In the Fold

NINE

I returned to Bath and to Nimrod Street and found that the rubble from the fallen balcony, including the three large segments of broken limestone slab, remained strewn over the front steps.

The journey from Doniford had taken most of the day, though it was only sixty miles or so. There was no one to drive Hamish and me to the railway station: Lisa, whose sensitivity to practical matters could normally have been relied on, was not at home; and Adam had bidden us a sincere but unavailing farewell over breakfast, before vanishing up the hill to Egypt in his car with an expression of grim preoccupation on his face. Alone in the warm, silent, airless house we packed our things. A sense of failure dogged me as I went through the rooms retrieving those items that belonged to us, as though they were the detritus of some breakage or disaster, the evidence of a lack of love or merely care of which I was conveniently cleansing the scene. I could not attribute this failure entirely either to myself or to the Hanburys. Instead I was possessed by an awareness of how little survived the business of human encounter. What would be left of Rebecca and myself, once the storm of our association had abated? What did we have to show for ourselves? Hamish watched me as I put my violin in its case and laid the purple cloth like a shroud over its carved face. He seemed to tremble with a precarious, pregnant stillness, like a drop of water hanging from the corroded lip of a tap. For a moment his insubstantiality enraged me. I felt that I could have dashed him, shaken him off and demanded instead to know where the life was that made its robust demands, that insisted on itself in the face of everything that reverted to inconsequence.

We closed the front door behind us and it locked with an automatic, impersonal click. For nearly an hour we stood in Doniford on the grey, shuttered Sunday high street waiting for a bus, which presently emerged from the empty streets and carried us through the deserted haunts of its route, through tracts of green hemmed by frayed, budding hedgerows, through indifferent villages that we patiently unearthed from their tangle of narrow, muddy, aimless lanes, as though we were circulating around an organism that otherwise would have lapsed into its own mysterious, unregulated version of existence. The driver pursued his destiny with cursory speed, flying past some stops and observing unfathomable pauses at others, during which he switched off the engine and read a newspaper folded on his lap while Hamish and I, his only passengers, sat side by side on our oversprung seat in a clear torrent of silence far louder than the crowded din of the train that subsequently bore us in long, smooth surges to Bath. At the station we took a taxi: passing through the city I was struck at first by its rich, historied appearance and its textured, flesh-toned buildings that seemed like living things after Adam’s house. Everything was moving, almost undulating: the cluttered light, the noise of traffic and voices and garbled ribbons of music, the teeming pavements, the rows of shopfronts opening and closing their doors in numberless mechanical embraces, the scatter of pigeons and the clustered fall of water from fountains, the dark, stately motion of the river — it all churned and moved in a body, rising and falling inchoately like the sea. The taxi went at walking pace through the obstructed streets. People snagged and formed blockages around every shop window and restaurant and frequently spilled out into the road. There were so many people that on the pavement beside us the crowd ceased to move and instead seemed to swell, pushing inwards at its core so that people staggered or were crushed against each other, and I saw a look of uncertainty pass like a great shadow over their faces. A man was forced backwards off the kerb and stumbled as his shoe came off. I thought how hard it was, and yet how necessary, to love. Hamish’s hand rested beside me on the seat and I picked it up and held it. It was so small and soft and limp that it almost seemed as if it might dissolve in my palm, but I hung on to it as though it were the last thread connecting me to the earth, until his fingers grew warm and flexed themselves and he returned the pressure of my grip. We stopped and started along the street until at last we reached London Road, unfurling east from the packed core of the city, its beauteous facades casually dirtied by passing traffic.

It was a grey, gelid afternoon. There was no breeze: the air in Nimrod Street was so still that it caused a physical sensation of numbness. The black twisted railings made little frozen, anguished forms amidst the broken stones. There was a quality of weightlessness to everything, of ceaseless intermission, that did not belong here but appeared to have followed me from The Meadows. It was clear to me, though I couldn’t have said why, that it was easier to build a hundred houses in Doniford than it was to remove three pieces of broken masonry from Nimrod Street. The green, shiny leaves of the laurel hedge beside the front steps were still thickly coated in white dust. Inside, the house was full of grey light and its rooms had a creeping edge of staleness, as though no one had entered them while we’d been away. Everything had contracted a little with unfamiliarity, become flat and angular like a garment removed and hung in a closet.

Rebecca was sitting in the kitchen with a person who had her back to me. I did not immediately recognise this person. Two cups and a teapot stood on the table between them. The kitchen looked different: it was untidy, in a light, girlish way. Rebecca’s things — scarves, items of jewellery, a pink hairbrush — were strewn over surfaces that now betrayed no relationship to the preparation or consumption of food. The atmosphere of repudiation that I had picked up on my way through the house was far stronger in here: it emanated powerfully from its source — Rebecca — where she sat a few feet away.

‘You’re back,’ she said, nevertheless failing to rise from her chair.

Hamish ran towards her, his feet making loud slapping sounds on the floorboards. Rebecca smiled a great smile and held out her arms to him, still sedentary, as though some misfortune which she was too stalwart to mention had paralysed her legs in our absence.

‘Look, Charlie’s here,’ she said to him as soon as she had got him in a clinch.

‘Hey, Michael,’ said Charlie, turning around in her chair and smiling brilliantly at me. A moment later she rose and kissed both my cheeks. I received a warm, confused impression of hair and teeth and rattling jewellery, borne pungently over me in a suede-smelling wave from her jacket.

‘I didn’t recognise you,’ I said.

The last time I saw Charlie her hair had been blonde. Now it was black.

‘Charlie’s come to stay with us,’ said Rebecca to Hamish.

‘It’s the hair,’ said Charlie. She grasped a strand of it and held it out to one side. ‘Becca says it looks like a wig.’

I saw that somehow, in the person of her friend, Rebecca had contrived to erect a barrier around herself that promised to withstand not just this moment of our return, but an indefinite number of days that projected impossibly outwards like a diving board over cold, unbroken waters. Feelings of disappointment, and of what appeared to be more fear than anger, knifed me soundlessly in the chest, in the back.

‘There’s nothing wrong with wigs,’ Rebecca said. ‘I actually like the superimposed effect. It makes you look like one of those Andy Warhol lithographs.’

I wondered why I had phoned Rebecca so frequently while I was away. It was, I now saw, a pointless, self-referential act by which I had succeeded only in illuminating myself as an object, as though I had taken the trouble to write letters to myself and post them home from Doniford. She looked at me occasionally in uncertain flashes. She was wearing a strange dress that I had never seen before. It was pale pink, with little sleeves the shape of cowslips and a neckline that revealed most of her freckled clavicle. The wistful colour did not flatter her. On her long, calloused feet were a pair of strappy pink sandals with six-inch heels like daggers.

‘How long are you staying?’ I asked Charlie.

My voice sounded out of turn, like an instrument playing loud notes not indicated in the score.

‘Oh, listen to him,’ cried Charlie, with comical pathos. ‘He’s all disappointed, poor thing!’

‘Did you miss me?’ said Rebecca to Hamish. She buried her nose in his hair with an obscure look of satisfaction.

‘He was hoping to have you to himself,’ Charlie persisted, ‘and now I’ve come along and spoiled it. I’d be touched, Michael, if I wasn’t frankly offended. People like me only get through life by being humoured, you know. We non-conformists depend on the charity of you family types.’

I thought of taking off my coat, but the atmosphere in the room discouraged it.

‘How’s Ali?’ I said to Rebecca.

‘Actually, she’s really well,’ Rebecca replied, having given the matter a few seconds of consideration that she gave the impression were overdue, as though she hadn’t thought about her mother’s health in weeks.

‘Has there been any news?’

‘What? Oh, that,’ she said, waving her hand dismissively in the air. ‘That’s all fine.’

Her manner was disconcerting: I wondered whether she was exercising this uncharacteristic discretion as a result of Charlie’s presence, but a moment later Charlie said, pityingly:

‘Poor Becca’s been worried sick about Ali.’

‘Thank God you were here,’ Rebecca fervently responded, grasping her friend’s hand across the table.

I said: ‘I thought someone might have started clearing away the rubble at the front.’

If I had hoped to kindle a propitiatory spark by the route of disgruntlement I was disappointed. Rebecca and Charlie looked at me as if they didn’t know what I was talking about.

‘Yes, what happened out there?’ exclaimed Charlie finally, opening her eyes very wide.

‘The balcony fell off,’ I said, because although it was improbable that Charlie hadn’t deduced this fact, she seemed to require an answer.

‘Thank God no one was on it,’ she said.

I hadn’t actually considered this possibility before. No one ever stood on the balcony. It was ornamental, and could be reached only by climbing out through the windows on the first floor.

‘I know,’ concurred Rebecca, who to my knowledge had, like me, never set foot on it.

I said: ‘I came out of the front door one morning and it fell off. I was on the second step down to the street and it crashed down behind me. It missed me by a few inches.’

To my surprise, both women laughed.

‘You’re obviously completely traumatised!’ shrieked Charlie. ‘He’s obviously completely traumatised,’ she repeated, for Rebecca’s benefit.

I had no concrete objection to Charlie, other than in her current function as a sort of wrapper or container for Rebecca, by which I could see that Rebecca intended to elude me for as long as she could. She and Rebecca had been friends at school in Bath, but for as long as I had known her Charlie had lived in London, so that it was a tenet of their association that it had never been geographically easy to sustain: they pursued it with a sort of hectic diplomacy, as though they were the representatives of two distant states endeavouring to maintain relations.

Three or four years ago I had attended Charlie’s wedding, a cold, rain-sodden event I could only remember now in the light of the fact that Charlie had left her husband a year or so after it. Rebecca used to complain that her friendship with Charlie had become one-sided and perfunctory, as though it were the victim of ill-disposed market forces: these same forces reversed their direction when Charlie began to emerge from the carapace of marriage, sweeping Rebecca up in an ecstasy of renewed importance whose unforeseen consequence was that she now often accused me of disliking Charlie, or at least regarding her with suspicion. Rebecca’s theory was that I suspected Charlie of a cultish determination to motivate her friends to leave their husbands as she had left hers; or, less stridently, that exposure to Charlie would inadvertently result in the contagion of divorce entering our midst. In fact, if my awareness of Charlie possessed a certain clarity, then it resulted from a strange association I felt with the idea not of her notoriety but of her shame. Her wedding was bombastic and strikingly conventional: when the music started I remember she and her husband waltzed around the mud-spattered marquee before the applauding crowd, he in a dinner jacket and she in a long white dress too modish and flattering, somehow, for sincerity or even passion. Every time I saw her I remembered with what determination she had engineered the public display of her mistake.

‘It might have fallen on any of us,’ I observed.

‘That’s what I said to mum and dad,’ said Rebecca. ‘I said, look, why all the fuss about the insurance? It’s good that it’s come down. Nothing can insure you against a balcony falling on your head. Thank God it happened, I say,’ she concluded urgently.

Charlie laughed. ‘You do put things in the funniest way, Becca. Mark says she reverses into her sentences,’ she said, to me. Mark was Charlie’s boyfriend.

‘Mark’s in Germany,’ Rebecca informed me, darkly, as though I might find myself there too if I wasn’t careful.

‘For work,’ Charlie added. ‘Not on holiday.’

She appeared to find this distinction so significant that a moment later she said: ‘Does anybody go to Germany on holiday?’

‘My parents go there every year on their way to the Salzburg festival,’ I said.

‘Do they?’ she replied, contriving to seem enthusiastic. Her manner contributed to my mounting impression that I was being humoured.

‘They like music,’ I said.

‘I didn’t realise you came from such cultivated stock.’

‘Oh, they’re obsessed with it,’ Rebecca said, as though cultivation were generally agreed to be a nuisance. ‘They made him start violin lessons when he was about three. That’s why his fingers are such funny shapes.’

‘Let’s see!’ Charlie exclaimed.

I held out my hands in front of her with the fingers splayed.

‘My God,’ she said, ‘they are. That one bends inwards.’ She pointed at the smallest finger on my left hand. ‘Look, Becca, it’s almost at a right angle to the others.’

‘I know,’ said Rebecca absently.

‘It’s the equivalent of foot-binding!’ Charlie exclaimed.

‘Not quite,’ I said.

‘Actually,’ Charlie resumed after a pause, as though to pacify me, ‘Mark says Germany’s lovely.’

Rebecca gave an astringent laugh.

‘Of all the things I can think of to say about Germany, that’s about the least convincing. “Auschwitz? Yes, it was lovely.”’

‘I think he was talking about the countryside,’ said Charlie vaguely.

‘Oh, the countryside,’ said Rebecca. ‘Where people said they never noticed anything.’

‘In fact, he did mention a few strange things,’ Charlie said. She gave the impression of continually arriving late in the conversation. It was unclear whether this was deliberate or not.

‘Like what?’

‘His German associates disapprove of his use of public swimming pools. Apparently it’s become a sort of standing joke. One of them said to him that he hoped Mark washed properly afterwards and Mark asked him why and he said because the pools are used by black people. Don’t you think that’s horrible?’

Rebecca looked stricken. ‘And what did he say?’

‘I don’t know,’ Charlie said. ‘I don’t think he said anything.’

‘I would have come home,’ Rebecca declared. ‘I wouldn’t even have hesitated.’

‘It’s funny how little we know about each other, isn’t it?’ Charlie said, to me. ‘Mark’s collating a study for the EU about the way national populations spend their time.’

‘I wouldn’t even have hesitated,’ Rebecca said again.

‘Apparently the Germans do hardly any work. That’s not what you’d think, is it? The French spend all their time grooming. I can’t remember what the English do. Could it be cooking?’

‘I never cook,’ said Rebecca dramatically. ‘Never.’

‘Mark thinks it’s interesting, anyway,’ said Charlie, shrugging her shoulders.

‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’ said Rebecca. ‘He’s a man. Any chance to be dispassionate — any chance to surrender your humanity in the face of a statistic!’

Charlie said to me, with a rueful expression: ‘You can see we’ve been working ourselves up into a fever of female indignation in your absence.’

‘You should have heard Michael when I was in labour!’ exclaimed Rebecca, turning her sights on me. ‘He’d look at his watch and tell me I couldn’t be in pain because it wasn’t time yet!’

Charlie laughed.

‘Poor Michael,’ she said, shaking her head and then laughing again.

‘Why?’ said Rebecca. ‘Why “poor Michael”? Why does everybody feel sorry for him?’

I saw that she was actually angry: there was a brief thickening of her voice as she spoke which betrayed the fact. Hamish was sitting on Rebecca’s lap in an attitude of extreme limpness and pallor. He jolted this way and that each time her body discharged its surfeit of discontent.

‘Everybody doesn’t feel sorry for me,’ I said.

‘It’s just that he’s only just walked through the door,’ Charlie added, in mitigation of the awkward way I had phrased my remark. ‘He’s only been here five minutes and people are accusing him of deformity, and strange cruelty to pregnant women.’

‘I’m not people,’ Rebecca said.

She folded her arms and looked down into them as though something were cradled there.

‘Anyway,’ Charlie continued, ‘where have you two been?’

I sensed that she meant to recompense me for the bitter welcome I had received and perhaps for something else too, for other conversations by which I hadn’t been wounded because I wasn’t there to hear them.

‘A friend of mine has a family farm in Somerset,’ I said. ‘Hamish and I went to help with the lambing.’

‘What fun!’ cried Charlie, by which cheery expostulation I deduced that Rebecca’s revelations had been more gruesome than ever. ‘Was this a he-friend or a she-friend?’

‘A he,’ I said, although I thought it was a strange, suggestive question to ask, particularly in Rebecca’s presence. I caught a glimpse of something I had noticed in Charlie before, a certain blindness to the concept of virtue. Then it struck me that the tastelessness of the comment might be Rebecca’s own.

‘And how do you know each other, you and this sheep-farmer?’

‘It’s his father who owns the farm. My friend is a chartered surveyor.’

‘Gosh,’ Charlie said. She wore the expression of someone who has just opened a door and found something unexpectedly horrible behind it. ‘A chartered surveyor from Somerset. He must be scintillating company. Or is he one of those people like in Tolstoy, who make a philosophical occasion of themselves?’

‘I’ve met him,’ Rebecca said, as though this indicated we were about to hear the last word on the subject. ‘He’s the sort of person who seems quite exciting at eighteen but then ends up middle-aged before he’s thirty.’

Chagrined, I turned away from the table and began to look for something I could give Hamish to eat. I opened the fridge and was surprised to see it lavishly stocked. There were numerous luxurious packets of things, olives and expensive-looking cheeses and handmade pasta like little wrapped gifts in muted shades of green and cream.

‘We’re making Michael cross,’ said Charlie behind me. ‘Let’s stop or he’ll leave us sitting here on our own. We were discussing the chartered surveyor and his universal values. Is he superannuated, like Becca says?’

‘He doesn’t think he’s young,’ I said. I was speaking into the open fridge and so I allowed myself to say it a little spitefully.

‘I sense we’re being mocked,’ Charlie said to Rebecca. ‘Is he going to be a chartered surveyor for the rest of his life?’

‘I don’t think so. He always expected he’d take over the farm one day.’

‘Imagine that. I can’t think of anything nicer. Or worse, I’m not sure which.’

‘Nor is he. He’s considering going up north to work for his father-in-law.’

‘Who’s the father-in-law?’

I turned around with some of the things from the fridge in my hands and was surprised to see a look of protest, almost of affront, flit across Rebecca’s face as she saw them, as though my taking of food were inappropriate, or as though I were taking what she wanted for herself.

‘He sells jacuzzis,’ I said. ‘He’s offered him a job.’

‘My God,’ said Charlie. ‘I hope he’s not going to do that, in any case.’

‘He might. The farm’s losing money. It turns out his stepmother has been financing it all along, out of her own pocket.’

‘So it’s all a sort of illusion.’

‘Sort of.’

‘For whose benefit?’

I took a saucepan out of the cupboard and lit the gas with a match from a box beside the cooker. Taking the match from its box I was aware again of Rebecca’s strange gaze and its accusation of theft.

‘God knows,’ I said. ‘If you’d been there you’d have thought it was the father. The stepmother thinks that he — procured her. He and his wife, to bail themselves out. She claims now that they set out to destroy her marriage in order to get their hands on her money.’

Charlie shrieked.

‘What a scandal!’ she cried. ‘And is it true?’

I smiled at her tone.

‘I don’t know. It might be.’

‘But what’s she like, the stepmother?’

‘She’s slightly saturnine. She mopes around this great dark house. And Audrey is very vivacious.’

‘Is that the mother? The minx!’

‘They always seemed perfectly amicable. It was what I always liked about them. They seemed so uninhibited by their situation.’

‘Well, now you know why,’ said Charlie. ‘The second one couldn’t believe she’d got the man and the first one couldn’t believe she’d got the money! Are you listening to this, Becca? What I want to know is how it all came out. Were you there?’

I nodded. ‘Paul, my friend’s father, was in hospital for a few days. It seemed to be precipitated by his absence. Adam said he’d gone through the farm accounts, and then Audrey came up demanding money and Vivian wouldn’t give her any, and suddenly everyone was fighting about who’d done what to whom. Then one of the children shot his brother with a crossbow.’

‘My God,’ said Charlie in a reverent tone. ‘Over the money?’

‘No, no — a small child, one of Vivian’s grandchildren. He’d been given a crossbow as a toy and there was an accident. The bolt went into his little brother’s hand. A boy Hamish’s age.’

At the sound of his name Hamish slid off his mother’s lap and came to stand beside me at the cooker. His food bubbled in the pan. He rested his hand on the back of my leg; he leaned, as though against a tree or a solid section of wall.

‘It all sounds barbaric!’ exclaimed Charlie. ‘What happened? Was he all right?’

‘It was strange,’ I said. ‘His parents weren’t there and nobody seemed to want to take him to hospital. There was some doctor they all knew, a family friend who lived in the next valley, and they spent ages trying to track him down and arguing over where he was and talking to ten different people about him on the telephone and then it turned out he’d retired years ago and didn’t practise any more. Finally Adam’s wife took him to the hospital in Taunton. I don’t know what happened after that. She hadn’t come back when we left.’

‘What on earth were you two doing in this den of vipers? How did you come across them in the first place?’

I said: ‘I knew Adam at university. We lived next door to each other.’

‘I see. And —’

Charlie paused to remove her suede jacket. Beneath it she wore a black silk shirt which strained across her breasts as she moved, so that a string of gaps suddenly opened among the buttons down her front. A black lace garment was momentarily visible through them. The sight of it caused me to feel a confused sense of both suspicion and sympathy for her: for reasons I could not establish, her underwear reminded me of her humanity, of her native power both to wound and be wounded. Her hair snaked darkly over her shoulders as she turned and hung the jacket on the chair next to her. When she faced me again her countenance was flushed. I sensed that she had felt my notice of her and wasn’t sure what it meant.

‘— and at the weekends,’ she continued, ‘he used to take you back to the family pile.’

‘The first time I went there it was his sister Caris’s eighteenth birthday party,’ I said. ‘She’d never met me but she invited me anyway. The place is called Egypt Farm and on her invitation it said something like “Please come to Egypt”. It really annoyed me, but when I got there it suddenly seemed romantic.’

‘What about the sister?’ Charlie said, with the suggestive tone that irritated me. ‘Was she romantic too?’

‘She was far too sophisticated for me,’ I said. ‘She was having a relationship with an artist who used to paint her naked.’

‘Who was it?’ Rebecca enquired, in a remote voice.

‘I think he was called Jasper Elliot.’

Rebecca raised her eyebrows but said nothing.

‘So you admired the sister from afar,’ Charlie said, ‘and at eighteen you thought it was exciting that two women could be married to the same man and still be civil to each other. And we know Adam was more interesting in those days because Becca says he was. What about the father? I sense the father is at the root of all this.’

A feeling of discomfort, almost of apprehension, stole over me. I felt a sensation of nakedness across my back, a coldness, as though someone were standing behind me. As much to relieve this feeling as anything else I turned to lift Hamish and set him on a chair at the table. My hands cleaved to his slender ribcage. I was almost disappointed to feel how small he was, for in that instant I had been visited by the perverse illusion that he could offer me some protection. Instead he seemed so small as to be barely human.

‘He let me drive his car,’ I said.

‘I may be being obtuse,’ said Charlie, ‘but the symbolism of that is escaping me for the moment.’

‘The first time he met me,’ I explained. ‘He threw me the keys and asked me to go down to the town for more wine.’

I laid Hamish’s plate in front of him. Tendrils of vapour curled upwards around the fixed peaks of his face. Rebecca was watching us with an expression of unidentifiable emotion.

‘For the party?’

‘My father never once let me drive his car,’ I observed.

‘Perhaps your father attached more value to things.’

‘I don’t know. He might have.’

‘But the point was that he recognised you as a man and your father didn’t. And there he was with his two wives and his gorgeous daughter and his parties and his big house. Did you feel flattered?’

‘I felt relieved.’

‘About what?’

‘That things didn’t have to be so hard.’

At this Charlie sat back with an expression of triumph.

‘So he bought you too!’ she exclaimed.

‘Why would he bother to do that?’ I said, though I didn’t entirely disagree with her.

‘Maybe he envied you your incorruptibility. What I want to know is why you fell for it. You’re such a puritan, Michael,’ she exclaimed. ‘All this talk of aristocratic largesse and car keys — you don’t even have a car! You pay yourself slave wages down at that slum you call an office. You’re the least materialistic person I know and yet there you are getting all seduced and concupiscent over a sheep farmer! Perhaps this is your weakness,’ she said, with a devilish glint in her eye. ‘Perhaps this is your dark secret.’

‘It wasn’t like that,’ I protested, laughing.

‘Then what was it?’

I remembered that golden day of Caris’s party, which remained untouched in my recollection in all its exquisite irretrievability.

‘Something happened to me almost as soon as I got there,’ I said. ‘I had an — intimation.’

‘Of what?’ said Charlie.

‘That my life was going to expand and expand and become beautiful.’

A silence followed this disclosure. The gaze of the two women grew so discomfiting that I added:

‘It was a quality they had. The Hanburys.’

‘And what was this magic quality?’ said Charlie.

‘They made it seem as though all you had to do was something other than what you thought you should do.’

Charlie nodded her head abstractedly, as though this proposition pleased her.

‘I see,’ she said presently. ‘And that became your motto, did it? To live adjacent to your own conservative compulsions. That’s not bad. Of course, I didn’t know you before you experienced this divine revelation. Was it as transforming as that? Would you be sitting here now, for example, in this gorgeous, crumbling residence, with the gorgeous Rebecca, if these Hanburys hadn’t got their claws into you?’

‘I didn’t say it was a revelation.’

‘Oh yes. It was an intimation. You haven’t answered my question.’

I wasn’t sure I wanted to answer it. Rebecca had turned her head and was looking at me with a shadowy, inscrutable expression. I realised that I still had my coat on. It seemed for a moment as though I could leave, as though I had given them all the satisfaction it was in my power to give.

‘It might have been the feeling that I didn’t need to possess things to experience them,’ I said. Charlie’s face was blank. ‘Think of it as a picture,’ I added.

‘A picture.’

‘Of a house on top of a big hill overlooking the sea, with these people in it and a party going on.’

‘Is this a point about art?’

‘Sort of,’ I said.

‘And suddenly you decided to visit this charming little picture,’ said Charlie. ‘You took your life in your hands. Was this by any chance related to your near-death experience on the front step?’

‘I thought I should see Adam,’ I said. ‘I suppose it was a social compulsion.’

‘You forgot it was a picture.’

‘I couldn’t remember any more what it always made me remember.’

‘So you went back,’ said Charlie, ‘and these models of bohemian living turned out to be a pack of money-grubbing reprobates. Egypt!’ she snorted, shaking her head and laughing.

At this moment Rebecca spoke.

‘It isn’t anything to do with art,’ she said. ‘It’s to do with cowardice.’

Her voice was so cold that it abraded me like a fierce, freezing wind where I stood. Had we been alone I believed in that instant I would have rushed to her in my petrifying nakedness and begged her for warmth and forgiveness; but then the moment passed, and I found myself subsiding once more into a familiar accommodation with our remoteness from one another. Charlie gave a surprised laugh.

‘That’s a bit harsh, Becca,’ she said.

‘It’s true,’ said Rebecca, obstinately but with a little less frigidity. ‘Anyway, it’s unnatural not to be possessive. Men are supposed to be possessive.’

‘Are they?’ said Charlie.

‘It doesn’t mean they’re compromised,’ Rebecca persisted. ‘It takes courage to set the terms — look at dad, for heaven’s sake! He’s always out there, taking risks, making things happen, and for what? To make us safe.’ She raised her hands aloft, to indicate the very roof under which we sat. ‘You could call him domineering or macho or possessive, but the fact is that he lives life ten times more passionately than the rest of us!’

This way of speaking about her father was quite a new facet of Rebecca’s personality. I sensed she deployed it as a tool, to make the work of exposing my own shortcomings less time-consuming. Yet I remembered that when I first met her, it was the very qualities she was now claiming to admire in Rick that used to cause her pain.

‘Well,’ said Charlie, ‘I suppose we can’t all be like daddy. It’s Michael that I’m worried about. His whole philosophy of life is in ruins.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said.

‘I always find that the less things matter the harder they are to live with. He looks like he’s about to leave us, Becca. He’s got his coat on. Tell us you’ll stay, Michael.’

‘He’d never leave,’ said Rebecca sullenly, as though my steadfastness were one of the irritating constituents of marriage to which she had been forced to reconcile herself. ‘Never. It isn’t in his nature.’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ said Charlie. ‘Tell us you’ll stay,’ she repeated.

Pulling out a chair next to Hamish I sat down at the table. He had finished his supper and he clambered on to my lap and laid his cheek against my chest. Earlier I had marvelled at his fragility but now he felt like a boulder pinning me to my seat. My heart was thudding uncomfortably. For a moment the sense of my own precariousness was intolerable. It inflamed me with feelings of violence: I wanted to smash and break, to turn the table on its side and send the teacups sliding to the floor, to demonstrate what was mine by destroying it. This feeling passed as quickly as it came. In its wake a terrible loveliness seemed to adhere to everything around me. The first stain of dusk tinted the room unexpectedly before my eyes. I looked at the two women sitting in their chairs. The chairs were antiques with wooden backs carved in the shape of hearts: they belonged to Rick and Ali, as did most of our furniture. They were beautiful, though not particularly valuable. Rebecca, in her draining pink, with her sandy-coloured hair gathered in a tangled knot on the top of her head, had her arms folded and her legs crossed. Her head was turned so that she could be seen in profile, eyes downcast; a posture redolent of some inadequacy, some lack she perennially found in her experiences, so that she gave an impression that was familiar to me, of being in silent correspondence with the concept of a shortfall, of looking down into it, as though it were a hole bored into the ground next to her. Charlie made a dark shape, denser and more solid. She sat straight and kept her eyes ahead. I could see the edges of the heart-shaped chair backs around each of them, like pairs of wings; and it may have been this illusion that gave me the sense of a relationship to their femaleness that was tenuous and fleeting, almost unworldly, as though their robustness as human beings was attended by something fragile and fluttering, something of which they themselves were barely conscious, something that every word and gesture crushed but that rose again and again, released into the air by each new pause like a delicate butterfly from a dense, fibrous confusion of greenery. I felt a desire both to help them and to be indistinguishable from them, to be incorporated into whatever mystery it was that gathered in a mist around them. It seemed a sort of tragedy to me, because within that desire was contained the trace of a memory, a streak of recognition that ran across it; not of any particular event but of a state that was less combative, less rooted in the body, a harmonious time that I supposed must have been childhood, though I wasn’t sure which part of it.

‘Charlie’s thinking of moving back to Bath,’ said Rebecca.

‘Are you?’ I said.

‘She’s got a job at the university.’

‘I’ve got an interview,’ amended Charlie. ‘I haven’t got a job.’

‘You’ll get it,’ Rebecca replied, with a far-seeing tone.

‘There are a lot of things I have to work out first,’ said Charlie mysteriously.

‘Mark doesn’t want her to go,’ said Rebecca. She said it to me, with an air of unspecific accusation.

‘I don’t really want to go either,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s just that I think I should. I’m seeing it as an opportunity for spiritual advancement.’

‘People don’t often come to Bath for that,’ I said.

‘Oh, I could be going anywhere. It just so happened that it was here. The thing is, I’ve never been alone in my life and I’m banking on it being good for me. You’re right, though — I’d hate to be too comfortable. It would spoil the penitent effect.’

‘You won’t be alone,’ Rebecca said. ‘You’ve got hundreds of friends here.’

‘You see?’ said Charlie to me. ‘That’s the problem. When it comes down to it I’m not prepared to suffer at all.’

‘At least Mark will suffer,’ I said.

Charlie gave a little melancholic smile.

‘That wasn’t really the idea. I’m beginning to see that my plan is flawed.’

‘It isn’t your fault! You can’t tailor your life to suit other people. You have to go where the opportunities are,’ declared Rebecca, for whom opportunities had only ever dared to present themselves in one way, which was to her immediate convenience.

Charlie said: ‘Do you remember when I was doing my doctorate?’

‘I remember you were obsessed with a brown cloud,’ said Rebecca.

I said: ‘What was your doctorate on?’

‘Climate change. Signs and portents thereof. It was a little idea I had, that we were recreating the concept of an apocalypse in the form of anxieties about the environment. Then I had to turn it into a much bigger idea, and in the process I rather became the victim of these anxieties myself. I’d spend all day in the library reading about glaciers melting and the world getting hotter and hotter and the fact that half of it was going to be under water in fifty years’ time, and I would sit at my desk and become distraught at the thought of this ruination, this doom, actually nauseous with terror — I felt I could see the whole planet darkening and dying, and I was consumed with this hatred of human beings and at the same time fear for them, pity for them. Then I’d walk home looking at everything, the sky and the people and the buildings and it would seem so sort of heedless and alien, you know, someone in a car getting angry with someone for pulling out, and people talking on their mobiles and the sky all grey and boring, and I would think, well, maybe we get what we deserve. Then I’d go home and Sam and I would argue.’ Sam was the name of Charlie’s ex-husband. ‘Quite often I’d find myself distraught again before bedtime, except this time it would be about housework, or the fact that Sam said I’d spent too much money. There was no connection,’ said Charlie, shaking her head. ‘There was no connection anywhere.’

Through the window the sky was blue-grey. The indistinct green furze of the little garden stood rigid beyond the glass. Rebecca looked perplexed.

‘I don’t think anyone could blame you because you couldn’t reconcile your marriage with global warming,’ she said.

‘It made me think for the first time that I needed to be better than I was. Because otherwise there was nothing. It’s different for you. You’ve had a child.’

Rebecca shrugged. ‘So have one.’

Charlie laughed. ‘I can’t! Or not yet, anyway. Possibly not ever.’

‘Anyway, having a child doesn’t make you a better person,’ Rebecca declared presently.

‘Doesn’t it?’ Charlie raised her eyebrows. ‘I’d have thought it gives you less time to be a bad one.’

‘It doesn’t have anything to do with it,’ said Rebecca.

She looked as though she’d meant to say it matter-of-factly, but I saw a tremor of awareness pass through her, as though at the unexpected magnitude of her realisation.

‘It doesn’t have anything to do with it,’ she said again. ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘I thought everything with Mark was perfect.’

Her ironic intonation of the word “perfect” suggested a well-known abhorrence of the idea.

Charlie shook her long black hair self-consciously away from her face. ‘It is, in a way. But to be honest that’s a bit of an illusion too. If he ever found out what I’m really like it wouldn’t be perfect any more.’

‘God!’ cried Rebecca, so unexpectedly that the rest of us started. ‘That’s so bloody typical!’

She thumped the table top with her hand and I felt Hamish jump on my lap.

‘How do they do it?’ she asked wonderingly, shaking her head. ‘How do they do it?’

‘It’s just that he’s so good,’ Charlie said. ‘And I’m so bad that I have to lie to make myself seem better. I’ve lied about everything! So now there’s that on top of all the other things.’ She put her head in her hands and laughed. ‘Not that he ever asks me anything.’

‘That’s so typical,’ said Rebecca again.

‘No, I mean he never pries. Of course, he already knows about Sam and he doesn’t like it, I can tell. He doesn’t like the fact that I left. Poor Sam — I embellish his villainy mercilessly. You know, I’d really like to do something I could be proud of,’ she said, looking fervently at Rebecca and me. ‘I’d like to do something hard. Sometimes I even think that I should go back to Sam. That really would be hard. It would make the perfect cross.’

‘You can’t do that!’

‘Why not? I’d only be keeping all those promises I made. Think how much Mark would admire me!’

‘That’s just silly,’ Rebecca said petulantly.

‘All I’m saying is that I have a distorted nature. I’ve never felt the right sort of pain. I’ve felt the pain of being wrong but I’ve never felt the pain of being right. I’ve never suffered out of forbearance.’

‘Why should you suffer? What would be the point of that?’

Charlie laughed. ‘I have the feeling that the health of the organism depends on it.’

‘Is that what he says?’

‘Oh, it’s completely selfish! Otherwise what story do you have to tell about yourself? That all you’ve done is gorge on emotion — that you’ve just lived in yourself? The problem is that when I get close to it, virtue begins to seem like another bizarre illusion.’

‘What have you done that’s so terrible?’ Rebecca burst out. ‘I mean, really, compared to — compared to the Nazis, what have you actually done wrong? I mean, you haven’t killed anybody, have you?’

The two women looked at each other.

‘In a way, I have,’ Charlie said.

‘I don’t accept that,’ said Rebecca defiantly. ‘Everybody has abortions. I nearly had one.’

I felt Charlie’s eyes flicker questioningly over my face. To my knowledge, Rebecca had only been pregnant once. I had noticed before her growing tendency to lay claim to an identity more chequered than her own. Suddenly, it seemed, she couldn’t bear the idea that she was more straight-laced than other people: it struck me that in her thirties she was experiencing an explosion of adolescent feelings of rebelliousness. Her clothes, her demeanour, her pretence of being “bad” — she had even, I noticed, taken up smoking, a heartbreaking spectacle of ineptness that she determinedly staged two or three times each day. Rebecca had often told me how obedient and sensible she was as a child and teenager, a position she adopted in answer to her parents’ refusal to behave in a ‘normal’ way. She felt she had no entitlement to youth and irresponsibility: Rick and Ali would not relinquish them. I remembered with what rational belligerence she had wanted a baby, as though this were the next foothold, the next stepping stone in her faltering progress across the torrent of life. She was on the verge, I saw, of flinging herself into this maelstrom; which was not, in fact, life but subjectivity, was the treacherous expanse of everything pre-existing that she needed to make her way over before she could consider herself safe. I felt pity for her, and guilt that I had not helped her more, but more than anything I felt fear.

‘I was the third woman Sam got pregnant,’ Charlie said, to me. ‘He kept the identity bracelets the others were given when they went into hospital. He had them in a little box. When I came back from the clinic he showed them to me.’

Rebecca laughed. Charlie looked at her quizzically.

‘I’m not joking,’ she said severely. ‘It’s true. Do you remember that flat I lived in after I left Sam?’

Rebecca laughed again. ‘Oh God, I do remember that flat.’

‘The door wouldn’t lock properly and the armchair looked like someone had died in it and on the wall beside the bed there was this funny shaped stain, and one day I was looking at it and I realised the shape was human, that it was the outline of a person who had sat on the bed leaning against the wall for so long that he’d left a sort of imprint there.’

‘Please,’ said Rebecca, putting her hands in front of her face.

‘Anyway, I used to have these dreams when I was there and in the dreams I was always where I actually was, in that bed, in the dark, with the mark on the wall next to me. And then I’d wake up and I’d be there, in the same room. There was no difference between my dreams and reality, do you see what I mean? That was hell,’ she said consideringly. ‘I found it in that funny room.’

Out in the street, on the far side of the house, the sounds of several car doors closing came into the sedate room like a muffled volley of gunshots.

I said: ‘I don’t think you can say that you haven’t suffered.’

‘Oh, I’m just making you feel sorry for me,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s all part of my routine. This is why no one’s ever dared to hold me to account.’

‘But what have you actually done?’ Rebecca exclaimed. She looked prepared to be amused.

‘At least you’ve resisted the temptation to be honest,’ I said.

‘I’m not sure I can resist it,’ Charlie said.

‘Is it infidelity?’ interposed Rebecca, making quotation marks with her fingers around the word “infidelity”.

I was arrested by her tone, as well as by the quotation marks.

‘Why do people make such a fuss about “infidelity”?’ she repeated. She examined her nails. I noticed her hand was shaking. ‘Rick and Ali positively use it as a sex aid.’

‘Do they have a — what’s it called? An open marriage?’ said Charlie, wide-eyed.

‘They like to speculate about other people,’ I said. ‘It’s not quite the same thing.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Rebecca. Presently I realised that she was speaking to me.

‘It’s completely harmless,’ I said.

‘It’s not an open marriage,’ Rebecca said to Charlie, ‘it’s a bloody bazaar. It’s an end of season sale. Don’t tell me Rick’s never come on to you.’

Charlie shook her head. ‘Should I feel insulted?’

‘Come to think of it, you’re probably too old for him. He hasn’t slept with one of my friends for years. He’s got all Marco’s girlfriends to distract him now.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I said. I wanted to put Hamish down but he had locked his legs tenaciously around the backs of my knees. ‘That is a complete misrepresentation of the facts.’

‘Don’t use that language against me!’ shrieked Rebecca, gripping the edge of the table. ‘I’m not asking for your judgement! I don’t need you to authorise my conversation!’

‘I’m only pointing out that saying things isn’t the same as doing them.’

‘Isn’t it? Isn’t it?’ Rebecca cried. ‘No, come to think of it, it’s worse! At least there’s some honesty in doing it — at least there’s some fucking implication! They’re so fucking frightened of it happening that they can’t stop talking about it!’

‘Becca,’ said Charlie, reaching out to take Rebecca’s hand.

‘I don’t understand your shame,’ Rebecca said to her in a jagged voice. A tear sped down her cheek. ‘I just can’t understand it. I wish I’d done things I couldn’t account for. I wish I had the guts. I’d tell everyone about it — I’d shout it from the fucking rooftops!’

She put her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook so that the little frilled sleeves of her dress trembled.

‘I wish I had the guts to tell them all to go to hell,’ she wept.

‘Mummy,’ said Hamish.

Rebecca sat and cried into her white hands.

‘I wish I could send them all to hell!’

Charlie gave me a look of enquiry which Rebecca raised her tear-streaked face in time to notice.

‘Oh, don’t expect him to care!’ she cried. ‘We’re all sinners in his book, you know! Don’t expect him to lift a finger — he let me go a long time ago!’

‘Mummy mummy,’ said Hamish.

‘He never stood up to them. You ask him, you see if he did! He never judged them on my account!’

‘You wouldn’t have wanted me to,’ I said.

‘I wanted you to fight for me!’ she shrieked.

‘I love you,’ said Hamish.

Rebecca put her face in her hands again and the tears dripped through the grille of her fingers.

‘I’m tired of being good,’ she sobbed. ‘I should have gone crazy — I should have gone completely crazy. I should have told them just to go to hell!’

‘I love you, mummy,’ said Hamish.

‘I want to find out what will happen if I stop being good,’ wept Rebecca wildly. ‘I want to stop being good!’

Hamish got off my lap. Charlie was leaning across the table in the gloom with her hands outstretched, her prominent features casting little blocks of shadow over her face. My wife sat weeping in her chair. The pale silky material of her dress and her light-toned skin and hair gave her a formless, undulating appearance in the unlit room: she glimmered like some unearthly creature and water streamed from her eyes. She folded herself over so that her face rested on her knee and her back shook as the long tremor of each sob passed strenuously through her. Hamish stepped around the table to where she sat and spread himself carefully over her. He laid his chest over her back and wrapped his arms around her quaking sides so that his feet were almost lifted off the ground. He pressed his cheek into the back of her neck. He covered her unresponsive body with as much of himself as he could, as though in preparation for the great indifference of the latitudes towards which he saw himself now embarking; like some creature, a barnacle, an anemone, that knows only how to adhere, to cling on for dear life.