Free In the Fold by Rachel Cusk Page B

said.
    ‘If you knew him,’ she said, ‘it wouldn’t surprise you.’
    She approached Adam and I where we sat at the table. In one hand she held a blackened frying pan from which smoke was issuing in a fast, grey, vertical stream. In the other she held a metal implement with which she proceeded to scrape furiously at the bottom of the pan, eventually detaching two ragged fried eggs which she added to what was already on our plates.
    ‘Thank you,’ I said.
    Adam and I had been in the barns with the sheep since four o’clock that morning and it was now after nine: I was hungry, but in the gloom of the kitchen the food had a grey, indistinct appearance, as though it were very old. When I thought of the kitchen of Egypt Farm I thought of a place that was all light, yet I could see now that it faced into its own depths like a cave or a cathedral. The black hearth made a wall of darkness at one end. The flagstones on the floor were cold and the colour of discomfort. Daylight came through the small window that faced on to the yard and then stopped in a sort of obstructed oblong, as though we were looking at it from under water. Occasionally, the sun fell behind a bank of cloud outside in the tossing spring sky and the room would tilt and sway a little. Sometimes long shadows raced across the kitchen floor and flew up the far wall into oblivion.
    I said: ‘I’m surprised. I’d have had Caris down as an animal lover.’
    ‘She used to cry on walks because the dogs chased the rabbits,’ said Adam. ‘Which I suppose makes her an animal lover of sorts. She said it was persecution. Something about the way they sniffed the ground.’
    ‘She might have changed,’ said Vivian, as though she hadn’t seen Caris for years. ‘She’s always changing. The moment you’ve got the hang of what she’s interested in she’s interested in something completely different and can’t stand the first thing. Then she seems to want to argue about it.’
    Adam snorted. He had his mouth full. I watched him divide the fatty ribbons of bacon, the rough discs of potato, the blackened, visceral mushrooms, and place the sections one after the other in his mouth. Bang-a-bang-a-bang-a went the door. Around the walls stood the towering shelves holding the same items, pieces of china, ancient things made of copper and brass and iron, antique jelly moulds, jars and weights and scales, and mysterious yellowed cookery books with missing spines that were stacked together like a sorcerer’s almanac. They looked reclusive, recessed into their dark wooden alcoves like strange icons. I wondered if any of them had been taken down and used since the last time I saw them. The dense black range crouched in a haze of grey, fat-smelling smoke. Vivian stood by the sink amidst the detritus of her culinary activities. I noticed how thin and hollow-looking she was. Her skin had a jaundiced appearance. Her eyes looked permanently aghast in their wrinkled beds of shadow. Her attenuated arms twitched lightly at her sides, yet her back and shoulders were so hunched around her concave chest that a great weight seemed to be hanging from them. In her dark clothes she had the look of a bloodless, exoskeletal creature.
    ‘In fact,’ said Adam, to me, ‘you’ll find Caris hasn’t changed at all.’
    ‘Good,’ I said.
    ‘She’s still wondering what she wants to be when she grows up. Actually, I haven’t seen her since last year,’ he added bitterly. ‘I haven’t even spoken to her.’
    ‘Doesn’t she keep in touch?’
    He laughed. ‘By horoscope. By looking into her crystal ball.’
    ‘What’s she doing these days?’
    ‘She lives in a commune. They call it an “artists’ co-operative”. Women only, of course. They’ve freed themselves from the male oppressor. Though to look at some of them I’d say the feeling was mutual.’
    ‘In London?’
    ‘She went off in a fit of pique,’ he said, with his mouth full, ‘about four years ago.’
    ‘There was