‘They’re... furry.’
‘Ah,’ said my grandfather.
‘There are rather a lot of them,’ I added hopefully.
‘Would you say, perhaps,’ the old cat flicked a glance at me, ‘that they look a bit – common?’
I quailed.
‘Look closer, laddie... see here, where all the little runners creep out across the ground. Like little spiders they are, spreading their webs all over the field. Put down roots, they do, all along ’em, grow a whole new plant where they stop. Efficient, that is. A clever little beggar, this plant.’
The old cat bit off a flowerhead and pushed it towards me and as he did so, I noticed for the first time the strange tinge to the white fur on my grandfather’s paws: a sort of yellow staining, like the markings on the fingers of the old man who tended the garden a couple of doors down. ‘Chew that,’ he ordered.
I patted the broken flower with a paw-tip.
‘Don’t play with the damned thing – eat it!’
I bent my head to the weed and gingerly took it in my mouth. It smelled bad enough; but it tasted appalling. My eyes watered. I shook my head to get rid of the taste, but it was acrid on my tongue. I swallowed, and at once the taste diminished. Was my grandfather poisoning me? Was this the old cat’s revenge for my impudence?
Hawkweed watched me closely.
‘There’s a lot more to this little plant than might appear at first sight. Just as there is to everything in the world, Orlando. Perhaps you’ll remember that whenever you see this fine example of vegetable life.
‘This is Hieracium pilosella as a philosopher once termed it; but Auricula muris, Mouse-ear Hawkweed we call it today, and it is a noble and a useful plant. Rub it on a wound and the bleeding will stop, quicker than you can say “cat-spit”. And that’s not all.
“‘To him that hath a flux
of Shepherd’s Purse he gives.
And Coltsfoot unto him
whom some sharp rupture grieves.
To him that delirium seeks.
Henbane like drunkenness may seem;
But ’tis Hawkweed thou must take
if thou wouldst chase a dream.’”
I regarded my grandfather, and then the scruffy little plant, with confusion. Then I said: ‘You still haven’t told me why you share its name.’
Hawkweed smiled into his ruff and shook his head sadly. ‘You’ll learn soon enough.’ He winked at me and the scar tissue wrenched his face into a terrible grimace.
‘What colour is piss, laddie?’
I laughed. ‘It’s yellow.’
‘And what colour is hawkweed?’
I wrinkled my nose in confusion. ‘Yellow...’
‘Well, laddie—’ Hawkweed pushed his face close to mine. Then he opened his mouth wide and roared so that my ears rang for minutes afterwards: ‘We both have the ability to make you piss yourself!’
6
What my grandfather had claimed was quite true, as I was to discover.
All the way home I had to stop to relieve myself. I urinated like a kitten, squatting ignominiously behind tufts of grass and stumps of trees, rather than the energetic way that Hawkweed rid himself of his water, with a contemptuous lift of the tail and a powerful jet of evil-smelling liquid. (This was a gift of which I was mightily jealous at the time; though when I was eventually to master the skill, I would find it brought me only difficulty and misunderstanding.)
I had never urinated so often or so copiously in all my young life, and with each embarrassing call of nature, I became more and more convinced that soon I would dry up entirely and shrivel away to nothing, and that my grandfather had laid some sort of terrible curse on me by means of the yellow flower. But when I unburdened my troubled soul to Dellifer later that night she just laughed.
‘Poor little puffball! He’s certainly got unorthodox teaching style, your grandfather. But Mouse-ear won’t do you any harm, Orlando, my dear. In fact it’s just what you need for your trade.’
I had no idea what she meant.
*
Anna watched Orlando squatting in the flowerbed.
‘Oi!’ she called. She tapped the window. He looked up, then guiltily away. A moment later he and the old cat burst into the kitchen and promptly had a disagreement about who sat by the Aga. ‘Less of that,’ she warned them. She fed Orlando, offering some to the tortoiseshell who as usual turned his nose up at it. ‘What’s your game?’ she mused, blocking the way as he tried to leave. ‘What do you two get up to out there?’
He walked round her without a glance.
She was still puzzled by him. She had enquired in the village, she had enquired in the Green Man. Oh yes, they said, he was a fixture. Everyone knew him, no one owned him. But Anna had noticed he always left the garden in the same direction, diagonally over the pasture and into the trees; so, that evening, with the low sunlight slanting through the rough grass, she set out to see where he went. His walk was a kind of rangy leonine amble. He knew quite well she was there. Once or twice he looked back at her, his fixed grin white in the complex shadows of his face. Reaching the edge of the pasture, he broke into an unhurried trot and disappeared into the rougher country beyond as suddenly as if he had fallen down a hole.
‘Damn,’ said Anna.
Right and left stretched an ancient hawthorn hedge, set in a steep-sided trough dense with nettle and dog rose. Perfect territory for cats, less so for someone wearing a cotton frock. Feeling as if the whole place was on his side – that he was in there somewhere laughing at her – she pushed through quickly and found herself in a green lane thick with wild garlic and sycamore saplings. Light fell, the colour of the old cat’s eyes, across the central strip of rabbit-cropped turf. He was making off again, tail high, as Anna emerged from the hedge. She smiled to herself. He had forgotten she was there. Thereafter she followed at a relaxed distance while the lane took charge of them both, making its way up a wooded rise then down the other side, turning all the time towards the common, on the other side of which it encountered the nut-brown water of Brindley’s canal and was lifted up briefly by a little red-brick bridge before wandering off to Drychester through low-lying fields. The old cat crossed the bridge, paused for a second to look around, then darted through the greying bars of an old wooden gate and jumped down on to the towpath, where perhaps a dozen narrowboats were tied up nose to tail.
*
Most of them had wintered badly. They were low in the water, with a list to one side or the other, and their once-cheerful colours, sandpapered by the cold downland winds, had a faded velvety look in the evening sunshine. Some had never been more than reclamation projects anyway, springlined loosely to the bank, their leaky decks and roofs cluttered with tins of paint, engine parts, bits and pieces of indeterminate use wrapped up in heavy plastic sheeting; grass had grown up around their mooring pins. Others, caught perfectly between conversion and decline, lay on the water with the charm of an Edwardian music-hall artiste. Everywhere you looked there were rose-and-castle motifs applied in curlicued panels, pelargoniums in coloured tin water-jugs, dignified old bicycles propped up in cabin doorways. Anna leaned over the gate and sighed. It was all rather tranquil. The willow-lined canal curved gently south and west. Net curtains flapped at open brass portholes. The air was softened by the distant sound of church bells, the faint shouts of cricket practice on the green; while near at hand, a radio played light classical music. As she watched, the old cat made a long back, slipped under a pair of mooring ropes, then sprang on to the deck of the Magpie – a seventy-foot narrowboat with battered strakes and upperwork faded to a kind of dusty terracotta – where he greeted its owner, and, after some head-rubbing and light cuffing, was given what looked like a fish.
‘Well well,’ whispered Anna. ‘So this is where you belong.’
She climbed the gate and made her way down to the towpath. There, realising she was being watched by the owner of the Magpie, and seized by a sudden shyness, she dawdled along with folded arms unt
il she drifted to a stop. All she could think of to say was:
‘Is that your cat?’
The sun went in. Chilly airs ruffled the water. The cat looked up from his efforts – eating was a noisy and difficult process for him – and fixed her with knowing yellow eyes. Taking his dinner carefully in the good side of his mouth, he jumped off the Magpie, trotted a few yards down the towpath and disappeared into a hawthorn hedge. This left Anna uncompromisingly eye to eye with the man on deck. He was older than her – perhaps, she thought, in his early forties. Though slight, he had a compact look. Soft, longish black hair swept back from his forehead. His clothes – grey Levis and a black cotton sweater worn with the sleeves pushed up above the elbows – made him seem slighter than he was. His forearms were cabled and strong, very brown – tanned, Anna thought, not by holidays but by real time spent in the outdoors. He was very attractive. He had a book in one hand. Anna recognised nothing about him, nevertheless she felt a sudden, vertiginous rush of excitement, combined with a sharp certainty that she had seen him before. She couldn’t explain it. The way he stood, perhaps, reminded her of someone she had once known. And yet he was more familiar than that.
‘No,’ he said. His voice was deep and rusty, as if he didn’t use it much. He returned her gaze for a moment then added, ‘No one ever owns a cat,’ and went below.
Anna felt deflated. She stood on the towpath and folded her arms against the cold breeze. ‘How rude,’ she said loudly.
*
Later that evening, over a Bloody Mary at the Green Man, she was forced to admit to Alice: ‘I was so angry I just stood there. I got thoroughly cold but he didn’t come out again.’ She laughed. ‘I mean, it was so absurd,’ she said.
She lowered her voice to approximate his. “‘No one ever owns a cat.” What does that mean? And this ridiculous silver earring.’ She thought for a moment. ‘And those big hands,’ she added.
‘Oh, you noticed them, did you?’ said Alice.
‘It was absurd,’ Anna said again. ‘I just stood there like a fool and let him be rude to me.’
‘He’s more shy than rude,’ was Alice’s judgement.
‘You know him then?’
Alice ducked below the bar to fetch up a rack of clean glasses. ‘His name’s John Dawe,’ she said.
‘And?’ said Anna.
‘No “and” about it,’ Alice said. She bent down again, coming up empty-handed this time to complain obscurely, ‘The state they leave these things in,’ and wipe her hands on a towel. ‘This place is a tip!’ she shouted into the back bar. There was no answer.
‘So,’ said Anna. ‘He’s John Dawe, he lives on a barge.’
‘That’s about it—’
‘This is like getting blood out of a stone.’
‘—except that they’re narrowboats down there, all of them. Cut’s not wide enough for a barge. You don’t want to let anyone down there hear you call them barges.’
‘Alice!’
‘Well what do you want me to say?’ said Alice. ‘Everyone knows him. He’s lived on the Magpie at least since I was a kiddie.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Maybe longer. A bit of a mystery-man, John Dawe,’ she mused, ‘nice as he is. He’s related to the Herringes, but no one’s quite sure how he makes a living.’ Then, in a more business-like voice: ‘He comes and goes. He’s up at the hall now and then. Or she’s down at the boat.’
‘Who?’
‘Stella. Stella Herringe.’
‘He’s welcome to her,’ said Anna, remembering the bossy old voice on the phone.
‘Oh he is, is he?’
‘In fact they’re welcome to each other.’
Alice giggled. ‘John Dawe,’ she said. ‘I’d pay to have those hands on me.’
‘Alice!’
‘Well, wouldn’t you?’
‘He’s a bit scruffy for my taste,’ said Anna dismissively, while some renegade part of her thought: But his eyes were so beautiful—
‘Stella’s his cousin,’ said Alice.
‘She’s a bit old to be that,’ said Anna. ‘Surely.’
For some reason she dreamt of Max again that night. It was the first time in some weeks. They were in the bedroom of the London house, and he was saying in that amused and infinitely gentle way he had, ‘But Anna, you don’t need me, you really don’t,’ as he packed his clothes with less fuss than if he’d been off on tour. The dream had a heartless clarity, an awful sense of foreboding, as if she was just discovering a loss which had already happened, which nothing could prevent – as, indeed, she was.
Ashmore Dreams
Spring
As Anna dreams regretfully of lost love, along the road at Eaton Cottages an old woman recalls a day in high summer just after the war, when her legs were long and slim and tan in the meadow grass behind the common. Between the stalks of poppies and scabious, she can just see the clock tower of the village church. Her lover’s eyes are as blue as the cornflowers they lie among, and it is only in her dreams that she can visit him, now. Even so, she can still feel the hard muscle of his arm under her head; hear the beating of a heart returning to its steady pace after exertion. In the distance, a dog barks, on and on and on, as if barking is all it has left to it. She shivers. A cloud has passed across the sun, and she reaches out among the sheets for her lover, but he is gone, long gone.
*
At the vicarage, France Baynes finds himself flying far above the village. Down below, there is a football match. He knows all the players, and their wives and daughters and brothers and aunts, but the further he soars, the less attached he feels himself to his parishioners, until at last he is gliding among wisps of cirrus, his cassock belling in the cold winds of the stratosphere. He opens his mouth with a great shout of exhilaration and arrows towards the sun.
Nearer, my God, to thee.
*
Down on the narrowboats at the canal, dreams are flying thick and fast. They seem more tangled here, harder to decipher, flowing in tides of imagery, as mutable as the water on which their originators live. Here: a locked door in a darkened hallway; there, a multi-headed creature rises from a shining pool; flames lick at a pile of photographs – their edges char and curl, releasing the bright figures within like fireflies into the night air; a black cat twines around and around a man’s legs, in and out, silky fur against naked skin. At last, the man lies down, and the black cat sits heavy on his chest.
*
Along Allbright Lane, dreams are forming, too.
A woman toils up a steep hill, her breath escaping in great clouds of steam. A man walks behind her. His face remains averted and in shadow. She is talking, laughing; animated: he does not respond, which makes her angry.
When she reaches the top of the hill, she turns to him, and trips. Her skirts – long, old-fashioned – suddenly blossom like some immense exotic flower, engulfing her head and trapping her arms. She spins, helpless, wrapped in shimmering colour. Below the fabric her body is naked. Pale and etiolated it seems a sickly stem for such a bloom. The man stares and stares, hands hanging limply at his sides.
The skirt gathers size, begins to fill with air. Soon, she is aloft. Her legs kick. Revealed between the pale skin of her thighs, her genitalia are as bright as blood, vivid as the reddest rose. It beckons to him, but deep in his private shadow, the man turns away and starts to walk back down the hill.
7
I found it hard to sleep that night. I lay irritably tossing and turning against my sister’s flank. Vita, in turn, lay against Dellifer, every so often showing her awareness of my movements by jabbing a sharp elbow at me. Old Delly was fast asleep – I could tell by the rasp of her snoring. There was never another cat like her for snoring. Quite how such an awful noise could come out of such a frail cat, I couldn’t understand. I imagined Dellifer’s insides to be as empty and hollow as an old tin bucket, and her snores a vast bluebottle trapped inside it.
I listened to that inescapable noise for what felt like hours, but was likely only minutes,
and tried to fall into rhythm with it, but whatever I did it rumbled on and on, oblivious to anyone else in the universe who might be trying to sleep.
Instead, after a while, I found myself listening to the sound of the wind in the trees outside the window. The world was full of air, it seemed; air that billowed softly in and out of every living creature: even the trees seemed to be breathing. I relaxed into this idea and in a short time became aware of how the currents of air stirred my whiskers and eyebrows, felt them move against the hairs of my ears and the exposed skin of my nose. If I tried hard enough, I thought, I might be able to feel the way the tides of the air moved outside, too.
So much life everywhere, breathing in and out, sharing the world! How strange it seemed then that the air that had sighed through the long grass in the meadow and the rushes round the pond, through the clouds and the cows and the bright yellow patches of hawkweed, should now be flowing through Vita and Dellifer’s lungs, and through my own.
Everything was connected to everything else.
Thinking this, I began to feel rather odd, as if I was somehow outside myself, a little way above the sofa, gazing down on three sleeping cats: a long, thin white one, whose skin shone pink in the moonlight where the fur grew sparsely above her eyes; a small, barred tabby with white socks; and one of flaming orange and cream, who even now was yawning so widely I could see every sharp, white tooth.
My mouth snapped shut and suddenly I was staring out of my own eyes again. I shook myself and sat up in the darkness, my head spinning, and waited for the world to right itself.
Alerted by the movement. Vita stirred briefly and opened one pale eye, which glowed in the dark as mysteriously green and inaccessible as the display on the buzzing white box downstairs in the kitchen. She blinked once, then stared at me as if she had never seen me before in her life.
Disconcerted, I dropped my head and started to groom feverishly; and when I looked up again. Vita was fast asleep once more. I gave my paw a last considering lick, and found that the fur there now tasted somewhat bitter.