Rachel Cusk: In the Fold

She folded her arms and looked at me sideways.

‘Oh, I see,’ she said finally, with a smile. ‘You’re one of those, are you? The sort of person who thinks everyone should be in a category .’

‘I was only questioning the idea that an artistic impulse could exist separately from what it wanted to express.’

‘Of course it can,’ she said. ‘An artist doesn’t emerge fully formed. He has to evolve.’

‘But you’re talking about wanting to be an artist. I’m talking about being one.’

‘What’s the difference? You make it sound like there’s some huge, important difference.’

‘Of course there is! You can’t just wander around saying you want to paint. Either you paint, or you don’t. I just think that if you were meant to paint you would know what your subject was. You wouldn’t need to look for it.’

‘You only say this because I’m a girl,’ said Caris presently. Her brows were furrowed above her glittering brown eyes. I saw that I had offended her. ‘If I was a man you wouldn’t say it — you’d be egging me on, giving me money and grants and trumpeting the fact that you’d discovered me. Whereas in fact what you want to do is crush me, isn’t it?’

She looked at me with her delicate face. I had to concede that there was some truth in what she had said.

‘Why do you want to crush me?’ she asked, wonderingly, with a little smile.

‘I want you to stay as you are,’ I said. ‘As you are right now.’

‘Do you know where we’re standing?’ she said.

I looked around me. We had wandered away a little from the party. We were in a place of foliage and moonlight where things snapped beneath our feet. The big, black presences of trees were around us.

‘We’re in a ring of oaks,’ she said. ‘It’s magic here, you know.’

I bent forward and kissed her. The distant commotion of the party was in my ears. Some seconds passed. Kissing Caris was like kissing a child. She was warm and sweet and she gave the impression of being entirely indifferent to what I was doing. She did not look as she had looked when Jasper the artist kissed her. I decided I would have to marry her. I would marry her and live with her at Egypt, along with all her family and perhaps even Jasper himself.

‘Happy birthday,’ I said again, stupidly.

Everyone was dancing on the lawn. The music and the shouting echoed down the hill in long chimes into the valley. I saw Paul Hanbury dancing with a very tall young woman, who swayed before him like a stalk of wheat while he scurried around her, crab-like, casting her salacious looks. When he saw me he grasped my hand and we all danced around together, me, him and the swaying girl. I couldn’t see Adam anywhere. I saw Vivian, standing by the drinks table with her arms crossed awkwardly over her stomach, talking to an elderly lady. Numerous children were dancing amongst the adults. Sometimes they danced with each other. More often their mothers danced with them, kind and weary-faced, stooped over. I noticed a fair-haired boy of eleven or so standing beside Vivian, gulping unnoticed from the wineglasses on the table. After each gulp he would look around him with a startled expression on his face. I guessed he was Adam’s brother Brendon, the boy I had seen in the chicken house.

When I turned back to the dancing, Audrey had manifested herself in front of me. She stood in her tight-fitting blue costume and high heels, one arm flung into the air and a bare leg planted dramatically out in front of her. She presented herself to me, glaring at me with the fiery, warlike countenance of an exotic bird embarking on its mating ritual. I saw that she was extremely drunk: she was incandescent; she was on fire. She began to dance around me in a strutting fashion, pausing occasionally to assume her dramatic pose, eyes blazing, arm aloft, as though offering me a challenge. Round and round me she went: I shadowed her uncertainly. In her exertion her face had grown warm beneath its make-up; the different colours shimmered greasily as though they had come alive, as though she were a living image of herself. Audrey clapped her hands on my shoulders. As she circled me she moved her hands over my shirt and said something with her painted mouth that I didn’t hear over the music. She bared her even, slightly yellowed teeth in a smile. A feeling of apprehension stirred in my stomach. She gave me an impatient look.

‘Do you like me?’ she said hotly into my ear, before circling me once more.

I smiled urbanely, or so I thought, and did not reply.

‘You can have me, darling,’ she said, into my ear. ‘You can take me now.’

‘I don’t think that would be a very good idea, Mrs Hanbury,’ I said quaveringly.

‘I need somebody to fuck me,’ she said. ‘I need somebody to fucking fuck me!’

She sounded quite annoyed about it.

‘I’m sorry I can’t help,’ I said.

‘I gave away my man and now I’m lonely,’ she said in my ear, in a little-girl voice. ‘Audrey gets very, very lonely on her own.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said.

I felt a firm, male grip on my arm.

‘Now, now, Audrey,’ said Paul. ‘Don’t get randy with Michael. Was she getting randy with you, Michael?’

‘Where’s Brendon?’ said Audrey vaguely.

‘Darling, I haven’t a bloody clue,’ said Paul. ‘What are you worrying about Brendon for?’

‘Someone should really put him to bed. All these children!’ She made an irritated gesture with her hand that clearly incorporated me. ‘They should all be put to bed.’

‘Is it good for you up here?’ said Paul. ‘Do you like it? Not everybody does.’

‘I like it very much,’ I said.

‘That’s because you’ve got manners,’ said Paul. ‘Tell Audrey to keep her hands off you — you’re a good boy. She gets a little heated sometimes, that’s all. It might be the menopause coming early. Her mother was the same.’

‘Oh, it’s fine,’ I said.

‘The people with manners like Egypt,’ said Paul. ‘It’s the ones that think too much that don’t. They find something false in it, you see, and they start to get ironic. I don’t like people being ironic — to me it means they’ve forgotten how to be natural. What are your people like, your family? Are they good-looking too, or are you the black sheep? Would they like it here, do you think?’

‘I’m sure they would,’ I said.

I realised as I said it that this was not true — they would hate it, but I wasn’t sure why. I wondered if this meant that they were ironic, and if the presence I sometimes felt in myself of something caustic was an inherited characteristic, like eye colour. I felt an urgent desire to slip free of that tendency. Someone had set up some fireworks in the field below the lawn and we went down to watch them. They banged like pistol shots in the darkness. Everyone whooped and clapped as they streaked up howling and burst into fountains of light. After a while the grey light of dawn slowly filled the valley. It was almost opaque: from where I stood on the hill it looked as though we were surrounded by sea. I stood on my own and watched it. I watched it and waited, as though I were a stowaway on a big, creaking ship making its way through the indifferent waters, watching the diminishing mainland, waiting for it to vanish and for my place on this laughing, unknown enterprise to be secured.

Recently a series of events caused me unexpectedly to meet the Hanburys again.

I mentioned once to my wife Rebecca the fact that Adam Hanbury still lived in Doniford, no more than sixty miles away. At one time we had been inseparable: now we could see each other any day we chose, yet we had not met for five or six years.