Anna poured the last cup of tea from the big pot and handed it to Ruth Canning. Ruth accepted it and settled back into her deckchair with a sigh. ‘Now this, I could get used to,’ she said, shading her eyes against the late September sunshine the better to watch Sam and the children playing French cricket on the lawn with Max and Alice. Max, pretending to a greater competitiveness than was actually called for, had started to bowl overarm, much to the delight of Fin and Dylan. They squealed and ducked and squealed again. They thought it exceptionally funny that Alice had to run all the way to the great cedar to retrieve the ball.
‘Look at them,’ said Ruth. ‘What a shower. Stop laughing like that. Fin, and pull your trousers up. Pull his trousers up, Sam.’
‘What’s that tea like?’ asked Anna. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer Pimm’s?’
Ruth gave her a look. ‘Oh, very Country Life,’ she said. ‘Very lady of the manor.’
Anna smiled. She was the lady of the manor, she supposed; but it was still hard to think of herself like that. Especially since she still found the house rather sinister, even without its former occupant, and preferred to spend her time out here, in the garden. Quite a lot of Nonesuch had burned down in the end – though the structure was sound there had been great damage to the interior. But Stella, controlling to the last, had left a fire-proof safe in her apartment, and inside it a copy of a will which deeded the house, along with her personal bank accounts, to her only living relative, John Dawe. That sum, by itself, had made it possible to begin the repairs; that and the sale of Anna’s cottage, snapped up after a day on the market by a couple called Tony and Fiona (who had made some money designing restaurants in London and were looking, as Fiona put it, for ‘somewhere quiet to think about things further’). The insurance was only now starting to come through, and restoration would be a long haul, but Anna was trying very hard to look upon Nonesuch as her home. John had seemed so determined to reclaim it, to save it from its ghosts, and was now pursuing the restoration with an energy and commitment that almost frightened her.
She shook the Pimm’s around in its jug. ‘I’m not sure I fancy it either,’ she said. ‘It was Max’s idea.’
‘Given Alice’s influence. I’m surprised he didn’t suggest something a bit more robust.’
They watched the cricket for a minute or two, then Ruth said: ‘How are your hands today?’
Anna looked own. Her scars were almost invisible now, but they would always show a little against a tan. She flexed her fingers. The sun glinted off the white gold of her wedding ring.
‘Oh, they’re not so bad,’ she said softly. ‘Not so bad now.’
They sat sipping their tea, enjoying the sun. A white pigeon fluttered down from one of Nonesuch’s gables and began to peck about on the grass in front of them. There was a sudden squawk, a considerable flapping of wings, and a small, aggrieved wail.
‘That damned kitten!’ said Anna.
*
‘Look at that kitten!’
Orlando the cat lay with his elbows tucked under him, eyes half-closed against the sun. ‘Lydia, you should teach her better: she’ll never catch anything if she chatters at it first like that.’
‘Criticise other people’s kittens when you’ve had some of your own,’ Lydia replied. ‘She was only playing anyway. Weren’t you, my darling?’
The kitten regarded its mother with scorn, then ran full tilt at Orlando, paws out for a fight. They rolled around growling at one another, and were soon joined by the rest of the litter. All three kittens were boxy and short-coupled, with dense blue-grey fur. Lydia didn’t seem to have passed on much of her heritage. And maybe that was as it should be, Orlando thought, perhaps unfairly. He regarded Lydia askance and felt strangely empty. There had been a time when to lie beside her on the grass like this; to share a house with her, to share a life with her, would have been his wildest dream. Now he was less sure of what he wanted.
Lydia, meanwhile, had turned her head to the other cat present. ‘Millefleur, whatever am I going to do with them? They’re too old to rough and tumble like this. And he keeps encouraging them.’
But Millie wasn’t listening. With a faraway look in her eye, she had watched the pigeon fly up into the shadow of Nonesuch: a flash of white disappearing into the dark, and remembered a small tabby cat whose white socks had flashed just so, before she disappeared for ever into the maw of the highways.
‘When I have kittens, I shall call my daughter Vita,’ she said.
Orlando, upside-down with three little ruffians on top of him, looked sad.
‘If you have kittens,’ said Lydia.
*
‘If I had a boy,’ said Anna, ‘I think I’d call him Barnaby.’
Ruth wasn’t going to have this. ‘Anna, Barnaby is the name of a cat. You can’t call your offspring after a cat. Besides, it shortens to Barney. Do you want that for you child? You aren’t pregnant again, are you?’
‘No, no I’m not.’
‘Because you only just had Eleanor.’
‘I know that, Ruth.’
As if summoned by this conversation, Eleanor herself arrived, pushed by her father in a buggy of sturdy off-road design. Neither the fall of Nonesuch nor the death of his cousin had changed John Dawe much. He still had the rangy, energetic walk. He still wore black Levi’s and cotton sweaters with the sleeves pushed up. He still wore the most ridiculous boots. And yet he looks so much more himself, Anna thought, watching him exchange a few words with Sam. What she meant by this she couldn’t quite say. Being a father had grown him up: perhaps that was it. She thought: I’m his wife. I never expected to be a wife. Or a mother. As for the darker side of it all, they rarely discussed it. You cannot be an ordinary couple if you admit that you have lived other lives, or that much of the behaviour that brought you together has somehow been programmed by a past with which you have no familiarity. Stella Herringe had known herself – or something in her had. Stella Herringe had been aware of her past lives. She had remembered them in detail – or believed she had. Past and future had all been one to her. But John had nothing but a few odd dreams – fading, now that he was a father, like his obsession with dreams themselves – like echoes of something heard at a distance: a sense, as he sometimes said, that there was more to him than met the eye. As for Anna, she remembered nothing at all of the past. She was Anna Dawe, née Prescott, no more, no less. And her dreams, she preferred to believe, were only dreams.
‘Do you think she was right? Do you think we really have lived all this out before?’ she had asked him, the day they moved into Nonesuch. ‘Some awful triangle, repeating and repeating itself?’
But they both knew there was no answer to that. John Dawe laughed at something Sam had said, then pushed the buggy over to Anna and Ruth. ‘Your turn now.’
‘Is she asleep?’
He made a face. ‘At last. I wish I was.’
‘Dylan was the same,’ said Ruth. ‘He didn’t want to miss out on life for a minute.’ She stood up to get a better view. ‘Anna, every time I see her she’s more beautiful!’
Anna admitted this, with some complacency. ‘I suppose she is. That black hair! I thought it was all supposed to fall off after the birth.’
Eleanor opened her eyes suddenly. ‘What an unusual shade of green,’ said Ruth. ‘She doesn’t get that from either of you, does she? Look at me – no, both of you. I thought so. Hazel and brown.’
She laughed up at John. ‘Anyone in your family have eyes like that?’ she asked him.
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