Rick and Ali treated Hamish as they treated everything, with an instant familiarity that nevertheless appeared to recognise no precedent, nor any attendant codes of conduct. Ali said that Hamish reminded her of her brother Chris. She said it no matter what he did, so that over time she created the strange impression that Chris was a fiction being manifested by Hamish in instalments. When she said to Rebecca, ‘That’s just what Chris used to do,’ or, ‘When he laughs he sounds exactly like Chris,’ Rebecca would say ‘Really?’ as though she had never met Chris in her life, and had perhaps not even heard of him until that moment. Rick liked Hamish the most. He took him out for solitary walks, as though to visit some distant shrine of male heredity. He would say to Ali, ‘Shut up about your fucking brother the jailbird. What’s he got to do with anything?’ Chris was a tax exile. I don’t think he actually went to prison, but apparently he borrowed some of Ali’s money years before, and never paid it back.
When Hamish was two Rebecca was offered a part-time job at the gallery. At first I was relieved by this development, since it represented, obliquely, a slackening of the hold the concept of ‘art’ had on her. For as long as I had known her Rebecca had claimed to be an artist, while never to my knowledge producing an item made by her own hand. A few times she got close to attempting it, a proximity which expressed itself in the immediate onset of illness and depression, accompanied by unexplained pains down the left side of her rib cage. I could not understand her insistence on giving a harbour to the tyrannical expectation that she create. This expectation came from herself, but it had its roots, I thought, in her parents and her need to surmount their capriciousness while remaining within the circle of their concerns. At university, where we met, Rebecca studied law, and though in the end she struggled to get her degree, I could see in her decision to take it something I had not seen since, namely a determination to forge for herself a more normative, classical, even useful existence than that to which she had been born. I could see in it a slightly punitive urge to stick to the facts. I wished sometimes that I had known the girl who had felt that urge. It had already begun to lose its momentum, to give way to doubt and self-consciousness, by the time we met. The law had become a source of oppression from which she wanted only to free herself; and art, whose peculiar strictures I suspected of having driven her to law in the first place, now reappeared in the guise of her liberator. What had she been thinking of, surrendering herself to a life of confinement and responsibility, of adherence to the letter of things? It was freedom that she wanted, most particularly the freedom to express herself. So requisite was this freedom that even the impingement on it of self-expression became intolerable. Yet she sought release: when she didn’t get it her freedom was tainted; it became a drag on her, a burden. She longed to give voice to something, but what? Sometimes, with an air of urgency, she would take her pad and pencils and establish herself somewhere with the intention of drawing. It was always drawing she seized upon to guide her out of this conflict, as though it were a first principle she had forgotten and to which she was now going to make her obeisance. The problem was that as far as I could see what Rebecca wanted was not to create but to discharge, to rid herself of a blackness, a pollution, that mounted inexorably in her system. The discipline of drawing was obstructive to this process: it was far too narrow a channel for her tumultuous feelings. After an hour or so of frantic marking and rubbing out on the paper she would throw her pencils on the floor as though she were throwing off her manacles or descending from a tightrope. She always looked more fleshly somehow, more earthbound, in the wake of an unsuccessful approach to the shrine of creativity, as though for an instant she gloried in the mere fact of being human. As far as I could see, all Rebecca’s masochistic female tendencies went into this abusive relationship she had with art, leaving her overly assertive and somewhat self-centred and preoccupied in her dealings with me.
Rick’s gallery was riding the wave of a middle-class spending boom. He changed the name, from Rick Alexander to discriminate. At that time he was setting up another, smaller gallery on the Dorset coast, where many of what he referred to as his artists lived, and so increasingly Rebecca was left to run things in the city on her own. I was surprised by her aptitude for it. Sitting at her father’s perspex desk in the big white space she was a creature in its natural habitat. It was as though her life had come in only two sizes: she had outgrown the first, and now the second fitted her perfectly. It was in this period that Rebecca first complained that I never asked her questions. One evening she said:
‘Why have you never asked me how it felt having Hamish?’
I considered the question. My memory of Hamish’s birth remained also the memory of the first failure of authenticity in my feelings for Rebecca. For some reason it had never occurred to me that she might have undergone the same change.
‘I don’t know.’
‘If you were hit by a car and were injured and in terrible pain, wouldn’t you think it was strange if I never asked you how you felt? Wouldn’t you think it was strange if I just never mentioned it again?’
‘That’s not a fair comparison,’ I said. ‘You don’t get any reward for being hit by a car.’
‘You might get compensation. You might get insurance money. Wouldn’t it be strange if you were suddenly very rich and in a wheelchair and I never mentioned it, or asked you how you felt?’
‘I don’t know why I didn’t ask,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t sure you’d want to talk about it.’
‘Correction,’ she said, erecting a white, forbidding finger in the air. ‘You mean you didn’t want me to talk about it. You couldn’t stand the idea of me talking about it. That’s because the idea of me, of my subjectivity, is disgusting to you.’
‘Have you ironed your hair?’ I asked.
There was a pause.
‘What?’
‘Your hair looks different. It looks as though you’ve ironed it.’
I had seen Rebecca’s new hairstyle everywhere lately. On the crowded pavements of Bath, which appeared to move, as though with infestation, in a single, avaricious body, I had seen it one day on nearly every female head and had concluded vaguely but regretfully that the hair with which I was familiar had become a thing of the past. I had had this feeling several times, the feeling that I had missed an episode in an important series; that, like someone rising from a coma, I had been made mysteriously destitute by the mere continuation of things. Women’s hair, as I remembered it, was remarkable for its diversity, and for the appearance it had of being a living thing, like a pet, that accompanied its owner with any and every degree of refinement, misbehaviour or submissiveness. Rebecca’s hair was light red and coarse and tangled and sometimes, when I was close to it, reminded me of the red rag rug I used to have in my student room. The ‘new’ hair hung like a pair of curtains on either side of the face, or like a pair of dismembered, glossy wings. It looked synthetic and slightly ghoulish. The style had spread almost overnight, like a virus that had struck within my own four walls before I had had time even to absorb the fact of its existence. Or rather, it was as though my seeing this fashion but failing properly to notice it had culminated in it taking possession of Rebecca’s head, much as her neglected feelings had. She had to constantly hold her head up to keep it in place, as though she were swimming and trying to keep her face out of the water. What irritated me, I realised, was not the prospect of Rebecca’s subjectivity, but her expectation that I myself should have emerged from Hamish’s birth completely unaltered.