‘So,’ she said, ‘leaving.’
Francis nodded. ‘And not just me. I caught a brief glimpse of Alice before communion.’
‘Oh yes?’
Alice Meynell had decided to go back to America as soon as she could wind down her life at Cambridge. She was going to marry her physicist and, after she had got herself a place at MIT, marry physics too. It was the only real pursuit for human beings, if you asked her. Meanwhile she intended to live, she said, in this amazing part of New York she had heard of, where Jack Kerouac had once carved his name in the tables of the bars and you could see life at any hour of the day or night. Anna was frightened for her friend and elated for her too: all that energy and commitment, all that faith in the world.
‘Oh yes.’ Francis smiled wryly. ‘She was trying to get round Pond Corner at about eighty-five miles an hour.’
‘I’ll miss her.’
‘The ducks won’t. Or the older parishioners.’
They contemplated this for a moment. Then Francis asked, ‘And how is John?’
‘He’s fine. He talked to the bank manager and they’re going to back him after all. He’s started working on his book again. The Dream as Cultural Index. I don’t understand a word of it and I don’t suppose anyone else will either. And of course he and Eleanor are like that—’ Here she smiled and held up her right hand, palm out, first two fingers pressed tightly together. ‘As for the rest of it, I don’t think he’ll ever remember much of what happened.’
‘He’s a good man,’ said Francis.
‘He is, isn’t he?’
They went out of the church. Francis locked the door for the last time and they walked about the churchyard together, arm in arm in the early morning sunshine. Rooks circled and cawed. Starlings hopped about under the yew trees, bustling through the dark glossy turf and over the graves of those village stalwarts, the Millers, the Clements, the Rose Popes and the Herringes. Most of them had their epitaphs, their final attempt to control the way the world saw them. But Stella Elizabeth Clara Herringe’s new South African granite headstone gave only her dates, 1947–1999. Primroses grew at its foot and there were fresh anemones in a little vase.
‘And have you decided to take another parish?’ Anna asked after a while.
He shook his head. ‘No.’
Then what will you do?’
‘Travel. Learn more. In a way, Alice is right.’
‘Don’t let her hear you say that.’
‘All we have is to ask questions of the world – physics is just a modern way of doing that. So much of the world is invisible. And so much of the visible world is wrapped up with the invisible. I was right all along: I was wrong.’
He thought for a moment. Some months after the fact, he had given Anna the edited version of his experience with the woman from the graveyard. Anna had seen through it immediately and delighted him by saying, ‘Francis, I believe you had sex with her, whatever she was!’ To which he had been surprised to find himself replying with some nonchalance, ‘Oh, repeatedly, repeatedly,’ which made her laugh out loud. Even so, he was a little nervous around the subject. ‘That thing I encountered—’ He stared up at the church tower and shivered. ‘That woman or thing or whatever she was… Well, despite herself, she helped me to understand. Perhaps that was her function, for me.’
‘In a way I wish I’d met her too.’
‘In a way you did. We all did.’
She took his hands. ‘Oh Francis! So you’re off to see the world?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m glad. You’ll send me e-mails?’
‘You know I will.’
They smiled at one another. Their walk had brought them back to the lych-gate. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘here’s my bike. Isn’t it awful? All that rust. It clanks so on the hills.’ She looked at her watch. ‘And I must go,’ she added. ‘Eleanor is making our lives hell about Teletubbies, toast and poo, and all that tends to happen at about this time of day.’ She held out her hand, then put her arms round him instead. ‘Oh dear. Goodbye, Francis.’
He watched her pedal away. He realised that, as ever, they had talked more about his life than hers. ‘What will you do?’ he called.
Anna Dawe, née Prescott – who had come a very long way from Pond Cottage, out of the jaws of certain death, not to mention the jaws of the past and of the money business and of her own inner life; who had defended both cats and men, and learned to lavish herself on the grubbiest daughter who ever swallowed a clothes peg, necessitating a race to A&E in Drychester at five o’clock on a winter morning in John’s ‘new’ Volvo (which was more ancient) – only waved and pedalled harder. ‘I’m going to make that house what it should have been all along,’ she called over her shoulder.
*
‘You’re very quiet.’
The sun beat down, making a warm haze of the space between my ears, where the fur had been singed back to the skin and was now growing through again, downy and fine – as soft as a kitten’s, Millie said, when she groomed me, and then she would fall silent and thoughtful, and her eyes would become unfocused for a moment or two and she would change the subject. It had taken me some time to recognise this silence and longer still to understand what it signified. My grandfather always said I was a fool, but I was only now realising the extent of my foolishness.
‘I was just thinking,’ I said, twisting my head to regard her and squinting through the brightness. The sun was silver on the sea, it made a halo of her fur, especially where it caught the tuft on the top of her head. ‘About Letty and Belly; and Cat.’ It was hard to think of her as Squash now, having seen the elegance and the power of her in her wild guise, making a finer dreamcatcher than I had ever been. ‘And Lydia.’
‘Ah, Lydia.’
I heard the resignation in Millie’s voice and it made something inside me shrivel in shame. ‘Well, Liddy and Cass,’ I amended quickly. Initially, it had been hard for me to see the Russian Blue in Lydia’s company, let alone usurping my relationship with the girls. ‘Call me Cass,’ he had growled at me once we had survived an awkward period of stalking around one another and he had ascertained I would not stand between him and his ‘family’. ‘I have had enough of this ridiculous Circassian Gogol II. The witch is gone and I must be a different cat now. I have certain… responsibilities.’ Then he had leaned his great, angular head towards me in an uncharacteristic gesture of confidentiality. ‘I shall do my best to make her happy; I know I have a great deal to make reparation for.’ And indeed, he did seem to make Liddy happy – if anyone could. In his company her eyes shone – not the hard topaz gleam they had when she contemplated me, but the melting golden tone they took on when she was confronted by a plateful of whitebait: luxurious and sensual; nebulous with greed.
For their part, the girls behaved towards him as if they had always been together and none of the bizarreness of the situation touched them at all. Perhaps it was that the scent of him, that faint, exotic musk had been familiar to them from birth. It was a mystery to me. As it was, I passed through an interval of grim jealousy, until one night I was visited by a dream in which I was barrelling down a wild road, my lion paws thudding soft and rhythmic on the cold dusty ground, and light was spilling off my shiny fur. Beside me, a beautiful lynx, her coat barred with black and silver, great tufts sprouting from her ears like spring barley, bounded along on oiled limbs, her eyes like lamps in the darkness, and as she ran she called out to me, ‘Leap and run, Orlando! Leap and run for ever!’ and I had never felt so powerful or so free.
The next day, Millefleur and I left for a visit to her favourite seaside haunt and it had been all she had promised me – sunshine and salty air; fat hedgerow voles too complacent and slow to evade our teeth and claws; and flowerbeds full of fragrant marigolds in which to curl up and sleep.
We were lying in the lee of a garden wall now, a wall crowned with nodding heads of red valerian, its rocky crannies colonised by pennywort and rosettes of bright ochre lichen. Over Millie’s shoulder I
could see one of the fishing boats, tiny against the vast silver sea, making its way back to the harbour. There would be mackerel heads to be cadged there later.
‘Millie,’ I said, taking my courage into my paws at last. ‘When I said I was thinking about the girls and Liddy, what I really meant was—’ The enormity of what I was about to say made a hard lump of fear rise in my chest, fear that she would laugh in my face and leave me here, alone and stupid; but I swallowed it down and struggled on as best I could. ‘What I was going to say, Millie – what I have wanted to say for some time now is: kittens.’ Millie blinked at me but said nothing at all. It was as if the world were holding its breath. ‘Kittens,’ I repeated, reckless now the word was out in the open. ‘You and I… Would you?… Could you?…’ I blundered hopelessly to a halt.
In reply, Millie regarded me solemnly, then rolled backwards into the long grass. Her belly fur glowed in the sunlight. ‘Takes more than fine words to make kittens, honey,’ she said softly.
Her jaunty piebald mask twitched minutely. It was only when both eyes were open and shining again that I realised she had winked at me.
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About Gabriel King
A lifelong cat lover, GABRIEL KING has shared a home with every variety of feline from stray moggy to pedigree. Born in Cornwall and raised in Warwickshire, the author now lives between London and Shropshire.
The Wild Roads Series
Behind the realm of man lie the wild roads. Weaving through time and space, these hidden pathways carry the natural energies – the spirits, the dreams – of the world.
No creature can slip into the shadows and travel the wild roads better than the cat. For millennia, cats have patrolled the tangled paths, maintaining balance and order, guarding against corruption and chaos. It is dangerous territory: for those who control the wild roads hold the key to the world.
Amid the struggle between the purest good and the darkest evil, here are tales of duty and destiny, of courage and comradeship among the extraordinary creatures who brave the wild roads...
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First published in 2002 by Arrow Books
This eBook edition first published in the UK in 2017 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Gabriel King, 2001
The moral right of Gabriel King to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (E) 9781786699381
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