The Knot Garden by Gabriel King
He is ignoring her, thought Anna, and she hates it.
Suddenly Stella Herringe looked her age; you sensed that her need to control her companions – to control men in general – came not from strength but weakness. For a moment her eyes were puzzled and hurt. Then she was on her feet, running over to John Dawe to greet him, pretending she had only just seen him there. She tugged at his hand, talking as animatedly as Alice. Would he come and meet her friends?
He smiled. He would. But as soon as he sat down at the table by the fire, she seemed to lose interest in him again. She was content for him to be there. Business – if that was what it was – took up her attention. This seemed to amuse him, and he stared into the fire with a smile playing about his mouth. After a few minutes she leaned towards him suddenly and embraced him, laughing. ‘You mustn’t mind him,’ Anna heard her say brightly. ‘He doesn’t have much of an opinion about anything, my John.’ The young men exchanged glances, chuckled in a dutiful, uncomfortable way. For a moment, as John and Stella stared at one another, you saw how similar they were, blackhaired, fine-boned, full of ego and challenge and an energy always on the verge of anger. It was a balanced contest, Anna thought, a clash of personal magnetism. When they were together, they would always be like this. John, though he pretended to keep himself at arm’s length, would always be drawn to Stella. And though he would never have admitted it, his very standoffishness was a way of attracting her. When he finally detached himself from her embrace, Stella laughed and said, ‘At least fetch me another gin and tonic, you old grouch,’ as if she had twenty years to his forty. His reply was too low for Anna to catch, but it seemed to amuse everyone. He scraped his chair noisily back from the table, and asked her friends what they would like to drink. There was an ironic edge, a kind of insolence, to this gesture which filled Anna with anger, though she could never have said why.
Neither could she have explained why, when he walked past her table on his way back from the bar, she got up, stood herself squarely in front of him, and said in a loud voice:
‘I don’t suppose you remember me, but I’d like you to know you’re the rudest man I ever met.’
Around her, conversations stopped, heads turned. She was aware of Alice, caught in open-mouthed astonishment at the spirit optics. Why did I do that? she thought. Out of the comer of her eye, she saw the elegantly made-up face of Stella Herringe turning towards her in a kind of inevitable slow motion, that ironic half-smile at the corners of the beautiful lips. She had the sense that everything she had loved in the Green Man – the friendliness and warmth, the smell of beer, the fat Labrador with its head in the hearth, even the kind firelight itself – was at risk. And why? Why shout at a man you hardly knew, in a crowded pub? She hadn’t been quite so horrified by her own behaviour since she was seven. She felt dizzy with it. Then someone laughed and called, ‘You tell him, love. You set him straight on that.’ Conversations started up again. The bar returned to normal. John Dawe stared at Anna as if he had encountered a madwoman on the street, stepped round her, and carried Stella Herringe’s drink back to Stella Herringe’s table under the puzzled eyes of Stella Herringe’s business associates.
Anna had no names for the emotions she was feeling. She watched his retreating back for a moment, then, filled with panic because her own actions seemed so suddenly out of her own control, picked up her coat and ran out of the pub.
*
‘Why did I say that?’
Out in the car park, squalls of rain blew through the glare of a single halogen lamp, to pock and ruffle the water that lay in broad shallow puddles on the tarmac. If you looked away from the Green Man, there was no sense of human habitation. A single vehicle, the dark grey Mercedes saloon in which Stella Herringe had arrived, stood in the rain. A few agitated tree-tops made themselves visible just inside the reach of the lamp: otherwise it was airy darkness, empty, rushing space. Anna huddled miserably in the doorway, struggling to get into her Barbour while the wind struggled equally hard to take it away. She felt childish, awkward, new to clothes. If she was quick, she decided, she could run home without it.
Oh, damn, damn, damn, she thought. Why on earth did I say that to him? I don’t even know him. You can’t just tell people what you think of them like that.
The rain and wind hit her like a wall. Halfway across the car park, kicking up fans of water as she ran, she knew that she would have to put the coat on after all. She stopped directly under the light and resumed the struggle. The sleeves eluded her. Wet fabric slapped her face. She looked back at the Green Man and there was John Dawe, silhouetted against the frosted glass panels of the door.
He’ll see me! was her first thought, and she ducked out of the cone of light. But he didn’t seem to be looking. Instead, shoulders hunched, hands in pockets, he walked unhurriedly over to the dark grey Mercedes, the rain plastering his shirt to his thick shoulders. He stood in front of it for a moment, walked round it first one way then the other, as if he was examining it in a dealer’s forecourt, then brought his foot back smartly and kicked its offside front wing as hard as he could. Anna caught her breath. An alarm burst into life, hoo-hawing into the wind. John Dawe considered his handiwork for a second, a tight smile on his lips, then left the car park. Anna, who by then could think of nothing else to do, followed him with one arm inside her coat.
*
An hour and a half later she was shivering on the towpath of the Brindley cut, her feet soaked, and her shoes thick with grey mud.
She remembered the wind roaring in the tops of the chestnut trees at the edge of the village, then a narrow lane curving away blindly between untrimmed hedges. The landscape had wheeled and shifted around her as her eyes tried to adapt to the darkness. There had been lights in the distance, as of scattered houses. She remembered losing sight of John Dawe, only to glimpse him again, silhouetted for a moment against the sky where the canal raised itself suddenly on a shallow-sided clay embankment and ran arrow-straight for half a mile across the valley floor. She remembered not caring any more whether he saw her or not as she blundered along up there behind him with a frightening magnetic emptiness pulling at her from either side and rain billowing past like dirty net curtain. She remembered being unable to think for the buffeting of the wind. She did not remember these images in their proper order.
If she had little idea of how she had arrived here, she had even less of why. Why do you follow a complete stranger in the middle of the night? What happens next? Why, she thought to herself, do you have this weird feeling that you have seen him before?
The Magpie was dark and still.
John Dawe, unaware that he was being followed, had gone below and apparently fallen asleep without so much as switching on a light or boiling a kettle. A few minutes after his arrival, a beautiful if rather bedraggled cat, with long elegant limbs, fur a dense, tawny gold colour and eyes which reflected the night, had picked its way through the puddles and, rather obviously ignoring Anna’s silent figure on the towpath, scratched for admittance at the cabin door. Receiving no response it had jumped on to the roof and after a moment’s struggle, let itself in through one of the ‘pigeon loft’ ventilators near the bow. Forty minutes had passed since then, and Anna had stood like a statue for every one of them, while the storm blew itself out around her and stars began to appear between the rags of racing cloud in a washed ultramarine sky. Now she blinked and wiped her hand across her cheeks. She felt like someone waking up from an anaesthetic.
The pub will be closed, she thought. I’ve got to get myself home.
The lanes were littered with broken branches. Alluvial fans of sand and small stones remained where stormwater had poured across the road. Anna walked along for some time, telling herself, ‘I won’t think about any of this now.’ After all, what could she think? She had shouted at a man she hardly knew in front of everyone at the Green Man, then for no reason followed him home. It was mad. Whenever he was around, it was as if some other Anna was in control. And then to stand like
She had just begun to feel relieved when she heard a kind of fluttering roar from the direction of the village. She was bathed briefly in dazzling light. A motorcycle lurched round the bend in front of her, its front suspension fighting with the pitted surface of the road, and shot past close enough for the hot airstream to pluck at her clothing. She jumped back, but by then its brake lamp was already flaring misty red as it heeled over into the next comer. A moment after that it was gone, folded away into the night as if it had never been, a spark of furious life in a silent world. Alice Meynell, some hapless boy pinned to the back seat of her Kawasaki, out looking for whatever adventure she might find in the rural night.
Ten minutes later, Anna let herself into the cottage, fed the cats, and went shivering to bed—
—where she was welcomed only by bad dreams, dreams like sea waves, in which formless shapes merged and broke, merged and broke in darkness. Anna was Anna: she was not Anna. She was in Ashmore, but it was not the village she knew. Faces moved above her, all around her, blurred but continually resolving themselves towards familiarity. If there were events in the dreams, they had become inextricably mixed with the events of the evening. Stella Herringe stared ironically across a room at John Dawe. ‘I hate you,’ Anna told him, as she stumbled after him in the chaos of the night, ‘I hate you.’ Clothes blew about in the wind, like rags. ‘Hurry!’ someone said. ‘You must hurry!’ Something awful was about to happen, and she made one last effort and worked desperately, crying out, feverish and ill, only to find the marmalade kitten Orlando sitting on her chest, staring into her face with something that seemed close to concern. His eyes were huge as an owl’s, and she almost thought she saw something move in them. Then he pushed the side of his head against hers and purred. His sweet breath tickled her ear. He smelled so clean and new!
‘Hello,’ she whispered. ‘Hello, little thing.’
*
Shapes spinning, colours braiding: green and gold and scarlet; moving apart and drawing back together, like wildflowers at the mercy of the wind. Mesmerised, I stared closer and the globe hovered, as though the weight of my gaze anchored it in place. Now, the shapes spun away from me, gaining perspective and definition. Figures in outlandishly long dresses circled one another formally in a space bright with candles, then there seemed to be a great rush of air and darkness replaced the light. Someone laughed. Harsh and high-pitched, it was not a pleasant sound. Rather, it made the hairs rise on the back of my neck. I looked away, and when I looked back, I saw a woman running as if in a storm. Her clothes whipped around her; no long dress now, but jeans and a wet coat, and her mouth was open, stretched wide in some expression of strong emotion.
It was Anna.
She woke up and stared straight at me.
10
There was a knock on the door next morning and it was Alice, with her motorcycle helmet in one hand and a bottle of red-top milk in the other.
‘Delivery for you,’ she said.
‘You look tired,’ said Anna. ‘Come in and have some coffee.’
‘I don’t mind,’ said Alice.
She was wearing jeans, and an ancient fleece-lined leather flying jacket over a Norwegian thermal vest. All these items had seen better days; someone had once tried to paint the flying jacket silver. Alice clumped through the cottage in her heavily buckled black boots, saying things like, ‘That’s nice, I always liked dried flowers when I was a kiddie,’ and, ‘I remember when this place belonged to old Arthur Dowden.’ And then, ‘Oh look!’ She had found Vita.
‘Try not to step on her,’ said Anna.
‘I’m used to animals. My sister’s got two ornamental goats, a hamster, and her bloke’s ferret. They used to keep rabbits as well.’ Then she added, without a pause but as if in brackets, ‘Oh, and they’ve got two boys, eight and nine.’
‘Can a goat ever be ornamental?’
They sat on kitchen chairs pulled up to the Aga, drinking milky coffee while Anna first ate toast and marmalade then decided to poach an egg. ‘My gran always coddled them,’ said Alice. ‘She preferred that to poached. Look! Look at this!’ Clinging grimly to Alice’s hand with her front paws. Vita had allowed herself to be lifted high in the air. She enjoyed it to begin with, then looked down and became thoughtful; while her foster-mother watched with anxious eyes, and Orlando tried to get at the butter.
‘So,’ said Alice, when Anna had finished her egg. ‘What happened last night? What was all that about?’
‘Let’s put more coffee on,’ said Anna, who would have been happy not to think about those events, let alone talk about them. She was still horrified by her own contribution. Her whole life, from childhood to university to TransCorp, had been a search for balance, decency, a quiet control over emotional events. It wasn’t just that she now failed to understand her own actions – much more frighteningly, it was that she hardly knew the Anna who carried them out.
‘I had Stella Herringe asking who you were.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘She was furious about her car.’
Anna shrugged. She didn’t want to have to explain what had happened in the rain outside the Green Man – let alone afterwards – so all she said was:
‘I’m not to blame for that.’
‘Oh, she knows who did it,’ Alice said. ‘He’s always had a temper on him, that one. They’ve been at one another for years. No, I think she was just fascinated by you.’
Anna shivered.
‘What’s up?’
‘I don’t know. Something walked over my grave.’
In fact she had experienced a clear, filmic memory of herself standing on the towpath by the Magpie, water streaming down her face as if she was made of stone. She had no explanation of her own actions, much less those of John Dawe or Stella Herringe. The last thought that had come to her before she slept was, I mustn’t get mixed up with those two and their quarrels. Alice’s opinion, it turned out, was very much the same.
‘You don’t want to take it to heart,’ she said. ‘What her and her cousin do is their business. Let them get on with it.’
Anna, who felt like hugging her for the common sense of this, offered her the coffee pot instead.
‘No thanks,’ said Alice.
‘I don’t really know why I made such a fuss.’
‘Not to worry,’ Alice said equably. She put Vita down, then removed Orlando from the butter dish and tickled him under the chin as he struggled. ‘Gave everyone a laugh, anyway.’ She stood up and stretched, revealing the safety pin that held up her jeans. ‘Fancy a ride on the bike?’ she invited. ‘No. I can see you don’t.’
Orlando followed her to the front door, trying to capture the buckles of her boots.
*
The weather stayed unseasonally bad. Lenses of low pressure passed over the village as regularly as jets at an airport, bringing strong winds, rain, even a little sleet: between showers the sky was high and pale, with a ceramic sheen and torn strips of cloud high up. Anna couldn’t settle, so she cleaned the cottage from top to bottom. The cats, who were refusing to go out until the weather improved, hated the disturbance: as soon as they heard water pouring into a bucket or smelled furniture polish, they went to ground in the airing cupboard. Two hours later they crept out with the body language of the violated, sniffed everything as if it was brand-new and cheap, looked at the vacuum cleaner like dirt, then, fastidious and energetic, made copious use of the cat-litter so things smelled like home again.
‘I don’t care what you think,’ Anna told them. ‘It’s my house.’
Two or three days of this, and she was as restless as Orlando. She switched the radio from station to station. She tried to read a
Built on an eleventh-century lime-burning site, in a cup of the downs where they curved north and east. Drychester had made its fortune during the late 1500s, from wool, mutton, and a distinctive local stone much in demand by the country-house builders of the Tudor boom. Thereafter it had dozed like a woodcutter in a charmed sleep until the railway woke it and reinvented it as a modestly popular Victorian spa. Now, like many an old market town on the cusp of the new century, it was busily turning itself into a centre for weekend leisure and heritage tourism, aided by the presence of Cistercian ruins, a network of gentle, engaging downland walks, and the railway station with its original cast-iron pillars and lamp-standards. A row of Tudor cottages hosted the different departments of the local history museum; a Queen Anne house the tourist information centre: while the old Shambles had become an extensive souk-like warren of little one-room shops selling everything from ‘modem antiques’ to speciality foods; a packet of Edwardian letters tied with faded purple ribbon, to half a pound of coffee ground for cafetière—
‘What was that, love, cafetière?’