It was almost dark when Anna got back to the cottage. The moment she entered the kitchen she knew something was wrong. The box by the radiator smelled sour and damp. Inside, the kittens nuzzled at their mother; she lay unresponsive, her eyes almost closed. She hadn’t even tried her food. She felt hot and dry to the touch. Anna sterilised the bathroom thermometer, raised the tabby’s tail and took her temperature. The tabby opened her eyes and gave Anna a wounded look. ‘I know,’ Anna said. ‘I know it’s undignified. I’m sorry. Shh. Shh.’
‘If the queen refuses to eat,’ recommended Everything You Need to Know About Your Cat or Kitten, ‘offer her a little Brand’s Essence.’
‘What is that?’ Anna asked the kitchen angrily. “‘Brand’s Essence”! I don’t even know what it is!’
She tried the vet again.
Nothing.
All night, the tabby lay panting. She seemed to lose weight by the hour. She refused water, or, if she drank it, threw it back up again immediately. The more listless she became, the more the kittens demanded from her, until she hissed and turned her back on them. Anna was upset.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, you mustn’t.’
Two o’clock in the morning, then three: unable to contemplate sleep, Anna poured a measure of Jameson’s into a cup of tea. She tried to read a book. She dragged an armchair into the kitchen, wrapped herself in the quilt from her bed, and sat dozing by the radiator. She was visited from time to time by dreams chaotic and formless, as full of mewling noises as the cardboard box. ‘Hush,’ she heard herself say absently, not quite sure whether she was awake or asleep—
‘Hush.’
Just before dawn, the tabby seemed to improve. She encouraged the kittens to suckle, then did her best to clean them up, nuzzling and pushing and licking at them one by one. She raised her head and allowed Anna to stroke it. She set up a curious, fluttering purr. Two minutes later she was dead. Anna looked dully into the box. Horror, pity, anxiety: she didn’t know which to feel first. She hardly knew what to feel. The kittens, failing to understand what had happened, were burrowing determinedly about again, their squinched-up eyes giving them the look of little old men.
‘You funny things,’ she said absently. ‘What am I going to do with you now?’ Then she took the cooling tabby up in her arms and went into the garden.
It was raining gently, a fine grey rain in the faint grey light of a new day. Beads of water hung on every branch, every blade of grass. The air was still and expectant. Barefoot and dressed in her old towelling robe, Anna carried the frail bundle of bones and fur across the lawn, under the vine trellis and up to the wire fence at the end of the garden, where they could both look out at the pasture stretching away, full of spiderwebs silvered with rain, to the distant line of the hedge. ‘That’s where you came from,’ she said. ‘Over there.’ A thrush began to sing. Anna hugged the cat. ‘I hope I was a help,’ she said. And promised:
‘I’ll look after them.’
*
How much do I remember of this drama, or the drama of my other lives? I could feel them tickling at my skull, but already they were beginning to haze away. Time blurs and swirls as ivy grows around an oak, obscuring the original shape, only to create another; adding detail where before there was none; hiding the whorls and knots and the ancient storm damage beneath a chaos of tendrils.
But one thing I remember clearly is this:
I dreamed. All creatures dream, great and small: I know that now.
In my dream, I was a fleck of life fixed to the very centre of the world by one fragile link. Everything in me and around me pulsed in time with the beat of this link. I had no idea what it was: only that if I were to let go, even for a moment, something truly terrible would happen, for the world beyond was a limitless void, waiting to swallow me up. I floated in my dreams, clamped relentlessly to this lifeline for unknowable moments. Then something happened. The lifeline began to shrink in my mouth. With a perception born of pure panic, I felt it pucker and recede. I scrabbled after it with my mouth, my paws. In a moment, it was gone!
And then I was falling.
Down and down into endless black space, my little torso twisting in panic, limbs swivelling, toes spreading, braced for a terrible landing...
And when I woke up, my mother was dead.
Was it a premonition? The embodiment of my greatest fear? Or my body’s way of making sense of an inexplicable tragedy? I cannot tell you for sure. All I know is that whenever I think of my mother even now, all I remember is the sensation of falling.
*
By late morning, she was frantic.
The tabby had been buried quietly at the end of the garden, the kittens transferred to Anna’s study, so she could keep an eye on them while she worked. On the advice of the book, she had wrapped a hot water bottle in a towel and placed it in the box with them. It was a pitiful substitute for the love and care they had lost. ‘The tick of a clock,’ the book added, ‘may also help, by simulating the heartbeat of the missing mother.’
‘Only a man would think that,’ said Anna. ‘Anyway, clocks don’t tick any more.’
She resented Everything You Need to Know About Your Cat or Kitten. Nevertheless, she followed its instructions as carefully as she could, diluting warm goat’s milk in water for two-hourly feeds, which she tried to get the kittens to take from a plastic eyedropper. Their blind ancient faces yearned towards the smell of milk, then turned away again in disappointment. ‘Just try,’ she wheedled. ‘Please?’ But they only squirmed in her hands – energetically at first, then less so as their last good meal wore off – and whimpered for their mother. Despite his undignified entry into the world it was the marmalade tom, runt of the litter, who did best. He found the dropper more often than his larger, more active sisters; he took a little milk each time before turning away.
Just after midday, Anna went to the village shop to buy baby formula, in case they could be persuaded to try that instead. While she was out, one of the females, whose temperature had been on the high side for an hour, went into convulsions and died. Anna stared helplessly into the box, her eyes stinging with tears. She picked the little thing up in her hand. She could see that it was going to be a tabby, perhaps with one white sock. ‘Keep a close eye on your kittens,’ the book warned. ‘Or you may lose them.’
‘They won’t eat!’ Anna raged. ‘What can I do if they won’t eat?’
Two o’clock in the afternoon found her exhausted at her desk, nails still dark with earth from burying the kitten next to its dead mother, trying to drink a cup of tea. Propped up by the computer screen, Ruth Canning’s card with its scrawled injunction. Call us, or we’ll send you the kids, made her smile again. She missed Ruth. They had arrived at university together; survived in their third year the emotional bumps and bruises of a shared flat. For years after that they had borrowed each other’s clothes and – until Max – approved each other’s choice of men. ‘I’ve got a family of my own now,’ she told the card softly. She picked it up, turned it over, tapped its edge against her thumbnail. These actions liberated a curious half-memory – Ruth, in some noisy pub or other, some evening not too long ago, turning away from the bar to shout: ‘I do their accounts.’
Anna frowned and drank her tea. She couldn’t recall the occasion, only how Ruth had laughed and added, ‘Touchingly primitive by your standards I expect, but the fact is that most of the old dears have forgotten how to add up.’
‘Old dears?’ Anna asked herself.
What old dears?
‘AWC,’ she remembered. ‘Of course!’ And she picked up the phone.
‘Ruth,’ she said. ‘Is that you, Ruth? It’s Anna. I got your card. Listen—’
‘Anna! You’re coming to see us!’
‘Well,’ said Anna, ‘I—’
‘You’re not coming to see us,’ interrupted her friend. ‘Fair enough. I warned you. They’ve got streaming colds, all they ever talk about is PlayStation, and they’re on the first train down to you.’
Anna laughed. ‘No, listen—’ she said.
‘Too late! Too late now!’
‘I am coming to see you. Soon. But I’ve got a problem I need your help with.’
‘Ho,’ said Ruth. ‘I don’t sense anything new on the negotiating table here. I don’t sense an offer. I ought to warn you that it’s not only PlayStation, it’s whine whine whine all day about the violent games their friends are allowed to have—’
‘Ruth,’ said Anna, ‘shut up. Do you still work for AWC?’
‘For who?’
‘Animal Welfare Coalition. The charity. You know. You did their accounts.’
‘Good grief,’ said Ruth. ‘That was a few years ago.’
‘Oh, don’t say that. I’ve got kittens here, and I need help. Ruth, you’d love them. They’re only a day old. They’re so sweet, and their mother died, and they aren’t doing well, and the local vet is too bone-idle to answer his phone—’
‘Anna—’
‘—and I don’t know what Brand’s Essence is. Do you?’
‘Anna, hang on and I’ll—’
‘I mean, have you ever heard of bloody Brand’s Essence?’
Ruth laughed. ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘But I can find you someone who has. I put all the AWC stuff on the computer somewhere, in case I ever needed it again. Just hang on.’
Anna heard the light clatter of a keyboard, then some cheerful swearing.
‘OK,’ said Ruth.
‘What?’
‘Entire list of field workers by area.’
‘Brilliant!’
‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ warned Ruth. ‘That means about fourteen old ladies scattered across the British Isles. And two of them have certainly passed on since the list was last updated.’ The keyboard clacked again. ‘We were never a big organisation. Let’s see... Well, I can’t quite believe that. Ashmore. You’re in luck.’
‘There’s someone here?’
‘Yep. Got a pen? It’s a woman called Stella Herringe – fine old name, that. I’ve heard it before, but I can’t think where.’
‘Do hurry,’ said Anna.
‘Anna, are you all right?’
Anna laughed. ‘Of course I am,’ she said. Suddenly she confessed. ‘I miss you, Ruth. How are you, really?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘And Sam?’
‘Sam’s fine. It’s you we worry about, Anna.’
‘Don’t be daft.’
‘I don’t like to think of you stuck out there on your own.’
It was an old complaint. Ruth couldn’t imagine how human life sustained itself without air smelling of Jamaican food and burnt diesel. But there was more. She meant: you were always so brave before. She meant: why did you allow yourself to run away from the things you loved? She meant: why did you take Max Wishart so to heart?
‘I’m not stuck, Ruth,’ Anna said. ‘I just wanted a change.’
The two remaining kittens chose that moment to emerge from a dull sleep, calling fractiously for something only their mother could supply. ‘Hush now,’ Anna told them absently. She put her hand into the box. They laid their heads against its warmth and tried to forget themselves again. ‘After Max, I felt... well, what I felt doesn’t matter now. Look, give me this Herringe person’s phone number. I must—’
‘I know: you’ve got to go. Just remember we’re here.’
‘I will.’
Anna wrote down the number. ‘Ruth?’ she said.
‘Yes?’
‘One of them looks exactly like Barnaby.’
Ruth sighed. ‘Come and see us soon, Anna.’
‘I will. And Ruth?’
‘What?’
‘Thanks.’
*
After what seemed a long time, she was diverted, with a lot of busy clicking and banging, to Stella Herringe’s old-fashioned answering machine. ‘There’s no one here,’ said the indistinct voice on the audiotape. ‘Leave a message, or call back at a better time.’ As soon as Anna opened her mouth, the machine began to switch itself off again. ‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Hello?’ And then desperately, ‘My name is Anna Prescott, I’m at Ashmore 732521, and I have a problem with some kittens—’ In the end she wasn’t sure she had managed to leave a message at all; but a moment or two after she closed the connection, her phone began to ring. At the other end, someone said:
‘Yes? Who is this?’
Anna, for some reason imagining that Ruth had called back on a bad line, answered: ‘It’s Anna.’
‘Anna who?’
‘Ah,’ said Anna: ‘you’re Stella Herringe, aren’t you? I left a message on your answer machine—’
‘I’m aware of that, dear.’
‘I wasn’t sure it was recording.’
There was no reply to this.
‘Sorry,’ Anna said. ‘You must think I’m a complete fool.’ No reply to this, either. ‘I’m so sorry to bother you, but—’
‘These kittens. Are they female?’
Anna was puzzled. ‘Well, one of them is,’ she said. ‘The other female died. I don’t quite—’
‘And is it in good heart?’
‘They’re just not eating,’ said Anna. ‘That’s the problem.’
‘Have you tried a little Brand’s Essence?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know what that is.’
‘Hm. Look, this is rather a challenge for someone who’s never done it before.’
‘I’m sure they’d be fine,’ said Anna. ‘If I could get them to eat.’
‘To be honest, you’ve done marvellously well to keep them alive at all. Do you know what I think? I think you’ve done all you can do by yourself. Hand-rearing’s a bit of an art. Why don’t you bring them over to Nonesuch and let me try? Do you know Nonesuch? It’s the Tudor building on the left at the end of Allbright Lane.’
Anna couldn’t picture Allbright Lane. She tried to remember the village as it looked from up on the downs: nothing came to mind. Who was Stella Herringe? Anna couldn’t picture her, either – though now she remembered, from her walks in the churchyard, that Herringe was a notable local name. Relieved to share the problem but not quite ready to have it taken away in this manner, she found herself saying cautiously:
‘It’s very good of you to offer—’
‘That’s what we’re here for.’
‘—and I’m so glad to have someone to talk to. I’ve been ringing and ringing the local vet, but he doesn’t answer.’
There was a dry laugh at the other end. ‘Andy Corcoran drank himself to death two years ago. You won’t find a vet closer than Drychester now.’
‘Oh.’
‘You’d be better bringing them to me.’
‘Well,’ Anna began, ‘what I really wanted was advice—’
There was a silence.
‘That is my advice, dear,’ said Stella Herringe.
The silence drew out.
Into it, Stella Herringe said cheerfully: ‘They’ll be quite safe with me, and I’ll soon be able to give you an idea if they’re worth continuing with. Bring them over. Or if you haven’t any transport I can get someone to collect them. Now, let’s see: where are you?’
Where was she indeed? Outside, grey cumulus clouds lowered over the downs. The wind flung a handful of hail against the windows. Anna could see it bouncing and leaping like a lot of white insects on the hard earth between the rose bushes. Chilled without knowing why, the kittens mewed and clung to one another in their box. Her heart went out to them. It would be such a relief to have them properly looked after. But I promised their mother, Anna thought. She brought them to me. It was me she trusted. I can’t go back on that.
‘Are you there?’ said the voice on the phone.
‘I think I’ll keep them for now,’ said Anna.
‘Do remember that they’re little live things,’ said Stella Herringe, ‘and not just a problem to solve.’ Her voice, coming and going on the undependable connection, had a strange effect, pleasant enough, often rather reassuring, but at the same time clipped and practical. It was the voice of a woman who, after years of work on behalf of others, has grown used to having her good sense recognised. ‘Whatever you do, don’t let stubbornness get in the way.’
Anna could make nothing of this. ‘Well, I think I’ll have another try,’ she said.
‘Suit yourself.’
There was a clatter at the other end. Stella Herringe had rung off.
Anna stared out at the weather. For the rest of the afternoon she battled with the kittens, wondering every so often why Stella Herringe had made her feel so nervous. People who pride themselves on their practicality often seem rather too interested in taking charge. I shouldn’t have let that rub me up the wrong way, Anna admitted, but really I don’t think her manner bothered me as much as... well, what? In the end, she thought, the phone call itself was what remained puzzling. How had Stella Herringe managed to ring back so quickly? Had she been monitoring Anna’s call all along? Anna thought she had. It was hard to get rid of an image of this bossy old lady leaning over her ancient answer-phone, quietly listening to someone else’s struggles on the tinny loudspeaker and doing nothing to help. It made Anna shiver with embarrassment. To take her mind off it, she told the kittens sternly:
‘Now. We’re going to try formula this time, and you are jolly well going to eat some. See? You like it! Oh dear.’
*
By late afternoon the battle was lost. The kittens had ceased to respond to the eye-dropper. Their cries diminished and then died away altogether. Anna switched off the computer, moved the cardboard box into the kitchen and tried everything, from cold chicken stock to Marmite in warm water. Nothing raised their heads. Little faces set grimly, they curled up tight into one another and every so often a single shiver went through them, as if they were one organism. They had decided not to accept the world. They were prepared to wait it out, in mourning for the one thing they could never have again. Anna gave them her hand to cuddle against, and waited for them to die. Then she lost her temper with herself and tried goat’s milk again. She renewed their hot water bottle. At five o’clock, she picked up the phone for the first time, putting it down immediately. Over the next ten minutes, she picked it up and put it down four times. She stared out of the kitchen window at the damp, hard earth around the rose bushes, wiped her eyes impatiently and asked herself, ‘What does it matter if I liked her or not? I just don’t know enough to help them. I have to admit it.’ She dialled the number quickly, so there wouldn’t be an opportunity to change her mind. Every time she looked at the kittens she started to cry again.
‘Oh dear,’ she told them. ‘This is no good.’ Then: ‘You’ll be better off with her and I suppose I’ll never see you again.’
But things didn’t work out that way. At Stella Herringe’s house, the machine was switched off and no one was answering the phone. It had been ringing emptily for some minutes when Anna looked out of the kitchen window and thought she saw two animals running down the garden towards her in the rain and failing light.