Rachel Cusk - In the Fold

‘Well, she can’t tell me if she doesn’t come.’

‘There’s a phone beside the bed, dad.’

‘I can’t talk to her on the telephone. I never could — she uses it as an instrument of torture.’

‘Something to do with money. She says she hasn’t got her allowance. I didn’t know what she was talking about.’

Paul was silent. He held his head up in a soldierly fashion, as though bravely contemplating some doom-laden enterprise.

‘Tell Vivian to come in, will you?’ he said presently. ‘Tell the old girl to come in. Tell her I’m not too good. Put her in the car and bring her yourself if you have to. Will you do that for me?’

‘All right,’ said Adam. ‘She said she was coming anyway. She’ll probably be here before I even get a chance to speak to her.’

‘I don’t expect she will. Just do as I ask. Get the old girl in here where I can see her.’

‘It’ll probably be tomorrow rather than today.’

‘Make it as soon as you can, there’s a good boy,’ said Paul.

‘Has the consultant been in yet?’

‘What? Oh, yes.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He was an Asian fellow,’ said Paul. ‘Knew his stuff, though, I’ll say that for him,’ he added. ‘He said he came from Kerala in the south of India — a beautiful place apparently, he told me all about it, white buildings and trees, hot as hell. The Christians colonised it in the fifteenth century. Now he’s living in a suburb of Taunton. I said to him, if you know what beauty is, how can you stand to live without it? And he said, “Beauty is secondary, Mr Hanbury.”’ Paul put on an accent to relay the consultant’s sentiments. ‘I said to him, don’t they need consultants in Kerala? Yes, he said, they do. So I said, well, tell me why you’re here then. He looked a little taken aback, you know, a little superior. Then he started yakking on about skills and training and equipment, and suddenly I thought, here it is again! Selfishness! Greed! So I said, admit it, you’re here because they pay you more. And he admitted that he was!’

Paul gave a bark of laughter and sat back against his pillows with his arms folded. His expression was morbid.

‘When did he say you could come home?’ said Adam.

‘Monday. Tell Vivian that too. Tell her not to bring out the fatted calf. Tell her I’m on a hospital diet. Have you experienced Vivian’s cooking?’ he asked me. ‘Awful, isn’t it? The first Mrs Hanbury wasn’t bad, but she never ate the things she cooked, which used to make you wonder what she’d put in it.’

‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ said Adam.

‘Don’t forget, will you? You’ve got to bring Vivian in. Actually in, do you hear?’

‘Goodbye, Paul,’ I said.

I held out my hand and Paul grabbed it and pulled me nearly on to his chest. Hamish, whom I was holding, clung to my neck as we went over and Paul put his arms around my neck too, so that I lay across the bed like a fallen tree being strangulated by vines.

‘Kiss me,’ said Paul gruffly, and I obeyed by kissing his leathery cheek. ‘You’re a good boy,’ he said. He released my neck and gripped my face between the vice of his hands instead. ‘It’s rather soft, your fur,’ he said. ‘Do you put anything on it?’

‘No,’ I said, with difficulty.

‘I never petted mine enough,’ he said hotly, into my ear. ‘You’ve got to pet them and stroke them every day, then they’ll never give you any trouble. Every day, do you hear? The day you forget is the day they’ll get it in their minds to turn against you!’

He released my head and turned to Hamish, who was regarding him close to with a certain alarmed curiosity. He ruffled Hamish’s fair hair, before making an unexpected and not inaccurate attempt at Hamish’s bell noise.

‘Goodbye, fellow-me-lad,’ he said, laughing loudly.

*

In the car on the way back to Doniford I kept turning around and talking nonsense to Hamish and tickling his toes as he liked them tickled, aware as I did so that I was harbouring a feeling of guilt about what suddenly seemed to me to be the unsatisfactory state of his circumstances. As we drew into The Meadows, a mild feeling of oppression settled over me. In the flat, late-afternoon light which cast no shadows, unstirred by wind or rain, there was something actually inhuman about the place. I noticed that several of the houses had caravans parked in their driveways, white and rounded, like the babies of the stolid, red-brick adults, as though the big dwelling had mechanistically spawned the small. The caravans were the only things here that were neither square nor triangular, though I supposed that if they stayed long enough they might become so. The houses stared dumbly out of their windows.

‘What I like about this place,’ said Adam, steering us with conspicuous smoothness around the tarmac, ‘is the fact that it doesn’t remind me of anything.’

‘On the phone you described it as hilarious,’ I observed.

‘Well, it is, in a way,’ he said. ‘If you were going to be a snob about it.’

We passed a group of children in spotless tracksuits and baseball caps, who lifted their white faces to us as we went by.

‘I’m not saying we’re going to stay here for ever,’ said Adam. ‘But for now it actually suits us really well. At least it isn’t pretentious. It doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not.’

I heard the voice of Lisa speaking through this remark.

‘With some of the houses they’re building now, they’re trying to make them look as though they haven’t just slapped them up. I think that’s worse, in a way. Actually, the houses here have gone up fifteen, twenty per cent since we bought, and that’s partly because you’re not paying for some mock-Georgian porch over your front door, or a carport with a cupola. You’re paying for the location and the outside space. There are houses in Doniford now that are twice the size of ours with half the garden. Lisa gets itchy feet sometimes,’ he added presently.

‘Does she?’

‘She’d like more, you know, grandeur. But we’re just going to have to wait. We’ll have to wait and see what happens. This is a pretty solid investment.’ We both contemplated the house, in whose driveway we were now parked. ‘Tony’s offered me a job,’ Adam disclosed, with his face sideways to mine. ‘Lisa’s father. He’s offered me a share in the business.’

‘Are you going to take it?’ I said, surprised.

‘I don’t know. Lisa’s pretty keen. She’d like to be near her family. I can’t quite see myself up north but in a way it’s a fantastic opportunity. Tony’s thinking of retiring. They’ve got a place in Portugal, you know, and they want to spend more time there. So I’d basically be running the show. It would mean giving up my practice, of course,’ he said, ‘though I don’t feel particularly sentimental about that. It would be a relief, actually. I just did it for something to do until dad needed me to take over the farm. But that’s all changed a bit.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well —’ Adam rubbed his face with his hands sheepishly. ‘I’ve been going through some of the accounts this week. I was just being nosy, actually. Dad’s never really said anything specific about what the farm earns — there’s just been, you know, this impression of money, but in fact he’s been running it virtually at a loss. He makes five, six thousand a year, most of it from subsidies. It’s incredible — I don’t know quite how he’s done it. The new barns alone cost a fortune, plus the tractor and all the new fencing. In fact, if he sold his whole herd he wouldn’t begin to cover the cost. I suppose Vivian must have paid for them.’

We sat there in silence for a moment.