In the Fold

SEVEN

‘Where are the women?’ Paul Hanbury wanted to know, when Adam, Hamish and I opened the door to his room. ‘Stand aside — let me see! Where are they? Where are my bloody women? Three days I’ve been in this bloody room and not one of them has come to see me!’

In its spacious sparseness and beige diffidence, the room was more like a room in a hotel than a hospital. Paul Hanbury lay on the grand, plinth-like bed at its centre. He wore a white smock and looked very small and tyrannical, like a child emperor. I would have recognised him by his voice alone, yet it was hard now to believe that it had emanated from him — it travelled around the room in great rings of sound that dwarfed his body. He had never been large, but lying in that bed he looked wizened — except for his head, which retained its distinctive scale and grandeur, and which he barely moved when he spoke, so that in spite of everything he had the poised appearance of a statesman, or an actor. His hair rolled back from his forehead in thick, steel-grey waves and his face had darkened and deepened into creases since the last time I saw him, especially around his eyes, which were small and black and glittered like buttons. He opened his large, well-shaped mouth wide in order to talk, revealing straight, strong, even yellow teeth and the resilient, plump pad of his tongue.

‘That’s not true, dad,’ said Adam. ‘Vivian came last night.’

‘She did not — not a soul has come since you showed your face here yesterday! And before that there was only that poseur David, who came with some bloody stupid periodical and wouldn’t sit down in case he creased his trousers, and apart from that there’s been nobody.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Adam.

‘Where’s it gone? It’s called the Wankers’ Review — or the Wallies’ Review. Where the hell is it? Ah yes, here we go — the Wolsey Review. “Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation”. I think that’s David’s idea of a joke. D’you see what they’ve done to my dong? They’ve gift-wrapped it, do you see?’ He folded back his covers to reveal part of a hooped wire contraption that stood in an ominous arch over his hips, and then drew them quickly up again before it could be established what was underneath. ‘And what else is there — “Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination”! I think I’ll save that for Vivian, if she ever comes.’

Beside me Hamish made his bell noise. It sounded particularly loud in the well-insulated room.

‘What’s that?’ said Paul amusedly, looking around. ‘School’s out?’

‘Vivian definitely said she was coming in last night,’ said Adam. ‘I don’t understand why she didn’t say something this morning.’

‘Michael! Come over here where I can see you.’ This was bellowed as though from a great distance, although I was standing six feet from the bed and the room was full of daylight. ‘Is this fellow yours?’

‘Yes.’

‘He’s a funny little bugger, isn’t he? What’s his name?’

‘Hamish.’

‘Put him up on the bed, will you? Put him here, next to me, if he’ll come. Has he got a mother?’

‘Rebecca. My wife.’

‘Well, I hope he doesn’t get his looks from her. How does life treat you, Michael? With its gloves off, judging by the bags under your eyes.’

‘I’m very well.’

‘If you say so. Where are you living? Have you got some nice place in the country where your boy can stretch his legs?’

‘We live in Bath.’

‘Ah, Bath. I always liked the idea of Bath. The reality never quite lived up to it, though. I’d take the women there and you wouldn’t see them for dust. They’d be off and into the shops like rats up a drainpipe. And how do you earn your crust in Bath?’

‘I work for a charity.’

‘Of course you do. Paying your debt to society — I’m glad somebody is! And you’re taking some leave — or rather, you’re down here for a week’s babysitting while the missus exercises her feminist imagination. I wouldn’t leave a woman alone in Bath for a day, let alone a week, but I suppose she’s acclimatised. Or is she the enigmatic type as well?’

Hamish seemed happy enough sitting on the plush bed, but I was worried that he might knock the wire hoop. It would be very painful, I imagined, if he did. I furtively grasped the back of Hamish’s shirt.

‘Caris is here,’ said Adam.

‘Not as far as I can see she bloody well isn’t,’ said Paul.

‘She came down yesterday on the train.’

‘Well, don’t leave her alone in the house. She’ll have packed everything up and sent it to the Donkey Sanctuary or the IRA or whoever the hell else she’s feeling sorry for this week. Have you seen Caris?’ he asked me.

‘Yes.’

‘Nuts, isn’t she?’ he said delightedly. ‘She’s getting fat, too. Her mother never got fat, but then she never had to. All she had to do was sit on her little arse in Doniford reading magazines and drinking diet milkshakes until they came out of her ears. But Caris won’t have anything to do with all that — her mother shoved it down her throat and now she won’t have anything to do with it. And more’s the pity,’ he continued, settling back into his pillows, ‘because she was a good-looking girl, a fine-looking girl. Her mother competed with her, that was the problem. She could be very cold. Caris got the idea that it didn’t do to be so pretty. Of course, she’ll tell you it’s all my fault,’ he concluded cheerfully, with his arms folded behind his head. ‘Women stick together in the end — ask Mary Wollstonecraft.’

‘I’ve been up at the farm with Adam,’ I said, by way of a diversion.

‘Oh you have, have you?’ He looked slightly discomfited, as though I had revealed myself to be untrustworthy. ‘What are you doing up there?’

‘We’re lambing, dad,’ said Adam, loudly.

‘All right, all right,’ said Paul irritably, flapping his hand. ‘I’m not some old fart in a home — I just didn’t know what he meant, that’s all. So you’ve been up at Egypt, have you? What do you think of the place? Marvellous, isn’t it? I always say that as the rest of the world gets worse, Egypt gets better. The principal of entropy does not apply. You’ve no idea, the torture it is to me to be in here, with spring coming on to the hill and everything waking up. I tell you, I can hear the grass growing! I only hope this isn’t what death is like, you know, an empty box and a view of the car park. I should have gone to a normal hospital,’ he said petulantly. ‘I’d have been far happier on a ward, with a fat black lady taking my temperature.’

‘You didn’t want to go on a ward!’ protested Adam. ‘You wanted to come here.’

‘Thought I’d never come out of one of those places alive, didn’t I?’ muttered Paul. ‘Now I don’t know which is worse, dying with the riffraff or living alone in this hell. Besides, I thought the nurses would be better looking. The nurses are absolute dogs,’ he said, to me. ‘They send them to me specially. I’m not allowed to be stimulated.’

I made to remove Hamish from the bed but Paul shot out a hand from behind his head and gripped his arm with it.

‘Oh, leave him be,’ he said. ‘I like the feel of a warm boy next to me.’ He cackled delightedly at himself.

‘I don’t want him to hurt you.’

‘You mean you don’t want him hearing my filth — are you another of these protective parents? None of them will let me lay a hand on their babies, you know. I think Laura hoses hers down with antiseptic after they’ve been at Egypt. As for the new one, I have to request audiences with her, like Vivian did with the Pope. And she’s a Hanbury — my own flesh and blood!’

‘I didn’t know Vivian had seen the Pope,’ said Adam, from the bathroom, where he had gone to fill his father’s water jug.

‘That’s because she hasn’t,’ called Paul. ‘He wouldn’t have her. The Pontiff turned her down.’

Adam laughed. ‘Did he?’

‘He took the view,’ said Paul, ‘that dissolving Vivian’s marriage would be like dissolving a set of functioning molars. I think he’s a very sensible chap. You can’t go saying a marriage didn’t happen when there are two strapping children to show that it did. So he stood her up. She went all the way to Rome and he stood her up. At least, that’s where she said she was. She could have been anywhere. She was probably getting pissed on sangria with that hippy friend of hers and her dago shopkeeper husband. Now that I come to think of it, she did come back with her tan. Do you know Vivian’s tan?’ he asked me. ‘It’s very amusing. She looks like she’s been embalmed in salad dressing.’

‘Dad, do you want me to turn up the pump?’ said Adam. ‘The dial’s set lower than it was yesterday.’

‘The funny thing,’ said Paul, to me, ‘is that after His Holiness rebuffed her she kept going back for punishment. To Mass.’ He pronounced it to rhyme with ‘arse.’ ‘And because she’d had the gumption finally to leave her miserable drunk husband she wasn’t allowed to take the holy Host. She was considered to be excommunicated. For some reason she didn’t know she was, though. One day she was standing in the queue and when she got to the priest and stuck her tongue out he wouldn’t give it to her. He popped his wafer right back in the bowl and put his hand over it, as though she might steal one! Some interfering old bitch had told him that Vivian was excommunicado. So after that she went along and sat at the back and when everyone else got up to join the queue she stayed where she was and pretended to read the hymn-book. I said to her, how can you bloody let them do that to you! How can you let them win, do you see? I’ll bet they loved seeing her sitting there all contrite, while they were busy rogering the altar-boys — leave that bloody thing alone!’ he said to Adam, who was scrutinising a plastic valve from which a pale tube led to the hard delta of veins in Paul Hanbury’s brown, hairy wrist.

‘It’s just that it seems very low.’

‘I don’t want that bloody stuff in my veins!’

‘Dad,’ said Adam heavily, ‘all you’re doing is subjecting your body to unnecessary pain.’

‘I wouldn’t walk around with a blindfold on either.’

‘There’s nothing vital about pain.’

‘What do you mean! How will I know what’s happened to me if I don’t feel it? Answer me that! That’s how you walk over a cliff in life! You can’t go around numbing yourself and sedating yourself against half the things that happen to you and expect to get any sensation from the other half — that’s what it means, to do things by halves! Do you know,’ he said, to me, ‘I’ve been going to the dentist in Doniford all my life and I’ve never had an anaesthetic. While this big fellow —’ he pointed to Adam ‘— has to be unconscious before he’ll let them so much as clean between his teeth.’

‘I think you’ll find, dad, that most people have an anaesthetic when they go to the dentist.’

‘What do I care what most people do? Most people live lives of such surpassing inanity I don’t know why they bother! Most people want to sit in their little red-brick boxes on their little estates watching television, or drive around going nowhere in their cars, or stuff their faces with junk, or go shopping — and I’m not saying that’s any worse than what people have always wanted to do. The difference is that now they’ve got everything laid on for them. The world’s been wrecked, laying on their houses and their cars and their cheap holidays and their cheap food — and a hundred years ago, most of them would have been pushing a plough with not a thought in their heads, and be none the worse off for it!’

Through the great pale window the distant skeletons of trees were faintly picked out against a wad of sky. The hospital was half an hour’s drive from Doniford, I didn’t know exactly where, just that we had driven directly away from the coast and the green hills and become gradually mired in a flat, grey, nondescript landscape cluttered with buildings and petrol stations, and street lamps with nothing human to light, and warehouses behind wire fences. This clutter was not, it appeared, to amount to anything so definite as a town: like a tundra, its formlessness was its single geographical feature. The hospital was a low red-brick building that stood like an island in the sea of its car park. Inside, in the foyer, it blazed with light and with wood-veneered surfaces. The foyer was carpeted, as was the lift. The woman at the reception desk wore a tailored black suit and high heels and the nurses wore vague white uniforms, so that the whole place had an atmosphere of discretion that bordered on secrecy, as though the question of sickness were inadmissible; as though, were a drama ever to unfold here, it would manifest itself in the spectacle not of disease but of celebration of life itself.

‘We were at mum’s yesterday,’ said Adam.

Paul assumed a peevish expression. ‘Yes, David says she’s got the hump about something. I suppose I’ve said something I shouldn’t have, have I? Is that it?’

‘She’d better tell you about it herself,’ said Adam.

‘The first Mrs Hanbury,’ said Paul, to me, ‘is a very sensitive creature where her own thin skin is concerned. She’s like the princess who can feel the pea through twenty mattresses — I believe she considers it to be the mark of good breeding. She’s what they call “high maintenance”. So’s the second, now that I come to think of it, though in a different way. The second gets the blues. Vivian’s blues are like those fogs you get in Scotland that last for two weeks. They sort of envelop you and quietly soak you to the skin.’

‘I don’t understand why Vivian didn’t come in,’ said Adam, for the third or fourth time. He was still holding the plastic valve in his hand. He had something of the butler about him, the castrated quality of a male given over to a life of service. He seemed to me just then to be completely without what I could only describe as poetry, or heroism; to lack, in any case, the promise or the threat of unpredictability.

‘I tell you, she’s got the blues. The first Mrs Hanbury’s got the hump and the second’s got the blues. What’s your woman like, Michael? Is she cheerful? I hope for your sake that she is.’

‘Sometimes she is.’

‘What does she make of that fur on your face? Does she like it?’

‘She doesn’t mind it,’ I said, although the truth was that Rebecca’s attitude to my beard was entirely ambivalent, and for that reason I maintained it, partly as a sort of doorstop to prevent our relationship swinging shut. For some reason, I felt that as long as I kept this semicircle of dark hair on my face I could never be said to have succumbed: I could not be negated, by love nor by hate.

‘Only doesn’t mind?’ he said. ‘I’d have thought she’d be one way or the other, if the women I know are anything to go by. The women I know like to take a definite position. As a military tactic it doesn’t work, that’s what I’m always telling them. If you take a position you’re open to attack. You’re better off keeping on the move. I always wondered whether women liked a beard,’ he said, consideringly. ‘But I could never get mine to grow. Does it increase sensation? Does she tell you that?’

I smiled in what I hoped was a mysterious fashion.

‘Oh, I see. That’s how it is. That’s how it is, is it?’ Paul looked around the featureless room impatiently. ‘Well, someone’s got to humour a sick old man — where’s Lisa? Why hasn’t she been in to see me?’

‘She doesn’t want to bring Isobel into the hospital,’ said Adam.

‘Why, does she think it’s catching, cancer of the dong? You see what I mean about protective parents,’ he said, to me again. ‘Have you been to their house? You have to take your shoes off before they’ll let you in. I feel like a horse with nothing on its hooves when I’m there. And my socks are always squiffy. That’s why Audrey won’t go there, you know. Her stiletto heels were soldered to her feet at birth. She’d go up in a puff of smoke if she ever took them off. Have you met Lisa? She’s a good girl really. She’s rather a solid girl. Very house-proud, isn’t she, Adam? Her father sells bathtubs.’

‘Jacuzzis,’ said Adam. ‘Don’t pretend you’ve never been in a jacuzzi, dad.’

‘The first Mrs Hanbury was fond of that sort of thing. I couldn’t stand it — it was like being boiled alive. And on the subject of hygiene, they’re an absolute breeding ground for germs — all sorts of people pile into them, you know, all together. You try to stretch your legs out and you find you’re playing footsie with the hairy calves of some overweight middle manager. Still, we’ve all got to earn our living, I suppose. Adam says he does rather well out of it. The problem is, you never know when that sort of craze will pass, do you? He might find himself out on his ear in a year or two, when people find some other way to waste their time and money. Do you see what I mean? It’s not like a farm, is it? You can never say, this is my patch of the earth, my place. This is where I have my being. You can’t say that about a bloody bathtub, can you?’

‘They’ve got a perfectly good patch of the earth,’ said Adam. ‘They own an eight-bedroom house in Northumberland with twenty acres of land.’

‘But it’s all in hock to the bathtubs! If the bathtubs go, so does the land!’

‘That’s how life is, dad. That’s how life is for most people. We’re not all as lucky as you.’

‘Luck has nothing to do with it,’ said Paul. ‘The best luck I’ve had is to be given the good sense not to meddle with what I have. I could have ruined it in a million different ways — look at Don Brice! Look at Si Higham, driving around in that big jalopy with the white leather seats, pleased as punch with himself, and for what? For selling all his land to the highest bidder and turning Doniford into suburbia!’

Paul was becoming quite exercised — his wiry neck and chest were dark red where I could see around the collar of the white hospital garment. I picked up Hamish, who had sat beside him on the bed all this while virtually motionless, looking straight ahead with a superior expression on his face. This time Paul let me take him with an exasperated gesture.

‘I don’t see what’s so wrong with that,’ said Adam. ‘He wasn’t farming the land — he wasn’t using it for anything. Anyway, where are people supposed to live?’

‘If they’ve got nowhere to live then they shouldn’t have been born.’

‘It’s a bit late for that,’ said Adam calmly.

‘You people,’ said Paul, ‘you people don’t understand how to desire what is actually yours — you’re always scheming, the lot of you! Always dissatisfied! Even that layabout Brendon, turning the lodge into a chicken farm when he thinks I’m not looking — a bunch of hangers-on, a pack of vultures is what you are!’

I carried Hamish to the window and together we looked down at the car park, with its symmetrical rows of shiny, unpersoned vehicles.

‘No one’s scheming, dad,’ said Adam behind me. ‘Brendon’s doing the chickens as a way of being more financially independent, that’s all. And Caris is never here — you can hardly call her a vulture.’

‘I’ll call her what I like,’ said Paul morosely. ‘She’s been a great disappointment to me.’

‘As for me, I’m just trying to help you. I’ve taken a week off work to do the lambs — even Michael is here to help you.’

‘Why?’ snapped Paul. ‘Why haven’t you got your own lives to lead? Michael, haven’t you got a family of your own? Parents of your own?’

‘Yes.’

‘And where are they?’

‘They live in Surrey.’

‘What are they doing there?’ said Paul, as though there were something outlandish about it.

‘They’re doctors,’ I said.

‘Doctors — are they really? Both of them?’

‘Yes.’

‘I suppose they don’t need much help then. I suppose they’re quite able to doctor on their own. Are they busy — out a lot? Don’t have time for you?’

‘Something like that,’ I said.

‘And all they’ll be leaving you is their surgical instruments, I suppose, and the house in Surrey. Mind you, that could be worth something.’

‘I don’t expect them to leave me anything.’

‘Well, they probably will, but you’re a good boy anyway. The problem with my brood,’ he said confidentially, ‘is that they’ve come in to land a bit early. They all think I’m going to pop my clogs before I’m seventy — even Caris shelled out the money for the train fare as soon as she heard I was hospitalised.’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ said Adam.

‘She wouldn’t miss it for the world! And nor would Brendon, if he could only work out how to get here. As for the eldest son, he hasn’t let me out of his sight in years — the heir presumptive, if you know what I mean. Mind you, there’s always the jacuzzi salesman to consider. They’re bad for the heart, you know, those things. Eight bedrooms and twenty acres in Northumberland, don’t forget. He could be taking his leave any day.’

In spite of myself, I laughed.

‘Tell me what your mother’s got the hump about, there’s a good boy,’ said Paul to Adam, who was putting his coat on.

‘I’d rather she told you herself. I don’t really understand what the problem is.’

‘Well, she can’t tell me if she doesn’t come.’

‘There’s a phone beside the bed, dad.’

‘I can’t talk to her on the telephone. I never could — she uses it as an instrument of torture.’

‘Something to do with money. She says she hasn’t got her allowance. I didn’t know what she was talking about.’

Paul was silent. He held his head up in a soldierly fashion, as though bravely contemplating some doom-laden enterprise.

‘Tell Vivian to come in, will you?’ he said presently. ‘Tell the old girl to come in. Tell her I’m not too good. Put her in the car and bring her yourself if you have to. Will you do that for me?’

‘All right,’ said Adam. ‘She said she was coming anyway. She’ll probably be here before I even get a chance to speak to her.’

‘I don’t expect she will. Just do as I ask. Get the old girl in here where I can see her.’

‘It’ll probably be tomorrow rather than today.’

‘Make it as soon as you can, there’s a good boy,’ said Paul.

‘Has the consultant been in yet?’

‘What? Oh, yes.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He was an Asian fellow,’ said Paul. ‘Knew his stuff, though, I’ll say that for him,’ he added. ‘He said he came from Kerala in the south of India — a beautiful place apparently, he told me all about it, white buildings and trees, hot as hell. The Christians colonised it in the fifteenth century. Now he’s living in a suburb of Taunton. I said to him, if you know what beauty is, how can you stand to live without it? And he said, “Beauty is secondary, Mr Hanbury.”’ Paul put on an accent to relay the consultant’s sentiments. ‘I said to him, don’t they need consultants in Kerala? Yes, he said, they do. So I said, well, tell me why you’re here then. He looked a little taken aback, you know, a little superior. Then he started yakking on about skills and training and equipment, and suddenly I thought, here it is again! Selfishness! Greed! So I said, admit it, you’re here because they pay you more. And he admitted that he was!’

Paul gave a bark of laughter and sat back against his pillows with his arms folded. His expression was morbid.

‘When did he say you could come home?’ said Adam.

‘Monday. Tell Vivian that too. Tell her not to bring out the fatted calf. Tell her I’m on a hospital diet. Have you experienced Vivian’s cooking?’ he asked me. ‘Awful, isn’t it? The first Mrs Hanbury wasn’t bad, but she never ate the things she cooked, which used to make you wonder what she’d put in it.’

‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ said Adam.

‘Don’t forget, will you? You’ve got to bring Vivian in. Actually in, do you hear?’

‘Goodbye, Paul,’ I said.

I held out my hand and Paul grabbed it and pulled me nearly on to his chest. Hamish, whom I was holding, clung to my neck as we went over and Paul put his arms around my neck too, so that I lay across the bed like a fallen tree being strangulated by vines.

‘Kiss me,’ said Paul gruffly, and I obeyed by kissing his leathery cheek. ‘You’re a good boy,’ he said. He released my neck and gripped my face between the vice of his hands instead. ‘It’s rather soft, your fur,’ he said. ‘Do you put anything on it?’

‘No,’ I said, with difficulty.

‘I never petted mine enough,’ he said hotly, into my ear. ‘You’ve got to pet them and stroke them every day, then they’ll never give you any trouble. Every day, do you hear? The day you forget is the day they’ll get it in their minds to turn against you!’

He released my head and turned to Hamish, who was regarding him close to with a certain alarmed curiosity. He ruffled Hamish’s fair hair, before making an unexpected and not inaccurate attempt at Hamish’s bell noise.

‘Goodbye, fellow-me-lad,’ he said, laughing loudly.

*

In the car on the way back to Doniford I kept turning around and talking nonsense to Hamish and tickling his toes as he liked them tickled, aware as I did so that I was harbouring a feeling of guilt about what suddenly seemed to me to be the unsatisfactory state of his circumstances. As we drew into The Meadows, a mild feeling of oppression settled over me. In the flat, late-afternoon light which cast no shadows, unstirred by wind or rain, there was something actually inhuman about the place. I noticed that several of the houses had caravans parked in their driveways, white and rounded, like the babies of the stolid, red-brick adults, as though the big dwelling had mechanistically spawned the small. The caravans were the only things here that were neither square nor triangular, though I supposed that if they stayed long enough they might become so. The houses stared dumbly out of their windows.

‘What I like about this place,’ said Adam, steering us with conspicuous smoothness around the tarmac, ‘is the fact that it doesn’t remind me of anything.’

‘On the phone you described it as hilarious,’ I observed.

‘Well, it is, in a way,’ he said. ‘If you were going to be a snob about it.’

We passed a group of children in spotless tracksuits and baseball caps, who lifted their white faces to us as we went by.

‘I’m not saying we’re going to stay here for ever,’ said Adam. ‘But for now it actually suits us really well. At least it isn’t pretentious. It doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not.’

I heard the voice of Lisa speaking through this remark.

‘With some of the houses they’re building now, they’re trying to make them look as though they haven’t just slapped them up. I think that’s worse, in a way. Actually, the houses here have gone up fifteen, twenty per cent since we bought, and that’s partly because you’re not paying for some mock-Georgian porch over your front door, or a carport with a cupola. You’re paying for the location and the outside space. There are houses in Doniford now that are twice the size of ours with half the garden. Lisa gets itchy feet sometimes,’ he added presently.

‘Does she?’

‘She’d like more, you know, grandeur. But we’re just going to have to wait. We’ll have to wait and see what happens. This is a pretty solid investment.’ We both contemplated the house, in whose driveway we were now parked. ‘Tony’s offered me a job,’ Adam disclosed, with his face sideways to mine. ‘Lisa’s father. He’s offered me a share in the business.’

‘Are you going to take it?’ I said, surprised.

‘I don’t know. Lisa’s pretty keen. She’d like to be near her family. I can’t quite see myself up north but in a way it’s a fantastic opportunity. Tony’s thinking of retiring. They’ve got a place in Portugal, you know, and they want to spend more time there. So I’d basically be running the show. It would mean giving up my practice, of course,’ he said, ‘though I don’t feel particularly sentimental about that. It would be a relief, actually. I just did it for something to do until dad needed me to take over the farm. But that’s all changed a bit.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well —’ Adam rubbed his face with his hands sheepishly. ‘I’ve been going through some of the accounts this week. I was just being nosy, actually. Dad’s never really said anything specific about what the farm earns — there’s just been, you know, this impression of money, but in fact he’s been running it virtually at a loss. He makes five, six thousand a year, most of it from subsidies. It’s incredible — I don’t know quite how he’s done it. The new barns alone cost a fortune, plus the tractor and all the new fencing. In fact, if he sold his whole herd he wouldn’t begin to cover the cost. I suppose Vivian must have paid for them.’

We sat there in silence for a moment.

‘Anyway, it did start me thinking, you know, about Egypt, about what it actually was. I mean, dad’s always talked about it as a working farm, as something that had to be nurtured and worked at. Pretty much from the minute we could walk we had to be out there helping, with the sheep and the hay harvest and the fencing, and hearing him talking about it all day and night, and now I’m beginning to wonder whether it wasn’t just a bit of a con. You know, whether he didn’t use it as a way to control us. I mean, if it isn’t a farm then what is it? It’s just a nice house, that’s all. A nice house.’

I tried to think of what the answer to his question might be.

‘I don’t understand why he didn’t tell me!’ cried Adam, thumping the steering wheel. ‘All these years it’s been, you know, when Adam takes over the farm, when I hand over the reins to Adam, Adam the son and heir — and in fact there’s nothing to hand over! There’s just Egypt, where he lives, and which he’ll only leave, as he’s fond of saying, in a wooden box. And I’m not waiting for that — it could take years! Even if I did get the house I couldn’t afford to maintain it on what I get from the practice. I’d have to sell. It’s worth more than a million pounds, you know. I got an off-the-record valuation from the agent in Doniford.’ He looked askance at me. ‘Incredible, isn’t it?’

‘Perhaps you should tell him that you’ve seen the accounts.’

‘I don’t think I can do that,’ said Adam after a pause. ‘I know dad. He’d cut me out completely. He’d leave everything to Brendon. Laughable as that may seem.’

Adam’s front door opened and Lisa appeared, mouthing and beckoning frantically. Finally she picked her way in her bare feet across the gravel. The soft shapes of her breasts jiggled beneath her T-shirt.

‘Caris is here,’ she said discreetly through the window. ‘She’s been here absolutely ages. We’re running out of things to talk about.’

She turned around and slowly picked her way back again.

Caris was sitting on Adam and Lisa’s sofa with her legs curled up beside her and the baby on her lap. Immediately I felt a certain kinship with her, as I had the first time I met her all those years ago, when she had wound the impermanent ivy around herself for adornment. I guessed that she, like me, held back from definitively securing the territories of her existence. Sometimes, when I looked at the people I knew, I saw them as the generals of invisible armies, always advancing and expanding. Their lives seemed to bulk out around them like pyramidal structures by which they were lifted higher and higher until they became almost impossible to see, and when they spoke it was of the next campaign and the one after, so that they appeared peculiarly more burdened by the future than by the past.

‘Hello, Michael,’ she said. ‘Still here?’

‘Still here.’

‘What is it you want from us?’ she said jovially. ‘What is it you’re after?’

‘Entertainment, I think. Or perhaps just distraction. I’ve forgotten which it was.’

‘Michael’s here to see Adam,’ interposed Lisa, who looked slightly alarmed by this exchange. ‘They’re old friends from university.’

‘I know Michael,’ said Caris grandly. She looked large and rather unruly in the tidy, pale-coloured room. ‘I know what’s under that beard, that’s how well I know him. Who’s this?’ she added, with a fluting note of suspicion in her voice, when she caught sight of Hamish. She looked around her, as though expecting someone to come and claim him, or at least to offer an explanation.

‘My son. Hamish.’

‘Your son? Well! I didn’t know!’

I didn’t see particularly why she should have known, but she seemed nonetheless slightly peeved at the fact of Hamish’s existence.

‘How old is he?’ she asked, looking from him to me and back again.

‘He’s three.’

‘Well!’ she said again. ‘Three years — so I was —’ she did a mental calculation ‘— yes, I had just moved to London then.’

I wondered if she would explain the way in which these two events were related. Today she was wearing a sort of beatnik outfit, with a black beret pressed down over her coarse, springy hair and a frayed black leather jacket.

‘You wouldn’t have heard, then,’ I said. ‘Not in London.’

‘I know you’re teasing me, Michael,’ she said, mock-reprovingly. ‘But I like to get things in order. I like to see the whole picture. There’s you over there —’ she illustrated my position, which was on the left side of the sofa, with one hand ‘— and here’s me over here —’ the right side of the sofa ‘— and we’re both travelling at the same speed on our separate roads.’ She lifted her arms while the baby wobbled precariously on her lap and together we were slowly precipitated forwards over the edge of the seat.

‘And the strange thing is,’ she continued, enlightened, ‘that exactly when you were increasing your estate I was shedding mine.’

‘Were you?’

‘I walked away from everything,’ she said dramatically. ‘I just walked away. My place, my relationship, even my family.’ The last she uttered furtively, out of consideration I supposed. ‘I left the money economy, and the sex economy, and the patriarchy of the home — it wasn’t easy.’

‘No, I don’t suppose it was.’

‘Are you being sarcastic, Michael? Because I know it’s tempting to be. But I happen to regard sarcasm as a vice, a crutch. I had to hurt a lot of people to be free.’ She stroked the baby’s feathery hair with her hand. ‘Some of them were innocent people. But I did it. And I don’t regret it.’

‘Free from what, exactly?’

‘I was sick,’ she said. ‘It was as though my body were full of poisons. But in fact it was full of lies and misconceptions, about who and what I was. A woman, hence secondary; a daughter, not a son; a sex object, a servant, a parasite. Someone who wasn’t capable of seeing past the end of her pretty nose, let alone of doing any good in the world. But I’ll tell you what, you’re never safe, you’re never really free from it — I haven’t been back here in eighteen months and yet it’s already started, the shame, the jealousy, the anger, the feelings of guilt.’

‘You haven’t left the money economy,’ interposed Adam from the kitchen, where he had withdrawn with Lisa on some nebulous domestic business. ‘You get money for those pots.’

‘Yes,’ said Caris, composedly, with her head held high, ‘we do. We have rent and bills to pay, like everyone else. And necessities, and some luxuries too. We’re a community, not a penitentiary. We’re just a group of women who’ve chosen to live together and support one another and pool our talents in the hope of doing some good, whether at home or elsewhere.’

‘I don’t think I could live with lots of other women,’ said Lisa, drawn from her sanctuary in the kitchen by the turn the conversation had taken. ‘Don’t you find you just fight all the time? I grew up with sisters and I’m telling you, we were awful. We were always nicking each others’ things and having great screaming rows, and we were ever so competitive, you know. Everyone says it’s men who are competitive, but I think women are much worse.’

‘Can men join your community?’ I asked.

Caris laughed. ‘Why? Are you tempted?’

‘I just wondered why freedom from society is something women can be seen to want but not men.’

‘If you have men,’ said Caris coolly, ‘then you are society. We’d be deferring to them and offering to do their laundry inside a month.’

‘Then you don’t have a very high opinion of yourselves.’

Caris smiled. ‘That’s why we’re there.’

‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about,’ said Lisa.

‘Michael’s saying that he thinks we ought to be able to be what we want to be in a world that includes men,’ said Caris. ‘Perhaps he thinks we’re storing up unhappiness for ourselves.’

‘I just don’t think you can last,’ I said.

‘There’s no reason why we should. Needing to hang on to things is part of the problem.’

‘What about love? What about affection?’

‘You see!’ said Caris triumphantly. ‘That’s why we don’t let in men — they’d be telling us to relax —’ she assumed a collapsed position on the sofa ‘— and to stop being so uptight!’

‘But what about it?’

Caris sat up and smiled mysteriously. ‘I love my sister and my sister loves me,’ she said. ‘Besides, there are plenty of people who don’t get love and affection in their marriages. Look at Vivian, for pity’s sake.’

‘If you ask me,’ intervened Lisa, ‘Vivian’s brought that on herself.’

‘Anyway, what does it matter?’ said Caris. ‘We’re more than just our sex, you know — we campaign, we do environmental projects, we get involved in justice issues.’

‘It sounds like a laugh a minute,’ said Adam from the kitchen.

‘Right now,’ said Caris, for some reason consulting her watch, ‘loggers are ripping down primeval rain forest in Tasmania and dousing the land with napalm. Does that not mean anything to you?’

‘Not really,’ said Adam, who had joined Lisa at the threshold. ‘Why should it? It’s happening on the other side of the world.’

‘Well, it matters to me. We’re petitioning everyone in our area and sending the signatures to the Australian government.’

‘Somehow,’ said Adam, ‘I don’t think you’ll stop them.’

‘We might!’

‘All you’re doing,’ said Adam, ‘is causing yourself unnecessary pain.’

I wondered where I had heard him say this before, and remembered it was in the hospital.

‘And you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you? On the list of things that have caused me unnecessary pain, you’d come out just about at the top!’

‘I think I’ll go and get the children’s tea on,’ said Lisa, in her ‘discreet’ voice. ‘Are you coming, Hamish?’

‘Oh come on,’ said Adam. ‘Not that again.’

‘He broke my arm,’ said Caris, to me. ‘He knocked out two of my front teeth. He gave me a cracked rib and concussion, not to mention bruises all over my legs.’

‘It wasn’t broken. It was fractured.’

‘It was broken, damn you! From the age of three to the age of sixteen,’ said Caris, fixing my eyes with hers, ‘my brother systematically physically abused me. From before that, for all I know.’

‘Caris,’ called Lisa distantly from the kitchen, ‘I really don’t think you ought to make those sorts of accusations.’

‘He locked me in the wine cellar where there were rats. He pushed me down the stairs. He tied me to a tree and threw tennis balls at me.’

‘That’s just what children do!’ protested Adam.

‘He shut me in the boot of dad’s car. He hit me with his cricket bat.’

‘Caris, I think you should stop,’ said Lisa from the doorway. She crossed the room and took the baby from Caris’s lap and returned to the kitchen. ‘Everyone’s mean to their brothers and sisters,’ she said, from the doorway. ‘I really think you should just get over it.’

‘Well,’ said Caris, ‘he’s your problem now, not mine.’ She rose from the sofa. ‘Sorry to mess up your evening,’ she said in a strangled voice. ‘You obviously don’t want me here so I’ll go.’

‘Do you want me to call you a cab?’ I said.

‘Oh, it’s still light,’ she said. ‘I’ll walk.’

I followed her into the hall.

‘Don’t be angry,’ I said.

She stood outside on the drive with her arms folded and her head tilted away. I felt sorry for all the time that had passed.

‘It’s all true, you know,’ she said. ‘I’m always surprised when that doesn’t make a difference.’

She was gone in a few smart crunches of gravel before I could say anything. I closed the front door behind her. From the kitchen I heard Lisa say:

‘Do you think Caris is a lesbian?’

I went upstairs and for the first time since my arrival in Doniford I took my violin out of its case and began to play. I played most of the repertoire we went through during our Friday evenings. At first the sound was loud and harsh but gradually it grew more rounded, as though it were working itself into the stiff walls and carpet and rendering them pliant. I must have lost track of time, because when I became aware of Lisa standing in the doorway the window was full of the purple light of evening. She was smiling. In the dusk her face had a bronzed look from which her hair and teeth glowed with an avid, slightly sinister whiteness. She had her arms folded and her head cocked to one side.

‘That’s really nice,’ she said. In her ‘discreet’ voice she added: ‘The thing is, I’ve just put the baby down and I’d really like her to go to sleep.’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ll stop.’