To Anna Clarke and Barry Clarke
LIUBOV ANDREYEVNA What truth? You can see where the truth is and where it isn’t, but I seem to have lost my power of vision, I don’t see anything. You’re able to solve all your problems in a resolute way — but tell me, my dear boy, isn’t that because you’re young, because you’re not old enough yet to have suffered on account of your problems? You look ahead so boldly — but isn’t that because life is still hidden from your young eyes, so that you’re not able to foresee anything dreadful, or expect it? You’ve a more courageous and honest and serious nature than we have, but do consider our position carefully, do be generous — even if only a little bit — and spare me.
I first met the Hanburys when Adam Hanbury’s sister Caris invited me to her eighteenth birthday party. The invitation read as follows:
Caris Hanbury
invites you to celebrate her eighteenth birthday
at Egypt
on Saturday 21 July at 8pm
Carriages at Dawn
RSVP
‘Where’s that?’ I asked Adam.
‘What?’
‘Where’s “Egypt”?’
‘It’s where we live,’ he said, after a pause.
‘Why’s it got that name?’
‘I don’t know. Everyone’s always called it that.’
‘Well, how are you meant to find it when it doesn’t say where it is?’
There wasn’t an address or a map or any directions. There wasn’t even a telephone number.
‘Everyone knows where it is,’ said Adam.
Adam Hanbury and I occupied adjacent rooms in the university hall of residence: I had surmised, vaguely, that he was different from me, but such differences I regarded as somehow ornamental; as though, suspended between the involuntary world of childhood and the open road of adult life, our student characteristics were a temporary form of self-adornment. We were like a bank of flowers in their season, a waving mass of contemporaneous heads whose stalks and roots were for the time being obscured. The other two rooms on our floor were occupied by a pair of girls called Fiona and Juliet, who spoke in accents of biting gentility and were generally amiable, except in matters pertaining to the shared bathroom, where they exercised flaying powers of discrimination with which I now see they were biologically equipped and which, as they got older, no doubt unfolded into the visible characteristics of a social type. At the end of the year Fiona and Juliet wrote Adam and me a letter which they pinned to Adam’s door:
Dear Boys, it read
Out of sympathy for your neighbours next year we thought it might interest you to hear some HOME TRUTHS about yourselves, as it is obvious no one ever loved you enough to tell you how not to disgust and revolt people, and there is obviously no chance of you getting girlfriends, who might have told you that if you want people to like you it’s a good idea not to do your washing up in the bath, or at least to clean the bath out afterwards so that the next person doesn’t think they’ve stumbled on a scene from the TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE. Also not to leave pubic hairs in the sink, lest people wonder how they got there. We’ve counted at least ten — it’s actually quite off-putting when you’re trying to clean your teeth. On that subject …! Did your mothers abandon you at birth, or have they just forgotten to tell you that using other people’s toothbrushes is unhygienic and rude, and in fact these days is tantamount to a criminal offence. Haven’t you heard of AIDS?!!! Come to think of it, you always seemed suspiciously close. Though on second thoughts at least gays are meant to be TIDY. Is this some kind of double bluff we’ve uncovered here? I think we should be told.
Yours, Fifi and Jules
A few years later I met one of them at a party and she expressed a surprising depth of regret for this missive. I had forgotten it by then but she gave the impression of having thought of little else in the intervening period than how stupid, how pathetic she was to write it. I told her I didn’t see why it worried her so much, when everything it said was basically correct. For some reason this observation actually intensified her remorse. I remembered once opening the door to her room to drop off her post in the mistaken belief that she was out, and finding her standing there naked except for high heels and some items of exotic underwear that she was in the process of fastening. I apologised and was shutting the door again, but she said hello and gave me a horsy, hostessy smile, so with a thudding heart I handed over her letters. The other one, her friend, was always talking about her mother, who was tyrannical and upset her strangely, and who reported her to the college dean for staying overnight with her boyfriend, even though there was no rule against doing this.
‘Don’t you think that’s a bit pretentious?’ I said to Adam.
‘Not particularly,’ he said.
‘Well, what about people who don’t know where it is? What are they supposed to do?’
‘I think it’s more the opposite. It suggests the only people she’s inviting are friends of my parents.’
‘She’s never even met me,’ I said, though at that time it was not in my constitution to refuse invitations. ‘Why is she inviting someone she’s never even met?’
We drove there in Adam’s car, which was so decrepit that the doors were tied shut with string, so that the only way to get in and out was through the windows. When people saw you doing this they clearly thought something criminal was occurring, although they could never establish exactly what it was. Inside, the car was warm and rancid-smelling, and the compostable matter worked into its floor and upholstered surfaces gave off a rich atmosphere, generating heat as it lived out its cycle of maturity and decay. I often experienced feelings of comfort and security in Adam’s car. Being driven in it was like being carried in the warm, smelly mouth of a kindly animal. We drove south and west from Bristol, and then for more than an hour along a narrow road that dallied interminably down the coast, above intermittent glimpses of a marbled sea. The road was like a pointless, rambling sentence that never succeeds in conveying information or reaching any meaningful conclusion. Under a heavy, grey summer sky it passed by ragged farms and fields, by the static contemplation of cows and sheep, by yards strewn with the muddied metal skeletons of farm machinery, by more farms and fields and villages, neither diminishing nor increasing but always in more or less the same quantity, so that a feeling I often used to have in those days was gradually forced on me, the feeling that I had unintentionally left the proper path of my life and was now lost and far from home. At that time there seemed a constant risk of this occurring. It was as though my existence were a small room in a huge, complicated building, to which at the end of every day I was presented with the challenge of finding my way back. It began to oppress me that Adam kept his foot on the accelerator. I saw us worrying the seam of the meandering road with an inexplicable persistence. I began to look down every little lane we passed, glimpsing in the shady, silent tributaries a deep, expectant anonymity, like a dark body of water waiting at the bottom of an irresistible slope. I guessed that ‘Egypt’ was not going to be found down one of these lanes. We thundered by them without a backward glance. I received in that moment an intimation of the notion of privilege: of a world set apart from the world that was at hand.
After a while we came over a rise and the countryside opened out before us, sloping, green and wooded, with the flat, calm spread of the sea around it. The grey, wadded sky stayed behind us, stolid, diminishing, and ahead a great arc of blue stood over everything. A town was clustered around the small bay, and the sun cast shadows on its buildings so that it seemed highly contoured and quaint, like a toy town, with its little bright boats in the harbour and its houses splashed up the hill behind it.
‘This is Doniford,’ said Adam. He sat up straight and put his face close to the windscreen.
‘Should I have heard of that too?’
‘It’s a hilarious place, actually.’
I was to hear this repeated often by the Hanburys, that Doniford was ‘hilarious’. I still don’t really know what they meant by it, which is a pity, because I’m sure they only said it for the benefit of visitors such as myself.
‘Does that mean it doesn’t have a pub?’
‘Of course it has a pub.’
We went to a pub overlooking the little harbour, which Adam reached by driving the car right up on to the wooden esplanade and jettisoning it directly outside the entrance, a strategy which proved useful an hour later when we were forced to search the disgusting interior for money to pay for our drinks. Afterwards we climbed back in through the windows, in view of a small crowd of people that had gathered around the car on the esplanade. There was no communication between Adam and these people. The only thing that suggested his familiarity here was the confidence with which he ignored them. He careered off the esplanade and roared on through the town with his window rolled down and his open shirt flapping madly at his neck in the sun. A cavalier spirit seemed to have seized his body. He drove faster, until the houses looked askew, like great trees falling in our path, and the road undulated crazily in front of us.
‘I’ve got to get up speed for the hill,’ he shouted above the noise of the engine.
We rolled up and out of Doniford and shot into a narrow lane that steeply ascended the flank of green that lay massively behind the town. A feeling of weightlessness possessed the car, as though we had taken flight. I glanced at Adam and felt the first intrusion of a process with which I am by now familiar. It is the process by which whole-hearted acceptance becomes slowly interred in recrimination. With his hands gripping the wheel and the summer sun gilding him from the west, Adam Hanbury had the look of a demon. What gave him that look was the fact that he was going home: he was connected to the earth; suddenly he was subjective, malevolent, interested. I felt him peeling away from me, as though with the adhesive of prior experience. I saw that I would have to fend for myself. The car slowed almost to a halt as we approached the rise. It crawled over and then span away victoriously down a little slope before biting on a second incline. The green hill opened out in the sunshine. The muddle of the countryside along the coast had given way to a landscape of great, unfamiliar splendour. It was as though we had risen through the clouds up into the roots of another world. It looked bold and sombre even in summer. The grass was like felt and the shadows were dark blue and inky. On that golden day it looked like a painting, executed as though from memory: its sheep and horses, its fields and fences, looked recollected, dreamt-of, in their little auras of sunlight. Right in the lap of the hill, shimmering as though they were surrounded by water, were two smaller rises of a strange, distinctly pyramidal shape.
The road passed through a pair of broken stone pillars and became a track, studded with potholes and protruding bits of rock and brick. On one side were a pair of new, grey, industrial-looking structures. On the other the lush green flank of the hill rose further still. Distant clouds of sheep passed across it, parting and re-forming around the thick trunks of trees.
I said: ‘What do you grow?’
‘You can’t grow anything up here,’ scoffed Adam. ‘It’s too high. The time and money people waste trying to find a crop you can sustain on a hill farm,’ he continued, as though I myself were responsible for this scandal. ‘The only things that have any business on a hill farm are sheep. That’s all there’s ever been at Egypt and all there ever will be.’
We jolted along for about a quarter of a mile until we came to a pond that ruminated in a circle of trees and beyond that a range of old buildings — round, rectangular, barn-like, some decrepit — that culminated at the far end in a large house. The house was white and flat-fronted and exposed, and faced with a startled expression down the hill towards the sea. The outbuildings were made of a softer, golden-coloured stone and stemmed from the side of the house as though in mitigation, by a series of uneven steps and archways, until they subsided into a pretty conical ruin with a pointed, rotten roof. Chickens were roosting in the glassless windows. At the front of the house I saw a green table of lawn, pierced by croquet hoops. A warm wind blew in through the open window. When it passed through the trees outside it made a rushing sound like the sound of the sea.
Adam said:
‘We’re here.’
He said it sighingly, as though succumbing to the irresistible force of the status quo. The cooling engine made ticking noises. In the black window frames where the fat, rust-coloured chickens sat I suddenly saw a face. It was the white face of a boy.
‘Who’s that?’ I said.
‘Who?’ said Adam.
‘Up there with the chickens. I saw him looking at us.’
The face had gone; the dark void of the ruined interior replaced it.
‘It was probably Brendon,’ said Adam. ‘He’s always up there.’
‘Who’s Brendon?’
‘My brother. Come on, let’s go.’
We got our bags and went around the side of the house, through the succession of archways into a small courtyard, where a little pot-bellied dog hurtled around yapping over the cobblestones, and through a low door into the house itself. Another dog barked from somewhere inside. We entered a cool, gloomy tiled hall full of dark furniture. I could hear voices.
‘— only six of white wine.’
‘Six? There can’t only be six — Paul, why didn’t you get more wine?’
‘I don’t want them pissed. I don’t want pissed teenagers on my property,’ said a man’s voice.
‘— milk and country dancing.’
‘The problem is that they vomit.’
‘— thought they should have non-alcoholic drinks.’
‘White wine is a non-alcoholic drink,’ said the man’s voice. It was a particularly carrying voice.
‘I want to make kir.’
‘Darling, she says she wants to make kir.’
‘Kir is a woman’s drink.’
‘I told you. I told you that was what I wanted.’
‘What about Jasper? Hasn’t he got any? Darling, go and ask Jasper.’
‘I don’t want to ask Jasper!’
I followed Adam into a large, low-ceilinged room whose far wall was entirely occupied by a black hearth tall enough for an adult to stand in and twice as wide. In the centre of the room was a table like a big door plinthed on thick wooden legs. Its weathered surface was instantly mesmerising. It was scarred and polished like skin, and it seemed to undulate a little, as though it were a living medium, a living presence in the room. The walls were full of things, on shelves and racks and hooks, things stacked or hanging or made to stand in lines, all different and densely patterned with light and orderly, convened, so that the place had the atmosphere of an eccentric sort of museum. Two women and a man sat at the table. Another man was standing by the black maw of the fireplace with a grey, rough-haired dog prostrate at his feet. A girl was sitting by the open window, on top of a wooden sideboard. The warm, twittering day stood immured behind her, beyond the glass. In the instant before they registered our arrival I formed an impression of the drama, almost the theatricality, of their grouping. I was accustomed to the bright, depthless circle of people my own age, who spilled out into the world like some fast-flowing liquid, spreading and spreading until we found something to block our path. The people in the kitchen were not like that: in their somatic presence I discerned wells of motivation, as though bored into the ground beneath them. It seemed that they might never move but might remain there, like musicians holding their bows, situated in a meaningful entanglement. The girl looked up.
‘Look what’s blown in,’ she said.
The two women at the table were of a similar age, somewhere in their late forties I guessed. One was dark and the other fair. They were different and yet the same. They had an uncanny, conspiratorial look about them, like a pair of witches, or two characters from a fairy tale.
‘Now the men arrive,’ said the fair one. ‘Now the party can begin. We just needed the men to arrive, as a catalyst. Now we can work up our enthusiasm.’
‘He went and bought three kegs of bitter,’ said the dark one. ‘Isn’t that the end? Don’t you think that’s the end?’
The dark one was big and thin and angular, with complicated, jointed parts like a mathematical instrument. She had closely cut hair and a dull, sallow complexion. Her narrow face had a downward aspect to it: her nose sloped and her mouth was downturned and her eyes drifted down at the corners too, which gave her a mournful expression, as though her hopes were gradually subsiding.
‘Three kegs of bitter for a summer party,’ she said gloomily, ‘and six bottles of white wine.’
‘That was not the plan,’ said the fair one. She had a loud, distinct, drawling way of speaking. She seemed perpetually to be smiling and speaking out of the side of her mouth. ‘That was not the idea at all.’
‘This is Michael,’ said Adam.
They all looked at me while Adam spoke their names. I couldn’t catch them: they passed over me quickly, like the shadows of birds. Only the name of the man by the fireplace, Paul, snagged in my ears. There was another man at the table, but I wasn’t sure which of them was Adam’s father.
‘Would you have bought three kegs of bitter for a summer party?’ said the dark woman, to me. ‘Perhaps you would, being male. The women won’t drink it, though. That’s the problem with letting the men organise the drink. They only think about themselves, don’t they?’
‘We’ve got the wine,’ said the fair one. ‘Don’t forget the wine, Vivian. We’ll measure it out. We’ll sit on the grass and drink it out of buttercups.’
‘I wanted to make kir,’ said the girl in the window.
‘We’re having dew,’ said the fair one, ‘and we’re drinking it out of buttercups.’
‘Can you drive?’ demanded the man by the fireplace. He was speaking to me. He took something out of his pocket and lobbed it across the room towards me. I caught it shakily. It was a set of car keys. ‘Take my car, would you, and go down to Doniford for some wine? We’ve got to shut these women up. We’ve got to silence the harpies.’
‘And some cassis,’ said the girl. ‘We have to have cassis.’
‘Try the Spar on the high street,’ said the fair woman, with what I later understood to be sarcasm. ‘They’re bound to have it.’
‘Well, give him some money!’ said the man impatiently. ‘What’s he supposed to do, steal the stuff?’
It was the dark-haired woman who responded to this command. She opened a battered leather handbag and took out her purse.
‘Do you know where to go?’ she asked concernedly, putting some notes into my hand. Her drooping face was close to mine. Her skin was dry and soft, like dust.
‘Come here,’ said the man by the fireplace, holding out his arms to Adam. ‘Come and kiss your father. Let me get the feel of you.’
‘I’ll work it out,’ I said.
Adam’s father’s car was an old green Jaguar with cracked, cream-leather seats. It breasted the road like a ponderous boat. From the driver’s seat the world seemed to swing alarmingly from left to right. I was not a very practised driver. In fact, I had only driven a car on my own two or three times before. I sailed down to Doniford on a wave of risk, concerned only with the amount of time I would be seen to have taken. At one point the brown, feathered body of a little bird thumped against the windscreen and fell away — I grimaced but did not stop. When I found myself back at the house at the top of the hill, in the sun and the wind, with three cases of wine and two bottles of cassis, I had almost no recollection at all of the journey. In the hot little town, wandering distraught and excited amongst the summer crowds, I had glimpsed myself repeatedly in the dusty glass shopfronts, and only these pieces of glass bearing my reflection remained lodged in my memory. Again and again I had seen myself and been amazed by how limited and strange the image was, how little it expressed of what I felt.
‘You’re a young buck, aren’t you?’ said Paul admiringly, when I entered the courtyard carrying a box of wine under each arm. ‘You’re a good-looking boy. I’d give anything for a day in that body of yours, just a day.’
He took the boxes from me and ripped them open. Adam was standing a few feet away in the sun, emptying ice from big bumpy bags into an old metal bathtub with clawed feet. Paul had taken his shirt off. I saw his gnarled, ruddy chest and his wiry arms. He was surprisingly small in stature and his legs were short and thin and rather bowed, but his head was very large and his features prominent, and a plume of bushy grey hair rose grandly up and back from his forehead. He had something of a goat about him, or a satyr.
‘D’you look after yourself?’ he said, scrutinising me. ‘Lift weights and whatnot? I never needed that, but then I had the work on the farm. You don’t always get the right shape that way, though. I’m in two pieces — the top part’s the farm, the bottom’s the horses.’
The other man had emerged from the kitchen and was leaning against the frame of the door to the courtyard watching us. He was around the same age as Paul and resembled him sketchily in the face, but he was tall and slender and wore slightly effeminate clothes, a primrose-yellow shirt tucked into his trousers and a silk handkerchief tied around his neck. He had a full, neat moustache that nested on his upper lip like a little animal.
‘Most of the farmers around here look like pregnant women to me,’ he said disdainfully.
‘Take David,’ said Paul, pointing at him. ‘He looks all right with his clothes on, but underneath he’s like a rag doll. He and Audrey eat rabbit food — they nibble away like a pair of bunnies. Some women can manage on that but others get a bad smell when they’re underfed. You can smell it on their breath, the stomach acids. Audrey never suffered from it, but others do.’
‘Apparently they do no physical exercise at all,’ said David. ‘They ride around on those little tractor bikes and never use their legs. Don Brice got gangrene that way, you know. Disgusting, isn’t it? It’s one thing if you have intellectual pursuits,’ he said, to me. ‘I’ve always thought you had to be one thing or the other, intellectual or physical. I’m an intellectual myself. You’ll perceive that I’m in a minority around here. What are you reading, Michael?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘At university.’ He smiled patiently.
‘Oh. The same as Adam. History.’
‘Ah.’ He folded his arms with apparent satisfaction. ‘What do they call it? The story not of great deeds but of great men. Actually, I myself am something of an historian.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, I’m writing a book.’
‘Don’t get him on his book,’ said Paul grimly. He was plunging the wine bottles by their necks into the bath of ice.
‘It’s just a little local history,’ said David deprecatingly, making a swatting motion with his hand. ‘A mere nothing.’
‘Go on then, ask him what it’s about,’ said Paul. ‘Go on, be quick.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘Since you ask,’ said David, ‘it’s about a murder.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘A murder that was never solved.’ He paused dramatically. ‘Eleventh of March 1883 — beware the Ides of March, eh? A woman killed, brutally, with an axe, while her small son looked on, and no one ever able to say who did it, or why.’ He paused again. His blue eyes were very wide open. ‘Annie Askey. A harmless woman killed with an axe one night as she sat sewing at her kitchen table.’
‘Where did it happen?’ I asked.
‘Right here,’ he said brightly. ‘In this house! The man of the family, Martin Askey, sold it to our great-grandfather. I think it’s still the same table, isn’t it?’
‘Of course it’s bloody not,’ said Paul crossly.
‘For an area with such a low population density, Doniford and its surrounds can lay claim to a remarkable catalogue of the most gruesome murders,’ said David. ‘This is by no means an untypical example.’
‘He didn’t sell it,’ said Paul. ‘He exchanged it for a fishing rod. They were pissed at the pub one night and he swapped the house for a fishing rod. Personally I always thought that was suspicious, don’t you think? I think the rum bugger killed her himself.’
‘Why on earth would he have done that?’ said David. ‘What possible motivation could he have had to kill his own wife?’
‘He probably couldn’t stand the bloody sight of her.’
‘He’s the prime suspect, Uncle David,’ said Adam. ‘The family are always the prime suspects.’
‘You wouldn’t kill your wife in front of your own son,’ said David reproachfully.
‘I imagine he couldn’t help himself,’ said Paul.
‘You make it sound as if there were no principle of honour between men and women,’ said David, his moustache quivering. ‘No integrity! No sacred bond! Don’t listen to these relativists,’ he said to me, distressed. ‘My own theory is that it was a vendetta of some sort, against Martin Askey himself. Perhaps he’d mistreated one of his labourers. That’s the theory I advance in my book, incidentally. That the quasi-feudal way of life in a farming community such as this provoked high levels of violence. It’s quite an unconventional theory in its way — people tend to idealise life in the highly systematised societies of the past. They prefer the passion motive. But I believe human beings are quite capable of suppressing their passions. It’s power they can’t resist!’
‘Do you know what happened to the boy?’ I asked.
David put his face close to mine. His eyes bulged out from their sockets. I could see the numberless, coarse filaments of his moustache.
‘He never spoke again,’ he said, triumphantly. ‘He grew up mute — silenced by what he had seen. Hence unable to bring the perpetrator to justice!’
Presently Paul sent us inside to fetch the glasses. In the kitchen the women were sitting at the table. The dark-haired woman was frantically chopping cucumber and flinging it into a large glass bowl. Her big, bony hands were white with stress around the knuckles. The girl, Caris, was drawing ringlets of ivy from a pile in front of her and twining them around glass jars with candles in. Next to her sat the other woman, who was turned sideways in her chair and was examining the girl’s profile raptly, occasionally lifting a hand to tuck strands of hair behind her ear. I saw that Caris was both irritated by the attention and transfixed by the warmth of it.
‘Mum, could you pass me the scissors?’ she said.
‘What’s that, darling?’
Caris leaned over to get the scissors herself, thus causing her mother to remove her hand. When Caris returned to her chair, her mother presently resumed caressing her hair.
‘Do you like them?’ said Caris. She held up one of the little jars and smiled.
‘They’re sweet,’ said her mother vaguely. She turned her face away. I noticed her withdrawing her hand. ‘Vivian, how are we going to feed all these children? I suppose at least half of them will be anorexics, but still, one salad and a few things on crackers is on the frugal side, don’t you think?’
‘There’s meat,’ said Vivian severely, who was making the table shake with her chopping.
‘There’s meat,’ repeated Caris’s mother generally, as though to an invisible audience. ‘What meat is there?’
‘Paul’s doing it outside. I think it’s sausages.’
‘The sausages are vegetarian,’ said Caris.
‘The sausages are ethical,’ said Caris’s mother. ‘Vivian, do you hear that? They may not be edible but at least the sausages are ethical.’
It had taken me time to get used to the older women’s faces, rather as eyes take time to adjust to darkness, but now I could see that Caris’s mother was very good-looking. She was slim and slight, with daintily rounded limbs like the limbs of a child. She had streaked dark-blonde hair cut in a messy, youthful style, and a wide, laughing mouth. A gorge of brown, freckled breastbone, roped by jewellery, was disclosed by her close-fitting dark blue shirt. She drummed her long, rounded, coral-plated fingernails on the tabletop. Her little face was spiteful and merry.
‘Paul offered her a suckling pig but she didn’t want it,’ said Vivian. ‘He did offer it, though. The thing was that she didn’t want it.’
‘I’ll say she didn’t. Poor little pigling. Ethical sausages much nicer.’
‘The problem is that it’s impossible to please everybody,’ said Vivian. ‘You offer to throw a party and then you find that people start wanting different things.’
‘I don’t want different things,’ said Caris. ‘I want it to be just like all the other parties.’
‘Where are the glasses?’ said Adam.
‘I want it to be like the parties you had when we were little,’ said Caris.
‘Those were not vegetarian parties, darling,’ said her mother. ‘They weren’t vegetarian, were they, Vivian? They were distinctly unprincipled.’
‘I remember you used to stay up all night,’ said Caris. ‘And when I got up in the morning and came out you were all still there.’
‘Yes, it was a bit much, I suppose,’ said Vivian. ‘I remember the men used to go off to bed while we had to do the washing up and make breakfast for the children. It was a bit much, really, when you think about it.’
‘We need the glasses,’ said Adam.
Caris rose from her chair. ‘I’m going upstairs to get dressed,’ she said.
‘Shall I come?’ her mother called after her. ‘We can beautify ourselves together like little Cinderellas for the ball. Darling, shall I come?’
Silence emanated from the stairwell.
We took the glasses outside, where Paul was putting tables on a sloping stretch of lawn in the wind. We pegged white sheets over the tops. Then we carried out wooden benches, one after the other. I didn’t know where they had got so many benches, but the ease with which they produced them suggested that this was a well-worked routine. We arranged the glasses in rows under a green and white striped canopy that flapped crazily in the wind. The lawn and the hill were bright in the sun. People began to arrive. The two women came out.
‘I thought that was your mother,’ I said to Adam.
‘Vivian?’
‘The dark-haired one.’
Vivian was wearing a complicated selection of draperies that I imagined did not show her to her best advantage, but rather emphasised the dispirited quality of her physiognomy. The draperies were white. From a certain angle they looked like a series of bandages that had come loose. Adam’s mother was standing next to her in her tight-fitting blue silk ensemble and shoes with very high heels. She was looking about with the bright, abrupt movements of a bird. She looked contrastingly compact: her containment in her small, firm body was strangely threatening, as though she might at any moment explode.
‘Audrey’s my mother,’ said Adam. ‘Vivian’s married to dad. She married him when I was twelve.’
‘Do you like her?’
‘Of course.’ He affected surprise.
‘Don’t you resent her?’
‘Not really.’
‘How come all of you live with your father and not your mother?’
‘This is our home. It’s the place that matters, not the people in it,’ said Adam, which I thought was a strange thing to say.
‘What about your mother?’
‘She has a house in Doniford. She lives with Uncle David. I don’t think they’re lovers or anything. I think he just lives there. He hasn’t got any money. He’s pretty hopeless. Mum’s here a lot. She comes up nearly every day.’
‘I can’t believe they all sit around the table together.’
‘Why not?’ said Adam, with the patrician air he occasionally assumed and which I found quite irritating.
‘People’s feelings usually prevent it,’ I said.
‘Do they? How boring.’
He produced a packet of cigarettes and we each lit one. The smoke was quickly scooped up off the green hill by the wind.
‘This is a fantastic place,’ I said.
Two girls with yellow hair came out of the house and walked towards us across the lawn. They looked slightly discomfited as the wind blew their clothes against their bodies. One of them was about my age. The other one was younger and had a red rash on her face.
‘You’re back!’ cried the older one. ‘When did you get back?’
‘This is Michael,’ said Adam. ‘This is Laura, and that’s Jilly. My stepsisters.’
‘Don’t call us that!’ shrieked the older one. ‘I think it sounds so awful!’
She was solidly built, with thick, white arms and skin that was so even-toned it seemed not to be skin at all but a sort of casing, like that of a doll. She looked as though she could never be troubled by anything. Her sister was the opposite: she was thin and jointed and awkward-looking, and her rash, which I now saw spread over her neck and down her arms as well as her face, gave her a look of public suffering, almost of election. Their yellow hair had a synthetic appearance. If these were Vivian’s daughters they were nothing like her. They were like things that had accrued to her by accident.
‘Mummy’s in a complete state,’ said the older one.
‘She didn’t want the party,’ said the younger one.
‘It’s just that Caris has been so demanding,’ said the older one, rolling her eyes cheerfully.
‘She likes to be the centre of attention,’ said the younger one.
‘What’s it like, getting away from this place?’ said the older one. ‘Is it really great?’
‘I can’t wait to get away,’ said the younger one. ‘I can’t wait to have a house of my own. I’m going to have horses. I’m not going to have sheep. I hate sheep. At our old house we didn’t have sheep.’
‘It’s not too bad,’ said Adam.
The older one turned to me. ‘Is it really great?’ she asked.
‘At our old house we had a swing made out of a car tyre,’ said the younger one, also to me. Her red, distressed face was pinched. ‘It used to swing you out over the pond and if you fell off you went into the water. Daddy used to make us go really high.’
‘Have you made lots of friends and gone to lots of parties and things?’ said the older one.
At that moment Caris emerged from the house. She came out of a door at the back and stood alone. She looked more extraordinary than any person I had seen before, although it is hard to say exactly why she gave this impression. She was wearing a simple white dress that left her arms and shoulders bare and she had her brown hair loose. A wreath of ivy sat on the top of her head. She wore no shoes or jewellery. Her pale face was very beautiful. She looked like a goddess. Everyone turned and when they saw her they applauded riotously. I happened to catch Audrey’s eye and she gave me an inscrutable, imploring look. A stocky, dishevelled man in a pale suit approached Caris over the lawn and when he reached her he took her in his arms and kissed her in front of everybody. I was surprised by this because he was much older than her. Her face when he let her go was like the open face of a flower.
‘Who’s that?’ I asked Adam.
‘That’s Jasper. He’s an artist. He lives in the lodge down by the gates. He rents it from dad. He’s staying for a year because he’s got some grant from Doniford council. He’s pretty good, actually. Caris is his muse.’
‘Does he paint her?’
‘Absolutely. Even in the buff.’
‘Doesn’t your father mind?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Adam shrugged. ‘Jasper’s sort of an abstract expressionist anyway. It doesn’t look that much like her. There’s one hanging in the window of the gallery on the high street and you’d never know.’
I laughed. The evening softened and lengthened out towards the sea, which lay pacific and opaque far below. The lawn was crowded with people in the dusk, shouting and laughing noisily. Their noise in this empty, elevated place flew wildly up into the air like a river of sparks from a beacon; the party was like a big fire laid out on the hill, generating heat and light in the falling darkness, growing molten and indistinct at its core. Someone lit Caris’s candles. Someone else put on some music. I saw Paul Hanbury roaming the lawn with his shirt unbuttoned and a bottle of wine dangling from his fingers. I saw Caris standing near me in her luminous dress and I said:
‘Happy birthday.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, smiling brilliantly, as though I had paid her a compliment.
‘It’s a good party. It was nice of you to invite me. Especially since you’d never even met me.’
‘I feel as though I had met you,’ said she earnestly. ‘Adam talks about you a lot. I feel you were meant to be here.’
I was surprised to hear that Adam talked about me. I couldn’t imagine what he would say. It caused me to feel an inextricable mixture of pleasure and affront, though I liked the feeling of being possessed. I liked to be compelled through my own resistance. I liked too the fact that the Hanburys’ privileged circumstances left me with the illusion that I was indifferent to them.
‘Are these your friends?’ I asked, because I had noticed that most of the guests on the lawn were far older than Caris.
‘Of course they are,’ she said, smiling incredulously at me in a way that nonetheless managed to suggest that they might not have been.
‘Even him?’ I asked.
There was a corpulent old man with a walking stick standing entrenched in the middle of the dancing. He wore knee-length breeches and a tweed jacket.
‘That’s Barnsie,’ protested Caris, laughing. I was gratified to see her face turn red. ‘He always comes to our parties. Mum and dad used to have the most amazing parties,’ she added. ‘I seem to remember even Barnsie getting pretty wild. They could last for days. I remember when I was little going to bed and then getting up in the morning and finding them still at it. They’d carry all the furniture out on to the lawn. I used to come out here and find dad sitting on the sofa on the grass at breakfast time, smoking a cigar.’
It irritated me that she kept talking about the past, as though the superiority of that era were a matter of agreement between us; as though we were two diminutive people whose stature had relegated them to a life on the sidelines.
‘Your family are very unusual,’ I said.
‘I know,’ she said quickly. ‘I keep having to remind myself that one day soon I should leave Egypt and go and see some other part of the world. I don’t want to. I want to stay here. I think I’d be quite happy, wandering in the fields, painting pictures of flowers.’
‘What are you going to do?’
She sighed in the dusk.
‘Paint,’ she said. ‘Not flowers, though. I don’t know what. That’s what I have to work out.’
‘Shouldn’t you have worked it out already?’ I said. ‘I mean, shouldn’t you have at least some idea what you want to paint before deciding to become an artist? I mean, what’s the point of just painting for the sake of it? What’s the point?’
She folded her arms and looked at me sideways.
‘Oh, I see,’ she said finally, with a smile. ‘You’re one of those, are you? The sort of person who thinks everyone should be in a category.’
‘I was only questioning the idea that an artistic impulse could exist separately from what it wanted to express.’
‘Of course it can,’ she said. ‘An artist doesn’t emerge fully formed. He has to evolve.’
‘But you’re talking about wanting to be an artist. I’m talking about being one.’
‘What’s the difference? You make it sound like there’s some huge, important difference.’
‘Of course there is! You can’t just wander around saying you want to paint. Either you paint, or you don’t. I just think that if you were meant to paint you would know what your subject was. You wouldn’t need to look for it.’
‘You only say this because I’m a girl,’ said Caris presently. Her brows were furrowed above her glittering brown eyes. I saw that I had offended her. ‘If I was a man you wouldn’t say it — you’d be egging me on, giving me money and grants and trumpeting the fact that you’d discovered me. Whereas in fact what you want to do is crush me, isn’t it?’
She looked at me with her delicate face. I had to concede that there was some truth in what she had said.
‘Why do you want to crush me?’ she asked, wonderingly, with a little smile.
‘I want you to stay as you are,’ I said. ‘As you are right now.’
‘Do you know where we’re standing?’ she said.
I looked around me. We had wandered away a little from the party. We were in a place of foliage and moonlight where things snapped beneath our feet. The big, black presences of trees were around us.
‘We’re in a ring of oaks,’ she said. ‘It’s magic here, you know.’
I bent forward and kissed her. The distant commotion of the party was in my ears. Some seconds passed. Kissing Caris was like kissing a child. She was warm and sweet and she gave the impression of being entirely indifferent to what I was doing. She did not look as she had looked when Jasper the artist kissed her. I decided I would have to marry her. I would marry her and live with her at Egypt, along with all her family and perhaps even Jasper himself.
‘Happy birthday,’ I said again, stupidly.
Everyone was dancing on the lawn. The music and the shouting echoed down the hill in long chimes into the valley. I saw Paul Hanbury dancing with a very tall young woman, who swayed before him like a stalk of wheat while he scurried around her, crab-like, casting her salacious looks. When he saw me he grasped my hand and we all danced around together, me, him and the swaying girl. I couldn’t see Adam anywhere. I saw Vivian, standing by the drinks table with her arms crossed awkwardly over her stomach, talking to an elderly lady. Numerous children were dancing amongst the adults. Sometimes they danced with each other. More often their mothers danced with them, kind and weary-faced, stooped over. I noticed a fair-haired boy of eleven or so standing beside Vivian, gulping unnoticed from the wineglasses on the table. After each gulp he would look around him with a startled expression on his face. I guessed he was Adam’s brother Brendon, the boy I had seen in the chicken house.
When I turned back to the dancing, Audrey had manifested herself in front of me. She stood in her tight-fitting blue costume and high heels, one arm flung into the air and a bare leg planted dramatically out in front of her. She presented herself to me, glaring at me with the fiery, warlike countenance of an exotic bird embarking on its mating ritual. I saw that she was extremely drunk: she was incandescent; she was on fire. She began to dance around me in a strutting fashion, pausing occasionally to assume her dramatic pose, eyes blazing, arm aloft, as though offering me a challenge. Round and round me she went: I shadowed her uncertainly. In her exertion her face had grown warm beneath its make-up; the different colours shimmered greasily as though they had come alive, as though she were a living image of herself. Audrey clapped her hands on my shoulders. As she circled me she moved her hands over my shirt and said something with her painted mouth that I didn’t hear over the music. She bared her even, slightly yellowed teeth in a smile. A feeling of apprehension stirred in my stomach. She gave me an impatient look.
‘Do you like me?’ she said hotly into my ear, before circling me once more.
I smiled urbanely, or so I thought, and did not reply.
‘You can have me, darling,’ she said, into my ear. ‘You can take me now.’
‘I don’t think that would be a very good idea, Mrs Hanbury,’ I said quaveringly.
‘I need somebody to fuck me,’ she said. ‘I need somebody to fucking fuck me!’
She sounded quite annoyed about it.
‘I’m sorry I can’t help,’ I said.
‘I gave away my man and now I’m lonely,’ she said in my ear, in a little-girl voice. ‘Audrey gets very, very lonely on her own.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said.
I felt a firm, male grip on my arm.
‘Now, now, Audrey,’ said Paul. ‘Don’t get randy with Michael. Was she getting randy with you, Michael?’
‘Where’s Brendon?’ said Audrey vaguely.
‘Darling, I haven’t a bloody clue,’ said Paul. ‘What are you worrying about Brendon for?’
‘Someone should really put him to bed. All these children!’ She made an irritated gesture with her hand that clearly incorporated me. ‘They should all be put to bed.’
‘Is it good for you up here?’ said Paul. ‘Do you like it? Not everybody does.’
‘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.