Sleep was impossible in the face of this. She sighed and flung the covers off. The air was freezing. Why hadn’t the central heating come on? Tilting her watch to catch what little light there was in the room, Anna saw that it was only ten to four. She groaned, then, draping the duvet round her shoulders, knelt on the window-seat to gaze out on the dismal morning. Ashmore was in the grip of a heavy frost. There were feathers of it around the edges of the window. The herringbone brick in her front garden was crazed with it: rosemary and lavender stood stark and rimy against the bitter earth. Across the road, the pond was a skating rink, except for a dark hole in the centre where it looked to Anna as if something like a small log had broken the surface.
‘You might as well get up,’ she told herself.
She rubbed her hand over her face and stumbled into the bathroom. In the middle of her shower, her heart began to pound again and she thought: It’s John! John is in danger! Then she thought: it was only a dream.
She remembered his hands on her and lifted her face to the showerhead and let the water fall unchecked.
Half an hour later, she had combed her wet hair back from her face and put on a fleece jumper, a pair of warm moleskin jeans and some bulky woollen socks. She sat at the table downstairs, her hands cupped round a mug of tea, and leafed through the printouts she had made from the internet the previous night. In the glum morning light, the abused animals looked even more forlorn. They looked wrenched, and tired out and scared. This is no good, she said to herself. People would do this to each other if we let them, they would find the best of reasons. I can’t just sit here feeling like this. I have to do something, I have to go and tell Stella what I think of her.
On the way, she would go and apologise to John. It wasn’t fair to blame him: the bars of his cage were emotional, but he was as trapped by them as any research animal.
Before she left, she took the empty mug out into the kitchen. Orlando and Vita had been back in the night. Their bowls were empty. You greedy pair, she thought with relief. Then she thought: what on earth do they find to do out there in weather like this?
Cats. Cats and their strange little lives. She smiled.
Outside, it was so cold that each breath she took felt like a separate block of frigid air forcing its way into her lungs. She tucked her scarf firmly into the neck of her Barbour jacket and set off, with her hands deep in her pockets. The lanes were full of broken sticks, and even quite large branches, as if high winds had swooped over the edge of the downs during the night, then vanished like the turmoil in her dreams.
*
Down at the Brindley cut, the narrowboats huddled on the motionless brown water, their upperwork lumbered with bicycles, leaky water-cans and tubs of doomed geraniums.
John Dawe’s boat looked a little more alive than the rest, its fresh paint and recently polished brasswork bright in the developing light of day. A line of frozen washing – towels the consistency of crisp bread, jeans with sculpted wrinkles – stretched from a hook on the cabin roof to the raised mooring post on the towpath. Boat life, bohemian life: it was a cheerful scene. Her spirits raised, Anna addressed the washing. When it resisted, she ducked smartly under it, and peered into the Magpie’s shadowy interior.
She could see some furniture. The foldaway bed was down, blankets trailing off it. His laptop, open but switched off, remained connected to the cellphone following some recent transaction. There was unwashed crockery stacked in the sink. Otherwise, it was dust and objects: she made out the skull of a crow; the long yellowed spine of some foreign snake; a leather backgammon set; dyed feathers, tied to a stick. She had grown used to these things. There were days when she even missed them. This is no good, she thought, and jumped up on deck. Everything there was shut down, put away, tidied up. There was no smoke from the chimney, which meant that the stove had gone out. She rattled the door against its little brass padlock. She looked hopefully across at the other boats, but they were silent. Everyone was asleep, or had fled wherever canal people flee in winter from the muddy towpaths and grim lines of willows. She banged the cabin roof with the flat of her hand.
‘John?’ she called. ‘John!’
But she knew he wasn’t there.
She got down off the upperwork and tried to see in through the windows again. She had more luck this time, and it was all bad. On the Formica-topped table, by the bread board and milk jug stood a bottle of Calvados and a jar of instant coffee with the lid off – the things he had used to fill his flask for the ‘picnic’ the day before. He hadn’t been home since. After she left him at Cresset Beacon he had headed straight for Nonesuch, and whatever solace he was used to finding there. Anna stood on the towpath, banging her hands together in the cold. If that was what he wanted, then let him. They so richly deserved one another. She could walk away from them both now, leave them to the emotional prison they had constructed for themselves up at Nonesuch all those years ago. Damn, she thought. Oh, damn, damn, damn. Because she knew in her heart that he didn’t want the prison, and only she could free him. He was manacled to the thirteen-year-old boy he had once been, and she would have to go and separate them and prise him out of that place. It was time to break his dependence on Stella forever. Gritting her teeth, she retraced her steps to the lane and started up the long hill back into the village.
*
The sun cleared the trees in the birchwood as she came up towards the common. It was a wintry sun, pale and brassy, and it was doing little to help burn off the frost, which had cemented the tangles of couch grass in the verge and shellacked every dip in the road. Past the post-box, amid a litter of broken branches, she came upon a dead squirrel. It didn’t seem to have been run over. Perhaps, she thought, it had misjudged a leap during last night’s gale, come down with all these shattered limbs of birch. Were squirrels active at night? She had no idea. She bent to retrieve the stiff little carcass. It lay as light as a paper carton in her hands, its lips curled back over curved orange teeth, its black eyes bulging in astonishment.
‘Sorry, old chap,’ she whispered, dropping it gently into the brambled hedge. ‘No time to give you a decent burial.’
She squinted into the sunshine that spilled between the birches. There really were a lot of branches down. Something made her quicken her pace, and by the time she reached the corner of Allbright Lane, she had broken into a jog. A light breeze rose, and brought the hoarfrost off the trees and telephone wires in hard little flurries like dry snow.
*
It was a strange morning.
Some way along Allbright Lane she came upon an elderly man kneeling in the road. He was dressed in a neat, old-fashioned camel overcoat and a tweed hat. She knew him by sight – he and his small wire-haired terrier were fixtures at the Green Man – but couldn’t remember what he was called. The dog had wrapped its lead around the base of a broken lamp-post, and he was trying to disengage it. Excited by the novelty of this situation, the dog ran round and round in tight little circles, barking and snapping and winding the lead tighter.
‘Can I help?’ said Anna.
At that moment the dog seemed to get free of its own accord. The man regarded her with a kind of flaccid irritability. When he stood up, she saw that he was grey in the face. Melted frost had left dark patches on the knees of his trousers, a dark bruise discoloured his left cheek. ‘Mind your own business,’ he said. He yanked the dog smartly away and pushed past her without another word, as if she had made him some shameful offer.
Anna watched him go.
Suddenly she remembered his name.
‘Mr Cunningham!’ she called. ‘Are you all right?’
No reply. With a mental shrug she passed on, beneath the towering yew hedges, until she reached the gates of Nonesuch House.
*
In 1482, Joshua Hering, determined on the New Build but fearing the effect of Ashmore’s winter easterlies on his susceptible second wife Elizabeth Marchmount, had been as cunning in his choice of location as in any other enterprise. The
site was sheltered by the landforms themselves. As a result, Nonesuch had done well in last night’s gale. The terraces were tidy, the great plantings untouched. But still air encourages frost (as Joshua himself had soon discovered), and as Anna made her way up the long drive, it seemed to her that every twig, every needle, every blade of grass was sheathed in transparent ice. The air was laden, hard to breathe. Her fingers and toes grew numb. It was a bitter place for a human being, let alone a small animal; yet halfway to the house, she heard a mewing sound quite close.
From the shelter of some rhododendrons emerged a tabby-and-white cat, long in the leg but sturdy in the body, with a bizarre little crest of fur on its head and an odd look in its eyes, companionable and cautious at the same time. It stood, shifting its weight from one paw to another on the cold ground, and purred. Anna knelt down. She made soft clicking noises. ‘Puss,’ she said. ‘Puss?’ The tabby had a look around, then approached her. ‘You see?’ she said. ‘I’m all right. I’m OK.’ It sniffed at her fingers, its nose cold against her skin. It butted her hand. She stroked its cool, smooth fur for a few moments, running her hand firmly down its spine and off its long tail.
‘Who are you then?’ Anna asked, rubbing it under the chin. There was no collar. ‘One of Stella’s strays?’
Even as the words left her mouth she realised, given what she now knew, how frightening and paradoxical an idea that had become. But the cat left her no time to meditate on this. Instead it wove itself twice more round her legs then set off at a brisk trot, tail up, through a gap in the rhododendrons and on to one of the great lawns at the front of the house. About ten yards off, as if it had realised Anna was not following, it stopped and looked back enquiringly over one shoulder.
Anna smiled. ‘Goodbye then,’ she said, and she carried on up the drive. The tabby ran in front of her, and wound itself so tightly round her legs again she had to stop or tread on it. It mewed insistently. It made very direct eye contact with her.
‘What do you want?’
Not to be stroked, clearly: as soon as she bent down, it ran off again.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘This is ridiculous.’
Nevertheless, she followed. The tabby set off into the middle of the bleak, icy expanse of the lawn, stopping from time to time to make sure Anna was still there. It was nervous in the open, she could see. Whenever it looked up and noticed the walls of Nonesuch, it crouched suddenly, and seemed likely to change its mind; finally it put back its ears and took off at a run, leaving behind a faint curve of footprints in the frozen turf. Reaching the corner of the house, it looked back once and disappeared. ‘Damn!’ said Anna, who had become involved despite herself. She followed the footprints, and was soon confronted by an old wall of soft orange brick, beyond which could be seen the tops of a number of gnarled and leafless trees. The Nonesuch orchard: Stella’s famous medlars from sixteenth-century stock, with their soft and rotten-tasting fruit. The cat waited for a moment, then it was off again, running more confidently along the base of the wall, through an open gate, down a leafless walk—
—and into the knot garden.
Paths of coloured gravel separated the carefully clipped lines of box and germander which crossed and re-crossed the open space in great whorls and spirals, hidden in the geometrical complexities of which you might never suspect the Herringe initials, the Herringe ego – waiting like a spider, trapped like a bird, since 1482. Anna came to a halt. She stared. While the little cat sat and watched, she put one foot carefully in front of another and walked three sides of the design. She admired the accuracy of it, the precision. It was a clock which told Herringe time, a site of mystery and arrogance. Anyone watching from the house would have seen her frown, as if she had half-solved some puzzle. Should she walk on? This way, or that? The whole thing was somewhat spoiled, she noted, by a mass of broken and flattened stems at the centre of the maze, where the coloured gravels had been scuffed away to reveal the soil beneath, sticky with some dark residue.
*
When I came to, I had no idea where I was. The surface I lay on was dark and cold. It stank, of urine and faeces, and something sweet and cloying to which I could put no name.
I struggled up, feeling dizzy, every muscle aching from my ordeals, to find myself in a kind of narrow concrete run hemmed in on both sides by metal cages, a hundred of them or more, piled up higgledy-piggledy and glinting in the red light of dawn. At one end of the run was a closed door; at the other a blank wall. Inside each cage was a cat or kitten, each one of which regarded me with deep curiosity.
‘Who are you?’
A skinny female Siamese, her blue eyes crossed in concentration.
‘He’s a boy—’
A tiny black-and-white.
‘He’s just another stud—’
A big old tabby, past her best.
‘Let me see!’
Many of the cages contained more than one animal. They crowded to the bars to get a look at me, and now I could see that they were all queens, some mated, some not. If I tuned out the rank smell of the place itself, their common scent washed over me, resolving into a hundred signatures impressed on the air like graffiti on a wall, musky, distinctive, strange.
‘I’m Orlando.’ I croaked.
My throat was still clogged with scraps of the Dream.
‘Orlando? Is it you?’
I was only half conscious until then. The sound of that voice turned me round so fast my head spun.
‘Liddy!’
There she was, her perfect face pressed up to the wire of a cage near the bottom of the stack! I made a few unsteady steps across the concrete and stared up at her.
‘Oh, Liddy!’
‘It’s Lydia,’ she reminded me.
At once there was a chorus of, ‘Hark at Lady Muck—’, ‘Ooh, Queenie’s off again’ and ‘Little Ms High and Mighty—’
‘Oh, leave her alone,’ said a bored voice.
My heart swelled. ‘Lidd— oh, Lydia. I’ve found you at last.’
This brought some cackling from the tiered cages.
‘Found her at last, has he?’ ‘Oh he has. He’s found her all right.’ Then: ‘You’ve arrived a bit late to be the gallant champion. Sonny Jim. Someone got to her before you. ’E was quite forceful.’
‘Pardon?’
‘I said: ’e was quite forceful.’
More cackles, and a certain amount of rough mimicry.
‘Lydia,’ I said, ‘what’s wrong?’
She turned away. ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said dully.
It was the cruellest of disappointments.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered, as much to myself as her.
‘No need to be sorry,’ said Lydia. ‘Although if you’d come earlier, of course—’ She sighed.
At this I looked so glum even the chorus of queens could think of nothing to add. Then one of them, a brindled matron little more than a vast slack belly topped by the tiny, wedged-shaped face and slanting yellow eyes that spoke of early good looks, said, ‘Hey, don’t take it personally. We’re all up the spout here; or will be soon.’ Some private thought occupied her for a moment. ‘I always wanted a lot of kits,’ she said. ‘This’ll be my third litter in eighteen months.’ She gave a bitter laugh. ‘Not that I’ve ever seen a one of them.’
‘Who has?’ said a voice I couldn’t locate.
‘Count your blessings, honey,’ someone else advised. ‘I see mine all the time. In my dreams.’
With this, a fierce inturned silence descended on them all.
I stared from face to face, bemused. ‘Who are you? Why are you here?’
Their spirits were restored. A gale of amusement swept the cages.
‘He in’t the stud, darlin’, that’s for sure.’
‘He surely ain’t.’
‘Pretty, though.’
‘Oh he’s surely pretty.’
And then, to me:
‘Something’s happening here, sweetheart, and you don’t know what it is. None of you cats out
side know what it is.’
‘How could we?’ I said.
‘You don’t care to know.’
‘That’s not fair,’ said Lydia suddenly, from the back of her cage. ‘He can’t help the things humans do.’
‘What things?’ I said. ‘What things?’
One of the older queens took pity on me. ‘Some get brought in like your friend,’ she said. ‘Most are born here. Our lines go so far back we can’t remember them. We’ve lost the thread.’ She looked at me with a kind of shy regard. ‘We were never outdoor cats like you.’
Other cats took up the story, and passed it from cage to cage.
‘We’re bred here and it’s what we know as home,’ said one.
Another said: ‘She mates us until we die. You quicken, you’re ready to drop, but she lays you open with a knife, and takes the kittens every time—’
‘We never see the kittens.’
‘She takes the kittens every time—’
‘—and what she does with ‘em then is anyone’s guess, since we never see ’em again.’
‘—never see them again.’
Silence.
‘This woman,’ I said. ‘Who is she?’
‘Oh, we’re in hell,’ said the bored voice from the back. ‘And she’s the devil.’
Dreamcatching, I thought, was nothing compared to this. All that running and fighting, it was hard work, yes: but how simple and clear-cut compared to this slow, deadly penance, worked out without reward in the stink and grey light of the cages. I felt humbled. The cats before me might have taken refuge in madness and depression. Instead, they bore the misery of their lives, the futility of their dearest impulses, with humour and companionship. I looked from face to face. Every one of them seemed as beautiful as Lydia.