Rachel Cusk - In the Fold

‘Anyway, it did start me thinking, you know, about Egypt, about what it actually was. I mean, dad’s always talked about it as a working farm, as something that had to be nurtured and worked at. Pretty much from the minute we could walk we had to be out there helping, with the sheep and the hay harvest and the fencing, and hearing him talking about it all day and night, and now I’m beginning to wonder whether it wasn’t just a bit of a con. You know, whether he didn’t use it as a way to control us. I mean, if it isn’t a farm then what is it? It’s just a nice house, that’s all. A nice house.’

I tried to think of what the answer to his question might be.

‘I don’t understand why he didn’t tell me!’ cried Adam, thumping the steering wheel. ‘All these years it’s been, you know, when Adam takes over the farm, when I hand over the reins to Adam, Adam the son and heir — and in fact there’s nothing to hand over! There’s just Egypt, where he lives, and which he’ll only leave, as he’s fond of saying, in a wooden box. And I’m not waiting for that — it could take years! Even if I did get the house I couldn’t afford to maintain it on what I get from the practice. I’d have to sell. It’s worth more than a million pounds, you know. I got an off-the-record valuation from the agent in Doniford.’ He looked askance at me. ‘Incredible, isn’t it?’

‘Perhaps you should tell him that you’ve seen the accounts.’

‘I don’t think I can do that,’ said Adam after a pause. ‘I know dad. He’d cut me out completely. He’d leave everything to Brendon. Laughable as that may seem.’

Adam’s front door opened and Lisa appeared, mouthing and beckoning frantically. Finally she picked her way in her bare feet across the gravel. The soft shapes of her breasts jiggled beneath her T-shirt.

‘Caris is here,’ she said discreetly through the window. ‘She’s been here absolutely ages. We’re running out of things to talk about.’

She turned around and slowly picked her way back again.

Caris was sitting on Adam and Lisa’s sofa with her legs curled up beside her and the baby on her lap. Immediately I felt a certain kinship with her, as I had the first time I met her all those years ago, when she had wound the impermanent ivy around herself for adornment. I guessed that she, like me, held back from definitively securing the territories of her existence. Sometimes, when I looked at the people I knew, I saw them as the generals of invisible armies, always advancing and expanding. Their lives seemed to bulk out around them like pyramidal structures by which they were lifted higher and higher until they became almost impossible to see, and when they spoke it was of the next campaign and the one after, so that they appeared peculiarly more burdened by the future than by the past.

‘Hello, Michael,’ she said. ‘Still here?’

‘Still here.’

‘What is it you want from us?’ she said jovially. ‘What is it you’re after?’

‘Entertainment, I think. Or perhaps just distraction. I’ve forgotten which it was.’

‘Michael’s here to see Adam,’ interposed Lisa, who looked slightly alarmed by this exchange. ‘They’re old friends from university.’

‘I know Michael,’ said Caris grandly. She looked large and rather unruly in the tidy, pale-coloured room. ‘I know what’s under that beard, that’s how well I know him. Who’s this?’ she added, with a fluting note of suspicion in her voice, when she caught sight of Hamish. She looked around her, as though expecting someone to come and claim him, or at least to offer an explanation.

‘My son. Hamish.’

‘Your son? Well! I didn’t know!’

I didn’t see particularly why she should have known, but she seemed nonetheless slightly peeved at the fact of Hamish’s existence.

‘How old is he?’ she asked, looking from him to me and back again.

‘He’s three.’

‘Well!’ she said again. ‘Three years — so I was —’ she did a mental calculation ‘— yes, I had just moved to London then.’

I wondered if she would explain the way in which these two events were related. Today she was wearing a sort of beatnik outfit, with a black beret pressed down over her coarse, springy hair and a frayed black leather jacket.

‘You wouldn’t have heard, then,’ I said. ‘Not in London.’

‘I know you’re teasing me, Michael,’ she said, mock-reprovingly. ‘But I like to get things in order. I like to see the whole picture. There’s you over there —’ she illustrated my position, which was on the left side of the sofa, with one hand ‘— and here’s me over here —’ the right side of the sofa ‘— and we’re both travelling at the same speed on our separate roads.’ She lifted her arms while the baby wobbled precariously on her lap and together we were slowly precipitated forwards over the edge of the seat.

‘And the strange thing is,’ she continued, enlightened, ‘that exactly when you were increasing your estate I was shedding mine.’

‘Were you?’

‘I walked away from everything,’ she said dramatically. ‘I just walked away. My place, my relationship, even my family.’ The last she uttered furtively, out of consideration I supposed. ‘I left the money economy, and the sex economy, and the patriarchy of the home — it wasn’t easy.’

‘No, I don’t suppose it was.’

‘Are you being sarcastic, Michael? Because I know it’s tempting to be. But I happen to regard sarcasm as a vice, a crutch. I had to hurt a lot of people to be free.’ She stroked the baby’s feathery hair with her hand. ‘Some of them were innocent people. But I did it. And I don’t regret it.’

‘Free from what, exactly?’

‘I was sick,’ she said. ‘It was as though my body were full of poisons. But in fact it was full of lies and misconceptions, about who and what I was. A woman, hence secondary; a daughter, not a son; a sex object, a servant, a parasite. Someone who wasn’t capable of seeing past the end of her pretty nose, let alone of doing any good in the world. But I’ll tell you what, you’re never safe, you’re never really free from it — I haven’t been back here in eighteen months and yet it’s already started, the shame, the jealousy, the anger, the feelings of guilt.’

‘You haven’t left the money economy,’ interposed Adam from the kitchen, where he had withdrawn with Lisa on some nebulous domestic business. ‘You get money for those pots.’

‘Yes,’ said Caris, composedly, with her head held high, ‘we do. We have rent and bills to pay, like everyone else. And necessities, and some luxuries too. We’re a community, not a penitentiary. We’re just a group of women who’ve chosen to live together and support one another and pool our talents in the hope of doing some good, whether at home or elsewhere.’

‘I don’t think I could live with lots of other women,’ said Lisa, drawn from her sanctuary in the kitchen by the turn the conversation had taken. ‘Don’t you find you just fight all the time? I grew up with sisters and I’m telling you, we were awful. We were always nicking each others’ things and having great screaming rows, and we were ever so competitive, you know. Everyone says it’s men who are competitive, but I think women are much worse.’

‘Can men join your community?’ I asked.

Caris laughed. ‘Why? Are you tempted?’

‘I just wondered why freedom from society is something women can be seen to want but not men.’

‘If you have men,’ said Caris coolly, ‘then you are society. We’d be deferring to them and offering to do their laundry inside a month.’

‘Then you don’t have a very high opinion of yourselves.’

Caris smiled. ‘That’s why we’re there.’