‘Yes.’
‘Half a pound?’
‘Yes.’
‘Costa Rica?’
‘Yes please.’
On a wet day in Drychester everyone pressed into the Shambles to avoid the rain, filling its alleys with damp camel-hair and partly folded umbrellas. By twelve-thirty Anna was tired of shouting to make herself heard. She had bought the whitebait, and seen enough shellac records, 1920s cigarette cases and Festival of Britain tea services to last a lifetime, but wasn’t quite ready to eat lunch. Standing in the Shambles bookshop leafing through a volume called Canals and Narrowboats of Today, she smelled scent – something subtle, expressive, musky, something hard to come by, Anna thought, even if you could afford it – and heard a voice say:
‘It’s Anna Prescott, isn’t it? Whatever happened to those kittens, dear? Come and have some lunch, and tell me about them.’
It was Stella Herringe.
‘Well,’ said Anna, ‘that’s very kind of you, but—’
Ten minutes later they were facing one another across a table at Fletcher’s, waiting for soup and filled croissants and – to Anna’s dismay – calling each other by their first names. Stella Herringe settled herself and her shopping, treated Anna to an ironical but somehow satisfied smile, and then leaned forward to whisper, ‘All these Jaeger jackets and Scotch House skirts! Very countrified. Very Drychester.’ Anna, though she laughed and felt included, was suddenly aware of her own Barbour jacket and Levis. She said rather shyly:
‘You look more like Manhattan than Drychester.’
Stella received the tribute with a curious mixture of complacency and mischievousness. She looked down at herself, then back up at Anna, tilting her head exactly the way she had done for her admirers in the Green Man. ‘Donna Karan,’ she said. ‘Middle-aged but elegant. And exactly ten years younger than I ought to be wearing. I’m mutton dressed as lamb, dear, but I suppose you’ve already guessed that.’
She reached out suddenly and touched Anna’s cheek. ‘You should take care of that skin,’ she said. ‘I can recommend something.’
Anna was surprised and irritated by the intimacy of this gesture, disturbed by the dry, warm pressure of her companion’s fingertips. She looked away deliberately across the steamy room, at the chattering seated women and hard-pressed waitresses, and only after she was certain Stella Herringe had lowered her hand, said, ‘I think we’re going to have a bit of a wait.’
Stella consulted her watch. She lit a cigarette – glancing ruefully at Anna as if to say, ‘I know, I know. But what can I do?’ – and called for an ashtray.
‘And the kittens?’ she said.
‘I lost one. Along with the mother, of course, but you knew that. The other two are doing beautifully.’
‘Oh good,’ said Stella. She drew on her cigarette. ‘You seem to have managed rather well without me,’ she acknowledged.
Anna was unsure how to respond. Even if she had felt like taking Stella Herringe into her confidence, it would have been impossible: she couldn’t begin to explain the unlikely circumstances in which her difficulties had been solved. So after some thought she decided to lie.
‘I was grateful for your offer, of course. But I got them to accept baby formula in the end.’
‘Good for you!’
‘They’re quite grown up now. Real little nuisances.’
‘If they’re a nuisance I could take the female off your hands as soon as she’s mature. The male would be harder to accommodate. We might have to make other arrangements for him—’
‘No, no!’ interrupted Anna, appalled. ‘I didn’t mean that.’
Stella Herringe seemed to lose interest. She stubbed out her cigarette.
‘They’re just lively kittens,’ said Anna. ‘That’s all.’
‘Well, dear, just remember I’m here.’
Shortly afterwards, lunch arrived. Stella had barely glanced at the menu when it was offered to her. Now she said, ‘Ah, food!’ and concentrated her attention so thoroughly that Anna felt snubbed. Stella ate with the appetite of eighteen years and the fastidiousness of fifty, taking small, quick, regular mouthfuls and dispatching them easily with her white teeth. Her eyes, unfocused, seemed to look inward. She addressed herself to her plate for some moments without saying anything, then, indicating the remains of her croissant with her fork, enquired. ‘Would it be wrong of me to order another of these?’
Anna said faintly: ‘They are nice, aren’t they?’
‘I think I’ll have a parmesan salad as well,’ Stella informed the waitress. ‘I love food,’ she said to Alice. ‘Don’t you?’
Some minutes later she was wiping her mouth on her serviette (‘What we’re taught to call a “napkin” in nice houses’), lighting another cigarette and suggesting, ‘My car’s not far from here. Why don’t I drive you home?’
‘Oh,’ said Anna, ‘no, thank you, but I—’
‘Even better, let’s go and have a look at these naughty kittens of yours, then I’ll take you over to Nonesuch for tea. Mm?’
‘I really shouldn’t,’ said Anna.
Somehow though she found herself sitting in the big grey Mercedes with its tranquil, cosseting interior, watching the hedgerows stream by on either side and – caught out so soon in a lie – wondering how she would explain Dellifer’s presence to Stella Herringe. The sun had emerged from between sailing cumulus clouds in a scoured blue sky; the hawthorn leaves were bright fresh green. Stella drove well, if a little impatiently, ignoring the glitter of water on the road. She had a brusque way with comers, Anna noticed, as if she suspected their right to be there. While she drove, she liked to chat; and now that she had what she wanted where the kittens were concerned, she seemed less interested in them than in Anna. Without quite intending to, Anna passed from the guarded (‘I suppose I’m just like anyone else, really’) to the candid, providing details of her childhood in Warwickshire and Croydon, undergraduate life at University College, the beginnings of a career in banking and finance during the great stock market panics of the late eighties. But though Stella’s curiosity was fierce, and she was good at listening and nodding, and saying things like, ‘How extraordinary!’ it was clear that none of this interested her in the slightest.
‘What about men, dear?’ she said eventually, with a kind of plaintive exasperation. ‘It’s no life without men.’
Anna drew the line at this, and – aware of the irony – returned as soon as possible to the subject of the kittens, which, though it had its pitfalls, seemed less invasive. ‘I still feel sorry for their mother,’ she said. Then, casting around for something to add: ‘After I buried her and the dead kitten, some animal came and dug them up. It was horrible.’
Stella Herringe patted her arm. ‘Don’t talk about death, dear,’ she advised. ‘People hate it.’ Then she said: ‘What’s all this I hear about you and John?’
Anna stared miserably out of the car. Any answer at all would mean acknowledging what had happened in the Green Man, establishing a link between her life and Stella Herringe’s. It would mean – as she put it to herself – ‘letting Stella in’.
‘I thought he had been rude to me,’ she said. ‘But it turns out that he’s just rather shy.’
Stella Herringe gave a shout of delighted laughter. ‘Where on earth did you hear that?’
Anna, who had anticipated almost every reaction but this, blinked. She wasn’t sure whether to feel relieved or angry. She had chosen the latter and was beginning to say, in the frostiest voice she could muster, ‘I’m sorry?’ when the sound of a mobile phone filled the interior of the Mercedes.
‘That’s mine, I think,’ said Stella.
‘It could hardly be mine,’ said Anna, who had left hers behind with a sigh of relief when she left TransCorp.
Still laughing, Stella Herringe mauled her handbag about with one hand until she found the phone and, without driving the slightest bit slower, began to talk into it. After a moment or two she stopped laughing, and her voice becam
e dangerously calm. ‘Tell him he’d bloody well better get a move on,’ she said. Then: ‘I don’t care. I don’t care what his problems are. I asked him if he could sign by the end of the month and he said yes.’ And finally: ‘Look, dear, this is what I pay you for.’ She studied her little Cartier watch. ‘I’ll be at Nonesuch all afternoon. About five minutes. Good. No.’ And she rang off. ‘I’m sorry,’ she told Anna, ‘but we’re going to have to give the kittens a miss.’
This time, Anna felt only relief. ‘Just drop me in the village,’ she said. ‘Anywhere will do.’
‘No, no. I want you to see my house!’ insisted Stella.
She seemed distracted, though. She drove much faster; and about John Dawe nothing more was said.
*
Though the great house at Nonesuch was Tudor in origin – having been started from scratch in late 1482 by Joshua Hering, a Norfolk merchant who had made his fortune in and about the Mediterranean by way of enterprises described at the time as ‘diverse’ – it had been remodelled to suit the taste of successive occupants. Anna’s first view of it was from the south, from which aspect the tall ranked windows of the Jacobean front (added in 1621 by Sir John Herringe, a nephew of Joshua’s successor and the first to adopt the modern spelling of the family name) rose out of the surrounding gardens like something from a TV historical drama.
Nonesuch – known until the end of the sixteenth century as ‘the New Build’ – lay in the shelter of a shallow, wooded valley a little east of Ashmore village. One glimpse of the south front was enough for Anna to recognise a certain false modesty in Stella’s original description of the house as ‘the Tudor building on the left at the end of Allbright Lane’. It was rather more than that. Its convoluted design – carried out in Drychester stone and a delicious warm red brick and based, the story went, on a stylisation of Joshua Hering’s initials – made for curious perspectives and a crowded roofline rendered more fantastic by Flemish gables and groups of tall octagonal chimneys. The viewer’s eye was always uncertain about Nonesuch – after a visit people were never really able to reconstruct its shape. The grounds were hardly less complex – hidden lawns and terraces, labyrinths of holly, fantasias of box and yew enclosing potagers and rose gardens between which wound, like tangled ribbon, pathways of herringbone brick – a pun endlessly repeated to assuage Joshua’s Tudor ego.
Anna was entranced. ‘How beautiful!’ she said.
Afternoon light struck down on the Herringe arms, ochred with lichen, done in plaques on the gateposts. The Mercedes engine purred like a cat as it lifted them up the long rising drive which made its way between the gardens towards the great front doors.
‘You’re seeing it at its best, of course,’ said Stella.
*
Once inside, Anna fell into an expectant but dreamy state in which the building itself seemed to affect her mood. Why should she feel sad in the airy, sun-filled space of the Great Hall, yet laugh despite herself when she saw the dreary two-light windows of the crypt (retained from a structure that had stood on the site fully a hundred years before Joshua Hering’s time)? It was less the architectural features themselves that affected her than their juxtaposition. Nonesuch was a bizarre, mazy collision of styles and times, of corridors which had been turned into rooms, pantries which had been turned into stairwells, of solars and chapels and parlours. Every new addition or restoration or rationalisation was a few feet out-of-true with everything else.
‘Cross a threshold here,’ said Stella Herringe, ‘and you’ve moved two hundred years before you know it. Take care in that doorway, dear, there’s one more step than you’d expect.’
Anna stared up at a decorated ceiling. What kind of life had gone on beneath it?
‘Old houses always feel so inhabited,’ she said.
‘Do they, dear? I suppose they do.’
‘I would be overpowered by it,’ said Anna.
Stella considered this view briefly. ‘It’s very modern to try and live without the past,’ she concluded: ‘But that’s only a kind of repression, isn’t it?’ She seemed preoccupied. She hurried from room to room, moving off like an impatient tour guide the moment Anna caught up, and her voice was always echoing back from somewhere ahead.
Anna – disconcerted, and increasingly unsure whether Stella was talking to her or into the mobile phone which she kept shaking and pressing to her ear – struggled along behind, saying things like, ‘Amazing,’ and, ‘Oh, but that’s beautiful,’ and trying to keep track of their progress into the house. It was colder near the centre, she thought: or perhaps she had only expected that. Puzzled by the ups and downs of her own feelings, and defeated from the outset by the curves and re-entrants of Joshua Hering’s original ground plan, she soon felt completely lost.
‘I thought these Tudor places always had a courtyard in the middle,’ she said.
Stella ignored her. ‘Look, I can easily get someone else,’ she told the mobile phone: ‘If that’s what he wants.’ She listened with exaggerated patience for a moment, then took the phone away from her ear and stared at it. ‘Bloody things,’ she said to Anna. ‘You can’t do anything with them and you can’t do anything without them.’ Then she opened a door.
‘If you want a courtyard,’ she said, ‘have a look in there.’
Anna hesitated on the threshold, peering in. Light from a casement window fell across the blackened floorboards of a large, sparely furnished room, to reveal the mural painted directly on to the plaster of the opposite wall. It was the view across a cobbled courtyard to a glassed-in arcade below a timbered upper storey – the gables of which were carved with Tudor roses and fleur-de-lys – seen through the leaded panes of an oriel window. There were no figures in the composition, but a shadow behind the leaded glass of the arcade suggested that someone, perhaps a woman, had just entered there. The courtyard light had been painted to seem as if it was coming from every direction at once, as if the artist had been instructed to make an illusion that would work at any time of the day. This cleverness undercut its own success. For a second, your eye was willing to be deceived: then it shrugged and gave up, turning with relief to the real things in the room.
‘Go on,’ encouraged Stella. ‘You can go in and look.’
Anna entered reluctantly.
‘Trompe l’œil,’ said Stella proudly, tapping the plaster with her knuckles to produce a hollow sound. ‘Put in by the Haut-Herringes a couple of centuries ago. The original wall’s behind it, complete with the Elizabethan window through which you could once look down into the real courtyard. They loved a joke in those days, they loved to be clever.’ She stood away a little and waited for Anna to say something. Anna – partly to get her own back for the jibe about history and repression, and partly because she couldn’t see how anyone had ever been fooled by the painting – laughed and said:
‘I suppose they did. It seems rather naïve now.’
‘Don’t be too sure about that.’
Anna said, ‘Oh, but look out of this window!’
She flung the old lights open and leaned out, to discover herself high on the east front. Long terraced lawns stretched away, broken here and there by groups of cedar trees and leaden statuary. From somewhere closer to came a smell of thyme and lavender, the sound of early insects bumbling through the grass. A breeze idly moved the tops of the great cedars, then went on to ruffle the beechwoods on the rise a quarter of a mile behind the house. Anna, standing in a kind of shocked delight at the window, said, ‘I’ve seen this view before, I’m sure I have,’ and then, laughing: ‘But as soon as I think about it I know I haven’t. Because I’ve never seen anything so beautiful in my life. Déjà vu.’
Then she said: ‘If the courtyard really is back there, the house is only one room thick.’
Stella gave her a considering glance. ‘Be careful at that casement, dear,’ she warned. ‘It isn’t just the plaster that’s unsound.’
Anna shut the window. ‘Déjà vu,’ she whispered again.
Stella H
erringe was waiting a little way along the dimly lit passage outside. Anna surprised her in a moment of respite, leaning against the wall holding her mobile phone laxly by her side and staring into the air in front of her. With no one to impress or dominate, she had allowed a vacant expression to creep on to her face, where it settled down to loosen the muscles, slacken the skin, accentuate a fold here, a gauntness there, until she looked all of her fifty years. On the oak panelling above her head hung a small, dark oil painting in a heavy frame from which most of the gold leaf was missing. It was clearly a portrait of one of her own ancestors, a woman two decades younger than Stella – lazy, used to power, wearing pearls and a tight brocade bodice – whose unbound black hair framed the same perfect bone structure. She was seated, and staring out boldly at the portraitist. One hand held the neck of a stringed instrument; the other was folded across it. They were strong hands, and her blue eyes were blank with greed.
Stella chuckled. ‘Clara de Montfort,’ she said, ‘just after she married Joshua’s grandson Edward in 1573,’ She tilted her head. ‘We’re supposed to look rather alike. What do you think?’ Anna thought the similarity shocking. Except for the difference in age, they might have been the same woman. But suspecting that Stella already knew this, she said only:
‘I can see the family resemblance.’
‘Ah,’ said Stella. ‘The family resemblance.’
She looked down at the mobile phone in her hand as if she had forgotten what it was for. ‘She was a woman of great self-knowledge, that one.’ A green light had begun to blink on the keypad of the phone. She touched it experimentally with the tip of her index finger. ‘Great self-knowledge,’ she repeated.
Suddenly she shrugged. ‘The whole place is falling down round our ears, of course. Nobody’s lived in more than a couple of rooms of it since the Second World War. I’ve had rather a nice little flat made at the back, where the north-east corridor used to be. Let’s go and have some tea.’
*
Stella’s apartment had an immaculate air, as if it was still waiting for someone to move in. Designed less as a home than as a ‘living space’, it featured spare, uncluttered white walls, furniture and fittings of stainless steel, polished hardwood floors. It was full of light. Ranked halogen lamps chased the shadows from a kitchen equipped with an eight-hob professional range and Westinghouse refrigerator; from a tiny bathroom with elegant shelves and a Japanese tub. Even the etched-glass risers of the staircase were side-lit, to bring out designs of stylised cats and herbs. Look beyond the untreated linen blinds, Anna thought, and you might be in Docklands or Clerkenwell: anywhere but Nonesuch. At first it seemed like an insult to the past. Yet in a sense Stella was only continuing the tradition of the English country house: like every Herringe before her, she had added to the building according to the fads and styles of her time.