In the Fold

by Rachel Cusk

‘Yes.’

  ‘I suppose they don’t need much help then. I suppose they’re quite able to doctor on their own. Are they busy – out a lot? Don’t have time for you?’

  ‘Something like that,’ I said.

  ‘And all they’ll be leaving you is their surgical instruments, I suppose, and the house in Surrey. Mind you, that could be worth something.’

  ‘I don’t expect them to leave me anything.’

  ‘Well, they probably will, but you’re a good boy anyway. The problem with my brood,’ he said confidentially, ‘is that they’ve come in to land a bit early. They all think I’m going to pop my clogs before I’m seventy – even Caris shelled out the money for the train fare as soon as she heard I was hospitalised.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ said Adam.

  ‘She wouldn’t miss it for the world! And nor would Brendon, if he could only work out how to get here. As for the eldest son, he hasn’t let me out of his sight in years – the heir presumptive, if you know what I mean. Mind you, there’s always the jacuzzi salesman to consider. They’re bad for the heart, you know, those things. Eight bedrooms and twenty acres in Northumberland, don’t forget. He could be taking his leave any day.’

  In spite of myself, I laughed.

  ‘Tell me what your mother’s got the hump about, there’s a good boy,’ said Paul to Adam, who was putting his coat on.

  ‘I’d rather she told you herself. I don’t really understand what the problem is.’

  ‘Well, she can’t tell me if she doesn’t come.’

  ‘There’s a phone beside the bed, dad.’

  ‘I can’t talk to her on the telephone. I never could – she uses it as an instrument of torture.’

  ‘Something to do with money. She says she hasn’t got her allowance. I didn’t know what she was talking about.’

  Paul was silent. He held his head up in a soldierly fashion, as though bravely contemplating some doom-laden enterprise.

  ‘Tell Vivian to come in, will you?’ he said presently. ‘Tell the old girl to come in. Tell her I’m not too good. Put her in the car and bring her yourself if you have to. Will you do that for me?’

  ‘All right,’ said Adam. ‘She said she was coming anyway. She’ll probably be here before I even get a chance to speak to her.’

  ‘I don’t expect she will. Just do as I ask. Get the old girl in here where I can see her.’

  ‘It’ll probably be tomorrow rather than today.’

  ‘Make it as soon as you can, there’s a good boy,’ said Paul.

  ‘Has the consultant been in yet?’

  ‘What? Oh, yes.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He was an Asian fellow,’ said Paul. ‘Knew his stuff, though, I’ll say that for him,’ he added. ‘He said he came from Kerala in the south of India – a beautiful place apparently, he told me all about it, white buildings and trees, hot as hell. The Christians colonised it in the fifteenth century. Now he’s living in a suburb of Taunton. I said to him, if you know what beauty is, how can you stand to live without it? And he said, “Beauty is secondary, Mr Hanbury.”’ Paul put on an accent to relay the consultant’s sentiments. ‘I said to him, don’t they need consultants in Kerala? Yes, he said, they do. So I said, well, tell me why you’re here then. He looked a little taken aback, you know, a little superior. Then he started yakking on about skills and training and equipment, and suddenly I thought, here it is again! Selfishness! Greed! So I said, admit it, you’re here because they pay you more. And he admitted that he was!’

  Paul gave a bark of laughter and sat back against his pillows with his arms folded. His expression was morbid.

  ‘When did he say you could come home?’ said Adam.

  ‘Monday. Tell Vivian that too. Tell her not to bring out the fatted calf. Tell her I’m on a hospital diet. Have you experienced Vivian’s cooking?’ he asked me. ‘Awful, isn’t it? The first Mrs Hanbury wasn’t bad, but she never ate the things she cooked, which used to make you wonder what she’d put in it.’

  ‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ said Adam.

  ‘Don’t forget, will you? You’ve got to bring Vivian in. Actually in, do you hear?’

  ‘Goodbye, Paul,’ I said.

  I held out my hand and Paul grabbed it and pulled me nearly on to his chest. Hamish, whom I was holding, clung to my neck as we went over and Paul put his arms around my neck too, so that I lay across the bed like a fallen tree being strangulated by vines.

  ‘Kiss me,’ said Paul gruffly, and I obeyed by kissing his leathery cheek. ‘You’re a good boy,’ he said. He released my neck and gripped my face between the vice of his hands instead. ‘It’s rather soft, your fur,’ he said. ‘Do you put anything on it?’

  ‘No,’ I said, with difficulty.

  ‘I never petted mine enough,’ he said hotly, into my ear. ‘You’ve got to pet them and stroke them every day, then they’ll never give you any trouble. Every day, do you hear? The day you forget is the day they’ll get it in their minds to turn against you!’

  He released my head and turned to Hamish, who was regarding him close to with a certain alarmed curiosity. He ruffled Hamish’s fair hair, before making an unexpected and not inaccurate attempt at Hamish’s bell noise.

  ‘Goodbye, fellow-me-lad,’ he said, laughing loudly.

  *

  In the car on the way back to Doniford I kept turning around and talking nonsense to Hamish and tickling his toes as he liked them tickled, aware as I did so that I was harbouring a feeling of guilt about what suddenly seemed to me to be the unsatisfactory state of his circumstances. As we drew into The Meadows, a mild feeling of oppression settled over me. In the flat, late-afternoon light which cast no shadows, unstirred by wind or rain, there was something actually inhuman about the place. I noticed that several of the houses had caravans parked in their driveways, white and rounded, like the babies of the stolid, red-brick adults, as though the big dwelling had mechanistically spawned the small. The caravans were the only things here that were neither square nor triangular, though I supposed that if they stayed long enough they might become so. The houses stared dumbly out of their windows.

  ‘What I like about this place,’ said Adam, steering us with conspicuous smoothness around the tarmac, ‘is the fact that it doesn’t remind me of anything.’

  ‘On the phone you described it as hilarious,’ I observed.

  ‘Well, it is, in a way,’ he said. ‘If you were going to be a snob about it.’

  We passed a group of children in spotless tracksuits and baseball caps, who lifted their white faces to us as we went by.

  ‘I’m not saying we’re going to stay here for ever,’ said Adam. ‘But for now it actually suits us really well. At least it isn’t pretentious. It doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not.’

  I heard the voice of Lisa speaking through this remark.

  ‘With some of the houses they’re building now, they’re trying to make them look as though they haven’t just slapped them up. I think that’s worse, in a way. Actually, the houses here have gone up fifteen, twenty per cent since we bought, and that’s partly because you’re not paying for some mock-Georgian porch over your front door, or a carport with a cupola. You’re paying for the location and the outside space. There are houses in Doniford now that are twice the size of ours with half the garden. Lisa gets itchy feet sometimes,’ he added presently.

  ‘Does she?’

  ‘She’d like more, you know, grandeur. But we’re just going to have to wait. We’ll have to wait and see what happens. This is a pretty solid investment.’ We both contemplated the house, in whose driveway we were now parked. ‘Tony’s offered me a job,’ Adam disclosed, with his face sideways to mine. ‘Lisa’s father. He’s offered me a share in the business.’

  ‘Are you going to take it?’ I said, surprised.

  ‘I don’t know. Lisa’s pretty keen. She’d like to be near her family. I can’t quite see myself up north but in a way it’s a fantastic opportunity.
Tony’s thinking of retiring. They’ve got a place in Portugal, you know, and they want to spend more time there. So I’d basically be running the show. It would mean giving up my practice, of course,’ he said, ‘though I don’t feel particularly sentimental about that. It would be a relief, actually. I just did it for something to do until dad needed me to take over the farm. But that’s all changed a bit.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well –’ Adam rubbed his face with his hands sheepishly. ‘I’ve been going through some of the accounts this week. I was just being nosy, actually. Dad’s never really said anything specific about what the farm earns – there’s just been, you know, this impression of money, but in fact he’s been running it virtually at a loss. He makes five, six thousand a year, most of it from subsidies. It’s incredible – I don’t know quite how he’s done it. The new barns alone cost a fortune, plus the tractor and all the new fencing. In fact, if he sold his whole herd he wouldn’t begin to cover the cost. I suppose Vivian must have paid for them.’

  We sat there in silence for a moment.

  ‘Anyway, it did start me thinking, you know, about Egypt, about what it actually was. I mean, dad’s always talked about it as a working farm, as something that had to be nurtured and worked at. Pretty much from the minute we could walk we had to be out there helping, with the sheep and the hay harvest and the fencing, and hearing him talking about it all day and night, and now I’m beginning to wonder whether it wasn’t just a bit of a con. You know, whether he didn’t use it as a way to control us. I mean, if it isn’t a farm then what is it? It’s just a nice house, that’s all. A nice house.’

  I tried to think of what the answer to his question might be.

  ‘I don’t understand why he didn’t tell me!’ cried Adam, thumping the steering wheel. ‘All these years it’s been, you know, when Adam takes over the farm, when I hand over the reins to Adam, Adam the son and heir – and in fact there’s nothing to hand over! There’s just Egypt, where he lives, and which he’ll only leave, as he’s fond of saying, in a wooden box. And I’m not waiting for that – it could take years! Even if I did get the house I couldn’t afford to maintain it on what I get from the practice. I’d have to sell. It’s worth more than a million pounds, you know. I got an off-the-record valuation from the agent in Doniford.’ He looked askance at me. ‘Incredible, isn’t it?’

  ‘Perhaps you should tell him that you’ve seen the accounts.’

  ‘I don’t think I can do that,’ said Adam after a pause. ‘I know dad. He’d cut me out completely. He’d leave everything to Brendon. Laughable as that may seem.’

  Adam’s front door opened and Lisa appeared, mouthing and beckoning frantically. Finally she picked her way in her bare feet across the gravel. The soft shapes of her breasts jiggled beneath her T-shirt.

  ‘Caris is here,’ she said discreetly through the window. ‘She’s been here absolutely ages. We’re running out of things to talk about.’

  She turned around and slowly picked her way back again.

  Caris was sitting on Adam and Lisa’s sofa with her legs curled up beside her and the baby on her lap. Immediately I felt a certain kinship with her, as I had the first time I met her all those years ago, when she had wound the impermanent ivy around herself for adornment. I guessed that she, like me, held back from definitively securing the territories of her existence. Sometimes, when I looked at the people I knew, I saw them as the generals of invisible armies, always advancing and expanding. Their lives seemed to bulk out around them like pyramidal structures by which they were lifted higher and higher until they became almost impossible to see, and when they spoke it was of the next campaign and the one after, so that they appeared peculiarly more burdened by the future than by the past.

  ‘Hello, Michael,’ she said. ‘Still here?’

  ‘Still here.’

  ‘What is it you want from us?’ she said jovially. ‘What is it you’re after?’

  ‘Entertainment, I think. Or perhaps just distraction. I’ve forgotten which it was.’

  ‘Michael’s here to see Adam,’ interposed Lisa, who looked slightly alarmed by this exchange. ‘They’re old friends from university.’

  ‘I know Michael,’ said Caris grandly. She looked large and rather unruly in the tidy, pale-coloured room. ‘I know what’s under that beard, that’s how well I know him. Who’s this?’ she added, with a fluting note of suspicion in her voice, when she caught sight of Hamish. She looked around her, as though expecting someone to come and claim him, or at least to offer an explanation.

  ‘My son. Hamish.’

  ‘Your son? Well! I didn’t know!’

  I didn’t see particularly why she should have known, but she seemed nonetheless slightly peeved at the fact of Hamish’s existence.

  ‘How old is he?’ she asked, looking from him to me and back again.

  ‘He’s three.’

  ‘Well!’ she said again. ‘Three years – so I was –’ she did a mental calculation ‘– yes, I had just moved to London then.’

  I wondered if she would explain the way in which these two events were related. Today she was wearing a sort of beatnik outfit, with a black beret pressed down over her coarse, springy hair and a frayed black leather jacket.

  ‘You wouldn’t have heard, then,’ I said. ‘Not in London.’

  ‘I know you’re teasing me, Michael,’ she said, mock-reprovingly. ‘But I like to get things in order. I like to see the whole picture. There’s you over there –’ she illustrated my position, which was on the left side of the sofa, with one hand ‘– and here’s me over here –’ the right side of the sofa ‘– and we’re both travelling at the same speed on our separate roads.’ She lifted her arms while the baby wobbled precariously on her lap and together we were slowly precipitated forwards over the edge of the seat.

  ‘And the strange thing is,’ she continued, enlightened, ‘that exactly when you were increasing your estate I was shedding mine.’

  ‘Were you?’

  ‘I walked away from everything,’ she said dramatically. ‘I just walked away. My place, my relationship, even my family.’ The last she uttered furtively, out of consideration I supposed. ‘I left the money economy, and the sex economy, and the patriarchy of the home – it wasn’t easy.’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose it was.’

  ‘Are you being sarcastic, Michael? Because I know it’s tempting to be. But I happen to regard sarcasm as a vice, a crutch. I had to hurt a lot of people to be free.’ She stroked the baby’s feathery hair with her hand. ‘Some of them were innocent people. But I did it. And I don’t regret it.’

  ‘Free from what, exactly?’

  ‘I was sick,’ she said. ‘It was as though my body were full of poisons. But in fact it was full of lies and misconceptions, about who and what I was. A woman, hence secondary; a daughter, not a son; a sex object, a servant, a parasite. Someone who wasn’t capable of seeing past the end of her pretty nose, let alone of doing any good in the world. But I’ll tell you what, you’re never safe, you’re never really free from it – I haven’t been back here in eighteen months and yet it’s already started, the shame, the jealousy, the anger, the feelings of guilt.’

  ‘You haven’t left the money economy,’ interposed Adam from the kitchen, where he had withdrawn with Lisa on some nebulous domestic business. ‘You get money for those pots.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Caris, composedly, with her head held high, ‘we do. We have rent and bills to pay, like everyone else. And necessities, and some luxuries too. We’re a community, not a penitentiary. We’re just a group of women who’ve chosen to live together and support one another and pool our talents in the hope of doing some good, whether at home or elsewhere.’

  ‘I don’t think I could live with lots of other women,’ said Lisa, drawn from her sanctuary in the kitchen by the turn the conversation had taken. ‘Don’t you find you just fight all the time? I grew up with sisters and I’m telling you, we were awful. We were a
lways nicking each others’ things and having great screaming rows, and we were ever so competitive, you know. Everyone says it’s men who are competitive, but I think women are much worse.’

  ‘Can men join your community?’ I asked.

  Caris laughed. ‘Why? Are you tempted?’

  ‘I just wondered why freedom from society is something women can be seen to want but not men.’

  ‘If you have men,’ said Caris coolly, ‘then you are society. We’d be deferring to them and offering to do their laundry inside a month.’

  ‘Then you don’t have a very high opinion of yourselves.’

  Caris smiled. ‘That’s why we’re there.’

  ‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about,’ said Lisa.

  ‘Michael’s saying that he thinks we ought to be able to be what we want to be in a world that includes men,’ said Caris. ‘Perhaps he thinks we’re storing up unhappiness for ourselves.’

  ‘I just don’t think you can last,’ I said.

  ‘There’s no reason why we should. Needing to hang on to things is part of the problem.’

  ‘What about love? What about affection?’

  ‘You see!’ said Caris triumphantly. ‘That’s why we don’t let in men – they’d be telling us to relax –’ she assumed a collapsed position on the sofa ‘– and to stop being so uptight!’

  ‘But what about it?’

  Caris sat up and smiled mysteriously. ‘I love my sister and my sister loves me,’ she said. ‘Besides, there are plenty of people who don’t get love and affection in their marriages. Look at Vivian, for pity’s sake.’

  ‘If you ask me,’ intervened Lisa, ‘Vivian’s brought that on herself.’

  ‘Anyway, what does it matter?’ said Caris. ‘We’re more than just our sex, you know – we campaign, we do environmental projects, we get involved in justice issues.’

  ‘It sounds like a laugh a minute,’ said Adam from the kitchen.

  ‘Right now,’ said Caris, for some reason consulting her watch, ‘loggers are ripping down primeval rain forest in Tasmania and dousing the land with napalm. Does that not mean anything to you?’