Pudding
On Thursday morning I was on the wall where I had been since the water went down, and the whole of the night before was still in my fur.
I shall say it once. She was drowning. I was on a wall. I screamed her name until my throat was a ploughed field, and I did not go in. A man came running down the drove with the water to his chest, and he went in, and I sat on the bricks and watched him do it.
The blood came out of the cottage at seven in a pink dressing gown that was not hers, over her clothes, with a towel on her head. She did not look at me. She stood on the step and looked at the drove, where what had been her taxi lay in the brown water with its roof sticking out like the back of a hippopotamus.
"I did not enjoy it," I said.
"I know."
"I should have, that is, I intended—"
"Nope," said the blood. "Not yet."
That was all. She went back in, and I heard her fill the kettle, and I understood that I was to be given nothing, and I sat on the wall and took it.
At eight a lorry came down the drove with a winch on the back, and on its door in green letters it said THEW'S FEN EDGE LODGES. It had two men in it who did not speak. They hooked the taxi under the chin, and the drowned Skoda came up out of the drove backwards, slowly, pouring from every door, with the pine tree still hanging from the mirror like a drowned man's last thought. The blood signed something on a board. One of them gave her a small plastic bag with a card in it, and rice, and she looked at it and said to nobody, "Insurer wants the film by noon tomorrow."
"Take mine," said Mo, who had come down her path in her slippers with her car keys on a long string. "Go on, love. Take the Micra. I've the bus, I've never minded the bus, and there's a cushion on the back seat for him. You're not to say no."
"I'll pay for the petrol."
"You will not."
The blood took the keys. She stood there with them in her hand.
At ten Ned came to the cottage.
I was on the sill outside the kitchen window. He stood in the kitchen door in his waders, with a tea towel round his wrist, and the blood stood at the table with her arms folded and the whole of her face shut. I had a number of remarks ready, in case she needed them.
"Jess," he said. "About the two thousand, and the rest. I came to say. If you want me to go."
"You saved my life," said the blood, "and you sold my life. So we're even."
"I don't think we are."
"And you're paying for the window."
"Yes, of course. Sixty pounds. I've a mate."
"Good." She did not unfold her arms. "I'm not saying I forgive you. I'm saying we're even. Go away."
He went. The van started with a noise like a bucket of bolts and went up the drove, and the blood stood at the table until the sound had gone, and then she sat down and put her head in her hands.
I came in. I got up on the table.
"Madam," I said. "You have forgiven a man who sold you."
"I haven't."
"You have given him a window."
"He's paying for it."
"A man who takes two thousand pounds is a man who would take three."
"Yes," said the blood. "That's what Gavin's counting on."
"He is plainly a plot."
"He pulled me out of a car." She said it into her hands. "I'm not going to hate him. I haven't got the time."
She took her hands off her face. She did not look at me, but she did not look away. "Not yet. Right? I'm not talking about it. I'll tell you when."
She went out to put the borrowed car round the back, and I heard her cancel the estate agent from the yard. It took four words. I sat on the table with my paws together, and I was not wounded.
The floor took me at four.
It was Mo's kitchen, and it was the longest yet. Mo, who could see only a cat on its side, got down on her knees with a noise like a fire in a grate and took hold of my back legs in both her hands and said, "I know, I know," over and over. It was the first time in eleven years that sentence had been of any use to me, and I did not tell her so.
That night the taxi was a rectangle of dry mud, and the blood was in the box room, in the narrow bed, with her face to the wall, and I stood in the doorway of it, as one stands at the edge of a field one is not permitted to cross. She had put a chair against the door and a towel along the bottom. It kept out neither of us. She did not say a word.
At eleven the church clock struck and something went.
It was not far. It was not in the town, or the churchyard, or any of the dull places that had gone before, with their names on the map. It was in my own mouth, at the back, low, in the middle, so near that I put my paws up to my face. It was cold. It was a crack. And the taste that came was not of old pennies. It was of iron, and salt, and a woman's coat on a peg.
"Madam," I said. "Get up. Get up. It is the garden. That is eleven."
She was up before I had finished, in the dressing gown, with her hand on the wall and her telephone out, and she said, "Where?"
"At the bottom. In the dyke. Under the water, at the foot of the bank, under the gate. I can smell it."
"Can you find it?"
"I can find it," I said. "I cannot dig."
"Right." She had her photographs up on the telephone. She looked at the map. She swore, quietly. "Garden, dyke side. There's a stone. It's under four foot of water."
"It is."
"Then I'll need to see where it is." She looked at me. She had a face on that I had not seen before. It was very plain. "You know that."
"I do."
"Right."
She rang the man.
She had told him to go away, and she rang him. She stood in the dark kitchen with her thumb on the glass and said, "It's Jess. I need a boat." There was a pause. She said, "A dinghy's fine." There was another. She said, "No. The garden." And she put it in her pocket, and I was so outraged I could not speak.
He would be twenty minutes, she said, and I went down to the gate to wait, past the vicar's thurible, cold on its gatepost. I went down the steps, all eleven, in the dark, and I sat on the third, because it was warm and because, if I am to be honest, I wished to be as far from the dyke as it was possible to be and still be looking at it. The blood came after me with a torch. Mo came down her own garden and over the fence in her other pink dressing gown, with a coat over it and a flask in her hand, saying "Oh, my God, oh, my God, I heard the phone, what is it, is it the water?" and the blood laid the beam of the torch on the dyke and said nothing at all.
I watched it. It was wide and black and quite still, with a skin on it like a pudding left overnight. Beyond it, a mile off in the dark, the sea bank, and on the other side of that, the sea.
"I shall go in," I said.
Mo stared. The blood was looking at me.
I stood up on the third step. I stood up all the way. I have given a speech on a great many occasions, but I have not before given one in the knowledge that I was going to be made to keep it.
"I shall go in," I said again. "I mean to go in as a Thorncrown goes in. I do not go in water. I have not gone in it by choice since 1725, and I shall go. I intend to enter that dyke with my head up and my tail aloft, as the Duke of the Ninth Furnace should, and I intend to find that bottle by my own nose, and I intend to stand on it, if need be, until the Last Trump. I shall not scream. I shall not look at the eels. I intend to be magnificent. I shall be—"
"Pudding," said the blood.
"I am not finished."
"You are."
The van came round the back path with its lights off and a small grey rubber boat tied to the roof like a hat. I will not give you Ned launching it. It took two minutes, and he said only, from the bank, with the boat floating at his feet on the black water, "I'll hold the light, Jess. Tell me where." Then he got into it with the big lamp off the van, and pushed off a length into the dyke, and knelt in it with the beam on the water, waiting to be told.
The blood had the cord out of the dressing gown she was wearing, Mo's spare, long and pink. "Take it, love," called Mo, from the bank, "it's good cord!" She tied it round my middle, twice, quickly, with her mouth shut, and I did not say anything about the pink.
Then she took me in her arms, and walked down the bank, and went in.
I will give you the water.
It was cold in the way a clock is cold. It came up round her waist and she held me out of it for four steps, and the fifth was the last, and she set me down on the top of it, and I did the only thing there was. I let go of her.
I went in.
I did not say I would be magnificent. I do not know that I was. I know that the water shut over my back, and the cord was round me, and my legs were going as a dog's go, which I will thank you not to mention, and that the dark came into my ears and my mouth and the whole of my head, and that something long went past my flank in the black, slowly, and I did not scream. I had water in my mouth.
And then I smelled it.
It was under me. It was to the left. It came up out of the bottom of the dyke as a note comes off a struck glass: iron, and salt, and an old coat on a peg, and nails, and a woman's hair. It was her. It was Agatha. It was the whole of her, laid down in a jug in the mud.
"Left!" I said.
I said it with the whole of my mouth, with the water in it, and from behind me, a half-second late, the blood shouted it, "Left!", to the boat. The boat went left. The beam came after it, and in the beam I saw the mud, and I put my four feet down on a hard round thing with a face on it.
"He says he's cold, love!" called Mo, from the bank. "He says he's cold!"
I stood on it.
The water was over my head. I should like to say I held my breath. I held it as a duke holds an office. I stood on a jug in the bottom of a ditch in the dark, with my claws in the clay and a cord round my belly, and I did not move, and I knew that if I moved she would never find it, and so I did not, and I counted, as she does. One. Two. I did not know I knew how.
Her hands came.
They found my feet. They were cold and enormous and they closed over my paws, and over the stone under them, and I felt her go down, with her whole face in the dyke, and I felt the clay go. Then there was nothing under my feet, and a hand under my belly, and a great pull on the cord, and I was out. I was out in the air. I was against her coat, soaked, with my head over her shoulder and my mouth open, and she was standing in the dyke up to her ribs with an old stoneware jug in the other arm, with a face on its neck, and she was saying, over and over, in the voice she uses for the meter, "Got you, got you, got you."
She did not hand me to the boat. She walked up the bank with me against her, and she put me on the grass, and then she sat down by me with the jug in her lap, and the dyke running off her.
"Turn round," she said.
"I'm not looking!" shouted Mo. "I've got my hands over my eyes!"
"Turn the light down, Ned."
I looked at the dyke, which was convenient. She did it from the recipe on her telephone, in the beam of the torch, held low, and she did it fast, and she did it in a voice that was entirely level, and I felt each part of it go in me like a thing being sewn. Out went the old water. In went the new. The nails stayed. The hair stayed. She stopped the crack with clay and she pressed it with her thumb, and she walked it down the bank, and she put it back in the mud, face to the sea, and stood on it.
It went in like a key.
I felt it turn. A quarter-turn, small and cold and exact, and a warmth in the place where the old crack had been, and the taste of pennies going out of my mouth. That was two.
The dyke ticked. Somewhere a very long way off a moorhen said what it thought.
They took me in. Mo did the towels and the tea, and rubbed me with a thing that smelled of lavender, and her pink gown flapped open at the front the whole time like a tent that has lost its nerve. The man took his boat home.
The blood sat down on the kitchen floor in a towel with her back against the range, and she was blue, and she had her knees up. I was in front of her on the lino in a heap. She looked at me for a long time. Then she sneezed. She sneezed on me, all over, with her whole face, as she has done since the first night, and wiped her nose on the towel, and said:
"You came in."
I could have said a number of things. I have said all of them, at one time or another, to bishops. I could have said that it was always my intention. It was not true. I had meant, that afternoon, to stand on the wall and be forgiven for it.
"I went in," I said.
She did not say anything for a while. Then she put her hand flat on the floor beside me, near, not on, and left it there. I looked at it. Presently I put my head down on my paws, and I let it stay.