Rachel Cusk - In the Fold

It was a grey, gelid afternoon. There was no breeze: the air in Nimrod Street was so still that it caused a physical sensation of numbness. The black twisted railings made little frozen, anguished forms amidst the broken stones. There was a quality of weightlessness to everything, of ceaseless intermission, that did not belong here but appeared to have followed me from The Meadows. It was clear to me, though I couldn’t have said why, that it was easier to build a hundred houses in Doniford than it was to remove three pieces of broken masonry from Nimrod Street. The green, shiny leaves of the laurel hedge beside the front steps were still thickly coated in white dust. Inside, the house was full of grey light and its rooms had a creeping edge of staleness, as though no one had entered them while we’d been away. Everything had contracted a little with unfamiliarity, become flat and angular like a garment removed and hung in a closet.

Rebecca was sitting in the kitchen with a person who had her back to me. I did not immediately recognise this person. Two cups and a teapot stood on the table between them. The kitchen looked different: it was untidy, in a light, girlish way. Rebecca’s things — scarves, items of jewellery, a pink hairbrush — were strewn over surfaces that now betrayed no relationship to the preparation or consumption of food. The atmosphere of repudiation that I had picked up on my way through the house was far stronger in here: it emanated powerfully from its source — Rebecca — where she sat a few feet away.

‘You’re back,’ she said, nevertheless failing to rise from her chair.

Hamish ran towards her, his feet making loud slapping sounds on the floorboards. Rebecca smiled a great smile and held out her arms to him, still sedentary, as though some misfortune which she was too stalwart to mention had paralysed her legs in our absence.

‘Look, Charlie’s here,’ she said to him as soon as she had got him in a clinch.

‘Hey, Michael,’ said Charlie, turning around in her chair and smiling brilliantly at me. A moment later she rose and kissed both my cheeks. I received a warm, confused impression of hair and teeth and rattling jewellery, borne pungently over me in a suede-smelling wave from her jacket.

‘I didn’t recognise you,’ I said.

The last time I saw Charlie her hair had been blonde. Now it was black.

‘Charlie’s come to stay with us,’ said Rebecca to Hamish.

‘It’s the hair,’ said Charlie. She grasped a strand of it and held it out to one side. ‘Becca says it looks like a wig.’

I saw that somehow, in the person of her friend, Rebecca had contrived to erect a barrier around herself that promised to withstand not just this moment of our return, but an indefinite number of days that projected impossibly outwards like a diving board over cold, unbroken waters. Feelings of disappointment, and of what appeared to be more fear than anger, knifed me soundlessly in the chest, in the back.

‘There’s nothing wrong with wigs,’ Rebecca said. ‘I actually like the superimposed effect. It makes you look like one of those Andy Warhol lithographs.’

I wondered why I had phoned Rebecca so frequently while I was away. It was, I now saw, a pointless, self-referential act by which I had succeeded only in illuminating myself as an object, as though I had taken the trouble to write letters to myself and post them home from Doniford. She looked at me occasionally in uncertain flashes. She was wearing a strange dress that I had never seen before. It was pale pink, with little sleeves the shape of cowslips and a neckline that revealed most of her freckled clavicle. The wistful colour did not flatter her. On her long, calloused feet were a pair of strappy pink sandals with six-inch heels like daggers.

‘How long are you staying?’ I asked Charlie.

My voice sounded out of turn, like an instrument playing loud notes not indicated in the score.

‘Oh, listen to him,’ cried Charlie, with comical pathos. ‘He’s all disappointed, poor thing!’

‘Did you miss me?’ said Rebecca to Hamish. She buried her nose in his hair with an obscure look of satisfaction.

‘He was hoping to have you to himself,’ Charlie persisted, ‘and now I’ve come along and spoiled it. I’d be touched, Michael, if I wasn’t frankly offended. People like me only get through life by being humoured, you know. We non-conformists depend on the charity of you family types.’

I thought of taking off my coat, but the atmosphere in the room discouraged it.

‘How’s Ali?’ I said to Rebecca.

‘Actually, she’s really well,’ Rebecca replied, having given the matter a few seconds of consideration that she gave the impression were overdue, as though she hadn’t thought about her mother’s health in weeks.

‘Has there been any news?’

‘What? Oh, that,’ she said, waving her hand dismissively in the air. ‘That’s all fine.’

Her manner was disconcerting: I wondered whether she was exercising this uncharacteristic discretion as a result of Charlie’s presence, but a moment later Charlie said, pityingly:

‘Poor Becca’s been worried sick about Ali.’

‘Thank God you were here,’ Rebecca fervently responded, grasping her friend’s hand across the table.

I said: ‘I thought someone might have started clearing away the rubble at the front.’

If I had hoped to kindle a propitiatory spark by the route of disgruntlement I was disappointed. Rebecca and Charlie looked at me as if they didn’t know what I was talking about.

‘Yes, what happened out there?’ exclaimed Charlie finally, opening her eyes very wide.

‘The balcony fell off,’ I said, because although it was improbable that Charlie hadn’t deduced this fact, she seemed to require an answer.

‘Thank God no one was on it,’ she said.

I hadn’t actually considered this possibility before. No one ever stood on the balcony. It was ornamental, and could be reached only by climbing out through the windows on the first floor.

‘I know ,’ concurred Rebecca, who to my knowledge had, like me, never set foot on it.

I said: ‘I came out of the front door one morning and it fell off. I was on the second step down to the street and it crashed down behind me. It missed me by a few inches.’

To my surprise, both women laughed.

‘You’re obviously completely traumatised!’ shrieked Charlie. ‘He’s obviously completely traumatised,’ she repeated, for Rebecca’s benefit.

I had no concrete objection to Charlie, other than in her current function as a sort of wrapper or container for Rebecca, by which I could see that Rebecca intended to elude me for as long as she could. She and Rebecca had been friends at school in Bath, but for as long as I had known her Charlie had lived in London, so that it was a tenet of their association that it had never been geographically easy to sustain: they pursued it with a sort of hectic diplomacy, as though they were the representatives of two distant states endeavouring to maintain relations.

Three or four years ago I had attended Charlie’s wedding, a cold, rain-sodden event I could only remember now in the light of the fact that Charlie had left her husband a year or so after it. Rebecca used to complain that her friendship with Charlie had become one-sided and perfunctory, as though it were the victim of ill-disposed market forces: these same forces reversed their direction when Charlie began to emerge from the carapace of marriage, sweeping Rebecca up in an ecstasy of renewed importance whose unforeseen consequence was that she now often accused me of disliking Charlie, or at least regarding her with suspicion. Rebecca’s theory was that I suspected Charlie of a cultish determination to motivate her friends to leave their husbands as she had left hers; or, less stridently, that exposure to Charlie would inadvertently result in the contagion of divorce entering our midst. In fact, if my awareness of Charlie possessed a certain clarity, then it resulted from a strange association I felt with the idea not of her notoriety but of her shame. Her wedding was bombastic and strikingly conventional: when the music started I remember she and her husband waltzed around the mud-spattered marquee before the applauding crowd, he in a dinner jacket and she in a long white dress too modish and flattering, somehow, for sincerity or even passion. Every time I saw her I remembered with what determination she had engineered the public display of her mistake.