Rachel Cusk - In the Fold

‘You — you! I think maybe you needed to be broken. I think maybe that’s why you chose me.’

‘I thought you chose me. I thought I was the vessel and you were the —’

I couldn’t remember what she was. It had started out as some kind of fast-setting liquid, and ended up as an exuberant house plant.

‘You could have found some nice girl. Some nice, predictable girl.’

‘Why do you keep saying things like that?’ I shouted. ‘You’re the only thing that makes me predictable, because somebody has to be!’

‘You don’t know how hard it is for me,’ she said presently, in a trembling voice, ‘to stand on my own.’

‘I’m not asking you to stand on your own.’

‘You are. You just don’t see it yet.’

‘I think I’d see it if I were asking it.’

My mouth felt as though it were stuffed with something dry, like bread.

‘We’re married,’ I said finally. ‘Doesn’t that mean anything to you? For all their faults, at least your parents stay together.’

‘That isn’t a marriage,’ said Rebecca. ‘That’s a mutual dependency.’

‘Of course it seems like that to you! At least they touch each other!’ I said. It seemed I was shouting again. ‘You’d have to have a lump on your breast the size of a football for me to stand any chance of even noticing it!’

I went to bed and lay listening to the sound of Hamish rustling in his sleeping bag. I lay awake for so long in the airless, featureless spare room that I began to feel like something in a specimen case, being lightly tormented where I lay pinned behind glass by the sounds my son made, which summoned me constantly to awareness and to the state that precedes activity. I felt that if only I could hear or smell the sea this sensation would pass. I felt I could be comforted by the existence of something animate but impartial. In this place of fences such intrusions were apparently considered hazardous. It occurred to me that Doniford had succumbed to a sort of partitioning, a spoliation, out of its inability to adhere to its true nature. Like me, it had admitted ugliness because ugliness asked to be admitted.

‘Where are the women?’ Paul Hanbury wanted to know, when Adam, Hamish and I opened the door to his room. ‘Stand aside — let me see! Where are they? Where are my bloody women? Three days I’ve been in this bloody room and not one of them has come to see me!’

In its spacious sparseness and beige diffidence, the room was more like a room in a hotel than a hospital. Paul Hanbury lay on the grand, plinth-like bed at its centre. He wore a white smock and looked very small and tyrannical, like a child emperor. I would have recognised him by his voice alone, yet it was hard now to believe that it had emanated from him — it travelled around the room in great rings of sound that dwarfed his body. He had never been large, but lying in that bed he looked wizened — except for his head, which retained its distinctive scale and grandeur, and which he barely moved when he spoke, so that in spite of everything he had the poised appearance of a statesman, or an actor. His hair rolled back from his forehead in thick, steel-grey waves and his face had darkened and deepened into creases since the last time I saw him, especially around his eyes, which were small and black and glittered like buttons. He opened his large, well-shaped mouth wide in order to talk, revealing straight, strong, even yellow teeth and the resilient, plump pad of his tongue.

‘That’s not true, dad,’ said Adam. ‘Vivian came last night.’

‘She did not — not a soul has come since you showed your face here yesterday! And before that there was only that poseur David, who came with some bloody stupid periodical and wouldn’t sit down in case he creased his trousers, and apart from that there’s been nobody.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Adam.

‘Where’s it gone? It’s called the Wankers’ Review — or the Wallies’ Review . Where the hell is it? Ah yes, here we go — the Wolsey Review . “Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation”. I think that’s David’s idea of a joke. D’you see what they’ve done to my dong? They’ve gift-wrapped it, do you see?’ He folded back his covers to reveal part of a hooped wire contraption that stood in an ominous arch over his hips, and then drew them quickly up again before it could be established what was underneath. ‘And what else is there — “Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination”! I think I’ll save that for Vivian, if she ever comes.’

Beside me Hamish made his bell noise. It sounded particularly loud in the well-insulated room.

‘What’s that?’ said Paul amusedly, looking around. ‘School’s out?’

‘Vivian definitely said she was coming in last night,’ said Adam. ‘I don’t understand why she didn’t say something this morning.’

‘Michael! Come over here where I can see you.’ This was bellowed as though from a great distance, although I was standing six feet from the bed and the room was full of daylight. ‘Is this fellow yours?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s a funny little bugger, isn’t he? What’s his name?’

‘Hamish.’

‘Put him up on the bed, will you? Put him here, next to me, if he’ll come. Has he got a mother?’

‘Rebecca. My wife.’

‘Well, I hope he doesn’t get his looks from her. How does life treat you, Michael? With its gloves off, judging by the bags under your eyes.’

‘I’m very well.’

‘If you say so. Where are you living? Have you got some nice place in the country where your boy can stretch his legs?’

‘We live in Bath.’

‘Ah, Bath. I always liked the idea of Bath. The reality never quite lived up to it, though. I’d take the women there and you wouldn’t see them for dust. They’d be off and into the shops like rats up a drainpipe. And how do you earn your crust in Bath?’

‘I work for a charity.’

‘Of course you do. Paying your debt to society — I’m glad somebody is! And you’re taking some leave — or rather, you’re down here for a week’s babysitting while the missus exercises her feminist imagination. I wouldn’t leave a woman alone in Bath for a day, let alone a week, but I suppose she’s acclimatised. Or is she the enigmatic type as well?’

Hamish seemed happy enough sitting on the plush bed, but I was worried that he might knock the wire hoop. It would be very painful, I imagined, if he did. I furtively grasped the back of Hamish’s shirt.

‘Caris is here,’ said Adam.

‘Not as far as I can see she bloody well isn’t,’ said Paul.

‘She came down yesterday on the train.’

‘Well, don’t leave her alone in the house. She’ll have packed everything up and sent it to the Donkey Sanctuary or the IRA or whoever the hell else she’s feeling sorry for this week. Have you seen Caris?’ he asked me.

‘Yes.’

‘Nuts, isn’t she?’ he said delightedly. ‘She’s getting fat, too. Her mother never got fat, but then she never had to. All she had to do was sit on her little arse in Doniford reading magazines and drinking diet milkshakes until they came out of her ears. But Caris won’t have anything to do with all that — her mother shoved it down her throat and now she won’t have anything to do with it. And more’s the pity,’ he continued, settling back into his pillows, ‘because she was a good-looking girl, a fine-looking girl. Her mother competed with her, that was the problem. She could be very cold. Caris got the idea that it didn’t do to be so pretty. Of course, she’ll tell you it’s all my fault,’ he concluded cheerfully, with his arms folded behind his head. ‘Women stick together in the end — ask Mary Wollstonecraft.’