Rachel Cusk - In the Fold

‘Roger would divorce me if I had any more,’ said Laura.

‘I made Paul get his tubes tied after Brendon,’ said Audrey. ‘He protested mightily. Oh, how the lord and master protested. He said it was the death of possibility. I said to him, darling, we’ve got three lumping great possibilities already. How much more possibility do you want? I said, if I have any more possibilities I’ll have to start wearing support tights and girdles. That galvanised him, I’m telling you.’

It was difficult to get a sense of Audrey’s face, submerged as it was beneath a meticulous mask of make-up. Two pencil lines described the surprised arc of her brows. Her eyelashes stood out in great curving black fronds which fanned up and down when she blinked. It was in her mouth, a red, wrinkled, oily delta of lipstick, that her age declared itself. Her eyes glittered erratically beneath the black fronds. She had retained, I saw, the tousled hairstyle of her earlier era, although today it looked slightly askew, as though it had been thrown at her head and nearly missed. I wondered whether she had had a facelift. The skin of her face had a boiled appearance, and there was about her generally an air of frantic uplift, of a bodily effort to ascend as though from some sinking substance in which her feet were mired. Caris was looking at her mother with her arms folded and the same strange, lilting smile on her face that she had worn earlier. Brendon remained at the kitchen table, but he had pushed back his chair and was holding his arms and legs slightly out to the sides, as though someone had just placed their hands on his chest and shoved him forcefully backwards. Adam still gripped the straining dogs by their collars.

‘I’m just going to put them out,’ he said again.

‘You’ll have to shut them back in the stable,’ said Vivian, who remained as though for defence behind the upended chair. ‘Right in, do you see, otherwise they get out through the gate.’

‘What are they saying?’ said Audrey, looking about her with gracious incredulity.

‘I’m putting the dogs back in the stable.’

‘Why on earth are you doing that?’

‘They’ve got a bit wild with dad away.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Audrey. ‘Come and see mummy, darlings. Don’t listen to what those horrid people say about you.’

‘They bark at Vivian.’

‘They bark at me ,’ said Caris, still smiling.

Audrey looked around the room in distress. Her garlanded eyes met mine.

‘Perhaps you can tell me what they’re talking about,’ she said sweetly. ‘They’re talking about locking up animals, aren’t they?’

‘If you’re going out I’ll go out with you,’ said Laura to Adam, edging towards the door with the baby in her arms. ‘I’m just going to run down to Doniford.’

‘Do you know Paul?’ said Audrey, to me. ‘He’s very fond of these old girls. I don’t think he’d like them being locked up, do you?’

‘They’re only dogs,’ said Vivian quaveringly. ‘They’re not children. It’s not as though we’re talking about locking up children.’

‘ What an extraordinary thing to say!’ gasped Audrey comically. ‘Are you suggesting something, Vivian darling, about my reputation as a mother? Because from what Caris tells me you’ve got some history of your own in that department!’

‘I was just saying that they’re only dogs,’ Vivian said.

‘I always think you can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat a dog,’ said Audrey, to all of us. ‘Particularly men. I like a man who gives a dog a good tousling. I can’t stand it when you see a man sort of cross his legs. And the ones who claim to be allergic are the worst.’

‘I’m the one that feeds them, you know,’ said Vivian. ‘I’m the one that looks after them.’

‘Is this dogs or children, darling? I suppose you’d say it was both. The feeding hangs heavy in both cases. Still, locking them up is a little extreme. I don’t think I went down that road, even in my worst moments.’

‘They should have gone to kennels,’ said Adam. He had an uncomfortable expression on his face, as though he were slowly being suffocated by his own body.

‘I always thought that about all of you,’ Audrey said. ‘I remember there used to be a sign on the way down to Doniford that said “Cat Hotel”. Every time I passed it I used to wonder whether they’d make an exception.’

‘That isn’t actually all that funny,’ said Caris.

‘It might not seem funny to you,’ said Audrey. ‘I think people don’t really develop a sense of humour until they have children,’ she added, to me. ‘It’s hard to take things quite so seriously once you’ve wiped a few bottoms. Mine seem to think that I don’t know about their bottoms. Perhaps it’d be better if I didn’t. There’s a point at which one’s information becomes obsolete — it’s terribly bad for the brain. I often look at women my age and think that they’re just slated for extinction, like the dinosaurs.’

‘In a way, you did put them in kennels,’ Vivian said, as though the idea were not unpleasing to her. ‘The children. You did board them in a way.’

Audrey laughed. ‘What a horrible thing to say, darling! And I suppose you were the kennel master. Of course,’ she said, to me, ‘everyone forgets the fact that they were with their father. He’d never have let them go in a million years. But don’t try telling that to anyone. If you’re a woman people think you owe them an explanation. And if you ever find one that feels sorry for you it’s even worse! They start telling you what you should be doing to get them back, and sending you the names of lawyers and asking whether you’ve rung them.’

‘Janie,’ said Lisa, in her ‘discreet’ voice, ‘I asked you to take Hamish and play together outside.’

‘All right,’ said Janie. ‘I’m not going out that way, though.’

‘Go out the front,’ said Lisa, ‘where we can see you from the window.’

She came to where I stood and held out her hand for Hamish. He took it quite willingly. Together they went to the other door and a moment later I saw them through the window out on the lawn. Hamish was walking over the grass in a straight line, like a toy that had been wound up. Janie walked beside him in a crouched position that suggested vigilance.

‘And had you?’ said Caris.

‘Had I what, darling?’ said Audrey.

‘Rung them.’

‘What, rung a lawyer? Of course not! We never needed lawyers, did we, Vivian? We were all eminently reasonable. The only one who got lawyered was Vivian’s poor old husband. We lawyered him all the way to the Isle of Wight, if I remember.’

‘He threw a rock through the window,’ said Vivian, looking around her abjectly, as though expecting to find it still lying at her feet.

‘I’m not surprised he threw rocks, darling. He was terribly upset. Paul always said what a rotter he was, but then it suited him to say that. Men tend to take the path of least resistance, I find. He was actually rather sweet, wasn’t he, Vivian? And he did love you desperately. They had these pet names for one another. He was Hippo and she was — what were you, Vivian?’

‘Elephant,’ said Vivian miserably.

‘That’s right!’ said Audrey, delighted. ‘Paul told me that Ivybridge was full of them, you know, little figurines of hippos and elephants. They collected them, the two of them! They were absolutely everywhere, apparently, all over the house. Whatever happened to them?’

‘I threw them away,’ said Vivian.

‘You might have let him have them,’ said Audrey reproachfully.

‘He didn’t want them.’

‘Poor Hippo,’ said Audrey. ‘Poor submersible creature.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Caris, who was wearing her expression of wonderment again.