In the Fold Read Online Free PDF Page B

that had happened since rested structurally and irremediably on that intensity that had given way so silently to indifference. Or, as though I had failed at numerous points in my life to establish whether it was for their lasting significanceor their transitory attractiveness that I had chosen my circumstances, with the strange result that in the light of my friendship with Adam Hanbury, the existence I had constructed without him appeared to me momentarily as both insignificant and totally binding.
    ‘I heard he got married,’ I said. ‘I think they have some children.’
    My wife shrugged and smiled a mysterious smile. It was unclear whether she was acknowledging she could provide no proof of this, or indicating that the subject of marriage and children was beneath her commentary. I wanted to take issue with the big wheel and the idea that we were all stuck on it going round and round, endlessly held at a remove from the things we wanted. I suspected Rebecca only liked it because it proved that nothing was your fault.
    ‘I don’t understand,’ I persisted, ‘why we don’t see each other. We used to see each other every day.’
    ‘I don’t know,’ said Rebecca, who was apparently becoming irritated. ‘It obviously wasn’t your time.’
    She meant, in terms of predestination.
    ‘Was it all a waste, then?’
    ‘How should I know?’
    ‘You’re always telling me I should ask more questions.’
    ‘Some questions don’t have answers,’ said Rebecca. She looked fatigued. She fanned her face with her hand.
    She had complained several times about the fact that I never asked her anything. What should I ask her? She didn’t know – that was one of the questions that didn’t have an answer. Sometimes I saw in her a yearning for a time of reckoning that I felt she didn’t fully understand. She seemed to think that a move into an era of analysis and interrogation would constitute a new, living chapter in our relationship, or a new source of nourishment, as though after a famine; where to me it was clear that it would signify only that our relationship was over, that the disaster had occurred and that neutral forces of rationality, of law and order and civilisation, werenow washing over the wound. Marriage seemed to me to depend on two people staying together in time. It was like a race you ran together, a marathon. You kept your eyes ahead and you tried to surmount your weariness, and you reconciled yourself to the fact that while it may not be strictly enjoyable, at least running this race was healthy and strenuous and relieved you of the burden of thinking what else you might do with your time. I remembered a period of weeks or months when waking to the fact of my life with Rebecca was like waking to find an intricate, moving pattern of sunlight on my body.
    She was wearing a garment that resembled a complicated piece of Victorian underwear. It was cross-hatched with ribbons and little buttons and straps and it was edged with gathered lace all around the neck, so that in its painstaking envelopment of her form it seemed almost to be expressing love for her. Her face was mournful. I had the feeling I had begun occasionally to have, as though I were reaching the bottom of a long fall into water and were experiencing the change in pressure as I hollowed out the end of my trajectory and began to rise again. All the things I had gone streaking past on the way down now hovered around and above me, immanent, patient.
    ‘Given that you always claim to feel so powerless,’ I said, ‘I don’t see why you cleave to theories that make a virtue out of passivity.’
    ‘What are you talking about?’ she said.
    Her pale-blue eyes flashed past mine, little rents in her countenance. She looked momentarily lively. I had come to view Rebecca’s demeanour as involuntarily symptomatic of her consciousness, as though it were a drug she had taken whose crests and falls I had learned to read.
    ‘If I haven’t seen Adam Hanbury