‘Let’s have a cup of tea,’ Marnie said tiredly.
Anna thought that was such a good idea. ‘Perhaps you could help me get these bags of things down to the dustbins too,’ she suggested.
Marnie insisted they make lunch — cheese on toast and a salad — and afterwards have a stroll round the garden. They dead-headed some of the sadder-looking roses. They lifted the mirror out of the flowerbed and propped it up by the garage, where Marnie thought it looked almost deliberate, like a mirror designed to extend the space in a corner of some well known garden off towards Glyndebourne, the name of which she couldn’t remember. Down by the summerhouse she said, ‘I notice you’ve got rid of the poppies.’ Anna, who felt unable to admit to her daughter that the poppies had vanished overnight, leaving behind them a strip of earth so packed and dry that nothing could have grown there for years, agreed that she had dug them up. ‘But I don’t see where you’ve put them,’ Marnie said. ‘They’re not in the compost.’
‘Oh, somewhere, darling. I expect I put them somewhere.’
Marnie hooked her arm through Anna’s. Each time they drew near the house, she steered them away again. ‘It’s such a nice day,’ she said, or, ‘Those paint fumes can’t be good for you,’ or, ‘Oh, Mum, smell all this!’ — indicating, with a delighted sweep of her arm and a clear subtext, the roses, the orchard, the August air itself.
It
‘I don’t know why you’re doing this,’ Marnie accused her.
‘These days, I don’t know why I’m doing anything,’ Anna said, trying to make Marnie laugh. ‘Oh darling, can’t you give me a bit of room?’
‘If you don’t go too far.’
It was Anna’s turn to be angry.
‘How far is that?’ she demanded. ‘This place was always really rather ordinary, Marnie. That was fine for your father. It was fine for you growing up. But now I want something different.’ Staring across at the summerhouse, she caught a fleeting glimpse of herself thirty years ago in a West London bathroom, two o’clock in the morning. Fishes painted on the wall, amber-coloured soap with a rosebud trapped inside like someone else’s past — the past you’ll have, once you’re in the future. It’s the Millennium, or close to it. A dozen scented candles flicker, stuck to the bath surround with their own fat, throwing on the rag-rolled walls the shadows of twigs in vases encrusted with fake verdigris. The bathwater cooling around your nipples but still acceptable as long as you don’t move too often. 2am, and Michael Kearney’s footsteps are heard upon the stair; his key is heard in Anna’s lock.
‘Come with me, Marnie,’ Anna said. She led Marnie upstairs and made her look at the new bathroom. ‘I want this. I once had this, and I want it again.’
‘Mum, I —’
‘I was younger than you are now when I last had a bathroom I liked. You have a nice stable life, Marnie, but I didn’t. I’m not giving my house to you. I’m not just going to give you my fucking house and live in a shed somewhere.’
There was a long, helpless silence. ‘Anna,’ Marnie said, ‘what are you talking about?’
Anna wasn’t sure. Every attempt to articulate it left her feeling failed. She was getting the house ready for Michael: as much as common sense, a kind of shyness prevented her from admitting that. Over the next few days she painted. It was hard work. In the end the walls took three coats and the mirrors four. One afternoon, she left the paint to dry and walked along the lanes to a pub called the de Spencer Arms, expecting to be able to sit outside at her favourite table and — a bit windswept and pleasantly sundazzled — watch the retirees from London manoeuvring their Jaguars in and out of the car park. Instead she found the table occupied by a boy and two dogs. The boy had a woollen workshirt on over a loose pullover, and over them a donkey jacket. His jeans were tight, worn a little too long, trodden down by the heels of his black, awkward, lace-up boots. Every item was covered in mud or splattered with paint. He was sitting negligently on the table itself, next to an empty pint glass, kicking his legs and whistling.
‘Do you mind if I sit down?’ Anna said.
‘I’ll get off this table, shall I?’ the boy said. ‘It’s the cleanest table here, this one. That’s why I sat here.’
‘Your dogs are so beautiful.’
‘They won’t hurt you,’ the boy said, ‘these dogs. Some say they’re dangerous, but I know they’re not.’ They stood alertly by his legs, identical animals facing away from him into the wind, shaped like greyhounds if a little smaller, with pale blue eyes, patches of long grey, bristly fur and a kind of curled, nervous alertness. Now and then a shiver passed over one or the other of them. Every movement drew their attention. They looked where the boy looked, then looked to him for confirmation of the things they saw. ‘I’d get another drink,’ he said to Anna, ‘but I hate that posh bar in there. You don’t need to worry about these dogs, they wouldn’t harm a child.’
‘What kind of dogs are they?’
The boy gave her a sly look. ‘Working dogs,’ he said. He lowered his voice confidentially. ‘I’m out lamping most nights, with that lot in the fields,’ he said. ‘They’re down the fields every night, with the lights and dogs. They’ve got some fierce dogs, that lot.’ Anna said she wasn’t sure what lamping was. The boy looked blank at that. It was so much a part of his life, she saw, that there was too much to tell. He was helpless to know where to start. She indicated the pub, with its with its pleasantly sagging Horsham stone roofs, its wisteria and virginia creeper.
‘I could get you a drink,’ she offered, ‘if you didn’t want to go in.’
The boy set his face. ‘They don’t want these dogs in a bar like that,’ he said. ‘Fat boys,’ he said contemptuously. ‘Pushing their thousand quid mountain bikes up these hills. Pushing them up the hills!’
In fact the bar was full of ex-estate agents and their wives, ignoring the sour smell of the carpets and drinking gin and tonic as fast as they could — withered men in roomy blazers, their shoulders at odd independent angles underneath; women whose gaze seemed unnaturally eager, their cheeks the red you see on pheasants, their hair tightened up chemically to within a nanometre of hair’s tolerance, ready to snap. Anna bought the boy a pint of Harvey’s Mild and a wine-box spritzer for herself. She thought he might like a packet of cheese and onion crisps. She looked forward to talking to him again. Perhaps he would let her stroke the dogs. But when she got outside with the drinks he was already walking away across the car park, head down, shoulders hunched tensely, hands in his pockets. His long, relaxed stride made it seem as if as if the two halves of his body had nothing to do with each other. The dogs walked one either side of him on their stiff, fragile-looking legs, so attentive that their heads almost touched his knees. He turned round to wave to Anna.
‘But your drink — !’ she called. He only waved again and went off towards Wyndlesham.
Anna ate the cheese and onion crisps, staring out at the curve of the Downs. She drank the wine then the beer, taking her time. The de Spencer Arms themselves, as represented on the pub sign, featured something for everyone — crosses, chevrons, bars — done in stained-glass colours as rich as the light inside a cathedral; among which was a weirdly modern, penetrative, electric blue.
All afternoon the boy’s loose stride took him up and down the footpaths and bridleways around Wyndlesham. Patchy woodland fifty yards from back gardens. Dried up ruts in secondary growth already the colour of straw. Sunglare on dusty fields where an inch of soil, parched as early as April, was skimmed on to hectares of raw chalk; then the relief of a wide grassy rake falling away steeply between beeches. Buzzards in the updraughts and a temporary altar of concrete slabs under the tall old-fashioned single-arch railway bridge at Brownlow. He never left the same three or four square miles. He was waiting for it to be dark, so he could go down the low-lying fields between Wyndlesham and Winsthrow and run his dogs along the beam of the lamp. They were a shade heavy, his dogs, but they were good for a long night on the lamp. He loved to see them curl and uncurl in the path of light. He was happy taking rabbit but he liked hares best. ‘A hare stretches them out, these dogs,’ he would tell himself. ‘She gives them a run.’ It was something to see. It was over in a minute or two. Sometimes he was so excited he saw everything in slow motion as if hare and dogs were swimming ecstatically in the dark air. His heart was so far out to them there! He was seeing faster than they could run. He could feel his heart rocking his body. He could replay every hare his dogs ever caught, like a download in his head. ‘It’s something to see,’ he would say when people asked him. He didn’t know where to begin with them and their mountain bikes, weekend in, weekend out.
That lot in the fields weren’t out tonight, so he went on his own. The very first thing, the dogs put up a grey hare, the colour of ash in the light. The boy had never seen that before. The hare seemed to lag, it seemed to wait for him to pay attention. Then the dogs were off and running and the action was so fast he couldn’t keep it in the
