In the Fold (10 page)

I took another load in the wheelbarrow and pushed it out into the open yard. Adam was there raking the pile up against the wall in the wind. Little scratchy shreds of matter were whirled up into the air and came barrelling against our faces.

‘We drew the short straw, you know,’ he said in a low voice. ‘All this shovelling and tidying up – the nights are much better. Brendon got them, of course. Him and Beverly light all these candles and sit in the straw drinking beer.’

I was surprised.

‘I didn’t know Brendon was still here.’

‘He never left. He lives in the lodge. They’ll give you hot water at the house, you know,’ he called over to Beverly.

Beverly was sitting in the yard lighting the little gas burner she’d brought with her in her van. It made a hoarse noise of great exertion against the wind. She had a tin kettle she stood on it to make tea.

‘I’m all right here,’ Beverly called back.

‘Brendon,’ Adam continued in a discreet voice, ‘isn’t viable.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He isn’t capable of independent life. He’s never even had a job! He just sits there talking to his chickens. And for that,’ Adam concluded grimly, ‘he gets all the perks.’

I found that I felt defensive of Brendon: something in the
way Adam spoke about him made me think of Hamish. I remembered the little white face of the forgotten boy I had glimpsed in the chicken house the first time I came to Egypt.

‘I remember he liked chickens.’

Adam laughed and shook his head.

‘Incredible, isn’t it? No one’s ever lifted a finger to help me and Lisa. Everything we’ve got, we’ve got for ourselves. Some people have to be carried through life,’ he added, looking at me significantly, as though to ascertain whether I was one of those people. ‘I’m going over there now, actually. I’ve got to ask him to help Vivian with the dogs. Should be entertaining – he’s got some kind of dog phobia. We’re just going down to the lodge,’ he called to Beverly.

‘See you,’ she said, lightly but with resignation. ‘Tell Brendon I’ll see him at the pub.’

I followed Adam out of the barn. He raised his arm beside me in assent but when we got out on to the track he said:

‘That’s the first I’ve heard of her seeing him at the pub.’

‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘There’s nothing morally wrong with Brendon seeing a woman,’ admitted Adam after a while.

‘Is this where the artist used to live?’

We were going down the track towards the stone gates.

‘Which artist?’

‘The one who painted Caris.’

‘Oh, him. I don’t know what happened to him. He sort of disappeared.’

‘I thought he was going to be the next Frank Auerbach.’

‘Well, he wasn’t.’

A single-storey grey stone building appeared on the side of the hill. A feather of wood smoke came out of the chimney, bent sideways by the wind. As we approached I saw that a big wire structure was attached to the side wall. It was like a tunnel or hangar following the line of the building. There were three large wooden hen houses inside. A number of fat, ruffled birds were pecking the ground around them.

‘You’ve been busy,’ said Adam when his brother opened the door.

A set of bamboo wind chimes hung from the lintel. They made a crazy knocking noise and writhed about in the wind. Brendon wore an expression of astonishment. He regarded us, wild-eyed, for a full ten seconds.

‘You mean the new run,’ he stated.

‘It’s pretty close to the house.’

‘Right by it,’ nodded Brendon, emphatically.

He was taller and more slender than Adam. His pale blue eyes were startled and round. His blond hair stood up in spikes. He looked like a doll that had been too energetically played with. I had last seen him as a child and I could still see that early version of him within the man he had become. It was like seeing someone imprisoned in a very small cell. On his feet he wore big lace-up boots that had been clumsily hand-painted in the colours of the rainbow.

‘This is Michael.’ Adam gestured towards me.

‘H-hi. Welcome.’

‘The birds’ll scratch a trench along the wall,’ Adam said.

Brendon stared at him.

‘Thought of that,’ he gasped, nodding. ‘I l-lined it with bricks. Want to see?’

We followed him round to the side of the house, where the wind desisted a little.

‘They love the s-s-space,’ stammered Brendon, red with pride. ‘My yields have sh-shot up.’

He was wearing a shirt which had on it a pattern of buxom, dark-haired women with garlands around their necks.

‘You should change your cartons,’ said Adam. ‘You’d get more business.’

‘I don’t think I can. I’ve got a new customer that likes them.’

Adam lifted his head suspiciously.

‘Who’s that?’

‘Sh-shelby’s.’

‘You can’t supply someone like Shelby’s from here,’ said Adam. ‘There isn’t the infrastructure.’

Brendon moved his mouth, as though he were ingesting the word.

‘Come inside,’ he said finally. ‘You look a bit stressed out. Beverly says it’s pretty manic up there.’

We followed him through the door of the cottage and into a cramped sitting room. The ceiling sagged perilously in the middle. On one wall a large dark patch of rot was smeared across the plaster. A decrepit-looking sofa and a malformed armchair were the only furniture. The room smelled of damp and wood smoke. It didn’t look like a place where a person could live. I remembered what Adam had said about Brendon receiving perks, and wondered if this was meant to be one of them.

He went through a doorway into a lean-to that housed the kitchen. I watched him pick up a hot-water bottle that lay on the counter and unscrew the plug. With his back to us he emptied the contents into the kettle and switched it on.

‘We should sort this place out,’ said Adam, looking around. ‘People are getting a fortune for this kind of thing. They rent them out as holiday cottages. The Brices say theirs is booked nearly the whole year round.’

‘You can’t do that here,’ said Brendon from the kitchen.

‘Why not?’ Adam demanded.

‘You can’t. Dad w-wanted to. He got someone to come and look at it and they found, you know, asbestos. In the roof. So officially the building’s a, um, health hazard.’ Brendon appeared in the doorway. ‘It isn’t harmful so long as you don’t touch it.’

‘What isn’t?’

‘Asbestos.’

The kitchen was so small that when the kettle boiled it sent a jet of steam out into the sitting room.

‘Bloody typical,’ muttered Adam. He seemed to think Brendon had put the asbestos there himself. ‘How much is
that going to cost to sort out, I wonder?’

‘I d-don’t know. A lot. Dad decided it wasn’t worth it. It would have h-halved the price.’

‘What price? We’re talking about renting it out, not selling it.’

‘No.’ Brendon shook his head. ‘No, it was to s-sell.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘He wanted to sell it,’ repeated Brendon. ‘With some land. Half the l-little field down the hill and –’

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Adam again.

‘The problem was,’ Brendon continued, tentatively coming further into the room like something being slowly lured out of its burrow, ‘they’d have knocked it down.’

‘Who would?’

‘The new owners. And built something else. An eyesore.’ Brendon tugged at his eye with his middle finger and disappeared into the kitchen again.

‘Brendon doesn’t know what he’s talking about,’ said Adam, to me.

Brendon did not contradict this, although he was now standing right beside his brother with two cups trembling in his hands. Some of the hot, light-brown liquid spilled over the brim of one of them and pattered over the carpet.

‘It’s not as if he needs the money,’ Adam persisted. ‘He’d never let a piece of the farm go, not in a million years.’

He seemed distressed, as much by the fact that he hadn’t been told about it as by the inadmissibility of the idea itself. I felt sorry for him: this was a state into which I was frequently thrown by Rebecca.

‘I was glad,’ Brendon said. ‘I didn’t want them to knock it down. This place stands on a l-ley line, you know. It’s a s-sacred site. Bad luck to harm it. Did you know Caris is coming?’ he added.

I sat down in the armchair. It was covered with a length of cloth, like something in a morgue.

‘I had heard,’ said Adam.

‘She’ll tell you. She’s s-seen things here.’

Adam put a hand to his head, as though he were in pain.

‘What sort of things?’ I asked.

‘E-emanations. Lights. Do you know Caris?’

‘A little.’

‘She’s very porous. She’s always seeing things.’

‘Well, she hasn’t seen Isobel,’ Adam said. Isobel was the name of his baby. ‘She’s had distinct trouble seeing her. She’s never once laid eyes on her.’

Brendon stared at him with his mouth open.

‘I know she got someone to do her solar chart when she was born,’ he said reasonably. ‘She’s bringing it with her from London. It’s, ah, good news apparently.’

The windows of the little room were wet with condensation. A pall of odorous steam was suspended at its centre. There was a dirty, boiled-roots smell.

‘What’s that smell?’ I asked.

‘Hot mash,’ Brendon replied. ‘For the birds. Apparently it stops them pining for a cockerel.’

‘Who told you that?’ said Adam.

‘M-mum.’

‘I thought so. Show Michael your cartons.’

‘Oh. All right.’ Brendon hopped off the sofa and vanished into the kitchen. He returned with a carton and handed it to me. ‘Th-there you go.’

The carton was bright pink. It had a turquoise label which read ‘Funky Chickens’.

‘A friend of mine makes them for me,’ said Brendon proudly. ‘They s-stand out a mile in the shops.’

‘You should have seen dad’s face when he saw them,’ said Adam, to me. ‘He thought he’d never be able to show himself in Doniford again.’

‘He just had to get used to them,’ said Brendon. ‘He likes them now. He saw Lady Higham buying some and she said they were the l-latest thing.’

‘The latest thing,’ Adam repeated, shaking his head. He put
his hands on his knees and stood up heavily. ‘The latest thing in eggs. That reconciled him, did it?’

I stood up too. The dank steam was much thicker towards the top and centre of the room so I went and stood by the cast-iron fireplace. On the mantelpiece there was a small brass Buddha, grinning insanely. Next to it was an inlaid incense holder with a little grey worm of ash lying beside it.

‘I came to ask you a favour,’ Adam said.

Brendon looked frightened. ‘Go on,’ he said.

‘Vivian needs the dogs walking.’

‘All right,’ said Brendon doubtfully. ‘They don’t like me, though.’

‘She can’t see to the end of her arm. They’re spending all day shut in.’

‘I’ll t-try,’ said Brendon.

‘They’re a bit temperamental with dad away.’

Brendon looked aghast.

‘It’s all right,’ Adam said. ‘It’s only for a week.’

‘What am I supposed to do with them?’

‘Just take them to the top of the hill and back.’

‘But what if they run away?’

Adam opened the cottage door and let us out on to the windy hill. A belch of steam was let out with us and was instantly drawn upwards into the sky.

‘If they run away you’ll just have to go and find them,’ he said.

We set off back up the track towards the barns.

Adam’s house stood in a delta of tarmac, new, black and pristine. It lay at the end of a black, pristine tarmac river that meandered grandly out of the east side of town, beyond the old grid-patterned streets of residential Doniford, which looked infirm by comparison. There, the coast road passed through a fuming, hooting, rattling cascade of metal the narrow, decorous terraces struggled to contain. Great lorries like dinosaurs manoeuvred on the small roundabouts. Dirty trucks freighted with skips and scaffolding roared past, driven by men who gazed blankly through their spattered windscreens. Beside them the pavements and brick walls of front gardens looked miniature: the gardens and the facades of the houses shook like toys as the lorries passed and the daffodils seemed to jolt from side to side in the grass. The houses looked so vulnerable next to the pounding road that it was difficult to believe in the world in which they had been constructed. Some of the terraces were only fifty or sixty years old but they seemed rooted in a past that had become meaningless. Great weights hurtled back and forth at high velocity past the little, unaccustomed rows of houses, four feet from their front gates.

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 could 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.