He followed us back out into the white hall. A white-carpeted staircase swept up one side of it. I noticed that a chain of little lights had been woven all the way up through the wooden railings. They reminded me of the lights that guide aircraft on and off the tarmac.
‘Tell mum I’m going again tomorrow if she wants a lift.’
‘Best to tell her yourself,’ said David. ‘Saves wires getting crossed.’
His passivity grated on me: I had the sense of it as the casing for a parasitical nature. I remembered how David had formed an incidental part of the pleasing picture of eccentricity I had taken away with me from Egypt Hill all those years before: now I discerned something hard and unyielding in him that struck me as being more central to this world than I had thought, though not more instrumental. He was like a deposit, a residue, by which the composition of the greater body could be read. I wondered what it said of the Hanburys that this should be their imprint; and of me that I had failed to take the measure of it.
‘I saw your pa myself today,’ David said.
‘I’m glad somebody did.’
‘Funny place he’s in — it’s like a hotel. The old boy seemed quite put out by it all.’
‘It was his choice,’ Adam said. ‘He could have gone to a normal hospital.’
‘I left him some magazines — strictly educational, of course. I thought they’d do him good. He’s never paid enough attention to his grey matter, that’s part of the problem. You’ve got to, in a place like this,’ he said, to me. ‘There’s no theatre or art or music here. There was a bookshop, but they closed it down for lack of use. Sometimes I look at the people here and wonder what possible motivation they can have for staying alive.’
He opened the front door with its gleaming brass handle to let us out.
‘As far as cultural activities go,’ he said, peering out into the grey, windy evening, ‘we might as well be on the moon.’
*
At ten o’clock Adam and Lisa went to bed, making their apologies as they backed towards the stairs, like a pair of sheepish politicians sent to the scene of a tragedy; that tragedy being, I supposed, that we had all got older. I phoned Rebecca, as it seemed she was not going to phone me. When she picked up the telephone she was laughing.
‘Hello?’ she said presently, in a garrulous voice.
The man who had been laughing with her continued to laugh.
‘It’s me. Is that Marco with you?’
Marco laughed a lot, excessively in fact, particularly where the world struck you as least funny. I realised it sounded as though I considered her brother to be the only suitable, indeed the only possible, male for Rebecca to be entertaining at home, late in the evening, in my absence.
‘No,’ she said. Her voice was stranded somewhere between coldness and levity. ‘No, it’s Niven actually.’
I had a sudden pain in my stomach, which sheared off into a feeling of indifference.
‘We’re just going through the layout for his show,’ Rebecca continued. ‘You know, the Art in Nature show we’re doing in the summer. We’ve had this fantastic idea of arranging the canvases to make a sort of walk, a country walk.’
‘A ramble,’ interposed Niven boomingly in the background.
‘Sorry, a ramble. We could do it with partitions and — and —’ For some reason the mention of partitions caused Rebecca to succumb once more to hilarity. ‘We had this brilliant idea,’ she presently resumed, more soberly, ‘of covering the floor of the gallery with leaves.’
‘Don’t forget the sheep,’ boomed Niven.
‘Niven wants sheep,’ Rebecca relayed to me. ‘Just one or two, sort of — wandering around …’
A gale of laughter blew tinnily down the receiver.
‘Hamish is having a nice time,’ I said, enunciating clearly through the noise.
‘Is he?’ laughed Rebecca. ‘That’s great news. No, really, Michael,’ she said, her voice descending the ladder of mirth, ‘that’s great. I’m really, really pleased.’
In the warm, airless spare room I lay on the bed in the dark. I stared at the side wall of the house opposite. There were no windows in that wall. On the floor beside me Hamish rolled around in his sleeping bag. Every time he moved the sleeping bag made a dry, rustling noise. The noise was like something emanating from his sleep, from his unconsciousness. It was like the constant expression of a need. I lay listening to it for the rest of the night until Adam came in to wake me at four and we went up in the dark to the farm.
FIVE
I knew that Caris had arrived, but I didn’t expect to find her sitting at the table in the kitchen when we came up to the house for breakfast.
‘Hello, Michael,’ she said.
She spoke in a rich voice, and looked me straight in the eyes as though to mesmerise me.
‘Caris. It’s been a long time.’
As I said her name the thought occurred to me that perhaps she wasn’t Caris: her penetrating air, as well as the distinct theatricality of her appearance, seemed to raise the possibility that she was an impersonator, or a passing fortune teller who had mysteriously divined my identity. She was wearing an embroidered peasant blouse with voluminous gathered sleeves and had large gold hoops in her ears. Her hair was a wild bonnet of coarse, springy-looking black curls.
‘It’s been a long time,’ I said again. It was the sight of Caris so changed that made a sort of geological reality of the fact.
‘Not so long,’ she said, still pinioning me with her eyes, into which a quizzical light had stolen. ‘Seeing you, it’s as though it were only a minute. I feel as though I could just walk outside, and find my party still going on.’
Were this the case, the uncharitable thought crossed my mind that Caris would discover she no longer fitted into her dress.
‘But of course,’ she continued, perhaps seeing something disbelieving in my expression, ‘this is the new Michael, the grown-up Michael. I don’t know this Michael at all. I don’t know why he should be here, the week that I decide to go home. All I know is that for some reason he’s come around again.’
The mere mention of coming around turned my innards to stone. Caris continued to fix me with her dark-brown gaze as though to prevent me looking at her in return. I discerned a certain weariness in her, with a compulsion of her own from which she was unable to free herself, to invest everything with significance. Her face had become longer and squarer and a resemblance to her father had emerged, like a second face behind the first. Parentheses were etched deeply into the skin around her mouth: again, they gave an impression of fatigue, almost of disillusion. But her eyebrows were militant, fierce and thick and black, and from where I was sitting I could see a coarse shadow of black hair on her upper lip. She had grown much larger and fleshier in the parts of her that I could see, her shoulders and neck and arms. She had acquired a striking, almost sculptural, solidity. The effect was not unimpressive.
‘It’s so strange being here without dad!’ she observed gaily, looking around her. ‘I can’t remember a single time that I was here without him. Adam, don’t you think it’s strange being here without dad?’
This was her greeting to Adam, who had stopped in the yard on the way up and hence had only just entered the room. I recalled the fact that they had not seen each other for almost a year, and thought that Caris’s opening salvo showed a certain steel.
‘He always sits just there,’ continued Caris, pointing at the high-backed wooden chair next to the vast black hearth, ‘usually in his riding things, swearing like a trooper and drinking port at eight o’clock in the morning.’
This, at least, I did recall of the Caris of old, a certain coquettish habit of asserting universal truths where her father was concerned. It had seemed more charming at eighteen than it did at thirty-four.