Rachel Cusk: In the Fold

‘Look what’s blown in,’ she said.

The two women at the table were of a similar age, somewhere in their late forties I guessed. One was dark and the other fair. They were different and yet the same. They had an uncanny, conspiratorial look about them, like a pair of witches, or two characters from a fairy tale.

‘Now the men arrive,’ said the fair one. ‘Now the party can begin. We just needed the men to arrive, as a catalyst. Now we can work up our enthusiasm.’

‘He went and bought three kegs of bitter,’ said the dark one. ‘Isn’t that the end? Don’t you think that’s the end?’

The dark one was big and thin and angular, with complicated, jointed parts like a mathematical instrument. She had closely cut hair and a dull, sallow complexion. Her narrow face had a downward aspect to it: her nose sloped and her mouth was downturned and her eyes drifted down at the corners too, which gave her a mournful expression, as though her hopes were gradually subsiding.

‘Three kegs of bitter for a summer party,’ she said gloomily, ‘and six bottles of white wine.’

‘That was not the plan,’ said the fair one. She had a loud, distinct, drawling way of speaking. She seemed perpetually to be smiling and speaking out of the side of her mouth. ‘That was not the idea at all.’

‘This is Michael,’ said Adam.

They all looked at me while Adam spoke their names. I couldn’t catch them: they passed over me quickly, like the shadows of birds. Only the name of the man by the fireplace, Paul, snagged in my ears. There was another man at the table, but I wasn’t sure which of them was Adam’s father.

‘Would you have bought three kegs of bitter for a summer party?’ said the dark woman, to me. ‘Perhaps you would, being male. The women won’t drink it, though. That’s the problem with letting the men organise the drink. They only think about themselves, don’t they?’

‘We’ve got the wine,’ said the fair one. ‘Don’t forget the wine, Vivian. We’ll measure it out. We’ll sit on the grass and drink it out of buttercups.’

‘I wanted to make kir ,’ said the girl in the window.

‘We’re having dew,’ said the fair one, ‘and we’re drinking it out of buttercups.’

‘Can you drive?’ demanded the man by the fireplace. He was speaking to me. He took something out of his pocket and lobbed it across the room towards me. I caught it shakily. It was a set of car keys. ‘Take my car, would you, and go down to Doniford for some wine? We’ve got to shut these women up. We’ve got to silence the harpies.’

‘And some cassis ,’ said the girl. ‘We have to have cassis .’

‘Try the Spar on the high street,’ said the fair woman, with what I later understood to be sarcasm. ‘They’re bound to have it.’

‘Well, give him some money!’ said the man impatiently. ‘What’s he supposed to do, steal the stuff?’

It was the dark-haired woman who responded to this command. She opened a battered leather handbag and took out her purse.

‘Do you know where to go?’ she asked concernedly, putting some notes into my hand. Her drooping face was close to mine. Her skin was dry and soft, like dust.

‘Come here,’ said the man by the fireplace, holding out his arms to Adam. ‘Come and kiss your father. Let me get the feel of you.’

‘I’ll work it out,’ I said.

Adam’s father’s car was an old green Jaguar with cracked, cream-leather seats. It breasted the road like a ponderous boat. From the driver’s seat the world seemed to swing alarmingly from left to right. I was not a very practised driver. In fact, I had only driven a car on my own two or three times before. I sailed down to Doniford on a wave of risk, concerned only with the amount of time I would be seen to have taken. At one point the brown, feathered body of a little bird thumped against the windscreen and fell away — I grimaced but did not stop. When I found myself back at the house at the top of the hill, in the sun and the wind, with three cases of wine and two bottles of cassis, I had almost no recollection at all of the journey. In the hot little town, wandering distraught and excited amongst the summer crowds, I had glimpsed myself repeatedly in the dusty glass shopfronts, and only these pieces of glass bearing my reflection remained lodged in my memory. Again and again I had seen myself and been amazed by how limited and strange the image was, how little it expressed of what I felt.

‘You’re a young buck, aren’t you?’ said Paul admiringly, when I entered the courtyard carrying a box of wine under each arm. ‘You’re a good-looking boy. I’d give anything for a day in that body of yours, just a day.’

He took the boxes from me and ripped them open. Adam was standing a few feet away in the sun, emptying ice from big bumpy bags into an old metal bathtub with clawed feet. Paul had taken his shirt off. I saw his gnarled, ruddy chest and his wiry arms. He was surprisingly small in stature and his legs were short and thin and rather bowed, but his head was very large and his features prominent, and a plume of bushy grey hair rose grandly up and back from his forehead. He had something of a goat about him, or a satyr.

‘D’you look after yourself?’ he said, scrutinising me. ‘Lift weights and whatnot? I never needed that, but then I had the work on the farm. You don’t always get the right shape that way, though. I’m in two pieces — the top part’s the farm, the bottom’s the horses.’

The other man had emerged from the kitchen and was leaning against the frame of the door to the courtyard watching us. He was around the same age as Paul and resembled him sketchily in the face, but he was tall and slender and wore slightly effeminate clothes, a primrose-yellow shirt tucked into his trousers and a silk handkerchief tied around his neck. He had a full, neat moustache that nested on his upper lip like a little animal.

‘Most of the farmers around here look like pregnant women to me,’ he said disdainfully.

‘Take David,’ said Paul, pointing at him. ‘He looks all right with his clothes on, but underneath he’s like a rag doll. He and Audrey eat rabbit food — they nibble away like a pair of bunnies. Some women can manage on that but others get a bad smell when they’re underfed. You can smell it on their breath, the stomach acids. Audrey never suffered from it, but others do.’

‘Apparently they do no physical exercise at all,’ said David. ‘They ride around on those little tractor bikes and never use their legs. Don Brice got gangrene that way, you know. Disgusting, isn’t it? It’s one thing if you have intellectual pursuits,’ he said, to me. ‘I’ve always thought you had to be one thing or the other, intellectual or physical. I’m an intellectual myself. You’ll perceive that I’m in a minority around here. What are you reading, Michael?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘At university.’ He smiled patiently.

‘Oh. The same as Adam. History.’

‘Ah.’ He folded his arms with apparent satisfaction. ‘What do they call it? The story not of great deeds but of great men. Actually, I myself am something of an historian.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, I’m writing a book.’

‘Don’t get him on his book,’ said Paul grimly. He was plunging the wine bottles by their necks into the bath of ice.

‘It’s just a little local history,’ said David deprecatingly, making a swatting motion with his hand. ‘A mere nothing.’

‘Go on then, ask him what it’s about,’ said Paul. ‘Go on, be quick.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘Since you ask,’ said David, ‘it’s about a murder.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘A murder that was never solved.’ He paused dramatically. ‘Eleventh of March 1883 — beware the Ides of March, eh? A woman killed, brutally, with an axe, while her small son looked on, and no one ever able to say who did it, or why.’ He paused again. His blue eyes were very wide open. ‘Annie Askey. A harmless woman killed with an axe one night as she sat sewing at her kitchen table.’