Nonesuch

  He studied it over her shoulder. ‘No,’ he told her. ‘It’s very striking, but it’s not her. This thing’s too old anyway. I’d put my money on one of the ancestors – Eleanor Knole, Clara de Montfort, someone like that.’ He studied it again. ‘Those women! They all look so alike, as far back as you can trace them. And God knows how far after that. Saxon women seducing Normans. Tribal beauties luring Roman notables away from their safe and civilised lives. I bet they looked the same when they were knapping flints on the chalk downs.’ He handed the miniature back to Anna with a bitter laugh. ‘The genes of the Herringe women, raging out of the Stone Age long before they had a name.’

  Anna, who didn’t find this at all funny, said, ‘But how did Eleanor get this? Did you give it to her?’

  ‘She picked it up,’ he said vaguely. ‘It must have been in here somewhere.’

  ‘I thought we discussed this. I thought you were going to keep a better eye on her if I let you have her. That was the agreement.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry.’

  ‘That was the agreement,’ Anna repeated.

  Her skin had crawled when she set eyes on the woman in the picture. She should say more, she knew. She should make more of it. Instead, she looked down at the miniature again. She could see that he was right. Though the colours were still rich, the varnish used to fix them had long ago decayed into a fine craquelure of tiny lines, lending a brownish cast to the light where it fell across the sitter’s face and an oddly sexual look to her smile. It was very like Stella, but it wasn’t Stella. How could it be? Anna returned it to Eleanor, who looked surprised and gratified. The ways of adults were certainly odd.

  ‘Please try to keep an eye on her,’ Anna said to John.

  He looked relieved. ‘I will, I will.’

  Anna made a small gesture with the postcard. ‘Well, I should get on, I suppose. I just thought I’d show you this.’

  ‘Good,’ he said.

  ‘She’s coming home soon but she isn’t sure of her flights.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’ Then she went on, ‘We aren’t really here, are we? You and me. Not for Ellie, not for each other. Are we just going to let this happen to us?’

  She waited for him to agree, disagree, anything, just so that he acknowledged the danger they were in. He let her get all the way to the door before he said, ‘Anna, I wish—’

  ‘What?’

  But she had turned back too quickly and frightened him off. ‘Nothing.’

  *

  Anna telephoned Francis Baynes. He didn’t answer. There was an odd ticking sound on the line and behind that a sort of expectant hush. Anna put down the handset. On the table in front of her she had Alice’s postcard from New York, showing a detail from the Cuxa Cloister at the Museum of Modern Art. She held it upright between her fingertips. ‘Hurry up and come home, Alice,’ she said aloud. Then she telephoned Francis again. This time he was engaged. She put on her coat, found the keys to the Volvo and drove it down to the village, where she parked it outside the front gate of the rectory and waited. The Hewlett sisters walked past, pretending not to look into the car. Ivy Compton followed. There would be talk later. After about ten minutes Francis came out, looking puzzled.

  Anna wound down the driver’s window. ‘Hello, Francis.’

  ‘Why are you waiting there?’ he asked her. ‘Is there something I can do?’

  ‘You can come for a walk with me,’ she told him.

  He opened his mouth.

  She opened the passenger door. ‘Get in.’

  She got the car moving and after about a mile said, ‘If I don’t talk to somebody I’ll go mad. Francis, I’m afraid I’ve lost them. That damned house is taking them from me.’

  Francis sat facing precisely forward, staring out of the windscreen like a trapped animal.

  ‘Am I going too fast?’ she asked.

  ‘It isn’t like you.’

  ‘No,’ she agreed, slowing down. ‘It isn’t. Where would you like to walk?’

  ‘The downs are always nice,’ he said.

  It was a cold day, but with a brightness about it. They sat in the car for a moment in the empty car park. ‘From up here you can see every church in the county,’ Francis said suddenly. He rubbed his hands together. ‘Well then, you’ve taken me from my sermon, so let’s have this walk. You can explain to me as we go.’

  But she could explain nothing. How could she explain an irrational fear? And phrases like ‘a fatal error’ kept coming to her; she kept wanting to say, ‘I think I’ve made a fatal error.’ In the end she managed, ‘We just aren’t talking to one another any more.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound so new.’

  ‘I suppose not. But it’s worse than it’s ever been. He won’t see what’s in front of him. I can’t make him care.’ Suddenly she said, ‘Francis, do I use you?’

  He smiled at her. ‘A little.’

  ‘And do you mind?’

  ‘A little.’

  Shame emptied her out and she walked on in silence. Up there it was very bright, very bright and cold; a variety of paths meandered along between groups of stunted birch. They stopped where the trees thinned out and looked down over Ashmore, laid out between the scarp of the downs and the curve of the canal with the duckpond at its centre like the iris in the eye of a cat.

  ‘Show me all the churches, then,’ she said. ‘Tell me their names.’

  ‘Sanford Orcas, East Owler, Laxfield St Cross, St Margaret’s, St Peter’s, St Cuthman-at-Cookley.’ He touched her arm, pointed out across the plain. ‘And there! See? There’s St Mary’s in Burnham, the only round-tower church south of the Blackwater Estuary – Norman font, fifteenth-century bell, a porch with medieval faces of the sun and moon.’ It was a litany. He loved these places. He loved the idea they represented. With the collar of his tweed coat turned up and his face shining in the cold he looked thin, undernourished, unbearably young. He looked like a survivor from another age. Only his naïveté, Anna thought suddenly, is keeping him here. Without this astonishing belief in things he would fall away from the nice life, the acceptable life, be discovered years later living on the street in Birmingham or Bethnal Green, having made up his own religion, something appalling and occult, driven by the unspoken forces inside him. She was overwhelmed by a feeling of pity for him, caught up inextricably with her pity for herself. ‘North Creake,’ he was reciting, ‘South Creake, Sedgeford-by-Attwater—’

  ‘Stop!’ she said. ‘Stop now.’

  She made him face her, brushed his hair out of his eyes. ‘Poor old Francis, you do have a time of it.’ She kissed him gently on the lips. She felt him jump like a startled child. ‘Shh.’

  A lion burst out of the air beside them.

  Perhaps not precisely out of the air, she would think later, and perhaps not precisely a lion. But something huge, some huge cat; and it came, in a sense, from nowhere, assembling itself in an instant from the spaces between the birch trees, this huge, hot, golden animal running towards them. They could feel the heat of it. They could feel the bunch and unbunch of its muscles, how it was propelled tirelessly forward as if it need never, ever stop, through a different world from theirs. Then, ‘Francis!’ she cried, for it was at her elbow – at one and the same time infinitely distant and close enough to touch. It was a lion. It was a tiger. It was the couched Brazilian jaguar in its arboreal gloom. Its paws were the size of dinner plates. She could smell the rankness of it. It hung there in the air, then jumped down and paced jerkily about in front of them, roaring.

  ‘Francis! What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  They were shouting like people trying to make themselves heard in a storm. She clutched his arm. Shaking with astonishment, they stared at the apparition. Its flanks heaved and steamed in the sharp air. Head on one side, it showed them white teeth, a mouth the colour of a rose. Its eyes had the flat gleam of a cat’s at night. Then a shimmer went over its outline so tha
t Anna seemed to be seeing it through water and as suddenly as it had come it was gone, and with it all Anna’s fear.

  ‘What was it, Francis?’ she asked. ‘What was it?’

  He shook his head. They stared at each other, trembling.

  Anna said, ‘Where did it come from? Has it escaped from a zoo?’ Then she laughed, a laugh of amazement, delight, sheer relief. ‘I’ve never seen anything so beautiful. And what a smell!’ She laughed. ‘Phew.’ She took his arm, looked around. ‘We oughtn’t to stay here. It won’t come back. But wasn’t it beautiful? Wasn’t it beautiful?’

  Francis said nothing. She walked him back towards the car, her arm through his. Everything looked sharper and clearer, as if she were seeing the world through some special kind of glass. ‘I’ll drive you home,’ she offered and laughed. ‘You needn’t worry that I’ll go too fast.’ On the way back, a kind of calmness overcame her. ‘It wasn’t from a zoo.’ What had happened? She would never know, except that something like that was the opposite of everything Nonesuch stood for. It was beautiful and real, but it was like any other event: you could not hold on to it. At Nonesuch they would never let anything go. And there was another thing. If you wanted an event like that to have any meaning for your life, you would have to make up that meaning yourself. You would have to learn its lesson, allow it to change you. So when she had stopped the car outside Francis’s house and let him out, she said, ‘Francis, I shouldn’t have kissed you. It was unfair and silly, and I’ll always feel guilty about it.’

  ‘Anna, I—’

  She gave him a sad smile. ‘I know, Francis, I already know. But it isn’t any good, is it? I love John.’

  He let his arms drop to his sides. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘It’s just that I wish—’ He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It was my fault. It isn’t anything for you to be ashamed of.’

  ‘I’m rather afraid it is.’

  ‘Oh, Francis, it was just a kiss!’

  He shrugged and made his way into the rectory. Later, she would be reminded of how he had stared out almost desperately towards the Drychester churches like a sailor looking for one last landmark, something to navigate by after the fog set in. But now she was so full of her vision of the great cat and what it meant to her that, right or wrong, she forgot him. Suddenly she was parking the car at Nonesuch and running upstairs to John’s office, and throwing her arms round him whether he wanted it or not and saying, ‘We’re being really, really stupid, you and me. We really are. Life is too short for this. Do you know that?’

  Eleanor stared up at them from the floor.

  *

  Francis Baynes leaned against the wainscoting in the cold bare rectory hall. Greyish light seeped in round the partly open door, to illuminate his drawn features, baggy trousers, muddy shoes. I look like my own father, he thought with despair.

  Try as he might, he was unable to see the afternoon’s events as anything but ill-starred and minatory. They were a warning. Against what he wasn’t sure. He knew that he shouldn’t have allowed Anna to kiss him. He knew, perhaps more importantly, that he had failed to understand her joy. It was the characteristic failure of his life: with the mystery all around him, he had failed to meet it on its own terms. He had been unable to live up to it. What had happened anyway? She had kissed him. As a result, a huge animal had appeared. He couldn’t separate one event from the other. He was twenty-six years old and he had been too hard on himself for most of them, and he felt as though he might be going mad. As the Volvo drove off, he thought he saw the great cat flicker briefly into existence again, lashing its tail and running away down the village street.

  He took himself upstairs.

  There he began to get undressed, staring down into the graveyard from his window and thinking, I wish I had been born a thousand years ago. The afternoon was almost over. Night was in the foliage of the yews. Rooks circled and cawed around St Mary’s tower; they settled, flew up, circled again. Francis let his trousers fall round his feet, stepped out of them. ‘Why must you always be here?’ he said bitterly to the woman on the bed.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she answered. ‘Have we had a reverse?’

  He turned away from the window to face her. ‘Why won’t you leave me alone?’ he asked.

  She laughed. ‘It was you who called to me,’ she explained. ‘You have a spiritual smell, men like you; you’ve never sorted sex from desire, desire from religion.’ She pretended to sniff. ‘Quite right too. Delicious!’

  She was squatting on the uncovered mattress, her feet planted squarely as if for purchase. She had strewn her flowers on the bed and drawn up her brown muslin skirts, exposing her thighs and vulva. She looked roughly hewn, monolithic, cream-coloured here, a smoky yellow there, like some old figure carved in bone. She smelled as rank as a cat. She was smiling at him with the side of her mouth, not in contempt or triumph, or even sexual invitation. It was something that bore only a resemblance to those things, Francis Baynes thought, something lazy and without a name. In the end it was indifferent to what you called it. All he could see were her thighs, massive and open. The rest of her seemed to recede.

  ‘I’ll give you some advice,’ she said. ‘It’s this: you’ll get nowhere with that skinny bitch.’ She laughed at his expression. ‘Oh, I know. Do you think I don’t know everything? But I do, my cherub, I do. There’s nothing for you there.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  She laughed. ‘Oh yes, you do, my cherub. Oh yes, you do. But come in here and have some comfort before the night.’

  Francis looked down at himself. His erection was thick and painful. It made him feel foolish and encumbered, standing there with his socks and his shirt still on. He came as soon as he touched her, felt used, then didn’t know what he felt. ‘There, there,’ she said. ‘You’ll soon want to go again, a boy like you.

  ‘All the boys want Izzie.’

  *

  Busy, busy. Up and down. Me and Izzie we go from corridor to corridor in the night, corner to corner, nook to cranny, secret to secret. We have got some secrets between us, her and me. But here’s the big one—

  Izzie says, I’m the oldest one of all. I was here before anyone else. I was deep in the bones of this landscape. I was dug down deep here before the Herringes learned how not to die. She laughs. It was me taught them. I showed them how to make the maze. I taught them how to say the words. More than that, I stay with them while they’re dead: I help them remember who they are. I pick the strongest. Only the strongest get the chance to live on. I’m a clever old Izzie, she says, I pick the ones with the most fear.

  They’re the ones ravenous to come back. They’re the ones who’ll do anything.

  I watch them at the Johnny-and-Jill, the old in and out that never varies. I’m at the heart of all this. I’m the heart of this. Look at life, you find me hidden underneath it all, in and out, Jill and her Johnny, Johnny and his Jill. You go along now, she says to me, and do what must be done.

  You were my best pupil, she says to me. You were always the most afraid. It’s the next time round for you. This is your next time round, if you want it. Run along and find it now, the underneath, the underneath-it-all, and bring the things you already have to the thing you’ll find there.

  I say, But Izzie—

  Oh, you’ll find me too all right, my hinny, I’ll be there. Don’t you worry. Don’t you care. You can take this little baby and be inside it fully. You can be you. You can be what you want. You can always be what you want. You can always have what you want. Come back now, my hinny. Come back now, my Stella. My lovely frightened Stella now. Come on. Come.

  Izzie says this over and over again to me.

  So I know who I am not. I know who I am. It’ll be fucking between the hedges now, underneath the yellow moon. It’ll be Johnny-and-his-Stella again now.

  And that other bitch, and her damned cat, had best watch out.

  *

  Night.

  Anna woke up suddenly, convinc
ed she had heard something. She looked at her watch: a quarter to two. She yawned. Her dreams had been of Nonesuch – rain with a bitter grey light slanting through it at wrenched angles, the sodden pathways of the knot garden tangling and retangling themselves until she couldn’t find the way out, smiles awry on faces heavily rouged over arsenic-white, notes of deceit exchanged by deft betraying hands – unpleasant encounters in period dress which, unresolved in sleep, flickered on in her head for an instant or two like TV drama and were gone.

  ‘John?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ said John. He gave a greedy chuckle. ‘But if it means more of this I can learn.’

  ‘John?’

  He was fast asleep.

  He had come to bed earlier than usual, slightly bemused and already aroused. They had made love until she was quite sore and John couldn’t do anything whatever she whispered in his ear. Nothing had been solved by this and it had rather puzzled her. But sharing the same pillow makes it easier to admit your grievances. John felt that everyone depended on him too much. This frightened him. ‘If I don’t get the house right, what will we do? Where will we live? I’ll have let us all down.’

  The honesty of this forced Anna to confess, ‘I’m jealous of Eleanor. I don’t know what I expected. That she would be a real person but somehow not change anything between you and me. I expected a doll; instead, she elbowed her way into our life. And why not? All she wants is a place. How can I blame her for that? Or for loving you?’

  ‘She loves her father, it’s true. Will you always hold it against me?’