A Darker Place (41 page)

She would have to wait awhile before she tried to walk through their midst, though, so she settled down with the cup of coffee (which miraculously had not entirely sloshed over the steps when she was first confronted by the pack) and a pair of hairy heads immobilizing her feet, and breathed in the day.

Ana’s previous trips to England had concentrated on the cities and on tourist sites. The closest she had come to a farmyard were one visit to a farm museum near Oxford and a night in a rural bed-and-breakfast when she and Aaron had been caught by night on a dark road somewhere between Stonehenge and Bath.

There was no doubt that this was a working farm; the very smell in the air told Ana that, even without the sounds of rooster and cow and the memory of three large
tractors parked in the yard the afternoon before. The weeds might be thick but the fences were maintained, and although there had appeared to be a leak somewhere in the roof over Ana’s bedroom, she would have bet that the barn was sound.

When the cup was empty, Ana figured that she had sat there long enough to become familiar to the dogs. She put her cup down onto the side of the step where no passerby would kick it, and got casually to her feet, standing for a minute while the dogs around the edges gave a few disapproving whuffs. Her two closest admirers waved their tails expectantly; the others waited to see what she had in mind. She addressed her companions.

“Want to go for a walk, guys?” she asked in a cheerful voice. “Yes? Okay, come on.”

The disapproving ones started barking, which set off the middle-of-the-road members, but Ana merely slapped her left thigh encouragingly and strode off.

She ended up with five dogs in all, sailing back and forth across the gravel in front of her, but before she reached the end of the yard, she heard a woman’s voice behind her, calling for her to stop and wait. She stopped and turned around to wait for the flustered young woman, who was securing a floppy straw hat onto her head with one hand as she ran and holding an identical hat in her other hand.

Hats—oh yes; Bennett had said that hats were to be worn out-of-doors to foil the intrusions of the telephoto lenses, spy planes, and satellites.

The young woman stopped in front of her, panting from the run, and held out the extra hat. “You need to wear this,” she said. “You mustn’t forget again, or Marc will get angry.”

Ana looked at the hat. It was a ridiculous piece of headgear with a low, round crown guaranteed to shift around on the head surrounded by ten inches of soft,
grubby, sweat-stained brim. The ribbons necessary to hold it in place were colorless with age and had been tied together in a couple of places. She did not want to have this disgusting object between her and the magnificent blue sky.

Ana, she told herself, in Israel you cover yourself neck to wrist to ankle even in August; in New York you cripple yourself with heels. Here you will wear a hat.

She clapped it on her head and thanked the young woman with as much good grace as she could muster, and without another word turned her back and continued on up the lane.

The wide brim and musty smell of the object on her head dimmed the morning somewhat, and when she reached the point where the road went into the woods, tempted by the thought that in there she might remove it, she paused. The vision of a man wearing camouflage gear was vivid. Perhaps until she knew the ground rules she’d better stick to the open fields, she decided, and turned left onto a muddy track that ran between a fenced field with half a dozen cows in it on one side and on the other a wild thicket of nettles, blackberries, and bushes where the woods began. It was not as nice as the lane, and she had to take care not to put her foot into a cowpat or lose her hat to a branch, but the dogs were pleased and her spirit was content.

It was a nice long circuit with many pleasing ins and outs and dead ends, but it was also a puzzling one. On her left for the entire time lay civilization in the form of cows and sheep, two massive draft horses and a well-populated duck pond, fenced pastures and vegetable garden. Extending out from the house was a twelve-foot-high brick wall lined with espaliered fruit trees, with a gap in the bricks revealing a glimpse of an acre or more of enclosed garden with a gleaming greenhouse, more
trees espaliered against the wall, and rows of ruthlessly neat planted beds.

It was a beautiful farm, ageless in structure and vigorously modern in intent; it left Ana with a clear idea of just where all that hard work Bennett had referred to went.

The whole time, however, with the civil arts of the gardener displayed on her left, the right-hand prospect was nothing but a wall of overgrown shrubs, tangled vines, and impenetrable thicket. It was beautiful, too, in its wild way—magnificent, even, such as the huge rhododendron that had grown up and then toppled, rooting and resprouting where it lay until it formed a single plant nearly fifty feet long. Its clusters of red blossoms were fading now, but a few weeks earlier they must have been spectacular in spite of the heavy tangle of bramble that was clambering over the great bush. The rhododendron gave way to a wall of privet that cried out for the attentions of half a dozen strong men with chain saws; farther on, a tree three feet across at its base had fallen onto the lane and had its upper half cleared away while the rest of it was left to rot on the ground, after which a gate, so overgrown as to be unopenable with any tool short of a bulldozer, showed where a narrow lane had once joined with the home farm. So it continued, all the way around: tidy industry and the clean fragrance of grass on the left, a high wall of wild vegetation and the smell of rotting things on the right, hacked back as if a line had been drawn, untouched beyond that boundary. Order versus chaos—the early American colonies must have felt a little like this, settlements carved out of the wilderness. Or an enchanted castle, insulated from time.

From down at the bottom of the farm, the house was softened by the outlying walls and structures, its lower half hidden by trees. The top of it rose up, though, and Ana saw for the first time that it was not just a box, as it
had appeared from the back door. The central portion of the main block stepped up, two or three stories higher than the sides, and that section was topped by the tangle of chimneys. It looked a bit like a flattened pear, an overripe Cornice dropped from a height onto its bottom, and would, she reflected, have been much improved had someone alleviated the unimaginative symmetry by propping a giant leaf up against the central stem of chimneys. She grinned at the whimsical image, and went on.

Back at the walled garden near the house, Ana turned to survey the gently sloping terrain down to the jungle, and was hit by its unlikely but striking similarity to another would-be paradise, the remnants of which she had once visited, a
hortus conclusus
whose inhabitants had tried to keep the outside world at bay while an ideal society was being constructed within the boundaries. Sealed in, like this place, by the hermetic walls of the jungle, with stringently limited outside contact and a strong sense of oppression, the pressure had built until it could be held no longer. People called it Jonestown—and why the hell, thought Ana, was she dwelling on that tropical, blood-soaked patch of insanity, here on this glorious morning on this piece of God’s green earth less than three hours from the edges of London? Macabre thoughts had no business intruding, and paranoia was clearly a two-way street. Yes, it was a good thing that she would never do this for Glen again; academia was an outpost of rationality by comparison.

Still, as she looked back at the abrupt wall of vegetation she found that she was again wishing for the last two days back, so she could walk straight through the Phoenix airport and put Dulcie and Jason in a taxi and drive them straight to Glen or Agent Rayne Steinberg or even the FBI boy with the protruding ears in Prescott. Looking at the forest walls pressing in on her, she could not shake off the fanciful image of bringing Jason and
Dulcie to be hermetically sealed into these green walls, awaiting Transformation. She shivered and pushed the idea away violently. Enough! Time for breakfast and human contact: The mind of the individual, like that of the community, needs contact with others to keep it balanced.

Life was stirring in the house when she returned. She removed her mucky boots at the kitchen door, carrying them inside for fear one of the dogs might take it into his head that they were chew toys, and propped them and the distasteful hat in a corner. She found a washroom and cleaned her hands, then presented herself in the kitchen.

“Good morning,” she said to the room at large. “Anything I can do to help?”

There was.

Some years before, Anne Waverly had come to know a visiting pair of eminent anthropologists who were spending half a year at her university. Most of the team’s publications were in the husband’s name, but he freely admitted that a lot of the research, and indeed all of the research done into the women’s side of the society being studied, was conducted by his wife, a frail, white-haired woman whom Anne had come to think of as the Miss Marple of the anthropology set.

The woman’s approach was to present herself to their new society—be it in Africa, highland New Guinea, or northern Canada—as precisely what she was: a grandmother. Out would come the knitting and the photographs, the stories and the remedies for arthritis, and with the babies crawling around their feet and the pots bubbling in the background, the women would freely submit to having their brains picked and their communal souls bared. She was a formidable weapon in the anthropological
array, and. Anne imitated her methods whenever she could. A community’s mind and pocket may be in the meditation hall and the office, but its heart and soul are found on the cooking hearth, and although Ana might not have snapshots of the grandchildren or a woolly sweater on her needles, she had found that a person could ask anything if she did it with her arms immersed in greasy soapsuds.

Until the schooling arrangements for the Arizona newcomers were straightened out, which according to Dov would take a couple of days, Ana had no responsibilities, so she washed pans and scrubbed shelves and peeled vegetables. And she talked blithely, and she listened to their complaints and their squabbles, and she wondered at the level of antagonism in the kitchen and at the plethora of convoluted difficulties they were having with health inspectors and school inspectors and Social Services inspectors and banks. She had thought the United States was drowning in bureaucracy, but it would appear that America had nothing on the United Kingdom. By the time the lunch dishes were cleaned up, she had a clear sense of the mental state of this community—which she found filled with sharp little tensions while maintaining a powerful sense of self-confidence in the face of the world’s vexations—and had gained a basic idea of how the community functioned.

She was struck, first of all, by the extent to which Marc Bennett had been right: There were profound differences between Steven’s compound and this one—differences that went far deeper than the presence or lack of a coffeepot. The English group was actually much smaller, though it was longer established, and because it did not import children for a school, the population was older. Also, although Steven had referred to Jonas as the leader here, the unseen figure seemed to occupy more a position of aloof but ultimate authority than being involved
in the day-to-day operations of the place, which were firmly in the hands of Marc Bennett.

Bennett was not universally popular. In fact, two of the women agreed that they had seen a number of members leave over the last year or so, since he had assumed (or been assigned?) a greater degree of control. He was respected, though, and the general consensus seemed to be that whereas Jonas was incredibly wise and authoritative, he was too otherworldly to be burdened with lowly details. No, they were fortunate to have Marc Bennett to direct the daily operations of keeping Change together in a largely hostile universe.

During the course of the morning spent working with the women, it struck Ana how like Change was to a certain kibbutz she had spent some weeks with on the West Bank—surrounded by the enemy, committed to the way of life, unconsciously preserving the traditional gender-linked work roles, scornful of the soft life led by outsiders, and dependent solely on themselves for all the necessities of food, shelter, and defense. Change even had a system of pantries and storage lockers like that of the kibbutz, three great rooms loaded with airtight canisters of grain, plastic drums of dried fruit, and cartons of candles, toilet paper, and canned meats.

Like the kibbutz—or the survivalists in North Dakota she had lived with, her very first job for Glen, when she had learned what it was like to breathe and eat with fear continually touching the back of her mind. This Change community was even populated by the same kind of people as both kibbutzim and survivalists: straight-spined militarists, tightly disciplinarian with their children, and energetic to the point of edginess. The closest she had come to finding a placid individual here was Sara, and even Sara had trotted briskly up the stairs and made her side of the bed with knife-edged corners. It was like being in a hive of type-A personalities,
bristling and focused and extremely clear about what they were doing. And to think that in Arizona she had found Dov tight-assed.

She shook herself and reached out for the reason she had come into the storage room: a broom to sweep the crumbs from the floor of the dining hall. It was where she had been told it was, with a dustpan. She took them into the former ballroom and got to work.

It was an awkward job, since the broom was not the nice flat shape she was used to but rather resembled a janitor’s push broom, only smaller. The wide head caught at all the chair legs, and though it did not feel right to pull it, pushing it seemed even more awkward. Still, she fumbled and cracked her way through the room, pulling the debris into the dustpan as she went and using the time of uninterrupted, mindless labor to think about lunch.

Perhaps because this Change community was smaller, they all ate at the same time. At least, most of the members gathered together—she had not seen Bennett there, nor Jonas. She had not yet laid eyes on Jonas at all, in fact, although she had been watching for the bearded face from Glen’s three-year-old photograph. She did not know if the higher echelons had their own dining area or even a separate kitchen, but she took it that here, rank’s privileges held. Or maybe they were just too spiritually uplifted to eat.