In the Fold

TWO

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.’

‘I’m not Jewish,’ said Rebecca. ‘I’m not anything.’

I started to tell them about Doniford and the Hanburys, which was the blueprint I had in mind for our move to the countryside, but unfortunately they were now locked in debate about whether Rebecca was Jewish or not.

‘I think you’re really uptight,’ said Ali. ‘It really worries me that you’re so uptight.’

‘I don’t have to be something just because you say I am,’ said Rebecca.

‘What about your grandmother?’ said Rick. ‘What about what she went through? Did she go through that for you to go and live in some village with Miss Marple?’

‘She was Catholic,’ said Rebecca. ‘She was baptised. At least I’m not talking about living a lie.’

‘That’s not fair,’ said Ali, shaking her head.

‘Anyway,’ said Rebecca, ‘Michael isn’t Jewish. Our children won’t be Jewish.’

‘Did we ever say anything about that?’ demanded Rick, holding up his large white hands. ‘Tell me, did we ever say one thing about that?’

‘What’s so great about this big bourgeois dolls’ house anyway?’ exploded Rebecca, finally returning to the point. ‘All people do here is go shopping! All they care about is renovating their houses so they can pretend they live in the past! If you took their little museums away from them they’d be as racist as anyone else —’

‘Look,’ said Ali, laying one hand on my arm and the other on Rebecca’s. ‘Look, what you two need is a gorgeous little Georgian terrace with lots of light and some original features, and I promise you you’ll feel completely different.’

Ali often took this route in conversation, of recommending as a panacea the very thing by which you claimed to be being tormented.

‘We can’t afford that,’ said Rebecca sullenly.

‘Have Nimrod Street,’ shrugged Ali.

‘You’ve got tenants in there.’

‘Have it.’

‘In fact, darling, they’re leaving anyway,’ said Rick agreeably, with the distinctive accord the Alexanders always found in such moments.

‘Have it,’ said Ali again, dramatically, as though this were grist to her mill.

‘Hey!’ wailed Rebecca’s brother Marco, who was listening. ‘That’s not fair!’

Marco was in his last year of the sixth form at a boys’ school in the city. He was a big, thick-fleshed boy with black hair that stood out in wild curls all over his head, and a sallow, pitted face on which he perpetually wore an expression of soporific surprise. Whenever I saw him I was reminded not of myself at his age, but of other people at that time who I’d seen but one way and another never got to know.

‘Look,’ said Ali, ‘just shut up, all right?’

‘Yeah, just fucking shut up,’ added Rick.

Rick and Ali often spoke like this to their children. With the exception of Rebecca, they all recognised verbal abuse as a form of good manners. For the Alexanders, conventionality in matters of domestic conduct was the ultimate humiliation. For example, I remember around this time an evening during which Rick repeatedly accused Marco of being cold to Ali, because he wouldn’t let her drop him off at school on her way to work, but insisted on walking there himself.

‘Why don’t you want her to take you?’

‘I just thought she might want to steer clear of school for a while,’ Marco finally disclosed.

‘Why?’

There was a pause.

‘She didn’t make the list,’ said Marco heavily.

‘What list?’

‘The list.’

‘Oh,’ said Rick.

‘What list?’ I asked.

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Rick. ‘Well, that’s a fucking disaster.’

‘There was nothing I could do,’ said Marco, holding out his hands helplessly.

‘You’ve got to get her on the list,’ said Rick.

‘Believe me, I tried. No can do. It’s a democratic process.’

‘What list?’ I asked again.

‘Go on, tell him,’ said Rebecca loudly to her father and brother. ‘Tell Michael exactly what you’re talking about! God, I don’t believe it,’ she added, putting her head in her hands.

‘What’s the list?’ I said.

‘Every year,’ said Rebecca, with disgust, ‘the pupils at Marco’s school make a list.’

‘Of what?’

‘Mothers.’

‘You know, the fit ones,’ said Marco.

‘They make a list of the mothers they’d most like to sleep with,’ said Rebecca in a sing-song voice. ‘They vote on it.’

‘This is the first time she hasn’t made it,’ Marco said.

‘It’s so embarrassing for her,’ said Rick.

‘I know, I know,’ said Marco. ‘I told them, I really did. Apparently it happens all the time with the top year, because so many younger mothers are coming up the school. Believe me, I tried, but Alex is a real stiff. He hates my guts.’

‘So make friends with him,’ said Rick. ‘Kiss his arse. Just get her on.’

‘I can’t!’

‘Why not?’

‘I’d have to nominate her myself,’ said Marco sheepishly. ‘That’s the only way. I just thought, you know, there has to be a limit.’

*

The day our son Hamish was born I woke in the early hours of the morning when it was still dark. The night seemed to have been full of shadows and motion, like a night spent on a train. Rebecca was sitting on the edge of the bed. Her great body made a depression in the mattress that seemed infinite.

‘What’s the matter?’ I said.

She sighed.

‘I’m so tired,’ she said indistinctly.

‘Can’t you sleep?’

‘I’ve been up for hours. I’ve been pacing the room, like mum said to do.’

Her voice palpitated dramatically between self-pity and common sense.

‘Does that mean it’s started?’ I said.

‘I can’t believe you didn’t wake up,’ she said.

I considered this, there in the thick, crumpled dark.

‘Well, one of us might as well get some sleep,’ I said.

‘How could you sleep with me walking around your bed? What did you think I was doing?’

‘I didn’t realise you were walking around.’

‘How could you lie there asleep while I was in pain?’ she shrieked.

I had to remind myself that what I had or hadn’t done was now irrelevant. Events were overtaking us. In the taxi Rebecca sprawled, affronted, on the back seat, while I sat next to the driver. Every time I glanced back at her, her belly seemed to rise and impose itself between us. It seemed to erupt through the surface of the life on which we had agreed, and I saw everything cascading down its numinous sides. I felt a part of that landslide: I felt myself plummeting down to a region of irreparable disorder. Occasionally Rebecca would groan, a melancholic, interior sound. I tried to hold on to her in the jolting car when she made this noise, but it was as though it were a strong current bearing her away on the waters of her own experience. I watched her recede into the darkness of herself and then return, thrown back into the yellow light of the car, each time more dishevelled and wretched; and I waited for her to retaliate with the sense of her own autonomy, to locate in herself the primitive instinct that would tell her how to negotiate this storm of her body, but she didn’t. She cried and groaned with what appeared to me to be more than pain, to be an actual constitutional flaw. I understood that I was witnessing her in the last minutes of her wholeness, as I might have watched a fragile, falling object in the seconds before it hit the floor. It was around that time that Rebecca vacated one part of my consciousness and took up residence in another. Her new home was far more crowded: it housed everyone, more or less, whom I loved under obligation. As I pretended that this change had not occurred, I felt it didn’t really matter that it had. All that had happened was that I was, at my centre, alone again.

Hamish was a big, peculiar baby with flowing blond hair and the prominent features of a general or a politician. He seemed to relish pointing out the obvious, and treated everything as a joke: in this way he was identifiably male, though in spite of his size and virile countenance there was something effeminate about him. He was like a big, exuberant, bad-mannered amphibian, or a laughing, androgynous cleric. The spectacle of Rebecca looking after him suggested that of a teenaged girl entertaining her first, unruly boyfriend in the family home. She giggled, or reddened with shame; she was by turns prim and infantile, and then, as time went on, intermittently burdened, disgusted, recondite, submissive. It was Rebecca who had wanted the baby, but from the start I had the subdued sense that Hamish would ultimately be transferred to my sphere of responsibility, like the pets people buy their tender, clamorous children; children who then harden, as though the giving, the giving in, were proof in itself that in order to survive and succeed in the world you must be more callous and changeable than those who were so easily talked into acceding to your desires. I knew Hamish and I were in it together. I knew it even as Rebecca put him in the pouch she wore on her front and picked her way, moon-faced, farouche, through the streets accepting the compliments of strangers.

Rick and Ali treated Hamish as they treated everything, with an instant familiarity that nevertheless appeared to recognise no precedent, nor any attendant codes of conduct. Ali said that Hamish reminded her of her brother Chris. She said it no matter what he did, so that over time she created the strange impression that Chris was a fiction being manifested by Hamish in instalments. When she said to Rebecca, ‘That’s just what Chris used to do,’ or, ‘When he laughs he sounds exactly like Chris,’ Rebecca would say ‘Really?’ as though she had never met Chris in her life, and had perhaps not even heard of him until that moment. Rick liked Hamish the most. He took him out for solitary walks, as though to visit some distant shrine of male heredity. He would say to Ali, ‘Shut up about your fucking brother the jailbird. What’s he got to do with anything?’ Chris was a tax exile. I don’t think he actually went to prison, but apparently he borrowed some of Ali’s money years before, and never paid it back.

When Hamish was two Rebecca was offered a part-time job at the gallery. At first I was relieved by this development, since it represented, obliquely, a slackening of the hold the concept of ‘art’ had on her. For as long as I had known her Rebecca had claimed to be an artist, while never to my knowledge producing an item made by her own hand. A few times she got close to attempting it, a proximity which expressed itself in the immediate onset of illness and depression, accompanied by unexplained pains down the left side of her rib cage. I could not understand her insistence on giving a harbour to the tyrannical expectation that she create. This expectation came from herself, but it had its roots, I thought, in her parents and her need to surmount their capriciousness while remaining within the circle of their concerns. At university, where we met, Rebecca studied law, and though in the end she struggled to get her degree, I could see in her decision to take it something I had not seen since, namely a determination to forge for herself a more normative, classical, even useful existence than that to which she had been born. I could see in it a slightly punitive urge to stick to the facts. I wished sometimes that I had known the girl who had felt that urge. It had already begun to lose its momentum, to give way to doubt and self-consciousness, by the time we met. The law had become a source of oppression from which she wanted only to free herself; and art, whose peculiar strictures I suspected of having driven her to law in the first place, now reappeared in the guise of her liberator. What had she been thinking of, surrendering herself to a life of confinement and responsibility, of adherence to the letter of things? It was freedom that she wanted, most particularly the freedom to express herself. So requisite was this freedom that even the impingement on it of self-expression became intolerable. Yet she sought release: when she didn’t get it her freedom was tainted; it became a drag on her, a burden. She longed to give voice to something, but what? Sometimes, with an air of urgency, she would take her pad and pencils and establish herself somewhere with the intention of drawing. It was always drawing she seized upon to guide her out of this conflict, as though it were a first principle she had forgotten and to which she was now going to make her obeisance. The problem was that as far as I could see what Rebecca wanted was not to create but to discharge, to rid herself of a blackness, a pollution, that mounted inexorably in her system. The discipline of drawing was obstructive to this process: it was far too narrow a channel for her tumultuous feelings. After an hour or so of frantic marking and rubbing out on the paper she would throw her pencils on the floor as though she were throwing off her manacles or descending from a tightrope. She always looked more fleshly somehow, more earthbound, in the wake of an unsuccessful approach to the shrine of creativity, as though for an instant she gloried in the mere fact of being human. As far as I could see, all Rebecca’s masochistic female tendencies went into this abusive relationship she had with art, leaving her overly assertive and somewhat self-centred and preoccupied in her dealings with me.

Rick’s gallery was riding the wave of a middle-class spending boom. He changed the name, from Rick Alexander to discriminate. At that time he was setting up another, smaller gallery on the Dorset coast, where many of what he referred to as his artists lived, and so increasingly Rebecca was left to run things in the city on her own. I was surprised by her aptitude for it. Sitting at her father’s perspex desk in the big white space she was a creature in its natural habitat. It was as though her life had come in only two sizes: she had outgrown the first, and now the second fitted her perfectly. It was in this period that Rebecca first complained that I never asked her questions. One evening she said:

‘Why have you never asked me how it felt having Hamish?’

I considered the question. My memory of Hamish’s birth remained also the memory of the first failure of authenticity in my feelings for Rebecca. For some reason it had never occurred to me that she might have undergone the same change.

‘I don’t know.’

‘If you were hit by a car and were injured and in terrible pain, wouldn’t you think it was strange if I never asked you how you felt? Wouldn’t you think it was strange if I just never mentioned it again?’

‘That’s not a fair comparison,’ I said. ‘You don’t get any reward for being hit by a car.’

‘You might get compensation. You might get insurance money. Wouldn’t it be strange if you were suddenly very rich and in a wheelchair and I never mentioned it, or asked you how you felt?’

‘I don’t know why I didn’t ask,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t sure you’d want to talk about it.’

‘Correction,’ she said, erecting a white, forbidding finger in the air. ‘You mean you didn’t want me to talk about it. You couldn’t stand the idea of me talking about it. That’s because the idea of me, of my subjectivity, is disgusting to you.’

‘Have you ironed your hair?’ I asked.

There was a pause.

‘What?’

‘Your hair looks different. It looks as though you’ve ironed it.’

I had seen Rebecca’s new hairstyle everywhere lately. On the crowded pavements of Bath, which appeared to move, as though with infestation, in a single, avaricious body, I had seen it one day on nearly every female head and had concluded vaguely but regretfully that the hair with which I was familiar had become a thing of the past. I had had this feeling several times, the feeling that I had missed an episode in an important series; that, like someone rising from a coma, I had been made mysteriously destitute by the mere continuation of things. Women’s hair, as I remembered it, was remarkable for its diversity, and for the appearance it had of being a living thing, like a pet, that accompanied its owner with any and every degree of refinement, misbehaviour or submissiveness. Rebecca’s hair was light red and coarse and tangled and sometimes, when I was close to it, reminded me of the red rag rug I used to have in my student room. The ‘new’ hair hung like a pair of curtains on either side of the face, or like a pair of dismembered, glossy wings. It looked synthetic and slightly ghoulish. The style had spread almost overnight, like a virus that had struck within my own four walls before I had had time even to absorb the fact of its existence. Or rather, it was as though my seeing this fashion but failing properly to notice it had culminated in it taking possession of Rebecca’s head, much as her neglected feelings had. She had to constantly hold her head up to keep it in place, as though she were swimming and trying to keep her face out of the water. What irritated me, I realised, was not the prospect of Rebecca’s subjectivity, but her expectation that I myself should have emerged from Hamish’s birth completely unaltered.

‘Actually,’ I said, ‘you’ve never —’

I was about to observe that Rebecca had never asked me how I felt about having Hamish either, but by this time she had risen and was towering unexpectedly over me where I sat on the sofa. In her hand she held my large black-leather ring binder, into which I had the habit of writing every necessary or important piece of information that came my way, and which over a period of years had therefore come more or less to represent my brain. She raised her arm and dashed it violently to the floor. The binding snapped open and a blizzard of paper bloomed out into the air. For some seconds the dry, densely written pages snowed softly and heavily over every available surface.

‘I can’t believe you did that,’ I said.

Two or three weeks later she threw a heavy crystal fruit bowl at me, which hit the wall behind my head and separated instantly into a million little diamonds that sped purposefully away across the floor in different directions. We had to get Ali to come and take Hamish for a couple of hours while we found them all.

‘Come on, you guys,’ she said, on the doorstep. ‘You’re being really stupid. You’ve got to sort this out.’

‘No one else knows how despicable you are,’ said Rebecca, to me.

‘Everyone goes through these patches,’ said Ali. ‘Honestly, everyone does.’

‘You’re worse than the worst Nazi,’ said Rebecca, to me. ‘Hitler was better than you.’

‘What you guys really need,’ said Ali, ‘is to spend some more time together.’

‘If they knew what you were like they’d take me away from you,’ said Rebecca, to me.

‘Rick knows this sweet little hotel in Cornwall,’ said Ali, grabbing both our arms and squeezing them desperately. She put her face close to ours and spoke in an urgent voice. ‘Look, you just need to go to bed. You need to spend all day in bed. You need to work it out. All right? All right?’ she reiterated, squeezing harder.

‘All right,’ I said evenly. I was holding my breath. I felt that if Ali didn’t go soon my lungs would explode.

Rebecca bought a pair of boots that looked as though they had been commissioned to effect my particularly horrible murder. They were black and went up to her knees, and had heels like knitting needles. The toes were sharpened to a point that extended two or three inches out at the front. For a year she wore these boots nearly every day. She clicked menacingly off to the gallery, with her hair in curtains and a devious expression on her face. She mentioned a whole galaxy of men she met there; she charted for me, at length, their ever-changing positions in the heavens of her favour, where they stood governed by the sun of emotion and the moon of art. At length these stars receded back into their darkness, leaving Rebecca to the contemplation of a new artist Rick was selling, a man called Niven. He had only a single name, like a planet. It was Niven, I think, who introduced Rebecca to the concept of the big wheel. I believe I also have him to thank for the discreet retirement of the black boots. Niven admired only what was natural. He was often to be found in Rick and Ali’s kitchen, his long, attenuated body, from which a voice of unexpected power and solidity issued like the proboscis of a predatory insect, draped over two or more chairs, pouring wine down his tanned and prominent gullet. Niven had a large, roughly made head and a massive, meaty chin and a nimbus of thin, curly, brown hair. His eyes were like a pair of small shallow puddles. Ali claimed to find him irresistibly attractive.

‘He’s such a shit,’ she said. ‘I always go for the shits, don’t I, darling?’

‘You’re too much like hard work for Niven, darling,’ said Rick. ‘He says he wants a handmaiden.’

‘A handmaiden?’ said Rebecca. Her tone was very sour. ‘What does that mean?’

‘A helpmeet,’ said Rick. ‘A slave to his talent.’

‘He’d be better off finding someone with some money,’ said Rebecca. ‘Or some connections.’

I rolled my eyes. This sort of comment had, apparently overnight, become Rebecca’s speciality.

‘Now how did he express it?’ said Rick. ‘I think he said, “I put in the fuel, I get to drive the car.”’

‘God, I bet he’s a fantastic lay,’ said Ali dramatically. ‘Don’t you think, Becca?’

‘For Christ’s sake, listen to you,’ said Rebecca. ‘You’re such a fake. You’re such a sad old woman.’

‘That’s really unfair,’ wailed Ali. ‘You don’t know what it’s like being married to Rick! He’s got all these gorgeous young female artists just throwing themselves at him to get space in the gallery.’ She leaned forward confidentially, though Rick had wandered upstairs by now. ‘He told me that the other day this really beautiful girl came in and sat on his desk and said, you know, what do I have to do? What do I have to do to get in here?’

I snorted with laughter. Ali and Rick always tried each to promote the attractiveness of the other, as though it were a consignment of something they needed to get off their hands before the market crashed. In fact Ali was by far the better looking of the two. Rick was perfectly charismatic, but it was hard to imagine anyone flinging themselves at him, even for the sake of career advancement.

‘It’s not funny,’ said Ali mildly. ‘It’s really difficult for him to resist.’

‘What Niven needs is someone who can structure his creative life,’ said Rebecca. ‘That’s very different from being a doormat. He needs someone who understands what an artist is, who can stop him consuming himself.’

I lifted my eyes to my wife’s face and wondered whether she was considering offering herself for the position. A few weeks later, sitting in the pub one evening with some people we knew, I became aware again of the way Rebecca was talking. This time she was pouring her heart out to someone called Mike, the boyfriend of a friend of ours. We’d met him for the first time that evening. He had a white, startled face, and round, wire-framed glasses that may have contributed to his look of alarm as Rebecca bared herself to him. She said things I had never heard her say before. She appeared to believe herself to be visibly involved in some disaster or emergency, as though it were plain to everyone that she had come to the table buried in rubble or trapped in wreckage, and could be expected to be candid about it. On the way home I said to her:

‘You can’t talk like that to other people.’

‘Like what?’

‘You make yourself look ridiculous. You make me look ridiculous.’

There in the street Rebecca swung at me with her handbag. I hadn’t noticed the handbag until that moment; it was new. It was a little pink leather thing on a long strap. On the front it was decorated with a pattern of raised metal studs in the shape of a pair of lips. These lips met my cheek in a hard and painful sort of kiss.

‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you!’ I shouted, with my hand to my face. ‘But you’re upsetting me and you’re upsetting our son! He can’t even speak any more!’

It was true: Hamish was nearly four and made virtually no sound except a loud ringing noise like that of a bicycle bell. It was extremely startling when he did it. The teachers at his nursery school frequently expressed their concern, though I myself wasn’t entirely mystified by it. In fact, sometimes I wanted to make the same noise.

‘I feel erased,’ said Rebecca. She began to weep.

‘I don’t want to hear any more about your problems,’ I said. ‘It’s nothing to do with me. It’s up to you to make your life how you want it.’

‘You’re so cold. You’re like a room I’m trapped in that just gets colder and colder. You don’t touch me or hurt me — no one could ever say you’ve done anything wrong. That’s what matters, doesn’t it? It’s really very clever, Michael. No one can connect you with the crime!’

‘I haven’t committed any crime.’

‘You see!’ she shrieked triumphantly. ‘Do you see how you move to protect your reputation? You want to come out of this with exactly what you had when you went in. You don’t want to pay the price. But that isn’t living, Michael. You can’t live without getting your hands dirty.’

‘You seem very confident that you know what living is.’

‘Everything has to furnish your sense of reality. Yours is the only consciousness. Your morality is the only morality.’

‘I think you only feel alive when you’re destroying something.’

Rebecca laughed.

‘That’s an old tactic, Michael. I’m not going to fall for that one.’

‘I think it has something to do with your unsatisfied need to free yourself from your parents.’

At this she looked virtually ecstatic.

‘That’s right! That explains it! It isn’t your fault — it isn’t your fault you’ve messed up your life!’

‘I haven’t messed up my life.’

‘Look at your violin!’ she cried. We were inside the house by now and Rebecca was walking up and down in front of me with her arms folded. ‘Look at it sitting there in its little case!’

I learned to play classical violin when I was younger, but for years I had played folk and Irish music and every other Friday I spent the evening at a pub in Bath where a group of us played together. Sometimes a tiny freckled girl called Dolores sang with us, when the strange scribble of her life happened to cross our more linear arrangements. We were paid in beer from the bar. I had an old leather jacket and a red scarf and cap I kept for these occasions. It might have seemed that my Friday evenings were a hobby but I had a sense of them that was disproportionate to their frequency, a feeling that when I addressed myself in the privacy of my own consciousness it was to the figure in the jacket, scarf and cap that I spoke. I attributed to that figure particularly sustaining qualities of loyalty. Playing the violin was the only real skill that I possessed. I often thought that if my life ever became intolerable I could always put on my cap, sling my violin case over my shoulder and wander out into the world to make my way. Rebecca herself played the piano, quite soulfully: at least, she started well, but before long the music would begin to unravel in her fingers, and the image I had of us playing together would come apart in separate pieces. When this happened I felt that I partook momentarily of her artistic frustrations: I felt that I understood what it was to hold something in the mind that I was unable to bring to life.

‘Sometimes I want to take that violin and break it over the table,’ said Rebecca. ‘Do you want to know why? Because it represents control. It represents perfectionism. It represents the selfish way you possess things.’

The case was lying open. Rebecca was standing right next to it. It did not strike me as being out of the question that she actually would take out my violin and break it over the table.

‘When I hear you playing scales on that violin I want to weep. A grown man, practising his scales!’

‘If you’d kept up your piano you could accompany me,’ I said.

Rebecca shrieked and clawed the air with her fingers.

‘The arrogance!’ she said. ‘The presumption!’

‘I thought you were the one who cared about art.’

‘You think I’m the enemy of self-expression?’ she cried. ‘You think I’m the enemy of art? That isn’t art! That’s the triumph of methodology! The only thing you can do on that violin is play tunes that have been played a thousand times before. It should be smashed — it should be broken! Better to be broken than to be the slave of method!’

‘You’re not actually that original, you know. That’s what everybody wants. Everybody wants to destroy things! You think destruction is an honourable response to your feelings of containment but it isn’t. What you’re destroying is the chance to understand yourself.’

Rebecca appeared to give this idea momentary, involuntary consideration, as though it were something I had thrown towards her which she was unable to prevent herself catching.

‘I’ll say one thing for you, Michael,’ she said finally, as though regretfully. ‘You’re consistent. You always have been.’

*

The houses in Nimrod Street had balconies on the first floor at the front. They were large, ornamental Georgian things: each one was made of a single slab of limestone fifteen feet long and four feet wide that extended across nearly the entire width of the house. They had cast-iron railings around them that bowed slightly outwards and then curled around delicately at the top in the shape of a stave. They gave the houses a privileged, slightly exotic appearance, extending out into the air with a little clean wedge of shadow underneath. I never looked at our house without this lofty shape imprinting its stony grace on me. It registered itself silently, repeatedly, as the symbol of some aspect of miracle, some necessary excess that embellished my existence yet could never entirely be within my possession; so that my comings and goings at Nimrod Street were always accompanied by the vague sense that my life was both more beautiful and more difficult than it needed to be. Often, when it rained, Rebecca and I had sat on our doorstep in the evenings with the stone roof overhead, but increasingly I stood under it alone, shutting myself out of the house in order to consider the possibility that my life with Rebecca was unsustainable, a thought that was like a small, panicked pet I wasn’t allowed to keep indoors, and hence was forced to exercise outside, where it ran crazily up and down the front steps in the dark, occasionally venturing a few feet out into the street.

One morning, when I left to go to work, I closed the front door and was on the second or third step down to the pavement when the balcony dropped off the front of the building just behind me. The impact was so great that it was virtually soundless. It made a sort of void or vacancy in time. A tremor rose from the earth beneath my feet and passed through me like a momentary torrent of electricity, exiting with a burning sensation from the top of my head. I didn’t turn around, or run: it was too late to move. Presently I noticed that the street was utterly deserted. For some reason I found this disconcerting, that there were no witnesses to this strange event. I looked behind me and saw the giant slab lying broken on the steps. It had broken into no more than three or four pieces. It broke like a heart, I thought. After a while I climbed over the pieces and with a shaking hand rang the doorbell. I could hear Hamish crying inside. Rebecca took a long time to answer.

It was only because I happened to be at home when the surveyor came that I was the one to whom the explanation for the falling balcony was given. The surveyor was a slim, clean-smelling man of about my own age. His name was Ed Reynolds. When I saw him standing on the doorstep amidst the rubble and the broken railings I understood how dangerous my life had become. Crystal fruit bowls did not come flying through the air at Ed Reynolds. Balconies did not fall on him from above. Standing there he explained to me how a small crack in the limestone had gone for several years unfilled, allowing a plant to grow up through the slab. I knew that plant: it used to put out purple flowers that waved outside our bedroom window in summer. In fact I had noticed before how it seemed to be growing out of the wall. It had a thick, twisted brown stem. At the time I found it quaintly characteristic of the Alexanders that flowers should be allowed to grow out of their walls: it seemed to add to the impression I had formed of them, that they acknowledged few rules and yet went joyously unpunished. In conditions of frost, the surveyor continued, the plant had expanded and contracted. This caused the crack to become unstable. A simple programme of repairs and maintenance over time would have prevented the accident. For these reasons it was excluded from the terms of most insurance policies. When I relayed this information to Rick and Ali they acted as though some personal stupidity in my dealings with Ed Reynolds had resulted in his presenting us with this verdict. For the first time I felt a coldness, an insubstantiality in their attitude to me. They didn’t seem to understand how many times fate had loomed over Rebecca and Hamish and me in the form of the limestone slab, how nearly it had caught us. I had showed Ed Reynolds a photograph I had found of Hamish, aged two, sitting on the doorstep, under the balcony, in the sun. I had thrust it before his eyes repeatedly, as though I were possessed. I couldn’t stop looking at this photograph. I couldn’t separate myself from it. For a time it seemed almost to replace Hamish himself.

Adam Hanbury had become a surveyor. He had a practice in Doniford. Seeing Ed Reynolds had put me in mind of him, and so without much thinking of what I was doing I found his number and sat one day at the window dialling it, while I looked through the glass at the catastrophe which still lay strewn, untouched, over the front steps. A little bird alighted for an instant on one of the giant broken pieces of stone and flew away again.

‘We were talking about you the other day,’ said Adam, as though it were a matter of months rather than years since we last spoke. I could hear a baby wailing in the background. ‘Dad’s got a boundary dispute going with the council. He’s been driving us all mad with it so in the end I said, “Look, Michael’s a lawyer, let’s just ring him up and ask him.” We had the wrong number, though. We rang this woman and dad kept telling her she was your wife and she kept saying she wasn’t. They talked for about an hour in the end. When dad rings off he says —’ Adam put on a low, comical, inebriated voice ‘— he says, “She wasn’t a bad old thing in the end, Michael’s other half.”’

‘Boundary disputes aren’t really my line.’

‘Oh no?’

‘I gave all that up.’

‘I didn’t know that. What do you do now?’

I laughed. ‘Let’s just say I get paid a lot less for it.’

‘And there was I,’ said Adam, ‘imagining you as an equity partner somewhere.’

He’d taken his mouth away from the receiver and his voice was indistinct.

‘What?’

‘I was asking was it a penance for something. It sounds very virtuous.’ He sounded perplexed. ‘Though I can’t say I’ve never wanted to get off the treadmill. Only I’d have to get paid for doing it.’ He paused. ‘To be honest, I never thought I’d be where I am now. Doing the nine to five in Doniford.’

‘I don’t think anybody does,’ I said.

‘Don’t they? I think that’s what dad would call old bunkam. Not that he’d know what it’s like. He’s never had to sit behind a desk wondering how early he can leave without anybody noticing. What’s annoying is that he appears to think this is the result of his own ingenuity.’ He laughed mirthlessly. ‘He’s ill,’ he added.

‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘Prostate cancer. It’s all right — it’s a straightforward operation. But it couldn’t have happened at a worse time of year.’

It was mid-March. Through the window the trees were still bare, except for the branches of the laurel that grew at the bottom of our steps. Its rubbery, imperishable leaves were thickly coated in white dust.

‘Why’s that?’ I said.

‘He’s in hospital all week, and there are a hundred pregnant ewes at Egypt.’

‘My God.’

‘The first ones are due on Friday.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘It’s funny,’ remarked Adam. ‘That’s just what dad wanted to know. I’m having to take half my summer holiday now. Lisa is not pleased,’ he said in a low voice. There was a pause, then he added, more loudly: ‘You don’t feel like doing some lambing, do you?’

I laughed.

‘Are you serious?’

‘Of course,’ said Adam, with the vague suggestion that he was not asking a favour but conferring a privilege.

His tone sent a strange thrill through me: an impulse, like a light, that travelled all around my limbs, illuminating great tracts of weariness. I felt as though I had been rowing against a hard wind and had just lifted my oars out of the resisting water, in order to succumb with mild terror to the pleasure of being blown wherever it was easiest for me to go.

I said: ‘I’m not sure I can.’

‘Oh, dad’s hired someone to do the really nasty stuff,’ he said, misunderstanding me. ‘It would just be, you know, shepherding. We could put you up here.’

The baby wailed faintly in the background. I heard a woman talking: her voice rose and fell, rose and fell. There was the sound of dishes being scraped against one another.

‘All right,’ I said.

‘Can you make it by Wednesday?’

‘I don’t see why not. I’ll have to make some arrangements.’

‘You’re probably owed some holiday,’ he said meaningfully, as though he had been told that I was. As it happened, it was true.

‘A bit,’ I said.

‘You’d be doing me a real favour,’ he conceded.

I said: ‘Can I bring my son?’

‘Of course,’ Adam replied, after a brief hesitation which suggested that in fact he found the request slightly outlandish. ‘How old is he?’

‘Three. I thought he’d enjoy it, that’s all.’

‘Of course, of course. We’re all, um, equipped. For children.’

‘Thanks.’

‘We live in Doniford now. In a sort of executive suburb. Our house is hilarious.’

I looked through the window at the spectacle of the front steps in the grey afternoon.

‘Not as hilarious as mine,’ I said.

‘The girls will be pleased to see you,’ he said.

I had no idea to which girls he was referring. Did he mean Vivian, or perhaps his strange, intimidating mother? Was Caris still there, after all these years? I wondered then whether farmers called their pregnant ewes ‘girls’.

‘And I them,’ I said.

*

Rebecca responded to the proposal in a manner that defied my expectations. Yet I did not know what to expect; I was open to innumerable possibilities, all of them, however, distinguished by the clarity and drama that were the signature even of Rebecca’s misapprehensions, and that either caused or intensified an answering muteness in myself, so that in the very act of escaping her I found it so difficult to ascribe motivations to my own behaviour that I preferred to believe it was she who was escaping me.

She was clearing out the closet in our bedroom and did not desist from this activity while we spoke; I saw her face at different planes and angles as she moved around, bending and straightening, lunging here and there with her arms bared to the elbow and her hands, white at the peaks of the knuckles, betraying like a tide-mark the steady presence of emotional frenzy, as though it moved in a body within her, now rising, now subsiding. I found her task obscurely threatening, for Rebecca was generally untidy and inconsistent in her habits and her fits of domestic purification were often significant and expressive of anger and intolerance, and a desire for change that did not augur well for those other residents of the status quo by which she had become so palpably infuriated.

‘What about Hamish?’ was what she said first of all, when I told her I was thinking of going away; the fact of my own absence having registered itself in an automatic neutrality of expression, as though it were a train passing through a station at which it was not scheduled to stop. It was left to me to feel the regret and anxiety that evidently did not suggest themselves to her, and which I noticed missing only when I spoke my plan out into the room and saw how indelibly rimed it was with controversy, and with the sordid expectation that by threatening to remove myself I would at least attract her attention. She did not feel it was required of her to explain what her question meant. Even so, it pained me as much to hear her ask it as if the plain fact that Rebecca could no longer be left alone with Hamish were new to me. Until now I had retained this knowledge as a form of generosity towards her, but I saw it become in that moment a dark tenet of our family life.

I said: ‘I thought I would take him with me.’

At that a little wave of realisation broke uncontrollably over Rebecca’s face, which she bent into the closet to hide. A few moments later she emerged holding a crushed shoe-box that disgorged bright pink tissue paper from its broken side. Excitement declared itself in two spots of colour on her pale cheeks.

‘How long will you be gone?’ she said.

‘A week.’

‘A week,’ she repeated thoughtfully.

She maintained this quietly suggestive demeanour all the way to Wednesday, with the exception of one instance, when I wondered aloud whether in fact I hadn’t better stay in Bath after all and arrange for someone to start clearing away the wreckage of the balcony. I might have been a dignitary contemplating the abandonment of some vital, long-planned mission for all the dismay this suggestion evoked; and she my zealous aide, promising extravagantly to take care of the problem herself, as solicitous for my absence as I was eager for the absence itself to effect some change in her. On the subject of the Hanburys she seemed to have trouble striking the note she wanted: she tried to find it both predictable and inexplicable that I should be going to see them, and when she referred to them at all it was as “your friends”. At night I lay beside her and the presence of her still, coiled body was as exigent and declarative as that of a stranger on a long journey, someone dozing in a neighbouring seat; a person captured in a ceaseless act of self-manifestation, whose absence, when it comes, will be felt, in the failure to maintain a hold on even a remnant of her humanity, as a kind of death.

On Wednesday morning Rebecca drove us to the railway station and left us there an hour and a half before the departure of our train. She couldn’t stay, she said, as irritated as though we had asked her to; she had so many things to do. Her manner was strikingly changed. She seemed now to find nothing of significance in our departure, to herself or to us. I felt that I could lie down on the pavement outside the station where she left us and not know whether it was in relief or despair. My heart was clenched like a fist in my chest. I watched her drive away, fast, and it was as though the little wavering car had streamers attached to it, which fluttered frantically around its vanishing form. Later, when our train pulled into its station and I saw Adam Hanbury standing on the platform in a padded brown coat and a deerstalker hat, my eyes attached to him like the first object seen after waking from a dream. I looked at him, mesmerised by his solidity, until he saw us through the window and raised his hand.