In the Fold (22 page)

‘Do stop it, darling,’ said Audrey. ‘You’re sounding positively addled. What was I supposed to do? I had to get my house – I couldn’t just go and camp in a field, could I? And that sort of property is terribly expensive in Doniford. Everyone wants it, you know.’

‘He called me a bloody viper.’

‘Who did?’

‘A bloody viper. Don’t you think that’s vicious?’ said Vivian, looking around at us. ‘He said he’d never forgive me!’

‘You had to do without Hippo’s forgiveness,’ said Audrey. ‘We all did. Thank heavens for the Isle of Wight!’

‘He said, I’m not giving Egypt to a bloody viper. I’m not giving my house to a bloody snake in the grass, that’s what he said. And I said, well, I shan’t come then, you can manage on your own. He was terribly rude, you know. But he signed. He had to sign – he had no choice, do you see? I felt rather pleased with myself. I wanted to ring my husband and tell him but of course I couldn’t by then. He wouldn’t speak to me.’

‘Sign what?’ said Adam.

‘I don’t think he ever
has
forgiven me, you know,’ said Vivian miserably. ‘At the time I thought I’d been rather clever, but now I wish I hadn’t done it. I sometimes think he might have felt more for me if I hadn’t. And you don’t forget it, someone calling you a bloody viper, not when you have to see them every day. It wasn’t as though I even wanted the farm! Ivybridge was much more sheltered, you know – one got the sun all year there. I wonder sometimes if my husband knew that was what would happen. He was the one who encouraged me, you know. He was the one who said I had to get it all in my name.’

There was silence in the kitchen. The Hanburys stared at one another, stared and stared, with faces that filled with calculation and then emptied and filled again. There seemed to be no air in the room, no suspending element – it was as though we stood in the lee of a gathering wave as it sucked
everything back into itself. I felt the presence of a catastrophe, an emergency whose tumultuous moments we had entered as a boat might enter a field of rapids. A bitter smell assailed my nostrils. I realised that the room was filling with smoke.

‘I think the potatoes are burning,’ I said.

Just then there was a child’s cry out on the lawn, a wail that went up and down and came closer like a siren, until it was in the hall, echoing horribly in the confinement of the house. There was the sound of something being knocked over and falling with a clatter to the floor. Janie burst into the kitchen. Her face was a wreck of tears.

‘Rufus shot the little boy!’ she shrieked. ‘They’re out in the garden! You have to come! He shot the little boy with his crossbow!’

I don’t know what the others did. I ran out of the house and over the damp lawn, towards the ring of oaks where Caris and I had once kissed, and where I saw the fair heads of the children, clustered together like the bright little heads of flowers, weaving and moving as though in the ecstasy of their impermanence.

I returned to Bath and to Nimrod Street and found that the rubble from the fallen balcony, including the three large segments of broken limestone slab, remained strewn over the front steps.

The journey from Doniford had taken most of the day, though it was only sixty miles or so. There was no one to drive Hamish and me to the railway station: Lisa, whose sensitivity to practical matters could normally have been relied on, was not at home; and Adam had bidden us a sincere but unavailing farewell over breakfast, before vanishing up the hill to Egypt in his car with an expression of grim preoccupation on his face. Alone in the warm, silent, airless house we packed our things. A sense of failure dogged me as I went through the rooms retrieving those items that belonged to us, as though they were the detritus of some breakage or disaster, the evidence of a lack of love or merely care of which I was conveniently cleansing the scene. I could not attribute this failure entirely either to myself or to the Hanburys. Instead I was possessed by an awareness of how little survived the business of human encounter. What would be left of Rebecca and myself, once the storm of our association had abated? What did we have to show for ourselves? Hamish watched me as I put my violin in its case and laid the purple cloth like a shroud over its carved face. He seemed to tremble with a precarious, pregnant stillness, like a drop of water hanging from the corroded lip of a tap. For a moment his insubstantiality enraged me. I felt that I could have dashed him, shaken him off and demanded instead to know where the life was that made its robust demands, that insisted on itself in the face of everything that reverted to inconsequence.

We closed the front door behind us and it locked with an automatic, impersonal click. For nearly an hour we stood in Doniford on the grey, shuttered Sunday high street waiting for a bus, which presently emerged from the empty streets and carried us through the deserted haunts of its route, through tracts of green hemmed by frayed, budding hedgerows, through indifferent villages that we patiently unearthed from their tangle of narrow, muddy, aimless lanes, as though we were circulating around an organism that otherwise would have lapsed into its own mysterious, unregulated version of existence. The driver pursued his destiny with cursory speed, flying past some stops and observing unfathomable pauses at others, during which he switched off the engine and read a newspaper folded on his lap while Hamish and I, his only passengers, sat side by side on our oversprung seat in a clear torrent of silence far louder than the crowded din of the train that subsequently bore us in long, smooth surges to Bath. At the station we took a taxi: passing through the city I was struck at first by its rich, historied appearance and its textured, flesh-toned buildings that seemed like living things after Adam’s house. Everything was moving, almost undulating: the cluttered light, the noise of traffic and voices and garbled ribbons of music, the teeming pavements, the rows of shopfronts opening and closing their doors in numberless mechanical embraces, the scatter of pigeons and the clustered fall of water from fountains, the dark, stately motion of the river – it all churned and moved in a body, rising and falling inchoately like the sea. The taxi went at walking pace through the obstructed streets. People snagged and formed blockages around every shop window and restaurant and frequently spilled out into the road. There were so many people that on the pavement beside us the crowd ceased to move and instead seemed to swell, pushing inwards at its core so that people staggered or were crushed against each other, and I saw a look of uncertainty pass like a great shadow over their faces. A man was forced backwards
off the kerb and stumbled as his shoe came off. I thought how hard it was, and yet how necessary, to love. Hamish’s hand rested beside me on the seat and I picked it up and held it. It was so small and soft and limp that it almost seemed as if it might dissolve in my palm, but I hung on to it as though it were the last thread connecting me to the earth, until his fingers grew warm and flexed themselves and he returned the pressure of my grip. We stopped and started along the street until at last we reached London Road, unfurling east from the packed core of the city, its beauteous facades casually dirtied by passing traffic.

It was a grey, gelid afternoon. There was no breeze: the air in Nimrod Street was so still that it caused a physical sensation of numbness. The black twisted railings made little frozen, anguished forms amidst the broken stones. There was a quality of weightlessness to everything, of ceaseless intermission, that did not belong here but appeared to have followed me from The Meadows. It was clear to me, though I couldn’t have said why, that it was easier to build a hundred houses in Doniford than it was to remove three pieces of broken masonry from Nimrod Street. The green, shiny leaves of the laurel hedge beside the front steps were still thickly coated in white dust. Inside, the house was full of grey light and its rooms had a creeping edge of staleness, as though no one had entered them while we’d been away. Everything had contracted a little with unfamiliarity, become flat and angular like a garment removed and hung in a closet.

Rebecca was sitting in the kitchen with a person who had her back to me. I did not immediately recognise this person. Two cups and a teapot stood on the table between them. The kitchen looked different: it was untidy, in a light, girlish way. Rebecca’s things – scarves, items of jewellery, a pink hairbrush – were strewn over surfaces that now betrayed no relationship to the preparation or consumption of food. The atmosphere of repudiation that I had picked up on my way through the house was far stronger in here: it emanated
powerfully from its source – Rebecca – where she sat a few feet away.

‘You’re back,’ she said, nevertheless failing to rise from her chair.

Hamish ran towards her, his feet making loud slapping sounds on the floorboards. Rebecca smiled a great smile and held out her arms to him, still sedentary, as though some misfortune which she was too stalwart to mention had paralysed her legs in our absence.

‘Look, Charlie’s here,’ she said to him as soon as she had got him in a clinch.

‘Hey, Michael,’ said Charlie, turning around in her chair and smiling brilliantly at me. A moment later she rose and kissed both my cheeks. I received a warm, confused impression of hair and teeth and rattling jewellery, borne pungently over me in a suede-smelling wave from her jacket.

‘I didn’t recognise you,’ I said.

The last time I saw Charlie her hair had been blonde. Now it was black.

‘Charlie’s come to stay with us,’ said Rebecca to Hamish.

‘It’s the hair,’ said Charlie. She grasped a strand of it and held it out to one side. ‘Becca says it looks like a wig.’

I saw that somehow, in the person of her friend, Rebecca had contrived to erect a barrier around herself that promised to withstand not just this moment of our return, but an indefinite number of days that projected impossibly outwards like a diving board over cold, unbroken waters. Feelings of disappointment, and of what appeared to be more fear than anger, knifed me soundlessly in the chest, in the back.

‘There’s nothing wrong with wigs,’ Rebecca said. ‘I actually like the superimposed effect. It makes you look like one of those Andy Warhol lithographs.’

I wondered why I had phoned Rebecca so frequently while I was away. It was, I now saw, a pointless, self-referential act by which I had succeeded only in illuminating myself as an object, as though I had taken the trouble to write letters to
myself and post them home from Doniford. She looked at me occasionally in uncertain flashes. She was wearing a strange dress that I had never seen before. It was pale pink, with little sleeves the shape of cowslips and a neckline that revealed most of her freckled clavicle. The wistful colour did not flatter her. On her long, calloused feet were a pair of strappy pink sandals with six-inch heels like daggers.

‘How long are you staying?’ I asked Charlie.

My voice sounded out of turn, like an instrument playing loud notes not indicated in the score.

‘Oh,
listen
to him,’ cried Charlie, with comical pathos. ‘He’s all disappointed, poor thing!’

‘Did you miss me?’ said Rebecca to Hamish. She buried her nose in his hair with an obscure look of satisfaction.

‘He was hoping to have you to himself,’ Charlie persisted, ‘and now I’ve come along and spoiled it. I’d be touched, Michael, if I wasn’t frankly offended. People like me only get through life by being humoured, you know. We non-conformists depend on the charity of you family types.’

I thought of taking off my coat, but the atmosphere in the room discouraged it.

‘How’s Ali?’ I said to Rebecca.

‘Actually, she’s really well,’ Rebecca replied, having given the matter a few seconds of consideration that she gave the impression were overdue, as though she hadn’t thought about her mother’s health in weeks.

‘Has there been any news?’

‘What? Oh, that,’ she said, waving her hand dismissively in the air. ‘That’s all fine.’

Her manner was disconcerting: I wondered whether she was exercising this uncharacteristic discretion as a result of Charlie’s presence, but a moment later Charlie said, pityingly:

‘Poor Becca’s been worried sick about Ali.’

‘Thank God you were here,’ Rebecca fervently responded, grasping her friend’s hand across the table.

I said: ‘I thought someone might have started clearing away the rubble at the front.’

If I had hoped to kindle a propitiatory spark by the route of disgruntlement I was disappointed. Rebecca and Charlie looked at me as if they didn’t know what I was talking about.

‘Yes, what
happened
out there?’ exclaimed Charlie finally, opening her eyes very wide.

‘The balcony fell off,’ I said, because although it was improbable that Charlie hadn’t deduced this fact, she seemed to require an answer.

‘Thank God no one was on it,’ she said.

I hadn’t actually considered this possibility before. No one ever stood on the balcony. It was ornamental, and could be reached only by climbing out through the windows on the first floor.

‘I
know
,’ concurred Rebecca, who to my knowledge had, like me, never set foot on it.

I said: ‘I came out of the front door one morning and it fell off. I was on the second step down to the street and it crashed down behind me. It missed me by a few inches.’

To my surprise, both women laughed.

‘You’re obviously
completely
traumatised!’ shrieked Charlie. ‘He’s obviously
completely
traumatised,’ she repeated, for Rebecca’s benefit.

I had no concrete objection to Charlie, other than in her current function as a sort of wrapper or container for Rebecca, by which I could see that Rebecca intended to elude me for as long as she could. She and Rebecca had been friends at school in Bath, but for as long as I had known her Charlie had lived in London, so that it was a tenet of their association that it had never been geographically easy to sustain: they pursued it with a sort of hectic diplomacy, as though they were the representatives of two distant states endeavouring to maintain relations.

Three or four years ago I had attended Charlie’s wedding, a cold, rain-sodden event I could only remember now in the
light of the fact that Charlie had left her husband a year or so after it. Rebecca used to complain that her friendship with Charlie had become one-sided and perfunctory, as though it were the victim of ill-disposed market forces: these same forces reversed their direction when Charlie began to emerge from the carapace of marriage, sweeping Rebecca up in an ecstasy of renewed importance whose unforeseen consequence was that she now often accused me of disliking Charlie, or at least regarding her with suspicion. Rebecca’s theory was that I suspected Charlie of a cultish determination to motivate her friends to leave their husbands as she had left hers; or, less stridently, that exposure to Charlie would inadvertently result in the contagion of divorce entering our midst. In fact, if my awareness of Charlie possessed a certain clarity, then it resulted from a strange association I felt with the idea not of her notoriety but of her shame. Her wedding was bombastic and strikingly conventional: when the music started I remember she and her husband waltzed around the mud-spattered marquee before the applauding crowd, he in a dinner jacket and she in a long white dress too modish and flattering, somehow, for sincerity or even passion. Every time I saw her I remembered with what determination she had engineered the public display of her mistake.

‘It might have fallen on any of us,’ I observed.

‘That’s what I said to mum and dad,’ said Rebecca. ‘I said, look, why all the fuss about the insurance? It’s
good
that it’s come down. Nothing can insure you against a balcony falling on your head. Thank God it happened, I say,’ she concluded urgently.

Charlie laughed. ‘You do put things in the funniest way, Becca. Mark says she reverses into her sentences,’ she said, to me. Mark was Charlie’s boyfriend.

‘Mark’s in Germany,’ Rebecca informed me, darkly, as though I might find myself there too if I wasn’t careful.

‘For work,’ Charlie added. ‘Not on holiday.’

She appeared to find this distinction so significant that a
moment later she said: ‘Does
anybody
go to Germany on holiday?’

‘My parents go there every year on their way to the Salzburg festival,’ I said.

‘Do they?’ she replied, contriving to seem enthusiastic. Her manner contributed to my mounting impression that I was being humoured.

‘They like music,’ I said.

‘I didn’t realise you came from such cultivated stock.’

‘Oh, they’re obsessed with it,’ Rebecca said, as though cultivation were generally agreed to be a nuisance. ‘They made him start violin lessons when he was about three. That’s why his fingers are such funny shapes.’

‘Let’s see!’ Charlie exclaimed.

I held out my hands in front of her with the fingers splayed.

‘My God,’ she said, ‘they
are
. That one bends inwards.’ She pointed at the smallest finger on my left hand. ‘Look, Becca, it’s almost at a right angle to the others.’