‘— and at the weekends,’ she continued, ‘he used to take you back to the family pile.’
‘The first time I went there it was his sister Caris’s eighteenth birthday party,’ I said. ‘She’d never met me but she invited me anyway. The place is called Egypt Farm and on her invitation it said something like “Please come to Egypt”. It really annoyed me, but when I got there it suddenly seemed romantic.’
‘What about the sister?’ Charlie said, with the suggestive tone that irritated me. ‘Was she romantic too?’
‘She was far too sophisticated for me,’ I said. ‘She was having a relationship with an artist who used to paint her naked.’
‘Who was it?’ Rebecca enquired, in a remote voice.
‘I think he was called Jasper Elliot.’
Rebecca raised her eyebrows but said nothing.
‘So you admired the sister from afar,’ Charlie said, ‘and at eighteen you thought it was exciting that two women could be married to the same man and still be civil to each other. And we know Adam was more interesting in those days because Becca says he was. What about the father? I sense the father is at the root of all this.’
A feeling of discomfort, almost of apprehension, stole over me. I felt a sensation of nakedness across my back, a coldness, as though someone were standing behind me. As much to relieve this feeling as anything else I turned to lift Hamish and set him on a chair at the table. My hands cleaved to his slender ribcage. I was almost disappointed to feel how small he was, for in that instant I had been visited by the perverse illusion that he could offer me some protection. Instead he seemed so small as to be barely human.
‘He let me drive his car,’ I said.
‘I may be being obtuse,’ said Charlie, ‘but the symbolism of that is escaping me for the moment.’
‘The first time he met me,’ I explained. ‘He threw me the keys and asked me to go down to the town for more wine.’
I laid Hamish’s plate in front of him. Tendrils of vapour curled upwards around the fixed peaks of his face. Rebecca was watching us with an expression of unidentifiable emotion.
‘For the party?’
‘My father never once let me drive his car,’ I observed.
‘Perhaps your father attached more value to things.’
‘I don’t know. He might have.’
‘But the point was that he recognised you as a man and your father didn’t. And there he was with his two wives and his gorgeous daughter and his parties and his big house. Did you feel flattered?’
‘I felt relieved.’
‘About what?’
‘That things didn’t have to be so hard.’
At this Charlie sat back with an expression of triumph.
‘So he bought you too!’ she exclaimed.
‘Why would he bother to do that?’ I said, though I didn’t entirely disagree with her.
‘Maybe he envied you your incorruptibility. What I want to know is why you fell for it. You’re such a puritan, Michael,’ she exclaimed. ‘All this talk of aristocratic largesse and car keys — you don’t even have a car! You pay yourself slave wages down at that slum you call an office. You’re the least materialistic person I know and yet there you are getting all seduced and concupiscent over a sheep farmer! Perhaps this is your weakness,’ she said, with a devilish glint in her eye. ‘Perhaps this is your dark secret.’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ I protested, laughing.
‘Then what was it?’
I remembered that golden day of Caris’s party, which remained untouched in my recollection in all its exquisite irretrievability.
‘Something happened to me almost as soon as I got there,’ I said. ‘I had an — intimation.’
‘Of what?’ said Charlie.
‘That my life was going to expand and expand and become beautiful.’
A silence followed this disclosure. The gaze of the two women grew so discomfiting that I added:
‘It was a quality they had. The Hanburys.’
‘And what was this magic quality?’ said Charlie.
‘They made it seem as though all you had to do was something other than what you thought you should do.’
Charlie nodded her head abstractedly, as though this proposition pleased her.
‘I see,’ she said presently. ‘And that became your motto, did it? To live adjacent to your own conservative compulsions. That’s not bad. Of course, I didn’t know you before you experienced this divine revelation. Was it as transforming as that? Would you be sitting here now, for example, in this gorgeous, crumbling residence, with the gorgeous Rebecca, if these Hanburys hadn’t got their claws into you?’
‘I didn’t say it was a revelation.’
‘Oh yes. It was an intimation. You haven’t answered my question.’
I wasn’t sure I wanted to answer it. Rebecca had turned her head and was looking at me with a shadowy, inscrutable expression. I realised that I still had my coat on. It seemed for a moment as though I could leave, as though I had given them all the satisfaction it was in my power to give.
‘It might have been the feeling that I didn’t need to possess things to experience them,’ I said. Charlie’s face was blank. ‘Think of it as a picture,’ I added.
‘A picture.’
‘Of a house on top of a big hill overlooking the sea, with these people in it and a party going on.’
‘Is this a point about art?’
‘Sort of,’ I said.
‘And suddenly you decided to visit this charming little picture,’ said Charlie. ‘You took your life in your hands. Was this by any chance related to your near-death experience on the front step?’
‘I thought I should see Adam,’ I said. ‘I suppose it was a social compulsion.’
‘You forgot it was a picture.’
‘I couldn’t remember any more what it always made me remember.’
‘So you went back,’ said Charlie, ‘and these models of bohemian living turned out to be a pack of money-grubbing reprobates. Egypt!’ she snorted, shaking her head and laughing.
At this moment Rebecca spoke.
‘It isn’t anything to do with art,’ she said. ‘It’s to do with cowardice.’
Her voice was so cold that it abraded me like a fierce, freezing wind where I stood. Had we been alone I believed in that instant I would have rushed to her in my petrifying nakedness and begged her for warmth and forgiveness; but then the moment passed, and I found myself subsiding once more into a familiar accommodation with our remoteness from one another. Charlie gave a surprised laugh.
‘That’s a bit harsh, Becca,’ she said.
‘It’s true,’ said Rebecca, obstinately but with a little less frigidity. ‘Anyway, it’s unnatural not to be possessive. Men are supposed to be possessive.’
‘Are they?’ said Charlie.
‘It doesn’t mean they’re compromised,’ Rebecca persisted. ‘It takes courage to set the terms — look at dad, for heaven’s sake! He’s always out there, taking risks, making things happen, and for what? To make us safe.’ She raised her hands aloft, to indicate the very roof under which we sat. ‘You could call him domineering or macho or possessive, but the fact is that he lives life ten times more passionately than the rest of us!’