The Knot Garden

As a result of this decision Anna found herself in possession of a bicycle. A ladies’ black sit-up-and-beg, with skirt-savers and faded, creaking wicker baskets front and rear, it came out into the light with all the other junk, covered in cobwebs and dust. She wouldn’t have been seen dead on it at Cambridge. Now she hosed it down, oiled the working parts, and, after an abortive attempt to train the kittens to travel by basket (Orlando, unimpressed, shrewdly refused to join in; his sister stayed in place a moment or two before trying to climb up Anna’s forearm to safety), was soon riding round the lanes, up towards Cresset Beacon and the high point of the downs. The bicycle clanked mournfully on the steeper hills, but otherwise seemed sound. From the top, she watched cloud-shadows race across the valley, while the wind blew her hair into her eyes. She loved to be out and about before Ashmore was awake, bowling along the towpath of the Brindley canal or down past the village shop – from behind the tiny counter of which Hilda and Reggie Candleton sold frozen fish pie and first-class stamps, Kodak film and icecream for the summer visitors – in the thick yellow sunshine.

  She was happy, though after Stella Herringe had given her the Engelion cream, she sometimes found herself staring into the bathroom mirror in the late afternoon. She would gently touch the side of her face, a brand-new look, tentative and questioning, in her eyes as she searched for evidence of the Annas of the past – Max Wishart’s Anna, or TransCorp Bank’s Anna, or the Anna who had lived briefly in Muswell Hill with Barnaby and Ruth Canning and a rather beautiful Japanese boy called Kenzo who wanted to be a performance artist.

  But generally things went well. The kittens were becoming proper young cats, with never a day’s illness. The weather continued to improve. Two or three afternoons a week, Anna put on a flowerprint cotton frock and sailed off to the Candletons’ to fill her bicycle baskets with shopping; or – conned by Alice Meynell, who claimed she couldn’t very well do it on a Kawasaki ZZR – delivered the newssheet of the Ashmore & District Summer Fete to front doors as socially distinct as Stella Herringe’s at Nonesuch and Hetty Parker’s at number six Eaton Cottages, the Victorian terrace opposite the pub. She drank cups of tea with Francis Baynes, the vicar, who was some years younger than her, believed that the Church did too little to encourage the innate spirituality of what he called its ‘constituency’, and always seemed to be reading A Glastonbury Romance.

  She drank the Hewett sisters’ elderflower cordial, which was, so the Hewett sisters said, a legend in three parishes.

  In this way she got to know the villagers, and they began to look out for her, perhaps as a welcome contrast to Alice, who, at the age of eight, had grown out of bicycles for ever and announced the fact by driving her father’s unattended Land Rover down Station Lane and into the pond.

  *

  Anna was in the garden one afternoon when the doorbell rang.

  ‘Damn!’ she said.

  She put on her sandals and went to answer it. Stella Herringe’s cousin was standing there.

  ‘I wondered,’ he said, ‘if you—’

  Anna shut the door.

  She walked up and down behind it for a moment or two, biting her knuckles in embarrassment and hissing, ‘Go away. Go away.’ When she opened the door again, he was still standing there. The weather being hot, he had rolled up the sleeves of his oxford-cloth shirt. His Levis had seen better days, as had his oiled-leather Bluntstone boots; slung over his shoulder was a faded canvas-and-leather knapsack as old-fashioned as Anna’s bike. He had clearly been out walking, and she couldn’t bear the healthy look of him.

  ‘My name is John Dawe,’ he said.

  ‘I know that,’ said Anna.

  ‘I felt as if we’d got off to a bad start,’ he said, ‘and I wondered if you would have supper with me to—’

  ‘Of course I won’t,’ said Anna. ‘Not until I know—’

  She shut the door again. She had been about to say, ‘Not until I know why you have this effect on me. Not until I know who you are.’ But it was worse than that. What she really wanted to say, she now saw, was: ‘Not until I know who I am. You confuse me, and make me breathless, and I feel out of control near you, and all I want to do is follow you around. No woman does that any more. No woman wants to feel like that.’ Orlando, who had run in from the back garden to see what was going on, rubbed against her legs purring, his tail held high. ‘You can go away too,’ she told him in a venomous whisper. She studied the yellowed lining-paper which had begun to peel off the walls of her tiny hallway. ‘I want to be in control,’ she said. She opened the door a crack and peered out. John Dawe was walking away towards the centre of the village. Orlando, hugely delighted by all this, darted out between Anna’s legs and began to follow him down the road.

  ‘Come back!’ called Anna.

  As a consequence, three things happened at once. John Dawe stopped and turned round uncertainly, raising one hand to keep the sun out of his eyes. Orlando, consumed by shyness, retreated to a position just outside the front gate, where he sat down thoughtfully and began to lick one of his paws. And several ducks which – encouraged by human activity to expect stale bread – had left the pond to waddle about on the grass across the road, eyed the cat and returned cautiously to their natural element, where quarrels broke out among them.

  ‘All right,’ Anna said. ‘I will have supper with you.’

  John Dawe looked as confused as the ducks. He swapped his knapsack from his left shoulder to his right, walked back a little way, his blue eyes fixed on hers, and knelt down in the road to stroke Orlando’s head.

  ‘This is a nice little cat,’ he said. ‘Is he yours?’

  “‘No one owns a cat”,’ Anna quoted contemptuously.

  ‘And will you meet me at the pub, or on my boat?’

  Anna, angry all over again – although at least now she understood why – said: ‘I would rather meet you on your boat, of course.’

  *

  ‘Why did I say that?’

  ‘I could have a guess,’ said Alice.

  ‘And what am I going to wear?’

  ‘Trousers, I would.’

  ‘Alice!’

  ‘It’s no good pretending you don’t want something you’ve just been at considerable pains to get,’ said Alice. ‘Not with me. Look, now try this,’ – she put a half-pint glass down in front of Anna – ‘and tell me it’s not the best summer ale you ever tasted.’

  Anna drank the beer. ‘What do you mean, “pretending”?’ she said.

  ‘Hold your nose and pour it down, then. I don’t know why I bother.’

  ‘Alice.’

  Alice flounced off to the sink. ‘What I mean,’ she said significantly, ‘is that there are those of us who have never had the chance, try as they might.’ She came back with a floor cloth and used it to wipe the perfectly clean patch of bar around Anna’s drink. ‘There are those of us,’ she said, ‘who are gagging for it.’

  ‘I haven’t been at “considerable pains”,’ Anna defended herself. ‘How can you say that? You saw what happened in here the other night.’

  Alice laughed bitterly. ‘I certainly did,’ she said.

  ‘Alice, what am I going to wear?’

  ‘You can borrow this if you like.’

  ‘Alice, that’s really kind of you. But it wouldn’t work so well without the pierced navel.’

  Alice cheered up. ‘We could always get you done,’ she said.

  In the end, though, Anna went up to London by train from Drychester. She arrived at Victoria at ten in the morning to find the streets already grey and humid, the traffic reluctant and confusing, the air full of thunder. She looked up at the cap of cloud over Pimlico and the river, and took a taxi to Knightsbridge, where she saw some beautiful things, but nothing – as she put it later to Alice – you could wear to supper on a narrowboat with someone you didn’t really like. Two or three hours later, bad-tempered and sticky, she was forced to admit defeat. She ate lunch on the fifth floor at Harvey Nichols, then, rather than go home empty-handed, wandere
d the food market at random, buying exotic produce for herself and the cats. She called Ruth Canning, with the idea of suggesting tea or a drink, but no one answered the phone. It was dark by three in the afternoon. Lightning flickered silent and eerie inside the clouds. Then, as Anna scuttled across Sloane Street among a crowd of other people trying to catch the attention of a cab-driver, she thought she saw someone she knew.

  ‘Stella! Stella Herringe!’

  It wasn’t Stella but a much older woman, in her late sixties and really quite frail. A stroke had left one side of her white, heavily powdered face hanging lax and unbiddable. The eye on that side was dull hazel, instilled with panic; the mouth dragged down.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Anna. ‘I can’t think why I thought... Sorry.’

  The woman looked at her for what seemed a long time before turning away.

  Unsettled for the rest of the afternoon, Anna gave up the idea of a taxi and jumped on a bus instead, intending to go to Sloane Square and have a look in the King’s Road shops. Anxiety made her get off at the wrong stop and she wandered about in the dreary triangle between Chelsea Barracks, Belgravia and the railway, until the sky opened and a steady, vertical rain drove her back to Victoria, where she stood on the concourse soaked and impatient among all the other disgruntled shoppers.

  ‘I’ll never like London again,’ she told Alice, and two days later, at half past seven in the evening, walked reluctantly down to John Dawe’s mooring dressed in jeans and an old Jigsaw jumper, carrying a bottle of Chardonnay that had cost twenty pounds in Harvey Nichols’ food market.

  ‘Hello?’ she said.

  No reply.

  It was very quiet down there, and all the boats seemed empty. The day had stored its warmth in the packed earth of the towpath, which was now giving it up gently. The subtle light, more suited to dawn than evening, blanched the summer colours out of the landscape and softened the Magpie’s terracotta upperwork to pink. Despite that, everything looked quite clear and sharp, the boats, the trees, the curve of the little bridge reflected on the absolutely motionless surface of the water. Anna didn’t quite know what to do. Should she just go aboard? She had thought of phoning him to cancel, but there was no Dawe in the telephone book.

  ‘Hello?’

  She took a step or two back towards the bridge. As if at a signal, the Magpie creaked and rocked a little against its springlines, the doors at the stern of the boat banged open and a cat jumped out. ‘For God’s sake, Lydia,’ she heard John Dawe complain in his rusty growl, ‘can’t you have some patience?’

  The cat gave Anna a filthy look and picked its way forward to sit at the stem of the boat. After a moment or two it began to wash ostentatiously.

  John Dawe came up the little steps from the interior. His eyes were as blue as cornflowers, and through a rip in his grey jeans, she could see that the skin of his thigh was as tanned as his forearms. A strong smell of fish came up with him.

  ‘Fresh tuna,’ he explained.

  ‘How nice,’ said Anna.

  ‘She thought it was for her.’

  ‘Ah.’

  This seemed to be as much as they could manage. They stared at one another uncertainly, and she half-offered the bottle of wine, as if she had to give him something to be invited aboard.

  He took it from her, unwrapped the tissue paper and held it up for the cat to see.

  ‘Perfect with fish!’ he taunted.

  The cat turned its back.

  ‘She’s pretty enough,’ he said, ‘but she has the moral sense of a barracuda.’

  Anna laughed. ‘What lovely fur,’ she said. ‘It’s like gold.’ She added: ‘I think I once saw her in the dark.’

  John Dawe didn’t seem to hear this; or if he did, ignored it. ‘Good parentage, bad lot,’ he said. ‘Half Abyssinian, half Siamese. From the mother, indolence and sentimentality. From the father a loud voice and violent appetites. Just enough brains to be dissatisfied with everything. She’ll never be happy, but she’s certainly a star.’

  ‘You talk about her as if she’s a person,’ Anna said.

  This seemed to annoy him.

  ‘Their lives are only different to ours,’ he pointed out. ‘Not less important.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ said Anna.

  There was a silence.

  ‘Well,’ said John Dawe eventually, ‘I ought to cook the fish.’

  ‘That wine should still be quite cool,’ she said.

  The Magpie had been built a mere twenty years ago, so its tumblehome sides announced, by L.T.C. Rolt of Banbury. Anna felt obscurely disappointed. There was an engaging shabbiness to its exterior – but it was the shabbiness, she thought sadly, of a 1970s bungalow where you had been expecting the more dignified decline of the Victorian workman’s cottage. She didn’t know what to make of the interior at all. If it had been less cluttered it would, paradoxically, have seemed smaller. Ducking down the little steps, she had the impression of a single long, low, poorly lit space, the varnished roof of which seemed to stretch away into a distant gloom. Bits of furniture outcropped here and there: a foldaway bed, old-fashioned cane chairs one either side of a small table, a little grey solid-fuel stove the flue of which went up dangerously between packed bookshelves. It was clean, but fantastically untidy. Books overflowed the shelves and on to the floor. Bedding trailed off the bed. Every surface was covered with objects.

  There were bowls full of small fossils and bits of flint, a glass case containing a small stuffed ray, a heavy old artillery compass, two or three chess sets with bizarre or incomplete sets of pieces. There were items assembled from feathers or leather, or carved from ivory: bird’s eggs, Egyptian-looking trinkets, browned old bone; dusty, once-colourful, gypsy kinds of things all mixed up with modern items – a saxophone, a Sony laptop with its modem cable plugged into a mobile phone, software CDs, an expensive sound system playing some kind of South American ambient music full of bird calls and muted drumming. It looked like the room of an intelligent teenage boy.

  While John Dawe busied himself in the tiny galley area, Anna wandered up and down with a glass of Pineau in her hand, picking things up and putting them down again. What did he do all day in here?

  ‘I haven’t had Pineau since I was last in France,’ she said. ‘I’d forgotten how nice it was.’ When he didn’t answer she added, ‘Can I help?’

  He was so used to doing everything by himself that this seemed to confuse him. Eventually he said: ‘You could clear some space on the table.’ And then: ‘These boats are a bit cramped for co-operative cooking. It’s better if one person does everything.’ He was right. The cabin was so narrow she had to keep pushing past him, murmuring, ‘Sorry,’ or, ‘Can I just—?’ The fact was, no one had been doing anything much on the Magpie. What a mess, she thought, trying not to look at the unmade bed.

  A minute or two later he said, ‘I think we could eat this now.’

  He had seared the tuna, and now served it with sauteed courgettes and a rocket salad. They sat in the cane chairs, which were too low for the table. John Dawe was a self-sufficient eating companion, attentive but silent, passing the salt or pouring wine without comment.

  ‘This is nice,’ said Anna.

  He seemed surprised. ‘I’m glad,’ he said. Then he added: ‘I don’t cook often. Fish is always easy, isn’t it?’

  Thinking of Max Wishart’s culinary talent – which had been a natural extension of his easy sensuality – she said: ‘I never got the hang of it.’ Max had spoiled her, she realised. She had let him cook all those wonderful meals and learned nothing from him. He had been attentive, thoughtful, and in the end unreliable: a honey trap. John Dawe was an altogether spikier proposition. He would be difficult to get to know, but perhaps more rewarding for that.

  He laughed. ‘Ten minutes each side,’ he said. ‘A bit of oil. That’s the secret of tuna.’

  His manner was a kind of carapace, she thought: under it, he was not so much shy as, like his own voice, unused. He had got out of
the habit of sharing himself. As they ate, the cat made its way back in, sitting quietly at the cabin door while it tried to gauge his mood. Finally it approached, and rubbed its head tentatively against his leg.

  ‘You’re not getting anything,’ he said. ‘So you might as well stop selling yourself.’ But Anna noticed how affectionately he caressed the fur of its throat as he spoke.

  ‘You’re very fond of her,’ she said.

  He looked up from his food and shrugged. ‘Am I?’ he said. ‘I suppose I am. But I doubt that’s why she stays.’

  ‘Oh, surely—’

  ‘We can’t know how they see the world,’ he interrupted. ‘Perhaps it’s a mistake to imagine they love us in return. Perhaps to them we’re just a source of warmth, food, shelter.’

  ‘I know my cats love me,’ said Anna.

  While he made coffee, she examined his books. They were a mixed lot. Paperback popular science rubbed shoulders with university texts in foreign languages. He seemed to be interested in everything from physics to shamanism. She recognised a title here and there – The Golden Bough, The Book of the Dead, A Brief History of Time. There were books on ancient Egypt, the vanished native-American cultures, the Inuit peoples of the Arctic. There were, curiously, books on ocean navigation, as if he had considered taking the Magpie to sea. There were a lot of books about dreams. She opened at random a volume called Dream Time. ‘Listen,’ she said, “‘Dreams go by contraries. To weep in dreams betokens bliss.” Now you know.’

  He laughed. ‘I wish it was so simple,’ he said.

  Anna shut the book. ‘You do love cats, don’t you?’ she said. ‘I mean, not just have ideas about them?’

  ‘I suppose I do,’ he admitted.

  ‘Then can we call a truce on the subject, do you think?’ she said.

  He smiled. ‘I was going to ask you that.’

  He looked so relieved that Anna touched his hand, and felt the tension go out of things, and it was like a normal evening for a while. They took the coffee outside to the twilight, and sat in the warm air, listening to music and talking. Lydia, now forgiven, came out to watch the swifts and housemartins as they hawked for insects above the surrounding fields, until at twilight they were replaced by bats, and she remembered business of her own, and was off. John Dawe went inside to change the CD, then again to fetch another bottle of wine. He brought out a lamp, and a jacket for Anna to put round her shoulders. Anna, relieved that they seemed to be getting on again, felt bold enough to ask him about himself. Educated at Marlborough and Cambridge, he had become interested in dreams early on in his career. A doctorate in anthropology followed, and for a few years he had taught cultural studies at a Midlands university. In the end, though, the students – who, interested only in their careers and already confusing the word ‘dream’ with the word ‘ambition’ – had begun to bore him, and he had lost interest in that side of academia. His own dreams had puzzled him increasingly. From the age of thirteen, when he first lived at Nonesuch, they had been curious, vivid, really rather undreamlike.