Rachel Cusk - In the Fold

The view from Adam and Lisa’s house was densely patterned and, because everything you saw had been created at roughly the same time, strangely depthless. From my window in the spare room I could see the homogeneous red brick of other houses, the straight beige lines of the unweathered pallet fence, the lurid blades of new grass, the neat black ribbon of tarmac. I could see clean cars and bicycles and white garage doors. It was like looking at a collage: nothing shaded into anything else but rather seemed cut out and pasted into place. The window was so well sealed that it created a sort of vacuum in the room. In Nimrod Street our windows rattled and let in noise and draughts, and the presence of these things was like that of an audience, bored, judgmental, companionable, suspirating in the anonymous dark. In Adam and Lisa’s spare room the silence and stillness were such that I became almost intolerably aware of myself. When I opened the window there was a small sound of compressed air being released, a hesitation, before the outside world ran in in a tepid stream of babbling air.

The house had four bedrooms, which Lisa showed me. She did this with some gravity in the afternoon, while Adam went to look in at his office over in the town. It was as though she had waited for us to be alone. Also, she had waited for daylight, she explained, rather than showing me the house when I might, if ever, have expected to see it, on arrival the night before. She gave the confusing impression that her interest in these matters was not unsatirical. It was a distinct possibility that she believed herself in addition to be gratifying some sordid but well-established impulse on my part, and had elected to do it, if it had to be done, in broad daylight.

‘This is the baby’s room,’ she said on the square landing, pushing open a door so that it made a hoarse sound as it ran over the thick, resisting carpet. The baby’s habitation of her room was faint and sketch-like. I glimpsed a cot and various padded items. ‘And this is Janie’s room.’ Janie was Lisa’s daughter from her previous marriage, whom I had not yet met. Her room was a little more substantiated than the baby’s, though overwhelmingly similar in colour, shape and texture. She had already been installed in it asleep when we arrived, and was now apparently at school.

‘This is the spare room, which you know,’ said Lisa, whose liturgy nonetheless required that she complete the ceremony by opening and shutting the door to my room. ‘And this is our room.’

Adam and Lisa’s room, being the pièce de résistance of the tour, we were permitted to enter. Lisa stepped ahead of me into its cream-carpeted spaces, as enchanted as a fawn entering a sunlit clearing. I saw the mystery of their bed, immaculately made.

‘Very nice,’ I said.

‘And this is our bathroom.’

I ducked my head into the bathroom — tiled, with gold taps and white porcelain appurtenances — and received a startling impression of multitudinous cosmetics, randomly marshalled like the skyline of a fast-growing city over every surface. A large chrome-plated hairdryer with an intimidating vent on the end hung from a hook on the wall. A prod-like object with an electric flex hung beside it. On a shelf sat a tray of miniature forensic items, tiny picks and blades. The bottles and jars of every conceivable size and shape suggested a world suspended partway between medicine and magic. I caught a glimpse of something called ‘breast-firming cream’. I tried to imagine the orgy of self-improvement that routinely occurred here.

‘Everything is so efficient in this house,’ Lisa remarked. ‘Everything works. You can just get on with your life.’

I found myself wondering what, according to these terms, life actually was. We were still in the bathroom — Lisa sat down on the white, rounded edge of the bath. I contemplated the gleaming toilet, from which the suggestion seemed to emanate that unknown to me the problems of human putrefaction had recently and happily been resolved. Lisa was dressed for the temperate climate of the house, in a sleeveless T-shirt and a pair of sandals. Her toenails were painted red.

‘We did look at a few old houses,’ she said, with the emphasis — derogatory — on ‘old’. ‘We though it might be fun to buy a wreck and, you know, do it up, but in the end, I thought, what’s the point? What is the actual point of period features ? What’s it for , all that arty-farty stuff? I think it’s pretentious,’ she concluded, ‘living somewhere with fireplaces when you’ve got central heating.’

‘That sounds like our place,’ I said, simulating a rueful expression.

‘I grew up in an old house,’ said Lisa, consideringly, after a moment, as though she had decided to disclose her roots to me in order to prove that her opinions were not the fruit of mere bigotry.

‘Whereabouts?’ I asked.

‘Oh, you wouldn’t know it,’ said she mysteriously. ‘It’s in the north-east. But our house was really old. When you got into bed your sheets would be wet from the damp.’

‘Do you come from a big family?’

I wanted to hear more of this tale of woe.

‘Oh yeah,’ she said vaguely. Now I could detect her accent. ‘There’s lots of us.’

She was still sitting on the edge of the bath. She folded her arms over a bare, unblemished section of her midriff and jiggled her foot to and fro so that the sandal slapped against her sole. She was a large-limbed, rounded, well-finished woman with blonde hair so straight and symmetrical there was no doubt of it having been ironed. I wondered if the electric prod was what she did it with. I did not dislike her, though I saw she was suffering from a madness of convenience. She had decided to concern herself with the morality of inanimate objects. I had encountered this affliction before, but only in the denizens of those arty houses with superfluous fireplaces. Rick and Ali, for example, were quite capable of allowing their evangelism in matters of taste to interfere with the run of social play. I had seen Ali complain to someone whose house we were staying at for the weekend that she could not possibly sleep in the sheets with which she had been provided because they were made of the wrong material. I understood that people did and said such things because they were in some sense incapable, but I could not have said exactly what constituted this incapacity in Lisa, unless it was a background of such dreariness or deprivation that it had made her obsessed with her own comfort.

‘Adam’s family are really strange,’ she continued. ‘They spend all their time talking about each other. Often they’re so horrible I wonder if they actually hate each other. My family aren’t like that at all.’

I sensed she found this habit of mutual discussion as pretentious as a liking for period features.

‘They didn’t use to be like that,’ I said in their defence. ‘When I first met them the thing that struck me was how friendly they all managed to be.’

‘Really?’ Lisa’s neat, even-toned face assumed an expression of distaste. ‘My family are just a really close family,’ she said.

‘The Hanburys have never been able to acknowledge their divisions,’ I said grandly, somewhat surprising myself.

‘What do you mean?’ Lisa visibly perked up.

‘They’re so socially and materially conformist, yet so terrified of seeming conventional,’ I continued, finding that it was not about the Hanburys but the Alexanders that I was speaking, ‘that they violate the laws of emotion as a substitute for real acts of rebellion.’

‘Adam’s stepmother is a very dark lady,’ Lisa presently agreed, apparently inspired by my talk of laws being violated. ‘She’s a very dark, unhappy lady. Did you know that when they were younger she used to deny the children food?’