Anna was lying on the sofa hating herself, a cup of tea left to grow a cold skin on the table at her side, when someone knocked on the door. For a moment she thought it might be John, but it was only Alice Meynell. Anna was thankful, in a way. It simplified things. How do you stay angry with a man who spread warmth all through you not three hours ago, then spoiled everything? How do you not? Alice, always a relief, stood on the doorstep with one hand on her hip and the other cradling her motorcycle helmet. She was wearing a new set of leathers, in red and white to match the bike.
‘Alice. Good Lord. You look like a parrot.’
‘I do, don’t I?’ said Alice comfortably. ‘Max Wishart bought them for me.’
‘It’s amazing how people’s tastes can change. Oh Alice, I’m so glad to see you! Come in and talk to me.’ Anna indicated the Kawasaki, which was propped up in the lane outside. Heat rose from its engine and shimmered in the clear winter air. ‘Did you know you’ve left that thing going?’ she said.
Alice looked less comfortable. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Actually I can’t stop. I just wanted to— God, I hate having to do this.’
‘Alice, do what?’
‘Anna, one of your cats got run over.’
‘No,’ said Anna.
She wasn’t really listening after that. She put her hand to her mouth. ‘Was it Orlando?’ she said, thinking of the quick, marmalade-coloured shape she had seen darting away through the fog that morning. She felt bemused. She felt her lip begin to tremble.
She said, ‘Oh no.’
‘I’m really sorry, love,’ Alice was saying. ‘I think it was the old one, I can’t remember what you called her—’
‘Dellifer,’ said Anna quietly. ‘Her name was Dellifer.’
‘It was up near the common. There’s a dip there that often has standing fog in winter, you’ve to treat it with a bit of care...’ She shrugged. ‘Anyway, I was there when it happened. Stella Herringe went into it all over the road in that bloody great boat of a Mercedes, talking nineteen to the dozen to the bloke in the front seat—’
‘Poor Dellifer,’ said Anna. ‘Oh, poor old thing.’
Alice looked away. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know. But it must have been quick. You know? Because when I got off to help, the old bag just waved me away. She was all, the cat’s dead, nothing either of us can do now, why don’t you mind your own business.’ She ran her hand through her hair. ‘What a bitch,’ she said. ‘So I got back on the bike and left her to it. I don’t know what happened after that. I didn’t really know what else to do.’
‘Her name was Dellifer,’ Anna said. ‘I don’t know where she came from and I don’t know what I would have done without her. She meant everything to those kittens.’
She gave an odd little wail and began to sob. Once she had started, she couldn’t stop. Everything rolled over her. She was inconsolable. She would never forgive herself. Images of Dellifer – leaking milk on to the best cushions, boxing the young Orlando’s ears to teach him manners, past her best as a mother but still determined – now seemed to merge with all the other painful matters of Anna’s life. The failure with Max, the death of Barnaby, the retreat from London, all this nightmare with Stella and John – the growing sense she had of herself as someone who couldn’t make a life: the old cat became a symbol of it all. Anna put her face in her hands and wept and wept and wept.
‘That bloody woman,’ Alice said. ‘I could kill her.’
‘Oh Alice,’ said Anna. She sniffed. She tried to laugh. ‘I’m cold out here,’ she said, ‘And I need a tissue. One way or another I haven’t had a very good day.’
Alice stared into Anna’s raw, wet face and realisation dawned suddenly. ‘This isn’t just about the cat, is it?’
Dumbly, Anna shook her head.
‘Ah,’ said Alice. ‘Is it him?’
‘Oh you don’t know, it’s not just him, you don’t know anything—’
Alice, always quick to detect self-pity, said: ‘You’d better tell me what it is then, my girl. Or you’ll get no sympathy from me.’
‘You sound like your own grandmother,’ said Anna.
Alice dropped her helmet on the doorstep. She went over and switched off the Kawasaki. She came back, picked the helmet up again, put her other arm round Anna in a creaky leather-smelling embrace, and ushered her inside. ‘Sit down there,’ she ordered, indicating the chair by the Aga, and began to make tea in her own inimitable fashion.
‘Nothing wrong with my grannie,’ she said.
*
‘Let’s see then—’ she said later.
In addition to tea she had made peanut butter sandwiches, very thick, and after that eaten some marmalade on toast. She had turned the heating up. The kitchen smelled warm and inhabited for a change; the kitchen table was littered with used knives, open jars and bits of local cheese in wrinkled shrink-wrap.
‘—the sky’s fallen in on you because though you did very well at school and university, you always felt you could have done better. The sky’s fallen in on you because, despite the fact that you were one of the most successful women at TransCorp, you suspected the male dealers didn’t rate you. Am I right?’ Instead of allowing Anna to answer, she began to tick off further points on her fingers, using one of the dirty knives. ‘You blame yourself for failing to understand Max Wishart’s character (which, though I like him lots, is not necessarily that of Captain Reliable). You blame yourself for the death of your cat Barnaby, and – correct me if I’m wrong here – the deaths of practically every other cat in the world. The sky has fallen in on you because you’ve had a row with John Dawe, known to be Ashmore’s, not to say the universe’s, most difficult man. And finally—’
With exaggerated care she replaced the knife on the table-top.
‘Finally, the sky has fallen in on you because John Dawe’s fifty-year-old cousin once taught him how to shag?’
She shrugged.
‘Everyone has to learn,’ she said.
‘The problem is,’ said Anna. ‘I don’t know if it ever stopped.’
Alice considered this with the matter-of-factness of eighteen years. ‘Well, you can see she’s nuts about him,’ she admitted. ‘But I’d say she doesn’t get as much of him as she’d like, not by the way she watches him in the pub. It’s a greedy look, like watching your dinner getting served by mistake to someone else when you’re starving hungry. I feel quite sorry for her, poor old dear.’
‘I hate her,’ said Anna.
‘Well, that’s a start,’ Alice got up. ‘I can see you’re feeling better,’ – she retrieved her motorcycle jacket from the floor, hauling it across her shoulders in a single fluid movement – ‘so I’m off to pick Max up from the station.’
Anna felt contrite. She hadn’t given Max a thought. ‘How is he?’
Alice grinned. ‘He’s a man, Anna. One sneeze is pneumonia, closely followed by viral myocardia and death. Pins and needles means life, but in a wheelchair.’
‘So what is it, then?’
‘Well they don’t really know. It’s not MS, though. You can get them to say that he might have had a virus. But you can always get them to say that. His osteo always thought it was a trapped nerve, maybe some kind of RSI. It could be down to the way he holds his instrument.’ She winked. ‘So I’m off to hold his instrument for him now, and we’ll see if that will cure what ails him.’
‘Best of luck.’
Alice gave Anna a look her mother would have called ‘direct’. ‘Come and have a drink with us later,’ she invited, ‘at the Green Man. Oh, and another thing,’ – she worked her helmet energetically down over her head, talking at the same time, so that her voice proceeded oddly from its cushioned interior – ‘if our Stella’s got her claws into John Dawe, you’d better be prepared to fight for him.’ With that, she was out of the door. A moment later the Kawasaki burst into life and roared away down the road with its front wheel in the air.
Anna stared out into the garden, and thought about Dellifer. She decided to phone Nonesuch, so see if anything could be done. Then, because her motives were so mixed, she decided not to. She was, she knew, as interested in finding out where John had gone after the argument at Cresset Beacon as she was in discovering the fate of the old cat. The mistress of Nonesuch, always merciless to the morally confused, would take immediate advantage of that. Suddenly the telephone rang. Anna stared at it in a kind of terror, convinced suddenly that Stella would be at the other end if she answered. She let it ring and ring. At last she picked the receiver up and jammed it to her ear. ‘Hello?’ she said sharply. ‘Who’s this?’
‘No need to shout,’ said Ruth Canning.
‘Ruth, I’m so glad to hear you, I—’
‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine,’ said Anna miserably. What else could she say? It would take ages to tell Ruth everything, and even then, what could she do? It was a long way from Hackney to Ashmore. ‘I’m fine,’ repeated Anna, who had never felt so isolated in her life.
‘You don’t sound it,’ Ruth said. ‘Look, can I do anything?’
‘No, no. Don’t. Honestly, I really am OK.’
Ruth rang off, puzzled. Anna stood by the phone, thinking miserably, I must do something. I must do something. Ten minutes later she was sitting at her computer. Ruth’s voice had reminded her of Engelion Cosmetics. If she was to take John away from his cousin, it was time to understand as much as she could about Stella’s activities. The hard disk of the computer buzzed and rattled to itself; the browser flickered into life; search engines were dispatched.
*
The files started innocuously enough with the official Engelion website’s home page, which spread itself enticingly across the screen in the sumptuous pinks and greys and golds of the company livery. These colours were repeated in the main image, which showed a German supermodel from the eighties, known to be past her best. Naked but for some carefully engineered satin, she looked unfeasibly unlined and glowing as she endorsed the remarkable rejuvenating powers of Engelion’s firming and regenerating serum. ‘I’ve worked hard and played hard; and I’ve earned the best – Engelion,’ she claimed. Above her, left of the company masthead, Stella Herringe gazed serenely out of a smaller image, all cheekbones and sleek black hair and startling green eyes. Stella, who was at least ten years older than the supermodel, somehow looked the younger of the two.
‘Beauty is a performance. It is the performance of your life. Push back the damage of the years,’ Stella invited. ‘Why let age wither you when the power to reverse time lies in your own hands?’
There followed a long list of quasi-technical details, which completed themselves with a further mission statement: ‘At Engelion we spend more than half of our resources testing the product to make certain it is safe for you to enjoy.’
Anna clicked irritably out of the site, and found instead an article from an online news agency, dated the previous August:
Protesters arrested at research facility.
Fifteen animal rights activists were taken into custody yesterday when they attempted to set fire to an isolated building in farmland in the Oxfordshire countryside. Unconfirmed reports identify the building as Hale Farm, one of several properties owned by Allbright Chemicals Ltd. Demonstrators claimed that the building was being used in the process of animal testing of ingredients for British cosmetics company, Engelion pic. A company spokesman, Oliver Holland, denied that Engelion ever tested any of their products on animals. ‘We are completely committed to a beauty without cruelty ethic,’ he stated. But a spokesperson for the Anti-Vivisection League remained unconvinced. ‘We’ve been keeping an eye on Allbright and Engelion for some time now, and we’ve gathered some pretty damning evidence. Even though testing so-called beauty products on animals is now illegal, it seems that all some companies have to do to avoid prosecution is to claim some spurious medical application for their work. But if the courts won’t do something about these practices, we’ll be taking matters into our own hands.’
Soon the web address for the Anti-Vivisection League site glowed in blue on Anna’s monitor. Tentatively, she double-clicked the link.
Guinea pigs with shaved heads and weeping sores stared out of row upon row of wire cages; rabbits with ulcerated eyes were forced to receive more liquid into the affected areas via pipette; a monkey shrieked in silent outrage in the inimical grip of a stereotaxic device; dogs with the tops of their skulls trepanned sat staring patiently into the middle distance, as if imagining a different kind of world; a kitten with every part of its head trapped inside a complex vice comprising so many levers and clamps that it looked like a medieval torture device, writhed as a hand introduced an electrode into the exposed tissue on the crown of its head.
Anna felt her heart contract, her mouth go dry.
A banner ran across the bottom of the screen. ‘Join the VN,’ it read, ‘and do something about it!’
She clicked on the banner. Up came a new site. It was crude in appearance, the lettering and layout basic. Content was more important than form here, and the content was simple. In bold capitals it declared: ‘A Call to War! The VN (Vivisectionist’s Nightmare): Fighting for Animal Rights’.
Beneath the headline there was a list of places and dates. This had not been updated for some time. In the middle of the list, Anna spotted an entry for Hale Farm. ‘Cats bred for testing here. Take action: August 18th,’ it read. And then, halfway down a subsidiary list, of those implicated at Hale: ‘Herringe, Stella; Holland, Mark; Holland, Oliver’. No explanation for their inclusion was given. She remembered Mark and Oliver in their identical Paul Smith suits, staring around at the countryside as if they had never seen it before. ‘Is that a jay?’ she remembered one of them asking her. ‘We thought it was a jay.’
The last item she found was about the use of foetal material from animals in anti-ageing treatments. Engelion was listed as one of the companies that had, until recent legislation, been pioneering in this area.
‘You bastards,’ she whispered.
Anna switched off the computer and stared at the dead screen. When she closed her eyes, she saw the laboratories. When she closed her eyes, she saw the patient, trepanned dogs, the tortured kitten with its mouth open on an unending cry of betrayal and despair.
She went to the bathroom and took down the pot of cream Stella had given her earlier that year. She took the lid off it and washed its contents down the sink, careful to make sure none of it touched her hands. Then she opened the back door and threw the pot into the dustbin. She stared out into the darkened garden, remembering how the bright fox had brought her Orlando’s mother. She remembered all that pain, all that determination, all that trust. She thought about Dellifer, who couldn’t stop herself from being a mother. Sleet was beginning to fall out of a leaden sky. Anna thought she might phone Stella Herringe after all, and tell her some of these things. Instead she wandered about the cottage, switching on all the lights. She switched on the television, only to be rewarded with the wretchedly cheerful theme of Animal Hospital. She tried Radio 4, where she found in progress a discussion about the future of the Euro. She read for a while, made soup and toast, and waited for her kittens to come home. By ten o’clock, the cat-flap had not so much as rattled. She switched on the outside light. She called their names. She banged a teaspoon on the food bowl. Nothing. She tried the same at the front door, then crossed the road to the pond and called again. All she got back was a resounding silence. She remembered what John Dawe had said that morning: ‘Cats wander. They have their own lives.’
‘Be careful with your lives, you two,’ she said softly into the night. ‘However many you may have.’
She wondered how she would have felt if she had ever used the Engelion cream.
The old tomcat was still in the spare room, crammed under the bed, hard up against the skirting board out of her reach. He smelled as bad as ever, and appeared to be sleeping until she pushed a bowl of moistened Science Diet towards him. His one eye opened. It regarded her with its customary gleaming hostility, then transferred its attention to the bowl. She smiled, ‘Still got one life left, then, you old monster?’ she said fondly. One of her anxieties thus assuaged, she made her way up to bed.
The nightmares were terrible.