The Copper Peacock Read online

  It was Daniel who rescued her. About an hour after Emma shut Nell in the cupboard Daniel came home from school. He let himself in and found the house empty which was most unusual. By that time Nell had stopped shouting and beating on the door. She was sitting on the stone floor with her arms clasped round her knees, keeping very still so as not to exhaust the oxygen in the dusty sooty air. Daniel wasn’t expected home for another hour at least. He should have gone straight to his violin lesson from school but he had forgotten his music and come home to fetch it.

  Although it was almost unknown for Nell to be out when he came home, he knew he wasn’t expected home yet. Perhaps she always went out while he was at his violin lesson. With very little time to spare, he would have gone straight up to his bedroom, fetched his music and gone out again, but as he passed the living-room door he caught a glimpse of pink where no pink should be. This was his sister’s pink jumpsuit. Emma was asleep on the rug in the living room, her thumb in her mouth, the small brush attachment from the vacuum cleaner lying by her side. The brush provided him with a clue and as he approached the broom cupboard, Nell heard his footsteps and shouted to him: ‘Daniel, Daniel, I’m in here, I’m in the cupboard!’

  He released her. Nell staggered out of the cupboard with cobwebs in her hair and blinking her eyes at the light. Daniel seemed rather pleased to see Emma get into trouble, for even after nearly two years he hadn’t quite got over his jealousy. He scolded Emma himself and for once Nell didn’t stop him.

  It was the first evening for weeks that Ivan had come home at a reasonable hour. He brought Denise with him. They had some unfinished work to get through and Ivan thought they might as well do it at home. Nell told them of the events of the afternoon and Denise said how clever and enterprising Daniel had been. If he had been less observant he would have left the house again immediately and where would poor Nell be now?

  ‘It’s hard to see what else he could have done,’ said Ivan. ‘You might say with more justice that this is the reverse of virtue rewarded. If Daniel hadn’t be so careless as to leave his music behind he would never have come home when he did. How can you praise someone for that?’

  He scowled unpleasantly, but not at Denise. He and Denise would get to work on the new catalogue until eight and then he would take her out to eat somewhere. They had to have dinner but there was no need for Nell to cook for them, he said more graciously, especially after her ordeal. Denise said she was terribly pleased Nell was all right. She couldn’t wait to see her boyfriend’s reaction when she told him the story.

  Ivan came in very late. His brown wolf’s eyes had a glazed look, sleepy and entranced, a look which Nell had once known very well. Next day she said to him, apropos of nothing in particular, that she thought the day was coming when she would feel obliged to tell Daniel the truth about what had happened to his mother. It might also mean having to tell others and therefore acknowledging that she had committed perjury at the inquest, but she couldn’t help that, she would have to face that. Ivan said, didn’t she mean he would have to face that? And then he said no one would believe her.

  ‘If we split up,’ Nell said, ‘I should get custody of these children. Daniel not being my own wouldn’t make any difference, I should get custody. But you wouldn’t mind that, would you? You don’t like children.’

  ‘What nonsense. Of course I like children.’

  ‘And you’d lose your house and half your income.’

  ‘Two-thirds,’ said Ivan.

  ‘I think you’d like to see the back of Daniel. You can’t stand him. And the reason you can’t stand him is because one day you know you’re either going to have to tell him the truth which will be the end of you or tell him a lie that will blight the rest of his life.’

  ‘How melodramatic you are’, said Ivan, ‘and how wrong. Anyway, we aren’t going to split up, are we?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t go on living like this.’

  He took Emma on his knee and explained to her how extremely naughty she had been to shut Nell up in the broom cupboard. It was a very dangerous thing to do because there was no air in the cupboard and people need air in order to stay alive. Emma squirmed and fidgeted and struggled to get down. When Ivan held her firmly so that she couldn’t get away, she bounced up and down on his lap. Suppose Emma herself had come to some harm, asked Ivan who, judging others by himself, hadn’t much faith in an appeal to altruism. Suppose she had fallen down the steps and hurt herself?

  When Emma had gone to bed Ivan suggested he and Nell made a fresh start. He would make an effort, he promised, to be home at a reasonable time in the evenings. Dismissing Densie would be tricky but he thought she would leave of her own accord. And he wouldn’t embark on these projects that necessitated working long hours.

  ‘How about Daniel?’ said Nell.

  Ivan smiled slightly. It was a sad smile, Nell thought. ‘I’m working out something to tell Daniel.’ She thought he was looking at the scar on her hand and she turned it palm-downwards. ‘I shall tell him how it was you sitting in the passenger seat and he was in the back, playing with his cars, and the engine was running. I shall make it plain that he was in no way to blame. Of couse I’ll explain to him that you were feeling too ill to know what you were doing.’

  ‘You needn’t make it sound as if I cut myself on purpose. I’m not going to die, you know. I’ll be around to answer for myself.’

  Ivan didn’t reply. He said it would be a nice idea to have a party for their seventh wedding anniversary.

  The people Ivan had known during his first marriage he knew no longer, they had been left behind when he and Nell came to this house. But they invited Nell’s mother and Nell’s sister and brother-in-law and their doctor and his wife and the neighbours and the woman at the gallery with her husband and the girl who had taken over from Denise. It was a fine moonlit evening for a barbecue and Emma was up and still rushing about the garden at nine, at ten. She was naughty and uncontrollable, Ivan told the doctor, brimming with energy, it was impossible to cope with her.

  ‘Hyperactive, I suppose,’ said the doctor.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Ivan. ‘For example, only a few weeks ago she shut Nell up in a cupboard, closed the door, and just ran off and left her there. If my son hadn’t happened to forget something and come back for it I don’t know what would have happened. There’s no air in that cupboard.’ Everyone had stopped talking and was listening to Ivan. Nell, handing round little cheese biscuits, stopped and listened to Ivan. ‘I gave her a talking-to, you can imagine the kind of thing, but she’s only two. Precocious of course but basically a baby.’ Ivan’s smile was so wolfish, he looked as if he was about to lift his head and bay at the moon. ‘I don’t know why it is,’ he said, ‘but neither of my children ever do what they’re told, they don’t listen to a word I say.’

  Nell dropped the plate and screamed. She stood there screaming until the woman from the gallery went up to her and slapped her face.

  Long Live the Queen

  It was over in an instant. A flash of orange out of the green hedge, a streak across the road, a thud. The impact was felt as a surprisingly heavy jarring. There was no cry. Anna had braked but too late and the car had been going fast. She pulled in to the side of the road, got out, walked back.

  An effort was needed before she could look. The cat had been flung against the grass verge which separated road from narrow walkway. It was dead. She knew before she knelt down and felt its side that it was dead. A little blood came from its mouth. Its eyes were already glazing. It had been a fine cat of the kind called marmalade because the colour is two-tone, the stripes like dark slices of peel among the clear orange. Paws, chest and part of its face were white, the eyes gooseberry green.

  It was an unfamiliar road, one she had only taken to avoid roadworks on the bridge. Anna thought, I was going too fast. There is no speed limit here but it’s a country road with cottages and I shouldn’t have been going so fast. The poor cat. Now she must go and admit what she h
ad done, confront an angry or distressed owner, an owner who presumably lived in the house behind that hedge.

  She opened the gate and went up the path. It was a cottage but not a pretty one: of red brick with a low slate roof, bay windows downstairs with a green front door between them. In each bay window sat a cat, one black, one orange and white like the cat which had run in front of her car. They stared at her, unblinking, inscrutable, as if they did not see her, as if she was not there. She could still see the black one when she was at the front door. When she put her finger to the bell and rang it the cat did not move, nor even blink its eyes.

  No one came to the door. She rang the bell again. It occurred to her that the owner might be in the back garden and she walked round the side of the house. It was not really a garden but a wilderness of long grass and tall weeds and wild trees. There was no one. She looked through a window into a kitchen where a tortoiseshell cat sat on top of the fridge in the sphynx position and on the floor, on a strip of matting, a brown tabby rolled sensuously, its striped paws stroking the air.

  There were no cats outside as far as she could see, not living ones at least. In the left-hand corner, past a kind of lean-to coalshed and a clump of bushes, three small wooden crosses were just visible among the long grass. Anna had no doubt they were cat graves.

  She looked in her bag and finding a hairdresser’s appointment card, wrote on the blank back of it her name, her parents’ address and their phone number, added, Your cat ran out in front of my car. I’m sorry, I’m sure death was instantaneous. Back at the front door, the black cat and the orange and white cat still staring out, she put the card through the letter box.

  It was then that she looked in the window where the black cat was sitting. Inside was a small over-furnished living room which looked as if it smelt. Two cats lay on the hearthrug, two more were curled up together in an armchair. At either end of the mantelpiece sat a china cat, white and red with gilt whiskers. Anna thought there ought to have been another one between them, in the centre of the shelf, because this was the only clear space in the room, every other corner and surface being crowded with objects, many of which had some association with the feline: cat ashtrays, cat vases, photographs of cats in silver frames, postcards of cats, mugs with cat faces on them and ceramic, brass, silver and glass kittens. Above the fireplace was a portrait of a marmalade and white cat done in oils and on the wall to the left hung a cat calendar.

  Anna had an uneasy feeling that the cat in the portrait was the one that lay dead in the road. At any rate, it was very like. She could not leave the dead cat where it was. In the boot of her car were two plastic carrier bags, some sheets of newspaper and a blanket she sometimes used for padding things she did not want to strike against each other while she was driving. As wrapping for the cat’s body the plastic bags would look callous, the newspapers worse. She would sacrifice the blanket. It was a clean dark blue blanket, single size, quite decent and decorous.

  The cat’s body wrapped in this blanket, she carried it up the path. The black cat had moved from the left-hand bay and had taken up a similar position in one of the upstairs windows. Anna took another look into the living room. A second examination of the portrait confirmed her guess that its subject was the one she was carrying. She backed away. The black cat stared down at her, turned its head and yawned hugely. Of course it did not know she carried one of its companions, dead and now cold, wrapped in an old car blanket, having met a violent death. She had an uncomfortable feeling, a ridiculous feeling, that it would have behaved in precisely the same way if it had known.

  She laid the cat’s body on the roof of the coalshed. As she came back round the house she saw a woman in the garden next door. This was a neat and tidy garden with flowers and a lawn. The woman was in her fifties, white-haired, slim, wearing a twinset.

  ‘One of the cats ran out in front of my car,’ Anna said. ‘I’m afraid it’s dead.’

  ‘Oh, dear.’

  ‘I’ve put the – body, the body on the coalshed. Do you know when they’ll be back?’

  ‘It’s just her,’ the woman said. ‘It’s just her on her own.’

  ‘Oh, well. I’ve written a note for her. With my name and address.’

  The woman was giving her an odd look. ‘You’re very honest. Most would have just driven on. You don’t have to report running over a cat, you know. It’s not the same as a dog.’

  ‘I couldn’t have just gone on.’

  ‘If I were you I’d tear that note up. You can leave it to me, I’ll tell her I saw you.’

  ‘I’ve already put it through the door,’ said Anna.

  She said goodbye to the woman and got back into her car. She was on her way to her parents’ house where she would be staying for the next two weeks. Anna had a flat on the other side of the town but she had promised to look after her parents’ house while they were away on holiday, and – it now seemed a curious irony – her parents’ cat.

  If her journey had gone according to plan, if she had not been delayed for half an hour by the accident and the cat’s death, she would have been in time to see her mother and father before they left for the airport. But when she got there they had gone. On the hall table was a note for her in her mother’s hand to say that they had had to leave, the cat had been fed and there was a cold roast chicken in the fridge for Anna’s supper. The cat would probably like some too, to comfort it for missing them.

  Anna did not think her mother’s cat, a huge fluffy creature of a ghostly whitish-grey tabbyness, named Griselda, was capable of missing anyone. She could not believe it had affections. It seemed to her without personality or charm, to lack endearing ways. To her knowledge, it had never uttered beyond giving an occasional thin squeak that signified hunger. It had never been known to rub its body against human legs, or even against the legs of the furniture. Anna knew that it was absurd to call an animal selfish, an animal naturally put its survival first, self-preservation being its prime instinct, yet she thought of Griselda as deeply, intensely, callously selfish. When it was not eating it slept, and it slept in those most comfortable places where the people that owned it would have liked to sit but from which they could not bring themselves to dislodge it. At night it lay on their bed and if they moved, dug its long sharp claws through the bedclothes into their legs.

  Anna’s mother did not like hearing Griselda referred to as ‘it’. She corrected Anna and stroked Griselda’s head. Griselda, who purred a lot when recently fed and ensconced among cushions, always stopped purring at the touch of a human hand. This would have amused Anna if she had not seen that her mother seemed hurt by it, withdrew her hand and gave an unhappy little laugh.

  When she had unpacked the case she brought with her, had prepared and eaten her meal and given Griselda a chicken leg, she began to wonder if the owner of the cat she had run over would phone. The owner might feel, as people bereaved in great or small ways sometimes did feel, that nothing could bring back the dead. Discussion was useless and so, certainly, was recrimination. It had not in fact been her fault. She had been driving fast, but not illegally fast, and even if she had been driving at thirty miles an hour she doubted if she could have avoided the cat which streaked so swiftly out of the hedge.

  It would be better to stop thinking about it. A night’s sleep, a day at work, and the memory of it would recede. She had done all she could. She was very glad she had not just driven on as the next-door neighbour had seemed to advocate. It had been some consolation to know that the woman had many cats, not just the one, so that perhaps losing one would be less of a blow.

  When she had washed the dishes and phoned her friend Kate, and wondered if Richard, the man who had taken her out three times and to whom she had given this number, would phone and had decided he would not, she sat down beside Griselda, not with Griselda but on the same sofa as she was on, and watched television. It got to ten and she thought it unlikely the cat woman – she had begun thinking of her as that – would phone now.

 
There was a phone extension in her parents’ room but not in the spare room where she would be sleeping. It was nearly eleven-thirty and she was getting into bed when the phone rang. The chance of its being Richard, who was capable of phoning late, especially if he thought she was alone, made her go into her parents’ bedroom and answer it.

  A voice that sounded strange, thin and cracked, said what sounded like, ‘Maria Yackle.’

  ‘Yes?’ Anna said.

  ‘This is Maria Yackle. It was my cat that you killed.’

  Anna swallowed. ‘Yes. I’m glad you found my note. I’m very sorry, I’m very sorry. It was an accident. The cat ran out in front of my car.’

  ‘You were going too fast.’

  It was a blunt statement, harshly made. Anna could not refute it. She said, ‘I’m very sorry about your cat.’

  ‘They don’t go out much, they’re happier indoors. It was a chance in a million. I should like to see you. I think you should make amends. It wouldn’t be right for you just to get away with it.’

  Anna was very taken aback. Up till then the woman’s remarks had seemed reasonable. She did not know what to say.

  ‘I think you should compensate me, don’t you? I loved her, I love all my cats. I expect you thought that because I had so many cats it wouldn’t hurt me so much to lose one.’

  That was so near what Anna had thought that she felt a kind of shock as if this Maria Yackle or whatever she was called had read her mind. ‘I’ve told you I’m sorry. I am sorry, I was very upset, I hated it happening. I don’t know what more I can say.’

  ‘We must meet.’

  ‘What would be the use of that?’ Anna knew she sounded rude but she was shaken by the woman’s tone, her blunt, direct sentences.

  There was a break in the voice, something very like a sob. ‘It would be of use to me.’

  The phone went down. Anna could hardly believe it. She had heard it go down but still she said several times over, ‘Hallo? Hallo?’ and ‘Are you still there?’