by Rachel Cusk
‘There has to be a limit,’ said Vivian. ‘It can’t just go on and on. It can’t be like a cow giving milk, on and on.’
‘A cow?’ said Audrey. She looked around at everyone in comic mystification.
‘They call me a cow,’ said Vivian flatly. ‘I heard them in the supermarket. Someone said, where does she get all her money, and they said, don’t you know, she’s got a cash cow.’
‘Who has?’ said Audrey.
‘You. Marjory said I’m your cash cow. I heard her say it. I was in the supermarket last week and I was bending down so they couldn’t see me, because they were in the next aisle, you see, and I heard them.’
‘Darling, it was probably nothing to do with you! They were probably talking about real cows, you know, moo –’
‘They said my name. They were in the next aisle, you see. It was as if they were standing right beside me. They said I was a cash cow.’
‘Well,’ said Audrey lightly, after a pause, ‘people are very silly – you know that, Vivian, as well as I do. The fact is that we have our arrangement and what other people say about it isn’t really the point, is it?’
‘It’s horrible,’ said Vivian.
‘Poor darling. Poor Vivian,’ said Audrey, slightly impatiently.
‘It means that every time you want money you come and milk me. You and Paul pull the udders and the money comes out!’
‘I know what it means,’ said Audrey, tapping her foot on the flagstones.
‘That’s what people say. It means that you exploit me.’
‘Nobody exploits you!’
‘If you keep milking me I’ll run dry, you know. I’ll have nothing left – all the money daddy gave me, and not a penny of it left for Laura and Jilly!’
‘You got plenty for it,’ said Audrey. Her voice was unkind. ‘You got plenty for your damned money. I gave you my house. I gave you my children. I gave you my man. He was my man. Mine!’ She struck her pony-haired chest unexpectedly with her small, pale fist. ‘I left the field. I bowed out gracefully and for that you had to pay.’
‘There was nothing to give, you know,’ said Vivian, to me. ‘All this talk of giving! She didn’t give me the house – I bought it.’
‘That isn’t true,’ said Caris.
‘They cooked it up between them!’ cried Vivian.
‘Mum, that isn’t true,’ said Caris.
Audrey gave a little shrug and turned to the window with her arms folded.
‘Vivian did help daddy out a little with the farm,’ she said. ‘I never knew by how much. I think I can be forgiven for not wanting to know, can’t I?’
‘He got a valuation from that friend of his in town and he said that was what I had to pay – it was far more than it was worth! My husband told me that. He said, get your name on the deeds. Whatever you do, get your name on the deeds.’
Audrey snorted.
‘What would Hippo know about the valuation?’ she said. ‘The submersible was usually submerged in gin by lunchtime.’
‘It didn’t last them long! They ran through it all!’ said Vivian. ‘All of it!’
‘Honestly, Vivian,’ said Audrey, ‘you make it sound as though you were frog-marched into it. The fact is, darling, you went to bed with my husband.’
‘He seduced me, you know,’ said Vivian forlornly, to me.
‘Nobody made you do it,’ said Audrey. ‘Nobody forced you.’
‘He sent me a lamb. It was a little white lamb for the children. We all thought it was terribly sweet but after two months it was enormous. They used to give it all sorts of food, you see, and it got very big and aggressive until in the end it used to run at them and knock them over. It was like a bull – it wasn’t like a sheep at all!’
Audrey laughed. ‘That should have told you everything you needed to know, darling.’
‘Jilly scratched her face until it bled,’ Vivian said, to me. ‘For a whole year she scratched her face. None of the women would speak to me. Then he said we should send them away to school because the house was too crowded. And I said, well, why don’t we send them all away in that case, and he said, no, we can’t do that, it would cost too much to send them all, so mine were sent and his stayed. So I was left looking after three children who weren’t mine, do you see?’
‘You didn’t have to do it,’ said Audrey.
‘I suppose I wanted him to love me,’ said Vivian. ‘Sometimes you do things you oughtn’t to, don’t you? You can be quite outside yourself.’
‘You’re very sweet to talk about love,’ said Audrey.
‘Is it Vivian’s name that’s on the deeds?’ said Adam.
‘Of course it’s not!’ scoffed Audrey. ‘Do you really think your father would do that, after everything we went through? That was definitely not part of the deal.’
‘What deal?’ said Caris.
‘The arrangement, then. Everyone makes arrangements, darling.’
‘Every month I pay her,’ said Vivian. ‘They won’t talk to me until I do.’
‘That’s my alimony!’ said Audrey. ‘That’s the least you owe me!’
‘You always get alimony, Vivian,’ said Lisa, ‘in a case like this.’
‘But it’s rather a lot,’ said Vivian. ‘It’s an awful lot, you know. It’s a bit much, isn’t it, when you think about it.’
‘Have you got anything actually written down?’ said Adam.
‘Especially since I pay for the house separately and everything separately, do you see what I mean?’
‘Why couldn’t dad pay it?’ said Caris. She seemed perplexed. ‘He’s got plenty of money. He’s always had money.’
‘He hasn’t, actually,’ said Adam, after a pause.
‘Of course he has!’ said Caris.
‘He hasn’t. I saw the accounts. He’s been running the farm at a loss.’
‘They haven’t got a penny between them, you know – that’s why they got their cash cow. They came and found me!’ said Vivian, her hands gyrating at her sides. ‘They hunted me down, both of them! Don’t you think I don’t know what you did!’ she said, to Audrey. ‘I know! Everybody knows!’ She turned to me. ‘They cooked it up between them!’ she cried. ‘Ask anyone – they’ll tell you!’
She buried her fists in her black mop of hair and looked at us all wildly. A sort of electricity seemed to be coursing through her body: her eyes were alarmed and her face wore a strange grimace, and where her hands were clutching her hair it stood on end.
‘Everybody just did what they wanted!’ she said.
‘Including you,’ said Audrey. ‘You did what you wanted. In fact, you had a high old time.’
‘They call it living in sin, you know,’ she said, to me. ‘It’s rather a good expression for it, don’t you think?’
‘Oh stop it!’ said Caris. ‘I won’t listen to it any more! All this talk about sin – if you want sin, don’t look for it here! Look for it outside in the world, because there’s plenty of it, Vivian! There are places that are drowning in it! It’s feelings that matter,’ she concluded, clutching at her heart.
‘She didn’t want them, that was part of it,’ said Vivian, to me. ‘Her own children! That was the part that was really beyond belief.’
‘I won’t hear you!’ cried Caris. ‘I won’t, I won’t!’
She put her hands over her ears. Her expression was triumphant.
‘Personally,’ Adam said presently, in a statesmanlike tone, ‘I respect mum for it. You can’t put a price on Egypt, Vivian. Our family belongs here. It wasn’t that she didn’t want us. She did it for us. There’s a bit of a difference, don’t you think?’
Audrey was looking at her son with an interested expression, her finger resting on her chin.
‘The thing is,’ said Vivian, ‘it was only because my husband told me. I wouldn’t have known otherwise. I wouldn’t have known to ask. But he said, whatever you do, stick to it. Stick to it or they’ll have you lock, stock and barrel. It’s awful in a way, when you think of how we treate
d him. He got nothing out of it himself, you know. He lives in a flat. Laura says it’s awfully modest. I paid far too much for it, of course. They ran through it in a year!’
‘Do stop it, darling,’ said Audrey. ‘You’re sounding positively addled. What was I supposed to do? I had to get my house – I couldn’t just go and camp in a field, could I? And that sort of property is terribly expensive in Doniford. Everyone wants it, you know.’
‘He called me a bloody viper.’
‘Who did?’
‘A bloody viper. Don’t you think that’s vicious?’ said Vivian, looking around at us. ‘He said he’d never forgive me!’
‘You had to do without Hippo’s forgiveness,’ said Audrey. ‘We all did. Thank heavens for the Isle of Wight!’
‘He said, I’m not giving Egypt to a bloody viper. I’m not giving my house to a bloody snake in the grass, that’s what he said. And I said, well, I shan’t come then, you can manage on your own. He was terribly rude, you know. But he signed. He had to sign – he had no choice, do you see? I felt rather pleased with myself. I wanted to ring my husband and tell him but of course I couldn’t by then. He wouldn’t speak to me.’
‘Sign what?’ said Adam.
‘I don’t think he ever has forgiven me, you know,’ said Vivian miserably. ‘At the time I thought I’d been rather clever, but now I wish I hadn’t done it. I sometimes think he might have felt more for me if I hadn’t. And you don’t forget it, someone calling you a bloody viper, not when you have to see them every day. It wasn’t as though I even wanted the farm! Ivybridge was much more sheltered, you know – one got the sun all year there. I wonder sometimes if my husband knew that was what would happen. He was the one who encouraged me, you know. He was the one who said I had to get it all in my name.’
There was silence in the kitchen. The Hanburys stared at one another, stared and stared, with faces that filled with calculation and then emptied and filled again. There seemed to be no air in the room, no suspending element – it was as though we stood in the lee of a gathering wave as it sucked everything back into itself. I felt the presence of a catastrophe, an emergency whose tumultuous moments we had entered as a boat might enter a field of rapids. A bitter smell assailed my nostrils. I realised that the room was filling with smoke.
‘I think the potatoes are burning,’ I said.
Just then there was a child’s cry out on the lawn, a wail that went up and down and came closer like a siren, until it was in the hall, echoing horribly in the confinement of the house. There was the sound of something being knocked over and falling with a clatter to the floor. Janie burst into the kitchen. Her face was a wreck of tears.
‘Rufus shot the little boy!’ she shrieked. ‘They’re out in the garden! You have to come! He shot the little boy with his crossbow!’
I don’t know what the others did. I ran out of the house and over the damp lawn, towards the ring of oaks where Caris and I had once kissed, and where I saw the fair heads of the children, clustered together like the bright little heads of flowers, weaving and moving as though in the ecstasy of their impermanence.
NINE
I returned to Bath and to Nimrod Street and found that the rubble from the fallen balcony, including the three large segments of broken limestone slab, remained strewn over the front steps.
The journey from Doniford had taken most of the day, though it was only sixty miles or so. There was no one to drive Hamish and me to the railway station: Lisa, whose sensitivity to practical matters could normally have been relied on, was not at home; and Adam had bidden us a sincere but unavailing farewell over breakfast, before vanishing up the hill to Egypt in his car with an expression of grim preoccupation on his face. Alone in the warm, silent, airless house we packed our things. A sense of failure dogged me as I went through the rooms retrieving those items that belonged to us, as though they were the detritus of some breakage or disaster, the evidence of a lack of love or merely care of which I was conveniently cleansing the scene. I could not attribute this failure entirely either to myself or to the Hanburys. Instead I was possessed by an awareness of how little survived the business of human encounter. What would be left of Rebecca and myself, once the storm of our association had abated? What did we have to show for ourselves? Hamish watched me as I put my violin in its case and laid the purple cloth like a shroud over its carved face. He seemed to tremble with a precarious, pregnant stillness, like a drop of water hanging from the corroded lip of a tap. For a moment his insubstantiality enraged me. I felt that I could have dashed him, shaken him off and demanded instead to know where the life was that made its robust demands, that insisted on itself in the face of everything that reverted to inconsequence.
We closed the front door behind us and it locked with an automatic, impersonal click. For nearly an hour we stood in Doniford on the grey, shuttered Sunday high street waiting for a bus, which presently emerged from the empty streets and carried us through the deserted haunts of its route, through tracts of green hemmed by frayed, budding hedgerows, through indifferent villages that we patiently unearthed from their tangle of narrow, muddy, aimless lanes, as though we were circulating around an organism that otherwise would have lapsed into its own mysterious, unregulated version of existence. The driver pursued his destiny with cursory speed, flying past some stops and observing unfathomable pauses at others, during which he switched off the engine and read a newspaper folded on his lap while Hamish and I, his only passengers, sat side by side on our oversprung seat in a clear torrent of silence far louder than the crowded din of the train that subsequently bore us in long, smooth surges to Bath. At the station we took a taxi: passing through the city I was struck at first by its rich, historied appearance and its textured, flesh-toned buildings that seemed like living things after Adam’s house. Everything was moving, almost undulating: the cluttered light, the noise of traffic and voices and garbled ribbons of music, the teeming pavements, the rows of shopfronts opening and closing their doors in numberless mechanical embraces, the scatter of pigeons and the clustered fall of water from fountains, the dark, stately motion of the river – it all churned and moved in a body, rising and falling inchoately like the sea. The taxi went at walking pace through the obstructed streets. People snagged and formed blockages around every shop window and restaurant and frequently spilled out into the road. There were so many people that on the pavement beside us the crowd ceased to move and instead seemed to swell, pushing inwards at its core so that people staggered or were crushed against each other, and I saw a look of uncertainty pass like a great shadow over their faces. A man was forced backwards off the kerb and stumbled as his shoe came off. I thought how hard it was, and yet how necessary, to love. Hamish’s hand rested beside me on the seat and I picked it up and held it. It was so small and soft and limp that it almost seemed as if it might dissolve in my palm, but I hung on to it as though it were the last thread connecting me to the earth, until his fingers grew warm and flexed themselves and he returned the pressure of my grip. We stopped and started along the street until at last we reached London Road, unfurling east from the packed core of the city, its beauteous facades casually dirtied by passing traffic.
It was a grey, gelid afternoon. There was no breeze: the air in Nimrod Street was so still that it caused a physical sensation of numbness. The black twisted railings made little frozen, anguished forms amidst the broken stones. There was a quality of weightlessness to everything, of ceaseless intermission, that did not belong here but appeared to have followed me from The Meadows. It was clear to me, though I couldn’t have said why, that it was easier to build a hundred houses in Doniford than it was to remove three pieces of broken masonry from Nimrod Street. The green, shiny leaves of the laurel hedge beside the front steps were still thickly coated in white dust. Inside, the house was full of grey light and its rooms had a creeping edge of staleness, as though no one had entered them while we’d been away. Everything had contracted a little with unfamiliarity, become flat and angul
ar like a garment removed and hung in a closet.
Rebecca was sitting in the kitchen with a person who had her back to me. I did not immediately recognise this person. Two cups and a teapot stood on the table between them. The kitchen looked different: it was untidy, in a light, girlish way. Rebecca’s things – scarves, items of jewellery, a pink hairbrush – were strewn over surfaces that now betrayed no relationship to the preparation or consumption of food. The atmosphere of repudiation that I had picked up on my way through the house was far stronger in here: it emanated powerfully from its source – Rebecca – where she sat a few feet away.
‘You’re back,’ she said, nevertheless failing to rise from her chair.
Hamish ran towards her, his feet making loud slapping sounds on the floorboards. Rebecca smiled a great smile and held out her arms to him, still sedentary, as though some misfortune which she was too stalwart to mention had paralysed her legs in our absence.
‘Look, Charlie’s here,’ she said to him as soon as she had got him in a clinch.
‘Hey, Michael,’ said Charlie, turning around in her chair and smiling brilliantly at me. A moment later she rose and kissed both my cheeks. I received a warm, confused impression of hair and teeth and rattling jewellery, borne pungently over me in a suede-smelling wave from her jacket.
‘I didn’t recognise you,’ I said.
The last time I saw Charlie her hair had been blonde. Now it was black.
‘Charlie’s come to stay with us,’ said Rebecca to Hamish.
‘It’s the hair,’ said Charlie. She grasped a strand of it and held it out to one side. ‘Becca says it looks like a wig.’
I saw that somehow, in the person of her friend, Rebecca had contrived to erect a barrier around herself that promised to withstand not just this moment of our return, but an indefinite number of days that projected impossibly outwards like a diving board over cold, unbroken waters. Feelings of disappointment, and of what appeared to be more fear than anger, knifed me soundlessly in the chest, in the back.