In the Fold

by Rachel Cusk

  Rebecca raised her eyebrows but said nothing.

  ‘So you admired the sister from afar,’ Charlie said, ‘and at eighteen you thought it was exciting that two women could be married to the same man and still be civil to each other. And we know Adam was more interesting in those days because Becca says he was. What about the father? I sense the father is at the root of all this.’

  A feeling of discomfort, almost of apprehension, stole over me. I felt a sensation of nakedness across my back, a coldness, as though someone were standing behind me. As much to relieve this feeling as anything else I turned to lift Hamish and set him on a chair at the table. My hands cleaved to his slender ribcage. I was almost disappointed to feel how small he was, for in that instant I had been visited by the perverse illusion that he could offer me some protection. Instead he seemed so small as to be barely human.

  ‘He let me drive his car,’ I said.

  ‘I may be being obtuse,’ said Charlie, ‘but the symbolism of that is escaping me for the moment.’

  ‘The first time he met me,’ I explained. ‘He threw me the keys and asked me to go down to the town for more wine.’

  I laid Hamish’s plate in front of him. Tendrils of vapour curled upwards around the fixed peaks of his face. Rebecca was watching us with an expression of unidentifiable emotion.

  ‘For the party?’

  ‘My father never once let me drive his car,’ I observed.

  ‘Perhaps your father attached more value to things.’

  ‘I don’t know. He might have.’

  ‘But the point was that he recognised you as a man and your father didn’t. And there he was with his two wives and his gorgeous daughter and his parties and his big house. Did you feel flattered?’

  ‘I felt relieved.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘That things didn’t have to be so hard.’

  At this Charlie sat back with an expression of triumph.

  ‘So he bought you too!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘Why would he bother to do that?’ I said, though I didn’t entirely disagree with her.

  ‘Maybe he envied you your incorruptibility. What I want to know is why you fell for it. You’re such a puritan, Michael,’ she exclaimed. ‘All this talk of aristocratic largesse and car keys – you don’t even have a car! You pay yourself slave wages down at that slum you call an office. You’re the least materialistic person I know and yet there you are getting all seduced and concupiscent over a sheep farmer! Perhaps this is your weakness,’ she said, with a devilish glint in her eye. ‘Perhaps this is your dark secret.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ I protested, laughing.

  ‘Then what was it?’

  I remembered that golden day of Caris’s party, which remained untouched in my recollection in all its exquisite irretrievability.

  ‘Something happened to me almost as soon as I got there,’ I said. ‘I had an – intimation.’

  ‘Of what?’ said Charlie.

  ‘That my life was going to expand and expand and become beautiful.’

  A silence followed this disclosure. The gaze of the two women grew so discomfiting that I added:

  ‘It was a quality they had. The Hanburys.’

  ‘And what was this magic quality?’ said Charlie.

  ‘They made it seem as though all you had to do was something other than what you thought you should do.’

  Charlie nodded her head abstractedly, as though this proposition pleased her.

  ‘I see,’ she said presently. ‘And that became your motto, did it? To live adjacent to your own conservative compulsions. That’s not bad. Of course, I didn’t know you before you experienced this divine revelation. Was it as transforming as that? Would you be sitting here now, for example, in this gorgeous, crumbling residence, with the gorgeous Rebecca, if these Hanburys hadn’t got their claws into you?’

  ‘I didn’t say it was a revelation.’

  ‘Oh yes. It was an intimation. You haven’t answered my question.’

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to answer it. Rebecca had turned her head and was looking at me with a shadowy, inscrutable expression. I realised that I still had my coat on. It seemed for a moment as though I could leave, as though I had given them all the satisfaction it was in my power to give.

  ‘It might have been the feeling that I didn’t need to possess things to experience them,’ I said. Charlie’s face was blank. ‘Think of it as a picture,’ I added.

  ‘A picture.’

  ‘Of a house on top of a big hill overlooking the sea, with these people in it and a party going on.’

  ‘Is this a point about art?’

  ‘Sort of,’ I said.

  ‘And suddenly you decided to visit this charming little picture,’ said Charlie. ‘You took your life in your hands. Was this by any chance related to your near-death experience on the front step?’

  ‘I thought I should see Adam,’ I said. ‘I suppose it was a social compulsion.’

  ‘You forgot it was a picture.’

  ‘I couldn’t remember any more what it always made me remember.’

  ‘So you went back,’ said Charlie, ‘and these models of bohemian living turned out to be a pack of money-grubbing reprobates. Egypt!’ she snorted, shaking her head and laughing.

  At this moment Rebecca spoke.

  ‘It isn’t anything to do with art,’ she said. ‘It’s to do with cowardice.’

  Her voice was so cold that it abraded me like a fierce, freezing wind where I stood. Had we been alone I believed in that instant I would have rushed to her in my petrifying nakedness and begged her for warmth and forgiveness; but then the moment passed, and I found myself subsiding once more into a familiar accommodation with our remoteness from one another. Charlie gave a surprised laugh.

  ‘That’s a bit harsh, Becca,’ she said.

  ‘It’s true,’ said Rebecca, obstinately but with a little less frigidity. ‘Anyway, it’s unnatural not to be possessive. Men are supposed to be possessive.’

  ‘Are they?’ said Charlie.

  ‘It doesn’t mean they’re compromised,’ Rebecca persisted. ‘It takes courage to set the terms – look at dad, for heaven’s sake! He’s always out there, taking risks, making things happen, and for what? To make us safe.’ She raised her hands aloft, to indicate the very roof under which we sat. ‘You could call him domineering or macho or possessive, but the fact is that he lives life ten times more passionately than the rest of us!’

  This way of speaking about her father was quite a new facet of Rebecca’s personality. I sensed she deployed it as a tool, to make the work of exposing my own shortcomings less time-consuming. Yet I remembered that when I first met her, it was the very qualities she was now claiming to admire in Rick that used to cause her pain.

  ‘Well,’ said Charlie, ‘I suppose we can’t all be like daddy. It’s Michael that I’m worried about. His whole philosophy of life is in ruins.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said.

  ‘I always find that the less things matter the harder they are to live with. He looks like he’s about to leave us, Becca. He’s got his coat on. Tell us you’ll stay, Michael.’

  ‘He’d never leave,’ said Rebecca sullenly, as though my steadfastness were one of the irritating constituents of marriage to which she had been forced to reconcile herself. ‘Never. It isn’t in his nature.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ said Charlie. ‘Tell us you’ll stay,’ she repeated.

  Pulling out a chair next to Hamish I sat down at the table. He had finished his supper and he clambered on to my lap and laid his cheek against my chest. Earlier I had marvelled at his fragility but now he felt like a boulder pinning me to my seat. My heart was thudding uncomfortably. For a moment the sense of my own precariousness was intolerable. It inflamed me with feelings of violence: I wanted to smash and break, to turn the table on its side and send the teacups sliding to the floor, to demonstrate what was mine by destroying it. This feeling passed as
quickly as it came. In its wake a terrible loveliness seemed to adhere to everything around me. The first stain of dusk tinted the room unexpectedly before my eyes. I looked at the two women sitting in their chairs. The chairs were antiques with wooden backs carved in the shape of hearts: they belonged to Rick and Ali, as did most of our furniture. They were beautiful, though not particularly valuable. Rebecca, in her draining pink, with her sandy-coloured hair gathered in a tangled knot on the top of her head, had her arms folded and her legs crossed. Her head was turned so that she could be seen in profile, eyes downcast; a posture redolent of some inadequacy, some lack she perennially found in her experiences, so that she gave an impression that was familiar to me, of being in silent correspondence with the concept of a shortfall, of looking down into it, as though it were a hole bored into the ground next to her. Charlie made a dark shape, denser and more solid. She sat straight and kept her eyes ahead. I could see the edges of the heart-shaped chair backs around each of them, like pairs of wings; and it may have been this illusion that gave me the sense of a relationship to their femaleness that was tenuous and fleeting, almost unworldly, as though their robustness as human beings was attended by something fragile and fluttering, something of which they themselves were barely conscious, something that every word and gesture crushed but that rose again and again, released into the air by each new pause like a delicate butterfly from a dense, fibrous confusion of greenery. I felt a desire both to help them and to be indistinguishable from them, to be incorporated into whatever mystery it was that gathered in a mist around them. It seemed a sort of tragedy to me, because within that desire was contained the trace of a memory, a streak of recognition that ran across it; not of any particular event but of a state that was less combative, less rooted in the body, a harmonious time that I supposed must have been childhood, though I wasn’t sure which part of it.

  ‘Charlie’s thinking of moving back to Bath,’ said Rebecca.

  ‘Are you?’ I said.

  ‘She’s got a job at the university.’

  ‘I’ve got an interview,’ amended Charlie. ‘I haven’t got a job.’

  ‘You’ll get it,’ Rebecca replied, with a far-seeing tone.

  ‘There are a lot of things I have to work out first,’ said Charlie mysteriously.

  ‘Mark doesn’t want her to go,’ said Rebecca. She said it to me, with an air of unspecific accusation.

  ‘I don’t really want to go either,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s just that I think I should. I’m seeing it as an opportunity for spiritual advancement.’

  ‘People don’t often come to Bath for that,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, I could be going anywhere. It just so happened that it was here. The thing is, I’ve never been alone in my life and I’m banking on it being good for me. You’re right, though – I’d hate to be too comfortable. It would spoil the penitent effect.’

  ‘You won’t be alone,’ Rebecca said. ‘You’ve got hundreds of friends here.’

  ‘You see?’ said Charlie to me. ‘That’s the problem. When it comes down to it I’m not prepared to suffer at all.’

  ‘At least Mark will suffer,’ I said.

  Charlie gave a little melancholic smile.

  ‘That wasn’t really the idea. I’m beginning to see that my plan is flawed.’

  ‘It isn’t your fault! You can’t tailor your life to suit other people. You have to go where the opportunities are,’ declared Rebecca, for whom opportunities had only ever dared to present themselves in one way, which was to her immediate convenience.

  Charlie said: ‘Do you remember when I was doing my doctorate?’

  ‘I remember you were obsessed with a brown cloud,’ said Rebecca.

  I said: ‘What was your doctorate on?’

  ‘Climate change. Signs and portents thereof. It was a little idea I had, that we were recreating the concept of an apocalypse in the form of anxieties about the environment. Then I had to turn it into a much bigger idea, and in the process I rather became the victim of these anxieties myself. I’d spend all day in the library reading about glaciers melting and the world getting hotter and hotter and the fact that half of it was going to be under water in fifty years’ time, and I would sit at my desk and become distraught at the thought of this ruination, this doom, actually nauseous with terror – I felt I could see the whole planet darkening and dying, and I was consumed with this hatred of human beings and at the same time fear for them, pity for them. Then I’d walk home looking at everything, the sky and the people and the buildings and it would seem so sort of heedless and alien, you know, someone in a car getting angry with someone for pulling out, and people talking on their mobiles and the sky all grey and boring, and I would think, well, maybe we get what we deserve. Then I’d go home and Sam and I would argue.’ Sam was the name of Charlie’s ex-husband. ‘Quite often I’d find myself distraught again before bedtime, except this time it would be about housework, or the fact that Sam said I’d spent too much money. There was no connection,’ said Charlie, shaking her head. ‘There was no connection anywhere.’

  Through the window the sky was blue-grey. The indistinct green furze of the little garden stood rigid beyond the glass. Rebecca looked perplexed.

  ‘I don’t think anyone could blame you because you couldn’t reconcile your marriage with global warming,’ she said.

  ‘It made me think for the first time that I needed to be better than I was. Because otherwise there was nothing. It’s different for you. You’ve had a child.’

  Rebecca shrugged. ‘So have one.’

  Charlie laughed. ‘I can’t! Or not yet, anyway. Possibly not ever.’

  ‘Anyway, having a child doesn’t make you a better person,’ Rebecca declared presently.

  ‘Doesn’t it?’ Charlie raised her eyebrows. ‘I’d have thought it gives you less time to be a bad one.’

  ‘It doesn’t have anything to do with it,’ said Rebecca.

  She looked as though she’d meant to say it matter-of-factly, but I saw a tremor of awareness pass through her, as though at the unexpected magnitude of her realisation.

  ‘It doesn’t have anything to do with it,’ she said again. ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘I thought everything with Mark was perfect.’

  Her ironic intonation of the word “perfect” suggested a well-known abhorrence of the idea.

  Charlie shook her long black hair self-consciously away from her face. ‘It is, in a way. But to be honest that’s a bit of an illusion too. If he ever found out what I’m really like it wouldn’t be perfect any more.’

  ‘God!’ cried Rebecca, so unexpectedly that the rest of us started. ‘That’s so bloody typical!’

  She thumped the table top with her hand and I felt Hamish jump on my lap.

  ‘How do they do it?’ she asked wonderingly, shaking her head. ‘How do they do it?’

  ‘It’s just that he’s so good,’ Charlie said. ‘And I’m so bad that I have to lie to make myself seem better. I’ve lied about everything! So now there’s that on top of all the other things.’ She put her head in her hands and laughed. ‘Not that he ever asks me anything.’

  ‘That’s so typical,’ said Rebecca again.

  ‘No, I mean he never pries. Of course, he already knows about Sam and he doesn’t like it, I can tell. He doesn’t like the fact that I left. Poor Sam – I embellish his villainy mercilessly. You know, I’d really like to do something I could be proud of,’ she said, looking fervently at Rebecca and me. ‘I’d like to do something hard. Sometimes I even think that I should go back to Sam. That really would be hard. It would make the perfect cross.’

  ‘You can’t do that!’

  ‘Why not? I’d only be keeping all those promises I made. Think how much Mark would admire me!’

  ‘That’s just silly,’ Rebecca said petulantly.

  ‘All I’m saying is that I have a distorted nature. I’ve never felt the right sort of pain. I’ve felt the pain of being wrong but I’ve never felt the pain of being right. I’v
e never suffered out of forbearance.’

  ‘Why should you suffer? What would be the point of that?’

  Charlie laughed. ‘I have the feeling that the health of the organism depends on it.’

  ‘Is that what he says?’

  ‘Oh, it’s completely selfish! Otherwise what story do you have to tell about yourself? That all you’ve done is gorge on emotion – that you’ve just lived in yourself? The problem is that when I get close to it, virtue begins to seem like another bizarre illusion.’

  ‘What have you done that’s so terrible?’ Rebecca burst out. ‘I mean, really, compared to – compared to the Nazis, what have you actually done wrong? I mean, you haven’t killed anybody, have you?’

  The two women looked at each other.

  ‘In a way, I have,’ Charlie said.

  ‘I don’t accept that,’ said Rebecca defiantly. ‘Everybody has abortions. I nearly had one.’

  I felt Charlie’s eyes flicker questioningly over my face. To my knowledge, Rebecca had only been pregnant once. I had noticed before her growing tendency to lay claim to an identity more chequered than her own. Suddenly, it seemed, she couldn’t bear the idea that she was more straight-laced than other people: it struck me that in her thirties she was experiencing an explosion of adolescent feelings of rebelliousness. Her clothes, her demeanour, her pretence of being “bad” – she had even, I noticed, taken up smoking, a heartbreaking spectacle of ineptness that she determinedly staged two or three times each day. Rebecca had often told me how obedient and sensible she was as a child and teenager, a position she adopted in answer to her parents’ refusal to behave in a ‘normal’ way. She felt she had no entitlement to youth and irresponsibility: Rick and Ali would not relinquish them. I remembered with what rational belligerence she had wanted a baby, as though this were the next foothold, the next stepping stone in her faltering progress across the torrent of life. She was on the verge, I saw, of flinging herself into this maelstrom; which was not, in fact, life but subjectivity, was the treacherous expanse of everything pre-existing that she needed to make her way over before she could consider herself safe. I felt pity for her, and guilt that I had not helped her more, but more than anything I felt fear.