The weather was just warm enough for Anna Dawe’s daughter Eleanor to sit out on a picnic blanket under one of the great Nonesuch cedars, where – to the amusement of one parent and the discomfort of the other – she could spend her time profitably annoying a large marmalade cat called Orlando.
‘Oof,’ said her father. ‘I felt that.’
Eleanor was belabouring Orlando with an old plastic doll’s head she had found somewhere in the rich chaos of the house. The cat would bear her attentions stoically for a while, then move away and sit down somewhere else, the fur on his back twitching with discomfort. Eleanor would promptly follow him and begin again. You could see that he was as much embarrassed as anything: this wasn’t correct behaviour, his body language seemed to suggest, for a human being, even a small and sticky one. Eleanor, he felt, ought to know better. Eventually, he got to his feet, stretched and stalked off in the direction of the house to see what the builders were up to. Orlando got on well with the builders.
‘I wish we could do something about those two,’ Anna said. ‘They should be such good friends.’
John Dawe shrugged. Though clearly amused, he was not quite as interested as he might have been in his daughter’s behaviour. The garden table in front of him was littered with the plans, invoices and lists of building materials which had filled his life since he and Anna had begun to reconstruct the house.
‘She’ll grow out of it,’ he said carelessly. ‘As for the cat, he’s good with the kittens. He’ll never hurt her.’
He looked at his watch and got up. ‘I’m off.’
‘Oh, but must you? Francis Baynes is coming to tea.’
‘Francis! He’s more your friend than mine.’
‘He’d be hurt if he heard you say that.’
‘Hm,’ said John. ‘Well, I haven’t got time today. We’re having an argument about the plaster for the Long Corridor. Do I want cow dung in the mix—’
‘John! How appalling!’
‘—or can I do with something more modern?’ He grinned and for a moment looked rather boyish. ‘I want cow dung, of course,’ he admitted. ‘It’s the real thing.’ His grin vanished abruptly and he ran his fingers through his hair. ‘After that I talk to the bank and try to persuade them to fund the next stage.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Anna. ‘No fun at all.’
‘Not much,’ he admitted.
She touched his hand and he gave her a smile. Despite their problems, she thought, they still managed to maintain the love they felt for one another. Though sometimes it took more maintenance than John seemed to have time for. New fathers, she had read, often became a little difficult to reach. Finding life harder than they had expected, they brought into play that well-known masculine ability to focus on problems rather than people. On his way into the house John knelt down and had a conversation with his daughter. He said something to her and Anna could see him stroking an imaginary Orlando. Nice cat, nice cat. You see, nice pussy cat. They stroked the absent cat together for a moment. Then Eleanor banged it on the head again. John’s bark of a laugh disturbed birds from the cedar. He held out his hand. The little girl appeared to offer him something, which she snatched away at the last minute with a giggle. They played this game until he tried to take it from her anyway, to be warned off with an offended shriek.
Like father like daughter. Eleanor had a passion for objects. Thousands of them had already passed through her fingers (not to say her mouth). Of these, some had occupied her for ten minutes, others a day or two. Her more lasting obsessions had nothing much in common but Eleanor herself. One of her own shoes, a rag book featuring leopards and lions, and an old nail brush had replaced one another in her affections in the space of a month. But the plastic doll’s head, with its curiously smoothed-off features and partly bald skull, seemed to have a staying power the others did not. Eleanor roared if you separated her from it at night; she roared if she woke up without it in the morning. It was constantly covered in loving spit. She introduced it to her dinner. She rolled it in the well-drained earth of the Nonesuch flowerbeds. She banged Orlando on the head with it. (None of the other cats would put up with this; indeed, if they could help it, none of the other cats would remain within arm’s length of Eleanor for more than thirty seconds.) During the day, if you tried to take it off her, she wept real tears.
‘It’s time we got firm about that thing,’ Anna said.
John laughed. ‘Rather you than me,’ he told her.
‘It really is a bit disgusting, John. Can’t we lose it one evening when she’s asleep?’
‘She’ll have forgotten it in a week,’ he said lightly.
‘It really is a bit disgusting.’
He laughed and turned away.
Anna shaded her eyes. ‘Don’t be so offhand, John,’ she called after him.
He stopped and looked back at her – the deep shade of the cedar made it hard to judge his expression – then walked off, his gait managing to convey the kind of puzzled, slightly hurt impatience men do so well when they want to avoid talking about something. He looked rather like Orlando.
Now why did I say that? Anna asked herself. I’ve spoilt a nice afternoon.
*
‘These days we only ever use each other’s names when we’re irritable,’ she found herself confiding to Francis Baynes an hour or two later; and immediately wondered why. It was the dog collar, perhaps. In some lights it made him appear older, in others so young that the ten years separating them made her feel old enough to be his mother. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said immediately. ‘It must be boring to be the recipient of people’s confidences just because of your job. You must feel as if you have no real existence of your own. Like a postbox.’
‘I’d miss it,’ he assured her, ‘if I couldn’t come here and talk.’
Anna didn’t really hear this. ‘I’m not being disloyal to him, you know,’ she said. ‘It’s just life. Babies. Renovations. No money. All that. He has a hard time of it since Ellie arrived – it’s rather knocked the dreamer out of him.’
‘Babies?’
‘Well. Baby.’
Francis received this with his patient smile. ‘I’d like some more tea,’ he ventured, ‘if there is any.’
‘It will be tepid at best,’ Anna warned him.
They were sitting in deckchairs on the lawn, a comfortable litter of plates and knives and jars of jam between them on a weathered old folding table. The sun would soon slant down behind the cedar, filling its branches with glimpses of light. Her face mysteriously transfigured, as if in her dreams she had to concentrate very hard on something wonderful, Eleanor was asleep in the buggy. She really could be the most beautiful little child, Anna thought. It was worth everything just to see her there. Instinctively detecting a window of respite, Orlando the cat had returned to curl up on the picnic blanket. He kept one eye open and his left ear twitched at each clink of the milk jug.
Francis tried his tea, made a face. ‘How are you getting on otherwise?’ he asked.
‘Oh, as best we can. We live in the two or three rooms we’ve managed to finish. The rest is a mess.’ John thought it was fun, but it was a bit too like camping for Anna, a bit like camping out, or being a student again. She had enjoyed it to start with, as part of the fierce excitement of being with him, but it was going on too long now, with no end in sight, and she had suddenly begun to feel haunted by the old building. Two years ago, John’s cousin Stella, maddened with jealousy by John and Anna’s relationship, and believing herself to be the reincarnation of one of her own ancestors kept young by cosmetics made from the placental material of cats, had tried to kill them both. They had watched her burn up in the fire that followed. Thinking of this, she said suddenly to Francis, ‘It’s odd, though, you know; apart from Stella’s apartment, which was completely burned out, the effects of the fire seem quite random. A whole floor will have smoke damage, with two rooms somewhere in the middle of it completely untouched. You’d hardly know anything had happened. Don’t you think that’s strange?’
Francis spread his hands. ‘I know nothing about fire,’ he said politely.
She recognised his mood. He didn’t want to talk about Nonesuch, or Anna’s marriage. He wanted to talk about Anna. He wanted her to gossip about her inner life, so that he could gossip about his. To tease him she said, ‘The latest problem, apparently, is an argument about authenticity in the Long Corridor. Did you know that in the fifteenth century they used cow dung to bind plaster? John is all for it, of course.’
Francis only smiled.
‘I mean, cow dung,’ she persisted.
‘Just look at those cats,’ said Francis, refusing to rise to the bait. ‘Aren’t they beautiful?’
‘Francis, you’re so transparent!’
Nevertheless, he was right. They were beautiful. And odd.
After the fire. Nonesuch had become home to a score of cats, many of whom had known no other life than that of the laboratory animal. Exhausted perhaps, by the effort of escape, the majority of them had fled no further than the grounds of the house where they avoided human beings and kept a kind of cat parliament in the rhododendrons that flanked the curving drive. You saw them running pell-mell across the moonlit lawns at night. Who knew what they were up to there? You surprised one of them stalking a wood-pigeon in the herb garden in the early morning – it treated you to an unafraid measuring, somehow ironic look, as if to say ‘I know you’ and then it was gone.
They were characters and Anna loved them. But without doubt the most notable of the Nonesuch cats were Lydia, a lovely, large, ornamental-looking beast with dense gold fur, who belonged to John Dawe, Lydia’s three almost-grown kittens and a long-legged tabby female, which seemed to come and go at will, and which, because of the characteristic crest of fur on its head, Anna called Tufty. Tufty helped with the childcare, while Lydia endlessly groomed herself (or allowed herself to be groomed). Together they made a sort of family and Nonesuch seemed to hold no terrors for them – though you never saw them anywhere near the ruins of the Painted Room or the old hidden courtyard. It was this ensemble that had drawn Francis’s attention. They came stalking across the lawn in a line, swinging their heads from side to side like big savannah cats, Lydia at the front and Tufty bringing up the rear. Somehow this didn’t look as comical as it might have. The kittens walked with a louche swagger. Their mother’s body was long and gleaming in the horizontal light. Orlando blinked with pleasure and got up to greet her. She let him touch noses, but as soon as he tried to rub the side of his head against hers he was cuffed round the ears for his pains. Her stand-offishness was a family joke.
‘Poor old Orlando,’ Anna said. ‘He’s taken such beautiful care of those kittens and this is all the thanks she ever gives him. They don’t even look like him.’
‘Are you sure he’s the father?’
Anna, who sometimes wondered the same thing, said with a certain asperity, ‘I don’t see who else it could be, Francis. Anyway, he loves them and they love him.’
‘We haven’t seen much of the tabby lately,’ he said.
‘She’s away for days at a time now. I wondered if she had a new interest somewhere in the village. But she always comes back. It’s curious, but she still seems closer to Orlando than his wife.’
Francis looked amused at this. ‘Is wife quite the right word here, I wonder?’
Just then, Eleanor woke up and began to howl. The cats, including Orlando, melted away as if they had never been. Anna hauled her child out of the buggy, turned it over and sniffed its nappy. The message was clear.
‘Oh dear,’ said Francis, and looked at his watch He could be comically uneasy around the baby. ‘I think perhaps I’d better go, too.’ Having said it, he seemed reluctant to get up.
Anna felt sorry for him. He had not had his talk and now he would go off and eat baked beans or toast for supper in the kitchen of a vicarage as draughty and unwelcoming as an aeroplane hangar She suspected she was his only friend in Ashmore. She said impulsively, ‘Stay to dinner! Won’t you?’
He seemed tempted for a moment, then shook his head. ‘I must be off.’
‘Well, if you must.’
With the baby tucked firmly under her arm, like someone securing a piglet, she saw him to his Rover.
From the driving seat Francis craned his neck to look into the sky. The air towards Ashmore was full of liquid silvery light, but despite that he shivered suddenly. He wound the window down. ‘It will be a cold night,’ he said.
Anna waved the Rover down the drive. ‘Say goodbye,’ she told the baby. ‘Wave!’
Eleanor howled.
*
I can only come at night, Izzie says, away from the eyes that pry. Little walls have big ears, she says, oh yes they listen all the time don’t think they don’t. So that’s when she comes and I go to her then. I’m not to mind the night and I don’t so it’s busy busy busy looking for her in all the hidden places I know and some of the ones that aren’t hidden at all. Busy busy, I’m in the long place or the short one. I’m up, which can be an effort, and down, which can be an adventure. Busy busy busy. I’m out there smelling the smells in the dust. The night is your friend, Izzie is always saying. I ask why but I only get wait and see, wait and see. Izzie says I am going to find out one day who I really am. Then we’ll see what happens, she says. We’ll see what happens then. (We’ll see what happens to her.)
Some hidden places are more difficult to reach than others. They are a long way. They’re shadowy and scary. They smell bad too. I say, I can’t go here I’ve honestly tried and tried Izzie I really have but she says, do you want to be a cooked thing in a pot, or be given diseases, so up I go as fast as I can. Izzie says there, you see, you could do it after all, but we don’t find anything anyway and she goes away for a long time and won’t speak. It will soon be light and I don’t know what to do. Izzie? Izzie? It’s cold and no answer and I have to find my own way back. Izzie says you stupid thing, listen to me never do that again, then she says well done you are my coddled egg, you are my perfect quince (which I don’t know what that is). One day you’ll know, she says, my quince, my perfect little shallot. You’ll know.
*
The Long Corridor was plastered, more or less authentically and only a day or two behind schedule. The bank said yes, the work could go on, though they were, they had to admit, a little worried by some of Mr Dawe’s figures… Eleanor, meanwhile, grizzled. She sucked the doll’s head and made flirty eyes at her father. When he wasn’t there, which was most of the time, she grew increasingly difficult to manage. Changing a nappy became a nightmare; feeding, always a tussle of wills, left the kitchen looking like a Jackson Pollock. ‘Well, don’t eat your bloody Moulinexed vegetables then,’ said Anna who, seeing her husband only at breakfast and when they fell exhausted into bed at night, had become sexually frustrated and short of temper. The cats got under the feet of the builders and came back covered in plaster dust. The builders traipsed mud and lime and sand along the hall from the big main doors. It was bedlam. Anna rejected it all and on the comforting hotplates of her Aga boiled the kettle to make tea for her friend Alice Meynell, who had come down for the afternoon from Cambridge.
Alice looked around at the dust and disarray. ‘I’m impressed,’ she stated. Then, ‘Come and have a drink at the Green Man.’
Anna looked at the kitchen clock. ‘Perhaps not,’ she said. ‘Ellie will wake up in a moment and I’ll have to feed her.’
‘Do it at the pub.’
‘Alice, I still breastfeed her in the afternoons.’
‘Well?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Anna. ‘Tits out in the Green Man. The Women’s Institute will love that.’
‘You don’t want to take any notice of them,’ advised Alice, who at twenty years old had no need to.
Alice’s cropped tops and pierced navel were rarely seen now behind the bar at the Green Man. Cambridge took up her time and for the holidays she had a boyfriend in New York. He was twenty-three, a physicist from the Santa Fe Institute who gambled on Wall Street in his spare time. Her recent affair with Max Wishart, a concert violinist, had ended amicably, both parties feeling rather pleased with themselves. Alice developed a taste for baroque music. Max bought a motorcycle. (Alice promptly exchanged hers for a faster one. When their visits to Nonesuch coincided, which was quite often, they could be heard from miles away, racing one another along the Drychester Road to the dismay of sensible people everywhere.) Neither of them talked about the day they had pulled Anna and John out of the fire, burned and suffering from smoke inhalation – although on the first anniversary of that event Max had brought with him some bottles of Pol Roger and all four of them had lifted their glasses in a solemn, companionable silence. Remembering this – and remembering how the face of the dying Stella Herringe had seemed to swim away from her into madness and smoke, down into the bitter reek of burning varnish, the fatty smell of melted cosmetics and that other smell, which came perhaps from the very fabric of the Herringe identity and could only be described as that of time itself being consumed – Anna thought how good it was to be alive, even though your daughter was sometimes a bit careless with your nipples.
‘Anyway,’ Alice was saying, ‘if you don’t like it, get her on to the bottle properly.’
‘She won’t let me stop.’
‘Won’t she, now?’ Alice bent over Eleanor’s carrycot. ‘I wouldn’t have that,’ she said softly. Alice, you sensed, wouldn’t have anything she didn’t want. Life was too short. ‘Not from you, you rum little bugger,’ she told the baby. Then she said in amazement, ‘Look at those little fingers!’ and, ‘Hey, I think she smiled at me.’
‘No,’ said Anna. ‘You’re wrong there. She only smiles at her father. Later she will marry him and they will live happily together, having first confined me to an attic.’
‘That’s her plan, is it?’
‘Yes. Luckily for me she’s a late walker. Actually, I’m a bit worried about that too. She can crawl well enough to make Orlando’s life a misery, but however hard we encourage her she doesn’t seem to be interested in anything else. All the other village toddlers are, well, toddling. We must be doing something wrong.’
Alice wasn’t willing to accept this. ‘Kiddies sometimes don’t walk until they’re two or three,’ she said. ‘Others are at it as early as eight months. It’s the same with talking – the books tell you stuff, but that’s only a guideline. My sister’s boys were prattling on before they could crawl. It’s the TV. God knows when they first said the words “Ryan Giggs”.’
‘Oh Alice, are you saying she’s a late talker too?’
‘The last thing you want to do is get competitive about it.’
Anna sighed. ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ she agreed. ‘At least she sleeps well. Touch wood, we’ve got past those awful nights when all she did was scream and scream when we tried to put her down.’
‘Sip of whisky cures that.’
‘Alice!’
‘That’s what my old gran used to say.’
‘We would never do that nowadays,’ said Anna primly. ‘Nowadays we give them a spoonful of Calpol instead. That is, if we haven’t drunk it ourselves.’ And, while Alice was laughing at that, ‘Come on, then, if you can put up with my driving we’ll go down to the Green Man.’
John had always refused to own a car, but when Eleanor was born and it became plain they couldn’t manage without one, he had reluctantly bought an ancient Volvo 244 which they called ‘the Tank’. Its paintwork, originally bronze, had weathered to a dull brown colour and it went round corners like a narrowboat; but as he said, it was dependable and you could move building materials in it too. It was amazing the loads you could ask that suspension to take. It was all heart. Anna, conventional enough to doubt that material things had hearts, fetched the shopping home in it twice a week. She used it to take Ellie to the clinic in Drychester. Eleanor gurgled to herself whenever she saw the Tank. She loved it.
‘Which is a good thing,’ Anna explained to Alice, looking both ways and then both ways again as she inched out of the drive and into Allbright Lane, ‘because I don’t. I’m happier on my bicycle, really.’
‘I can see that,’ said Alice. A little later she added, ‘Even a Volvo’ll go faster than this’ and was silent then until they passed the rectory at St Mary’s. ‘Wasn’t that the new vicar?’
‘He’s been here two years, Alice.’
Alice craned her neck to look back through the rear window. ‘I think he wanted you to stop. Weird bloke, but quite fanciable in a way.’
‘Is there anyone you don’t fancy?’
‘I’m not that keen on Ryan Giggs.’
Eleanor chortled and smiled, and waved coyly out of the window at imaginary passers-by.
*
Francis Baynes had indeed been trying to attract Anna’s attention. Something odd had happened to him and he wanted to talk about it—
He had woken early, to one of those still, wet mornings when even the birds are thoughtful and silent. Rain was hissing down quietly on the knapped-flint walls of the rectory garden. Everything seemed to be meditating. From his bedroom window Francis could see the church, a ship anchored on a quiet green swell, graves bobbing peacefully around it like rowing boats. Pausing between the dresser and the bed, he caught sight of a figure beneath the yew. It was Anna Dawe, tidying the little pot of flowers at the foot of Stella Herringe’s grave. His heart lifting, he wrestled with the sash window, which had been painted shut by a previous incumbent.
‘Anna!’ he called.
No reply; and when he looked again he saw it wasn’t her. He felt foolish. How had he made such a mistake? The air was soft with rain, but perfectly clear. His eyes were good. Not twenty yards away, the unspeaking figure was caught as if in a photograph: a woman in early middle age, of healthy appearance, taller than she had first seemed, dressed in brown, head tilted alertly to one side. Suddenly she seemed to look straight at him, and this brought him back to himself. He leaned precariously out of the window. ‘Can I help you?’
Instead of answering the woman drew herself up and began to walk away along the side of the church, her gait somehow stiff and graceful at the same time. Francis hurried downstairs. The rectory hall, gloomy despite its gloss-white wainscoting, smelled of floor polish and mice. He opened the door; light poured round its edges like a chord played on an organ. By the time he reached the churchyard it was empty. He stared down at Stella Herringe’s grave. Something brought that woman here, he thought. She came for some kind of help. Though it had no basis whatsoever, this idea returned to him with different levels of force throughout the morning, filling him with nervous energy, so that when Anna drove past and he failed to catch her attention, he found it hard to go back into the rectory and work on his sermon. Composition, though, is demanding and some time during the long afternoon it wore the edge off his excitement. Towards tea, he thought briefly of calling Anna to ask if some Herringe relative, staying at Nonesuch, had visited the grave that morning. But other things intervened and he forgot.
*
Night.
Anna Dawe woke up suddenly, convinced that something was wrong with her daughter.
She was unable to do anything about this for a moment. Her limbs didn’t seem to be connected to her brain, ideas were slow to transcribe themselves as action and a dull buzzing filled her head. She felt as if her dreams were unfinished. They had been full of rain and high winds, costumes she did not recognise from her waking life, encounters which, unresolved in sleep, now seemed to animate the room she slept in, passing like smoke across the walls and the looming Jacobean furniture. They were ancient dreams. If she went back to sleep they would slip back into her head and begin again.
‘Eleanor?’ she said eventually. Her own voice seemed gluey and distant. ‘Ellie?’
‘I’d prefer walnut inlays,’ said John. Flinging out one arm, he turned over. ‘It’s a problem,’ he admitted.
‘John?’
He chuckled. He was fast asleep.
Anna got up and went to look in the cot, where Eleanor lay awkwardly, body facing one way, head the other. She had kicked off her covers. Her skin was hectic, her breathing stertorous, her hands hot to the touch. Perhaps she had a light infection. She clutched the old doll’s head so tightly to her cheek that it had left a faint indent there.
‘Hush,’ said Anna absently. She removed the top blanket, rearranged the others. After a moment, the child gave a small sigh, moved one hand as if pointing, relaxed.
Anna folded up the blanket. It’s too warm in here, she thought. It made all three of us dream. In a room too warm you thought of fire. After the things that had happened to Anna in this house, the idea of fire was never very far away from her, day or night. She looked down at her hands and saw the faint scars in the moonlight. I healed well, she thought. John healed well, too. Considering what we went through, we both healed well. When she bent over the cot again, the doll’s head caught her attention. Bland, pretty features barely broke the rounded symmetry of its face; its counterweighted eyelids opened and closed fractionally with the child’s breathing; a few blond nylon hairs still adhered to its pink scalp. It must be forty years old, she thought, I wonder whose it was. She stared at it for some time and then, back in bed, tried to remember when she had last owned a doll of her own. In the effort of this her anxiety ebbed slowly away and with it the memory of her dreams.
The next morning at breakfast she said, ‘You know, the weird thing is this: when I first woke up I thought she wasn’t there. I thought that when I looked I would find the cot empty.’
She wasn’t sure she had his attention. Both of them were exhausted in the mornings, just from the wear and tear of it all. He had drunk three cups of coffee and now he was trying to read the editorial page of the Guardian.
‘John?’
‘What?’
‘I said, when I first woke up I was sure she wasn’t there.’
He laughed. ‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ he said. He leaned over to where Eleanor, trapped in her high chair and growing bored with breakfast, had begun to insert chocolate Rice Krispies into her eye. ‘Chance would be a fine thing, eh, Ellie?’
Eleanor offered him a smile of monstrous bonhomie, then opened her mouth to let him see its half-chewed contents, by which he dutifully pretended to be appalled. ‘Kidgie,’ she said.
Anna said, more loudly than she had intended, ‘John, you might listen.’
He put down the paper. ‘I was listening,’ he said. ‘It was just a dream. You woke up from a bad dream.’
She stared at him. ‘You never used to be so cavalier about people’s dreams.’
‘That was in the days before I became a proud father. When all my time was spare time.’ He laughed. ‘Dreams are for single men.’ When she didn’t rise to this he took her hand. ‘Are you all right, Anna?’
‘I am when you notice I’m here.’
He looked at her puzzledly. ‘All this is for you,’ he said. ‘It’s for us.’
She touched his hand. ‘Is it?’ she asked. Then, seeing his hurt expression, ‘I know it is. I know.’
They stared at one another for a moment, then he said, ‘Well, talk cuts no timber. I’d better get back to it.’
Later that day Anna abandoned Eleanor to the less-than-tender care of Alice Meynell and drove into Drychester to see Dr Martha Russell.
*
‘Do you ever dream of past lives?’ asked Anna.
It was an old question, she knew. She asked it every time she came here. She felt trapped by its ironies, in this place where the truth could never be admitted. She stared out of the consulting room window into the little brick courtyard below, where a fine grey rain was falling on the minute beds of rosemary and thyme, the tubs of hostas. After the broad, ancient gardens of Nonesuch, this planned, trimmed, achingly new little space looked less like a garden than an architect’s diagram of one.
She shivered a little, thinking of the contrast, then went on, ‘Do you think that’s possible?’
Dr Russell seemed to consider this for a moment. ‘In a sense,’ she said, ‘that’s all we ever dream of. Dreams are a way of revisiting a problem, a relationship. An event.’ She gave Anna time to respond to this and, when nothing was forthcoming, continued, ‘Or else they are about the fear of revisiting it. Dreams really are intimately caught up with past lives: our own.’
This sounded so complacent that Anna didn’t know how to reply. She made an irritable movement of one shoulder, as if shrugging off someone’s hand: I don’t want comfort. ‘I didn’t mean that.’
‘I know,’ acknowledged Dr Russell gently.
Martha Russell was a tall, rangy woman, a little older than Anna, who, growing bored with the management of a ‘holistic’ practice in Fulham, had left London and turned her attention to post-traumatic stress disorder. She had treated Anna for the lingering psychological effects of the fire at Nonesuch; then, because it seemed clear to them both that the two things were connected, for the bout of depression which had followed Ellie’s birth. She was unmarried and a compulsive amateur archaeologist. At weekends she could be found in green padded waistcoat and shabby if rather elegant cargo trousers, pottering about between the longbarrows and circles of standing stones that litter the downs above Ashmore, accompanied by her huge dog Otto. The wide-screen TV in her consulting room was often switched on to show silent video footage of local excavations with which she was involved, as if in a metaphor of her profession, which was to bring to the surface the deep archaeology of her patients’ lives. She smoked unfiltered American cigarettes, one of which she now lit. ‘So how is it,’ she asked, ‘with John?’
‘You’re a doctor,’ said Anna. ‘But you smoke. How can you possibly reconcile those two things? I mean, I don’t mind. But—’ It was her turn to leave a pause.
‘“Reconcile”’, said Martha Russell evenly, ‘is an interesting word. So how is it going with John?’
The two women laughed at one another. Over the next hour the rain settled in, beading the triple-glazed windows of the consulting room, falling steadily into the courtyard. Smoke rose from the doctor’s cigarette. Dim sounds of traffic filtered into the room from Drychester High Street. Anna felt calmed by all this. Once every session, a moment of inner stillness arrived and she felt that Martha Russell was a help after all; although Martha Russell could never understand – could never be told – what had really happened at Nonesuch.
‘I want him back,’ Anna said. ‘The man I met.’ She laughed. ‘I know how that sounds,’ she continued. ‘I know people change and move on. And he probably feels like that about me. After the fire, and the death of his cousin who was so important to him, after the baby, after all the different things that have happened to us, we’re both different people. But I loved him when he lived on his canal boat and got angry about things no one else understood, and argued with people about dreams over the supper table.’ She tried to add something more to this list, but could only think about the smell of him in bed at night, so she finished, ‘I wish he were writing his book again. He was overpowering, then, and a bit obsessive. But I loved that about him. I loved his extraordinary energy She shrugged. ‘Does this make any sense?’
‘What are you trying to tell me?’ asked Martha Russell gently.
‘All he cares about now is his house and his daughter,’ Anna whispered. ‘And sometimes I’m just bored by him.’
‘I think you’re angry too.’
‘He doesn’t trust me. Since the depression I had, he doesn’t trust my judgement. He would never admit that, or put it that way. I suspect he doesn’t even feel it that way. He’s too nice. But essentially he hasn’t trusted me since then. We’re avoiding all these feelings between us. I get involved with Ellie. He gets involved with the house. There’s nothing really wrong. But everything’s wrong.’
‘And—?’
‘I don’t know. It undermines my confidence that he doesn’t trust me. Before I came to Ashmore I was in money—’
‘Such an odd way to put it. Don’t you think? “In” money?’
‘You know quite well what I mean. I worked for an international bank and I could make five hundred thousand pounds a year in bonuses alone. I’m not boasting about that. It was just a fact of my life. When I met John he was living on someone else’s money, on a narrowboat, writing a completely impractical book about dreams.’
‘You rather resent that,’ said Martha Russell. ‘And yet you want him to be the dreamer again, you miss the dreamer he used to be.’
Anna shrugged. ‘I didn’t say I wasn’t complicated,’ she said mulishly.
‘Neither did I, dear.’
‘Anyway, this isn’t about that. I spend all day with Ellie – blaming myself for her bad behaviour and feeling like an unnatural mother because he doesn’t have these difficulties with her; while he spends all day worrying about the cost of walnut panelling. And at night we’re further apart, not closer together.’ She contemplated this. ‘I won’t give up,’ she said, as if the doctor had asked her to. ‘I love him. I love him from the bottom of my heart, however silly that sounds. I don’t give up easily on things. It’s too easy to walk away from a relationship these days. People have made it too easy.’ Having come dose to saying what she meant, but not quite dose enough, she looked at her watch. ‘Time’s up.’
‘How convenient.’ Martha Russell laughed.
On her way out, Anna paused. ‘I’ve been coming here since the fire,’ she said.
Martha Russell nodded.
‘Once a week. At first John had to drive me, even though his hands were burned worse than mine. But now I drive myself.’ She stared at the doctor, as if that had been a question. When no answer came, she added, ‘You saw me through the post-natal depression. I got over that too. I’m strong. I’ve always been in charge of my own life.’
‘What, then?’ enquired Martha Russell eventually.
‘I feel as if I’m well again. When can I stop coming?’
Martha Russell smiled. ‘You’ll stop coming when you want to.’
*
Before she returned to Nonesuch, Anna decided to shop. Afterwards, in the Waitrose car park, beneath a lowering sky, she found Francis Baynes cramming carrier bags into the back of his Rover. The light was the colour of sulphur; large, isolated raindrops spotted the tarmac. People were running to their cars and slamming the doors.
Francis had bought cans of ravioli; cheap toilet rolls in numbers. ‘I have to make economies,’ he explained when he saw her expression. ‘In fact, I shouldn’t even be shopping here.’
‘I promise I won’t tell.’
They stood there looking at one another for a moment. Francis asked, ‘So how’s life?’
‘Oh, I hate my life at the moment.’
‘I don’t think you do,’ he said. He glanced at his watch, then at the sky. ‘Come and have tea somewhere.’
‘You mustn’t let me take up your time—’
‘Think of it as a pastoral visit.’
They found seats in one of the Shambles cafes. As soon as she had ordered, Anna said, ‘I wouldn’t mind if only John seemed a bit more—’ She couldn’t think what. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Connected.’ She had always hated women whose troubles came out easily, over meals with people they hardly knew. It was a kind of emotional promiscuity. Nevertheless she went on, ‘A house is for living in, not running away into.’
Francis stirred his tea. ‘Is that what you think he’s doing?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘The baby’s tiring you both,’ he pointed out. ‘On top of that, John has money worries.’
‘I have them too,’ protested Anna.
‘Of course. But we are trying to see his side of it here.’
She laughed despite herself. ‘Francis, your profession is showing.’
He gave her an interested look. ‘Do you think it is?’
‘Don’t be disingenuous.’ She refilled his cup.
There was a brief silence, then he asked, ‘Do you get much help from the Herringes?’
‘God no,’ said Anna. ‘It’s John’s house now – it came to him through Stella – and so it’s down to us to find the finance. In fact, when he went to his trust fund for help, they advised him to sell. The Herringe money’s all gone offshore and the big family players with it. They’re more interested in the NASDAQ Index than their own history. They described the house as an “asset”.’
‘It must have been insured.’
‘The insurers will only go so far. And it’s a listed building. That means no one could complain if we let it fall to bits – but once we decide to restore it, everything has to be done properly. There are grants, of course, but—’ To make ends meet, Anna had sold her cottage in Ashmore; and though there hadn’t seemed much point in getting rid of John’s narrowboat – it wouldn’t fetch enough to be useful – she knew the Magpie would go in the end. For some reason this thought made her even more despondent. ‘We depend rather a lot on the bank,’ she admitted. ‘If John would let me work—’ She shrugged.
Francis swilled the dregs of his tea round his cup and examined them with the care of a fortune-teller. He looked up. ‘So you don’t see any Herringes at Nonesuch?’
‘Once in a blue moon,’ she said. ‘I think there was one down here at Christmas. John had to sign something and they always make a production of that.’
‘“A blue moon”,’ mused Francis. ‘I sometimes wonder about the English language.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Oh dear. Now I really should be somewhere else. Come and talk to me whenever you need to.’
‘I will, Francis.’
‘Promise?’
She smiled up at him gratefully. ‘I promise.’
*
Busy, busy, busy. Long and short places wide and narrow places, places up and places down. Some places are colder than others but Izzie says we have to be busy about them anyway. Up and down dark and light dark and darker. Looking looking looking. Izzie said you may not like the dark but you surely like the places and she called me her little squirmer. I said nothing.
Soon I arrived at a place. The riddle of it is this, it is quite easy to get to though it is very hard to find. Izzie says some places are realer than others. She laughs and says, You could be forgiven for not knowing which is which. One day, she says, I will know everything again.