In the Fold (3 page)

‘I thought that was your mother,’ I said to Adam.

‘Vivian?’

‘The dark-haired one.’

Vivian was wearing a complicated selection of draperies that I imagined did not show her to her best advantage, but rather emphasised the dispirited quality of her physiognomy.
The draperies were white. From a certain angle they looked like a series of bandages that had come loose. Adam’s mother was standing next to her in her tight-fitting blue silk ensemble and shoes with very high heels. She was looking about with the bright, abrupt movements of a bird. She looked contrastingly compact: her containment in her small, firm body was strangely threatening, as though she might at any moment explode.

‘Audrey’s my mother,’ said Adam. ‘Vivian’s married to dad. She married him when I was twelve.’

‘Do you like her?’

‘Of course.’ He affected surprise.

‘Don’t you resent her?’

‘Not really.’

‘How come all of you live with your father and not your mother?’

‘This is our home. It’s the place that matters, not the people in it,’ said Adam, which I thought was a strange thing to say.

‘What about your mother?’

‘She has a house in Doniford. She lives with Uncle David. I don’t think they’re lovers or anything. I think he just lives there. He hasn’t got any money. He’s pretty hopeless. Mum’s here a lot. She comes up nearly every day.’

‘I can’t believe they all sit around the table together.’

‘Why not?’ said Adam, with the patrician air he occasionally assumed and which I found quite irritating.

‘People’s feelings usually prevent it,’ I said.

‘Do they? How boring.’

He produced a packet of cigarettes and we each lit one. The smoke was quickly scooped up off the green hill by the wind.

‘This is a fantastic place,’ I said.

Two girls with yellow hair came out of the house and walked towards us across the lawn. They looked slightly discomfited as the wind blew their clothes against their bodies. One of them was about my age. The other one was younger and had a red rash on her face.

‘You’re back!’ cried the older one. ‘When did you get back?’

‘This is Michael,’ said Adam. ‘This is Laura, and that’s Jilly. My stepsisters.’

‘Don’t call us that!’ shrieked the older one. ‘I think it sounds so awful!’

She was solidly built, with thick, white arms and skin that was so even-toned it seemed not to be skin at all but a sort of casing, like that of a doll. She looked as though she could never be troubled by anything. Her sister was the opposite: she was thin and jointed and awkward-looking, and her rash, which I now saw spread over her neck and down her arms as well as her face, gave her a look of public suffering, almost of election. Their yellow hair had a synthetic appearance. If these were Vivian’s daughters they were nothing like her. They were like things that had accrued to her by accident.

‘Mummy’s in a complete state,’ said the older one.

‘She didn’t want the party,’ said the younger one.

‘It’s just that Caris has been so demanding,’ said the older one, rolling her eyes cheerfully.

‘She likes to be the centre of attention,’ said the younger one.

‘What’s it like, getting away from this place?’ said the older one. ‘Is it really great?’

‘I can’t wait to get away,’ said the younger one. ‘I can’t wait to have a house of my own. I’m going to have horses. I’m not going to have sheep. I hate sheep. At our old house we didn’t have sheep.’

‘It’s not too bad,’ said Adam.

The older one turned to me. ‘Is it really great?’ she asked.

‘At our old house we had a swing made out of a car tyre,’ said the younger one, also to me. Her red, distressed face was pinched. ‘It used to swing you out over the pond and if you fell off you went into the water. Daddy used to make us go really high.’

‘Have you made lots of friends and gone to lots of parties and things?’ said the older one.

At that moment Caris emerged from the house. She came out of a door at the back and stood alone. She looked more extraordinary than any person I had seen before, although it is hard to say exactly why she gave this impression. She was wearing a simple white dress that left her arms and shoulders bare and she had her brown hair loose. A wreath of ivy sat on the top of her head. She wore no shoes or jewellery. Her pale face was very beautiful. She looked like a goddess. Everyone turned and when they saw her they applauded riotously. I happened to catch Audrey’s eye and she gave me an inscrutable, imploring look. A stocky, dishevelled man in a pale suit approached Caris over the lawn and when he reached her he took her in his arms and kissed her in front of everybody. I was surprised by this because he was much older than her. Her face when he let her go was like the open face of a flower.

‘Who’s that?’ I asked Adam.

‘That’s Jasper. He’s an artist. He lives in the lodge down by the gates. He rents it from dad. He’s staying for a year because he’s got some grant from Doniford council. He’s pretty good, actually. Caris is his muse.’

‘Does he paint her?’

‘Absolutely. Even in the buff.’

‘Doesn’t your father mind?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Adam shrugged. ‘Jasper’s sort of an abstract expressionist anyway. It doesn’t look that much like her. There’s one hanging in the window of the gallery on the high street and you’d never know.’

I laughed. The evening softened and lengthened out towards the sea, which lay pacific and opaque far below. The lawn was crowded with people in the dusk, shouting and laughing noisily. Their noise in this empty, elevated place flew wildly up into the air like a river of sparks from a beacon; the party was like a big fire laid out on the hill, generating heat and light in the falling darkness, growing molten and indistinct at its core. Someone lit Caris’s candles.
Someone else put on some music. I saw Paul Hanbury roaming the lawn with his shirt unbuttoned and a bottle of wine dangling from his fingers. I saw Caris standing near me in her luminous dress and I said:

‘Happy birthday.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, smiling brilliantly, as though I had paid her a compliment.

‘It’s a good party. It was nice of you to invite me. Especially since you’d never even met me.’

‘I feel as though I
had
met you,’ said she earnestly. ‘Adam talks about you a lot. I feel you were meant to be here.’

I was surprised to hear that Adam talked about me. I couldn’t imagine what he would say. It caused me to feel an inextricable mixture of pleasure and affront, though I liked the feeling of being possessed. I liked to be compelled through my own resistance. I liked too the fact that the Hanburys’ privileged circumstances left me with the illusion that I was indifferent to them.

‘Are these your friends?’ I asked, because I had noticed that most of the guests on the lawn were far older than Caris.

‘Of course they are,’ she said, smiling incredulously at me in a way that nonetheless managed to suggest that they might not have been.

‘Even him?’ I asked.

There was a corpulent old man with a walking stick standing entrenched in the middle of the dancing. He wore knee-length breeches and a tweed jacket.

‘That’s Barnsie,’ protested Caris, laughing. I was gratified to see her face turn red. ‘He always comes to our parties. Mum and dad used to have the most amazing parties,’ she added. ‘I seem to remember even Barnsie getting pretty wild. They could last for
days
. I remember when I was little going to bed and then getting up in the morning and finding them still at it. They’d carry all the furniture out on to the lawn. I used to come out here and find dad sitting on the sofa on the grass at breakfast time, smoking a cigar.’

It irritated me that she kept talking about the past, as though the superiority of that era were a matter of agreement between us; as though we were two diminutive people whose stature had relegated them to a life on the sidelines.

‘Your family are very unusual,’ I said.

‘I know,’ she said quickly. ‘I keep having to remind myself that one day soon I should leave Egypt and go and see some other part of the world. I don’t want to. I want to stay here. I think I’d be quite happy, wandering in the fields, painting pictures of flowers.’

‘What are you going to do?’

She sighed in the dusk.

‘Paint,’ she said. ‘Not flowers, though. I don’t know what. That’s what I have to work out.’

‘Shouldn’t you have worked it out already?’ I said. ‘I mean, shouldn’t you have at least some idea what you want to paint before deciding to become an artist? I mean, what’s the point of just
painting
for the sake of it? What’s the point?’

She folded her arms and looked at me sideways.

‘Oh, I see,’ she said finally, with a smile. ‘You’re one of those, are you? The sort of person who thinks everyone should be in a
category
.’

‘I was only questioning the idea that an artistic impulse could exist separately from what it wanted to express.’

‘Of course it can,’ she said. ‘An artist doesn’t emerge fully formed. He has to evolve.’

‘But you’re talking about
wanting
to be an artist. I’m talking about being one.’

‘What’s the difference? You make it sound like there’s some huge, important difference.’

‘Of course there is! You can’t just wander around saying you want to paint. Either you paint, or you don’t. I just think that if you were meant to paint you would know what your subject was. You wouldn’t need to look for it.’

‘You only say this because I’m a girl,’ said Caris presently. Her brows were furrowed above her glittering brown eyes.
I saw that I had offended her. ‘If I was a man you wouldn’t say it – you’d be egging me on, giving me money and grants and trumpeting the fact that you’d discovered me. Whereas in fact what you want to do is crush me, isn’t it?’

She looked at me with her delicate face. I had to concede that there was some truth in what she had said.

‘Why do you want to crush me?’ she asked, wonderingly, with a little smile.

‘I want you to stay as you are,’ I said. ‘As you are right now.’

‘Do you know where we’re standing?’ she said.

I looked around me. We had wandered away a little from the party. We were in a place of foliage and moonlight where things snapped beneath our feet. The big, black presences of trees were around us.

‘We’re in a ring of oaks,’ she said. ‘It’s magic here, you know.’

I bent forward and kissed her. The distant commotion of the party was in my ears. Some seconds passed. Kissing Caris was like kissing a child. She was warm and sweet and she gave the impression of being entirely indifferent to what I was doing. She did not look as she had looked when Jasper the artist kissed her. I decided I would have to marry her. I would marry her and live with her at Egypt, along with all her family and perhaps even Jasper himself.

‘Happy birthday,’ I said again, stupidly.

Everyone was dancing on the lawn. The music and the shouting echoed down the hill in long chimes into the valley. I saw Paul Hanbury dancing with a very tall young woman, who swayed before him like a stalk of wheat while he scurried around her, crab-like, casting her salacious looks. When he saw me he grasped my hand and we all danced around together, me, him and the swaying girl. I couldn’t see Adam anywhere. I saw Vivian, standing by the drinks table with her arms crossed awkwardly over her stomach, talking to an elderly lady. Numerous children were dancing amongst the
adults. Sometimes they danced with each other. More often their mothers danced with them, kind and weary-faced, stooped over. I noticed a fair-haired boy of eleven or so standing beside Vivian, gulping unnoticed from the wineglasses on the table. After each gulp he would look around him with a startled expression on his face. I guessed he was Adam’s brother Brendon, the boy I had seen in the chicken house.

When I turned back to the dancing, Audrey had manifested herself in front of me. She stood in her tight-fitting blue costume and high heels, one arm flung into the air and a bare leg planted dramatically out in front of her. She presented herself to me, glaring at me with the fiery, warlike countenance of an exotic bird embarking on its mating ritual. I saw that she was extremely drunk: she was incandescent; she was on fire. She began to dance around me in a strutting fashion, pausing occasionally to assume her dramatic pose, eyes blazing, arm aloft, as though offering me a challenge. Round and round me she went: I shadowed her uncertainly. In her exertion her face had grown warm beneath its make-up; the different colours shimmered greasily as though they had come alive, as though she were a living image of herself. Audrey clapped her hands on my shoulders. As she circled me she moved her hands over my shirt and said something with her painted mouth that I didn’t hear over the music. She bared her even, slightly yellowed teeth in a smile. A feeling of apprehension stirred in my stomach. She gave me an impatient look.

‘Do you like me?’ she said hotly into my ear, before circling me once more.

I smiled urbanely, or so I thought, and did not reply.

‘You can have me, darling,’ she said, into my ear. ‘You can take me now.’

‘I don’t think that would be a very good idea, Mrs Hanbury,’ I said quaveringly.

‘I need somebody to fuck me,’ she said. ‘I need somebody to fucking fuck me!’

She sounded quite annoyed about it.

‘I’m sorry I can’t help,’ I said.

‘I gave away my man and now I’m lonely,’ she said in my ear, in a little-girl voice. ‘Audrey gets very, very lonely on her own.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said.

I felt a firm, male grip on my arm.

‘Now, now, Audrey,’ said Paul. ‘Don’t get randy with Michael. Was she getting randy with you, Michael?’

‘Where’s Brendon?’ said Audrey vaguely.

‘Darling, I haven’t a bloody clue,’ said Paul. ‘What are you worrying about Brendon for?’

‘Someone should really put him to bed. All these children!’ She made an irritated gesture with her hand that clearly incorporated me. ‘They should all be put to bed.’

‘Is it good for you up here?’ said Paul. ‘Do you like it? Not everybody does.’