Outside the post office one sunny morning shortly after her visit to Nonesuch, Anna spotted Alice deep in conversation with John Dawe. They were standing on the other side of the village street, a little way down from the old almshouses. Alice had got in as close as she could and was talking animatedly. Though they were of a height, she had somehow arranged herself so that she was looking up at him. As a consequence she had to lift one hand to shade her eyes from the sun, and this gesture had given her upper body a relaxed, attractive tilt. She laughed at something he said; then, seeing Anna, waved and called:
‘Hey! Come and talk to us!’
Anna thought about it for a moment. Then John Dawe turned his head towards her and smiled tentatively, and that was that. She half-waved at Alice and, blushing, let her feet carry her rapidly away. Later, in the Green Man, she admitted:
‘I don’t know what comes over me when I see him. God knows what I must look like to him.’
‘Mad,’ said Alice. ‘I suspect he thinks you’re mad.’
‘Well, at least I’m not rude and violent and satisfied with myself,’ said Anna. ‘And what does he know about cats anyway?’
‘Play us another tune,’ recommended Alice. ‘We’re bored with that one.’ She went off down the bar to serve someone. ‘The fact is,’ she said when she came back, ‘you fancy him.’
‘What?’
‘You fancy him.’
Anna drank her drink. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said.
‘Suit yourself,’ said Alice sunnily. ‘But you’ll find I’m right. You may not like him, but you already fancy him something awful.’ She wiped the bar.
All the way home, Anna puzzled over the implications of this. It was true, she decided: she was attracted to John Dawe, in quite a simple, physical way. She liked his shyness, so easily mistaken for bad temper. She liked his sudden smile. She thought frequently about his tanned, powerful forearms. But for some reason that only made her angrier with him. How dared he have such an immediate effect on her? It felt intrusive. She might understand it if he was Max Wishart, or some other old lover – but someone she had never met before?
Nothing was solved.
*
Anna began to work energetically, if haphazardly, on her garden. When he could spare the time, Orlando was delighted to help. He sat around yawning louchely in the sunshine while Anna put in the hours, occasionally jumping on the bits of leaves and stick she pulled up in handfuls from the borders. Anna found herself grateful for his support: to her, even weeding was an adventure. Generally she worked from a book, or asked over the garden fence the advice of Old Mrs Lippincote. Her neighbour on the other side, Mr Thompson (an active old man, pink-faced and boyish at eighty-three, who wore thick woollen worsted trousers and still drank a pint or two of Guinness at the Green Man every morning), promised to help her plant her own vegetables, though he clearly expected to do much of the work himself. He was often more available than Old Mrs Lippincote, who would only talk during the ten minutes she took for ‘morning coffee’. She was, she intimated, too busy the rest of the time, re-doing her daughter-in-law’s washing.
‘And I wondered about this?’
‘Gold bless us, my girl,’ said Mrs Lippincote, ‘it’s sweet william, where were you born?’
‘I did think it might be,’ Anna apologised.
*
‘The fact is,’ she admitted to Alice Meynell in the pub that night, ‘I’ve just pulled up a borderful of biennials. I can’t tell the plants from the weeds.’
‘Who can?’ said Alice.
‘I think I’ll clean out the garden shed instead.’
As a result of this decision Anna found herself in possession of a bicycle. A ladies’ black sit-up-and-beg, with skirt-savers and faded, creaking wicker baskets front and rear, it came out into the light with all the other junk, covered in cobwebs and dust. She wouldn’t have been seen dead on it at Cambridge. Now she hosed it down, oiled the working parts, and, after an abortive attempt to train the kittens to travel by basket (Orlando, unimpressed, shrewdly refused to join in; his sister stayed in place a moment or two before trying to climb up Anna’s forearm to safety), was soon riding round the lanes, up towards Cresset Beacon and the high point of the downs. The bicycle clanked mournfully on the steeper hills, but otherwise seemed sound. From the top, she watched cloud-shadows race across the valley, while the wind blew her hair into her eyes. She loved to be out and about before Ashmore was awake, bowling along the towpath of the Brindley canal or down past the village shop – from behind the tiny counter of which Hilda and Reggie Candleton sold frozen fish pie and first-class stamps, Kodak film and icecream for the summer visitors – in the thick yellow sunshine.
She was happy, though after Stella Herringe had given her the Engelion cream, she sometimes found herself staring into the bathroom mirror in the late afternoon. She would gently touch the side of her face, a brand-new look, tentative and questioning, in her eyes as she searched for evidence of the Annas of the past – Max Wishart’s Anna, or TransCorp Bank’s Anna, or the Anna who had lived briefly in Muswell Hill with Barnaby and Ruth Canning and a rather beautiful Japanese boy called Kenzo who wanted to be a performance artist.
But generally things went well. The kittens were becoming proper young cats, with never a day’s illness. The weather continued to improve. Two or three afternoons a week, Anna put on a flowerprint cotton frock and sailed off to the Candletons’ to fill her bicycle baskets with shopping; or – conned by Alice Meynell, who claimed she couldn’t very well do it on a Kawasaki ZZR – delivered the newssheet of the Ashmore & District Summer Fete to front doors as socially distinct as Stella Herringe’s at Nonesuch and Hetty Parker’s at number six Eaton Cottages, the Victorian terrace opposite the pub. She drank cups of tea with Francis Baynes, the vicar, who was some years younger than her, believed that the Church did too little to encourage the innate spirituality of what he called its ‘constituency’, and always seemed to be reading A Glastonbury Romance.
She drank the Hewett sisters’ elderflower cordial, which was, so the Hewett sisters said, a legend in three parishes.
In this way she got to know the villagers, and they began to look out for her, perhaps as a welcome contrast to Alice, who, at the age of eight, had grown out of bicycles for ever and announced the fact by driving her father’s unattended Land Rover down Station Lane and into the pond.
*
Anna was in the garden one afternoon when the doorbell rang.
‘Damn!’ she said.
She put on her sandals and went to answer it. Stella Herringe’s cousin was standing there.
‘I wondered,’ he said, ‘if you—’
Anna shut the door.
She walked up and down behind it for a moment or two, biting her knuckles in embarrassment and hissing, ‘Go away. Go away.’ When she opened the door again, he was still standing there. The weather being hot, he had rolled up the sleeves of his oxford-cloth shirt. His Levis had seen better days, as had his oiled-leather Bluntstone boots; slung over his shoulder was a faded canvas-and-leather knapsack as old-fashioned as Anna’s bike. He had clearly been out walking, and she couldn’t bear the healthy look of him.
‘My name is John Dawe,’ he said.
‘I know that,’ said Anna.
‘I felt as if we’d got off to a bad start,’ he said, ‘and I wondered if you would have supper with me to—’
‘Of course I won’t,’ said Anna. ‘Not until I know—’
She shut the door again. She had been about to say, ‘Not until I know why you have this effect on me. Not until I know who you are.’ But it was worse than that. What she really wanted to say, she now saw, was: ‘Not until I know who I am. You confuse me, and make me breathless, and I feel out of control near you, and all I want to do is follow you around. No woman does that any more. No woman wants to feel like that.’ Orlando, who had run in from the back garden to see what was going on, rubbed against her legs purring, his tail held high. ‘You can go away too,’ she told him in a venomous whisper. She studied the yellowed lining-paper which had begun to peel off the walls of her tiny hallway. ‘I want to be in control,’ she said. She opened the door a crack and peered out. John Dawe was walking away towards the centre of the village. Orlando, hugely delighted by all this, darted out between Anna’s legs and began to follow him down the road.
‘Come back!’ called Anna.
As a consequence, three things happened at once. John Dawe stopped and turned round uncertainly, raising one hand to keep the sun out of his eyes. Orlando, consumed by shyness, retreated to a position just outside the front gate, where he sat down thoughtfully and began to lick one of his paws. And several ducks which – encouraged by human activity to expect stale bread – had left the pond to waddle about on the grass across the road, eyed the cat and returned cautiously to their natural element, where quarrels broke out among them.
‘All right,’ Anna said. ‘I will have supper with you.’
John Dawe looked as confused as the ducks. He swapped his knapsack from his left shoulder to his right, walked back a little way, his blue eyes fixed on hers, and knelt down in the road to stroke Orlando’s head.
‘This is a nice little cat,’ he said. ‘Is he yours?’
“‘No one owns a cat”,’ Anna quoted contemptuously.
‘And will you meet me at the pub, or on my boat?’
Anna, angry all over again – although at least now she understood why – said: ‘I would rather meet you on your boat, of course.’
*
‘Why did I say that?’
‘I could have a guess,’ said Alice.
‘And what am I going to wear?’
‘Trousers, I would.’
‘Alice!’
‘It’s no good pretending you don’t want something you’ve just been at considerable pains to get,’ said Alice. ‘Not with me. Look, now try this,’ – she put a half-pint glass down in front of Anna – ‘and tell me it’s not the best summer ale you ever tasted.’
Anna drank the beer. ‘What do you mean, “pretending”?’ she said.
‘Hold your nose and pour it down, then. I don’t know why I bother.’
‘Alice.’
Alice flounced off to the sink. ‘What I mean,’ she said significantly, ‘is that there are those of us who have never had the chance, try as they might.’ She came back with a floor cloth and used it to wipe the perfectly clean patch of bar around Anna’s drink. ‘There are those of us,’ she said, ‘who are gagging for it.’
‘I haven’t been at “considerable pains”,’ Anna defended herself. ‘How can you say that? You saw what happened in here the other night.’
Alice laughed bitterly. ‘I certainly did,’ she said.
‘Alice, what am I going to wear?’
‘You can borrow this if you like.’
‘Alice, that’s really kind of you. But it wouldn’t work so well without the pierced navel.’
Alice cheered up. ‘We could always get you done,’ she said.
In the end, though, Anna went up to London by train from Drychester. She arrived at Victoria at ten in the morning to find the streets already grey and humid, the traffic reluctant and confusing, the air full of thunder. She looked up at the cap of cloud over Pimlico and the river, and took a taxi to Knightsbridge, where she saw some beautiful things, but nothing – as she put it later to Alice – you could wear to supper on a narrowboat with someone you didn’t really like. Two or three hours later, bad-tempered and sticky, she was forced to admit defeat. She ate lunch on the fifth floor at Harvey Nichols, then, rather than go home empty-handed, wandered the food market at random, buying exotic produce for herself and the cats. She called Ruth Canning, with the idea of suggesting tea or a drink, but no one answered the phone. It was dark by three in the afternoon. Lightning flickered silent and eerie inside the clouds. Then, as Anna scuttled across Sloane Street among a crowd of other people trying to catch the attention of a cab-driver, she thought she saw someone she knew.
‘Stella! Stella Herringe!’
It wasn’t Stella but a much older woman, in her late sixties and really quite frail. A stroke had left one side of her white, heavily powdered face hanging lax and unbiddable. The eye on that side was dull hazel, instilled with panic; the mouth dragged down.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Anna. ‘I can’t think why I thought... Sorry.’
The woman looked at her for what seemed a long time before turning away.
Unsettled for the rest of the afternoon, Anna gave up the idea of a taxi and jumped on a bus instead, intending to go to Sloane Square and have a look in the King’s Road shops. Anxiety made her get off at the wrong stop and she wandered about in the dreary triangle between Chelsea Barracks, Belgravia and the railway, until the sky opened and a steady, vertical rain drove her back to Victoria, where she stood on the concourse soaked and impatient among all the other disgruntled shoppers.
‘I’ll never like London again,’ she told Alice, and two days later, at half past seven in the evening, walked reluctantly down to John Dawe’s mooring dressed in jeans and an old Jigsaw jumper, carrying a bottle of Chardonnay that had cost twenty pounds in Harvey Nichols’ food market.
‘Hello?’ she said.
No reply.
It was very quiet down there, and all the boats seemed empty. The day had stored its warmth in the packed earth of the towpath, which was now giving it up gently. The subtle light, more suited to dawn than evening, blanched the summer colours out of the landscape and softened the Magpie’s terracotta upperwork to pink. Despite that, everything looked quite clear and sharp, the boats, the trees, the curve of the little bridge reflected on the absolutely motionless surface of the water. Anna didn’t quite know what to do. Should she just go aboard? She had thought of phoning him to cancel, but there was no Dawe in the telephone book.
‘Hello?’
She took a step or two back towards the bridge. As if at a signal, the Magpie creaked and rocked a little against its springlines, the doors at the stern of the boat banged open and a cat jumped out. ‘For God’s sake, Lydia,’ she heard John Dawe complain in his rusty growl, ‘can’t you have some patience?’
The cat gave Anna a filthy look and picked its way forward to sit at the stem of the boat. After a moment or two it began to wash ostentatiously.
John Dawe came up the little steps from the interior. His eyes were as blue as cornflowers, and through a rip in his grey jeans, she could see that the skin of his thigh was as tanned as his forearms. A strong smell of fish came up with him.
‘Fresh tuna,’ he explained.
‘How nice,’ said Anna.
‘She thought it was for her.’
‘Ah.’
This seemed to be as much as they could manage. They stared at one another uncertainly, and she half-offered the bottle of wine, as if she had to give him something to be invited aboard.
He took it from her, unwrapped the tissue paper and held it up for the cat to see.
‘Perfect with fish!’ he taunted.
The cat turned its back.
‘She’s pretty enough,’ he said, ‘but she has the moral sense of a barracuda.’
Anna laughed. ‘What lovely fur,’ she said. ‘It’s like gold.’ She added: ‘I think I once saw her in the dark.’
John Dawe didn’t seem to hear this; or if he did, ignored it. ‘Good parentage, bad lot,’ he said. ‘Half Abyssinian, half Siamese. From the mother, indolence and sentimentality. From the father a loud voice and violent appetites. Just enough brains to be dissatisfied with everything. She’ll never be happy, but she’s certainly a star.’
‘You talk about her as if she’s a person,’ Anna said.
This seemed to annoy him.
‘Their lives are only different to ours,’ he pointed out. ‘Not less important.’
‘I didn’t mean that,’ said Anna.
There was a silence.
‘Well,’ said John Dawe eventually, ‘I ought to cook the fish.’
‘That wine should still be quite cool,’ she said.
The Magpie had been built a mere twenty years ago, so its tumblehome sides announced, by L.T.C. Rolt of Banbury. Anna felt obscurely disappointed. There was an engaging shabbiness to its exterior – but it was the shabbiness, she thought sadly, of a 1970s bungalow where you had been expecting the more dignified decline of the Victorian workman’s cottage. She didn’t know what to make of the interior at all. If it had been less cluttered it would, paradoxically, have seemed smaller. Ducking down the little steps, she had the impression of a single long, low, poorly lit space, the varnished roof of which seemed to stretch away into a distant gloom. Bits of furniture outcropped here and there: a foldaway bed, old-fashioned cane chairs one either side of a small table, a little grey solid-fuel stove the flue of which went up dangerously between packed bookshelves. It was clean, but fantastically untidy. Books overflowed the shelves and on to the floor. Bedding trailed off the bed. Every surface was covered with objects.
There were bowls full of small fossils and bits of flint, a glass case containing a small stuffed ray, a heavy old artillery compass, two or three chess sets with bizarre or incomplete sets of pieces. There were items assembled from feathers or leather, or carved from ivory: bird’s eggs, Egyptian-looking trinkets, browned old bone; dusty, once-colourful, gypsy kinds of things all mixed up with modern items – a saxophone, a Sony laptop with its modem cable plugged into a mobile phone, software CDs, an expensive sound system playing some kind of South American ambient music full of bird calls and muted drumming. It looked like the room of an intelligent teenage boy.
While John Dawe busied himself in the tiny galley area, Anna wandered up and down with a glass of Pineau in her hand, picking things up and putting them down again. What did he do all day in here?
‘I haven’t had Pineau since I was last in France,’ she said. ‘I’d forgotten how nice it was.’ When he didn’t answer she added, ‘Can I help?’
He was so used to doing everything by himself that this seemed to confuse him. Eventually he said: ‘You could clear some space on the table.’ And then: ‘These boats are a bit cramped for co-operative cooking. It’s better if one person does everything.’ He was right. The cabin was so narrow she had to keep pushing past him, murmuring, ‘Sorry,’ or, ‘Can I just—?’ The fact was, no one had been doing anything much on the Magpie. What a mess, she thought, trying not to look at the unmade bed.
A minute or two later he said, ‘I think we could eat this now.’
He had seared the tuna, and now served it with sauteed courgettes and a rocket salad. They sat in the cane chairs, which were too low for the table. John Dawe was a self-sufficient eating companion, attentive but silent, passing the salt or pouring wine without comment.
‘This is nice,’ said Anna.
He seemed surprised. ‘I’m glad,’ he said. Then he added: ‘I don’t cook often. Fish is always easy, isn’t it?’
Thinking of Max Wishart’s culinary talent – which had been a natural extension of his easy sensuality – she said: ‘I never got the hang of it.’ Max had spoiled her, she realised. She had let him cook all those wonderful meals and learned nothing from him. He had been attentive, thoughtful, and in the end unreliable: a honey trap. John Dawe was an altogether spikier proposition. He would be difficult to get to know, but perhaps more rewarding for that.
He laughed. ‘Ten minutes each side,’ he said. ‘A bit of oil. That’s the secret of tuna.’
His manner was a kind of carapace, she thought: under it, he was not so much shy as, like his own voice, unused. He had got out of the habit of sharing himself. As they ate, the cat made its way back in, sitting quietly at the cabin door while it tried to gauge his mood. Finally it approached, and rubbed its head tentatively against his leg.
‘You’re not getting anything,’ he said. ‘So you might as well stop selling yourself.’ But Anna noticed how affectionately he caressed the fur of its throat as he spoke.
‘You’re very fond of her,’ she said.
He looked up from his food and shrugged. ‘Am I?’ he said. ‘I suppose I am. But I doubt that’s why she stays.’
‘Oh, surely—’
‘We can’t know how they see the world,’ he interrupted. ‘Perhaps it’s a mistake to imagine they love us in return. Perhaps to them we’re just a source of warmth, food, shelter.’
‘I know my cats love me,’ said Anna.
While he made coffee, she examined his books. They were a mixed lot. Paperback popular science rubbed shoulders with university texts in foreign languages. He seemed to be interested in everything from physics to shamanism. She recognised a title here and there – The Golden Bough, The Book of the Dead, A Brief History of Time. There were books on ancient Egypt, the vanished native-American cultures, the Inuit peoples of the Arctic. There were, curiously, books on ocean navigation, as if he had considered taking the Magpie to sea. There were a lot of books about dreams. She opened at random a volume called Dream Time. ‘Listen,’ she said, “‘Dreams go by contraries. To weep in dreams betokens bliss.” Now you know.’
He laughed. ‘I wish it was so simple,’ he said.
Anna shut the book. ‘You do love cats, don’t you?’ she said. ‘I mean, not just have ideas about them?’
‘I suppose I do,’ he admitted.
‘Then can we call a truce on the subject, do you think?’ she said.
He smiled. ‘I was going to ask you that.’
He looked so relieved that Anna touched his hand, and felt the tension go out of things, and it was like a normal evening for a while. They took the coffee outside to the twilight, and sat in the warm air, listening to music and talking. Lydia, now forgiven, came out to watch the swifts and housemartins as they hawked for insects above the surrounding fields, until at twilight they were replaced by bats, and she remembered business of her own, and was off. John Dawe went inside to change the CD, then again to fetch another bottle of wine. He brought out a lamp, and a jacket for Anna to put round her shoulders. Anna, relieved that they seemed to be getting on again, felt bold enough to ask him about himself. Educated at Marlborough and Cambridge, he had become interested in dreams early on in his career. A doctorate in anthropology followed, and for a few years he had taught cultural studies at a Midlands university. In the end, though, the students – who, interested only in their careers and already confusing the word ‘dream’ with the word ‘ambition’ – had begun to bore him, and he had lost interest in that side of academia. His own dreams had puzzled him increasingly. From the age of thirteen, when he first lived at Nonesuch, they had been curious, vivid, really rather undreamlike.
‘They’re more like plays or masques,’ he admitted to Anna, ‘the same situations rehearsed over and over again in different costumes. As intense as bad TV but as fragile as a cobweb. Sometimes I wake from dreams like that and I’m certain they’re memories of other lives.’
‘Very scientific,’ said Anna.
The attempt to understand his own dreams – or at least to find out if anyone else dreamed in the same way – had led to a fascination with dreams in general, and that fascination had rapidly become the structuring principle of his life. ‘For quite a long time I was obsessed. Dreaming was life; the rest of life was just standing around waiting to dream.’ He had given up teaching and travelled extensively, in India, Africa, the Near East, East Asia. ‘I even spent time above the Arctic Circle, listening to the Inuit talk about their dreams. It wasn’t enough. Perhaps you never can learn enough: I come back here every so often and try to fit it all together, and there’s always a piece missing, so off I go again. Climb a mountain. Stand in the Valley of the Nile at dawn. Try a new drug. Write down the dreams of everyone I meet. You only get to know the world by being in it, and in fact perhaps it would be better to do just that – be, not know.’ He laughed. ‘This is a distinction only male academics make,’ he explained. After a pause he added softly: ‘And the dreams just go on.’
‘And are you any nearer understanding?’
‘The obsessed,’ he said, ‘always believe that the inside of their obsession is bigger than the outside. Climbers, poets, scientists at the cutting edge, people who collect things – they always think there’s a whole world in there to be mapped and understood.’ He shook his head. Though his face was softened by the lamplight it was no easier to read. ‘It’s only your own obsessiveness you’re exploring.’
Max Wishart had always taught her that it was an evasion to describe yourself in terms of your ideas – a way of hiding yourself. Anna now understood why. Max was a skater across the surface of things. Even his music had come easily to him. He had never allowed it to keep him awake at night. He would never burn his fingers on it, or allow it to stretch his spirit. The attraction of John Dawe was that he found his ideas worth the effort. He was committed. This made him seem odd and difficult and distanced, but, in a peculiar way, more reliable – he wouldn’t, you felt, drift cheerfully away in pursuit of the next sensation. At the same time it made him so hard to open up! How could she get him to talk about Stella Herringe if he wouldn’t first talk about himself?
‘And you always come back here, to the boat?’ she asked him. ‘Not to Nonesuch?’
This invitation he refused. ‘Not to Nonesuch,’ he said. ‘Not since I was twenty.’ He offered the wine bottle. ‘Have some more of this.’
Anna held out her glass. ‘But what do you do?’ she pressed (meaning perhaps. What have you done with your life?). ‘What’s the end product of all this travelling, all these—’ lost for words, she made a vague gesture ‘—intellectual adventures?’
He filled her glass. ‘More adventures?’ he suggested. When she didn’t laugh, he added: ‘A book, I suspect. But not soon, and not a fun read. Look for The Dream as Cultural Index. You won’t be any wiser than I am when you’ve finished it.’
‘Why bother then?’ said Anna irritably.
‘To understand myself.’
‘What a helpful contribution to the world,’ said Anna. She found him pretentious one minute, confused the next. ‘Rather than living,’ she went on, partly out of spite, partly in an attempt to force his hand, ‘you seem to have spent your life collecting ideas about life.’
He smiled. ‘That truce didn’t last long,’ he remarked. Suddenly he looked tired. He lifted his hands. ‘And what about you?’ he said.
‘I was in London before I came here.’
‘And what did you do in London?’
She thought for a moment how she might answer this. The coat she wore smelled of him; the yellow lamplight spilled out across the water, even and warm, to faintly illuminate the willow trees on the far bank. ‘I worked in the City,’ she said; and when he didn’t respond but only waited to see what else she would say, demanded with a sudden impatience: ‘What do you want to know? I was just like anyone else, I went to university then got a job.’
No answer.
‘Do you understand money?’
He shook his head slowly.
‘Well, I moved it around the world at night, to take advantage of the exchange rates. A thousandth of a percent here, a thousandth of a percent there. In the morning there was more of it.’
As if by magic, there always had been more of it.
‘I was never a high-flyer,’ she was prompted to admit, ‘but I did well enough.’ She managed not to add, ‘for a woman,’ and looked into her wine instead, as if she might see herself in the twist of light at the bottom of the glass – walking briskly across the atrium of the TransCorp Bank on Old Broad Street wearing the clothes she wore then. As if she might remember herself more clearly. ‘We would move money around all night, and then drive madly off to Stepney and have a fried breakfast at six in the morning in Pellicci’s. The other traders were all men, and I got on well with them. It was very competitive but I quite liked that then.’ She laughed. ‘I never thought of it as money, only numbers on a screen. I moved numbers around on a screen and one year’s bonus was enough to buy me a little house by the Thames.’ A little house that had cost five hundred thousand pounds. She shivered to think of that world now. It all made such a tangle in her consciousness, such a complex knot of pleasures and anxieties.
She said: ‘Have you ever had money?’
He leaned forward, his face a mask in the lamplight. ‘Not what you would call money,’ he said grimly. ‘So tell me: when people ask you who you are, is this how you always answer? Is this how you would want yourself described, as someone who once had a career in the City?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Well then,’ he said, as if she had demonstrated some point he wanted to make. She didn’t know how to answer that, so she left a silence. Into it, he asked, in quite a different voice:
‘Why are you here, Anna Prescott?’
‘I’m not going to tell you that,’ she said, adding immediately, ‘I suppose I wanted a rest from my old life, and I thought Ashmore would be—’ She had meant to say ‘nice’ or ‘kind’ or ‘safe’, but he was already interrupting her.
‘No, I mean here. Why did you come here tonight?’
She stared at him. ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted.
‘So you’re an adventurer, too.’
She laughed. ‘Touché,’ she said.
He stood up. ‘It’s turning cold. Would you like to go back inside?’
‘Very much,’ she said. She lifted her hands to him.
Bats flickered through the damp air between the willows, absorbed by the invisible world: echoes, then echoes of echoes, shivering away into the great emptiness of the water meadows. Small clouds raced through a sky the colour of a grapeskin, where the new moon floated in its prismatic ring of haze. A breeze ruffled the canal, and in response the Magpie moved gently against its springlines.
‘Careful,’ said John Dawe. He helped her to her feet. His hands were dry and warm. For a moment Anna was so close to him she could smell his skin. She thought of sand; walnuts. She thought he would kiss her.
Instead he said lightly: ‘Stella was determined I should apologise. She said you’d been up at Nonesuch.’
Anna stared at him. ‘Is that why you invited me here?’
‘Of course not.’
She pulled away from him. ‘It is,’ she said, wonderingly. ‘You wouldn’t have been interested in me if she hadn’t.’ Suddenly she was furious. ‘It is! What do you want from me, you and your cousin?’
When he didn’t answer she was surprised to hear herself say coldly: ‘I like you, John, but there are too many problems here.’
And then: ‘I think I’ll go home now.’
‘Wait. You can’t—’
‘I can do anything I want.’
She pushed past him and stepped awkwardly back on to the towpath.
*
Sixty or seventy years ago, when Ashmore was still a proper farming community, cottages had come right down to the water here, their gardens divided from the water only by a low wooden fence. Nothing was left of that. Thinking she would be home quicker if she went directly across the fields, Anna pushed blindly through the straggling hawthorn hedge which had replaced it. Suddenly she was among the couch grass and bracken, the rotten, lichenous apple boughs of an abandoned orchard, her feet soaked with dew. The trees creaked in a gust of wind, which drove dead leaves through the hedge and across the surface of the canal. John Dawe ran after her between the grey boughs then stopped. Anna heard him call her name once, but he didn’t follow her. She was glad. For a moment, when she looked at him, all she had felt was panic.
*
When she got home her house was deserted and cold, and she blundered around inside it like a stranger, switching on all the lights in the hope of making things familiar. The cats were out, their dishes empty. Obscurely disappointed, she put down fresh food and water for them; she did the washing up. ‘I should go to bed,’ she told herself, but she couldn’t settle. She made a cup of instant coffee and huddled over the Aga with her hands in her armpits more for comfort than warmth. If she closed her eyes she could see John Dawe’s puzzled face. She could hear herself shouting at him. She thought: I have to understand why I’m doing this.
Then she thought: But what is it they want from me?
Slipping out of his leather jacket, she brought its comfortable, age-softened folds up to her face. I was right, she thought, his skin does smell of sand and walnuts. Then embarrassment washed over her. ‘I’ve still got his coat,’ she said aloud to the empty kitchen.
This seemed to settle something. She got up, went out into the front garden, and looked up at the sky. The air had cooled further, clouds were scudding energetically across the moon. There was a faint smell of foxgloves, mallow, night-scented stock. In the morning there would be ground-mist in the hollows of the common: then another brilliant day. She found her bicycle propped up under the window, its shadow black against the cottage wall. She wheeled it into the silent road, mounted, and clanked off towards Station Lane. ‘This is mad,’ she told herself. As if in response, a mallard called drowsily from the crack-willows at the other side of the pond.
The canal boats lay motionless and untenanted. Only the Magpie showed a light: one dim yellow porthole. Anna manhandled her bike down on to the towpath and let it fall. Through the porthole she could see John Dawe, sitting at his table in the lamplight. He had shoved the supper plates and salad bowl to one side to make room for a book, a tumbler, a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam. She tapped the porthole with her fingernails. As if he had heard something without quite registering it, he stopped reading for a moment and ran his hands tiredly over his face. She tapped the glass again. This time he looked directly at her, and she heard him laugh. A moment later he was up on deck. He appraised Anna, then the abandoned bicycle.
‘It’s three o’clock in the morning,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘Your feet are soaked.’
‘What?’
‘Your feet.’
She looked down at them, shook her head impatiently. ‘What does that matter?’ she said. ‘Why do we keep doing this? I don’t know why I keep doing this.’
He smiled faintly. ‘No.’ he said. ‘I can tell that you don’t.’
‘That isn’t any sort of answer,’ she wailed. ‘John, all this see-sawing back and forth, it’s mad. We’re at each other’s throats every five minutes but we can’t just walk away. We barely know each other but I already feel as if I’m trying to escape something. I don’t understand myself any more! Do you feel that?’
‘I’m not sure what I feel,’ he said.
‘That’s not enough, John,’ she said. Suddenly it felt like three in the morning. Her legs ached, and she was exhausted. She took his coat off. Held it out. ‘Do you want this back?’
‘Do you want to give it back?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘Would you like to come in?’
‘No. Not now.’ She looked round for a moment, then made a small gesture, as if the night, the water, the trees on the far bank, were enough to explain something. She thought of saying, ‘I just came back to tell you I was sorry,’ but found she didn’t want to go that far, and turned it into, ‘I just want to understand what’s happening here,’ instead. ‘I just want us to stop doing this.’
‘Then perhaps we will,’ he said gently.
She turned away.
‘Shall I telephone you?’ he said.
‘I’d like that.’