‘It’s amazing!’
‘It’s a temperature inversion,’ he said. ‘On mornings like these, a layer of warm air keeps the fog in the valley. Look at me.’
She looked at him.
‘I always keep my promises.’
‘Do you?’ she said.
She took his hand and with one finger traced the word ‘Mau’ on his palm. ‘I thought I recognised you, too,’ she admitted, ‘the first time we met.’ She shivered, looked out across the illuminated mist. ‘What can it mean? What can it all mean?’ The very thought of it brought a kind of vertigo. It was like tottering on the lip of some endless fall into thin air, and reaching out for help, and finding none, and realising even as you toppled that the fall was into yourself. ‘Even if I remember you,’ she heard her own voice say, ‘I don’t remember anything else.’ Still, she clutched at him as hard as she could.
*
They followed the footpath to the Cresset Beacon viewing point, climbed a stile and sat down on the wooden bench there. The air was still. There were spiderwebs among the bracken, still laden with dew. In another hour, the sun would have peeled the fog off the lower downland. Anna leaned against John Dawe, and he put his arm around her. For the first time she felt neither nervous nor angry in his presence. He felt familiar at last.
‘I wonder if we’ve—’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ She had meant to finish ‘—been here before?’ but she didn’t want to articulate any of it, she wasn’t ready to admit anything to herself. ‘Why don’t you kiss me?’ she said instead.
He kissed her for a long time – then, brushing hair away from her face, seemed content just to look at her. His fingers were rough from work on the boat; his eyes were as tawny as a cat’s. Staring into them, she felt her blood beat up in her. How knowing he had been, all along. He took her hands and pulled her to her feet.
‘Come on,’ he said.
‘I—’
‘Come on.’
A little unsteady with anticipation, she let herself be led away. At the back of the hill lay a hollow like a cup in the earth, encircled by old rowan trees and hornbeams. He knelt down there, took the woollen rug out of his bag, and spread it on the ground. She could only seem to stand and watch, hypnotised and helpless. He peeled her out of her scarf, her coat, her gloves; out of her old Artwork cardigan. She didn’t care that it was December air on her skin, December light among the trees. She was full of a languid curiosity to see what happened next. She was hot where he touched her, or where she thought he might touch her next. When he entered her, it was astonishingly familiar and intensely new. It was so easy. ‘Oh,’ she heard herself say. She opened her eyes for a moment and saw the trees above her, the ancient winter light of the hollow. If she had been able to think, she might have thought, have you brought me here before?
When she came, it was in such a rush of sensation that she was barely aware of him. Had he come too? She gazed up at him, only to find him gazing down. The hard edges of his face had softened. He looked younger. He looked delighted.
‘Hello,’ she said, as if she had been away. ‘Was that all right?’
This made him laugh. ‘Anna, Anna, Anna,’ he said.
A fox walked into the circle of trees.
It emerged silently from the shadows, the exact colour of copper beech leaves, with a splash of cream at the throat and down into the rough fur of its chest. Had it come to watch? What did it make of them? It stood there, its breath a faint vapour in the bright morning air, regarding them with intelligent, unblinking yellow eyes. When it had seen enough, it turned and leapt away, vanishing suddenly between the hornbeams, shedding as it went what seemed to Anna, in her state of disorientation, to be rings of rainbow light. There was a patch of grey fur on one of its haunches.
‘Look!’ she said. ‘Look!’
John had seen it too. ‘The genius loci,’ he whispered. He sat up. ‘The spirit of the place.’
She pulled him back down to her. ‘I’m cold if you move,’ she said. While she thought to herself: It was the fox. It was the fox!
*
Three miles away, where the fog coiled at its thickest around a tail-chimneyed, gabled house, a woman for whom sleep came hard wailed into her pillow, but in her dream no sound emerged.
Ahead, through a blinding, icy mist, she saw two mouths meet and fix upon one another with fervent, unmistakable hunger. It was a hunger she recognised: she had lived with it herself for so long now that it had become a permanent ache. But something about the scene was not right – for the head that reached up to take the kiss was mousy and nondescript, not glossy and black. The mist swirled and parted, and for an instant she saw more clearly: two bodies, naked, entwined—
The fury that rose in her was so powerful that she could feel herself generating it with a physical force, a welling fountain of hatred and bile.
Something moved in front of her then, blocking her line of sight.
A red mask reared up, a lolling tongue, a jaw lined with teeth—
‘You can’t keep doing this,’ accused the fox. ‘What?’ she snarled. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Wreaking your havoc.’
She glared at it. ‘I’ll outlive all of you.’
‘Surviving at the expense of all that is natural is no survival at all.’
‘What do I care for what you call natural?’ Her eyes glittered angrily. ‘If I cannot have what I want, it can all wither and die and go to hell—’
It was like birthing a monster. The Dream burst from her, all glowing blacks and reds, all teeth and claws and murder.
The fox ran at it, ears flat with desperation, but his legs were not made for leaping. It evaded him easily, fleeing away into the icy tunnel, and where it touched, it burned...
*
John Dawe had found a comfortable place to sit among the roots of a rowan tree. Anna lay with her head on his thighs. The sky was an uninterrupted cerulean blue with vapour trails high up: the air was like glass. From this side of the Beacon they could see all the way to Westley. Church spires and threads of chimney smoke rose against the rolling downland; there were oak-hangers on the rises. They had put on their clothes, eaten the picnic, which included the contents of the foil packages – two delicious beef and onion pasties that John had cooked himself, early that morning, and finished the contents of John Dawe’s flask. (Tm not sure,’ she had concluded, ‘that Calvados goes all that well with hot chocolate. Whatever you say.’) They had talked companionably about everything that came into their heads. Now they were content just to be there with one another, part of the limpid silence of the morning. After a while Anna felt so secure that she was able to say:
‘And so what about you and Stella?’
She knew the moment she closed her mouth that she had made a mistake. The fact was, she didn’t want to know.
‘You don’t have to tell me,’ she said quickly.
‘No, no, I don’t mind,’ he said. ‘When I first met her, she was twenty-two years old.’ There was a long pause, as if he was organising his thoughts. ‘Stella! You wouldn’t have believed her then.’
‘I’m not sure I believe her now.’
‘She was twenty-two, I was thirteen. We were related on my mother’s side, that was my Herringe connection. She was a sweet woman, my mother, but never competent. As for my father—’ He shrugged. ‘He seemed like a fool, but what do I know? She went downhill after he died, and I ended up at Nonesuch. The Herringes were very good about it, but they didn’t quite know what to do with me.
‘They didn’t know what to do with Stella, either, and that in itself was a bond between us. She was mad to achieve something in her life, and they had no idea how to handle that.’ He smiled thinly. ‘This was the sixties, remember. So there she was, stuck in the middle of nowhere, all that energy going to rot and waste. She had no outlet until I arrived to soak it all up. I was like blotting paper. Quite soon she was all the family I needed.’
He looked out over
the downs, his eyes narrowed, as if he could see himself there, at Nonesuch all those years ago.
‘I don’t know which I loved more, her or the house. Can you imagine a twenty-two-year-old girl in charge of all that? Stella made her own rules even then. We did what we wanted, ate what we wanted, we lived from room to room like gypsies, while the staff followed us about. She still had a staff then. We took an Old Dansette with us everywhere we went, and I watched her dance to the Rolling Stones in a slant of sunlight in some fifteenth-century solar I never found again. She wound us – everything we did – into the history of the place. I loved that history, because it was in itself a kind of dusty attic, a secret passageway, filled with all the fantastic bric-a-brac of ancestry and inheritance. I loved the idea of a convoluted but unbroken line that ran from Joshua to Stella – and even, in some measure, from Joshua to me. All the time, I realised later, Stella was watching me for something beyond that, some other response; but in the end, like everyone ordinary, I was a disappointment to her. I hadn’t understood the lesson. I hated to disappoint her.’
‘She’s very strong, isn’t she?’ Anna interrupted, because she was jealous and wanted him out of this dream of adolescence. ‘One of the strongest people I’ve ever met.’
He stared at her. Eventually he gave a curious laugh.
‘Stella Herringe hasn’t a tenth of your strength,’ he said. ‘She’s demanding, she’s wilful, she’s driven, but underneath it she’s insecure and desperate. Her needs always undermined her intelligence. The Herringes never knew what to do with her for that reason alone: they sensed she was undependable, and old money has such an instinct to protect itself! In addition, of course, she was a woman. She came out of a minor Oxford college at twenty-two years old expecting to move up the family hierarchy, join the players, run one of the high-profile businesses. They were still on the mainland then. They had manufacturing concerns. They were in armaments, steel, the nascent North Sea oil industry. Stella saw herself in a boardroom somewhere, ousting the old men who drink the Herringe port. But the trustees made sure all she got was me. Nonesuch, and a rundown chemical company to play with. She built that into Engelion, and it was a brilliant achievement; but apart from some trust-fund politics and a few semi-active directorships, Engelion is all she has. It was never a sufficient powerbase from which to take what she thought of as her rightful place in the family. The power lay elsewhere, if it lay anywhere at all. Stella had already begun to break herself against that discovery when I was young. I heard her walking the passages at night, ranting to the ancestral portraits on the walls.’
He shook his head.
‘She’s terrified of ageing, she’s terrified of death. She’s obsessed with Nonesuch and its past. She’s gone so far into herself now that she has to be looked after. What do you think that fatuous pair Mark and Oliver do? They make sure she signs the right papers and doesn’t drink too much gin. They put petrol in the Mercedes when she forgets, and make sure she doesn’t run it into a tree. They’re from some even more distantly related branch of the family than I am – and that’s how they treat her, like some great aunt three-times-removed. They make her feel young, and in control, and she laps it up.’
He took Anna’s hands. ‘Don’t you see? It’s a mistake to think of her as strong. It’s weakness that makes her so dangerous. She sucks you in, and before you know it you’re propping up her fantasies. Then, when you try to get away...’ He sighed and looked off into the distance. ‘And yet somehow, there’s more to it. There’s more to Stella, but I only ever understand it in dreams.’ He sighed. ‘And she was so extraordinarily beautiful back then. When she was in the room I couldn’t take my eyes off her; when she wasn’t, she was all I could see.
‘I felt like Pip in Great Expectations. You know? She held all that out to me: how could I have resisted it?’
He shook his head. ‘Unlike Pip, of course, I got what I wanted.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Anna; although she thought she did.
‘Anna—’
‘I don’t care about all this.’
He was about to contradict her when she said in a rush, ‘No, I really don’t. I love you. We could have something together.’ She took his hand in both hers, curled it into a fist, put it against her heart. ‘I know it. I feel it. But you have to let go of Stella. You have to stop feeling bound to her, by the money, whatever—’
‘It’s not the money,’ he said dully. ‘Not only the money.’
‘Then what is it?’
‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘What do you think happens between a bored, power-hungry girl twenty-two years old and an adolescent boy?’
Anna got to her feet quickly. ‘That’s awful,’ she said.
‘No it isn’t, he said. ‘It isn’t awful at all. Not when you’re thirteen. It’s marvellous.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘You know what I’m saying,’ he told her gently.
‘Well, I hate it.’
‘Nonesuch was all the home I had until I went up to Cambridge. Every weekend, every holiday from Marlborough, she was there, the house was there. They were inseparable, full of light. I loved her for years.’
Anna laughed bitterly. ‘She fucked you for years,’ she said. ‘That’s all.’
He tried to take her hand but she pulled it away. He said quietly, ‘It’s a mistake to rubbish other people’s experience, Anna. Whatever it was, it happened to me, just as Max happened to you. It filled up my life, just as Max filled yours, and it took a long time to escape from. That’s all I know.’ After a moment he went on, ‘I haven’t escaped her yet. I don’t feel I can simply throw her away. She’s a manipulator, she’s a monster, but I can’t deny her any more than you can deny the violinist. I can’t walk away and pretend she doesn’t exist. Anna, I want a future too. But I can’t have it simply by rejecting the past. I need to come to terms with Stella, sort out some kind of friendship. I owe her that. I’m sorry about this.’ He indicated the trees, the blanket, the scattered picnic. ‘It was wrong of me. It was too soon—’
‘Wrong of you? Oh, you bastard!’
Anna pushed him away as hard as she could. ‘Who the hell do you think you are, to say “it’s too soon”, “it’s too late”? There are two of us here! Or was I just another knick-knack for that sad bloody collection on the Magpie? Just another piece in your famous spiritual jigsaw? You’re not helpless. If things are this way, it’s because in some measure you want them to be. All that crap about “the bric-a-brac of inheritance”? Spare me, John. You aren’t Nonesuch’s prisoner, or even Stella’s – you’ve just lost the knack of having feelings for anyone but yourself!’
He stared at her. She stood there for a moment wishing, unreasonably, that he would defend himself. Then she turned and ran back down the path.
22
The fog I ran through that morning as I fled the house made a perfect reflection of my state of mind. Feelings of confusion, abandonment and impending doom tumbled and swirled in my head, and images leapt out at me as out of the dreams I had caught this last week: Liddy’s outraged face; Dellifer’s eyes as stark as the moon; menacing figures carrying baskets as quiet as the grave; Vita’s food bowl, empty and dark as a pit; wild roads that roared and howled like live things tortured: all of it a maze of meaning, and I, the solitary traveller, struggling to make his way through it all.
So it was, forlorn and desperate, that I ran through Ashmore Village. Two cars passed me, at a snail’s pace, the drivers’ faces pressed anxiously close to the windscreen. Hedges and trees loomed up out of the fog, to be replaced by a telegraph pole, a post-box, the expanse of someone’s lawn. I saw the odd pedestrian, a dog walker, a lone shopper, sneezing and coughing, swathed against the weather (even the dog, a small, miserable-looking terrier, wore a buckled tartan coat). I even thought I saw Anna and the man from Liddy’s boat: they swam up out of the mist, then were sucked back into it again as if they were ghosts.
Perhaps we are a
ll ghosts, I have thought since then, existing briefly in a fog, unaware of the grand context into which we were born. For what possible autonomy, what force of self-will, can be exerted in such a world?
I ran the length of the main road. There was no sign of my sister.
I sniffed around dustbins and gate-posts and sheds, but the scents were as muffled as the air. I slipped through the lych gate and into the churchyard, sifted through the muted smells of turned earth and tended flowers; the sharp aroma of wet holly and yew; the tang of damp stone; the passage of human feet. Vita had not been here, of that I was sure.
I crossed the fields towards Glory Farm and the iron tracks. Nothing. Turning back towards the village, on the path to the common, though, my nose twitched. One of the rabbit runs, a much-trodden path through bracken and bramble, gave back my first clue to my sister’s whereabouts. A faint, sweet scent, slightly fishy; another, muskier. I breathed in deeply. Vita certainly, with another cat, a female, just out of heat. Could it be Liddy? My heart sprang up. I bent my nose close to the ground and followed the scent assiduously. Almost twenty feet further on, there was a scrabbling of feet and a rustle of vegetation; then the fog parted and a rabbit bolted past me, eyes liquid with fear. I stared into the swirl of mist it left behind, then touched my nose to the ground once more. Here, the scent was fainter, less distinct. I lost it for a moment, circled around in panic, and found it again. My heart beating with anticipation (Liddy, oh Lydia), I sniffed along the trail. After a while, it started to twine back upon itself, as if some sort of confusion had occurred, before coming to an abrupt halt. I lifted my head and stared past my nose. It seemed to be the entrance to a small wild road.
*
Once inside, the compass winds blew furiously, all of a tangle, so that my lion’s mane tied itself into knots and whipped me hard across the face. Usually, the highways funnelled their air currents down their length, so that the only squalls of turbulence you encountered were at multiple junctions, where nests of small highways met a major thoroughfare. Such a gale I had not encountered before. And it smelled. It smelled of something acrid and deathly; something fiery with hate. I feared for Lydia, I feared for my sister; I feared for myself. Even so I set my head steadfastly into the blow and plodded along, planting my feet firmly on the highway floor to keep my balance, but though I marched for a hundred yards in all directions, there was no sign of another living being.