The Knot Garden

  ‘Max. Max Wishart.’

  Her own voice sounded flat and false to her. She disengaged herself from him awkwardly, feeling the weight of John’s gaze upon the two of them. The beat of her heart was painful. It was so terribly unfair.

  ‘Fine,’ she lied. ‘Nice to see you.’

  Max looked puzzled.

  John Dawe looked puzzled.

  ‘Now we must all sit down!’ said Stella Herringe, who didn’t look puzzled at all.

  *

  It was like being forced to open the shoebox of things you put away after every finished relationship – the matchbooks, cinema tickets and blanched photobooth snaps – only to find that while your feelings were no clearer, they had become just a little faded, just a little remote. Max stood there and the connection was instant. He stood there, and he was a million miles away. He had just got off the plane from New York – where he had been on a ‘bread and butter tour’, as he put it, ‘playing second violin to a flautist whose name I’m too embarrassed to mention’ – and was clearly surprised to find himself here at such short notice. He looked down at Stella, who only smiled and murmured, ‘I was so glad you could come!’

  He seemed thinner than he had the last time Anna had seen him. Perhaps he had been working too hard. Otherwise, he was Max – tall, smiling, generous with his intelligence and wit, clever but never superficial, murderer of hearts and cats, everyone’s favourite dinner guest.

  Dinner was a strange affair. The wavering light from the church candles glittered confusedly off an assortment of Victorian glasses and Jacobean silverware but failed to illuminate the catering staff, who moved about the dim room beyond like ghosts, coming and going suddenly and without apparent reason. Stuffed quails came and went, followed by champagne granitas and a rack of lamb, trussed like a victim and accompanied by so many cleverly presented vegetables that Anna felt quite without appetite in their presence. ‘Have some of the parsnips julienne,’ Stella urged her, ladling a spoonful of the glistening strips on to the huge, ornate dinnerplate. The food lay there, mythic in dimension, never diminishing despite her best efforts, which were, she had to admit, pathetic in the extreme.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she heard herself saying. ‘I’m just not very hungry tonight.’

  Stella, laughing, speared the pinkly bleeding lamb from Anna’s plate – ‘too good to let it go to waste, dear’ – and despatched it with fastidious gusto.

  She had assembled her guests in a kind of pocket of time. They sat, the three of them, staring uncertainly at one another across the dazzling white tablecloth, trying to think of things to say; while Stella looked from one to the other with a small expectant smile on her face, and the history of Nonesuch seemed to revolve around them like a shadowy carousel.

  ‘So, Max,’ John Dawe said, ‘you’re in the music business.’

  If his tone was a little sour, a little calculated. Max didn’t seem to notice. The smile with which Anna had seen win him the attentions – wanted or unwanted – of so very many women, spread itself slowly across his face. The skin crinkled around the corners of his apparently guileless blue eyes.

  ‘You might say that.’

  Stella had seated them rather oddly, Anna thought. She had placed herself, reasonably enough, at the head of the long table; but rather than seat Anna and John to face one another across the shorter expanse, as you usually would with a couple, it was as if she had imposed a carefully premeditated distance between them. At the same time, by placing him at the opposite end to herself, she had accentuated her link with her cousin: two members of the Herringe family presiding over the little soap opera going on in the middle.

  ‘Max’s a baroque violinist,’ Anna said. ‘He won’t tell you, but he’s one of the most respected in Europe. If he wasn’t so lazy he’d be more famous that he is. We’re old friends.’

  ‘Oh, a little more than friends, dear,’ said Stella, reaching across the table to squeeze Max’s arm, ‘if all I hear is true.’

  Despite herself, Anna blushed. ‘We lived together for a while,’ she said. ‘People do.’ Everyone comes with baggage, she thought. Why should Max and I have to defend ours? Why is she making such a fuss about this? Then she thought, she’s doing this deliberately. She’s going to try and use my history with Max to lever John and me apart. Why should I have to defend myself? She glanced across at John for help, but he was looking at Stella. The whole arrangement of the table made it difficult to catch his attention; and that had been deliberate, too. Out of a kind of astonished rage – not so much at Stella’s scheming as the pathetically old-fashioned assumptions behind it – she found herself smiling at Max and saying with a lot more warmth than she felt: ‘It’s good to see you again.’

  ‘The violinist and the currency dealer!’ Stella said. ‘How extraordinary. You do look rather wonderful together. What went wrong?’

  That’s really none of your business, Anna thought angrily. She was opening her mouth to say so when Max interrupted mildly, ‘You know, I don’t think it was really a matter of anything going wrong: just a matter of moving on.’ He appealed to Stella. ‘It’s important to move on, don’t you think? You can’t just immure yourself in the past, can you?’ He glanced casually around the Painted Room. ‘Though this is lovely past to live in, if you must.’

  At this, Anna’s heart filled with gratitude: for once, someone had made Stella look ill at ease. To cover her annoyance, Stella examined the ruins of the previous course. ‘Do any of you want pudding?’ she said. After a moment she rang the little silver bell at her elbow and two of the shadowy caterers appeared. Dessert turned out to be a concoction of whipped cream accompanied by a salad of exotic fruits. ‘It’s my own recipe,’ Stella announced, ‘and my only contribution.’ She sat back with an expectant smile. Among the figs, lychees and blackheart cherries lay something apple-like, soft, and slightly rotten-smelling.

  ‘What’s this?’ Anna asked. Even the food seemed to have been designed to put her at a disadvantage. She prodded a slice with her spoon. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever come across it before.’

  ‘It’s a medlar,’ John said. ‘From Stella’s orchard.’

  ‘You have an orchard?’ Anna asked in surprise.

  ‘Oh yes, dear. What would Nonesuch be without its orchard? It’s walled, and very old, and rather overgrown. We keep half a dozen medlars amongst the apples and pears. The stock is sixteenth century, I believe. You eat the fruit only when it’s decayed.’

  ‘“You’ll be rotten before you be half ripe, and that’s the right vertue of the medlar,”’ John quoted. ‘All those glorious Elizabethan images of decay and sex.’ He met Stella’s eyes. Something unspoken passed between them, and even as it did, Anna saw a movement in the picture behind them. The rain-dirtied courtyard light darkened further towards evening. The shadowy figure in the arcade beneath the Tudor gables seemed to come into focus, shifting in some subtle preparatory way. She blinked, but when she looked again the painting was as dull as it had ever been, and all she had seen was the shadow of one of the catering staff flicker across it. A candle guttered, as if in a breeze.

  Max said: ‘Rotten before you’re half ripe. Sounds like one of my dreams.’

  ‘More like a nightmare,’ said Anna. ‘Decay and sex.’ She shuddered.

  Stella Herringe gave her a brief, considering glance. Then she said; ‘John’s your man for dreams. He thinks if you dig around in dreams enough you can unearth all life’s little dark secrets.’

  ‘But how Freudian,’ said Max. He looked genuinely amused.

  ‘John’s is a more spiritual approach, I think.’

  John glowered at her. ‘You make me sound like Gipsy Rose Lee,’ he said.

  Stella turned her head to give Max the benefit of her blue eyes and challenging little laugh. Before this gesture was complete she had murmured – almost lightly, almost in passing – to her cousin: ‘Well, you do look as if you have a touch of the tarbrush, darling. Not in every light, of course.’

  Joh
n clenched his jaw. With some idea of saving him from his own temper – though by now she would happily have seen him turn on his cousin – Anna interrupted quickly: ‘I’ve been having the strangest dreams.’

  She hadn’t thought much about this, but as soon as the words were out of her mouth she saw how true they were. ‘In fact, I haven’t been sleeping at all well.’

  Ever since John kissed her, bizarre images had filled her sleep, only to evaporate as she woke hot and upset, tangled in her sheets in the middle of the night. Of those that remained by morning, some achieved a peculiar clarity, often frankly sexual but edged with violence or horror, and quite unlike the unfocused tranquillity of her usual dreams; while others seemed to have so little meaning that the word itself was irrelevant. ‘Here’s an odd one,’ she said, hastily selecting the most innocuous example she could recall. ‘I’m sitting in a room looking out of the window and I see a bird soaring into the sky beside a church spire, the sun turning its feathers to brilliant white. Then it starts to circle, disappears from view, and I think it must have flown away. There’s no real sense of loss. I don’t seem to have any feelings in the dream. But then the bird re-enters the window frame on the other side—’

  She paused. ‘Only now it’s become completely black.’

  Max gave her a thoughtful look. ‘Might it not be a different bird?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, no. It’s the same bird. Always the same bird.’

  Stella, who had listened to Anna with a kind of greedy anticipation, leaned across the table and said excitedly, ‘I think we should all tell a dream, don’t you?’ then, in a completely different tone of voice, to John Dawe: ‘Well now, dear. What do you make of that?’

  John put his elbows on the table, cupped his face in his hands. ‘It’s interesting enough,’ he said, as if he was already tired of talking to amateurs. After a moment he looked up at Anna and said: ‘Dreams aren’t a simple code.’

  ‘Oh, cop-out, cop-out,’ exclaimed his cousin.

  He ignored her. ‘Dreams are an ad hoc language. It’s not just that they have a different grammar to the ones we use in everyday life: it’s that every one of them has a different grammar to every other.’ It was a reproach, Anna saw; he was reproaching her because she had inadvertently helped Stella turn a lifelong passion into a parlour game. ‘You can’t just perform simple substitutions. Symbols don’t cohere, they shift and break up. They don’t have to mean the same thing twice. You can’t even be sure what’s signal and what’s noise.’

  ‘That just sounds so clever,’ said Stella. ‘Doesn’t it?’

  ‘But surely you can hazard a guess?’ wheedled Max, to whom everything was a parlour game anyway. ‘Otherwise why bother? People want an interpretation, not a discussion of the interpretive method itself.’ He winked at Anna. ‘Myself, I’d say it was a dream of lost innocence.’

  John Dawe gave him a sarcastic look. Then he poured himself a second brandy, drank half of it in one swallow, and asked: ‘And just how do you reach that conclusion?’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ said Max.

  Max Wishart, Anna thought, as she watched him consider his answer, who are you now?

  He wasn’t quite the Max she knew. Despite the passion for red wines, and bouillabaisse, he looked underweight and drawn. Little sheaves of lines had developed at the corners of his eyes and mouth. He looked less blithe, less self-sufficient, than when she had seen him last. Perhaps his life had not been so continually successful as he expected; perhaps it had been less friendly to him. This thought she savoured, though she knew it to be spiteful. Max, happily unaware, sat back and stretched his long legs out under the table so that they brushed against hers. Flustered, she tucked her feet under her chair. He didn’t seem to notice.

  ‘I would read the white bird,’ he said, ‘as an image of purity.’

  John Dawe leaned back in his chair. ‘You would,’ he said, more to his wine glass than Max Wishart, ‘would you.’

  ‘Oh yes. The window of the house, the eye of the soul: you know? So this is something very personal to Anna. The bird is herself. Is the landscape herself too?’ he asked himself in parenthesis. ‘Well, we can’t know that. So anyway: your little white bird returns blackened from its trip around the sky. What can have brought about this disaster? The only other signifier in the picture is’ – here he grinned at Anna – ‘the phallus represented by the church spire.’

  Stella laughed. ‘We know all about that,’ she said.

  John looked contemptuous. ‘One interpretation is as good as another at this sort of level,’ he said roughly. ‘Why don’t the three of you play Trivial Pursuit and be done with it?’

  ‘Dear me,’ said Stella to Max. ‘He didn’t like that.’

  ‘What is your interpretation, John?’ Anna asked softly.

  He shrugged. ‘The sky is a venue, a field of possibilities, a space in which to act. A life,’ – here he acknowledged Max’s interpretation with a nod – ‘perhaps Anna’s life. The white bird flies out, only to return, in a gesture of completion, as its own diametric opposite.’ He spread his hands. He looked around as if nothing more needed to be said. There was a puzzled silence. ‘Don’t you see?’ he appealed. ‘There is only one bird here.’ He gave Anna an intense look. ‘You have dreamed,’ he said, ‘the two halves of a whole.’

  ‘Nice,’ Max Wishart admitted softly. ‘Very nice indeed.’ The two men exchanged a smile.

  In the comfortable pause that followed, Anna thought about her own life, which she now saw not as a seesaw of good and bad, success and failure, happiness and unhappiness, gain and loss, but as one whole, healed thing. The two birds were her own heart, the yin and yang of her, the warm fluttering systole and diastole of life. It was an image too difficult to maintain, but even after it had slipped away she felt buoyed-up and at ease with herself for the first time since the split with Max.

  Stella Herringe toyed with her wine glass, and would not look at the others. ‘But what about the spire?’ she demanded. ‘That’s all very well, but what about the spire?’

  ‘Oh, I think that might just be Ashmore Church,’ said John carelessly.

  Everyone laughed, even Stella. The cheese board arrived. The catering staff attended to the failing candles, coming and going with their long white wax tapers like cathedral attendants. “‘The sapient sutlers of the Lord”,’ quoted Max obscurely. John seemed to approve of this, because he raised his glass. Stella’s table warmed a degree or two, and the supper party with it. John and Max had a loud argument about what John called ‘romantic religion’. Everyone drank more brandy. Max, egged on by Stella, produced for their entertainment a recurring dream he had.

  ‘I’m sailing alone in a carved and varnished boat on a calm ocean. I can go anywhere in the world. It’s wonderfully relaxing.’

  ‘And?’ said John. ‘Then?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Max. ‘Do you see? That’s the beauty of it. Nothing else happens at all!’

  ‘Lucky you,’ said Anna pointedly, but Max was already turning to Stella and urging her, ‘Come on, my dear, you started this, and now it’s your go. What dream have you for us?’

  ‘Oh yes!’ said Anna. She clapped her hands.

  ‘My cousin is afraid to sleep,’ John Dawe said. ‘For one reason or another. She doesn’t miss it. Insomnia’s something of a family tradition.’

  Stella laughed. ‘Herringes hate to waste time when there’s so much to be done in the world,’ she told Max.

  ‘Just like Margaret Thatcher,’ said John.

  ‘You must be able to remember one dream,’ Anna urged. ‘I’ve gone and Max’s gone. It really is your turn.’

  ‘Tell them the one about the cats,’ said John in a cruel voice.

  Stella greeted this with a blank look. Suddenly she said: ‘I’m walking uphill with a man. When I reach the top there’s a strong wind blowing. It blows so hard, it inflates my skirts and I rise up into the air like some balloon with my feet dangling and an intense sensation of pleasur
e.’ She looked pleased with herself. ‘There. I don’t think we need analyse that, do we?’

  ‘And what about the man?’ said Anna.

  ‘Oh my dear, you know men. He just walks away.’

  ‘Touché,’ applauded Max Wishart. ‘Is this a dream of higher things? Are we to envisage you rising at night from the contaminating earth, like an angel, or a holy fog?’

  John snorted into his brandy glass. ‘An angel,’ he said.

  This seemed to hurt Stella, who looked away. His indifference, so obviously displayed, left her tired and old. It was an effort to gather herself together again, but after a moment, she said, ‘What about you, John? What do you dream of?’

  He put back the rest of his brandy. ‘There are cultures which believe that at least half of our life goes on in dreams. That dreaming is the soul’s adventure – no, the soul’s project. That the effects of those dreams are as real as any event that takes place during the day. There are cultures which believe that the dreams you have at night can affect the health and well-being of the entire daylight world.’

  He looked round table, pushed back his chair and got unsteadily to his feet.

  ‘I don’t dream to amuse you,’ he said. ‘Sorry, folks.’

  ‘Well that’s a nice neat hole to hide in,’ said Stella. ‘The dignity of the expert.’

  Anna leaned across the table and touched John’s forearm. He had taken his jacket off and rolled up his sleeves. He was clenching his fist so hard that the muscle was like a block of wood. ‘Come on, John,’ she said. ‘It is your turn.’

  He stared at her in a betrayed way then, lifting his hands, palms open, in surrender, sat down again.

  ‘All right, then. Here’s the dream I had last night—’