Charlie said to me, with a rueful expression: ‘You can see we’ve been working ourselves up into a fever of female indignation in your absence.’
‘You should have heard Michael when I was in labour!’ exclaimed Rebecca, turning her sights on me. ‘He’d look at his watch and tell me I couldn’t be in pain because it wasn’t time yet!’
Charlie laughed.
‘Poor Michael,’ she said, shaking her head and then laughing again.
‘Why?’ said Rebecca. ‘Why “poor Michael”? Why does everybody feel sorry for him?’
I saw that she was actually angry: there was a brief thickening of her voice as she spoke which betrayed the fact. Hamish was sitting on Rebecca’s lap in an attitude of extreme limpness and pallor. He jolted this way and that each time her body discharged its surfeit of discontent.
‘Everybody doesn’t feel sorry for me,’ I said.
‘It’s just that he’s only just walked through the door,’ Charlie added, in mitigation of the awkward way I had phrased my remark. ‘He’s only been here five minutes and people are accusing him of deformity, and strange cruelty to pregnant women.’
‘I’m not people,’ Rebecca said.
She folded her arms and looked down into them as though something were cradled there.
‘Anyway,’ Charlie continued, ‘where have you two been?’
I sensed that she meant to recompense me for the bitter welcome I had received and perhaps for something else too, for other conversations by which I hadn’t been wounded because I wasn’t there to hear them.
‘A friend of mine has a family farm in Somerset,’ I said. ‘Hamish and I went to help with the lambing.’
‘What fun!’ cried Charlie, by which cheery expostulation I deduced that Rebecca’s revelations had been more gruesome than ever. ‘Was this a he-friend or a she-friend?’
‘A he,’ I said, although I thought it was a strange, suggestive question to ask, particularly in Rebecca’s presence. I caught a glimpse of something I had noticed in Charlie before, a certain blindness to the concept of virtue. Then it struck me that the tastelessness of the comment might be Rebecca’s own.
‘And how do you know each other, you and this sheep-farmer?’
‘It’s his father who owns the farm. My friend is a chartered surveyor.’
‘Gosh,’ Charlie said. She wore the expression of someone who has just opened a door and found something unexpectedly horrible behind it. ‘A chartered surveyor from Somerset. He must be scintillating company. Or is he one of those people like in Tolstoy, who make a philosophical occasion of themselves?’
‘I’ve met him,’ Rebecca said, as though this indicated we were about to hear the last word on the subject. ‘He’s the sort of person who seems quite exciting at eighteen but then ends up middle-aged before he’s thirty.’
Chagrined, I turned away from the table and began to look for something I could give Hamish to eat. I opened the fridge and was surprised to see it lavishly stocked. There were numerous luxurious packets of things, olives and expensive-looking cheeses and handmade pasta like little wrapped gifts in muted shades of green and cream.
‘We’re making Michael cross,’ said Charlie behind me. ‘Let’s stop or he’ll leave us sitting here on our own. We were discussing the chartered surveyor and his universal values. Is he superannuated, like Becca says?’
‘He doesn’t think he’s young,’ I said. I was speaking into the open fridge and so I allowed myself to say it a little spitefully.
‘I sense we’re being mocked,’ Charlie said to Rebecca. ‘Is he going to be a chartered surveyor for the rest of his life?’
‘I don’t think so. He always expected he’d take over the farm one day.’
‘Imagine that. I can’t think of anything nicer. Or worse, I’m not sure which.’
‘Nor is he. He’s considering going up north to work for his father-in-law.’
‘Who’s the father-in-law?’
I turned around with some of the things from the fridge in my hands and was surprised to see a look of protest, almost of affront, flit across Rebecca’s face as she saw them, as though my taking of food were inappropriate, or as though I were taking what she wanted for herself.
‘He sells jacuzzis,’ I said. ‘He’s offered him a job.’
‘My God,’ said Charlie. ‘I hope he’s not going to do that, in any case.’
‘He might. The farm’s losing money. It turns out his stepmother has been financing it all along, out of her own pocket.’
‘So it’s all a sort of illusion.’
‘Sort of.’
‘For whose benefit?’
I took a saucepan out of the cupboard and lit the gas with a match from a box beside the cooker. Taking the match from its box I was aware again of Rebecca’s strange gaze and its accusation of theft.
‘God knows,’ I said. ‘If you’d been there you’d have thought it was the father. The stepmother thinks that he — procured her. He and his wife, to bail themselves out. She claims now that they set out to destroy her marriage in order to get their hands on her money.’
Charlie shrieked.
‘What a scandal!’ she cried. ‘And is it true?’
I smiled at her tone.
‘I don’t know. It might be.’
‘But what’s she like, the stepmother?’
‘She’s slightly saturnine. She mopes around this great dark house. And Audrey is very vivacious.’
‘Is that the mother? The minx!’
‘They always seemed perfectly amicable. It was what I always liked about them. They seemed so uninhibited by their situation.’
‘Well, now you know why,’ said Charlie. ‘The second one couldn’t believe she’d got the man and the first one couldn’t believe she’d got the money! Are you listening to this, Becca? What I want to know is how it all came out. Were you there?’
I nodded. ‘Paul, my friend’s father, was in hospital for a few days. It seemed to be precipitated by his absence. Adam said he’d gone through the farm accounts, and then Audrey came up demanding money and Vivian wouldn’t give her any, and suddenly everyone was fighting about who’d done what to whom. Then one of the children shot his brother with a crossbow.’
‘My God,’ said Charlie in a reverent tone. ‘Over the money?’
‘No, no — a small child, one of Vivian’s grandchildren. He’d been given a crossbow as a toy and there was an accident. The bolt went into his little brother’s hand. A boy Hamish’s age.’
At the sound of his name Hamish slid off his mother’s lap and came to stand beside me at the cooker. His food bubbled in the pan. He rested his hand on the back of my leg; he leaned, as though against a tree or a solid section of wall.
‘It all sounds barbaric!’ exclaimed Charlie. ‘What happened? Was he all right?’
‘It was strange,’ I said. ‘His parents weren’t there and nobody seemed to want to take him to hospital. There was some doctor they all knew, a family friend who lived in the next valley, and they spent ages trying to track him down and arguing over where he was and talking to ten different people about him on the telephone and then it turned out he’d retired years ago and didn’t practise any more. Finally Adam’s wife took him to the hospital in Taunton. I don’t know what happened after that. She hadn’t come back when we left.’
‘What on earth were you two doing in this den of vipers? How did you come across them in the first place?’
I said: ‘I knew Adam at university. We lived next door to each other.’
‘I see. And —’
Charlie paused to remove her suede jacket. Beneath it she wore a black silk shirt which strained across her breasts as she moved, so that a string of gaps suddenly opened among the buttons down her front. A black lace garment was momentarily visible through them. The sight of it caused me to feel a confused sense of both suspicion and sympathy for her: for reasons I could not establish, her underwear reminded me of her humanity, of her native power both to wound and be wounded. Her hair snaked darkly over her shoulders as she turned and hung the jacket on the chair next to her. When she faced me again her countenance was flushed. I sensed that she had felt my notice of her and wasn’t sure what it meant.