As soon as the door of the flat closed behind her, she revived a little. ‘Don’t tell me,’ she said, amused by Anna’s expression. ‘You think it looks like the lighting department at Heal’s.’
‘It’s quite a surprise.’
‘That’s what I told the architect,’ said Stella. She lit a cigarette. ‘Now,’ she said: ‘Tea!’ She looked vaguely around the kitchen, as if uncertain where to start.
‘Shall I put the kettle on?’ Anna suggested.
‘Oh god, dear, not for me. I was wondering where I’d left the gin.’
‘Well I’d like some tea.’
‘Help yourself to whatever you want,’ said Stella. ‘I won’t be a moment.’ Soon she could be heard pottering about in the bathroom. There was a sound of running water, the faint click of small items being taken down, rejected, replaced on the shelves.
Left to herself Anna opened and closed a drawer, turned on the water at the deep hospital-style sink. Ten or fifteen minutes passed. The kettle boiled. Anna poked around in the galvanised steel cupboards, where she found catering packs of Earl Grey tea and digestive biscuits, both unopened. She found several bottles of gin.
Everything’s so clean, she thought. How nice to live so well.
When Stella returned, she looked ready for anything. Her green eyes were bright and clear, her skin seemed to have firmed up. She mixed herself a gin and tonic, sat down at the table and began to talk animatedly.
‘Cosmetics!’ she said. ‘What would we do without them?’
‘Surely not,’ said Anna. ‘I mean, you look—’
‘Don’t be fooled, dear. This is some of the most exclusive stuff in the world. If you could see it, I wouldn’t wear it.’ She sighed, and in a different voice complained, ‘Women tend their fears with an intelligence that only ever makes them worse. We stand in terror of ageing, the loss of sexual attraction which is the loss of power, the loss of everything that makes a woman.’ She leaned over quickly, captured Anna’s hand, and passed her fingers lightly and rapidly across the skin of the inner wrist.
‘Are you afraid yet?’ she asked.
Anna pulled her hand away. ‘Afraid of what?’
‘How old are you, dear? Thirty-five? Thirty-seven?’
‘I—’
‘Sit there!’ said Stella. ‘Don’t move!’
A moment later she was back again.
‘It’s never too early to start,’ she said. ‘And this will really help.’
On the table between them she placed a pot of skin cream no more than an inch or two in diameter, beautifully packaged in a cool grey and pink carton. Anna, who had never in her life imagined herself buying anything similar, looked at it uncertainly. She wanted to laugh, but she knew what a mistake that would be. Instead, she began with care:
‘I recognise the brand, of course. Who wouldn’t? But I don’t usually use—’
‘I promise you, dear,’ interrupted Stella Herringe, ‘that it works.’
Anna gave up. ‘It looks wonderfully expensive.’
‘Doesn’t it?’ agreed Stella. ‘Nevertheless,’ she said, ‘you’re to have it.’ She picked the little carton up again and folded the fingers of Anna’s right hand round it, then, satisfied that Anna had accepted the gift, looked at her watch. ‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if you’d mind finding your own way home?’
‘Of course not,’ said Anna. ‘It’s such a lovely day—’
‘Isn’t it?’ said Stella. ‘Let me walk you back through the house.’
They stood for a moment on the steps outside the great door. The breeze had dropped. Afternoon light glittered off Stella Herringe’s car. There was a sense of the space and heat of a summer evening, a kind of heavy softness of the air beneath the great cedars. Anna – who had in fact minded being asked to ‘find her own way home’ – was delighted all over again, and felt better immediately. The grounds of a Tudor mansion! Impulsively she took Stella’s hands. ‘It was very kind of you to invite me,’ she said, thinking how much she would enjoy the walk down through the gardens. ‘It’s such a lovely place.’
She laughed.
‘The only thing is, I expected there to be cats everywhere! After all, you’re so interested in them.’ She remembered something she had intended to mention over tea. ‘I did hear just the one, when we were in the room with the mural.’
‘I doubt it, dear. They never come in the house.’
‘It was quite distant, but I’m sure it was a cat.’
Stella’s face was suddenly expressionless. ‘I never allow them in,’ she insisted. ‘It doesn’t do, does it, to get too fond of them?’
Unable to respond to this (unable, too, to give the other response Stella wanted, ‘I suppose I must have been mistaken...’), Anna felt she had become invisible, enabling Stella to look straight through her at the lawns and cedars, the driveway descending in its shallow, elegant curves towards the road. There was a moment of uncomfortable silence.
‘Anyway,’ Anna said. ‘Thank you for tea.’
‘You must come again,’ said Stella.
Then she tilted her head as if to listen, twisting her body at its neat girlish waist to stare back into the shadows of Nonesuch.
‘I think that’s my phone,’ she said. ‘Excuse me.’
*
That evening, not altogether expecting an answer, Anna asked Ruth Canning: ‘What could I say?’
‘What indeed?’ said Ruth, in the voice of someone who had called up in the hope of more interesting gossip.
‘I knew I’d heard a cat. She knew too.’
‘As she said, it may not have been inside the house. In my day, most of the AWC people had outdoor catteries. That was one of the big costs.’
‘But if you love cats—’
‘I’m not sure “love” is the right word here,’ said Ruth. ‘When you do rescue work, the animals you’re taking care of are strays, or ferals, or discards. They’re old, sick, difficult. They might have to be put down. You can’t afford to get attached to them, and you don’t mix them up with your pets. A lot of these old dears have learned the hard way. They take a witheringly practical approach.’
‘Old dears?’ said Anna. ‘Ruth, that’s another thing. She might be fifty, but she looks like the cover of this month’s Vogue. As for the cosmetics. I’ve never seen anything like them. She’s given me something that must have cost a hundred pounds a gram. I’ve only ever seen it in places like Harvey Nichols. I couldn’t afford it even when I worked for the bank.’
‘Ah,’ said Ruth. ‘I think I can help you there. Speaking of money and banks.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Do you remember me saying I thought I knew the name Herringe? Well I did, but I couldn’t remember where from. It nagged and nagged – especially the AWC connection. There’s only one thing I know about, and that’s the City: so I went back through some of my old stuff. Sure enough, Herringe was a name that had cropped up more than once when I was researching articles on City institutions. There were a couple of Herringes on the boards of things, so I had another look, to see what I could see.’ Moving from the Internet to Companies House, then back to the Internet again, Ruth had tracked the Herringe footprint through a bewildering web of holding companies, trust funds and offshore havens. It seemed to multiply endlessly, glimmering in the data like a seam of metal, associated with everything from petrochemicals to agribusiness. ‘They aren’t ICI, but they aren’t poor either. They’re in the Third World, they’re in the First. Most of all, they’re in money.’
‘If they were in money I’d have heard of them,’ said Anna.
Ruth thought this naïve. ‘Who knows who runs anything?’ she asked. ‘A name slips away so easily into the cracks. After that it’s proxy-directors, offshore operations, whole concerns run from a site on the Web or an address in some East-Asian office block. It spreads across the world until, somehow, the connections between companies become more important than the companies themselves. You’d find nothing unless you knew where
to look.’
She paused, as if to order her thoughts.
‘I’m not sure I should have put it quite like this. They’re not hiding or anything. This is just the way business is done today. You know that as well as I do. Nothing’s “above board” because there isn’t a board any more – if there ever was.’
‘Don’t be coy, Ruth.’
‘Hm. OK. Stella is both trustee and recipient of family money – not all of it by any means. But she’s used it well. She has her own business interests too, and—’
‘—one of them is a cosmetics manufacturer!’
‘Exactly,’ said Ruth. ‘Engelion pic. Quite small, but very successful. Registered thirty years ago, with offices in Hoxton, although it appears to have led one or two lives before that, first as a wholesale fashion house, and then, weirdly enough, a firm of chemical engineers. To be honest, I got lost trying to follow it back. That’s not my skill, of course, the bigger Herringe companies are fabulously old. You can trace them quite easily, all the way back to the 1600s and the beginnings of coffee-house capitalism.’ She laughed. ‘God knows what they did with their money before that.’
Anna thought of Nonesuch, with its entangled passageways and ancient cedars. They built houses with it, she said to herself. Or one house, anyway. And then, out loud, remembering the ‘diverse enterprises’ on which Joshua Hering had based his fortune: ‘Nothing changes, does it?’
‘Are you OK, Anna?’ said Ruth.
‘Of course I am.’
They talked for a few minutes about other things, then Anna said goodbye to her friend and put down the phone.
‘Coffee-house capitalism!’ she whispered.
Returning from Nonesuch in the late afternoon, she had unpacked the morning’s shopping and then, turning out into a shallow bowl the whitebait she had bought from the Shambles market, watched with delight as Dellifer and the kittens confronted their half-pound shoal of tiny silver fish. Up had gone their noses, the moment the bag was opened. Up had gone their tails. Orlando and Vita had trodden on one another in their haste to bury their faces in the dish, then looked up at Anna speechless with love, gratitude and greed (not necessarily in that order). Dellifer, on the other hand, had approached the whole event more cautiously, crouching as far away from the bowl as she could and stretching her neck out to sniff at its contents, before dabbing at the fish with one paw and deciding that discretion is always the better part of valour.
‘You ridiculous thing!’ Anna had laughed. ‘At least give it a try.’
In all this excitement she had forgotten the elegant little carton from Engelion Cosmetics. Now she took it out of her bag and placed it thoughtfully on the table in front of her. Separating the jar from its packaging and instructions, she found herself trying to make sense of Stella Herringe – the greed, the narcissism, the unsettling seesaw of conflicting moods. Childishness always on the heels of maturity. A need for approval one minute, for control the next. Weakness masquerading as strength – or, perhaps more accurately, a strength based on the very weakness it was trying to deny. Stella had arranged herself so coyly beneath the portrait of Lady Clara! Would it ever be possible to separate her from her own vanity?
The jar was heavy for its size, simple and nicely proportioned, made of a milky glass. Anna gave the lid a half-turn anticlockwise and the kitchen filled so suddenly with a thick, musky perfume that the cats looked up as if someone had called their names. It was a complex scent, layered and penetrative. A flowery first cousin to Stella Herringe’s perfume overlay something harsher and more animal. Beneath that, a long way down, the ghost of chemicals, so faint you could never say for certain you had smelled them. Dellifer sniffed the air anxiously once or twice, jumped as if she had been prodded, then dived noisily through the cat-flap and out into the garden.
Anna smiled.
‘Dear old Dellifer,’ she said absently. ‘Two new things in one day will always be too much for you.’
She touched the tip of her finger to the perfectly even white surface of the substance in the jar. It was surprisingly cold, as if she had kept it in the fridge. Though light in texture it had a strangely viscous consistency which made it feel as thick as oil. Anna unfolded the leaflet that came with it. ‘Beauty,’ she read, ‘is a performance. It is the performance of your life.’ The key to Stella Herringe’s personality: youth as beauty, beauty as unrelenting display. What an effort it must take to maintain! ‘To prevent your skin from losing elasticity,’ the Engelion leaflet explained, ‘anti-ageing precautions should begin as early as twenty.’ A list of ingredients included ‘ceramide derivatives to limit collagen decay, AHAs to retexture, and natural hydro-fixers including animal fibroins modified to retain 400 times their own weight in water’. Finally, it reassured: ‘At Engelion we spend more than half our resources testing the product to make certain it is safe.’ Anna wiped her fingertip on a tissue, replaced the lid securely on the jar. Stella Herringe had woken up one morning – ten years ago? fifteen? – and heard a clock ticking. Whatever she did now, Anna guessed, that sound rarely went away. Still living out the same long, dreamy moment of panic, she was stretched as tight as a face-lift across her own despair.
Anna understood perfectly. But it was, she suspected, too easy an understanding, one that would really mean nothing to her until – in one year’s time? In five? – she panicked too.
11
Days passed and the weather improved; but the dreams – if dreams they were – haunted me. My life appeared to have reached a turning point. Something I had taken for granted seemed to have been lost forever.
I enjoyed, as blithely as I always had, the things I loved most: the way briny tuna fired its way along the sides of my tongue: play-hunting my catnip mouse; the sun on my fur in the morning: but where before I had passed unthinking from one state of delightful immediacy to the next, now I found that when I was not entirely immersed in whatever I was doing, in those moments ‘between’ things – before I fell asleep; just after I awoke; when I sat on the bare patch of grass outside the back door without any specific plan in my head – I found myself preoccupied with suspicion and doubt.
Whenever I could, I avoided my grandfather, slinking silently under a bush if I saw a dark shadow in the long grass, fleeing swiftly into another room if the old cat entered the house. And I spent less time with Vita: unfairly, I now regarded her as dull – a childish nuisance, rather than my beloved nestmate.
Instead, I sought out the company of the young male cats who hung around behind the cottages, boasting of their conquests, their speed and skill and general hardness—
‘Rats, now,’ a large black and white cat, about six months old and known for no apparent reason as Fernie, would confide: ‘They’re great fun to hunt. A bit more fight in ’em than your average mouse or shrew. More sporting, if you know what I mean.’
Heads would nod vigorously. They rarely disagreed about anything that really mattered. The group dynamic tended to favour conformity, rather than difference, and I had decided against sharing with it such philosophical difficulties as whether dreams could have physical consequences – like stained fur – opting instead for safer ground: hunting, fighting and feeding, or a combination of all three. No one noticed the yellow marks on my feet: the self-absorption of the young is legendary. Besides, personal hygiene did not figure very high in their priorities.
‘Ah, but they don’t taste that good, do they, rats?’ Ginge would shake his head sadly. ‘Rather bitter.’
‘Blackbirds, though: once you get through the feathers—’
‘Thrushes too—’ This from a small brindled cat who encouraged the others to call him Feisty, although I often heard him summoned by his owner, a little girl with long brown hair and big green and white shoes, by the name of ‘Oscar’.
‘A really good robin—’
I would join in enthusiastically, though I had never yet actually caught and eaten another living creature. It did not occur to me that neither had most of the others.
Ginge and Fernie, though, spent a considerable amount of their time hanging out with some older cats down near a place they referred to as ‘the canal’. They described them with awe, and I had soon made a picture in my head of an exotic, tattered bunch of ne’er-do-wells who lay in the sun-streaked rushes by the waterside, stripping their shining claws and spinning tales of blood and guts.
Such connections conferred senior status upon Ginge and Fernie. But because I was a well set-up young cat who could run and leap as fast and as high as others a month or two older, I soon found myself further up this little pecking order than I might otherwise have expected, and it pleased me immensely, giving me as it did somewhere to belong, without complications.
Thus it was that I left my kittenhood behind, along with the sister I would now chase off with a snarl and a cuff rather than allow her to infiltrate my fragile male domain.
One day I slipped through the back door to hear Dellifer comforting Vita in the kitchen. Vita sat there miserably, head down, toying boredly with a piece of wilted spinach: ‘Never mind, darling,’ Dellifer said. ‘He’ll grow out of it.’
Grow out of it! At the time I was highly miffed.
But she was right, of course. It was, after all, her job to be right.
Yet it must have seemed to Vita that I never would. Her days without a playmate with whom to share her kittenish energies, her ravenous need for adventure, stretched out dull and interminable. Dellifer, her own youth receded to a distant blur, had no patience with mock-fights and tail-biting. ‘I’m far too busy for that sort of nonsense,’ she would say crossly, and then would go and arrange that oddly long white form along the sunny windowsill in the breakfast room and stare blankly out into the garden. Expressly forbidden to wander beyond the confines of the garden. Vita took to lying disconsolately in the flowerbeds, her only companions ladybirds and centipedes, none of whom seemed inclined to play the games she craved.