In the Fold Read online

  ‘She can’t be,’ said Adam. ‘I only just bought a pack.’ After a pause he said: ‘I don’t need to come home and see. Either she has or she hasn’t.’ After another pause he said: ‘I’ll see what I can do. I’ll see what I can do, okay? Sorry,’ he said to me. ‘I’ve got to stop and get some you-know-whats.’

  Adam parked the car on the pavement outside the Spar. I stayed there while he went inside. I looked at the milling high street, whose grey prospect was occasionally riven by slanting sheets of spring sunlight. I looked at people’s legs and at the wheels of passing cars. A girl of sixteen or seventeen tried to get her pushchair through the space between our car and the shopfront and couldn’t. People waited behind her. Presently a new stream of people forged itself on the other side of the car, in the road. An elderly man tapped on my window and I rolled it down. He said:

  ‘You can’t park here.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  ‘People can’t get along the pavement,’ he said, indicating it with his hand.

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  He shook his head and walked away. After a while Adam came out of the Spar and we drove back to the house.

  SIX

  Lisa said:

  ‘I don’t have a really good relationship with Caris.’

  ‘Don’t you?’ I said.

  ‘I’ll be honest with you, I don’t actually like her. She’s the only one of the family I don’t actually like.’

  We were in the Spar while this admission was being made. Lisa had Isobel and I had Hamish. We were like members of some particularly burdened species that favoured talk and inaction. Lisa went very slowly down the aisles and chose things as though the choosing of them, rather than the putative cooking and consumption, were the point.

  ‘Hamish,’ she said, ‘do you like these Potato Faces thingies?’

  ‘No,’ said Hamish.

  ‘I think that means yes, don’t you?’ she said, to me. She hurled the frozen bag into the cart with a thud.

  We stood in the cold parabola of the freezer section while Lisa looked everything over. The Spar hadn’t changed much since I had searched it for Caris’s cassis all those years before, except in the unnerving particular that I was certain its aisles once ran along its length rather than across its width as they did now.

  ‘The thing about Caris,’ said Lisa in her ‘discreet’ voice, putting her head very close to mine and her mouth beside my ear, ‘is that she’s stuck in the past.’

  She said it to rhyme with ‘gassed’.

  ‘She’s full of bitterness and resentment about the things that happened and yet she can’t stop herself idealising it, you know, her family and how it all was. And so when she comes down here she feels this contradictory set of emotions. I haven’t met her very many times, actually,’ said Lisa. ‘She hardly ever comes here, I think for the reasons I say. She and Adam aren’t very close.’

  We arrived at fruit and vegetables, where Lisa picked up a large shiny pepper that looked as though it were made out of plastic.

  ‘Which do you prefer,’ she said, turning it in her hand to get a good look at it, ‘red peppers or green? I used to hate the green ones but now I quite like them. Do you ever find that happens to you?’

  I felt that I was as far as I could be from actually eating the pepper, without having to grow it first. It seemed to me that Lisa should choose something a little more advanced in its evolution towards the plate.

  ‘Rebecca was a vegetarian,’ I said, ‘and then one day I found her eating a packet of salami. She ate the whole packet. I did find it very disturbing seeing her eat it.’

  ‘Why?’ said Lisa, amazed. She stopped turning the pepper. I realised that I had caused us to grind to a complete halt.

  I said, ‘It was slightly frightening, that’s all. It seemed very bloody. I think I must have respected her more than I realised.’

  ‘You haven’t told me about your wife,’ said Lisa. ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘I don’t think I can describe her,’ I said, after a pause.

  Lisa laughed. ‘You must know what she’s like,’ she said.

  I looked at the bank of fruit and vegetables, where bananas lay with bananas and tomatoes with tomatoes, neat forests of broccoli and apples in straight lines, all even-coloured, all unblemished, and which Lisa stood beside as though she had created it for me herself, as a model of categorisation. It struck me that I did not find her bent for simplification actually irritating. The reason for this was that I believed she did it on purpose – that she had settled on it as the best way of presenting herself under the circumstances. I didn’t think, either, that it had arisen out of a need to distinguish herself from the Hanburys, or even as a sort of criticism of them. I guessed that Adam had found her literal-mindedness attractive, and that one way or another it had become her means of survival. The problem was that she was stuck with it, while still having to get her pleasure and satisfaction from somewhere.

  ‘What’s anybody like?’ I said.

  Lisa immediately looked crestfallen. I didn’t mean to be cruel, exactly, but I didn’t see that it was my responsibility to humour her either.

  ‘I only meant,’ she said, ‘that you must know her better than anybody else. You said, for example, that you respected her more than you realised. What did you mean by that exactly?’

  I was conscious of the Spar’s strip lighting overhead, which rained nakedly down from the synthetic panelled ceiling.

  ‘That I sometimes failed to see the value of the things Rebecca believed in.’

  ‘Are you a vegetarian?’ said Lisa.

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you wanted her to be one, is that what you’re saying?’

  Lisa seemed prepared to find this idea amusing. I saw her beginning to take pleasure in what she considered to be my quirks, as a child might begin to discern in an object the possibility of play. Rebecca had consumed the salami standing beside the sink in our kitchen. Watching the meat fold itself into her pale pink mouth I had felt revolted. Yet in the past her refusal to eat meat had irritated me, not only because I regarded it as an affectation but because it galled me to see her impose a discipline on herself that profited nobody. If she wanted reforms, I had numerous suggestions for them. In fact, I had come vaguely to feel that she abstained in order to spite me, which made my sense of her betrayal, almost of her infidelity, as she stood there at the sink, seem so sad and self-defeating that I was unable to speak to her about what she had done.

  ‘Not really,’ I said.

  ‘My sister’s a vegetarian. She says she can smell the meat on people now. She says sometimes it really turns her stomach. Hamish, will you get us some of those Hula Hoops? I know we shouldn’t eat them but I can’t help it. The ones in the orange packet, that’s it.’

  Lisa took out her purse, which was large and creased, and stuffed with cards and banknotes and receipts. She withdrew a piece of paper on which she had written a shopping list and went through the items, murmuring aloud. She wore sunglasses pushed back on her head and sandals, although outside the Spar the street was grey and turbulent and people walked past the big windows as though they were moving through water, with their heads bowed and their clothes pressed in wrinkles against their bodies. In her chair the baby began to make a plaintive sound. Little ropes of saliva were running over the ledge of her lower lip and paying wetly down the front of her coat. Without taking her eyes from the list, Lisa pulled a dummy out of her pocket and plugged it into the baby’s mouth. I experienced a feeling of surrender to her methods and to her sense of time, which ran along like a slow train making no stops at which you might be permitted to disembark. While I had come to Doniford with the undefined expectation of surrendering to something, it was certainly not to this. It was as though I had arrived carrying some unwieldy, burdensome object – a standard lamp, say – of which I had confidently hoped somehow to discharge myself; and finding, to my vexation and surprise, that there was nowhere to put it, nowhere to leave it
in safe keeping, I had become used to just lugging it around with me. Everywhere I went I had the sense of myself carrying around the standard lamp, setting it down beside me to eat or speak to people, who were of course too polite to mention that it was there. What I had expected to surrender to, I suppose, was the state of dispossession, but it appeared that it was no longer permissible to be unencumbered, to be free. At my age you had to belong somewhere, even if it was on Lisa’s train. I had noticed that she was reluctant to leave me in the house alone, as though this were inappropriate, even scandalous.

  ‘To get back to Caris,’ she said, ‘I think she’s very distrustful of other women. Sometimes I think she doesn’t actually want to be a woman. I think that’s why she doesn’t have children. Also,’ she said, ‘I think she’s got a real father complex. Paul’s quite a manly man. He likes men to be men and women to be women – he’s quite vulgar in a way, actually. But then you realise that in fact he’s very principled. He’s not like most people; he’s not at all interested in money. Adam says he could get hundreds of thousands for his barns and for some of his land around Doniford, where the council are letting you build. He’s not like that at all, though. He sits on the planning committee and tries to get everything overturned. Adam says he’s made a lot of enemies in the town. Caris wants Egypt,’ she said, putting her mouth next to my ear, ‘but Adam’ll get it because he’s the son.’

  ‘Surely he’d leave it to all of them,’ I said.

  ‘Oh no,’ she replied, ‘not Paul. He’s too canny for that. He knows they’d fight over it. Anyway, they couldn’t all live there. They’d have to sell, or buy each other out. He’s not above playing games, though,’ she said. ‘He likes to say he’s changing his will every now and then. He likes to get them all running around. I think it makes him feel powerful.’

  ‘Maybe he will change it one day.’

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t think so,’ said Lisa. ‘It’s always gone to the eldest son, down three generations. You wouldn’t get away with that in my family, I’m telling you! We’re three girls and a boy, though. My dad wouldn’t dare. We’ve got a female advantage.’

  Lisa was flinging things in plastic bags as the cashier slid them along. She spoke so carelessly that I didn’t entirely believe her.

  ‘As I say, it’s Caris that really wants it,’ she said. ‘Me and Adam aren’t really bothered one way or the other. It’s sad, isn’t it, the way things work out?’

  ‘Maybe you’ll give it to her,’ I said.

  ‘We can’t do that!’ shrieked Lisa jovially. ‘Anyway, we’re more likely to sell it and maybe give her a share of the proceeds. I can’t really see myself living up there, can you, miles from anywhere, with all those sheep and no proper driveway – I’d go crackers. Once,’ she said, lowering her voice, ‘Adam and I had to stay the night up there and we were woken up by this noise in our room, and do you know what it was? A bat! Don’t you think that’s disgusting? I can cope with wasps and even mice at a pinch – but bats!’

  *

  In the afternoon I tried to persuade Hamish to come with me again down to the harbour.

  ‘Hamish, shall we go and see the boats again?’

  Hamish said something that sounded like ‘nofuck’.

  ‘Shall we go down to the harbour?’

  ‘Nofuck.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘No. Not not. No.’

  ‘We can look at the boats and find some nets,’ I said, wheedlingly.

  Hamish was sitting cross-legged on the carpet in the sitting room. He kept turning his head away from me, like someone distracted at a party.

  ‘He’s all right if you want to leave him here,’ called Lisa from the kitchen. ‘There’s the Teletubbies about to come on.’

  ‘I’ll take you down on the rocks and we can find some seaweed and pebbles and things,’ I said. ‘Then we can make some pictures like the ones mummy used to make when she was little, and wait for the waves to come and wash them away.’

  Rebecca had two ways of talking about the world of her childhood. One of them was as a place where everything was wrong. The other was as a place where everything was right.

  ‘Tick crot,’ said Hamish, turning his head away from me in a manner I was beginning to find infuriating. ‘Ya ya ya.’

  I realised that it was one of the features of our unpredictable family life that Hamish generally chose not to be refractory. He had been stubborn only in his refusal to speak, which now that I thought about it was almost the only area of his existence that fell entirely within his control.

  ‘Stop talking nonsense,’ I said crossly. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

  I held out my hand but he disdained it like a duchess, with his nose in the air, so I grabbed his arm and tried to yank him to his feet. So solid was his resistance that he appeared willing to allow his arm to be torn from his body rather than move. He wanted no part of my scheme, to leave this warm room and go out there in the grey day, with the cold, tea-coloured sea brimming at the harbour wall, and the cars and the boats and the people and the wind, all nagging like things heard in sleep, pricking the unconscious and dragging it into wakefulness. I, too, began to doubt that it would be entirely pleasant, and like a little blade my doubt nicked my anger and it all came running out, hot and bilious. I would go on my walk, I would! And Hamish would accompany me, if only for the reason that there was no one on earth except him whom I could compel to do anything! I tried to wrestle him to his feet and discovered that it was much more difficult than wrestling him off his feet. He kicked me and started batting at me with his hands. I picked up his squirming, vigorous body and started walking with it towards the door. He roared in my ear. I felt the hot, wet spurt of his tears on my cheek. Holding him I experienced, suddenly, a longing for the time when he was a baby and I used to walk him up and down the creaking floorboards at Nimrod Street, holding him upright just as I was now, with his hot face buried in my neck and shoulder. He, too, seemed to recall those uncomplicated interludes, for as I walked with him towards the door he ceased to struggle and his body adhered to mine, grasping me as though with tentacles of ferocious need. His face, though bigger than it was, still fitted in my neck and shoulder. In Lisa and Adam’s well-carpeted hall I walked him about while he sobbed. It seemed truly a pity to me that he’d had to get so big, and yet retain the naked ability to feel. In the end I had to go back into the sitting room and sit down with him plastered over my front, while Lisa tiptoed reverently around us. After a while I looked down and saw that he had passed silently into sleep. His big, beaky face lay abandoned an inch or two from mine. I looked for a while through the rectangular window at the motionless vista of the garden and then my gaze contracted to the beige walls, so that in the silence I was conscious of nothing but the hot body that lay on my chest; and my consciousness of it grew labyrinthine, interior, until I became lost in the red folds of physical proximity and wandered about, asleep, in the drama there.

  When I awoke the room was dim and full of shadow, as though it were being stealthily colonised by the natural forces of neglect. A long slice of light showed around the edge of the kitchen door. Behind it I could hear voices. There was a smell of cooking and the clattering of pots and pans. I heard Adam say:

  ‘Don’t put the garlic in now. It’ll burn.’

  Janie said, ‘I hate garlic. I won’t eat it if it’s got garlic.’

  ‘Shall I not put it in then?’ said Lisa.

  ‘Yes, in a minute.’

  ‘No!’ wailed Janie. ‘Don’t!’

  ‘Is there any point putting it in if she’s not going to eat it?’

  ‘She’s not the only pebble on the beach. You’re not the only pebble on the beach, young lady.’

  ‘But hon,’ said Lisa, ‘think about it, it’s only one tiny thing. You probably won’t even notice the difference.’

  ‘Neither will she then.’

  Hamish stirred on my chest and sat up. There was something seismic in our parting, like the crusty
parting of the surface of the earth when the underlying plates force themselves violently upwards.

  ‘Anyway, didn’t she eat earlier?’

  ‘No, I thought she could eat with us tonight.’

  ‘What are those green things? I don’t like those green things.’

  ‘You see?’

  ‘Those are peppers. They’re just peppers.’

  Hamish looked around the shadowy room silently, as though trying to remember where he was.

  ‘– the spicy kind. The green kind. They’re there to make it look pretty.’

  ‘Once you let her get the idea that it’s up to her –’

  ‘I don’t like them.’

  ‘You’ve never tried them, Janie. Have you ever tried them?’

  ‘No, because I don’t like them.’

  ‘They don’t actually taste of anything,’ said Lisa.

  There was a clattering sound.

  ‘– tell her that. Why are you telling her that?’

  ‘I’m just saying that they aren’t actually offensive.’

  The room was filling with a blue, underwater light. It was like a reflection, a displacement: it seemed to have rolled in off the placid, darkening sea that lay out of sight nearby. Adam told me that the land these houses were built on had once lain under water. Hamish and I were sitting below sea level. The headlights of a passing car fled in a brilliant arc up the walls and across the ceiling, illuminating the empty pieces of furniture.

  ‘Look,’ said Lisa, ‘I’ll take the peppers out of yours, all right?’

  ‘That’s completely ridiculous.’

  ‘All right?’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake don’t start crying.’

  Mewling sounds came from behind the closed door. Hamish turned his head towards it.

  ‘Oh, honey, what’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing’s the matter,’ I heard Adam say.

  ‘What is it, sweetheart?’

  ‘I don’t like peppers!’ wailed Janie.