The book was a joke gift. James had found it in a charity shop in Clifton — a Victorian compendium of folk magic with a tooled leather spine and marbled endpapers and the title A Complete System of Domestic and Protective Enchantment in faded gilt on the cover. He brought it to Clare’s dinner party wrapped in newspaper and presented it with the self-satisfied air of someone who had found the perfect thing without trying. Everyone agreed it was very funny.
Clare read from it over the dessert course. There were six of them around the table — she and James, Priya and her partner Dom, and two colleagues from the firm named Beth and Marcus who had just started seeing each other and were therefore very careful about touching. The kitchen was warm and the candles had burned low and someone had opened a second bottle of the red. It was the kind of evening that generates its own momentum, that arrives without ceremony at the place where ordinary things become possible.
“Salt circle for the protection of domestic spaces,” Clare read, in the theatrical voice she used when reading aloud. “Draw a circle of sea salt upon the floor of the room to be protected, no less than three feet in diameter. Speak the words of binding. The circle, once consecrated, will remain in effect until deliberately dispelled, and no malevolent force or unwanted presence may cross its boundary.”
“Do the words,” Priya said.
Clare read the words. They were in a cod-archaic English that sounded vaguely medieval and meant nothing in particular. She read them in the voice. Everyone laughed.
She had poured the salt from the ceramic salt pig beside the cooker in a rough circle on the kitchen floor, about four feet across, because she had rather a lot of salt and was enjoying herself. The circle was not especially round. It did not matter. She read the words, they laughed, and then Dom helped her sweep it up and they went back to the table for the second bottle.
In the morning she found a few grains of salt she’d missed in the grout between the floor tiles and swept those up too. She didn’t think about it again.
Three days later she noticed the cat.
The cat was twelve years old and named Fermat, after the mathematician, for no reason Clare could recall except that it had seemed apt at the time. He was a large grey animal of settled habits who spent his days moving between three spots — the kitchen windowsill, the armchair in the sitting room, and the patch of afternoon sun that moved across the kitchen floor from about two until four. She had never paid close attention to the specifics of this routing because there was no reason to.
She noticed on the Wednesday after the dinner party that Fermat had stopped going to the afternoon sun patch. He would come into the kitchen, walk to a particular point, and then stop. He would sit there and look at the floor and then turn and go somewhere else. She put it down to a draught, or to the spring flea treatment she’d given him two weeks before, which sometimes made him odd for a while.
By Friday he had rearranged his entire routine around the invisible line. He moved through the kitchen on a new path that described a precise arc — she could see it now, once she was watching — that skirted something she could not see. He ate his food, which was in the kitchen. He drank his water. He used the cat flap. He simply no longer crossed a particular, invisible, roughly circular boundary in the middle of the kitchen floor.
Clare stood at the kitchen threshold and tried to remember exactly where she had drawn the circle.
She dropped her keys on day nine.
She was standing at the counter making coffee, keys in hand after coming in from work, and she simply dropped them. They fell and slid across the tiles as dropped keys will, skittering toward the centre of the kitchen. They slid to a point perhaps four feet from where she stood and stopped. Not against anything. Not caught in a grout line. They simply stopped, as though they had run out of momentum, and lay there on the flat, smooth floor.
She stared at them for a long time. Then she walked over and picked them up.
She had to reach across something to do it. She couldn’t have said what that something was. She reached across it and her hand crossed it without difficulty and she picked up the keys and stood up. Nothing happened. She was simply aware, very clearly, that she had reached across a threshold.
She made her coffee. She drank it standing at the counter.
She did not look up the book. She knew where it was — James had left it, thinking she might want it for a coffee table curiosity — and she did not look it up. She thought about this decision for some time and could not entirely explain it to herself, except to say that she was not sure she wanted to know what “deliberately dispelled” required.
The postman came on day twelve.
From her desk in the front room, Clare had a sightline through the kitchen to the back path. She could see, when she happened to look up at the right moment, the postman’s high-visibility jacket as he came along the side of the terrace. She sometimes waved. He sometimes waved back. He was a cheerful man with a strong opinion about local cycle lanes.
On day twelve she looked up and saw him come along the path, reach the back gate, open it, and start toward the kitchen door. She watched him walk to within perhaps six feet of the door and then simply turn around. No hesitation she could identify. No looking at his bag to check he had something. He turned, walked back through the gate, and continued up the path.
Her post was in the box by the front door when she checked. He had come round and delivered it through the front.
She called the sorting office that evening. The postman was perfectly fine. He had no recollection of making any specific decision about the delivery route. He thought he might have been running late and decided it was quicker to use the front.
She thanked the sorting office and rang off.
On day nineteen, her sister Rachel came for Sunday lunch.
Rachel lived in Bath and drove up in the small Renault she had owned for eleven years and parked in the usual spot and rang the bell and came in and kissed Clare on the cheek. They had a glass of wine in the sitting room and talked about their mother and about Rachel’s plans for the summer. Then Clare went into the kitchen to check on the chicken.
“Come through,” she called.
Rachel didn’t come through.
Clare looked up. Rachel was standing in the kitchen doorway. She was not crossing the threshold. She was not doing anything particular — she wasn’t gripping the doorframe, wasn’t looking at anything specific, was not behaving unusually except that she was standing in the doorway rather than coming in.
“You all right?” Clare said.
“Fine,” Rachel said. “Just — is it warm in there? I might stay in here.”
Clare said that was fine and brought the wine out to the table in the sitting room and they ate there instead, which was cramped but manageable. Rachel ate well and talked easily and showed no sign of distress. She simply could not explain, afterward, why she had not wanted to come into the kitchen. She couldn’t remember deciding not to. She’d just felt like sitting down.
Clare washed up alone, after Rachel had gone. She stood in the kitchen for a long time with her hands in the warm water and looked at the middle of the floor.
Nothing was there. Nothing was ever there.
She dried her hands. She put the kettle on. She had stopped cooking in the kitchen by then — she’d been making toast and eating cereal, things that didn’t require her to move around the floor much — and she had stopped thinking about why without particularly deciding to.
The book was on the sitting-room shelf where James had put it.
She had not opened it since the dinner party.
She did not open it now.
She made her tea and took it to her desk and sat down and looked at her work and thought about nothing in particular, with the careful deliberate neutrality of someone who has decided that certain things are better left alone.