15

When Catherine woke, first light was showing.

It was two months later, the warmest May for years, and the copper beech on the lawn was coming into leaf. She could see the crown of the tree now, through the open curtains. It was a glorious tawny red, made more distinct by the oak and tulip trees behind it.

“What’s the matter?” John asked.

She looked across at him. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s OK. Go back to sleep.”

He held out his arms; she eased herself into them and lay with her head in the curve of his shoulder. She closed her eyes, savoring this moment, the warm length of his body, the way he immediately responded to her touch. He caught her hand in his, raised it to his lips, and then wordlessly held it against his chest.

“Do you want me to go to the house with you today?” John asked.

She considered. “No,” she said finally.

Robert had sent her a letter asking her to meet him at their home, giving today’s date. It was now three months, perhaps a little more, since she had seen him. When she had gone back yesterday to check the house over, she had found the letter among a pile of mail. It was postmarked London and dated the week before. When she had come back to Bridle Lodge, she had held it out wordlessly to John.

“It had to happen sooner or later,” he said.

“He will want to sell,” she said. “That’s all it can be.”

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” John had commented.

They had been standing in the hallway. She had been living here now for just over six weeks; since that first night, she had never really had any inclination to go home. Sometimes, she wondered even what life had been like with Robert. It seemed pallid when she looked back at it. A world she had stepped out of, like Alice stepping through the looking glass. Or a character out of a canvas. Except she felt that she had stepped from a dream into actual life, and not the other way around.

John gave her back the letter. He stepped down from the tread he had been working on: he was restoring the panels under the balustrade, tracing out the twisting vines back onto the pieces that had been painted out. It was meticulous work, and it seemed to Catherine that he had dedicated himself to it like a religious mission.

“Do you know that there is a resemblance?” he had asked her, that very first morning they had been together. “She’s just like you.”

She’d turned to look at him. “I don’t understand. What resemblance?”

“In the painting,” he replied. He had kissed her; she had left, going into work. When she had come back to him that evening, he had a poster of The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke on the table, weighed down at each corner with books.

“Oh, my God,” she said, laughing as she came in the door. “For a second there, I thought we had another copy of an original.” She had shaken her head, holding her hand over her heart in mock fright.

He took her hand. “Look at the girl with the mirror,” he said.

He had pointed to the left-hand side of the picture. There in the center stood two women, directly to the left of the magician, whose open arms and wide-brimmed hat commanded the whole center of the painting.

Catherine leaned down to look closely. “She doesn’t look like me at all,” she murmured.

“She does,” John countered. “The way she holds her head, the turn of her body. She’s got your coloring.”

Catherine smiled. These two women were famous for their eroticism, particularly the mirror girl’s companion, dressed all in white, a hawkmoth on one hand, a broom in the other, a lady’s maid straight out of a Victorian gentleman’s fantasy; the kind of woman that every repressed schoolboy must have hoped would be hired for the house. Her calves bulged above tiny feet; her waist was nipped in to nothing; above it, her breasts strained at the bodice of her dress. The girl with the mirror looked toward her, but not directly at her; her eyes were downcast. She looked like a nymph ballerina, with translucent wings fanning out from her shoulders.

“I always thought she looked Spanish,” Catherine said thoughtfully.

“Spanish?” he echoed.

“Yes,” she said. “Look at her dark hair. She’s got such a secret smile. She reminds me of those Spanish dancers. Their expressions. And her hands are almost clapping at her side.”

“Except for the mirror.” He took the books from the corners of the poster and held it up. “Look what’s in the mirror,” he said. “Look at the reflection.”

She stared, frowning. “I can’t see,” she murmured. “It’s just a plain green disc.”

“Look closer.”

She did. She could still see nothing.

“I always thought you could see the edge of her face,” John said. “And it’s a different version of her real face. Warmer.”

She looked up at him, smiling. “Another girl living in the glass?” she asked.

He had put down the poster and put his hands on her shoulders. Then, with his right hand, he traced the line of her neck the curve of her face. Electricity ran through her, a visceral, nearly desperate, desire to touch him. “You stepped out of the reflection,” he murmured.

She took hold of his hand and looked at it. “What do you feel when you draw?” she asked.

“I don’t draw.”

“I mean your technical drawings.”

“That isn’t like this,” he said, nodding in the direction of the picture.

“Why not?” she said. “You make something that didn’t exist before. You imagine it in your head and transfer it to paper.”

“You’re comparing me with Dadd?” he said, laughing a little.

“I’m comparing the process.”

“I never thought of it in the same way.”

“You are creating something.”

He frowned a little, holding her at arm’s length. “I’m not a painter.”

“Any more than I am a painter’s subject,” she said.

He considered it. “You are very like her,” he repeated.

“Perhaps the two of us are the modern equivalents.”

He smiled broadly. “You have something,” he said. “I could paint you. Will you dress up as a ballerina, with wings on your back?”

She had returned to his hand, the one with which he had caressed her face and shoulders. She ran her finger down the center of the palm. “I’m not a girl in a painting,” she said. “I’m real.”

An expression almost like pain crossed his face. He pulled her close to him. “You think I don’t know that,” he said.

“You didn’t answer my question,” she said.

“Which question?”

“What do you feel when you draw?”

“Contact,” he said. “Understanding.”

“You feel an understanding … of what?”

“Of whatever it is I’m trying to see in my head. And then it’s a matter of transferring it.”

“The point of contact.”

“The touch,” he said. “Where it meets.”

She moved under his hand. He started to smile. “You’re making fun of me,” he said.

“Like this?” she said. And lowered her eyes and turned her head, so that he was presented with the profile of the fairy dancer, springing into life. He began to laugh. “Real and unreal,” he said. “That’s what you are. Real, and …”

She put her fingers over his mouth.

He never finished the sentence.

She lifted her head now, in the half-light of the day.

“John, I can’t sleep. I’m going to get up.”

He made a movement as if to get out of bed with her, but she restrained him with a slow shake of her head. He watched her as she pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater; at the door, she turned to say that she would call him when she had made breakfast, but he had already closed his eyes.

She went downstairs, looking up at the stained-glass window as she passed it. In the dawn light, the figure was filmy, picked out only in shades of bluish gray. She sat on the bottom step, wriggling her feet into her shoes. Frith eased himself grudgingly from his basket, looking up at her questioningly. She took the door key from the hall table, unlocked the front door, and went out into the garden.

Everything was perfectly still. The full moon that they had commented on last night—a swimming blur in the clouds—now sat low in the sky, almost invisible. The clouds had gone; the last stars showed in the sky. She tilted back her head and drank in the cool air. She walked through the heavy dew of the lawn, pulling a darker trail of footprints.

Most of the trees on the lawn had been planted, like the rest of the garden, in the year that the Lodge was built. Now 130 years old, they stood like a small army of green ghosts towering above her. A week or two ago, John had taken her on a guided tour, naming the ones he knew, guessing in a comical fashion at those he didn’t.

Frith was way ahead of her. She could hear him skittering down the damp path toward the ponds and the stream.

“I want you to live here,” John had said that first night. “I want you to stay.”

“It’s too soon,” she’d replied. She had laid back on the bed. He sat next to her, looking not at her body but at her face. “It’s too complicated,” she added. “With Robert, and everything.”

“You would rather be with Robert?”

“No,” she said. “Of course not.”

“You would rather wait for him.”

“No!” She stared at him aghast. “How can you think that?”

“Yet you want to go and stay in that empty house, and you want me to live here without you?” He kept her gaze for a moment longer, then lowered his face, pressed his lips to her stomach, her breasts, her shoulders. His voice was soft, not insistent.

“John,” she said, trying to lift him so that she could see into his eyes. “Tell me something. Aren’t you afraid of rushing into this?”

He considered a moment. “No,” he replied, perfectly calm.

“But you hardly know me.”

He sat back, taking her seriously, holding her hand. “OK,” he said. “Consider this. Tell me how long you knew Robert before you married him.”

“Eighteen months,” she said, frowning.

“And did you really know everything about him then?”

She thought about her husband, this man who had made her feel safe because he was so sure of himself. A man who rarely told her what he was thinking; who didn’t seem to have dreams.

“I don’t imagine he thought it was necessary to know everything,” she said.

“But did you?”

“Oh, yes,” she told him. “I wanted to be part of him. I believed in that.” And she wondered again, the same thought, how she had come to be so connected to someone who was not connected to her in his heart. Her face clouded over.

“You loved him,” John murmured.

“Yes.” She remembered how driven she had been to get things right. To make things right between them. “It’s peculiar,” she said. “I always had this sensation that I was holding us together. Trying to knot us together, and all the time he was turning away. Not pulling away. Just—if anyone had painted us—I imagine him in the act of half-turning away, as if he’d been distracted.”

“Did he have affairs?”

“No,” she said. “Not until this one.” And she tried to get her head round it: that she had always been trying to turn Robert back toward her. “I don’t know why I did it,” she told John now. “I just felt that that’s how it ought to be. All or nothing.”

“Swept away?” John suggested.

“No,” she replied. “Because that sounds like losing touch. I wanted to be in touch. Inside his heart. But I don’t think he ever gave it away,” she said quietly, and nodded a little to herself, as if confirming a fact. “That’s what it was,” she said. “He kept something back.”

When she looked back at John, she saw that he was looking at her with a strange expression: regretful, but also horrified.

“You can’t be in love,” he said, “and hold anything back.”

She smiled at him, pulled his arms around her, laced his fingers in the small of her back, and put her own arms around his neck. “No, John,” she told him. “No, you can’t.”

She followed the path that Frith had taken, down through the camellias and rhododendrons. There was one rhododendron, just where the path took a dogleg turn before descending steeply to the water, which was astonishingly beautiful. It must have been eighty feet tall and covered in startlingly pink flowers, almost too gaudy to be real; hundreds of miniature bouquets of densely packed cerise hung over the path. She stopped now and looked up through the branches at tier upon tier of color sandwiched between the glossy dark leaves of the tree. The pink had a blue tone, close to lilac, in this light.

She turned and looked across the fields below the weirs. She felt happy and released. As if she had been freed from a flat and unreal life, into one full of color. The wild garlic was in rank profusion by the water’s edge; beyond it, the grass was growing higher in the nearest meadow. She glimpsed Frith running across the field, bouncing like a jack-in-the-box to get sight of the woodland.

“Frith,” she called. But the dog didn’t hear her.

She went on down the slope, to the water.

She walked round the far side, across the bridge, and sat down on the edge of the path. She looked past the shallows, to where the stream widened out into the nearest pool. In its undisturbed surface she could see the faint reflection of the pink rhododendron, and the fainter apricot and pink of the first light of day. The house was invisible behind its wall of trees. Nothing moved either there or in the fields behind. It was magical; a fairy-tale place.

Catherine stood looking for a long time, hugging herself. A fairytale place, and John the magician had made it, and brought her there.

She reached down and felt the temperature of the water. It was cold, but not icy. She took off her shoes and stood for a moment on the prickling gravel bed; then a secret smile came over her face. She had been eight or nine years old when she last stood barefoot in a river. There used to be a stream at the bottom of their road when she was small. The house that they had at weekends was ringed with oak trees, and the stream ran there, between the garden and the farmland beyond. As a child, she had always wished it were bigger. She entertained fantasies of sailing away, through the countryside to the sea, past all the sleeping churches and farms, plunging into the ocean, carried out on a blue-black tide.

Catherine jumped out onto the bank and, after glancing around herself with that same small smile of childhood pleasure on her face, eased herself out of her jeans and sweater. She paused another moment, wondering if she ought to, or could, swim; then she wriggled quickly out of the remainder of her clothes.

She stepped back into the water and made her way slowly across the streambed, feeling her way with her toes across the shingle, and walked on into the deeper pool. Soon the ground dipped away under her feet; she launched herself forward, gasping at the cold. Swirls of mud appeared in the pool, disturbed by her feet, twists of licorice curling in the green.

She swam for a few hurried strokes until the temperature felt warmer, laughing at herself, caught up in the strange secretive pleasure of it. She swam through the muddied picture of the rhododendrons, a brightening haze striped with ripples. Her hands brushed the stems of water lilies, their first leaves forcing upward to the light, scrolls of purple with pale roots extending sideways, catching her skin, touching her with blind fingertips. Turning back from the far edge, she lay on her back and stared up at the sky.

“Catherine!” cried a voice.

She heard the vibration vaguely, as if dreamed.

“Catherine!”

She turned onto her stomach. John was standing at the edge of the water, near the bridge. She laughed and held out her hands.

“What are you doing!” he shouted.

“Come in,” she said. “It’s amazing. It’s warm.”

“Oh, Christ,” she heard him say.

He sat down suddenly on the bridge, his head bowed.

“John?” she called.

He didn’t respond. He had crossed his arms over his chest, and was staring fixedly at the ground.

She waded toward him and got out. He was in the process of standing up. She ran along the herringbone brick border, naked, dripping. “What’s the matter?” she asked, reaching him. “What is it?”

He shook his head.

“Did I scare you?”

He smiled. “Don’t do that again,” he said.

“But I was only swimming.”

He took an enormous breath. She saw that he was very pale. “What did you think?” she asked. “I was just swimming. Look, I’m fine.”

“In this,” he said, not a question. He looked her up and down. “My God,” he murmured.

She pressed herself to him. “I’m all right,” she told him.

“I took Frith out of here four months ago,” he said. “He nearly drowned us both.”

“I’m not drowned,” she said. “I’m warm.” And she pressed his hand to her stomach.

He let it rest there. “I’m here,” she said.

She took his hand and held it against her heart. He stared into her face. Keeping his gaze, she lowered his hand down the length of her body. The water drops danced in his head, on his tongue, in his throat. It was like relieving a lifelong thirst, the cold green rush of her, the water drops of the dream, the skin almost hot to the touch underneath.

“This is for you,” she said, her breathing shallower, her lips parted. “This is all for you. This is yours.”

He kneeled down, brought her with him, laid her on the ground, all the while thinking of the racing flood of needing her since that very first second he had seen her at the door to the house.

He closed his eyes, and the storm when he entered her was like nothing else he had ever known, would ever want to know; it flung him out of the day, the newly sunlit garden, the sound of her own ecstatic cries. He felt nothing: not the wet ground, nor the water anymore, nor the morning air on his back, nor even her hands on him. He had the curious and frightening sensation of traveling at ungovernable speed.

When he came back to her, he looked down at her closed eyes and parted mouth. He peeled a strand of wet hair from her neck; he listened as the pace of his heart slowed and the familiar dull ache in his chest returned.

“I want to live forever,” he whispered.

She opened her eyes and smiled.