In the Fold

by Rachel Cusk

  ‘I’ve only just got in,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve got your coat on,’ Lisa observed.

  ‘Do I have to?’

  ‘She’ll be really pleased,’ said Lisa flatly.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ I said.

  ‘It’s only down the road,’ they both replied, whether by way of encouragement or the reverse it was unclear.

  I picked up Hamish from where he sat in front of the television. He was like someone in a trance. His legs remained neatly crossed in front of him as he rose through the air.

  ‘How was your mum?’ Lisa said.

  ‘A little frayed,’ said Adam. ‘She’d drawn her eyebrows all wrong. One of them went up and the other one went down. The effect was –’

  ‘Oh, leave the poor woman alone!’ cried Lisa unexpectedly. ‘The thing is, Adam,’ she enlarged, after a pause, ‘she’s probably worried sick about your dad. She probably hasn’t got the time to think about herself.’

  She put her finger on her chin and looked at him interestedly, as though by this Socratic pose hoping to draw him into a counter-debate.

  ‘She kept talking about money,’ said Adam. ‘On and on. Something about her allowance.’

  ‘You make her sound like a senile old lady!’ shrieked Lisa. ‘Go on, what did she actually say?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when I get back.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  Adam lowered his voice.

  ‘She said dad and Vivian had stopped her allowance.’

  Lisa’s blue eyes went very wide at this admission.

  ‘Christ on a stick,’ she said. ‘What do you make of that?’

  ‘It’s the first I’ve heard of any allowance. Dad never told me he still gave her money. I didn’t know what she was talking about.’

  ‘What d’you mean you didn’t know what she was talking about? How do you think she lives if your dad doesn’t pay her alimony?’ She pronounced it to rhyme with ‘pony’. ‘It’s her entitlement. After all,’ said Lisa significantly, ‘she’s the original wife.’

  ‘I never noticed you getting any alimony.’

  ‘Don’t start on all that,’ said Lisa.

  ‘They’ve been divorced for twenty-three years.’

  Out in the hall I bent down and fastened the buttons of Hamish’s coat. We opened the door and went and stood outside on the gravel drive.

  ‘– bloody life sentence,’ said Adam.

  ‘How can you say that about your own mother?’ I heard Lisa say.

  Presently Adam came out to join us. We set off down the cul-de-sac. I felt again the strange candour of the saturating grey light. I was aware of the grain of the beige mortar in the new brick walls, the spongy black surface of the road, the toothpick legs of the little brown birds that landed weightlessly on car bonnets and fences and then lit off again. A bit of twig detached itself from a bare branch somewhere near by and whirled slowly to the ground in front of us, and the world seemed paused for the moments of its spinning descent. I watched it make contact with the grey slab of the pavement.

  All around us women were emerging from the front doors of houses. One of them greeted Adam and fell into step beside us.

  ‘How are you?’ said Adam, in a way that suggested he had forgotten her name.

  ‘Not too bad,’ she said. She had a large mouth that turned down at the corners when she smiled, so that she looked as though she were about to make irreverent commentary on her own pleasantries. ‘Yourself? We don’t usually see you around at this time of day. Doing the school run.’

  ‘Oh, fine. We’re fine. We’re lambing up at my father’s farm this week.’

  ‘Really?’ She gave the ironic smile again. Her plump lips were slathered in a grainy, bubble gum-pink lipstick. ‘That must be fun.’

  I wasn’t sure whether she meant it was fun or not fun at all. I wondered if she knew. Several women were now moving with us along the pavement, singly or in groups of two or three. They appeared peculiarly burdened: with their bags and coats and pushchairs they had the processive bulk of a column of refugees. Their hair was whipped to and fro by the wind. I saw the short hair of one woman, dyed red, riven into furrows of colour like the pelt of an animal. Most of them had children with them and they were padded too – they staggered behind like small astronauts or stared out of their pushchairs paralysed by zip-up suits that made their arms and legs stick out stiffly. The woman beside us wore a tight, padded coat. It made a creaking sound when her arms swayed back and forth.

  ‘Chris is off work too,’ she said. ‘Sick leave.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Adam.

  She laughed out of her pink, downturned mouth.

  ‘He’s feeling very sorry for himself,’ she said. ‘He had the snip on Monday.’

  She made a scissors motion with her fingers. A cold feeling suffused the back of my neck.

  ‘Oh, right,’ said Adam uneasily.

  We were approaching the school. The mothers were congregating in the grey playground, each arrival being integrated into the mass so that it had the appearance of an avid, fast-growing organism seething with noise and movement.

  ‘He’s taken the whole week off,’ she continued, ‘to convalesce. Typical male behaviour. I told him he should try having a ba–’

  Her attention left us like a scrap of paper whipped up in a sudden wind. She was waving frantically. The coat creaked faster.

  ‘Hi! Hi!’ she called, her head periscoping on her neck.

  ‘How’s Chris?’ someone shouted.

  ‘Furious!’ yelled the woman, to whoops of female laughter.

  In the classrooms that bordered the playground the children were pressing their small, indistinct faces to the window.

  ‘There she is,’ said Adam. ‘I’ll go in. You wait here.’

  Hamish and I ambled around the playground in the mêlée, amidst the calling mothers and the screaming, running children, who appeared to be either fleeing an event or ecstatically approaching one, it was unclear which.

  ‘You’re going to school soon,’ I said to Hamish, who did not reply.

  Adam came out holding the hand of a small girl who was crying hysterically. I saw him say something to her and point towards Hamish and me, at which sight her desolate mouth opened wider and tears ran in sheets down her face.

  ‘Sorry about this,’ he called. ‘I think she was expecting Lisa.’

  ‘I want my mummy!’ the girl shrieked. ‘I want my mummy!’

  ‘All right, Janie,’ said Adam.

  ‘Where is she? I want my mummy!’

  ‘You can have her in just a minute.’

  ‘I want her now!’

  ‘Janie,’ said Adam, ‘you’re embarrassing me. Please. What’s Hamish going to think?’

  Janie’s crying rose a key.

  ‘Let’s just get your coat on,’ Adam persisted. ‘It’s cold. You need to wear your coat.’

  Janie was permitted to work herself into a sort of fit over the coat, lying down on the playground and kicking her legs and turning her head from side to side so that long, wet strands of her fair hair were webbed across her face.

  ‘You’re going to get hurt,’ puffed Adam, bent over her with his hands gripping the tops of her arms. ‘I’m going to hurt you if you don’t let me put your coat on.’

  This statement of intent had the effect both of incensing Janie and of bringing about, at the heart of her tantrum, a form of submission. Somehow Adam got her coat on and then we were walking back up the road. Several of the women looked at us as we passed. They appeared to disapprove of us.

  ‘You’d think it would be easy, but it’s not,’ Adam said, when Janie was walking ahead. ‘It’s not like it is with your own child. You get all the responsibility and none of the pleasure. Lisa says I try to control her too much.’

  ‘I want my mummy!’ bellowed Janie, activated by the mention of her mother’s name.

  ‘The problem is, if you can’t be in control, what are you left with? You’re left wit
h being a saint. You become a sort of victim in your own life. Every time I look at her,’ he added in a low voice, ‘I see her father. I can’t help it. I see his face looking out of hers. I feel like I’m living with a rival.’ After a while, he added: ‘The baby’s been really good. It’s helped us all to feel we’re more of a family.’

  When we got back to the house Janie stepped over the baby in order to get out into the manicured back garden, where she spent the rest of the afternoon jumping over a broomstick she had laid horizontally across two chairs, her ponytail bobbing, tapping her own flank with a little riding crop each time she made the approach. I took Hamish down to the harbour to look at the boats. The tide was out and so they lay on their sides in the mud. Their naked, round underbellies dried helplessly in the wind. Rope and rigging and faded orange buoys clung to their sleeping forms. There was a little stone pier and I sat there on a bench while Hamish played with some green fisherman’s nets that were lying tangled against a wall. Because the tide was out there was no water around the pier either, just a vacant drop on all sides. The wind blew relentlessly. Presently Adam appeared on the esplanade. He waved his arm, clutching his coat around himself. As he came up the pier the wind blew his clothes flat against his body and I noticed how broad and formless he had become, as though he had grown rings around himself, like a vegetable left too long in the ground. His coat was square and brown and padded. His fair hair stood sideways in the wind. He looked like a less fortunate relation of the Adam I had first known. He sat down beside me on the bench.

  ‘Lisa’s back at the house. She’s made some food for Hamish.’

  ‘That’s nice of her,’ I said.

  ‘She’s a rock,’ Adam stated, into the wind. After a while he said: ‘Do you mind if we stop at mum’s on the way back? I want to see if she wants a lift to the hospital. It’s visiting time at six. There’s no point in all of us going separately.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘I can’t get hold of Vivian. She must have set off on her own.’

  We walked back up the pier and into the middle of Doniford. The shops were all closed. Most of them were charity shops: as we passed their darkened windows I could see the shapes of old furniture and shelves indistinctly cluttered with bric-à-brac, and ghostly racks of clothes, all in deep tents of shadow like little museums of abandonment. We turned down an alleyway and then emerged on the seafront again, where a terrace of grand Regency houses looked out over the brown, drained harbour. Adam stopped at one of these houses and banged the brass knocker. I noticed in the window a little poster facing out on to the street, fixed to the glass. It said ‘57% Say No!’

  ‘No to what?’ I said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  I pointed at the poster.

  ‘Fifty-seven per cent say no to what?’

  The door opened. A man stood there.

  ‘Well, well,’ he said.

  It was Adam’s uncle David. He was wearing a plum-coloured silk robe tied around the waist with a shirt and tie and trousers on underneath.

  ‘We won’t keep you,’ Adam said. ‘I just wanted a word with mum.’

  David arched an eyebrow. Behind him I could see a very elegant hallway, whose most striking characteristic was that everything in it was white. The walls were white and the floor was tiled with white marble and a white chandelier hung overhead. There was a little antique bureau and chair, also white, on top of which stood a bowl of white roses.

  ‘Actually, she’s flown the coop,’ he said, standing back to allow us in. ‘Some guru she knows about is talking at the town hall in Taunton. The five pliers of something, what was it, there’s a leaflet about it somewhere – did I say pliers? I meant pillars. Five of them. Something to do with a quest for enlightenment. Self-esteem and whatnot. She’s gone with all her friends. No doubt there will also be a quest for refreshments afterwards.’

  He led us through the hall into a large room where, again, everything was strikingly white, the sofas, the carpets, the curtains, the tables and chairs. There was a bowl of white stones in the fireplace.

  ‘What an extraordinary house,’ I couldn’t stop myself from remarking.

  ‘You not been here before?’ said David. ‘Yes, well, it’s not everyone’s thing. A friend of mine says it’s like being inside a marshmallow. It’s the same upstairs, you know. Audrey did it all herself. She says she likes it because it doesn’t remind her of Egypt – take that how you will. It isn’t a house for children,’ he added, glancing at Hamish. ‘At least, that was the idea. Audrey rather blanked out thoughts of the next generation. She’s got away with it so far but she can’t keep them out for ever. I think we’ll be fine so long as nobody calls her “granny”.’

  ‘I thought she might want to see dad,’ Adam said.

  ‘What? Well, you’ll have to thrash that out with her. I try to keep out of her plans. I’ve got work of my own to do. I’m writing a book,’ he said, to me. ‘It’s fascinating stuff, but you really have to pull up the drawbridge, if you take my meaning, otherwise it never gets done. Audrey and I are ships in the night. Marvellous phrase, that, isn’t it? I wonder who came up with that. Some scribbler who couldn’t pay the gas bill no doubt.’

  I was standing by the white-painted mantelpiece, where white-framed photographs stood in a line. I looked at the photographs in turn, all of which, I presently realised, depicted Audrey. In most of them she was laughing. In one of them she was lying on a bed shrouded in white lengths of gauze.

  ‘Do you think she might have gone to the hospital on the way?’

  ‘No idea,’ said David delightedly. He tapped the side of his head. ‘Not a clue! Have we met before?’ he asked me.

  ‘A long time ago.’

  ‘Thought so. It was the beard that foxed me. I never forget a face. You were one of Adam’s university chums. Chemistry, wasn’t it?’

  ‘History.’

  ‘That’s it! I’m an historian myself, you know.’

  ‘I remember.’

  Hamish had squatted down beside the fireplace and was removing the white stones from their bowl and placing them on the carpet.

  ‘Call him off, will you?’ said David, with a tormented look in his eyes. ‘Only Audrey’s such a stickler – I’ll get into all sorts of trouble.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. I detached the stones from Hamish’s warm hands and replaced them in the bowl.

  ‘To resume,’ said David. ‘I’m doing a little work into family trees at the moment, absolutely gripping stuff, you can imagine, Doniford having once been an active port. We’ve got all sorts here, Jews, Slavs, Albanians who jumped ship, half the East End of London. I’m trying to make a link between racial ancestry and violent crime, of which Doniford has a particularly high incidence. It’s amazing what I’ve uncovered – you could almost spot the villains at birth! The Hanburys have a Latvian link,’ he said, in my ear. ‘Real slashers and burners. Have you boys got time for a drink?’

  ‘Afraid not,’ Adam said.

  ‘That’s a pity. While the cat’s away and all that.’

  He followed us back out into the white hall. A white-carpeted staircase swept up one side of it. I noticed that a chain of little lights had been woven all the way up through the wooden railings. They reminded me of the lights that guide aircraft on and off the tarmac.

  ‘Tell mum I’m going again tomorrow if she wants a lift.’

  ‘Best to tell her yourself,’ said David. ‘Saves wires getting crossed.’

  His passivity grated on me: I had the sense of it as the casing for a parasitical nature. I remembered how David had formed an incidental part of the pleasing picture of eccentricity I had taken away with me from Egypt Hill all those years before: now I discerned something hard and unyielding in him that struck me as being more central to this world than I had thought, though not more instrumental. He was like a deposit, a residue, by which the composition of the greater body could be read. I wondered what it said of the Hanburys that this should be their imprint;
and of me that I had failed to take the measure of it.

  ‘I saw your pa myself today,’ David said.

  ‘I’m glad somebody did.’

  ‘Funny place he’s in – it’s like a hotel. The old boy seemed quite put out by it all.’

  ‘It was his choice,’ Adam said. ‘He could have gone to a normal hospital.’

  ‘I left him some magazines – strictly educational, of course. I thought they’d do him good. He’s never paid enough attention to his grey matter, that’s part of the problem. You’ve got to, in a place like this,’ he said, to me. ‘There’s no theatre or art or music here. There was a bookshop, but they closed it down for lack of use. Sometimes I look at the people here and wonder what possible motivation they can have for staying alive.’

  He opened the front door with its gleaming brass handle to let us out.

  ‘As far as cultural activities go,’ he said, peering out into the grey, windy evening, ‘we might as well be on the moon.’

  *

  At ten o’clock Adam and Lisa went to bed, making their apologies as they backed towards the stairs, like a pair of sheepish politicians sent to the scene of a tragedy; that tragedy being, I supposed, that we had all got older. I phoned Rebecca, as it seemed she was not going to phone me. When she picked up the telephone she was laughing.

  ‘Hello?’ she said presently, in a garrulous voice.

  The man who had been laughing with her continued to laugh.

  ‘It’s me. Is that Marco with you?’

  Marco laughed a lot, excessively in fact, particularly where the world struck you as least funny. I realised it sounded as though I considered her brother to be the only suitable, indeed the only possible, male for Rebecca to be entertaining at home, late in the evening, in my absence.

  ‘No,’ she said. Her voice was stranded somewhere between coldness and levity. ‘No, it’s Niven actually.’

  I had a sudden pain in my stomach, which sheared off into a feeling of indifference.

  ‘We’re just going through the layout for his show,’ Rebecca continued. ‘You know, the Art in Nature show we’re doing in the summer. We’ve had this fantastic idea of arranging the canvases to make a sort of walk, a country walk.’