The year had tilted towards winter. The geese abandoned the pond to its year-round inhabitants, the coots and mallards. Fewer people drove out from Drychester to the Green Man for Sunday lunch. The inhabitants of Ashmore woke cold, and made a note to have their winter-weight quilts dry-cleaned. Down in the valley, the canal filled with willow leaves, which lay for a week fading to white before they drifted away; the water slowed, took on the colour of a bottle that has been in the ground. It was bitterly cold in the surrounding meadows at night. When Lydia did not return to the narrowboat, John and Anna walked the length and breadth of Ashmore together, calling, ‘Lydia? Liddy?’ to no avail. They posted notices on fences and trees.
‘She’ll be back,’ he said glumly. ‘Who else would put up with her?’
‘You know you love her.’
They were meeting almost daily by then. They sought out things they could do together. They ate Thai food in a rural pub near Westley (‘Ah,’ he said, ‘coriander and cricket trophies: nothing like it!’); they joined the Film Club (which, being the interest of Francis Baynes, the vicar, offered mostly subtitled Eastern European films about the martyrs of Mystic Christianity). One cold morning he got her to help him strip and repaint the Magpie’s faded terracotta upperwork. After an hour Anna found herself staring speculatively at his hands. In the end she had to look away. ‘Please just take me to bed,’ she wanted to say: ‘There’s nothing in the way of that now.’ But something held her back. Perhaps he was holding himself back too. What would he be like to live with? she wondered. The boat would be impossible for two, it was narrow, damp, there would be too many cats; and the idea of John Dawe – his untidiness, his restlessness, that obsessive energy which, thwarted, would turn so easily into the kind of sullen, self-destructive anger she had seen him direct at his cousin – trammelled by her neat little cottage seemed equally unlikely. Nevertheless, she found herself trying to imagine some sort of life the two of them could share. She stopped what she was doing in the late afternoon to think about it. Standing at the bathroom mirror before she went to bed at night, she congratulated herself wryly:
‘You don’t look so bad, for someone with no obvious future.’
They avoided talking about it, but wherever they went, the events at Stella’s dinner party went with them. Stella was always in their minds, too, a difficulty postponed, almost consciously unacknowledged. It was an unspoken rule that they never mentioned her.
*
They did their Christmas shopping in Drychester indoor market, where, after agreeing to meet up again at Pizza Express for lunch, they drifted easily away from one another in a daze of consumption. He bought her a brightly coloured Peruvian ear-flap hat. She bought him a bottle of honeyed wine. He arrived at the restaurant first. She arrived laughing. ‘Along with the condiments,’ he said, ‘Pizza Express are delighted to put a real flower on your table every day.’ As she sat down he took the flower out of its vase and presented it to her solemnly. ‘This is for you.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
He smiled.
Later she said experimentally: ‘You don’t ask me about Max any more.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t.’
He put his hand out across the table. She held it.
‘Alice Meynell took him back to London that morning,’ she said. She wanted him to be certain about these events; the meanings of them.
She left a pause in which he could make a comment if he felt like it, then added: ‘She’s been up there a couple of times to see him, I think.’
John was amused. ‘Has she now?’ he said.
‘I think I’d like more chilli oil.’
The closer they got, the more cautious they became. They were aware of Stella, of course, brooding up there in her hideout among the cedars. But it was more than that: neither of them could forget how fragile things had been the last time, and this forced courtesies upon them they might not otherwise have observed. He had a cellphone on the Magpie – she left messages with his answering service. He left messages with hers. Though both of them, perhaps, wished it otherwise, they never called on one another unexpectedly: until one day she woke to find him on the doorstep with the milk.
‘It’s early,’ she pointed out.
‘I thought we might go for a walk.’
‘Excuse me.’ Anna stuck her head outside and inspected the weather. ‘As I thought. Foggy and cold. I hate December, it just looks like a lot of damp sticks. And anyway, what would we see, in this?’
‘We could walk up to Cresset Beacon,’ he said, as if he hadn’t heard her. He had his ancient leather-and-canvas knapsack with him; this he opened, to allow her a brief glimpse of its contents. ‘I’ve got a picnic.’
‘Anyone can pack a flask and some apples,’ she said carelessly, ‘and something wrapped in kitchen foil, and call that a picnic.’ She thought she might have seen a woollen blanket in there too. She had another look at the weather. ‘Not today, thank you,’ she said briskly, beginning to close the door.
‘Trust me,’ he promised, ‘and you’ll have sunshine.’
She looked up at him. ‘Oh, all right then,’ she said, without believing a word of it.
The fog was so thick you expected it to have weight, consistency, substance of its own. It padded the arms of the old fruit trees in the cottage gardens, muffled the sound of the closest voice. Cars made their way through the village as cautiously as cows through a new gate; the fog swung closed behind them, and they moved away mooing nervously at one another. Few people were out and about on foot. The postman was the rattle of a gate, the clatter of a letterbox. Old Mr Thompson, bundled up in worsted trousers, two pullovers, and a quilted bodywarmer, waved his stick at Anna and John as they passed, though whether in greeting or reproach it was impossible to tell. Down near the common, where the fog lost texture and took on the colour of milk, Anna saw a marmalade cat dash suddenly between two trees.
‘Was that Orlando? It was!’ She stared anxiously into the middle distance: nothing. ‘Did you see him? Did you see him?’
‘No.’
‘I don’t like to think of him outside in weather like this. What if he got run over?’
John Dawe smiled. ‘By whom?’ he asked. ‘No one’s going more than ten miles an hour.’
‘Well, lost, then,’ she said. Tike Liddy. What if he got lost?’
‘Cats have their own lives. You can’t just coop them up to stop them getting into trouble.’
‘I suppose not.’
They walked for a while in the padded silence. Anna, who had been thinking of Barnaby as well as Orlando, said: ‘Do you suppose they really have nine lives? Cats, I mean.’ When he didn’t reply, aware of the risk she took in bringing the name out into the open between them, she took the opportunity to add: ‘Stella doesn’t. At the supper party – after you left? – she called it a “misreading of popular reincarnation themes that leaked out of Egypt in the millennium before Christ”. She said cats were just fertility symbols.’
John shrugged. ‘Stella has a metaphysics all her own,’ he said. ‘Mostly, she believes in Stella.’
‘But what do you think?’
‘I think the cat symbolises Atum-Ra, lord of life. “From Atum-Ra issued Earth, Air, Fire and Water. And from each element its presiding deity.” One god, four elements, four demiurges: if you like, you can add that up to nine. Prayer, a tree of life, an emergent cosmology, all contained inside the one symbol – Mau, the cat. Stella’s interpretation pales by comparison – it’s vague and reductive at the same time, like most anthropology.’
‘Cats are fertile though,’ Anna said. ‘Aren’t they?’
He kicked at a stone, which skittered away across the road to be swallowed abruptly by the fog.
‘“I am one who becomes two; I am two who become four; I am four who become eight; I am one more after that,”’ he quoted at last. ‘Can’t you feel the force of that? Can’t you feel how thin it makes the words “fertility symbol”? There must be more to it. Love, invisibility, power, healing, protection.’ He thought a moment. ‘There are no metaphors here,’ he decided. ‘At Deir el-Bahari, in the Missing Dynasty, in some perfectly literal sense, five drops of cat’s blood would immunise a child against illness.’
This was too much for Anna. ‘Those Egyptians,’ she said. ‘With medicine that advanced, no wonder they had to believe in reincarnation.’
‘Don’t you?’ he said.
‘No,’ she admitted, ‘I don’t think I do.’
‘You’re lucky,’ he said. ‘My dreams are full of it. Since I was a little boy. I still dream of Nonesuch every night. It knows me, that house: it knows who I am. Who I’ve been. Do you ever feel as if there’s some truer, more complete world than the one we occupy, some different story of things? You’re a part of it, but you don’t know why? You’re part of it and you don’t even know where it is?’
All she felt was that she had to slow him down. ‘John,’ she said, ‘I—’
He smiled and moved his hands, in a gesture of defeat. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Of course you don’t. No one in their right mind feels that. But I do. My soul’s a jigsaw made of years. All this is only the smallest, newest piece. It’s barely real.’
‘Thanks a lot,’ she said; but he didn’t hear, so she laughed as best she could.
‘I ask myself why nature would go to the effort of creating all those lives – all those souls, all those billions of different personalities in the world – if, when the body died, they just disappeared into nothing. Wouldn’t you say that was wasteful?’
‘Reincarnation as recycling,’ she said. ‘Very green.’
He rubbed his hand over his face. ‘I’m not explaining myself well here.’
‘No.’
The lanes had brought them out above and to the north of Ashmore. Here, where the land fell away into steep pasture, the fog had a luminous quality to it, as if it were full of light. It was no easier to penetrate, but John Dawe leaned over the nearest stone wall and stared into it anyway. He said:
‘The thing is this: the first time I saw you, down on the towpath, I knew without a doubt I’d seen you before.’
‘Well, you probably had,’ said Anna. ‘It’s a small village.’
‘I don’t mean that,’ he said patiently.
‘Then what?’
‘I thought I had seen you in another life,’ he said, and walked off quickly uphill as if he already wanted to divorce himself from this news.
Anna, thrown into a panic she couldn’t explain, caught up with him and called his name and touched his body just beneath the shoulder blades. In exactly the same instant, they emerged from the fog into dazzling sunshine. It was like a flashbulb going off; or an electric shock. Anna, who thought confusedly that she had been burned, dropped her hand. While she was blinking and rubbing her eyes, filled suddenly with an extraordinary sense of peace, he took her roughly by the tops of the arms.
‘Turn round!’ he said urgently. ‘Look!’
Fog, burning white, its surface shifting and roiling like a slowed-down sea. Somewhere below, she imagined, Ashmore lay smothered and gasping for breath, never suspecting the airy ecstasy of light above. A little way down the valley, the tops of some birches and a stand of pines cleared the surface; a bird flew up out of the trees, then, losing height suddenly, disappeared again.
‘It’s amazing!’
‘It’s a temperature inversion,’ he said. ‘On mornings like these, a layer of warm air keeps the fog in the valley. Look at me.’
She looked at him.
‘I always keep my promises.’
‘Do you?’ she said.
She took his hand and with one finger traced the word ‘Mau’ on his palm. ‘I thought I recognised you, too,’ she admitted, ‘the first time we met.’ She shivered, looked out across the illuminated mist. ‘What can it mean? What can it all mean?’ The very thought of it brought a kind of vertigo. It was like tottering on the lip of some endless fall into thin air, and reaching out for help, and finding none, and realising even as you toppled that the fall was into yourself. ‘Even if I remember you,’ she heard her own voice say, ‘I don’t remember anything else.’ Still, she clutched at him as hard as she could.
*
They followed the footpath to the Cresset Beacon viewing point, climbed a stile and sat down on the wooden bench there. The air was still. There were spiderwebs among the bracken, still laden with dew. In another hour, the sun would have peeled the fog off the lower downland. Anna leaned against John Dawe, and he put his arm around her. For the first time she felt neither nervous nor angry in his presence. He felt familiar at last.
‘I wonder if we’ve—’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’ She had meant to finish ‘—been here before?’ but she didn’t want to articulate any of it, she wasn’t ready to admit anything to herself. ‘Why don’t you kiss me?’ she said instead.
He kissed her for a long time – then, brushing hair away from her face, seemed content just to look at her. His fingers were rough from work on the boat; his eyes were as tawny as a cat’s. Staring into them, she felt her blood beat up in her. How knowing he had been, all along. He took her hands and pulled her to her feet.
‘Come on,’ he said.
‘I—’
‘Come on.’
A little unsteady with anticipation, she let herself be led away. At the back of the hill lay a hollow like a cup in the earth, encircled by old rowan trees and hornbeams. He knelt down there, took the woollen rug out of his bag, and spread it on the ground. She could only seem to stand and watch, hypnotised and helpless. He peeled her out of her scarf, her coat, her gloves; out of her old Artwork cardigan. She didn’t care that it was December air on her skin, December light among the trees. She was full of a languid curiosity to see what happened next. She was hot where he touched her, or where she thought he might touch her next. When he entered her, it was astonishingly familiar and intensely new. It was so easy. ‘Oh,’ she heard herself say. She opened her eyes for a moment and saw the trees above her, the ancient winter light of the hollow. If she had been able to think, she might have thought, have you brought me here before?
When she came, it was in such a rush of sensation that she was barely aware of him. Had he come too? She gazed up at him, only to find him gazing down. The hard edges of his face had softened. He looked younger. He looked delighted.
‘Hello,’ she said, as if she had been away. ‘Was that all right?’
This made him laugh. ‘Anna, Anna, Anna,’ he said.
A fox walked into the circle of trees.
It emerged silently from the shadows, the exact colour of copper beech leaves, with a splash of cream at the throat and down into the rough fur of its chest. Had it come to watch? What did it make of them? It stood there, its breath a faint vapour in the bright morning air, regarding them with intelligent, unblinking yellow eyes. When it had seen enough, it turned and leapt away, vanishing suddenly between the hornbeams, shedding as it went what seemed to Anna, in her state of disorientation, to be rings of rainbow light. There was a patch of grey fur on one of its haunches.
‘Look!’ she said. ‘Look!’
John had seen it too. ‘The genius loci,’ he whispered. He sat up. ‘The spirit of the place.’
She pulled him back down to her. ‘I’m cold if you move,’ she said. While she thought to herself: It was the fox. It was the fox!
*
Three miles away, where the fog coiled at its thickest around a tail-chimneyed, gabled house, a woman for whom sleep came hard wailed into her pillow, but in her dream no sound emerged.
Ahead, through a blinding, icy mist, she saw two mouths meet and fix upon one another with fervent, unmistakable hunger. It was a hunger she recognised: she had lived with it herself for so long now that it had become a permanent ache. But something about the scene was not right – for the head that reached up to take the kiss was mousy and nondescript, not glossy and black. The mist swirled and parted, and for an instant she saw more clearly: two bodies, naked, entwined—
The fury that rose in her was so powerful that she could feel herself generating it with a physical force, a welling fountain of hatred and bile.
Something moved in front of her then, blocking her line of sight.
A red mask reared up, a lolling tongue, a jaw lined with teeth—
‘You can’t keep doing this,’ accused the fox. ‘What?’ she snarled. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Wreaking your havoc.’
She glared at it. ‘I’ll outlive all of you.’
‘Surviving at the expense of all that is natural is no survival at all.’
‘What do I care for what you call natural?’ Her eyes glittered angrily. ‘If I cannot have what I want, it can all wither and die and go to hell—’
It was like birthing a monster. The Dream burst from her, all glowing blacks and reds, all teeth and claws and murder.
The fox ran at it, ears flat with desperation, but his legs were not made for leaping. It evaded him easily, fleeing away into the icy tunnel, and where it touched, it burned...
*
John Dawe had found a comfortable place to sit among the roots of a rowan tree. Anna lay with her head on his thighs. The sky was an uninterrupted cerulean blue with vapour trails high up: the air was like glass. From this side of the Beacon they could see all the way to Westley. Church spires and threads of chimney smoke rose against the rolling downland; there were oak-hangers on the rises. They had put on their clothes, eaten the picnic, which included the contents of the foil packages – two delicious beef and onion pasties that John had cooked himself, early that morning, and finished the contents of John Dawe’s flask. (Tm not sure,’ she had concluded, ‘that Calvados goes all that well with hot chocolate. Whatever you say.’) They had talked companionably about everything that came into their heads. Now they were content just to be there with one another, part of the limpid silence of the morning. After a while Anna felt so secure that she was able to say:
‘And so what about you and Stella?’
She knew the moment she closed her mouth that she had made a mistake. The fact was, she didn’t want to know.
‘You don’t have to tell me,’ she said quickly.
‘No, no, I don’t mind,’ he said. ‘When I first met her, she was twenty-two years old.’ There was a long pause, as if he was organising his thoughts. ‘Stella! You wouldn’t have believed her then.’
‘I’m not sure I believe her now.’
‘She was twenty-two, I was thirteen. We were related on my mother’s side, that was my Herringe connection. She was a sweet woman, my mother, but never competent. As for my father—’ He shrugged. ‘He seemed like a fool, but what do I know? She went downhill after he died, and I ended up at Nonesuch. The Herringes were very good about it, but they didn’t quite know what to do with me.
‘They didn’t know what to do with Stella, either, and that in itself was a bond between us. She was mad to achieve something in her life, and they had no idea how to handle that.’ He smiled thinly. ‘This was the sixties, remember. So there she was, stuck in the middle of nowhere, all that energy going to rot and waste. She had no outlet until I arrived to soak it all up. I was like blotting paper. Quite soon she was all the family I needed.’
He looked out over the downs, his eyes narrowed, as if he could see himself there, at Nonesuch all those years ago.
‘I don’t know which I loved more, her or the house. Can you imagine a twenty-two-year-old girl in charge of all that? Stella made her own rules even then. We did what we wanted, ate what we wanted, we lived from room to room like gypsies, while the staff followed us about. She still had a staff then. We took an Old Dansette with us everywhere we went, and I watched her dance to the Rolling Stones in a slant of sunlight in some fifteenth-century solar I never found again. She wound us – everything we did – into the history of the place. I loved that history, because it was in itself a kind of dusty attic, a secret passageway, filled with all the fantastic bric-a-brac of ancestry and inheritance. I loved the idea of a convoluted but unbroken line that ran from Joshua to Stella – and even, in some measure, from Joshua to me. All the time, I realised later, Stella was watching me for something beyond that, some other response; but in the end, like everyone ordinary, I was a disappointment to her. I hadn’t understood the lesson. I hated to disappoint her.’
‘She’s very strong, isn’t she?’ Anna interrupted, because she was jealous and wanted him out of this dream of adolescence. ‘One of the strongest people I’ve ever met.’
He stared at her. Eventually he gave a curious laugh.
‘Stella Herringe hasn’t a tenth of your strength,’ he said. ‘She’s demanding, she’s wilful, she’s driven, but underneath it she’s insecure and desperate. Her needs always undermined her intelligence. The Herringes never knew what to do with her for that reason alone: they sensed she was undependable, and old money has such an instinct to protect itself! In addition, of course, she was a woman. She came out of a minor Oxford college at twenty-two years old expecting to move up the family hierarchy, join the players, run one of the high-profile businesses. They were still on the mainland then. They had manufacturing concerns. They were in armaments, steel, the nascent North Sea oil industry. Stella saw herself in a boardroom somewhere, ousting the old men who drink the Herringe port. But the trustees made sure all she got was me. Nonesuch, and a rundown chemical company to play with. She built that into Engelion, and it was a brilliant achievement; but apart from some trust-fund politics and a few semi-active directorships, Engelion is all she has. It was never a sufficient powerbase from which to take what she thought of as her rightful place in the family. The power lay elsewhere, if it lay anywhere at all. Stella had already begun to break herself against that discovery when I was young. I heard her walking the passages at night, ranting to the ancestral portraits on the walls.’
He shook his head.
‘She’s terrified of ageing, she’s terrified of death. She’s obsessed with Nonesuch and its past. She’s gone so far into herself now that she has to be looked after. What do you think that fatuous pair Mark and Oliver do? They make sure she signs the right papers and doesn’t drink too much gin. They put petrol in the Mercedes when she forgets, and make sure she doesn’t run it into a tree. They’re from some even more distantly related branch of the family than I am – and that’s how they treat her, like some great aunt three-times-removed. They make her feel young, and in control, and she laps it up.’
He took Anna’s hands. ‘Don’t you see? It’s a mistake to think of her as strong. It’s weakness that makes her so dangerous. She sucks you in, and before you know it you’re propping up her fantasies. Then, when you try to get away...’ He sighed and looked off into the distance. ‘And yet somehow, there’s more to it. There’s more to Stella, but I only ever understand it in dreams.’ He sighed. ‘And she was so extraordinarily beautiful back then. When she was in the room I couldn’t take my eyes off her; when she wasn’t, she was all I could see.
‘I felt like Pip in Great Expectations. You know? She held all that out to me: how could I have resisted it?’
He shook his head. ‘Unlike Pip, of course, I got what I wanted.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Anna; although she thought she did.
‘Anna—’
‘I don’t care about all this.’
He was about to contradict her when she said in a rush, ‘No, I really don’t. I love you. We could have something together.’ She took his hand in both hers, curled it into a fist, put it against her heart. ‘I know it. I feel it. But you have to let go of Stella. You have to stop feeling bound to her, by the money, whatever—’
‘It’s not the money,’ he said dully. ‘Not only the money.’
‘Then what is it?’
‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘What do you think happens between a bored, power-hungry girl twenty-two years old and an adolescent boy?’
Anna got to her feet quickly. ‘That’s awful,’ she said.
‘No it isn’t, he said. ‘It isn’t awful at all. Not when you’re thirteen. It’s marvellous.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘You know what I’m saying,’ he told her gently.
‘Well, I hate it.’
‘Nonesuch was all the home I had until I went up to Cambridge. Every weekend, every holiday from Marlborough, she was there, the house was there. They were inseparable, full of light. I loved her for years.’
Anna laughed bitterly. ‘She fucked you for years,’ she said. ‘That’s all.’
He tried to take her hand but she pulled it away. He said quietly, ‘It’s a mistake to rubbish other people’s experience, Anna. Whatever it was, it happened to me, just as Max happened to you. It filled up my life, just as Max filled yours, and it took a long time to escape from. That’s all I know.’ After a moment he went on, ‘I haven’t escaped her yet. I don’t feel I can simply throw her away. She’s a manipulator, she’s a monster, but I can’t deny her any more than you can deny the violinist. I can’t walk away and pretend she doesn’t exist. Anna, I want a future too. But I can’t have it simply by rejecting the past. I need to come to terms with Stella, sort out some kind of friendship. I owe her that. I’m sorry about this.’ He indicated the trees, the blanket, the scattered picnic. ‘It was wrong of me. It was too soon—’
‘Wrong of you? Oh, you bastard!’
Anna pushed him away as hard as she could. ‘Who the hell do you think you are, to say “it’s too soon”, “it’s too late”? There are two of us here! Or was I just another knick-knack for that sad bloody collection on the Magpie? Just another piece in your famous spiritual jigsaw? You’re not helpless. If things are this way, it’s because in some measure you want them to be. All that crap about “the bric-a-brac of inheritance”? Spare me, John. You aren’t Nonesuch’s prisoner, or even Stella’s – you’ve just lost the knack of having feelings for anyone but yourself!’
He stared at her. She stood there for a moment wishing, unreasonably, that he would defend himself. Then she turned and ran back down the path.