‘Only on wet days.’
‘What a comfort you are.’
She had not told him about seeing the lion, or kissing Francis. That was her business. Now she looked down at him and whispered, ‘Don’t ever think you’ve let us down, John Dawe. You’re not in it on your own. We’re in it with you.’ Then she thought. This room seems hot. I’ll drink some water. But the glass by the bed was empty and a few moments later she had fallen asleep. This time the dreams were less pleasant. In them she was dead again. There were all kinds of death and this was the one like knotted wet sheets. She woke full of anxiety, with her mouth thick and dry. She was sweating. John lay half across her in his sleep, one arm flung out; his body heat made the bed seem close and airless, like some felt-curtained four-poster from the deep history of the house. She pulled herself from beneath him, looked at her watch. It was a quarter to three and the room was very dark. ‘I’m going downstairs for some water,’ she whispered. ‘If I can still walk.’ He grunted but did not wake.
Rather than disturb him by switching on the light, she felt her way round the end of the bed to Eleanor’s cradle and reached in to make sure her daughter hadn’t thrown off the blankets. ‘Sleep well, little girl,’ she said. ‘Sleep well.’ She felt around with her hands.
The cradle was empty.
*
Anna stood outside the bedroom door in her nightdress. Her head was full of sleep and at the same time mercilessly clear.
This is it, now, she thought.
She thought. I’m so tired.
The corridor stretched away in the dim glow of the temporary lighting. Abandoned ladders and stacks of lath projected long, expressionist shadows on the panelled walls. Beneath them scampered Eleanor Dawe, a little plump figure in a pair of pull-ups, clutching her latest object and talking to herself as she went.
‘Eleanor!’ called Anna. ‘Eleanor, come back!’
If the child heard she took no notice, but turned the corner at the end of the passage and vanished from sight. Anna started after her, hesitated, half turned back to fetch John then thought. Too late. I mustn’t lose her. I mustn’t lose her again.
She reached the end of the passage in time to see Eleanor turn down the next one and that was how it was from then on: like a nightmare in which Anna could never catch up. Eleanor made all the running. Her agenda, though, was hard to understand. She slipped into John’s office, to reappear almost immediately with something in her other hand – whatever it was, she dropped it soon after and didn’t seem to notice. She squatted down suddenly at the smoke-blackened entrance to Jonathan Herringe’s Great Chamber, and with a good deal of grunting and whispering, relieved herself into the nappy. She went up a floor by the back stairs, only to descend again immediately by the front ones – encouraging herself as she lowered herself backwards from step to step in the voice Anna had heard in her dreams. On and on it went—
Busy, busy, it said. Oops, norty. A small laugh, then: Hidey and findy. Hidey a-n-d… findy!
—while Eleanor climbed stairs, pushed open doors and, breathing catarrhally, clambered over the clever child-proof gates John had taken such trouble to fit. All along she had had the run of the house, but to see her actually do it was like a discovery in a nightmare – senseless, debilitating. And if Anna found the facts difficult to accept, they also made her wary – more than once she opened her mouth to call ‘Eleanor!’ only to shut it without speaking.
How can a baby do this? she thought.
In the half-hour that now passed, none of the answers to this question proved palatable; meanwhile, despite her familiarity with the building, Anna lost all sense of where she was. Staircases seemed to elongate themselves bizarrely. Stale air wrapped itself around her like an unwashed blanket. ‘Cross a threshold here,’ she remembered Stella Herringe saying, ‘and you’ve moved two hundred years before you know it.’ Eventually she recognised the Long Corridor and the oblong on the panelled wall where the portrait of Clara de Montfort had hung – Eleanor had brought her mother to the door of the Painted Room, that site of many defeats. Inside, moonlight struck in through the casement window, falling as a series of startling, sharply delineated bars; shadows hung in the corners like the cobwebs in a bad film; while through the ragged hole in William Haut-Herringe’s trompe l’œil could be seen a faint suggestion of the empty courtyard beyond. Eleanor rocked on her heels in a beam of light. ‘Wor,’ she whispered softly, turning her head as if at a fireworks display. ‘Vootie.’ She offered her toy to the empty air; snatched it back; then, chuckling to herself at this good joke, wriggled her way through the hole in the painting and vanished into the courtyard beyond, trailing behind her the distinctive smell of an unchanged nappy.
The courtyard, empty of machinery, looked bigger than Anna remembered it. Bits of broken concrete like recently excavated bones littered the loose dry soil across which Eleanor made her way on hands and knees. She seemed agitated now, a little reluctant, stopping repeatedly to look up into the air. Whatever she thought she saw there caused her to wince away. ‘Phew,’ she complained in her not-Eleanor voice. ‘Busy busy.’ She reached the centre of the courtyard, where the builders had found the old subsidence, and, murmuring with relief, knelt down. She looked at her hands, wiped them on herself and, using as a trowel the miniature of the woman in the brown dress, made a ragged mark in the earth. This she contemplated for a moment. Then she began to dig. Her idea of digging was to lean forward, scoop the soil towards her with both hands, then propel it back energetically between her pudgy legs. After a few minutes she didn’t seem like a little girl any more. She seemed more like an animal.
Anna, watching from the Painted Room, couldn’t bear it. Bad dreams still roiled about inside her like brown smoke. She tried to call out. To begin with nothing happened. Then she made a jerky, almost inadvertent movement of the head and neck – as if some physical gesture were necessary to unlock her vocal cords – and with great effort managed to whisper, ‘Ellie.’
Eleanor looked uncertainly over her shoulder. Had she heard something? Perhaps not. She gave a little shrug. The dry grey soil began to shift and slip away into the subsidence in front of her like the surface of the sand in an egg timer; a shallow depression formed. At this, Eleanor chuckled appreciatively, picked up the miniature and began scraping with renewed excitement. More soil fell away. Soon she was in it up to her elbows. She was easing herself forward into the position of a swimmer who prepares to slide beneath the surface.
At this, Anna’s paralysis left her. ‘Eleanor,’ she cried, lunging through the hole in the wall. ‘Eleanor, don’t you dare!’
A comical expression passed across Eleanor’s face. ‘No, Mummy,’ she said in a voice easily recognisable as her own and burrowed into the dirt until only her feet remained visible.
Anna grabbed them.
For a moment, things seemed to get worse. All around her the soil, undermined from beneath, was slipping away into whatever ancient cellar or passageway lay down there, making a quiet hissing sound as it went. Eleanor shrieked and kicked. Anna groaned and shouted, and hauled on Eleanor’s ankles. There ensued a tug of war, not so much with the child as with the ground. The ground had become something in itself, something undisclosed and shy, powerful yet not entirely willing to show its hand. She felt it there, as a fully-fledged consciousness opposed to her own, and then it was gone. Anna lost her balance and sat down suddenly. Eleanor was pulled out of the earth like a cork from a bottle, roaring and struggling and calling, ‘No, Mummy. No, Mummy.’
Anna made eye contact. ‘Eleanor,’ she said. ‘You are a very naughty girl.’
Eleanor laughed. ‘Let me go, you silly bitch,’ she said.
Anna slapped her and ran.
She ran with Eleanor tucked under one arm. She ran as if somehow she could take Eleanor away from herself. She ran for both their sakes, blundering through the Painted Room and out into the Long Corridor, where she turned right instead of left and became mired in Stella Herringe’s old q
uarters. Here, the fire had burned so hot it consumed plaster as well as lath, stone as well as metal. The melted objects of Stella’s tenure – lifestyle accessories from Heal’s, Conran, Purves & Purves – lay underfoot like bruised and rotting medlars in the orchard. Anna slithered about among this stuff for some minutes, while the child murmured blandly, ‘This won’t help you. Do you think this will help you, dear?’
‘I’m not letting go of you,’ Anna said, determinedly looking for a way out. ‘I’m not.’
Suddenly the topography of the house unspooled itself for her and she saw where she had gone wrong. Clutching her burden firmly, she took the nearest staircase to the ground floor.
Eleanor shrieked and pulled at her hair. ‘Norty! Norty Mummy!’ Both of them were sweating, crying, covered in greyish earth.
Anna ran, murmuring, ‘Oh, Ellie, poor Ellie,’ one moment and, ‘Shut up. Shut up. Shut up,’ the next. Suddenly she was in the kitchen, sweeping things off the worktop in search of the keys to the Volvo, and a man was in front of her, his mouth opening and shutting like someone trying to make words underwater.
He had black hair. Half-dressed, bleary-eyed, puzzled-looking, he was still pulling on a flannel shirt. He clutched at her arm. ‘Anna!’ he shouted. ‘Anna, it’s me! It’s John!’
She examined him. ‘So it is,’ she said in a moment of clarity. Her panic subsided for an instant, only to wash back again. He was no good unless he could help. And she had the keys. ‘Don’t you know what’s going on here?’ she asked. ‘Your special little girl has had the run of this house for weeks. She’s been out there every night while you snored, in and out of everything, digging up the courtyard, assembling that hideous collection of objects. It was she who overturned the dustbin to get them back. It was she who buried them in the knot garden—’
He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘Anna—’
‘John, for God’s sake listen. Do babies do that? In your experience?’
‘Anna, of course they don’t.’
‘Then listen. This has something to do with Stella. That bloody horrible little flint idol—’
‘Anna, please—’
She shook him off. ‘There’s no time,’ she said. ‘We’re leaving. Something awful will happen here if we don’t. Listen to her, John.’ She held the baby up in front of him. ‘Just listen to the things she’s saying.’
‘Dada,’ wailed Eleanor, holding out her arms.
‘Why is she so upset?’ he asked. ‘Have you upset her? She’s a tiny girl, Anna—’
Anna gave a bitter laugh. ‘That’s all you know,’ she said. ‘I want you to come too, John. We’re better off out of here. We should never have come back.’
He tried to take this in. ‘But this is our house.’
She stared at him in complete disbelief. ‘It’s Stella’s house, John,’ she told him. ‘It always was.’ She looked at her watch: almost morning. ‘I’ve got to go now.’ She caught a glimpse of herself in one of the hall mirrors – a woman with her car keys in her hand, already turning away. Her hair was disordered, her life toppling off the edge of itself. She was still in the unbleached cotton T-shirt she used to sleep in – it was one of his, oversized, bearing the legend ‘Green World’.
He followed her to the doorway, clutching at the hem of it. ‘Anna, you’re overwrought. You can’t just run off like this.’
They struggled briefly and in the confusion Eleanor managed to get her arms round his neck. ‘Dada, Dada,’ she screamed.
Anna dragged her away. ‘Get off, John,’ she said and, when he tried to catch hold of her again, pushed at him as hard as she could. He lost his balance and fell over backwards. ‘Leave us! Leave us alone!’ she cried.
She ran past him, down the steps, into the dawn.
14
Once the candles had gone out the blackness of the chamber was absolute. In all my life I had never known such intense darkness; it felt almost a physical pressure. Cats have good eyes: it’s said we can see in the dark, and to an extent it’s true, for we can find and focus whatever small light there may be in our surroundings. But no one can see light where light does not exist and in that pitch-dark there was none for my eyes to find. I sat crouched, waiting for whatever might happen next.
For a long time there was nothing. Nothing, that is, except for my own sense of apprehension and a growing suspicion that something was watching me; or if not watching me, exactly, that something was aware of me and was biding its time. Then there came a subtle change in the air pressure and a strong scent filled the cavern. It came from all around; it seemed to engulf me. It was every dead thing I had ever smelled; it was rotting fungus and hatching flies’ eggs; it was soft flesh and old fish; it made my eyes water. And then a rumbling came that shuddered through the bones of my skull, through my chest and down into my legs. Where I touched the ground the vibration redoubled, till shudders of sound ran up and met the ripples running down and turned my limbs to liquid. I spun this way and that, as if I might somehow surprise the source of the noise into revealing itself, but all that followed was laughter. It was not the laugh I had heard before, which had been high and light; a child’s laugh, wayward and impish, rather than this sound: a deep, malicious roar, which made my skin crawl with such repulsion that my bollocks retreated up under my fur and the ridge of fur along my back sprang so high that I could feel the chill of the air on the naked skin between the peaks.
Then whatever it was spoke. The rumbling continued through the chamber, but the voice sounded inside my head: ‘Don’t meddle in things that don’t concern you, little beast,’ it said to me. ‘You are trespassing in the first place they made for me here. All this is beyond you; I am beyond you – for I am age itself; I am life.’
That it should address me so, angered me and somehow I found the gall to respond. ‘I don’t know what you are,’ I said into the darkness, ‘but to me you smell of death.’
‘A cat – you are a cat, aren’t you? It’s always the cats that give me most trouble – a cat should know better than to judge me so,’ it replied then, and I knew from the tickle that its scent made in my head that the thing which addressed me was female, ‘for do not cats die many times, yet cling so tight to life that they return over and over again?’
‘It is the way the Great Cat made us,’ I said, not knowing where the words came from. ‘She abhors waste.’
‘The Great Cat!’ The laughter reverberated around me. ‘The Great Whore, more like. She certainly knew how to spread her gifts widely. We have much in common, she and I.’
The smell of decay grew stronger as her poison seeped into my head. ‘I will not listen to you,’ I said loudly and closed the muscles of my ears hard against the sound of her voice. Yet even though I could feel my ears furling inwards, the muscles contracting as tightly as an eyelid shutting, I could still hear every word.
‘We want it all,’ she continued, ‘the Great Cat and I: the power and the glory, for ever and ever. The glory of living on and on; the power not to cease to exist; the glory and chaos of the sexual act, the energy and stench of it all. That’s what we seek, this power over others, and to create ourselves again and again through them. You will never understand this urge. You should leave well alone, for you will never understand – you have no greatness in you, you males.’
‘Who are you?’ I called into the darkness.
There was a laugh; a pause. Then, ‘Me? Oh, I have many names and many forms. Long ago, when I was strong and many worshipped me, I was known as Ishtar, the great mother, and the world trembled at my feet. The Phoenicians named me Balaath and Astarte, and amid the barren hills of Sinai they prayed to the Mistress of Torquoise. Others called me Isis and brought their dead for me to revive. The fools – I ate their souls and grew stronger again. They learned, after a time; and for a time I slept and made dreams for them. In Europe, they knew me as Isar and named rivers for me. Perhaps it was for the cargoes I sent them, in the night. The Iceni tried to make me theirs; but I was not for the
taking. Other people carved white symbols in the chalk to summon me; or made a pyramid of bones licked by fire. I like children to call me Izzie, or the White Lady. It seems – how shall I put this?’ I could hear the sneering smile she made. ‘More friendly, shall we say?
‘And you, little beast. What will you call me?’
All I heard in my skull was the buzz of flies, then the scent in the cavern changed, subtly at first, so that the aroma of putrefaction lost its rankness, gradually becoming sweeter and more enticing so that my nose twitched in spite of itself. At last it became a wave of intoxifying musk that made the blood buzz in my head. It was the smell of a cat on heat, a female ready to mate, a queen offering herself to me. It was quite intoxicating.
‘You see,’ the voice went on, ‘see my power and what I can offer you; and perhaps I shall, if you leave this place, leave the Great Knot alone and go away from here. The time is at hand. It will not be for long; then you may claim your reward.’
I opened my mouth to respond but that heady perfume enveloped the scent organ which we cats have there that enables us to assess smells with the greatest accuracy, and whatever repudiation I was forming in my mind evaporated. The walls themselves seemed to press in on me then and I knew I was lost.
The air wavered minutely. I thought for a moment that I was about to lose consciousness and fall into the power of that smell, that voice, but just as my joints started to wobble a spark of brilliance fractured the gloom, then became a glow that spread out from its source in the same way as do the concentric wavelets made by a raindrop falling in a lake. The effulgence undulated and expanded, until it had filled that dark place with a spectrum of colour; then the fox appeared, shedding rings of light in mid-gallop, rings of light that broke as if on an invisible shore and melted away into the once more darkening walls.
‘Come with me, Orlando!’ he cried and when I continued to stand there like an idiot, he barked at me, and then I felt the nip of his teeth on my neck accompanied by a sharp, searing pain. ‘Run, you fool!’