with it, to reveal inside the child he and Hilda had in their youth, which died at only four days old…
*
The wailing went on and on without respite. She covered her ears with her hands, but even this barely deadened the shrieking noise of it. She felt abruptly furious, hateful: full of hate and animal violence. It wasn’t her baby; how could it be? It was a beast, a creature, unnatural. The screaming rose by a note, as impossible to turn a deaf ear to as fingernails on metal, claws on glass. Hadn’t she buried it well enough the last time? Clearly not. Up she got, in a tangle of sheets – wet, somehow, clinging – and lumbered out into the garden. There, beneath the hedge, the baby had indeed resurfaced. There was dirt on its face, in its hair. Its eyes were black and indignant, its mouth a huge red hole of protest. She went to fetch the spade again…
*
John stood back to admire the builders’
handiwork. The new plaster gleamed, smooth and clean: a brand-new wall, which would dry to a surface perfect for the Farrow & Ball Casein Distemper (English Primrose) he had ordered and which would arrive next week, a properly traditional, rustic paint which would dry to a satisfyingly matt and chalky finish. Unable to resist the temptation to touch, he brushed his fingertips against the wall, then drew them back, disappointed to see the trailing marks they had left in the new plaster. Even as he watched, the shallow depressions deepened, became holes. Plaster began to slough off the wall, revealing the old brickwork, mottled and age-eaten underneath. He stepped back just in time. With a sigh, the wall caved in and fell in slow motion, each brick detaching itself from its fellows and pirouetting to the floor, which also began to break away under this new weight. Behind and beneath the brickwork lay a void, dark and evil-smelling. Second by second, the rubble grew. As the last brick toppled, he looked up just in time to see a crack searing its way across the newly plastered ceiling like lightning in a clear sky. He opened his mouth to scream; but before the sound could emerge, the house fell upon him and took him down with it, into the darkness.
*
I chased down a lot of bad dreams over the nights that followed, but one nightmare breeds another, it seems, and it was hard for a single dreamcatcher to keep up with the dreams of an entire village. I wore myself ragged going after them, racing down the highways till my lion’s heart was ready to burst, sleeping only during the bright hours of the day; and even then, my own dreams were disturbed and unrestful. In the end and after many arguments, in which the advocacy of both Millie and the Besom were engaged, I allowed Caterina to accompany me on to the wild roads at night, and together we hunted and swallowed down the dreams of Ashmore before they could do their pernicious damage to the highways.
Thoughts of Vita haunted me. I saw her again and again in the wooden cage, her eyes pleading at me; the witch, laughing. At last I took myself off to see the Besom. Fed on the food that Cat and I stole for her from the kitchen – Anna had been so preoccupied she had not noticed that she was missing, over the days that Ma Tregenna had been with us, a packet of bacon, two chicken drumsticks and a good-sized lump of cheese – she had put on some of the weight she had lost and a gleam of vitality had come back into her glazed old eyes. She and Griz sat and swapped reminiscences under the rhododendrons; I could hear them cackling together whenever I brought my latest bit of thievery, though sometimes when I appeared they would fall abruptly silent, as if I had intruded on the discussion of a subject too close to the bone for comfort.
This time, my offering consisted of four pork sausages, still joined by their twisted rubbery casings. (The other four had fallen on to the floor when I had dragged them from the cold white cupboard before anyone was up, but between us Cat and I had managed to bundle them back in on to the shelf again, and Cat had licked the dust from them so that they looked as clean as ever.) But if I had expected Griz to leave us to speak in private, the sausages soon put paid to any hope that she might quietly wander off. Instead, she eyed the gleaming pink packages, licked her lips and grinned at the Besom.
‘This is the life, eh, Pol? Handsome young lad fetchin’ and carryin’ for us. Bet you never expected such luxuries in your old age, eh?’
‘Never expected to live so long,’ Ma said lugubriously. ‘Nor wished to, neither. I’ve seen too much in my time.’
‘Ma,’ I started, tentative.
The Besom had her head down to the sausages now, was chewing with the side of her mouth. ‘Mmm,’ she said indistinctly.
‘Ma, I’ve seen my sister Vita. On the highways. Here, but not here. There’s a sort of knot in the roads that run through the house, but it’s as if they twist back on themselves, and every time you think you know where you’re going, they snake around on you and suddenly you’re not where you thought you were at all, or when. And then there’s the objects, you see, the things the baby has collected. They mean something, something more than themselves, if you see what I mean, and every time a new one arrives the roads seem to change again, and if I chase the right dream, I know it will take me somewhere the object wants me to be I stopped, partly from lack of breath, partly because my speech seemed foolish and garbled even to myself, and indeed, when I looked up, Griz was staring at me as if I were mad. The Besom carried on her slow, methodical chewing. I gazed from one to the other. Obviously I was going to come by no help here after all.
But just as I stood up and made to walk away, Ma reached out with a paw and patted me. ‘I can eat, listen and think at the same time, my lad,’ she said. ‘It’s something you learn to do, over the span of the years, with application and practice and cunning. You might learn the art yourself some day. Sit down.’
I stared at her. She gazed back, her face a mask. I sat down. She winked at me, showing more of her pink old gums than I’d have preferred to see. It was clear now why eating took so long: she had barely any teeth left beyond the yellowed atrocities at the front.
‘It’s the Great Knot, Orlando. The wild rides. She makes them; or rather, she has the power to take them and shape them.’
‘The witch?’ I asked, shivering. ‘I saw her down there, she was—’
‘No—’ The Besom was impatient. ‘Not her, though she’s gaining strength again, the Great Cat curse her. No, it’s the one who came before; the Big Woman. Got a taste for life, she has, that one, stronger than all the other Old Ones put together. She’ll push so hard, she’ll turn the world over, given the chance.’
‘Who will?’
The glossy green foliage parted to reveal Lydia, with Millie in her wake, looking resigned and a little irritated, as if she had been dragged out here against her will. I felt my heart lurch.
At the sight of the half-eaten sausages lying on the dusty ground, Liddy’s head lunged forward. ‘Where did you get those?’ Her voice was sharp with recrimination. A line of spittle had started to form at the corner of her mouth.
The Besom looked at Grizelda. Griz looked at me. ‘He brought them,’ she said, careless of the consequences of such an admission.
‘I knew it!’ Lydia turned to Millie with an expression of triumph. ‘You see, my instincts are always right. I told you I could smell sausages on Caterina; I knew she’d been stealing. And I knew she wouldn’t have done it unless he’d made her, for I’ve brought her up properly, her and my other two, my treasures, all on my own—’ She turned gimlet eyes upon me and finished, ‘He’s always had the common touch, has Orlando, oh yes. He has far more care for these old ragbags than he has for me!’
I opened my mouth to protest, but it was Millie who stepped into the fray. ‘Lydia!’ She was furious. ‘Do you have no shame? Do you have no fellow feeling at all? These cats have been through as much as you, shared the same fate, and yet you’d deny them food when you’re as fat as butter! Look at you; you’ve all but doubled in size since coming to Nonesuch, as if you think you can keep the bad things of the world at bay just by eating till there’s no more to eat. And as for bringing up the girls on your own. I’ve never heard such a shocking lie. Poor Orlando. All this time he’s been here for you, loving you, taking care of you, raising your kittens as if they were his own, and all you do is turn your nose up at him, look through him as if he doesn’t exist.’ Her voice crackled with emotion. ‘You treat him abysmally and he loves you all the more, as if he cannot help himself, poor idiot. I watch the two of you playing out these little dramas you love so much and my heart breaks to see a decent, brave, beautiful cat like Orlando – a tomcat who should be fathering kittens of his own with a queen who would give herself to him completely – twisted round your selfish, miserly paw. You are a cruel, cold trollop, Lydia. You should have stuck with the witch and that handsome stud cat of hers, and left Orlando for me, who loves him more than all the world!’
My jaw dropped open. I stared at Millie, who looked away from me, her eyes crazed and damp. Then Lydia began to laugh. She threw her head back and howled with it, a harsh, clattering
sound that rose through the winter leaves like the mocking of a magpie.
It brought the child to our hiding place. Crashing through the leaves, she came at us, waving her stick gleefully. Anna was some way behind her, her face closed and pale.
‘Wor!’ Eleanor said. And, ‘Ca’!’
At the sight of her Grizelda and the Besom quailed, then shot away, their fur standing on end as if they had been electrified. Millie hissed and ran right past me towards the lawn, followed by Lydia, bowling me over in her panic. Like a fool, I lay there and watched them go. My legs felt leaden, my heart as heavy as a stone.
Eleanor stumbled on, flailing her stick around, missing me by inches. That galvanised me. Getting my haunches under me, I leapt away after Liddy and Millefleur, but was almost trodden underfoot by another pair of humans emerging at speed from the rhododendrons, preceded by half a dozen of the cattery survivors, who scattered wildly across the lawn. I stared back at the pursuers. Two men, in identical clothing, one with a white plastic sack in his hand. Lydia and Millie had also stopped and looked back to see what the cause of this new commotion might be and the other cats streamed past them.
At the sight of the Two Who Look Like One, Lydia’s eyes widened and she began to mew in consternation. Millie’s head whipped round. I saw her take in the two men, saw how they came at her and Liddy, hands outstretched.
‘Run!’
I heard the voice, shrill and desperate in my head, but no sound emerged. Of their own accord, it seemed, my cowardly feet bore me away and when I looked back all I could see was a confusion of movement, a blur of bodies, a struggle, and then the Two Who Look Like One were dashing across the lawn, heads down, and there was something in the sack, something that distorted the white plastic with desperate limbs.
Anna came running out on to the lawn after them, her hair wild and mud on her knees. She shouted something and one of the men glanced back, then urged the other on towards the big silver machine parked awkwardly half on the grass, half on the gravel. They flung themselves into it and roared away down the drive, spraying stones as they fled.