There was a knock on the door next morning and it was Alice, with her motorcycle helmet in one hand and a bottle of red-top milk in the other.
‘Delivery for you,’ she said.
‘You look tired,’ said Anna. ‘Come in and have some coffee.’
‘I don’t mind,’ said Alice.
She was wearing jeans, and an ancient fleece-lined leather flying jacket over a Norwegian thermal vest. All these items had seen better days; someone had once tried to paint the flying jacket silver. Alice clumped through the cottage in her heavily buckled black boots, saying things like, ‘That’s nice, I always liked dried flowers when I was a kiddie,’ and, ‘I remember when this place belonged to old Arthur Dowden.’ And then, ‘Oh look!’ She had found Vita.
‘Try not to step on her,’ said Anna.
‘I’m used to animals. My sister’s got two ornamental goats, a hamster, and her bloke’s ferret. They used to keep rabbits as well.’ Then she added, without a pause but as if in brackets, ‘Oh, and they’ve got two boys, eight and nine.’
‘Can a goat ever be ornamental?’
They sat on kitchen chairs pulled up to the Aga, drinking milky coffee while Anna first ate toast and marmalade then decided to poach an egg. ‘My gran always coddled them,’ said Alice. ‘She preferred that to poached. Look! Look at this!’ Clinging grimly to Alice’s hand with her front paws. Vita had allowed herself to be lifted high in the air. She enjoyed it to begin with, then looked down and became thoughtful; while her foster-mother watched with anxious eyes, and Orlando tried to get at the butter.
‘So,’ said Alice, when Anna had finished her egg. ‘What happened last night? What was all that about?’
‘Let’s put more coffee on,’ said Anna, who would have been happy not to think about those events, let alone talk about them. She was still horrified by her own contribution. Her whole life, from childhood to university to TransCorp, had been a search for balance, decency, a quiet control over emotional events. It wasn’t just that she now failed to understand her own actions – much more frighteningly, it was that she hardly knew the Anna who carried them out.
‘I had Stella Herringe asking who you were.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘She was furious about her car.’
Anna shrugged. She didn’t want to have to explain what had happened in the rain outside the Green Man – let alone afterwards – so all she said was:
‘I’m not to blame for that.’
‘Oh, she knows who did it,’ Alice said. ‘He’s always had a temper on him, that one. They’ve been at one another for years. No, I think she was just fascinated by you.’
Anna shivered.
‘What’s up?’
‘I don’t know. Something walked over my grave.’
In fact she had experienced a clear, filmic memory of herself standing on the towpath by the Magpie, water streaming down her face as if she was made of stone. She had no explanation of her own actions, much less those of John Dawe or Stella Herringe. The last thought that had come to her before she slept was, I mustn’t get mixed up with those two and their quarrels. Alice’s opinion, it turned out, was very much the same.
‘You don’t want to take it to heart,’ she said. ‘What her and her cousin do is their business. Let them get on with it.’
Anna, who felt like hugging her for the common sense of this, offered her the coffee pot instead.
‘No thanks,’ said Alice.
‘I don’t really know why I made such a fuss.’
‘Not to worry,’ Alice said equably. She put Vita down, then removed Orlando from the butter dish and tickled him under the chin as he struggled. ‘Gave everyone a laugh, anyway.’ She stood up and stretched, revealing the safety pin that held up her jeans. ‘Fancy a ride on the bike?’ she invited. ‘No. I can see you don’t.’
Orlando followed her to the front door, trying to capture the buckles of her boots.
*
The weather stayed unseasonally bad. Lenses of low pressure passed over the village as regularly as jets at an airport, bringing strong winds, rain, even a little sleet: between showers the sky was high and pale, with a ceramic sheen and torn strips of cloud high up. Anna couldn’t settle, so she cleaned the cottage from top to bottom. The cats, who were refusing to go out until the weather improved, hated the disturbance: as soon as they heard water pouring into a bucket or smelled furniture polish, they went to ground in the airing cupboard. Two hours later they crept out with the body language of the violated, sniffed everything as if it was brand-new and cheap, looked at the vacuum cleaner like dirt, then, fastidious and energetic, made copious use of the cat-litter so things smelled like home again.
‘I don’t care what you think,’ Anna told them. ‘It’s my house.’
Two or three days of this, and she was as restless as Orlando. She switched the radio from station to station. She tried to read a book. She stared out of one window or another at the soaking garden, and for the first time found herself remembering nostalgically the little bars and cafes of central London. ‘Well,’ she reminded herself fractiously, ‘you live in the country now.’ But she wanted to shop. She wanted an almond croissant and a decent cup of coffee. In a gap between downpours she caught the morning bus into Drychester. If nothing else, she wanted to see what the kittens would do if she brought them back half a pound of whitebait.
Built on an eleventh-century lime-burning site, in a cup of the downs where they curved north and east. Drychester had made its fortune during the late 1500s, from wool, mutton, and a distinctive local stone much in demand by the country-house builders of the Tudor boom. Thereafter it had dozed like a woodcutter in a charmed sleep until the railway woke it and reinvented it as a modestly popular Victorian spa. Now, like many an old market town on the cusp of the new century, it was busily turning itself into a centre for weekend leisure and heritage tourism, aided by the presence of Cistercian ruins, a network of gentle, engaging downland walks, and the railway station with its original cast-iron pillars and lamp-standards. A row of Tudor cottages hosted the different departments of the local history museum; a Queen Anne house the tourist information centre: while the old Shambles had become an extensive souk-like warren of little one-room shops selling everything from ‘modem antiques’ to speciality foods; a packet of Edwardian letters tied with faded purple ribbon, to half a pound of coffee ground for cafetière—
‘What was that, love, cafetière?’
‘Yes.’
‘Half a pound?’
‘Yes.’
‘Costa Rica?’
‘Yes please.’
On a wet day in Drychester everyone pressed into the Shambles to avoid the rain, filling its alleys with damp camel-hair and partly folded umbrellas. By twelve-thirty Anna was tired of shouting to make herself heard. She had bought the whitebait, and seen enough shellac records, 1920s cigarette cases and Festival of Britain tea services to last a lifetime, but wasn’t quite ready to eat lunch. Standing in the Shambles bookshop leafing through a volume called Canals and Narrowboats of Today, she smelled scent – something subtle, expressive, musky, something hard to come by, Anna thought, even if you could afford it – and heard a voice say:
‘It’s Anna Prescott, isn’t it? Whatever happened to those kittens, dear? Come and have some lunch, and tell me about them.’
It was Stella Herringe.
‘Well,’ said Anna, ‘that’s very kind of you, but—’
Ten minutes later they were facing one another across a table at Fletcher’s, waiting for soup and filled croissants and – to Anna’s dismay – calling each other by their first names. Stella Herringe settled herself and her shopping, treated Anna to an ironical but somehow satisfied smile, and then leaned forward to whisper, ‘All these Jaeger jackets and Scotch House skirts! Very countrified. Very Drychester.’ Anna, though she laughed and felt included, was suddenly aware of her own Barbour jacket and Levis. She said rather shyly:
‘You look more like Manhattan than Drychester.’
Stella received the tribute with a curious mixture of complacency and mischievousness. She looked down at herself, then back up at Anna, tilting her head exactly the way she had done for her admirers in the Green Man. ‘Donna Karan,’ she said. ‘Middle-aged but elegant. And exactly ten years younger than I ought to be wearing. I’m mutton dressed as lamb, dear, but I suppose you’ve already guessed that.’
She reached out suddenly and touched Anna’s cheek. ‘You should take care of that skin,’ she said. ‘I can recommend something.’
Anna was surprised and irritated by the intimacy of this gesture, disturbed by the dry, warm pressure of her companion’s fingertips. She looked away deliberately across the steamy room, at the chattering seated women and hard-pressed waitresses, and only after she was certain Stella Herringe had lowered her hand, said, ‘I think we’re going to have a bit of a wait.’
Stella consulted her watch. She lit a cigarette – glancing ruefully at Anna as if to say, ‘I know, I know. But what can I do?’ – and called for an ashtray.
‘And the kittens?’ she said.
‘I lost one. Along with the mother, of course, but you knew that. The other two are doing beautifully.’
‘Oh good,’ said Stella. She drew on her cigarette. ‘You seem to have managed rather well without me,’ she acknowledged.
Anna was unsure how to respond. Even if she had felt like taking Stella Herringe into her confidence, it would have been impossible: she couldn’t begin to explain the unlikely circumstances in which her difficulties had been solved. So after some thought she decided to lie.
‘I was grateful for your offer, of course. But I got them to accept baby formula in the end.’
‘Good for you!’
‘They’re quite grown up now. Real little nuisances.’
‘If they’re a nuisance I could take the female off your hands as soon as she’s mature. The male would be harder to accommodate. We might have to make other arrangements for him—’
‘No, no!’ interrupted Anna, appalled. ‘I didn’t mean that.’
Stella Herringe seemed to lose interest. She stubbed out her cigarette.
‘They’re just lively kittens,’ said Anna. ‘That’s all.’
‘Well, dear, just remember I’m here.’
Shortly afterwards, lunch arrived. Stella had barely glanced at the menu when it was offered to her. Now she said, ‘Ah, food!’ and concentrated her attention so thoroughly that Anna felt snubbed. Stella ate with the appetite of eighteen years and the fastidiousness of fifty, taking small, quick, regular mouthfuls and dispatching them easily with her white teeth. Her eyes, unfocused, seemed to look inward. She addressed herself to her plate for some moments without saying anything, then, indicating the remains of her croissant with her fork, enquired. ‘Would it be wrong of me to order another of these?’
Anna said faintly: ‘They are nice, aren’t they?’
‘I think I’ll have a parmesan salad as well,’ Stella informed the waitress. ‘I love food,’ she said to Alice. ‘Don’t you?’
Some minutes later she was wiping her mouth on her serviette (‘What we’re taught to call a “napkin” in nice houses’), lighting another cigarette and suggesting, ‘My car’s not far from here. Why don’t I drive you home?’
‘Oh,’ said Anna, ‘no, thank you, but I—’
‘Even better, let’s go and have a look at these naughty kittens of yours, then I’ll take you over to Nonesuch for tea. Mm?’
‘I really shouldn’t,’ said Anna.
Somehow though she found herself sitting in the big grey Mercedes with its tranquil, cosseting interior, watching the hedgerows stream by on either side and – caught out so soon in a lie – wondering how she would explain Dellifer’s presence to Stella Herringe. The sun had emerged from between sailing cumulus clouds in a scoured blue sky; the hawthorn leaves were bright fresh green. Stella drove well, if a little impatiently, ignoring the glitter of water on the road. She had a brusque way with comers, Anna noticed, as if she suspected their right to be there. While she drove, she liked to chat; and now that she had what she wanted where the kittens were concerned, she seemed less interested in them than in Anna. Without quite intending to, Anna passed from the guarded (‘I suppose I’m just like anyone else, really’) to the candid, providing details of her childhood in Warwickshire and Croydon, undergraduate life at University College, the beginnings of a career in banking and finance during the great stock market panics of the late eighties. But though Stella’s curiosity was fierce, and she was good at listening and nodding, and saying things like, ‘How extraordinary!’ it was clear that none of this interested her in the slightest.
‘What about men, dear?’ she said eventually, with a kind of plaintive exasperation. ‘It’s no life without men.’
Anna drew the line at this, and – aware of the irony – returned as soon as possible to the subject of the kittens, which, though it had its pitfalls, seemed less invasive. ‘I still feel sorry for their mother,’ she said. Then, casting around for something to add: ‘After I buried her and the dead kitten, some animal came and dug them up. It was horrible.’
Stella Herringe patted her arm. ‘Don’t talk about death, dear,’ she advised. ‘People hate it.’ Then she said: ‘What’s all this I hear about you and John?’
Anna stared miserably out of the car. Any answer at all would mean acknowledging what had happened in the Green Man, establishing a link between her life and Stella Herringe’s. It would mean – as she put it to herself – ‘letting Stella in’.
‘I thought he had been rude to me,’ she said. ‘But it turns out that he’s just rather shy.’
Stella Herringe gave a shout of delighted laughter. ‘Where on earth did you hear that?’
Anna, who had anticipated almost every reaction but this, blinked. She wasn’t sure whether to feel relieved or angry. She had chosen the latter and was beginning to say, in the frostiest voice she could muster, ‘I’m sorry?’ when the sound of a mobile phone filled the interior of the Mercedes.
‘That’s mine, I think,’ said Stella.
‘It could hardly be mine,’ said Anna, who had left hers behind with a sigh of relief when she left TransCorp.
Still laughing, Stella Herringe mauled her handbag about with one hand until she found the phone and, without driving the slightest bit slower, began to talk into it. After a moment or two she stopped laughing, and her voice became dangerously calm. ‘Tell him he’d bloody well better get a move on,’ she said. Then: ‘I don’t care. I don’t care what his problems are. I asked him if he could sign by the end of the month and he said yes.’ And finally: ‘Look, dear, this is what I pay you for.’ She studied her little Cartier watch. ‘I’ll be at Nonesuch all afternoon. About five minutes. Good. No.’ And she rang off. ‘I’m sorry,’ she told Anna, ‘but we’re going to have to give the kittens a miss.’
This time, Anna felt only relief. ‘Just drop me in the village,’ she said. ‘Anywhere will do.’
‘No, no. I want you to see my house!’ insisted Stella.
She seemed distracted, though. She drove much faster; and about John Dawe nothing more was said.
*
Though the great house at Nonesuch was Tudor in origin – having been started from scratch in late 1482 by Joshua Hering, a Norfolk merchant who had made his fortune in and about the Mediterranean by way of enterprises described at the time as ‘diverse’ – it had been remodelled to suit the taste of successive occupants. Anna’s first view of it was from the south, from which aspect the tall ranked windows of the Jacobean front (added in 1621 by Sir John Herringe, a nephew of Joshua’s successor and the first to adopt the modern spelling of the family name) rose out of the surrounding gardens like something from a TV historical drama.
Nonesuch – known until the end of the sixteenth century as ‘the New Build’ – lay in the shelter of a shallow, wooded valley a little east of Ashmore village. One glimpse of the south front was enough for Anna to recognise a certain false modesty in Stella’s original description of the house as ‘the Tudor building on the left at the end of Allbright Lane’. It was rather more than that. Its convoluted design – carried out in Drychester stone and a delicious warm red brick and based, the story went, on a stylisation of Joshua Hering’s initials – made for curious perspectives and a crowded roofline rendered more fantastic by Flemish gables and groups of tall octagonal chimneys. The viewer’s eye was always uncertain about Nonesuch – after a visit people were never really able to reconstruct its shape. The grounds were hardly less complex – hidden lawns and terraces, labyrinths of holly, fantasias of box and yew enclosing potagers and rose gardens between which wound, like tangled ribbon, pathways of herringbone brick – a pun endlessly repeated to assuage Joshua’s Tudor ego.
Anna was entranced. ‘How beautiful!’ she said.
Afternoon light struck down on the Herringe arms, ochred with lichen, done in plaques on the gateposts. The Mercedes engine purred like a cat as it lifted them up the long rising drive which made its way between the gardens towards the great front doors.
‘You’re seeing it at its best, of course,’ said Stella.
*
Once inside, Anna fell into an expectant but dreamy state in which the building itself seemed to affect her mood. Why should she feel sad in the airy, sun-filled space of the Great Hall, yet laugh despite herself when she saw the dreary two-light windows of the crypt (retained from a structure that had stood on the site fully a hundred years before Joshua Hering’s time)? It was less the architectural features themselves that affected her than their juxtaposition. Nonesuch was a bizarre, mazy collision of styles and times, of corridors which had been turned into rooms, pantries which had been turned into stairwells, of solars and chapels and parlours. Every new addition or restoration or rationalisation was a few feet out-of-true with everything else.
‘Cross a threshold here,’ said Stella Herringe, ‘and you’ve moved two hundred years before you know it. Take care in that doorway, dear, there’s one more step than you’d expect.’
Anna stared up at a decorated ceiling. What kind of life had gone on beneath it?
‘Old houses always feel so inhabited,’ she said.
‘Do they, dear? I suppose they do.’
‘I would be overpowered by it,’ said Anna.
Stella considered this view briefly. ‘It’s very modern to try and live without the past,’ she concluded: ‘But that’s only a kind of repression, isn’t it?’ She seemed preoccupied. She hurried from room to room, moving off like an impatient tour guide the moment Anna caught up, and her voice was always echoing back from somewhere ahead.
Anna – disconcerted, and increasingly unsure whether Stella was talking to her or into the mobile phone which she kept shaking and pressing to her ear – struggled along behind, saying things like, ‘Amazing,’ and, ‘Oh, but that’s beautiful,’ and trying to keep track of their progress into the house. It was colder near the centre, she thought: or perhaps she had only expected that. Puzzled by the ups and downs of her own feelings, and defeated from the outset by the curves and re-entrants of Joshua Hering’s original ground plan, she soon felt completely lost.
‘I thought these Tudor places always had a courtyard in the middle,’ she said.
Stella ignored her. ‘Look, I can easily get someone else,’ she told the mobile phone: ‘If that’s what he wants.’ She listened with exaggerated patience for a moment, then took the phone away from her ear and stared at it. ‘Bloody things,’ she said to Anna. ‘You can’t do anything with them and you can’t do anything without them.’ Then she opened a door.
‘If you want a courtyard,’ she said, ‘have a look in there.’
Anna hesitated on the threshold, peering in. Light from a casement window fell across the blackened floorboards of a large, sparely furnished room, to reveal the mural painted directly on to the plaster of the opposite wall. It was the view across a cobbled courtyard to a glassed-in arcade below a timbered upper storey – the gables of which were carved with Tudor roses and fleur-de-lys – seen through the leaded panes of an oriel window. There were no figures in the composition, but a shadow behind the leaded glass of the arcade suggested that someone, perhaps a woman, had just entered there. The courtyard light had been painted to seem as if it was coming from every direction at once, as if the artist had been instructed to make an illusion that would work at any time of the day. This cleverness undercut its own success. For a second, your eye was willing to be deceived: then it shrugged and gave up, turning with relief to the real things in the room.
‘Go on,’ encouraged Stella. ‘You can go in and look.’
Anna entered reluctantly.
‘Trompe l’œil,’ said Stella proudly, tapping the plaster with her knuckles to produce a hollow sound. ‘Put in by the Haut-Herringes a couple of centuries ago. The original wall’s behind it, complete with the Elizabethan window through which you could once look down into the real courtyard. They loved a joke in those days, they loved to be clever.’ She stood away a little and waited for Anna to say something. Anna – partly to get her own back for the jibe about history and repression, and partly because she couldn’t see how anyone had ever been fooled by the painting – laughed and said:
‘I suppose they did. It seems rather naïve now.’
‘Don’t be too sure about that.’
Anna said, ‘Oh, but look out of this window!’
She flung the old lights open and leaned out, to discover herself high on the east front. Long terraced lawns stretched away, broken here and there by groups of cedar trees and leaden statuary. From somewhere closer to came a smell of thyme and lavender, the sound of early insects bumbling through the grass. A breeze idly moved the tops of the great cedars, then went on to ruffle the beechwoods on the rise a quarter of a mile behind the house. Anna, standing in a kind of shocked delight at the window, said, ‘I’ve seen this view before, I’m sure I have,’ and then, laughing: ‘But as soon as I think about it I know I haven’t. Because I’ve never seen anything so beautiful in my life. Déjà vu.’
Then she said: ‘If the courtyard really is back there, the house is only one room thick.’
Stella gave her a considering glance. ‘Be careful at that casement, dear,’ she warned. ‘It isn’t just the plaster that’s unsound.’
Anna shut the window. ‘Déjà vu,’ she whispered again.
Stella Herringe was waiting a little way along the dimly lit passage outside. Anna surprised her in a moment of respite, leaning against the wall holding her mobile phone laxly by her side and staring into the air in front of her. With no one to impress or dominate, she had allowed a vacant expression to creep on to her face, where it settled down to loosen the muscles, slacken the skin, accentuate a fold here, a gauntness there, until she looked all of her fifty years. On the oak panelling above her head hung a small, dark oil painting in a heavy frame from which most of the gold leaf was missing. It was clearly a portrait of one of her own ancestors, a woman two decades younger than Stella – lazy, used to power, wearing pearls and a tight brocade bodice – whose unbound black hair framed the same perfect bone structure. She was seated, and staring out boldly at the portraitist. One hand held the neck of a stringed instrument; the other was folded across it. They were strong hands, and her blue eyes were blank with greed.
Stella chuckled. ‘Clara de Montfort,’ she said, ‘just after she married Joshua’s grandson Edward in 1573,’ She tilted her head. ‘We’re supposed to look rather alike. What do you think?’ Anna thought the similarity shocking. Except for the difference in age, they might have been the same woman. But suspecting that Stella already knew this, she said only:
‘I can see the family resemblance.’
‘Ah,’ said Stella. ‘The family resemblance.’
She looked down at the mobile phone in her hand as if she had forgotten what it was for. ‘She was a woman of great self-knowledge, that one.’ A green light had begun to blink on the keypad of the phone. She touched it experimentally with the tip of her index finger. ‘Great self-knowledge,’ she repeated.
Suddenly she shrugged. ‘The whole place is falling down round our ears, of course. Nobody’s lived in more than a couple of rooms of it since the Second World War. I’ve had rather a nice little flat made at the back, where the north-east corridor used to be. Let’s go and have some tea.’
*
Stella’s apartment had an immaculate air, as if it was still waiting for someone to move in. Designed less as a home than as a ‘living space’, it featured spare, uncluttered white walls, furniture and fittings of stainless steel, polished hardwood floors. It was full of light. Ranked halogen lamps chased the shadows from a kitchen equipped with an eight-hob professional range and Westinghouse refrigerator; from a tiny bathroom with elegant shelves and a Japanese tub. Even the etched-glass risers of the staircase were side-lit, to bring out designs of stylised cats and herbs. Look beyond the untreated linen blinds, Anna thought, and you might be in Docklands or Clerkenwell: anywhere but Nonesuch. At first it seemed like an insult to the past. Yet in a sense Stella was only continuing the tradition of the English country house: like every Herringe before her, she had added to the building according to the fads and styles of her time.
As soon as the door of the flat closed behind her, she revived a little. ‘Don’t tell me,’ she said, amused by Anna’s expression. ‘You think it looks like the lighting department at Heal’s.’
‘It’s quite a surprise.’
‘That’s what I told the architect,’ said Stella. She lit a cigarette. ‘Now,’ she said: ‘Tea!’ She looked vaguely around the kitchen, as if uncertain where to start.
‘Shall I put the kettle on?’ Anna suggested.
‘Oh god, dear, not for me. I was wondering where I’d left the gin.’
‘Well I’d like some tea.’
‘Help yourself to whatever you want,’ said Stella. ‘I won’t be a moment.’ Soon she could be heard pottering about in the bathroom. There was a sound of running water, the faint click of small items being taken down, rejected, replaced on the shelves.
Left to herself Anna opened and closed a drawer, turned on the water at the deep hospital-style sink. Ten or fifteen minutes passed. The kettle boiled. Anna poked around in the galvanised steel cupboards, where she found catering packs of Earl Grey tea and digestive biscuits, both unopened. She found several bottles of gin.
Everything’s so clean, she thought. How nice to live so well.
When Stella returned, she looked ready for anything. Her green eyes were bright and clear, her skin seemed to have firmed up. She mixed herself a gin and tonic, sat down at the table and began to talk animatedly.
‘Cosmetics!’ she said. ‘What would we do without them?’
‘Surely not,’ said Anna. ‘I mean, you look—’
‘Don’t be fooled, dear. This is some of the most exclusive stuff in the world. If you could see it, I wouldn’t wear it.’ She sighed, and in a different voice complained, ‘Women tend their fears with an intelligence that only ever makes them worse. We stand in terror of ageing, the loss of sexual attraction which is the loss of power, the loss of everything that makes a woman.’ She leaned over quickly, captured Anna’s hand, and passed her fingers lightly and rapidly across the skin of the inner wrist.
‘Are you afraid yet?’ she asked.
Anna pulled her hand away. ‘Afraid of what?’
‘How old are you, dear? Thirty-five? Thirty-seven?’
‘I—’
‘Sit there!’ said Stella. ‘Don’t move!’
A moment later she was back again.
‘It’s never too early to start,’ she said. ‘And this will really help.’
On the table between them she placed a pot of skin cream no more than an inch or two in diameter, beautifully packaged in a cool grey and pink carton. Anna, who had never in her life imagined herself buying anything similar, looked at it uncertainly. She wanted to laugh, but she knew what a mistake that would be. Instead, she began with care:
‘I recognise the brand, of course. Who wouldn’t? But I don’t usually use—’
‘I promise you, dear,’ interrupted Stella Herringe, ‘that it works.’
Anna gave up. ‘It looks wonderfully expensive.’
‘Doesn’t it?’ agreed Stella. ‘Nevertheless,’ she said, ‘you’re to have it.’ She picked the little carton up again and folded the fingers of Anna’s right hand round it, then, satisfied that Anna had accepted the gift, looked at her watch. ‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if you’d mind finding your own way home?’
‘Of course not,’ said Anna. ‘It’s such a lovely day—’
‘Isn’t it?’ said Stella. ‘Let me walk you back through the house.’
They stood for a moment on the steps outside the great door. The breeze had dropped. Afternoon light glittered off Stella Herringe’s car. There was a sense of the space and heat of a summer evening, a kind of heavy softness of the air beneath the great cedars. Anna – who had in fact minded being asked to ‘find her own way home’ – was delighted all over again, and felt better immediately. The grounds of a Tudor mansion! Impulsively she took Stella’s hands. ‘It was very kind of you to invite me,’ she said, thinking how much she would enjoy the walk down through the gardens. ‘It’s such a lovely place.’
She laughed.
‘The only thing is, I expected there to be cats everywhere! After all, you’re so interested in them.’ She remembered something she had intended to mention over tea. ‘I did hear just the one, when we were in the room with the mural.’
‘I doubt it, dear. They never come in the house.’
‘It was quite distant, but I’m sure it was a cat.’
Stella’s face was suddenly expressionless. ‘I never allow them in,’ she insisted. ‘It doesn’t do, does it, to get too fond of them?’
Unable to respond to this (unable, too, to give the other response Stella wanted, ‘I suppose I must have been mistaken...’), Anna felt she had become invisible, enabling Stella to look straight through her at the lawns and cedars, the driveway descending in its shallow, elegant curves towards the road. There was a moment of uncomfortable silence.
‘Anyway,’ Anna said. ‘Thank you for tea.’
‘You must come again,’ said Stella.
Then she tilted her head as if to listen, twisting her body at its neat girlish waist to stare back into the shadows of Nonesuch.
‘I think that’s my phone,’ she said. ‘Excuse me.’
*
That evening, not altogether expecting an answer, Anna asked Ruth Canning: ‘What could I say?’
‘What indeed?’ said Ruth, in the voice of someone who had called up in the hope of more interesting gossip.
‘I knew I’d heard a cat. She knew too.’
‘As she said, it may not have been inside the house. In my day, most of the AWC people had outdoor catteries. That was one of the big costs.’
‘But if you love cats—’
‘I’m not sure “love” is the right word here,’ said Ruth. ‘When you do rescue work, the animals you’re taking care of are strays, or ferals, or discards. They’re old, sick, difficult. They might have to be put down. You can’t afford to get attached to them, and you don’t mix them up with your pets. A lot of these old dears have learned the hard way. They take a witheringly practical approach.’
‘Old dears?’ said Anna. ‘Ruth, that’s another thing. She might be fifty, but she looks like the cover of this month’s Vogue. As for the cosmetics. I’ve never seen anything like them. She’s given me something that must have cost a hundred pounds a gram. I’ve only ever seen it in places like Harvey Nichols. I couldn’t afford it even when I worked for the bank.’
‘Ah,’ said Ruth. ‘I think I can help you there. Speaking of money and banks.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Do you remember me saying I thought I knew the name Herringe? Well I did, but I couldn’t remember where from. It nagged and nagged – especially the AWC connection. There’s only one thing I know about, and that’s the City: so I went back through some of my old stuff. Sure enough, Herringe was a name that had cropped up more than once when I was researching articles on City institutions. There were a couple of Herringes on the boards of things, so I had another look, to see what I could see.’ Moving from the Internet to Companies House, then back to the Internet again, Ruth had tracked the Herringe footprint through a bewildering web of holding companies, trust funds and offshore havens. It seemed to multiply endlessly, glimmering in the data like a seam of metal, associated with everything from petrochemicals to agribusiness. ‘They aren’t ICI, but they aren’t poor either. They’re in the Third World, they’re in the First. Most of all, they’re in money.’
‘If they were in money I’d have heard of them,’ said Anna.
Ruth thought this naïve. ‘Who knows who runs anything?’ she asked. ‘A name slips away so easily into the cracks. After that it’s proxy-directors, offshore operations, whole concerns run from a site on the Web or an address in some East-Asian office block. It spreads across the world until, somehow, the connections between companies become more important than the companies themselves. You’d find nothing unless you knew where to look.’
She paused, as if to order her thoughts.
‘I’m not sure I should have put it quite like this. They’re not hiding or anything. This is just the way business is done today. You know that as well as I do. Nothing’s “above board” because there isn’t a board any more – if there ever was.’
‘Don’t be coy, Ruth.’
‘Hm. OK. Stella is both trustee and recipient of family money – not all of it by any means. But she’s used it well. She has her own business interests too, and—’
‘—one of them is a cosmetics manufacturer!’
‘Exactly,’ said Ruth. ‘Engelion pic. Quite small, but very successful. Registered thirty years ago, with offices in Hoxton, although it appears to have led one or two lives before that, first as a wholesale fashion house, and then, weirdly enough, a firm of chemical engineers. To be honest, I got lost trying to follow it back. That’s not my skill, of course, the bigger Herringe companies are fabulously old. You can trace them quite easily, all the way back to the 1600s and the beginnings of coffee-house capitalism.’ She laughed. ‘God knows what they did with their money before that.’
Anna thought of Nonesuch, with its entangled passageways and ancient cedars. They built houses with it, she said to herself. Or one house, anyway. And then, out loud, remembering the ‘diverse enterprises’ on which Joshua Hering had based his fortune: ‘Nothing changes, does it?’
‘Are you OK, Anna?’ said Ruth.
‘Of course I am.’
They talked for a few minutes about other things, then Anna said goodbye to her friend and put down the phone.
‘Coffee-house capitalism!’ she whispered.
Returning from Nonesuch in the late afternoon, she had unpacked the morning’s shopping and then, turning out into a shallow bowl the whitebait she had bought from the Shambles market, watched with delight as Dellifer and the kittens confronted their half-pound shoal of tiny silver fish. Up had gone their noses, the moment the bag was opened. Up had gone their tails. Orlando and Vita had trodden on one another in their haste to bury their faces in the dish, then looked up at Anna speechless with love, gratitude and greed (not necessarily in that order). Dellifer, on the other hand, had approached the whole event more cautiously, crouching as far away from the bowl as she could and stretching her neck out to sniff at its contents, before dabbing at the fish with one paw and deciding that discretion is always the better part of valour.
‘You ridiculous thing!’ Anna had laughed. ‘At least give it a try.’
In all this excitement she had forgotten the elegant little carton from Engelion Cosmetics. Now she took it out of her bag and placed it thoughtfully on the table in front of her. Separating the jar from its packaging and instructions, she found herself trying to make sense of Stella Herringe – the greed, the narcissism, the unsettling seesaw of conflicting moods. Childishness always on the heels of maturity. A need for approval one minute, for control the next. Weakness masquerading as strength – or, perhaps more accurately, a strength based on the very weakness it was trying to deny. Stella had arranged herself so coyly beneath the portrait of Lady Clara! Would it ever be possible to separate her from her own vanity?
The jar was heavy for its size, simple and nicely proportioned, made of a milky glass. Anna gave the lid a half-turn anticlockwise and the kitchen filled so suddenly with a thick, musky perfume that the cats looked up as if someone had called their names. It was a complex scent, layered and penetrative. A flowery first cousin to Stella Herringe’s perfume overlay something harsher and more animal. Beneath that, a long way down, the ghost of chemicals, so faint you could never say for certain you had smelled them. Dellifer sniffed the air anxiously once or twice, jumped as if she had been prodded, then dived noisily through the cat-flap and out into the garden.
Anna smiled.
‘Dear old Dellifer,’ she said absently. ‘Two new things in one day will always be too much for you.’
She touched the tip of her finger to the perfectly even white surface of the substance in the jar. It was surprisingly cold, as if she had kept it in the fridge. Though light in texture it had a strangely viscous consistency which made it feel as thick as oil. Anna unfolded the leaflet that came with it. ‘Beauty,’ she read, ‘is a performance. It is the performance of your life.’ The key to Stella Herringe’s personality: youth as beauty, beauty as unrelenting display. What an effort it must take to maintain! ‘To prevent your skin from losing elasticity,’ the Engelion leaflet explained, ‘anti-ageing precautions should begin as early as twenty.’ A list of ingredients included ‘ceramide derivatives to limit collagen decay, AHAs to retexture, and natural hydro-fixers including animal fibroins modified to retain 400 times their own weight in water’. Finally, it reassured: ‘At Engelion we spend more than half our resources testing the product to make certain it is safe.’ Anna wiped her fingertip on a tissue, replaced the lid securely on the jar. Stella Herringe had woken up one morning – ten years ago? fifteen? – and heard a clock ticking. Whatever she did now, Anna guessed, that sound rarely went away. Still living out the same long, dreamy moment of panic, she was stretched as tight as a face-lift across her own despair.
Anna understood perfectly. But it was, she suspected, too easy an understanding, one that would really mean nothing to her until – in one year’s time? In five? – she panicked too.