by Rachel Cusk
Adam’s road, the new road, branched away from this spectacle towards its fresh green site in the fields between the town and the sea. There were perhaps a hundred houses there, all like Adam’s. In spite of the exertions of the tarmac, which wound and circled graciously amidst the properties as though to give the impression that each was distinct and difficult to find, the development had a somewhat regimental appearance. When you glimpsed it from the town, its roofs and top-floor windows resembled the impassive heads of an invading army coming over the hill. Once there, however, a pleasant, almost dreamlike atmosphere prevailed. It was an atmosphere that arose from the expectation that absolutely nothing untoward was going to occur. This expectation was well founded, in that as far as I could see none of the factors – natural or man-made – that might constitute, or even precipitate, an event were present. There were no shops or strangers or meeting places, no through-traffic or litter or noise. Even the sea, which was less than half a mile away on the other side of a small rise, was soundless, invisible and without odour. There were merely people, curiously motiveless in their identical red-brick houses, each with their fenced rectangle of grass that was indistinguishable from the grass outside the fence. I hadn’t been there long before I noticed the habit they had, of coming out of their houses and standing there beneath the wadded grey sky, looking around. They would look around for a while and then they would go back in again.
I said to Lisa:
‘It’s a shame you can’t see the sea from here.’
She said, ‘I don’t really want to look at the sea all day.’
I supposed she might have taken offence at my remark, which to be honest I half-thought I was making to Adam. I have found there to be roughly two types of men, those who take offence at everything I say, and those who don’t. Adam was the second type.
‘I wouldn’t want to have it there day in and day out,’ continued Lisa, ‘just sitting outside my window. Why would you want to have this great big thing outside your window? I mean, why would you?’
I wasn’t entirely sure why I would: she made it sound slightly depraved.
‘People make such a fuss about a sea view,’ she sighed.
The view from Adam and Lisa’s house was densely patterned and, because everything you saw had been created at roughly the same time, strangely depthless. From my window in the spare room I could see the homogeneous red brick of other houses, the straight beige lines of the unweathered pallet fence, the lurid blades of new grass, the neat black ribbon of tarmac. I could see clean cars and bicycles and white garage doors. It was like looking at a collage: nothing shaded into anything else but rather seemed cut out and pasted into place. The window was so well sealed that it created a sort of vacuum in the room. In Nimrod Street our windows rattled and let in noise and draughts, and the presence of these things was like that of an audience, bored, judgmental, companionable, suspirating in the anonymous dark. In Adam and Lisa’s spare room the silence and stillness were such that I became almost intolerably aware of myself. When I opened the window there was a small sound of compressed air being released, a hesitation, before the outside world ran in in a tepid stream of babbling air.
The house had four bedrooms, which Lisa showed me. She did this with some gravity in the afternoon, while Adam went to look in at his office over in the town. It was as though she had waited for us to be alone. Also, she had waited for daylight, she explained, rather than showing me the house when I might, if ever, have expected to see it, on arrival the night before. She gave the confusing impression that her interest in these matters was not unsatirical. It was a distinct possibility that she believed herself in addition to be gratifying some sordid but well-established impulse on my part, and had elected to do it, if it had to be done, in broad daylight.
‘This is the baby’s room,’ she said on the square landing, pushing open a door so that it made a hoarse sound as it ran over the thick, resisting carpet. The baby’s habitation of her room was faint and sketch-like. I glimpsed a cot and various padded items. ‘And this is Janie’s room.’ Janie was Lisa’s daughter from her previous marriage, whom I had not yet met. Her room was a little more substantiated than the baby’s, though overwhelmingly similar in colour, shape and texture. She had already been installed in it asleep when we arrived, and was now apparently at school.
‘This is the spare room, which you know,’ said Lisa, whose liturgy nonetheless required that she complete the ceremony by opening and shutting the door to my room. ‘And this is our room.’
Adam and Lisa’s room, being the pièce de résistance of the tour, we were permitted to enter. Lisa stepped ahead of me into its cream-carpeted spaces, as enchanted as a fawn entering a sunlit clearing. I saw the mystery of their bed, immaculately made.
‘Very nice,’ I said.
‘And this is our bathroom.’
I ducked my head into the bathroom – tiled, with gold taps and white porcelain appurtenances – and received a startling impression of multitudinous cosmetics, randomly marshalled like the skyline of a fast-growing city over every surface. A large chrome-plated hairdryer with an intimidating vent on the end hung from a hook on the wall. A prod-like object with an electric flex hung beside it. On a shelf sat a tray of miniature forensic items, tiny picks and blades. The bottles and jars of every conceivable size and shape suggested a world suspended partway between medicine and magic. I caught a glimpse of something called ‘breast-firming cream’. I tried to imagine the orgy of self-improvement that routinely occurred here.
‘Everything is so efficient in this house,’ Lisa remarked. ‘Everything works. You can just get on with your life.’
I found myself wondering what, according to these terms, life actually was. We were still in the bathroom – Lisa sat down on the white, rounded edge of the bath. I contemplated the gleaming toilet, from which the suggestion seemed to emanate that unknown to me the problems of human putrefaction had recently and happily been resolved. Lisa was dressed for the temperate climate of the house, in a sleeveless T-shirt and a pair of sandals. Her toenails were painted red.
‘We did look at a few old houses,’ she said, with the emphasis – derogatory – on ‘old’. ‘We though it might be fun to buy a wreck and, you know, do it up, but in the end, I thought, what’s the point? What is the actual point of period features? What’s it for, all that arty-farty stuff? I think it’s pretentious,’ she concluded, ‘living somewhere with fireplaces when you’ve got central heating.’
‘That sounds like our place,’ I said, simulating a rueful expression.
‘I grew up in an old house,’ said Lisa, consideringly, after a moment, as though she had decided to disclose her roots to me in order to prove that her opinions were not the fruit of mere bigotry.
‘Whereabouts?’ I asked.
‘Oh, you wouldn’t know it,’ said she mysteriously. ‘It’s in the north-east. But our house was really old. When you got into bed your sheets would be wet from the damp.’
‘Do you come from a big family?’
I wanted to hear more of this tale of woe.
‘Oh yeah,’ she said vaguely. Now I could detect her accent. ‘There’s lots of us.’
She was still sitting on the edge of the bath. She folded her arms over a bare, unblemished section of her midriff and jiggled her foot to and fro so that the sandal slapped against her sole. She was a large-limbed, rounded, well-finished woman with blonde hair so straight and symmetrical there was no doubt of it having been ironed. I wondered if the electric prod was what she did it with. I did not dislike her, though I saw she was suffering from a madness of convenience. She had decided to concern herself with the morality of inanimate objects. I had encountered this affliction before, but only in the denizens of those arty houses with superfluous fireplaces. Rick and Ali, for example, were quite capable of allowing their evangelism in matters of taste to interfere with the run of social play. I had seen Ali complain to someone whose house we were staying at for the weekend that she c
ould not possibly sleep in the sheets with which she had been provided because they were made of the wrong material. I understood that people did and said such things because they were in some sense incapable, but I could not have said exactly what constituted this incapacity in Lisa, unless it was a background of such dreariness or deprivation that it had made her obsessed with her own comfort.
‘Adam’s family are really strange,’ she continued. ‘They spend all their time talking about each other. Often they’re so horrible I wonder if they actually hate each other. My family aren’t like that at all.’
I sensed she found this habit of mutual discussion as pretentious as a liking for period features.
‘They didn’t use to be like that,’ I said in their defence. ‘When I first met them the thing that struck me was how friendly they all managed to be.’
‘Really?’ Lisa’s neat, even-toned face assumed an expression of distaste. ‘My family are just a really close family,’ she said.
‘The Hanburys have never been able to acknowledge their divisions,’ I said grandly, somewhat surprising myself.
‘What do you mean?’ Lisa visibly perked up.
‘They’re so socially and materially conformist, yet so terrified of seeming conventional,’ I continued, finding that it was not about the Hanburys but the Alexanders that I was speaking, ‘that they violate the laws of emotion as a substitute for real acts of rebellion.’
‘Adam’s stepmother is a very dark lady,’ Lisa presently agreed, apparently inspired by my talk of laws being violated. ‘She’s a very dark, unhappy lady. Did you know that when they were younger she used to deny the children food?’
‘Did she?’
‘She denied them fruit!’ Lisa looked me in the eye as she levelled this obscure charge. ‘Adam told me that once she put some beautiful peaches in a bowl on the table and every time the children asked if they could have one she said no. Then one day they found that the peaches had gone bad. Also,’ she continued in a low voice, carefully hooking her hair behind her ears, ‘she tried once to stop Adam and me getting married.’
‘Why?’ I said, surprised.
‘Because of my – you know. My previous life.’ She leaned forwards on the edge of the bath. ‘She told Adam,’ she continued discreetly, speaking only with her lips, ‘that he shouldn’t saddle himself with someone else’s child. I don’t know if that’s exactly how she put it, but that was the gist, you know. She offers to have Janie sometimes but Janie won’t go. The first time she met her Janie thought she was a witch.’ Lisa sat back and looked at me triumphantly. ‘It was quite embarrassing, actually. The thing is, the baby isn’t even related to her,’ she concluded irrelevantly. ‘I have to keep reminding Adam that Vivian and the baby aren’t actually blood relatives.’
I had a pressing need to get out of the bathroom, whose close, tiled walls seemed to be amplifying but not ventilating our conversation. Besides, we had left Hamish and the baby downstairs in the richly carpeted sitting room, whose dense furnishings would no doubt absorb any sounds of alarm. Lisa rose from her seat on the bathtub as though I had spoken this thought aloud: I followed her through the bedroom, lapped suddenly by warm sensations of gratitude which caused my personal powers of discrimination to cleave to my skin like wet clothing. It was not the first time in our brief acquaintance that Lisa had caused me to feel this singular form of discomfort. Not only had she elected to look after Hamish in the mornings while Adam and I were up at the farm, but already she actually claimed to feel some fondness for him. When we came back from the farm I had found him sitting on her lap on the sofa in a synthetic-coloured swamp of baby toys, watching television; and while I questioned her methods I was overwhelmed all the same by relief. Nevertheless, I sensed that Lisa was a person who could say anything, and would, given sufficient time. I was no closer, after our conversation in the bathroom, to understanding her relationship with Adam: in fact, if anything I was more mystified, now that I knew he had not only ‘saddled’ himself with the encumbrance of a child but winkled its mother out of the humble but tenacious bosom of her family in the distant north-east, for the express purpose of being with her. It seemed to run contrary to his sense of personal destiny, not to mention that of geographical limitation.
Hamish and the baby were exactly as we had left them, seated on the carpet with their faces lifted, transfixed, to the television screen. They sat in its blue light as though in the light of an icon. Their submission was slightly sinister. I noticed that Lisa, with the use of various aids, was adept at plunging children into immobility or, if required, rousing them to action. She could get them from one state to the other in seconds, guiding them on their criss-crossing paths through the hours like someone in a control tower directing air traffic. Similarly she appeared able to do several things at once, as though her body were inhabited by more than one consciousness. She had the unnerving habit, when speaking to another adult, of removing sweets from their wrappers with her hands without her eyes ever leaving your face, so that when a child came to interrupt she could insert one directly into its open mouth. While preparing to take me on her tour of the house she had placed the children in front of the screen, switched it on, and then, like an anaesthetist, waited for a count of ten, before the end of which they had happily vacated their bodies.
‘A hot potter,’ Hamish said when he noticed us.
This utterance, which I had to conclude was more or less meaningless, was nonetheless typical of a recent advance in Hamish’s development: I hoped, at least, that it was an advance, consisting as it did of phrases of verbal nonsense spoken earnestly, as though they contained coded information of the highest importance. This scrambled form of communication was slightly distressing to me. I felt sure that Hamish did have important things to say, particularly about his mother, whom he saw on the eve of our departure repeatedly smashing my watch against the kitchen wall while it was still attached to my wrist. Rebecca had never censored her outbursts for Hamish’s sake: on the contrary, I sometimes thought she needed to have him there, as the courtroom needs the stenographer, in order to see the precise record of her actions detailed on his blank little face. Rebecca claimed to believe that it was better for him to see her as she really was, while feigning a certain blindness to the effects of these exposures. I sometimes felt that Hamish was closer to madness than Rebecca herself, though I did not endear myself to her by saying so.
‘A hot trotter,’ he said.
‘What’s that he’s saying?’ marvelled Lisa, deceived by the mysteriously accomplished tone of his delivery.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘But at least it’s in English. I used to worry that he might be tuned into a different station.’
Hamish had started doing something strange with his hands, which involved holding them above his head and rotating them very fast, as though he were spinning a dinner plate on each one. This was a relatively new habit, which I had noticed with a sinking heart.
‘Are you saying you think there’s something wrong with him?’ said Lisa.
I had by now grown used to the way she leaned forward in order to communicate something she considered to be private. The movement caused the blade of her hair to swing disconcertingly towards my face. Lisa gave the impression that it was of no interest to her whether there actually was something wrong with Hamish or not. What concerned her was whether I thought there was. The sitting-room window extended almost the entire width of the room: it faced on to the back garden, and hence gave an unconfined view of a confined space. The effect was distinctly odd. The room was saturated with grey daylight. The fenced rectangle of the garden lay unbearably exposed in every detail.
‘Not at all,’ I said.
‘He’s just a little delayed,’ she continued, as though he were a train. ‘He’s obviously very bright.’
I had heard these two statements juxtaposed so many times that their true nature was beginning to make itself known to me. Taken separately they were relatively harmless, but togethe
r they functioned like the converging arms of a pair of pliers bent on working Hamish loose from his happy entrenchment in obscurity. He turned his head and looked at us over his shoulder. His large, highly modelled face was startling and slightly grotesque in the room’s relentless neutrality. Hamish looked good against a more gothic background. He said something that sounded like ‘Derry doctor’ and returned his attention to the screen.
‘That’s Adam back,’ said Lisa, although it was unclear how she had deduced this from the torpor of the house. A minute or two later, though, the front door banged and Adam called out from the hall. Lisa sat on the sofa, plump, almost mystically calm, as though directing him in with rays from her unblinking eyes. I sat on the thick carpet with the children. In the warm, well-sealed room we were like dumb creatures waiting in a nest.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ said Adam. ‘I had to call in at mum’s.’
‘Would you mind going to pick up Janie?’
Adam was slightly breathless and his cheeks were red from the wind. He looked alarmed at Lisa’s request, which she made from the imperturbable depths of the sofa.
