The Knot Garden

  ‘They’re more like plays or masques,’ he admitted to Anna, ‘the same situations rehearsed over and over again in different costumes. As intense as bad TV but as fragile as a cobweb. Sometimes I wake from dreams like that and I’m certain they’re memories of other lives.’

  ‘Very scientific,’ said Anna.

  The attempt to understand his own dreams – or at least to find out if anyone else dreamed in the same way – had led to a fascination with dreams in general, and that fascination had rapidly become the structuring principle of his life. ‘For quite a long time I was obsessed. Dreaming was life; the rest of life was just standing around waiting to dream.’ He had given up teaching and travelled extensively, in India, Africa, the Near East, East Asia. ‘I even spent time above the Arctic Circle, listening to the Inuit talk about their dreams. It wasn’t enough. Perhaps you never can learn enough: I come back here every so often and try to fit it all together, and there’s always a piece missing, so off I go again. Climb a mountain. Stand in the Valley of the Nile at dawn. Try a new drug. Write down the dreams of everyone I meet. You only get to know the world by being in it, and in fact perhaps it would be better to do just that – be, not know.’ He laughed. ‘This is a distinction only male academics make,’ he explained. After a pause he added softly: ‘And the dreams just go on.’

  ‘And are you any nearer understanding?’

  ‘The obsessed,’ he said, ‘always believe that the inside of their obsession is bigger than the outside. Climbers, poets, scientists at the cutting edge, people who collect things – they always think there’s a whole world in there to be mapped and understood.’ He shook his head. Though his face was softened by the lamplight it was no easier to read. ‘It’s only your own obsessiveness you’re exploring.’

  Max Wishart had always taught her that it was an evasion to describe yourself in terms of your ideas – a way of hiding yourself. Anna now understood why. Max was a skater across the surface of things. Even his music had come easily to him. He had never allowed it to keep him awake at night. He would never burn his fingers on it, or allow it to stretch his spirit. The attraction of John Dawe was that he found his ideas worth the effort. He was committed. This made him seem odd and difficult and distanced, but, in a peculiar way, more reliable – he wouldn’t, you felt, drift cheerfully away in pursuit of the next sensation. At the same time it made him so hard to open up! How could she get him to talk about Stella Herringe if he wouldn’t first talk about himself?

  ‘And you always come back here, to the boat?’ she asked him. ‘Not to Nonesuch?’

  This invitation he refused. ‘Not to Nonesuch,’ he said. ‘Not since I was twenty.’ He offered the wine bottle. ‘Have some more of this.’

  Anna held out her glass. ‘But what do you do?’ she pressed (meaning perhaps. What have you done with your life?). ‘What’s the end product of all this travelling, all these—’ lost for words, she made a vague gesture ‘—intellectual adventures?’

  He filled her glass. ‘More adventures?’ he suggested. When she didn’t laugh, he added: ‘A book, I suspect. But not soon, and not a fun read. Look for The Dream as Cultural Index. You won’t be any wiser than I am when you’ve finished it.’

  ‘Why bother then?’ said Anna irritably.

  ‘To understand myself.’

  ‘What a helpful contribution to the world,’ said Anna. She found him pretentious one minute, confused the next. ‘Rather than living,’ she went on, partly out of spite, partly in an attempt to force his hand, ‘you seem to have spent your life collecting ideas about life.’

  He smiled. ‘That truce didn’t last long,’ he remarked. Suddenly he looked tired. He lifted his hands. ‘And what about you?’ he said.

  ‘I was in London before I came here.’

  ‘And what did you do in London?’

  She thought for a moment how she might answer this. The coat she wore smelled of him; the yellow lamplight spilled out across the water, even and warm, to faintly illuminate the willow trees on the far bank. ‘I worked in the City,’ she said; and when he didn’t respond but only waited to see what else she would say, demanded with a sudden impatience: ‘What do you want to know? I was just like anyone else, I went to university then got a job.’

  No answer.

  ‘Do you understand money?’

  He shook his head slowly.

  ‘Well, I moved it around the world at night, to take advantage of the exchange rates. A thousandth of a percent here, a thousandth of a percent there. In the morning there was more of it.’

  As if by magic, there always had been more of it.

  ‘I was never a high-flyer,’ she was prompted to admit, ‘but I did well enough.’ She managed not to add, ‘for a woman,’ and looked into her wine instead, as if she might see herself in the twist of light at the bottom of the glass – walking briskly across the atrium of the TransCorp Bank on Old Broad Street wearing the clothes she wore then. As if she might remember herself more clearly. ‘We would move money around all night, and then drive madly off to Stepney and have a fried breakfast at six in the morning in Pellicci’s. The other traders were all men, and I got on well with them. It was very competitive but I quite liked that then.’ She laughed. ‘I never thought of it as money, only numbers on a screen. I moved numbers around on a screen and one year’s bonus was enough to buy me a little house by the Thames.’ A little house that had cost five hundred thousand pounds. She shivered to think of that world now. It all made such a tangle in her consciousness, such a complex knot of pleasures and anxieties.

  She said: ‘Have you ever had money?’

  He leaned forward, his face a mask in the lamplight. ‘Not what you would call money,’ he said grimly. ‘So tell me: when people ask you who you are, is this how you always answer? Is this how you would want yourself described, as someone who once had a career in the City?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Well then,’ he said, as if she had demonstrated some point he wanted to make. She didn’t know how to answer that, so she left a silence. Into it, he asked, in quite a different voice:

  ‘Why are you here, Anna Prescott?’

  ‘I’m not going to tell you that,’ she said, adding immediately, ‘I suppose I wanted a rest from my old life, and I thought Ashmore would be—’ She had meant to say ‘nice’ or ‘kind’ or ‘safe’, but he was already interrupting her.

  ‘No, I mean here. Why did you come here tonight?’

  She stared at him. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted.

  ‘So you’re an adventurer, too.’

  She laughed. ‘Touché,’ she said.

  He stood up. ‘It’s turning cold. Would you like to go back inside?’

  ‘Very much,’ she said. She lifted her hands to him.

  Bats flickered through the damp air between the willows, absorbed by the invisible world: echoes, then echoes of echoes, shivering away into the great emptiness of the water meadows. Small clouds raced through a sky the colour of a grapeskin, where the new moon floated in its prismatic ring of haze. A breeze ruffled the canal, and in response the Magpie moved gently against its springlines.

  ‘Careful,’ said John Dawe. He helped her to her feet. His hands were dry and warm. For a moment Anna was so close to him she could smell his skin. She thought of sand; walnuts. She thought he would kiss her.

  Instead he said lightly: ‘Stella was determined I should apologise. She said you’d been up at Nonesuch.’

  Anna stared at him. ‘Is that why you invited me here?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  She pulled away from him. ‘It is,’ she said, wonderingly. ‘You wouldn’t have been interested in me if she hadn’t.’ Suddenly she was furious. ‘It is! What do you want from me, you and your cousin?’

  When he didn’t answer she was surprised to hear herself say coldly: ‘I like you, John, but there are too many problems here.’

  And then: ‘I think I’ll go home now.’

  ‘Wait. You can?
??t—’

  ‘I can do anything I want.’

  She pushed past him and stepped awkwardly back on to the towpath.

  *

  Sixty or seventy years ago, when Ashmore was still a proper farming community, cottages had come right down to the water here, their gardens divided from the water only by a low wooden fence. Nothing was left of that. Thinking she would be home quicker if she went directly across the fields, Anna pushed blindly through the straggling hawthorn hedge which had replaced it. Suddenly she was among the couch grass and bracken, the rotten, lichenous apple boughs of an abandoned orchard, her feet soaked with dew. The trees creaked in a gust of wind, which drove dead leaves through the hedge and across the surface of the canal. John Dawe ran after her between the grey boughs then stopped. Anna heard him call her name once, but he didn’t follow her. She was glad. For a moment, when she looked at him, all she had felt was panic.

  *

  When she got home her house was deserted and cold, and she blundered around inside it like a stranger, switching on all the lights in the hope of making things familiar. The cats were out, their dishes empty. Obscurely disappointed, she put down fresh food and water for them; she did the washing up. ‘I should go to bed,’ she told herself, but she couldn’t settle. She made a cup of instant coffee and huddled over the Aga with her hands in her armpits more for comfort than warmth. If she closed her eyes she could see John Dawe’s puzzled face. She could hear herself shouting at him. She thought: I have to understand why I’m doing this.

  Then she thought: But what is it they want from me?

  Slipping out of his leather jacket, she brought its comfortable, age-softened folds up to her face. I was right, she thought, his skin does smell of sand and walnuts. Then embarrassment washed over her. ‘I’ve still got his coat,’ she said aloud to the empty kitchen.

  This seemed to settle something. She got up, went out into the front garden, and looked up at the sky. The air had cooled further, clouds were scudding energetically across the moon. There was a faint smell of foxgloves, mallow, night-scented stock. In the morning there would be ground-mist in the hollows of the common: then another brilliant day. She found her bicycle propped up under the window, its shadow black against the cottage wall. She wheeled it into the silent road, mounted, and clanked off towards Station Lane. ‘This is mad,’ she told herself. As if in response, a mallard called drowsily from the crack-willows at the other side of the pond.

  The canal boats lay motionless and untenanted. Only the Magpie showed a light: one dim yellow porthole. Anna manhandled her bike down on to the towpath and let it fall. Through the porthole she could see John Dawe, sitting at his table in the lamplight. He had shoved the supper plates and salad bowl to one side to make room for a book, a tumbler, a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam. She tapped the porthole with her fingernails. As if he had heard something without quite registering it, he stopped reading for a moment and ran his hands tiredly over his face. She tapped the glass again. This time he looked directly at her, and she heard him laugh. A moment later he was up on deck. He appraised Anna, then the abandoned bicycle.

  ‘It’s three o’clock in the morning,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your feet are soaked.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your feet.’

  She looked down at them, shook her head impatiently. ‘What does that matter?’ she said. ‘Why do we keep doing this? I don’t know why I keep doing this.’

  He smiled faintly. ‘No.’ he said. ‘I can tell that you don’t.’

  ‘That isn’t any sort of answer,’ she wailed. ‘John, all this see-sawing back and forth, it’s mad. We’re at each other’s throats every five minutes but we can’t just walk away. We barely know each other but I already feel as if I’m trying to escape something. I don’t understand myself any more! Do you feel that?’

  ‘I’m not sure what I feel,’ he said.

  ‘That’s not enough, John,’ she said. Suddenly it felt like three in the morning. Her legs ached, and she was exhausted. She took his coat off. Held it out. ‘Do you want this back?’

  ‘Do you want to give it back?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Would you like to come in?’

  ‘No. Not now.’ She looked round for a moment, then made a small gesture, as if the night, the water, the trees on the far bank, were enough to explain something. She thought of saying, ‘I just came back to tell you I was sorry,’ but found she didn’t want to go that far, and turned it into, ‘I just want to understand what’s happening here,’ instead. ‘I just want us to stop doing this.’

  ‘Then perhaps we will,’ he said gently.

  She turned away.

  ‘Shall I telephone you?’ he said.

  ‘I’d like that.’

  13

  Time passed, and as it crept by so did my horror of the dreams and what they contained. In fact, in the last several forays I had made out on to the wild roads with my grandfather, nothing very dramatic had occurred and I was beginning to accept as another fact of normality the idea of apprenticing to be the local dreamcatcher. I even found myself taking some pride in my night-work, the clean despatch of the small dreams we encountered.

  Most of them were harmless things: children’s night-fears, full of monsters that at first appeared grotesque and terrifying, but once bitten dissolved to nothing, like a mayfly on the tongue. With Hawkweed I learned how to run down and trap the more elusive human dreams of guilt and shame and anxiety. I did not understand, then, most of the images I came upon in this way, for many were blurred and shifted shape as fast as I bit them. Others were as bright and defined as the pictures I saw on the black box in the living room when we curled up on Anna’s lap on a lazy weekend evening.

  Between us, my grandfather and I ate them all down, allowing nothing to escape, and all the inhabitants of Ashmore and its environs slept easy in their beds, their nests and dens.

  *

  One late summer afternoon, after a week of baking sun, the lads and I were lying scattered in whatever shade we could find behind the garages. Heat haze rose shimmering from the concrete.

  We lay there and dozed, too hot even to talk, until there was an outraged howl from Ginge, who, defying the sun, had climbed up to sit on the bonnet of a black truck, eyes closed, a beatific smile upon his dreaming face.

  ‘Ow! It bit me!’ He leapt off the vehicle and glared at it accusingly. ‘It bit my bum,’ he complained, turning round and round to assess the extent of his injury. ‘It bloody hurts.’ He twisted desperately in the other direction, but his bottom got no closer. Eventually he fell over in a heap and peered through his legs.

  The rest of us gathered around, curious, and not a little amused. Ginge was a show-off: we shared a certain grim satisfaction in his discomfort.

  ‘Go on then, Ginge,’ said Stripes, pretending deep concern. ‘Let’s have a look.’

  Someone sniggered. Ginge’s head shot up, but the culprit’s face was carefully masked. Ginge was a big cat and could give you a fair bite.

  ‘My ma says you can do yourself irreparable damage, sitting on a hot car,’ Seamus added earnestly. ‘Says you can fry your bollocks so that they’re never the same again.’

  ‘Best have a look, Ginge,’ Feisty urged.

  Ginge regarded them with dubious eyes. Then he turned slowly and lifted his tail. Even through the dense orange fur of his rump a distinctly pink flush was clearly visible.

  Fernie sucked his breath through his teeth. Stripes shook his head. ‘Nasty, that,’ said Feisty.

  ‘Can you see it?’ Ginge demanded, twisting again. ‘Is it bad?’

  ‘Terrible.’ Even I was involved now.

  ‘Oh no—’ Ginge was starting to lose his sang-froid.

  ‘Only one cure for that, mate,’ Fernie stated solemnly.

  Ginge looked hopeful.

  Fernie leaned in confidingly. ‘Sweet cat-spit from a virgin’s tongue! Best go see young Liddy down at the canal.?
??

  The other cats howled and fell about.

  The blush on Ginge’s bottom flooded out over the rest of him until it burned, hot-pink, like a beacon.

  ‘Heard she’s quite a one, Ginge.’

  ‘Too wild for you.’

  ‘Too posh, more like.’

  ‘Thinks she’s some kind of princess, she does.’

  ‘Got herself some romantic airs.’

  ‘She wouldn’t lay a tongue on Ginge’s arse!’

  ‘Says she’ll only go with a proper wild cat, one that’s proved himself out on the highways: no green boys for her—’

  ‘I ain’t green—’

  ‘Nor pink ones, either!’

  At this jibe, Ginge lost whatever composure he retained and flung himself at Fernie. Seamus, always one who enjoyed a good scrap, leapt on top of them both. Stripes, with a war-cry, joined the fray. It looked like good, clean fun: so I dived in as well. Soon there was one great whirligig of fur and the air was full of howls.

  The heat was like a hammer. Enervated, we finally fell apart, helpless and exhausted.

  Each of us found a shady spot and started licking our fur back into place. Ginge lay on his side a little way apart from the rest of us and peered with apparent fascination at a distant tree. A tickle began in the middle of my skull. I had been thinking of revealing my secret life to my friends for some time, but something had always stopped me. Latent common-sense, perhaps; or fear of my grandfather. Now, I could feel the words bubbling away in my head. I pushed them down, tried for modest silence, but bravado got the better of me. Looking around to make sure everyone could hear, I dropped casually into the silence: ‘I’ve been out on the wild roads.’