The house was full of paintings: they hung around the walls like witnesses to the proceedings, though none of them represented anything recognisable, and often I would glimpse up to see one of these confusions of paint and feel startled by the way it seemed to replicate something about myself, some interior chaos that was always silently revolving at the borders of the life I was establishing for myself. Rebecca’s father Rick owned an art gallery in the town. He liked to give the impression that a sort of precariousness was conferred on this enterprise, by a force that was conflated with creativity itself, but I never saw any sign of it. On the contrary, Rick’s gallery was constantly awash in an apparently inexhaustible fund of notoriety and success, and the more these two commodities could be observed in the infallible business of their synthesis, the clearer an impression of its elemental steadiness could be obtained. The first time Rebecca took me there Rick was in the act of hanging a painting on a wall. His sleeves were rolled up and lengths of his wiry black and grey hair kept flopping in his face as he paced repeatedly away and back again, looking at it. When he saw me he cried out, and flagged me over in the sort of masculine summons that usually precedes a request for physical assistance.
‘Just the man I need!’ he shouted.
I went and stood beside him. In front of us was a painting about which I could tell nothing but that it reminded me of myself, though not in the usual way. I recognised in it a quality of self-consciousness, as though it were not entirely immersed in what it was.
‘What do you think?’ said Rick.
He moved closer to me and folded his thick, white, hairy arms. I folded my arms too. We stood there in a kind of spectatorial intimacy.
‘What’s the title?’ I said.
‘Oh, fuck, I dunno,’ said Rick, darting heavily forward and looking at something on the frame. ‘It’s Panic II,’ he declared over his shoulder. ‘I don’t know what happened to Panic I. Maybe it saw Panic II and, you know —’ he guffawed ‘— panicked.’
Silence fell. We looked at the painting. Rebecca had disappeared. I wished Rick hadn’t asked me what I thought, but at the same time I construed it as a test, something unavoidable that would have found me out one way or another.
‘Go on,’ said Rick softly. ‘What do you think?’
‘I’m not really the person to ask,’ I said.
‘Go on,’ he said, softer still.
‘I think it’s slightly — derivative?’ I said finally.
‘That does it!’ yelled Rick. ‘I’m not taking it! Three bloody thousand pounds my arse!’
My heart jolted in my chest, as it had when Paul Hanbury threw me the keys to his car that day on Egypt Hill. On both occasions, for reasons of unintelligible benevolence, I was incorporated into the world of another man’s masculinity.
Rebecca’s mother Ali had pale green eyes that never seemed to blink. She was small and slight and olive-skinned, and she did everything slowly and with an air of deliberation, keeping herself in the light, holding herself still, as though she lived in a frame and were perpetually making pictures there. She had delicate, unblemished hands with which she touched you frequently and confidentially, and her voice was delicate too, so that her talk, which issued from a single, arterial vein of frankness, was somewhat intoxicating. After an evening spent talking to Ali I would often suffer the next day from feelings of shame and contamination. I interpreted these feelings as proof of a constitutional weakness. They were a sort of allergic reaction, to the moral ambivalence that prevailed amongst the Alexanders, although none of them had ever done anything wrong as far as I knew. It was rather that they had no interest in seeming to be virtuous — they may even have been afraid of it. Instead, they concerned themselves with domineering feats of patronage and ostentatious magnanimity. What impressed me as I came to know them was that, unlike most people, the Alexanders actually invested their integrity entirely in their ostentation. The house in Nimrod Street was a good example of this. For six years we lived there free of charge on the basis of a single conversation, in which Rebecca mentioned that we were thinking of finding a place outside Bath, in the countryside.
‘Why the fuck do you want to do that?’ said Rick.
In spite of the fact that Rebecca was its advocate, this idea had originated with me. Rebecca was pregnant at the time and was peculiarly malleable and open to the wildest suggestions.
‘I don’t want to live in a flat,’ said Rebecca. ‘In Michael’s flat people walk all over the ceiling. At night it’s like sleeping in a grave with people walking all over it.’
‘Tell them to fucking shut up then,’ said Rick. ‘Tell them to take their fucking shoes off or you’ll call the police.’
‘I think they’re doctors or something,’ said Rebecca. ‘They have these alarms that go off all night.’
‘They’re doctors,’ I confirmed.
‘Why don’t you do what anyone normal would do,’ said Rick, ‘and move house? Move around the corner. Move out of earshot. Give the doctors some elbow room. Don’t move to a fucking village.’
‘I want a garden,’ said Rebecca.
‘Why do you want a garden? So you can grow a fucking carrot? So you can sit there and eat carrot stew in some Jew-hating village —’
‘Oh, come on,’ said Rebecca.
‘He’s not exaggerating, you guys,’ said Ali over the noise, in her empty, pacific voice that always seemed to float like a lifeboat on the surface of a conversational tumult. ‘People in the countryside are actually really racist. Especially against Jews.’
‘I’m not Jewish,’ said Rebecca. ‘I’m not anything.’
I started to tell them about Doniford and the Hanburys, which was the blueprint I had in mind for our move to the countryside, but unfortunately they were now locked in debate about whether Rebecca was Jewish or not.
‘I think you’re really uptight,’ said Ali. ‘It really worries me that you’re so uptight.’
‘I don’t have to be something just because you say I am,’ said Rebecca.
‘What about your grandmother?’ said Rick. ‘What about what she went through? Did she go through that for you to go and live in some village with Miss Marple?’
‘She was Catholic,’ said Rebecca. ‘She was baptised. At least I’m not talking about living a lie.’
‘That’s not fair,’ said Ali, shaking her head.
‘Anyway,’ said Rebecca, ‘Michael isn’t Jewish. Our children won’t be Jewish.’
‘Did we ever say anything about that?’ demanded Rick, holding up his large white hands. ‘Tell me, did we ever say one thing about that?’
‘What’s so great about this big bourgeois dolls’ house anyway?’ exploded Rebecca, finally returning to the point. ‘All people do here is go shopping! All they care about is renovating their houses so they can pretend they live in the past! If you took their little museums away from them they’d be as racist as anyone else —’