So that she wouldn’t be tempted to go to London to panic-buy clothes she couldn’t afford and didn’t really need, Anna left all her decisions until Friday afternoon. This strategy of delay becalmed her in front of the bedroom mirror two hours before she was due at Nonesuch, with most of the contents of her wardrobe on the floor around her feet. She was not so naïve as to assume that frock-anxiety signified only itself: beneath it lay a reluctance to go to the party at all. Despite her efforts, the complexities of her relationship with John had somehow spread to include his cousin: knowing what she knew about their relationship, she found herself suddenly reluctant to meet Stella.
There was more. A kind of shyness lay between her and John. From the beginning, part of their antagonism had been sexual, an oblique acknowledgement of the physical tension between them. They had been like two rather dangerous animals, puzzledly trying to defuse one another’s defences sufficiently to mate. Every touch of his startled her. She knew he was startled too. His eyes widened when he saw her, he couldn’t hide that. The kiss in the lane had eased nothing – indeed it had probably been the kiss, rather than the meeting with Stella, which had caused their latest quarrel. Since then she had been having a disturbingly recurrent fantasy in which – at the turn of some darkened corridor of his cousin’s house, his eyes intent yet wary – John Dawe reached out to explore the hollow of her collarbone, then ran his long, strong fingers lightly downward.
When she wasn’t worrying about what to wear, she was wondering what she would say to Stella. When she wasn’t worrying about Stella, small thrills of sexual anticipation were chasing themselves across the surface of her skin. She shook them away.
‘Don’t be so ridiculous,’ she advised herself. ‘It’s only a dinner party.’
She pulled out a jacket of brown and grey velvet. Bought at fantastic cost from Voyage on the Old Brompton Road, at the height of her career with TransCorp, it would save the day, as it always had. It was her favourite garment. But at some point when they were younger Orlando and Vita had found it, and, deciding that they loved it too, covered it in fine tabby and orange cat-hair. She threw it on the bed in despair.
‘I should have donated you both to Stella,’ she said out loud. ‘It would serve you right.’
In the end she decided on a long, strappy black dress from Whistles, plainly but nicely cut. It would be the first time she had worn it in two years. A side-slit revealed rather more leg than she had remembered, but as soon as she saw herself in it, she knew. A more confident Anna Prescott emerged to stand before the mirror. Her face, long and oval, finely featured with its strong eyebrows and steady brown eyes, gazed solemnly back at her. ‘Not bad.’ She twisted her hair up and pinned it casually so that tendrils fell to her pale shoulders. ‘Not bad at all.’ Suddenly she was grinning and twirling, imaginary glass of champagne in hand, taped viol music echoing softly off Jacobean walls, and a silent dark man watching her every move as if she were the centre of his universe.
She looked at her watch. Seven thirty, and the light was going out of the air. She had half an hour in which to bathe, put on her make-up and get into the local taxi, driven tonight by an old boyfriend of Alice’s who chain-smoked and drove rather too fast, his free arm resting across the back of the front passenger seat.
‘Wow,’ he said, looking at her legs. ‘Party at the Big House, is it?’
Anna nodded.
‘Nasty old night,’ he said.
It was a nasty old night. A few stars hung above the afterglow, smudged by flying streamers of cloud. A black westerly was bringing ripe horse chestnuts down from the trees in such numbers that they bounced off the bonnet of the Ford like small munitions. “‘Wild west wind”!’ quoted Anna to herself, wondering what the evening held for her. At Nonesuch, the cedars shook themselves like great slow animals; rain fell suddenly, blackening the soft stone of the gateposts, disfiguring the Herringe arms as the taxi passed beneath.
‘We’re in for it now,’ predicted the driver as he pulled up by the lighted porch. Anna, handing him three pounds, said: ‘“Thou breath of Autumn’s being.”’
‘You what?’
‘Could you come back for me about midnight?’
‘Pumpkin time, eh?’
Anna grinned.
The heavy, iron-bossed front doors hung open, surfaces limned with gold light. There were complex smells of food and wine: she felt her nose twitch like any cat’s. The supper was being catered, by a firm from Drychester which usually did weddings. ‘I’m damned if I’m going to cook, dear,’ Stella had warned Anna. ‘And you’d be damned if you ate it.’
Staff from the caterer’s met Anna in the big hall and were quietly surprised by the Voyage jacket (quickly defurred with some Sellotape) which Anna had decided to wear anyway as cover-up over the sleeveless dress. She was surprised in her turn to be led not into Stella’s little minimalist flat, but towards the centre of the house and into the Long Corridor instead. There, with Clara de Montfort staring down at her in cold amusement from the row of ancestral portraits, Anna protested: ‘Is this right? This can’t be right.’
But it was. They were going to eat in the Painted Room. She walked in, feeling less sure of herself than she had, and there was John Dawe, waiting for her, dressed in a loosely tailored black suit and a mid-grey shirt. Something gave her the idea that he had spent an afternoon similar to her own – putting on a tie, perhaps, then discarding it. Putting it on again, with a different shirt. She went up to him straight away and said: ‘You look nice.’
‘You look nice, too.’
‘Shame about the boots.’
He looked down at his Bluntstones. ‘They give the game away,’ he admitted. ‘But I did polish them.’
He offered her a glass of wine. She took it, and held it in her hand. Puzzled and impressed by one another’s best clothes, unsure how to progress further, they stared around the Painted Room, lit by a myriad of church candles, as if neither of them had seen it before.
‘I hate that mural,’ Anna said, eyeing the trompe l’œil, with its counterfeit window frame and flatly painted view of the original cobbled courtyard. The light in it seemed to have changed since she first saw it, so that the gables on the far side of the courtyard were grey and diffuse, the intervening air smeared with rain. ‘Don’t you? Especially since they’ve hidden the real courtyard behind it. Why would you do that? Brick up a lovely old Elizabethan window and then paint a false one over it? How could anyone have mistaken that for the real thing?’
‘I don’t think that was the point,’ John Dawe said gently.
‘Well it isn’t clever,’ Anna heard herself insist. ‘I think the Herringe ancestors were just intellectual snobs. And that! Is that supposed to be a person there, in the arcade? It’s just such bad drawing!’ She stared into her wine. Her voice seemed quieter to her than its own echo, which went about hollowly up there among the roof beams. That, she thought, is what you get for avoiding the issue. She lifted her chin, looked him in the eye. ‘I don’t care how you live,’ she said, more definitely than she had intended. ‘The other day – I was wrong to have an opinion.’ And then, just so he couldn’t miss the point: ‘How you live is up to you.’
John Dawe studied this abrupt apology as if uncertain how best to acknowledge it. Then he smiled. ‘I don’t care how you live, either,’ he said.
Anna gave him a cross look. ‘That’s very generous of you. I’m sure.’
They were saved from further confrontation by the arrival of Stella Herringe, who came in through the door smoking a long, dark cigarette, and turning to call back down the corridor to her third guest of the evening.
‘Anthony Downing! Of all people,’ she was saying, in her most mischievous voice. ‘But so typical of him!’
If Stella had spent the afternoon in a dialogue with the mirror, it didn’t show. She had chosen a onesleeved evening gown in pewter lame. With her black hair in an elaborate French plait to lengthen her pretty neck and Manolo Blahnik kitten heels to give her an inch or two on Anna, she looked like a single, perfect flower in a narrow vase. It was, perhaps, a little too cold, too studied: then you saw her bare shoulder, round, inviting, smooth as butter. She gave her attention to the Painted Room, as if she, too, had never seen it before, the trompe l’œil courtyard full of a watery light of its own, the candles, the long Jacobean table with its gleaming cutlery and snowy napery.
‘But here they are!’ she marvelled over John and Anna, as if some puzzle had solved itself. ‘They’re already here!’
The third guest stepped into the room.
Flickering candlelight played off longish, untidy blond hair, a long, mobile face split by an enormous grin.
It was Max Wishart.
‘Anna—’ He crossed the room in two bounds, wrapped his arms around her so that she was crushed against the white linen of his dress shirt. Her wine glass tilted: wine slopped uselessly on to the wooden floor. His smell, which she had forbidden herself to remember, surrounded her like the climate of another country. It made her feel raw and new, transplanted, responsive to pain. Her life in Ashmore, so carefully fostered to protect her from her own emotions, had peeled away like the scab from a wound. Her defences had not held up.
He was holding her at arm’s length and regarding her with an expression both delighted and bemused. ‘Anna. Anna Prescott. Here, of all places! How in the world are you?’ Simultaneously, in quite a different room, he was holding her in the same way to say goodbye. Trapped on the vertiginous contour between these two events, Anna found herself unable to think, unable to speak. Everyone else in the room must have seen this, she thought. She felt caught out: on view. She felt shamed in some way. This moment had lain in wait for her all along. Somehow Stella Herringe had sought it out and ambushed her from inside it.
‘Max. Max Wishart.’
Her own voice sounded flat and false to her. She disengaged herself from him awkwardly, feeling the weight of John’s gaze upon the two of them. The beat of her heart was painful. It was so terribly unfair.
‘Fine,’ she lied. ‘Nice to see you.’
Max looked puzzled.
John Dawe looked puzzled.
‘Now we must all sit down!’ said Stella Herringe, who didn’t look puzzled at all.
*
It was like being forced to open the shoebox of things you put away after every finished relationship – the matchbooks, cinema tickets and blanched photobooth snaps – only to find that while your feelings were no clearer, they had become just a little faded, just a little remote. Max stood there and the connection was instant. He stood there, and he was a million miles away. He had just got off the plane from New York – where he had been on a ‘bread and butter tour’, as he put it, ‘playing second violin to a flautist whose name I’m too embarrassed to mention’ – and was clearly surprised to find himself here at such short notice. He looked down at Stella, who only smiled and murmured, ‘I was so glad you could come!’
He seemed thinner than he had the last time Anna had seen him. Perhaps he had been working too hard. Otherwise, he was Max – tall, smiling, generous with his intelligence and wit, clever but never superficial, murderer of hearts and cats, everyone’s favourite dinner guest.
Dinner was a strange affair. The wavering light from the church candles glittered confusedly off an assortment of Victorian glasses and Jacobean silverware but failed to illuminate the catering staff, who moved about the dim room beyond like ghosts, coming and going suddenly and without apparent reason. Stuffed quails came and went, followed by champagne granitas and a rack of lamb, trussed like a victim and accompanied by so many cleverly presented vegetables that Anna felt quite without appetite in their presence. ‘Have some of the parsnips julienne,’ Stella urged her, ladling a spoonful of the glistening strips on to the huge, ornate dinnerplate. The food lay there, mythic in dimension, never diminishing despite her best efforts, which were, she had to admit, pathetic in the extreme.
‘I’m sorry,’ she heard herself saying. ‘I’m just not very hungry tonight.’
Stella, laughing, speared the pinkly bleeding lamb from Anna’s plate – ‘too good to let it go to waste, dear’ – and despatched it with fastidious gusto.
She had assembled her guests in a kind of pocket of time. They sat, the three of them, staring uncertainly at one another across the dazzling white tablecloth, trying to think of things to say; while Stella looked from one to the other with a small expectant smile on her face, and the history of Nonesuch seemed to revolve around them like a shadowy carousel.
‘So, Max,’ John Dawe said, ‘you’re in the music business.’
If his tone was a little sour, a little calculated. Max didn’t seem to notice. The smile with which Anna had seen win him the attentions – wanted or unwanted – of so very many women, spread itself slowly across his face. The skin crinkled around the corners of his apparently guileless blue eyes.
‘You might say that.’
Stella had seated them rather oddly, Anna thought. She had placed herself, reasonably enough, at the head of the long table; but rather than seat Anna and John to face one another across the shorter expanse, as you usually would with a couple, it was as if she had imposed a carefully premeditated distance between them. At the same time, by placing him at the opposite end to herself, she had accentuated her link with her cousin: two members of the Herringe family presiding over the little soap opera going on in the middle.
‘Max’s a baroque violinist,’ Anna said. ‘He won’t tell you, but he’s one of the most respected in Europe. If he wasn’t so lazy he’d be more famous that he is. We’re old friends.’
‘Oh, a little more than friends, dear,’ said Stella, reaching across the table to squeeze Max’s arm, ‘if all I hear is true.’
Despite herself, Anna blushed. ‘We lived together for a while,’ she said. ‘People do.’ Everyone comes with baggage, she thought. Why should Max and I have to defend ours? Why is she making such a fuss about this? Then she thought, she’s doing this deliberately. She’s going to try and use my history with Max to lever John and me apart. Why should I have to defend myself? She glanced across at John for help, but he was looking at Stella. The whole arrangement of the table made it difficult to catch his attention; and that had been deliberate, too. Out of a kind of astonished rage – not so much at Stella’s scheming as the pathetically old-fashioned assumptions behind it – she found herself smiling at Max and saying with a lot more warmth than she felt: ‘It’s good to see you again.’
‘The violinist and the currency dealer!’ Stella said. ‘How extraordinary. You do look rather wonderful together. What went wrong?’
That’s really none of your business, Anna thought angrily. She was opening her mouth to say so when Max interrupted mildly, ‘You know, I don’t think it was really a matter of anything going wrong: just a matter of moving on.’ He appealed to Stella. ‘It’s important to move on, don’t you think? You can’t just immure yourself in the past, can you?’ He glanced casually around the Painted Room. ‘Though this is lovely past to live in, if you must.’
At this, Anna’s heart filled with gratitude: for once, someone had made Stella look ill at ease. To cover her annoyance, Stella examined the ruins of the previous course. ‘Do any of you want pudding?’ she said. After a moment she rang the little silver bell at her elbow and two of the shadowy caterers appeared. Dessert turned out to be a concoction of whipped cream accompanied by a salad of exotic fruits. ‘It’s my own recipe,’ Stella announced, ‘and my only contribution.’ She sat back with an expectant smile. Among the figs, lychees and blackheart cherries lay something apple-like, soft, and slightly rotten-smelling.
‘What’s this?’ Anna asked. Even the food seemed to have been designed to put her at a disadvantage. She prodded a slice with her spoon. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever come across it before.’
‘It’s a medlar,’ John said. ‘From Stella’s orchard.’
‘You have an orchard?’ Anna asked in surprise.
‘Oh yes, dear. What would Nonesuch be without its orchard? It’s walled, and very old, and rather overgrown. We keep half a dozen medlars amongst the apples and pears. The stock is sixteenth century, I believe. You eat the fruit only when it’s decayed.’
‘“You’ll be rotten before you be half ripe, and that’s the right vertue of the medlar,”’ John quoted. ‘All those glorious Elizabethan images of decay and sex.’ He met Stella’s eyes. Something unspoken passed between them, and even as it did, Anna saw a movement in the picture behind them. The rain-dirtied courtyard light darkened further towards evening. The shadowy figure in the arcade beneath the Tudor gables seemed to come into focus, shifting in some subtle preparatory way. She blinked, but when she looked again the painting was as dull as it had ever been, and all she had seen was the shadow of one of the catering staff flicker across it. A candle guttered, as if in a breeze.
Max said: ‘Rotten before you’re half ripe. Sounds like one of my dreams.’
‘More like a nightmare,’ said Anna. ‘Decay and sex.’ She shuddered.
Stella Herringe gave her a brief, considering glance. Then she said; ‘John’s your man for dreams. He thinks if you dig around in dreams enough you can unearth all life’s little dark secrets.’
‘But how Freudian,’ said Max. He looked genuinely amused.
‘John’s is a more spiritual approach, I think.’
John glowered at her. ‘You make me sound like Gipsy Rose Lee,’ he said.
Stella turned her head to give Max the benefit of her blue eyes and challenging little laugh. Before this gesture was complete she had murmured – almost lightly, almost in passing – to her cousin: ‘Well, you do look as if you have a touch of the tarbrush, darling. Not in every light, of course.’
John clenched his jaw. With some idea of saving him from his own temper – though by now she would happily have seen him turn on his cousin – Anna interrupted quickly: ‘I’ve been having the strangest dreams.’
She hadn’t thought much about this, but as soon as the words were out of her mouth she saw how true they were. ‘In fact, I haven’t been sleeping at all well.’
Ever since John kissed her, bizarre images had filled her sleep, only to evaporate as she woke hot and upset, tangled in her sheets in the middle of the night. Of those that remained by morning, some achieved a peculiar clarity, often frankly sexual but edged with violence or horror, and quite unlike the unfocused tranquillity of her usual dreams; while others seemed to have so little meaning that the word itself was irrelevant. ‘Here’s an odd one,’ she said, hastily selecting the most innocuous example she could recall. ‘I’m sitting in a room looking out of the window and I see a bird soaring into the sky beside a church spire, the sun turning its feathers to brilliant white. Then it starts to circle, disappears from view, and I think it must have flown away. There’s no real sense of loss. I don’t seem to have any feelings in the dream. But then the bird re-enters the window frame on the other side—’
She paused. ‘Only now it’s become completely black.’
Max gave her a thoughtful look. ‘Might it not be a different bird?’ he asked.
‘Oh, no. It’s the same bird. Always the same bird.’
Stella, who had listened to Anna with a kind of greedy anticipation, leaned across the table and said excitedly, ‘I think we should all tell a dream, don’t you?’ then, in a completely different tone of voice, to John Dawe: ‘Well now, dear. What do you make of that?’
John put his elbows on the table, cupped his face in his hands. ‘It’s interesting enough,’ he said, as if he was already tired of talking to amateurs. After a moment he looked up at Anna and said: ‘Dreams aren’t a simple code.’
‘Oh, cop-out, cop-out,’ exclaimed his cousin.
He ignored her. ‘Dreams are an ad hoc language. It’s not just that they have a different grammar to the ones we use in everyday life: it’s that every one of them has a different grammar to every other.’ It was a reproach, Anna saw; he was reproaching her because she had inadvertently helped Stella turn a lifelong passion into a parlour game. ‘You can’t just perform simple substitutions. Symbols don’t cohere, they shift and break up. They don’t have to mean the same thing twice. You can’t even be sure what’s signal and what’s noise.’
‘That just sounds so clever,’ said Stella. ‘Doesn’t it?’
‘But surely you can hazard a guess?’ wheedled Max, to whom everything was a parlour game anyway. ‘Otherwise why bother? People want an interpretation, not a discussion of the interpretive method itself.’ He winked at Anna. ‘Myself, I’d say it was a dream of lost innocence.’
John Dawe gave him a sarcastic look. Then he poured himself a second brandy, drank half of it in one swallow, and asked: ‘And just how do you reach that conclusion?’
‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ said Max.
Max Wishart, Anna thought, as she watched him consider his answer, who are you now?
He wasn’t quite the Max she knew. Despite the passion for red wines, and bouillabaisse, he looked underweight and drawn. Little sheaves of lines had developed at the corners of his eyes and mouth. He looked less blithe, less self-sufficient, than when she had seen him last. Perhaps his life had not been so continually successful as he expected; perhaps it had been less friendly to him. This thought she savoured, though she knew it to be spiteful. Max, happily unaware, sat back and stretched his long legs out under the table so that they brushed against hers. Flustered, she tucked her feet under her chair. He didn’t seem to notice.
‘I would read the white bird,’ he said, ‘as an image of purity.’
John Dawe leaned back in his chair. ‘You would,’ he said, more to his wine glass than Max Wishart, ‘would you.’
‘Oh yes. The window of the house, the eye of the soul: you know? So this is something very personal to Anna. The bird is herself. Is the landscape herself too?’ he asked himself in parenthesis. ‘Well, we can’t know that. So anyway: your little white bird returns blackened from its trip around the sky. What can have brought about this disaster? The only other signifier in the picture is’ – here he grinned at Anna – ‘the phallus represented by the church spire.’
Stella laughed. ‘We know all about that,’ she said.
John looked contemptuous. ‘One interpretation is as good as another at this sort of level,’ he said roughly. ‘Why don’t the three of you play Trivial Pursuit and be done with it?’
‘Dear me,’ said Stella to Max. ‘He didn’t like that.’
‘What is your interpretation, John?’ Anna asked softly.
He shrugged. ‘The sky is a venue, a field of possibilities, a space in which to act. A life,’ – here he acknowledged Max’s interpretation with a nod – ‘perhaps Anna’s life. The white bird flies out, only to return, in a gesture of completion, as its own diametric opposite.’ He spread his hands. He looked around as if nothing more needed to be said. There was a puzzled silence. ‘Don’t you see?’ he appealed. ‘There is only one bird here.’ He gave Anna an intense look. ‘You have dreamed,’ he said, ‘the two halves of a whole.’
‘Nice,’ Max Wishart admitted softly. ‘Very nice indeed.’ The two men exchanged a smile.
In the comfortable pause that followed, Anna thought about her own life, which she now saw not as a seesaw of good and bad, success and failure, happiness and unhappiness, gain and loss, but as one whole, healed thing. The two birds were her own heart, the yin and yang of her, the warm fluttering systole and diastole of life. It was an image too difficult to maintain, but even after it had slipped away she felt buoyed-up and at ease with herself for the first time since the split with Max.
Stella Herringe toyed with her wine glass, and would not look at the others. ‘But what about the spire?’ she demanded. ‘That’s all very well, but what about the spire?’
‘Oh, I think that might just be Ashmore Church,’ said John carelessly.
Everyone laughed, even Stella. The cheese board arrived. The catering staff attended to the failing candles, coming and going with their long white wax tapers like cathedral attendants. “‘The sapient sutlers of the Lord”,’ quoted Max obscurely. John seemed to approve of this, because he raised his glass. Stella’s table warmed a degree or two, and the supper party with it. John and Max had a loud argument about what John called ‘romantic religion’. Everyone drank more brandy. Max, egged on by Stella, produced for their entertainment a recurring dream he had.
‘I’m sailing alone in a carved and varnished boat on a calm ocean. I can go anywhere in the world. It’s wonderfully relaxing.’
‘And?’ said John. ‘Then?’
‘Nothing,’ said Max. ‘Do you see? That’s the beauty of it. Nothing else happens at all!’
‘Lucky you,’ said Anna pointedly, but Max was already turning to Stella and urging her, ‘Come on, my dear, you started this, and now it’s your go. What dream have you for us?’
‘Oh yes!’ said Anna. She clapped her hands.
‘My cousin is afraid to sleep,’ John Dawe said. ‘For one reason or another. She doesn’t miss it. Insomnia’s something of a family tradition.’
Stella laughed. ‘Herringes hate to waste time when there’s so much to be done in the world,’ she told Max.
‘Just like Margaret Thatcher,’ said John.
‘You must be able to remember one dream,’ Anna urged. ‘I’ve gone and Max’s gone. It really is your turn.’
‘Tell them the one about the cats,’ said John in a cruel voice.
Stella greeted this with a blank look. Suddenly she said: ‘I’m walking uphill with a man. When I reach the top there’s a strong wind blowing. It blows so hard, it inflates my skirts and I rise up into the air like some balloon with my feet dangling and an intense sensation of pleasure.’ She looked pleased with herself. ‘There. I don’t think we need analyse that, do we?’
‘And what about the man?’ said Anna.
‘Oh my dear, you know men. He just walks away.’
‘Touché,’ applauded Max Wishart. ‘Is this a dream of higher things? Are we to envisage you rising at night from the contaminating earth, like an angel, or a holy fog?’
John snorted into his brandy glass. ‘An angel,’ he said.
This seemed to hurt Stella, who looked away. His indifference, so obviously displayed, left her tired and old. It was an effort to gather herself together again, but after a moment, she said, ‘What about you, John? What do you dream of?’
He put back the rest of his brandy. ‘There are cultures which believe that at least half of our life goes on in dreams. That dreaming is the soul’s adventure – no, the soul’s project. That the effects of those dreams are as real as any event that takes place during the day. There are cultures which believe that the dreams you have at night can affect the health and well-being of the entire daylight world.’
He looked round table, pushed back his chair and got unsteadily to his feet.
‘I don’t dream to amuse you,’ he said. ‘Sorry, folks.’
‘Well that’s a nice neat hole to hide in,’ said Stella. ‘The dignity of the expert.’
Anna leaned across the table and touched John’s forearm. He had taken his jacket off and rolled up his sleeves. He was clenching his fist so hard that the muscle was like a block of wood. ‘Come on, John,’ she said. ‘It is your turn.’
He stared at her in a betrayed way then, lifting his hands, palms open, in surrender, sat down again.
‘All right, then. Here’s the dream I had last night—’
‘He writes them down,’ Stella interrupted, ‘in a book he keeps beside the bed.’ She smiled sleepily across at Anna. ‘Don’t ask me how I know that.’
‘—I was sitting here, at dinner. The table was laid just as you see it now.’ He made a gesture that took in the whole of the Painted Room. ‘There were candles everywhere, just as there are now, throwing odd shadows on the walls. That bloody awful painting lay there in wait for us all, the way it always does. In some way, I knew it was this evening. Here’s the only difference: I was sitting where Max is now, and opposite me sat a woman.’
‘Ah,’ said Stella. ‘Which one?’
‘I never saw her face.’
‘Another cop-out!’ Max cried happily.
‘Do you think so?’ John asked him. ‘Is that what you think? She sat opposite me and she held my hands in hers. Have you ever been rendered powerless by a touch? I was so sexually attracted to her that I could barely breathe; and I knew, even though I couldn’t see her face, that she was tremendously beautiful.’
Stella began to smile. It made her look twenty or thirty years younger.
‘I was afraid of her. She had asked me for something I was unable to give. I wanted to give it: don’t think I didn’t. I had refused less out of fear than out of sheer sexual paralysis.’
He stopped. ‘Have you ever felt that?’ he asked Max. ‘Have you ever wanted someone so much you simply couldn’t take them? Only men ever feel that,’ he added bitterly. And then before Max could say anything: ‘I felt a tingling sensation in my arms. When I looked down, I could see swirling silver patterns appearing on my hands, starting at the fingertips and spiralling past my wrists; then up my forearms in great complex, knotted patterns, almost Celtic in form, the lines crossing and recrossing as if to bind me. And these patterns were so entrancing that although I knew they bound me to her, I could never break them.’
He looked down at his hands, as if he could see the patterns there now. ‘I knew I would have her for the rest of my life,’ he said brutally. ‘I knew I would never have her. In some way, she had made herself available and unavailable to me in exactly the same gesture. She was a shaman. I was bound.’
Anna’s chest felt constricted. She realised she had been holding her breath.
‘My, my,’ said Stella softly. Her skin glowed in the candlelight; her eyes were bright.
Max looked round the table, let his gaze rest on Anna. ‘Someone’s clearly got designs on you,’ he said to John.
Anna blushed and looked away.
John sat bolt upright. ‘What was that?’
‘I said, someone’s got designs—’ began Max.
‘Not that,’ John interrupted him contemptuously. ‘Listen. That. I thought I heard a cat.’
The room fell quiet. Anna shivered. ‘I heard a cat in here this summer,’ she said. ‘But Stella never has them in the house.’
John Dawe got unsteadily to his feet, pushed rudely past Stella at the end of the table and announced, ‘I’ve got to piss.’
*
In the wake of this gesture, no one could think of anything to say. And when, after fifteen minutes or so, it was clear that John wasn’t coming back, supper lost its momentum. The atmosphere of the Painted Room would no longer support conversation. In the silences that stretched out between increasingly dull attempts. Max interested himself in the mural. Stella poured more brandy, and stared listlessly ahead of herself, her lips moving as if she was rehearsing some old argument with her cousin. Anna poured herself some mineral water: something – the brandy, the tension, the smell of stale candle smoke – had given her a headache. She didn’t think things could get much worse. Then Max turned to her and said carelessly:
‘And how’s my favourite cat, then?’
Anna couldn’t think what he meant. ‘Pardon?’
‘How’s old Barnaby doing?’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I see.’ She frowned. Then she said flatly. ‘He’s dead. He was run over the week after you left.’
When she looked up and saw the stricken expression on Max’s face, she knew she had gone too far. But nothing she could think of adding would make the situation any better.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
‘It’s a myth, of course, about them having nine lives,’ said Stella, as if she was one of an elect few who had seen through this old wives’ tale. ‘Just a misreading of the reincarnation themes which leaked out of Egypt via the Mediterranean cultures in the millennium before Christ.’ She stared at Anna. She was very drunk, Anna realised. ‘Take my word for it,’ she said. ‘They were fertility symbols, nothing else.’
Anna’s head started to spin.
This woman is mad, she said to herself, then out loud: ‘Excuse me.’ She walked quickly out of the Painted Room and with what she thought was remarkable presence of mind considering the rush of brandy to her head, managed to find the little bathroom attached to Stella’s apartment. There, soothed by the cool white walls and minimal fittings, she sat perched on the toilet with her head in her hands and cried with rage and mortification. The whole event had been a disaster.
She washed her face. When she looked in the bathroom mirror, her eyes, dark with misery and self-loathing, stared at her over the top of the pristine white towel. How could she possibly go back inside that room without killing Stella Herringe? She looked at her watch. It was almost twelve.
She retrieved her jacket from the caterers and stepped out into the cold, damp autumn air. Of John Dawe there was no sign.
The taxi came for her just after midnight.
‘See you didn’t turn into a pumpkin, then,’ said Alice’s ex.
‘It was the coach that turned into a pumpkin,’ she reminded him, ‘not Cinderella.’ She looked down at herself. ‘But have it your way.’
*
Back at the cottage, she tore off the long black dress and stuffed it disgustedly into the back of the wardrobe. She changed into an old, but comfortable, brushed cotton nightdress, made herself a cup of chocolate and curled up on the sofa with Vita and Dellifer and a Joanna Trollope novel she had bought in the bookshop in Drychester. She was just ebbing away from herself, slipping comfortably into the story, when there was a knock at the front door. Vita leapt off the sofa excitedly and ran aimlessly about. Dellifer tucked her nose under her paws and made a huffing noise as if irritated at the disturbance. Through the diamond of bossed glass in the front door, Anna could make out a face, framed by blond hair.
It was Max Wishart. He had a cat in his arms.
Anna put her book down carefully, pulled her robe around her and opened the door.
‘I found this rascal sitting in the middle of the road,’ he said, offering her the cat, which turned out to be Orlando. ‘For a minute I thought it was Barnaby.’
Orlando, who never much liked being picked up, squirmed briefly in Anna’s hands, jumped to the ground and legged it out of the door and into the front garden. He sat there for a time licking his fur in an affronted manner, then vanished into the bushes.
‘You never used to let Barnaby out at night,’ Max said.
‘That was London,’ Anna said firmly. ‘This is Ashmore. Things are different here.’
‘I can see that.’
‘Why are you here, Max?’
‘Stella invited me.’
‘No, I mean why are you here, now, at nearly one o’clock, in my cottage? Max, we haven’t seen each other for two years. What did you think we might have to say to one another?’
‘I came to apologise,’ he said. ‘For this evening.’
Anna regarded him steadily. ‘That’s new,’ she said.
‘Anna—’
‘The man I lived with would never have apologised for anything. He’d have just slipped away in his usual bloody solipsistic dream. Moi? Hurt anyone? How could I? I’m Max.’ She turned away from him and began to shut the door in his face. ‘I’m too ornamental for that. And you are. Max, you are. Barnaby was more use than you.’
He held on to the door. ‘Anna, listen—’
‘Bugger off, Max.’
‘Listen: I deserved that,’ he said.
She stared at him. ‘There’s something the matter with you. Max. Isn’t there?’ When he didn’t answer, she said, ‘You’d better come in. Do you want a cup of tea?’
Once inside, he didn’t seem to know what to do with himself. He looked around at the CD shelves, the TV, as if he had never been in a house before. He picked up the Joanna Trollope, put it down again. He tickled Dellifer under her bony chin and said, ‘Well now, and what’s your name?’ (Dellifer purred politely, but Anna could see she hadn’t fallen for it.) He came into the kitchen and stared at the kettle on the Aga.
‘Look, Max, you don’t have to follow me everywhere. For heaven’s sake go and sit down.’
‘I hardly know Stella Herringe. I had no idea why she wanted me there.’ He saw that Anna didn’t believe him. ‘I’ve got fans,’ he said. ‘You know that. They come to the concerts, they buy the CDs, they—’ He shrugged tiredly. ‘She was very insistent. I assumed it was something like that.’
Anna laughed bitterly. ‘Oh, I bet you did, Max.’
‘Anna, listen to me—’
‘Oh, I know. Max. All that stuff at the dinner table was perfectly deliberate. She set me up, and I fell for it. All those years at TransCorp, dealing with men who would have killed each other – let alone me – for my job, and I allow some old bitch to manipulate me back to my teenage days – no confidence, lots of guilt, not knowing how to defend myself. Well, it won’t happen again, you can be sure of that.’
Max looked at her intently. ‘You’ve got between those two, and it’s a dangerous place to be. That’s all I wanted to say.’
‘No it isn’t,’ said Anna. ‘Max, I lived with you, remember? What is it? Why did you come here?’
When he still didn’t answer, she said: ‘I can take care of myself, Max. Here’s your tea. Please come through and sit down and drink it and then go.’ But although he wandered obediently out of the kitchen, she couldn’t get him to sit down. He stood in the tiny room, the teacup in his hand, while she bustled around him trying to tidy things up. His head brushed the central ceiling beam. Eventually he said: ‘I’m sorry it didn’t work out for us—’
‘It didn’t “not work out” for us, Max. You walked away from it.’
‘—and I’m really, really sorry about Barnaby.’ Suddenly, tears filled his eyes. He looked blindly around for somewhere to put down his cup. She got up and took it from him. She held his hands. His strong, calloused violinist’s fingers lay passively in hers; they were cold.
‘Anna, I’m ill.’
‘Max!’
‘They don’t know what it is. They’re doing a spinal tap next week.’ His face crumpled. He said in a strained and muffled voice: ‘They think it may be MS.’
‘Oh, Max—’
‘What’s life worth, Anna? What’s it worth when this can happen to you?’
Anna threw her arms around him. Whatever he had been to her – whatever he had done to her – he was just a man now, in need of help. How thin he had got! She could feel the bones of his shoulder blades under the palms of her hands, even through the wool of his coat. She could feel him tremble. ‘Sh,’ she whispered. ‘Max, shh.’ She put her hands on either side of his face and made him look at her. ‘It will be all right. I promise you.’
He clung to her like a child.
They were standing there like that, in the middle of her front room with the lights full on and the curtains wide open, when she saw a face at the window.
‘Max!’
She tried to pull herself away, but he only buried his face in her shoulder and clung on harder, so that they tottered about together in a ghastly two-step of despair and frustration.
‘Max!’ she said harshly. ‘Let go of me!’
John Dawe stared in at them for a moment. Then he was gone.