Rachel Cusk - In the Fold

I remembered that golden day of Caris’s party, which remained untouched in my recollection in all its exquisite irretrievability.

‘Something happened to me almost as soon as I got there,’ I said. ‘I had an — intimation.’

‘Of what?’ said Charlie.

‘That my life was going to expand and expand and become beautiful.’

A silence followed this disclosure. The gaze of the two women grew so discomfiting that I added:

‘It was a quality they had. The Hanburys.’

‘And what was this magic quality?’ said Charlie.

‘They made it seem as though all you had to do was something other than what you thought you should do.’

Charlie nodded her head abstractedly, as though this proposition pleased her.

‘I see,’ she said presently. ‘And that became your motto, did it? To live adjacent to your own conservative compulsions. That’s not bad. Of course, I didn’t know you before you experienced this divine revelation. Was it as transforming as that? Would you be sitting here now, for example, in this gorgeous, crumbling residence, with the gorgeous Rebecca, if these Hanburys hadn’t got their claws into you?’

‘I didn’t say it was a revelation.’

‘Oh yes. It was an intimation . You haven’t answered my question.’

I wasn’t sure I wanted to answer it. Rebecca had turned her head and was looking at me with a shadowy, inscrutable expression. I realised that I still had my coat on. It seemed for a moment as though I could leave, as though I had given them all the satisfaction it was in my power to give.

‘It might have been the feeling that I didn’t need to possess things to experience them,’ I said. Charlie’s face was blank. ‘Think of it as a picture,’ I added.

‘A picture.’

‘Of a house on top of a big hill overlooking the sea, with these people in it and a party going on.’

‘Is this a point about art?’

‘Sort of,’ I said.

‘And suddenly you decided to visit this charming little picture,’ said Charlie. ‘You took your life in your hands. Was this by any chance related to your near-death experience on the front step?’

‘I thought I should see Adam,’ I said. ‘I suppose it was a social compulsion.’

‘You forgot it was a picture.’

‘I couldn’t remember any more what it always made me remember.’

‘So you went back,’ said Charlie, ‘and these models of bohemian living turned out to be a pack of money-grubbing reprobates. Egypt!’ she snorted, shaking her head and laughing.

At this moment Rebecca spoke.

‘It isn’t anything to do with art,’ she said. ‘It’s to do with cowardice.’

Her voice was so cold that it abraded me like a fierce, freezing wind where I stood. Had we been alone I believed in that instant I would have rushed to her in my petrifying nakedness and begged her for warmth and forgiveness; but then the moment passed, and I found myself subsiding once more into a familiar accommodation with our remoteness from one another. Charlie gave a surprised laugh.

‘That’s a bit harsh, Becca,’ she said.

‘It’s true,’ said Rebecca, obstinately but with a little less frigidity. ‘Anyway, it’s unnatural not to be possessive. Men are supposed to be possessive.’

‘Are they?’ said Charlie.

‘It doesn’t mean they’re compromised,’ Rebecca persisted. ‘It takes courage to set the terms — look at dad, for heaven’s sake! He’s always out there, taking risks, making things happen, and for what? To make us safe .’ She raised her hands aloft, to indicate the very roof under which we sat. ‘You could call him domineering or macho or possessive, but the fact is that he lives life ten times more passionately than the rest of us!’

This way of speaking about her father was quite a new facet of Rebecca’s personality. I sensed she deployed it as a tool, to make the work of exposing my own shortcomings less time-consuming. Yet I remembered that when I first met her, it was the very qualities she was now claiming to admire in Rick that used to cause her pain.

‘Well,’ said Charlie, ‘I suppose we can’t all be like daddy. It’s Michael that I’m worried about. His whole philosophy of life is in ruins.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said.

‘I always find that the less things matter the harder they are to live with. He looks like he’s about to leave us, Becca. He’s got his coat on. Tell us you’ll stay, Michael.’

‘He’d never leave,’ said Rebecca sullenly, as though my steadfastness were one of the irritating constituents of marriage to which she had been forced to reconcile herself. ‘Never. It isn’t in his nature.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ said Charlie. ‘Tell us you’ll stay,’ she repeated.

Pulling out a chair next to Hamish I sat down at the table. He had finished his supper and he clambered on to my lap and laid his cheek against my chest. Earlier I had marvelled at his fragility but now he felt like a boulder pinning me to my seat. My heart was thudding uncomfortably. For a moment the sense of my own precariousness was intolerable. It inflamed me with feelings of violence: I wanted to smash and break, to turn the table on its side and send the teacups sliding to the floor, to demonstrate what was mine by destroying it. This feeling passed as quickly as it came. In its wake a terrible loveliness seemed to adhere to everything around me. The first stain of dusk tinted the room unexpectedly before my eyes. I looked at the two women sitting in their chairs. The chairs were antiques with wooden backs carved in the shape of hearts: they belonged to Rick and Ali, as did most of our furniture. They were beautiful, though not particularly valuable. Rebecca, in her draining pink, with her sandy-coloured hair gathered in a tangled knot on the top of her head, had her arms folded and her legs crossed. Her head was turned so that she could be seen in profile, eyes downcast; a posture redolent of some inadequacy, some lack she perennially found in her experiences, so that she gave an impression that was familiar to me, of being in silent correspondence with the concept of a shortfall, of looking down into it, as though it were a hole bored into the ground next to her. Charlie made a dark shape, denser and more solid. She sat straight and kept her eyes ahead. I could see the edges of the heart-shaped chair backs around each of them, like pairs of wings; and it may have been this illusion that gave me the sense of a relationship to their femaleness that was tenuous and fleeting, almost unworldly, as though their robustness as human beings was attended by something fragile and fluttering, something of which they themselves were barely conscious, something that every word and gesture crushed but that rose again and again, released into the air by each new pause like a delicate butterfly from a dense, fibrous confusion of greenery. I felt a desire both to help them and to be indistinguishable from them, to be incorporated into whatever mystery it was that gathered in a mist around them. It seemed a sort of tragedy to me, because within that desire was contained the trace of a memory, a streak of recognition that ran across it; not of any particular event but of a state that was less combative, less rooted in the body, a harmonious time that I supposed must have been childhood, though I wasn’t sure which part of it.

‘Charlie’s thinking of moving back to Bath,’ said Rebecca.

‘Are you?’ I said.

‘She’s got a job at the university.’

‘I’ve got an interview,’ amended Charlie. ‘I haven’t got a job.’

‘You’ll get it,’ Rebecca replied, with a far-seeing tone.

‘There are a lot of things I have to work out first,’ said Charlie mysteriously.