In the Fold (2 page)

‘Look what’s blown in,’ she said.

The two women at the table were of a similar age, somewhere in their late forties I guessed. One was dark and the other fair. They were different and yet the same. They had an uncanny, conspiratorial look about them, like a pair of witches, or two characters from a fairy tale.

‘Now the men arrive,’ said the fair one. ‘Now the party can begin. We just needed the men to arrive, as a catalyst. Now we can work up our enthusiasm.’

‘He went and bought three kegs of bitter,’ said the dark one. ‘Isn’t that the end? Don’t you think that’s the end?’

The dark one was big and thin and angular, with complicated, jointed parts like a mathematical instrument. She had closely cut hair and a dull, sallow complexion. Her narrow face had a downward aspect to it: her nose sloped and her mouth was downturned and her eyes drifted down at the corners too, which gave her a mournful expression, as though her hopes were gradually subsiding.

‘Three kegs of bitter for a summer party,’ she said gloomily, ‘and six bottles of white wine.’

‘That was not the plan,’ said the fair one. She had a loud, distinct, drawling way of speaking. She seemed perpetually to be smiling and speaking out of the side of her mouth. ‘That was not the idea at all.’

‘This is Michael,’ said Adam.

They all looked at me while Adam spoke their names. I couldn’t catch them: they passed over me quickly, like the shadows of birds. Only the name of the man by the fireplace, Paul, snagged in my ears. There was another man at the table,
but I wasn’t sure which of them was Adam’s father.

‘Would
you
have bought three kegs of bitter for a summer party?’ said the dark woman, to me. ‘Perhaps you would, being male. The women won’t drink it, though. That’s the problem with letting the men organise the drink. They only think about themselves, don’t they?’

‘We’ve got the wine,’ said the fair one. ‘Don’t forget the wine, Vivian. We’ll measure it out. We’ll sit on the grass and drink it out of buttercups.’

‘I wanted to make
kir
,’ said the girl in the window.

‘We’re having dew,’ said the fair one, ‘and we’re drinking it out of buttercups.’

‘Can you drive?’ demanded the man by the fireplace. He was speaking to me. He took something out of his pocket and lobbed it across the room towards me. I caught it shakily. It was a set of car keys. ‘Take my car, would you, and go down to Doniford for some wine? We’ve got to shut these women up. We’ve got to silence the harpies.’

‘And some
cassis
,’ said the girl. ‘We have to have
cassis
.’

‘Try the Spar on the high street,’ said the fair woman, with what I later understood to be sarcasm. ‘They’re bound to have it.’

‘Well, give him some money!’ said the man impatiently. ‘What’s he supposed to do, steal the stuff?’

It was the dark-haired woman who responded to this command. She opened a battered leather handbag and took out her purse.

‘Do you know where to go?’ she asked concernedly, putting some notes into my hand. Her drooping face was close to mine. Her skin was dry and soft, like dust.

‘Come here,’ said the man by the fireplace, holding out his arms to Adam. ‘Come and kiss your father. Let me get the feel of you.’

‘I’ll work it out,’ I said.

Adam’s father’s car was an old green Jaguar with cracked, cream-leather seats. It breasted the road like a ponderous
boat. From the driver’s seat the world seemed to swing alarmingly from left to right. I was not a very practised driver. In fact, I had only driven a car on my own two or three times before. I sailed down to Doniford on a wave of risk, concerned only with the amount of time I would be seen to have taken. At one point the brown, feathered body of a little bird thumped against the windscreen and fell away – I grimaced but did not stop. When I found myself back at the house at the top of the hill, in the sun and the wind, with three cases of wine and two bottles of cassis, I had almost no recollection at all of the journey. In the hot little town, wandering distraught and excited amongst the summer crowds, I had glimpsed myself repeatedly in the dusty glass shopfronts, and only these pieces of glass bearing my reflection remained lodged in my memory. Again and again I had seen myself and been amazed by how limited and strange the image was, how little it expressed of what I felt.

‘You’re a young buck, aren’t you?’ said Paul admiringly, when I entered the courtyard carrying a box of wine under each arm. ‘You’re a good-looking boy. I’d give anything for a day in that body of yours, just a day.’

He took the boxes from me and ripped them open. Adam was standing a few feet away in the sun, emptying ice from big bumpy bags into an old metal bathtub with clawed feet. Paul had taken his shirt off. I saw his gnarled, ruddy chest and his wiry arms. He was surprisingly small in stature and his legs were short and thin and rather bowed, but his head was very large and his features prominent, and a plume of bushy grey hair rose grandly up and back from his forehead. He had something of a goat about him, or a satyr.

‘D’you look after yourself?’ he said, scrutinising me. ‘Lift weights and whatnot? I never needed that, but then I had the work on the farm. You don’t always get the right shape that way, though. I’m in two pieces – the top part’s the farm, the bottom’s the horses.’

The other man had emerged from the kitchen and was
leaning against the frame of the door to the courtyard watching us. He was around the same age as Paul and resembled him sketchily in the face, but he was tall and slender and wore slightly effeminate clothes, a primrose-yellow shirt tucked into his trousers and a silk handkerchief tied around his neck. He had a full, neat moustache that nested on his upper lip like a little animal.

‘Most of the farmers around here look like pregnant women to me,’ he said disdainfully.

‘Take David,’ said Paul, pointing at him. ‘He looks all right with his clothes on, but underneath he’s like a rag doll. He and Audrey eat rabbit food – they nibble away like a pair of bunnies. Some women can manage on that but others get a bad smell when they’re underfed. You can smell it on their breath, the stomach acids. Audrey never suffered from it, but others do.’

‘Apparently they do no physical exercise at all,’ said David. ‘They ride around on those little tractor bikes and never use their legs. Don Brice got gangrene that way, you know. Disgusting, isn’t it? It’s one thing if you have intellectual pursuits,’ he said, to me. ‘I’ve always thought you had to be one thing or the other, intellectual or physical. I’m an intellectual myself. You’ll perceive that I’m in a minority around here. What are you reading, Michael?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘At university.’ He smiled patiently.

‘Oh. The same as Adam. History.’

‘Ah.’ He folded his arms with apparent satisfaction. ‘What do they call it? The story not of great deeds but of great men. Actually, I myself am something of an historian.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, I’m writing a book.’

‘Don’t get him on his book,’ said Paul grimly. He was plunging the wine bottles by their necks into the bath of ice.

‘It’s just a little local history,’ said David deprecatingly, making a swatting motion with his hand. ‘A mere nothing.’

‘Go on then, ask him what it’s about,’ said Paul. ‘Go on, be quick.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘Since you ask,’ said David, ‘it’s about a murder.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘A murder that was never solved.’ He paused dramatically. ‘Eleventh of March 1883 – beware the Ides of March, eh? A woman killed, brutally, with an axe, while her small son looked on, and no one ever able to say who did it, or why.’ He paused again. His blue eyes were very wide open. ‘Annie Askey. A harmless woman killed with an axe one night as she sat sewing at her kitchen table.’

‘Where did it happen?’ I asked.

‘Right here,’ he said brightly. ‘In this house! The man of the family, Martin Askey, sold it to our great-grandfather. I think it’s still the same table, isn’t it?’

‘Of course it’s bloody not,’ said Paul crossly.

‘For an area with such a low population density, Doniford and its surrounds can lay claim to a remarkable catalogue of the most gruesome murders,’ said David. ‘This is by no means an untypical example.’

‘He didn’t sell it,’ said Paul. ‘He exchanged it for a fishing rod. They were pissed at the pub one night and he swapped the house for a fishing rod. Personally I always thought that was suspicious, don’t you think? I think the rum bugger killed her himself.’

‘Why on earth would he have done that?’ said David. ‘What possible motivation could he have had to kill his own wife?’

‘He probably couldn’t stand the bloody sight of her.’

‘He’s the prime suspect, Uncle David,’ said Adam. ‘The family are always the prime suspects.’

‘You wouldn’t kill your wife in front of your own son,’ said David reproachfully.

‘I imagine he couldn’t help himself,’ said Paul.

‘You make it sound as if there were no principle of honour
between men and women,’ said David, his moustache quivering. ‘No integrity! No sacred bond! Don’t listen to these relativists,’ he said to me, distressed. ‘My own theory is that it was a vendetta of some sort, against Martin Askey himself. Perhaps he’d mistreated one of his labourers. That’s the theory I advance in my book, incidentally. That the quasi-feudal way of life in a farming community such as this provoked high levels of violence. It’s quite an unconventional theory in its way – people tend to idealise life in the highly systematised societies of the past. They prefer the passion motive. But I believe human beings are quite capable of suppressing their passions. It’s power they can’t resist!’

‘Do you know what happened to the boy?’ I asked.

David put his face close to mine. His eyes bulged out from their sockets. I could see the numberless, coarse filaments of his moustache.

‘He never spoke again,’ he said, triumphantly. ‘He grew up mute – silenced by what he had seen. Hence unable to bring the perpetrator to justice!’

Presently Paul sent us inside to fetch the glasses. In the kitchen the women were sitting at the table. The dark-haired woman was frantically chopping cucumber and flinging it into a large glass bowl. Her big, bony hands were white with stress around the knuckles. The girl, Caris, was drawing ringlets of ivy from a pile in front of her and twining them around glass jars with candles in. Next to her sat the other woman, who was turned sideways in her chair and was examining the girl’s profile raptly, occasionally lifting a hand to tuck strands of hair behind her ear. I saw that Caris was both irritated by the attention and transfixed by the warmth of it.

‘Mum, could you pass me the scissors?’ she said.

‘What’s that, darling?’

Caris leaned over to get the scissors herself, thus causing her mother to remove her hand. When Caris returned to her chair, her mother presently resumed caressing her hair.

‘Do you like them?’ said Caris. She held up one of the little jars and smiled.

‘They’re sweet,’ said her mother vaguely. She turned her face away. I noticed her withdrawing her hand. ‘Vivian, how are we going to feed all these children? I suppose at least half of them will be anorexics, but still, one salad and a few things on crackers is on the frugal side, don’t you think?’

‘There’s meat,’ said Vivian severely, who was making the table shake with her chopping.

‘There’s meat,’ repeated Caris’s mother generally, as though to an invisible audience. ‘What meat is there?’

‘Paul’s doing it outside. I think it’s sausages.’

‘The sausages are vegetarian,’ said Caris.

‘The sausages are ethical,’ said Caris’s mother. ‘Vivian, do you hear that? They may not be edible but at least the sausages are ethical.’

It had taken me time to get used to the older women’s faces, rather as eyes take time to adjust to darkness, but now I could see that Caris’s mother was very good-looking. She was slim and slight, with daintily rounded limbs like the limbs of a child. She had streaked dark-blonde hair cut in a messy, youthful style, and a wide, laughing mouth. A gorge of brown, freckled breastbone, roped by jewellery, was disclosed by her close-fitting dark blue shirt. She drummed her long, rounded, coral-plated fingernails on the tabletop. Her little face was spiteful and merry.

‘Paul offered her a suckling pig but she didn’t want it,’ said Vivian. ‘He did offer it, though. The thing was that she didn’t want it.’

‘I’ll say she didn’t. Poor little pigling. Ethical sausages much nicer.’

‘The problem is that it’s impossible to please everybody,’ said Vivian. ‘You offer to throw a party and then you find that people start wanting different things.’

‘I don’t want different things,’ said Caris. ‘I want it to be just like all the other parties.’

‘Where are the glasses?’ said Adam.

‘I want it to be like the parties you had when we were little,’ said Caris.

‘Those were not vegetarian parties, darling,’ said her mother. ‘They weren’t vegetarian, were they, Vivian? They were distinctly unprincipled.’

‘I remember you used to stay up all night,’ said Caris. ‘And when I got up in the morning and came out you were all still there.’

‘Yes, it was a bit much, I suppose,’ said Vivian. ‘I remember the men used to go off to bed while we had to do the washing up and make breakfast for the children. It was a bit much, really, when you think about it.’

‘We need the glasses,’ said Adam.

Caris rose from her chair. ‘I’m going upstairs to get dressed,’ she said.

‘Shall I come?’ her mother called after her. ‘We can beautify ourselves together like little Cinderellas for the ball. Darling, shall I come?’

Silence emanated from the stairwell.

We took the glasses outside, where Paul was putting tables on a sloping stretch of lawn in the wind. We pegged white sheets over the tops. Then we carried out wooden benches, one after the other. I didn’t know where they had got so many benches, but the ease with which they produced them suggested that this was a well-worked routine. We arranged the glasses in rows under a green and white striped canopy that flapped crazily in the wind. The lawn and the hill were bright in the sun. People began to arrive. The two women came out.