She extended a paw in mock-elegant manner, then changed her mind and affectionately headbutted me instead.
‘Do you want to come dreamcatching with me?’ I asked suddenly. It was the first thing that came into my head; I still don’t know why I asked her, or why I should have forgotten my mission so easily.
Millie smiled delightedly. ‘I can’t see the dreams, even if I eat the weed,’ she admitted. ‘They say it skips a generation, you know, the gift.’ A roguish light came into her eye. ‘But I love to hear about the dreams. Humans, they’re so bizarre!’
Being on the highways on my own had been a tense adventure, one that made my heart hammer in my ears. Being on the wild roads with Hawkweed was more like being on trial, as if the old cat were in league with the highways and had brought me there as to some ancient testing ground, where the compass winds would probe with icy fingers beneath my new wild fur to root out the essence of my character, to examine the tenacity of every moral fibre.
Being on the highways with Millie was a whole other experience.
As we entered my favourite wild road, the one that led off the old footpath running past the Green Man, I watched her caper in delight as her wild form came upon her. Silver and black bars wrapped themselves around her fur; from her ears great tufts sprouted like shoots of spring barley; her paws grew to the size of lily pads; and her body was one great smooth coiled muscle. On the highways, Millie was quite a different proposition to the odd little cat I had met upon the towpath. She saw me watching her and a huge fanged smile split the grizzled mask. Reflections of golden dreams danced in her eyes, so strange that none but I could see them.
‘Well, what are you waiting for?’ she rumbled. ‘Catch me some dreams.’
So I leapt and pounced and leapt again. Up I soared, into the roof of the highway, paws splayed and talons spread. A dream fled past to my left, and at once I was upon it, worrying it like a mouse before flipping it up into the air again. The golden globe wobbled and fell, straight back into my waiting maw. I landed on my hind legs and at once sprang back into the air. I landed on all fours, two dreams pinioned beneath my front paws. I pirouetted; I spun like a dervish. On and on I hunted: a twisting leap here; a killing blow there.
Dream after shining dream succumbed to my lethal jaws and spilled their sticky juices down my ruff. The air was rank with the smell of them, hot with the energy generated by a dreamcatcher’s dance of life.
One by one their golden lights failed and died, until at last the road was dark and empty once more. Empty except for an apprentice dreamcatcher and the rumbling purr of my new friend, the lynx.
‘Now we will go back into the tame world and you can tell me about the dreams of the people of Ashmore,’ it said. ‘And when you have done that, I will reward you.’
The purr of the lynx reverberated through the highway like a force of nature. And then, quite abruptly, it stopped, and where there had been the most powerfully companionable noise in the world, now there was a complete absence of sound, as if I had been sucked into a vacuum.
I looked around. I was alone. Confused, my head full of other people’s imagery, I gazed into the darkness, just in time to see the flick of a bob-tail disappearing through the wall of the wild road.
*
Outside, the stars were scattered all over the sky as if someone had thrown them down in haste. There was a distinct chill in the air.
Millie, her wild self now only a memory, a shimmer echoing down the length of the highways, was stretched out in a patch of wild poppies, paying meticulous attention to a long, slim, extended leg. Where her barbed tongue tracked through the fur, it gave back a silvery sheen to the stars, and with each stroke the silken flowerheads nodded their approval. There is a little in life so reassuring as grooming. For a cat who has just slipped out of the adrenalised haze of the wild roads back into the cold, still exposure of the mundane world, where the vast, remote dark sky wheels overhead and perspectives are surreal and untrustworthy, the warm, rhythmic rasp of tongue over fur and muscle is a gentle reaffirmation of self: the persistent recreation of identity.
For me, watching Millie’s head bob and draw, bob and draw, it was like watching the Great Cat Herself steadily licking the world back into shape. With each stroke I felt my heart slow, my pulse gentle; I felt the dancing dream-images in my head coalesce to harlequin patterns of pastel light.
She looked up. ‘So, now, my little dreamcatcher,’ she said. ‘Tell me what you saw.’
And so I settled myself beside her and recounted what I could recall of the dreams I had eaten, without pause to make any sense or order of it all. I told her of curious figures and sequences; of running, and screams; how the light fell on the skin of an orange; how mould spread like a wave across a woman’s skin; how an empty boat rocked gently in a lake of pale liquid gold; I remembered bare brown skin and a shining dark eye, very close up. How, seen through a small window, a dove rose vertically into blue air by a church spire, the bright sun turning its feathers to brilliant white and, circling, how it disappeared from view, only to re-enter the windowframe on the other side, a bird black with shadow. Of corridors lined with hundreds of doors, all closed. Of glowing embers and a broken violin. And made her laugh when I told her of a woman I had seen in her dream, a woman whose eyes were the most extraordinary green, her hair as black as a crow. She was watching her reflection in a mirror as her head became the head of a cat.
‘She should be so lucky.’
‘In her dream, she felt she was.’
‘Transformation is magical,’ Millie said simply.
I stared at her, surprised by the sudden gravity of the conversation.
She smiled. ‘Everyone likes to be more than they are. That’s why I love to be on the highways. That sense of greatness, all that power and potential.’ She flexed her paws so that her claws popped, sharp and glinting, out into the moonlight. ‘On the highways, Orlando, you are a lion. Did you know?’
Now it was my turn to smile. ‘And you, Millie: you are a lynx.’
‘A lynx is good,’ she considered. ‘Did you know that hundreds of years ago humans believed that a lynx could see through walls?’
I snorted. ‘A cat on a highway can walk through walls. That’s no big trick.’
‘And they believed that its urine crystallised into precious stones!’
‘Now you’re making things up—’
Millie started to laugh. ‘People are mad, Orlando: quite mad! They used to think that squeezing the juice out of a civet cat’s arse made them smell good! Can you imagine?’
‘Never!’ I scoffed.
‘It’s true!’
She rolled on her back and wriggled in delight. The starlight glimmered on the silver ring in her ear and made crescent moons of her eyes. Then all of a sudden she became still and her bellyfur glowed submissively white against the dark ground.
‘You were a lion when you fought the narrowboat cats, too,’ she said, and her voice was as low as a bumblebee’s drone. ‘I watched you beat them all, one by one by one.’
The long, long legs parted minutely, in a gesture both vulnerable and lascivious. A warm pheromonal musk filled the air.
My mind went blank.
‘Don’t need to fight anyone for me, honey,’ she said softly, a light purr trilling at the back of her throat.
In the distance a cricket chirred and a night-bird sang, and my blood beat faster. It would be so easy to fall upon this willing female, to roll her roughly over and bite the thick skin at the back of that long unfamiliar neck and to lower myself into her receptive warmth. Too easy. And far too difficult.
All I could see in my mind’s eye was a tawny cat, gold to the bone, angular of face and slim of shoulder, beckoning me into the depths of her boat.
‘I can’t, Millie,’ I gasped. ‘I just can’t.’ I leapt to my feet as if scalded. I could not bring myself to look at her. ‘I’m sorry. Really, I am.’
And with that I turned and ran.
*
Millie rolled on to her side and watched the young marmalade cat go, and the jaunty piebald mask she wore to encounter the world fell away to reveal a face both bleak and inexpressibly forlorn.
17
So that she wouldn’t be tempted to go to London to panic-buy clothes she couldn’t afford and didn’t really need, Anna left all her decisions until Friday afternoon. This strategy of delay becalmed her in front of the bedroom mirror two hours before she was due at Nonesuch, with most of the contents of her wardrobe on the floor around her feet. She was not so naïve as to assume that frock-anxiety signified only itself: beneath it lay a reluctance to go to the party at all. Despite her efforts, the complexities of her relationship with John had somehow spread to include his cousin: knowing what she knew about their relationship, she found herself suddenly reluctant to meet Stella.
There was more. A kind of shyness lay between her and John. From the beginning, part of their antagonism had been sexual, an oblique acknowledgement of the physical tension between them. They had been like two rather dangerous animals, puzzledly trying to defuse one another’s defences sufficiently to mate. Every touch of his startled her. She knew he was startled too. His eyes widened when he saw her, he couldn’t hide that. The kiss in the lane had eased nothing – indeed it had probably been the kiss, rather than the meeting with Stella, which had caused their latest quarrel. Since then she had been having a disturbingly recurrent fantasy in which – at the turn of some darkened corridor of his cousin’s house, his eyes intent yet wary – John Dawe reached out to explore the hollow of her collarbone, then ran his long, strong fingers lightly downward.
When she wasn’t worrying about what to wear, she was wondering what she would say to Stella. When she wasn’t worrying about Stella, small thrills of sexual anticipation were chasing themselves across the surface of her skin. She shook them away.
‘Don’t be so ridiculous,’ she advised herself. ‘It’s only a dinner party.’
She pulled out a jacket of brown and grey velvet. Bought at fantastic cost from Voyage on the Old Brompton Road, at the height of her career with TransCorp, it would save the day, as it always had. It was her favourite garment. But at some point when they were younger Orlando and Vita had found it, and, deciding that they loved it too, covered it in fine tabby and orange cat-hair. She threw it on the bed in despair.
‘I should have donated you both to Stella,’ she said out loud. ‘It would serve you right.’
In the end she decided on a long, strappy black dress from Whistles, plainly but nicely cut. It would be the first time she had worn it in two years. A side-slit revealed rather more leg than she had remembered, but as soon as she saw herself in it, she knew. A more confident Anna Prescott emerged to stand before the mirror. Her face, long and oval, finely featured with its strong eyebrows and steady brown eyes, gazed solemnly back at her. ‘Not bad.’ She twisted her hair up and pinned it casually so that tendrils fell to her pale shoulders. ‘Not bad at all.’ Suddenly she was grinning and twirling, imaginary glass of champagne in hand, taped viol music echoing softly off Jacobean walls, and a silent dark man watching her every move as if she were the centre of his universe.
She looked at her watch. Seven thirty, and the light was going out of the air. She had half an hour in which to bathe, put on her make-up and get into the local taxi, driven tonight by an old boyfriend of Alice’s who chain-smoked and drove rather too fast, his free arm resting across the back of the front passenger seat.
‘Wow,’ he said, looking at her legs. ‘Party at the Big House, is it?’
Anna nodded.
‘Nasty old night,’ he said.
It was a nasty old night. A few stars hung above the afterglow, smudged by flying streamers of cloud. A black westerly was bringing ripe horse chestnuts down from the trees in such numbers that they bounced off the bonnet of the Ford like small munitions. “‘Wild west wind”!’ quoted Anna to herself, wondering what the evening held for her. At Nonesuch, the cedars shook themselves like great slow animals; rain fell suddenly, blackening the soft stone of the gateposts, disfiguring the Herringe arms as the taxi passed beneath.
‘We’re in for it now,’ predicted the driver as he pulled up by the lighted porch. Anna, handing him three pounds, said: ‘“Thou breath of Autumn’s being.”’
‘You what?’
‘Could you come back for me about midnight?’
‘Pumpkin time, eh?’
Anna grinned.
The heavy, iron-bossed front doors hung open, surfaces limned with gold light. There were complex smells of food and wine: she felt her nose twitch like any cat’s. The supper was being catered, by a firm from Drychester which usually did weddings. ‘I’m damned if I’m going to cook, dear,’ Stella had warned Anna. ‘And you’d be damned if you ate it.’
Staff from the caterer’s met Anna in the big hall and were quietly surprised by the Voyage jacket (quickly defurred with some Sellotape) which Anna had decided to wear anyway as cover-up over the sleeveless dress. She was surprised in her turn to be led not into Stella’s little minimalist flat, but towards the centre of the house and into the Long Corridor instead. There, with Clara de Montfort staring down at her in cold amusement from the row of ancestral portraits, Anna protested: ‘Is this right? This can’t be right.’
But it was. They were going to eat in the Painted Room. She walked in, feeling less sure of herself than she had, and there was John Dawe, waiting for her, dressed in a loosely tailored black suit and a mid-grey shirt. Something gave her the idea that he had spent an afternoon similar to her own – putting on a tie, perhaps, then discarding it. Putting it on again, with a different shirt. She went up to him straight away and said: ‘You look nice.’
‘You look nice, too.’
‘Shame about the boots.’
He looked down at his Bluntstones. ‘They give the game away,’ he admitted. ‘But I did polish them.’
He offered her a glass of wine. She took it, and held it in her hand. Puzzled and impressed by one another’s best clothes, unsure how to progress further, they stared around the Painted Room, lit by a myriad of church candles, as if neither of them had seen it before.
‘I hate that mural,’ Anna said, eyeing the trompe l’œil, with its counterfeit window frame and flatly painted view of the original cobbled courtyard. The light in it seemed to have changed since she first saw it, so that the gables on the far side of the courtyard were grey and diffuse, the intervening air smeared with rain. ‘Don’t you? Especially since they’ve hidden the real courtyard behind it. Why would you do that? Brick up a lovely old Elizabethan window and then paint a false one over it? How could anyone have mistaken that for the real thing?’
‘I don’t think that was the point,’ John Dawe said gently.
‘Well it isn’t clever,’ Anna heard herself insist. ‘I think the Herringe ancestors were just intellectual snobs. And that! Is that supposed to be a person there, in the arcade? It’s just such bad drawing!’ She stared into her wine. Her voice seemed quieter to her than its own echo, which went about hollowly up there among the roof beams. That, she thought, is what you get for avoiding the issue. She lifted her chin, looked him in the eye. ‘I don’t care how you live,’ she said, more definitely than she had intended. ‘The other day – I was wrong to have an opinion.’ And then, just so he couldn’t miss the point: ‘How you live is up to you.’
John Dawe studied this abrupt apology as if uncertain how best to acknowledge it. Then he smiled. ‘I don’t care how you live, either,’ he said.
Anna gave him a cross look. ‘That’s very generous of you. I’m sure.’
They were saved from further confrontation by the arrival of Stella Herringe, who came in through the door smoking a long, dark cigarette, and turning to call back down the corridor to her third guest of the evening.
‘Anthony Downing! Of all people,’ she was saying, in her most mischievous voice. ‘But so typical of him!’
If Stella had s
pent the afternoon in a dialogue with the mirror, it didn’t show. She had chosen a onesleeved evening gown in pewter lame. With her black hair in an elaborate French plait to lengthen her pretty neck and Manolo Blahnik kitten heels to give her an inch or two on Anna, she looked like a single, perfect flower in a narrow vase. It was, perhaps, a little too cold, too studied: then you saw her bare shoulder, round, inviting, smooth as butter. She gave her attention to the Painted Room, as if she, too, had never seen it before, the trompe l’œil courtyard full of a watery light of its own, the candles, the long Jacobean table with its gleaming cutlery and snowy napery.
‘But here they are!’ she marvelled over John and Anna, as if some puzzle had solved itself. ‘They’re already here!’
The third guest stepped into the room.
Flickering candlelight played off longish, untidy blond hair, a long, mobile face split by an enormous grin.
It was Max Wishart.
‘Anna—’ He crossed the room in two bounds, wrapped his arms around her so that she was crushed against the white linen of his dress shirt. Her wine glass tilted: wine slopped uselessly on to the wooden floor. His smell, which she had forbidden herself to remember, surrounded her like the climate of another country. It made her feel raw and new, transplanted, responsive to pain. Her life in Ashmore, so carefully fostered to protect her from her own emotions, had peeled away like the scab from a wound. Her defences had not held up.
He was holding her at arm’s length and regarding her with an expression both delighted and bemused. ‘Anna. Anna Prescott. Here, of all places! How in the world are you?’ Simultaneously, in quite a different room, he was holding her in the same way to say goodbye. Trapped on the vertiginous contour between these two events, Anna found herself unable to think, unable to speak. Everyone else in the room must have seen this, she thought. She felt caught out: on view. She felt shamed in some way. This moment had lain in wait for her all along. Somehow Stella Herringe had sought it out and ambushed her from inside it.