Rachel Cusk - In the Fold

‘She’s still wondering what she wants to be when she grows up. Actually, I haven’t seen her since last year,’ he added bitterly. ‘I haven’t even spoken to her.’

‘Doesn’t she keep in touch?’

He laughed. ‘By horoscope. By looking into her crystal ball.’

‘What’s she doing these days?’

‘She lives in a commune. They call it an “artists’ co-operative”. Women only, of course. They’ve freed themselves from the male oppressor. Though to look at some of them I’d say the feeling was mutual.’

‘In London?’

‘She went off in a fit of pique,’ he said, with his mouth full, ‘about four years ago.’

‘There was the most terrible argument,’ added Vivian. ‘She got very angry with everybody, I can’t remember what about. There’s always something, isn’t there? The problem is that people don’t say anything at the time. They get angry with you later, after you’ve forgotten whatever it is you’re supposed to have done.’

‘She said we were a disease,’ said Adam.

‘A what?’

‘A disease.’

‘The thing is, everybody does the best they can do at the time, don’t they?’ said Vivian. ‘It’s no good saying it wasn’t good enough because it was the best you could do at the time.’

I noticed that Vivian was wearing a pair of sunglasses. She had taken them out of her pocket and put them on, in spite of the fact that it was almost dark in the kitchen. The large brown plastic lenses gave her big, bug-like eyes.

‘Did she say when she was coming back?’ said Adam.

‘She talked about the myth. She said she was coming to inspect the myth.’

‘And what did you say?’

‘I said that of course she could come and inspect it if that was what she wanted,’ said Vivian gamely, from behind her glasses. ‘Only she mustn’t expect to find it. It’s the expectations that are the problem, do you see?’

Just then the dogs stopped scratching at the door and ran away down the passage. A car door slammed in the distance. Presently their muffled barks could be heard from outside. I laid my knife and fork side by side on my plate. I had managed to eat nearly everything and a feeling of extreme satiation oppressed me. The burnished wood of the table seemed to rise up before my eyes and slowly undulate. I saw little roads and rivers in the grain, and stripes, as though on the pelt of an animal.

‘Who’s that?’ said Adam.

‘I should think it’s Jilly,’ said Vivian darkly, ‘wanting something.’

‘Mum?’ a woman’s voice called from out in the passage. The kitchen door opened. ‘Mum? What’s wrong with the dogs?’

I wasn’t sure that I would recognise Jilly but I did; though my first impression of her was that she was nothing like the poor rash-covered creature I remembered on the lawn at Caris’s party. The impression she gave now was one of striking beauty which, curiously, solidified almost immediately into the certainty that she was not beautiful; at which point the awkward girl became visible once more. She was very tall and narrow, with a long neck and a small, lofty head, like a giraffe. She wore her hair, whose blonde streaks were being overridden by vigorous patches of brown, in an untidy ponytail and her clothes were unkempt too. The hem of her coat hung down and there were white stains on the jersey beneath it.

‘It’s dark in here,’ she said, looking at us. She switched on the lights, which made it seem darker. ‘There. Hello,’ she said straight away, to me. ‘I remember you. You were Adam’s friend from university.’ She spoke in a candid, child-like way that I found faintly disturbing. ‘You didn’t have a beard then, though.’

‘I remember you too. You said you were going to have horses when you grew up.’

‘Doesn’t everybody think that?’ said Jilly, with a costive expression. ‘What’s wrong with the dogs?’ she continued. ‘They went mad at me out on the drive.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with them,’ said Vivian, looking innocently at her. ‘They probably didn’t recognise your car.’

‘Well, they see it often enough. They must know that Paul’s away. Animals are clever like that.’

‘There’s nothing for lunch, you know,’ said Vivian.

Jilly looked beaky and offended.

‘I didn’t come to get anything,’ she said. ‘I just came to borrow Paul’s big ladder. I need to put a tarpaulin over the barn.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Anyway, it’s only ten o’clock. I couldn’t possibly eat anything yet.’

‘Where’s Nigel?’ said Vivian.

‘He’s gone over to Clatworthy. To see his mother.’

‘Well, he won’t get much out of her !’

‘It’s worth a try,’ said Jilly.

‘Listen to you!’

Jilly sat down at the kitchen table and put her head in her hands.

‘The roof on the barn’s about to fall in,’ she said in a pinched little voice. ‘What are we supposed to do, just let it go? We haven’t a penny to spend on it. It’s just been one thing after another.’

‘It’s hard to sympathise,’ said Vivian morbidly, ‘when you have to have your kitchen cupboards made by hand and brought from London.’

‘Oh, when will you stop talking about that?’ cried Jilly. ‘I’ve told you, it was Nigel’s cousin who made them! We got them for a fraction of the price!’

‘And the tiles from Italy, and the leather chairs, and that crockery you’re not even allowed to wash —’

‘And why shouldn’t we have them, when she’s never done a day’s work in her life! That great big house,’ sighed Jilly. ‘She’s hardly ever there, you know. She stays in London — she’s got another six empty bedrooms there!’

‘I’m not surprised she stays away,’ said Vivian. ‘I always thought that house was unhappy. And it faces due north, you know. It can’t get any light at all. I never understood why she went to such lengths to get it.’

‘It’s the family seat,’ said Jilly indignantly. ‘Her father built that house.’

‘Wasn’t her father mad?’ said Adam.

‘I remember he bred llamas,’ said Vivian. ‘They always looked very odd, standing there in the rain. He and his wife used to go about in the most extraordinary clothes.’

‘What sort of clothes?’ said Adam.

‘I remember he used to wear a sort of chain mail outfit. And she wore a crown and these great medieval dresses with long sleeves. Everyone in the house did the same. The house was like a castle, a funny little castle there in the valley. They had a lot of servants and people just sort of hanging about and all of them had to wear these costumes too. I think they got a lot of people from London,’ said Vivian, as though that explained everything.

‘Why do you want to talk about all that?’ said Jilly crossly. ‘Nigel doesn’t like people knowing. Anyway, he says it’s all exaggerated. They probably had one fancy dress party.’

‘She drowned in the river at the bottom of the garden,’ said Vivian in a distant voice. ‘He sold the house and no one heard anything from him again. They were using it as a nursing home. It had lifts on all the stairs.’

‘You make it sound awful!’ said Jilly. ‘It’s not awful,’ she added, to me.

‘Then one day Nigel’s mother came and bought it. It turned out that her father had finally died and when she got his money the first thing she did was come back and buy that dreadful house. It’s rather sad, don’t you think?’ said Vivian forlornly. ‘Don’t you think it’s sad?’

‘She probably paid five times what her father sold it for,’ said Adam.

‘She’s got thousands in the bank,’ said Jilly, ‘and she won’t use a first-class stamp. Can you believe it? She won’t pay the money for a first-class stamp.’