What my grandfather had claimed was quite true, as I was to discover.
All the way home I had to stop to relieve myself. I urinated like a kitten, squatting ignominiously behind tufts of grass and stumps of trees, rather than the energetic way that Hawkweed rid himself of his water, with a contemptuous lift of the tail and a powerful jet of evil-smelling liquid. (This was a gift of which I was mightily jealous at the time; though when I was eventually to master the skill, I would find it brought me only difficulty and misunderstanding.)
I had never urinated so often or so copiously in all my young life, and with each embarrassing call of nature, I became more and more convinced that soon I would dry up entirely and shrivel away to nothing, and that my grandfather had laid some sort of terrible curse on me by means of the yellow flower. But when I unburdened my troubled soul to Dellifer later that night she just laughed.
‘Poor little puffball! He’s certainly got unorthodox teaching style, your grandfather. But Mouse-ear won’t do you any harm, Orlando, my dear. In fact it’s just what you need for your trade.’
I had no idea what she meant.
*
Anna watched Orlando squatting in the flowerbed.
‘Oi!’ she called. She tapped the window. He looked up, then guiltily away. A moment later he and the old cat burst into the kitchen and promptly had a disagreement about who sat by the Aga. ‘Less of that,’ she warned them. She fed Orlando, offering some to the tortoiseshell who as usual turned his nose up at it. ‘What’s your game?’ she mused, blocking the way as he tried to leave. ‘What do you two get up to out there?’
He walked round her without a glance.
She was still puzzled by him. She had enquired in the village, she had enquired in the Green Man. Oh yes, they said, he was a fixture. Everyone knew him, no one owned him. But Anna had noticed he always left the garden in the same direction, diagonally over the pasture and into the trees; so, that evening, with the low sunlight slanting through the rough grass, she set out to see where he went. His walk was a kind of rangy leonine amble. He knew quite well she was there. Once or twice he looked back at her, his fixed grin white in the complex shadows of his face. Reaching the edge of the pasture, he broke into an unhurried trot and disappeared into the rougher country beyond as suddenly as if he had fallen down a hole.
‘Damn,’ said Anna.
Right and left stretched an ancient hawthorn hedge, set in a steep-sided trough dense with nettle and dog rose. Perfect territory for cats, less so for someone wearing a cotton frock. Feeling as if the whole place was on his side – that he was in there somewhere laughing at her – she pushed through quickly and found herself in a green lane thick with wild garlic and sycamore saplings. Light fell, the colour of the old cat’s eyes, across the central strip of rabbit-cropped turf. He was making off again, tail high, as Anna emerged from the hedge. She smiled to herself. He had forgotten she was there. Thereafter she followed at a relaxed distance while the lane took charge of them both, making its way up a wooded rise then down the other side, turning all the time towards the common, on the other side of which it encountered the nut-brown water of Brindley’s canal and was lifted up briefly by a little red-brick bridge before wandering off to Drychester through low-lying fields. The old cat crossed the bridge, paused for a second to look around, then darted through the greying bars of an old wooden gate and jumped down on to the towpath, where perhaps a dozen narrowboats were tied up nose to tail.
*
Most of them had wintered badly. They were low in the water, with a list to one side or the other, and their once-cheerful colours, sandpapered by the cold downland winds, had a faded velvety look in the evening sunshine. Some had never been more than reclamation projects anyway, springlined loosely to the bank, their leaky decks and roofs cluttered with tins of paint, engine parts, bits and pieces of indeterminate use wrapped up in heavy plastic sheeting; grass had grown up around their mooring pins. Others, caught perfectly between conversion and decline, lay on the water with the charm of an Edwardian music-hall artiste. Everywhere you looked there were rose-and-castle motifs applied in curlicued panels, pelargoniums in coloured tin water-jugs, dignified old bicycles propped up in cabin doorways. Anna leaned over the gate and sighed. It was all rather tranquil. The willow-lined canal curved gently south and west. Net curtains flapped at open brass portholes. The air was softened by the distant sound of church bells, the faint shouts of cricket practice on the green; while near at hand, a radio played light classical music. As she watched, the old cat made a long back, slipped under a pair of mooring ropes, then sprang on to the deck of the Magpie – a seventy-foot narrowboat with battered strakes and upperwork faded to a kind of dusty terracotta – where he greeted its owner, and, after some head-rubbing and light cuffing, was given what looked like a fish.
‘Well well,’ whispered Anna. ‘So this is where you belong.’
She climbed the gate and made her way down to the towpath. There, realising she was being watched by the owner of the Magpie, and seized by a sudden shyness, she dawdled along with folded arms until she drifted to a stop. All she could think of to say was:
‘Is that your cat?’
The sun went in. Chilly airs ruffled the water. The cat looked up from his efforts – eating was a noisy and difficult process for him – and fixed her with knowing yellow eyes. Taking his dinner carefully in the good side of his mouth, he jumped off the Magpie, trotted a few yards down the towpath and disappeared into a hawthorn hedge. This left Anna uncompromisingly eye to eye with the man on deck. He was older than her – perhaps, she thought, in his early forties. Though slight, he had a compact look. Soft, longish black hair swept back from his forehead. His clothes – grey Levis and a black cotton sweater worn with the sleeves pushed up above the elbows – made him seem slighter than he was. His forearms were cabled and strong, very brown – tanned, Anna thought, not by holidays but by real time spent in the outdoors. He was very attractive. He had a book in one hand. Anna recognised nothing about him, nevertheless she felt a sudden, vertiginous rush of excitement, combined with a sharp certainty that she had seen him before. She couldn’t explain it. The way he stood, perhaps, reminded her of someone she had once known. And yet he was more familiar than that.
‘No,’ he said. His voice was deep and rusty, as if he didn’t use it much. He returned her gaze for a moment then added, ‘No one ever owns a cat,’ and went below.
Anna felt deflated. She stood on the towpath and folded her arms against the cold breeze. ‘How rude,’ she said loudly.
*
Later that evening, over a Bloody Mary at the Green Man, she was forced to admit to Alice: ‘I was so angry I just stood there. I got thoroughly cold but he didn’t come out again.’ She laughed. ‘I mean, it was so absurd,’ she said.
She lowered her voice to approximate his. “‘No one ever owns a cat.” What does that mean? And this ridiculous silver earring.’ She thought for a moment. ‘And those big hands,’ she added.
‘Oh, you noticed them, did you?’ said Alice.
‘It was absurd,’ Anna said again. ‘I just stood there like a fool and let him be rude to me.’
‘He’s more shy than rude,’ was Alice’s judgement.
‘You know him then?’
Alice ducked below the bar to fetch up a rack of clean glasses. ‘His name’s John Dawe,’ she said.
‘And?’ said Anna.
‘No “and” about it,’ Alice said. She bent down again, coming up empty-handed this time to complain obscurely, ‘The state they leave these things in,’ and wipe her hands on a towel. ‘This place is a tip!’ she shouted into the back bar. There was no answer.
‘So,’ said Anna. ‘He’s John Dawe, he lives on a barge.’
‘That’s about it—’
‘This is like getting blood out of a stone.’
‘—except that they’re narrowboats down there, all of them. Cut’s not wide enough for a barge. You don’t want to let anyone down there hear you call them barges.’
‘Alice!’
‘Well what do you want me to say?’ said Alice. ‘Everyone knows him. He’s lived on the Magpie at least since I was a kiddie.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Maybe longer. A bit of a mystery-man, John Dawe,’ she mused, ‘nice as he is. He’s related to the Herringes, but no one’s quite sure how he makes a living.’ Then, in a more business-like voice: ‘He comes and goes. He’s up at the hall now and then. Or she’s down at the boat.’
‘Who?’
‘Stella. Stella Herringe.’
‘He’s welcome to her,’ said Anna, remembering the bossy old voice on the phone.
‘Oh he is, is he?’
‘In fact they’re welcome to each other.’
Alice giggled. ‘John Dawe,’ she said. ‘I’d pay to have those hands on me.’
‘Alice!’
‘Well, wouldn’t you?’
‘He’s a bit scruffy for my taste,’ said Anna dismissively, while some renegade part of her thought: But his eyes were so beautiful—
‘Stella’s his cousin,’ said Alice.
‘She’s a bit old to be that,’ said Anna. ‘Surely.’
For some reason she dreamt of Max again that night. It was the first time in some weeks. They were in the bedroom of the London house, and he was saying in that amused and infinitely gentle way he had, ‘But Anna, you don’t need me, you really don’t,’ as he packed his clothes with less fuss than if he’d been off on tour. The dream had a heartless clarity, an awful sense of foreboding, as if she was just discovering a loss which had already happened, which nothing could prevent – as, indeed, she was.