How perfect! She thought. And at the same time: How extraordinarily familiar, as if I’ve been here a thousand times before.
Behind her, the downland rolled away. If she liked, she could follow its sandy wooded ridges for miles. Instead, she looked at her watch and descended again, aiming this time for the Green Man, her favourite of the Ashmore pubs. The footpath dropped quite steeply at first, then levelled out and ran along the top edge of the churchyard, a muddy slot recording, in the medium of Wellington boots and Labrador paws, the quiet traffic of village life. By the time she got there, the woods had begun to fill with evening, so she cut down through the churchyard, where thick yellow sunshine still cast the shadows of branches on the ivy-covered knapped-flint walls, and the church lay like an empty ship anchored on a quiet green swell. There were graves everywhere, long, eroded wafers of Horsham slab interspersed with stubby new granite plaques as polished as the front of a high-street bank.
The oldest stones – among them two extraordinary Saxon coffin-lids unearthed from the vestry floor during restoration in 1854 – were clustered beneath the massive graveyard yew, quite close to the church, on and around the site of a long-demolished Norman transept. The westering sunlight cut into this ancient corner, failing to warm it. Pausing at the lych gate, Anna turned back and caught sight of a figure beneath the yew.
‘Hello,’ she called, beginning to open the gate. ‘What a lovely evening it’s going to be!’
No reply.
Anna stood with her hand on the bleached grey wood of the latch. She felt slightly foolish. The air was clear. There was nothing wrong with her eyes. Not twenty yards away, the silent figure was caught as if in a photograph, its face turned to hers; yet she couldn’t quite decide what she was seeing. At first she had assumed it was a woman in early middle age, of healthy appearance and well dressed, stooping over one of the older graves with what looked like a pruning knife in one hand: now she wasn’t so sure. The figure was taller than it had seemed. She had an idea it was old. Dressed in brown. It had definitely been cutting something. Suddenly it seemed to draw itself up and walk off behind the church, with a gait somehow stiff and graceful at the same time.
Disconcerted, Anna made her way to the Green Man.
‘I’ve just seen something in the graveyard,’ she told Alice the barmaid. ‘A ghost or something.’
Alice, who was all of eighteen years old, laughed grimly. ‘That’s just the beginning,’ she said. ‘Later you claim to have been taken away and impregnated by space aliens. After that they send you on holiday for your own good.’ She pumped beer into two glasses, a pint for Anna and a half for herself, and eyed it critically. ‘I like these old light ales,’ she said. ‘Not too much of a head, and a nice flowery taste.’
‘There was someone there,’ insisted Anna.
‘There often is someone in a graveyard,’ Alice reminded her. ‘People go to put chrysanths on their mum and dad.’
‘I suppose so,’ Anna said. ‘I suppose that’s what it might have been doing.’
‘Make up your mind,’ recommended Alice.
‘Pardon?’
‘Either you saw a ghost or you didn’t.’
‘I wonder if it’s ever that easy.’
The two women contemplated this idea in silence. Anna drank some of her beer. After a moment she began to tell Alice about her adventures with the kittens. ‘I would never have believed how tiring it was,’ she said. ‘I’m going to keep them. I couldn’t let them go after all that.’
‘They’re a lot of work, cats,’ was Alice’s opinion.
‘Good company, though,’ Anna said.
Alice narrowed her eyes. ‘You want to get out more, you do,’ she said, with the air of someone who had been waiting for the opportunity to deliver this advice, ‘instead of mooning about in that cottage all day. That’s just the way women used to end up.’
Alice, you felt, would never end up doing anything unless it was by choice. She wore leather trousers with cropped skinnyrib tops in the colours of Liquorice Allsorts, and had her hair done in a peroxided brush cut. She drove a motorcycle round the country lanes. Her father owned the Green Man, and other pubs between Ashmore and Drychester, but no pub could contain Alice. She was off to Cambridge in the autumn, on an arts scholarship, and after that, she had decided, London or New York. (The local boys were visibly relieved to learn this. She was a weight off their minds, a disaster averted, an itch they would otherwise have spent their lives trying to scratch. Alice hadn’t noticed.)
‘Seeing ghosts,’ she said, and shook her head pityingly. ‘Keeping cats.’ After a moment’s thought she decided: ‘It’s Quiz Night tomorrow. You could come to that.’
Anna shivered. ‘I’d rather be impregnated by aliens,’ she said.
‘You don’t have to do the football questions.’
‘Perhaps I’ll just stay out of the graveyard,’ Anna said, finishing her drink and heading for the door. ‘Perhaps that would be best.’
Alice laughed. ‘Take care of yourself,’ she commanded.
3
It was almost dark when Anna got back to the cottage. The moment she entered the kitchen she knew something was wrong. The box by the radiator smelled sour and damp. Inside, the kittens nuzzled at their mother; she lay unresponsive, her eyes almost closed. She hadn’t even tried her food. She felt hot and dry to the touch. Anna sterilised the bathroom thermometer, raised the tabby’s tail and took her temperature. The tabby opened her eyes and gave Anna a wounded look. ‘I know,’ Anna said. ‘I know it’s undignified. I’m sorry. Shh. Shh.’
‘If the queen refuses to eat,’ recommended Everything You Need to Know About Your Cat or Kitten, ‘offer her a little Brand’s Essence.’
‘What is that?’ Anna asked the kitchen angrily. “‘Brand’s Essence”! I don’t even know what it is!’
She tried the vet again.
Nothing.
All night, the tabby lay panting. She seemed to lose weight by the hour. She refused water, or, if she drank it, threw it back up again immediately. The more listless she became, the more the kittens demanded from her, until she hissed and turned her back on them. Anna was upset.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, you mustn’t.’
Two o’clock in the morning, then three: unable to contemplate sleep, Anna poured a measure of Jameson’s into a cup of tea. She tried to read a book. She dragged an armchair into the kitchen, wrapped herself in the quilt from her bed, and sat dozing by the radiator. She was visited from time to time by dreams chaotic and formless, as full of mewling noises as the cardboard box. ‘Hush,’ she heard herself say absently, not quite sure whether she was awake or asleep—
‘Hush.’
Just before dawn, the tabby seemed to improve. She encouraged the kittens to suckle, then did her best to clean them up, nuzzling and pushing and licking at them one by one. She raised her head and allowed Anna to stroke it. She set up a curious, fluttering purr. Two minutes later she was dead. Anna looked dully into the box. Horror, pity, anxiety: she didn’t know which to feel first. She hardly knew what to feel. The kittens, failing to understand what had happened, were burrowing determinedly about again, their squinched-up eyes giving them the look of little old men.
‘You funny things,’ she said absently. ‘What am I going to do with you now?’ Then she took the cooling tabby up in her arms and went into the garden.
It was raining gently, a fine grey rain in the faint grey light of a new day. Beads of water hung on every branch, every blade of grass. The air was still and expectant. Barefoot and dressed in her old towelling robe, Anna carried the frail bundle of bones and fur across the lawn, under the vine trellis and up to the wire fence at the end of the garden, where they could both look out at the pasture stretching away, full of spiderwebs silvered with rain, to the distant line of the hedge. ‘That’s where you came from,’ she said. ‘Over there.’ A thrush began to sing. Anna hugged the cat. ‘I hope I was a help,’ she said. And promised:
 
; ‘I’ll look after them.’
*
How much do I remember of this drama, or the drama of my other lives? I could feel them tickling at my skull, but already they were beginning to haze away. Time blurs and swirls as ivy grows around an oak, obscuring the original shape, only to create another; adding detail where before there was none; hiding the whorls and knots and the ancient storm damage beneath a chaos of tendrils.
But one thing I remember clearly is this:
I dreamed. All creatures dream, great and small: I know that now.
In my dream, I was a fleck of life fixed to the very centre of the world by one fragile link. Everything in me and around me pulsed in time with the beat of this link. I had no idea what it was: only that if I were to let go, even for a moment, something truly terrible would happen, for the world beyond was a limitless void, waiting to swallow me up. I floated in my dreams, clamped relentlessly to this lifeline for unknowable moments. Then something happened. The lifeline began to shrink in my mouth. With a perception born of pure panic, I felt it pucker and recede. I scrabbled after it with my mouth, my paws. In a moment, it was gone!
And then I was falling.
Down and down into endless black space, my little torso twisting in panic, limbs swivelling, toes spreading, braced for a terrible landing...
And when I woke up, my mother was dead.
Was it a premonition? The embodiment of my greatest fear? Or my body’s way of making sense of an inexplicable tragedy? I cannot tell you for sure. All I know is that whenever I think of my mother even now, all I remember is the sensation of falling.
*
By late morning, she was frantic.
The tabby had been buried quietly at the end of the garden, the kittens transferred to Anna’s study, so she could keep an eye on them while she worked. On the advice of the book, she had wrapped a hot water bottle in a towel and placed it in the box with them. It was a pitiful substitute for the love and care they had lost. ‘The tick of a clock,’ the book added, ‘may also help, by simulating the heartbeat of the missing mother.’
‘Only a man would think that,’ said Anna. ‘Anyway, clocks don’t tick any more.’
She resented Everything You Need to Know About Your Cat or Kitten. Nevertheless, she followed its instructions as carefully as she could, diluting warm goat’s milk in water for two-hourly feeds, which she tried to get the kittens to take from a plastic eyedropper. Their blind ancient faces yearned towards the smell of milk, then turned away again in disappointment. ‘Just try,’ she wheedled. ‘Please?’ But they only squirmed in her hands – energetically at first, then less so as their last good meal wore off – and whimpered for their mother. Despite his undignified entry into the world it was the marmalade tom, runt of the litter, who did best. He found the dropper more often than his larger, more active sisters; he took a little milk each time before turning away.
Just after midday, Anna went to the village shop to buy baby formula, in case they could be persuaded to try that instead. While she was out, one of the females, whose temperature had been on the high side for an hour, went into convulsions and died. Anna stared helplessly into the box, her eyes stinging with tears. She picked the little thing up in her hand. She could see that it was going to be a tabby, perhaps with one white sock. ‘Keep a close eye on your kittens,’ the book warned. ‘Or you may lose them.’
‘They won’t eat!’ Anna raged. ‘What can I do if they won’t eat?’
Two o’clock in the afternoon found her exhausted at her desk, nails still dark with earth from burying the kitten next to its dead mother, trying to drink a cup of tea. Propped up by the computer screen, Ruth Canning’s card with its scrawled injunction. Call us, or we’ll send you the kids, made her smile again. She missed Ruth. They had arrived at university together; survived in their third year the emotional bumps and bruises of a shared flat. For years after that they had borrowed each other’s clothes and – until Max – approved each other’s choice of men. ‘I’ve got a family of my own now,’ she told the card softly. She picked it up, turned it over, tapped its edge against her thumbnail. These actions liberated a curious half-memory – Ruth, in some noisy pub or other, some evening not too long ago, turning away from the bar to shout: ‘I do their accounts.’
Anna frowned and drank her tea. She couldn’t recall the occasion, only how Ruth had laughed and added, ‘Touchingly primitive by your standards I expect, but the fact is that most of the old dears have forgotten how to add up.’
‘Old dears?’ Anna asked herself.
What old dears?
‘AWC,’ she remembered. ‘Of course!’ And she picked up the phone.
‘Ruth,’ she said. ‘Is that you, Ruth? It’s Anna. I got your card. Listen—’
‘Anna! You’re coming to see us!’
‘Well,’ said Anna, ‘I—’
‘You’re not coming to see us,’ interrupted her friend. ‘Fair enough. I warned you. They’ve got streaming colds, all they ever talk about is PlayStation, and they’re on the first train down to you.’
Anna laughed. ‘No, listen—’ she said.
‘Too late! Too late now!’
‘I am coming to see you. Soon. But I’ve got a problem I need your help with.’
‘Ho,’ said Ruth. ‘I don’t sense anything new on the negotiating table here. I don’t sense an offer. I ought to warn you that it’s not only PlayStation, it’s whine whine whine all day about the violent games their friends are allowed to have—’
‘Ruth,’ said Anna, ‘shut up. Do you still work for AWC?’
‘For who?’
‘Animal Welfare Coalition. The charity. You know. You did their accounts.’
‘Good grief,’ said Ruth. ‘That was a few years ago.’
‘Oh, don’t say that. I’ve got kittens here, and I need help. Ruth, you’d love them. They’re only a day old. They’re so sweet, and their mother died, and they aren’t doing well, and the local vet is too bone-idle to answer his phone—’
‘Anna—’
‘—and I don’t know what Brand’s Essence is. Do you?’
‘Anna, hang on and I’ll—’
‘I mean, have you ever heard of bloody Brand’s Essence?’
Ruth laughed. ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘But I can find you someone who has. I put all the AWC stuff on the computer somewhere, in case I ever needed it again. Just hang on.’
Anna heard the light clatter of a keyboard, then some cheerful swearing.
‘OK,’ said Ruth.
‘What?’
‘Entire list of field workers by area.’
‘Brilliant!’
‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ warned Ruth. ‘That means about fourteen old ladies scattered across the British Isles. And two of them have certainly passed on since the list was last updated.’ The keyboard clacked again. ‘We were never a big organisation. Let’s see... Well, I can’t quite believe that. Ashmore. You’re in luck.’
‘There’s someone here?’
‘Yep. Got a pen? It’s a woman called Stella Herringe – fine old name, that. I’ve heard it before, but I can’t think where.’
‘Do hurry,’ said Anna.
‘Anna, are you all right?’
Anna laughed. ‘Of course I am,’ she said. Suddenly she confessed. ‘I miss you, Ruth. How are you, really?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘And Sam?’
‘Sam’s fine. It’s you we worry about, Anna.’
‘Don’t be daft.’
‘I don’t like to think of you stuck out there on your own.’
It was an old complaint. Ruth couldn’t imagine how human life sustained itself without air smelling of Jamaican food and burnt diesel. But there was more. She meant: you were always so brave before. She meant: why did you allow yourself to run away from the things you loved? She meant: why did you take Max Wishart so to heart?
‘I’m not stuck, Ruth,’ Anna said. ‘I just wanted a change.’
The two rem
aining kittens chose that moment to emerge from a dull sleep, calling fractiously for something only their mother could supply. ‘Hush now,’ Anna told them absently. She put her hand into the box. They laid their heads against its warmth and tried to forget themselves again. ‘After Max, I felt... well, what I felt doesn’t matter now. Look, give me this Herringe person’s phone number. I must—’
‘I know: you’ve got to go. Just remember we’re here.’
‘I will.’
Anna wrote down the number. ‘Ruth?’ she said.
‘Yes?’
‘One of them looks exactly like Barnaby.’
Ruth sighed. ‘Come and see us soon, Anna.’
‘I will. And Ruth?’
‘What?’
‘Thanks.’
*
After what seemed a long time, she was diverted, with a lot of busy clicking and banging, to Stella Herringe’s old-fashioned answering machine. ‘There’s no one here,’ said the indistinct voice on the audiotape. ‘Leave a message, or call back at a better time.’ As soon as Anna opened her mouth, the machine began to switch itself off again. ‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Hello?’ And then desperately, ‘My name is Anna Prescott, I’m at Ashmore 732521, and I have a problem with some kittens—’ In the end she wasn’t sure she had managed to leave a message at all; but a moment or two after she closed the connection, her phone began to ring. At the other end, someone said: