Authors: Rachel Cusk
Vivian said it was a good thing Caris was coming. She said she needed help with the dogs.
Out in the passage, the dogs were scratching at the kitchen door. Their claws pushed it and the wind pushed it back. The wood banged around in the loose frame and the banging sound made them bark, as if to alert themselves to what they had done. Through the door they could be heard rattling away down the passage. Almost as soon as they’d gone they came back again in a hurtling crescendo of tapping sounds and hurled themselves against the door once more.
‘One feels like a stranger in one’s own home,’ said Vivian gloomily. ‘It’s a bit much, when you think that I’m the one who feeds them. Other people always seem to have something more important to do, don’t they? They never used to come into the house,’ she said, to me. ‘Now they go sniffing around like a pair of policemen. I try to keep the door shut but I can hear them panting through the keyhole. It’s quite sinister.’
‘You wouldn’t like being here alone,’ Adam observed.
‘We’re not all as idiotic as Marjory Brice!’ said Vivian. ‘She thinks men are constantly trying to get in through her bedroom window.’
‘Well, don’t expect Caris to handle them,’ said Adam. ‘She hates those dogs. You’d get more help from the Queen Mother.’
‘In Spain, a dog has to know its place,’ Vivian informed me, in a significant tone. ‘A dog has to work. People say the Spanish are cruel to animals because they don’t let them sit on the sofa and lick the dinner plates but at least they know their place.’
Unseen by Vivian, Adam rolled his eyes.
‘I have friends who own a ranch outside Madrid.’ She pronounced the word ‘Madrid’ in an accent of severe authenticity. ‘Alvaro has lurchers. Three of them, all black, terribly elegant. They’re almost like people, though not the sort of people you ever meet. I asked him once how he’d trained them and he said he beat them. Beat them to within an inch of their lives! After that, he showed them nothing but respect. He never laid a finger on them again. I think that’s rather dramatic, don’t you?’
‘Very,’ I said.
‘If you knew him,’ she said, ‘it wouldn’t surprise you.’
She approached Adam and I where we sat at the table. In one hand she held a blackened frying pan from which smoke was issuing in a fast, grey, vertical stream. In the other she held a metal implement with which she proceeded to scrape furiously at the bottom of the pan, eventually detaching two ragged fried eggs which she added to what was already on our plates.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
Adam and I had been in the barns with the sheep since four o’clock that morning and it was now after nine: I was hungry, but in the gloom of the kitchen the food had a grey, indistinct appearance, as though it were very old. When I thought of the kitchen of Egypt Farm I thought of a place that was all light, yet I could see now that it faced into its own depths like a cave or a cathedral. The black hearth made a wall of darkness at one end. The flagstones on the floor were cold and the colour of discomfort. Daylight came through the small window that faced on to the yard and then stopped in a sort of obstructed oblong, as though we were looking at it from under water. Occasionally, the sun fell behind a bank of cloud outside in the tossing spring sky and the room would tilt and sway a little. Sometimes long shadows raced across the kitchen floor and flew up the far wall into oblivion.
I said: ‘I’m surprised. I’d have had Caris down as an animal lover.’
‘She used to cry on walks because the dogs chased the rabbits,’ said Adam. ‘Which I suppose makes her an animal lover of sorts. She said it was persecution. Something about the way they sniffed the ground.’
‘She might have changed,’ said Vivian, as though she hadn’t seen Caris for years. ‘She’s always changing. The moment you’ve got the hang of what she’s interested in she’s interested in something completely different and can’t stand the first thing. Then she seems to want to argue about it.’
Adam snorted. He had his mouth full. I watched him divide the fatty ribbons of bacon, the rough discs of potato, the blackened, visceral mushrooms, and place the sections one after the other in his mouth.
Bang-a-bang-a-bang-a
went the door. Around the walls stood the towering shelves holding the same items, pieces of china, ancient things made of copper and brass and iron, antique jelly moulds, jars and weights and scales, and mysterious yellowed cookery books with missing spines that were stacked together like a sorcerer’s almanac. They looked reclusive, recessed into their dark wooden alcoves like strange icons. I wondered if any of them had been taken down and used since the last time I saw them. The dense black range crouched in a haze of grey, fat-smelling smoke. Vivian stood by the sink amidst the detritus of her culinary activities. I noticed how thin and hollow-looking she was. Her skin had a jaundiced appearance. Her eyes looked permanently aghast in their wrinkled beds of shadow. Her attenuated arms twitched lightly at her sides, yet her back and shoulders were so hunched around her concave chest that a great weight seemed to be hanging from them. In her dark clothes she had the look of a bloodless, exoskeletal creature.
‘In fact,’ said Adam, to me, ‘you’ll find Caris hasn’t changed at all.’
‘Good,’ I said.
‘She’s still wondering what she wants to be when she grows up. Actually, I haven’t seen her since last year,’ he added bitterly. ‘I haven’t even spoken to her.’
‘Doesn’t she keep in touch?’
He laughed. ‘By horoscope. By looking into her crystal ball.’
‘What’s she doing these days?’
‘She lives in a commune. They call it an “artists’ co-operative”. Women only, of course. They’ve freed themselves from the male oppressor. Though to look at some of them I’d say the feeling was mutual.’
‘In London?’
‘She went off in a fit of pique,’ he said, with his mouth full, ‘about four years ago.’
‘There was the most terrible argument,’ added Vivian. ‘She got very angry with everybody, I can’t remember what about. There’s always something, isn’t there? The problem is that people don’t say anything at the time. They get angry with you later, after you’ve forgotten whatever it is you’re supposed to have done.’
‘She said we were a disease,’ said Adam.
‘A what?’
‘A disease.’
‘The thing is, everybody does the best they can do at the time, don’t they?’ said Vivian. ‘It’s no good saying it wasn’t good enough because it was the best you could do at the time.’
I noticed that Vivian was wearing a pair of sunglasses. She had taken them out of her pocket and put them on, in spite of the fact that it was almost dark in the kitchen. The large brown plastic lenses gave her big, bug-like eyes.
‘Did she say when she was coming back?’ said Adam.
‘She talked about the myth. She said she was coming to inspect the myth.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘I said that of course she could come and inspect it if that was what she wanted,’ said Vivian gamely, from behind her glasses. ‘Only she mustn’t expect to find it. It’s the expectations that are the problem, do you see?’
Just then the dogs stopped scratching at the door and ran away down the passage. A car door slammed in the distance. Presently their muffled barks could be heard from outside. I laid my knife and fork side by side on my plate. I had managed to eat nearly everything and a feeling of extreme satiation oppressed me. The burnished wood of the table seemed to rise up before my eyes and slowly undulate. I saw little roads and rivers in the grain, and stripes, as though on the pelt of an animal.
‘Who’s that?’ said Adam.
‘I should think it’s Jilly,’ said Vivian darkly, ‘wanting something.’
‘Mum?’ a woman’s voice called from out in the passage. The kitchen door opened. ‘Mum? What’s wrong with the dogs?’
I wasn’t sure that I would recognise Jilly but I did; though my first impression of her was that she was nothing like the poor rash-covered creature I remembered on the lawn at Caris’s party. The impression she gave now was one of striking beauty which, curiously, solidified almost immediately into the certainty that she was not beautiful; at which point the awkward girl became visible once more. She was very tall and narrow, with a long neck and a small, lofty head, like a giraffe. She wore her hair, whose blonde streaks were being overridden by vigorous patches of brown, in an untidy ponytail and her clothes were unkempt too. The hem of her coat hung down and there were white stains on the jersey beneath it.
‘It’s dark in here,’ she said, looking at us. She switched on the lights, which made it seem darker. ‘There. Hello,’ she said straight away, to me. ‘I remember you. You were Adam’s friend from university.’ She spoke in a candid, child-like way that I found faintly disturbing. ‘You didn’t have a beard then, though.’
‘I remember you too. You said you were going to have horses when you grew up.’
‘Doesn’t everybody think that?’ said Jilly, with a costive expression. ‘What’s wrong with the dogs?’ she continued.
‘They went mad at me out on the drive.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with them,’ said Vivian, looking innocently at her. ‘They probably didn’t recognise your car.’
‘Well, they see it often enough. They must know that Paul’s away. Animals are clever like that.’
‘There’s nothing for lunch, you know,’ said Vivian.
Jilly looked beaky and offended.
‘I didn’t come to
get
anything,’ she said. ‘I just came to borrow Paul’s big ladder. I need to put a tarpaulin over the barn.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Anyway, it’s only ten o’clock. I couldn’t possibly eat anything yet.’
‘Where’s Nigel?’ said Vivian.
‘He’s gone over to Clatworthy. To see his mother.’
‘Well, he won’t get much out of
her
!’
‘It’s worth a try,’ said Jilly.
‘Listen to you!’
Jilly sat down at the kitchen table and put her head in her hands.
‘The roof on the barn’s about to fall in,’ she said in a pinched little voice. ‘What are we supposed to do, just let it go? We haven’t a penny to spend on it. It’s just been one thing after another.’
‘It’s hard to sympathise,’ said Vivian morbidly, ‘when you have to have your kitchen cupboards made by hand and brought from London.’
‘Oh, when will you stop talking about that?’ cried Jilly. ‘I’ve told you, it was Nigel’s cousin who made them! We got them for a fraction of the price!’
‘And the tiles from Italy, and the leather chairs, and that crockery you’re not even allowed to wash –’
‘And why shouldn’t we have them, when she’s never done a day’s work in her life! That great big house,’ sighed Jilly. ‘She’s hardly ever there, you know. She stays in London – she’s got another six empty bedrooms there!’
‘I’m not surprised she stays away,’ said Vivian. ‘I always thought that house was unhappy. And it faces due north, you
know. It can’t get any light at all. I never understood why she went to such lengths to get it.’
‘It’s the family seat,’ said Jilly indignantly. ‘Her father built that house.’
‘Wasn’t her father mad?’ said Adam.
‘I remember he bred llamas,’ said Vivian. ‘They always looked very odd, standing there in the rain. He and his wife used to go about in the most extraordinary clothes.’
‘What sort of clothes?’ said Adam.
‘I remember he used to wear a sort of chain mail outfit. And she wore a crown and these great medieval dresses with long sleeves. Everyone in the house did the same. The house was like a castle, a funny little castle there in the valley. They had a lot of servants and people just sort of hanging about and all of them had to wear these costumes too. I think they got a lot of people from London,’ said Vivian, as though that explained everything.
‘Why do you want to talk about all that?’ said Jilly crossly. ‘Nigel doesn’t like people knowing. Anyway, he says it’s all exaggerated. They probably had
one
fancy dress party.’
‘She drowned in the river at the bottom of the garden,’ said Vivian in a distant voice. ‘He sold the house and no one heard anything from him again. They were using it as a nursing home. It had lifts on all the stairs.’
‘You make it sound awful!’ said Jilly. ‘It’s not awful,’ she added, to me.
‘Then one day Nigel’s mother came and bought it. It turned out that her father had finally died and when she got his money the first thing she did was come back and buy that dreadful house. It’s rather sad, don’t you think?’ said Vivian forlornly. ‘Don’t you think it’s sad?’
‘She probably paid five times what her father sold it for,’ said Adam.
‘She’s got thousands in the bank,’ said Jilly, ‘and she won’t use a first-class stamp. Can you believe it? She won’t pay the money for a first-class stamp.’
‘When you think of the people who must have died there!’ said Vivian, distressed.
‘It would be a drop in the ocean to her,’ said Jilly. ‘What we need for the roof. It’s Nigel’s money, anyway. It’s his inheritance.’
Adam said: ‘She might live till she’s a hundred.’
‘That’d be just like her,’ said Jilly. ‘Can’t you do something about those dogs?’ she added, turning around in her chair to address her mother. The dogs had started scratching at the door again. ‘What’s wrong with them?’
‘I don’t know,’ shrugged Adam. ‘They’ve been like this since dad went.’
‘I can’t imagine Paul in hospital. I can’t even imagine him being ill,’ Jilly said wonderingly.
‘You should go in. He’s desperate for visitors.’
‘I don’t think I could,’ said she, shaking her head. ‘I don’t actually think I could. I’d find it too upsetting, seeing him like that.’
‘He’s bored stiff lying there on his own. He isn’t actually that ill, you know – he’s just waiting for the operation. He looks completely normal. I think they said they were doing it this afternoon.’
‘I can’t imagine what they make of him, the nurses and doctors!’ cried Jilly. ‘Do they all think he’s disgustingly rude? You know,’ she said, to me, ‘all my friends were absolutely terrified of Paul. You’d be sitting there dreading the moment when he singled you out and yet wanting him to, because you felt so invisible if he didn’t. Do you remember the time he threatened to kill Nell because Alice Beasley said she was allergic to dogs?’ She laughed. ‘He even got the gun out. Alice went completely white. I don’t think she ever came back here again!’