She said: ‘It’s nice to look nice though, isn’t it?’
Alice dignified this with a laugh. ‘It is, is it?’ she said. ‘And why would that be, I wonder?’
‘Oh well, you know,’ said Anna. She pushed her glass forward. ‘Can I have another half of this, please?’
She was seeing John Dawe as often as she saw his cousin. Rather comically careful with one another, reluctant to develop things further, they went to the pictures in Drychester. He invited her to an exhibition of Egyptian art at the British Museum; she suggested a visit to the South Bank. She wore his jacket to the Green Man. But if she liked him increasingly, and came to depend on him as a kind of quiet physical presence in her life, she was no more certain of him – or of herself – than she had been the first time he invited her aboard his boat. He came and went, she didn’t know where. Even when he was in Ashmore, there were times when he was so inner-directed he seemed absent. ‘Oh, but physics is a kind of mysticism!’ he said to her one evening in the pub. It was a statement almost meaningless on its own, the conclusion of some train of thought that excluded her. At times like that, his identity seemed to her to be based on a weakness, thought not feeling, the struggle to assemble himself from a set of ideas, in wilful ignorance of whatever he already was.
‘Knowing is one thing,’ she tried to tell him. ‘Feeling is another.’
He leaned forward to touch her arm. ‘I know that’s true, Anna,’ he said. ‘But somehow I just can’t feel it.’
She burst into laughter. ‘John, you bastard!’
They still fought. Sometimes there still seemed to be two other people down there. But they had begun to rely on one another. They had admitted, quietly and determinedly, each in their own way, that there was more to be had by knowing one another than by keeping apart.
*
Stella Herringe was much more certain of herself than her cousin. She thought less, acted more. ‘Who you are, dear,’ she advised Anna, ‘is what you want. When you know what you want, you know who you are.’ Anna was unable to reply to that. Her puzzlement increased one afternoon, when, making her way dreamily along the Chapel Corridor (built and rebuilt many times since Joshua Hering’s day but with its fine Jacobean ceiling joists clearly visible), she heard raised voices some distance off.
‘I won’t have it,’ the first voice said angrily, and then, after some answer too quiet to catch:
‘I don’t care about that.’
It was late afternoon. Thundery light flickered across the lawns of Nonesuch, pooled in the blue shadow of the cedars. Indoors, the heat had been lodged for days behind the warped oak panels and horsehair plaster, filling the house with the overpowering smell of its own history.
‘And yet you spend the money, dear,’ the second voice said. ‘Someone has to care.’
A door slammed. Footsteps moved rapidly away. There was a bright, empty laugh and then silence. Anna stood for some time, waiting for something else to happen, but all she heard was her own breathing. Her senses were so sharp she could feel her upper body rocking with every beat of her heart. What tied these cousins together in such an uncomfortable knot? As parts of her life, Anna’s instinct was to keep them separate. But as the summer drew to a close this became more and more difficult.
*
Ashmore and the surrounding villages lay suffocating under the spell of heat and humidity. Thick overnight mists hung in the low-lying fields either side of the Brindley cut, giving way to hot, dazzling days. The afternoons were heavy with the smell of corn, elderberries and dust, the evening airs breathless and soft. Summer had piled itself up against the door into autumn, John Dawe said, and soon its own weight would push it through. It was the time of year, he said, when you knew nothing could last.
‘That’s very cheerful,’ Anna told him.
To escape the heat, they took the green lanes up on to the downs, where the world seemed huge and they could walk about all day under a windy sky full of white clouds. The sandy soil of the gorselands smelled like cinnamon. If they could escape the heat, they couldn’t escape each other. They talked and talked, but in the silences she felt how close he was, felt as an irritant every dry touch of his sleeve on her arm, felt her heart jump when something he said caused her to see him in some new light. Trying to explain the choices she had made in her life, she heard herself say, ‘You do know what I mean, don’t you? I know I’m not saying this well, but you do know what I mean?’
He stopped and held her by the shoulders and laughed. ‘Anna, I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.’
‘Oh dear. I know. Isn’t it awful?’
‘Look,’ he said. ‘A hawk.’
Or a dragonfly. Or deer, moving gracefully behind a screen of trees. He was always showing her things. He was always redirecting her attention.
‘I see them! I see them!’
Do something, she wished. You stupid man.
Tell me what we already know.
In the end, he did do something, but he waited until it was evening and they were almost home, leaning on an old gate, watching rabbits crop the greying turf in the field beyond. He stopped talking, and she did too. They stared helplessly at one another for a moment. Then they were too close to do anything but kiss. She had waited for that kiss for what felt like centuries. Relief made her weak. She clung to him for a moment – transfixed by the clarity of the world, the feel of him, the hot, baked smell of the earth in the field – then returned the kiss quite savagely. He said, ‘I’ve wanted to do that for so long.’ She whispered, ‘Why didn’t you, then?’ She laughed softly. ‘Never tell me anything about physics or rabbits or the environment again,’ she said. They kissed again, for longer. This time as they separated, Stella Herringe’s Mercedes came round the corner from the direction of Ashmore, travelling at high speed.
*
It passed them, rocked to a halt a few yards on, then reversed rapidly. Stella wound down the window and stuck her head out. She was wearing a Hermes headscarf, heavy sunglasses and an animated smile. ‘How nice to see you!’ she called. She pulled off the scarf, shook out her hair, opened the driver door and stepped out into the road, all in the same motion. An exotic perfume filled the heavy evening air.
‘Hello!’ said Anna.
‘Hello, dear,’ said Stella, and walked past without looking at her. She was wearing a short A-line skirt. ‘John!’ she exclaimed. When she lifted herself up on her toes like a small girl to embrace her cousin, she had the calves of a twenty-year-old tennis player, firm and honey-coloured, without a sign of a vein. ‘John!’ If he seemed reluctant; she seemed nervous. Their closeness short-circuited itself the moment they touched. He always seemed to be about to shake her off, with a kind of absent-minded distaste. ‘And where have you been?’ she chided him. ‘You knew there were papers to sign this week!’
John Dawe shrugged. ‘I had other things to do,’ he said.
Stella turned her head to look up at him. She gave her little laugh. ‘I’m sure I believe you,’ she said.
Two young men in grey suits got out of the back of the Mercedes. Were they the same two Anna had seen in the Green Man? She wasn’t sure. They stood in the road for a moment, looking around as if they had heard about hedges before but never seen them. Then one of them said to Anna, ‘Hi, I’m Oliver and this is Mark. Was that a jay we just saw in the tree over there?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Anna.
Stella called, ‘Don’t get out of the car, dears! I’m not staying.’ She had walked John Dawe a little way off, holding him by the sleeve, as if she expected him to run away from her. ‘Look,’ she said to Anna, ‘would you mind awfully if I borrowed him for a moment?’ Then, as if Anna might have some definite but not entirely reasonable objection to this: ‘We’ll only be sitting in the car.’
Anna tried to catch John’s eye. ‘Of course not,’ she said when he didn’t respond. Before she had completed two words out of the three, Stella was ushering him towards the Mercedes.
&nbs
p; Anna folded her arms on top of the gate and stared across the empty field. She blinked. The warm wood felt hard and smooth under her hands, as if it had petrified long ago. ‘Well I thought it was a jay,’ she heard Mark say to Oliver; or perhaps it was Oliver to Mark. When she turned round a minute of two later, all four of them were in the car, talking earnestly. Oliver and Mark seemed to be trying to explain something to John Dawe. Stella was looking amused again. Suddenly, she started the engine. John got out of the car, slammed the door behind him, then put his head in through the open window.
‘You could have talked about this at any time,’ he said.
‘John, dear—’
‘For God’s sake leave me alone.’
He walked off towards Ashmore.
Stella smiled at Anna. She let the car roll forward. ‘It looks as if you can have him back now, dear,’ she said. ‘If you can catch him.’
The Mercedes accelerated and vanished round the next bend. Through its rear window Anna could make out the very similar heads of Mark and Oliver, facing one another in silhouette. They didn’t seem to be talking. When she looked back, John was already a hundred yards away and walking hard. She ran after him.
‘Why on earth are you behaving like this?’
His eyes were completely empty.
She stood in his way. ‘Stop. Don’t do this,’ she said. ‘It’s so childish.’
Eventually he shook his head like someone waking up. He laughed harshly. ‘Families always know how to turn the screw,’ he said. ‘Well, I can’t be bothered with her.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
He shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said.
‘Won’t you explain?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
They walked in silence. Then he said: ‘I knew you’d been spending time up at Nonesuch. She was careful to mention it.’
‘What do you mean, “careful”?’
He shrugged, in a way that made Anna feel cold.
‘John, it’s the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen. And she’s very kind. I’m always delighted to go.’ She let a few seconds go by, then said: ‘You’re quite alike, you two. I mean in looks.’
‘Not in much else,’ he said.
‘I can see the Herringe looks in you,’ Anna said.
He turned his head away. ‘Yes.’
When he didn’t say anything else she added: ‘She’s very young for her age, isn’t she?’
An expression she couldn’t describe to herself went across his face. ‘I suppose she is,’ he said. Then he added: ‘I wish she hadn’t seen us together.’
‘What do you mean?’
He stared at her. ‘I mean I wish she hadn’t seen us together,’ he said.
By this time they were standing on the bank of Ashmore pond, looking over towards Anna’s house framed between the willows. The water was absolutely still. A dragonfly hung above it like a blue enamel brooch; darted a little way; hung again. John Dawe bent down to look for a stone to skip across the pond. Anna, who felt suddenly that if he broke the surface of the water, something else would break, touched his arm. ‘John, what is it?’
‘I wish you wouldn’t spend so much time up there,’ he said, and seemed to have difficulty continuing. ‘Look,’ he managed eventually, ‘Stella can be...’
‘What?’
‘She’s not what she seems,’ he said.
This wasn’t enough for Anna. ‘I won’t stop going there unless you can give me a reason,’ she said gently.
‘I can’t,’ he said.
After that, neither of them could find a way to alleviate the silence that stretched out between them. You idiot, she thought, say something. But if John Dawe wasn’t prepared to give an explanation of his relationship with his cousin, Anna was equally unprepared to admit that she required one. So in the end they walked round the pond, and he left her at her gate, and they parted without arranging to meet again.
When he didn’t call the next day she felt angry and then miserable, a condition which she alleviated by cycling all the way into Drychester to buy a quarter of Gruyère cheese from the Real Cheese Shop. When he didn’t call the next day after that, she went down to the Green Man and sat around in the public bar reading the Guardian women’s page and getting on Alice’s nerves.
Alice was unsympathetic.
‘Men don’t call,’ she said. ‘You ought to know that.’
‘Perhaps he feels pursued.’
‘Perhaps he does,’ agreed Alice. ‘Perhaps,’ she suggested with some asperity, ‘he’s doing what you ought to have done a bit more of, from the start.’
‘What?’
‘Treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen,’ said Alice.
‘Max always felt pursued,’ Anna said. A further thought occurred to her. ‘Perhaps Barnaby did too.’
‘Barnaby was a cat, Anna. He was a cat.’ Alice took the newspaper out of Anna’s hands the way you would take a comic away from a child, folded it up in a haphazard fashion and pushed it out of reach. ‘Are you going to drink that beer or not?’
‘I think I’ll have a margarita instead.’
‘Not in my bar you won’t,’ said Alice with some determination. ‘Not in the middle of the afternoon.’
After she left the Green Man, Anna went home, made coffee and worked. Figures scrolled down her computer screen. She worked all afternoon and into the evening. At half-past seven Orlando came in and upset the small jar in which she kept paper clips. ‘Don’t do that,’ she told him absently. He jumped down, purred round her feet for a minute to two, then she heard the cat-flap bang as he went out again. Eventually she got up and went into the kitchen and looked in the refrigerator. It was nine o’clock. Rather than cook, she switched on the TV and walked about her small front room listening to the news while she ate bio yoghurt from the pot with a dessert spoon. There had been reprisals in the Balkans, record temperatures in Illinois. Here at home the good weather would hold. When the news was over, Anna put on her shoes and walked down to the canal. She stood on the bridge and looked over to where the Magpie lay in darkness, yellow lamplight in its portholes, water lapping against its hull. Two voices carried to her on the still warm air. John Dawe had a visitor. If she hadn’t been so afraid of finding out who it was, Anna could have walked a few yards down the towpath and looked in at the light porthole.
*
When she got home again, the red light was blinking on the answerphone. There was a call from a double glazing company. There was a call from Ruth Canning. Ruth’s voice filled the cottage, warm and affectionate, a long way away from all these difficulties. The children were well, financial journalism was slow; Sam had been offered a new job. ‘Give us a call,’ Ruth ended. ‘We miss you. There was something else I meant to tell you, but I can’t remember what it was. Something to do with that Herringe woman?’ There was a brief pause. ‘Damn. Oh well. I’ll phone you if I remember.’
Anna rang the Hackney number, but no one answered.
‘They’ll be in bed by now,’ she told the empty cottage. ‘Which is where I should be.’
She stood in the hall and looked up the stairs to her bedroom. In the daytime, when the bedroom door was open, the staircase was dark and the door made a welcoming rectangle of light around the attractively composed shapes beyond – the corner of her bed, part of the pine dresser, a bit of blue sky framed by the bedroom window. Now it was the other way round, and she walked up under the bitter sixty-watt light into darkness.
Next day, the Magpie was gone.
*
Anna welcomed the gusty winds, the outbreaks of rain that swept in over the next week, as an excuse to eat comfort food, put on comfort clothes, and trudge up and down the towpath with her hands in her pockets. The line of canal boats lay much as she had first seen it, locked in a slow struggle with the seasons. The Magpie’s empty mooring was like a lost tooth in a jaw so familiar it must be your own. She couldn’t keep her tongue out of the gap: she missed the boat as much as s
he missed its owner. She missed his clutter, his rough attempt at making his life comfortable.
‘You’re unaccomplished,’ she had once said to him, thinking of Max’s easy familiarity with the good, ordinary things in life – food, wine, shopping. ‘You’re unaccomplished at living.’ And then, touched his forearm gently: ‘Everything is such a struggle for you.’
Now she thought: I love that. I love that about him.
Anna couldn’t concentrate. She made long, late-evening calls to people she hadn’t seen for years, most of whom put down the receiver at the end of the conversation without knowing quite why she had phoned. She began garden projects she knew she couldn’t complete. Within days of his leaving, her dreams were rank with sex. She dreamed of sex between cats, one black and one brown – there was no need to guess who was who. Awake, she couldn’t imagine him biting the back of her neck like that. Her dreams were steeped with him. She admitted this surprisedly to the practical Alice, who grinned.
‘I’m off work in half an hour. Come out and have a ride on the bike. Do you good.’
‘All right,’ said Anna.
‘What?’
‘I’d like to.’
‘Bloody hell.’
Alice brought her home late, with a loud rushing sound in her ears. They had been to London and back, and had Smirnoff Mules in a bar in Catford. She got clumsily off the bike and held on to her front gate. When she closed her eyes, she could still see the world hurtling towards her, grey with speedlines, at a hundred and thirty miles an hour. The horizon lurched sixty degrees to the left, snapped upright, then tipped the other way. She was still astonished by the violence and excitement of it all, the noise, the vibration, the airstream like a constant slap in the face, the raw competition of forces that held the Kawasaki in place at any given moment. There had been moments of such precariousness that she screamed with terror; and moments of such relief that she screamed with laughter. Then an instant of machine grace, when they seemed to be flying.