Arlington Park

by Rachel Cusk

  Juliet did not feel transcendent any longer. She felt angry, dense and angry and dark, compacted, like lead.

  “Daddy,” said Katherine, “would you like it if this lady sang to you?”

  Benedict smiled, a trifle forlornly, and ruffled her shining hair.

  “I’d like it very much,” he said.

  She walked the children to school through the rain. All the way up Guthrie Road and Arlington Rise, all along Bedford Crescent and Southfield Street, the cars stood stationary in lines. Their lights glowed like devilish pairs of eyes. The rain fell on their impervious metal roofs. Heat came in great sheets of steam off their armoured bonnets. The arms of their windscreen wipers went back and forth, back and forth. In each one sat a man in a tie and an ironed shirt, warm and dry, his suit jacket hanging from a peg beside the door. These men glanced at Juliet as she went by, one after another through their beaded windscreens. She went along the grey pavements holding her umbrella. Katherine was holding her hand. Barnaby was walking behind, with his hood up and his hands in his pockets. Juliet carried their lunchboxes and their schoolbags. The children were wearing Wellingtons, but the water had soaked Juliet’s tights nearly up to the knee. She laboured along the pavement, burdened, bedraggled, while the men looked at her from their cars.

  It was a mysterious place, Arlington Park: it was a suburb, a sort of enormous village really, yet even here the force of life came up strong, dealing out its hard facts, its irrepressible, universal dimensions. It was all so vigorous and uncrushable, the getting and having, the putting forth, the relentless, warlike assertion of one thing over another. It was civilisation, and yet to Juliet it seemed uncivilised to the core. What was there here that brought about such a rude growth of life? It lacked art: worse, it lacked any conception of justice. It was just getting and having—look at them all, backed up in their cars all the way to the park, jostling, fighting to get and to have! And as for the women, they were even worse! They were harsh, compassionless, driven by that rude force away from anything that smacked of failure or difficulty, driven headlong, and riding roughshod as they went over justice, over art!

  The girls Juliet taught were self-satisfied little creatures who came from the mould of their mothers, came out with a plop and quivered there, naked and pink, with no sense whatever of their own vulnerability. Did they not fear that something might rise up, rise up and smite their jellied forms? Did Matthew Milford not fear it? Did the men in those cars not await it in terror, the possibility that one day they would be interrogated and smitten down where they stood? You could not live your life in flagrant disregard for justice, Juliet thought. You couldn’t live like that and get away with it for ever.

  She crossed the road with the children and went up the High Street. There were the shops, with their windows still dark and their shutters down. There were shops selling cushions and scented candles, shops selling women’s clothes, shops selling jewellery and silver and antiques; there were nail bars and hairdressers, beauty salons and boutiques, and a shop with a single vast cream leather sofa in the window. They passed a coffee shop and the three of them automatically turned their heads in the rain towards its gorgeous aroma. Juliet gave a pound to a man sitting in his sleeping bag in a doorway. He lifted his plastic cup to her in a gentlemanly salute.

  Barnaby thought she shouldn’t have done it.

  “That’s our money,” he said. “You shouldn’t have given it to him.”

  “He needs it more than we do,” Juliet said.

  “Then why doesn’t he get some himself?” Barnaby said.

  “We could give him more things we don’t need,” Katherine said. “We could give him our house.”

  Juliet laughed. “But we do need our house!”

  “We could have a smaller house,” Katherine said.

  “That’s true,” Juliet said. “We could all have less of everything.”

  Barnaby kicked a lamppost and muttered something under his breath.

  “What was that?” Juliet said.

  “Nothing.”

  “No, go on, tell me what you said.”

  “It was nothing.”

  “You said you hated Mummy,” Katherine told him quietly.

  “I did not.”

  “You did! Mummy, he did! I heard him!”

  When they reached the school Juliet put the children in their classrooms and returned outside. The rain was falling abandonedly into the grey playground. Huddled figures ran everywhere, their coats over their heads. She stood beneath her umbrella and watched them. Oh, how it moved her, strangely moved her, to see people running, scattering, fleeing this way and that with their heads covered! They were most of them women, though beneath their hoods you couldn’t really tell. That was what moved her, the veil, the disguise: it brought her into a great sympathy with her own kind.

  More women were emerging behind her through the doors, unencumbered by children. Always, they came through the doors into the daylight, and they looked around, as if to verify that they were really alone. They always seemed, for an instant, utterly bereft. Then they fell to the business of chatting, making plans, reattaching themselves to life. They made battle plans for their first coffee, for lunch, for a trip to the park with the children after school. They did not include Juliet in their plans, though she stood no more than three feet away from them. They didn’t mean her any harm, but they didn’t invite her to join them for coffee. In its way it was a religious ceremony, and she was not of their religion. With her job, her Ph.D., her air of bitterness, she was an outsider.

  Slowly she walked away from the school. Her first class wasn’t until eleven. She lost herself in the grey streets, walking vaguely back towards the shops. She thought of Benedict in his smock and the fact that she couldn’t let him touch her. She thought of his fingers winding themselves further and further into her hair. Really, she should love him. She didn’t know why she couldn’t. It was unclear to her whether she could love anybody. When she was away from him she saw love from a distance and it seemed easy, an easy climb up to the sunlit peak. Yet when she was there, closer, it seemed impossible. What would become of her if she couldn’t love?

  She walked along the High Street in the rain and saw that the shutters were coming up. The shops were opening themselves to another day, putting their lights on, flinging themselves into the stream, into the great rude current. If only she could sing, like Melanie Barth! If only she could open her mouth, open her throat, and let herself out! Then she, too, could be borne along, go forward down the river, lighter, alive! Instead, she was heavy, full of lead. She sank like a stone through the onrush of time. Why shouldn’t Barnaby hate her? Why shouldn’t he, when she hated herself? No, not hated herself; not that, quite. It was only that she was so heavy. She was full of the deposits of wasted days. If only she could open her mouth and let out a great sound; but the truth was she had never expressed herself, in any native act. Not in sex, not in love, not even in childbirth, when she had ensured she was numbed from her neck down to the soles of her feet. She had expected to find expression by a different route. She had expected to find it carefully, patiently, by a system of reward.

  And that was how it had got her, this strange life; that was how it had reeled her in. She had forgotten she was a woman. She had forgotten she was a native creature, a thing of flesh. One day she had met Benedict and it had risen up before her startled eyes, a great vista of challenges like a mountain range: things she didn’t have, things she’d never even thought of! Really they were only the dreary lineaments of her mother’s life, a husband, a house, children—but to Juliet they seemed mysterious, full of foreign, ineluctable glamour. She had never thought of how she would go about getting those things. She had thought only of how long she would have to wait before her chance of expression came: her university job, her newspaper by-line. And Benedict was so clever that he seemed somehow allied with all that. When he came climbing up her hair, she didn’t detect him as a threat, not at all. She saw him as a prize
, her first, in the strange new field of endeavour known as human relationships.

  It almost made her laugh now, to think of it. A woman a hundred years ago knew her life would be over the moment she got herself pregnant. But Juliet had thought it required a degree of cleverness, that there was something difficult about it. For a while she prized the idea of a house and a husband and children, as though these things were uncommon, as though they represented some new refinement of human experience. Then she got them, and the feeling of lead started to build up in her veins, a little more each day. The time she realised that if she didn’t go and buy food herself there would be none in the house; the time Benedict returned to work a week after Barnaby’s birth and she realised she would be looking after him alone; the countless times a domestic task had fallen to her, so that she became experienced and preferred to do it because it was easier than asking Benedict—it was all surprising to her, outrageous almost. With her sense of justice she expected that at some point the outrage would be detected and addressed, but of course it was not. She made the mistake of complaining to her mother. Oh, the joy, the harsh, vitriolic joy in her mother’s face! She could almost hear her mother thinking, That’s showed you. That’s told you what’s what. Juliet remembered her mother when younger as a rather loud, passionate, untidy, and unbridled person. Now she was a vitriolic woman who kept a house full of dustless ornaments, sparkling glass paperweights, and little ivory boxes in which she took a strange, voluptuous, almost demented pleasure.

  Yet she could imagine her mother, as she could not imagine herself, saying to Matthew Milford, “You want to be careful,” and frightening him a bit.

  She stopped at a shop window and, pretending to look inside, stared at herself in the rain-streaked glass. The window wouldn’t reflect her properly. She was just a shape, an amorphous shape with water running down her. She realised she was looking into the window not of a shop but of a hairdresser’s. She saw the rows of empty white leather chairs, the mirrors, the neat arrangements of implements, ready for the day. A girl was in there. She was walking about, aligning hairbrushes, making little adjustments to things. Juliet pushed open the door and went in. The girl looked up. She was wearing tight black trousers and a white T-shirt that showed a stretch of plump brown stomach. She had a nose ring and hair extravagantly tinted and feathered, shaved on one side and on the other fluffed up like a parakeet’s tail feathers. Juliet gazed at her. What was this creature doing here, alone in this room in the rain? Where had she come from?

  “Can I help you?” she said. She looked about eighteen.

  “I wondered if you had any free appointments,” Juliet said. She felt old. Her voice was old. It seemed to come out of a cave, somewhere on a desolate mountainside.

  “When were you thinking of?” said the girl, leafing through a ledger on the front desk.

  “I was wondering—well, now,” said Juliet. “Are you busy now?”

  It was evident from the empty salon that she was not, but nevertheless she looked through her ledger.

  “We’ve got a space at nine-fifteen,” she said.

  Juliet looked at her watch. It was nine-ten.

  “Fine,” she said.

  “Would you like to come over?” the girl said, proceeding to one of the white leather chairs and pulling it out a little.

  Juliet sat down while the girl fastened a synthetic cape around her shoulders. She lifted Juliet’s hair in handfuls, inspecting it, first one handful then another.

  “Just a trim, is it?” she said.

  “No,” Juliet said. “I want you to cut it off.”

  The girl instantly looked alarmed. She looked as though such a thing had never happened to her before. For a second Juliet hated her. What else did people come to hairdressers for, if not to have their hair cut off?

  “What, all of it?” she said.

  “All of it,” said Juliet.

  “Are you sure? Are you sure you don’t want to just think about it? There’s a coffee shop over the road,” she persisted unexpectedly. “You could go over there for half an hour and have a little think.”

  “I don’t want to think,” Juliet said. “I’ve thought enough.”

  That shut her up.

  “Any particular style?” she said. “We’ve got lots of magazines you can look at. You can find a photo of something you like and I can copy it.”

  Juliet rested her hands on the sides of the chair. She drew herself up before the mirror and looked herself right in the eyes.

  “I don’t care what you do,” she said. “Just cut it off.”

  The women had said they might come to Amanda’s house for coffee.

  She was in her car, cruising through the rain along the High Street while the turbid seas of Arlington Park parted before her. It was nine-fifteen. Her husband had left the house punctually at eight, and her daughter Jessica was at school by nine; she had a feeling of rapid ascent, as though the members of her household were sandbags she was heaving one by one out of the basket of a hot-air balloon. Only Eddie remained: Amanda could see him in the rear-view mirror, self-absorbed and slightly shifty. He kept looking up, apparently to check for unwelcome developments, such as a turn off the High Street to the right that might signify he was being taken to nursery.

  Eddie didn’t go to nursery on Fridays, but he didn’t really know that. Amanda kept him at home as a matter of form. It was a disorderly area of the week that she disciplined herself to tolerate. She looked forward to the time—September—when he would start school, and their Fridays could be packed up and put away, as his outgrown clothes and tricycle and high chair had been put away, at the correct and proper moment. These things were not her true companions. They were bumps on the surface of life that fretted and jolted her as she was forced to go over them.

  Her car was her true companion: it was clean and spacious and mechanically discreet, and it did her bidding powerfully, efficiently, and with silent approval of her style of command. When she was in her car she had a feeling of infinite passage. She felt she could go anywhere; more than that, she felt she didn’t need to. Driving through Arlington Park she experienced a sense of consummation, a feeling that to live and to desire were indistinguishable. High up in the seat of her silver Toyota she desired herself; her soul was combusted and life, motion, were produced.

  And there was something else, too, something to do with time, with the fact that while each hour—on her Fridays with Eddie, for instance—was like a boulder she had to singlehandedly lift and move laboriously out of her path, in her car time seemed to pass at a remove. It passed on the other side of the windows. She drove along, and through her windows she saw people burdened by time, while she herself remained free.

  Now, for example, in the High Street, in the grey, slanting rain, the shop-fronts stood in an imprisoned row with water running down their canopies, and there were roadworks where men picked and jabbed hopelessly at the earth, fenced in by tattered lengths of incident tape, and a van was trying to reverse out into the resistant traffic, and people were walking along the wet pavements with bags and umbrellas and pushchairs, bowed over, drenched, encumbered; and this spectacle was entirely the work of time, which moved irresistibly, mercilessly, through everything and turned it to chaos, like a plough moving through the ground and churning up great furrows of rock and roots and mud.

  Through her window Amanda saw a plastic bag blown this way and that on the pavement by wet, random little gusts of wind. Why did people expose themselves, to the casual cruelties of a Friday morning in the rain? The woman walking past her now, soaked to the skin, with a baby in a pram and a child Eddie’s age dangling by the wrist: what was she doing? Amanda was waiting at a traffic light while this woman plodded by like an ox in harness. When the lights changed she surged past her, so that her miserable diminishing form was trapped in the wing mirror.

  Outside the butcher’s she commanded the localised bureaucracy of the street to yield to her: immediately a car prised itself out of the par
king bay right in front of the shop and went slouching and blinking off down the road, dismissed. Sometimes Amanda was able to evoke perfect subjection in the world around her and sometimes she was not. Her writ ran through the centre of the day like a single wire on which she maintained an unpredictable balance. Destiny stemmed from her in a constant stream on that wire. There were times, as now, when it was channelled in an orderly, forward-going current that recognised no obstruction; and times when her confidence fell away, when the oncoming stream of minutes and hours broke its banks and flooded out sideways, on and on, until she seemed to be disgorging a force of pure catastrophe. Then the car no longer flew, the seas of Arlington Park no longer parted before her. There were mornings when she had driven around weeping, sweating, palpably distressed, with her feet shaking on the pedals so that the world would come surging alarmingly towards her through the windscreen and then jolt to a quavering standstill; when she had lunged for traffic lights and parking spaces while human bodies and the great metallic forms of other cars revolved inchoately around her in a white haze of danger. She never knew how or when these frightening interludes would end, or why they had come at all.

  Today, however, she drew to an irreproachable halt outside the butcher’s in the rain and turned around in her seat so as to reverse into the parking bay. Eddie, who was strapped in behind her, also turned around. Together they looked out of the rear window at the grey, wet vista of the road. The car behind had stopped too close for Amanda to be able to reverse into her parking space.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Eddie said.

  Amanda regarded the car with predatory patience. Her hands remained on the steering wheel; her body was twisted so that she could feel her form, as though it had grown out of the seat beneath her. She was all steel today, all determination. The car behind reversed a few feet. She raised her hand in general-like acknowledgement and in two manoeuvres brought the car to a standstill six inches from the pavement, where she sat in the muted aura of the lavishly cooling engine and regarded the butcher’s window. Rain ran down it in thick, viscous-looking channels. Behind the glass the pink and red display made its lurid statement.