by Rachel Cusk
‘There’s nothing wrong with wigs,’ Rebecca said. ‘I actually like the superimposed effect. It makes you look like one of those Andy Warhol lithographs.’
I wondered why I had phoned Rebecca so frequently while I was away. It was, I now saw, a pointless, self-referential act by which I had succeeded only in illuminating myself as an object, as though I had taken the trouble to write letters to myself and post them home from Doniford. She looked at me occasionally in uncertain flashes. She was wearing a strange dress that I had never seen before. It was pale pink, with little sleeves the shape of cowslips and a neckline that revealed most of her freckled clavicle. The wistful colour did not flatter her. On her long, calloused feet were a pair of strappy pink sandals with six-inch heels like daggers.
‘How long are you staying?’ I asked Charlie.
My voice sounded out of turn, like an instrument playing loud notes not indicated in the score.
‘Oh, listen to him,’ cried Charlie, with comical pathos. ‘He’s all disappointed, poor thing!’
‘Did you miss me?’ said Rebecca to Hamish. She buried her nose in his hair with an obscure look of satisfaction.
‘He was hoping to have you to himself,’ Charlie persisted, ‘and now I’ve come along and spoiled it. I’d be touched, Michael, if I wasn’t frankly offended. People like me only get through life by being humoured, you know. We non-conformists depend on the charity of you family types.’
I thought of taking off my coat, but the atmosphere in the room discouraged it.
‘How’s Ali?’ I said to Rebecca.
‘Actually, she’s really well,’ Rebecca replied, having given the matter a few seconds of consideration that she gave the impression were overdue, as though she hadn’t thought about her mother’s health in weeks.
‘Has there been any news?’
‘What? Oh, that,’ she said, waving her hand dismissively in the air. ‘That’s all fine.’
Her manner was disconcerting: I wondered whether she was exercising this uncharacteristic discretion as a result of Charlie’s presence, but a moment later Charlie said, pityingly:
‘Poor Becca’s been worried sick about Ali.’
‘Thank God you were here,’ Rebecca fervently responded, grasping her friend’s hand across the table.
I said: ‘I thought someone might have started clearing away the rubble at the front.’
If I had hoped to kindle a propitiatory spark by the route of disgruntlement I was disappointed. Rebecca and Charlie looked at me as if they didn’t know what I was talking about.
‘Yes, what happened out there?’ exclaimed Charlie finally, opening her eyes very wide.
‘The balcony fell off,’ I said, because although it was improbable that Charlie hadn’t deduced this fact, she seemed to require an answer.
‘Thank God no one was on it,’ she said.
I hadn’t actually considered this possibility before. No one ever stood on the balcony. It was ornamental, and could be reached only by climbing out through the windows on the first floor.
‘I know,’ concurred Rebecca, who to my knowledge had, like me, never set foot on it.
I said: ‘I came out of the front door one morning and it fell off. I was on the second step down to the street and it crashed down behind me. It missed me by a few inches.’
To my surprise, both women laughed.
‘You’re obviously completely traumatised!’ shrieked Charlie. ‘He’s obviously completely traumatised,’ she repeated, for Rebecca’s benefit.
I had no concrete objection to Charlie, other than in her current function as a sort of wrapper or container for Rebecca, by which I could see that Rebecca intended to elude me for as long as she could. She and Rebecca had been friends at school in Bath, but for as long as I had known her Charlie had lived in London, so that it was a tenet of their association that it had never been geographically easy to sustain: they pursued it with a sort of hectic diplomacy, as though they were the representatives of two distant states endeavouring to maintain relations.
Three or four years ago I had attended Charlie’s wedding, a cold, rain-sodden event I could only remember now in the light of the fact that Charlie had left her husband a year or so after it. Rebecca used to complain that her friendship with Charlie had become one-sided and perfunctory, as though it were the victim of ill-disposed market forces: these same forces reversed their direction when Charlie began to emerge from the carapace of marriage, sweeping Rebecca up in an ecstasy of renewed importance whose unforeseen consequence was that she now often accused me of disliking Charlie, or at least regarding her with suspicion. Rebecca’s theory was that I suspected Charlie of a cultish determination to motivate her friends to leave their husbands as she had left hers; or, less stridently, that exposure to Charlie would inadvertently result in the contagion of divorce entering our midst. In fact, if my awareness of Charlie possessed a certain clarity, then it resulted from a strange association I felt with the idea not of her notoriety but of her shame. Her wedding was bombastic and strikingly conventional: when the music started I remember she and her husband waltzed around the mud-spattered marquee before the applauding crowd, he in a dinner jacket and she in a long white dress too modish and flattering, somehow, for sincerity or even passion. Every time I saw her I remembered with what determination she had engineered the public display of her mistake.
‘It might have fallen on any of us,’ I observed.
‘That’s what I said to mum and dad,’ said Rebecca. ‘I said, look, why all the fuss about the insurance? It’s good that it’s come down. Nothing can insure you against a balcony falling on your head. Thank God it happened, I say,’ she concluded urgently.
Charlie laughed. ‘You do put things in the funniest way, Becca. Mark says she reverses into her sentences,’ she said, to me. Mark was Charlie’s boyfriend.
‘Mark’s in Germany,’ Rebecca informed me, darkly, as though I might find myself there too if I wasn’t careful.
‘For work,’ Charlie added. ‘Not on holiday.’
She appeared to find this distinction so significant that a moment later she said: ‘Does anybody go to Germany on holiday?’
‘My parents go there every year on their way to the Salzburg festival,’ I said.
‘Do they?’ she replied, contriving to seem enthusiastic. Her manner contributed to my mounting impression that I was being humoured.
‘They like music,’ I said.
‘I didn’t realise you came from such cultivated stock.’
‘Oh, they’re obsessed with it,’ Rebecca said, as though cultivation were generally agreed to be a nuisance. ‘They made him start violin lessons when he was about three. That’s why his fingers are such funny shapes.’
‘Let’s see!’ Charlie exclaimed.
I held out my hands in front of her with the fingers splayed.
‘My God,’ she said, ‘they are. That one bends inwards.’ She pointed at the smallest finger on my left hand. ‘Look, Becca, it’s almost at a right angle to the others.’
‘I know,’ said Rebecca absently.
‘It’s the equivalent of foot-binding!’ Charlie exclaimed.
‘Not quite,’ I said.
‘Actually,’ Charlie resumed after a pause, as though to pacify me, ‘Mark says Germany’s lovely.’
Rebecca gave an astringent laugh.
‘Of all the things I can think of to say about Germany, that’s about the least convincing. “Auschwitz? Yes, it was lovely.”’
‘I think he was talking about the countryside,’ said Charlie vaguely.
‘Oh, the countryside,’ said Rebecca. ‘Where people said they never noticed anything.’
‘In fact, he did mention a few strange things,’ Charlie said. She gave the impression of continually arriving late in the conversation. It was unclear whether this was deliberate or not.
‘Like what?’
‘His German associates disapprove of his use of public swimming pools. Apparently it’s become
a sort of standing joke. One of them said to him that he hoped Mark washed properly afterwards and Mark asked him why and he said because the pools are used by black people. Don’t you think that’s horrible?’
Rebecca looked stricken. ‘And what did he say?’
‘I don’t know,’ Charlie said. ‘I don’t think he said anything.’
‘I would have come home,’ Rebecca declared. ‘I wouldn’t even have hesitated.’
‘It’s funny how little we know about each other, isn’t it?’ Charlie said, to me. ‘Mark’s collating a study for the EU about the way national populations spend their time.’
‘I wouldn’t even have hesitated,’ Rebecca said again.
‘Apparently the Germans do hardly any work. That’s not what you’d think, is it? The French spend all their time grooming. I can’t remember what the English do. Could it be cooking?’
‘I never cook,’ said Rebecca dramatically. ‘Never.’
‘Mark thinks it’s interesting, anyway,’ said Charlie, shrugging her shoulders.
‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’ said Rebecca. ‘He’s a man. Any chance to be dispassionate – any chance to surrender your humanity in the face of a statistic!’
Charlie said to me, with a rueful expression: ‘You can see we’ve been working ourselves up into a fever of female indignation in your absence.’
‘You should have heard Michael when I was in labour!’ exclaimed Rebecca, turning her sights on me. ‘He’d look at his watch and tell me I couldn’t be in pain because it wasn’t time yet!’
Charlie laughed.
‘Poor Michael,’ she said, shaking her head and then laughing again.
‘Why?’ said Rebecca. ‘Why “poor Michael”? Why does everybody feel sorry for him?’
I saw that she was actually angry: there was a brief thickening of her voice as she spoke which betrayed the fact. Hamish was sitting on Rebecca’s lap in an attitude of extreme limpness and pallor. He jolted this way and that each time her body discharged its surfeit of discontent.
‘Everybody doesn’t feel sorry for me,’ I said.
‘It’s just that he’s only just walked through the door,’ Charlie added, in mitigation of the awkward way I had phrased my remark. ‘He’s only been here five minutes and people are accusing him of deformity, and strange cruelty to pregnant women.’
‘I’m not people,’ Rebecca said.
She folded her arms and looked down into them as though something were cradled there.
‘Anyway,’ Charlie continued, ‘where have you two been?’
I sensed that she meant to recompense me for the bitter welcome I had received and perhaps for something else too, for other conversations by which I hadn’t been wounded because I wasn’t there to hear them.
‘A friend of mine has a family farm in Somerset,’ I said. ‘Hamish and I went to help with the lambing.’
‘What fun!’ cried Charlie, by which cheery expostulation I deduced that Rebecca’s revelations had been more gruesome than ever. ‘Was this a he-friend or a she-friend?’
‘A he,’ I said, although I thought it was a strange, suggestive question to ask, particularly in Rebecca’s presence. I caught a glimpse of something I had noticed in Charlie before, a certain blindness to the concept of virtue. Then it struck me that the tastelessness of the comment might be Rebecca’s own.
‘And how do you know each other, you and this sheep-farmer?’
‘It’s his father who owns the farm. My friend is a chartered surveyor.’
‘Gosh,’ Charlie said. She wore the expression of someone who has just opened a door and found something unexpectedly horrible behind it. ‘A chartered surveyor from Somerset. He must be scintillating company. Or is he one of those people like in Tolstoy, who make a philosophical occasion of themselves?’
‘I’ve met him,’ Rebecca said, as though this indicated we were about to hear the last word on the subject. ‘He’s the sort of person who seems quite exciting at eighteen but then ends up middle-aged before he’s thirty.’
Chagrined, I turned away from the table and began to look for something I could give Hamish to eat. I opened the fridge and was surprised to see it lavishly stocked. There were numerous luxurious packets of things, olives and expensive-looking cheeses and handmade pasta like little wrapped gifts in muted shades of green and cream.
‘We’re making Michael cross,’ said Charlie behind me. ‘Let’s stop or he’ll leave us sitting here on our own. We were discussing the chartered surveyor and his universal values. Is he superannuated, like Becca says?’
‘He doesn’t think he’s young,’ I said. I was speaking into the open fridge and so I allowed myself to say it a little spitefully.
‘I sense we’re being mocked,’ Charlie said to Rebecca. ‘Is he going to be a chartered surveyor for the rest of his life?’
‘I don’t think so. He always expected he’d take over the farm one day.’
‘Imagine that. I can’t think of anything nicer. Or worse, I’m not sure which.’
‘Nor is he. He’s considering going up north to work for his father-in-law.’
‘Who’s the father-in-law?’
I turned around with some of the things from the fridge in my hands and was surprised to see a look of protest, almost of affront, flit across Rebecca’s face as she saw them, as though my taking of food were inappropriate, or as though I were taking what she wanted for herself.
‘He sells jacuzzis,’ I said. ‘He’s offered him a job.’
‘My God,’ said Charlie. ‘I hope he’s not going to do that, in any case.’
‘He might. The farm’s losing money. It turns out his stepmother has been financing it all along, out of her own pocket.’
‘So it’s all a sort of illusion.’
‘Sort of.’
‘For whose benefit?’
I took a saucepan out of the cupboard and lit the gas with a match from a box beside the cooker. Taking the match from its box I was aware again of Rebecca’s strange gaze and its accusation of theft.
‘God knows,’ I said. ‘If you’d been there you’d have thought it was the father. The stepmother thinks that he – procured her. He and his wife, to bail themselves out. She claims now that they set out to destroy her marriage in order to get their hands on her money.’
Charlie shrieked.
‘What a scandal!’ she cried. ‘And is it true?’
I smiled at her tone.
‘I don’t know. It might be.’
‘But what’s she like, the stepmother?’
‘She’s slightly saturnine. She mopes around this great dark house. And Audrey is very vivacious.’
‘Is that the mother? The minx!’
‘They always seemed perfectly amicable. It was what I always liked about them. They seemed so uninhibited by their situation.’
‘Well, now you know why,’ said Charlie. ‘The second one couldn’t believe she’d got the man and the first one couldn’t believe she’d got the money! Are you listening to this, Becca? What I want to know is how it all came out. Were you there?’
I nodded. ‘Paul, my friend’s father, was in hospital for a few days. It seemed to be precipitated by his absence. Adam said he’d gone through the farm accounts, and then Audrey came up demanding money and Vivian wouldn’t give her any, and suddenly everyone was fighting about who’d done what to whom. Then one of the children shot his brother with a crossbow.’
‘My God,’ said Charlie in a reverent tone. ‘Over the money?’
‘No, no – a small child, one of Vivian’s grandchildren. He’d been given a crossbow as a toy and there was an accident. The bolt went into his little brother’s hand. A boy Hamish’s age.’
At the sound of his name Hamish slid off his mother’s lap and came to stand beside me at the cooker. His food bubbled in the pan. He rested his hand on the back of my leg; he leaned, as though against a tree or a solid section of wall.
‘It all sounds barbaric!’ exclaimed Charlie. �
�What happened? Was he all right?’
‘It was strange,’ I said. ‘His parents weren’t there and nobody seemed to want to take him to hospital. There was some doctor they all knew, a family friend who lived in the next valley, and they spent ages trying to track him down and arguing over where he was and talking to ten different people about him on the telephone and then it turned out he’d retired years ago and didn’t practise any more. Finally Adam’s wife took him to the hospital in Taunton. I don’t know what happened after that. She hadn’t come back when we left.’
‘What on earth were you two doing in this den of vipers? How did you come across them in the first place?’
I said: ‘I knew Adam at university. We lived next door to each other.’
‘I see. And –’
Charlie paused to remove her suede jacket. Beneath it she wore a black silk shirt which strained across her breasts as she moved, so that a string of gaps suddenly opened among the buttons down her front. A black lace garment was momentarily visible through them. The sight of it caused me to feel a confused sense of both suspicion and sympathy for her: for reasons I could not establish, her underwear reminded me of her humanity, of her native power both to wound and be wounded. Her hair snaked darkly over her shoulders as she turned and hung the jacket on the chair next to her. When she faced me again her countenance was flushed. I sensed that she had felt my notice of her and wasn’t sure what it meant.
‘– and at the weekends,’ she continued, ‘he used to take you back to the family pile.’
‘The first time I went there it was his sister Caris’s eighteenth birthday party,’ I said. ‘She’d never met me but she invited me anyway. The place is called Egypt Farm and on her invitation it said something like “Please come to Egypt”. It really annoyed me, but when I got there it suddenly seemed romantic.’
‘What about the sister?’ Charlie said, with the suggestive tone that irritated me. ‘Was she romantic too?’
‘She was far too sophisticated for me,’ I said. ‘She was having a relationship with an artist who used to paint her naked.’
‘Who was it?’ Rebecca enquired, in a remote voice.
‘I think he was called Jasper Elliot.’