Rachel Cusk - In the Fold

I turned around with some of the things from the fridge in my hands and was surprised to see a look of protest, almost of affront, flit across Rebecca’s face as she saw them, as though my taking of food were inappropriate, or as though I were taking what she wanted for herself.

‘He sells jacuzzis,’ I said. ‘He’s offered him a job.’

‘My God,’ said Charlie. ‘I hope he’s not going to do that, in any case.’

‘He might. The farm’s losing money. It turns out his stepmother has been financing it all along, out of her own pocket.’

‘So it’s all a sort of illusion.’

‘Sort of.’

‘For whose benefit?’

I took a saucepan out of the cupboard and lit the gas with a match from a box beside the cooker. Taking the match from its box I was aware again of Rebecca’s strange gaze and its accusation of theft.

‘God knows,’ I said. ‘If you’d been there you’d have thought it was the father. The stepmother thinks that he — procured her. He and his wife, to bail themselves out. She claims now that they set out to destroy her marriage in order to get their hands on her money.’

Charlie shrieked.

‘What a scandal!’ she cried. ‘And is it true?’

I smiled at her tone.

‘I don’t know. It might be.’

‘But what’s she like, the stepmother?’

‘She’s slightly saturnine. She mopes around this great dark house. And Audrey is very vivacious.’

‘Is that the mother? The minx!’

‘They always seemed perfectly amicable. It was what I always liked about them. They seemed so uninhibited by their situation.’

‘Well, now you know why,’ said Charlie. ‘The second one couldn’t believe she’d got the man and the first one couldn’t believe she’d got the money! Are you listening to this, Becca? What I want to know is how it all came out. Were you there?’

I nodded. ‘Paul, my friend’s father, was in hospital for a few days. It seemed to be precipitated by his absence. Adam said he’d gone through the farm accounts, and then Audrey came up demanding money and Vivian wouldn’t give her any, and suddenly everyone was fighting about who’d done what to whom. Then one of the children shot his brother with a crossbow.’

‘My God,’ said Charlie in a reverent tone. ‘Over the money?’

‘No, no — a small child, one of Vivian’s grandchildren. He’d been given a crossbow as a toy and there was an accident. The bolt went into his little brother’s hand. A boy Hamish’s age.’

At the sound of his name Hamish slid off his mother’s lap and came to stand beside me at the cooker. His food bubbled in the pan. He rested his hand on the back of my leg; he leaned, as though against a tree or a solid section of wall.

‘It all sounds barbaric!’ exclaimed Charlie. ‘What happened? Was he all right?’

‘It was strange,’ I said. ‘His parents weren’t there and nobody seemed to want to take him to hospital. There was some doctor they all knew, a family friend who lived in the next valley, and they spent ages trying to track him down and arguing over where he was and talking to ten different people about him on the telephone and then it turned out he’d retired years ago and didn’t practise any more. Finally Adam’s wife took him to the hospital in Taunton. I don’t know what happened after that. She hadn’t come back when we left.’

‘What on earth were you two doing in this den of vipers? How did you come across them in the first place?’

I said: ‘I knew Adam at university. We lived next door to each other.’

‘I see. And —’

Charlie paused to remove her suede jacket. Beneath it she wore a black silk shirt which strained across her breasts as she moved, so that a string of gaps suddenly opened among the buttons down her front. A black lace garment was momentarily visible through them. The sight of it caused me to feel a confused sense of both suspicion and sympathy for her: for reasons I could not establish, her underwear reminded me of her humanity, of her native power both to wound and be wounded. Her hair snaked darkly over her shoulders as she turned and hung the jacket on the chair next to her. When she faced me again her countenance was flushed. I sensed that she had felt my notice of her and wasn’t sure what it meant.

‘— and at the weekends,’ she continued, ‘he used to take you back to the family pile.’

‘The first time I went there it was his sister Caris’s eighteenth birthday party,’ I said. ‘She’d never met me but she invited me anyway. The place is called Egypt Farm and on her invitation it said something like “Please come to Egypt”. It really annoyed me, but when I got there it suddenly seemed romantic.’

‘What about the sister?’ Charlie said, with the suggestive tone that irritated me. ‘Was she romantic too?’

‘She was far too sophisticated for me,’ I said. ‘She was having a relationship with an artist who used to paint her naked.’

‘Who was it?’ Rebecca enquired, in a remote voice.

‘I think he was called Jasper Elliot.’

Rebecca raised her eyebrows but said nothing.

‘So you admired the sister from afar,’ Charlie said, ‘and at eighteen you thought it was exciting that two women could be married to the same man and still be civil to each other. And we know Adam was more interesting in those days because Becca says he was. What about the father? I sense the father is at the root of all this.’

A feeling of discomfort, almost of apprehension, stole over me. I felt a sensation of nakedness across my back, a coldness, as though someone were standing behind me. As much to relieve this feeling as anything else I turned to lift Hamish and set him on a chair at the table. My hands cleaved to his slender ribcage. I was almost disappointed to feel how small he was, for in that instant I had been visited by the perverse illusion that he could offer me some protection. Instead he seemed so small as to be barely human.

‘He let me drive his car,’ I said.

‘I may be being obtuse,’ said Charlie, ‘but the symbolism of that is escaping me for the moment.’

‘The first time he met me,’ I explained. ‘He threw me the keys and asked me to go down to the town for more wine.’

I laid Hamish’s plate in front of him. Tendrils of vapour curled upwards around the fixed peaks of his face. Rebecca was watching us with an expression of unidentifiable emotion.

‘For the party?’

‘My father never once let me drive his car,’ I observed.

‘Perhaps your father attached more value to things.’

‘I don’t know. He might have.’

‘But the point was that he recognised you as a man and your father didn’t. And there he was with his two wives and his gorgeous daughter and his parties and his big house. Did you feel flattered?’

‘I felt relieved.’

‘About what?’

‘That things didn’t have to be so hard.’

At this Charlie sat back with an expression of triumph.

‘So he bought you too!’ she exclaimed.

‘Why would he bother to do that?’ I said, though I didn’t entirely disagree with her.

‘Maybe he envied you your incorruptibility. What I want to know is why you fell for it. You’re such a puritan , Michael,’ she exclaimed. ‘All this talk of aristocratic largesse and car keys — you don’t even have a car! You pay yourself slave wages down at that slum you call an office. You’re the least materialistic person I know and yet there you are getting all seduced and concupiscent over a sheep farmer! Perhaps this is your weakness,’ she said, with a devilish glint in her eye. ‘Perhaps this is your dark secret.’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ I protested, laughing.

‘Then what was it?’