They secured the house with child-proof gates. This made things difficult for the builders, who were quick to complain and almost immediately began leaving the gates open for easier access to the upper floors. Anna seemed to spend her time arguing with them. When this produced no result, she was reduced to going round every couple of hours to make sure the gates were shut. She complained to John. John preferred, he said, to be kept out of arguments of this kind. He had to maintain some sort of relationship with the people doing the real work.
Anna stared at him. ‘I do real work,’ she said and stormed off. ‘Bloody men,’ she complained to Alice Meynell later. ‘What are they like?’
‘The pits,’ said Alice. ‘If you want my opinion.’
Part of the trouble was that Alice’s physicist had proved to be as free a spirit as herself. While Alice admired this quality in a man at the end of an affair, she wasn’t so sure about it at the beginning of one. Also, he had recently decided to spend two weeks of the coming summer in Baja without her, on the grounds that he wanted to do some thinking about turbulence in hydrodynamic systems. ‘That means he’s going surfing,’ Alice explained. She was losing her patience with him, she said. ‘I’m thinking of becoming celibate anyway.’
‘Of course you are,’ Anna agreed.
Alice lifted her head and sniffed. ‘Anna, I think you need to change your baby.’
‘I wouldn’t change her for the world,’ said Anna. ‘Oh, that. You wouldn’t like to do it, would you? If I go anywhere near her with a nappy there’ll be bedlam.’
‘Nobody in their right mind would like to do it,’ was Alice’s response. She approached Eleanor, pretending to hold her nose. ‘Pooh,’ she said. ‘Nasty pooey little girl!’ Eleanor, whose sense of humour was exactly what you’d expect in a child not yet two, found this highly amusing. She giggled accommodatingly and allowed herself to be swept up. ‘Want to know something weird?’ Alice asked Anna when she had finished.
‘What?’
‘I saw the new vicar in the graveyard the other night. It was quite late and he was hanging about out there on his own.’
‘It’s his graveyard,’ Anna pointed out.
‘He was talking to himself.’
‘I’m sure he wasn’t,’ said Anna, who thought him capable of it.
‘Excuse me, I had him bang in the headlights. I could see him talking quite clearly and there was nobody else there. I’d have seen more,’ she admitted, ‘but things got a bit out of shape on the bend into Pond Lane. If you come off the throttle too quick the Ducati just seems to stop dead. I haven’t entirely got the hang of that yet and I didn’t want to bin it in front of him. Well, you don’t, do you?’ She chuckled. ‘Out there with his dog collar half off, chattering away to himself.’ She concluded with a kind of confused piety, ‘I suppose you have to expect it of a vicar.’
‘Poor Francis.’ Anna sounded vague. ‘You probably frightened him to death. I must get him round for tea this week.’
‘Good idea,’ Alice confirmed. ‘Invite me too.’
Anna was amused. ‘Find your own vicar, you barefaced slut. You’re not sharing mine.’
‘Ooh,’ said Alice to Eleanor. ‘Hark at her.’
Anna allowed herself the dry smile of motherhood. ‘By the way,’ she advised, ‘that nappy’s on back to front.’
‘Oh. Damn.’
Eleanor cackled and wriggled about.
*
Anna really didn’t intend to share Francis with anyone.
What the friendship offered her wasn’t clear. She certainly had no religious faith. In the end, she had to admit, it was the attention she liked. She liked having him as a confidant. What’s wrong with that? she asked herself, but she knew the question wasn’t honest. She was perfectly aware of his vulnerability where she was concerned – he was attracted to her but barely even knew it himself, which for a man is always the hardest kind of attraction to manage. In the end she pretended it didn’t matter. Francis needed someone to talk to and so did Anna.
He turned up that same afternoon. ‘Just on the off-chance’, he said, ‘that you were here.’
‘Where else would I be, Francis?’
She sat him down on the lawn and made him hold Ellie while she buttered some cheap scones he had bought from the village shop. ‘You can read to her. She sometimes likes that.’
Francis said ‘Ah’ and stared rather helplessly at Ant and Bee. Eleanor, who had seen through him the moment he arrived, squealed with laughter and clutched at bits of his face.
‘Don’t let her do that,’ Anna advised him. ‘Look, I’d better take her. Pour the tea if you want something to do.’
This didn’t fit Eleanor’s plans. She opened her mouth to let them know about it. She held on quite hard to Francis’s cheek.
Francis, at a loss, fumbled about in his pockets for something to distract her. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Look!’
It was a shiny black lacquered box, about three inches by two, with complicated formal designs of intertwined flower stalks in a cream-coloured inlay. He offered it to Eleanor. ‘It’s a music box,’ he told her. And indeed, when he opened the lid, a faint, tinkly rendering of ‘Für Elise’ filled the air, like someone playing the piano a long way off. ‘I found it in some builders’ rubbish by the front door,’ he told Anna. ‘It’s rather too nice to throw away, I thought. Well?’ he asked Eleanor. ‘What do you think?’
Eleanor stared. Acquisitiveness struggling with caution in her expression, she released her grip on his cheek and allowed herself to be taken away. ‘Für Elise’ wound itself down, the last notes dripping into the air with a reluctant sweetness. Anna felt for a fraction of a second as if she were in a sepia photograph of some late-Edwardian afternoon, saw herself with some surprise as a sweet-faced girl with a cloud of dark hair under an enormous hat. Eleanor stared up at Anna, then back at Francis, who continued to hold out the music box until it was silent. Eventually she reached out for it, but even then she looked puzzled and shy.
‘Say thank you to Francis,’ Anna recommended. ‘Oh, thank you, Francis.’
Eleanor, finding this hilarious, gave a brief raucous laugh and banged herself with the box. Two or three more notes of music issued from it, then it was silent again.
Francis was in a strange mood. ‘I love St Mary’s,’ he said. ‘But it’s a waste. Empty, day after day. It ought to be sold off.’
‘Francis!’
‘It’s what my bishop would say.’
‘He doesn’t believe it any more than you do.’
‘No,’ Francis was forced to admit, ‘I don’t suppose he does.’
‘Then you’re both being silly. Pour the tea.’
‘Still, it’s a way of acknowledging a truth about the Church. Every stone in one of these old buildings is impregnated with the mystery of religion. But people don’t want that any more – not even bishops want that. The blood, the body, the act of sacrifice, the strangeness that sits so firmly at the centre of Christianity. All that’s gone. And once you secularise the Church, what’s left?’
Anna, who had hoped for one of their quiet afternoon chats about her life, was bemused and a little irritated. ‘I don’t know. Helping people.’
‘Helping people is social work, not religion.’
‘What do you want, Francis?’
He spread his hands. ‘I want the mysteries,’ he said.
‘You’re alive in the wrong millennium. Eat your scone.’
‘The heart of what we believe is unfathomed,’ he persisted. ‘Still quite dark and unfathomed. No one wants to admit that any more. Their lives are too comfortable.’ He shrugged. ‘I’d prefer atheism to comfort.’
Anna, who had no idea what he was talking about, glanced at the sparks of sunlight falling through the branches of the cedar. She looked at her daughter, who sat on the picnic blanket gnawing half an unbuttered scone. She looked closely at Francis Baynes and sighed. The expression of dissatisfaction that turned down the corners of his mouth made him seem even younger than usual. Relationships, she thought, especially these kinds of relationships, have their responsibilities as well as their rewards.
‘What’s made you feel like this?’ she asked.
*
That evening she complained to John, ‘Francis is in a very odd mood. Alice says she saw him talking to himself in the graveyard. And I couldn’t get the slightest sense out of him today.’
‘Only today?’ John enquired.
‘Don’t be cruel.’
They turned on the television to catch the early news.
In the morning John had a letter to say that the bank had changed its mind about funding the renovations further. He stared at it for a long time, then balled it up in a sudden but controlled gesture of disgust and placed it on the table. ‘Well, that’s that, then,’ he said, staring at the Aga.
When Anna tried to uncrumple the letter, he added, as if he were talking to a child, ‘Oh, for God’s sake just leave it alone.’
Anna drew back her hand, but not before she had read the words ‘business plan’.
*
When Anna arrived for her appointment, the television was on in Martha Russell’s office. It was hard to know what to make of the blurred, rainy, hand-held-camera images that came and went hesitantly across the screen. People, including the doctor herself, carried things to and fro. Someone held up a theodolite, someone else a spade. There was a jerky change of scene and a deep hole appeared on the screen, its sides chocolatey and steep. Then a close-up of someone’s hands, big male fingers with dirty nails offering to the camera two or three small pieces of dried-up-looking wood or leather. From this the camera moved to a kind of sieve, full of similar objects, the wet sheen of which made them look even more unpleasant.
‘What on earth is this?’ Anna wanted to know.
Dr Russell laughed. ‘Some of the contents of an Iceni lavatory,’ she said. ‘A midden, really. Part of a site at Barton Orcas up near Waverham on the downs. There’s some quite exciting stuff there. It’s a just pre-Roman settlement, but we’re finding religious objects much, much older. It looks as if the locals had quite different beliefs from the rest of the Iceni.’
Something about this made Anna shiver. ‘I hate the past,’ she said. ‘All those things hidden in the ground. I’ve seen it on Time Team, of course.’ Suddenly she heard herself say, ‘Dr Russell, I think my baby has been wandering about the house for weeks at night, while she pretends to us that she can’t walk.’
Martha Russell gave her patient a long and considering look. ‘You’d better sit down and tell me what happened.’
This Anna did. ‘I don’t know where to turn,’ she finished. ‘It seems so unnatural.’
‘Not at all rare, though,’ Martha Russell told her. ‘Children can be frighteningly manipulative. They hide their development for all sorts of reasons. I have a friend forty years old who still remembers quite clearly keeping it to herself that she could walk. When you ask her about it, she says, “I knew that if I admitted I could do it, I would have to do it all the time. They would stop carrying me about.” She kept it up until she was four years old. She made them carry her about until she found her own reasons for walking.’ She gave Anna a careful look. ‘That isn’t some case history in a book, dear, it’s a real event.’
Anna stared at the TV screen, where the rain had begun to fall harder and, in long shot, three or four people were seen struggling without much success to erect some kind of temporary cover above the excavation. She watched their efforts for some time. She had dreams like that, where life was a struggle in the rain and mud for purposes you couldn’t quite understand.
Dr Russell let the silence linger for a moment, then lit one of her American cigarettes and turned off the TV. ‘You know that you aren’t the first mother to feel this,’ she suggested.
‘I know. I do know. Ellie is a perfectly normal little girl. She’s headstrong, a bit tantrumy, the way lively and intelligent children often are. I love her, don’t mistake me. Even her difficulties can be rewarding.’ Anna shook her head. ‘And she’s so beautiful. And most of the time she’s so lovely to be with. It’s just that sometimes—’
‘You’d like a little more help.’
That wasn’t what Anna had meant at all. She seized on it anyway. ‘John should help me more. Yet when he does, I resent him. He makes it seem so easy to be with her. They get on so well together. I do all the work—’
‘—and then they shut you out,’ said Martha Russell with gentle irony, ‘and never a word of thanks for your sacrifice?’
Anna shrugged helplessly. ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘I suppose that’s what it is.’
Later, they talked about Francis Baynes.
‘He’s a dear friend, but he thinks he’s in love with me,’ Anna said. ‘I try to keep him at arm’s length, keep the relationship light, but sometimes it’s hard.’
‘Do you feel it’s entirely healthy to encourage him?’
‘Of course I don’t!’ Anna snapped. Then she continued more quietly, ‘Of course I don’t. But I need him. I need someone to talk to.’
‘You talk to me,’ Dr Russell reminded her.
‘A friend,’ Anna said. ‘I need a friend.’ She knew this was evasive. She had Alice Meynell as a friend. That wasn’t what she lacked, not really. ‘Oh, I don’t mean you’re not a friend.’
The doctor smiled. ‘Yes you do,’ she contradicted. ‘But there’s nothing wrong with that.’
‘Anyway,’ said Anna. ‘Now he’s acting rather oddly and I’m beginning to feel responsible for that too.’ She made a gesture with her shoulders, as if trying to free herself from a net someone had thrown over her. She looked down at her lap, then up at the doctor. She felt her lip quiver. Was she going to cry? ‘Everybody depends on me—’ she heard herself say suddenly.
‘Yes?’ Martha Russell encouraged.
Anna shrugged and would not go on.
But on the way home, dithering in the face of the fast local traffic, she completed the sentence she had begun ‘—when all I want is someone I can depend on. When all I want to feel is safe and loved!’
*
The next week saw him increasingly withdrawn. He avoided the builders, rarely answered the phone and came to bed only after he thought Anna was asleep. During the day he spent his time staring at the screen of his laptop, or pottering around aboard the Magpie, which he had put on the market. About everything else he was bitter and resentful. She found it hard to comfort him. At the beginning of their relationship this would have bewildered her; now she saw that withdrawal helped him process his frustration and left him to it. Herself she comforted with domestic tasks. Nonesuch was suited to that kind of therapy. Filled with a dreaminess amounting to melancholy, she washed up, made beds, sorted linen, wrote lists, told herself I must buy stamps and bread.
One morning at eleven o’clock she looked out of the bedroom window to see a large car making its almost silent way up the drive towards the house. It was the silver-grey colour of the rain and there were two men in it. The way they sat, or perhaps the way they dressed, reminded her of something, though she couldn’t think what. She watched the car – a Mercedes – until it slipped from view. She heard tyres on the gravel as it pulled up in front of the house; the discreetly engineered European slam of doors; then voices raised in greeting, one of which she thought was John’s. A gust of wind shook the cedars, small rain pattered on the window.
‘Your daddy’s got visitors,’ Anna said over her shoulder to Eleanor. ‘I wonder who they are.’
Eleanor, dependably a chatterbox in the mornings though she never said anything recognisable or coherent, chose not to answer. She had been too quiet for some time, except for the heavy catarrhal breathing which signified deep and often deplorable involvement. Anna turned from the window to put a stop to whatever was going on and found her daughter sitting in the middle of the great bed, bent over Francis Baynes’s musical box. She was staring at it as if she had never seen it before, struck dumb perhaps by the perfection of it, while with a tentative finger she traced the inlays on its polished black lid. Her expression was one of such concentration that Anna felt she had no right to speak: it would be like breaking into the private moment of an adult. Children are amazing, she thought. They’re such people.
After a moment Eleanor looked up. ‘Aaaah,’ she said.
‘Yes. And it would be even better if you let me wind it up.’
Eleanor produced a brilliant foxlike smile; clutched the box firmly to her narrow little chest. No chance of that. Possession, she indicated, was worth more than music. Anyone could tell that.
Anna sighed and looked at her watch. ‘Well, I want to know who the visitors are even if you don’t.’ She held out her arms. ‘Come on, let’s go and see. It’s nearly lunchtime anyway.’
*
In the event, John kept his guests busy. They went round the house, floor by floor. Then a second, slightly less expensive vehicle arrived, proving to contain John’s bank manager and everyone went round again. This took an hour. By the time Anna bumped into them, hands were being shaken in the hall and you could already imagine the cars speeding off, quiet and wraithlike, to Drychester and beyond. Indeed, the bank manager had gone out to his, leaving John to finish his goodbyes to the two tallish young men from the Mercedes. They were polite, quietly spoken, dressed in identical charcoal-grey suits tailored downstairs at Paul Smith in Covent Garden. They smiled at Anna with the ease conferred by a good education.
‘Mrs Dawe. Hello. I’m Mark and this is Oliver. I’m sure you remember us.’
Anna ignored the outstretched hand. ‘I’m sure I do,’ she said. ‘Tortured any animals for profit lately?’ No one seemed to hear that, so she raised her voice. ‘John, what’s going on here?’
‘And this is Eleanor, is it?’ asked Mark.
Oliver said, ‘What a lovely baby.’
Eleanor simpered at him; overcome by faux shyness, she buried her face in Anna’s chest and clung like a limpet. Anna stared at John in horror over Eleanor’s head. He made some sort of temporising gesture, which Mark and Oliver could hardly have missed. ‘She’s certainly that,’ he told them, walking them through the big doors. ‘Are you sure you won’t have some lunch?’ Anna wanted to scream but common sense made her hang back and watch, inarticulate with anger, until he had got the two of them down the steps and into their vile car. She felt as if her home had been violated, her baby threatened in some unspoken way. She sensed something coming towards her purposefully from a long, long distance off. Her skin crawled with that feeling.
‘How dare you?’ she said, after John had watched the Mercedes drift off down the drive. ‘How dare you have those two in here?’
John was defensive. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I know how you must feel—’
‘No, you don’t, John. Or they wouldn’t have been here.’
‘—but they came with a perfectly good offer.’
‘Offer?’ She had to sit down. ‘What do you mean? You haven’t—’
‘I haven’t said yes to anything.’
‘Good, because you’re not going to. Everything awful that happened in this house, they were in it up to the hilt. They helped Stella Herringe turn foetal material into cosmetics. God knows what else they helped her do. And it didn’t stop with her death. Engelion still exists and they still run it. Or had you forgotten?’
He rubbed his eyes as if she had made him tired. ‘Of course not. But they represent the Herringes, too,’ he said patiently. ‘They came here with Estate backing and a rescue package that might suit everyone.’
She stared at him. ‘The Estate? What’s it got to do with them? You own this house!’
‘Like it or not I’m a member of the family—’
‘Oh, you are, are you?’
‘—and I have to consider their views. Mark and Oliver want to lease Nonesuch as a management training centre for their people. As part of the deal they’ll split the cost of the renovations with the Estate. It’s a good solution. The bank gets its money. The Estate feels it has an asset again. And most of the year you and I have most of Nonesuch to ourselves.’
‘You mean we’d be caretakers in our own house.’
‘Let’s see what else we could do.’ He sounded angry. ‘Sit in it until it falls down?’
‘Give me six months in the City and I’ll buy us another house,’ she promised. ‘Do you think I couldn’t?’
He touched her hand. ‘No,’ he said with a smile. ‘I think you could.’
She pulled her hand away. ‘Then for God’s sake let me! I mean it. I won’t take a penny from Engelion. And neither will you.’
‘Anna, they were prosecuted and they cleaned up their act.’
‘They got off scot-free, the way all those companies do. A fine they can easily pay, some minor board member sacked at a press conference, a convenient name change. People forget, business goes on as usual. You’ve seen the same TV footage as me.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I want justice.’
‘Anna—’
‘I don’t want paltry fines followed by crocodile tears and repositioning of the product in the market. What do they call themselves now? English Garden House of Beauty?’
‘I don’t think it’s that bad. I think they called it “English Lion” or something. They left me a brochure—’
‘Oh, shut up, John. You know this isn’t right.’
He knew. He looked crestfallen. Eleanor – who, bored since the departure of her admirers, had squirmed impatiently throughout the whole exchange – offered him her music box, then burst into tears when he didn’t seem to notice the gesture. In the rather quiet and strained few days that followed, she kept it as close by her as she could. She continued to refuse to have it wound up. Any music that came from it now was fragmentary, incidental. Anna, meanwhile, sure that nothing was as it seemed, acted exactly like a cat whose territory had been disturbed. Her fur was up, her skin twitched. Rehearsing these anxieties, she prowled the corridors as if she suspected Mark and Oliver were still around and hoped to catch them unawares. As anyone who has been burgled will report, none of this was necessarily conscious. Later, Alice Meynell disturbed her in the kitchen, orating fiercely while she ironed perfect little baby clothes of Eleanor’s, ‘I despise you and everything you stand for.’
It was a moment before she noticed Alice. She shrugged, as if to say, ‘Everyone talks to themselves. So what.’ Then something caused her to ask, ‘Which would you prefer, Alice, freedom from the past or freedom from the future?’ As if it were possible to have either. ‘I hate the past,’ she added, when Alice only stared. ‘I bloody hate it.’ As if that could explain anything.
‘Cup of tea?’ suggested Alice.
*
Izzie says I must be careful where I put things. Putting things away is almost as difficult to learn as finding them in the first place. You’re here and there waiting and listening on the stairs sitting in some moonlight on a landing with the smells of mice coming up between the boards. There are a lot of places to put things. A lot of boltholes, says Izzie, a lot of rat holes but only one safe place for each one thing. It isn’t just a matter of hiding them my little onion. I should know (and she laughs) I put the safest thing away and you’ll be older than you are before you find that my girl. Older and wiser, she says, and laughs again.
Won’t you have a shock, too, she says. I did. When I saw what I had to do.
When Izzie comes her voice is beautiful. She is often singing a song. She is telling me something already so I miss the beginning of it. She tells it as a story, she sings it as a song. One song is about a very beautiful woman who was forced to kill her own baby.
*
Ashmore, early morning. Sunshine lay weightless on the fronts of the Victorian almshouses. Eaton Terrace smelled of fresh bread and cut grass. Rooks, up early to see what could be had, planed in widening circles against a clear blue sky. Francis Baynes stood with his hand on the lych-gate to watch Anna Dawe’s marmalade cat, its fur full of light, slip across the churchyard on some business of its own. ‘Hello, Orlando,’ he murmured and clicked his tongue.
The cat, halting for a fraction of a second, looked back over its shoulder at him, blinked its intelligent yellow eyes and disappeared among the headstones.
Francis smiled and went on into St Mary’s. There, he put on his vestments and prepared for Early Communion, which he had reinstated along with the old Book of Common Prayer when he took over the parish. No one had complained because no one ever came. Although he regretted this, Francis rarely allowed it to depress him. He was less a traditionalist, he knew, than a romantic. He had never regretted that, either.
This morning, when he had finished, and put away the cup and paten, the church seemed filled for a tantalising moment with a kind of liquid gold, some glorious substance that permeated the spaces between the very molecules of the air. He loved St Mary’s when it was lit like this, from within. Its bareness seemed elegant, willed, proper. Its emptiness made of it a vessel. But after a moment or two it always reverted to the church he knew, smelling strongly of lilies and wholesale wax polish, and echoing to the faint sound of a tap dripping in the vestry. Ordinary light cut across its columns and pews. Francis sighed, tidied the pamphlets in the rack by the door, and – casting one more glance towards the east window before he turned to leave – saw he was not alone after all.
While he was busy with the pamphlets, she had slipped quietly past him and now stood at the other end of the nave, at the base of one of the great cylindrical Romanesque piers. He had not heard her at the door. Yet here she was, unspeaking, tall, dressed in brown, carrying her grey kid gloves in one hand and a few flowers in the other. The light from the side windows fell across her. She brought to the cool air of the nave the smell of earth and St Mary’s was suddenly resonant with a faint full chord, as if someone had played barely audible notes on the organ.
‘What do you want?’ whispered Francis Baynes, while some inner voice leapt to answer, ‘The mystery! The mystery!’ and the woman from the graveyard turned her face towards him and vanished.
*
All the rest of the day he went about his parish business puzzled and frustrated. By midnight, returning tired yet restless, he found it impossible to settle to anything. The weather had turned and it was raining. He put on his coat, stood for a few minutes in the empty graveyard as if waiting for something; then, getting into his little Rover, hurried it up on to the downs, where he parked and stared out across the rain-dark valley at the Queen Anne chimneys and curiously angled gables of Nonesuch, thinking and thinking, while the wind raced the clouds through a moonlit sky the colour of fish scales.
‘Quite dark,’ he whispered to himself.
When he got back, the door of the vicarage was blowing open and someone had turned on a nightlight in one of the upper rooms. He stood there at a loss in the darkened hall. He could hear someone moving about up there.
‘Hello?’ he called.
No answer.
He started to climb the stairs, but caution made him stop again a few steps up. ‘Hello?’ Though it was electric, the nightlight seemed to flicker momentarily, as if in a draught. This is ridiculous, thought Francis Baynes. If I’m not afraid of God, I shouldn’t be afraid of anything else. ‘Hello?’
‘Hello!’ said the woman in the brown muslin dress.
When he looked up, she was standing at the top of the stairs looking down at him. There was a welcoming smile on her face – she was welcoming him to his own house – and her gloves and flowers were nowhere to be seen. The gloves were off. It was almost dark. He felt that she had changed in some way since the morning. Her body seemed heavier, untidier; her face was less ethereal. Francis found himself thinking she looked more real. Almost, he said to himself, more alive. And then, for no reason he could think of, more established.
He made his way uncertainly up towards her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I—
What had he meant to say? He had no idea why he should apologise to her. But as soon as he got close to her, a wave of heat seemed to roll across him and he forgot all that. She smelled of earth, flowers, musk. He saw now how low the brown muslin dress was cut; how it seemed to offer him her breasts, heavy in the half-dark. She smelled of sweat. She held out her hand, but he couldn’t take it and only stood there as shy as a boy. Because what did he know about her? And anyway, he had an erection suddenly hot and painful in his trousers and he felt that she knew it. He didn’t know where to look.
‘Francis!’ she said. ‘That’s your name. Francis.’ She laughed. ‘Isn’t it? Well, look, Francis,’ she said, holding out her hand again, ‘I don’t bite. Not always.’
Her hand was hot and dry. She led him into his own bedroom. There he saw, in the dim illumination of the nightlight, that she had taken the entire contents of his kitchen cupboards and refrigerator – a week’s groceries bought guiltily at Waitrose that morning – and strewn them over the bed. Two large tin loaves and half a dozen eggs. Fair Trade tea bags and Cafe Direct. A pound of mild cheddar cheese. Eight pounds of potatoes. Pork pies. Tomatoes, celery, peppers. Rhubarb and gooseberries. Liver and kidneys. Dried pasta shells. Two doughnuts.
Francis stared.
‘I’m afraid I started without you,’ she said. ‘Oh, Francis, isn’t it wonderful, just to be alive?’
There was salt everywhere. She had ripped open the milk cartons, and spilled HP sauce and raspberry jam over his bedspread. She had stripped the plastic off the wrapped stuff.
She had taken a bite out of every single item.
‘I’d forgotten quite how wonderful it was,’ she said.
Francis stared at her. He saw now that she had food round her mouth. Plum juice and ketchup had trickled down her neck and on to the upper part of her breasts. The smell of her had become overpowering. He felt more and more like an adolescent. At the same time he felt like himself, angry, confused, more sexually aware than he ever wanted to be. He stared up at her in the constantly flickering light. Somehow, he managed to do that. ‘Who are you?’ he made himself ask.
She answered, ‘You know me. I was in the groves when they murdered Actaeon. I was in Egypt and Persia. I starred in The Golden Bough. They called me Diana, they called me the Moon. Later they burned my followers all across Europe. I’m earth to your fire, Francis. If you have any. I’m from far away and long ago; and I’m from around here too. They know me on the downs. This village knows me. The family know me, they always knew me very well – I was on their ground before they built there. You needn’t worry.’ She went on, ‘I’m the answer to your mystery.’ Then she laughed. ‘Or not so much the answer, Francis, as the mystery itself. You do want to know, don’t you? Haven’t you always wanted to know? That’s why you need me. That, and—’ Here she looked meaningfully down at the front of his trousers. ‘That’s why I chose you. That’s why you’re so lucky.’
‘I—’
‘You were waiting for me. You were always waiting for me.’ She crooked her finger. ‘Come here,’ she said. ‘Come to Izzie.’
*
When Eleanor Dawe woke in the mornings, a little chuckling delightful stream of lalage woke with her, a commentary on her life and doings. Listen from a distance and you could be fooled, until you realised that the words were not words at all, but only the sounds that words are made from, timed perfectly to the rhythms of the voices around her. You recognised her mother’s voice; her father’s. Then, with a little start of surprise, the intonations of Alice Meynell or even Francis Baynes. In the mornings, Eleanor teetered on the edge of speech but never quite jumped in. John and Anna encouraged her by talking to her endlessly. Anna read to her from her favourite book. Around the World with Ant and Bee.
John greeted her, ‘Hello Eleanor,’ forming every syllable with exaggerated care. ‘It’s Eleanor. Hello, Eleanor!’
Unsure how to respond, his daughter looked dubiously from one expectant parental face to the other, then down at her Lion King dish where it lay on the kitchen table ready to be filled with Rice Krispies. Breakfast, she saw, might depend on humouring them. She managed a placatory smile.
‘Gidgie,’ she said, pointing to the spoon.
‘Spoon, Eleanor. Spoon.’
They were delighted and disappointed by turns. They marvelled at how close she got to language, without quite discovering it. Ironically, they remained frozen in their attempts to communicate with each other.
Mark and Oliver had returned to Nonesuch more than once. But so had the bank manager and, although negotiations continued and the building work slowly recovered momentum, it was clear no deal had yet been struck. John kept the details to himself. This enabled Anna to maintain an uneasy truce on the subject. Underneath, though, she was still raw. They both were. Nonesuch was rarely mentioned, but they quarrelled over everything else – politics, Eleanor’s bedtime, whose turn it was to put petrol in the Volvo. Then John refused to take the Magpie off the market.
‘You’re doing this to spite yourself,’ Anna accused him. ‘And me. You don’t really want to sell her.’
‘“Her”?’ he said. ‘It’s a boat, Anna.’ And then more gently, ‘I don’t see what other choice I have.’ He passed one hand tiredly across his face. ‘I’ve thought and thought about it. We just need money, any money we can come by.’
She looked at the floor. ‘You don’t want this,’ she persisted. ‘What would you get for her? Peanuts. Enough to fund a week or two’s work. You’re just angry with everything.’
‘And you’re just being sentimental,’ he accused.
She didn’t know how to answer that. All she had achieved was to make him more angry and lose the ground she had gained. Eventually she whispered, ‘Someone has to be.’
‘Things move on, Anna.’
The bleakness of this upset her further. ‘I loved our time on that boat!’
He shook his head. ‘I loved it too,’ he said. ‘You know I did. But—’ He held her gaze for a moment, looking helpless and miserable. Then he shook his head, folded up the Guardian and pushed back his chair. He was always going somewhere else. That was how their life was now. ‘Don’t you remember?’ he asked. ‘We did nothing but fight.’ He stopped in the kitchen doorway as if he might find some way to soften this, then shrugged. ‘Nothing changes, does it?’
‘John!’
When he had gone she whispered, ‘You don’t believe any of that.’
She couldn’t stop trying to fetch him out of himself, though she knew these panicky acts only drove him further in. The builders, meanwhile, began some of the exterior work, with a corresponding increase in mud and noise; and Mark and Oliver wandered elegantly about, looking at ordinary household items as if they were brand new and rather clever. Anna heard their voices. She stayed in the kitchen until she could watch their car float away down the drive; while John, temperamentally incapable of sharing his rage and guilt, took refuge in his ‘office’, an old linen press on the second floor where he had telephone, fax machine and Anna’s two-year-old desktop computer set up in a litter of estimates, invoices and half-empty cups of coffee. Anna was reluctant to pursue him there because other rooms on the same floor had been used to store salvaged fittings from Stella Herringe’s apartment. Nevertheless she went up one rainy, lonely afternoon, and took Eleanor too because when he was like this Eleanor was the only lever she had.
She found him with his chair tipped back, stroking Orlando’s three daughters – who, housebound by the rain, were padding about on the desk, purring and knocking down anything that looked important. Orlando, meanwhile, sat on the windowsill, looking detached and a little forlorn.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said and opened her mouth to say more.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Don’t. Don’t. I’m sorry too.’
They studied one another uncertainly.
‘I brought Ellie to visit her grumpy father.’
He smiled. ‘So I see.’
‘But she fell asleep.’
‘I can see that too.’ He cleared some files off an old leather armchair. ‘Do you think she would be comfortable here?’
‘I think she would be very comfortable there.’
‘Because it seems a pity to wake her up.’
‘It does. It does seem a pity.’
They looked down at her together. ‘She’s ours,’ he said, in tones of deep proprietary satisfaction. He gestured towards the desk. ‘And what do you think of these cats?’ It was as if he had just found them.
‘I think we have the most beautiful cats in the world.’
‘Hm,’ he said. ‘Come and stand by the window.’ They stood by the window for a moment looking out. ‘This garden—’ he began.
‘It’s a beautiful garden, John.’
He put his arm round her shoulders, and – when she turned in towards him to feel his steady warmth, which always made her want to curl into his chest like a cat – looked down at her and concluded gently, ‘So. Between us, you and me, we’re in danger of spoiling a very good thing.’
Anna hid her face against him. ‘I know,’ she admitted.
He smelled of Pears soap. She could feel his heart beating. ‘Hold me,’ she begged. Then a little later she said something less distinct, which made him draw in his breath and lay her down on the chilly floorboards. The cats purred and trod around them. Anna pulled up her skirt; the wind threw a handful of rain against the windows; the Nonesuch cedars bent their heads. The light was pale grey, gentle but merciless, encouraging clarity in all things. ‘Fuck me, John,’ she heard herself whisper in a rush of love and bleakness. ‘Oh yes, fuck me.’ And she wondered, in the instant before she slipped into the willed oblivion of it, how much longer they could use this to heal themselves.
*
Anna woke suddenly, lying on her side. John had spooned himself round her while he slept. Her hip was sore. She detached herself gently from his enclosing arm and stood up to look out of the window while her hands busied themselves independently about – adjusting, dusting down, tugging at her skirt and cardigan. The rain was heavier; the sky darker and racing with cloud. Something grumbled over the horizon. A storm was on its way, but it was the room that had the thundery look, a kind of brown tint to the air which hung around the computer console, the littered papers and half-empty cups. The computer fan hummed, though the screen was dark. The telephone rang once, then stopped.
John slept on. The cats had gone.
So had Eleanor.
*
Anna called her daughter’s name. She looked under the chair, behind it. She looked under the desk. She bit her lip. It was a room too small to hide in.
The passage outside had an institutional look, acquired during the Second World War, when two or three tall drab rooms along its length had housed for a short time the officers of a local bomber squadron. Anna had never entered those rooms willingly, even before the fire, because they had still seemed to her to smell of the boot polish, hair oil and thin beer of that earlier occupation. But there was no sign of Eleanor in the passage and now one of the doors hung open just far enough to admit a toddler. Anna stopped and listened. She could hear a voice from inside, diminutive, pitched high, oddly conversational.
She pushed the door. ‘Ellie?’
Stella’s things were piled up against the walls, Jacobean chairs, a cracked slate dining table from Heal’s, bits of chrome and bolts of water-damaged brocade, a senseless jumble of furniture and fittings thick with the reek of scorch and damp. Left to herself, Anna – still unnerved by anything that reminded her of the fire, or the events preceding it – would have had this dismal stuff destroyed. Eleanor Dawe had no such qualms. She was sitting in the middle of it all, her legs straight out in front of her, the musical box clutched firmly in one little fist, looking up at everything with wide delighted eyes. She was chattering away to herself just as she did in the mornings – except that now the stream of lalage rushed and bubbled with real words. She seemed to have remembered everything anyone had ever said to her.
‘Naughty girl,’ she said; and, ‘baby, baby, little baby.’
Several times she said, ‘What a pretty girl.’
Anna, who recognised many of these phrases because they were her own, stood by the door, as much entranced as disconcerted by the accuracy of the imitation, not daring to interrupt in case Eleanor lost the hang of it. Eleanor, though, wasn’t in need of help. She paused magisterially. There was a sense of a gear shifting and she was off on a kind of sing-song recital, picked up effortlessly in midflow, ‘an to the big hole in the wall, an oops a daisy, oops a daisy, the little girl’s fell, oh she’s fell over, an it’s a big hole…’ Suddenly her tone changed again and she said, ‘I’ve been down to Portsmouth today. The traffic was vile.’ She added, ‘When we got there it was full of people in cheap sports shoes.’ This, with its effect of a conversation between two dull middle-aged men in the bar at the Green Man, was bizarre to hear in the light, high voice of a toddler.
‘Eleanor!’ Anna said. ‘Eleanor?’
‘…an dark places an light – haughty-taughty, naughty girl – an up we go little girl, up we go… an oh do pay attention Alice… an such a lot of stairs, lot of stairs, people on the stairs…’
Anna felt something like panic. ‘Eleanor, stop now. Stop!’
It was too much. It was too soon. But Eleanor just kept on talking as if Anna weren’t there – as if, now she had the hang of it, she would never stop – and eventually Anna walked up to her and picked her up and shook her. ‘Eleanor!’
‘—and berries,’ finished Eleanor with satisfaction.
She gave Anna a sideways look. Then she shook herself suddenly. Her face turned red and large tears rolled down it. A ripe smell filled the room.
‘Oh dear,’ said Anna. ‘Nappy alert, I think.’ She turned Eleanor over. There was no need to sniff. ‘Come on,’ she continued, relieved to have something ordinary to deal with, ‘let’s clean you up and show you to your daddy.’
Eleanor, unable to see anything in it for her, took this gloomily.
‘Cheer up,’ Anna advised her. ‘You can talk. You can talk!’
Eleanor blinked and offered Anna the music box which, all along, had been trickling its sweet, distant rendering of ‘Für Elise’ into the dusty air.
*
They found John sitting on the floor of his office, engagingly crumpled and bleary, rubbing his jaw and yawning with the air of a man who has only just woken up. He had fastened his grey Levis and Oxford cloth shirt, but they looked as though he had slept all night in them. He needed a shave. Anna’s heart went out to him, in a rush of love and excitement. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘I mean, listen!’
‘You should make up your mind.’
‘Go on, Eleanor!’ urged Anna. Eleanor, somewhat recovered, smiled blandly, pointed at her father, then held out her arms to him. She remained resolutely silent. ‘Oh, Eleanor, how disappointing!’
John eyed them both. ‘What’s disappointing?’
‘John, she can talk. I found her chattering away to herself—’
‘Found her?’ asked John.
Anna blushed. ‘She must have crawled off while we were—’
‘Ah.’ He smiled. ‘That. What responsible parents we are.’ He rubbed his face again, looked down at himself puzzledly, then round the room. ‘Have I been asleep?’
‘Oh, John!’
He examined Eleanor. ‘Well, she’s not doing it now,’ he stated. ‘Are you sure? It’s easy to mistake that babble for words.’
‘Gidgie poes,’ Eleanor contributed obligingly; and to that she would add nothing.
‘Oh, well,’ said John. ‘You must have misheard.’
‘I suppose I must,’ said Anna, who knew she hadn’t.
*
On the way back to the kitchen to make tea, Anna poked her head round the door of the storeroom. Some of the furniture she remembered from her very first visit to Nonesuch. She had rather admired it then, but now it filled her with the same disgust as the concrete pens of the experimental cattery, which had been awaiting demolition since Stella Herringe’s death. She shivered. It was so hard to escape the past. And then, she was still puzzled by the afternoon’s turn of events – though less now by the suddenness of Eleanor’s plunge into language than by her subsequent retreat from it.