In the Fold

SIX

Lisa said:

‘I don’t have a really good relationship with Caris.’

‘Don’t you?’ I said.

‘I’ll be honest with you, I don’t actually like her. She’s the only one of the family I don’t actually like.’

We were in the Spar while this admission was being made. Lisa had Isobel and I had Hamish. We were like members of some particularly burdened species that favoured talk and inaction. Lisa went very slowly down the aisles and chose things as though the choosing of them, rather than the putative cooking and consumption, were the point.

‘Hamish,’ she said, ‘do you like these Potato Faces thingies?’

‘No,’ said Hamish.

‘I think that means yes, don’t you?’ she said, to me. She hurled the frozen bag into the cart with a thud.

We stood in the cold parabola of the freezer section while Lisa looked everything over. The Spar hadn’t changed much since I had searched it for Caris’s cassis all those years before, except in the unnerving particular that I was certain its aisles once ran along its length rather than across its width as they did now.

‘The thing about Caris,’ said Lisa in her ‘discreet’ voice, putting her head very close to mine and her mouth beside my ear, ‘is that she’s stuck in the past.’

She said it to rhyme with ‘gassed’.

‘She’s full of bitterness and resentment about the things that happened and yet she can’t stop herself idealising it, you know, her family and how it all was. And so when she comes down here she feels this contradictory set of emotions. I haven’t met her very many times, actually,’ said Lisa. ‘She hardly ever comes here, I think for the reasons I say. She and Adam aren’t very close.’

We arrived at fruit and vegetables, where Lisa picked up a large shiny pepper that looked as though it were made out of plastic.

‘Which do you prefer,’ she said, turning it in her hand to get a good look at it, ‘red peppers or green? I used to hate the green ones but now I quite like them. Do you ever find that happens to you?’

I felt that I was as far as I could be from actually eating the pepper, without having to grow it first. It seemed to me that Lisa should choose something a little more advanced in its evolution towards the plate.

‘Rebecca was a vegetarian,’ I said, ‘and then one day I found her eating a packet of salami. She ate the whole packet. I did find it very disturbing seeing her eat it.’

‘Why?’ said Lisa, amazed. She stopped turning the pepper. I realised that I had caused us to grind to a complete halt.

I said, ‘It was slightly frightening, that’s all. It seemed very bloody. I think I must have respected her more than I realised.’

‘You haven’t told me about your wife,’ said Lisa. ‘What’s she like?’

‘I don’t think I can describe her,’ I said, after a pause.

Lisa laughed. ‘You must know what she’s like,’ she said.

I looked at the bank of fruit and vegetables, where bananas lay with bananas and tomatoes with tomatoes, neat forests of broccoli and apples in straight lines, all even-coloured, all unblemished, and which Lisa stood beside as though she had created it for me herself, as a model of categorisation. It struck me that I did not find her bent for simplification actually irritating. The reason for this was that I believed she did it on purpose — that she had settled on it as the best way of presenting herself under the circumstances. I didn’t think, either, that it had arisen out of a need to distinguish herself from the Hanburys, or even as a sort of criticism of them. I guessed that Adam had found her literal-mindedness attractive, and that one way or another it had become her means of survival. The problem was that she was stuck with it, while still having to get her pleasure and satisfaction from somewhere.

‘What’s anybody like?’ I said.

Lisa immediately looked crestfallen. I didn’t mean to be cruel, exactly, but I didn’t see that it was my responsibility to humour her either.

‘I only meant,’ she said, ‘that you must know her better than anybody else. You said, for example, that you respected her more than you realised. What did you mean by that exactly?’

I was conscious of the Spar’s strip lighting overhead, which rained nakedly down from the synthetic panelled ceiling.

‘That I sometimes failed to see the value of the things Rebecca believed in.’

‘Are you a vegetarian?’ said Lisa.

‘No.’

‘But you wanted her to be one, is that what you’re saying?’

Lisa seemed prepared to find this idea amusing. I saw her beginning to take pleasure in what she considered to be my quirks, as a child might begin to discern in an object the possibility of play. Rebecca had consumed the salami standing beside the sink in our kitchen. Watching the meat fold itself into her pale pink mouth I had felt revolted. Yet in the past her refusal to eat meat had irritated me, not only because I regarded it as an affectation but because it galled me to see her impose a discipline on herself that profited nobody. If she wanted reforms, I had numerous suggestions for them. In fact, I had come vaguely to feel that she abstained in order to spite me, which made my sense of her betrayal, almost of her infidelity, as she stood there at the sink, seem so sad and self-defeating that I was unable to speak to her about what she had done.

‘Not really,’ I said.

‘My sister’s a vegetarian. She says she can smell the meat on people now. She says sometimes it really turns her stomach. Hamish, will you get us some of those Hula Hoops? I know we shouldn’t eat them but I can’t help it. The ones in the orange packet, that’s it.’

Lisa took out her purse, which was large and creased, and stuffed with cards and banknotes and receipts. She withdrew a piece of paper on which she had written a shopping list and went through the items, murmuring aloud. She wore sunglasses pushed back on her head and sandals, although outside the Spar the street was grey and turbulent and people walked past the big windows as though they were moving through water, with their heads bowed and their clothes pressed in wrinkles against their bodies. In her chair the baby began to make a plaintive sound. Little ropes of saliva were running over the ledge of her lower lip and paying wetly down the front of her coat. Without taking her eyes from the list, Lisa pulled a dummy out of her pocket and plugged it into the baby’s mouth. I experienced a feeling of surrender to her methods and to her sense of time, which ran along like a slow train making no stops at which you might be permitted to disembark. While I had come to Doniford with the undefined expectation of surrendering to something, it was certainly not to this. It was as though I had arrived carrying some unwieldy, burdensome object — a standard lamp, say — of which I had confidently hoped somehow to discharge myself; and finding, to my vexation and surprise, that there was nowhere to put it, nowhere to leave it in safe keeping, I had become used to just lugging it around with me. Everywhere I went I had the sense of myself carrying around the standard lamp, setting it down beside me to eat or speak to people, who were of course too polite to mention that it was there. What I had expected to surrender to, I suppose, was the state of dispossession, but it appeared that it was no longer permissible to be unencumbered, to be free. At my age you had to belong somewhere, even if it was on Lisa’s train. I had noticed that she was reluctant to leave me in the house alone, as though this were inappropriate, even scandalous.

‘To get back to Caris,’ she said, ‘I think she’s very distrustful of other women. Sometimes I think she doesn’t actually want to be a woman. I think that’s why she doesn’t have children. Also,’ she said, ‘I think she’s got a real father complex. Paul’s quite a manly man. He likes men to be men and women to be women — he’s quite vulgar in a way, actually. But then you realise that in fact he’s very principled. He’s not like most people; he’s not at all interested in money. Adam says he could get hundreds of thousands for his barns and for some of his land around Doniford, where the council are letting you build. He’s not like that at all, though. He sits on the planning committee and tries to get everything overturned. Adam says he’s made a lot of enemies in the town. Caris wants Egypt,’ she said, putting her mouth next to my ear, ‘but Adam’ll get it because he’s the son.’

‘Surely he’d leave it to all of them,’ I said.

‘Oh no,’ she replied, ‘not Paul. He’s too canny for that. He knows they’d fight over it. Anyway, they couldn’t all live there. They’d have to sell, or buy each other out. He’s not above playing games, though,’ she said. ‘He likes to say he’s changing his will every now and then. He likes to get them all running around. I think it makes him feel powerful.’

‘Maybe he will change it one day.’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t think so,’ said Lisa. ‘It’s always gone to the eldest son, down three generations. You wouldn’t get away with that in my family, I’m telling you! We’re three girls and a boy, though. My dad wouldn’t dare. We’ve got a female advantage.’

Lisa was flinging things in plastic bags as the cashier slid them along. She spoke so carelessly that I didn’t entirely believe her.

‘As I say, it’s Caris that really wants it,’ she said. ‘Me and Adam aren’t really bothered one way or the other. It’s sad, isn’t it, the way things work out?’

‘Maybe you’ll give it to her,’ I said.

‘We can’t do that!’ shrieked Lisa jovially. ‘Anyway, we’re more likely to sell it and maybe give her a share of the proceeds. I can’t really see myself living up there, can you, miles from anywhere, with all those sheep and no proper driveway — I’d go crackers. Once,’ she said, lowering her voice, ‘Adam and I had to stay the night up there and we were woken up by this noise in our room, and do you know what it was? A bat! Don’t you think that’s disgusting? I can cope with wasps and even mice at a pinch — but bats!’

*

In the afternoon I tried to persuade Hamish to come with me again down to the harbour.

‘Hamish, shall we go and see the boats again?’

Hamish said something that sounded like ‘nofuck’.

‘Shall we go down to the harbour?’

‘Nofuck.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘No. Not not. No.’

‘We can look at the boats and find some nets,’ I said, wheedlingly.

Hamish was sitting cross-legged on the carpet in the sitting room. He kept turning his head away from me, like someone distracted at a party.

‘He’s all right if you want to leave him here,’ called Lisa from the kitchen. ‘There’s the Teletubbies about to come on.’

‘I’ll take you down on the rocks and we can find some seaweed and pebbles and things,’ I said. ‘Then we can make some pictures like the ones mummy used to make when she was little, and wait for the waves to come and wash them away.’

Rebecca had two ways of talking about the world of her childhood. One of them was as a place where everything was wrong. The other was as a place where everything was right.

‘Tick crot,’ said Hamish, turning his head away from me in a manner I was beginning to find infuriating. ‘Ya ya ya.’

I realised that it was one of the features of our unpredictable family life that Hamish generally chose not to be refractory. He had been stubborn only in his refusal to speak, which now that I thought about it was almost the only area of his existence that fell entirely within his control.

‘Stop talking nonsense,’ I said crossly. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

I held out my hand but he disdained it like a duchess, with his nose in the air, so I grabbed his arm and tried to yank him to his feet. So solid was his resistance that he appeared willing to allow his arm to be torn from his body rather than move. He wanted no part of my scheme, to leave this warm room and go out there in the grey day, with the cold, tea-coloured sea brimming at the harbour wall, and the cars and the boats and the people and the wind, all nagging like things heard in sleep, pricking the unconscious and dragging it into wakefulness. I, too, began to doubt that it would be entirely pleasant, and like a little blade my doubt nicked my anger and it all came running out, hot and bilious. I would go on my walk, I would! And Hamish would accompany me, if only for the reason that there was no one on earth except him whom I could compel to do anything! I tried to wrestle him to his feet and discovered that it was much more difficult than wrestling him off his feet. He kicked me and started batting at me with his hands. I picked up his squirming, vigorous body and started walking with it towards the door. He roared in my ear. I felt the hot, wet spurt of his tears on my cheek. Holding him I experienced, suddenly, a longing for the time when he was a baby and I used to walk him up and down the creaking floorboards at Nimrod Street, holding him upright just as I was now, with his hot face buried in my neck and shoulder. He, too, seemed to recall those uncomplicated interludes, for as I walked with him towards the door he ceased to struggle and his body adhered to mine, grasping me as though with tentacles of ferocious need. His face, though bigger than it was, still fitted in my neck and shoulder. In Lisa and Adam’s well-carpeted hall I walked him about while he sobbed. It seemed truly a pity to me that he’d had to get so big, and yet retain the naked ability to feel. In the end I had to go back into the sitting room and sit down with him plastered over my front, while Lisa tiptoed reverently around us. After a while I looked down and saw that he had passed silently into sleep. His big, beaky face lay abandoned an inch or two from mine. I looked for a while through the rectangular window at the motionless vista of the garden and then my gaze contracted to the beige walls, so that in the silence I was conscious of nothing but the hot body that lay on my chest; and my consciousness of it grew labyrinthine, interior, until I became lost in the red folds of physical proximity and wandered about, asleep, in the drama there.

When I awoke the room was dim and full of shadow, as though it were being stealthily colonised by the natural forces of neglect. A long slice of light showed around the edge of the kitchen door. Behind it I could hear voices. There was a smell of cooking and the clattering of pots and pans. I heard Adam say:

‘Don’t put the garlic in now. It’ll burn.’

Janie said, ‘I hate garlic. I won’t eat it if it’s got garlic.’

‘Shall I not put it in then?’ said Lisa.

‘Yes, in a minute.’

‘No!’ wailed Janie. ‘Don’t!’

‘Is there any point putting it in if she’s not going to eat it?’

‘She’s not the only pebble on the beach. You’re not the only pebble on the beach, young lady.’

‘But hon,’ said Lisa, ‘think about it, it’s only one tiny thing. You probably won’t even notice the difference.’

‘Neither will she then.’

Hamish stirred on my chest and sat up. There was something seismic in our parting, like the crusty parting of the surface of the earth when the underlying plates force themselves violently upwards.

‘Anyway, didn’t she eat earlier?’

‘No, I thought she could eat with us tonight.’

‘What are those green things? I don’t like those green things.’

‘You see?’

‘Those are peppers. They’re just peppers.’

Hamish looked around the shadowy room silently, as though trying to remember where he was.

‘— the spicy kind. The green kind. They’re there to make it look pretty.’

‘Once you let her get the idea that it’s up to her —’

‘I don’t like them.’

‘You’ve never tried them, Janie. Have you ever tried them?’

‘No, because I don’t like them.’

‘They don’t actually taste of anything,’ said Lisa.

There was a clattering sound.

‘— tell her that. Why are you telling her that?’

‘I’m just saying that they aren’t actually offensive.’

The room was filling with a blue, underwater light. It was like a reflection, a displacement: it seemed to have rolled in off the placid, darkening sea that lay out of sight nearby. Adam told me that the land these houses were built on had once lain under water. Hamish and I were sitting below sea level. The headlights of a passing car fled in a brilliant arc up the walls and across the ceiling, illuminating the empty pieces of furniture.

‘Look,’ said Lisa, ‘I’ll take the peppers out of yours, all right?’

‘That’s completely ridiculous.’

‘All right?’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake don’t start crying.’

Mewling sounds came from behind the closed door. Hamish turned his head towards it.

‘Oh, honey, what’s the matter?’

‘Nothing’s the matter,’ I heard Adam say.

‘What is it, sweetheart?’

‘I don’t like peppers!’ wailed Janie.

‘Look, she just said she was going to take yours out!’ said Adam. ‘It’s completely ridiculous.’

‘I don’t like them!’

‘Why don’t you just give her something else? What’s the point of wasting good food on her? It’s completely ridiculous.’

‘You’re repeating yourself.’

‘Your mother isn’t a slave, you know! She’s got better things to do than cook three separate meals every evening!’

‘People are allowed not to like things,’ said Lisa.

‘I don’t like peppers!’ wailed Janie.

‘I know you don’t. Mummy’ll take them out.’

‘But I want something else! I don’t want that — I want something else!’

Hamish got off my lap and set off into the gloom. Presently I saw his shape passing in front of the large window.

‘But you said!’ said Janie.

‘Nobody said.’

‘They did!’

‘No they didn’t!’

‘Look, it’s nothing. I’ll just do something else quickly. I’ll do some fish fingers. It won’t take a minute.’

‘You’re giving in to her.’

‘I had fish fingers for lunch.’

‘I’m not giving in! I just happen to think it’s cruel to force children to eat things that disgust them.’

‘We had fish fingers at school for lunch.’

‘Well, in that case she should eat earlier. She should eat with the baby. It isn’t disgusting, you know, just because you don’t like it. Adults don’t eat disgusting things. Why would I eat something if it was disgusting?’

‘You don’t like tomatoes. Nobody forces you to eat tomatoes, do they?’

‘I do like tomatoes.’

‘I hate tomatoes,’ said Janie.

Their voices seemed to agitate the surface of a torpor at whose bottom I lay, untouched, like some sunken object that had slipped out of the bounds of light and fallen far beneath the reach of a commotion now both meaningless and mysterious. I wondered where Rebecca was, and the thought of her paid out above me, winding and waving upwards through the blue light until I could see its end, far short of any grasp. If she came to look for me, I thought, she would never find me.

I heard Lisa say:

‘That’s a lie.’

‘What?’

‘I said that’s a lie. You’re lying. You don’t like tomatoes.’

Adam said: ‘I can’t believe you’d accuse me of lying.’

He appeared to wish to confer on this accusation more seriousness than the dislike of tomatoes alone could sustain.

‘I’m just stating the facts.’

‘There aren’t any facts. I know what I like and what I don’t like.’

‘When I don’t like something,’ said Janie, ‘I put it in my pocket.’

‘What, food? You put food in your pocket?’

‘I take it out later and throw it into the bin.’

‘You put it in your pocket?’

‘When I don’t like something I do. Like stew — it’s got all those bits in it.’

‘You put that in your pocket?’

Hamish bumped into the darkened television set. It rocked on its stand and he cried out in alarm as a cascade of videos fell to the floor. Immediately the kitchen door opened. Hamish stood as though naked in the new path of light, his face petrified.

‘Oops-a-daisy!’ cried Lisa, before I could speak.

She trod swiftly over the carpet and gathered Hamish into her arms, and without a glance in my direction she carried him into the kitchen.

*

At ten o’clock, as I did the night before, I phoned Rebecca before it could be established, definitively, that she was not going to phone me.

‘I just got in,’ she said. ‘I just walked through the door.’

This, at least, was ambiguous: she might have been accusing me of pestering her, or she might equally have been mentioning her absence as the excuse for not having called earlier. There was a third possibility, which was that she meant to convey both things, irritation and guilt, at once. I envisaged these three interpretations as a sort of diagram, like a drawing of the chambers of the heart. In such drawings there were always little arrows to clarify the direction of flow, in through the blue veins and out through the red. Then there was the heart itself, which in spite of its centrality to all those veins, in spite of the appearance it gave of turning bad blood to good, was remarkable only for the intricacy with which it maintained separation between them. In those neat little chambers the blue and the red dwelt side by side, not mingling but merely proximate. It was the closest possible arrangement, like marriage, for contradictory traffic.

I distinctly remembered that when Rebecca and I first began our relationship we were possessed by the need to maintain spotlessness in our dealings with one another. As soon as a smear or mark appeared we cleaned it up, and although it was usually clear which one of us had, by error or accident, put it there, there was no sequel of recrimination or blame, merely the mutual desire to reinstate order. We were like two people running their separate businesses out of shared premises. I don’t know precisely when this decorous era ended, but by a certain point our modest, hopeful square footage had been abandoned for a different, more sprawling joint enterprise. I remembered that when Hamish was a very small baby Rebecca became distraught with him one afternoon, actually angry, and I was surprised that after six weeks she thought she knew him well enough to carry on like that. It suggested to me that her good conduct at the same stage in our own relationship was the result of a great and uncharacteristic exercise of self-restraint, an exercise that could be considered somewhat fraudulent, given that as far as I knew it was repeated nowhere else in her history. Rick and Ali were always pleased to fill me in on the parts of that history that predated my arrival. It sometimes occurred to me that Rebecca had seen in me the possibility for reform, if not outright escape from herself; that she saw me as some new, prosperous, unhistoried country, like Australia, to which she could emigrate and forget her problems. She discussed those problems with me, which mainly had to do with her childhood and her family, and owing to my inability to solve them, or perhaps merely to hear and respond to them correctly I soon superseded them and became the problem myself; leaving her, I suppose, with strong but muddled feelings of what appeared to be homesickness for the original problems, compounded by the sense that in allying herself with me she had effected some sort of betrayal of the things she loved. The real problem, in the end, seemed to be that I wasn’t related to her. If I had been her cousin, or even some old family friend, she would not have suffered so from divided loyalties, nor found herself to be carrying the disease of my difference from her, my innate hostility to the organism that was her life. That was as close as I could come to solving the problem — or rather diagnosing it, for there was of course no actual cure for this particular difficulty.

‘Where have you been?’ I said. I said it with lively curiosity rather than accusatory grimness, but there was only so much camouflage the words themselves would accept.

‘At mum and dad’s,’ she replied, somewhat stonily. She didn’t say anything else. Again I had the sense of two unambiguous meanings combined to make a force of highly systematised confusion. This time it appeared to me as the coloured tubes of copper filament, one live, one neutral, that lie side by side in the white plastic vein of an electric flex. Either she had gone to her parents as a place of refuge from me; or she had gone there and been made unhappy by them. Or both: her refusal to elaborate left the question charged.

‘Did they give you something to eat?’ I said.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘They were just in a complete state.’

‘What about?’

There was a second of tinny silence.

‘Mum found a lump on her breast. Or rather, dad found it, as he kept telling everyone. I’m sure it’ll turn out to be nothing.’

‘When was this?’

There was another pause. I heard Rebecca take a drink of something and swallow.

‘This morning. They went down to the hospital and had some tests done on it.’

‘When will they get the results?’

‘I don’t know. A few days, I think. I’m sure it will be nothing.’

‘I’m really sorry,’ I said.

‘I’m sure it will be nothing,’ said Rebecca again. ‘Anyway, they’ve gone completely wild over it. They’ve really gone for the amateur dramatics. There’s no, you know, let’s wait and see what the test says. Dad won’t let her out of his sight — he even followed her to the toilet and stood there talking to her through the door. They sat there all evening holding hands as though mum had just been told she’d got a week to live. What’s really annoying,’ she continued, ‘is that dad’s already wanting to scale things down at the gallery so that he can look after her. He’s even saying he wants to cancel Niven’s show.’

‘That’s a shame,’ I said.

‘I told him, you know, wait until we’ve actually got a diagnosis before you start cancelling things! Whatever happened to, you know, positive visualisation?’

‘I’m sure it won’t come to that.’

‘Oh, they’re still in the dramatic phase, you know, big statements, big gestures, the whole roadshow. But that’s exactly when they can decide to make an example of someone. It’s right when they’re in the middle of an emotional trip that they suddenly need something to bite on, you know, just to show that they’re not all talk. What I hate,’ she continued, ‘is the fact that they think their world is more real than anyone else’s. I know we all think that in a way, but with them it’s all about other people. It’s in being witnessed that their life becomes real for them. Have you ever noticed,’ she said, ‘how they’re always losing friends and making new ones? Everywhere they go they find more people. You turn your back for a second and they’ve collared someone else and started telling them about their sex life. Then when they’ve done that they tell them about your sex life. Then eventually everyone gets into the habit of this frankness thing and they all start to behave badly, and then they fall out. People like that shouldn’t have children. All they want children for is so that they can have more material, more life, more things to talk about, more actors in their pathetic domestic drama —’

‘I think you’re being a little hard on them.’

‘It’s no wonder that none of us have had children of our own,’ said Rebecca. ‘We know what they’ll be made into — victims, food for the predators!’

‘Except you, of course,’ I said.

‘What’s that?’

‘You. You’ve had a child.’

Rebecca gave a strange little laugh.

‘I was thinking about something else,’ she said vaguely. ‘Anyway, they’re sort of down on Niven at the moment.’

‘Why?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, something to do with dad giving him money to get something for him and him not getting it and not giving dad the money back. It was grass, I bet. They make a big point of never mentioning drugs in front of me. They think it atones for something.’

I said nothing. I steadily extended my silence forwards like a hydraulic arm with which I intended to push Rebecca over the precipice of enquiry.

‘How are you, anyway?’ she finally said.

Now that she’d asked, I found that I didn’t want to tell her anything about myself. I found myself thinking about Ali’s lump, identifying with it almost, with the lump itself. Wrongly, I suppose, I attributed to it qualities of vulnerability that I felt myself in that moment to share. I realised presently that it was the prospect of its excision that caused me to feel this.

‘I miss you,’ said Rebecca.

Still I did not speak. A little surge of adrenalin caused my heart to thump. This did not signify excitement exactly, more a feeling of fear. I did not in that instant make a native connection between Rebecca’s missing me and the possibility of mercy or benevolence or love. It seemed, rather, to hint at the possibility of violence.

‘Though I think it’s good,’ she continued, ‘for us to be apart.’

‘Do you?’

‘Oh, absolutely,’ she said. ‘It was what you always used to say, that the loosest ties are the strongest.’

‘I never said that.’

‘You’ve always said,’ reiterated Rebecca, ‘that we should lead more separate lives. I can hear you saying it now.’

‘I didn’t mean that we shouldn’t see each other.’

‘Letting go has been the hardest thing for me.’

‘I never said anything about letting go! I only meant that we shouldn’t hold each other responsible for all our problems.’

‘I’ve been very angry with you, Michael, really angry, but I’ve adored you too. Never forget that. And you’re also the father of my child. You always will be.’

‘I only meant that there’s a limit to how much you can relate to another person. Beyond a certain point it just becomes chaos — chaos!’

I found that my skin had drawn very tight around the top of my head. This was an effect Rebecca could have on me.

‘You’re afraid of passion, Michael. You’re afraid of blood on the floor. But the thing is, I’ve always been a very passionate person and if you won’t allow me to express it then you know I’ll just turn on you. I’ll turn on you.’

In a way, I admired her for this kind of talk. Even when I’d listened, agonised, to her regaling that terrified boy with it in the pub, I felt too a sort of anarchic thrill at her lack of shame. To me, these fits of self-description were the closest she came to a creative act. It was herself she was creating, yet I felt sure that her state while she did it was not so distant from that which she yearned to attain, in which she would find herself enabled to make something that could actually stand apart from her.

‘All my life,’ she was saying now, ‘all my life I’ve been looking for something straight and fixed, something dependable, something I could pour myself into that would hold me.’

I guessed she was going to say that I was that thing.

‘And you were it, Michael. You were that vessel. You said to me, come on, I’ll hold you. I’ll contain you. I’ll give you routine and stability. I’ll give you a home, I’ll give you a baby if you want one. But don’t think that you can grow. Don’t think that you can move, or change. Because if you do I’ll crack. My nice strong walls can’t take pressure from the inside. I’ll crack and I’ll break and in the end I’ll shatter.’

‘You will?’ I said, confused.

‘You — you! I think maybe you needed to be broken. I think maybe that’s why you chose me.’

‘I thought you chose me. I thought I was the vessel and you were the —’

I couldn’t remember what she was. It had started out as some kind of fast-setting liquid, and ended up as an exuberant house plant.

‘You could have found some nice girl. Some nice, predictable girl.’

‘Why do you keep saying things like that?’ I shouted. ‘You’re the only thing that makes me predictable, because somebody has to be!’

‘You don’t know how hard it is for me,’ she said presently, in a trembling voice, ‘to stand on my own.’

‘I’m not asking you to stand on your own.’

‘You are. You just don’t see it yet.’

‘I think I’d see it if I were asking it.’

My mouth felt as though it were stuffed with something dry, like bread.

‘We’re married,’ I said finally. ‘Doesn’t that mean anything to you? For all their faults, at least your parents stay together.’

‘That isn’t a marriage,’ said Rebecca. ‘That’s a mutual dependency.’

‘Of course it seems like that to you! At least they touch each other!’ I said. It seemed I was shouting again. ‘You’d have to have a lump on your breast the size of a football for me to stand any chance of even noticing it!’

I went to bed and lay listening to the sound of Hamish rustling in his sleeping bag. I lay awake for so long in the airless, featureless spare room that I began to feel like something in a specimen case, being lightly tormented where I lay pinned behind glass by the sounds my son made, which summoned me constantly to awareness and to the state that precedes activity. I felt that if only I could hear or smell the sea this sensation would pass. I felt I could be comforted by the existence of something animate but impartial. In this place of fences such intrusions were apparently considered hazardous. It occurred to me that Doniford had succumbed to a sort of partitioning, a spoliation, out of its inability to adhere to its true nature. Like me, it had admitted ugliness because ugliness asked to be admitted.