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  Alan said, ‘Who are you, Taryn?’

  It might have been more to the point to ask, ‘Where are you?’ Because, at that moment, Taryn was in a library, one very like her grandfather’s. She was in a hushed room, peering at one book in a shelf among dozens of shelves and thousands of books. A volume illuminated by a shaft of light. Maybe for a moment it was just the book from Beatrice’s backpack, the one with the grail, and holy blood diluted for a hundred generations until it was surely only a homeopathic holiness. A book with ancient orders of knights springing to miraculous life like stone figures from old tombs. That’s where Taryn was, in her honeymoon bed, and a quiescent inner space, a library full of the sort of books Beatrice loved, the ones with the kind of cosmic conspiracies where the cosmos seems as exotic, and as cosy, as a bed of bracken covered in bear skins.

  2

  The Muleskinner

  The first thing he did when they met was explain himself. He had been talking to the hunting party, Alan, and Alan’s guests, but it was only when Taryn joined the group that he told them that as a master guide he was a hunter himself, but on this trip he was along only as a tracker and a muleskinner. ‘A muleskinner’s job is to make sure the trophies are properly preserved. I’ll be tracking for the party, and I can give Mr Palfreyman advice about his new crossbow. But I won’t be shooting any animals myself.’

  This last remark he addressed to Taryn. The intensity of his regard confused her, so she knelt to strip the bear bells from her legs. She’d been for a walk, and there were bears, and it was best to let them know you were coming so they’d move on. She’d been up on Tunnel Mountain with the other wife of the party who, like Taryn, was along for the scenery and the lodge’s spa and five-star cuisine, but not the hunt.

  As Taryn stooped to unfasten her bells she looked by degrees at the person before her, beginning with his Gore-Tex boots and thick oatmeal socks folded over their tops, proceeding to the old-fashioned corduroy trousers tucked into the boots, then to the belt with loops for shotgun shells, and stopping at his red-knuckled hands. The boots were in line with what the other hunters were wearing, but everything else was pioneer gentleman.

  While Alan’s party was at the lodge, Taryn saw very little of the Muleskinner. At dinner he was quiet, and passed the dishes. One time another guide got him to tell them about the grizzly he’d bagged with his bow a year before. Where he’d found the bear, how long he’d tracked it. When he was speaking he sat almost entirely still, his hands folded, only his eyes moving between the faces of the men who’d got him talking, his fellow guide, and his client and host, Alan. And Taryn. She was sitting beside Alan eating her kirsch-soaked blueberries one by one with her fingers. The Muleskinner’s gaze was mild, but the back of Taryn’s head got hot, as if he were throwing microwaves through her.

  Taryn hadn’t planned to go to the top camp—she just decided to at the last minute. Alan was a little piqued; after all, his colleague’s wife had come along solely to keep Taryn company. Alan had wanted Taryn to come to Canada with him, but not to go hunting. Then, when it came to it, she complained about being left in Banff, and it had been a bit of a scramble to get her and the other wife included in the trip to the lodge. The top camp was miles beyond and higher up than the lodge. It had no comforts, and the men would be spending most of each day out in the woods. Alan said, ‘You’ll be on your own with just a cattle prod between you and the bears.’

  ‘The cabin has a door, doesn’t it?’ Taryn said. ‘I’ll take paper and pens. I might write something.’

  ‘Okay. This is new. This writing things.’

  ‘The devil is making me,’ Taryn said, and leaned against her husband. She slipped a foot out of her trainer and tried to poke it, toe pointed, down the side of Alan’s nearest boot. He put an arm around her so she could maintain her balance. He said, ‘The devil should write his own book.’

  Left alone in the camp, Taryn meant to stay close to the buildings. But when she stepped outside she could see a patch of sunlit green in one of the few straight-through lines in the forest. She walked into the trees. Their thick trunks deadened every sound. Taryn half expected the green to be a sward—the English green of Marvel’s ‘green thought in a green shade’. But the mountain meadow she found was as botanically complicated as a garden. Many flowers among many grasses; the meadow a space that simply began and ended, trees coming right up to its every edge. A fallen tree made a walkway some hundred feet out from what Taryn wanted to call a shore—though a shore would be a transition between forest and meadow, and here there was no transition.

  Taryn walked out along the log.

  ‘And then came a young deer,’ Taryn told the Muleskinner. It was late that night and she’d returned to the fire in her boots and long nightshirt. The Muleskinner was just sitting, nothing in his hands, no drink, no cigarette, no dismantled gun (he’d been oiling guns before dinner). He was alone and unoccupied.

  Taryn told him about her day. ‘She was a little deer, walking slowly, with her ears swivelling to all points of the compass, but her eyes on me. She made no sound. She didn’t seem solid. I’ve seen at least one great ballerina, and I remember being stabbed through the heart by this thing she could do. She’d go en pointe, but incredibly slowly, with her arms up over her head. She’d rise onto the toe of one foot by straightening it really gradually. She looked weightless, as if she might just drift upward. The deer was like that. If she had started floating, I wouldn’t have been very surprised.’

  ‘Was she a whitetail?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And we were out after them.’

  The men had bagged an elk, and would try for moose tomorrow.

  Taryn thought about how keenly she’d watched the deer and realised that she’d taught herself only to pay close attention to what was unlikely to suffer harm. The deer was young, so not fair game. The mountain meadow was ancient and undisturbed. Taryn had taken to going weightlessly through the world as if she hoped her minimal point of contact might lead to her floating free someday.

  She said, ‘This wasn’t a fully grown animal. None of you would have shot her.’

  ‘The young deer don’t know,’ the Muleskinner said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Two ridges up that way a deer will take off if it even smells you. But down in the valley, say another five miles, they’ll stop and stare. Because that’s a national park and somehow they know it. But your deer wasn’t in the national park.’

  ‘It didn’t have any reason to be scared of me.’

  ‘She should at least have been wary.’

  Taryn thought about this. She shuffled over to sit nearer.

  He stretched a hand to the stack of split logs beside the wind shelter and put another in the fire. It was a tacit agreement. They were going to stay up and keep talking. He dusted the loose bark from his palms. ‘I don’t know how the deer learn where they’re safe. How they develop expectations.’

  ‘You mean without teaching one another?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They must learn from one another,’ she said. ‘And even if the place wasn’t safe the deer could see I was.’

  ‘Were you?’

  ‘I wasn’t going to hurt it. Or are you asking whether I was safe myself? I wasn’t wearing my bear bells or checking over my shoulder for cougar.’

  There was a pause and Taryn heard the fire begin to busy itself.

  She was thinking of a familiar road, and of feeling safe when you shouldn’t. Then, ‘I had a sister,’ she said.

  By the time the party left the top camp the Muleskinner knew everything Taryn thought but never spoke about. He just listened, eyes sometimes on her face, and more often on the fire. He asked easy questions that first night—easy, factual questions—not the sort of try-hard ones that might make the person asking look concerned and interested, but which only had very simple answers, the kind of answers that, if Taryn gave them honestly, always made her feel she was somehow failing to live her life. ‘You mus
t be pretty angry,’ someone would say. How could she respond to that except by admitting it? ‘Yes. My eyes are always stinging from the smoke of it.’ But no one is supposed to stay angry, especially not a woman. Anger is futile and exhausting—or at least that is the common wisdom.

  Another question was, ‘Have you had any counselling about this?’ which Taryn always heard as, ‘I’m not the person to talk to.’ A counsellor would be a professional person; all others, even friends, were amateur persons.

  The Muleskinner said, ‘What was Beatrice like?’ He said ‘Beatrice’, not ‘your sister’. Saying ‘your sister’ if you knew her name was like saying ‘your wound’ and not asking about Beatrice at all. Beatrice had an existence apart from Taryn’s wound—just being dead didn’t mean she’d stopped having an existence. When Taryn mentioned that Bea had a book in her bag, the Muleskinner even asked what book it was. Taryn knew a lot of people whom she thought of as intellectual snobs. What they were, in fact, were people incapable of relinquishing their sovereign sense that their identity was tied up with what they understood and enjoyed. And they liked to stay sure of themselves, so they never read or watched anything outside what they already approved as good or enjoyable for them. These were the people who, when Taryn told them what book Bea was carrying, sometimes said, ‘Oh, I couldn’t finish that.’ To which she’d reply, ‘Neither could Beatrice.’

  Taryn explained things to the Muleskinner that she hadn’t been able to explain to anyone else. With Alan she hadn’t even made the attempt, feeling unable to risk that much exposure to someone who was going to be a constant presence in her future. Also, Taryn wasn’t ready for Alan to help her by being wiser and showing her a way out of her misery. By squiring her.

  Taryn explained how she was plaited closely with Beatrice and how, once Beatrice had gone, she herself came loose from everything. Even her mother and father and grandmother. ‘As if our lives are threads,’ Taryn told the Muleskinner. ‘In the hands of the Fates of legend. The one with the spindle, the one with the loom and the one with the scissors. The thread of my life has come loose from the cloth. Right now I’m dragging, but maybe one day I’ll be hooked in again somewhere.’

  She could see him thinking how he had picked up her thread and would follow it, and they’d go on together, his colour by hers. She may be married to Alan, but it was him she was inviting to do something to anchor her.

  Taryn registered this, but didn’t acknowledge it. She had gone on to imagine someone lifting the skin over the entrance of the cave where the Fates worked at their spinning and weaving. Not Perseus, the thief, slipping in unseen to steal the single eye they shared, but some other god or hero. The cowhide was pulled all the way back, and a wind came into the cave and blew Taryn’s thread loose. It floated across the face of the loom and was hooked and stamped into a pattern running along the very edge of the cloth, a pattern in more colourfast yarn that continued, scarcely changed, all along the weaving.

  Taryn tucked her hair behind her ears. She could see the Muleskinner would like to touch her hair to tidy it. Catch her thread and twine it with his own.

  ‘People come loose from their lives all the time,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing special. I’m just putting it well.’

  After that conversation the Muleskinner was attentive but unobtrusive. He carried an extra water bottle for her. He found a pink quartz crystal and gave it to her, with no ceremony. And when the party went back down the mountain for some fly-fishing, he taught her how to cast. Alan said, ‘That guy has a crush on you.’

  Taryn knew that in every important respect Alan was right—but she also felt the Muleskinner was less interested in enjoying her attention than figuring out what he could do for her. There are people who steal near to you and you can sense their shadows touching you, darkening the air around you and beginning to stretch out over your life. But it wasn’t like that with the Muleskinner. Rather, it was as if Taryn’s shadow had attached itself to him and he wasn’t going to feel right again until he had helped her change her life. Taryn sensed that she was dragging the Muleskinner’s imagination around after her, and when she left, his thoughts would continue to follow her. He’d keep thinking, ‘What can I do for Taryn?’

  On the day they were to fly out of the wilderness lodge, Alan was inside settling up and giving final instructions about the delivery of his trophies, which weren’t going in either of his homes, but to his office, instead of artwork. (Though only the antlers, because he said the moose’s head reminded him too much of an elderly bridge player.)

  It was pouring. Water was cascading off the high canopy before the lodge entrance. The rain was supposed to pass over soon and let their helicopter come and go.

  The Muleskinner came over to shake Taryn’s hand and say goodbye. He had to raise his voice to be heard.

  Taryn shouted, ‘I liked the hunt despite myself,’ and thought, I should step back into the lobby and stop saying this shit after all the things we’ve shared.

  The Muleskinner was making all the usual polite noises, even—looking a bit desperate—‘I really enjoyed our talks.’ Then he swooped and drew her back from the rebounding rain. They were right by the lobby doors, which activated, letting out a cloud of warm air. Taryn glanced in and saw Alan. He gave her an I’ll-only-be-a-minute wave.

  The Muleskinner stepped close, ducked his head and said, ‘What do you want to happen, Taryn?’ He looked calm and patient, his hands in his pockets.

  Taryn was only ever to see this capacity for stillness in one other person she met—of all the extraordinary people who passed before her eyes in later years. And, because she’d known the Muleskinner, she was able to recognise the stillness as a poised, powerful intention, and only had to work out what the intention might possibly be. (She guessed, but she didn’t believe it. Who would believe it?)

  Taryn said to the Muleskinner, ‘When a guy asks me what I want to happen he’s asking me to choose.’

  ‘You can choose,’ he said. But then Alan joined them and that was—Taryn thought—the end of that.

  Some months later Taryn was in her Audi, waiting at the turn from the driveway to Alan’s Norfolk house, an ‘architectural monsterpiece’ as his friends called it. The house was a glass and concrete edifice which stood by the shore in its sandblasted, sculptural garden, screened every way but seaward by belts of dark pines.

  Even after two years of marriage Taryn still thought of Alan’s houses and apartments as his and of herself as his guest. She was comfortable, but poised to move, and always finding reasons to go out, to see people she didn’t particularly want to see. What she in fact wanted was to be between people and places, and on the road. She was off to an appointment now—two hours in her car for an hour at lunch. Which was perfect.

  The coast road was quiet, but the turn from the driveway was a tricky one. Taryn was always careful to check the convex mirror opposite the gate. She peered at the mirror and saw a figure in the pines behind her, by the driveway entrance. A man stepped out of the trees. Taryn put her foot on the gas and accelerated away, spraying gravel. She pulled in further down the road and checked her rear vision mirror. The man jumped over the shallow drainage ditch and came towards her. She recognised him by his grace, and waited. He got in beside her. She said his name. Taryn knew his name of course. This was before she began purposely to forget him, to think of him—when he did force himself into her thoughts—only as ‘the Muleskinner’.

  The Muleskinner said, ‘Sorry if I gave you a scare, Taryn. But I can only be of any use to you if we leave no trail and meet only in person.’ He took a watch cap out of his pocket and pulled it on, then restored his sunglasses. ‘We should go somewhere we won’t be noticed. People around here must know this car.’

  Taryn pulled out. They headed west. At the entrance to the village the Muleskinner tilted his seat all the way back and lay flat so he wouldn’t be seen. When they were through he returned the seat to upright. He stayed quiet. It was only when they were beyond Norwich
on the A11 and settled into the middle lane that Taryn opened a discussion. ‘I didn’t ask you to come.’

  ‘And yet here I am.’

  ‘A demon I’ve summoned.’

  ‘You’re in charge here, Taryn. I came to see what you want. I do have other reasons to be in England. I have family in Southampton. I finished a guiding job in New Mexico and used some air points.’

  ‘Am I before or after your family visit?’

  ‘Before.’

  ‘Where’s your car?’

  ‘I don’t have one. I have warm clothes, waterproof matches, a knife, and this high compression bivvy that is both tent and sleeping bag.’ He kicked the roll at his feet.

  ‘So you’ve come to have a look at the size of the job and give me a quote?’

  He didn’t answer. Instead he asked, ‘Are you expected anywhere?’

  ‘I should text my apologies,’ she said. Then, ‘You’re scaring me.’

  ‘I’m not going to impose on you in any way, Taryn. That’s a promise.’

  ‘Except to make something possible that wasn’t before, no matter how much I wished it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For a price.’

  ‘I don’t want any money.’

  ‘Okay. Now you’re really scaring me.’

  They passed into a rain shower, the car plunging through the big hard drops as if through a swarm of bees.

  ‘Your story moved me,’ the Muleskinner said, then frowned and corrected himself. ‘Not your story, your situation.’

  ‘I have money and freedom and a husband who loves me.’

  ‘Not your situation then, your predicament. You know what I mean.’

  They passed beneath a wire-grilled footbridge, straddling the motorway and shedding mildew-infused rain in the first downpour in weeks. The wipers came on again for a moment to clear blackened droplets from the windscreen.