Transit

by Rachel Cusk

  It’s all right, I said.

  I don’t know if it is or not, he said.

  There on the phone he began to talk to me about a book he was reading on Carl Jung.

  My whole life has been a fake, he said.

  I said there was no reason to believe that that perception wasn’t fake too.

  This is about freedom, he said.

  Freedom, I said, is a home you leave once and can never go back to.

  ‘God,’ Lawrence said, ‘God, I don’t know what to do.’

  But it was obvious he had already made up his mind.

  Since then I hadn’t seen much of Lawrence but as far as I knew he and Eloise were living together peaceably, Susie’s anger having stopped somewhere short of destroying their happiness entirely. She had phoned me up once, at the beginning, to give me her side of the story, a long and lurid narrative which had the presumably unintended effect of creating sympathy for Lawrence; she had phoned all their friends and relatives, apparently, in the same vein. Lawrence endured this onslaught silently, blackly – for a period his face wore a fixed expression of gritted teeth. Susie eviscerated him in their financial settlement and then, if not satisfied then presumably at least appeased, she withdrew. Lawrence was fond of luxury, and I wondered how the loss of money had affected him, but he never said anything to suggest that he and Eloise were hard up.

  After a stretch of motorway the journey followed a series of narrow, circuitous roads that never seemed to pass through any settlement but wound lengthily through dark countryside shrouded in thick fog. Sometimes a car would come from the other direction, its headlights boring two yellow holes in the whiteness. The submerged shapes of trees showed faintly along the roadside like objects imprisoned in ice. At certain points the fog became so thick that it was blinding. The car felt its way along, sometimes nearly colliding with the steep verge when a corner loomed up unexpectedly. The road unfurled with an apparently inexhaustible slowness and monotony, only ever showing the part of itself that lay immediately ahead. It was entirely possible that I would crash at any moment. The feeling of danger was merged with an almost pleasurable sense of anticipation, as though some constraint or obstruction was about to be finally torn down, some boundary broken on the other side of which lay release. A text sounded on my phone. Please be careful, it said. When I reached Lawrence’s house I switched off the engine with shaking hands and sat in the dark and silence of the gravelled driveway looking at the golden, lit-up windows.

  After a while Lawrence came out. His pale face loomed enquiringly at the car window. The house was a long low farmhouse with aged, bulging brick walls, surrounded by a walled garden. Even in the dark and fog it was evident that everything was very well tended and immaculate. The carriage light above the front door gave out a big bright beam. The gravel was raked and the bushes and hedges had been trimmed into smooth shapes. Lawrence had a cigarette in his hand. I got out of the car and we waited while he finished it.

  ‘Eloise hates me smoking,’ he said. ‘She says it makes her feel like our life is in a state of crisis. If it’s a crisis –’ he tossed the cigarette butt into the dark bushes – ‘then it’s a permanent one.’

  Lawrence had lost weight. He was expensively dressed and his appearance was sleeker and more groomed than it had been in the past. There was an air of faintly portentous vitality about him, almost of excitement. Despite his disavowal of crisis, standing outside his country house he did look a little like an actor in some drama of bourgeois life. There were other guests besides me, he told me before we went inside: a friend of Eloise’s from London and also a mutual friend of theirs who lived locally. The mutual friend was how he and Eloise had met and was a frequent visitor to the house.

  ‘We try to keep up the libations,’ Lawrence said, with a grimace-like smile.

  He opened the big, gnarled front door and we passed through a dark hall to another door edged in light, from beyond which came the sounds of music and conversation. It opened on to a large, low-ceilinged room that was illuminated by so many candles it seemed for an instant to be on fire. It was very warm, and furnished with things I didn’t recognise from Lawrence’s former existence: modern, cuboid sofas; a vast glass-and-steel coffee table; a rug made of an animal’s pelt. A number of unfamiliar modern paintings hung around the walls. I wondered how Lawrence had created it all so quickly, as if it were a stage set. Eloise and two other women sat around the coffee table on the low sofas drinking champagne. At the other end of the room, a number of children were sitting and lying in a group on the floor, playing a game. An older girl was beside them, sitting on a chair. She had striking straight red hair that fell like a veil to her waist and she wore a very short sleeveless red dress that showed the whole extent of her large bare white limbs. On her feet was a pair of strappy red shoes with pointed heels so high that it would have been difficult for her to walk more than a few paces.

  Eloise stood up to greet me. The other two women stayed where they were. Eloise was elegantly dressed and her face was carefully made up; her two friends also wore dresses and high heels. They looked like they were all waiting to go out to some grand party rather than remaining here for the evening in the dark, fog-bound countryside. It seemed a waste that there was no one to admire them. Eloise drew close and plucked at my clothes, tutting.

  ‘Always so dark,’ she said. I could smell her perfume. She herself was wearing a soft knitted dress made of cream-coloured yarn. She drew still closer, scrutinising my face. She brushed her fingertips over my cheek and then stood back to examine them. ‘I just wondered what you were wearing on your skin,’ she said. ‘You’re very pale. These –’ she plucked at my clothes again – ‘are draining you.’

  She introduced me to the two women, who didn’t get up but stretched out their bare arms from the depths of the sofa to shake my hand with varnished fingers. One of them was a dark, very slender woman with a fleshy lipsticked mouth and a long, narrow, bony face. She wore a clinging leopard-print dress and a heavy gold collar-like necklace around her sinewy throat. The other had fair flossy hair and a severe Nordic beauty, accentuated by the white sheath in which she was encased. The children were becoming restive in their corner and presently a little girl with a pair of wire-and-muslin wings attached to her back extracted herself from the group and came to stand beside us. The fair woman said something to her in a foreign language and the girl replied petulantly. Then she began to clamber up on to the back of the sofa, a development the woman did her best to ignore until the little girl was behind her and threw herself down on top of her with her arms wrapped tightly around the woman’s neck.

  ‘Ella!’ the woman said, startled. She made an ineffectual attempt to release herself. ‘Ella, what are you doing?’

  The child laughed wildly, sprawled across the woman’s back with her mouth open and her head thrown back. I could see the white stumps of her small teeth in her pink gums. Then she climbed over the woman’s shoulder and, still hanging from her neck, flung herself heavily into her lap, where she writhed and kicked her legs unconstrainedly. I saw that the woman was either unwilling or unable to take control of the situation and had therefore left herself with no alternative but to act as though it wasn’t happening.

  ‘Did you drive here from London?’ she asked me, with difficulty, while the child writhed in her lap.

  It was hard to participate in her pretence, as the child had her arms so tightly around her neck that she was visibly throttling her. Fortunately Lawrence passed by at that moment and, easily detaching the girl, wings and all, from the woman’s lap, cheerfully carried her suddenly limp and unprotesting form back to the other end of the room. The woman put her hand to her throat, where a number of red marks remained, watching him.

  ‘Lawrence is so good with Ella,’ she said. She spoke mildly, almost disinterestedly, as though she had observed the scene that had just occurred rather than participated in it. She had the very slight drawl of an accent. ‘She recognises his authority without be
ing frightened of him.’

  Her name was Birgid: she told me that she had become a close student of Lawrence’s behaviour and character over the past year, since he had taken up with Eloise. Eloise was one of her oldest friends; she had wanted, she said, to make sure that Lawrence was good enough for her. At first he had bridled at her scrutiny and the way she challenged what he said and did but in the end they had grown close, and frequently stayed up and talked after Eloise had gone to bed. Eloise was often very tired, Birgid added, as her younger son had sleeping problems and woke up several times a night; the older one, meanwhile, was struggling at school. Eloise didn’t have the energy to challenge Lawrence – who liked to get his own way – herself, and so Birgid did it for her.

  ‘I have seen it before with Eloise,’ Birgid said. ‘Men like her because she gives the impression of independence while being in fact completely submissive. She attracts bullies,’ she added, wrinkling her small nose. ‘Her last husband was an absolute pig.’

  Birgid had extraordinarily long and narrow eyes of an unearthly pale green colour. Her hair was pale too – almost white – and in the candlelight her skin had the seamlessness and solidity of marble. I asked her where she was from and she said that she had been born and brought up in Sweden, but had lived in this country since she was eighteen. She had come here to university and had met her husband – a fellow student – in her first term. They had got married during the university holidays and had returned, much to the bewilderment of their student peers, man and wife. Jonathan had been unable to come this evening, she added. He had too much work to do, and also he thought it would be good for her and Ella to take the trip together. She had decided not to drive because she had never driven anywhere alone with Ella before. Instead they had taken the train.

  ‘That’s why I asked if you had driven,’ she said. ‘I was afraid to drive.’

  I said she had been right to be afraid and she listened to me with an inflexible composure, shaking her head.

  ‘When you are afraid of something,’ she said, ‘that is the sign that it’s something you must do.’

  She herself had always lived by this philosophy, she added, but since the birth of Ella she had observed herself repeatedly failing to adhere to it. Jonathan and she had waited a long time to have a child: she had found out she was pregnant on her fortieth birthday. You could say, she said, that we waited until the last possible moment. It wasn’t biologically impossible, of course, for her to have a second child – she was forty-four now – but she had no wish to. It had been hard enough to accommodate Ella in their lives, after more than two decades of it just being the two of them. They were no longer fluid, as they had been at eighteen. To introduce a new element into something that has already set is extremely difficult. Not that Jonathan and I were fixed in our ways, she added. But we were very happy as we were.

  She reached out for her champagne glass and took a slow mouthful. Behind her, the fog stood blankly at the windows. I was surprised by her age, which I would have guessed to be at least ten years younger, though hers wasn’t the strenuous youthfulness of active self-preservation; rather, she merely looked as if she had avoided exposure, like a fold in a curtain that remains unfaded because it never sees the sun.

  I asked how often she went back to Sweden.

  Very rarely, she replied. She spoke a little Swedish sometimes with Ella, but otherwise her links with that past were few. Her husband – Ella’s father – was English, and as they had married so young she almost felt that Sweden represented childhood, while England was the scene of adult life. Her father still lived there, and some of her siblings – there had been five children in the family – but her work schedule was such that she didn’t have much time for family visits. If she and Jonathan took time off they preferred to go to warm, exotic places – to Thailand or India – though of course now that they had Ella those trips were impractical. But also, she didn’t like to be reminded of how much her family had changed: she preferred to remember her childhood the way that it was.

  Some sort of disagreement had broken out at the other end of the room. One of Eloise’s sons was crying; the other was wrestling with Lawrence’s daughter for possession of a toy that came apart as they pulled it between them, so that Lawrence’s daughter fell backwards and began to cry too. Birgid’s daughter started rapping the older boy in punishment with her plastic wand. The girl in the red dress remained motionless in her chair, watching the scene with a wide-eyed, expressionless face. She held her head with its sheet of red hair very still. Her hands were folded in her lap; she kept her long, bare legs in their high-heeled shoes tightly together. Though her clothes were scanty, she looked as though she were imprisoned in them.

  Eloise got up to intervene and seconds later was being mauled from all sides, her younger son hanging from her dress, the older one thumping her hip with his small white fist, all of them shouting in high-pitched voices to give their side of the story. The woman in the leopard-print dress turned on the sofa, champagne glass in hand, and addressed the red-haired girl from across the room, in a voice that was startlingly loud coming from her narrow body.

  ‘Henrietta!’ she called. ‘Henrietta! You’re meant to be looking after them, darling, aren’t you?’

  Henrietta gazed at her, her eyes widening even further, and turned her head slowly towards the children. She appeared to say something, her lips barely moving, but no one paid any attention.

  ‘Honestly,’ the woman in the leopard-print dress said, turning away. ‘I don’t know why I bother opening my mouth.’

  Lawrence was sitting back on the sofa, legs crossed and glass in hand, appearing not to notice Eloise’s struggles at the other end of the room.

  ‘Lawrence,’ Birgid said, watching him, ‘go and help her.’

  Lawrence gave her a slightly menacing smile.

  ‘We agreed that we don’t get involved in their fights,’ he said.

  ‘But you can’t just leave her to cope with it all,’ Birgid said.

  ‘If she chooses to break the agreement,’ Lawrence said, ‘then it’s up to her.’

  Eloise’s son had removed his feet from the floor so that he was hanging entirely from Eloise’s dress. The soft material instantly gave way and tore right across the front, revealing Eloise’s pale breasts in their lacy, mauve-coloured bra.

  ‘This is terrible,’ Birgid murmured, turning away.

  ‘She’ll have to deal with it,’ Lawrence said, tight-lipped.

  Eloise came pattering past in her high heels, clutching her dress across the front. She returned a few minutes later wearing a different dress.

  ‘That’s nice,’ the leopard-print woman said, leaning forward to finger the material. ‘Have I seen that before?’

  As soon as Eloise sat down Lawrence rose, as though to distance himself from her conduct by doing the opposite of whatever she did. He went to the fridge and took out another bottle of champagne and began to open it.

  ‘He is a proud man,’ Birgid said to me, watching him. ‘And in a way,’ she added, ‘he’s right. If they start to become sentimental about their children, their relationship will be ruined.’

  Her own parents, she said, had been a real love story: they had never wavered in their attention to one another through all the years of their marriage, despite the fact that they were bringing up five children so close in age that in the family photo albums her mother had appeared to be continuously pregnant for several years. They were young parents, she added, and tirelessly energetic: her childhood had been one of camping trips and sailing expeditions and summers in the cabin they had built with their own hands. Her parents never went off on holiday on their own, and treated all family occasions with great ceremony, eating with their children every night around the kitchen table, to the extent that she could not remember a single evening meal when they were absent, which must have meant that they rarely, if ever, went out to dinner together. While Jonathan and I, she added, eat in restaurants nearly every night. She lef
t for work so early and returned so late, she went on, that she almost never saw Ella eat at all, though of course the nanny fed her the correct food, as Jonathan and Birgid had instructed her to. To be perfectly honest, Birgid said, I actually avoid Ella’s mealtimes – I find myself things to do in the office instead. Since Ella’s birth Jonathan had started to make roast meat and potatoes for lunch on Sunday, as it was a tradition in his family and he thought they should repeat it for Ella’s sake.

  But I don’t really like to eat at lunch, she said, and Ella is fussy, so Jonathan ends up eating most of it on his own.

  Her own parents had cooked a rotating menu of dishes that had become as familiar to their children as the days of the week. The cadences of her childhood could almost be expressed in those recurring flavours and textures, and in the longer, slower repetition of seasons, the nuances and gradations of summer and winter foods, punctuated by the birthday cake that never changed, a different cake for each of them and the five cakes always each year the same. She was born in summer: her cake was a beautiful tiered structure of meringue and berries and fresh cream, the best of them all. One reason she disliked returning to Sweden was because of the food, which overwhelmed her with memories while leaving a bitter taste in her mouth, for it seemed familiar while being, in fact, entirely alien.