In the Fold (20 page)

‘Not particularly,’ said Lisa, who had looked at Caris and looked away again.

I wondered if Caris had gone in some way mad, for she did remain in utter self-consciousness at the door, moving her eyes from one to another of us with a little smile. Her head, unbodied, began to look slightly eerie. I noticed that no one spoke to her. It struck me that this might be reinforcing her madness – that her expression could be that of someone whom numerous people are feigning an inability to see. I thought I understood, though, why no one did speak to her: it was her air of great import, which seemed to presage an announcement that never came.

‘Polly’s completely harmless,’ said Laura, who appeared not to have noticed that Caris’s face, with its mystical expression, was suspended a mere ten or twelve inches from her own. ‘You can’t be frightened of Polly!’

‘She’s got an axe,’ said Janie. ‘I saw her running after that boy with it.’

‘Oh, she’s only playing. She wouldn’t actually hurt him, you know. Oh look!’ Laura laughed, pointing at Janie. ‘She’s terrified, the poor little thing!’

Caris finally made her announcement.

‘Mum’s here,’ she said.

Vivian looked up.

‘Here?’ she said.

‘She brought me up in the car. She’s outside talking to Rufus. I thought I’d come and warn you.’

‘What’s she doing here?’ said Vivian.

From outside I could hear the sound of the dogs barking.

‘She’s just come up to say hello,’ said Caris. Her look was inscrutable.

‘Well, no one invited her,’ said Vivian. ‘It’s a bit much, just to turn up uninvited!’

‘Vivian,’ said Adam pacifically, ‘come on. Mum’s always up here with you and dad.’

‘If she wants to see him she knows where to find him,’ said Vivian. ‘She can’t just come turning up here uninvited!’

There was a commotion out in the hall and suddenly the door was thrown ajar against Laura and the dogs tumbled through, tearing around Caris’s legs and into the kitchen. They skidded over the flagstone floor and hurled themselves with a deafening volley of barks at Vivian’s chair. Vivian shrieked and got to her feet, knocking the chair to the floor. The dogs snapped their livid, fleshy muzzles at her over the upended legs and made contorted shapes around her with their scruffy bodies.

‘Get down!’ shouted Adam, lunging for their collars. He kicked one of the dogs and its skinny, unresisting legs skated over the floor.

A woman’s voice drifted in from the hall.

‘What on earth were Nell and Daisy doing locked up?’ she said. ‘I found them out in the stable – I couldn’t believe my eyes!’

Adam held both dogs by their collars and they strained madly at his arms, barking, their clawed feet skating and scratching over the flagstones.

‘What
are
you doing?’ said Audrey, appearing in the doorway. ‘Let them go, Adam! You look like that man at the gates of hell.’

‘I can’t,’ puffed Adam. ‘They keep going for Vivian.’

‘They just went mad,’ said Lisa.

‘I don’t like them!’ wailed Janie.

‘What do you mean, they keep going for her? They’re just a pair of silly old girls. Aren’t you? You’re just a pair of silly old girls. You don’t go for people. No, not like the hounds of hell. Not like the horrid hounds from hell.’

Audrey had advanced into the room and was caressing the dogs’ slobbering muzzles as she spoke. They made high-pitched mewling sounds. She was wearing a close-fitting brown coat made of some kind of skin or pelt. Her slim, shapely legs were bare. On her feet she wore narrow, high-heeled boots of the same brown, hairy material as the coat. I became aware of her scent, which was moving in a body over the room. It was a heady smell composed of numerous elements – perfume, face powder, soap, leather, a smell of varnish – and their notes sounded on me randomly and repeatedly.

‘Do you like my new coat?’ she said girlishly, whirling round to face us all. ‘I got it in London last week. It’s pony. Don’t you think it’s divine? The boots were made to match. They cost the earth! But I had to have them, didn’t I? The pony has to have her little hooves shod.’

‘Was it really a pony?’ said Janie to her mother. Her expression was perturbed.

‘God, it’s fantastic,’ said Laura enthusiastically, stroking Audrey’s arm.

‘Was it really?’ said Janie.

‘It’s absolutely lovely,’ said Lisa. Her tone was uncharacteristically professorial. She looked slightly stiff beneath Janie’s scrutiny.

‘I’m going to put the dogs back out in the yard,’ said Adam.

‘I love clothes,’ said Laura, ‘but I never buy them any more. Look.’ She lifted her shirt cheerfully to reveal the zip of her skirt peeled open to accommodate her white, fleshy middle. ‘I can’t do anything up.’

‘There isn’t another baby in there, is there?’ pouted Audrey.

‘Don’t!’ shrieked Laura.

‘No more babies,’ said Audrey, shaking her manicured finger.

‘It’s awful, isn’t it?’ said Laura delightedly.

‘I met one of yours outside – he wanted to show me how to use his crossbow. It’s rather fun, isn’t it? I shot my bolt straight into a tree and imagined all sorts of people it might be. He was very gentlemanly when I showed him my new boots, and he climbed up and got it himself, gorgeous boy.’

‘Roger would divorce me if I had any more,’ said Laura.

‘I made Paul get his tubes tied after Brendon,’ said Audrey. ‘He protested mightily. Oh, how the lord and master protested. He said it was the death of possibility. I said to him, darling, we’ve got three lumping great possibilities already. How much more possibility do you want? I said, if I have any more possibilities I’ll have to start wearing support tights and girdles. That galvanised him, I’m telling you.’

It was difficult to get a sense of Audrey’s face, submerged as it was beneath a meticulous mask of make-up. Two pencil lines described the surprised arc of her brows. Her eyelashes stood out in great curving black fronds which fanned up and down when she blinked. It was in her mouth, a red, wrinkled, oily delta of lipstick, that her age declared itself. Her eyes glittered erratically beneath the black fronds. She had retained, I saw, the tousled hairstyle of her earlier era, although today it looked slightly askew, as though it had been thrown at her head and nearly missed. I wondered whether she had had a facelift. The skin of her face had a boiled appearance, and there was about her generally an air of frantic uplift, of a bodily effort to ascend as though from some sinking substance in which her feet were mired. Caris was looking at her mother with her arms folded and the same strange, lilting smile on her face that she had worn earlier. Brendon remained at the kitchen table, but he had pushed back his chair and was holding
his arms and legs slightly out to the sides, as though someone had just placed their hands on his chest and shoved him forcefully backwards. Adam still gripped the straining dogs by their collars.

‘I’m just going to put them out,’ he said again.

‘You’ll have to shut them back in the stable,’ said Vivian, who remained as though for defence behind the upended chair. ‘Right in, do you see, otherwise they get out through the gate.’

‘What are they saying?’ said Audrey, looking about her with gracious incredulity.

‘I’m putting the dogs back in the stable.’

‘Why on earth are you doing that?’

‘They’ve got a bit wild with dad away.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Audrey. ‘Come and see mummy, darlings. Don’t listen to what those horrid people say about you.’

‘They bark at Vivian.’

‘They bark at
me
,’ said Caris, still smiling.

Audrey looked around the room in distress. Her garlanded eyes met mine.

‘Perhaps
you
can tell me what they’re talking about,’ she said sweetly. ‘They’re talking about locking up animals, aren’t they?’

‘If you’re going out I’ll go out with you,’ said Laura to Adam, edging towards the door with the baby in her arms. ‘I’m just going to run down to Doniford.’

‘Do you know Paul?’ said Audrey, to me. ‘He’s very fond of these old girls. I don’t think he’d like them being locked up, do you?’

‘They’re only dogs,’ said Vivian quaveringly. ‘They’re not children. It’s not as though we’re talking about locking up children.’

‘
What
an extraordinary thing to say!’ gasped Audrey comically. ‘Are you suggesting something, Vivian darling, about my reputation as a mother? Because from what Caris tells me you’ve got some history of your own in that department!’

‘I was just saying that they’re only dogs,’ Vivian said.

‘I always think you can tell a lot about a person by the way they treat a dog,’ said Audrey, to all of us. ‘Particularly men. I like a man who gives a dog a good tousling. I can’t stand it when you see a man sort of cross his legs. And the ones who claim to be allergic are the worst.’

‘I’m the one that feeds them, you know,’ said Vivian. ‘I’m the one that looks after them.’

‘Is this dogs or children, darling? I suppose you’d say it was both. The feeding hangs heavy in both cases. Still, locking them up is a little extreme. I don’t think I went down that road, even in my worst moments.’

‘They should have gone to kennels,’ said Adam. He had an uncomfortable expression on his face, as though he were slowly being suffocated by his own body.

‘I always thought that about all of you,’ Audrey said. ‘I remember there used to be a sign on the way down to Doniford that said “Cat Hotel”. Every time I passed it I used to wonder whether they’d make an exception.’

‘That isn’t actually all that funny,’ said Caris.

‘It might not seem funny to you,’ said Audrey. ‘I think people don’t really develop a sense of humour until they have children,’ she added, to me. ‘It’s hard to take things quite so seriously once you’ve wiped a few bottoms. Mine seem to think that I don’t know about their bottoms. Perhaps it’d be better if I didn’t. There’s a point at which one’s information becomes obsolete – it’s terribly bad for the brain. I often look at women my age and think that they’re just slated for extinction, like the dinosaurs.’

‘In a way, you did put them in kennels,’ Vivian said, as though the idea were not unpleasing to her. ‘The children. You did board them in a way.’

Audrey laughed. ‘What a horrible thing to say, darling! And I suppose you were the kennel master. Of course,’ she said, to me, ‘everyone forgets the fact that they were with their father. He’d never have let them go in a million years.
But don’t try telling that to anyone. If you’re a woman people think you owe them an explanation. And if you ever find one that feels sorry for you it’s even worse! They start telling you what you should be doing to get them back, and sending you the names of lawyers and asking whether you’ve rung them.’

‘Janie,’ said Lisa, in her ‘discreet’ voice, ‘I asked you to take Hamish and play together outside.’

‘All right,’ said Janie. ‘I’m not going out that way, though.’

‘Go out the front,’ said Lisa, ‘where we can see you from the window.’

She came to where I stood and held out her hand for Hamish. He took it quite willingly. Together they went to the other door and a moment later I saw them through the window out on the lawn. Hamish was walking over the grass in a straight line, like a toy that had been wound up. Janie walked beside him in a crouched position that suggested vigilance.

‘And had you?’ said Caris.

‘Had I what, darling?’ said Audrey.

‘Rung them.’

‘What, rung a lawyer? Of course not! We never needed lawyers, did we, Vivian? We were all eminently reasonable. The only one who got lawyered was Vivian’s poor old husband. We lawyered him all the way to the Isle of Wight, if I remember.’

‘He threw a rock through the window,’ said Vivian, looking around her abjectly, as though expecting to find it still lying at her feet.

‘I’m not surprised he threw rocks, darling. He was terribly upset. Paul always said what a rotter he was, but then it suited him to say that. Men tend to take the path of least resistance, I find. He was actually rather sweet, wasn’t he, Vivian? And he did love you desperately. They had these pet names for one another. He was Hippo and she was – what were you, Vivian?’

‘Elephant,’ said Vivian miserably.

‘That’s right!’ said Audrey, delighted. ‘Paul told me that Ivybridge was full of them, you know, little figurines of hippos and elephants. They collected them, the two of them! They were absolutely everywhere, apparently, all over the house. Whatever happened to them?’

‘I threw them away,’ said Vivian.

‘You might have let him have them,’ said Audrey reproachfully.

‘He didn’t want them.’

‘Poor Hippo,’ said Audrey. ‘Poor submersible creature.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Caris, who was wearing her expression of wonderment again.

‘We’re talking about hippos and elephants,’ said Audrey, with an adversarial glint in her fronded eye. ‘You know what hippos and elephants are, don’t you? They’re big, sweet creatures that tolerate captivity. Some animals don’t, you know. They get sad and lethargic and their fur goes all mangy.’

Caris shook her head from side to side as though she were trying to dislodge something. Again I saw in her face the strange effort of self-realisation.

‘You make it sound so simple,’ she said.

‘Well, it was. Or is there something you don’t understand? Perhaps I’m being insensitive. The thing is, I never had the luxury of sensitivity. I had to take things as I found them. That’s the problem with children,’ she said, to me. ‘You go to the trouble of having them and then you find that all you’ve done is guarantee you’ll come in second place for ever more. I gave you life, sweetie,’ she said to Caris. ‘Wasn’t that enough?’

‘It wasn’t simple for
me
,’ said Caris.

‘That’s so typical,’ said Adam. ‘Little Miss Self-Obsessed. If anyone found it hard it was Brendon. He was only six.’

‘The same age as Janie,’ nodded Lisa.

‘It wasn’t as bad for him as it was for me,’ said Caris, with her lilting smile.

‘Brendon used to bang his head,’ said Vivian strangely.

‘What do you mean, bang his head?’ said Adam.

‘He used to bang his head against the wall. It made the most horrible sound.’