In the Fold (13 page)

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘It’s so strange being back,’ said Caris, from the window.

‘Is it?’ said Vivian vaguely. ‘I expect it is. It’s rather a shame
the weather isn’t better. If you’d waited until the summer we could have used the terrace. Not that we ever get the evenings they get in Spain of course. At Las Pitunas they sit out half the night, with people turning up at the most extraordinary hours in just a T-shirt and a pair of flip-flops. Nobody seems to mind,’ she said gloomily. ‘They’re all terribly
free
. There’s none of this calling up and arranging Sunday lunch in three months’ time. By the time you’ve thought about it for that long you don’t actually want to do it, do you? The other day someone rang and invited us to dinner next autumn! She claimed they didn’t have a free weekend until then. I didn’t know whether to accept or not. It seemed a bit presumptuous. I thought, well, who knows, I might be dead. I suppose if I am someone will let them know.’

‘But we were never like that!’ exclaimed Caris. ‘There have always been people at Egypt, always, without anyone arranging it or planning it! Do you remember the time that man stayed, and after he’d gone everyone admitted they hadn’t got a clue who he was?’

‘I think he’d come to fix the boiler,’ said Vivian. She gave a snuffling little laugh.

‘Yes!’ shrieked Caris, delighted. ‘And someone offered him a drink!’

‘Didn’t he end up getting off with Fiona Lacey?’ She pronounced it ‘orf’.

‘No – no! He can’t have!’

‘She was still married to Dan in those days. God!’ she expostulated, gloomy once more. ‘He was the most terrible pig.’

‘I remember their daughter,’ said Caris. ‘She went to our school. The two boys were at some boarding school where you wore black tie and got to have your own horse, but she went to Doniford Middle because she was a girl.’

‘Yes,’ said Vivian vaguely, ‘I think Fiona’s a bit like that.’

‘It’s incredible, isn’t it,’ said Caris. ‘In this day and age – do you remember her? She had red hair. I wonder what happened to her. She might as well have gone around with it
branded on her forehead, you know – “I’m not important”.’

‘Maybe they just couldn’t afford it,’ said Adam. ‘It might have been nothing to do with her being a girl.’

‘In that case,’ said Caris, ‘none of them should have gone.’

‘So if everybody can’t have everything, nobody should have anything, is that what you’re saying?’

‘It’s called justice, Adam,’ said Caris sarcastically. ‘You may not have heard of it.’

‘I’d just like you to explain where the justice is in denying two people a decent education.’

‘There was nothing wrong with the education you got at Doniford Middle – in fact, they’d probably have been better off there.’

‘Well, what are you complaining about then?’ said Adam, sitting back in his chair triumphantly. ‘In that case she got the best deal.’

‘I just happen personally to regard being manufactured by a patriarchal institution as a handicap in life. Not everyone agrees with me.’

‘I suppose I should never have sent Jilly and Laura away,’ interposed Vivian. ‘When they came back they were never quite as I remembered them. They seemed very big and sort of frightening. I remember they were always looking in the cupboards. Almost the minute they came home they’d start going around the house opening everything and looking inside. It was like having burglars to stay.’

‘You don’t really regret sending them, do you?’ said Caris.

‘I didn’t at the time,’ said Vivian. ‘But now they say I did something awful to them, although I don’t see how I can have done, when I wasn’t even there. I had quite fond memories of school. The nuns were always terribly nice, although I don’t think they taught us anything.’

‘What did you do that was awful?’ asked Caris reprovingly, as though it were inconceivable that anyone could accuse Vivian of whatever it was.

‘The problem was,’ said Vivian, looking vacantly at something
over our heads, ‘that there simply wasn’t room for them here.’

‘Vivian,’ said Caris carefully, ‘that isn’t actually true.’ She smiled. ‘They took my bedroom.’

‘Well, they’d had rooms of their own at Ivybridge, you know –’

‘Yes,’ said Caris, still smiling, ‘but it was my room. The boys kept their rooms, of course,’ she added, speaking to me. ‘The sons and heirs were not to be inconvenienced.’

‘This was the problem, you see?’ said Vivian frantically, also to me. ‘There was all this fighting! In the end Paul just said, you know, bloody well enough!’

Caris had turned to the window and folded her arms tightly across her chest, so that discord radiated from her back.

‘It’s not really surprising that we fought,’ she said, in a cold and faraway voice. ‘When you consider the circumstances.’

‘Bloody well enough, he said, I can’t stand women fighting! If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s women fighting, that’s what he said, you know.’

‘So Jilly and Laura were packed off,’ said Adam, shaking his head and laughing.

‘He said, “I don’t care who it bloody well is, just get them out of here,”’ cried Vivian, who appeared still not to know what to make of it all. A dark animation surged in her face. She gyrated with emotion. ‘“Just get them all out!”’

‘All?’ said Caris in her small, cold voice.

There was the sound of a car horn out on the drive.

‘That’s Jackie,’ said Caris, after a long pause. ‘She’s giving me a lift down to mum’s. I’ll see you later.’

And she picked up her coat and left the room, without once turning to face any of us.

‘I’d better sort out those dogs,’ said Adam, rising and scraping back his chair. His face was red with a mixture of shame and amusement. ‘I’ll put them in the shed for you. My advice is that you don’t let them back in, no matter how much they bark. They’ll take the hint eventually.’

He stamped out of the room in his boots and down the hall, perhaps thinking that if he made enough noise he would erase the uncomfortable atmosphere Caris had left behind her. Her head drooping, Vivian stood forlornly beside the raw egg on the floor, as though it were something that had fallen out of her, like an eye, that would be virtually impossible to put back. Unexpectedly, she looked up and gave me a roguish smile.

She said, ‘My first husband was an awful bore, you know, but Jilly and Laura talk about him as though he were a plaster saint. He lives on the Isle of Wight now. He has a flat.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘When we left Ivybridge,’ she said, ‘he picked up a rock and threw it through one of the windows. Don’t you think that’s awful?’

‘Was Ivybridge the house you lived in before?’

‘He always hated it because it wasn’t his, you see. It belonged to my parents – it was my childhood home. He took me to court to try and get half the money from the sale, but he didn’t get it. Paul fought him tooth and nail. In the end I didn’t really see why he
shouldn’t
get it since he seemed to have lost everything else, but Paul wasn’t having any of that. He said, you know, that’s your inheritance. That’s your birthright, don’t give it away. It was a lot of money, you see, because it wasn’t just an ordinary sale, a private sale. We’d got permission to develop the barns and the outbuildings, and a Change of Use, which is very difficult to get, but Paul is on the planning committee and that sort of smoothed the way.’

She appeared to expect me to speak.

‘A developer bought it, if you must know,’ she confessed presently. ‘I rather expected my parents to, you know, rise from their graves when it happened.’ She gave a strange little laugh. ‘But in the end the fuss died down and everyone forgot about it. You know, sort of life goes on. I’ve no idea what it looks like now, of course. I never go there, even though it’s only just in the next valley. You can walk there from Egypt in,
oh, twenty minutes I suppose.’ She looked at me almost gaily. ‘They call it Ivybridge Holiday Village. What do you think that is, a “holiday village”? Jilly says they’ve put up a big red-brick wall all the way round it with these sort of Victorian street lamps on top. She says they look like policemen’s heads! And she says the most ghastly people go there, you know, all sandals with socks, and men with tattoos and great fat bellies, and there they sit, you know.’

Adam’s footsteps were creaking rapidly overhead. I could hear his voice, rising and falling harshly, and the excited sliding, skittering sounds of the dogs’ paws.

‘I couldn’t bear to see what they’ve done to the garden!’ cried Vivian, grasping my arm suddenly with her bony hand. ‘They must have taken up all mummy’s rose bushes! And the apple orchard, with twenty-six old varieties, some of them virtually extinct! And the tree by the pond where I used to have my swing, and my little vegetable patch that daddy made me!’

‘Vivian,’ I said.

‘All gone,’ she cried, ‘all destroyed! I’ll never see any of it again! And I’m to be punished for it – as if I haven’t been punished enough! Every winter that I’ve sat up here on this hill it’s got worse!’

‘What’s got worse?’

‘They hate me,’ she said in a low voice. ‘They’ve always hated me – you don’t know what it’s like, to be so hated!’

She rose abruptly from the table and moved with the light, disjointed speed of a spider to the kitchen cupboards. She opened a door and removed a half-pint bottle of whisky, from whose neck I was startled to see her take a long, determined swallow.

‘Joan and Alvaro say that I should leave him, you know,’ she gasped, giving me a dramatic look. ‘They say that but then they don’t know, do they? He’s always here, that’s the thing. It’s hard to leave someone if they’re always there. They never let you alone. It all seems very simple to them, in Spain.
To them it’s just a matter of staying where you are and missing the flight home. They think that would solve everything, don’t they? The problem is that then there’d be two messes where there was one. You can’t just go around making more and more messes, can you? Mummy and daddy would be horrified if they knew,’ she said, folding her arms and retracting her chin into her bony chest. She looked up at me through her fringe. ‘They’d tell me to pull myself together. “Where’s your backbone?” they used to say. “Where’s your spine?” That’s what they would have said, you know.’

The door opened and Adam came in holding the dogs by their collars. They made high-pitched mewling noises and their feet skated over the cold stone floor. They writhed around their own necks where he held them.

‘They’ve been on all the beds,’ he puffed. ‘They wouldn’t come. I don’t know what’s got into them. It’s a bit of a mess up there, I’m afraid. They’ve been in the sheets and everything. I’ll take them to the shed for you.’

Vivian looked at him mutely with her cheeks puffed out, as though she had her mouth full. I got up and opened the back door for him.

‘We’ll go home after this,’ he said over his shoulder. The dogs were tugging him down the passage. ‘We’re done for the day. Tell Vivian, would you?’

I went back into the kitchen to tell Vivian but she wasn’t there – she had vanished. I felt the presence of something sinister in the empty room, as though it had swallowed her. I went outside again to find Adam.

‘You compare Egypt to Don Brice’s land,’ said Adam, ‘and it’s amazing really, the difference.’

We drove out of the track and turned down the empty road to Doniford. I saw the deserted vista of the hillside, with its descending waves of green and the glinting heap of the town at its feet.

‘What
is
the difference?’

‘He’s farmed all the life out of it. There’s no love.’

I was surprised to hear Adam talk of love.

‘Dad does things the old-fashioned way. People respect him for it. I don’t know whether I’d be able to keep it up.’

‘Keep what up?’

‘He wouldn’t even let the council run electricity cables over his fields. There’s a house beyond the farm that’s still powered by a generator because it’s too circuitous to run it along the road and Dad won’t let them go over his fields. The family tried to bribe him.’ Adam laughed. ‘They offered him a whack of money. It’s depressing the value of their house so much they reckoned it was worth it.’

We had passed the boundary of Egypt: the rudimentary litany of what I now knew to be Don Brice’s fields flowed past my window instead. It was an untidy patchwork of electric fences and half-dug pits and pawed segments of earth. Everywhere, decaying lengths of plastic sheeting anchored by old car tyres waved their tatters in the wind. Adam slowed down to look at the sheep. The pregnant ewes were penned into a muddy square steeped in their own dung. The smell came through the open window like a fist as we drove by. Half a mile down the road, a man was driving a mud-splattered four-wheeled motorbike along the verge with two scrappy dogs twisting around him, one on either side like a pair of apostrophes.

‘That’s Don,’ said Adam. ‘He’s always on that bike. I can’t remember the last time I saw him standing on his own legs.’

The man craned his head around and squinted at us over his shoulder. He was smoking a pipe. He raised his arm. Adam pulled up alongside him and the dogs jumped yapping at the window. One of them had a yellow eye. The other dog was brown and white and ran around barking at its own tail.

‘You done midwifing for the day, then?’ said Don. His lined mouth opened like a wound around his pipe.

‘You don’t look far off yourself,’ said Adam.

‘‘Nother three weeks yet. It’s your dad likes to get them in
early, so’s the frost can kill ’em off.’

‘We’re having a good year,’ said Adam. ‘A few twins.’

‘Is that so?’ said Don.

‘We’ve kept them all so far except one.’

Don laughed and folded his arms as he sat astride his bike.

‘He’s saved you the price of the petrol, then,’ he said.

‘Beverly’s running a tight ship.’

‘Surprised that girl can run a tap.
Sharrup
!’ Don scooped the barking brown and white dog on to his boot and forked it into the verge.

‘Yours aren’t looking too bright for that matter, Don,’ said Adam. ‘You should try rotating them. That way they don’t have to stand in their own leavings.’