by Rachel Cusk
‘A ramble,’ interposed Niven boomingly in the background.
‘Sorry, a ramble. We could do it with partitions and – and –’ For some reason the mention of partitions caused Rebecca to succumb once more to hilarity. ‘We had this brilliant idea,’ she presently resumed, more soberly, ‘of covering the floor of the gallery with leaves.’
‘Don’t forget the sheep,’ boomed Niven.
‘Niven wants sheep,’ Rebecca relayed to me. ‘Just one or two, sort of – wandering around …’
A gale of laughter blew tinnily down the receiver.
‘Hamish is having a nice time,’ I said, enunciating clearly through the noise.
‘Is he?’ laughed Rebecca. ‘That’s great news. No, really, Michael,’ she said, her voice descending the ladder of mirth, ‘that’s great. I’m really, really pleased.’
In the warm, airless spare room I lay on the bed in the dark. I stared at the side wall of the house opposite. There were no windows in that wall. On the floor beside me Hamish rolled around in his sleeping bag. Every time he moved the sleeping bag made a dry, rustling noise. The noise was like something emanating from his sleep, from his unconsciousness. It was like the constant expression of a need. I lay listening to it for the rest of the night until Adam came in to wake me at four and we went up in the dark to the farm.
FIVE
I knew that Caris had arrived, but I didn’t expect to find her sitting at the table in the kitchen when we came up to the house for breakfast.
‘Hello, Michael,’ she said.
She spoke in a rich voice, and looked me straight in the eyes as though to mesmerise me.
‘Caris. It’s been a long time.’
As I said her name the thought occurred to me that perhaps she wasn’t Caris: her penetrating air, as well as the distinct theatricality of her appearance, seemed to raise the possibility that she was an impersonator, or a passing fortune teller who had mysteriously divined my identity. She was wearing an embroidered peasant blouse with voluminous gathered sleeves and had large gold hoops in her ears. Her hair was a wild bonnet of coarse, springy-looking black curls.
‘It’s been a long time,’ I said again. It was the sight of Caris so changed that made a sort of geological reality of the fact.
‘Not so long,’ she said, still pinioning me with her eyes, into which a quizzical light had stolen. ‘Seeing you, it’s as though it were only a minute. I feel as though I could just walk outside, and find my party still going on.’
Were this the case, the uncharitable thought crossed my mind that Caris would discover she no longer fitted into her dress.
‘But of course,’ she continued, perhaps seeing something disbelieving in my expression, ‘this is the new Michael, the grown-up Michael. I don’t know this Michael at all. I don’t know why he should be here, the week that I decide to go home. All I know is that for some reason he’s come around again.’
The mere mention of coming around turned my innards to stone. Caris continued to fix me with her dark-brown gaze as though to prevent me looking at her in return. I discerned a certain weariness in her, with a compulsion of her own from which she was unable to free herself, to invest everything with significance. Her face had become longer and squarer and a resemblance to her father had emerged, like a second face behind the first. Parentheses were etched deeply into the skin around her mouth: again, they gave an impression of fatigue, almost of disillusion. But her eyebrows were militant, fierce and thick and black, and from where I was sitting I could see a coarse shadow of black hair on her upper lip. She had grown much larger and fleshier in the parts of her that I could see, her shoulders and neck and arms. She had acquired a striking, almost sculptural, solidity. The effect was not unimpressive.
‘It’s so strange being here without dad!’ she observed gaily, looking around her. ‘I can’t remember a single time that I was here without him. Adam, don’t you think it’s strange being here without dad?’
This was her greeting to Adam, who had stopped in the yard on the way up and hence had only just entered the room. I recalled the fact that they had not seen each other for almost a year, and thought that Caris’s opening salvo showed a certain steel.
‘He always sits just there,’ continued Caris, pointing at the high-backed wooden chair next to the vast black hearth, ‘usually in his riding things, swearing like a trooper and drinking port at eight o’clock in the morning.’
This, at least, I did recall of the Caris of old, a certain coquettish habit of asserting universal truths where her father was concerned. It had seemed more charming at eighteen than it did at thirty-four.
‘His port-drinking days are over,’ Adam grimly observed. ‘The doctor put him on a strict diet of white wine and shandy.’
‘Now that I can’t imagine,’ said Caris. ‘Dad drinking – what did he call them? Women’s drinks. Do you remember that about dad, Michael? Women, poofs and Jews. The unholy Trinity.’
‘How did you get here?’ asked Adam.
‘How did I get here? Let me see – I took the bus to the tube station, then I took the tube to the railway station. Then I took two different trains to get to Taunton. Then I took the bus to Doniford, and I was about to walk the rest but Clifford spotted me and gave me a lift in his taxi. I rather liked the idea of arriving on foot, like a pilgrim, but he wasn’t to be put off.’
‘Lisa would have picked you up. She wouldn’t have minded.’
‘I found out the most extraordinary things about Clifford! Did you know he used to live in a castle? He grew up on the west coast, somewhere near Braunton, and apparently there was this big castle on a hill that he always used to look at when he was a child. He decided that when he was older he’d buy it, and one day it came on the market and he did. He was a builder at the time, he said. He raised an enormous mortgage and scraped together every penny of his own, and he and his wife moved in and installed some kitchen units!’ She sat back in her chair and laughed rousingly. ‘I think that was all they could ever afford to do. Then a couple of years later the market crashed and the mortgage company took it away from him. He lost all his money, so he came to Doniford because his brother lived here and they started a taxi company. And do you know what he did as soon as he’d made a thousand pounds? He bought a little field, right in the middle of Doniford. Apparently it’s now worth a million pounds to a developer, but he can’t sell it because there’s a right of way across it, which the council are always on the verge of overturning and then don’t. I got the impression he doesn’t actually want them to. If they did he might have to go and buy another castle. He’s still haunted by his kitchen units. He built them himself, he said.’ She looked for someone to whom to address her next remark and settled on me. ‘This is the sort of thing you find out when you don’t drive a car.’
‘Don’t or can’t?’ I said.
‘Won’t,’ she replied triumphantly. ‘Can, but won’t. I used to drive. I was a very dextrous driver. I especially liked going fast. I used to come right up behind people and flash my lights at them.’
‘At least you admit it,’ I said.
‘Oh, I admit everything,’ said Caris. ‘I’ve made a full confession. I despise my former idolatry. I used to love cars, and now I can hardly bring myself to get in one. They disgust me – the smell disgusts me, the smug moulded seats, the seatbelts, that great big idiotic steering wheel, the whole phallic enterprise. I feel as though I must have had an early traumatic experience in a car but in fact it was only that I liked them. Work that out,’ she said, lifting her palms upwards. ‘In London I tap on people’s windows and wave at them. I can’t help it. When I see them sitting all in a row staring straight ahead I can’t help it. People get so frightened when you touch their cars. It’s as though you’ve put your hands down their trousers.’
‘Do you do that too?’ I joked, nevertheless making it clear that I had forgotten the pale, superior nymph-Caris who lived somewhere in this trenchant Caris.
‘No, Michae
l.’ She gave me a sour look. ‘No, I don’t do that.’
‘Oh, you’re all here,’ said Vivian from the door. She smiled rather rakishly, with one side of her mouth. The other side remained downturned, as though half of her were perpetually reminding the other half of occasions on which an optimistic approach to things had not paid off. ‘I wasn’t expecting you to come up for another half an hour or so. I don’t know why I wasn’t,’ she said, in a rambling manner, shuffling out of a large brown garment that was half coat, half cape. ‘It’s silly of me in a way to expect you always to come up at the same time. There’s no reason why you should, is there? I don’t know why,’ she continued, so that it was impossible not to form the impression that she was slightly drunk, or in some way afflicted, ‘I always think that everything has to happen according to a sort of timetable. I suppose it’s all the years of following what the men were doing. There is such a timetable, that’s the thing, on a farm – other people simply aren’t flexible, so I suppose in the end you become rather like that yourself.’
Having shed her cape, Vivian retained a hat with a drooping brim that almost obscured her eyes, which were themselves shielded by her large brown sunglasses. She did not look particularly like she had spent her life adhering to a timetable. She looked distinctly cavalier.
‘Beverly needs to go somewhere later,’ said Adam. ‘She asked if we minded breaking a bit earlier so she can get away.’
‘Well, I do think she could have told me,’ said Vivian from beneath her hat. ‘She obviously thinks I just sit here all day waiting for people to go in and out. I know the lambs are important, but other people have lives too.’
‘Oh, the lambs!’ cried Caris. ‘The little lambs! I must come down and say hello to them – do you remember how dad used to take the old record player out to the barn and play music to the ewes? It was the funniest thing – do you remember, Vivian?’
‘He claimed it took their minds off it,’ said Vivian, giving us her rakish smile again. ‘I suppose there was no way of knowing whether it did or not.’
‘Of course,’ continued Caris, ‘it was a different thing altogether when it came to human beings. Dad was notoriously unsympathetic,’ she said, to me. ‘His own capacity for pain is enormous. I once saw him put a pitchfork through his own foot. He went completely white. Then he just pulled it out again –’ she imitated this manoeuvre with her robust arms ‘– and walked back to the house.’
‘I don’t remember that,’ said Adam.
‘You weren’t there,’ said Caris. ‘I was the only one there.’
‘I suppose I never really believed that a sheep had the capacity to know its own suffering,’ said Vivian. ‘I suppose that was it, really.’
‘They make a lot of noise,’ I said. It was a noise my head was still full of. ‘But they don’t seem to suffer much.’
‘I don’t see how you’d know,’ said Caris. ‘Anyway, the noise suggests they do suffer. Why would they make it otherwise?’
‘Yes, it would help to sort of drown it out, wouldn’t it?’ said Vivian. She was holding a frying pan out in front of her as though preparing to hit a tennis ball with it. ‘The music. Perhaps that’s why he did it.’
‘They all make the noise,’ I said, to Caris. ‘Communally. At the same time.’
‘I imagine they’re frightened,’ she replied presently, giving me a wide-eyed look that accused me of some unspecified tyranny.
Adam said, ‘Vivian, is that the dogs upstairs?’
Vivian was now at the stove, breaking eggs into the frying pan. She did this by holding the egg high above the pan and then crushing it amidst her shaking fingers, creating a long, glaucous fall of matter. She did one and then picked up another and held it what seemed to be rather too far to the left. As I watched, the innards of the egg fell not into the frying pan but all the way down to the floor with a flop. Vivian appeared not to notice.
‘Vivian?’ Adam repeated. ‘Are the dogs upstairs?’
‘What did you say?’ said Vivian, apparently startled. She turned her head and I saw that she was still wearing her sunglasses.
‘I think I can hear the dogs upstairs.’
I too could hear scratching sounds travelling in patterns over our heads.
‘They went up there,’ said Vivian. ‘I couldn’t get them down.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Adam.
‘I went out into the hall and they came down the stairs and barked at me.’
‘They barked at me too,’ said Caris. ‘They were lying on my bed.’
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake!’ said Adam. ‘They never go upstairs.’
‘I shut them out last night and they went wild,’ said Vivian. ‘Marjory Brice could hear them all the way down the hill. She telephoned to see what the matter was. In the end I let them in and they just ran upstairs into our room and got on to the bed.’
‘So how did you get them out?’ demanded Adam.
‘I didn’t. I locked them in and slept in the spare room. All night I could hear them panting through the keyhole.’
‘What about Brendon? Didn’t Brendon come?’
‘They wouldn’t go with him either. He managed to get their leads on – the problem was that then we couldn’t get them off again. They got all tangled around his legs and then they sort of each ran off in different directions and pulled him over. He hit his head on the chest of drawers. Then Nell bit him on the hand. He was terribly upset.’
‘This is completely ridiculous,’ Adam said.
‘It’s a bit much, really, isn’t it?’ said Vivian, to all of us. ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit much?’
We listened to the tapping sounds, running in rapid figures of eight over our heads.
‘It’s as if they know dad isn’t here,’ said Caris.
‘Of course they know dad isn’t here,’ said Adam. ‘They can see he isn’t here.’
‘But it’s as though they’re worried. They know something’s wrong. Dad has an amazing rapport with animals,’ she informed me. I noticed that her early, impressive contralto had now risen by several tones. ‘They speak to him, they really do. They’d defend him to the death.’
The black fumes of Vivian’s breakfast were billowing across the kitchen. With a feeling of submission, almost of defeat, I felt my palate rise in anticipation, not just of food but apparently of repetition itself. It seemed that the quality of Vivian’s breakfasts was insignificant, compared to my willingness to make a habit of them. For some reason this caused me to think of Hamish. It was both sad and relieving to imagine him adjusting to each new latitude, each substitution of day for night, with a physiological routine bent not on understanding things but merely acclimatising to them. Already he seemed perfectly happy living with Lisa at 22 The Meadows, which in terms of time zones was as Sydney to Rebecca and Nimrod Street’s London. Whatever feelings spilled out of him at the transits of his fate the mechanism of his body set about busily mopping up. Caris had risen from her chair and moved to the window, giving me the opportunity to examine the other half of her outfit. Below the peasant blouse she was wearing a very full dark-red skirt with beads sewn around the bottom, a pair of white lacy tights and high-heeled red shoes. She looked as though she were wearing the national dress of a small, high-spirited country. I wondered how she had planned to climb Egypt Hill in this attire. The skirt emphasised the solidity of her hips in a way that was more intimidating than unflattering. She folded her arms and stood with one leg thrown out to the side, contemplating the grey prospect of the courtyard. Vivian put my plate in front of me. I looked down at the steaming, gory spectacle and experienced a return of the previous day’s aversion, along with the feeling that by eating amongst the Hanburys I would in some way implicate myself, confer a solidity upon myself that might make it impossible for me ever to leave; that by this complicated, laborious act of ingestion I would surrender not only something of my impartiality but some of the space, too, in which my loyalty to my own life was housed.
�
�Thank you,’ I said.
‘It’s so strange being back,’ said Caris, from the window.
‘Is it?’ said Vivian vaguely. ‘I expect it is. It’s rather a shame the weather isn’t better. If you’d waited until the summer we could have used the terrace. Not that we ever get the evenings they get in Spain of course. At Las Pitunas they sit out half the night, with people turning up at the most extraordinary hours in just a T-shirt and a pair of flip-flops. Nobody seems to mind,’ she said gloomily. ‘They’re all terribly free. There’s none of this calling up and arranging Sunday lunch in three months’ time. By the time you’ve thought about it for that long you don’t actually want to do it, do you? The other day someone rang and invited us to dinner next autumn! She claimed they didn’t have a free weekend until then. I didn’t know whether to accept or not. It seemed a bit presumptuous. I thought, well, who knows, I might be dead. I suppose if I am someone will let them know.’
‘But we were never like that!’ exclaimed Caris. ‘There have always been people at Egypt, always, without anyone arranging it or planning it! Do you remember the time that man stayed, and after he’d gone everyone admitted they hadn’t got a clue who he was?’
‘I think he’d come to fix the boiler,’ said Vivian. She gave a snuffling little laugh.
‘Yes!’ shrieked Caris, delighted. ‘And someone offered him a drink!’
‘Didn’t he end up getting off with Fiona Lacey?’ She pronounced it ‘orf’.
‘No – no! He can’t have!’
‘She was still married to Dan in those days. God!’ she expostulated, gloomy once more. ‘He was the most terrible pig.’
‘I remember their daughter,’ said Caris. ‘She went to our school. The two boys were at some boarding school where you wore black tie and got to have your own horse, but she went to Doniford Middle because she was a girl.’
‘Yes,’ said Vivian vaguely, ‘I think Fiona’s a bit like that.’
‘It’s incredible, isn’t it,’ said Caris. ‘In this day and age – do you remember her? She had red hair. I wonder what happened to her. She might as well have gone around with it branded on her forehead, you know – “I’m not important”.’
