by Rachel Cusk
‘Maybe they just couldn’t afford it,’ said Adam. ‘It might have been nothing to do with her being a girl.’
‘In that case,’ said Caris, ‘none of them should have gone.’
‘So if everybody can’t have everything, nobody should have anything, is that what you’re saying?’
‘It’s called justice, Adam,’ said Caris sarcastically. ‘You may not have heard of it.’
‘I’d just like you to explain where the justice is in denying two people a decent education.’
‘There was nothing wrong with the education you got at Doniford Middle – in fact, they’d probably have been better off there.’
‘Well, what are you complaining about then?’ said Adam, sitting back in his chair triumphantly. ‘In that case she got the best deal.’
‘I just happen personally to regard being manufactured by a patriarchal institution as a handicap in life. Not everyone agrees with me.’
‘I suppose I should never have sent Jilly and Laura away,’ interposed Vivian. ‘When they came back they were never quite as I remembered them. They seemed very big and sort of frightening. I remember they were always looking in the cupboards. Almost the minute they came home they’d start going around the house opening everything and looking inside. It was like having burglars to stay.’
‘You don’t really regret sending them, do you?’ said Caris.
‘I didn’t at the time,’ said Vivian. ‘But now they say I did something awful to them, although I don’t see how I can have done, when I wasn’t even there. I had quite fond memories of school. The nuns were always terribly nice, although I don’t think they taught us anything.’
‘What did you do that was awful?’ asked Caris reprovingly, as though it were inconceivable that anyone could accuse Vivian of whatever it was.
‘The problem was,’ said Vivian, looking vacantly at something over our heads, ‘that there simply wasn’t room for them here.’
‘Vivian,’ said Caris carefully, ‘that isn’t actually true.’ She smiled. ‘They took my bedroom.’
‘Well, they’d had rooms of their own at Ivybridge, you know –’
‘Yes,’ said Caris, still smiling, ‘but it was my room. The boys kept their rooms, of course,’ she added, speaking to me. ‘The sons and heirs were not to be inconvenienced.’
‘This was the problem, you see?’ said Vivian frantically, also to me. ‘There was all this fighting! In the end Paul just said, you know, bloody well enough!’
Caris had turned to the window and folded her arms tightly across her chest, so that discord radiated from her back.
‘It’s not really surprising that we fought,’ she said, in a cold and faraway voice. ‘When you consider the circumstances.’
‘Bloody well enough, he said, I can’t stand women fighting! If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s women fighting, that’s what he said, you know.’
‘So Jilly and Laura were packed off,’ said Adam, shaking his head and laughing.
‘He said, “I don’t care who it bloody well is, just get them out of here,”’ cried Vivian, who appeared still not to know what to make of it all. A dark animation surged in her face. She gyrated with emotion. ‘“Just get them all out!”’
‘All?’ said Caris in her small, cold voice.
There was the sound of a car horn out on the drive.
‘That’s Jackie,’ said Caris, after a long pause. ‘She’s giving me a lift down to mum’s. I’ll see you later.’
And she picked up her coat and left the room, without once turning to face any of us.
‘I’d better sort out those dogs,’ said Adam, rising and scraping back his chair. His face was red with a mixture of shame and amusement. ‘I’ll put them in the shed for you. My advice is that you don’t let them back in, no matter how much they bark. They’ll take the hint eventually.’
He stamped out of the room in his boots and down the hall, perhaps thinking that if he made enough noise he would erase the uncomfortable atmosphere Caris had left behind her. Her head drooping, Vivian stood forlornly beside the raw egg on the floor, as though it were something that had fallen out of her, like an eye, that would be virtually impossible to put back. Unexpectedly, she looked up and gave me a roguish smile.
She said, ‘My first husband was an awful bore, you know, but Jilly and Laura talk about him as though he were a plaster saint. He lives on the Isle of Wight now. He has a flat.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘When we left Ivybridge,’ she said, ‘he picked up a rock and threw it through one of the windows. Don’t you think that’s awful?’
‘Was Ivybridge the house you lived in before?’
‘He always hated it because it wasn’t his, you see. It belonged to my parents – it was my childhood home. He took me to court to try and get half the money from the sale, but he didn’t get it. Paul fought him tooth and nail. In the end I didn’t really see why he shouldn’t get it since he seemed to have lost everything else, but Paul wasn’t having any of that. He said, you know, that’s your inheritance. That’s your birthright, don’t give it away. It was a lot of money, you see, because it wasn’t just an ordinary sale, a private sale. We’d got permission to develop the barns and the outbuildings, and a Change of Use, which is very difficult to get, but Paul is on the planning committee and that sort of smoothed the way.’
She appeared to expect me to speak.
‘A developer bought it, if you must know,’ she confessed presently. ‘I rather expected my parents to, you know, rise from their graves when it happened.’ She gave a strange little laugh. ‘But in the end the fuss died down and everyone forgot about it. You know, sort of life goes on. I’ve no idea what it looks like now, of course. I never go there, even though it’s only just in the next valley. You can walk there from Egypt in, oh, twenty minutes I suppose.’ She looked at me almost gaily. ‘They call it Ivybridge Holiday Village. What do you think that is, a “holiday village”? Jilly says they’ve put up a big red-brick wall all the way round it with these sort of Victorian street lamps on top. She says they look like policemen’s heads! And she says the most ghastly people go there, you know, all sandals with socks, and men with tattoos and great fat bellies, and there they sit, you know.’
Adam’s footsteps were creaking rapidly overhead. I could hear his voice, rising and falling harshly, and the excited sliding, skittering sounds of the dogs’ paws.
‘I couldn’t bear to see what they’ve done to the garden!’ cried Vivian, grasping my arm suddenly with her bony hand. ‘They must have taken up all mummy’s rose bushes! And the apple orchard, with twenty-six old varieties, some of them virtually extinct! And the tree by the pond where I used to have my swing, and my little vegetable patch that daddy made me!’
‘Vivian,’ I said.
‘All gone,’ she cried, ‘all destroyed! I’ll never see any of it again! And I’m to be punished for it – as if I haven’t been punished enough! Every winter that I’ve sat up here on this hill it’s got worse!’
‘What’s got worse?’
‘They hate me,’ she said in a low voice. ‘They’ve always hated me – you don’t know what it’s like, to be so hated!’
She rose abruptly from the table and moved with the light, disjointed speed of a spider to the kitchen cupboards. She opened a door and removed a half-pint bottle of whisky, from whose neck I was startled to see her take a long, determined swallow.
‘Joan and Alvaro say that I should leave him, you know,’ she gasped, giving me a dramatic look. ‘They say that but then they don’t know, do they? He’s always here, that’s the thing. It’s hard to leave someone if they’re always there. They never let you alone. It all seems very simple to them, in Spain. To them it’s just a matter of staying where you are and missing the flight home. They think that would solve everything, don’t they? The problem is that then there’d be two messes where there was one. You can’t just go around making more and more messes, can you? Mummy and daddy would
be horrified if they knew,’ she said, folding her arms and retracting her chin into her bony chest. She looked up at me through her fringe. ‘They’d tell me to pull myself together. “Where’s your backbone?” they used to say. “Where’s your spine?” That’s what they would have said, you know.’
The door opened and Adam came in holding the dogs by their collars. They made high-pitched mewling noises and their feet skated over the cold stone floor. They writhed around their own necks where he held them.
‘They’ve been on all the beds,’ he puffed. ‘They wouldn’t come. I don’t know what’s got into them. It’s a bit of a mess up there, I’m afraid. They’ve been in the sheets and everything. I’ll take them to the shed for you.’
Vivian looked at him mutely with her cheeks puffed out, as though she had her mouth full. I got up and opened the back door for him.
‘We’ll go home after this,’ he said over his shoulder. The dogs were tugging him down the passage. ‘We’re done for the day. Tell Vivian, would you?’
I went back into the kitchen to tell Vivian but she wasn’t there – she had vanished. I felt the presence of something sinister in the empty room, as though it had swallowed her. I went outside again to find Adam.
*
‘You compare Egypt to Don Brice’s land,’ said Adam, ‘and it’s amazing really, the difference.’
We drove out of the track and turned down the empty road to Doniford. I saw the deserted vista of the hillside, with its descending waves of green and the glinting heap of the town at its feet.
‘What is the difference?’
‘He’s farmed all the life out of it. There’s no love.’
I was surprised to hear Adam talk of love.
‘Dad does things the old-fashioned way. People respect him for it. I don’t know whether I’d be able to keep it up.’
‘Keep what up?’
‘He wouldn’t even let the council run electricity cables over his fields. There’s a house beyond the farm that’s still powered by a generator because it’s too circuitous to run it along the road and Dad won’t let them go over his fields. The family tried to bribe him.’ Adam laughed. ‘They offered him a whack of money. It’s depressing the value of their house so much they reckoned it was worth it.’
We had passed the boundary of Egypt: the rudimentary litany of what I now knew to be Don Brice’s fields flowed past my window instead. It was an untidy patchwork of electric fences and half-dug pits and pawed segments of earth. Everywhere, decaying lengths of plastic sheeting anchored by old car tyres waved their tatters in the wind. Adam slowed down to look at the sheep. The pregnant ewes were penned into a muddy square steeped in their own dung. The smell came through the open window like a fist as we drove by. Half a mile down the road, a man was driving a mud-splattered four-wheeled motorbike along the verge with two scrappy dogs twisting around him, one on either side like a pair of apostrophes.
‘That’s Don,’ said Adam. ‘He’s always on that bike. I can’t remember the last time I saw him standing on his own legs.’
The man craned his head around and squinted at us over his shoulder. He was smoking a pipe. He raised his arm. Adam pulled up alongside him and the dogs jumped yapping at the window. One of them had a yellow eye. The other dog was brown and white and ran around barking at its own tail.
‘You done midwifing for the day, then?’ said Don. His lined mouth opened like a wound around his pipe.
‘You don’t look far off yourself,’ said Adam.
‘‘Nother three weeks yet. It’s your dad likes to get them in early, so’s the frost can kill ’em off.’
‘We’re having a good year,’ said Adam. ‘A few twins.’
‘Is that so?’ said Don.
‘We’ve kept them all so far except one.’
Don laughed and folded his arms as he sat astride his bike.
‘He’s saved you the price of the petrol, then,’ he said.
‘Beverly’s running a tight ship.’
‘Surprised that girl can run a tap. Sharrup!’ Don scooped the barking brown and white dog on to his boot and forked it into the verge.
‘Yours aren’t looking too bright for that matter, Don,’ said Adam. ‘You should try rotating them. That way they don’t have to stand in their own leavings.’
‘Oh, those old birds,’ said Don, turning his mean little blue eyes to the muddy horizon. ‘This is their last year. I’m just seeing ’em to market is all.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ said Adam. He sounded surprised.
‘I only just knew myself. I wouldn’t have bothered with them otherwise.’
‘Are you selling?’
‘My planning’s come through. Call came just yesterday.’
‘What planning?’
‘For my barns. The barns down the hill along the road.’
‘I didn’t know you had any barns there,’ said Adam.
‘Barns as was,’ said Don. ‘I think once they used them for something but I never did. They just sat there. They’re no more’n a couple of old sheds to be honest. They think they can get three four-bed dwellings out of them, though dwellings for what I don’t like to think.’ He laughed around his pipe. ‘Dwarfs, it’d have to be. They’re taking my old beet fields too as acreage. I know your dad was against it and he’ll be none too pleased, but there it is,’ he added. His little eyes were now hovering around Adam like a pair of flies. ‘It went through at the meeting and he weren’t there.’
‘How could he have been there?’ said Adam. ‘He’s in hospital.’
‘Can’t be helped,’ said Don. ‘I told him before, you’ve got to live and farming ain’t no living any more. He’s all right – he’s got her to keep him, and as far as I can see she made her money the same way I’m making mine. Like I say, there it is. It won’t make no difference to him anyhow,’ he added. ‘It’s just a couple of old sheds. You can hardly see ’em from up there. In his condition things like this don’t matter, do they? It comes down to what’s important, don’t it, family and that, not whether there’s houses or not on some old field. Don’t it, eh, son?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Adam.
‘Niver understood why he was so dead against it in the first place,’ Don continued, wrapping his fingers around his pipe as though in meditation.
‘That’s the way he is.’
A grimace of understanding crossed the farmer’s face.
‘I suppose you’ll be boss up there yourself one of these days,’ he said meaningfully.
‘I’m my own boss already.’
‘Course y’are. Got your own little place. And a wife and kiddies too.’
‘I’ll see you, Don.’
We pulled away with Don holding his pipe at his lips while he opened his mouth to laugh. The lane plummeted downwards in shuttered flashes of brightness. Big black birds hopped on the verge around a smear of blood and fur. Thin lines of wires zigzagged overhead, veered off across the fields like things taking flight, then emerged from their tributaries again and coalesced, swooping upwards in formation to crest the giant grey peaks of pylons that passed along the bottom of the hill in their march down the coast. We passed a new bungalow being built on the side of the road. I glimpsed the raw slash of gravel in front, the military row of dwarfish green conifers, the still-exposed flanks of grey breeze block.
‘Look,’ said Adam, ‘they’re coming up the hill. For ages the first house you saw on the way down was that one.’
We were in the outskirts of Doniford now. He pointed to the end of a plain, white-harled row of old council housing which stood forlornly impacted in a ring of bigger new red-brick houses that bristled with ornamentation. The garden was a small rectangle of green with nothing in it except a bare metal climbing frame in the shape of a beehive.
‘I used to be friends with the boy who lived there,’ said Adam. ‘We were in the same class at school.’
‘Really?’
‘I used to go there to play. I sort of liked going ther
e. It was cosy and his mother was always there, and no one ever asked you to do anything. And compared to Egypt it was so small! I couldn’t believe how small it was. Once when Vivian came to collect me I said to her in front of Ian and his mother that I liked Ian’s house because it was so small.’ He laughed. ‘I think I thought I was being interesting. Vivian went wild afterwards. She said some pretty strong things in the car. I remember thinking, God, she really hates me. Of course, I understand that better now,’ he added stiffly. ‘I understand how difficult it was for her.’
‘Does he still live here?’ I asked. I wanted to hear more of Adam’s feelings for this boy.
‘He manages the petrol station. We always say hello. It’s funny, we were such good friends,’ he said, as though it made no sense to him now. ‘I used to think that one day Ian might come to live with us at Egypt. He’d just appear and we’d save him. I suppose I couldn’t believe he was happy where he was. His mother used to cook this awful food. Everything was white and soft and bland. It was like hospital food. Ian used to eat it up.’
His telephone rang in his lap.
‘We’re just coming down the hill,’ he said into it.
I looked out of the window at Doniford, which had changed so much and yet was still regarded as itself, like a person grown older, thicker, coarser. My memories of it, and of the Hanburys themselves, were in a sense homeless: they could not dwell in reality, so changed. They wandered around the occupied spaces, mournful as ghosts. I had not realised that time would move in this way over my life, would fill its lacunae as brown saltwater filled Doniford harbour until it brimmed.
‘What for?’ said Adam.
We stopped at the traffic lights on the high street, where a woman stood on the pavement waiting to cross. Her hands were folded in front of her and the straps of her leather handbag were looped over her forearm, which she held very still. She had permed, mouse-coloured hair and the round, pallid face of a Delft maiden. We looked at one another blankly before she crossed the road, stepping carefully in front of our car.
