Grazing The Long Acre

by Gwyneth Jones

  Over his head, young Sherlock’s parents exchanged an agreement to block any further moves towards an adoption application.

  ‘No, I bet he comes from that place up on the road.’ Spence pointed to a red-roofed ranchero that they could see over their hedge, the last house of the town. ‘He’s probably discovered that tourists are a soft touch, and comes here on the scrounge.’

  ‘Can I go and ask them?’

  ‘No!’ snapped Anna and Spence together. Jake shrugged, and gave the cat some pate. It didn’t have the manners of a beggar. It ate a little, as if for politeness’ sake, and resumed its eager watchfulness.

  The child was put to bed and finally slept, having failed to persuade the cat to join him inside the yurt. The parents stayed outside. The air was so still that Anna brought out candles, to save the big lamp. They lay wrapped in rugs, reading and talking softly; and made a list for the next hypermarché: where, it was to be hoped, there’d be cooking gas cylinders in stock again at last. And batteries for Jake’s headband tv, the single most necessary luxury in their lives. The cat came to visit them, peering sweetly into their faces and inviting them to play. It showed no sign of returning to the red-roofed ranch.

  ‘You know,’ said Anna, ‘Jake could be right. It’s weird for a fancy cat like that to be wandering around on the loose, like any old moggie. It’s a Tom, did you notice?’

  ‘I thought toms were supposed to roam.’

  ‘Cat breeders keep their studs banged-up. They spend their lives in solitary, except when they’re on the job. An inferior male kitten sold for a pet gets castrated. Let’s take a closer look.’

  The Burmese Temple Cat was a young entire male, very thin but otherwise in good health. He had once worn a collar. He now had no identifying marks. He suffered their examination with good-tempered patience, stayed to play for a little longer and then resumed his vigil: staring hopefully into the night.

  ‘He’s waiting for someone,’ said Anna, finishing her wine. ‘Poor little bugger. He must have gone off exploring, and they left without him. Pity he’s not tattooed.’

  ‘Libertarians are everywhere,’ Spence reminded her. ‘That’s probably why he still has his balls, too. No castration for me, no castration for my cat. I can see that.’

  ‘What can we do? I suppose we could leave a message at the gendarmerie, if there is one. Any one who lost a cat like that’s bound to have reported him missing.’

  ‘We can tell the gardienne in the morning, when she comes to collect the rent.’

  Next day started slowly. After lunch Spence and Jake walked into town to look for the Post Office. Spence needed to dispatch the proofs of the The Coast Of Coramandel, latest of the adventures of a renowned female pirate captain: who, with her dashing young mate Jake and the rest of the desperate crew, had been keeping Patrick Spencer Meade in gainful employment for some years. The postmistress greeted them with disdain and pity, as if tourists were an endangered species too far gone to be worth your sympathy. She examined his laptop, and refused to admit that her establishment possessed a phone jack that he could plug into. She told him he could use the telephone in a normal manner, but she was afraid that connections with England and the United States were impossible at present. She told him to go to Paris. Or Lyons.

  Or just get the hell out of here.

  Spence’s understanding of French was adequate but not subtle. He was always missing the point on small details. He’d learned to smile and nod and pass for normal, it had never failed so far. He accepted the woman’s hostility without complaint, and wondered what had caused the latest telecoms melt. Urban terrorism? Surprise right-wing coup brings down the Paris government? Whole population of the UK succumbs to food-poisoning? It was almost enough to send him in search of an English language newspaper, or drive him to reconnect the broadband receiver in the car. But not quite. They were on holiday. Lost in France, and planning to stay lost for as long as the market would bear. He paid for a mass of stamps and handed over the package containing the printed copy, which his publishers routinely required to back up anything sent down the wire. Andrea would be happy. His editor was an elderly young lady with a deep contempt for all things cyberspatial. She’d have loved it if Spence turned in his books written in longhand on reams of parchment. He collected Jake from the philately counter, and they left.

  They wandered on up the single street, which was hardly less deathly still than it had been the evening before. They bought bread, and for want of anything else to explore went into the ugly yellow church, that stood by the war memorial in a walled yard paved with gravestones.

  The interior had a crumbling nineteenth-century mariolatory decor: sky blue heavens, madonna lilies, silver ribbons. The structure was much older. Spence traced a course of ancient stone, revealed where a long chunk of painted plaster had fallen away. It was cool and damp to the touch, and still marked by the blows of its maker who had been dead for a thousand years. He sat on the front bench in the lady chapel, holding his laptop on his knees. Jake went to investigate a dusty Easter Garden in the children’s corner: Christ’s sepulchre done in papier-mache and florist’s moss; a matchwood cross draped in a swag of white.

  Spence was glad of a chance to sit and stare; a chance to think about the situation. For some reason his thoughts today took the form of considering their different ethnicities. Anna the European: so old a ship, so old…Spence the American. He had been brought up to believe, (along with an improbably large percentage of the US population), that he was of almost pure Irish descent, with a smattering of West African (tribe unspecified); and a soupcon of Cherokee. Anna had informed him that in fact what distinguishes United States citizens is a genetic inheritance extra-weighted towards callous survival. Spence’s ancestors were people who quit England because they could not stand the idea of religious tolerance; people who escaped from hellish conditions in nineteenth century Europe rather than staying to fight for a better society. People who, given the real and immediate physical choice, had preferred slavery to death. Americans are descended from those who refused to suffer; or if they had to suffer they refused to die.

  Could he correct that inheritance, could he become more like Anna? He imagined himself taken up from the nine-inch board in that stinking hold, extricated from his neighbours, his chains struck off. Over the side, a sack of spoiled meat. He saw himself fall into grace, loose limbs flapping: down into the green water, silver bubbles rising as the body slowly tumbles, into the deep, the very deep…But it was too late. Can’t turn back the hand of time. Spence lived, and would have to keep this thick-skinned hardiness: this spirit, wherever it came from, that would not be mortified.

  At least he could claim to be a permanent exile. Spence could never go home, not for more than a week or so at a time, not so long as his wife and his mother both lived. The whole United States wasn’t big enough to contain the iron-hard territoriality of those two females. This didn’t bother him. It only surprised him occasionally, when he realised how solidly his marriage confirmed a choice that he’d made for himself long before. He preferred America this way: preserved from one brief visit to the next in his voice, in his tastes, in his childhood memories. Yet displacement breeds displacement. They had travelled a great deal, in Europe and beyond: always going further and staying away longer than other people. They’d have taken longer and wilder trips still, except for Anna’s commitment to her work.

  Now Anna’s job was gone. There was nothing to go back for. No drag, no tie, no limit. They were no longer locked into that damned university laboratory academic year, miserable crowded August holidays. She’s mine now, he thought. She’s all my own. Instantly he was punished by a vision of Anna’s hands. Anna moving round a clothes shop like a blind woman, assessing the fabric as if she’s reading Braille: smoothing a shoulder seam, judging the cut and the fall of the cloth with those animate fingers, those living creatures imbued with genius. Anna removing and cleaning her contact lenses, nights in the past, so smashed she could ha
rdly breathe, the deft economy of her gestures serenely undisturbed. Those hands rendered useless, unable to practice the subtle art that he only knew in its faint, mundane echoes? Oh no. He thought of Marie Curie, the exacting drudgery of women scientists; it comes naturally to them. Delicacy and endurance, backed by a brain the size of Jupiter. She can’t have lost all that…Recent memory, from those last extraordinary weeks in England, cast up a red-faced drunken old man at a publishers’ party, shouting ‘your wife has destroyed the fabric of society!’ One of the more bizarre incidents in his career as a scientist’s spouse.

  He could not take her disaster seriously, and therefore he was free to indulge his fantasy. Of course she’d get another job, but they didn’t have to go home yet. They could stay away for the whole of September, mellow empty September in the French countryside. We can afford it, he thought, glowing a little. Easy. Could go south again, over to Italy, move into hotels if the weather gives out (but they all three loved to live outdoors). I may be a mere kiddies’ entertainer, but I can put food on the family table. She practically had a breakdown, she’s still fragile, depressed, not herself: she needs space.

  But what would it be like to live with Anna, without her career? What about sex? There’d be no more foreign conferences, no more jokes about over-sexed sex biologists. No more of those sparky professional friendships that had to make him suspicious, damn it, though he’d persistently denied it. He could be sure of her now…That made him uneasy. What would happen to desire, if the little goad of fear was removed? Spence had been trained by his wife to believe that animal behaviour invariably has an end in view, however twisted; however bent out of shape. What if sex with his best beloved (since they weren’t making babies, and it was no longer the forever inadequate confirmation that she belonged to him), began to seem unnecessary, a pointless exercise, a meaningless pleasure? An awful pang, as if the loss was real and already irrevocable, broke him out of his reverie.

  He stood up. ‘Let’s go, kid.’

  Jake was reluctant to leave the empty tomb, which was surrounded by a phalanx of home-made fake sunflowers, each with a photograph of a child’s face in the centre. He admired the whole ensemble greatly: because, Spence guessed, he could imagine doing something like that himself. The greatest art in Europe had left Jake unimpressed, since he felt he had no stake in the enterprise.

  ‘Can we take a picture of it?’

  ”Fraid not. We didn’t bring the camera.’

  ‘Can we come back with the camera, later?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Maybe means no,’ muttered Jake under his breath, ‘Why not call a spade a spade?’

  They went in search of the gardienne. She hadn’t turned up to claim their rent in the morning. The manager of a municipal campsite usually operated out of the town hall, but this one had a house near that crossroads where the path through the wood came out. They were permitted to enter a stiff, funereal parlour. The registration form was filled in, with immense labour, by the skinny old lady and a very fat man, either her husband or her son, who was squelched immovable into a wheelback armchair at the parlour table. Jake made friends with a little dog. Spence stared at a huge ornate clock that seemed on the point of plunging to its death from the top shelf of an oak dresser laden with ugly china.

  She didn’t know anything about the Balinese Dancer. There was no such cat in the village. No such cat had been reported missing by any campers. She could not recall when pitch 16 had last been used, and rejected the suggestion that she might consult her records. She supposed he might report this lost cat to the police, but she saw no reason why he should give himself the trouble. The police here knew their business, they would not be interested in his story.

  Spence began to get very strange vibes.

  He changed the subject. They chatted a little about the political situation, always a safe topic for non-specific head-shaking and sighing. Spence paid for two nights’ camping and recovered his passport. ‘Let’s go back through the woods,’ he said, when they were outside.

  ‘We haven’t finished exploring,’

  ‘Your Mom’s been alone long enough.’

  Sitting on the floor in the sanitaires, Anna scrubbed her legs with an emery paper glove. She blew away a dust of powdered hair from the page of Ramone Holyrod’s essays, keeping the book open with the balls of her feet.

  …like the civil rights movement, feminism has achieved certain goals at a wholly destructive price. It has created an aspirational female middle class whose interests are totally at odds with the interests of the female masses, and with the original aim of the movement. Successful women trade on their femininity. They have no desire to see difference between the sexes eroded, they foster and elaborate that same difference which condemns millions of other women…

  Anna was catching up. She’d once known Ramone personally, but she’d never had time to read books like this. She worked moisturising lotion into the newly smooth bare skin and removed a vagrant drop, the colour of melted chocolate ice cream, from the text. Feminist rage, she decided, had not changed much since she last looked. She turned Prefutural Tension face down and went to the mirror above the sinks; took her kohl pencil from the family washbag, stretched the skin of her left upper eyelid taut by applying a firm fingertip to the outer corner, and drew a fine solid line along the base of her lashes. Mirrors had begun to be haunted by the ghost of Anna’s middle age, by whispers from magazines saying don’t drink and go to bed early. But what good did it do if you couldn’t sleep? There was always something to prevent her. Last night, the faint smell of that dump…

  The campsite was completely quiet. The couple with the big trailer had left at dawn. If they were intent on skipping the rent they needn’t have bothered. The gardienne here obviously wasn’t the conscientious kind. Anna turned a soft brush in a palette of eye-shadow, a shade of yellow that was nearly gold, and dusted it across the whole area of her eyes: to lift and brighten the natural tone of her tanned skin, and correct the slightly too-deep sockets.

  Ramone had a nerve. A professional feminist, and accusing other people of trading on their feminine identity. Maquillage, she thought (carefully stroking the mascara wand upwards, under her lower lashes) is not a female trait. I can give you chapter and verse on that, Ramone my dear. It’s a male sexual gesture. As you well know. The public world is male, and to deal with it we all have to adopt male behaviour. You and me both, Ramone, we have to display: strut our stuff or perish, publish or be damned. It’s not your fault or mine, sister. It’s simply a question of whose head is on the coin. You want to work for the company, you wear the uniform. Where do you get off, claiming that you can speak from some female parade ground, where competition and challenge are unknown? Balls to that.

  She gazed at the face of Caesar in the mirror. Wide brow, pointed chin, black eyes, golden brown skin: Anna Senoz. Yes, I’m married. No, I didn’t change my name. Why didn’t you change your name? Because I didn’t want to. Next question…She thought of her ancestors, Spanish jews, pragmatic converts to Christianity. Discreet, tolerated aliens. I should have strutted my two-fisted stuff more, and used less eyeliner. Ramone’s right. Power dressing is a short term solution, but in the end a female who paints ‘I am sexually available‘ all over herself is offering submission, not issuing a challenge. That’s the animal truth, and it can’t be subverted. I was giving hopelessly confused signals all these years, and now I pay the price. She had collected suitors, not subordinates. She had been envied, desired, but never feared. And when she needed to fight she had none of the right responses. It’s Spence’s fault, she thought. Before Spence, I liked sex and I hoped I was attractive enough to get my share, but I had no more paranoia about my personal appearance than if I was Albert Einstein. He told me I was beautiful. He got me hooked on femininity, and it’s done me no good at all.

  Anna was not a professional feminist, but she wasn’t a political moron. She had known there would be trouble. She had known that her team’s pap
er (along with the simultaneous presentation on superjanet) would be challenged, questioned; angrily dismissed in some quarters. The erosion of difference between the sexes, though it might not interest Ramone’s aspirational female middle class, had been a hot topic in Anna’s world for several years. At the molecular level, that is. Anna knew that she’d made an extraordinary proposition. She’d even joked that the news might hit the tabloids. It had never occurred to her that she could lose her job.

  She remembered the room, her boss’s office. It was May time, but it had been raining and the sky was grey. Outside his floor length windows wet tassels of sycamore flower littered the Biology car-park. Across uncut grass, starred with buttercups and daisies, the small patch of woodland beside Material Sciences was brilliant with new leaf. She could not understand what she’d done wrong. But it isn’t a scare story, she protested. What I’m saying is that this isn’t like global warming or holes in the ozone layer. It’s not a punishment, it’s not an awful warning. Something is happening, that’s all. It’s just evolution. She was floundering. She had prepared the wrong script. She had been expecting to discuss tactics: how can we use this notoriety, how can we make it work for us? But he was furious. What does it matter? she begged. It’s not as if anything’s going to change overnight. This is not something any one will consciously experience. This will be like…coming down from the trees.

  Anna had demonstrated that the future belongs neither to women nor to men but to some new creature, now inexorably on its way. She had spoken this as fact, she had nothing to defend. Suddenly she was fighting for her life, but she couldn’t concentrate. She had found herself staring over his shoulder at the green world outside, trying to hear the birds in the little wood. There would be blackbirds, robins, perhaps a wren. The chorus was sadly depleted. Did he say your views are not welcome in this department? I don’t have any ‘views’ protested Anna…Did he say will not be renewing your contract? She was thinking of the songthrush and the cuckoo, those sweet and homely voices forever stilled. Don’t you see that the house is on fire? Our house is on fire, the little ones are dead. How can you jabber on about these ridiculous trivialities? Now she was crying. He gave her a paper tissue from a box he kept in his desk drawer. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, but…’