Mr. Fox (18 page)

 

 

The next time I opened my eyes it was very early morning. I put on a pair of slippers that were beside the bed. They were just my size. Which gave me something of a jolt. But they were warm, so I left them on. I went down to S.J.’s study. The plate with the squares of cake on it was still there on his desk, and I wanted to get rid of it. It jarred me. I found it feminine. So I opened the French doors and stepped outside, showering moist crumbs amongst some finches and sparrows that were already pecking at the grass outside. There were seeds in the cake, and it smelt of rum. I hoped the birds wouldn’t get too drunk. I wiped my hand on my skirt. Then I stood near the twisted cedar tree, staring. There was just enough light for the leaves to glow. I imagined touching a branch and watching it rise, followed by another branch and another, the trailing leaves parting so that I could step into the space the tree guarded, the secret place it hunched over for safekeeping from the sun.

S.J. came out of the house and stood beside me.

“Morning.”

Tentatively, without looking at me, he held out his hand. I took it and held it clasped to my chest. I didn’t look at him, either. We were eyeing the cedar.

“Morning.”

“What shall we do today?” he asked.

We went out walking, wrapped round in scarves and jackets. We tramped down lanes and places in the earth that seemed to have been dug and rubbed until granite came through, then abruptly left. We passed signs with names like Merrymeet and Tremar and Saint Cleer written on them, and by the time we crossed a low stone bridge with its feet in a shallow, pebbled brook our landscape was three-quarters blue. I began to step gingerly, even though I could see that the ground was firm all around me. There was so much sky that it felt as if we were on a precipice—there was not enough grass to stand on, it was so thin and flat by comparison. We walked around a barrow that rose from the long earth in the shape of a taut shoulder. Every now and again a bird coasted overhead, spreading shadows with the flap of its wings, and I would move uneasily, thinking that it must be coming for us, since there was nothing else for miles but flat tors and, in the distance, a hill so vast that it looked both broken and smooth as the eye tried to absorb its image all at once. I ruined my boots in what felt like an unending series of turf pits that had stored the previous week’s rainfall. I struggled in the last pit, thinking I was sinking, and S.J. crooked his arm and stood still on a safe spot, so I could take his elbow and step out. We came to a halt by a lake that seemed to have clouds in it even though it was a clear day. The moor swept on after the water interrupted it, and looking at the other side I felt doubled; without turning I could see what was behind me. S.J. told me stories about the lake. He was a good storyteller: matterof-fact, convincing. Excalibur had come out of this lake, he said, and I saw no reason to disbelieve him. I saw kites go up. Small figures rushed along up the hill, their wrists and fists leashed to the bright creatures in the sky.
I want to stay here,
I thought.
I want to stay.

In the evening S.J. worked, even though he’d said he wouldn’t, sat in the study with huge books opened up all around him, underlining bits of the case studies he was taking notes from. I looked at some cookbooks for a while, then left him and went upstairs, to the blue room. With dramatic bravado, I switched all the lights on and went through Daphne’s things, moved them around recklessly, daring her. If I was afraid that something bad would happen, why wait? Why not make it happen now?

Some papers had been folded into a square and pushed into a corner at the back of one of the dressing-table drawers. The words were written in faded, grainy pencil strokes—I had to hold them under the lamp to make them out properly. There was a lot of crossing out. They were the same few sentences, over and over. Different drafts. The last one read:

I put my head down on the desk because I felt braver with my head supported. In the corner of the last note, written in small letters and lightly, was
L 11: 24–26.
Without lifting my head, I dragged a King James pocket Bible, covered in white leather, out of another drawer in the dressing table. I set it in front of my nose and looked through it.

Leviticus . . . Lamentations . . . Luke . . . well, it couldn’t be Lamentations, because that only had five chapters.

The Leviticus passage was incomplete; the first sentence of it referred to the sentence before it, and the last sentence was an admonition against eating pork and mutton.

Luke said:

My gaze snagged on two parts of the passage again and again:

I read the passage aloud. I couldn’t help it. Better that than keep it as a thought.

As I said the last word, the rocking chair groaned behind me.

Exactly as if someone had sat down in it.

And the chair began to rock.

I changed my mind—I didn’t want her there. I didn’t.

I ran, leaping three steps at a time, coming down so hard I almost turned my ankle.

S.J. looked up when I reentered the study, breathless.

“What is it?” he asked. There was a note in his voice—as if he knew.

“Nothing.”

I lay down at his feet, my breasts against the rug. I turned the pages of a cookbook and pretended to read, but really I was imagining him walking across my back, his heel grinding into the base of my spine, the next step pushing the vertebrae away from each other; by the time he reached my neck I’d be in pieces. He wouldn’t do it, but he could—he had the ability. With his lips and hands he refigured me, coaxed me into moving so closely with him that we disappeared and left a trail of sighs behind us. Not just in the bed. Against walls, across tables, on floors with my heels dancing the same pleading two steps over his shoulder blades. But we didn’t go into the blue room again.

“Where’s all the downstairs furniture?” I asked him, in the morning.

He looked wary. “In the cellar,” he said.

There was a little platform immediately inside the cellar door, and a staircase leading straight down. It was gloomy once the door had closed behind us.

“You first,” S.J. said in my ear.

So I went first, sending a torch beam ahead of me with one hand and feeling my way with the other. S.J.’s hands collided with mine, and I heard him breathing behind me. There were a lot of chairs and tables packed into a very small amount of space; it was like climbing out into a sea of brocade and velvet padding. Insects wriggled around between the armchairs, and chair legs fell apart as I moved them out of my way; I picked bits up and saw they were worn through with holes. Woodworm. We stayed down there until we’d identified some pieces that were salvageable, taking turns sitting on each chair and leaning against each table to be sure. It was a slow, airless hour, full of rustling, like someone whispering through cloth. From time to time I trained the torch on S.J. He kept looking at me, looking away, then back at me, quietly surprised that I was still there.

We dragged the whole pieces out and arranged them in the rooms they belonged to. The place began to look less like an austere puzzle. I tampered with his placement of the sofas and armchairs and side tables and vases, and he tampered ceaselessly with mine. When we caught each other in the act we pretended we hadn’t seen. Those were the rules of playing house.

 

 

The next afternoon we went down to a cove in the opposite direction from the one we’d taken to get to the moor. It was only a little cove; it sloped down to the water smoothly. Gravely, as if guiding me into the deep of his secrets, S.J. showed me the markings on the stones he collected. Darkness fell, and we stripped down to wetsuits and walked into the sea. When we tired of swimming I just floated and spun in the gloss of the water and he bobbed beside me. We were top and tails; he held my ankle so I didn’t float away too far.

I texted Jonas:
Happy.

And he sent the word back to me:
Happy.

I ignored my agent’s phone calls and deleted the threats he left me via voice mail—I was smiling in a way that felt new, so fresh it was like another face, and I didn’t want to stop. Not even for the moment needed to take one of those pictures people said were so good, the ones in which a girl with blank and shiny eyes stood on one leg, looked over her shoulder, was an acrobat, was no one.

 

 

The day S.J. went back to work I dashed around Brier Moss, buying things to cook for a dinner party in the evening. He wanted me to meet some of his friends. Two female friends and two male friends. They were all single, so he was also hoping to set them up. I bought candles and flowers and artichokes and steak and braced myself for a frosty reception from the single female friends. It wasn’t unlikely that they had stayed single in the hopes that he might suddenly fall for them. When I came back from town I went into S.J.’s study to fetch a cookbook. He’d left the French doors open, and in going to close them, I almost trod on a finch. The bird lay on its back in between the doors and didn’t take fright at my drawing so near. Its beak and feet pointed at the sky, blackened, as if blasted by flame. It had died with its eyes open and some liquid in them congealing. And there were more just outside. I stopped counting after ten. They were all in the same condition. There were more birds chirping from somewhere, there were still birds, still singing, but I couldn’t see them.
They must be very high up.
For a moment I thought I’d be sick, but I wasn’t sick. The majority of the bodies were congregated in an uneven half-ring around the cedar tree.
Oh . . .
My eyes flickered closed—for a moment I saw myself standing on the grass, cake flowing from my hand like sand—my eyes opened again. I used a rolled-up magazine to push the bodies towards each other, into a heap. I wanted to dig, so that I could bury them, but I had nothing to dig with. I tried a little with my hands, and it took a long time to make even the slightest pocket in the ground. I had to cook the food; I had to get ready for guests. I didn’t want people to arrive and find me here, scrabbling in the earth with my fingernails. I just had to leave the birds where they were.

I went into the kitchen and stood beside the Aga staring at the wall. It was on; it had been on all morning. I’d laughed at it when I first saw it, but it gave off serious warmth. Dinner would be ready, possibly even burnt, in no time. And then I would have nothing to do.

I grasped gratefully at that thought. I became busy. I chopped the steak and made a marinade for the artichokes. I closed the kitchen door and lined the bottom of it with tea towels. I opened the oven door and knelt down and breathed blue, dancing gas. I coughed but without urgency. I was dizzy, and the heat around me was not unpleasant; it was like being lost in a fog when you had nowhere in particular to go. It didn’t matter. I collapsed onto my stomach and looked to the side, not that there was anything to see, apart from grey-coated metal.

I began to choke. I couldn’t move. I wanted to, but my head wouldn’t do it—the fog was in it.

I heard a distant sound—a dial turning.

The Aga shut down. No more blue, just gaping blackness.

Someone was crouching near me. She put her hand on my leg. My skin shrieked. I can’t explain how it felt. There was movement beneath her fingernails.

“You’re an idiot,” she said. Her voice wasn’t at all the way I’d imagined it. It was clear and firm.

“Nothing’s wrong here. Can’t you see that? Nothing’s wrong. Next time just don’t feed the birds with cake that’s been experimentally laced with pharmaceuticals. You listen to me, Mary Foxe, or whatever your name is. Stay here. There’s a decent man here who will probably fall for you if you don’t make a mess of things. He’ll take care of you. And you take care of him. No point having any more death.”

My mother. My father. I couldn’t speak.

“Yes,” she said. “I know. But you’re what happens next. That’s all I wanted to tell you upstairs, but you ran like—like the hound of the Baskervilles or something.”

“Thank you, Daphne,” I whispered.

“Oh, yes, you owe me one. So you’ll tell him?”

“Tell him what?”

“That it’s not his fault about me. Because it’s not.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“Don’t just say it. Make him believe it.”

“How—”

“Make him believe it.”
She squeezed my ankle.

“I will!”

“I’m tired,” she said. “I’m going now. Be bad. Be wicked. And you should worry. But don’t.”

 

M
ary stayed out of my way for a couple of weeks. I was busy with Daphne, trying to get her to like me again and call off the death threats from her friends. I began teaching Daphne to drive. She was fearless—a little too fearless for my taste—and she learnt fast. She’d bought a pair of driving gloves specially, and her hands rested serenely on the wheel when it was her turn to try taking a corner. We drove down to the pheasant farm I used to shoot at when I was coming up—fifteen minutes away, but it took us thirty-five with Daphne driving. She brought a pheasant back with us and cooked it up for dinner—it was the worst meal I’d ever encountered, but I choked it down and appreciated it. She was trying, and I was trying. It’d be wrong to say my wife hasn’t got any go in her. On our honeymoon she spent the best part of a morning leaping around a rock garden, bouncing from ledge to ledge like a lunatic and singing some almost offensively sugary song. She slipped and twisted her ankle, but she didn’t howl about it. She bit her lip and she cried a little, because, she said, she didn’t want to pretend it didn’t hurt. And she hobbled around good-humouredly, taking snapshots and studying the gaudy little paintings for sale on the streets just as solemnly as if they were up in a gallery. Remembering that she’d cried, I got a doctor to look at her ankle for her when we got back to the hotel. It was a sprain. I’d have understood if she’d howled.