‘Now tell me slowly, Delly: what has terrified you so?’ I shouted, to make an impression on those old ears.
‘You’ll think me foolish, dear. It was just a dream. Not a pleasant one; no, not at all pleasant. I can’t even remember what it was about now. There was a lot of running and shrieking; tall rooms; something terribly in pain...’ Her face contorted itself in the attempt to remember. ‘And then... and then...’ She sighed. ‘It’s no good, dear, I just can’t think.’
‘You said something about Vita—’
Dellifer’s eyes became round with panic. ‘Oh my. Vita! Yes – I left her alone.’ She peered over my shoulder towards the cottage. ‘Orlando, I fear something terrible may have happened to her while I slept up here, dead to the world!’ And with that she leapt down from the shed, her old limbs jarring at the shock of the landing, and ran stiff-legged to the back door. By the time I reached her, she was scratching distractedly at the cat-flap.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s locked!’ she wailed.
I shrugged. ‘She does that at night now, Anna,’ I said soothingly. ‘We’ll be all right; and Vita’s probably snoring her head off on the bed upstairs.’
But she wasn’t.
When Anna opened the back door the next morning, Dellifer and I scurried past her and searched the house from top to toe. Of Vita there was no sign. In the kitchen, though, I stopped dead in my tracks. Someone I knew, though not well, had been in my kitchen. I stalked around the quarry tiles with my nose an inch from the ground, as if tracking a very small beetle. Near the food bowls the scent was strongest, even though I could tell that Anna had washed them both this morning and refilled them with dried lamb-flavour pellets. I sat there, all at once overcome, staring into the green and blue dishes as if they might somehow contain an answer. First Liddy; now Vita. A dreamcatcher was supposed to know everything that happened along the convoluted web of his highways; yet here I was, still only an apprentice, with no idea where the two cats who mattered most to me in the world might be. I sniffed the air again; and suddenly all the bad dreams I had swallowed in the last horrible week returned to me in a flood, filling my mouth with harsh and bitter flavours, befuddling my senses; until I could not even tell whether the trace of scent I had discerned was cat or human: only that it was female.
I was still sitting there, deep in thought, when Dellifer came bustling in, her fur all over the place from burrowing behind furniture, and a wild light in her eye.
‘There’s no time for breakfast,’ she admonished me severely. ‘Your sister’s missing.’
For a moment I was angry that she had misinterpreted my reverie; then, inexplicably, I found myself thinking about the little tabby-and-white cat I had met by the canal, Millefleur: Millie. How I had last seen her, with the starlight glittering on her earring and her white bellyfur shining up at me, and the blood buzzing so hard in my head I hadn’t known whether to abandon myself to the glorious invitation of her scent, or to run till I could smell her no more...
When I looked up again, Dellifer was regarding me with a disturbingly knowing expression. I suddenly felt myself transparent to her gaze, my every thought wide open to her view.
Slowly, Dellifer shook her heard. ‘To think that only yesterday I was priding myself on having brought the pair of you up so well that my job was done. They always say that pride comes before a fall, and ‘twas a lesson long coming to me. I’ve never had a child disappear from home before, from under my care. Lads – you expect them to wander; but little Vita... Whatever will your granfer say?’
‘He should be here,’ I said forcefully. ‘He’s supposed to be the dreamcatcher. Something strange is happening in Ashmore, and he should be here to help us.’ Guilt and fury made me vicious. ‘Instead, he’s out there wandering around without a care in the world, probably giving all his scattered queens a good seeing-to, and leaving me to chase his bloody dreams.’
At the mention of the dreamcatcher Dellifer began to swell visibly, the fur bristling up from her head and neck as if she were being inflated. ‘Damn Hawkweed for his selfish, wayward, cussed nature! Never kept a promise to me in his life: can’t imagine why I thought he might honour the one he made me this time. I was living perfectly comfortably – nice, smart family; very good quality carpets and central heating – when he comes to me, wheedling. “This is the one, Delly,” he says. “This time I’m sure. Poor little orphans, and one of them the new dreamcatcher: I swear. Come and take care of them, Delly, as a personal favour, just for me. See them through the hard times, and then when the lad’s come to age enough to take on the task, you and I can be together and there’ll be no more roaming for me, no more careering around the highways at all hours of the day and night, no more chasing those damned dreams. And for you, no more litters to raise. Our jobs will be done, Delly. The two of us can be together at last: we can settle down in the bliss we deserve. And if the milk still comes (bless the lady for that at least, amongst all her other doings) well. I’m getting on now, my dear,” he says, “and there’s nothing quite so nutritious as mother’s milk. It won’t go to waste!” And he laughs and laughs. Dirty old beggar...’ She rambled to a halt, breathing hard with indignation.
It was the longest speech I had ever heard from my foster mother, but its import burned through me like poison. I stared at her, eyes wide.
‘So it’s my turn to shoulder the burden, is it?’ I said bitterly. ‘Now that I’ve been trained up as the Dreamcatcher of Ashmore, so that you and that old renegade can retire into a life of ease. You didn’t raise me, Dellifer: you sacrificed me. I’m as damned now as Hawkweed ever was!’
And I fled through the kitchen and out of the cat-door with such violence that I left fur stuck in its hinges.
*
Dellifer stretched up to where the tuft of marmalade fur lay ensnared in the cat-flap and sniffed at it. Spicy, and dusty at the same time, the scent of it was enough to transport her as effectively as any wild road to a place in her life where a tiny ball of orange fluff, and one of darker tabby, butted at her belly, their eyes squeezed shut and their tiny pink mouths mewing piteously for her milk.
All at once she found she could not swallow. Her eyes became so tight and sore it was hard to blink: but as cats are unable to weep, Dellifer could only open her own pink mouth to release a howl into the morning air that had dogs barking the length of the village’s main street and people pausing in their gossip in the post office to wonder at the sound.
21
The year had tilted towards winter. The geese abandoned the pond to its year-round inhabitants, the coots and mallards. Fewer people drove out from Drychester to the Green Man for Sunday lunch. The inhabitants of Ashmore woke cold, and made a note to have their winter-weight quilts dry-cleaned. Down in the valley, the canal filled with willow leaves, which lay for a week fading to white before they drifted away; the water slowed, took on the colour of a bottle that has been in the ground. It was bitterly cold in the surrounding meadows at night. When Lydia did not return to the narrowboat, John and Anna walked the length and breadth of Ashmore together, calling, ‘Lydia? Liddy?’ to no avail. They posted notices on fences and trees.
‘She’ll be back,’ he said glumly. ‘Who else would put up with her?’
‘You know you love her.’
They were meeting almost daily by then. They sought out things they could do together. They ate Thai food in a rural pub near Westley (‘Ah,’ he said, ‘coriander and cricket trophies: nothing like it!’); they joined the Film Club (which, being the interest of Francis Baynes, the vicar, offered mostly subtitled Eastern European films about the martyrs of Mystic Christianity). One cold morning he got her to help him strip and repaint the Magpie’s faded terracotta upperwork. After an hour Anna found herself staring speculatively at his hands. In the end she had to look away. ‘Please just take me to bed,’ she wanted to say: ‘There’s nothing in the way of that now.’ But something held her back. Perhaps he was holding himself back too. What
would he be like to live with? she wondered. The boat would be impossible for two, it was narrow, damp, there would be too many cats; and the idea of John Dawe – his untidiness, his restlessness, that obsessive energy which, thwarted, would turn so easily into the kind of sullen, self-destructive anger she had seen him direct at his cousin – trammelled by her neat little cottage seemed equally unlikely. Nevertheless, she found herself trying to imagine some sort of life the two of them could share. She stopped what she was doing in the late afternoon to think about it. Standing at the bathroom mirror before she went to bed at night, she congratulated herself wryly:
‘You don’t look so bad, for someone with no obvious future.’
They avoided talking about it, but wherever they went, the events at Stella’s dinner party went with them. Stella was always in their minds, too, a difficulty postponed, almost consciously unacknowledged. It was an unspoken rule that they never mentioned her.
*
They did their Christmas shopping in Drychester indoor market, where, after agreeing to meet up again at Pizza Express for lunch, they drifted easily away from one another in a daze of consumption. He bought her a brightly coloured Peruvian ear-flap hat. She bought him a bottle of honeyed wine. He arrived at the restaurant first. She arrived laughing. ‘Along with the condiments,’ he said, ‘Pizza Express are delighted to put a real flower on your table every day.’ As she sat down he took the flower out of its vase and presented it to her solemnly. ‘This is for you.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
He smiled.
Later she said experimentally: ‘You don’t ask me about Max any more.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t.’
He put his hand out across the table. She held it.
‘Alice Meynell took him back to London that morning,’ she said. She wanted him to be certain about these events; the meanings of them.
She left a pause in which he could make a comment if he felt like it, then added: ‘She’s been up there a couple of times to see him, I think.’
John was amused. ‘Has she now?’ he said.
‘I think I’d like more chilli oil.’
The closer they got, the more cautious they became. They were aware of Stella, of course, brooding up there in her hideout among the cedars. But it was more than that: neither of them could forget how fragile things had been the last time, and this forced courtesies upon them they might not otherwise have observed. He had a cellphone on the Magpie – she left messages with his answering service. He left messages with hers. Though both of them, perhaps, wished it otherwise, they never called on one another unexpectedly: until one day she woke to find him on the doorstep with the milk.
‘It’s early,’ she pointed out.
‘I thought we might go for a walk.’
‘Excuse me.’ Anna stuck her head outside and inspected the weather. ‘As I thought. Foggy and cold. I hate December, it just looks like a lot of damp sticks. And anyway, what would we see, in this?’
‘We could walk up to Cresset Beacon,’ he said, as if he hadn’t heard her. He had his ancient leather-and-canvas knapsack with him; this he opened, to allow her a brief glimpse of its contents. ‘I’ve got a picnic.’
‘Anyone can pack a flask and some apples,’ she said carelessly, ‘and something wrapped in kitchen foil, and call that a picnic.’ She thought she might have seen a woollen blanket in there too. She had another look at the weather. ‘Not today, thank you,’ she said briskly, beginning to close the door.
‘Trust me,’ he promised, ‘and you’ll have sunshine.’
She looked up at him. ‘Oh, all right then,’ she said, without believing a word of it.
The fog was so thick you expected it to have weight, consistency, substance of its own. It padded the arms of the old fruit trees in the cottage gardens, muffled the sound of the closest voice. Cars made their way through the village as cautiously as cows through a new gate; the fog swung closed behind them, and they moved away mooing nervously at one another. Few people were out and about on foot. The postman was the rattle of a gate, the clatter of a letterbox. Old Mr Thompson, bundled up in worsted trousers, two pullovers, and a quilted bodywarmer, waved his stick at Anna and John as they passed, though whether in greeting or reproach it was impossible to tell. Down near the common, where the fog lost texture and took on the colour of milk, Anna saw a marmalade cat dash suddenly between two trees.
‘Was that Orlando? It was!’ She stared anxiously into the middle distance: nothing. ‘Did you see him? Did you see him?’
‘No.’
‘I don’t like to think of him outside in weather like this. What if he got run over?’
John Dawe smiled. ‘By whom?’ he asked. ‘No one’s going more than ten miles an hour.’
‘Well, lost, then,’ she said. Tike Liddy. What if he got lost?’
‘Cats have their own lives. You can’t just coop them up to stop them getting into trouble.’
‘I suppose not.’
They walked for a while in the padded silence. Anna, who had been thinking of Barnaby as well as Orlando, said: ‘Do you suppose they really have nine lives? Cats, I mean.’ When he didn’t reply, aware of the risk she took in bringing the name out into the open between them, she took the opportunity to add: ‘Stella doesn’t. At the supper party – after you left? – she called it a “misreading of popular reincarnation themes that leaked out of Egypt in the millennium before Christ”. She said cats were just fertility symbols.’
John shrugged. ‘Stella has a metaphysics all her own,’ he said. ‘Mostly, she believes in Stella.’
‘But what do you think?’
‘I think the cat symbolises Atum-Ra, lord of life. “From Atum-Ra issued Earth, Air, Fire and Water. And from each element its presiding deity.” One god, four elements, four demiurges: if you like, you can add that up to nine. Prayer, a tree of life, an emergent cosmology, all contained inside the one symbol – Mau, the cat. Stella’s interpretation pales by comparison – it’s vague and reductive at the same time, like most anthropology.’
‘Cats are fertile though,’ Anna said. ‘Aren’t they?’
He kicked at a stone, which skittered away across the road to be swallowed abruptly by the fog.
‘“I am one who becomes two; I am two who become four; I am four who become eight; I am one more after that,”’ he quoted at last. ‘Can’t you feel the force of that? Can’t you feel how thin it makes the words “fertility symbol”? There must be more to it. Love, invisibility, power, healing, protection.’ He thought a moment. ‘There are no metaphors here,’ he decided. ‘At Deir el-Bahari, in the Missing Dynasty, in some perfectly literal sense, five drops of cat’s blood would immunise a child against illness.’
This was too much for Anna. ‘Those Egyptians,’ she said. ‘With medicine that advanced, no wonder they had to believe in reincarnation.’
‘Don’t you?’ he said.
‘No,’ she admitted, ‘I don’t think I do.’
‘You’re lucky,’ he said. ‘My dreams are full of it. Since I was a little boy. I still dream of Nonesuch every night. It knows me, that house: it knows who I am. Who I’ve been. Do you ever feel as if there’s some truer, more complete world than the one we occupy, some different story of things? You’re a part of it, but you don’t know why? You’re part of it and you don’t even know where it is?’
All she felt was that she had to slow him down. ‘John,’ she said, ‘I—’
He smiled and moved his hands, in a gesture of defeat. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Of course you don’t. No one in their right mind feels that. But I do. My soul’s a jigsaw made of years. All this is only the smallest, newest piece. It’s barely real.’
‘Thanks a lot,’ she said; but he didn’t hear, so she laughed as best she could.
‘I ask myself why nature would go to the effort of creating all those lives – all those souls, all those billions of different personalities in the world – if, when the body died, they just
disappeared into nothing. Wouldn’t you say that was wasteful?’
‘Reincarnation as recycling,’ she said. ‘Very green.’
He rubbed his hand over his face. ‘I’m not explaining myself well here.’
‘No.’
The lanes had brought them out above and to the north of Ashmore. Here, where the land fell away into steep pasture, the fog had a luminous quality to it, as if it were full of light. It was no easier to penetrate, but John Dawe leaned over the nearest stone wall and stared into it anyway. He said:
‘The thing is this: the first time I saw you, down on the towpath, I knew without a doubt I’d seen you before.’
‘Well, you probably had,’ said Anna. ‘It’s a small village.’
‘I don’t mean that,’ he said patiently.
‘Then what?’
‘I thought I had seen you in another life,’ he said, and walked off quickly uphill as if he already wanted to divorce himself from this news.
Anna, thrown into a panic she couldn’t explain, caught up with him and called his name and touched his body just beneath the shoulder blades. In exactly the same instant, they emerged from the fog into dazzling sunshine. It was like a flashbulb going off; or an electric shock. Anna, who thought confusedly that she had been burned, dropped her hand. While she was blinking and rubbing her eyes, filled suddenly with an extraordinary sense of peace, he took her roughly by the tops of the arms.
‘Turn round!’ he said urgently. ‘Look!’
Fog, burning white, its surface shifting and roiling like a slowed-down sea. Somewhere below, she imagined, Ashmore lay smothered and gasping for breath, never suspecting the airy ecstasy of light above. A little way down the valley, the tops of some birches and a stand of pines cleared the surface; a bird flew up out of the trees, then, losing height suddenly, disappeared again.