In the Fold (16 page)

‘Though I think it’s good,’ she continued, ‘for us to be apart.’

‘Do you?’

‘Oh, absolutely,’ she said. ‘It was what you always used to say, that the loosest ties are the strongest.’

‘I never said that.’

‘You’ve always said,’ reiterated Rebecca, ‘that we should lead more separate lives. I can hear you saying it now.’

‘I didn’t mean that we shouldn’t see each other.’

‘Letting go has been the hardest thing for me.’

‘I never said anything about letting go! I only meant that we shouldn’t hold each other responsible for all our problems.’

‘I’ve been very angry with you, Michael,
really
angry, but I’ve adored you too. Never forget that. And you’re also the father of my child. You always will be.’

‘I only meant that there’s a limit to how much you can relate to another person. Beyond a certain point it just becomes chaos – chaos!’

I found that my skin had drawn very tight around the top of my head. This was an effect Rebecca could have on me.

‘You’re afraid of passion, Michael. You’re afraid of blood on the floor. But the thing is, I’ve always been a very passionate
person and if you won’t allow me to express it then you know I’ll just turn on you. I’ll turn on you.’

In a way, I admired her for this kind of talk. Even when I’d listened, agonised, to her regaling that terrified boy with it in the pub, I felt too a sort of anarchic thrill at her lack of shame. To me, these fits of self-description were the closest she came to a creative act. It was herself she was creating, yet I felt sure that her state while she did it was not so distant from that which she yearned to attain, in which she would find herself enabled to make something that could actually stand apart from her.

‘All my life,’ she was saying now, ‘all my life I’ve been looking for something straight and fixed, something dependable, something I could pour myself into that would hold me.’

I guessed she was going to say that I was that thing.

‘And you were it, Michael. You were that vessel. You said to me, come on, I’ll hold you. I’ll contain you. I’ll give you routine and stability. I’ll give you a home, I’ll give you a baby if you want one. But don’t think that you can grow. Don’t think that you can move, or change. Because if you do I’ll crack. My nice strong walls can’t take pressure from the inside. I’ll crack and I’ll break and in the end I’ll shatter.’

‘
You
will?’ I said, confused.

‘You – you! I think maybe you needed to be broken. I think maybe that’s why you chose me.’

‘I thought you chose me. I thought I was the vessel and you were the –’

I couldn’t remember what she was. It had started out as some kind of fast-setting liquid, and ended up as an exuberant house plant.

‘You could have found some nice girl. Some nice, predictable girl.’

‘Why do you keep saying things like that?’ I shouted. ‘You’re the only thing that makes me predictable, because somebody has to be!’

‘You don’t know how hard it is for me,’ she said presently, in a trembling voice, ‘to stand on my own.’

‘I’m not asking you to stand on your own.’

‘You are. You just don’t see it yet.’

‘I think I’d see it if I were asking it.’

My mouth felt as though it were stuffed with something dry, like bread.

‘We’re married,’ I said finally. ‘Doesn’t that mean anything to you? For all their faults, at least your parents stay together.’

‘That isn’t a marriage,’ said Rebecca. ‘That’s a mutual dependency.’

‘Of course it seems like that to you! At least they touch each other!’ I said. It seemed I was shouting again. ‘You’d have to have a lump on your breast the size of a football for me to stand any chance of even noticing it!’

I went to bed and lay listening to the sound of Hamish rustling in his sleeping bag. I lay awake for so long in the airless, featureless spare room that I began to feel like something in a specimen case, being lightly tormented where I lay pinned behind glass by the sounds my son made, which summoned me constantly to awareness and to the state that precedes activity. I felt that if only I could hear or smell the sea this sensation would pass. I felt I could be comforted by the existence of something animate but impartial. In this place of fences such intrusions were apparently considered hazardous. It occurred to me that Doniford had succumbed to a sort of partitioning, a spoliation, out of its inability to adhere to its true nature. Like me, it had admitted ugliness because ugliness asked to be admitted.

‘Where are the women?’ Paul Hanbury wanted to know, when Adam, Hamish and I opened the door to his room. ‘Stand aside – let me see! Where are they? Where are my bloody women? Three days I’ve been in this bloody room and not one of them has come to see me!’

In its spacious sparseness and beige diffidence, the room was more like a room in a hotel than a hospital. Paul Hanbury lay on the grand, plinth-like bed at its centre. He wore a white smock and looked very small and tyrannical, like a child emperor. I would have recognised him by his voice alone, yet it was hard now to believe that it had emanated from him – it travelled around the room in great rings of sound that dwarfed his body. He had never been large, but lying in that bed he looked wizened – except for his head, which retained its distinctive scale and grandeur, and which he barely moved when he spoke, so that in spite of everything he had the poised appearance of a statesman, or an actor. His hair rolled back from his forehead in thick, steel-grey waves and his face had darkened and deepened into creases since the last time I saw him, especially around his eyes, which were small and black and glittered like buttons. He opened his large, well-shaped mouth wide in order to talk, revealing straight, strong, even yellow teeth and the resilient, plump pad of his tongue.

‘That’s not true, dad,’ said Adam. ‘Vivian came last night.’

‘She did not – not a soul has come since you showed your face here yesterday! And before that there was only that poseur David, who came with some bloody stupid periodical and wouldn’t sit down in case he creased his trousers, and apart from that there’s been nobody.’

‘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.