Rachel Cusk - In the Fold

‘What for?’ said Adam.

We stopped at the traffic lights on the high street, where a woman stood on the pavement waiting to cross. Her hands were folded in front of her and the straps of her leather handbag were looped over her forearm, which she held very still. She had permed, mouse-coloured hair and the round, pallid face of a Delft maiden. We looked at one another blankly before she crossed the road, stepping carefully in front of our car.

‘She can’t be,’ said Adam. ‘I only just bought a pack.’ After a pause he said: ‘I don’t need to come home and see. Either she has or she hasn’t.’ After another pause he said: ‘I’ll see what I can do. I’ll see what I can do, okay? Sorry,’ he said to me. ‘I’ve got to stop and get some you-know-whats.’

Adam parked the car on the pavement outside the Spar. I stayed there while he went inside. I looked at the milling high street, whose grey prospect was occasionally riven by slanting sheets of spring sunlight. I looked at people’s legs and at the wheels of passing cars. A girl of sixteen or seventeen tried to get her pushchair through the space between our car and the shopfront and couldn’t. People waited behind her. Presently a new stream of people forged itself on the other side of the car, in the road. An elderly man tapped on my window and I rolled it down. He said:

‘You can’t park here.’

‘Okay,’ I said.

‘People can’t get along the pavement,’ he said, indicating it with his hand.

‘Okay,’ I said.

He shook his head and walked away. After a while Adam came out of the Spar and we drove back to the house.

Lisa said:

‘I don’t have a really good relationship with Caris.’

‘Don’t you?’ I said.

‘I’ll be honest with you, I don’t actually like her. She’s the only one of the family I don’t actually like.’

We were in the Spar while this admission was being made. Lisa had Isobel and I had Hamish. We were like members of some particularly burdened species that favoured talk and inaction. Lisa went very slowly down the aisles and chose things as though the choosing of them, rather than the putative cooking and consumption, were the point.

‘Hamish,’ she said, ‘do you like these Potato Faces thingies?’

‘No,’ said Hamish.

‘I think that means yes, don’t you?’ she said, to me. She hurled the frozen bag into the cart with a thud.

We stood in the cold parabola of the freezer section while Lisa looked everything over. The Spar hadn’t changed much since I had searched it for Caris’s cassis all those years before, except in the unnerving particular that I was certain its aisles once ran along its length rather than across its width as they did now.

‘The thing about Caris,’ said Lisa in her ‘discreet’ voice, putting her head very close to mine and her mouth beside my ear, ‘is that she’s stuck in the past.’

She said it to rhyme with ‘gassed’.

‘She’s full of bitterness and resentment about the things that happened and yet she can’t stop herself idealising it, you know, her family and how it all was. And so when she comes down here she feels this contradictory set of emotions. I haven’t met her very many times, actually,’ said Lisa. ‘She hardly ever comes here, I think for the reasons I say. She and Adam aren’t very close.’

We arrived at fruit and vegetables, where Lisa picked up a large shiny pepper that looked as though it were made out of plastic.

‘Which do you prefer,’ she said, turning it in her hand to get a good look at it, ‘red peppers or green? I used to hate the green ones but now I quite like them. Do you ever find that happens to you?’

I felt that I was as far as I could be from actually eating the pepper, without having to grow it first. It seemed to me that Lisa should choose something a little more advanced in its evolution towards the plate.

‘Rebecca was a vegetarian,’ I said, ‘and then one day I found her eating a packet of salami. She ate the whole packet. I did find it very disturbing seeing her eat it.’

‘Why?’ said Lisa, amazed. She stopped turning the pepper. I realised that I had caused us to grind to a complete halt.

I said, ‘It was slightly frightening, that’s all. It seemed very bloody. I think I must have respected her more than I realised.’

‘You haven’t told me about your wife,’ said Lisa. ‘What’s she like?’

‘I don’t think I can describe her,’ I said, after a pause.

Lisa laughed. ‘You must know what she’s like ,’ she said.

I looked at the bank of fruit and vegetables, where bananas lay with bananas and tomatoes with tomatoes, neat forests of broccoli and apples in straight lines, all even-coloured, all unblemished, and which Lisa stood beside as though she had created it for me herself, as a model of categorisation. It struck me that I did not find her bent for simplification actually irritating. The reason for this was that I believed she did it on purpose — that she had settled on it as the best way of presenting herself under the circumstances. I didn’t think, either, that it had arisen out of a need to distinguish herself from the Hanburys, or even as a sort of criticism of them. I guessed that Adam had found her literal-mindedness attractive, and that one way or another it had become her means of survival. The problem was that she was stuck with it, while still having to get her pleasure and satisfaction from somewhere.

‘What’s anybody like?’ I said.

Lisa immediately looked crestfallen. I didn’t mean to be cruel, exactly, but I didn’t see that it was my responsibility to humour her either.

‘I only meant,’ she said, ‘that you must know her better than anybody else. You said, for example, that you respected her more than you realised. What did you mean by that exactly?’

I was conscious of the Spar’s strip lighting overhead, which rained nakedly down from the synthetic panelled ceiling.

‘That I sometimes failed to see the value of the things Rebecca believed in.’

‘Are you a vegetarian?’ said Lisa.

‘No.’

‘But you wanted her to be one, is that what you’re saying?’

Lisa seemed prepared to find this idea amusing. I saw her beginning to take pleasure in what she considered to be my quirks, as a child might begin to discern in an object the possibility of play. Rebecca had consumed the salami standing beside the sink in our kitchen. Watching the meat fold itself into her pale pink mouth I had felt revolted. Yet in the past her refusal to eat meat had irritated me, not only because I regarded it as an affectation but because it galled me to see her impose a discipline on herself that profited nobody. If she wanted reforms, I had numerous suggestions for them. In fact, I had come vaguely to feel that she abstained in order to spite me, which made my sense of her betrayal, almost of her infidelity, as she stood there at the sink, seem so sad and self-defeating that I was unable to speak to her about what she had done.

‘Not really,’ I said.

‘My sister’s a vegetarian. She says she can smell the meat on people now. She says sometimes it really turns her stomach. Hamish, will you get us some of those Hula Hoops? I know we shouldn’t eat them but I can’t help it. The ones in the orange packet, that’s it.’

Lisa took out her purse, which was large and creased, and stuffed with cards and banknotes and receipts. She withdrew a piece of paper on which she had written a shopping list and went through the items, murmuring aloud. She wore sunglasses pushed back on her head and sandals, although outside the Spar the street was grey and turbulent and people walked past the big windows as though they were moving through water, with their heads bowed and their clothes pressed in wrinkles against their bodies. In her chair the baby began to make a plaintive sound. Little ropes of saliva were running over the ledge of her lower lip and paying wetly down the front of her coat. Without taking her eyes from the list, Lisa pulled a dummy out of her pocket and plugged it into the baby’s mouth. I experienced a feeling of surrender to her methods and to her sense of time, which ran along like a slow train making no stops at which you might be permitted to disembark. While I had come to Doniford with the undefined expectation of surrendering to something, it was certainly not to this. It was as though I had arrived carrying some unwieldy, burdensome object — a standard lamp, say — of which I had confidently hoped somehow to discharge myself; and finding, to my vexation and surprise, that there was nowhere to put it, nowhere to leave it in safe keeping, I had become used to just lugging it around with me. Everywhere I went I had the sense of myself carrying around the standard lamp, setting it down beside me to eat or speak to people, who were of course too polite to mention that it was there. What I had expected to surrender to, I suppose, was the state of dispossession, but it appeared that it was no longer permissible to be unencumbered, to be free. At my age you had to belong somewhere, even if it was on Lisa’s train. I had noticed that she was reluctant to leave me in the house alone, as though this were inappropriate, even scandalous.