The Knot Garden

  ‘Yes? Who is this?’

  Anna, for some reason imagining that Ruth had called back on a bad line, answered: ‘It’s Anna.’

  ‘Anna who?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Anna: ‘you’re Stella Herringe, aren’t you? I left a message on your answer machine—’

  ‘I’m aware of that, dear.’

  ‘I wasn’t sure it was recording.’

  There was no reply to this.

  ‘Sorry,’ Anna said. ‘You must think I’m a complete fool.’ No reply to this, either. ‘I’m so sorry to bother you, but—’

  ‘These kittens. Are they female?’

  Anna was puzzled. ‘Well, one of them is,’ she said. ‘The other female died. I don’t quite—’

  ‘And is it in good heart?’

  ‘They’re just not eating,’ said Anna. ‘That’s the problem.’

  ‘Have you tried a little Brand’s Essence?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know what that is.’

  ‘Hm. Look, this is rather a challenge for someone who’s never done it before.’

  ‘I’m sure they’d be fine,’ said Anna. ‘If I could get them to eat.’

  ‘To be honest, you’ve done marvellously well to keep them alive at all. Do you know what I think? I think you’ve done all you can do by yourself. Hand-rearing’s a bit of an art. Why don’t you bring them over to Nonesuch and let me try? Do you know Nonesuch? It’s the Tudor building on the left at the end of Allbright Lane.’

  Anna couldn’t picture Allbright Lane. She tried to remember the village as it looked from up on the downs: nothing came to mind. Who was Stella Herringe? Anna couldn’t picture her, either – though now she remembered, from her walks in the churchyard, that Herringe was a notable local name. Relieved to share the problem but not quite ready to have it taken away in this manner, she found herself saying cautiously:

  ‘It’s very good of you to offer—’

  ‘That’s what we’re here for.’

  ‘—and I’m so glad to have someone to talk to. I’ve been ringing and ringing the local vet, but he doesn’t answer.’

  There was a dry laugh at the other end. ‘Andy Corcoran drank himself to death two years ago. You won’t find a vet closer than Drychester now.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You’d be better bringing them to me.’

  ‘Well,’ Anna began, ‘what I really wanted was advice—’

  There was a silence.

  ‘That is my advice, dear,’ said Stella Herringe.

  The silence drew out.

  Into it, Stella Herringe said cheerfully: ‘They’ll be quite safe with me, and I’ll soon be able to give you an idea if they’re worth continuing with. Bring them over. Or if you haven’t any transport I can get someone to collect them. Now, let’s see: where are you?’

  Where was she indeed? Outside, grey cumulus clouds lowered over the downs. The wind flung a handful of hail against the windows. Anna could see it bouncing and leaping like a lot of white insects on the hard earth between the rose bushes. Chilled without knowing why, the kittens mewed and clung to one another in their box. Her heart went out to them. It would be such a relief to have them properly looked after. But I promised their mother, Anna thought. She brought them to me. It was me she trusted. I can’t go back on that.

  ‘Are you there?’ said the voice on the phone.

  ‘I think I’ll keep them for now,’ said Anna.

  ‘Do remember that they’re little live things,’ said Stella Herringe, ‘and not just a problem to solve.’ Her voice, coming and going on the undependable connection, had a strange effect, pleasant enough, often rather reassuring, but at the same time clipped and practical. It was the voice of a woman who, after years of work on behalf of others, has grown used to having her good sense recognised. ‘Whatever you do, don’t let stubbornness get in the way.’

  Anna could make nothing of this. ‘Well, I think I’ll have another try,’ she said.

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  There was a clatter at the other end. Stella Herringe had rung off.

  Anna stared out at the weather. For the rest of the afternoon she battled with the kittens, wondering every so often why Stella Herringe had made her feel so nervous. People who pride themselves on their practicality often seem rather too interested in taking charge. I shouldn’t have let that rub me up the wrong way, Anna admitted, but really I don’t think her manner bothered me as much as... well, what? In the end, she thought, the phone call itself was what remained puzzling. How had Stella Herringe managed to ring back so quickly? Had she been monitoring Anna’s call all along? Anna thought she had. It was hard to get rid of an image of this bossy old lady leaning over her ancient answer-phone, quietly listening to someone else’s struggles on the tinny loudspeaker and doing nothing to help. It made Anna shiver with embarrassment. To take her mind off it, she told the kittens sternly:

  ‘Now. We’re going to try formula this time, and you are jolly well going to eat some. See? You like it! Oh dear.’

  *

  By late afternoon the battle was lost. The kittens had ceased to respond to the eye-dropper. Their cries diminished and then died away altogether. Anna switched off the computer, moved the cardboard box into the kitchen and tried everything, from cold chicken stock to Marmite in warm water. Nothing raised their heads. Little faces set grimly, they curled up tight into one another and every so often a single shiver went through them, as if they were one organism. They had decided not to accept the world. They were prepared to wait it out, in mourning for the one thing they could never have again. Anna gave them her hand to cuddle against, and waited for them to die. Then she lost her temper with herself and tried goat’s milk again. She renewed their hot water bottle. At five o’clock, she picked up the phone for the first time, putting it down immediately. Over the next ten minutes, she picked it up and put it down four times. She stared out of the kitchen window at the damp, hard earth around the rose bushes, wiped her eyes impatiently and asked herself, ‘What does it matter if I liked her or not? I just don’t know enough to help them. I have to admit it.’ She dialled the number quickly, so there wouldn’t be an opportunity to change her mind. Every time she looked at the kittens she started to cry again.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she told them. ‘This is no good.’ Then: ‘You’ll be better off with her and I suppose I’ll never see you again.’

  But things didn’t work out that way. At Stella Herringe’s house, the machine was switched off and no one was answering the phone. It had been ringing emptily for some minutes when Anna looked out of the kitchen window and thought she saw two animals running down the garden towards her in the rain and failing light.

  4

  Outlines blurred and indistinct, they seemed to ripple under the natural divider of the vine-trellis, and then they were among the rose bushes right under the window, and quickly out of sight. Anna stood up and craned her neck to see better. Nothing. How odd, she thought. For a moment she had gained the distinct impression that they were decreasing in size as they ran. She put down the phone and without thinking went to the back door. The latch rattled, cold air spilled round her feet. The empty garden awaited her, its softened perspectives greying away into haze and distance. Lights were coming on at the far edge of the pasture.

  ‘Hello?’ she said.

  Nothing. Her voice sounded thin in the silence. She was turning to go back inside when something caused her to look down. There on the doorstep sat two ordinary domestic cats.

  One of them was a scruffy old thing, with eyes on the orange side of yellow and a thick tortoiseshell coat blanched by the evening light. He was rather larger than you would expect of an entire tomcat, but properly short-coupled, compact, broad of head. He had been in the wars all his life, by the look of him, and possibly not just with members of his own species (though the scars of such honest social encounters had left the skin around his eyes spectacular with hard dark tissue), for some brief engagement with an object even more durable tha
n himself had pushed in the left side of his face. The muscles of the damaged cheek, contracted permanently by trauma, dragged back his lip to reveal two sharp snaggle-teeth. In the shifty evening light, his face had a lopsidedness at the same time engaging and roguish.

  His companion, a female cat younger than him – though not by much – and white all over except for a circular black patch the size of a penny on one thin haunch, stood up and stretched as Anna appeared, revealing a curiously elongated back. Her blue eyes had a marked bulge. When she arched her spine and rubbed her head against Anna’s ankles, she resembled nothing so much as a cat from a sixteenth-century woodblock illustration. Her manner was anxious, and she matched the old tomcat’s serviceable, independent air with a clear need to please.

  ‘Well, you’re a pair,’ said Anna. ‘And no mistake. What are you doing here?’

  She bent down and extended her hand to the tom, who gazed calmly at her for a moment then fluffed up his fur and spat. Anna backed away in surprise. ‘You old devil!’ she said, making ineffectual shooing motions. ‘I was only trying to be friends.’ While her attention was occupied in this way, the female cat slipped past her and into the kitchen. ‘Hey!’ said Anna, turning just in time to see a white rump disappear neatly into the cardboard box of kittens: ‘Come out of there!’

  Too late.

  The kittens mewed, then fell silent.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Anna. ‘Oh dear.’

  She fled across the kitchen, expecting the worst whatever that might be, afraid of so many things she couldn’t articulate a single one of them. When she looked into the box, with its soiled newspaper and discarded eye-dropper, she was astonished.

  The white cat lay on her side, the rather scraggy length of her belly displayed, to reveal rosy pink nipples among the thinning fur. The marmalade kitten had found her, and was already suckling greedily; as Anna watched, his sister struggled up next to him. The white cat looked at Anna – who said in surprise, ‘But you’re lactating!’ – and purred suddenly. Soon, both kittens were settled, pulling with a kind of busy thoughtlessness at their new mother. The box was full of warmth and the smell of milk. It was a different place for them now. Anna said, ‘Aren’t they lovely?’ and reached in to touch them. Immediately the white cat extended one front paw and struck out at the back of her hand. There was some force behind the blow, and though the cat’s claws were retracted the warning was clear. ‘You’re right of course,’ said Anna. ‘I’m sorry.’ Half amused, half rueful, she withdrew her hand. Well, she told herself, I wanted someone to look after them. But I never... what an extraordinary coincidence! This reminded her of the tortoiseshell tom, who, apparently unaffected by these events, had sat himself down on the sisal mat outside the door and begun washing diligently.

  ‘Why don’t you come in and take over my kitchen, too?’ she invited him.

  His dark yellow eyes glittered at her. He let her have the full benefit of them, holding her gaze in that way cats have when they want you to know that they are more intelligent than you; then he got deliberately to his feet and walked off into the darkness. The white cat’s head appeared over the edge of the cardboard box and she stared after his retreating form. For a second it seemed she might follow him. Then the kittens mewled for attention, and she turned philosophically back to her task. Anna watched him cross the garden and disappear into the pasture beyond. The stars were out; night was in the apple trees. She shivered a little. Then she closed the door and laughed. ‘Have it your own way,’ she said. And, to the nursing queen, ‘Is it warm enough in here? Would you like the radio? You know, I think I’ll put the kettle on.’

  She made a cup of tea and ate two slices of Marmite toast, cutting off the crusts as if she were spoiling a child. She was ravenous, but still a little too excited to settle. She tried to phone Ruth: Ruth was engaged. She looked round the kitchen. I’ll boil an egg too, she thought. When she next looked into the box, the kittens had finished feeding. Their foster mother’s purr rose rough and loving as she set about them with a determined pink tongue. They held their ground blindly against these attentions, like little swimmers breasting a wave, and slept the moment she stopped.

  ‘At this age,’ advised Everything You Need to Know About Your Cat or Kitten, ‘a healthy kitten is either feeding or sleeping.’

  ‘Well then,’ said Anna smugly.

  Later, she opened a can of meat-and-liver dinner and forked half of it into a bowl. At the sound of the can-opener, the white cat’s head came up. She trembled. She jumped on to the side of the box. Balanced there for an instant, paws together in a neat row, she looked hungrily at the can in Anna’s hand, then back at her charges.

  ‘They’ll be fine,’ Anna reassured her.

  She ate with a kind of refined greed, stopping every so often to stare at the food as if something about it had made her think, then setting to again with renewed energy.

  ‘Where have you come from?’ Anna asked her. ‘What’s your story? How did you end up at my door?’ The white cat ate faster. ‘You like that,’ Anna said. ‘Well, you can always have it. We should call the girl Vita – you know, “life”? As for her brother: to start with I thought he’d be Barnaby, after my old cat who was the same colour. But is that fair? He deserves a name of his own.’

  She thought for a moment.

  ‘Let’s call him Orlando,’ she suggested.

  The white cat purred.

  *

  Next morning Anna found that while she slept something had got into the garden and dug up the dead tabby and her daughter, leaving behind on the bleak little lawn by the pasture fence a steep-sided hole and an extraordinary litter of loose chocolate-brown earth. There was a ferocity in the way the turf had been ripped up and flung about, a rage so pure it could never be described, only enacted. What had become of the pair was impossible to say. ‘How cruel,’ said Anna, blinking down into the empty grave. ‘What a cruel thing to do.’ It was eight o’clock in the morning. Two crows flapped lazily into the air from the pasture and hung there against a sky rinsed blue by early rain. She wiped her eyes.

  Later, at the Green Man, she asked Alice: ‘What sort of animal would dig up a dead cat?’

  ‘Kids,’ said Alice laconically. She noticed Anna’s expression and said: ‘It was a fox, I expect.’

  Anna stared at her. ‘Why do you say that?’ she said, more loudly then she had intended. ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘I think you’ll find we always blame the fox,’ said Alice, ‘here in the country.’ She made a vague gesture, and went down the bar to pull two halves of Guinness, taking an order for organic lasagne and chips while she waited for the glasses to fill. The Green Man was filling up, breathing on its customers the familiar comfortable breath of beer and food and cigarette smoke. ‘Anyway, what else could it have been?’ she continued when she could next spare the time, concluding less certainly: ‘Foxes dig things up. Don’t they?’

  Anna shook her head. ‘I don’t see why it should have been a fox,’ she said. ‘It could have been a badger, a dog: anything.’

  ‘I expect you saw a lot of badgers in Barnes,’ said Alice demurely. She held a glass up to the light. ‘What do I know?’ she asked herself. ‘I hate the country anyway.’ She brightened up. ‘There’s a DJ on later at the Yelverton in Drychester. You should go along, do you good. Tell you what,’ she suggested: ‘I will if you will.’

  Anna thought about it. ‘I want to get an early night tonight.’

  ‘It’s ten past one in the afternoon,’ Alice pointed out. ‘Just listen to yourself.’

  *

  The kittens thrived. They ate, they slept, they squirmed about energetically. The white cat – whose regard, though critical, was not without pride – kept them clean and tidy. After about a week, they opened their eyes, and, astonished by the obvious possibilities, redoubled their efforts to walk like proper cats. When, with her own eye on the future, their foster-mother moved them out of the confines of the cardboard box and into the wider world,
she chose for their next home the seat of Anna’s favourite chair. ‘I’ll get you a nicer cushion for that,’ Anna said. Dimly remembering the name of a wet-nurse in some old book, she had taken to calling the white cat ‘Dellifer’. Dellifer padded about the cottage at night, putting her nose into things. She was easily persuaded to sit on Anna’s knee, but she wouldn’t leave the house. If Anna opened the back door, Dellifer would hurry across the kitchen, gather the kittens to her and begin grooming them fiercely. ‘How funny you are!’ Anna told her. Then, holding the door open for a moment more: ‘Sure you won’t go out? Oh well. You’ve got the Plastic Palace, I suppose.’ The Plastic Palace, a space-age dirtbox, hooded, two-tone blue and equipped with filters, had come from the pet shop in Drychester. Dellifer, having accepted it with caution, introduced her charges to it as soon as they could walk. The kittens loved it. They went in one at a time and threw gravel about in an important way. The house was full of scratching and scratting noises at inappropriate times. ‘Less of that, you two,’ Anna would call. ‘Or I’ll send you to Hackney.’ The kittens ignored her. They knew she was captivated. Anyway, it was more important to get control of their legs. They wobbled after Dellifer to the bottom of the stairs then, unable to follow her, gazed up in awe and sat down suddenly without meaning to. Soon, though, they had mastered the stairs, too, and discovered again the warm confines of the airing cupboard, where they clambered over clean linen and swung on towels, pulling loose threads out with their sharp little claws. They fell asleep there under the sheets, thinking they could not be seen. They ambushed one another from behind doors, behind the sofa, behind their foster-mother: ambush was a big joke to them. They reared up on their tiny hind legs and sparred with Anna’s fingers. They were hungry from dawn to dusk. Their energy was phenomenal, but when they had spent it they fell asleep where they stood.