The Knot Garden

  From the very outset, the old tortoiseshell tomcat kept his eye on them. Anna could never tell when he would appear on the back doorstep, calling out in a rusty voice until she opened the door. It was the only time he asked for anything – thereafter he barely acknowledged her, or even the nursing queen, but gave his full attention to the kittens, sniffing and licking and breathing on them as if they were his own. At first Anna was anxious. ‘As all breeders are aware,’ Everything You Need to Know About Your Cat or Kitten warned her, ‘a loose tom will kill any or all the kittens in a litter.’ But it soon became clear that whatever the old boy wanted it wasn’t that. It wasn’t food, either, though he sometimes persuaded himself to eat a morsel from Dellifer’s bowl; neither was it Dellifer herself. She seemed unconcerned by these visits, though she hissed at him if he was too rough with her charges. This he took good-naturedly. He seemed simply to enjoy being with the kittens, though he gave less attention to Vita than to Orlando.

  By then, Orlando was the perfect red tabby. His sparse fluffy fur shone exactly like sunshine through marmalade on a spring morning, and flames had kindled along his stubby little sides. His eyes were mischievous one moment, dreamy the next. His legs were unsteady, his paws huge and he was taller than he was long: but he was up for anything. He regarded the old tom with interest. What a smell! What scars! This new creature had appeared at just the right time in his life. He followed it about, jerkily imitating its walk. He buried his face in its thick coat and growled. He fixed it with a beady eye, and engaged it in play battle. Some quite hard blows were delivered during these bouts, but Orlando never seemed to mind.

  Anna was less certain. Over the next few weeks she found the old cat’s developing relationship with the kittens difficult to accept. She hated it when he was openly rough with them, because they were so puzzled. When placatory gestures failed, they didn’t know what to do. Vita had some success at avoiding him; but with Orlando he persisted, chivvying him out of the airing cupboard or from under the TV where he liked to have his morning sleep. There was a great deal of hissing and spitting. Anna would come across the marmalade kitten backed into a corner, looking puzzled and hurt, its face turned away so as not to provoke the older cat. ‘Come on. If you can’t play nicely, shoo,’ ordered Anna; but whenever she looked up from her work the tortoiseshell was there, sitting on a windowsill, waiting at the door in the late afternoon gloom, watching the kittens from across the room, with hard, intelligent eyes. Their foster-mother seemed less inclined to confront him, and their encounters became brief and predictable. The tom dropped his head and fluffed his fur. Dellifer edged away, looking comically anxious. ‘Stop that, you old devil!’ Anna ordered. ‘Stop it!’ He regarded her stonily, the fur on his back slowly settling itself. The message was clear. ‘Right then,’ she said: ‘That’s enough.’ But when she stopped answering the door to him, he only got in through the kitchen window. She phoned Ruth Canning.

  ‘What can I do?’ she said.

  ‘Close the window.’

  ‘Ruth, you have no idea how hot that Aga gets.’

  Ruth laughed. ‘Have you thought of assertiveness training?’ she said.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Anna.

  But it is in the nature of kittens to grow up. Soon, Dellifer had taken them out into the garden, where she marshalled their activities as if there were six or seven of them. At all times of day she could be seen walking in a no-nonsense way round the flowerbeds, her tail up like a flag, while Orlando and Vita dawdled along behind, investigating the things they found. They snapped at insects. They tried to eat snails and worms. They tried to eat bees. They fought with one another, tearing round the trunk of Anna’s lilac or tumbling down the terraces of the little rockery. They struck gunfighter poses. They struck poses of death or glory. Dellifer continued their education. ‘This,’ Anna imagined her saying, ‘is a flower. And this is a flower-pot.’ She taught them to freeze and look hard at things. She taught them stalking. Bottoms stuck up in the air, they stalked anything that moved – leaves, paper, the wind in the grass. They stalked Anna’s foot. In all seriousness they stalked the washing on the washing line.

  ‘They’re so satisfying to watch,’ Anna told Ruth.

  ‘Anna, you need a man.’

  ‘Shut up, Ruth.’

  Ruth was interested in Orlando’s progress despite herself.

  ‘What about the old cat then?’ she said. ‘The bane of your life?’

  ‘He doesn’t come into the house so much. I see him in the garden with them. God knows what he gets up to out there. Orlando seems fine.’

  Soon Orlando was more than fine. He had filled out. His legs had grown longer and sturdier. He looked less like a kitten than a young cat. He stood up sniffing the air on the heights of the rockery in the morning light, every orange-gold hair glowing with life. ‘You beautiful thing,’ whispered Anna. Orlando loved his sister, despite their disagreements. He loved the outdoors. Anything else that went on in the garden went on out of sight. Anna had a cat-flap put in, and fretted less because she saw less. She suspected that Orlando was now making excursions outside the garden.

  ‘Soon you’ll be a grown-up,’ she told him.

  She hugged him hard, and he gave her a puzzled stare.

  She was happy. She had allowed the cottage to slow her to its own pace; she had allowed the quietness of her new life to seep into her. These mornings she often found herself swirling a cloth about aimlessly in the warm washing-up water, thinking about nothing much at all, while the kettle on the Aga filled the room with steam.

  ‘The kittens make me feel as if I’ve arrived at last,’ she told Ruth Canning on the phone one night. ‘They make me feel as if I’ve caught up with myself.’

  ‘That’s very profound, Anna,’ said Ruth.

  5

  Your job, as a kitten, is to learn about the world as fast as you can. For me, it started with a small, warm cupboard at the top of the stairs. You would not have thought there was much to be learned in such a place, but I was to discover otherwise. In the depths of that cupboard was a whole living world.

  High up against the ceiling, tiny creatures spun shining threads across dusty corners. Against the peeling paint of the old woodwork their babies lay in clusters, asleep. If you were a cat, even as tiny a cat as I was then, a cat who lay very still amongst the woman’s clean bed-things, you could hear them breathe.

  Down in the bottom of that cupboard was a colony of life. Hordes of tiny, armoured grey beasts raised families there; and great, spiky many-legged creatures hunted them amid the dust and fluff, and the softening wood of the old house.

  I could hear feet scurrying. I could hear the shriek of the captured and the dying. And all the time, tiny flies, bored with their journeys across the lazy green pond I had seen outside, would come in through the slatted doors, wings iridescent in the late afternoon light. The flies made hardly any sound at all. To me, then, they were magical beings, barely visible to the naked eye, tiny, sparkling shards of life.

  But I could hear their cries as they got caught in the shining webs; and when the many-legs despatched them with glee, the whispery paper-sound of jaws breaking through their crispy skins.

  I watched them, too.

  My whiskers twitched. My paws itched. Something about the pattern of hunter and hunted excited me; but I didn’t know why.

  My ears flexed to follow the progress of the flies, noted their flight-paths and their sudden ends; marked the frantic speed of escapees, the hunting-paths of the spiky ones, the intricately hidden nests. I was fascinated by it all. So much life: so much death. It seemed like a marvellous dance; a game, even. To me, then, everything was a game.

  I played and fought with my sister and thought nothing of the scratches and bites we inflicted on one another. I wandered into the back garden, and from there into other gardens, where I sat and watched with interest how insects ate the plants, and birds ate the insects, and how, from time to time, a cat might catch and eat a bird. And I yearned f
or the day when I would be big and nimble enough to become a hunter too, and take my place in the game.

  I cannot be proud of the fact that it would take me so very many lessons to learn the truth of the matter. That nothing, really, is a game.

  My lessons were soon to start in earnest: and not just how to clean my paws, or behind my ears; or that biting my sister would get me cuffed about the head by Dellifer. I thought that I had tumbled through the dark spaces of my falling dream, only to land foursquare on to soft carpets, and that tuna fish, garden sunlight and gentle hands would be my lot.

  But I had reckoned without the old cat.

  Of all the things in my young life, he fascinated me most; his random appearances, his uncertain temper: ‘mercurial’, Dellifer called him. ‘Your grandfather has a changeable nature, Orlando,’ she would warn me. ‘You watch yourself around him.’ Which only beguiled me more.

  ‘How did you get your name, Granfer?’ I asked him one day as we sat in the garden. He had taken to chivvying me outside, no matter the weather, to teach me the names of the things that I saw there, the birds and insects, the plants and the trees, and I went willingly, flattered by his attentions, and the fact that he took no such interest in my sister.

  The old cat blinked lazily and the sun struck off his yellow eyes, so that a flash of gold abruptly lit their opaque depths. I had a sudden vivid picture in my head of the tiny pond two gardens away, where ornamental fish swam through water hazy with sediment: a glimpse of gold disappearing tantalisingly into the dark and tangled weeds below.

  If I was entirely truthful, I would admit to being a little afraid of my grandfather, afraid of the dark and tangled depths I sensed lurking all too close to the surface. Afraid too, of his sharp teeth and fast paws.

  ‘When you get to my advanced age, laddie,’ he said, ‘you’ll have had so many names you’ll never be able to recall them all. Nor wish to, neither.’

  I had no idea, then, what it was he meant by this. How could anyone have too many names? And what did a name matter anyway? It was just what everyone called you by, and not necessarily how you thought of yourself.

  The old tortoiseshell rolled over so that the sun could warm the other side of his face, the side with the permanent snarl where the muscles had shortened and thickened. Two teeth, still sharp and white despite his years, snaggled out over the tight pinky-black lip. I was curious about the reason for my grandfather’s alarming expression, but had been warned most explicitly by Dellifer not to raise such a personal subject. Left to ourselves Vita and I had devised many ingenious explanations of our own, and in truth, I did not want to know exactly how he had come by his spectacular injuries, for the truth would only spoil the glamour we saw in him.

  ‘It’s a wound he sustained fighting for the honour of a queen,’ Vita had decided. ‘He took on ten brutish tomcats intent on rape and fought them all off, one by one. They wounded him so terribly that the queen could not look upon him, and banished him from her sight for ever after, so the greatest wound he cannot show; for it is his broken heart.’

  At this, I had merely snorted with derision. ‘A romantic champion? Old Hawkweed? He hasn’t got a heart.’

  I preferred my own theory: that somewhere out in the wilds, patrolling in the bleak of night, my grandfather had encountered a monster, and had to fight for his life.

  The wound was the clincher for me: it was a badge of honour; a visible manifestation of the old cat’s soul: sort of twisted and hard, and at the same time deeply mysterious. I wanted to have a wound just like it. But somehow his name didn’t seem to fit well with his exotic appearance.

  ‘I mean,’ I continued with foolish persistence: ‘Hawkweed. It’s well, proud, and at the same time...’ I hesitated, as well I might, ‘...common.’

  My grandfather fixed me with an unfathomable, unblinking stare so that I felt as uncomfortable as a fly in resin.

  Then he heaved himself to his feet.

  I got ready to run.

  Hawkweed laughed, a brief and creaky sound, but a laugh, nonetheless. I had spent just enough time with my grandfather to recognise it as such. It didn’t always augur well.

  ‘Come with me, laddie,’ he said.

  *

  He trotted briskly out of the meadow, up the dusty path that skirted the cottages, and I followed, at once curious and a little afraid. Then we were out in the open on the village’s main road, the sun beating down on us with an almost physical force.

  Out on the road! Dellifer had expressly forbidden such a thing, fencing it about with dire warnings of great, stinking beasts that roared along, looking for cats to maim and kill. Hawkweed’s ears twitched and flexed as if checking for such dangers, then he ducked into a wide, open space between houses. Here, though, upon the pebbly ground, a dozen great gleaming monsters sat silent in the sun, some of them ticking quietly to themselves, giving off an ominous, stinking heat, as if they were only resting and might spring out at us at any moment. Hawkweed skirted them swiftly and I followed in terror, running beneath tables of old silvered wood, emerging breathless beside a trellis wreathed with a dusty vine, and stone planters colonised by straggling forget-me-nots and ragged robin. In the wide brick building beyond, I could hear the dull hum of human voices and the clink of glass upon glass. We passed quickly by, slipping with relief into the shady peace of the footpath. Here, wild briar and elder looped overhead, shutting out the bright sky and muffling the birdsong of chaffinch and thrush. Halfway down this cool tunnel, Hawkweed stopped and leapt up the bank, pushing his nose through the rampant ivy that swarmed up to meet the hedgerow plants, and disappeared.

  For a moment I stood there, confused.

  Was this another game? Would he perhaps reappear silently behind me to teach me a cat’s proper stealth? I waited; but he did not show. Determinedly, I scrabbled up the bank, digging my toes into the shifting surface and dragging myself up painstakingly by root and stalk; but when I reached the top and pushed my face through the gap where I thought my grandfather had exited, all I could see was a wide, flat pasture, with some black-and-white cows grazing in the distance.

  I jumped down into the grass on the other side of the bank and stared around.

  No sign of Hawkweed at all.

  I was mystified. I stared back at the hedge. Perhaps I had come out at the wrong place after all. The hedgerow was a chaos of plants: hawthorn and brambles, ivy and nettles, great, towering, sticklike plants bearing huge bracts of white flowers, docks and ferns and dog rose, and none of it appeared to offer any clue as to my grandfather’s whereabouts.

  I have to admit then that I experienced a moment of fear. What if my grandfather had deliberately abandoned me? What if I could never find my way home?

  Then a bright red butterfly skimmed past my nose and all my anxiety was at once forgotten in the sheer joy of being a brand-new little animal who could leap and run and chase a butterfly across open pasture in bright sunlight, my muscles bunching and springing with the magical fuels of youth. It danced and teased, and I danced after it, not even really wanting to catch it, for then the game would be over. (And, besides, it might taste strange – all those legs and feelers waving around in your mouth.) I chased it some hundred yards across the cropped grass before it finally gave up the dance and fluttered up and away into the blue.

  I watched it flicker over the fields, over the heads of the cows and into the trees on the far side, and wished I could follow it, just to see where it was going. It might be nice to fly, skimming through the air, gazing unconcernedly down upon the world, far, far below...

  ‘Didn’t catch it, then.’

  A cold shadow fell across me.

  I whirled around out of my reverie.

  The old tortoiseshell had materialised beside me without the whisper of a single blade of trodden grass betraying his presence.

  ‘You have a great deal to learn, Orlando. You need to keep your wits about you. Blundering about like an idiot after some silly scrap of colour on wings.’
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  I stared at Hawkweed, feeling rebellious. Why shouldn’t I chase a butterfly? I was only a kitten. A cruel trick had been played on me, and by my own grandfather. I opened my mouth, ready to argue. But the old cat was smiling, the sort of hidden, fleeting smile that I was learning to distrust.

  I narrowed my eyes. ‘How did you do that – that disappearing thing?’

  Hawkweed’s smile widened for a second, then he tapped my nose with a conniving paw. ‘Can’t let you into all my trade secrets at once, can I, laddie? Or you’ll think you know more than the old master, and then where will the rightness in the world be?’ He cuffed me lightly around the head.

  ‘Still want to know how I came by this name?’

  He trotted off across the field and I stared after him, feeling the fur bristle on the top of my head. When it became clear that he was not going to stop and wait for me, I ran after him.

  Hawkweed loped through the pasture until he came to the uncut margins of the field. Patches of wildflowers grew there where the earth was churned and heaped. He bent his nose into a patch of yellow ones and inhaled. He lay down and rolled amongst them. Then he sneezed.

  I stayed well back, watching this odd display with some bewilderment.

  Hawkweed stared back at me, his expression inscrutable. ‘Come here.’

  I approached cautiously. The plants he had rolled upon, though a little flattened, looked remarkably ordinary: a scatter of leaves and tatty little yellow flowerheads, scruffier than dandelions. I was not much impressed.

  ‘So what do you see?’

  ‘They’re just a load of old weeds.’

  My grandfather cocked his head. ‘Look closer, laddie.’

  I did as I was told.

  The plants stood in little clumps, the flowerheads bobbing on their narrow stalks, stalks that rose out of a tightly packed rosette of hairy, undivided leaves. Both stalks and leaves were covered all over with little grey hairs.