Anna’s nights grew strange, coagulated. She no longer woke up in the hot room, with sleep still like curtains drawn inside her head. Instead, she was unconscious past dawn and dreamed all sorts of things. (John slept, too. They felt better for it, they told each other in the mornings, but not as much as they had hoped.) She dreamed she was in London, beside the Thames. John ran past her and jumped in. Once the water had closed over him he neither sank nor swam. She could see him down there under the water in a kind of wavering bubble, his arms clasped round his knees. It seemed clear he needed help, but she couldn’t make herself act. He hung there for a long time, while she stood on the bank not knowing what to think, her feelings shifting slowly from irritation to dread, a voice in her head whispering, ‘I have to save him from himself.’
She dreamed she was fat, fat and hard like an armadillo or half a barrel. She dreamed she was dead. After death, everything was a knotted wet mass. There was chaos – a life she did not recognize, clothes she had never worn – then flashes of light on a knotted wet mass.
Nightmares were nothing new in Anna’s life, but these were so disorientating they hardly seemed to qualify as her own. Then one night she dreamed she was in California with Alice and the physicist, who – in the dream anyway – had blond hair and was teaching her to swim while Alice looked on, strong with approval. His hands touched her under the water and she could see that Alice approved of that too. She was embarrassed and amused to find a card from Alice in the post next morning. On one side was a photograph of the surf rolling in on some southern Californian beach. On the other side was written in a careless hand—
Hi its really good here, David says surf is the physics of pleasure, you ought to come out xxxs
Guess Who?
It was a message from the dream, full of sunshine and music and sex, everything missing from Anna’s waking life. She propped it against the rice jar on the kitchen counter, where its raw, optimistic colours signalled to her until mid-morning, when she left Eleanor with John for an hour and took the Volvo out just for the sake of it, driving round the lanes on her own and uncharacteristically fast. Eleven thirty: she parked below Cresset Beacon, walked to the top and sat in the cold strong sunshine, watching for a fox, a deer, a dragonfly, something special. Eventually, she realised she was looking out for Alice; or for some of Alice’s qualities in herself. As if youth and durability and happiness could fly to her out of the air.
When she got back, she found John in the kitchen. He looked excited. ‘The builders are starting to demolish the old cattery,’ he said. ‘I thought you might want to watch.’
*
Down in Ashmore, Francis Baynes was going about the work of the parish. Thursday: his day for feuds and buildings. This week it was Hetty Parker, who had placed poinsettias in big displays inside the church, and the Hewlett sisters, who thought them vulgar. Meanwhile, the parish hall, a wooden building two doors down from the Green Man, had been designated a fire hazard. After lunch the telephone made him late for a meeting with his archdeacon in Drychester. Later, he stopped off to sit with old Mrs Evans in the Daffodil Ward of Drychester General, whose flesh had the transparency of candlewax and who looked unlikely ever to return to her cottage outside the village. Margaret Evans – ninety-two years old and with an indestructible local accent – had been a follower of Bertrand Russell for much of her life and an atheist for all of it. Francis held her hand, which had the weight and papery feel of birds’ bones, while she breathed stertorously for a bit, then warned him, in case she might have caught him praying, ‘None of that rubbish here, thank you.’
All this left him feeling, in his mild way, savage.
‘I can’t see what I’m for,’ he tried to explain to the woman in his bedroom. Her hair was down over the pillow, thick, black, oily with life. She hid whatever she had been doing and put it up again. ‘All these people’ – Francis gestured around, as if Hetty Parker, the Hewlett sisters and old Mrs Evans were all somehow present in the room – ‘I can’t see why I was brought to the Church if it wasn’t to open their lives to something wonderful.’
She gave him a smile from the side of her mouth. ‘If you want to see something wonderful, follow me.’
She led him through his own lych-gate, into the church – where Hetty Parker’s disputed poinsettias raged like fires up and down the nave – and into the tower. She filled the narrow spiral staircase, her dry brown skirts, which she had gathered up to make the stairs easier, brushing against the walls. Her feet were large, bare and dirty, her calves white, her thighs were round. Trudging reluctantly up behind, Francis could see the blue veins in her flesh. She was as pregnant – as massive – with herself, he thought, as she might have been with child. Her powerful smell came back to him in the confined space.
‘Now!’ she said, bursting out on to the top of the tower like a mare released into a field. ‘Look! All this could be yours!’
Francis looked. A cloud like a tower of smoke was beginning to spill over the edge of the downs and roil out towards Ashmore, its gilded underside, carmine and Japanese black, discharging great rods and beams of afternoon sunlight. ‘It’s beautiful,’ he said.
‘Not that!’ She was contemptuous. ‘This.’
Two blowflies, borne up from the graveyard below on some updraught of which they were barely aware, had settled on the worn stone parapet and begun to copulate. Francis studied them with revulsion. Locked together in the horizontal light, they looked like an iridescent enamel brooch. Every so often they buzzed groggily and lurched into a new position. He looked away. Then he turned back deliberately and crushed them.
‘Ah dear,’ said the woman from the graveyard and shivered as if she felt a cold breeze around her. At the same time her eyes were full of triumph. ‘Ah dear, vicar, you’re a fastidious man. Was their pleasure too great for you? I show you the mystery and you look at clouds instead.’
Francis rubbed his fingers together. ‘Why have you come here?’ he whispered.
‘Oh, I’m here to help.’
‘But why me? Why visit yourself on me like this?’
‘What? Do you think I’m here on your behalf? Is that what you think, my cherub? You’re a sideshow for me. You’re the entertainment. I never come for the men.’ Her great coarse laugh rang out across the churchyard, driving two or three surprised rooks from the branches of an adjacent yew. ‘The men always want me, but it’s the women I come for.’
*
The Nonesuch cattery – centre for the breeding and commodification of generations of animals – occupied the site of a pleasant little courtyard constructed by Joshua Herringe in 1482 so that his fragile second wife, Elizabeth, could enjoy the sun.
With his death a few years on its use had changed beyond recognition. Clara de Montfort had roofed it over. In his turn, William Haut-Herringe, a sly and overweening man, hid it from his peers behind a triumph of trompe l’œil art in what came to be called the Painted Room. By the time Stella Herringe took up the family traditions it was open to the sky again – but her regime was the least forgiving. A ribbed, unfinished-looking concrete surface drained into a central grating. The pens themselves were little more than galvanised metal shelves, enclosed and partitioned with rusty wire. Two years after her death, the courtyard remained saturated with the sad, ammoniac smell of trapped animals. Two or three nights in every month its former inhabitants abandoned their new lives in the Nonesuch shrubberies and returned in search of their half-forgotten kittens and, failing to find them, sat among the shadows with their eyes hard and narrowed until dawn.
‘We’ve got problems here,’ John told Anna. He seemed pleased. A problem gave him something to work against. ‘Stella seems to have had the floor poured to Ministry of Defence specifications.’ He had borrowed a yellow site helmet from the builders, along with some hardened safety glasses which made him look boyish and studious. ‘So we got this stuff in.’
They had brought in a compressor and two heavyweight pneumatic drills. The courtyard was thick with diesel fumes. Air lines snaked between the ripped-out cages, pulsing with each cycle of demand. The builders strode about covered with cement dust, sweating hard as they bellowed at one another over the roar and hiss of the compressor. Anna stared down into this throbbing pit for a while, hoping to feel something of John’s energy, some sense of justice being done. But there was still something sour and unpleasant about the place, and she experienced no relief.
It had been a mistake to watch from the Painted Room. Too much had happened to her there. She had been made a fool too many times by that room, right up until the moment, temper gone and caution to the winds, she had smashed through the depicted courtyard of the painting and into the real courtyard beyond. She had ignored for six months the faint cries of the trapped cats. She had watched Stella Herringe, dressed in kitten-heel shoes and a three-thousand-pound frock, triumphantly serving rotten medlar for supper a hand’s breadth from her victims. Staring now at the remains of the trompe l’œil, with its curiously stiff, awkwardly lit rendering of Joshua Herringe’s original vision – a place of tranquillity and meditation, a place to sit in the sun – Anna was left with the feeling that nothing had ended. Perhaps nothing ever ended, perhaps the consequences of things just kept ringing on and on, poisoning the life that came after.
Leaving, she heard herself say, ‘I want this destroyed too.’
John began to argue, but by then she was in the corridor where the picture of Clara de Montfort had once hung and she didn’t hear him.
*
Later, they argued again.
Unable to afford more than twenty-four hours’ equipment hire, John had asked the builders to work under arc lights until the job was done. Breaking through the concrete at about half past eight in the evening, they made a curious find in the sour earth beneath: a little mud-coloured drawstring bag of chamois leather, so hardened and distressed that it could no longer be opened but had to be pulled away from its own contents in strips. It was obviously very old. They switched off the compressor – silence pressed up against their ears – and stood, passing the bag puzzledly from hand to hand; then shrugged and called for John Dawe, who arrived with his daughter riding on his shoulders.
Eleanor stared around the courtyard with a kind of sleepy hauteur, taking in the workmen, the ploughed-up concrete, the dust drifting about under the glaring lights. ‘Poo,’ she said. But she was fascinated by what they had found and, by the time John carried her back into the kitchen half an hour later, he had already given it to her.
‘I wish you hadn’t done that,’ Anna said. ‘I really do.’
John looked mulish. ‘What harm can it do?’
‘We haven’t got any idea what it is or how it came to be there—’
They persuaded Eleanor to swap it temporarily for two squares of organic chocolate, so that Anna could turn it over in her hands – the figure of a squatting woman, three or four inches high, carved in cream-coloured bone, feet placed squarely apart as if for purchase on an invisible floor, her thighs, pelvis and partly exposed vulva massively proportioned, crudely worked yet detailed enough to have an immediate impact on the viewer. Everything else seemed unfinished, sketched-in, as if the sculptor had lost interest – everything, that is, but the expression on the face, which was both disturbing and inexplicable. The mouth opened as wide as it would go to admit some formless cry, the lips pulling themselves back and down, the eyes staring but unfocused. What had she been designed to signify, this icon of some vanished culture? Not anguish, precisely. Not pain, not effort, not rage, not sexual exultation. Something without a name, something that bore a resemblance to all those things. In the end you were left with those two impressions – the open thighs and planted feet, the enduring roar of… what?
Loss, Anna thought. Some kind of triumphant loss. Can you have that? How appalling. She weighed the figure in her hand. It seemed, on reflection, too heavy to be bone. She thought it might be flint, a coated flint, creamy white, out of the chalk downs. But how would you carve flint? Unless, she thought, it hadn’t been carved at all—
She made up her mind suddenly. ‘I don’t want her to have it.’
‘Oh, come on, Anna. It’s ugly, but she doesn’t know that.’
‘That’s not the point,’ Anna insisted. ‘She gets these things, she keeps them for a while, then they turn up in the knot garden, John. What’s happening to them? How are they getting there? Don’t you want to know?’
He opened his mouth, then shook his head as if he couldn’t think what to say. ‘Anna—’
‘You don’t,’ she said, ‘do you? You don’t think this is important.’
He put his arm round her and tried to calm her down. ‘The things that happened in this house are finished. All that ended two years ago. You’re right. I don’t want to think about Stella, or reincarnation, or what that might mean for us. But it’s not denial. It’s that I have a wife and a child and a house to look after. Look at me, Anna. No, look at me. I love you and I love Eleanor. There isn’t a day on which I don’t puzzle over everything that happened to us here. What we learned was wonderful and strange. But how can we go forward if we let it fill our minds? And how can we ever be free of Stella if all we do is see her in every little thing that happens?’
‘John—’
‘Anna, these are just objects Eleanor picks up and puts down, like any kid. They’re just toys. While you’re worrying yourself sick about them, someone has to look after the ordinary stuff, someone has to do the real work. And I think you’re in danger of forgetting that.’
Anna stared at him in disbelief. She pulled away. ‘That’s so unfair,’ she said. ‘That’s just so bloody unfair!’ She threw the figure down on the table in front of him. It fell oddly, spinning and flickering in the kitchen light, making a noise like the rattle of dice. Anna blinked and reached out her hand to stop it. ‘You’re the dreamer, not me.’
*
I learned how Izzie’s other name is the Fat Lady from Under the Earth, and how important she is for everything around here.
This is how it came about: it’s night and I’m busy, busy, busy about the place – what’s new? – hiding a secret here, a secret there, and I see how the corridors are suddenly elongating in the shadows, elongating and opening out until they don’t look like corridors any more but like roads. (What do you know about roads my sweetling, Izzie says, but she doesn’t see everything I do, and I know, I know.) In a flash they lead everywhere these roads, outwards, outwards, outwards. It would be a crazy ride on any one of them, you would speed like in your dreams.
This is it, though:
I see where they lead outwards from, these roads. I see the big knot under the garden maze, trapped and pulsing, the knot that Izzie made a million years ago, before this was a house at all.
No one sees my knot, Izzie says, except those who will benefit. Those who see without permission soon see no more, she says, and they welcome that, because I put the knot in their bowels, tightening and tightening, and everyone covers their ears against that scream they make trying to push it out again, too late for that.
Poo, I say to that. You won’t catch me trying to expel a knot in my bowels.
Hoity-toity, says Izzie to that, also Little Miss Know-all. You know what happened to Little Miss Know-all. Little Miss Know-all soon came to grief, she caught a disease.
Best be careful you don’t catch a disease.
So I’m very careful when I crawl between the hedges, where the Parts of Izzie I got will soon be the Parts of me, and she will go and I will stay and that will be the end of her, with her hoity-toity. That’ll be the end of her all right, the day I know who I am.
*
Anna continued to dream. Her dreams were full of strange anxieties. She dreamed she was a white bird flying out, a black bird flying home – she had been the same bird all along. She dreamed she had gone up to the Beacon so John could show her a fox; neither of them turned up. She dreamed of Francis Baynes, standing in the middle of the vicarage kitchen with his trousers down round his ankles, his mouth open on a kind of vacant sigh—
This dream caused her to start awake with a noise in her ears.
She thought it was Eleanor. She thought it was someone in the house.
‘Did you hear that?’ she asked John.
‘It was you, Anna,’ he answered. ‘You called out.’ He leaned over her to look at the alarm clock and groan. ‘It was more of a scream, actually,’ he said. ‘Can we go back to sleep now?’
But it turned out he couldn’t sleep, so after an hour’s irritable tossing and turning he got up to make a cup of tea, sit stunned in front of the Aga for a few minutes, then go back upstairs to confront his financial problems. That was how, already in a difficult mood, he discovered Mark and Oliver Holland making themselves at home in his office. They had pulled out all the drawers of the old steel filing cabinet so that it leaned perilously away from the wall. They had scattered coloured folders everywhere. The computer was on and a search programme loaded from an unmarked CD was busily munching its way through John’s secure files.
John looked at his watch: 7.30 a.m. on a wet Friday. ‘This is a little bit out of business hours,’ he commented.
‘Ah,’ said Mark.
Oliver added, ‘We thought it would be all right.’
‘I don’t think it is, you know,’ John pointed out.
The first Anna knew about the situation was when, ten minutes or so later, standing by the front door in a grubby white towelling robe, she glanced up from the morning’s crop of junk mail to see him escorting them towards her. They looked as discomfited as she had ever seen them.
‘You could regret this,’ Oliver said.
Mark began, ‘The Estate—’
John bunched up the lapels of Mark’s suit jacket and used them to push him against the wall. He was really much taller than Mark, Anna noticed, and his face was dark with anger. ‘Fuck the Estate,’ he said quietly. ‘Fuck them all. They knew as well as you did what was going on here in Stella’s day. It just wasn’t quite profitable enough to keep their attention.’ He let Mark go. ‘You won’t be coming to this house again. Will you?’ He thought for a moment. ‘In fact, before you go, you can give me whatever keys you have in your possession.’
Mark adjusted his jacket, some buttons of which had come off. He and Oliver exchanged a quick glance. ‘I’m not sure the arrangement would have suited us anyway,’ he said.
Oliver added, ‘I don’t think, given the figures, we can support your business plan.’
‘Get out. Just get out.’
Anna went outside to watch them drive away.
When she came back John was sitting at the bottom of the stairs, looking dejected. ‘That’s fucked that then,’ he told her.
She sat next to him and took his hand affectionately. ‘You were brilliant and I love you dearly, even when you give me lectures about parental responsibility.’
He looked comforted for a moment. But then he said, ‘Was I brilliant? The next time the phone rings it will be the bank manager, to review the loans. Or someone from the Estate, congratulating me on having the courage to go it alone.’ He shrugged. ‘How brilliant is that?’
She put her arms round him and hugged him fiercely. ‘It was the right thing to do.’
‘I found them going through my office,’ he said tiredly. ‘You can’t have people doing that. The rest of it – all this other stuff about them and the Engelion cream – well, you might be right and you might be wrong.’ He stood up. ‘I think you’re wrong.’
‘John—’
‘At least we’ve seen the last of them,’ he said.
*
But even that was too much to hope for.
Walking Eleanor slowly around the grounds two or three days later, on a morning so quiet you could hear the traffic miles away on the main road, Anna witnessed an event curious enough to seem like something from a film.
The sun, pushing through a layer of pearly cloud, had melted the night’s frost. Fine beads of moisture were left on every blade of grass, turning the lawns into silver carpets – stretching away from Nonesuch in magically heightened perspective – on the receptive surface of which every passing footprint stood out clear and delineated. The little tracks of birds beginning and ending in nowhere. The wincing, fastidious trudge of cats. A narrow meandering swathe like the spoor of a small mechanical digger, punctuated every so often by an abandoned stick – Ellie Dawe in her red Wellington boots.
Eleanor was collecting sticks. She was practising her new word. ‘Norty!’ she shouted.
An echo flew back off Nonesuch like a white bird.
‘Norty norty norty!’
Echo echo echo.
Eleanor’s technique when she saw a new stick was to approach it with a fast, cumbersome, tottering motion; then, breathing heavily through her mouth, plant her feet, rock forward with one arm outstretched and, overcompensating, fall over backwards on to her bottom. The effort caused her face to become as red and shiny as her Wellington boots. ‘Oh, dear!’ said Anna, who had never seen a funnier thing in her life. ‘Upsy daisy!’
‘Norty.’
They were making their way across the Great Lawn in this manner when several cats shot out of the thick bank of rhododendrons fringing the drive. For a fraction of a second they paused as one animal, haunches down, fur up, to look back the way they had come. Anna drew back nervously. Eleanor had no such qualms. ‘Wor,’ she said. She brandished her latest stick. ‘Ca’!’
This was too much. Hissing and spitting and falling over one another in their anxiety to escape, the cats scattered in all directions. Shortly afterwards the figures of Mark and Oliver Holland burst out on to the lawn. They had caught one of the cats and were trying to force it into an old fertiliser bag. Seeing Anna, Oliver stopped to brush at his clothes, while Mark continued to struggle with the cat. After a moment they turned and ran back into the bushes.
Anna, suddenly terrified they had taken Orlando, abandoned her daughter without a thought and flew after them shouting, ‘How dare you!’
The rhododendrons were a nightmare. Branches whipped at her face. She fell to her knees in the sodden, fibrous earth. Every time she found an easy way through the tangle, it led back to the lawn. Filthy and out of breath, she burst out on to the drive an instant too late and had to watch the silver Mercedes pulling away right under her nose, one Holland dragging the rear offside passenger door shut even as the other floored the accelerator pedal. The stolen cat, meanwhile, had escaped the bag but not the car, and was throwing itself desperately against the rear window. It wasn’t Orlando: she had time to see wild eyes, scrabbling claws, a pink nose pressed up against the glass – then a little crest of tabby fur.
They had taken Tufty.
Anna watched car and cat get smaller and smaller. She dabbed at her cheekbone where the rhododendron branches had cut her. ‘You bastards,’ she whispered. ‘You absolute bastards.’ Then she pushed her way through the rhododendrons and back on to the Great Lawn where her daughter sat, a picture of misery. ‘I’m coming,’ she called. ‘I’m coming.’
‘Norty, norty,’ wailed Eleanor.
*
With Tufty gone the dynamics of the household changed. The kittens missed her and could be found at all times of day sitting where she usually sat. They were bad-tempered with one another, although not perhaps as bad-tempered as Orlando and Liddy, who had to be separated by Anna after a confrontation in the kitchen.
Anna felt unsettled and irritable too. She was reluctant to tell John what had happened; he would only look patient and long-suffering, and somehow hold it against her. How could Mark and Oliver be pursued anyway? Even if she could get him to confront them, they would simply deny it. The question she asked herself again and again was. Why would they do this? In her heart she already knew. They had failed to find Stella’s formula and now, with the house closed to them, they were after the next best thing: the bloodlines, the genes, the most recent subjects of the four-hundred-year Herringe experiment – the cats who lived in the shrubbery. They had got Tufty by accident. It was an example less of their malice than their futility.
Two or three days later, events drove the incident out of her mind. Eleanor’s latest toy went missing. One minute Eleanor was clutching it as forcefully as ever while she sat on the floor, breathing heavily over the counters for a game of Flounder, the next – Anna had turned away to pull a saucepan off the Aga – she was empty-handed. She didn’t seem to have noticed. A search of the kitchen revealed nothing. The unpleasant little bone figure, with its obese thighs and indescribable expression, might never have been. Anna nodded to herself. ‘Right,’ she whispered.
*
Midnight: she made sure that John and Eleanor were sleeping soundly. Then she got out of bed, dressed and made her way downstairs. In the kitchen she set the kettle on the Aga. While the water was heating up, she collected her old fleece jacket from the hall and put that on too. From a downstairs cupboard she took the goose-down sleeping bag she had last used as a student. It looked a bit crushed and smelled faintly of damp, but when she shook it out it seemed perfectly warm and dry inside. The kettle boiled. Anna filled John’s steel Thermos flask with hot chocolate, to which she added two or three good measures of dark rum. Then she shrugged into her oiled-cotton jacket, and provided herself with gloves and a torch. She opened the door and stood there staring out, the sleeping bag under her arm and the flask stuffed into one of the pockets of the Barbour. ‘Come on,’ she told herself. ‘The sooner it’s done the sooner it’s over.’
It was a bright cold night in the knot garden, with a promise of frost. The contrails of airliners sketched themselves high up across Orion and his dog. There were no builders’ fires tonight. Much of the rubbish had been hauled away. Everywhere else in the grounds the chiaroscuro was fluid, shifty, moon-driven; here, the light fell across the sharp outlines of the box hedges in such a way as to bleach them white, at the same time strengthening the shadows so that things stood out with hallucinogenic clarity.
Making her way to the centre of the maze, the only moving thing in a static landscape, Anna looked like a silent paper cut-out, a strange, gliding figure waist-high in hedges. She bent down, scraped with her foot in the loose cold soil, then shone the torch on what she had uncovered. They were all there. The doll’s head, its blue eyes rocking open-closed, open-closed, open-closed, gazed up at her, bland and babyish. Torchlight glittered off jet necklace and silver spoon. From the music box came a ghostly flutter of noise, ‘Für Elise’, incredibly distant yet receding even further as she listened.
For a moment something in her tried to follow it. There was a brief vertigo, a sense that she was being drawn down into this nest of meaningless but significant objects. She felt the presence of something, another world perhaps, somewhere she had never been and yet knew as well as Nonesuch, somewhere central to her life. She heard a voice call – it was her own! – then it was gone and she was herself again. She shivered. Nothing would persuade her to spend the night sitting next to this ill-starred stuff. In the end she found a corner from which she could watch over it uninterrupted. She shook out the sleeping bag, poured herself a drink from the Thermos and settled down to wait for whoever would arrive to bury the bone figurine.
‘Someone must be doing it,’ she told herself. An hour later she was asleep.
*
The dreams were senseless, debilitating. She woke into them as if they weren’t really dreams at all, just another way of being awake. The house – it was Nonesuch but not quite the Nonesuch she knew – was dark and hot, and she never had any idea where she was. The corridors seemed to lengthen away from her in all directions, though she didn’t know how. The stale air wrapped itself around her like an unwashed blanket. Nevertheless, she was making progress and always to the same appalling place. All the time she could hear a voice she half recognised, childish and unformed, murmuring things like. Busy, busy, busy and Up and down, up and down the stairs. On and on it went, in a pleased sort of way – Seven secrets, only two to go. I put these parts together and they’re the parts of me – while Anna struggled to identify it. As soon as that seemed likely, fear overcame her and she dragged herself awake with a shout, only to find herself still in the same house, the same endless dark corridor, tilting up and back on itself. She had woken into the same dream, only she was a little closer to the knotted, throbbing heart of it. Seven secrets under the maze, the little childish voice congratulated itself. Seven secrets to make me who I am.
She opened her eyes. The moon was down. The knot garden looked vague and brown, cobwebbed with the residue of the dream. Anna lay fuddled and exhausted, her left arm, trapped beneath her, useless with pins and needles. She looked at her watch: a quarter to five. Soon it would be light. She pulled herself feverishly out of the sleeping bag. Two strides and she was shining the torch under the box hedge, hacking at the earth with the heel of her shoe—
Too late. The figurine was already there, nested among all the other stuff, its awful little face wrenched into the configurations of a loss no one alive now could understand.
‘Damn,’ said Anna.
At the sound of her voice the garden seemed to shift, gather itself, settle. There was a rustling noise, quite close to her. She swept the torch across the hedges, calling, ‘Hello? Orlando? Liddy?’ As soon as she spoke, the noise stopped. She switched off the torch, tilted her head to listen. Nothing. She toured the maze, shining the torch into every corner. It was empty. But for a moment she had gained the clear impression of something small pushing through a hedge, then moving away, trying to be as quick and silent as possible. This impression stayed with her even after she had taken herself tiredly back to the house and fallen asleep without even checking Ellie’s cot.
She had been so close! She thought about it all morning, then, leaving Eleanor with John for half an hour around noon, returned to the knot garden, which lay deserted under a brittle gold light. Anna stood for a moment at its centre, trying to feel the things she had felt in the night. But it was just a garden, a bit scruffy and uncared-for. Now that the rubbish was cleared away, you could see the clever, cursive lines of it. In a day or two, Joshua Herringe’s curiously enduring monument to himself would be gone for ever, four hundred years of history grubbed up and hauled away in an afternoon. John had already ordered the mechanical digger. Anna sighed. She remembered the first time she had come to Nonesuch in the company of Stella Herringe, how she had fallen in love with the house, the light, the soft heaviness of the air beneath the cedars. A shadow flickered briefly across the knot garden. Anna looked up. Three wood-pigeons flew over in a long, banking arc – she could hear the creak and quiver of their wings.
After a moment she found the right place, stirred the earth around the box roots with her foot, then bent down and quickly sifted it through her fingers. It was greyish, dry and crumbly, mixed up with bits of leaves, bleached sticks, a feather. She stared at this innocuous stuff for a moment, thinking. Why aren’t I surprised? She dusted her hands. She thought. At least I know I’m not mad. That’s something. I don’t know what I’m up against yet, but I know I’m not mad.
The hole was empty.
Everything had gone and that was the last time anything appeared there.
*
A growing panic sent her to Dr Russell’s consulting room. There, of course, she could admit nothing. She needed to talk. But of her daughter she would only allow herself to say, ‘I’m sure she still gets out at night,’ as if they were discussing some problem pet. All this accomplished was to cover up the fears Anna desperately needed to share. Martha Russell’s psychiatric toolkit barely penetrated the surface of Anna’s world, where the hidden strata of the personality were little more than a superficial membrane stretched over the nightmarish truths of reincarnation and death. The knot garden and its contents were packed tight behind everything she said, like the stuff in some overloaded cupboard, ready to fall out the moment the door was opened…
Her relationship with John was safer ground, so she talked about that, while the afternoon drifted away with the smoke of Martha Russell’s cigarette and in the corner of the room images of weekend excavations in the damp, receding downland flickered across the flat wide screen of the Sony television.
‘I wonder if I should leave him now,’ she said. ‘I wonder if it’s weak of me to stay.’
Martha Russell considered this. ‘You aren’t someone who gives up,’ she reminded Anna. ‘You said that yourself.’
‘You can love someone too much.’
‘Can you? Even if that’s true, it isn’t weakness that keeps you there. It’s strength.’
‘This desperation,’ Anna said, ‘to recoup what you’ve invested? When really you’d be better to cut your losses and walk away? In business they used to call it “sunk cost error”. My grandmother was more direct: “Anna,” she would advise me, “never throw good money after bad.”’ Anna laughed sadly. ‘I didn’t expect to be thinking about my life in those terms.’
‘Never do!’ the doctor said with a certain energy. She lit another cigarette. ‘Perhaps there are good, constructive reasons for leaving John,’ she added. ‘But the better they are the more important it is not to couch them in the language of defeat. Do you see? You are a strong person.’
‘Am I?’
‘I think so. You remain undefeated.’ Martha Russell thought for a moment. ‘You remain. That in itself counts for a lot.’ She blew smoke towards the television screen. ‘I want you to look at this.’ She did something with the remote control and the tape reversed itself with a gentle whine. ‘Here’s something we found this weekend.’ Thick male hands again, this time in fingerless mitts. Thumbs working at a clod of earth until it broke apart suddenly to reveal an ivory-coloured shape. It was the figure of a crouching woman, perhaps two inches high. At first it seemed to be carved from bone or ivory. Then you saw it was flint and not carved at all. ‘It’s the local Iceni goddess. Isn’t she impressive? Now there’s a metaphor for persistence in the face of things! Loss or gain, birth or bereavement, love and death: it’s all one to her, she just digs in and endures. We’ve been finding her all over the downs this summer, at every excavation. She goes all the way back to the early paleolithic. And yet you don’t see her worshipped anywhere else in Britain. Ashmore’s own goddess!’
Anna Dawe got to her feet so hastily that her chair fell over. ‘I have to go,’ she said.
‘Anna! What’s the matter?’
Anna indicated the TV screen. ‘Dr Russell, you’re wrong about that thing. I have to go.’
She stumbled out of the consulting room and drove back to Nonesuch at what was, for her, a reckless pace. When she parked the car she was still shaking. To calm herself before she faced her husband, she walked back through the grounds of Nonesuch. How would she convince him? How would she make him understand that all these events were linked? In the end, she didn’t have to, because things got worse and her new fears were driven away by older ones.
*
Pale sunshine fell across the herringbone paths, dusty brick walls and espaliered fruit trees. The kitchen garden was full of a faint, familiar musky smell Anna couldn’t quite identify. At first she thought it was drifting in over the orchard wall, where the medlars had been left to rot on the ground every year since Stella’s death; then she realised it was coming from the open kitchen door. When she left, the kitchen had been full of shouts of laughter. Now it was quiet. Anna thought nothing of that. John often took Eleanor on a tour of the renovations in the afternoon. Eleanor liked to inspect the workmen and it gave Anna a rest.
Alone at last, thought Anna. Beans on toast and a quiet cup of tea.
But what she found inside drove that out of her head. Eleanor Dawe was sitting square in the middle of the kitchen table, breathing heavily and talking to herself in a little sing-song voice of absorption and self-congratulation. Open in front of her was the pot of Engelion cream Anna had thrown in the dustbin and she was smearing it confidently if haphazardly over her pudgy face. It was in her hair. Her hands were thick with it. The kitchen reeked. Her father was nowhere to be seen.
‘Eleanor!’
Eleanor gave a girlish laugh. ‘Gidgiee!’ she said in her most affected voice. She offered the pot to Anna, then, seeing immediately the inappropriateness of the gesture, pulled a face instead and began to sob.
Anna swept her up, carried her to the sink, turned on the cold tap and ran the water over her head as hard as it would go. Eleanor, who had never experienced anything like it, took a huge breath and choked. Her arms and legs, emerging plump and reddened from her sodden dungarees, jerked disconnectedly. The wetter she got the more difficult it became to hold her. She writhed out of Anna’s grip and fell into the sink. ‘Oh no, you don’t,’ said Anna, reading this as an attempt to escape. ‘Oh no, you don’t.’ Eleanor’s screams redoubled for a minute or two; then the fight went out of her. Anna sat her down and used the washing-up liquid as shampoo. ‘Well, close your eyes, you stupid thing,’ she said mildly. ‘If it hurts. There now. That’s got it off. You’re all clean now.’ Eleanor, seeing that the threat was past, remembered her dignity and began to howl again.
That was how John Dawe found them – Eleanor slumped sobbing in two inches of cold water in the sink; while Anna, soaked from the waist up, rocked her daughter to and fro, saying over and over again, ‘All clean now. All clean now.’
‘What’s happened?’ he asked.
Even the sound of his voice made Anna want to hit him. She indicated Eleanor, slumped unhappily in the sink. ‘This is your daughter,’ she said. ‘I came back and found you had left her here on her own.’ She snatched up the almost empty pot of Engelion cream and brandished it at him. ‘I found her with this. She had it all over her face. You were in charge of her, John. How could you leave her? How could you?’
‘It was only for a moment. The builders—’
‘ “The builders”,’ she mimicked, ‘ “the builders”.’
‘It’s quite important at the moment that we—’
‘Oh God, John, just shut up. There isn’t any excuse. Don’t you see that?’
He turned away from her angrily. ‘At least I didn’t leave that foul stuff around for her to get hold of.’
This was too much for Anna. ‘I threw it away! I know I did. I’ve told you; I keep throwing these things away and they keep coming back again!’
‘Things don’t just “come back”, Anna,’ he said. ‘That can’t happen.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The rest of us live in a world of cause and effect,’ he replied. ‘For you, things just “come back”. I think you should see someone. I think you should ask Dr Russell to refer you to someone. I think you need help.’
‘What?’
There was shocked silence. Then she said, ‘You can’t imagine how useless that makes you sound—’ at exactly the same time as he said, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—’
But they both knew he had gone too far. They stared at one another mutely, wondering if this was how things broke for good and could never be mended. Anna began to cry quietly. He knew what had happened to them at Nonesuch in the terrifying moments before the fire. He knew what they had learned from Stella Herringe, about themselves, about the nature of the world. He had been a dreamer himself when she met him, someone prepared to believe he had lived other lives, to acknowledge what Francis Baynes would call the ‘mystery’ of things. Now he was denying all that in the cheapest way she could imagine. She had a sudden vertiginous sense of her whole life leading here, to this moment of blank, willed, nauseous misunderstanding.
‘Is that what you think?’ she asked. ‘That I’m mad?’
‘No,’ he answered. ‘I suppose I don’t.’ Then he said, ‘One of us ought to dry her and find her some clothes. Would it be better if I did it?’
‘Don’t you dare touch her, John.’
‘Anna—’
‘I’ll take her away, John. Something’s happening here. I’ll take her away if that’s the only way to save her.’