Nonesuch

  Then, with a howl of fury, something flung itself at his head. He felt it land on him, felt its claws rake his sides as they scrabbled for purchase. He felt its hot breath on his face and its teeth at his throat.

  Suddenly he could breathe again. His eyelids fluttered once, twice; and on the third blink he found himself nose to nose with the blurry image of Millefleur, her mouth full of black hair, her eyes shining. Then she slipped away from him and in her place he could see a headless Ma Tregenna, all four feet braced on the sides of the dream globe, her neck disappearing into its interior. A moment later she re-emerged, with what appeared to be a large wet rat in her jaws.

  The dream globe convulsed, as if the Besom had ripped away something crucial to its existence. Gouts of steam came up out of it, smelling of canker and rot, and some part of it turned itself inside-out, spilling a wreath of coloured vapours into the foul air. The Besom was catapulted backwards off the skin of the sphere, her burden adding momentum to her fall, which ended with an indistinct thud at the opposite end of the chamber. There was the murmur of voices, then something else was disgorged from the globe, something that shrieked like a firework and shot away into the darkness, trailing the stench of the grave in its wake.

  ‘Mistress!’

  Orlando heard an unfamiliar, deep voice; the unmistakable sound of a cat’s hunting call; the scuffle of dancing feet; a mournful wail that chilled him to the bone; silence.

  Then the world became inverted and Orlando found himself falling away from his prey. He hit the ground with an impact that shook the breath from him and when he came to himself this is what he saw:

  The sphere, darting overhead, smaller now and somehow lighter. Beneath it, a blue-grey cat with golden eyes danced on its hind legs, clapping her paws together, striking out right and left. A fox – long-backed, reddish, brindling towards its hindquarters and fine tail – wove himself in and out of her dance. As he did so, the room appeared to undergo a transformation. It shimmered; it twined about as if everything in it were as insubstantial as smoke. And where there had been a small grey cat, now there was a young leopard, all muscle and roar and arboreal splendour. It was an odd struggle. The cat leapt and turned, and made artful, devastating sweeps with her shining claws; while the sphere – its surface as slick and iridescent as a soap bubble – wobbled and bobbed out of her reach.

  Anna watched this strangely graceful display with something approaching awe. Into her mind came a line from a book she had once read – ‘Any cat who wants to live for ever should watch bubbles. Only kittens should chase them.’

  We can’t expect to armour ourselves against change, she thought. Yet if we don’t – well, this cat is as rough as it is beautiful. Your life doesn’t care how you use it, only that you should. It doesn’t care how it uses you.

  Even as she was completing this thought, the sphere trembled and burst. Anna heard it burst, with a sound like tapped porcelain. She clutched her daughter to her. Now we’re for it, she thought. All those rotten, knotted-up Nonesuch lives, all those crimes against animals and human beings, all that fear and desperation—

  But released, its contents weren’t dark and foul at all. They streamed upwards like coloured fire into the night sky. A single female human figure struggled hard to form itself and travel against the flow of things, only to waver and sigh, and relinquish its hold at last. While Anna heard an old woman’s voice whispering sadly in front of a mirror in some empty room, ‘I only wanted to keep the nice things, dear. I only wanted to stay nice.’

  Then it was all gone.

  Anna felt bruised, astonished, elated. She felt herself all over. ‘Well!’ she said.

  The next thing she thought of was Eleanor. She stared warily into her daughter’s eyes, half expecting to see Stella Herringe staring back out in triumph. But look how she might, all she could see there was a daughter, a proper little girl who was looking rather puzzledly around the chamber, as willing to be upset as to be amused by all these things that were happening. Anna laughed delightedly. ‘Hello, Eleanor!’ She hugged her tight, smelling baby smells, feeling baby warmth against the side of her face. ‘Eleanor, look!’ She held Eleanor up as if they were at the zoo. ‘Look, Eleanor! Look at all the cats!’

  Eleanor laughed and extended her hand. ‘Ca’!’ she said. ‘Ca’!’

  For a moment or two the leopard who, with the fox, had somehow conjured a wild road into existence before their very eyes, continued to fling herself about the room, rearing up on its hind legs in a kind of joyful memory of the chase, batting with its massive forepaws at the strange lights fading and dying like fireworks around her. Then the dream globe filled the air with a grunting, coughing roar that Anna felt as much as heard, and it fell back to all fours again, trotting once or twice round the room, panting heavily and staring from side to side in search of an exit.

  As it went, it shrank rapidly until it was the size and colour of an ordinary blue-grey cat, barely more than a kitten, with two little bony lumps on the top of its head.

  ‘Good grief,’ whispered Anna. ‘Caterina? Is that you?’

  Caterina wasn’t saying. She scampered across the room to exchange a sniff with Orlando and a tall tabby-and-white cat who looked remarkably like the missing Tufty, and who, in a distinctly proprietorial manner, was grooming viscous fluid out of his marmalade fur. She then progressed to the fox and they touched muzzles in what seemed an almost ritual greeting. Beside him, curled in upon herself like the husk of a dead wasp, an ancient brindled cat lay where it had fallen in the midst of the conflict. All the life had gone out of her, that was plain to see. Caterina bent and licked the top of the creature’s dusty old head. Then, with a curiously tender gesture, the fox nosed her out of the way, picked up the carcass so that it hung out of either side of his long, sharp jaws and sprang into the air. Rainbow rings shimmered across the room, and a moment later the fox and his burden were gone.

  In the afterglow as the wild road closed in upon itself, Anna became aware of two more cats sitting in the shadows at the back of the room. One was tall and regal-looking, his fur the dense blue-grey of an August stormcloud, or the wing of an elderly nuthatch, and his eyes were the same deep gold as Caterina’s. Beside him was a small tabby cat with neat white socks and a ragged ear.

  ‘Vita,’ breathed Anna, disbelieving. And it was, drawn through time from the centre of the pattern in which she had been trapped for so long, as if someone had taken the loose end of a knot and pulled it free, which in a way they had.

  Meanwhile Caterina made an ambling personal circuit of the chamber, sniffing the empty niches, addressing various invisible items with her nose or, more cautiously, with one front paw. Her gaze passed briefly over John Dawe, Francis Baynes and Alice Meynell, who lay, huddled or sprawled, their limbs at odd angles, more or less where events had left them. Then she shook herself and returned to the centre of the chamber, where she sat down and began to groom with considerable energy, beginning with her left front paw.

  Anna looked to where Orlando lay up with the cat she knew as Tufty. They had been joined by the tabby with the ragged ear, and each was licking the other in what seemed a paroxysm of relief.

  ‘Orlando, have I understood any of this?’

  No answer. How could a cat speak anyway? Anna shook herself. ‘Obviously not,’ she said.

  Alice Meynell now groaned and woke up. ‘I wish I hadn’t done that,’ she said. She looked at her own hand. ‘Anna? Have we come off the bike?’

  Anna laughed. She set Eleanor down next to Orlando – who paused for a second to give Eleanor a suspicious look before he acknowledged, by licking her outstretched hand, that she was just a little girl again; then, in that companionable way cats have when they groom in groups, stuck one rear leg up in the air and redoubled his efforts – and went to help her friend up. ‘Come on, Alice. I’ll explain later.’

  ‘I hope you will.’

  ‘I’m just going to have a look at Francis.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ sa
id Alice. ‘Didn’t there used to be a design of some sort on this floor?’

  Anna looked. ‘So there did,’ she confirmed. ‘But all that’s finished now.’

  Francis Baynes was already awake. A considerable smell of scorched tweed hung about him. Anna helped him to his feet. ‘Let me look at you,’ she said. ‘Oh dear, Francis, you have been in the wars.’ But while his face still looked shabby and aged – as if twenty years had passed in twenty-four hours – and much of the hair had been burned off the left side of his skull, his eyes gleamed with energy and his spirits were remarkable. He wasn’t what he had been, but you could see something of what he might become. Determination and intelligence had liberated themselves from the romantic in him – whatever had happened to him in the last twenty-four hours, he had exchanged one set of qualities for another and moved on. When she hugged him he winced.

  ‘I’m afraid some of my ribs are cracked,’ he said apologetically.

  ‘And your inner life, Francis? Is that cracked too?’

  This seemed to amuse him. ‘It could be worse,’ he told her.

  They smiled at one another for a moment; then he gave her a long, thoughtful look. ‘And Eleanor?’ he asked.

  Anna said quickly, ‘She’s fine, Francis, fine.’

  ‘I’m sorry if I—’

  ‘You did your best,’ she assured him.

  Any other answer would be too complex, requiring admissions, explanations, justifications that would better be made later and at leisure. Here and now, the events themselves were too close. What had happened to Francis? How had he come to be here? In a way she didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to pry. Francis’s trials had been his own and he had risen above them beautifully. Anyway, Eleanor was Eleanor again and safe.

  Half understanding this, Francis made a hesitant gesture, as if to explain himself, or begin explaining himself, then changed his mind and asked instead, ‘Do you have any idea what happened here?’

  ‘A little more than you, perhaps.’

  He nodded. ‘I thought so. You must tell me about it when you have a moment.’ Then, ‘You know, at first I believed some great evil was being brought to book.’ He looked around the chamber. ‘Now I suspect it was only a case of bad spiritual plumbing.’

  ‘Francis!’

  ‘Something was unblocked, anyway.’

  There was a comfortable pause. Then she suggested, ‘Come up to the house.’

  He shook his head. ‘There are things that ought to be done down here and they’re my responsibility. I want to make sure this never happens again. I don’t know how strong I am, or how much I can do, but I have to be a proper priest and try.’

  She held his hands for a moment. ‘Be careful, Francis.’

  ‘I will.’

  *

  Arms round each other, Anna and Alice looked down at John Dawe. He was snoring.

  ‘I’m tempted to leave him here,’ said Anna.

  ‘I know. But where would you get another one?’

  They woke him up and a few minutes later the three of them stood in the remains of the knot garden in the moonlight. Alice was examining the foundered JCB with a kind of professional disdain. John, who had his daughter in his arms, kept looking puzzledly back over his shoulder. He seemed to retain little memory of the night’s events and none at all of his episode of temporal fugue. He kept looking at his watch, shaking his head and saying, ‘I can’t believe it’s this late.’ Then he added, ‘Something awful happened down there, Anna. Didn’t it? I don’t know if I remember—’ Suddenly, he gave Eleanor to Alice and took Anna in his arms. ‘A lot of this was my fault,’ he said.

  She shivered and laid her head against his chest. ‘It was,’ she admitted.

  ‘Have I been a complete bastard?’

  Anna laughed. ‘You’ve been a complete idiot,’ she said. ‘If only you’d trusted the two of us, Ellie and me—’

  ‘She wasn’t Ellie, though, was she?’

  ‘I think most of her was, John. She needed you to encourage that part, not the other. Who knows how it would have gone then? But look, she’s Ellie again now and we’re going to keep her that way.’

  ‘I love you,’ John told her.

  ‘I love you too.’

  ‘Good grief,’ said Alice Meynell. ‘Kiss her or something, and then take this child off me so we can all have a cup of tea.’

  John looked round puzzledly. ‘What was I thinking of?’ he asked himself. He hugged Anna again. ‘I’m so glad you came back.’

  ‘Think yourself lucky,’ Alice Meynell advised him, ‘that she did.’

  ‘Alice!’ Anna chided.

  Indicating the digger, John said, ‘I’ll have to sort that out in the morning. It’ll mean another day’s hire. I’m afraid.’ And finally, ‘What exactly did happen here?’

  Anna laughed and touched his arm. ‘You fell asleep. Overwork. Bad driving. It’s the usual old story.’

  Bad driving, she thought, remembering the crashed Volvo – and, worse, the episode with Francis at Cresset Beacon. Oh well, we’ve all done some of that. Meanwhile she was anxiously examining her daughter’s eyes. They were still green, but it was a green that inclined to the hazel now and, more importantly, they were Eleanor’s. Each time Anna checked her heart turned over with relief and she thought of Stella Herringe, perhaps the worst driver of them all.

  ‘Do you think she’ll ever come back?’

  John looked puzzled. ‘Who?’ he enquired.

  ‘Never mind.’

  Anna looked up at the crowded roofline, Flemish gables and tall octagonal chimneys of Nonesuch, behind which the moon rode the mackerel-coloured sky. They seemed less convoluted and threatening now, and she was already recovering some of the delight she had felt when she first came to the house, armed only with Stella’s description of it as ‘the Tudor building on the left at the end of Allbright Lane’. She remembered the languor of the afternoon sunshine in empty rooms; Stella’s voice on the telephone – then suddenly, frost on the lawns on Christmas Day, her first Christmas as John’s wife.

  I can put up with the past, she told herself, as long as it stays where it belongs. I can even learn to welcome it. Out loud she said, ‘Let’s go in and have some tea.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Alice agreed.

  John said, ‘I want whisky with mine. I don’t seem to have had whisky for ages.’

  They were turning to go when Orlando the cat trotted up the steps from the hidden room. He sniffed the night air, gave the JCB an old-fashioned look, then made off rapidly, tail up, in the direction of the orchard.

  Alice Meynell laughed. ‘That cat knows something it’s not telling.’

  Anna laughed too. ‘They all know something.’ She gave the garden a secret smile. ‘Orlando?’ she called.

  He stopped, looked at Anna over his shoulder. His eyes gleamed like gold in the night, then he was gone. What did he know? She had a sudden memory of him as a day-old kitten, struggling with an eye dropper of condensed milk, fighting so blindly to stay alive. What a long way they had all come since then!

  Don’t be silly, Anna, she told herself, but tears came into her eyes.

  Epilogue

  Alone as usual, Francis Baynes took Early Communion at St Mary’s in Ashmore, then put away the paten and the chalice for the last time. He had grown to enjoy St Mary’s for its bareness, its strong smell of lilies and wholesale wax polish, the echo of the dripping vestry tap, which no one seemed able to mend. He would miss it. It seemed to him a very real place. Good, ordinary light cut across its columns and pews. But it’s wrong of me to prefer it empty, he thought, in a recognition of his own romanticism. He sighed, tidied the pamphlets in the rack by the door, and – casting one more glance over the battered pews before he turned to leave – saw he was not alone after all.

  While he was busy with the pamphlets, Anna Dawe had slipped past him to stand at the other end of the nave, at the base of one of the great cylindrical Romanesque piers. The light from the side windows fell ac
ross her yellow frock. She brought to the cool air of the nave the smell of some light, flowery perfume. She had cut her dark hair in a new way. For Francis, St Mary’s was suddenly resonant with a faint full chord, as if someone had touched the keys of the organ, and the very air seemed filled with a kind of liquid gold.

  Anna looked up at the east window, with its sweet, faded medieval glass and stout St Christopher. ‘Do you think,’ she asked, ‘that God minds me leaving my bike in the graveyard?’

  Francis pretended to consider this. ‘He would rather you left your bike in the graveyard,’ he answered solemnly, ‘than your Volvo in a ditch.’

  They embraced, then stood back and smiled at each other.