The Wolf Border(98)

Me? Ha!

You are pretty cool.

She does not feel confident about her feminine communication skills, which are all but non-existent, but Alexander has been generous and supportive over the past year; she owes him the favour.

OK. Shall I take her to see the wolves again?

Yes! That would be great.

He kisses her.

I don’t know, he says. I thought I was New Age. I thought I was a bloody feminist. All she wants to do is hang out with her horse and tell me I don’t understand anything.

What should I say to her?

Nothing. Just talk shop. Just let her talk if she wants.

Rachel has not seen Chloe for several months, and the time has been transformative. When they go into the enclosure – only the two of them this time – the girl is less vivacious and uninhibited, though still sweet and clever. She has a layer of fat, proper, cupped breasts under her T-shirt; even her face is a different shape. Gone is the floral mac and crocheted animal jumper; she has on jeans, a white shirt, conservative high street items. She walks up the grassland slowly, as if aware of her body and its limitations.

It’s nice of you to do this, she says. I know Dad asked you.

He did. But I thought you might want to see how they’re getting on.

I do.

They take signal readings from the handheld device, locate Ra and Merle, and situate themselves on the hillside near the rendezvous point. Rachel sets up the portable telescope in the hope of getting a clear view. The juveniles are probably too big to interest a typical young girl, no longer puppyish and scruffy, getting on for two-thirds the size of their parents. They are now more guileful than playful. But Chloe is still interested, and not typical. The high definition of the telescope is enough to impress her – she can see their eyes, their whiskers. They do not remain in view for long, but run off, casting glances up at the hill.

I like how they move, she says. Sort of floppy but fast. Can they live without their parents yet?

It’s perhaps a loaded question. Should the subtext – I’m not getting on with my dad – be addressed? Fall back on what you know, Rachel thinks. On the hike back to the car, she talks about the notion of intelligence and problem-solving. She tells Chloe about a wolf in the rescue centre in Romania that learnt to open its cage door by watching its caretakers.

How?

She pulled on the mechanism. A rope.

That’s really clever.

Maybe. But how can we know it wasn’t a reflex action? I mean, wolves and dogs tug on things. I bet you’ve seen them do it with slippers and anything dangling.

Yes. Our old sheepdog used to.

Chloe pauses, thinks for a moment.

But just because they do that doesn’t mean it isn’t clever to do it right then, on the lock. It doesn’t really sound like an accident. She figured it out.

Rachel nods and smiles.

I think so too. It’s called application. Some people think intelligence is learning to do new things using acquired skills. Do you still want to be a geneticist? she asks.

Chloe shrugs.

Maybe. I don’t know. I’d quite like to be a singer.

Ah, right.

I’m not very poppy, though. I don’t really look like a pop star. No sex appeal.

I’ve heard you sing. You have a great voice.

Thanks.

Don’t, Rachel thinks. Don’t succumb. She gets the sense Chloe would talk to her, intimately – that the grandmother has been somewhat practical on the subjects troubling her granddaughter, but has fallen short: the generational gap. She feels for the girl, for her predicament. She is ahead of her school friends physically, the boys are commenting on her figure, there are embarrassing things going on she cannot control. It is a stormy, lonely place to be. She tries to remember what Binny did. Noticed the row of rinsed underwear on the washing line, bought a box of Tampax, and left Rachel to her own devices, probably. There were no heart-to-hearts. They walk in silence, and then Chloe asks, out of the blue,

Are you going to marry Dad?

Whoa! Well, I don’t know.

There is, of course, no other answer. Rachel panics internally, tries to formulate a better explanation, but Chloe doesn’t ask anything more on the subject and Rachel has no idea whether such a thing would be considered good or bad. They walk back to the car and drive to meet Alexander in The Horse and Farrier, where the girl orders salad for lunch and looks longingly at her father’s plate of chips.

After come cool days, and glazed white skies. The swifts, late-leaving, migrate to other continents. Enormous spiders come into the cottage – a couple of times she gets to Charlie only just before they are inserted into his mouth, their legs thrashing in his little fist. The wind gets up, hurricanes over the Atlantic that disperse before reaching the edge of Europe. Autumn crackles in the air in the mornings and evenings, and the canopy of the woods begins to smoulder, yellowish.

The Annerdale project is officially a year old, as is her son. She throws a birthday party for Charlie, attended mostly by adults – Lawrence, Alexander and Chloe, Huib, a few similarly aged children from the area whose mothers she is linked to but rarely sees. Rachel tells herself she must do better at finding playmates for Charlie: a local crèche, a baby swim group, something. She must do better at making friends herself, with mothers who are at a similar stage, wrestling similar problems. But the times when she has met them the conversations always seem awkward; once the subject of babies is finished, there is little in common. She doesn’t watch television, she has no husband, her work is bizarre. She watches Charlie smear chocolate cake across his mouth, his heels pounding against his high chair, mumbling some kind of happy eating song, eyes huge. They have each other – is that enough? It’s hard to remember a time when he wasn’t hers, the central part of her life. At other moments she looks at him and he seems like an alien, randomly dropped from the sky – unrecognisable and incredible.