Cuckoo (34 page)
Thirty-One
Flossie woke Rose at dawn, grizzling and patting her on the face with tiny open hands. They were mini-slaps, sweaty and sticky. Rose had a panic for a second, unable to find her arms; each had gone completely numb from being tucked around a daughter. She retrieved her limbs and clenched and unclenched her fists until there was enough feeling in them for them to work. Screwing her eyes up against the sore weariness of such a deathly sleep, she picked up Flossie and tiptoed downstairs with her, careful not to disturb Anna, who had turned onto her side and was curled around her pillow, snoring softly.
The house was still and silent downstairs. It felt strangely empty. Then Rose remembered why that was. There was no cat accompanying her downstairs, no one rubbing against her legs wanting food, water and a morning scratch under the chin, or between the ears.
She put Flossie into her high chair and gave her a rusk. Then she scooped up Manky’s water and food bowls. She tipped the unfinished portion of Iams into the bin, then thought again and threw both the bowls away as well, as a sort of gesture towards closure. Then she stood at the sink and looked up towards the Annexe, wondering if Gareth had cleared up the remains yet.
‘Won’t be a sec, Floss.’ She slipped on her overshoes and climbed up the steps away from the house, breathing clouds of body warmth into the morning air that still held a little chill. It had rained in the night, again: the leaves held more than dew drops, and there were little puddles in the indentations of the York stone treads. It was just that moment before the sun hits the earth, when the air still wears a thick cloak of the night.
Death is as much a beginning as an end, Rose thought, but this gave her little comfort as she searched out the corpse of her cat. Getting down on her knees, wincing as the gravel stuck into her legs, she looked beneath the dusty undercarriage of the Galaxy. Manky was no longer there. The gravel had been scooped away, and all that remained of him was a small dollop of what looked like squashed raspberry. It had probably been too dark for Gareth to have seen that.
She hoped he had saved something to bury, to give her and Anna the chance to give their grief a ritual upon which to hang itself. Two animal deaths in a fortnight. It wasn’t looking good for the lesser species at The Lodge. She hoped that Gareth had concealed any remains within some sort of box. Not a bag: the idea of Manky’s remains laid in the ground flopping around in a sack made her stomach heave.
Rose sat back up on her haunches and leaned against the blue side of the car, fighting the urge to retch. The air filled suddenly with an alarming sound, like a school guillotine, chopping pile after pile of stacked-up sugar paper. She flinched and cowered, covering her ears. When she brought herself to look up, she saw the noise was coming from a pair of swans crossing the sky, slicing the air with their wings.
Then they were gone, leaving a resounding vacuum in their wake. She stood and brushed the nips of gravel from the indentations in her knees. She looked through the car window. Inside was an empty pizza box and – she counted carefully – eight empty Mexican beer bottles. Someone had been feasting last night.
She fixed her gaze up at the Annexe windows and listened very closely for any hint of life inside. But the silence, now the swans had passed, was impenetrable. All she could hear was a buzzing in her ears as if she had spent the night before with her head in some loudspeakers. It got louder as she climbed back down to the house, and she had to rub her ears with the flats of her hands to try to stop it. She looked in through the kitchen window at Flossie, who was very involved in smearing her half-masticated rusk around the tray of her high chair.
Good, Rose thought.
Taking a deep breath, she decided not to go back inside. Instead, she skirted round the side of the house, past the pizza oven and out across the sodden grass to Gareth’s studio. We really must put some stepping stones down, with all this rain, she thought.
She stopped in the middle of the lawn, hearing now her own blood pushing around her body like the swoosh of a foetal heart monitor. She breathed deeply, the freshness of the air catching her throat and burning her chest. What a smell the morning had. The sweet scent of a too-early honeysuckle just tinged the air. It could all have been so beautiful, if it weren’t for the noise in her ears, the sting in her eyes.
‘A beginning means a death,’ she said out loud.
Gently, she tried the door handle to the studio. It was locked. But Gareth never locked doors. Hadn’t he always laughed at her for finding that fact about him difficult? She bent and put her eye to the keyhole. The blinds were drawn – blackout blinds that let light neither in nor out. She held her breath and listened. She was sure she could hear his breathing, deep and slow. Or could she? And if she could, was there a counterpoint there? A lighter sound? Could she hear a duet?
She wished she could stop the noises that kept on coming up from within her so that she could listen more closely. But she seemed incapable of doing anything about it. The morning already felt as if she were trying to swim through a heavy syrup. Perhaps, she thought, I need to see a doctor.
She stood up and stretched her back out, turning to face the house. Just then, the fox streaked halfway across the lawn, his redness almost painful against the lush green of the wet grass. He stopped in the middle and stared right at her, eye to eye. She looked into him. It felt as if she were looking at herself.
It was impossible that he could have harmed Manky. She had read somewhere that foxes steered clear of cats; that they knew that in a fight they would come off a lot worse. And Foxy had other fish to fry. Or rabbits to tear to pieces. Why bother with a skin-and-bone moggy?
Again, she had to fight back the nausea that swooped up to her head from her belly. The fox slunk away into the bushes that stood between the house and the land.
‘Don’t go on the road,’ she warned him.
Then she heard Flossie cry out from the kitchen. She sprinted back to the house, not noticing till it was too late that, as she rushed in, her overshoes covered the kitchen floor with muddy footprints.
She looked over at Flossie and let the relief seep in: her problem was just one of a completely disintegrated rusk. Rose handed her another from the packet. Then she quickly got out a mop and bucket to clean up the floor. If it had been Anna, Gareth or the boys coming in with their feet like that, she would have lost her rag. She let herself off the hook, however. She had been having a bit of a time of it recently.
‘But if the kitchen gets in a mess, that’s the end of everything,’ she said to Flossie, who was watching her with a blank expression.
She squeezed out the mop, then, with a clean dishcloth, she tidied up Flossie’s rusk-crusted tray. She reached down Anna’s basket of onyx eggs then chose two smallish (but bigger than mouth-sized) specimens for Flossie to hold and roll around her tray. They were clean, smooth and perfect. She sat and watched as Flossie clasped first one, then the other, bringing each up in the air, tightly holding it in her hot little fingers and slamming it down on the tray. If she had laughed or smiled, Rose would have found the whole process a little less disconcerting. But Flossie performed each lift like a grim little automaton, like a bored person in a gym.
Rose turned her back on her baby and went to put the kettle on. She had turned it on twice already this morning, yet had so far failed to get any further towards making a cup of tea. This time, though, she forced herself to pour the water into the waiting mug, fish out the teabag, then top it up with milk. Task completed, she stood in front of the Aga, warming her legs and drinking her tea from her favourite big, clean mug. The reliability of the Aga’s heat, the fact it was always there, comforted her. It was like a rock, standing firm in the middle of foaming rapids, and it helped her internal noise to subside, until there was little more than a gentle hum, like the silence at the end of an overture.
She let her eyes move up to the Annexe again. Was this morning going to go round in circles? she wondered. Would she have to go up and check under the car, then skirt round again to the studio to see if she could detect any signs of Gareth? If nothing happened, she felt she might have to.
But the moment was quickly broken. Polly appeared from the back of the Annexe. Rose watched as she carefully made her way down the stone steps to the front door, in her slippers and nightdress. It was very early for Polly to be about. She looked tired.
‘Oh Rose, I’m so sorry.’ Polly came into the kitchen and put her arms around Rose, holding her to her, taking her warmth and pulling it into herself.
Rose drew away and looked at her friend. She could feel a flush spread up her neck.
‘What?’ she whispered, afraid of the answer. ‘What?’
‘Our poor old cat. Our poor old Manky. So awful,’ Polly said, taking Rose’s face between her hands. ‘You must feel so awful, Rose.’
‘Yes.’
‘Come, sit down. Can I get you anything?’
‘I’m fine, thanks.’ Rose showed Polly her cup of tea.
Polly started the Gareth-approved coffee-making ritual and Rose sat at the table as directed.
‘Gareth was such a hero last night,’ Polly was saying. ‘He’s put him in one of those wooden champagne boxes that Andy got him. We can have a proper burial. Put him to rest properly.’
‘Your slippers are muddy,’ Rose said.
‘God, sorry.’ Polly went over to the door where the shoe rack was and slipped them off her feet. ‘Is it OK if I wear these?’ She prodded Rose’s Birkenstocks with her big toe.
‘Go ahead,’ Rose said. ‘They’ll probably be too big, though.’
‘It’s just the floor’s a little chilly this morning.’
Rose got up and fetched the mop and bucket again, to wipe away Polly’s footprints. How, she wondered, do you get muddy slippers coming down a flight of stone steps? She knew about those steps. She had laid them carefully, on her knees, in the eighth month of her pregnancy.
‘Did you have a good time yesterday?’ she asked Polly.
‘Great!’ Polly said. ‘We tried to ring, but you weren’t in.’
‘I was at Simon’s,’ Rose said, watching Polly for any sign of a reaction. But she was a cool customer. Always had been.
‘This friend of Gareth’s, with the studio. He’s a really interesting guy. He played me some of his stuff. He worked with PJ Harvey, you know.’
‘Yes.’
‘My Nemesis, of course. If she hadn’t been there, I would have been her, they say.’ Polly ran her fingers through her hair, tangling them in the knots.
Rose sat down opposite Polly and took the largest egg from Anna’s basket. It was a heavy, yellow thing with amber-coloured swirls around it, too big to fit in one hand. She rolled it over and over underneath her palm.
‘Same name and everything,’ Polly said.
‘Where’s Gareth?’ Rose asked.
‘I suppose he’s lying in.’ Polly shrugged. They both paused and sipped their drinks. The only sounds were a rhythmic clunking from Flossie as she lifted and lowered the marble and onyx eggs onto her tray, and the roll and thud of the egg Rose was palming on the table.
‘Do you think we could stop that?’ Polly turned and took the eggs from Flossie, who just looked at her hands as if the things had disappeared from them. ‘It gets on my nerves,’ she said as she took the large egg from Rose, put everything back in the basket, and, stepping on a chair to reach, put it all back on the dresser shelf.
She looked over at Rose and sighed. ‘What are we going to do with you, eh, Rose?’
Rose squirmed.
‘I’ve got a great idea,’ Polly said. ‘Might cheer you up.’
‘It’ll have to be pretty good,’ Rose said.
‘Oh, poor Rose,’ Polly said. ‘You can’t think straight, can you? I mean, you’re so cut up about Manky – ’ Rose wished she had used a different expression ‘ – and I’ll bet anything Anna’s not going to take it well. She’s so
sensitive
, isn’t she? Well, here’s the plan: we’ll have the little ceremony later on in the morning. Gareth’s cool about digging a hole, and he says he’ll make a sort of wooden headstone. Then perhaps we could go to the river bathing-place? Have a picnic? Forget about it all for a bit?’
sensitive
, isn’t she? Well, here’s the plan: we’ll have the little ceremony later on in the morning. Gareth’s cool about digging a hole, and he says he’ll make a sort of wooden headstone. Then perhaps we could go to the river bathing-place? Have a picnic? Forget about it all for a bit?’
‘That sounds . . .’ Rose looked up to see Anna standing at the stairs, scratching her head, looking like a lost little ghost ‘. . . great. Really.’
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