I said: ‘I thought I would take him with me.’
At that a little wave of realisation broke uncontrollably over Rebecca’s face, which she bent into the closet to hide. A few moments later she emerged holding a crushed shoe-box that disgorged bright pink tissue paper from its broken side. Excitement declared itself in two spots of colour on her pale cheeks.
‘How long will you be gone?’ she said.
‘A week.’
‘A week,’ she repeated thoughtfully.
She maintained this quietly suggestive demeanour all the way to Wednesday, with the exception of one instance, when I wondered aloud whether in fact I hadn’t better stay in Bath after all and arrange for someone to start clearing away the wreckage of the balcony. I might have been a dignitary contemplating the abandonment of some vital, long-planned mission for all the dismay this suggestion evoked; and she my zealous aide, promising extravagantly to take care of the problem herself, as solicitous for my absence as I was eager for the absence itself to effect some change in her. On the subject of the Hanburys she seemed to have trouble striking the note she wanted: she tried to find it both predictable and inexplicable that I should be going to see them, and when she referred to them at all it was as “your friends”. At night I lay beside her and the presence of her still, coiled body was as exigent and declarative as that of a stranger on a long journey, someone dozing in a neighbouring seat; a person captured in a ceaseless act of self-manifestation, whose absence, when it comes, will be felt, in the failure to maintain a hold on even a remnant of her humanity, as a kind of death.
On Wednesday morning Rebecca drove us to the railway station and left us there an hour and a half before the departure of our train. She couldn’t stay, she said, as irritated as though we had asked her to; she had so many things to do. Her manner was strikingly changed. She seemed now to find nothing of significance in our departure, to herself or to us. I felt that I could lie down on the pavement outside the station where she left us and not know whether it was in relief or despair. My heart was clenched like a fist in my chest. I watched her drive away, fast, and it was as though the little wavering car had streamers attached to it, which fluttered frantically around its vanishing form. Later, when our train pulled into its station and I saw Adam Hanbury standing on the platform in a padded brown coat and a deerstalker hat, my eyes attached to him like the first object seen after waking from a dream. I looked at him, mesmerised by his solidity, until he saw us through the window and raised his hand.
THREE
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.