‘Do you?’
‘Oh, absolutely,’ she said. ‘It was what you always used to say, that the loosest ties are the strongest.’
‘I never said that.’
‘You’ve always said,’ reiterated Rebecca, ‘that we should lead more separate lives. I can hear you saying it now.’
‘I didn’t mean that we shouldn’t see each other.’
‘Letting go has been the hardest thing for me.’
‘I never said anything about letting go! I only meant that we shouldn’t hold each other responsible for all our problems.’
‘I’ve been very angry with you, Michael, really angry, but I’ve adored you too. Never forget that. And you’re also the father of my child. You always will be.’
‘I only meant that there’s a limit to how much you can relate to another person. Beyond a certain point it just becomes chaos — chaos!’
I found that my skin had drawn very tight around the top of my head. This was an effect Rebecca could have on me.
‘You’re afraid of passion, Michael. You’re afraid of blood on the floor. But the thing is, I’ve always been a very passionate person and if you won’t allow me to express it then you know I’ll just turn on you. I’ll turn on you.’
In a way, I admired her for this kind of talk. Even when I’d listened, agonised, to her regaling that terrified boy with it in the pub, I felt too a sort of anarchic thrill at her lack of shame. To me, these fits of self-description were the closest she came to a creative act. It was herself she was creating, yet I felt sure that her state while she did it was not so distant from that which she yearned to attain, in which she would find herself enabled to make something that could actually stand apart from her.
‘All my life,’ she was saying now, ‘all my life I’ve been looking for something straight and fixed, something dependable, something I could pour myself into that would hold me.’
I guessed she was going to say that I was that thing.
‘And you were it, Michael. You were that vessel. You said to me, come on, I’ll hold you. I’ll contain you. I’ll give you routine and stability. I’ll give you a home, I’ll give you a baby if you want one. But don’t think that you can grow. Don’t think that you can move, or change. Because if you do I’ll crack. My nice strong walls can’t take pressure from the inside. I’ll crack and I’ll break and in the end I’ll shatter.’
‘You will?’ I said, confused.
‘You — you! I think maybe you needed to be broken. I think maybe that’s why you chose me.’
‘I thought you chose me. I thought I was the vessel and you were the —’
I couldn’t remember what she was. It had started out as some kind of fast-setting liquid, and ended up as an exuberant house plant.
‘You could have found some nice girl. Some nice, predictable girl.’
‘Why do you keep saying things like that?’ I shouted. ‘You’re the only thing that makes me predictable, because somebody has to be!’
‘You don’t know how hard it is for me,’ she said presently, in a trembling voice, ‘to stand on my own.’
‘I’m not asking you to stand on your own.’
‘You are. You just don’t see it yet.’
‘I think I’d see it if I were asking it.’
My mouth felt as though it were stuffed with something dry, like bread.
‘We’re married,’ I said finally. ‘Doesn’t that mean anything to you? For all their faults, at least your parents stay together.’
‘That isn’t a marriage,’ said Rebecca. ‘That’s a mutual dependency.’
‘Of course it seems like that to you! At least they touch each other!’ I said. It seemed I was shouting again. ‘You’d have to have a lump on your breast the size of a football for me to stand any chance of even noticing it!’
I went to bed and lay listening to the sound of Hamish rustling in his sleeping bag. I lay awake for so long in the airless, featureless spare room that I began to feel like something in a specimen case, being lightly tormented where I lay pinned behind glass by the sounds my son made, which summoned me constantly to awareness and to the state that precedes activity. I felt that if only I could hear or smell the sea this sensation would pass. I felt I could be comforted by the existence of something animate but impartial. In this place of fences such intrusions were apparently considered hazardous. It occurred to me that Doniford had succumbed to a sort of partitioning, a spoliation, out of its inability to adhere to its true nature. Like me, it had admitted ugliness because ugliness asked to be admitted.
SEVEN
‘Where are the women?’ Paul Hanbury wanted to know, when Adam, Hamish and I opened the door to his room. ‘Stand aside — let me see! Where are they? Where are my bloody women? Three days I’ve been in this bloody room and not one of them has come to see me!’
In its spacious sparseness and beige diffidence, the room was more like a room in a hotel than a hospital. Paul Hanbury lay on the grand, plinth-like bed at its centre. He wore a white smock and looked very small and tyrannical, like a child emperor. I would have recognised him by his voice alone, yet it was hard now to believe that it had emanated from him — it travelled around the room in great rings of sound that dwarfed his body. He had never been large, but lying in that bed he looked wizened — except for his head, which retained its distinctive scale and grandeur, and which he barely moved when he spoke, so that in spite of everything he had the poised appearance of a statesman, or an actor. His hair rolled back from his forehead in thick, steel-grey waves and his face had darkened and deepened into creases since the last time I saw him, especially around his eyes, which were small and black and glittered like buttons. He opened his large, well-shaped mouth wide in order to talk, revealing straight, strong, even yellow teeth and the resilient, plump pad of his tongue.
‘That’s not true, dad,’ said Adam. ‘Vivian came last night.’
‘She did not — not a soul has come since you showed your face here yesterday! And before that there was only that poseur David, who came with some bloody stupid periodical and wouldn’t sit down in case he creased his trousers, and apart from that there’s been nobody.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Adam.
‘Where’s it gone? It’s called the Wankers’ Review — or the Wallies’ Review. Where the hell is it? Ah yes, here we go — the Wolsey Review. “Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation”. I think that’s David’s idea of a joke. D’you see what they’ve done to my dong? They’ve gift-wrapped it, do you see?’ He folded back his covers to reveal part of a hooped wire contraption that stood in an ominous arch over his hips, and then drew them quickly up again before it could be established what was underneath. ‘And what else is there — “Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination”! I think I’ll save that for Vivian, if she ever comes.’
Beside me Hamish made his bell noise. It sounded particularly loud in the well-insulated room.
‘What’s that?’ said Paul amusedly, looking around. ‘School’s out?’
‘Vivian definitely said she was coming in last night,’ said Adam. ‘I don’t understand why she didn’t say something this morning.’
‘Michael! Come over here where I can see you.’ This was bellowed as though from a great distance, although I was standing six feet from the bed and the room was full of daylight. ‘Is this fellow yours?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’s a funny little bugger, isn’t he? What’s his name?’
‘Hamish.’
‘Put him up on the bed, will you? Put him here, next to me, if he’ll come. Has he got a mother?’