In the Fold

FOUR

Adam’s house stood in a delta of tarmac, new, black and pristine. It lay at the end of a black, pristine tarmac river that meandered grandly out of the east side of town, beyond the old grid-patterned streets of residential Doniford, which looked infirm by comparison. There, the coast road passed through a fuming, hooting, rattling cascade of metal the narrow, decorous terraces struggled to contain. Great lorries like dinosaurs manoeuvred on the small roundabouts. Dirty trucks freighted with skips and scaffolding roared past, driven by men who gazed blankly through their spattered windscreens. Beside them the pavements and brick walls of front gardens looked miniature: the gardens and the facades of the houses shook like toys as the lorries passed and the daffodils seemed to jolt from side to side in the grass. The houses looked so vulnerable next to the pounding road that it was difficult to believe in the world in which they had been constructed. Some of the terraces were only fifty or sixty years old but they seemed rooted in a past that had become meaningless. Great weights hurtled back and forth at high velocity past the little, unaccustomed rows of houses, four feet from their front gates.

Adam’s road, the new road, branched away from this spectacle towards its fresh green site in the fields between the town and the sea. There were perhaps a hundred houses there, all like Adam’s. In spite of the exertions of the tarmac, which wound and circled graciously amidst the properties as though to give the impression that each was distinct and difficult to find, the development had a somewhat regimental appearance. When you glimpsed it from the town, its roofs and top-floor windows resembled the impassive heads of an invading army coming over the hill. Once there, however, a pleasant, almost dreamlike atmosphere prevailed. It was an atmosphere that arose from the expectation that absolutely nothing untoward was going to occur. This expectation was well founded, in that as far as I could see none of the factors — natural or man-made — that might constitute, or even precipitate, an event were present. There were no shops or strangers or meeting places, no through-traffic or litter or noise. Even the sea, which was less than half a mile away on the other side of a small rise, was soundless, invisible and without odour. There were merely people, curiously motiveless in their identical red-brick houses, each with their fenced rectangle of grass that was indistinguishable from the grass outside the fence. I hadn’t been there long before I noticed the habit they had, of coming out of their houses and standing there beneath the wadded grey sky, looking around. They would look around for a while and then they would go back in again.

I said to Lisa:

‘It’s a shame you can’t see the sea from here.’

She said, ‘I don’t really want to look at the sea all day.’

I supposed she might have taken offence at my remark, which to be honest I half-thought I was making to Adam. I have found there to be roughly two types of men, those who take offence at everything I say, and those who don’t. Adam was the second type.

‘I wouldn’t want to have it there day in and day out,’ continued Lisa, ‘just sitting outside my window. Why would you want to have this great big thing outside your window? I mean, why would you?’

I wasn’t entirely sure why I would: she made it sound slightly depraved.

‘People make such a fuss about a sea view,’ she sighed.

The view from Adam and Lisa’s house was densely patterned and, because everything you saw had been created at roughly the same time, strangely depthless. From my window in the spare room I could see the homogeneous red brick of other houses, the straight beige lines of the unweathered pallet fence, the lurid blades of new grass, the neat black ribbon of tarmac. I could see clean cars and bicycles and white garage doors. It was like looking at a collage: nothing shaded into anything else but rather seemed cut out and pasted into place. The window was so well sealed that it created a sort of vacuum in the room. In Nimrod Street our windows rattled and let in noise and draughts, and the presence of these things was like that of an audience, bored, judgmental, companionable, suspirating in the anonymous dark. In Adam and Lisa’s spare room the silence and stillness were such that I became almost intolerably aware of myself. When I opened the window there was a small sound of compressed air being released, a hesitation, before the outside world ran in in a tepid stream of babbling air.

The house had four bedrooms, which Lisa showed me. She did this with some gravity in the afternoon, while Adam went to look in at his office over in the town. It was as though she had waited for us to be alone. Also, she had waited for daylight, she explained, rather than showing me the house when I might, if ever, have expected to see it, on arrival the night before. She gave the confusing impression that her interest in these matters was not unsatirical. It was a distinct possibility that she believed herself in addition to be gratifying some sordid but well-established impulse on my part, and had elected to do it, if it had to be done, in broad daylight.

‘This is the baby’s room,’ she said on the square landing, pushing open a door so that it made a hoarse sound as it ran over the thick, resisting carpet. The baby’s habitation of her room was faint and sketch-like. I glimpsed a cot and various padded items. ‘And this is Janie’s room.’ Janie was Lisa’s daughter from her previous marriage, whom I had not yet met. Her room was a little more substantiated than the baby’s, though overwhelmingly similar in colour, shape and texture. She had already been installed in it asleep when we arrived, and was now apparently at school.

‘This is the spare room, which you know,’ said Lisa, whose liturgy nonetheless required that she complete the ceremony by opening and shutting the door to my room. ‘And this is our room.’

Adam and Lisa’s room, being the pièce de résistance of the tour, we were permitted to enter. Lisa stepped ahead of me into its cream-carpeted spaces, as enchanted as a fawn entering a sunlit clearing. I saw the mystery of their bed, immaculately made.

‘Very nice,’ I said.

‘And this is our bathroom.’

I ducked my head into the bathroom — tiled, with gold taps and white porcelain appurtenances — and received a startling impression of multitudinous cosmetics, randomly marshalled like the skyline of a fast-growing city over every surface. A large chrome-plated hairdryer with an intimidating vent on the end hung from a hook on the wall. A prod-like object with an electric flex hung beside it. On a shelf sat a tray of miniature forensic items, tiny picks and blades. The bottles and jars of every conceivable size and shape suggested a world suspended partway between medicine and magic. I caught a glimpse of something called ‘breast-firming cream’. I tried to imagine the orgy of self-improvement that routinely occurred here.

‘Everything is so efficient in this house,’ Lisa remarked. ‘Everything works. You can just get on with your life.’

I found myself wondering what, according to these terms, life actually was. We were still in the bathroom — Lisa sat down on the white, rounded edge of the bath. I contemplated the gleaming toilet, from which the suggestion seemed to emanate that unknown to me the problems of human putrefaction had recently and happily been resolved. Lisa was dressed for the temperate climate of the house, in a sleeveless T-shirt and a pair of sandals. Her toenails were painted red.

‘We did look at a few old houses,’ she said, with the emphasis — derogatory — on ‘old’. ‘We though it might be fun to buy a wreck and, you know, do it up, but in the end, I thought, what’s the point? What is the actual point of period features? What’s it for, all that arty-farty stuff? I think it’s pretentious,’ she concluded, ‘living somewhere with fireplaces when you’ve got central heating.’

‘That sounds like our place,’ I said, simulating a rueful expression.

‘I grew up in an old house,’ said Lisa, consideringly, after a moment, as though she had decided to disclose her roots to me in order to prove that her opinions were not the fruit of mere bigotry.

‘Whereabouts?’ I asked.

‘Oh, you wouldn’t know it,’ said she mysteriously. ‘It’s in the north-east. But our house was really old. When you got into bed your sheets would be wet from the damp.’

‘Do you come from a big family?’

I wanted to hear more of this tale of woe.

‘Oh yeah,’ she said vaguely. Now I could detect her accent. ‘There’s lots of us.’

She was still sitting on the edge of the bath. She folded her arms over a bare, unblemished section of her midriff and jiggled her foot to and fro so that the sandal slapped against her sole. She was a large-limbed, rounded, well-finished woman with blonde hair so straight and symmetrical there was no doubt of it having been ironed. I wondered if the electric prod was what she did it with. I did not dislike her, though I saw she was suffering from a madness of convenience. She had decided to concern herself with the morality of inanimate objects. I had encountered this affliction before, but only in the denizens of those arty houses with superfluous fireplaces. Rick and Ali, for example, were quite capable of allowing their evangelism in matters of taste to interfere with the run of social play. I had seen Ali complain to someone whose house we were staying at for the weekend that she could not possibly sleep in the sheets with which she had been provided because they were made of the wrong material. I understood that people did and said such things because they were in some sense incapable, but I could not have said exactly what constituted this incapacity in Lisa, unless it was a background of such dreariness or deprivation that it had made her obsessed with her own comfort.

‘Adam’s family are really strange,’ she continued. ‘They spend all their time talking about each other. Often they’re so horrible I wonder if they actually hate each other. My family aren’t like that at all.’

I sensed she found this habit of mutual discussion as pretentious as a liking for period features.

‘They didn’t use to be like that,’ I said in their defence. ‘When I first met them the thing that struck me was how friendly they all managed to be.’

‘Really?’ Lisa’s neat, even-toned face assumed an expression of distaste. ‘My family are just a really close family,’ she said.

‘The Hanburys have never been able to acknowledge their divisions,’ I said grandly, somewhat surprising myself.

‘What do you mean?’ Lisa visibly perked up.

‘They’re so socially and materially conformist, yet so terrified of seeming conventional,’ I continued, finding that it was not about the Hanburys but the Alexanders that I was speaking, ‘that they violate the laws of emotion as a substitute for real acts of rebellion.’

‘Adam’s stepmother is a very dark lady,’ Lisa presently agreed, apparently inspired by my talk of laws being violated. ‘She’s a very dark, unhappy lady. Did you know that when they were younger she used to deny the children food?’

‘Did she?’

‘She denied them fruit!’ Lisa looked me in the eye as she levelled this obscure charge. ‘Adam told me that once she put some beautiful peaches in a bowl on the table and every time the children asked if they could have one she said no. Then one day they found that the peaches had gone bad. Also,’ she continued in a low voice, carefully hooking her hair behind her ears, ‘she tried once to stop Adam and me getting married.’

‘Why?’ I said, surprised.

‘Because of my — you know. My previous life.’ She leaned forwards on the edge of the bath. ‘She told Adam,’ she continued discreetly, speaking only with her lips, ‘that he shouldn’t saddle himself with someone else’s child. I don’t know if that’s exactly how she put it, but that was the gist, you know. She offers to have Janie sometimes but Janie won’t go. The first time she met her Janie thought she was a witch.’ Lisa sat back and looked at me triumphantly. ‘It was quite embarrassing, actually. The thing is, the baby isn’t even related to her,’ she concluded irrelevantly. ‘I have to keep reminding Adam that Vivian and the baby aren’t actually blood relatives.’

I had a pressing need to get out of the bathroom, whose close, tiled walls seemed to be amplifying but not ventilating our conversation. Besides, we had left Hamish and the baby downstairs in the richly carpeted sitting room, whose dense furnishings would no doubt absorb any sounds of alarm. Lisa rose from her seat on the bathtub as though I had spoken this thought aloud: I followed her through the bedroom, lapped suddenly by warm sensations of gratitude which caused my personal powers of discrimination to cleave to my skin like wet clothing. It was not the first time in our brief acquaintance that Lisa had caused me to feel this singular form of discomfort. Not only had she elected to look after Hamish in the mornings while Adam and I were up at the farm, but already she actually claimed to feel some fondness for him. When we came back from the farm I had found him sitting on her lap on the sofa in a synthetic-coloured swamp of baby toys, watching television; and while I questioned her methods I was overwhelmed all the same by relief. Nevertheless, I sensed that Lisa was a person who could say anything, and would, given sufficient time. I was no closer, after our conversation in the bathroom, to understanding her relationship with Adam: in fact, if anything I was more mystified, now that I knew he had not only ‘saddled’ himself with the encumbrance of a child but winkled its mother out of the humble but tenacious bosom of her family in the distant north-east, for the express purpose of being with her. It seemed to run contrary to his sense of personal destiny, not to mention that of geographical limitation.

Hamish and the baby were exactly as we had left them, seated on the carpet with their faces lifted, transfixed, to the television screen. They sat in its blue light as though in the light of an icon. Their submission was slightly sinister. I noticed that Lisa, with the use of various aids, was adept at plunging children into immobility or, if required, rousing them to action. She could get them from one state to the other in seconds, guiding them on their criss-crossing paths through the hours like someone in a control tower directing air traffic. Similarly she appeared able to do several things at once, as though her body were inhabited by more than one consciousness. She had the unnerving habit, when speaking to another adult, of removing sweets from their wrappers with her hands without her eyes ever leaving your face, so that when a child came to interrupt she could insert one directly into its open mouth. While preparing to take me on her tour of the house she had placed the children in front of the screen, switched it on, and then, like an anaesthetist, waited for a count of ten, before the end of which they had happily vacated their bodies.

‘A hot potter,’ Hamish said when he noticed us.

This utterance, which I had to conclude was more or less meaningless, was nonetheless typical of a recent advance in Hamish’s development: I hoped, at least, that it was an advance, consisting as it did of phrases of verbal nonsense spoken earnestly, as though they contained coded information of the highest importance. This scrambled form of communication was slightly distressing to me. I felt sure that Hamish did have important things to say, particularly about his mother, whom he saw on the eve of our departure repeatedly smashing my watch against the kitchen wall while it was still attached to my wrist. Rebecca had never censored her outbursts for Hamish’s sake: on the contrary, I sometimes thought she needed to have him there, as the courtroom needs the stenographer, in order to see the precise record of her actions detailed on his blank little face. Rebecca claimed to believe that it was better for him to see her as she really was, while feigning a certain blindness to the effects of these exposures. I sometimes felt that Hamish was closer to madness than Rebecca herself, though I did not endear myself to her by saying so.

‘A hot trotter,’ he said.

‘What’s that he’s saying?’ marvelled Lisa, deceived by the mysteriously accomplished tone of his delivery.

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘But at least it’s in English. I used to worry that he might be tuned into a different station.’

Hamish had started doing something strange with his hands, which involved holding them above his head and rotating them very fast, as though he were spinning a dinner plate on each one. This was a relatively new habit, which I had noticed with a sinking heart.

‘Are you saying you think there’s something wrong with him?’ said Lisa.

I had by now grown used to the way she leaned forward in order to communicate something she considered to be private. The movement caused the blade of her hair to swing disconcertingly towards my face. Lisa gave the impression that it was of no interest to her whether there actually was something wrong with Hamish or not. What concerned her was whether I thought there was. The sitting-room window extended almost the entire width of the room: it faced on to the back garden, and hence gave an unconfined view of a confined space. The effect was distinctly odd. The room was saturated with grey daylight. The fenced rectangle of the garden lay unbearably exposed in every detail.

‘Not at all,’ I said.

‘He’s just a little delayed,’ she continued, as though he were a train. ‘He’s obviously very bright.’

I had heard these two statements juxtaposed so many times that their true nature was beginning to make itself known to me. Taken separately they were relatively harmless, but together they functioned like the converging arms of a pair of pliers bent on working Hamish loose from his happy entrenchment in obscurity. He turned his head and looked at us over his shoulder. His large, highly modelled face was startling and slightly grotesque in the room’s relentless neutrality. Hamish looked good against a more gothic background. He said something that sounded like ‘Derry doctor’ and returned his attention to the screen.

‘That’s Adam back,’ said Lisa, although it was unclear how she had deduced this from the torpor of the house. A minute or two later, though, the front door banged and Adam called out from the hall. Lisa sat on the sofa, plump, almost mystically calm, as though directing him in with rays from her unblinking eyes. I sat on the thick carpet with the children. In the warm, well-sealed room we were like dumb creatures waiting in a nest.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ said Adam. ‘I had to call in at mum’s.’

‘Would you mind going to pick up Janie?’

Adam was slightly breathless and his cheeks were red from the wind. He looked alarmed at Lisa’s request, which she made from the imperturbable depths of the sofa.

‘I’ve only just got in,’ he said.

‘You’ve got your coat on,’ Lisa observed.

‘Do I have to?’

‘She’ll be really pleased,’ said Lisa flatly.

‘I’ll come with you,’ I said.

‘It’s only down the road,’ they both replied, whether by way of encouragement or the reverse it was unclear.

I picked up Hamish from where he sat in front of the television. He was like someone in a trance. His legs remained neatly crossed in front of him as he rose through the air.

‘How was your mum?’ Lisa said.

‘A little frayed,’ said Adam. ‘She’d drawn her eyebrows all wrong. One of them went up and the other one went down. The effect was —’

‘Oh, leave the poor woman alone!’ cried Lisa unexpectedly. ‘The thing is, Adam,’ she enlarged, after a pause, ‘she’s probably worried sick about your dad. She probably hasn’t got the time to think about herself.’

She put her finger on her chin and looked at him interestedly, as though by this Socratic pose hoping to draw him into a counter-debate.

‘She kept talking about money,’ said Adam. ‘On and on. Something about her allowance.’

‘You make her sound like a senile old lady!’ shrieked Lisa. ‘Go on, what did she actually say?’

‘I’ll tell you when I get back.’

‘What did she say?’

Adam lowered his voice.

‘She said dad and Vivian had stopped her allowance.’

Lisa’s blue eyes went very wide at this admission.

‘Christ on a stick,’ she said. ‘What do you make of that?’

‘It’s the first I’ve heard of any allowance. Dad never told me he still gave her money. I didn’t know what she was talking about.’

‘What d’you mean you didn’t know what she was talking about? How do you think she lives if your dad doesn’t pay her alimony?’ She pronounced it to rhyme with ‘pony’. ‘It’s her entitlement. After all,’ said Lisa significantly, ‘she’s the original wife.’

‘I never noticed you getting any alimony.’

‘Don’t start on all that,’ said Lisa.

‘They’ve been divorced for twenty-three years.’

Out in the hall I bent down and fastened the buttons of Hamish’s coat. We opened the door and went and stood outside on the gravel drive.

‘— bloody life sentence,’ said Adam.

‘How can you say that about your own mother?’ I heard Lisa say.

Presently Adam came out to join us. We set off down the cul-de-sac. I felt again the strange candour of the saturating grey light. I was aware of the grain of the beige mortar in the new brick walls, the spongy black surface of the road, the toothpick legs of the little brown birds that landed weightlessly on car bonnets and fences and then lit off again. A bit of twig detached itself from a bare branch somewhere near by and whirled slowly to the ground in front of us, and the world seemed paused for the moments of its spinning descent. I watched it make contact with the grey slab of the pavement.

All around us women were emerging from the front doors of houses. One of them greeted Adam and fell into step beside us.

‘How are you?’ said Adam, in a way that suggested he had forgotten her name.

‘Not too bad,’ she said. She had a large mouth that turned down at the corners when she smiled, so that she looked as though she were about to make irreverent commentary on her own pleasantries. ‘Yourself? We don’t usually see you around at this time of day. Doing the school run.’

‘Oh, fine. We’re fine. We’re lambing up at my father’s farm this week.’

‘Really?’ She gave the ironic smile again. Her plump lips were slathered in a grainy, bubble gum-pink lipstick. ‘That must be fun.’

I wasn’t sure whether she meant it was fun or not fun at all. I wondered if she knew. Several women were now moving with us along the pavement, singly or in groups of two or three. They appeared peculiarly burdened: with their bags and coats and pushchairs they had the processive bulk of a column of refugees. Their hair was whipped to and fro by the wind. I saw the short hair of one woman, dyed red, riven into furrows of colour like the pelt of an animal. Most of them had children with them and they were padded too — they staggered behind like small astronauts or stared out of their pushchairs paralysed by zip-up suits that made their arms and legs stick out stiffly. The woman beside us wore a tight, padded coat. It made a creaking sound when her arms swayed back and forth.

‘Chris is off work too,’ she said. ‘Sick leave.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Adam.

She laughed out of her pink, downturned mouth.

‘He’s feeling very sorry for himself,’ she said. ‘He had the snip on Monday.’

She made a scissors motion with her fingers. A cold feeling suffused the back of my neck.

‘Oh, right,’ said Adam uneasily.

We were approaching the school. The mothers were congregating in the grey playground, each arrival being integrated into the mass so that it had the appearance of an avid, fast-growing organism seething with noise and movement.

‘He’s taken the whole week off,’ she continued, ‘to convalesce. Typical male behaviour. I told him he should try having a ba—’

Her attention left us like a scrap of paper whipped up in a sudden wind. She was waving frantically. The coat creaked faster.

‘Hi! Hi!’ she called, her head periscoping on her neck.

‘How’s Chris?’ someone shouted.

‘Furious!’ yelled the woman, to whoops of female laughter.

In the classrooms that bordered the playground the children were pressing their small, indistinct faces to the window.

‘There she is,’ said Adam. ‘I’ll go in. You wait here.’

Hamish and I ambled around the playground in the mêlée, amidst the calling mothers and the screaming, running children, who appeared to be either fleeing an event or ecstatically approaching one, it was unclear which.

‘You’re going to school soon,’ I said to Hamish, who did not reply.

Adam came out holding the hand of a small girl who was crying hysterically. I saw him say something to her and point towards Hamish and me, at which sight her desolate mouth opened wider and tears ran in sheets down her face.

‘Sorry about this,’ he called. ‘I think she was expecting Lisa.’

‘I want my mummy!’ the girl shrieked. ‘I want my mummy!’

‘All right, Janie,’ said Adam.

‘Where is she? I want my mummy!’

‘You can have her in just a minute.’

‘I want her now!’

‘Janie,’ said Adam, ‘you’re embarrassing me. Please. What’s Hamish going to think?’

Janie’s crying rose a key.

‘Let’s just get your coat on,’ Adam persisted. ‘It’s cold. You need to wear your coat.’

Janie was permitted to work herself into a sort of fit over the coat, lying down on the playground and kicking her legs and turning her head from side to side so that long, wet strands of her fair hair were webbed across her face.

‘You’re going to get hurt,’ puffed Adam, bent over her with his hands gripping the tops of her arms. ‘I’m going to hurt you if you don’t let me put your coat on.’

This statement of intent had the effect both of incensing Janie and of bringing about, at the heart of her tantrum, a form of submission. Somehow Adam got her coat on and then we were walking back up the road. Several of the women looked at us as we passed. They appeared to disapprove of us.

‘You’d think it would be easy, but it’s not,’ Adam said, when Janie was walking ahead. ‘It’s not like it is with your own child. You get all the responsibility and none of the pleasure. Lisa says I try to control her too much.’

‘I want my mummy!’ bellowed Janie, activated by the mention of her mother’s name.

‘The problem is, if you can’t be in control, what are you left with? You’re left with being a saint. You become a sort of victim in your own life. Every time I look at her,’ he added in a low voice, ‘I see her father. I can’t help it. I see his face looking out of hers. I feel like I’m living with a rival.’ After a while, he added: ‘The baby’s been really good. It’s helped us all to feel we’re more of a family.’

When we got back to the house Janie stepped over the baby in order to get out into the manicured back garden, where she spent the rest of the afternoon jumping over a broomstick she had laid horizontally across two chairs, her ponytail bobbing, tapping her own flank with a little riding crop each time she made the approach. I took Hamish down to the harbour to look at the boats. The tide was out and so they lay on their sides in the mud. Their naked, round underbellies dried helplessly in the wind. Rope and rigging and faded orange buoys clung to their sleeping forms. There was a little stone pier and I sat there on a bench while Hamish played with some green fisherman’s nets that were lying tangled against a wall. Because the tide was out there was no water around the pier either, just a vacant drop on all sides. The wind blew relentlessly. Presently Adam appeared on the esplanade. He waved his arm, clutching his coat around himself. As he came up the pier the wind blew his clothes flat against his body and I noticed how broad and formless he had become, as though he had grown rings around himself, like a vegetable left too long in the ground. His coat was square and brown and padded. His fair hair stood sideways in the wind. He looked like a less fortunate relation of the Adam I had first known. He sat down beside me on the bench.

‘Lisa’s back at the house. She’s made some food for Hamish.’

‘That’s nice of her,’ I said.

‘She’s a rock,’ Adam stated, into the wind. After a while he said: ‘Do you mind if we stop at mum’s on the way back? I want to see if she wants a lift to the hospital. It’s visiting time at six. There’s no point in all of us going separately.’

‘Not at all.’

‘I can’t get hold of Vivian. She must have set off on her own.’

We walked back up the pier and into the middle of Doniford. The shops were all closed. Most of them were charity shops: as we passed their darkened windows I could see the shapes of old furniture and shelves indistinctly cluttered with bric-à-brac, and ghostly racks of clothes, all in deep tents of shadow like little museums of abandonment. We turned down an alleyway and then emerged on the seafront again, where a terrace of grand Regency houses looked out over the brown, drained harbour. Adam stopped at one of these houses and banged the brass knocker. I noticed in the window a little poster facing out on to the street, fixed to the glass. It said ‘57 % Say No!’

‘No to what?’ I said.

‘What’s that?’

I pointed at the poster.

‘Fifty-seven per cent say no to what?’

The door opened. A man stood there.

‘Well, well,’ he said.

It was Adam’s uncle David. He was wearing a plum-coloured silk robe tied around the waist with a shirt and tie and trousers on underneath.

‘We won’t keep you,’ Adam said. ‘I just wanted a word with mum.’

David arched an eyebrow. Behind him I could see a very elegant hallway, whose most striking characteristic was that everything in it was white. The walls were white and the floor was tiled with white marble and a white chandelier hung overhead. There was a little antique bureau and chair, also white, on top of which stood a bowl of white roses.

‘Actually, she’s flown the coop,’ he said, standing back to allow us in. ‘Some guru she knows about is talking at the town hall in Taunton. The five pliers of something, what was it, there’s a leaflet about it somewhere — did I say pliers? I meant pillars. Five of them. Something to do with a quest for enlightenment. Self-esteem and whatnot. She’s gone with all her friends. No doubt there will also be a quest for refreshments afterwards.’

He led us through the hall into a large room where, again, everything was strikingly white, the sofas, the carpets, the curtains, the tables and chairs. There was a bowl of white stones in the fireplace.

‘What an extraordinary house,’ I couldn’t stop myself from remarking.

‘You not been here before?’ said David. ‘Yes, well, it’s not everyone’s thing. A friend of mine says it’s like being inside a marshmallow. It’s the same upstairs, you know. Audrey did it all herself. She says she likes it because it doesn’t remind her of Egypt — take that how you will. It isn’t a house for children,’ he added, glancing at Hamish. ‘At least, that was the idea. Audrey rather blanked out thoughts of the next generation. She’s got away with it so far but she can’t keep them out for ever. I think we’ll be fine so long as nobody calls her “granny”.’

‘I thought she might want to see dad,’ Adam said.

‘What? Well, you’ll have to thrash that out with her. I try to keep out of her plans. I’ve got work of my own to do. I’m writing a book,’ he said, to me. ‘It’s fascinating stuff, but you really have to pull up the drawbridge, if you take my meaning, otherwise it never gets done. Audrey and I are ships in the night. Marvellous phrase, that, isn’t it? I wonder who came up with that. Some scribbler who couldn’t pay the gas bill no doubt.’

I was standing by the white-painted mantelpiece, where white-framed photographs stood in a line. I looked at the photographs in turn, all of which, I presently realised, depicted Audrey. In most of them she was laughing. In one of them she was lying on a bed shrouded in white lengths of gauze.

‘Do you think she might have gone to the hospital on the way?’

‘No idea,’ said David delightedly. He tapped the side of his head. ‘Not a clue! Have we met before?’ he asked me.

‘A long time ago.’

‘Thought so. It was the beard that foxed me. I never forget a face. You were one of Adam’s university chums. Chemistry, wasn’t it?’

‘History.’

‘That’s it! I’m an historian myself, you know.’

‘I remember.’

Hamish had squatted down beside the fireplace and was removing the white stones from their bowl and placing them on the carpet.

‘Call him off, will you?’ said David, with a tormented look in his eyes. ‘Only Audrey’s such a stickler — I’ll get into all sorts of trouble.’

‘Sorry,’ I said. I detached the stones from Hamish’s warm hands and replaced them in the bowl.

‘To resume,’ said David. ‘I’m doing a little work into family trees at the moment, absolutely gripping stuff, you can imagine, Doniford having once been an active port. We’ve got all sorts here, Jews, Slavs, Albanians who jumped ship, half the East End of London. I’m trying to make a link between racial ancestry and violent crime, of which Doniford has a particularly high incidence. It’s amazing what I’ve uncovered — you could almost spot the villains at birth! The Hanburys have a Latvian link,’ he said, in my ear. ‘Real slashers and burners. Have you boys got time for a drink?’

‘Afraid not,’ Adam said.

‘That’s a pity. While the cat’s away and all that.’

He followed us back out into the white hall. A white-carpeted staircase swept up one side of it. I noticed that a chain of little lights had been woven all the way up through the wooden railings. They reminded me of the lights that guide aircraft on and off the tarmac.

‘Tell mum I’m going again tomorrow if she wants a lift.’

‘Best to tell her yourself,’ said David. ‘Saves wires getting crossed.’

His passivity grated on me: I had the sense of it as the casing for a parasitical nature. I remembered how David had formed an incidental part of the pleasing picture of eccentricity I had taken away with me from Egypt Hill all those years before: now I discerned something hard and unyielding in him that struck me as being more central to this world than I had thought, though not more instrumental. He was like a deposit, a residue, by which the composition of the greater body could be read. I wondered what it said of the Hanburys that this should be their imprint; and of me that I had failed to take the measure of it.

‘I saw your pa myself today,’ David said.

‘I’m glad somebody did.’

‘Funny place he’s in — it’s like a hotel. The old boy seemed quite put out by it all.’

‘It was his choice,’ Adam said. ‘He could have gone to a normal hospital.’

‘I left him some magazines — strictly educational, of course. I thought they’d do him good. He’s never paid enough attention to his grey matter, that’s part of the problem. You’ve got to, in a place like this,’ he said, to me. ‘There’s no theatre or art or music here. There was a bookshop, but they closed it down for lack of use. Sometimes I look at the people here and wonder what possible motivation they can have for staying alive.’

He opened the front door with its gleaming brass handle to let us out.

‘As far as cultural activities go,’ he said, peering out into the grey, windy evening, ‘we might as well be on the moon.’

*

At ten o’clock Adam and Lisa went to bed, making their apologies as they backed towards the stairs, like a pair of sheepish politicians sent to the scene of a tragedy; that tragedy being, I supposed, that we had all got older. I phoned Rebecca, as it seemed she was not going to phone me. When she picked up the telephone she was laughing.

‘Hello?’ she said presently, in a garrulous voice.

The man who had been laughing with her continued to laugh.

‘It’s me. Is that Marco with you?’

Marco laughed a lot, excessively in fact, particularly where the world struck you as least funny. I realised it sounded as though I considered her brother to be the only suitable, indeed the only possible, male for Rebecca to be entertaining at home, late in the evening, in my absence.

‘No,’ she said. Her voice was stranded somewhere between coldness and levity. ‘No, it’s Niven actually.’

I had a sudden pain in my stomach, which sheared off into a feeling of indifference.

‘We’re just going through the layout for his show,’ Rebecca continued. ‘You know, the Art in Nature show we’re doing in the summer. We’ve had this fantastic idea of arranging the canvases to make a sort of walk, a country walk.’

‘A ramble,’ interposed Niven boomingly in the background.

‘Sorry, a ramble. We could do it with partitions and — and —’ For some reason the mention of partitions caused Rebecca to succumb once more to hilarity. ‘We had this brilliant idea,’ she presently resumed, more soberly, ‘of covering the floor of the gallery with leaves.’

‘Don’t forget the sheep,’ boomed Niven.

‘Niven wants sheep,’ Rebecca relayed to me. ‘Just one or two, sort of — wandering around …’

A gale of laughter blew tinnily down the receiver.

‘Hamish is having a nice time,’ I said, enunciating clearly through the noise.

‘Is he?’ laughed Rebecca. ‘That’s great news. No, really, Michael,’ she said, her voice descending the ladder of mirth, ‘that’s great. I’m really, really pleased.’

In the warm, airless spare room I lay on the bed in the dark. I stared at the side wall of the house opposite. There were no windows in that wall. On the floor beside me Hamish rolled around in his sleeping bag. Every time he moved the sleeping bag made a dry, rustling noise. The noise was like something emanating from his sleep, from his unconsciousness. It was like the constant expression of a need. I lay listening to it for the rest of the night until Adam came in to wake me at four and we went up in the dark to the farm.