Rachel Cusk - In the Fold

‘She didn’t want them, that was part of it,’ said Vivian, to me. ‘Her own children! That was the part that was really beyond belief.’

‘I won’t hear you!’ cried Caris. ‘I won’t, I won’t!’

She put her hands over her ears. Her expression was triumphant.

‘Personally,’ Adam said presently, in a statesmanlike tone, ‘I respect mum for it. You can’t put a price on Egypt, Vivian. Our family belongs here. It wasn’t that she didn’t want us. She did it for us. There’s a bit of a difference, don’t you think?’

Audrey was looking at her son with an interested expression, her finger resting on her chin.

‘The thing is,’ said Vivian, ‘it was only because my husband told me. I wouldn’t have known otherwise. I wouldn’t have known to ask. But he said, whatever you do, stick to it. Stick to it or they’ll have you lock, stock and barrel. It’s awful in a way, when you think of how we treated him. He got nothing out of it himself, you know. He lives in a flat. Laura says it’s awfully modest. I paid far too much for it, of course. They ran through it in a year!’

‘Do stop it, darling,’ said Audrey. ‘You’re sounding positively addled. What was I supposed to do? I had to get my house — I couldn’t just go and camp in a field, could I? And that sort of property is terribly expensive in Doniford. Everyone wants it, you know.’

‘He called me a bloody viper.’

‘Who did?’

‘A bloody viper. Don’t you think that’s vicious?’ said Vivian, looking around at us. ‘He said he’d never forgive me!’

‘You had to do without Hippo’s forgiveness,’ said Audrey. ‘We all did. Thank heavens for the Isle of Wight!’

‘He said, I’m not giving Egypt to a bloody viper. I’m not giving my house to a bloody snake in the grass, that’s what he said. And I said, well, I shan’t come then, you can manage on your own. He was terribly rude, you know. But he signed. He had to sign — he had no choice, do you see? I felt rather pleased with myself. I wanted to ring my husband and tell him but of course I couldn’t by then. He wouldn’t speak to me.’

‘Sign what?’ said Adam.

‘I don’t think he ever has forgiven me, you know,’ said Vivian miserably. ‘At the time I thought I’d been rather clever, but now I wish I hadn’t done it. I sometimes think he might have felt more for me if I hadn’t. And you don’t forget it, someone calling you a bloody viper, not when you have to see them every day. It wasn’t as though I even wanted the farm! Ivybridge was much more sheltered, you know — one got the sun all year there. I wonder sometimes if my husband knew that was what would happen. He was the one who encouraged me, you know. He was the one who said I had to get it all in my name.’

There was silence in the kitchen. The Hanburys stared at one another, stared and stared, with faces that filled with calculation and then emptied and filled again. There seemed to be no air in the room, no suspending element — it was as though we stood in the lee of a gathering wave as it sucked everything back into itself. I felt the presence of a catastrophe, an emergency whose tumultuous moments we had entered as a boat might enter a field of rapids. A bitter smell assailed my nostrils. I realised that the room was filling with smoke.

‘I think the potatoes are burning,’ I said.

Just then there was a child’s cry out on the lawn, a wail that went up and down and came closer like a siren, until it was in the hall, echoing horribly in the confinement of the house. There was the sound of something being knocked over and falling with a clatter to the floor. Janie burst into the kitchen. Her face was a wreck of tears.

‘Rufus shot the little boy!’ she shrieked. ‘They’re out in the garden! You have to come! He shot the little boy with his crossbow!’

I don’t know what the others did. I ran out of the house and over the damp lawn, towards the ring of oaks where Caris and I had once kissed, and where I saw the fair heads of the children, clustered together like the bright little heads of flowers, weaving and moving as though in the ecstasy of their impermanence.

I returned to Bath and to Nimrod Street and found that the rubble from the fallen balcony, including the three large segments of broken limestone slab, remained strewn over the front steps.

The journey from Doniford had taken most of the day, though it was only sixty miles or so. There was no one to drive Hamish and me to the railway station: Lisa, whose sensitivity to practical matters could normally have been relied on, was not at home; and Adam had bidden us a sincere but unavailing farewell over breakfast, before vanishing up the hill to Egypt in his car with an expression of grim preoccupation on his face. Alone in the warm, silent, airless house we packed our things. A sense of failure dogged me as I went through the rooms retrieving those items that belonged to us, as though they were the detritus of some breakage or disaster, the evidence of a lack of love or merely care of which I was conveniently cleansing the scene. I could not attribute this failure entirely either to myself or to the Hanburys. Instead I was possessed by an awareness of how little survived the business of human encounter. What would be left of Rebecca and myself, once the storm of our association had abated? What did we have to show for ourselves? Hamish watched me as I put my violin in its case and laid the purple cloth like a shroud over its carved face. He seemed to tremble with a precarious, pregnant stillness, like a drop of water hanging from the corroded lip of a tap. For a moment his insubstantiality enraged me. I felt that I could have dashed him, shaken him off and demanded instead to know where the life was that made its robust demands, that insisted on itself in the face of everything that reverted to inconsequence.

We closed the front door behind us and it locked with an automatic, impersonal click. For nearly an hour we stood in Doniford on the grey, shuttered Sunday high street waiting for a bus, which presently emerged from the empty streets and carried us through the deserted haunts of its route, through tracts of green hemmed by frayed, budding hedgerows, through indifferent villages that we patiently unearthed from their tangle of narrow, muddy, aimless lanes, as though we were circulating around an organism that otherwise would have lapsed into its own mysterious, unregulated version of existence. The driver pursued his destiny with cursory speed, flying past some stops and observing unfathomable pauses at others, during which he switched off the engine and read a newspaper folded on his lap while Hamish and I, his only passengers, sat side by side on our oversprung seat in a clear torrent of silence far louder than the crowded din of the train that subsequently bore us in long, smooth surges to Bath. At the station we took a taxi: passing through the city I was struck at first by its rich, historied appearance and its textured, flesh-toned buildings that seemed like living things after Adam’s house. Everything was moving, almost undulating: the cluttered light, the noise of traffic and voices and garbled ribbons of music, the teeming pavements, the rows of shopfronts opening and closing their doors in numberless mechanical embraces, the scatter of pigeons and the clustered fall of water from fountains, the dark, stately motion of the river — it all churned and moved in a body, rising and falling inchoately like the sea. The taxi went at walking pace through the obstructed streets. People snagged and formed blockages around every shop window and restaurant and frequently spilled out into the road. There were so many people that on the pavement beside us the crowd ceased to move and instead seemed to swell, pushing inwards at its core so that people staggered or were crushed against each other, and I saw a look of uncertainty pass like a great shadow over their faces. A man was forced backwards off the kerb and stumbled as his shoe came off. I thought how hard it was, and yet how necessary, to love. Hamish’s hand rested beside me on the seat and I picked it up and held it. It was so small and soft and limp that it almost seemed as if it might dissolve in my palm, but I hung on to it as though it were the last thread connecting me to the earth, until his fingers grew warm and flexed themselves and he returned the pressure of my grip. We stopped and started along the street until at last we reached London Road, unfurling east from the packed core of the city, its beauteous facades casually dirtied by passing traffic.