by Rachel Cusk
I laughed. The evening softened and lengthened out towards the sea, which lay pacific and opaque far below. The lawn was crowded with people in the dusk, shouting and laughing noisily. Their noise in this empty, elevated place flew wildly up into the air like a river of sparks from a beacon; the party was like a big fire laid out on the hill, generating heat and light in the falling darkness, growing molten and indistinct at its core. Someone lit Caris’s candles. Someone else put on some music. I saw Paul Hanbury roaming the lawn with his shirt unbuttoned and a bottle of wine dangling from his fingers. I saw Caris standing near me in her luminous dress and I said:
‘Happy birthday.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, smiling brilliantly, as though I had paid her a compliment.
‘It’s a good party. It was nice of you to invite me. Especially since you’d never even met me.’
‘I feel as though I had met you,’ said she earnestly. ‘Adam talks about you a lot. I feel you were meant to be here.’
I was surprised to hear that Adam talked about me. I couldn’t imagine what he would say. It caused me to feel an inextricable mixture of pleasure and affront, though I liked the feeling of being possessed. I liked to be compelled through my own resistance. I liked too the fact that the Hanburys’ privileged circumstances left me with the illusion that I was indifferent to them.
‘Are these your friends?’ I asked, because I had noticed that most of the guests on the lawn were far older than Caris.
‘Of course they are,’ she said, smiling incredulously at me in a way that nonetheless managed to suggest that they might not have been.
‘Even him?’ I asked.
There was a corpulent old man with a walking stick standing entrenched in the middle of the dancing. He wore knee-length breeches and a tweed jacket.
‘That’s Barnsie,’ protested Caris, laughing. I was gratified to see her face turn red. ‘He always comes to our parties. Mum and dad used to have the most amazing parties,’ she added. ‘I seem to remember even Barnsie getting pretty wild. They could last for days. I remember when I was little going to bed and then getting up in the morning and finding them still at it. They’d carry all the furniture out on to the lawn. I used to come out here and find dad sitting on the sofa on the grass at breakfast time, smoking a cigar.’
It irritated me that she kept talking about the past, as though the superiority of that era were a matter of agreement between us; as though we were two diminutive people whose stature had relegated them to a life on the sidelines.
‘Your family are very unusual,’ I said.
‘I know,’ she said quickly. ‘I keep having to remind myself that one day soon I should leave Egypt and go and see some other part of the world. I don’t want to. I want to stay here. I think I’d be quite happy, wandering in the fields, painting pictures of flowers.’
‘What are you going to do?’
She sighed in the dusk.
‘Paint,’ she said. ‘Not flowers, though. I don’t know what. That’s what I have to work out.’
‘Shouldn’t you have worked it out already?’ I said. ‘I mean, shouldn’t you have at least some idea what you want to paint before deciding to become an artist? I mean, what’s the point of just painting for the sake of it? What’s the point?’
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.
TWO
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.
‘He’ll come around,’ said Rebecca, sagaciously.
I guessed she was referring to the ‘big wheel’, a theory of events she had lately taken to propounding. Its basis was that existence is not linear but circular and repetitive. The idea was that you didn’t have to go out and get anything – you just sat and waited for it to come to you, and if it was meant to, it would.
‘He might just keep going the way he’s going,’ I said. ‘We all might.’
‘It’ll turn,’ said Rebecca.
She revolved something invisible on the axis of her hand to illustrate her point. I was surprised to see how slow and grinding the revolution was, as she conceived it. Her hand only moved an inch or two. She spoke quite blithely, though. It was not a chore to her, this turning. It was a spectacle from which evidently she derived a certain joy. I wondered whether the fact of our estrangement altered what I knew of the three years during which Adam and I were friends. It made me feel uneasy suddenly to think of it, as though everything that had happened since rested structurally and irremediably on that intensity that had given way so silently to indifference. Or, as though I had failed at numerous points in my life to establish whether it was for their lasting significance or their transitory attractiveness that I had chosen my circumstances, with the strange result that in the light of my friendship with Adam Hanbury, the existence I had constructed without him appeared to me momentarily as both insignificant and totally binding.
‘I heard he got married,’ I said. ‘I think they have some children.’
My wife shrugged and smiled a mysterious smile. It was unclear whether she was acknowledging she could provide no proof of this, or indicating that the subject of marriage and children was beneath her commentary. I wanted to take issue with the big wheel and the idea that we were all stuck on it going round and round, endlessly held at a remove from the things we wanted. I suspected Rebecca only liked it because it proved that nothing was your fault.
‘I don’t understand,’ I persisted, ‘why we don’t see each other. We used to see each other every day.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Rebecca, who was apparently becoming irritated. ‘It obviously wasn’t your time.’
She meant, in terms of predestination.
‘Was it all a waste, then?’
‘How should I know?’
‘You’re always telling me I should ask more questions.’
‘Some questions don’t have answers,’ said Rebecca. She looked fatigued. She fanned her face with her hand.
She had complained several times about the fact that I never asked her anything. What should I ask her? She didn’t know – that was one of the questions that didn’t have an answer. Sometimes I saw in her a yearning for a time of reckoning that I felt she didn’t fully understand. She seemed to think that a move into an era of analysis and interrogation would constitute a new, living chapter in our relationship, or a new source of nourishment, as though after a famine; where to me it was clear that it would signify only that our relationship was over, that the disaster had occurred and that neutral forces of rationality, of law and order and civilisation, were now washing over the wound. Marriage seemed to me to depend on two people staying together in time. It was like a race you ran together, a marathon. You kept your eyes ahead and you tried to surmount your weariness, and you reconciled yourself to the fact that while it may not be strictly enjoyable, at least running this race was healthy and strenuous and relieved you of the burden of thinking what else you might do with your time. I remembered a period of weeks or months when waking to the fact of my life with Rebecca was like waking to find an intricate, moving pattern of sunlight on my body.
She was wearing a garment that resembled a complicated piece of Victorian underwear. It was cross-hatched with ribbons and little buttons and straps and it was edged with gathered lace all around the neck, so that in its painstaking envelopment of her form it seemed almost to be expressing love for her. Her face was mournful. I had the feeling I had begun occasionally to have, as though I were reaching the bottom of a long fall into water and were experiencing the change in pressure as I hollowed out the end of my trajectory and began to rise again. All the things I had gone streaking past on the way down now hovered around and above me, immanent, patient.
‘Given that you always claim to feel so powerless,’ I said, ‘I don’t see why you cleave to theories that make a virtue out of passivity.’
‘What are you talking about?’ she said.
Her pale-blue eyes flashed past mine, little rents in her countenance. She looked momentarily lively. I had come to view Rebecca’s demeanour as involuntarily symptomatic of her consciousness, as though it were a drug she had taken whose crests and falls I had learned to read.
‘If I haven’t seen Adam Hanbury it’s because I haven’t bothered to pick up the telephone and talk to him. It isn’t because of any wheel, or because it wasn’t our “time”.’
In fact, as I spoke I realised that, as was often the case with Rebecca and me, the truth lay somewhere between us, lost.
‘Call him, then,’ shrugged Rebecca, with the clear suggestion that she regarded
this as a typically dull, even a craven way to proceed, compared with waiting for Adam to ‘come around’.
That conversation was the first sign of the Hanburys, as a green spear poking through the brown earth might be the first sign of spring. Rebecca and I lived in Bath, in the middle of a Georgian terrace on Nimrod Street, in a house that belonged to Rebecca’s parents but which they were continually conferring on us, in one of the long, complicated strands of human intercourse of which their life was woven. The Alexanders liked to exist in a condition of sustained embroilment. Emotion by itself was a poor dish to serve up, without the accompaniment of a decent helping of practical, financial and social entanglement. It was this quality that attracted me to them, as it had attracted me to the Hanburys. Rebecca’s family never seemed to feel the need to bring anything to a conclusion. Whenever life retreated from them a step or two their response was always to pursue it and offer more, to attain new heights of risk and ridiculousness. They lived in a big house up the hill in Lansdown, which gave out views of the city that appeared to have been expropriated by conquest, and which was so beautiful and original inside that from the first minute I saw it, it could not help but become a factor in my feelings for the Alexanders. Every time I went there it aroused a strange need in me, as though for consummation; yet it made me anxious, too, with intimations of loss. The most striking feature of the house was at the back, where they had demolished a whole section of infrastructure to create one vast room. Entering this room was like rounding a bend to a view of the sea and feeling the burden of proportionality lift from your chest. It was the height and width of the whole house, and at the far end the outside wall had been replaced with enormous panes of glass, so that it shimmered and moved like water when the light came through. Up this wall of glass the Alexanders had trained three dark-green, tropical-looking cheese plants which stood in three big tubs on the floor. Over time they had climbed and extended themselves and met one another to form a great green web over the giant window. Some of their thick, rubbery leaves were two feet or more across and they curled out into the room from the dark, vigorous tangle of stems. The effect was slightly grotesque: the presence of this dark, creeping, living thing in the atrium of light was somehow monstrous. When I first saw it, it reached to about two-thirds the height of the room, but over time it found the ceiling and began to move inexorably outwards, horizontally over our heads. It both irritated and charmed me that the Alexanders had arranged something about which it was impossible to feel neutral at the very centre of their domestic habitat. Sometimes I found the presence of the plant almost intolerable, and sometimes it appeared to me as a stroke of genius, without which the room would lie naked and victimised in its bath of light. The sun came in as though through a pattern of lace. In summer, when the windows were open, the big, stiff, curled leaves slowly nodded and made the light wink and dance.
