What did he want?
Her, surely. Her, and the house.
* * *
MARY MOVED QUIETLY to get the blanket from indoors. Eric and George had started playing football, and she didn’t want them to know she was there. She shook the rug out on the lawn in the sun and lay on her stomach. It had belonged to Granny Joan and had a permanently unaired animal smell, of wool that lives folded up against itself. She turned her face toward Eric and Michelle’s fence. Technically, it was her fence—according to the deeds—but Eric and Michelle had got fed up with its permanent sagging off the post and had appeared at the front door one evening in spring to tell her a replacement was being fitted. No discussion. And she had had to thank them for their generosity in paying for it. Months on, the fence still had that horrible orange newness, and the ivy and other things that had climbed up its predecessor had been casualties of the upgrade. Probably Michelle had wanted a new fence just to get rid of the ivy. The ball cracked the wooden slats, and Mary jumped.
“Eric!”
Michelle made his name sound like a curse.
Mary felt drowsy. She really needed to concentrate. She picked over her and Mark’s conversation, trying to gather all the pieces of evidence of how he felt, what he wanted. The fact he had moved back to London. The way he kept staring at her dress. His grip on her arm. Then his sudden appearance in her hall. Michelle’s voice drifted over the fence: “Have you measured up for that gazebo?” Eric and Michelle had asked Mark first. That was so insulting. She was feeling very sleepy now. She imagined again his one hand on her back. More than nothing, short of something.
* * *
WHEN SHE OPENED her eyes, all Mary could see were the white wiry hairs of the picnic blanket sticking up like antennae. Through that thicket, among the finer hairs of her own skin, a ladybug was standing on her wrist. His legs were bright red, as if the color had bled from his shell. She pushed herself stiffly up on her forearms and, meaning to blow him away, inhaled sharply.
The taste was fainter than it had been in the kitchen or the shed, but it was clearly a strain of the same earthily sweet scent, and her recognition of it confirmed a new intelligence. She had learnt to tell his presence. Keeping her legs and arms still on the rug, Mary turned her head slowly over her shoulder.
He was lying on his stomach with his hind legs and tail stretched out long and straight on the grass behind him, as if he had arranged himself in order to maximize the possibility of an even tan. His forelegs, which were black, lay flat on the grass, in much the same position as her arms. His chest and head were raised above them, just as she had lifted her own upper body from the blanket. He was about the width of a king-size bed away and had directed his muzzle to her so she could see the black hairs of its outline. Neither of them moved. Their bodies seemed to want to hold the reflected shape of the other, as if all their physical instincts were bent toward expressing a synchronicity they had each, separately, chosen.
There was a scrambling sound as Neville’s cat appeared on the fence, and they both turned toward it. The cat rotated swiftly and retreated back into Tangle Wood. The red-legged ladybug continued to pick a path over the cracked earth. When Mary faced the fox again, she noticed something stowed in the space between his paws.
One brown egg, inscrutable in its ordinariness. Absurd, to see an egg on the lawn. She could just make out the orange lion printed on its shell. So he ate certified eggs! That meant he had not foraged for this one from an urban henhouse. It must have come from the supermarket, no doubt via someone’s kitchen or bin or shopping bag. From the other side of the fence, she heard the slithery metallic recoil of a tape measure.
The fox opened his jaws wide and, laying his head first on one side and then on the other, clamped his canines around the egg, like one of those devices for removing staples from a wall. All the while the egg stood upright on the grass, a paw flat either side. It was as puzzling as a cryptic clue, which its shell, so slippery and handleless, seemed both to express and disguise. He tried again. She thought she heard it give, and for a second time he released the egg from his jaws. But it was perfectly intact, sitting up perkily on the grass. He let it be and gently licked it. She watched his pink tongue lick and lick at the same spot on the egg, as if he were trying to wash a resistant dirty patch or perhaps to befriend it.
His right ear moved before she heard anything. It swiveled almost in a circle, like an old-fashioned tuning device looking for the right station. He got to his feet in a jump, his ears flattened against his head. His tail stood. She watched his fur enlarge. Dry twigs snapped. Then a voice behind her.
“These bricks are bursting apart, Mary. You need to secure your boundary here.”
Michelle! The other side of the rear wall. And no “Hi” or “Sorry to disturb you.” Mary leapt up and brushed the wispy lime blossom from her shorts. She had the sensation that she had been caught in a compromising position, and for a moment she stalled, looking at Michelle and the something held under her arm. Dimly she registered fairy lights on the shrub above the fence. Barbecue preparations already! Didn’t they have anything better to do?
“Hi!” she called, walking toward Michelle and calculating with a quick sideways glance that the position of the shed would narrowly prevent her neighbor from seeing her guest. He, meanwhile, had understood the need for discretion. His bristles stretched out in protection of her, but his feet stayed put. “Are you having a restful weekend?” Mary asked as she approached the crumbling wall.
Michelle looked at her as if she were mad. “Not really. I knocked at the front door, but there was no answer. Are you on your own? I thought I heard voices.”
“No. Just me.”
“I wanted to return this.” She held out Mary’s book, the pages thick with wear. Although their faces were cracked by creases, the two sisters on the cover exchanged a playful, secretive glance. “I found it this morning, between the sofa cushions.” For a moment Michelle looked as if she would climb into the garden, but she must have decided that it wasn’t practical because she waited for Mary to take the book, then held on too.
“I found it down the back of the sofa.”
“You said. Thanks! I was wondering where it had got to.”
“The thing is, I don’t remember seeing it when you arrived. How did it get into my lounge?” Michelle’s eyes were rimmed red. She looked unsure of herself.
The heat rushed to Mary’s cheeks, but she managed to laugh. “You probably had other things on your mind.” She had the uncomfortable sense that the three of them could be stuck in this uneven triangle for hours. From behind her, she heard a strange guttural clicking.
“Jesus!”
Michelle let go of the book and started yelling and clapping her hands, and Mary, in sole possession of her novel, watched the fox walk stiff-legged toward the part of the shed where she was standing and rub himself against its slatted walls. A damp smell of caramel on the turn wafted up.
“There’s a bloody great fox in your garden!” Michelle yelled, but Mary maintained her composure as his brush flicked her leg. It was surprisingly muscular. Then he tapered into a rustle of ivy behind the shed.
“Didn’t you know it was there? And your back door is open!”
“I fell asleep on the blanket. I didn’t see him.”
“God, Mary.” Michelle’s eyes were huge. “What’s the matter with you, falling asleep in the garden? Aren’t you worried? It came right up to you!”
“How are the children?”
She had thought she was changing the subject to the safe territory of domestic inquiry, but Michelle gasped. Leaving as she had arrived, without the courtesy of a greeting, she hastened back toward her own garden, where a tall, lockable gate gave her easy access to the woods and kept all intruders out.
Mary dropped the novel on the blanket with a sigh. From the other side of the fence, Michelle’s voice, yelling for Eric, faded inside the house. What a close scrape. He had pretty much saved her. At the expense o
f his precious egg too. She reached for it and was surprised to find her hand fly up in the air. She had misjudged the egg’s weight, expecting something heavier. But now that she was turning it in her hand, she could see that the shell was completely intact, apart from one hairline fracture through which all its contents had been drained.
CHAPTER SIX
The fox visited often. In just three weeks, Mary had entered his world. Or had he entered hers? When she walked to the station each morning, his hot blast of musk enveloped her—beside her front railings, as she passed the tree outside Neville’s. The smell rose again at the new-builds at the end of her street, on Shepherds Bridge Walk, at the fringe of the park. It hit her intermittently, as if she were passing through chambers of scent. The whole neighborhood was his castle, all the roads and houses and gardens portions of some enormous floor plan to which she now held the key. How long had it been here, this invisible, pungent architecture? Had she simply failed to notice it—or was the first time she saw him the day he moved into the area?
Almost without looking, Mary spotted the signs of him, the tidy droppings by a lamp post, the food waste bin upended. Their two worlds were coinciding. As she left the park and turned toward Haggerston station on her way to work one Monday morning, a gang of crows dispersed over the rooftops with a sudden cawing. She imagined him stalking below, his shoulders dropped and rolling, belly dusting the ground. The crows were a clutch of black kites, and he held their strings.
After work that day, Mary came straight home and lay on the blanket in the garden. She was dozing when the fox’s mellow spice began to solidify around her. The scent gave her the sense that she had awoken in his home, and when she turned her neck to see him nosing at the corner of her rug, it was not fear she felt but relief, because she had not imagined his presence but accurately divined it. They eyed each other cautiously. They both knew their relationship was entering a new phase.
On Tuesday Mary returned from work half an hour earlier than Monday, and again he strolled through the long grass to greet her. This time, he sat a little closer and dropped a rag between them, a funny thing with knots at each corner, and when she picked it up, she saw that stitched into one was a smiling face. She watched his claws extend and retract in the thinning lawn, toying with the invisible string that divided his space from hers.
And so the week went on. Without either of them needing to say, they settled into a routine. Mary would come outside, and he would appear. From the woods, he heard her footsteps or caught her cologne. He seemed to know her movements, to have a supernatural sense of her whereabouts, no matter how she tested him with small variations to her timing, or how quietly she drew back the lock and tiptoed outside. The fox knew more about her comings and goings than her mother, her neighbors, and Dawn put together, even though Dawn sat opposite her for eight hours a day and today had even commented on how cheerful Mary seemed. Actually, Dawn sat opposite her for eight hours in theory. It said a great deal about how little people truly noticed Mary that she could slip out of the office unseen, yet she found it impossible to come home without being met.
On Wednesday, after Red—not yet his name, just something she was trying—had sprung his exit over the back wall, she left the blanket outside. The sky had forgotten how to rain. And besides, he was no longer a threat. He was encroaching on her life the way any new relationship encroaches, and she shifted over to make room for him. The blanket was an open invitation, their sofa in front of the telly, the place where they met and crashed at the end of the day. At least, it was the end of her day—perhaps only the start of his. Later she learnt that he slept on the rug while she was at work, because it bristled with his smoky tang.
On Thursday, when Dawn disappeared into what was to be a long meeting, Mary took her chance. She arrived in the garden a whole hour earlier than Wednesday. The edges of the blanket curled upward in the sun, and this time when he walked down the lawn to meet her, he did not stop, but slipped his snout beneath a frayed corner. Mary pressed her stomach into the blanket, to fend against his tugging. “Easy!” she cajoled, as the plaid rucked and crumpled into new shapes over his head. Polite guy that he was, he withdrew his muzzle and hovered at the fringe with little snagging noises. Mary had been watching over her shoulder, and now as he approached the peak of his ear spiked the rim of her vision. Her limbs stiffened. How close would he come? But instantly his legs folded beneath him where he stood, and they lay there looking up at the trees, watching the shadow of a bee crawl across a low-hanging hazel leaf, trawling veins with its antennae. The hard part was done. They had got themselves here at last, side by side on the blanket. Now they could relax, lie in the sun, and talk.
* * *
HE WAS TOO busy to relax. His tail thumped the dead animal beneath his underparts. From the size of the fleece: a big beast. The fleece was all that was left. She must have eaten the rest long time gone which made. Hungry. His ears blinked at the tangle of sounds. Sounds were food. He avoided making sounds. Not wanting to be food himself.
Human Female was singing pigeon. Pigeon in the tree. Wrens squeaking. Infant Beetles chewing. Later, he would whistle them out of the log. A wood louse drummed on a crispy leaf. Most there was noise. Just he wanted rest. Puff, puff. He breezed some scent from the notch in his tail. A formality. The human Female was his. The fleece was his. The grass was his. The tunnels and dens and diggings were his. They all knew his. He was here in his. Not hiding. Busy being seen. Not resting. Watching. He was the Fox of the land. Tip tap tip tap went the wood louse across the. Leaf tipped. Louse flipped. All those little legs, w a g g l i n g fascinatingly. Stretching, straining, leaning, this way, that way, this way …
His snout was swaying, watching something. It was not a thought she could share with any human she knew, but Mary believed, from the way his muzzle bobbed in excitement, the happy thump of his tail on the blanket, that he enjoyed the sound of her voice. He was so easy to talk to. He seemed to understand her.
The thing was, she had loved Mark. “He was—in the beginning—a nice guy,” she said. He was affectionate and open, and the openness was a foreign thing for her. He needed her, he loved her, he told her that he loved her. He wanted to spend time with her. It was the opposite of being a child. She had absolutely no sense of being an aberration. She was his normal. He chose her every day, and his choice, in turn, gave her purpose. She adapted to his ways, grew herself to fit around his shape. “You can see why it’s hard to work out what I am without him,” she said to Red. He lifted his snout, and regarded her intently. His pupils cut a dark slit through his amber iris—the narrowest ovoid, as beckoning as the gap between closed curtains or the score line on a pill.
“I did love him,” she said. “Maybe still love him.” She had better clarify that. “Not actively,” she said. “Like the love spent a long time soaking in and left a permanent stain.”
It was hard to explain, but her submissiveness had become for her an effective way to keep the peace by second-guessing Mark’s needs. She applied herself to them, and the self-consciousness of her application, the way she complied and pandered, made her feel that somewhere inside she was reserving for herself a kind of discrete emotional autonomy. “I’ve been so used to keeping this little part of me locked away that now he’s gone, and I can do what I like, I can’t get used to the freedom,” she said. She was contemplating, among other things, the fact that she still hadn’t called Saba, struggled to enter a supermarket or get to work on time. Red’s head swayed as if he didn’t quite follow. She tried again. “Imagine you’re in a trap. It’s hypothetical,” she added, seeing his uncertain expression. “You are taken to be released into the wild. The trap opens, you see the fields or woods, smell the grassy air. What do you do? I bet you wait inside for a while. Maybe the trap feels safer. I bet you don’t rush out. Am I right?”
There was no answer.
“Do you know where he is?” she said suddenly. “Have you seen him?”
If he knew Mark, if Mark
lived within his territory, maybe he went through Mark’s bin. A bin was very revealing. But Red just coned his snout into the long grass.
“What are you crunching on?” she asked, smiling at him, companionable and independent, a cipher to crack her indecipherable life.
“Thank God for the house,” she said. This house was all she had.
This nice den.
He looked around for another. Snappy things with a chew inside. Not much effort to—Especially if they were in easy—
Her voice soothed him, she could see by the way he tucked his snout under the bushy hairs of his tail, and his eyes shrank to a wet seam. But his ears never slept. She watched them, flickering and twitching as she chatted, their minute movements like an electronic readout of her tenor–bass balance. Up, down, down, up. Or twisting round when she heard the clatter of dinner things next door, then when Eric and George called again and again for their cat, “Tiggy Tig-Tig!” He was so caring that when Flora grizzled, his ears lifted and quivered. They were large ears, and their size told a truth about him—he was an excellent listener. It occurred to Mary that, contrary to Mark’s evaluation of her, she might be an excellent talker. All she had needed was someone to give her the space to be one.
“Do you know,” she said, “when I was small I used to write letters to myself. The house was so empty and quiet. Dad at work, Mum around but not around, prepping for lessons. After school, no one to talk to. Dear Mary, How was the day, and what do you think you’re going to do about Stuart Biston, then? Actually, I did go out with him in the end, but only for a week.” She had never talked to anyone like this before. She glanced at her fox, and his ear bent in encouragement. She chuckled. This was a bit like thinking aloud a letter. Dear Fox …
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