In the Fold (7 page)

‘I’ll say one thing for you, Michael,’ she said finally, as though regretfully. ‘You’re consistent. You always have been.’

The houses in Nimrod Street had balconies on the first floor at the front. They were large, ornamental Georgian things: each one was made of a single slab of limestone fifteen feet long and four feet wide that extended across nearly the entire width of the house. They had cast-iron railings around them that bowed slightly outwards and then curled around delicately at the top in the shape of a stave. They gave the houses a privileged, slightly exotic appearance, extending out into the air with a little clean wedge of shadow underneath. I never looked at our house without this lofty shape imprinting its stony grace on me. It registered itself silently, repeatedly, as the symbol of some aspect of miracle, some necessary excess that embellished my existence yet could never entirely be within my possession; so that my comings and goings at Nimrod Street were always accompanied by the vague sense that my life was both more beautiful and more difficult than
it needed to be. Often, when it rained, Rebecca and I had sat on our doorstep in the evenings with the stone roof overhead, but increasingly I stood under it alone, shutting myself out of the house in order to consider the possibility that my life with Rebecca was unsustainable, a thought that was like a small, panicked pet I wasn’t allowed to keep indoors, and hence was forced to exercise outside, where it ran crazily up and down the front steps in the dark, occasionally venturing a few feet out into the street.

One morning, when I left to go to work, I closed the front door and was on the second or third step down to the pavement when the balcony dropped off the front of the building just behind me. The impact was so great that it was virtually soundless. It made a sort of void or vacancy in time. A tremor rose from the earth beneath my feet and passed through me like a momentary torrent of electricity, exiting with a burning sensation from the top of my head. I didn’t turn around, or run: it was too late to move. Presently I noticed that the street was utterly deserted. For some reason I found this disconcerting, that there were no witnesses to this strange event. I looked behind me and saw the giant slab lying broken on the steps. It had broken into no more than three or four pieces. It broke like a heart, I thought. After a while I climbed over the pieces and with a shaking hand rang the doorbell. I could hear Hamish crying inside. Rebecca took a long time to answer.

It was only because I happened to be at home when the surveyor came that I was the one to whom the explanation for the falling balcony was given. The surveyor was a slim, clean-smelling man of about my own age. His name was Ed Reynolds. When I saw him standing on the doorstep amidst the rubble and the broken railings I understood how dangerous my life had become. Crystal fruit bowls did not come flying through the air at Ed Reynolds. Balconies did not fall on him from above. Standing there he explained to me how a small crack in the limestone had gone for several years
unfilled, allowing a plant to grow up through the slab. I knew that plant: it used to put out purple flowers that waved outside our bedroom window in summer. In fact I had noticed before how it seemed to be growing out of the wall. It had a thick, twisted brown stem. At the time I found it quaintly characteristic of the Alexanders that flowers should be allowed to grow out of their walls: it seemed to add to the impression I had formed of them, that they acknowledged few rules and yet went joyously unpunished. In conditions of frost, the surveyor continued, the plant had expanded and contracted. This caused the crack to become unstable. A simple programme of repairs and maintenance over time would have prevented the accident. For these reasons it was excluded from the terms of most insurance policies. When I relayed this information to Rick and Ali they acted as though some personal stupidity in my dealings with Ed Reynolds had resulted in his presenting us with this verdict. For the first time I felt a coldness, an insubstantiality in their attitude to me. They didn’t seem to understand how many times fate had loomed over Rebecca and Hamish and me in the form of the limestone slab, how nearly it had caught us. I had showed Ed Reynolds a photograph I had found of Hamish, aged two, sitting on the doorstep, under the balcony, in the sun. I had thrust it before his eyes repeatedly, as though I were possessed. I couldn’t stop looking at this photograph. I couldn’t separate myself from it. For a time it seemed almost to replace Hamish himself.

Adam Hanbury had become a surveyor. He had a practice in Doniford. Seeing Ed Reynolds had put me in mind of him, and so without much thinking of what I was doing I found his number and sat one day at the window dialling it, while I looked through the glass at the catastrophe which still lay strewn, untouched, over the front steps. A little bird alighted for an instant on one of the giant broken pieces of stone and flew away again.

‘We were talking about you the other day,’ said Adam, as
though it were a matter of months rather than years since we last spoke. I could hear a baby wailing in the background. ‘Dad’s got a boundary dispute going with the council. He’s been driving us all mad with it so in the end I said, “Look, Michael’s a lawyer, let’s just ring him up and ask him.” We had the wrong number, though. We rang this woman and dad kept telling her she was your wife and she kept saying she wasn’t. They talked for about an hour in the end. When dad rings off he says –’ Adam put on a low, comical, inebriated voice ‘– he says, “She wasn’t a bad old thing in the end, Michael’s other half.”’

‘Boundary disputes aren’t really my line.’

‘Oh no?’

‘I gave all that up.’

‘I didn’t know that. What do you do now?’

I laughed. ‘Let’s just say I get paid a lot less for it.’

‘And there was I,’ said Adam, ‘imagining you as an equity partner somewhere.’

He’d taken his mouth away from the receiver and his voice was indistinct.

‘What?’

‘I was asking was it a penance for something. It sounds very virtuous.’ He sounded perplexed. ‘Though I can’t say I’ve never wanted to get off the treadmill. Only I’d have to get paid for doing it.’ He paused. ‘To be honest, I never thought I’d be where I am now. Doing the nine to five in Doniford.’

‘I don’t think anybody does,’ I said.

‘Don’t they? I think that’s what dad would call old bunkam. Not that he’d know what it’s like. He’s never had to sit behind a desk wondering how early he can leave without anybody noticing. What’s annoying is that he appears to think this is the result of his own ingenuity.’ He laughed mirthlessly. ‘He’s ill,’ he added.

‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘Prostate cancer. It’s all right – it’s a straightforward operation. But it couldn’t have happened at a worse time of year.’

It was mid-March. Through the window the trees were still bare, except for the branches of the laurel that grew at the bottom of our steps. Its rubbery, imperishable leaves were thickly coated in white dust.

‘Why’s that?’ I said.

‘He’s in hospital all week, and there are a hundred pregnant ewes at Egypt.’

‘My God.’

‘The first ones are due on Friday.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘It’s funny,’ remarked Adam. ‘That’s just what dad wanted to know. I’m having to take half my summer holiday now. Lisa is not pleased,’ he said in a low voice. There was a pause, then he added, more loudly: ‘You don’t feel like doing some lambing, do you?’

I laughed.

‘Are you serious?’

‘Of course,’ said Adam, with the vague suggestion that he was not asking a favour but conferring a privilege.

His tone sent a strange thrill through me: an impulse, like a light, that travelled all around my limbs, illuminating great tracts of weariness. I felt as though I had been rowing against a hard wind and had just lifted my oars out of the resisting water, in order to succumb with mild terror to the pleasure of being blown wherever it was easiest for me to go.

I said: ‘I’m not sure I can.’

‘Oh, dad’s hired someone to do the really nasty stuff,’ he said, misunderstanding me. ‘It would just be, you know, shepherding. We could put you up here.’

The baby wailed faintly in the background. I heard a woman talking: her voice rose and fell, rose and fell. There was the sound of dishes being scraped against one another.

‘All right,’ I said.

‘Can you make it by Wednesday?’

‘I don’t see why not. I’ll have to make some arrangements.’

‘You’re probably owed some holiday,’ he said meaningfully, as though he had been told that I was. As it happened, it was true.

‘A bit,’ I said.

‘You’d be doing me a real favour,’ he conceded.

I said: ‘Can I bring my son?’

‘Of course,’ Adam replied, after a brief hesitation which suggested that in fact he found the request slightly outlandish. ‘How old is he?’

‘Three. I thought he’d enjoy it, that’s all.’

‘Of course, of course. We’re all, um, equipped. For children.’

‘Thanks.’

‘We live in Doniford now. In a sort of executive suburb. Our house is hilarious.’

I looked through the window at the spectacle of the front steps in the grey afternoon.

‘Not as hilarious as mine,’ I said.

‘The girls will be pleased to see you,’ he said.

I had no idea to which girls he was referring. Did he mean Vivian, or perhaps his strange, intimidating mother? Was Caris still there, after all these years? I wondered then whether farmers called their pregnant ewes ‘girls’.

‘And I them,’ I said.

Rebecca responded to the proposal in a manner that defied my expectations. Yet I did not know what to expect; I was open to innumerable possibilities, all of them, however, distinguished by the clarity and drama that were the signature even of Rebecca’s misapprehensions, and that either caused or intensified an answering muteness in myself, so that in the very act of escaping her I found it so difficult to ascribe motivations to my own behaviour that I preferred to believe it was she who was escaping me.

She was clearing out the closet in our bedroom and did not desist from this activity while we spoke; I saw her face at
different planes and angles as she moved around, bending and straightening, lunging here and there with her arms bared to the elbow and her hands, white at the peaks of the knuckles, betraying like a tide-mark the steady presence of emotional frenzy, as though it moved in a body within her, now rising, now subsiding. I found her task obscurely threatening, for Rebecca was generally untidy and inconsistent in her habits and her fits of domestic purification were often significant and expressive of anger and intolerance, and a desire for change that did not augur well for those other residents of the
status quo
by which she had become so palpably infuriated.

‘What about Hamish?’ was what she said first of all, when I told her I was thinking of going away; the fact of my own absence having registered itself in an automatic neutrality of expression, as though it were a train passing through a station at which it was not scheduled to stop. It was left to me to feel the regret and anxiety that evidently did not suggest themselves to her, and which I noticed missing only when I spoke my plan out into the room and saw how indelibly rimed it was with controversy, and with the sordid expectation that by threatening to remove myself I would at least attract her attention. She did not feel it was required of her to explain what her question meant. Even so, it pained me as much to hear her ask it as if the plain fact that Rebecca could no longer be left alone with Hamish were new to me. Until now I had retained this knowledge as a form of generosity towards her, but I saw it become in that moment a dark tenet of our family life.

I said: ‘I thought I would take him with me.’

At that a little wave of realisation broke uncontrollably over Rebecca’s face, which she bent into the closet to hide. A few moments later she emerged holding a crushed shoe-box that disgorged bright pink tissue paper from its broken side. Excitement declared itself in two spots of colour on her pale cheeks.

‘How long will you be gone?’ she said.

‘A week.’

‘A week,’ she repeated thoughtfully.

She maintained this quietly suggestive demeanour all the way to Wednesday, with the exception of one instance, when I wondered aloud whether in fact I hadn’t better stay in Bath after all and arrange for someone to start clearing away the wreckage of the balcony. I might have been a dignitary contemplating the abandonment of some vital, long-planned mission for all the dismay this suggestion evoked; and she my zealous aide, promising extravagantly to take care of the problem herself, as solicitous for my absence as I was eager for the absence itself to effect some change in her. On the subject of the Hanburys she seemed to have trouble striking the note she wanted: she tried to find it both predictable and inexplicable that I should be going to see them, and when she referred to them at all it was as “your friends”. At night I lay beside her and the presence of her still, coiled body was as exigent and declarative as that of a stranger on a long journey, someone dozing in a neighbouring seat; a person captured in a ceaseless act of self-manifestation, whose absence, when it comes, will be felt, in the failure to maintain a hold on even a remnant of her humanity, as a kind of death.

On Wednesday morning Rebecca drove us to the railway station and left us there an hour and a half before the departure of our train. She couldn’t stay, she said, as irritated as though we had asked her to; she had so many things to do. Her manner was strikingly changed. She seemed now to find nothing of significance in our departure, to herself or to us. I felt that I could lie down on the pavement outside the station where she left us and not know whether it was in relief or despair. My heart was clenched like a fist in my chest. I watched her drive away, fast, and it was as though the little wavering car had streamers attached to it, which fluttered frantically around its vanishing form. Later, when our train pulled into its station and I saw Adam Hanbury standing on
the platform in a padded brown coat and a deerstalker hat, my eyes attached to him like the first object seen after waking from a dream. I looked at him, mesmerised by his solidity, until he saw us through the window and raised his hand.