Read Online In the Fold by Rachel Cusk - Free Book Online

the evening at a pub in Bath where a group of us played together. Sometimes a tiny freckled girl called Dolores sang with us, when the strange scribble of her life happened to cross our more linear arrangements. We were paid in beer from the bar. I had an old leather jacket and a red scarf and cap I kept for these occasions. It might have seemed that my Friday evenings were a hobby but I had a sense of them that was disproportionate to their frequency, a feeling that when I addressed myself in the privacy of my own consciousness it was to the figure in the jacket, scarf and cap that I spoke. I attributed to that figure particularly sustaining qualities of loyalty. Playing the violin was the only real skill that I possessed. I often thought that if my life ever became intolerable I could always put on my cap, sling my violin case over my shoulder and wander out into the world to make my way. Rebecca herself played the piano, quite soulfully: at least, she started well, but before long the music would begin to unravel in her fingers, and the image I had of us playing together would come apart in separate pieces. When this happened I felt that I partook momentarily of her artistic frustrations: I felt that I understood what it was to hold something in the mind that I was unable to bring to life.
    ‘Sometimes I want to take that violin and break it over the table,’ said Rebecca. ‘Do you want to know why? Because it represents control. It represents perfectionism. It represents the selfish way you possess things.’
    The case was lying open. Rebecca was standing right next to it. It did not strike me as being out of the question that she actually would take out my violin and break it over the table.
    ‘When I hear you playing scales on that violin I want to weep. A grown man, practising his scales!’
    ‘If you’d kept up your piano you could accompany me,’ I said.
    Rebecca shrieked and clawed the air with her fingers.
    ‘The arrogance!’ she said. ‘The presumption!’
    ‘I thought you were the one who cared about art.’
    ‘You think I’m the enemy of self-expression?’ she cried. ‘You think I’m the enemy of art? That isn’t art! That’s the triumph of methodology! The only thing you can do on that violin is play tunes that have been played a thousand times before. It should be smashed – it should be broken! Better to be broken than to be the slave of method!’
    ‘You’re not actually that original, you know. That’s what everybody wants. Everybody wants to destroy things! You think destruction is an honourable response to your feelings of containment but it isn’t. What you’re destroying is the chance to understand yourself.’
    Rebecca appeared to give this idea momentary, involuntary consideration, as though it were something I had thrown towards her which she was unable to prevent herself catching.
    ‘I’ll say one thing for you, Michael,’ she said finally, as though regretfully. ‘You’re consistent. You always have been.’
    *
    The houses in Nimrod Street had balconies on the first floor at the front. They were large, ornamental Georgian things: each one was made of a single slab of limestone fifteen feet long and four feet wide that extended across nearly the entire width of the house. They had cast-iron railings around them that bowed slightly outwards and then curled around delicately at the top in the shape of a stave. They gave the houses a privileged, slightly exotic appearance, extending out into the air with a little clean wedge of shadow underneath. I never looked at our house without this lofty shape imprinting its stony grace on me. It registered itself silently, repeatedly, as the symbol of some aspect of miracle, some necessary excess that embellished my existence yet could never entirely be within my possession; so that my comings and goings at Nimrod Street were always accompanied by the vague sense that my life was both more beautiful and more difficult thanit needed to