by Rachel Cusk
Eloise was putting the children to bed, Lawrence told me. They were all overtired. They should probably have fed them earlier, he said, and just sat them in front of the television.
‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘I feel like I’m slowly bleeding to death.’
Eloise came back and sat beside him and rested her head on his shoulder.
‘Poor you,’ she said to him. ‘You tried so hard.’ She glanced up at him and giggled. ‘It was quite funny though, in a way,’ she said. ‘All those well brought-up children in hysterics over their poussin.’
Lawrence gave a purse-lipped smile.
‘You’ll think it’s funny tomorrow, darling,’ she said, rubbing his arm. ‘Honestly you will.’
She yawned and asked what I was doing for the rest of the weekend. I said that tomorrow night I was going to the opera.
‘Who with?’ she said, sitting up a little with a glint in her eye. She studied my face and sat up even further. ‘Lawrence, look!’ she said, pointing at me.
‘What?’ Lawrence said.
‘Look at her face – she’s blushing! I’ve never seen her blush before, have you? Who is it?’ she said, leaning towards me across the table. ‘I have to know.’
I said it was just someone I had met.
‘But how?’ Eloise said, rapping the tabletop impatiently. ‘How did you find him?’
In the street, I said.
‘You found him in the street?’ Eloise said incredulously. She began to laugh. ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘I want to know everything.’
I said there was nothing yet to tell.
‘Is he rich?’ Eloise whispered.
Lawrence was watching me with dark eyes like pinpoints.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘That’s really good.’
I didn’t know whether it was even possible, I said.
‘You have to forget about the boys,’ he said. ‘For a while at least.’
‘She can’t just forget about them,’ Eloise said.
‘They’ll devour you,’ Lawrence said. ‘They can’t help it. It’s in their nature. They’ll take it all until there’s nothing left.’
He’d seen it with Eloise, he went on: when he met her she was a physical and emotional wreck, underweight, racked with exhaustion and financial anxiety. In fact he’d never have met her at all if her mother hadn’t for once been babysitting the children, a rare event since she lived abroad and didn’t like to be left alone with them when she visited, because frankly Eloise’s mother hadn’t wanted to be a mother at all—
‘Darling,’ Eloise said, resting a hand on his arm. ‘Darling, don’t.’
—she hadn’t wanted to be a mother, Lawrence continued, let alone a grandmother. But somehow Eloise had persuaded her, that evening, to take them for a couple of hours so that she could go to a party. Eloise had been a sort of famous ghost in their circle of friends. Lawrence had often heard her spoken about but had never had a sighting; he had heard it said time and again that Eloise would be at this or that social occasion, and she never once appeared. It was Susie, ironically enough, who had roused his curiosity – she mentioned one day that Eloise had accosted her at the school gate and offered to take Angelica to and from school, since she drove right past their door taking her own children. Susie had found this a baffling suggestion – why, she said, would Eloise think she needed help taking her own child to school? She didn’t even really know Eloise; she had no idea whether she was a safe and competent driver. Lawrence had tried to point out that it was obviously kindly meant, but from then on Susie had Eloise marked out as a suspicious character.
Lawrence rested his fingertips on the stem of his wine glass and slowly turned it in the candlelight.
Fate, he said, is only truth in its natural state. When you leave things to fate it can take a long time, he said, but its processes are accurate and inexorable. It took two more years, from that conversation with Susie, for Lawrence to meet Eloise himself; in that time he had often thought about her offer to drive Angelica to school, had looked at it in many different lights and looked too at Susie in the light of it. It was a fixed point, like a star a traveller might use to navigate through the darkness. By the time he actually met Eloise, Lawrence had come to understand a great deal about Susie and about himself; they had already spoken about a trial separation and were seeing a marriage counsellor. Susie – who was the opposite of fatalistic, who saw life as a fantastical plot full of contrivances – had looked back and made a different story out of these events, a story in which Eloise had deliberately and maliciously plotted to inveigle herself into Lawrence and Susie’s life and to take Lawrence away from her, a story she told to their friends as well as to herself. But Lawrence, navigating by that fixed point, had made his way steadily through the confusion. He had learned more about Eloise, he believed, from her absences than her presence would have taught him; what he had loved first about her, and still loved, were those very absences, whose mystery and intangibility had caused him to examine the reality of his own life.
The reason, he went on, that Eloise had never appeared at social functions – even when she intended to and had said she would be there – was obviously because of her children, who she felt she couldn’t leave. Their father – her ex-husband – had relinquished all responsibility for them when the marriage ended: it almost gave him pleasure, Lawrence believed, to see them suffer, partly because their suffering dramatised his own – as bullies enjoy seeing their own fear in their victims – and partly because it was a sure-fire means of punishing Eloise. Whenever Eloise left the boys with him, some mishap would occur: they would injure themselves or each other, would come back with stories of abandonment and neglect, of being taken to strange, inappropriate places or being left with people they didn’t know. He was absolutely pitiless in this conduct, as well as refusing to contribute a single penny towards their costs. Eloise was very hard up herself, but she had to send them to their father’s with money in case they needed to buy food, and had even been known to drop by with dishes she had cooked, saying they were going spare. At Christmas she bought, wrapped and delivered presents from him to his own children.
‘You still do,’ he said, looking at her. ‘You still prop up that good-for-nothing.’
‘Darling,’ she said. ‘Please.’
‘You won’t hear a word against him,’ Lawrence said. ‘Let alone stand up to him.’
Eloise wore a pleading expression.
‘What would be the point?’ she said.
‘He shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it,’ Lawrence said. ‘You should stand up to him.’
‘But what would be the point?’ Eloise said.
‘You should stand up to him,’ Lawrence repeated, ‘instead of propping him up, running yourself into the ground day and night to cover up for him. They should know the truth,’ he said, taking a long swallow of wine.
‘They just need to see they’ve got a father,’ Eloise said tearfully. ‘What does it matter if it’s a fake?’
‘They should see the truth,’ Lawrence said.
Tears began to run down Eloise’s cheeks.
‘I just want them to be happy,’ she said. ‘What does anything else matter?’
The two of them sat there, side by side in the guttering candlelight. Eloise was weeping with a lifted face, her eyes sparkling, her mouth open in a strange grimacing smile. Gaby glanced sideways at her and then quickly stared back down at her plate, her eyes widening. Lawrence took Eloise’s hand and she gripped him, still weeping, while he gazed darkly into the distances of the room. Birgid leaned over, a white shape in the dimness, and rested her hand on Eloise’s shoulder. Her voice, when she spoke, was surprisingly sonorous and reassuring.
‘I think,’ she said, ‘it’s time for all of us to go to bed.’
In the morning it was still dark when I got up. Downstairs the ruins of dinner remained on the table. The melted candles were hardened into sprawling shapes. Crumpled napkins were strewn amid the dirty glasses and cutler
y. Jake’s book lay open on the chair; I looked at the photograph he had shown me, the shadowy ridged declivity in the blasted planetary surface. At the far end of the room there was a blue light flickering beyond the half-open door. I heard the murmur of the television and saw a shape flit briefly across the gap. I recognised Eloise’s silhouette, caught a glimpse of her filmy nightgown and her swift bare foot. Through the windows a strange subterranean light was rising, barely distinguishable from darkness. I felt change far beneath me, moving deep beneath the surface of things, like the plates of the earth blindly moving in their black traces. I found my bag and my car keys and I let myself silently out of the house.
A Note on the Cover Photograph
The cover shows a detail of a photograph of a nude: Natacha, 1929 by Man Ray (b.1890, Philadelphia – d.1976, Paris). The photograph is an example of solarisation, a technique rediscovered by Man Ray and the photographer Lee Miller, who was his assistant, muse and lover. It involves exposing a partially developed photograph to light at an early stage of its processing. The result creates halo–like outlines and alters the tonal values, and was much used and perfected by Man Ray in his photographs of female nudes.
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Epub ISBN: 9781473523760
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Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Vintage Publishing,
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Copyright © Rachel Cusk 2016
Cover: Natacha, 1929 by Man Ray © Man Ray Trust/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2016
Rachel Cusk has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Jonathan Cape in 2016
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781910702628
Trade paperback ISBN 9781910702611
