In the Fold (4 page)

‘I like it very much,’ I said.

‘That’s because you’ve got manners,’ said Paul. ‘Tell Audrey to keep her hands off you – you’re a good boy. She gets a little heated sometimes, that’s all. It might be the menopause coming early. Her mother was the same.’

‘Oh, it’s fine,’ I said.

‘The people with manners like Egypt,’ said Paul. ‘It’s the ones that think too much that don’t. They find something false in it, you see, and they start to get ironic. I don’t like people being ironic – to me it means they’ve forgotten how to be natural. What are your people like, your family? Are they good-looking too, or are you the black sheep? Would they like it here, do you think?’

‘I’m sure they would,’ I said.

I realised as I said it that this was not true – they would hate it, but I wasn’t sure why. I wondered if this meant that they were ironic, and if the presence I sometimes felt in myself of something caustic was an inherited characteristic, like eye colour. I felt an urgent desire to slip free of that tendency. Someone had set up some fireworks in the field below the
lawn and we went down to watch them. They banged like pistol shots in the darkness. Everyone whooped and clapped as they streaked up howling and burst into fountains of light. After a while the grey light of dawn slowly filled the valley. It was almost opaque: from where I stood on the hill it looked as though we were surrounded by sea. I stood on my own and watched it. I watched it and waited, as though I were a stowaway on a big, creaking ship making its way through the indifferent waters, watching the diminishing mainland, waiting for it to vanish and for my place on this laughing, unknown enterprise to be secured.

Recently a series of events caused me unexpectedly to meet the Hanburys again.

I mentioned once to my wife Rebecca the fact that Adam Hanbury still lived in Doniford, no more than sixty miles away. At one time we had been inseparable: now we could see each other any day we chose, yet we had not met for five or six years.

‘He’ll come around,’ said Rebecca, sagaciously.

I guessed she was referring to the ‘big wheel’, a theory of events she had lately taken to propounding. Its basis was that existence is not linear but circular and repetitive. The idea was that you didn’t have to go out and get anything – you just sat and waited for it to come to you, and if it was meant to, it would.

‘He might just keep going the way he’s going,’ I said. ‘We all might.’

‘It’ll turn,’ said Rebecca.

She revolved something invisible on the axis of her hand to illustrate her point. I was surprised to see how slow and grinding the revolution was, as she conceived it. Her hand only moved an inch or two. She spoke quite blithely, though. It was not a chore to her, this turning. It was a spectacle from which evidently she derived a certain joy. I wondered whether the fact of our estrangement altered what I knew of the three years during which Adam and I were friends. It made me feel uneasy suddenly to think of it, as though everything that had happened since rested structurally and irremediably on that intensity that had given way so silently to indifference. Or, as though I had failed at numerous points in my life to establish whether it was for their lasting significance
or their transitory attractiveness that I had chosen my circumstances, with the strange result that in the light of my friendship with Adam Hanbury, the existence I had constructed without him appeared to me momentarily as both insignificant and totally binding.

‘I heard he got married,’ I said. ‘I think they have some children.’

My wife shrugged and smiled a mysterious smile. It was unclear whether she was acknowledging she could provide no proof of this, or indicating that the subject of marriage and children was beneath her commentary. I wanted to take issue with the big wheel and the idea that we were all stuck on it going round and round, endlessly held at a remove from the things we wanted. I suspected Rebecca only liked it because it proved that nothing was your fault.

‘I don’t understand,’ I persisted, ‘why we don’t see each other. We used to see each other every day.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Rebecca, who was apparently becoming irritated. ‘It obviously wasn’t your time.’

She meant, in terms of predestination.

‘Was it all a waste, then?’

‘How should I know?’

‘You’re always telling me I should ask more questions.’

‘Some questions don’t have answers,’ said Rebecca. She looked fatigued. She fanned her face with her hand.

She had complained several times about the fact that I never asked her anything. What should I ask her? She didn’t know – that was one of the questions that didn’t have an answer. Sometimes I saw in her a yearning for a time of reckoning that I felt she didn’t fully understand. She seemed to think that a move into an era of analysis and interrogation would constitute a new, living chapter in our relationship, or a new source of nourishment, as though after a famine; where to me it was clear that it would signify only that our relationship was over, that the disaster had occurred and that neutral forces of rationality, of law and order and civilisation, were
now washing over the wound. Marriage seemed to me to depend on two people staying together in time. It was like a race you ran together, a marathon. You kept your eyes ahead and you tried to surmount your weariness, and you reconciled yourself to the fact that while it may not be strictly enjoyable, at least running this race was healthy and strenuous and relieved you of the burden of thinking what else you might do with your time. I remembered a period of weeks or months when waking to the fact of my life with Rebecca was like waking to find an intricate, moving pattern of sunlight on my body.

She was wearing a garment that resembled a complicated piece of Victorian underwear. It was cross-hatched with ribbons and little buttons and straps and it was edged with gathered lace all around the neck, so that in its painstaking envelopment of her form it seemed almost to be expressing love for her. Her face was mournful. I had the feeling I had begun occasionally to have, as though I were reaching the bottom of a long fall into water and were experiencing the change in pressure as I hollowed out the end of my trajectory and began to rise again. All the things I had gone streaking past on the way down now hovered around and above me, immanent, patient.

‘Given that you always claim to feel so powerless,’ I said, ‘I don’t see why you cleave to theories that make a virtue out of passivity.’

‘What are you talking about?’ she said.

Her pale-blue eyes flashed past mine, little rents in her countenance. She looked momentarily lively. I had come to view Rebecca’s demeanour as involuntarily symptomatic of her consciousness, as though it were a drug she had taken whose crests and falls I had learned to read.

‘If I haven’t seen Adam Hanbury it’s because I haven’t bothered to pick up the telephone and talk to him. It isn’t because of any wheel, or because it wasn’t our “time”.’

In fact, as I spoke I realised that, as was often the case with Rebecca and me, the truth lay somewhere between us, lost.

‘Call him, then,’ shrugged Rebecca, with the clear suggestion that she regarded this as a typically dull, even a craven way to proceed, compared with waiting for Adam to ‘come around’.

That conversation was the first sign of the Hanburys, as a green spear poking through the brown earth might be the first sign of spring. Rebecca and I lived in Bath, in the middle of a Georgian terrace on Nimrod Street, in a house that belonged to Rebecca’s parents but which they were continually conferring on us, in one of the long, complicated strands of human intercourse of which their life was woven. The Alexanders liked to exist in a condition of sustained embroilment. Emotion by itself was a poor dish to serve up, without the accompaniment of a decent helping of practical, financial and social entanglement. It was this quality that attracted me to them, as it had attracted me to the Hanburys. Rebecca’s family never seemed to feel the need to bring anything to a conclusion. Whenever life retreated from them a step or two their response was always to pursue it and offer more, to attain new heights of risk and ridiculousness. They lived in a big house up the hill in Lansdown, which gave out views of the city that appeared to have been expropriated by conquest, and which was so beautiful and original inside that from the first minute I saw it, it could not help but become a factor in my feelings for the Alexanders. Every time I went there it aroused a strange need in me, as though for consummation; yet it made me anxious, too, with intimations of loss. The most striking feature of the house was at the back, where they had demolished a whole section of infrastructure to create one vast room. Entering this room was like rounding a bend to a view of the sea and feeling the burden of proportionality lift from your chest. It was the height and width of the whole house, and at the far end the outside wall had been replaced with enormous panes of glass, so that it shimmered and moved like water when the light came through. Up this wall of glass the Alexanders had trained three dark-green, tropical-looking
cheese plants which stood in three big tubs on the floor. Over time they had climbed and extended themselves and met one another to form a great green web over the giant window. Some of their thick, rubbery leaves were two feet or more across and they curled out into the room from the dark, vigorous tangle of stems. The effect was slightly grotesque: the presence of this dark, creeping, living thing in the atrium of light was somehow monstrous. When I first saw it, it reached to about two-thirds the height of the room, but over time it found the ceiling and began to move inexorably outwards, horizontally over our heads. It both irritated and charmed me that the Alexanders had arranged something about which it was impossible to feel neutral at the very centre of their domestic habitat. Sometimes I found the presence of the plant almost intolerable, and sometimes it appeared to me as a stroke of genius, without which the room would lie naked and victimised in its bath of light. The sun came in as though through a pattern of lace. In summer, when the windows were open, the big, stiff, curled leaves slowly nodded and made the light wink and dance.

The house was full of paintings: they hung around the walls like witnesses to the proceedings, though none of them represented anything recognisable, and often I would glimpse up to see one of these confusions of paint and feel startled by the way it seemed to replicate something about myself, some interior chaos that was always silently revolving at the borders of the life I was establishing for myself. Rebecca’s father Rick owned an art gallery in the town. He liked to give the impression that a sort of precariousness was conferred on this enterprise, by a force that was conflated with creativity itself, but I never saw any sign of it. On the contrary, Rick’s gallery was constantly awash in an apparently inexhaustible fund of notoriety and success, and the more these two commodities could be observed in the infallible business of their synthesis, the clearer an impression of its elemental steadiness could be obtained. The first time Rebecca took me there Rick was in the
act of hanging a painting on a wall. His sleeves were rolled up and lengths of his wiry black and grey hair kept flopping in his face as he paced repeatedly away and back again, looking at it. When he saw me he cried out, and flagged me over in the sort of masculine summons that usually precedes a request for physical assistance.

‘Just the man I need!’ he shouted.

I went and stood beside him. In front of us was a painting about which I could tell nothing but that it reminded me of myself, though not in the usual way. I recognised in it a quality of self-consciousness, as though it were not entirely immersed in what it was.

‘What do you think?’ said Rick.

He moved closer to me and folded his thick, white, hairy arms. I folded my arms too. We stood there in a kind of spectatorial intimacy.

‘What’s the title?’ I said.

‘Oh, fuck, I dunno,’ said Rick, darting heavily forward and looking at something on the frame. ‘It’s
Panic II
,’ he declared over his shoulder. ‘I don’t know what happened to
Panic I
. Maybe it saw
Panic II
and, you know –’ he guffawed ‘– panicked.’

Silence fell. We looked at the painting. Rebecca had disappeared. I wished Rick hadn’t asked me what I thought, but at the same time I construed it as a test, something unavoidable that would have found me out one way or another.

‘Go on,’ said Rick softly. ‘What do you think?’

‘I’m not really the person to ask,’ I said.

‘Go on,’ he said, softer still.

‘I think it’s slightly – derivative?’ I said finally.

‘That does it!’ yelled Rick. ‘I’m not taking it! Three bloody thousand pounds my arse!’

My heart jolted in my chest, as it had when Paul Hanbury threw me the keys to his car that day on Egypt Hill. On both occasions, for reasons of unintelligible benevolence, I was incorporated into the world of another man’s masculinity.

Rebecca’s mother Ali had pale green eyes that never seemed to blink. She was small and slight and olive-skinned, and she did everything slowly and with an air of deliberation, keeping herself in the light, holding herself still, as though she lived in a frame and were perpetually making pictures there. She had delicate, unblemished hands with which she touched you frequently and confidentially, and her voice was delicate too, so that her talk, which issued from a single, arterial vein of frankness, was somewhat intoxicating. After an evening spent talking to Ali I would often suffer the next day from feelings of shame and contamination. I interpreted these feelings as proof of a constitutional weakness. They were a sort of allergic reaction, to the moral ambivalence that prevailed amongst the Alexanders, although none of them had ever done anything wrong as far as I knew. It was rather that they had no interest in seeming to be virtuous – they may even have been afraid of it. Instead, they concerned themselves with domineering feats of patronage and ostentatious magnanimity. What impressed me as I came to know them was that, unlike most people, the Alexanders actually invested their integrity entirely in their ostentation. The house in Nimrod Street was a good example of this. For six years we lived there free of charge on the basis of a single conversation, in which Rebecca mentioned that we were thinking of finding a place outside Bath, in the countryside.

‘Why the fuck do you want to do that?’ said Rick.

In spite of the fact that Rebecca was its advocate, this idea had originated with me. Rebecca was pregnant at the time and was peculiarly malleable and open to the wildest suggestions.

‘I don’t want to live in a flat,’ said Rebecca. ‘In Michael’s flat people walk all over the ceiling. At night it’s like sleeping in a grave with people walking all over it.’

‘Tell them to fucking shut up then,’ said Rick. ‘Tell them to take their fucking shoes off or you’ll call the police.’

‘I think they’re doctors or something,’ said Rebecca. ‘They have these alarms that go off all night.’

‘They’re doctors,’ I confirmed.

‘Why don’t you do what anyone normal would do,’ said Rick, ‘and move house? Move around the corner. Move out of earshot. Give the doctors some elbow room. Don’t move to a fucking village.’

‘I want a garden,’ said Rebecca.

‘Why do you want a garden? So you can grow a fucking carrot? So you can sit there and eat carrot stew in some Jew-hating village –’

‘Oh, come on,’ said Rebecca.

‘He’s not exaggerating, you guys,’ said Ali over the noise, in her empty, pacific voice that always seemed to float like a lifeboat on the surface of a conversational tumult. ‘People in the countryside are actually really racist. Especially against Jews.’