‘You see?’ said Alice.
Anna clung to the gate. ‘Alice, I can’t hear you!’
‘It definitely helps. I mean, admit it. Sex can’t compete with that.’
‘What did you say?’
Alice grinned. ‘I’m off now,’ she mouthed.
‘I can’t hear anything at all.’
*
Two days later she put her head round the door of the Green Man and he was sitting there on a stool at the bar as if nothing had happened, reading a newspaper. Firelight winked off the bar furniture and spirit optics behind him. He looked up and began to smile. Anna slammed the door, then went and stood in the car park, where she trembled with surprise and fury. ‘Well I’ll just go home, then,’ she told herself, and rushed out into Station Lane. She got as far as the pond and – with some idea that it might make her feel better – decided to have a walk round the churchyard instead. That was where he caught up with her.
‘Wait!’ he called.
‘I won’t,’ she told him, though by then she had come to a halt anyway and was staring in a preoccupied way at the Herringe family graves lying between the great dark yew tree and the flint-knapped walls of the church.
‘Anna—’
She bent down to scrape lichen off some of the older stones. Laminated and flaking, reduced to mere fingers of Horsham slab, they protruded at odd angles from the tangled grass. A little under half of them belonged to women, though the women had not, it seemed, belonged to themselves. ‘Wife of,’ she read. ‘Mother of.’ ‘Hys lovinge sister.’ You could barely read the names, but quite a few of the dates were intact. She stood up again.
‘Don’t call me Anna,’ she said, dusting tiny dry flakes of lichen from her fingertips. ‘Go away.’
She was careful to keep her back to him. If he wouldn’t leave, she promised herself, she would; but a kind of hypnosis held her in place. They were both as nervous as ponies. She was going to walk away. She was going to refuse to speak. She was going to shout at him. She had no idea what she was going to do, only that she would never need to turn, or look, to find him: she could feel him there, heat, smell, everything.
Perhaps he guessed. He touched her shoulder. ‘Anna, why are you acting like this?’
‘You dare ask that!’
‘How will I know, without asking?’
This reminded her too much of Max Wishart.
‘Don’t be clever,’ she said.
He hated that. ‘And don’t pretend you’re angry just because I am,’ she warned him. He spread his arms then let them fall to his sides helplessly. She thought he looked tired around the eyes. ‘You went off without a word,’ she said. ‘You kissed me and then went off without a word.’ Before she could stop herself, she had added, in a voice she hardly recognised as her own, it was so full of need: ‘You wouldn’t put me before Stella.’
He looked startled. Then he said: ‘She owns me, Anna.’
‘What?’
He said gently, ‘Anna, I live on a canal boat, read, travel around. I’m writing a book no one but academics will ever read. I know a lot about dreams, and shamanism among the Inuit. Does that strike you as a way of earning a living?’
‘I thought—’ She realised she hadn’t thought at all. ‘Then what do you do?’ she asked.
‘No one in the Herringe family has needed to work since the Industrial Revolution. We’re a bit like royalty: we spend three years at Oxbridge, take second-class degrees in useless subjects, and the ambitious ones get a job in the firm.’ He shook his head. ‘The really ambitious ones end up running it. I wasn’t one of those. I collect a cheque every six months from a trust fund set up when I was born.’
Anna hated the bitter defensiveness of this. ‘You make yourself sound like some sort of dowser!’ she said. ‘But you got a doctorate, not a second-class degree, and you held down a demanding job for years. Since then you’ve been working on a project you love. You’ve been all over the world. Why are you making yourself sound so feeble?’
‘That’s not the point.’
‘I begin to think it is,’ said Anna. ‘All you do is denigrate yourself. I’ve got no patience with it. Other people would be proud of what they’ve achieved. Anyway, I don’t see what that has to do with Stella.’
‘Stella administers my trust.’
‘So?’
‘I’ve known her since I was twelve years old,’ he said, after a pause. ‘Nonesuch had already come down to her. She was in her early twenties then. So hungry, so determined, so flawed and fragile underneath it all! No one in the family could deny her anything.’ He examined these statements as if, like the house itself, they had complex internal architecture – as if, in saying one thing, he was really struggling to articulate another. ‘She filled that place like a light. She always got what she wanted. She still expects that, especially from me. She’s demanding, but she has no real underlying strength. That makes her difficult to deal with. Do you understand?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
He shrugged. ‘Perhaps I don’t, either,’ he said bleakly. ‘There are various ways she can limit my income, that’s all.’
‘But I can’t see why she should want to!’
He looked away. ‘She’s easily made jealous,’ he said.
‘Of me? Oh, I don’t believe I’m hearing this!’
‘Anna—’
‘Family money. Sibling rivalry. It’s a bad historical novel, John. I’m not going to be drawn into this.’
‘It doesn’t have to make any difference to us.’
‘It already has,’ said Anna quietly.
After that there didn’t seem to be a great deal to add. John Dawe looked angrily away into the distance. Anna, miserable, confused and unable to assimilate these changes to her view of him, simply went back to examining the Herringe graves. Presently she said: ‘They all lived a very long time, your ancestors.’
He glanced with hatred at the leaning stones. ‘Only the women,’ he said. The women always outlive the poor bloody men.’
She looked up at him. ‘All these resentments, John. You should stop blaming Stella for your life.’
‘If you knew—’
‘I’m going now. I’ll call you.’
He stood by the family plot and let her walk away.
15
After the embarrassing fiasco on the wild roads of the common, I found that I was no longer an accepted member of the band of cats I had come to think of as my friends. When they saw me coming they would run off with great loping strides, tails high in the air like taunting question marks, just slowly enough for me to note that their avoidance was deliberate; just close enough that I could catch a word here and there of name-callings aimed only at me. ‘Air-Catcher’ they called me; ‘Loony’, and most hurtfully, ‘Yellow Paws’.
So they had noticed, after all.
Ginge and Fernie appeared to have taken control of the gang, and in an insultingly short space of time had brought two newcomers into the group to replace me: a pair of grinning, brindled male kittens who had strayed much further from home than their owners would have liked. I was already stung by this rejection; but it was the sight of the two new members being initiated into the group’s rough and tumble play-fights that finally confirmed for me my own exclusion.
For a while I tried to make new friends, but the other village cats had already formed their own cliques, all with their own nicknames and games and little territories, and had no wish to welcome a larger-than-usual ginger kitten with an odd smell to him. Indeed, word about me seemed to have got around: many cats made it clear with hisses and curses that my presence was not required. Lonely and miserable, I took to making long, solitary forays into the surrounding countryside.
I wandered far away from the area which I had explored as part of the gang: down into the wastelands at the bottom of long, rambling lawns where the tenuous cultivation of part-time gardeners had lost any grip on the land, and brambles and nettles and self-seed
ed saplings were forming a vanguard for the wildwoods beyond.
Down there, I watched the summer come and go. Down there, where the air was cool and the tangle of undergrowth was alive with the scent of prey, I danced and hunted; and dozens of voles and mice succumbed to my pent-up fury. I crunched my way through them, bone and sinew, with grim determination, but I never took them home. They were my private vice; my own small triumph over the world.
On a mixed diet of wild prey and tinned food, I grew quickly. Already a strong cat, my daily journeys and hunting exploits made me firm and flexible and turned kitten-fat to lithe muscle. My head became lean and my profile striking. Looking at me in the light of early morning, Dellifer often commented on how I was coming to resemble the young Hawkweed. I could not imagine how this could be. Almost, I was affronted.
But I was not just developing in physical ways. I had begun to learn about the world: for it is quite one thing to be shown the world and its secrets by someone else, another entirely to discover them for yourself. As a result of my wanderings I saw things no other cat of my age had noticed: how skylarks rose into the air at dawn from the cornfields below the escarpment; how they hung invisible against the sky, borne up by the power of their song.
As the mists cleared in the mornings, allowing the pale sun to strike through, I saw how each single wet leaf had become a mirror which shone light back into the air, and I wondered at the complexities of the world.
On a day on which enough rain had fallen to bow the grass into a silvered sea, I looked back over my shoulder to see how my footprints marked a weaving trail from the byre at Glory Farm, out past the solitary sycamore where the crows gathered in its branches like wind-caught stripes of black plastic, to the stand of beeches on the crown of the hill.
I saw badgers in the ambiguous dawn light blundering along the side of the new dual carriageway, still confused by the bisection of their animal highway by this stinking, oily tarmac and the alien vehicles that hurtled along it. And all too often I came upon barely recognisable creatures ground to a mess of red meat and fur on the sides of the road; worse still, a cat I had once met in a farmyard some miles to the south of the village wandering vaguely around on the verge. It kept falling down then struggling up again, its legs trying to obey scrambled commands, only to collapse once more. Even from several yards away, I could tell that something was very wrong with the side of its head, and when I called out to it, it stared blankly at me for a moment, then pitched forward and lay still. When I sniffed at its face, I could tell there was no life left in it any more. I remembered how the two of us had once spent a companionable afternoon in the back of an abandoned haycart, watching the chickens pecking stupidly in the yard, before I had bidden it farewell and continued on my travels.
I shuddered and turned away, feeling at once elated at still being alive; and at the same time hollowed out, inadequate in the face of such pointless loss.
And through all this time, weaving their way in and out of the long nights, the dreams ran like the world’s unconscious memory of itself, secret and vivid and visible only to me.
I often lay out in the long meadow grass and watched the streams of golden scintilla ghosting up into the dark air: tiny and frantic, the dreams of insects; slow and languorous, the dreams of sleeping earthworms.
I examined the dreams of ponies and dogs, saw in them how they kicked up their heels to run, unfettered and ownerless, across windy moors. I watched the dreams of domestic fowl; how the hens dreamt of the cockerel, and he of them; how garden birds dream-fought over nest-sites and bacon rinds; and it struck me how curious it was that we should all be bound together by the commonality of our dreams; humans and animals, birds and burrowing things, all dreaming together of mates and territory and food, the ordinary stuff of life.
Having come to this simple conclusion – a deep truth I believed it then – I thought that nothing in the world could surprise me; and that such simplicity of motivation could do no great harm, whatever my grandfather said. Mine was the arrogance of the young, blind and sure. I had a lot more to learn.
It was, I see now, this arrogance, this inability to make a deeper connection, that alienated me from my own kind. Turned away by my friends, the world turned me also away from myself, so that my thoughts fled away from me, streaming out into the deep pink sunrise, into the forms the rabbits left upon the dewy grass, the sound of rain falling deep in the woods.
Then one day, exploring the hinterland of the village to the north, I threaded my way through stands of soft wet bracken and tall grasses, and emerged on to the towpath that ran beside the canal.
I had heard a lot about this place, but for a long time had deliberately avoided the area for fear of running into Ginge or Fernie or another of the local cats. Now I realised with some surprise that I no longer cared whether I did or not: my kittenhood felt such a long way away that the events that had led to my exclusion seemed paltry and inconsequential to the cat I had now become.
Even so, I approached with some caution, sniffing the air. Milling scents marked the area as the territory of a number of vigorous tomcats. I stood there, alert in the sharp morning light, muscles braced for a swift departure if it became necessary, and stared out over the canal. The houseboats basked lazily in the still water, and the sun struck off their colourful paint and brightwork. Pansies bloomed in pots on the roof of one of the narrowboats; on another an unmanned fishing line dropped from the bow to an idle plastic float. Washing had been strung amongst the rigging of a third, but there was no breeze to stir the hanging shirts and jeans. Of the owners, those creatures neither of dry land nor water, there was no other sign. It was the most tranquil place I had ever seen.
I sat on the edge of the towpath, eyes half closed against the sunlight, and let the quietness wash over me. How long I stayed like this, I could not say: it could have been moments only; or an hour. This slow passage of time was interrupted by the steadily growing sensation of being watched. I felt the gaze that fell upon me like the weight of an insect on my fur; but when I looked around, I could see no one at all. I shifted position, craned my neck. Still no one.
I sat up, stretched each of my legs in an apparently unconcerned manner, and walked nonchalantly along the towpath, my neck bristling under the unseen onlooker’s stare. When I reached the darkest of the moored houseboats, I stopped. There was a new scent in the air, a scent that made my nose twitch and my blood fizz. Puzzled, I stared around, but saw nothing but coiled ropes and shining metal, coloured railings, the shadowed deckhouse...
Slowly I looked up.
*
On top of the deckhouse, lying in a pose altogether contrived, yet wholly instinctive, was a tawny gold cat, a cat of maybe seven or eight months of age. She might be barely out of kittenhood, but any trace of kitten-fat had either vanished or had been subtly redistributed to imbue her slim figure with just a hint of seductive feminine roundness: softly, at the angle of jaw and cheek; here, at the shoulder; or there, a perfect curve of haunch. She licked her fur with the intentness of one at once aware of scrutiny, yet completely absorbed in her routine: it was as if the energy of her grooming consumed itself, only to generate itself once more as some powerful and mysterious magnetism that drew the eye and froze the limbs of any observer.
I was captivated. And when she lifted her head and focused on some point just beyond and to the left of me, the light fell full upon her features, and it seemed to me that her face was like a flower opening to the sun, and at the moment I felt I lost my heart entirely and irrevocably.
Her gaze shifted fractionally. She appraised me, her nostrils flaring briefly, then bent to lick with precise grace between the toes of her outstretched foot.
‘I haven’t seen you before,’ she said after a few strokes, knowing that I was still rooted to the spot. Her voice was cool and low, the vowels softened by a discernible country burr.
She considered for a moment. ‘But then again, it’s entirely possible I just didn’t notice you. Afte
r all, it’s not as if you’re much to look at.’
I was stung, I will admit. I wasn’t used to dealing with beautiful little queens with sharp tongues. Flummoxed, I stared at my feet. My face burned with sudden disappointment.
When I looked up again I found that she was looking at me, head on one side, and a wicked little half-smile lurked beneath her whiskers. ‘What’s the matter, eh? Cat got your tongue?’ She gave a little howl of laughter.
I felt as though someone had stuffed my brain with dandelion heads. I shook myself. ‘You’re very rude,’ I observed.
‘Mmmm, I find it saves time and effort.’ She spread her claws and examined them minutely. ‘There are so many idiots around, and they all seem to want to talk to me.’
‘I don’t regard myself as an idiot,’ I said stiffly, my eyes fixed on her extraordinary face, ‘though there are some who might disagree with me.’
‘Do stop gawping.’
‘Sorry.’
‘And don’t apologise – it’s so irritating.’
I had no idea what to say: all avenues seemed closed to me. So, ‘Don’t you like anyone but yourself?’ I pressed on, and found myself horrified at what had slipped from my mouth.
But all the vision did was to smile again, eyes averted: a smile that promised the disclosure of secrets. Then she said: ‘Since I don’t even know your name, I regard that as an impertinent question.’
‘Orlando,’ I said quickly.
‘That’s rather a smart name for such a foolish cat.’
‘Look,’ I said with sudden force, ‘if you can’t be friendly, why talk to me at all?’
‘Ah, so you do have a bit of spirit. Tell me, Orlando,’ – an involuntary shiver ran down my spine to hear my name enunciated to such sensual effect – ‘what are you doing here, down by the canal?’
‘Just exploring.’
‘A bold explorer, are you?’ She managed to look down at me through her eyelashes, a gesture I found most provocative.
‘I think so.’ I thought for a minute. ‘I’ve walked the countryside around here for miles in all directions. I’ve seen some amazing sights.’ I could see by the glaze that fell over those luminous tawny eyes that this line of discussion was failing to capture her imagination, so I added desperately: ‘I’ve wandered the wild roads too.’ For this, I was rewarded by a sudden spark of interest. She leaned forward.