Free In the Fold by Rachel Cusk

son?’
    ‘Of course,’ Adam replied, after a brief hesitation which suggested that in fact he found the request slightly outlandish. ‘How old is he?’
    ‘Three. I thought he’d enjoy it, that’s all.’
    ‘Of course, of course. We’re all, um, equipped. For children.’
    ‘Thanks.’
    ‘We live in Doniford now. In a sort of executive suburb. Our house is hilarious.’
    I looked through the window at the spectacle of the front steps in the grey afternoon.
    ‘Not as hilarious as mine,’ I said.
    ‘The girls will be pleased to see you,’ he said.
    I had no idea to which girls he was referring. Did he mean Vivian, or perhaps his strange, intimidating mother? Was Caris still there, after all these years? I wondered then whether farmers called their pregnant ewes ‘girls’.
    ‘And I them,’ I said.
    *
    Rebecca responded to the proposal in a manner that defied my expectations. Yet I did not know what to expect; I was open to innumerable possibilities, all of them, however, distinguished by the clarity and drama that were the signature even of Rebecca’s misapprehensions, and that either caused or intensified an answering muteness in myself, so that in the very act of escaping her I found it so difficult to ascribe motivations to my own behaviour that I preferred to believe it was she who was escaping me.
    She was clearing out the closet in our bedroom and did not desist from this activity while we spoke; I saw her face atdifferent planes and angles as she moved around, bending and straightening, lunging here and there with her arms bared to the elbow and her hands, white at the peaks of the knuckles, betraying like a tide-mark the steady presence of emotional frenzy, as though it moved in a body within her, now rising, now subsiding. I found her task obscurely threatening, for Rebecca was generally untidy and inconsistent in her habits and her fits of domestic purification were often significant and expressive of anger and intolerance, and a desire for change that did not augur well for those other residents of the status quo by which she had become so palpably infuriated.
    ‘What about Hamish?’ was what she said first of all, when I told her I was thinking of going away; the fact of my own absence having registered itself in an automatic neutrality of expression, as though it were a train passing through a station at which it was not scheduled to stop. It was left to me to feel the regret and anxiety that evidently did not suggest themselves to her, and which I noticed missing only when I spoke my plan out into the room and saw how indelibly rimed it was with controversy, and with the sordid expectation that by threatening to remove myself I would at least attract her attention. She did not feel it was required of her to explain what her question meant. Even so, it pained me as much to hear her ask it as if the plain fact that Rebecca could no longer be left alone with Hamish were new to me. Until now I had retained this knowledge as a form of generosity towards her, but I saw it become in that moment a dark tenet of our family life.
    I said: ‘I thought I would take him with me.’
    At that a little wave of realisation broke uncontrollably over Rebecca’s face, which she bent into the closet to hide. A few moments later she emerged holding a crushed shoe-box that disgorged bright pink tissue paper from its broken side. Excitement declared itself in two spots of colour on her pale cheeks.
    ‘How long will you be gone?’ she said.
    ‘A week.’
    ‘A week,’ she repeated thoughtfully.
    She maintained this quietly suggestive demeanour all the way to Wednesday, with the exception of one instance, when I wondered aloud whether in fact I hadn’t better stay in Bath after all and arrange for someone to start clearing away the wreckage of the balcony. I might have been a dignitary contemplating the abandonment of some vital, long-planned mission for all the dismay this suggestion evoked; and she my zealous