by Rachel Cusk
When he had finished speaking the other students began to pack away their books and papers: the two hours were up. I walked to the Tube station and got on the train. I was meeting a man for dinner, someone I barely knew. He had got my number from a mutual friend. When I arrived at the restaurant he was already there, waiting. He was reading a book, which he replaced in his bag before I could see the title. He asked me how I was and I found myself saying that I was very tired, to the extent that I might not have all that much to say for myself. He looked a little disappointed at this news, and asked if I wanted to hang up my coat. I said I would keep it on: I felt cold. There were builders in my house, I added. The doors and windows were constantly open and the heating had been turned off. The house had become like a tomb, a place of dust and chill. It was impossible to eat or sleep or work – there wasn’t even anywhere to sit down. Everywhere I looked I saw skeletons, the skeletons of walls and floors, so that the house felt unshielded, permeable, as though all the things those walls and floors ought normally to keep out were free to enter. I had had to go into debt to finance the work – a debt I had no immediate prospect of being able to repay – and so even when it was done I wasn’t sure I would feel entirely comfortable there. My children, I added, were away. I told him the story of the Saluki dogs following the hawk: my current awareness of my children, I said, was similarly acute and gruelling, except that I was trying to keep sight of them on my own. On top of that, I said, there was something in the basement, something that took the form of two people, though I would hesitate to give their names to it. It was more of a force, a power of elemental negativity that seemed somehow related to the power to create. Their hatred of me was so pure, I said, that it almost passed back again into love. They were, in a way, like parents, crouched malevolently in the psyche of the house like Beckett’s Nagg and Nell in their dustbins. My sons call them the trolls, I said. The boys were still young enough to see morality in terms of character, I said, as the fairy tales they’d read in childhood had taught them to do. They were still willing to give evil an identity.
He had removed his glasses at the word ‘evil’ and placed them in a case on the table. He had looked slightly owlish with them on. Now he looked like something else again.
I had been thinking lately about evil, I went on, and was beginning to realise that it was not a product of will but of its opposite, of surrender. It represented the relinquishing of effort, the abandonment of self-discipline in the face of desire. It was, in a way, a state of passion. I told him about Tony and his visit downstairs. Tony, I felt sure, had been afraid: talking to the trolls he had been unable either to resist or control them; instead he had found himself placating them by mirroring their hatred, and then had given me an account of his behaviour afterwards that attempted to turn that failure into an act of will and even heroism. But part of him, I saw, had retained what the trolls had said about me. It was possible, I had realised, to resist evil, but in doing so you acted alone. You stood or fell as an individual. You risked everything in the attempt: it might even be the case, I said, that evil could only be overturned by the absolute sacrifice of self. The problem was that nothing could give greater pleasure to your enemies.
He smiled and picked up the menu.
It sounds to me like you’re getting on top of things, he said.
He asked me what I wanted to eat, and ordered two glasses of champagne to be brought to the table. The restaurant was small and dimly lit: the softness of the light and of the upholstered surfaces seemed to blunt the sharpness of what I was trying to communicate. He said that it was strange it had taken us so long to meet: in fact it was almost exactly a year to the day since we had been – albeit briefly – introduced by a mutual friend. Since then, he had asked the mutual friend several times for my number; he had attended parties and dinners where he had been told I would be present, only to find that I wasn’t there. He didn’t know why the mutual friend had resisted putting him directly in touch with me, if it was anything so deliberate as resistance. But one way or another, he had been obstructed; until – again without knowing why – he had recently asked the mutual friend once more for my number and promptly been given it.
I said that my current feelings of powerlessness had changed the way I looked at what happens and why, to the extent that I was beginning to see what other people called fate in the unfolding of events, as though living were merely an act of reading to find out what happens next. That idea – of one’s own life as something that had already been dictated – was strangely seductive, until you realised that it reduced other people to the moral status of characters and camouflaged their capacity to destroy. Yet the illusion of meaning recurred, much as you tried to resist it: like childhood, I said, which we treat as an explanatory text rather than merely as a formative experience of powerlessness. For a long time, I said, I believed that it was only through absolute passivity that you could learn to see what was really there. But my decision to create a disturbance by renovating my house had awoken a different reality, as though I had disturbed a beast sleeping in its lair. I had started to become, in effect, angry. I had started to desire power, because what I now realised was that other people had had it all along, that what I called fate was merely the reverberation of their will, a tale scripted not by some universal storyteller but by people who would elude justice for as long as their actions were met with resignation rather than outrage.
He was watching me while I spoke, with strange-coloured eyes that reminded me of peat or earth and that now seemed strangely naked, as though by removing his glasses he had also removed the shield of adulthood. I saw that there were plates of food on the table, though I couldn’t remember the waiter bringing them. He was struck, he said, by my allusion to anger: it was a biblical word and carried connotations of righteousness, but he had always believed anger to be the most mysterious and dangerous of human qualities, precisely because it had no fixed moral identity.
His father, he said, had liked to make things with his hands in his spare time: there was a shed in the garden of their family home and his father had created a workshop in it. Everything there was kept meticulously in order, each tool hanging on its designated peg, the different-sized chisels always sharp, the nails and screws arranged according to size along a shelf. His father could always, therefore, conveniently select the tools appropriate for the task in hand, and his exercise of his personal qualities – which had included a terrifying, unpredictable anger as well as an unshakeable sense of honour – seemed to lie similarly under his premeditated command. He would use anger in particular with a calculated deliberation, and this sense of his control had been perhaps more frightening than the anger itself, for anger, surely, ought to be uncontrollable; or rather, if one was capable of controlling it sufficiently to decide when and how to use it, that use of it might be described as a sin.
I said I hadn’t heard someone use that word in a long time and he smiled.
‘I never believed in an angry God,’ he said.
He had learned how to tread carefully around his father but also how to please him and elicit his approval. His father’s calculatedness, in a sense, had tutored his children in the same arts, though he had never deemed his son trustworthy of handling his beautiful set of tools: he left them all to his son-in-law in his will, an unpleasant character who divorced his daughter a year later, so that the tools passed for ever out of the family. His father was a man who took the part of rightness even when he was wrong: that piece of poetic justice, had he been alive to witness it, would probably still have eluded him. Years after his father’s death, on a dismal holiday with his wife at the time and her two children in a farmhouse in the French countryside, he had done some small favour for the elderly housekeeper and she had returned the next day with a metal chest in the back of her car. Inside was a most beautiful set of old tools, which she explained she would like to give him. They had belonged to her husband, she told him: he had died a long time ago and she had kept them, wa
iting for someone to whom she felt she could bequeath them.
When he was five or six years old, his parents had sat him and his sister down and told them they were adopted. He was a model son and student until, at the age of seventeen or eighteen, he had suddenly stopped behaving well. He went to parties, started smoking and drinking, failed his exams and lost his chance to go to university. His father immediately threw him out of the house and never accepted him back again. The concept of justice he had evolved as a result of these experiences was not retributive but the reverse. He had tried to develop his own capacity for forgiveness in order to be free.
I said it seemed to me that forgiveness only left you more vulnerable to what you couldn’t forgive. Francis of Assisi, I added, had been disowned by his father, who had even taken him to court to sue him for the material outlay of parenthood, which at that point amounted to little more than the clothes on his back. St Francis removed them there in court and returned them to him, and thereafter lived in a state that other people called innocence but that I viewed as utter nihilism.
He smiled again and I noticed his crooked teeth, which seemed somehow connected to the instances of rebellion and abandonment he had described. He said that he still owned and wore many of his father’s clothes. His father had been much bigger and taller than him: wearing the clothes he felt that he was somehow re-enveloping himself in what had been good about his father, in his physical and moral strength.
I asked him whether he had ever tried to find his biological parents and he said that it had taken him until his early forties, after his adoptive father’s death, by which time his biological father was also dead. He had never been able to find any record of his mother. His father’s twin brother was still alive: he had driven out to a bungalow in the Midlands and there, in the plush-carpeted overheated lounge where the television remained on for the duration of his visit, he had for the first time met his blood relatives. He had also researched the adoption agency and was put in contact with a woman who had worked there at around the time of his birth. She had described the room – a room at the very top of a building in Knightsbridge – where the transaction actually occurred. It was reached by several flights of stairs, which the mother would climb holding her child. At the top she would enter a room that was empty except for a wooden bench. She would place the baby on that bench, and only when she had left the room and returned down the stairs would the adoptive parents enter from the room next door – where they were waiting – and pick up the baby from the bench where it had been left.
He had been six weeks old when his parents adopted him and gave him the name they preferred to the one his biological mother had chosen. He had been told that once they got him home he had started to cry and he hadn’t stopped. He had cried day and night, to the point where his parents began to wonder whether they hadn’t made a mistake in adopting a child. He supposed – if it wasn’t too fanciful to ascribe the will to survive to a two-month-old baby – that at that point he stopped crying. A year later they adopted a girl – his non-biological sister – and the family was considered to be complete. I asked whether he would tell me the name he had been given when he was born. He looked at me for a moment with his naked-seeming eyes. John, he said.
There was a literature of adoption, he went on, and when he looked back on his childhood he almost saw it as a series of theoretical instances: what at the time had been reality now – in certain lights – looked almost like a game, a drama of withheld knowledge, like the game where someone is blindfolded and everyone watches them fumbling and groping to find out what they – the audience – already know. His sister had been a very different child from himself, disobedient and wild: he had read since that this was a common – almost an inevitable – characteristic of adoptive siblings, one taking the part of compliance and the other of rebellion. His teenage explosion, his secretiveness and his desire to please, his feelings towards women, his two marriages and subsequent divorces, even the nameless sensation he held at his core, the thing he believed to be most himself: all of it was virtually preordained, accounted for before it had even occurred. He had found himself, lately, drifting away from the moral framework to which he had adhered all his life, because this sense of preordination made the exercise of will seem almost pointless. What I had said about passivity had struck a chord with him, but in his case it had caused him to see reality as absurd.
I noticed that he hadn’t eaten anything, while I had eaten everything in front of me. The waiter came and he waved away his untouched plate. He and his sister, he said in answer to my question, lived very different lives that nonetheless strangely mirrored one another. She was an air stewardess, and he too spent nearly all his time on aeroplanes, travelling to meetings and conferences all over the world. Neither of us belongs anywhere, he said. Like him she had been married and divorced twice: other than the travelling, that was about all they had in common. But as children they had loved one another with a passionate, unscripted love. He remembered that on the rare occasions when their strict parents had left them at home unsupervised, they would put a record on the family turntable and take off all their clothes and dance. They had danced ecstatically, wildly, shrieking with laughter. They had bounced on the beds, holding one another’s hands. They had promised, at the age of six or seven, to marry one another when they grew up. He looked at me and smiled.
Shall we go and get a drink somewhere? he said.
We took our coats and bags and left the restaurant. Outside in the dark, windy street he paused. It was here, he said. Right here. Do you remember?
We were standing in the same place where, a year earlier, we had met. I had been waiting on the pavement beside my car: someone was coming to tow it away because I had lost the keys. The man that I was with at the time had smashed the window with a piece of breeze block he had found in a nearby building site in order to get his bag, which was locked inside. He had left me there – he had an important meeting to go to – and although I understood what he had done I had found myself unable to forgive him for it. The alarm had been set off when the window was smashed. For three hours I had stood there with the shrieking sound in my ears. At a certain point, someone I knew – the mutual friend – came out of a café on the other side of the road. He was with another man, and when they saw me standing there they crossed the road to speak to me. I told the mutual friend what had happened, and I remembered, as I was speaking, becoming more and more aware of his companion, until I found that I was addressing my remarks to him instead. This was the man who stood beside me now. He had chosen the restaurant specially, he admitted, smiling. After that conversation beside the car, he told me, he and the mutual friend had walked away, but no sooner were they round the corner than he had stopped and said to the mutual friend that they ought to go back and help me.
But for some reason, he said now, we didn’t. I should have made him, he said. I should have insisted. It had taken him a whole year to reverse that moment in which he had walked away. He had interpreted the difficulty of getting hold of me as the punishment that was equal to the crime. But he had served his sentence.
He put out his hand and I felt his fingers circling my arm. The hand was solid, heavy, like a moulded marble hand from antiquity. I looked at it and at the dark woollen material of his coat sleeve and the mounded expanse of his shoulder. A flooding feeling of relief passed violently through me, as if I was the passenger in a car that had finally swerved away from a sharp drop.
Faye, he said.
Later that night, when I got home and let myself into the dark, dust-smelling house, I found that Tony had put down the insulating panels over the joists. They were all perfectly nailed and sealed. He and Pavel must have stayed late, I realised, to get the floor down. The rooms were silent, and solid underfoot. I walked across the new surface. I went to the back door and opened it and sat on the steps outside. The sky was clear now and bursting with stars. I sat and looked at the points of light surging forward out of the darknes
s. I heard the sound of the basement door opening and the scuffing noise of footsteps and the heavy sound of Paula’s breathing in the dark. She approached the fence that divided us. She couldn’t see me, but she knew that I was there. I heard the rasping noises of her clothes and her breath as she drew close and put her face to the fence.
Fucking bitch, she said.
On Friday night I drove west out of London to see my cousin Lawrence, who had recently moved house, having left his wife Susie for a woman named Eloise and in the process been forced to relocate from one Wiltshire village to another of similar size and type a few miles away. These events had elicited the outrage and consternation of friends and family alike, but had barely left a mark on the outward appearance of Lawrence’s life, which seemed to go on much as it had before. The new village, Lawrence said, was in fact far more desirable and picturesque than the old one, being closer to the Cotswolds and more unspoiled. Lawrence and Eloise and Eloise’s two children constituted the new household, with Lawrence’s young daughter shuttling back and forth between her parents.
One evening the previous summer, standing in the long shadows of my kitchen at the old house, I had answered the phone with a feeling of presentiment and had heard Lawrence’s voice, sounding as it had never sounded to me before. Rome, he said, when I asked him where he was. And in fact I could hear the noise of the city in the background, but my initial impression – which was that Lawrence was in that moment alone and surrounded by infinite empty distances which he gazed down on in terror and awe – remained. He did not reply to my questions about what he was doing in Rome and so I fell silent and allowed him to tell me that he was on the brink of ending his marriage, in order to be with a woman he believed he loved. This crisis had been building for a few months, he said, but here in Rome it had burst its bounds and become imminent. The woman, Eloise, was with him in the city – he was there for work and Eloise had accompanied him, a fact of which Susie remained in ignorance – but he had come out for a walk alone in order to think. It was on that walk that he had called me. It’s thirty-eight degrees here, he said. Everything feels completely unreal. I’ve just walked past a woman lying in the street unconscious, covered in mud. I don’t know where I am: the sun has gone down but for some reason it isn’t getting dark. The light feels like it’s coming from nowhere. It’s like time has stopped, he said, which I supposed was a way of saying that he could no longer identify or even imagine a future.
