by Rachel Cusk
‘I don’t understand,’ said Adam.
‘Where’s it gone? It’s called the Wankers’ Review – or the Wallies’ Review. Where the hell is it? Ah yes, here we go – the Wolsey Review. “Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation”. I think that’s David’s idea of a joke. D’you see what they’ve done to my dong? They’ve gift-wrapped it, do you see?’ He folded back his covers to reveal part of a hooped wire contraption that stood in an ominous arch over his hips, and then drew them quickly up again before it could be established what was underneath. ‘And what else is there – “Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination”! I think I’ll save that for Vivian, if she ever comes.’
Beside me Hamish made his bell noise. It sounded particularly loud in the well-insulated room.
‘What’s that?’ said Paul amusedly, looking around. ‘School’s out?’
‘Vivian definitely said she was coming in last night,’ said Adam. ‘I don’t understand why she didn’t say something this morning.’
‘Michael! Come over here where I can see you.’ This was bellowed as though from a great distance, although I was standing six feet from the bed and the room was full of daylight. ‘Is this fellow yours?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s a funny little bugger, isn’t he? What’s his name?’
‘Hamish.’
‘Put him up on the bed, will you? Put him here, next to me, if he’ll come. Has he got a mother?’
‘Rebecca. My wife.’
‘Well, I hope he doesn’t get his looks from her. How does life treat you, Michael? With its gloves off, judging by the bags under your eyes.’
‘I’m very well.’
‘If you say so. Where are you living? Have you got some nice place in the country where your boy can stretch his legs?’
‘We live in Bath.’
‘Ah, Bath. I always liked the idea of Bath. The reality never quite lived up to it, though. I’d take the women there and you wouldn’t see them for dust. They’d be off and into the shops like rats up a drainpipe. And how do you earn your crust in Bath?’
‘I work for a charity.’
‘Of course you do. Paying your debt to society – I’m glad somebody is! And you’re taking some leave – or rather, you’re down here for a week’s babysitting while the missus exercises her feminist imagination. I wouldn’t leave a woman alone in Bath for a day, let alone a week, but I suppose she’s acclimatised. Or is she the enigmatic type as well?’
Hamish seemed happy enough sitting on the plush bed, but I was worried that he might knock the wire hoop. It would be very painful, I imagined, if he did. I furtively grasped the back of Hamish’s shirt.
‘Caris is here,’ said Adam.
‘Not as far as I can see she bloody well isn’t,’ said Paul.
‘She came down yesterday on the train.’
‘Well, don’t leave her alone in the house. She’ll have packed everything up and sent it to the Donkey Sanctuary or the IRA or whoever the hell else she’s feeling sorry for this week. Have you seen Caris?’ he asked me.
‘Yes.’
‘Nuts, isn’t she?’ he said delightedly. ‘She’s getting fat, too. Her mother never got fat, but then she never had to. All she had to do was sit on her little arse in Doniford reading magazines and drinking diet milkshakes until they came out of her ears. But Caris won’t have anything to do with all that – her mother shoved it down her throat and now she won’t have anything to do with it. And more’s the pity,’ he continued, settling back into his pillows, ‘because she was a good-looking girl, a fine-looking girl. Her mother competed with her, that was the problem. She could be very cold. Caris got the idea that it didn’t do to be so pretty. Of course, she’ll tell you it’s all my fault,’ he concluded cheerfully, with his arms folded behind his head. ‘Women stick together in the end – ask Mary Wollstonecraft.’
‘I’ve been up at the farm with Adam,’ I said, by way of a diversion.
‘Oh you have, have you?’ He looked slightly discomfited, as though I had revealed myself to be untrustworthy. ‘What are you doing up there?’
‘We’re lambing, dad,’ said Adam, loudly.
‘All right, all right,’ said Paul irritably, flapping his hand. ‘I’m not some old fart in a home – I just didn’t know what he meant, that’s all. So you’ve been up at Egypt, have you? What do you think of the place? Marvellous, isn’t it? I always say that as the rest of the world gets worse, Egypt gets better. The principal of entropy does not apply. You’ve no idea, the torture it is to me to be in here, with spring coming on to the hill and everything waking up. I tell you, I can hear the grass growing! I only hope this isn’t what death is like, you know, an empty box and a view of the car park. I should have gone to a normal hospital,’ he said petulantly. ‘I’d have been far happier on a ward, with a fat black lady taking my temperature.’
‘You didn’t want to go on a ward!’ protested Adam. ‘You wanted to come here.’
‘Thought I’d never come out of one of those places alive, didn’t I?’ muttered Paul. ‘Now I don’t know which is worse, dying with the riffraff or living alone in this hell. Besides, I thought the nurses would be better looking. The nurses are absolute dogs,’ he said, to me. ‘They send them to me specially. I’m not allowed to be stimulated.’
I made to remove Hamish from the bed but Paul shot out a hand from behind his head and gripped his arm with it.
‘Oh, leave him be,’ he said. ‘I like the feel of a warm boy next to me.’ He cackled delightedly at himself.
‘I don’t want him to hurt you.’
‘You mean you don’t want him hearing my filth – are you another of these protective parents? None of them will let me lay a hand on their babies, you know. I think Laura hoses hers down with antiseptic after they’ve been at Egypt. As for the new one, I have to request audiences with her, like Vivian did with the Pope. And she’s a Hanbury – my own flesh and blood!’
‘I didn’t know Vivian had seen the Pope,’ said Adam, from the bathroom, where he had gone to fill his father’s water jug.
‘That’s because she hasn’t,’ called Paul. ‘He wouldn’t have her. The Pontiff turned her down.’
Adam laughed. ‘Did he?’
‘He took the view,’ said Paul, ‘that dissolving Vivian’s marriage would be like dissolving a set of functioning molars. I think he’s a very sensible chap. You can’t go saying a marriage didn’t happen when there are two strapping children to show that it did. So he stood her up. She went all the way to Rome and he stood her up. At least, that’s where she said she was. She could have been anywhere. She was probably getting pissed on sangria with that hippy friend of hers and her dago shopkeeper husband. Now that I come to think of it, she did come back with her tan. Do you know Vivian’s tan?’ he asked me. ‘It’s very amusing. She looks like she’s been embalmed in salad dressing.’
‘Dad, do you want me to turn up the pump?’ said Adam. ‘The dial’s set lower than it was yesterday.’
‘The funny thing,’ said Paul, to me, ‘is that after His Holiness rebuffed her she kept going back for punishment. To Mass.’ He pronounced it to rhyme with ‘arse.’ ‘And because she’d had the gumption finally to leave her miserable drunk husband she wasn’t allowed to take the holy Host. She was considered to be excommunicated. For some reason she didn’t know she was, though. One day she was standing in the queue and when she got to the priest and stuck her tongue out he wouldn’t give it to her. He popped his wafer right back in the bowl and put his hand over it, as though she might steal one! Some interfering old bitch had told him that Vivian was excommunicado. So after that she went along and sat at the back and when everyone else got up to join the queue she stayed where she was and pretended to read the hymn-book. I said to her, how can you bloody let them do that to you! How can you let them win, do you see? I’ll bet they loved seeing her sitting there all contrite, while they were busy rogering the altar-boys – leave that bloody thing alone!’ he
said to Adam, who was scrutinising a plastic valve from which a pale tube led to the hard delta of veins in Paul Hanbury’s brown, hairy wrist.
‘It’s just that it seems very low.’
‘I don’t want that bloody stuff in my veins!’
‘Dad,’ said Adam heavily, ‘all you’re doing is subjecting your body to unnecessary pain.’
‘I wouldn’t walk around with a blindfold on either.’
‘There’s nothing vital about pain.’
‘What do you mean! How will I know what’s happened to me if I don’t feel it? Answer me that! That’s how you walk over a cliff in life! You can’t go around numbing yourself and sedating yourself against half the things that happen to you and expect to get any sensation from the other half – that’s what it means, to do things by halves! Do you know,’ he said, to me, ‘I’ve been going to the dentist in Doniford all my life and I’ve never had an anaesthetic. While this big fellow –’ he pointed to Adam ‘– has to be unconscious before he’ll let them so much as clean between his teeth.’
‘I think you’ll find, dad, that most people have an anaesthetic when they go to the dentist.’
‘What do I care what most people do? Most people live lives of such surpassing inanity I don’t know why they bother! Most people want to sit in their little red-brick boxes on their little estates watching television, or drive around going nowhere in their cars, or stuff their faces with junk, or go shopping – and I’m not saying that’s any worse than what people have always wanted to do. The difference is that now they’ve got everything laid on for them. The world’s been wrecked, laying on their houses and their cars and their cheap holidays and their cheap food – and a hundred years ago, most of them would have been pushing a plough with not a thought in their heads, and be none the worse off for it!’
Through the great pale window the distant skeletons of trees were faintly picked out against a wad of sky. The hospital was half an hour’s drive from Doniford, I didn’t know exactly where, just that we had driven directly away from the coast and the green hills and become gradually mired in a flat, grey, nondescript landscape cluttered with buildings and petrol stations, and street lamps with nothing human to light, and warehouses behind wire fences. This clutter was not, it appeared, to amount to anything so definite as a town: like a tundra, its formlessness was its single geographical feature. The hospital was a low red-brick building that stood like an island in the sea of its car park. Inside, in the foyer, it blazed with light and with wood-veneered surfaces. The foyer was carpeted, as was the lift. The woman at the reception desk wore a tailored black suit and high heels and the nurses wore vague white uniforms, so that the whole place had an atmosphere of discretion that bordered on secrecy, as though the question of sickness were inadmissible; as though, were a drama ever to unfold here, it would manifest itself in the spectacle not of disease but of celebration of life itself.
‘We were at mum’s yesterday,’ said Adam.
Paul assumed a peevish expression. ‘Yes, David says she’s got the hump about something. I suppose I’ve said something I shouldn’t have, have I? Is that it?’
‘She’d better tell you about it herself,’ said Adam.
‘The first Mrs Hanbury,’ said Paul, to me, ‘is a very sensitive creature where her own thin skin is concerned. She’s like the princess who can feel the pea through twenty mattresses – I believe she considers it to be the mark of good breeding. She’s what they call “high maintenance”. So’s the second, now that I come to think of it, though in a different way. The second gets the blues. Vivian’s blues are like those fogs you get in Scotland that last for two weeks. They sort of envelop you and quietly soak you to the skin.’
‘I don’t understand why Vivian didn’t come in,’ said Adam, for the third or fourth time. He was still holding the plastic valve in his hand. He had something of the butler about him, the castrated quality of a male given over to a life of service. He seemed to me just then to be completely without what I could only describe as poetry, or heroism; to lack, in any case, the promise or the threat of unpredictability.
‘I tell you, she’s got the blues. The first Mrs Hanbury’s got the hump and the second’s got the blues. What’s your woman like, Michael? Is she cheerful? I hope for your sake that she is.’
‘Sometimes she is.’
‘What does she make of that fur on your face? Does she like it?’
‘She doesn’t mind it,’ I said, although the truth was that Rebecca’s attitude to my beard was entirely ambivalent, and for that reason I maintained it, partly as a sort of doorstop to prevent our relationship swinging shut. For some reason, I felt that as long as I kept this semicircle of dark hair on my face I could never be said to have succumbed: I could not be negated, by love nor by hate.
‘Only doesn’t mind?’ he said. ‘I’d have thought she’d be one way or the other, if the women I know are anything to go by. The women I know like to take a definite position. As a military tactic it doesn’t work, that’s what I’m always telling them. If you take a position you’re open to attack. You’re better off keeping on the move. I always wondered whether women liked a beard,’ he said, consideringly. ‘But I could never get mine to grow. Does it increase sensation? Does she tell you that?’
I smiled in what I hoped was a mysterious fashion.
‘Oh, I see. That’s how it is. That’s how it is, is it?’ Paul looked around the featureless room impatiently. ‘Well, someone’s got to humour a sick old man – where’s Lisa? Why hasn’t she been in to see me?’
‘She doesn’t want to bring Isobel into the hospital,’ said Adam.
‘Why, does she think it’s catching, cancer of the dong? You see what I mean about protective parents,’ he said, to me again. ‘Have you been to their house? You have to take your shoes off before they’ll let you in. I feel like a horse with nothing on its hooves when I’m there. And my socks are always squiffy. That’s why Audrey won’t go there, you know. Her stiletto heels were soldered to her feet at birth. She’d go up in a puff of smoke if she ever took them off. Have you met Lisa? She’s a good girl really. She’s rather a solid girl. Very house-proud, isn’t she, Adam? Her father sells bathtubs.’
‘Jacuzzis,’ said Adam. ‘Don’t pretend you’ve never been in a jacuzzi, dad.’
‘The first Mrs Hanbury was fond of that sort of thing. I couldn’t stand it – it was like being boiled alive. And on the subject of hygiene, they’re an absolute breeding ground for germs – all sorts of people pile into them, you know, all together. You try to stretch your legs out and you find you’re playing footsie with the hairy calves of some overweight middle manager. Still, we’ve all got to earn our living, I suppose. Adam says he does rather well out of it. The problem is, you never know when that sort of craze will pass, do you? He might find himself out on his ear in a year or two, when people find some other way to waste their time and money. Do you see what I mean? It’s not like a farm, is it? You can never say, this is my patch of the earth, my place. This is where I have my being. You can’t say that about a bloody bathtub, can you?’
‘They’ve got a perfectly good patch of the earth,’ said Adam. ‘They own an eight-bedroom house in Northumberland with twenty acres of land.’
‘But it’s all in hock to the bathtubs! If the bathtubs go, so does the land!’
‘That’s how life is, dad. That’s how life is for most people. We’re not all as lucky as you.’
‘Luck has nothing to do with it,’ said Paul. ‘The best luck I’ve had is to be given the good sense not to meddle with what I have. I could have ruined it in a million different ways – look at Don Brice! Look at Si Higham, driving around in that big jalopy with the white leather seats, pleased as punch with himself, and for what? For selling all his land to the highest bidder and turning Doniford into suburbia!’
Paul was becoming quite exercised – his wiry neck and chest were dark red where I could see around the collar of the white hospital garment. I picked
up Hamish, who had sat beside him on the bed all this while virtually motionless, looking straight ahead with a superior expression on his face. This time Paul let me take him with an exasperated gesture.
‘I don’t see what’s so wrong with that,’ said Adam. ‘He wasn’t farming the land – he wasn’t using it for anything. Anyway, where are people supposed to live?’
‘If they’ve got nowhere to live then they shouldn’t have been born.’
‘It’s a bit late for that,’ said Adam calmly.
‘You people,’ said Paul, ‘you people don’t understand how to desire what is actually yours – you’re always scheming, the lot of you! Always dissatisfied! Even that layabout Brendon, turning the lodge into a chicken farm when he thinks I’m not looking – a bunch of hangers-on, a pack of vultures is what you are!’
I carried Hamish to the window and together we looked down at the car park, with its symmetrical rows of shiny, unpersoned vehicles.
‘No one’s scheming, dad,’ said Adam behind me. ‘Brendon’s doing the chickens as a way of being more financially independent, that’s all. And Caris is never here – you can hardly call her a vulture.’
‘I’ll call her what I like,’ said Paul morosely. ‘She’s been a great disappointment to me.’
‘As for me, I’m just trying to help you. I’ve taken a week off work to do the lambs – even Michael is here to help you.’
‘Why?’ snapped Paul. ‘Why haven’t you got your own lives to lead? Michael, haven’t you got a family of your own? Parents of your own?’
‘Yes.’
‘And where are they?’
‘They live in Surrey.’
‘What are they doing there?’ said Paul, as though there were something outlandish about it.
‘They’re doctors,’ I said.
‘Doctors – are they really? Both of them?’
