Anna stared out of the kitchen window.
As soon as the weather’s better, she thought. I’ll do something about the garden.
Fine rain mizzled the old glass. It fell across a pocket-handkerchief lawn, softening the bare outlines of the roses in the surrounding beds, the dwarf apple trees and straggling lavender bushes – leggy and woody and comfortably past their best – which in the summer would hum with black and gold bees. Anna looked forward to that. She looked forward to foxgloves and monbretia. She liked the garden shed, with its lapped, peeling white boards and dim quartered window. Thanks to the efforts of some former owner she had inherited a proper cottage garden, intimate and pretty; even now it was in good heart, despite the long winter.
Past the shed, though, where a vine-trellis made a sort of tousled archway, the garden changed character, becoming a square of flat, rather bleak grass, separated by a few strands of raw new wire from the three-acre pasture beyond. Though in the recent past someone had tried out a hedge of copper beech it had not thrived, and nothing else grew there. Even the weather seemed different at that end. It was always windier there. The rain swept across it like rain across a council estate in Hackney.
Anna thought: I wish I knew more about fruit trees.
Almost simultaneously, staring through the arch, she thought:
It’s really two gardens.
As if this idea had liberated something there, a ripple seemed to go across the view; and Anna witnessed an event so odd that afterwards she was unable to describe it properly to herself, let alone anyone else.
She saw a fox talking to a cat.
*
It had been raining since she woke up, on the last Sunday of the wettest April in living memory. She had been thinking about making more coffee, or putting on her Barbour and braving the damp lanes; she had been thinking about starting a cassoulet for supper. She had been thinking about Max Wishart – a beautiful man, and, if the truth were told, a complete sod – and how she would always blame herself for what had happened between them. She had been thinking: Why did I really come here? Now she found herself unable to think at all.
A few stray gleams of sun illuminated the bleak end of the garden. The fox and the cat stood nose to nose in this anxious light, absolutely motionless as if whatever was happening between them was more important than cover or shelter. They’re touching, Anna told herself. They’re sniffing each other! Can that happen?
The fox was the exact colour of the copper beech leaves, with a splash of cream at the throat and down into the rough fur of his chest. A patch of greyed fur ran along one flank. His yellow eyes glittered with intelligence. He must have slipped into the garden under the lowest strand of wire. He was the most elegant animal Anna had ever seen. Shining in the rainy light, he looked, she thought, less like a fox than an advertising picture of one – sharp, brilliantly clear, somehow more than himself.
The cat was a shabbier proposition, its tabby coat matted, its white socks dull and uncared-for. It held itself awkwardly and seemed reluctant to move. Every so often a shiver passed along its spine and it swayed where it stood. After thirty seconds or so, it turned its head away from the fox and took a step or two towards the pasture. Instantly, the fox swivelled on his haunches, and, head low, teeth bared, urged the cat back towards the house. His eyes gleamed. Was he amused? The cat hissed and spat, dabbed out in an uncertain way with one front paw, then sat down suddenly and stared at its tormentor. To set against the fox’s energy and intelligence, Anna sensed, the cat had only endurance – the quiet acceptance of its own condition, its own needs. Would that be enough? She had no idea what she meant by thinking these things.
‘They’re animals!’ she told herself aloud, as if to correct some other assumption.
Their fur was sodden, they were only animals; but she was afraid to make the tiniest movement in case they saw her and were frightened away. Rain pattered against the kitchen window. The wind agitated the lavender bushes. Beads of water trembled and fell. Then a further ripple seemed to spread across the scene at the end of the garden, and at this the fox raised his head to sniff the damp air, gave the tabby what could only be described as a look of warning, and made off across the pasture without glancing back.
Anna thought: He brought her here and now he has abandoned her. Then she thought:
How can I possibly know that?
The tabby stared after the fox for a moment or two, then got to its feet and stood swaying, head down in the wind and rain, blinking numbly at the grass in front of it. It looked towards the house then away again, as if trying to make up its mind what to do next. Anna, as if released from a spell, ran out of the kitchen to find her shoes. She saw now that the cat was ill. She kept as quiet as she could, so as not to alarm it. But inside herself she was already calling:
Wait! Oh wait! I’ll help!
Her shoes were at the bottom of the stairs by the front door. She was putting them on when the telephone rang. Without thinking, she picked it up.
‘Damn!’ she said. ‘Hello?’
It sounded like a long-distance call. There was a silence that reached away from her like an empty arena, a space in which things might happen. Remote ticking noises. Something that might have been breathing. Then a voice said:
‘Anna Prescott?’
‘It is,’ she was forced to admit. ‘But look, I wonder if you’d mind ringing back. There’s—’
‘Anna Prescott?’
It was a woman’s voice.
Anna thought: If I ask who she is I’ll have to talk.
‘Could you ring back?’ she said. ‘There’s a cat in my garden.’
Silence.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Anna, ‘I’ll have to ring off now.’
‘A cat?’ said the voice.
‘I’m really sorry,’ Anna said. ‘I’ve got to rush.’ She was already putting the phone down as she added:
‘If you could just call me later...’
*
By the time she got into the garden, it was empty. She stood at the wire fence with folded arms, a tall, dark-haired woman in her mid-thirties, wearing a man’s fleece jacket (it had belonged to Max), and stared out across the empty field. There was no sign of either animal, though she could just make out the track the fox had left, meandering through the wet grass towards the far edge of the pasture where it fetched up in a tangle of bramble and a sketchy line of hawthorn branches. A chilly wind blew rain into her face, though the sun was now visible on and off as a pale disc through a thinning in the clouds. The beech leaves rustled. Back in the cottage, the phone was ringing again.
‘Oh go away,’ she said. And then, ‘Damn. Damn. Damn.’
Turning reluctantly from the field, she noticed her own footprints, so much less elegant than the fox’s, on the rain-silvered lawn. Wondering if it was too early to cut the grass, she saw how winter had taken its toll: the leaves of the espaliered quince on the south-facing wall were already sugary and grey with greenfly, the vine-trellis needed support, the garden shed needed paint.
The shed!
Bad weather had warped the door open two or three inches and wedged it there. Anna levered at it until it creaked and gave, then went in as cautiously as she could.
‘Hello?’ she said. ‘I won’t hurt you.’
Inside there was a smell of damp canvas and weed-killer. A greyish light fell through the cob-webbed window on to a lawnmower, two or three deckchairs, and a bicycle which had seen better days. The shelves were littered with objects – rusty clippers and secateurs, some peanut-butter jars filled with nails of different sizes, those tins and packets of garden chemicals you use once and then leave to harden invincibly over the years until you have to buy them again. Every surface, every object, had collected a thin film of dust Anna couldn’t see but which she could feel when she rubbed her fingertips together. (It was grittier than house-dust, and clung less to your finger-ends.) There was a pile of dry sacks in a corner. On it, regarding her with a kind of dull anxiety, lay the tabby.
‘I won’t hurt you.’
The animal got slowly to its feet, its green eyes fixed on hers. When she picked it up, it bowed at once to the inevitable. It seemed stunned. It purred in its pain and confusion. It was warm and so frail she could feel every bone. It was just a lot of heat and bones in her hands.
‘There,’ whispered Anna. ‘There you are.’
She was thinking: They always know when a human being is their last chance.
*
At first the tabby seemed to have no will of its own. Wherever she put it, it stayed. At the same time it would not rest or relax. It crouched awkwardly on the kitchen table, caught halfway between standing and sitting, while Anna found a cardboard box. Occasionally, it turned its head to one side, as if listening. It peered over the edge of the table at the quarry-tiled floor, and a shiver went through its hindquarters as if perhaps it meant to jump down. The moment passed; it stared ahead again. This uncertainty was transmitted to Anna, who, after lining the box with newspapers and lifting the cat carefully into it, could think of nothing to do but boil the kettle, with some idea that she might need hot water. She turned the central heating as high as it would go (for some reason she had been unable to understand when it was explained to her, the oil-fired Aga remained unconnected to this system, and therefore could be used only for cooking), and placed the box near the kitchen radiator.
‘There,’ she said. ‘You’ve been in the wars, but you’ll be safe here.’
The tabby blinked up at her. She could see now exactly how ill-cared for it was. Its fur was matted and spiky, falling out in patches to reveal, under greyish skin, ribs as thin as a fish’s. It smelled. It was starving. It was female.
It was pregnant.
‘Oh you poor thing,’ Anna said.
She took down a little blue-and-white saucer – orphaned from a set which had come to her on her grandmother’s death and one of the few possessions she had felt it worthwhile to bring with her from London – and poured milk into it. The cat lapped at the milk for a moment, licked one of its paws in a disconnected way, then fell asleep. Reassured, Anna crept off to make herself a cup of tea and consult the list of useful telephone numbers her predecessors had left pinned to the kitchen wall above the Aga. Heat and steam had curled the card like a dead leaf; most of the numbers, having been written in pencil, were faded and illegible: but she found ‘Vet’, followed by something in brackets she couldn’t read. When she rang the number there was no answer, so she consulted the card again. This time she was able to decipher the appended instruction: ‘Not Sundays’. She was on her own.
Anna, who had – to balance a cheerful faith in her practicality – only the vaguest idea of what might be useful in the circumstances, went round the cottage gathering up cotton wool, antiseptic and an armful of old towels, just in case.
‘Kittens!’ she thought.
She went back to the kitchen and had a peep inside the box. The milk remained, but the tabby had vanished.
*
At the turn of the century, the ground floor of Pond Cottage had consisted of a single room barely bigger than its own fireplace, with a low oak-beamed ceiling, walls of bare local stone, and a scullery at the back. In the thirties someone had plastered the walls, extended the scullery into the garden and added mains drainage. After this, the pace of improvement had slowed; but by 1975, when the rush to the country began in earnest, successive owners had added a lean-to ‘breakfast’ room and a garage. Further extension gave rise to a proper kitchen, while internal remodelling discovered space for the microscopic study and, upstairs alongside the second bedroom, a bathroom which would have delighted a doll.
The result was higgledy-piggledy, rather poorly lit and sometimes hard to keep clean. Anna had to watch her head on the beams. But the core of the house had a satisfying sense of history. On winter afternoons, with the firelight flickering off the leaded-light windows and ducks quarrelling sleepily on the village pond across the road, it was all you could ask from a cottage in the country. And if nothing else, Anna reflected, its size made it easy to search.
‘Puss?’ she called. ‘Come on, puss!’
While she was out of the kitchen, the cat had found its way quietly upstairs, levered open the door of the tiny eye-level airing cupboard next to the bathroom and settled itself on the top shelf along her warm, clean, sweet-smelling pillowcases. They stared at one another.
‘Oh dear,’ said Anna. ‘Are you sure that’s where you want to have them?’
The cat purred.
Anna went downstairs, thinking: Cassoulet! We can both eat that! She looked at her watch. ‘I’ve still got time to get the beans on,’ she said aloud.