by Rachel Cusk
‘Not really,’ said Adam, who had joined Lisa at the threshold. ‘Why should it? It’s happening on the other side of the world.’
‘Well, it matters to me. We’re petitioning everyone in our area and sending the signatures to the Australian government.’
‘Somehow,’ said Adam, ‘I don’t think you’ll stop them.’
‘We might!’
‘All you’re doing,’ said Adam, ‘is causing yourself unnecessary pain.’
I wondered where I had heard him say this before, and remembered it was in the hospital.
‘And you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you? On the list of things that have caused me unnecessary pain, you’d come out just about at the top!’
‘I think I’ll go and get the children’s tea on,’ said Lisa, in her ‘discreet’ voice. ‘Are you coming, Hamish?’
‘Oh come on,’ said Adam. ‘Not that again.’
‘He broke my arm,’ said Caris, to me. ‘He knocked out two of my front teeth. He gave me a cracked rib and concussion, not to mention bruises all over my legs.’
‘It wasn’t broken. It was fractured.’
‘It was broken, damn you! From the age of three to the age of sixteen,’ said Caris, fixing my eyes with hers, ‘my brother systematically physically abused me. From before that, for all I know.’
‘Caris,’ called Lisa distantly from the kitchen, ‘I really don’t think you ought to make those sorts of accusations.’
‘He locked me in the wine cellar where there were rats. He pushed me down the stairs. He tied me to a tree and threw tennis balls at me.’
‘That’s just what children do!’ protested Adam.
‘He shut me in the boot of dad’s car. He hit me with his cricket bat.’
‘Caris, I think you should stop,’ said Lisa from the doorway. She crossed the room and took the baby from Caris’s lap and returned to the kitchen. ‘Everyone’s mean to their brothers and sisters,’ she said, from the doorway. ‘I really think you should just get over it.’
‘Well,’ said Caris, ‘he’s your problem now, not mine.’ She rose from the sofa. ‘Sorry to mess up your evening,’ she said in a strangled voice. ‘You obviously don’t want me here so I’ll go.’
‘Do you want me to call you a cab?’ I said.
‘Oh, it’s still light,’ she said. ‘I’ll walk.’
I followed her into the hall.
‘Don’t be angry,’ I said.
She stood outside on the drive with her arms folded and her head tilted away. I felt sorry for all the time that had passed.
‘It’s all true, you know,’ she said. ‘I’m always surprised when that doesn’t make a difference.’
She was gone in a few smart crunches of gravel before I could say anything. I closed the front door behind her. From the kitchen I heard Lisa say:
‘Do you think Caris is a lesbian?’
I went upstairs and for the first time since my arrival in Doniford I took my violin out of its case and began to play. I played most of the repertoire we went through during our Friday evenings. At first the sound was loud and harsh but gradually it grew more rounded, as though it were working itself into the stiff walls and carpet and rendering them pliant. I must have lost track of time, because when I became aware of Lisa standing in the doorway the window was full of the purple light of evening. She was smiling. In the dusk her face had a bronzed look from which her hair and teeth glowed with an avid, slightly sinister whiteness. She had her arms folded and her head cocked to one side.
‘That’s really nice,’ she said. In her ‘discreet’ voice she added: ‘The thing is, I’ve just put the baby down and I’d really like her to go to sleep.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ll stop.’
EIGHT
The next day was Saturday. Beverly was taking the day off, so we agreed to work the late-morning shift while she and Brendon did the night. This meant that we didn’t need to get to the farm until eight o’clock and had to stay through until noon, which is how I came to witness the extraordinary scene that took place amongst the Hanburys that day.
For the first time, I was left to sleep until it was light. It was a luxury for which I expected myself to be grateful after the days of hard, dark, four o’clock risings, but when I opened my eyes to the grey, established daylight I discovered instead that I had been served with the unmistakable summons of despair. It was as though thoughts of my wife had formed a sort of crust or skin around me while I slept. On opening my eyes I received a startling impression of my own bondage to these thoughts; I was encased by them, to a point that apparently precluded physical movement. I realised that by getting up early all these mornings I had cheated the part of my constitution that needed time and stillness to form the fog of feeling. Lying helpless in bed I let the grey light run in its doomy legions over me. Eventually I heard Hamish rustling in his sleeping bag, and for some reason I prayed for him not to wake up yet, for it seemed unbearable to me that I should have to confront him in this state: but he did wake up. I was aware of him laboriously getting to his feet, as though he were the first human. The quivering top of his blond head and then his face appeared beside me.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Hi,’ he said.
I said, ‘We’re going home soon. Tomorrow maybe. We’re going home to see mummy.’
Hamish assumed a neutral expression, like a priest hearing a particularly gruesome confession.
‘I bet you’ve missed her, haven’t you?’
He nodded. As far as I knew Rebecca had not once telephoned to speak to Hamish; nor to me, as it happened, although I had been able to mask this omission by telephoning her myself. I had tried vainly to reach her the night before, which was doubtless one cause of my current prostration. The message on her mobile phone annoyed me so much that it caused feelings of actual hatred to course through me, not for Rebecca but for the phone itself, as though it were holding her hostage and repeatedly releasing the same fragment of her. I imagined smashing it, banging its square little face against a rock until its casing fell apart and then prising out its metallic innards.
By the time Adam and I drove up the hill, the day was windy and bright and the naked trees cast moving shadows on the grass and on the road so that sometimes their bare arms seemed to be flailing the windscreen while shards of cold sunlight hailed down from the sky. Great clouds foamed at the top of the hill, grey and white, like something beaten out of a distant ferment. I said:
‘I think we’ll be off tomorrow.’
In the shuttered, discontinuous light I waited for his reply.
‘That’s a shame,’ he said. ‘We expected you to stay longer.’
‘There are some problems at home I’ve got to sort out.’
A moment earlier I had felt a pressing need to make this disclosure. Now that I had, I felt vulnerable and ashamed.
‘We thought that might be the case,’ said Adam presently, with ostentatious care. He stared keenly through the windscreen.
‘The balcony fell off our house,’ I said. ‘I should really go and sort it out.’
There was a silence, during which Adam failed to recognise his obligation to enquire about the dramatic event to which I had just referred. Like some predatory animal my anger left off the trail of Rebecca and swerved hungrily towards this new source of affront. Did he think I was lying? That ‘we’!
‘It nearly killed me,’ I said. ‘It missed me by a foot.’
Still he did not speak. I thought that I might hit him. I wanted to – there was a hot feeling of excitement in my chest that made the prospect of hitting Adam seem infinitely satisfying, like the prospect of taking flight. I did not, however, hit him. I began to feel jittery and light-headed, and my hands trembled on my thighs. I looked out of the window to the side of me at the rushing hedgerows. There was a leaden sensation in my stomach. It seemed that Adam and I were no longer friends. I felt certain that he would agree, but what perplexed me was how our brief conversation, in
which we had taken such different parts, could have led to both of us forming this conclusion. I supposed that he could have decided it at some earlier point in my visit. I felt then that I had exposed myself to him in every particular. I felt his solidity, his self-satisfaction, in opposition to my transience. I imagined him and Lisa laughing at Hamish and at me; I imagined, ashamed, the clarity with which they had perceived that I scorned their suburban existence, and though I scorned it still, this idea, along with their beige carpets and their aspirations and the fact especially of their hospitality, put them somehow in the right. It was one of Rebecca’s criticisms of me that I was judgmental, as though I were the last advocate of an otherwise extinct morality. What she meant was that the disapproval made me immoral myself, by which I had always understood her to be saying that her lack of discrimination made discrimination a crime.
‘Lisa’s bringing the kids up at lunchtime to see the lambs,’ said Adam, as though further to assert the simple virtues of his existence, as opposed to the snarling, duplicitous chaos of mine.
‘Will she bring Hamish?’ I said.
Adam smiled.
‘Well, I don’t think she can leave him at home,’ he said.
‘That’s nice of her,’ I said, more petulantly than I’d meant to, so that as we were bumping up the track Adam turned his head to glance at me.
There were only six pregnant ewes in the pens. I left Adam to sit with them while I loitered around the barns in a pretence of efficiency, slowly shovelling dirty straw into the wheelbarrow. Sometimes I went out and looked at the vivid blue sea below, its surface creased by wind. I saw little boats charging madly up and down. The hours passed, forced through the tiny aperture in my angry feelings of subjection. I gave the orphaned lambs their milk, sickened by the greed with which they jostled and slobbered at the teat. They kept pulling it nearly out of my hands. I saw that Adam had moved two of the ewes to their own stalls.
‘Can you take one of these?’ he called.
Reluctantly I plodded to the stalls. The ewes stood panting rapidly and staring straight ahead with their close-together eyes. Adam was sitting on a stool in one of the stalls. I went into the other.
‘Good girl,’ I heard him say over the divide.
I sat on the stool, where the ewe’s broad, woolly haunches presented themselves to me. Her sides moved in and out quickly. I stared at her livid, quivering genitals. The smell of straw and muck was pleasanter in this enclosed space than when it was mixed with the wind outside. I sat and waited, as I had seen Adam and Beverly do.
‘Is there something I should be doing?’ I called.
‘Not unless her insides start coming out,’ said Adam ominously.
‘What do I do then?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Adam after a pause. ‘I get Beverly to do those. I think you have to sort of shove them back in.’
I stared around the battered wooden sides of the stall and then put my head back and looked up at the rafters. A group of pigeons were up there and they looked quizzically down at me. Outside the wind banged the gates and rattled them against their hinges. The ewe panted. Time passed. Her little sharp breaths seemed to buffer me; they broke on me like little waves on a smooth, empty beach. I marvelled at her containment. It seemed incredible to me that anything would issue from her impassive bulk. She was without sensibility; she was like a rock, a boulder. In the presence of her rudimentary life I had a sense of the superfluity of certain things and the necessity of others.
‘Were you given a cause?’ said Adam from the other stall.
‘For what?’
‘For the balcony collapsing.’
‘Frost damage,’ I said. ‘A plant grew through a crack in the stone.’
There was a pause.
‘You’ll have problems with insurance,’ he observed.
‘I know.’
‘If I were you,’ he said, ‘I’d look at reinforced concrete to replace it. It’s far cheaper and much easier to secure into the outside wall.’
‘It’s a listed building,’ I said.
‘That’s no problem. There’s no problem using a concrete slab. As long as the appearance is the same. Was the limestone painted?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, there you go. There’s only so far a listed buildings consent will go in specifying the nature of the materials. You want to find someone who’ll run it straight into the wall rather than taking out sections of the stone. Don’t listen if they say they can’t do it. You’ll save yourselves three or four thousand pounds.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
I leaned back against the frayed wood and thick splinters pushed against my shirt. The ewe shifted a little on her delicate hooves. I closed my eyes. The wind descanted distantly.
‘– continual maintenance, that’s the problem,’ Adam said from next door.
‘What’s that?’ I said.
‘I was saying you’re constantly having to maintain them. Old buildings. It can be a real headache. The maintenance costs on an old building can be a real drain. Personally I’d rather spend the money on something else.’
‘I think mine’s coming,’ I said.
A rounded, shiny-blue protuberance, like a knuckle, had appeared amidst the ewe’s red, fleshy folds. It kept receding and returning, each time a little more substantially.
‘Mine too,’ Adam said. ‘I worked out that the equity on a new build is actually more stable once you factor in the running costs.’
The ewe was panting even faster: while not moving at all, she was like something running at full tilt. The knuckle edged its way out. Now it was a parcel, mottled and tightly packed, being forced through a letterbox.
‘Should I pull it out?’ I said.
‘No,’ said Adam. ‘She does it all. There, mine’s out.’ I heard a rustle of straw from his stall. ‘In Bath, though,’ he continued, ‘I should say you’d get a lot of value added just from the heritage point of view. It’s the Georgian factor – you can’t go wrong, really, in Bath. Ridiculous, isn’t it? The money people will spend on something that’s basically just an illusion.’
I turned back to my ewe and saw the parcel, greasy and bright, suspended in a long moment of obstruction before it suddenly slithered out in a rush and fell with a thud into the straw. There was a smell of old blood. I watched as it woke itself, unfolding its legs and nosing blindly at the remnants of the bag it had come in, before scrambling unsteadily to its feet. It stood there, quivering, while the ewe licked it and carelessly shoved it around. I realised my heart was thumping. I met the ewe’s depthless brown gaze. The four ewes left in the pen bayed and barged against the metal poles with their massive bodies. I inched around the edge of the stall and let myself out.
*
Later I saw the gilded figure of Hamish running across the yard with his hair flying crazily in the wind and a smile on his face so large and unaccustomed that at first I thought he must be in pain.
‘Look!’ he shrieked. ‘Look!’
He was clutching something in his hand. Lisa and Janie and the baby were behind him, moving through the yard looking this way and that, like tourists. Lisa was wearing sunglasses.
‘Look!’
‘What is it?’ I asked. It was a piece of paper but I couldn’t prise it out of his fist.
‘You got a letter from mummy, didn’t you, Hamish?’ said Lisa, tucking a strand of hair sympathetically behind his ear as though he were a poor orphan.
‘Did you?’ I said, simulating pleasure. I was surprised to feel a little stab of jealousy at this revelation. Why should she be glorified for writing, when she was forced to do it simply by the fact of her absence? And why, if she was in the mood for writing letters, didn’t she write one to me?
‘It’s been a long time, hasn’t it, pet?’ Lisa continued, pityingly.
‘He can’t even read,’ said Janie. ‘Why is she sending him letters if he can’t even read?’
Had Hamish not been there I might have applauded this line o
f questioning, and perhaps hazarded the explanation that the letter had been sent out of a confused sense of guilt, mixed with a craven liking for showy, attention-seeking gestures which required the minimum of effort and carried high parental prestige.
‘Why doesn’t she just come and see him?’ Janie added.
‘She’s busy this week,’ I said, because Lisa was listening closely. ‘She’s working. She’s got a big exhibition she’s putting on at an art gallery.’
‘Clever mummy,’ said Lisa, with a meaningful intonation.
‘We did two this morning,’ said Adam heartily. His face was red and his jacket was covered in wisps of straw. ‘I had to get Michael in there at gunpoint. He thought he might have to put his hand up something.’
‘Men!’ exclaimed Lisa, tutting. ‘It’s perfectly natural, you know,’ she said to me. ‘There’s nothing disgusting about it.’
‘There wasn’t much to do,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what all the fuss is about.’
‘Try saying that when you’ve got a prolapsed ewe, or twins, or the cord tied round somebody’s neck,’ said Adam grimly. ‘You’d know what the fuss was about then.’
‘Laura’s up at the house,’ said Lisa. ‘I said you’d pop in and say hello.’
I remembered Laura very vaguely, as a laughing, self-possessed girl with no particular lack of grace or attractiveness, who nevertheless advanced common sense as her chief characteristic and virtue. I remembered her round, flat, white, well-modelled face, like the blank, unpainted face of a Venetian mask, from which she wore her fair hair pulled back by an Alice band. When we passed through the courtyard next to the house we saw two children playing, both extremely fair and unkempt, a boy of about eight and a slightly smaller girl. Adam greeted them, which did not prevent the boy from raising what appeared to be a small crossbow and pointing it directly at him.
‘Put that down, Rufus,’ said Adam, quite angrily. ‘Can’t you see there are children around?’
‘I’m not pointing it at them,’ said Rufus. I couldn’t tell whether he liked the fact that nobody had accused him of being a child himself, or not.