The House of Women (23 page)

2

Mindful of female caprice, McKenna had left the house that morning before the postman made his way up the hill, but returning to check on the cats, aware of his long neglect the day before, he found another missive from Manchester on the front doormat, half hidden under an unsolicited catalogue for designer casual wear, and an invitation to apply for a credit card restricted to the over-fifties.

Standing in the hall, blood pounding in his head, he tore open the envelope, and found a polite prompt to reply substantively to the earlier letter within the next ten days.

He fed the cats, pulled down the top sash of the parlour window so they could come and go, and put the letter with its companion under a paperweight on the table, next to the ranked playing cards which refused to resolve themselves, the Queen of Spades sneering still over the shoulders of the Knave of Diamonds and obstructing all progress.

3

Phoebe was sitting on her front doorstep, dragging a toy mouse on a length of string back and forth, while the cat, which seemed larger each day, lashed out occasionally with his left front paw.
‘He’s tired,’ she said, as McKenna walked up the drive.

‘
With what?’

‘
Eating and sleeping and eating, I guess, but I’m sure he thinks, too.’ She rolled the string around the mouse’s body, then rose in an ungainly fashion, a windblown leaf, perhaps the first fall of the year, clinging to the leg of her canvas trousers. She wore a smart cotton shirt with the trousers, but the clothes were already crumpled, pulled out of shape, he supposed, by the surplus flesh beneath.

‘
I’m sure my cats think, but I can’t prove it,’ he said, following her into the house.

On each visit he made to this house, the light from the wonderful window was different, its intensity and definitions changing with the passage of time. Now, the pooled colours were being angled towards the walls, rammed by the force of the sun, and he fancied they must flow out of sight under the skirtings as the sun set, to return with the dawn. As he lingered in the hall, the cat padded into the house behind him, and brushed against him, tail twined around his leg.

‘See?’ Phoebe said. ‘He’s decided he likes you, but he obviously had to think about it.’ She made for the kitchen, and set about her tea ritual. ‘I don’t know if your cats watch telly, but Tom does, and for the last six weeks, there’s been a series about big cats on Wednesday evenings. He’s watched every minute, probably because they’re snuff movies from his point of view. Anyway,’ she added, dropping tea-bags into the pot, ‘come half eight on Wednesday, he’s in his favourite couch-potato position right in front of the telly, and he trashed the front room when the programme didn’t come on, so that proves he can think, because telly programmes don’t relate to taste or smell or food.’ She poured boiling water into the pot and closed the lid with a little snap. ‘Cats give you hell when there’s a roast in the oven or fish on the table, but that’s normal. Knowing what’s on telly, and when it’s coming on, is something else.’

‘
I met his mother yesterday,’ McKenna said. ‘I thought it was him at first, so he must recognize the big cats as relations, and for all we know, their activities might spark a common species memory.’

‘
It’s still a sign of mental processing.’ She sat at the table, arms folded. ‘Uncle Ned said when you live with animals, you see the similarities, not the differences.’ She looked at the cat, now supine on the floor, legs out as if crucified. ‘Do you ever wonder how animals perceive themselves?’

‘
In a wholly subjective way totally inaccessible to others, like us, because there’s no choice.’ He stroked the animal’s soft belly, feeling rather than hearing its purr. ‘I rather envy them, because whether they think or not, they don’t have to spend a lifetime constructing themselves, as we do.’

‘
Uncle Ned said you can’t be true to yourself if you’re always trying to please others, and being whatever different people want.’

‘
Being true to yourself is usually viewed as anarchy or lunacy, and neither is conducive to peaceful co-existence.’ He wrenched his hand from the cat’s reaching fangs. ‘See what I mean?’

She grinned, then rose to pour the tea.
‘In case you’re wondering, Mama and Annie went to town for Bethan’s school uniform.’ Putting two mugs on the table, and an ashtray in front of him, she went on: ‘She’s starting at Annie’s school next month, so there won’t be any more worry about finding decent child-minders. Annie teaches the tens and elevens, but she could teach senior school if she wanted. She got a first class honours, and I keep telling her to do a post-grad, like George, then take up lecturing, ’cos she’d do a much better job than the professor.’ She sipped her tea, looking at him over the rim of the mug. ‘I suppose you’ve still got George locked up in your dungeons, haven’t you?’

‘
I’m afraid so.’

‘
Mama’s really furious about it, you know, which is a bit odd as she doesn’t like him. Then again, you don’t have to like a person to resent an injustice, do you?’

‘
How is she?’

‘
Like the rest of us, I suppose, waiting for whatever happens when an addict stops taking drugs. I know she didn’t sleep much last night. I heard her in the kitchen several times.’

‘
Then you can’t have had much sleep, either.’

The relics of her fight with Mina were fading, but the skin beneath her eyes was blue-tinged.
‘I haven’t slept very well since Uncle Ned died,’ she said, ‘because I can’t bear the waking up. It’s almost a whole week since he went, but in my head it seems like only a few hours. Time’s gone haywire.’

‘
Time’s probably the most subjective thing of all,’ he said. ‘And completely fluid. Music time can squeeze a lifetime’s experience into a few notes, or stretch virtually nothing almost to infinity, like psychological time.’ He picked up his tea. ‘And sometimes, a journey back takes a lot less time than the journey there, especially at night, as if other dimensions contract or expand according to invisible laws. When I was at the farm yesterday, I felt as if I’d travelled to a different time zone altogether.’

‘
That’s because it’s a different world, and so lovely I don’t know how Uncle Ned could bear to leave.’ She smiled. ‘Annie said Auntie Gladys really took to you, and Meirion said you seem “passable, considering”, which is quite a compliment coming from him, as I don’t expect you even exchanged grunts. He doesn’t talk to people on first acquaintance unless he has to.’

‘
I met Robin Ddu on my way back. He’d been to Llys Ifor.’

‘
He’s never been here, ’cos Mama would go apeshit with a tramp in the house. Actually, I think Uncle Ned envied him. He said Robin’s as near true to himself as a person can be.’

‘
He ekes out a brutal existence to prove it, and he’ll probably have an equally brutal death, with not a soul beside him to close his eyes.’

Phoebe ran her finger round and round the rim of her mug, frowning.
‘I think that’s what Uncle Ned meant. Robin’s past bothering about what worries the rest of us, isn’t he? He’s part of the land he roams, so he’ll happily rot away on a mountainside, like a sheep stifled by a blizzard, or the wild pony we once found above the farm. She’d died giving birth, beside this tiny, tiny foal which was just a bag of bones, and they were both so much part of the landscape we almost fell over them.’ Light and shade coloured her eyes as she turned the knowledge Ned had bequeathed to her. ‘Uncle Ned always felt like a refugee,’ she added, ‘because he couldn’t see the land where his roots were laid down, like Robin can, day or night. He had pictures in his mind instead, and he said we all need a feeling of belonging to make sense of who we are. Otherwise, we spend our whole life groping like the blind, looking for something we can’t recognize even if we find it.’

McKenna watched the smoke from his cigarette
caught by a little draught through the open back door, and shredded to a wisp. ‘On the other hand, perhaps being whole depends on a sense of exile, of knowing there’s something missing.’

‘
Perhaps.’ She felt the side of the teapot, as Gladys had done the day before, then topped up the mugs, and he felt for an instant as if caught in some warp of time, here and elsewhere simultaneously. ‘I used to wonder,’ she went on, ‘if he had so much pain because he had a lot of love and nobody of his own to spend it on, so it just stayed inside, hurting him.’

‘
And did you ever tell him that?’

She nodded, memory again darkening the slat
ey eyes. ‘He said that kind of love was a myth, and it caused a lot of misery, because people thought it was the be-all and end-all to life, when a bus was more likely to hit them than Cupid’s arrow. He believed you could only be really happy in what he called the “company of the world”, which is a fancy name for nature and whatever god you follow.’

‘
Do you think he was right?’

‘
I think it
became
right for him, when he realized there was nothing else on offer, and, for all I know, I might end up the same way.’

‘
I hope not. That would be a terrible waste.’

She smiled suddenly.
‘We women can always have a baby to spend love on, can’t we?’ Then there was a deep, breath-catching sigh, almost a sob. ‘But I know what he meant about loneliness.’

‘
You’ve got a very good brain,’ McKenna said, trying to retrieve some comfort for her.

‘
I’m entitled to some compensation for a body like mine. I’ve often wondered if we got on so well because we’re both such poor physical specimens, like with like against the prejudice of the rest of the world.’ She frowned again. ‘Minnie’s a terrible body fascist, and so is Solange. My English teacher is, too, because when I wrote an essay about Llys Ifor, she said I was over reaching myself, and I know she wouldn’t have been so bitchy if I were thinner, or prettier. Uncle Ned and George said the essay was good enough to enter in the Eisteddfod.’

‘
What did you write about?’

‘
Mostly ideas Uncle Ned put in my mind.’ She ran her fingertip again around the rim of the mug. ‘Mama let me stay at the farm for two whole weeks so I could really look at it, and think about what I was seeing, and what it meant, and how Llys Ifor and the land could go on without any of us, but how it couldn’t, and —’ She broke off, and stared at him. ‘D’you really want to hear this?’

‘
Yes.’

‘
Why?’

‘
Because I’m interested, and because there’s a lot of Ned in your thoughts. It helps me to know him.’

‘
Knowing him won’t tell you who killed him.’

‘
It might.’

‘
It won’t make the slightest difference. He died because he got in somebody’s way, or knew something he wasn’t supposed to know.’ She rose, a little stiff, a little bent, a little more like Gladys, and he found himself hoping the resemblances would cease before Gertrude entered the picture.

‘
Reading the essay would be easier than listening to me rabbit on, wouldn’t it?’ She went into the hall, and he heard her footfalls on the staircase. The cat shot after her when the noise of a car engine disturbed the morning quiet of Glamorgan Place, and he stayed in the kitchen, listening to three generations of Harris women returning from their shopping expedition. Phoebe thundered down the stairs, adding a base note, then Edith came into the kitchen, a bright smile on her lips and the light of impending terror in her eyes.

McKenna rose, about to speak, and could think of nothing to say which was not patronizing or crass, then Annie appeared in the doorway, Bethan in her arms, she smiling as if he were the most welcome visitor, her child yawning.

‘Bethan’s always worn out after a day at the farm,’ Annie explained.

‘
There was no need to drag her all the way back here last night,’ Edith said mildly. ‘I don’t need a minder quite yet.’

‘
When we were having dinner, you said it wouldn’t be long before you needed a straitjacket,’ Phoebe reminded her, edging around her sister and niece, the cat beside her. She dropped an exercise book on the table by McKenna’s cigarette packet, then filled the kettle. ‘And you weren’t joking, were you?’

‘
Cassandra rides again,’ Annie said. Bethan stared at him over her mother’s shoulder, just as the cat stared over Phoebe’s shoulder. Taking a bottle of orange juice from the refrigerator, Annie added: ‘Mama doesn’t need things ramming down her throat every five minutes.’

‘
She does,’ Phoebe countered. ‘She needs the pills she flushed down the bog.’ Swilling out the teapot, she talked on, as if to herself, while Annie leaned against the counter giving her child a drink, and Edith subsided into one of the chairs, right elbow on the table. There was electricity in the air between these women, he thought, little currents springing in arcs from one to the other, charging the atmosphere with tingling excitement rather than tension. Bethan coughed on her drink and Phoebe patted her between the shoulder blades, then tore off a length of paper towel to wipe away the tears springing to the child’s eyes and the juice running down her chin.

‘
Is George still locked up?’ Edith asked.

He nodded, aware of four pairs of eyes fixed on his face.

‘But there’s no more evidence against him, is there? And there won’t be, because he had nothing to do with Ned’s death,’ Edith insisted. ‘I do know who comes in and out of my house, and I’ve a good mind to go to police headquarters and make a formal complaint.’

‘
I doubt if that would make any difference, Mrs Harris.’

‘
You’d be surprised what can make a difference! It often depends on who’s doing the talking, doesn’t it? I’m sure Professor Williams would be only too happy to come with me. He’s of the same mind as we are about George, even though they can’t stand each other.’