In human terms, they—she and X—are admitting their knowledge of his guilt by fleeing, and their own guilt as voyeurs. They are outgunned, exposed to an overwhelming physical superiority. They are lightly armed guerrilla forces, darting through the undergrowth. He is a one-man napalm strike desperate to happen; the neighbor, a drone-fired cruise missile of pure malice needing only the press of the button.
The anger in the novelist’s voice persuades her that they must take refuge from rage.
So, thankfully, must he.
“What the hell? I mean. How could you? How could you be so careless?”
X has found Portia’s bedroom with its strip of police crime scene tape, left over from a burglary attempt, across the teenager’s door. It is slightly ajar. Enough for a snout to push wide enough until the vibrissae signal an adequate pathway for the fluffy, cozy, now quivering body.
Through X, Dolores experiences fear as she has never felt it before. Absolute. Visceral. Reflexive. Beyond reason.
X has grown up with no knowledge of threat. If she were allowed outside, how would she know that, while four legs are good, four wheels are bad; that sly Reynard the Fox would snap her neck with one flick of his or her jaws; that the world is so much more than three squares a day and a surfeit of cuddles?
Does she know anything that is red in tooth and claw?
Except her husband’s paramour.
“Never mind the damned cat. What about me? I could be pregnant?” Her voice rises interrogatively at the end of the sentence. The word fills the moment with universal horror.
“Pregnant?” A word not welcome in the lothario lexicon.
* * *
“Yes. Fucking pregnant. Which part of the word do you not understand?”
X tunnels. Under the bed.
Between plastic storage containers of sheet music and snowsuits and discarded dolls from earlier years there is a tunnel, a maze, leading to a secret silent core, like that inner sanctum in the Great Pyramid of Giza.
The what?
Pray we do not need the litter box, Dolores is thinking. Pray curiosity does not lure us forth to kill the cat, as Gerald surely would.
Knowing what he suspects.
The incisor piercing of the condom.
Exhibit A.
Anthropomorphization of the incident: as if a malignant human had plotted his downfall, lurking beyond the arras to conspire.
Biped voices in the long corridor. Dolores guesses that they are discussing cycles of fertility, phases between menstrual periods, the probability of disaster, abortion.
“What if I don’t want to get rid of it?” her neighbor is saying.
And, quite abruptly, she understands that if she had not awoken as a cat, she would not have known what was going on in her own home during her frequent professional absences. Cats learn many things that humans would never suspect, but they do not always remember them. They cannot testify or take action. They feel no obligation, indeed have no ability, to confess or bear witness. But humans condemned to a cat’s life know and understand all. Except how they got there. And how they will get out of it to wreak vengeance.
“Listen, lover boy. It’s either me or the cat. Your choice.” Lady Macbeth. Out, damned cat, out, I say.
Foul whisperings are abroad: unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles. Dolores recalls the final year at high school, in the amateur dramatics society. A walk-on part. Gentlewoman. Act 5 Scene 1. Good night, good doctor. The final curtain call before the trek north to uni. And the doomed tryst so much later with Gerald Tremayne. So often postponed that it might not have happened. There would have been others. There were others. But not since Gerald. The folly of fidelity.
“Heaven knows what she has known,” the gentlewoman says. And now I know, too.
X and Dolores hear the big white barrier bang closed. They hear the footsteps returning to the guest room and, soon afterward, they hear a rumbling sound that Dolores knows to be the washing machine sluicing out the damned spot. And the garbage bin opening and closing. Toilet flushing.
Cleanup. Cover-up. Before the domestic lady arrives with her Tagalog cell phone banter and sharp eyes for anomalies, stains, creases in sheets that should be pristine on beds that are supposed to be unused, in reserve for guests.
Another sound. A box of treats being rattled.
X stirs, settles. Dolores feels her pulling back, withdrawing into the hiding place no human can enter without tearing aside the storage boxes, excavating Portia’s past, the palimpsest of early youth, her blossoming.
A light now, in a white color range. The predator stalking. Torch in hand. Light turning milky, diffused through the opaque plastic, playing over shapes, memories: Barbie, Furby, My Little Pony, half the contents of Hamleys and F.A.O. Schwarz, Knopf Im Ohr. Portia’s first drawing. “For Mummy” in uncertain script. Primary colors and great bold daubs. Yellow sun. Cerulean sky. The green, green grass of home.
A new approach, conciliatory, wheedling. Fooling no one.
“Pretty pussy.”
“Treaty-wheaties.”
“No one’s cross with you, X.”
“Good cat!”
Another sound. Ding-a-ling. Familiar.
“Hi, baby. How’s my girl?”
Portia? Astra? Gerald has answered his telephone and stands up.
The darkness returns. X breathes very lightly, inaudible even to feline ears.
Sound of incoming electronic voice. Welcome, familiar. Portia. The elder, who sneaks prawn treats for X, and flips her on her back, and rubs the deep gray thatch of her cashmere-soft belly.
“Now? Sure. Be right there.”
More voice scrambled by the miniaturized speaker in the top-of-the-line smartphone.
“Both of you? Fine. No worries. No. Not busy at all. Finished for the day.”
And how! I wonder if he is aware of the cruel irony of that last remark. Then his voice takes on a harder edge.
“It’s not over, X. Wherever you are. Not by a long chalk. Not by the hair on your chinny-chin-chin.”
So now she is a pig? And he will blow the house down?
Come home. Dolores. Come home.
But I am home. I am here. I have seen all. And can tell no one.
What did I do? Did I not nurture him, pander to his bedtime foibles, praise his talents, stroke the writerly ego and its physical appendage? Was it my job? The absences? The girls? The home-husbandry? Did I neglect, or dis, or otherwise importune the genius?
Is it because I is black? An Ali G voice.
Oh my God. I have never thought that before.
She has not thought that before because she has not wanted to. Because she has never wished to see disadvantage in her lineage.
It is like one of those moments at the movies when the focus shifts from whatever is in the foreground, making it blurred and indistinct while the background snaps into crystalline view, invisible until that moment but now revealed, illuminating what was always there but not always seen.
Dolores thinks of her parents—one African, one English. Her father is from the southern quadrant of the continent, a hero of liberation yet steeped in the acquired culture of exile in Britain, her mother’s native land. People who know him only from telephone conversations sometimes make racial assumptions based on his Oxbridge tones and his facility with quotations from Shakespeare. They are surprised, when they first meet him, to discover that he is equally fluent in Marx and Fanon—the prophets of the oppressed—and that his expressive canon ranges from the Nguni tongues of his distant past to a diplomat’s ease with French and a smattering of conversational Russian from the days at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, the finishing school of the struggle.
Her father has tutored her from an early age in the premises of the Freedom Charter. She is a proud African, a product of his triumph over prejudice. Equality is her birthright. He has overcome, and so must she.
By upbringing, she has acquired an easy familiarity with the cosmopolitan idiom of du
al citizenship and twin passports. Her mother, less polemical than her father, but equally committed to their shared principles, has nudged and coaxed her along a straight and narrow path of scholarly achievement, the new weapons in the new struggle against the divisions of class and color. Her daughter will suffer neither the slings of colonialism nor the arrows of humiliation that haunt her mother’s memories of the bleak mill towns of Lancashire, the neglected heartland of blue-collar Britain where people lived shorter more stunted lives and left school early to play hands dealt from the bottom of the pack. And people from other places looked down on them and mocked them and made them the butt of cruel jokes.
Between them, her parents had proudly concluded, they had raised a daughter, an only child as it happened, who fused the best of both of them. Dolores has sought to pass on that same belief—veneer, perhaps—to her own daughters, ignoring the whispered asides of the soccer moms outside the fee-paying school where she has enrolled them to acquire even stronger shields of knowledge and polish and achievement. But she is not in denial about their difference; about the offhand malice of other children who have absorbed their parents’ kitchen-table racial attitudes by osmosis; about the uneasy sense that, whether at home in London or on vacation in far-flung Africa, they are never really gifted with easy acceptance. They are outsiders wherever they finish up and have had to learn to stand their ground, to ignore the slights and barbs and lewd remarks. To say: this is me and I bow the knee to no one.
But now a vision of betrayal through the eyes of a cat had begun to unpick the assumptions.
Is it because I is black? Or not black enough?
Is it because I is a cat with a woman inside me, neither one thing nor wholly the other?
The faux-soccer, mock-hockey dad rattles keys, double-locks vestibule doors that prevent X from escaping onto the staircase outside the family apartment with its nooks and crannies and hiding places and favored spots for surreptitious pooping to acquire rewards.
My remarkable cat’s ears detect him bounding down the stairs. My human memory conjures him forth, with his long, novelist’s hair bouncing and his eyes gleaming, relishing the pretext to reverse the navy blue Range Rover Sport—mine on the ownership and insurance papers—from the garage and spin round to the fee-paying school where the girls receive their education and perform after-hours sport, save when the weather forces postponements and cancellations without refunds. As per contractual arrangement. Like today. Mercifully.
He will pull up and the other child-duty spouses will welcome him in the jumble of overpriced, overpowered SUVs in the parking lot, wondering, perhaps, why any woman would leave a hunk like that at home and go off traveling for work when all kinds of temptation might cross his loping path. And a black woman at that, their eyes will say, though their tongues are more discreet.
Over time, as the semesters have notched up, and the exorbitant fees with them, he has established first-name bonds with many of his fellow parents. At first he recognized them mainly by their late-model chariots, marveling sometimes at the wealth reflected in all those Porsche Cayennes and Volvo XC90s and Mercedes ML350s. But then, as nodded greetings gave way to cautious introductions, he began to distinguish between them. Recognition by type—matronly, mature, trophy—led to first names. A social subgroup, bound by the shared experience of agendas set to educational rhythms, book-ended by the school bell and the sports ground. He was the only male among them, the fox in the chicken coop, the wolf in writerly clothing. Gerald. Call me Gerry. The familiar cast clustered around their charges. Rosemary, with the dogs and daughters, in her Mercedes Estate; Carmel, with the twinkly eyes in the big Audi Q7, with one child of her own and two by her spouse’s previous relationship, prior to being smitten by her, lured and ensnared; Carlotta, just starting out, husband in the city, one child in prep, wondering when it would be her turn again to disappear for days and nights into Canary Wharf to win the bread. And what did they all think of him? Kept man? Stud? What did they think of his after-hours secrets, his nocturnal trespass across the frontiers of skin color? Did that, in fact, make them more curious about, or more fearful of, the chromatic reach of his sexuality? Did they, for one moment, imagine his childhood days, traipsing in worn sneakers to and from the local comprehensive school in a place so far north that they would imagine it shared latitudes with Reykjavík and Anchorage?
No SUVs there, back in the day. No waiting mums in his childhood world of errant, absent dads and zero-hour contract jobs and food banks and bare-knuckle contests for turf and dominion. And if they had known, would they have wondered how he had gotten here, infiltrating these leafy environs, the tribal traces of the north well-hidden, save for the vestigial lapses, the vocal contortions that betrayed the roots, affecting a kind of cosmopolitanism like an ill-fitting suit. Rosemary and Carmel and Carlotta would probably find his distant heritage vaguely exotic, heavy with literary antecedents. Oliver Mellors. Gabriel Oak. Laurel and Hardy. Bathsheba. Mixed with the mysteries of Africa.
But, when he meets their husbands—Toby and Christian and Dominic and Algie, old chap—he knows that they know what they all know: no amount of automotive ostentation can ever erase the codes of speech and vowel and consonant that bind Britons into their upbringings and locate them in the firmament of their appropriate class and status as surely as any GPS. You can take the boy out of Newcastle …
In all probability, the menfolk would not know with any certainty or exactitude the difference between Leeds and Manchester and Liverpool and Doncaster and Sunderland, except from the highway road signs or railroad name-boards as they speed north to grouse moors and salmon rivers and hunting-shooting-fishing weekends in tweeds and big private houses. But they understood that, when you saw those names, you drove on. Here be dragons. Here be crime, violence, drugs, housing projects, terminal hazard, menace signaled by flat vowels and flat caps, post-industrial moonscapes of derelict mills and Poundstretcher stores. In these places people would strip you of everything you had, out of spite and greed and envy and want, with none of the insouciance and finesse of the hedge-fund husbands and stock-option spouses who achieved the same effect on gullible investors with comparable avarice. Only the tactics were different.
No matter if people like that finished up in the parking lot of posh, private schools in North London, sliding their rock-star arses across the cream leather seats of their wives’ Range Rovers. They still hailed from that lower order, across an unbridgeable void, direct descendants of highwaymen and brawlers and brigands of old who would not rest until the unearned wealth of the upper crust was transferred to their own, equally unsalaried coffers. As Honoré de Balzac wrote, all great fortunes sprang from great crimes.
And the same, theoretically, should be true in reverse: all great fortunes may be reversed by great crimes, although they rarely are. As every convicted cat burglar and unmasked Ponzi schemer knows to his or her everlasting regret.
When Gerald Tremayne heard their braying, drawling tones—the anthem of private schools and tuxedoed college dining clubs, and internships that led to gilt-edged futures—he knew that he would never gain access to the codebooks and signals charts by which they communicated. The references to Glyndebourne; the talk of fagging and scouts and bedders; the bespoke suits from the right tailors; Barbour jackets that never seemed to have been new, worn to a shine, steeped in the essence of wet gun-dog and misty moorland and fluttering, stricken pheasant. He understood that he stood forever apart from these men, though not necessarily from their wives.
six
He has brought them home. Portia, the firstborn, and Astra, two years her junior. X distinguishes between them because it is the elder biped who transmits the warmest signals while the younger seems prepared to cede primacy in the feline heart to her elder sister, caught between her seasons, kitten and cat, where veterinary intervention has frozen X forever. Portia is her soul mate. Astrid is like a sometimes-seen cousin. Portia loves X.
Once, she heard Astra ask her fathe
r whether she could have a puppy. Whatever that is.
I humor Portia, of course, because I know she likes to play and needs only a little coaxing from her innate shyness. In my tiny but powerful jaws, I bring her favorite toys to her. She likes simple things—a silver star on a strand of stretchy stuff, a round thing made of some bright orange material that I once saw wrapped around human energy food. She needs a little persuasion but I know she wants to overcome her modesty, her natural reticence. (I hear these words and wonder if some other animal is speaking them from deep within me.)
So I perform a few predictable maneuvers to draw her out of her reluctance and help her find her happy side.
I jump. I sprint. I excel in catobatics worthy of the Olympiad, twisting in midair, landing on all four paws. And finally she is coaxed into the game. She tosses the bright sphere and I run after it to encourage her. She flicks the silvery star aloft and I leap. Silver is my favorite color. I am fascinated by silver. Between my teeth.
The thought stirs in my recent memory, like a zephyr through fallen leaves. (Again, I take exception to this simile as I am a flat-cat and have no direct knowledge of leaves, or zephyrs—for heaven’s sake—except from what I can observe through the invisible barriers of my prison, my Robben Island. My what?)
Recent memory is a jumble of signals. Alarm. Danger. Threat. Something has happened that changes the harmony of my environment. There has been a shift, an injection of hostility. No. More than that. An infusion of peril. Life threatening. But what was it?
Bipeds love shiny surfaces as much as cats love silver. They spend endless hours staring at flat, smooth tablets, interrogating them, demanding that they yield up secrets from sleek, glossy surfaces that they stroke lovingly to conjure colors, shapes, configurations.
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