CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Acknowledgements & Secret Treasures
List of Supporters
Copyright
Sarah K. Marr started writing fiction at school, but got distracted. After studying law, anthropology and theoretical physics at the Universities of Oxford, Manchester and London, respectively, she finally returned to her first love and wrote All the Perverse Angels. She lives in London, where she spends too much time in art galleries and buys too many second-hand books.
for Beth
as true a friend as Watson
Dear Reader,
The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound. Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and ebook wherever books are sold, in shops and online.
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Founders, Unbound
CHAPTER ONE
Against the wall the blue lights came and went, came and went, and I remembered. If you really want to feel the drop, you have to close your eyes. And then the car journey, long, winding, through imagined landscapes, and all the while she spoke to me. The this-and-thats of my time away, and all of it hers and not mine because she had earned it and somehow I had not.
She made the pick-up by the glass doors where the set-down had happened three weeks ago. In that abrogation there had been a formal handover. In the collection there was no entry to the building, just a kerb-stop.
There were few material needs in that place. They even provided a toothbrush, wrapped in cheap plastic, with bristles that twisted off on the molars. So the small suitcase was thrown on the back seat and I threw myself in the front and leaned to kiss, but seeing no response faked down to reach my bag and take out water for the drive ahead. When we took a left and not a right I asked where we might be going and was told a break was needed, and so the car journey was long, and wound through imagined landscapes.
Our arrival was a breath, slow and deep. We were in the Cotswolds, she said, nestled as the Cotswolds nestle everything, in warm stone and antiques and second-hand bookshops with cats. The cottage was small, at the end of a path of herringbone bricks running between thickets of cross-hatched twigs, blackened by the fading winter light. On the gate the paint peeled around the ornately serifed “Rose Cottage”. I mourned the flowerless tangles beside the path. Emily stepped through the threshold of the garden whilst I lingered with the cold, watching the moon try to hide behind the smokeless chimney. She was unlocking the door with unfamiliar keys when I caught up.
“My clothes?”
“Inside,” she said, and she may have been answering or telling me to enter, so I passed by her and in, with a switch clicking as she turned on the dim lights to search out the corners of the room.
“You’re upstairs on the left,” she said and jerked her head towards the thin, white-plank door with the black latch that I opened and, looking back, asked, “We’re not together?”
She shook her head.
Stairs seemed new after single-floor accommodation with en-suite facilities and hot and cold running nurses, although running was never a good sign. Running followed from the buzzing start-gun and ended in inevitable victory for every competitor but one. But there were stairs and they rose ahead, and the space became darker until hesitancy began and the fragile light from below was blocked by her, but she was reaching, I could see, and then brightness returned. Two more steps and a landing with four doors: bathroom, large bedroom, small bedroom, and at the far end another thin, white-plank door with another black latch, and the whole effect made me think of Escher. The white planks would wait for me, so I entered the little room, my room, and found clothes in drawers, dresses in the wardrobe, and linens and towels on the bed.
I wished she had not done it.
“Anna,” said a quiet voice and I turned, not expecting to see anyone. Emily was there. She held me. We held each other. We breathed another breath. I was sorry. She was sorry, if she should be sorry, yes, she should be sorry, so she was sorry, I was sure. She allowed me a smile, and repaid me with one of her own.
“I have to go back to work on Monday,” she said, “but we have the weekend together, and I’ve cleared a lot of my clients. I should be able to stick to a nine-to-five. The village is nice. You’ll be fine here. Are you hungry?”
I nodded and wiped my eyes and whispered my wish that she had not done it, but she just stiffened and told me I needed to eat. We ate pasta and drank apple juice. Our conversation was a shallow exchange of words. The cottage was rented for the next three months, through to the new year. The village was small, but had too many cafés—she had not tried them but they looked pleasant enough—as well as a stationer’s and two bookshops, both terribly overpriced, and one had cheap paperbacks out front, but she could pick books up from the house in London, no, she would go on her own. The room upstairs, past the second palisade of white planks, was an attic space full of the owner’s possessions, and heaven only knew why it was not locked. There was no television, but we could get one, but why would we? So probably not, no, surely better without. There was plenty of food in the refrigerator. Pasta. Juice. Plates. Cutlery. Pills.
I started to feel sleepy. The world slowed down a little to give me a chance to reflect and recover. There were magazines stacked on a bookshelf and I flipped through one, looking at the pictures amongst a haze of grey alphabets. People were going to parties, babies were being born, weddings and horse races mingled. All from ten years ago and the faces of the people looked happy but their expressions could not tell me anything beyond the instant. There was no continuity, no flow, challenge, development. I needed art. The haze danced and I was asleep in my chair,
not knowing until awakened gently, led upstairs, sat on the bed. The door closed. The light was on as I felt the cool of the pillow on my cheek, off for the morning’s opening of eyes.
Saturday was Claude Monet: San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk. He painted the view, despite his initial reticence, across the Venetian waters to the island, and the church which stands upon it. The church is an absence, lit from behind by the setting sun, a gap in the oranges and blues. No, not exactly that, because Monet was not using any black paint: the shadows are just the darkened colours of twilight. The church is a deadening, a stopped conversation, as if one had shouted into a cave and heard no echo.
Emily and I walked down the lane in the early morning, with mist rising all around, binding the walls of our own church, a few yards from the cottage. Emily talked of history, of Levellers and smallpox, but I was in Venice by then. It had rained during the night, before or after my light was turned off, but the timing did not matter because the rain left puddles and they reflected the reality of nature. The water was the levelling of all things, the lagoon from which rose buildings and trees and a yapping dog passing by on the end of a thin lead. I stopped. My reflection stopped. Emily stopped.
“Anna?”
I looked up. “Sorry, Ems,” I said. “I was in Venice.”
“You’ve never even been to Venice, Anna. We keep saying we’ll go one day. We could make plans.”
“But they gang aft agley, don’t they?”
Emily took my hand. We walked to the nearest café and out of the freshly sputtering drizzle. Venice reappeared, warped through the drops on the window. A petite woman took our order on an off-white pad. I wondered if Monet’s wife was short: Alice, of course, his second, as Camille had been dead for years when Claude was in Venice. Alice had another three years to go, although she had no idea.
“I thought we might drive to the countryside this afternoon, if the weather doesn’t get worse,” said Emily, between sips of hot chocolate. I took a mouthful of filter coffee through a layer of soapy froth. I swallowed.
“We should go to Italy for the coffee,” I said. “And yes, the countryside would be nice. Did you bring my boots?”
Emily nodded and picked up a local paper from a rack beside the table.
“There’s a book fair in the next village, if you’d rather do that,” she said.
“Let’s let the weather decide.”
The weather toyed with us, lifting the mist with a seductive sun, then greying the world with cloud once more. Back at the cottage we warmed ourselves by the radiator, unimpressed by the dried flowers in the fireplace. As noon arrived the elements lost their playfulness and resigned themselves to sunshine. Monet painted Alice’s daughter, Suzanne, in the sun, and there she stands, under an ombrelle and not a parapluie, though both are protections from extremes.
While Emily made sandwiches I found my boots and went outside to the back garden. There was little in it other than patches of unkempt grass and empty borders at the foot of old fencing. A roller stood in the corner, far too big for the place, waiting anxiously in the hope of a miraculous, lumpy lawn to give it some meaning. I banged my boots against it, filling the air with the sound of leather on metal and flecks of dried mud from a holiday in Yorkshire, making the pigeons take flight in the Piazza San Marco.
The back of the cottage was plain, red brickwork with a name which I knew existed but had forgotten: Dutch bond, English bond, James Bond. Michael Bond. He wrote the Paddington Bear books. The cottage was a séance for the ghosts of its previous incarnations: filled-in windows, long-lost doorways. In the roof, which sloped down towards me, a gable-fronted dormer window admired the surrounding fields. It was a later addition to the building, its sill holding only a peepshow of faded wood, unlike the striptease common to its flaking companions on lower floors. The room through the window was invisible. Darkest Peru.
“Anna!”
Emily was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, clutching a small rucksack to her chest.
“I’ve been calling you. Let’s go.”
We headed out to the car, leaving the lawn roller to its dreams.
“Countryside or books?” I asked, when we were on our way.
“Countryside whilst the sun lasts, then books if it’s not too late.”
I said I thought that sounded reasonable and listened to Emily as she talked about work: her team had been busy, new clients coming in, the chance of a partnership in a year or two, some staff changes. I wondered if he had left. I thought that was why she mentioned the staff changes, but maybe I was supposed to ask. Maybe I was just supposed to understand. Maybe we were in Venice and we were sinking, and the deadening of the church hid the sunset from us.
“We’re here. Welcome to the late Neolithic.”
My puzzlement was met with a grin which I thought it best to return with one of my own. Emily had parked the car to the side of the lane, beside a thicket of trees and a stile in a two-rail, wooden fence. I followed her into the undergrowth and out again, into a soundless clearing where she could speak and I could only listen, where I could rage and scream and yet cause no vibration, as though shouting in a vacuum.
“These are the King’s Men,” said Emily, pointing at the circle of stones in the clearing. “There’s a legend that they were changed to stone by a witch. There’s another one around here called the King Stone. Same story.”
The vacuum filled with a hiss of air.
“I’m going to explore,” I said. I stood in the middle of the circle and turned clockwise, slowly, ticking off time, stone by stone. They were there when Monet’s wife—Alice, Camille, either—died, when the sun set in Venice, when there was no Venice. They were there for my Venice. I thought of Paul Klee, projecting lines from his drawings, and the more they met higher dimensions, the better. The stones began to run at me, all except one. Against that one Emily leaned back and ate a sandwich. Intellect and soul operate in different dimensions, according to Klee. He said he painted in order not to cry. I walked away.
The path back through the trees continued on the other side of the lane, and I followed. There, alone, captured within iron railings, stood the King Stone. Later, on the journey home, Emily told me the whole story. A witch promised a king that if he could see the village of Long Compton after taking seven strides he would be king of all England. Whilst the king’s men stood, craven, in a circle, he took seven strides and looked ahead, out over the countryside. Alas, his view was blocked by a forgotten hillock, and with no village to be seen the witch turned him and his men to stone. Never trust the promise of a witch.
I was the King Stone. I was the King Stone then, and I was the King Stone as a child. The circle was a place of sharing, protection and safety, not pure cowardice. The story was wrong. There, standing alone, was the sacrifice, the one given to the witch in hope of mercy for the others. I sat and rested against the railings, looking at the lane and trees. I felt my isolation and carried it back with me, towards the time of the stones, to a playground filled with other people’s games. I had sat against railings before, years ago. They had defined the edge of safety. I let my eyelids fall to a raucous lullaby of crows.
Tabitha took my hand and pulled me towards the centre of the world. It would be fun, she said, and I was her friend. The centre of the world, and around me Tabitha and her friends, and they must be my friends, because we were all part of the same world. Round me they went, rhyming, cross-stepping quickly, ten paces then reversing and chanting, chanting. My eyes stayed on Tabitha, left then right, turn after turn, faster and faster. The held-hands of the circle, clutching, came closer to thighs, then unclasped and arms interlocked at crooked elbows, hands on hips, closer to me with the right then left, faster still, and the rhyming had the sow in the middle, and I was the middle, but the middle of the world, and Tabitha was my friend so surely I was not the sow. They wanted to be close because I was special. Arms around waists and no space between, and the stones running at me, embraces unravelled to fists. Crouchin
g, and friends leaning over, friends of my enemy, and the sky blue, blocked, deadened. My name being called. Anna, Anna, Anna. Everything legs, socks, shoes and I wanted the railings back.
“Anna.”
Anna, Anna, Anna.
“Anna. Wake up.”
“I’m the King Stone,” I muttered, opening my eyes.
“You’re anything you want to be. Including hungry, I’ll bet.”
Emily pulled a sandwich from the rucksack and handed it to me.
“Bad dreams again?” she asked.
“Was I asleep for long?”
“About ten minutes. Perhaps we should go home.”
I nibbled at the edges of the sandwich.
“No, it’s early. I feel better now.” With Tabitha gone. With my railings returned. “Let’s go to the book sale.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. But sandwich first.”
Klee ate sandwiches, I supposed.
It was late afternoon by the time we reached the hamlet to the west of our borrowed cottage. Outside the church hall, men in sensible knitwear were starting to load vans with cardboard fruit trays full of books. Emily kept the engine running and looked at me, but when I opened my door she turned the key and followed my lead. A despondent youth sat inside the porch, reading the New Musical Express. He resigned himself to taking our money. In exchange for our twenty-pence pieces we received the kind of coat-check tickets that I had seen used for country-fair tombolas.
“We’re supposed to close in about an hour, but there’s not many come out today, so… Still, there’s a few left set up, so…” He nodded to his right, towards the inner door of the porch, and went back to his magazine.
“Thank you very much,” Emily said, in a voice so bright and lilting that it could only be sarcastic. N.M.E.-man did not respond.
Inside, the hall was lined with folding tables, a few of which stood empty. One supported a battered tea urn, which must have seen VE Day celebrations, and a sponge cake filled with jam and ennui. The remaining tables held books. Emily gave me her “we could just leave” look, but I moved away to the first table, where shabby Penguin paperbacks jostled each other to attract my attention. I ignored their orange brashness and picked up a hardback from a stack towards the rear.
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