by Rachel Cusk
‘Look, she just said she was going to take yours out!’ said Adam. ‘It’s completely ridiculous.’
‘I don’t like them!’
‘Why don’t you just give her something else? What’s the point of wasting good food on her? It’s completely ridiculous.’
‘You’re repeating yourself.’
‘Your mother isn’t a slave, you know! She’s got better things to do than cook three separate meals every evening!’
‘People are allowed not to like things,’ said Lisa.
‘I don’t like peppers!’ wailed Janie.
‘I know you don’t. Mummy’ll take them out.’
‘But I want something else! I don’t want that – I want something else!’
Hamish got off my lap and set off into the gloom. Presently I saw his shape passing in front of the large window.
‘But you said!’ said Janie.
‘Nobody said.’
‘They did!’
‘No they didn’t!’
‘Look, it’s nothing. I’ll just do something else quickly. I’ll do some fish fingers. It won’t take a minute.’
‘You’re giving in to her.’
‘I had fish fingers for lunch.’
‘I’m not giving in! I just happen to think it’s cruel to force children to eat things that disgust them.’
‘We had fish fingers at school for lunch.’
‘Well, in that case she should eat earlier. She should eat with the baby. It isn’t disgusting, you know, just because you don’t like it. Adults don’t eat disgusting things. Why would I eat something if it was disgusting?’
‘You don’t like tomatoes. Nobody forces you to eat tomatoes, do they?’
‘I do like tomatoes.’
‘I hate tomatoes,’ said Janie.
Their voices seemed to agitate the surface of a torpor at whose bottom I lay, untouched, like some sunken object that had slipped out of the bounds of light and fallen far beneath the reach of a commotion now both meaningless and mysterious. I wondered where Rebecca was, and the thought of her paid out above me, winding and waving upwards through the blue light until I could see its end, far short of any grasp. If she came to look for me, I thought, she would never find me.
I heard Lisa say:
‘That’s a lie.’
‘What?’
‘I said that’s a lie. You’re lying. You don’t like tomatoes.’
Adam said: ‘I can’t believe you’d accuse me of lying.’
He appeared to wish to confer on this accusation more seriousness than the dislike of tomatoes alone could sustain.
‘I’m just stating the facts.’
‘There aren’t any facts. I know what I like and what I don’t like.’
‘When I don’t like something,’ said Janie, ‘I put it in my pocket.’
‘What, food? You put food in your pocket?’
‘I take it out later and throw it into the bin.’
‘You put it in your pocket?’
‘When I don’t like something I do. Like stew – it’s got all those bits in it.’
‘You put that in your pocket?’
Hamish bumped into the darkened television set. It rocked on its stand and he cried out in alarm as a cascade of videos fell to the floor. Immediately the kitchen door opened. Hamish stood as though naked in the new path of light, his face petrified.
‘Oops-a-daisy!’ cried Lisa, before I could speak.
She trod swiftly over the carpet and gathered Hamish into her arms, and without a glance in my direction she carried him into the kitchen.
*
At ten o’clock, as I did the night before, I phoned Rebecca before it could be established, definitively, that she was not going to phone me.
‘I just got in,’ she said. ‘I just walked through the door.’
This, at least, was ambiguous: she might have been accusing me of pestering her, or she might equally have been mentioning her absence as the excuse for not having called earlier. There was a third possibility, which was that she meant to convey both things, irritation and guilt, at once. I envisaged these three interpretations as a sort of diagram, like a drawing of the chambers of the heart. In such drawings there were always little arrows to clarify the direction of flow, in through the blue veins and out through the red. Then there was the heart itself, which in spite of its centrality to all those veins, in spite of the appearance it gave of turning bad blood to good, was remarkable only for the intricacy with which it maintained separation between them. In those neat little chambers the blue and the red dwelt side by side, not mingling but merely proximate. It was the closest possible arrangement, like marriage, for contradictory traffic.
I distinctly remembered that when Rebecca and I first began our relationship we were possessed by the need to maintain spotlessness in our dealings with one another. As soon as a smear or mark appeared we cleaned it up, and although it was usually clear which one of us had, by error or accident, put it there, there was no sequel of recrimination or blame, merely the mutual desire to reinstate order. We were like two people running their separate businesses out of shared premises. I don’t know precisely when this decorous era ended, but by a certain point our modest, hopeful square footage had been abandoned for a different, more sprawling joint enterprise. I remembered that when Hamish was a very small baby Rebecca became distraught with him one afternoon, actually angry, and I was surprised that after six weeks she thought she knew him well enough to carry on like that. It suggested to me that her good conduct at the same stage in our own relationship was the result of a great and uncharacteristic exercise of self-restraint, an exercise that could be considered somewhat fraudulent, given that as far as I knew it was repeated nowhere else in her history. Rick and Ali were always pleased to fill me in on the parts of that history that predated my arrival. It sometimes occurred to me that Rebecca had seen in me the possibility for reform, if not outright escape from herself; that she saw me as some new, prosperous, unhistoried country, like Australia, to which she could emigrate and forget her problems. She discussed those problems with me, which mainly had to do with her childhood and her family, and owing to my inability to solve them, or perhaps merely to hear and respond to them correctly I soon superseded them and became the problem myself; leaving her, I suppose, with strong but muddled feelings of what appeared to be homesickness for the original problems, compounded by the sense that in allying herself with me she had effected some sort of betrayal of the things she loved. The real problem, in the end, seemed to be that I wasn’t related to her. If I had been her cousin, or even some old family friend, she would not have suffered so from divided loyalties, nor found herself to be carrying the disease of my difference from her, my innate hostility to the organism that was her life. That was as close as I could come to solving the problem – or rather diagnosing it, for there was of course no actual cure for this particular difficulty.
‘Where have you been?’ I said. I said it with lively curiosity rather than accusatory grimness, but there was only so much camouflage the words themselves would accept.
‘At mum and dad’s,’ she replied, somewhat stonily. She didn’t say anything else. Again I had the sense of two unambiguous meanings combined to make a force of highly systematised confusion. This time it appeared to me as the coloured tubes of copper filament, one live, one neutral, that lie side by side in the white plastic vein of an electric flex. Either she had gone to her parents as a place of refuge from me; or she had gone there and been made unhappy by them. Or both: her refusal to elaborate left the question charged.
‘Did they give you something to eat?’ I said.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘They were just in a complete state.’
‘What about?’
There was a second of tinny silence.
‘Mum found a lump on her breast. Or rather, dad found it, as he kept telling everyone. I’m sure it’ll turn out to be nothing.’
‘When was this?’
>
There was another pause. I heard Rebecca take a drink of something and swallow.
‘This morning. They went down to the hospital and had some tests done on it.’
‘When will they get the results?’
‘I don’t know. A few days, I think. I’m sure it will be nothing.’
‘I’m really sorry,’ I said.
‘I’m sure it will be nothing,’ said Rebecca again. ‘Anyway, they’ve gone completely wild over it. They’ve really gone for the amateur dramatics. There’s no, you know, let’s wait and see what the test says. Dad won’t let her out of his sight – he even followed her to the toilet and stood there talking to her through the door. They sat there all evening holding hands as though mum had just been told she’d got a week to live. What’s really annoying,’ she continued, ‘is that dad’s already wanting to scale things down at the gallery so that he can look after her. He’s even saying he wants to cancel Niven’s show.’
‘That’s a shame,’ I said.
‘I told him, you know, wait until we’ve actually got a diagnosis before you start cancelling things! Whatever happened to, you know, positive visualisation?’
‘I’m sure it won’t come to that.’
‘Oh, they’re still in the dramatic phase, you know, big statements, big gestures, the whole roadshow. But that’s exactly when they can decide to make an example of someone. It’s right when they’re in the middle of an emotional trip that they suddenly need something to bite on, you know, just to show that they’re not all talk. What I hate,’ she continued, ‘is the fact that they think their world is more real than anyone else’s. I know we all think that in a way, but with them it’s all about other people. It’s in being witnessed that their life becomes real for them. Have you ever noticed,’ she said, ‘how they’re always losing friends and making new ones? Everywhere they go they find more people. You turn your back for a second and they’ve collared someone else and started telling them about their sex life. Then when they’ve done that they tell them about your sex life. Then eventually everyone gets into the habit of this frankness thing and they all start to behave badly, and then they fall out. People like that shouldn’t have children. All they want children for is so that they can have more material, more life, more things to talk about, more actors in their pathetic domestic drama –’
‘I think you’re being a little hard on them.’
‘It’s no wonder that none of us have had children of our own,’ said Rebecca. ‘We know what they’ll be made into – victims, food for the predators!’
‘Except you, of course,’ I said.
‘What’s that?’
‘You. You’ve had a child.’
Rebecca gave a strange little laugh.
‘I was thinking about something else,’ she said vaguely. ‘Anyway, they’re sort of down on Niven at the moment.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, something to do with dad giving him money to get something for him and him not getting it and not giving dad the money back. It was grass, I bet. They make a big point of never mentioning drugs in front of me. They think it atones for something.’
I said nothing. I steadily extended my silence forwards like a hydraulic arm with which I intended to push Rebecca over the precipice of enquiry.
‘How are you, anyway?’ she finally said.
Now that she’d asked, I found that I didn’t want to tell her anything about myself. I found myself thinking about Ali’s lump, identifying with it almost, with the lump itself. Wrongly, I suppose, I attributed to it qualities of vulnerability that I felt myself in that moment to share. I realised presently that it was the prospect of its excision that caused me to feel this.
‘I miss you,’ said Rebecca.
Still I did not speak. A little surge of adrenalin caused my heart to thump. This did not signify excitement exactly, more a feeling of fear. I did not in that instant make a native connection between Rebecca’s missing me and the possibility of mercy or benevolence or love. It seemed, rather, to hint at the possibility of violence.
‘Though I think it’s good,’ she continued, ‘for us to be apart.’
‘Do you?’
‘Oh, absolutely,’ she said. ‘It was what you always used to say, that the loosest ties are the strongest.’
‘I never said that.’
‘You’ve always said,’ reiterated Rebecca, ‘that we should lead more separate lives. I can hear you saying it now.’
‘I didn’t mean that we shouldn’t see each other.’
‘Letting go has been the hardest thing for me.’
‘I never said anything about letting go! I only meant that we shouldn’t hold each other responsible for all our problems.’
‘I’ve been very angry with you, Michael, really angry, but I’ve adored you too. Never forget that. And you’re also the father of my child. You always will be.’
‘I only meant that there’s a limit to how much you can relate to another person. Beyond a certain point it just becomes chaos – chaos!’
I found that my skin had drawn very tight around the top of my head. This was an effect Rebecca could have on me.
‘You’re afraid of passion, Michael. You’re afraid of blood on the floor. But the thing is, I’ve always been a very passionate person and if you won’t allow me to express it then you know I’ll just turn on you. I’ll turn on you.’
In a way, I admired her for this kind of talk. Even when I’d listened, agonised, to her regaling that terrified boy with it in the pub, I felt too a sort of anarchic thrill at her lack of shame. To me, these fits of self-description were the closest she came to a creative act. It was herself she was creating, yet I felt sure that her state while she did it was not so distant from that which she yearned to attain, in which she would find herself enabled to make something that could actually stand apart from her.
‘All my life,’ she was saying now, ‘all my life I’ve been looking for something straight and fixed, something dependable, something I could pour myself into that would hold me.’
I guessed she was going to say that I was that thing.
‘And you were it, Michael. You were that vessel. You said to me, come on, I’ll hold you. I’ll contain you. I’ll give you routine and stability. I’ll give you a home, I’ll give you a baby if you want one. But don’t think that you can grow. Don’t think that you can move, or change. Because if you do I’ll crack. My nice strong walls can’t take pressure from the inside. I’ll crack and I’ll break and in the end I’ll shatter.’
‘You will?’ I said, confused.
‘You – you! I think maybe you needed to be broken. I think maybe that’s why you chose me.’
‘I thought you chose me. I thought I was the vessel and you were the –’
I couldn’t remember what she was. It had started out as some kind of fast-setting liquid, and ended up as an exuberant house plant.
‘You could have found some nice girl. Some nice, predictable girl.’
‘Why do you keep saying things like that?’ I shouted. ‘You’re the only thing that makes me predictable, because somebody has to be!’
‘You don’t know how hard it is for me,’ she said presently, in a trembling voice, ‘to stand on my own.’
‘I’m not asking you to stand on your own.’
‘You are. You just don’t see it yet.’
‘I think I’d see it if I were asking it.’
My mouth felt as though it were stuffed with something dry, like bread.
‘We’re married,’ I said finally. ‘Doesn’t that mean anything to you? For all their faults, at least your parents stay together.’
‘That isn’t a marriage,’ said Rebecca. ‘That’s a mutual dependency.’
‘Of course it seems like that to you! At least they touch each other!’ I said. It seemed I was shouting again. ‘You’d have to have a lump on your breast the size of a football for me to stand any chance of even noticing it!’
I wen
t to bed and lay listening to the sound of Hamish rustling in his sleeping bag. I lay awake for so long in the airless, featureless spare room that I began to feel like something in a specimen case, being lightly tormented where I lay pinned behind glass by the sounds my son made, which summoned me constantly to awareness and to the state that precedes activity. I felt that if only I could hear or smell the sea this sensation would pass. I felt I could be comforted by the existence of something animate but impartial. In this place of fences such intrusions were apparently considered hazardous. It occurred to me that Doniford had succumbed to a sort of partitioning, a spoliation, out of its inability to adhere to its true nature. Like me, it had admitted ugliness because ugliness asked to be admitted.
SEVEN
‘Where are the women?’ Paul Hanbury wanted to know, when Adam, Hamish and I opened the door to his room. ‘Stand aside – let me see! Where are they? Where are my bloody women? Three days I’ve been in this bloody room and not one of them has come to see me!’
In its spacious sparseness and beige diffidence, the room was more like a room in a hotel than a hospital. Paul Hanbury lay on the grand, plinth-like bed at its centre. He wore a white smock and looked very small and tyrannical, like a child emperor. I would have recognised him by his voice alone, yet it was hard now to believe that it had emanated from him – it travelled around the room in great rings of sound that dwarfed his body. He had never been large, but lying in that bed he looked wizened – except for his head, which retained its distinctive scale and grandeur, and which he barely moved when he spoke, so that in spite of everything he had the poised appearance of a statesman, or an actor. His hair rolled back from his forehead in thick, steel-grey waves and his face had darkened and deepened into creases since the last time I saw him, especially around his eyes, which were small and black and glittered like buttons. He opened his large, well-shaped mouth wide in order to talk, revealing straight, strong, even yellow teeth and the resilient, plump pad of his tongue.
‘That’s not true, dad,’ said Adam. ‘Vivian came last night.’
‘She did not – not a soul has come since you showed your face here yesterday! And before that there was only that poseur David, who came with some bloody stupid periodical and wouldn’t sit down in case he creased his trousers, and apart from that there’s been nobody.’