She stared at him. ‘You never used to be so cavalier about people’s dreams.’
‘That was in the days before I became a proud father. When all my time was spare time.’ He laughed. ‘Dreams are for single men.’ When she didn’t rise to this he took her hand. ‘Are you all right, Anna?’
‘I am when you notice I’m here.’
He looked at her puzzledly. ‘All this is for you,’ he said. ‘It’s for us.’
She touched his hand. ‘Is it?’ she asked. Then, seeing his hurt expression, ‘I know it is. I know.’
They stared at one another for a moment, then he said, ‘Well, talk cuts no timber. I’d better get back to it.’
Later that day Anna abandoned Eleanor to the less-than-tender care of Alice Meynell and drove into Drychester to see Dr Martha Russell.
*
‘Do you ever dream of past lives?’ asked Anna.
It was an old question, she knew. She asked it every time she came here. She felt trapped by its ironies, in this place where the truth could never be admitted. She stared out of the consulting room window into the little brick courtyard below, where a fine grey rain was falling on the minute beds of rosemary and thyme, the tubs of hostas. After the broad, ancient gardens of Nonesuch, this planned, trimmed, achingly new little space looked less like a garden than an architect’s diagram of one.
She shivered a little, thinking of the contrast, then went on, ‘Do you think that’s possible?’
Dr Russell seemed to consider this for a moment. ‘In a sense,’ she said, ‘that’s all we ever dream of. Dreams are a way of revisiting a problem, a relationship. An event.’ She gave Anna time to respond to this and, when nothing was forthcoming, continued, ‘Or else they are about the fear of revisiting it. Dreams really are intimately caught up with past lives: our own.’
This sounded so complacent that Anna didn’t know how to reply. She made an irritable movement of one shoulder, as if shrugging off someone’s hand: I don’t want comfort. ‘I didn’t mean that.’
‘I know,’ acknowledged Dr Russell gently.
Martha Russell was a tall, rangy woman, a little older than Anna, who, growing bored with the management of a ‘holistic’ practice in Fulham, had left London and turned her attention to post-traumatic stress disorder. She had treated Anna for the lingering psychological effects of the fire at Nonesuch; then, because it seemed clear to them both that the two things were connected, for the bout of depression which had followed Ellie’s birth. She was unmarried and a compulsive amateur archaeologist. At weekends she could be found in green padded waistcoat and shabby if rather elegant cargo trousers, pottering about between the longbarrows and circles of standing stones that litter the downs above Ashmore, accompanied by her huge dog Otto. The wide-screen TV in her consulting room was often switched on to show silent video footage of local excavations with which she was involved, as if in a metaphor of her profession, which was to bring to the surface the deep archaeology of her patients’ lives. She smoked unfiltered American cigarettes, one of which she now lit. ‘So how is it,’ she asked, ‘with John?’
‘You’re a doctor,’ said Anna. ‘But you smoke. How can you possibly reconcile those two things? I mean, I don’t mind. But—’ It was her turn to leave a pause.
‘“Reconcile”’, said Martha Russell evenly, ‘is an interesting word. So how is it going with John?’
The two women laughed at one another. Over the next hour the rain settled in, beading the triple-glazed windows of the consulting room, falling steadily into the courtyard. Smoke rose from the doctor’s cigarette. Dim sounds of traffic filtered into the room from Drychester High Street. Anna felt calmed by all this. Once every session, a moment of inner stillness arrived and she felt that Martha Russell was a help after all; although Martha Russell could never understand – could never be told – what had really happened at Nonesuch.
‘I want him back,’ Anna said. ‘The man I met.’ She laughed. ‘I know how that sounds,’ she continued. ‘I know people change and move on. And he probably feels like that about me. After the fire, and the death of his cousin who was so important to him, after the baby, after all the different things that have happened to us, we’re both different people. But I loved him when he lived on his canal boat and got angry about things no one else understood, and argued with people about dreams over the supper table.’ She tried to add something more to this list, but could only think about the smell of him in bed at night, so she finished, ‘I wish he were writing his book again. He was overpowering, then, and a bit obsessive. But I loved that about him. I loved his extraordinary energy She shrugged. ‘Does this make any sense?’
‘What are you trying to tell me?’ asked Martha Russell gently.
‘All he cares about now is his house and his daughter,’ Anna whispered. ‘And sometimes I’m just bored by him.’
‘I think you’re angry too.’
‘He doesn’t trust me. Since the depression I had, he doesn’t trust my judgement. He would never admit that, or put it that way. I suspect he doesn’t even feel it that way. He’s too nice. But essentially he hasn’t trusted me since then. We’re avoiding all these feelings between us. I get involved with Ellie. He gets involved with the house. There’s nothing really wrong. But everything’s wrong.’
‘And—?’
‘I don’t know. It undermines my confidence that he doesn’t trust me. Before I came to Ashmore I was in money—’
‘Such an odd way to put it. Don’t you think? “In” money?’
‘You know quite well what I mean. I worked for an international bank and I could make five hundred thousand pounds a year in bonuses alone. I’m not boasting about that. It was just a fact of my life. When I met John he was living on someone else’s money, on a narrowboat, writing a completely impractical book about dreams.’
‘You rather resent that,’ said Martha Russell. ‘And yet you want him to be the dreamer again, you miss the dreamer he used to be.’
Anna shrugged. ‘I didn’t say I wasn’t complicated,’ she said mulishly.
‘Neither did I, dear.’
‘Anyway, this isn’t about that. I spend all day with Ellie – blaming myself for her bad behaviour and feeling like an unnatural mother because he doesn’t have these difficulties with her; while he spends all day worrying about the cost of walnut panelling. And at night we’re further apart, not closer together.’ She contemplated this. ‘I won’t give up,’ she said, as if the doctor had asked her to. ‘I love him. I love him from the bottom of my heart, however silly that sounds. I don’t give up easily on things. It’s too easy to walk away from a relationship these days. People have made it too easy.’ Having come dose to saying what she meant, but not quite dose enough, she looked at her watch. ‘Time’s up.’
‘How convenient.’ Martha Russell laughed.
On her way out, Anna paused. ‘I’ve been coming here since the fire,’ she said.
Martha Russell nodded.
‘Once a week. At first John had to drive me, even though his hands were burned worse than mine. But now I drive myself.’ She stared at the doctor, as if that had been a question. When no answer came, she added, ‘You saw me through the post-natal depression. I got over that too. I’m strong. I’ve always been in charge of my own life.’
‘What, then?’ enquired Martha Russell eventually.
‘I feel as if I’m well again. When can I stop coming?’
Martha Russell smiled. ‘You’ll stop coming when you want to.’
*
Before she returned to Nonesuch, Anna decided to shop. Afterwards, in the Waitrose car park, beneath a lowering sky, she found Francis Baynes cramming carrier bags into the back of his Rover. The light was the colour of sulphur; large, isolated raindrops spotted the tarmac. People were running to their cars and slamming the doors.
Francis had bought cans of ravioli; cheap toilet rolls in numbers. ‘I have to make economies,’ he explained when he saw her expression. ‘In fact, I
shouldn’t even be shopping here.’
‘I promise I won’t tell.’
They stood there looking at one another for a moment. Francis asked, ‘So how’s life?’
‘Oh, I hate my life at the moment.’
‘I don’t think you do,’ he said. He glanced at his watch, then at the sky. ‘Come and have tea somewhere.’
‘You mustn’t let me take up your time—’
‘Think of it as a pastoral visit.’
They found seats in one of the Shambles cafes. As soon as she had ordered, Anna said, ‘I wouldn’t mind if only John seemed a bit more—’ She couldn’t think what. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Connected.’ She had always hated women whose troubles came out easily, over meals with people they hardly knew. It was a kind of emotional promiscuity. Nevertheless she went on, ‘A house is for living in, not running away into.’
Francis stirred his tea. ‘Is that what you think he’s doing?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘The baby’s tiring you both,’ he pointed out. ‘On top of that, John has money worries.’
‘I have them too,’ protested Anna.
‘Of course. But we are trying to see his side of it here.’
She laughed despite herself. ‘Francis, your profession is showing.’
He gave her an interested look. ‘Do you think it is?’
‘Don’t be disingenuous.’ She refilled his cup.
There was a brief silence, then he asked, ‘Do you get much help from the Herringes?’
‘God no,’ said Anna. ‘It’s John’s house now – it came to him through Stella – and so it’s down to us to find the finance. In fact, when he went to his trust fund for help, they advised him to sell. The Herringe money’s all gone offshore and the big family players with it. They’re more interested in the NASDAQ Index than their own history. They described the house as an “asset”.’
‘It must have been insured.’
‘The insurers will only go so far. And it’s a listed building. That means no one could complain if we let it fall to bits – but once we decide to restore it, everything has to be done properly. There are grants, of course, but—’ To make ends meet, Anna had sold her cottage in Ashmore; and though there hadn’t seemed much point in getting rid of John’s narrowboat – it wouldn’t fetch enough to be useful – she knew the Magpie would go in the end. For some reason this thought made her even more despondent. ‘We depend rather a lot on the bank,’ she admitted. ‘If John would let me work—’ She shrugged.
Francis swilled the dregs of his tea round his cup and examined them with the care of a fortune-teller. He looked up. ‘So you don’t see any Herringes at Nonesuch?’
‘Once in a blue moon,’ she said. ‘I think there was one down here at Christmas. John had to sign something and they always make a production of that.’
‘“A blue moon”,’ mused Francis. ‘I sometimes wonder about the English language.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Oh dear. Now I really should be somewhere else. Come and talk to me whenever you need to.’
‘I will, Francis.’
‘Promise?’
She smiled up at him gratefully. ‘I promise.’
*
Busy, busy, busy. Long and short places wide and narrow places, places up and places down. Some places are colder than others but Izzie says we have to be busy about them anyway. Up and down dark and light dark and darker. Looking looking looking. Izzie said you may not like the dark but you surely like the places and she called me her little squirmer. I said nothing.
Soon I arrived at a place. The riddle of it is this, it is quite easy to get to though it is very hard to find. Izzie says some places are realer than others. She laughs and says, You could be forgiven for not knowing which is which. One day, she says, I will know everything again.
2
‘Wake up!’
A sharp dig in the ribs made me catch my breath.
‘Wake up, Orlando!’
I opened one bleary eye. Sunlight fell into it, as sharp as an unexpected twig. I blinked the haze away and squinted. There sat Lydia, pursing her mouth. This I could tell not because I could see the detail of her expression – she sat with the light behind her so that it made a golden glow of her fur: an attitude adopted out of both vanity and sun worship but by the disapproving set of her head. It was an expression that had become habitual whenever she regarded me. Time had not improved our relationship. ‘What?’ I muttered, my eyes closing again.
‘You’re moaning in your sleep,’ she said crossly. ‘I wish you’d stop it. Moaning and striking out with your paws. It’s really quite infuriating.’
I struggled for consciousness; failed. It was like falling down a dark rabbit hole, this sudden jolt back into the dream. A pair of feet – as neat and white as any rabbit’s – fled before me again, darting around corners, disappearing down impossible perspectives, until I was left only with the impression of a shock of tabby fur above the white; a sharp tang of female scent. The scent was that of an intact queen, her mark as familiar as my own and yet as strange as a bird’s. My feet twitched in their phantom pursuit and I opened my mouth to call after her—
Another dig, this time, painfully, in the kidneys; a hiss, ‘You’re doing it again!’
I woke up properly this time, heart thumping, though it was hard to tell why. A sensation of despair hung over me, like a small and personal cloud. Something was lost, something very dear—
‘Honestly, Orlando, you’re worse than the children. How in the world am I supposed to catch up on my beauty sleep with you tossing and turning and groaning away like that? It’s so incredibly selfish of you.’
And before I could even think to retort – for it had been I who had taken her three little darlings bird hunting that morning till my feet were sore; I who had admonished them for making too much noise while their mother dozed in the marjoram; I who had played with them till they were so exhausted they had fallen in a heap – she had turned her back on me, shifting unceremoniously backwards with one of those exquisite golden haunches until she had pushed me entirely out of the pool of sunlight we had until that moment shared, leaving me swallowed by cold shadow.
Within moments she was unconscious and snoring.
I lay there, but try as I might, sleep evaded me. Perhaps it was the chill in the air, or the stertorous drone of Lydia’s breathing that prevented me; or perhaps it was my unwillingness to give myself back to the dream. I had been experiencing this same flicker of images, this by-play of events and sensations, in subtly different guises, for the past several days and nights, and whenever I awoke it was to anxiety and a hollow and unfocused dread. It was the sort of sleep that leaves you feeling less rested than when you laid your head down in the first place, so I was not unhappy to abandon my attempt.
I sat up and stretched, and considered Lydia’s snoring form. She was still beautiful, I thought with a certain detachment, despite the kittens, despite her recent obsession with food of all kinds and the consequences of that greed. I noted the way the dark ticking of that golden fur added definition to the smooth muscles, the long flanks, the elegantly coiled tail; though her beauty no longer had the power to make me catch my breath or stumble over my speech; no longer sent me howling, hot-eyed and furious, into the rhododendrons from yet another slight or rebuttal. The sharp peaks and deep valleys of my grand passion had been worn away into some vast and limitless plain, eroded down and spun away as fine dust under the climate of her selfishness. But here I was, still at the manor house with her and the girls, and I did not altogether know why.
After all – as my friend Millefleur constantly reminded me – the kittens were not even mine. Whose they were was the subject of much conjecture. I had more cause than most to hazard a guess at how they might have been conceived, but because Lydia, in her usual superior manner, refused outright to discuss the matter, she had earned the enmity of the local gossips. ‘She always was a proper little madam,’ they would say, reminding each other of her flir
tations with those erstwhile jack-the-lads who used to hang out on the canal banks on sultry summer nights and were now solid young cats, just beginning to spread around the midriff, with convoluted family ties and several families of their own.
‘Not what you’d call choosy…’
‘If she’d take one, she’d take all.’
‘A complete tart, if you ask me.’
Which reminded me of something Millie had once said; though during the intervening two years I had never seen her treat Lydia with anything but friendship and compassion. Even so, she kept on nagging at me to leave.
‘Have a break, Orlando. Take to the wild roads,’ she would advise me, the little tuft of fur on her head that was so like a jay’s crest bobbing with her impatience. ‘Leave Miss High-and-Mighty to get on with it for a while. Come with me. I’ve found this extraordinary rocky little dell that runs down to the sea, full of lily of the valley and sweet briar. In the summer it’s so warm that the air steams around you; and in the winter the stream freezes over so you can stand right above the fishes and watch them swim beneath your feet. There are voles as big as rats there, and rats as big as kittens. Come and chase them with me!’
But I would shake my head sadly and watch her bound across the lawns, to disappear with a flick of the tail into the animal highway that ran down by the old yew hedge. One minute she was there, the white patches of her fur contrasting sharply against the dense, dark foliage, with her head turned slightly towards me – the greatest concession she would make to bidding me farewell – the next she was gone; vanished from sight as if she had winked suddenly out of existence. Which, to all practical purposes, she had: for to travel the wild roads is to travel in dimensions other than those that are obvious to the eye.
I do not think it was even Lydia that kept me at Nonesuch. Yet neither was it the big house – with its gaping rooms and the disturbing smell of the old fire – or its grounds, which were infested by the cats that had existed here all their sad lives, both breathing and dead. Nor yet was it because of Nonesuch’s human occupants, though Anna had fed and sheltered me since my first days and I felt nothing but fondness for her. I liked the dark man with the careful hands, who had for years been Lydia’s feeder; and even the child intrigued me as much as it annoyed me, clutching at my tail with those hot, sticky paws babies have, or cheerfully banging me on the head with its toys. No; there was something else that kept me from charging blithely into the nearest highway and barrelling off to the sunlit coast or the heart of some distant, dappled wood: something that had caught me as firmly in its toils as any spider catches prey in its web. There was a mystery here that haunted my dreams and plagued the edges of my waking thoughts, and I knew that until I had hunted it down and caught it wriggling by the neck, I could not rest.