Rachel Cusk - In the Fold

‘We’re talking about hippos and elephants,’ said Audrey, with an adversarial glint in her fronded eye. ‘You know what hippos and elephants are, don’t you? They’re big, sweet creatures that tolerate captivity. Some animals don’t, you know. They get sad and lethargic and their fur goes all mangy.’

Caris shook her head from side to side as though she were trying to dislodge something. Again I saw in her face the strange effort of self-realisation.

‘You make it sound so simple,’ she said.

‘Well, it was. Or is there something you don’t understand? Perhaps I’m being insensitive. The thing is, I never had the luxury of sensitivity. I had to take things as I found them. That’s the problem with children,’ she said, to me. ‘You go to the trouble of having them and then you find that all you’ve done is guarantee you’ll come in second place for ever more. I gave you life, sweetie,’ she said to Caris. ‘Wasn’t that enough?’

‘It wasn’t simple for me ,’ said Caris.

‘That’s so typical,’ said Adam. ‘Little Miss Self-Obsessed. If anyone found it hard it was Brendon. He was only six.’

‘The same age as Janie,’ nodded Lisa.

‘It wasn’t as bad for him as it was for me,’ said Caris, with her lilting smile.

‘Brendon used to bang his head,’ said Vivian strangely.

‘What do you mean, bang his head?’ said Adam.

‘He used to bang his head against the wall. It made the most horrible sound.’

Brendon looked around at everybody with an expression of astonishment.

‘See?’ said Adam triumphantly. ‘It was worse for him.’

‘I couldn’t stop him,’ said Vivian. ‘He did it in his sleep, you see. I used to make him go to bed wearing a hat.’

Brendon laughed loudly.

‘The things that went on!’ marvelled Audrey, drawing her coat tighter around herself. ‘It’s a good thing I wasn’t here to see it all. I don’t think I could have borne it! You see, they used to be like puppies,’ she added, to me. ‘They tumbled around together like lion cubs. Then they started to develop human characteristics — that was where the problems began, with the human characteristics. Now they’re like those countries that are always at war. They’re dug in, if you see what I mean.’

‘I’m not at war ,’ Caris said.

‘When you were puppies I could resolve your disputes, darling. It was all about who had whose thing. I was rather good at that. Whoever could hang on to it could keep it as far as I was concerned. It was when the human characteristics came along that I got out of my depth. I remember I started to think about shoes. I used to lie there at night and think about the silliest, most impractical shoes I could imagine. It was the only way I kept my sanity while all of you were at each other’s throats. The problem with shoes was that I could never wear them up here. I had to move to Doniford. I exchanged human characteristics for shoes,’ she said, to me. ‘It was the most enormous relief.’

‘You make it sound as though you planned it,’ said Caris, with a smile.

‘There’s no harm in a little planning,’ said Audrey. ‘A little planning goes a long way in human affairs. The people with characteristics don’t see it like that, though. They don’t like it when you’ve got characteristics of your own. Your father used to say that you were predators. They’ll take it all, he said, if you let them. They’ll rip your heart out and eat it if they have to.’

Adam, Caris and Brendon did not, it had to be admitted, look particularly capable of this gruesome feat. Adam still held the dogs awkwardly by their collars. Lisa stood next to him with the baby on her hip. I looked at the baby’s rubescent, startled face, which shone blankly like a little sun in the gloomy room, and at her plump, soft body, possessed by incomprehension. Beside Lisa, Caris looked black and monumental and unkempt. Her arms were folded and her face looked stormy and disordered, as though it had been taken apart and wrongly reassembled. Brendon sat blanched and prostrate in his chair. The air was charged with their mother’s force of will: next to her they seemed anomalous. Behind them Vivian haunted the cooker: she hovered, dark and frayed and threadlike. Audrey, compact, scented, her face blazing in its make-up, presented herself as an advertisement for the virtues of self-preservation.

‘Audrey,’ said Lisa, ‘I’m sure Paul didn’t actually mean that.’

‘That’s sweet of you,’ said Audrey vaguely. ‘But I think he probably did. Look at you all!’ she burst out with a gay laugh. ‘You look like a queue of dissatisfied customers! I think I’d better slip away, before I have to start apologising. You don’t ever want to apologise,’ she said, to me. ‘That’s how you give people the idea that you’ve done something wrong. Vivian darling, I just came up for that cheque. I think the postman must have pocketed it. It was due last week. It doesn’t matter, if you can just write me another now.’

Vivian stood over the saucepan of potatoes, which had begun to boil. Clouds of steam enveloped her head. The lid rattled on top of the pan and the water spilled out in little hissing spurts.

‘I don’t think I can,’ she said.

‘Usually I don’t like to bother you,’ said Audrey. ‘It’s so tiresome when people bother you, isn’t it? I think it must have got lost in the post. I’ve been lying in wait like a panther for the postman all week. When he comes I leap on him.’

‘But I didn’t post it,’ said Vivian.

‘And now I’ve had to come all the way up, and I had a thousand and one things I meant to do today — it was the last thing I wanted to do, to start coming up to Egypt! I always get embroiled when I come up here. Embroilment was not in the plan today. Today I was going to be all efficiency so that I could be carefree tomorrow.’

There was a silence in the kitchen. Audrey stood in an expectant pose, one hand slightly raised, as though to catch something she believed was about to be thrown to her, or as though she were holding a vessel from which she had just poured the last dregs of an important substance.

‘Vivian,’ she said meaningfully, ‘you do see how annoying it is for me to have to come up?’

Vivian said nothing. The baby made a plaintive sound.

‘In the middle of everything I had to start getting in the car and running around! Paul always said I wasn’t to do that, you know,’ Audrey said, to me. ‘Don’t wear yourself out, he said. Women always wear themselves out. By the time they get to fifty they’re like a set of old tyres. They’ve lost their tread.’

The telephone rang in the hall and before Audrey had finished speaking Vivian had darted out of the room to answer it.

‘Has she gone?’ said Audrey smartly, looking around. ‘I didn’t know she could move so fast. It’s because she’s being evasive — she’s moving fast to evade the issue.’

‘She won’t see dad,’ Adam said. ‘I’ve been trying to get her to go in but she won’t. I don’t understand what’s going on. Dad said that none of you have been in. Only Uncle David.’

‘I sent David as a sop,’ said Audrey darkly. ‘I suspected your father of shenanigans, but now I’m not so sure. I think Vivian may be acting alone.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ said Adam. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, mum.’

‘That was Laura,’ said Vivian abstractedly, coming in again. ‘I thought she was here but then the telephone rang and it was her. She’s in Doniford. I don’t know how she did it. She says she’s got the baby but the three older ones are still here. I haven’t seen them, have you? I don’t know how she did it,’ she said again. She looked around, as though thinking she might find her. ‘I was sure she was here.’