Rachel Cusk - In the Fold

‘I’ve been up at the farm with Adam,’ I said, by way of a diversion.

‘Oh you have, have you?’ He looked slightly discomfited, as though I had revealed myself to be untrustworthy. ‘What are you doing up there?’

‘We’re lambing, dad,’ said Adam, loudly.

‘All right, all right,’ said Paul irritably, flapping his hand. ‘I’m not some old fart in a home — I just didn’t know what he meant, that’s all. So you’ve been up at Egypt, have you? What do you think of the place? Marvellous, isn’t it? I always say that as the rest of the world gets worse, Egypt gets better. The principal of entropy does not apply. You’ve no idea, the torture it is to me to be in here, with spring coming on to the hill and everything waking up. I tell you, I can hear the grass growing! I only hope this isn’t what death is like, you know, an empty box and a view of the car park. I should have gone to a normal hospital,’ he said petulantly. ‘I’d have been far happier on a ward, with a fat black lady taking my temperature.’

‘You didn’t want to go on a ward!’ protested Adam. ‘You wanted to come here.’

‘Thought I’d never come out of one of those places alive, didn’t I?’ muttered Paul. ‘Now I don’t know which is worse, dying with the riffraff or living alone in this hell. Besides, I thought the nurses would be better looking. The nurses are absolute dogs,’ he said, to me. ‘They send them to me specially. I’m not allowed to be stimulated.’

I made to remove Hamish from the bed but Paul shot out a hand from behind his head and gripped his arm with it.

‘Oh, leave him be,’ he said. ‘I like the feel of a warm boy next to me.’ He cackled delightedly at himself.

‘I don’t want him to hurt you.’

‘You mean you don’t want him hearing my filth — are you another of these protective parents? None of them will let me lay a hand on their babies, you know. I think Laura hoses hers down with antiseptic after they’ve been at Egypt. As for the new one, I have to request audiences with her, like Vivian did with the Pope. And she’s a Hanbury — my own flesh and blood!’

‘I didn’t know Vivian had seen the Pope,’ said Adam, from the bathroom, where he had gone to fill his father’s water jug.

‘That’s because she hasn’t,’ called Paul. ‘He wouldn’t have her. The Pontiff turned her down.’

Adam laughed. ‘Did he?’

‘He took the view,’ said Paul, ‘that dissolving Vivian’s marriage would be like dissolving a set of functioning molars. I think he’s a very sensible chap. You can’t go saying a marriage didn’t happen when there are two strapping children to show that it did. So he stood her up. She went all the way to Rome and he stood her up. At least, that’s where she said she was. She could have been anywhere. She was probably getting pissed on sangria with that hippy friend of hers and her dago shopkeeper husband. Now that I come to think of it, she did come back with her tan. Do you know Vivian’s tan?’ he asked me. ‘It’s very amusing. She looks like she’s been embalmed in salad dressing.’

‘Dad, do you want me to turn up the pump?’ said Adam. ‘The dial’s set lower than it was yesterday.’

‘The funny thing,’ said Paul, to me, ‘is that after His Holiness rebuffed her she kept going back for punishment. To Mass .’ He pronounced it to rhyme with ‘arse.’ ‘And because she’d had the gumption finally to leave her miserable drunk husband she wasn’t allowed to take the holy Host. She was considered to be excommunicated. For some reason she didn’t know she was, though. One day she was standing in the queue and when she got to the priest and stuck her tongue out he wouldn’t give it to her. He popped his wafer right back in the bowl and put his hand over it, as though she might steal one! Some interfering old bitch had told him that Vivian was excommunicado. So after that she went along and sat at the back and when everyone else got up to join the queue she stayed where she was and pretended to read the hymn-book. I said to her, how can you bloody let them do that to you! How can you let them win, do you see? I’ll bet they loved seeing her sitting there all contrite, while they were busy rogering the altar-boys — leave that bloody thing alone!’ he said to Adam, who was scrutinising a plastic valve from which a pale tube led to the hard delta of veins in Paul Hanbury’s brown, hairy wrist.

‘It’s just that it seems very low.’

‘I don’t want that bloody stuff in my veins!’

‘Dad,’ said Adam heavily, ‘all you’re doing is subjecting your body to unnecessary pain.’

‘I wouldn’t walk around with a blindfold on either.’

‘There’s nothing vital about pain.’

‘What do you mean! How will I know what’s happened to me if I don’t feel it? Answer me that! That’s how you walk over a cliff in life! You can’t go around numbing yourself and sedating yourself against half the things that happen to you and expect to get any sensation from the other half — that’s what it means, to do things by halves! Do you know,’ he said, to me, ‘I’ve been going to the dentist in Doniford all my life and I’ve never had an anaesthetic. While this big fellow —’ he pointed to Adam ‘— has to be unconscious before he’ll let them so much as clean between his teeth.’

‘I think you’ll find, dad, that most people have an anaesthetic when they go to the dentist.’

‘What do I care what most people do? Most people live lives of such surpassing inanity I don’t know why they bother! Most people want to sit in their little red-brick boxes on their little estates watching television, or drive around going nowhere in their cars, or stuff their faces with junk, or go shopping — and I’m not saying that’s any worse than what people have always wanted to do. The difference is that now they’ve got everything laid on for them. The world’s been wrecked, laying on their houses and their cars and their cheap holidays and their cheap food — and a hundred years ago, most of them would have been pushing a plough with not a thought in their heads, and be none the worse off for it!’

Through the great pale window the distant skeletons of trees were faintly picked out against a wad of sky. The hospital was half an hour’s drive from Doniford, I didn’t know exactly where, just that we had driven directly away from the coast and the green hills and become gradually mired in a flat, grey, nondescript landscape cluttered with buildings and petrol stations, and street lamps with nothing human to light, and warehouses behind wire fences. This clutter was not, it appeared, to amount to anything so definite as a town: like a tundra, its formlessness was its single geographical feature. The hospital was a low red-brick building that stood like an island in the sea of its car park. Inside, in the foyer, it blazed with light and with wood-veneered surfaces. The foyer was carpeted, as was the lift. The woman at the reception desk wore a tailored black suit and high heels and the nurses wore vague white uniforms, so that the whole place had an atmosphere of discretion that bordered on secrecy, as though the question of sickness were inadmissible; as though, were a drama ever to unfold here, it would manifest itself in the spectacle not of disease but of celebration of life itself.

‘We were at mum’s yesterday,’ said Adam.

Paul assumed a peevish expression. ‘Yes, David says she’s got the hump about something. I suppose I’ve said something I shouldn’t have, have I? Is that it?’

‘She’d better tell you about it herself,’ said Adam.

‘The first Mrs Hanbury,’ said Paul, to me, ‘is a very sensitive creature where her own thin skin is concerned. She’s like the princess who can feel the pea through twenty mattresses — I believe she considers it to be the mark of good breeding. She’s what they call “high maintenance”. So’s the second, now that I come to think of it, though in a different way. The second gets the blues. Vivian’s blues are like those fogs you get in Scotland that last for two weeks. They sort of envelop you and quietly soak you to the skin.’