by Rachel Cusk
She had asked people back for coffee before, but it always seemed that her invitation to Western Gardens had the effect of reminding them how much else they had to do; that her suggestion of coffee spoke to them reprovingly of all the other coffees, awoke in their consciences a shamed awareness of how much time they had spent drinking coffee when they might have been doing something more productive. Amanda did not believe they were shunning her: it was almost as though she inspired them, to reapply themselves to the job of who they were. She could evoke, in other people, a type of self-consciousness, a reconnection with themselves. In her last months at Pembroke Recruitment before her marriage, she had won the firm’s Manager of the Year Award 1998 (Southwest Region). James used to tell people that Amanda was evangelical about work. He still did, though now he would shake his head and say, “She was just evangelical about it,” so that they would feel it was a good thing she had stopped and represented no immediate danger to them.
It was her impression that the women she knew did nothing but drink coffee at each other’s houses all day, yet she had never succeeded—the facts could not be prevented from speaking for themselves—in attracting them into her own domain. Amanda and James held their domain in such high regard that the situation mystified and grated on her. Her kitchen, for example: like the pyramids or the New York skyline, more people knew about her kitchen than had seen it for themselves. Recently, over coffee at Christine Lanham’s house, Amanda had referred to Jessica’s enthusiasm for roller-skating around it and one of the assembled women had said, “That must play havoc with your lovely oak floors.” Amanda did not know this woman well; certainly she had never been to the house, or seen the floors in question.
Looking out of her windows at the sodden, motionless spectacle of the garden, Amanda felt the melancholia of a curator of neglected works of art. The windows were the kitchen’s most dramatic feature. They went from floor to ceiling all along the back of the house. James and Amanda had installed these windows after having the dividing walls torn down to create one vast room. They had decided to do this long before they bought the house itself: in the science of property, knocking things “through” was the tenet in which they most passionately believed. Their conversations on the subject of knocking through were so numerous and so energetic that by the time they moved into Western Gardens, they had gained so much velocity from them that the walls seemed almost to fall down by themselves.
Sometimes Amanda remembered the quavering places that had stood where her kitchen now was: the sinister little toilet with its tiny window of marbled glass, the cold, abject washroom, the austerity of the original kitchen itself, with its air of denial, almost of castigation—there had been a helplessness to these rooms that at the time had inflamed the Clapps’ urge to destroy them, but which now occasionally caused her to wonder what had become of them and what their true nature had been. For days the men had gone back and forth to the skip with metal wheelbarrows full of rubble, in which shreds of the thick vinyl paper with which every wall had been covered made strange forms, as though in attitudes of torment. Sometimes she had the inexplicable desire to bring those rooms back to life: to reunite those torn, tortured shreds, to build the rubble into walls again. This ambition fatally lacked the drive of the desires that had brought the walls down in the first place; it might have been that she entertained it only as a consequence of those efforts, a kind of run-off of energy, like a wheel continuing to revolve after the motor has been switched off.
But there was a moment, like a new soul, that had flickered into life when Amanda’s kitchen was created. It occurred on a winter’s day when heat surged in the radiators like blood in clean, vigorous veins and the warm air blazed with electric light, and the appliances thrummed steadily like the engine room of a majestic ship around which the grey, cluttered world outside churned like a roiling sea; and in summer, when the french doors were open and the light lay in golden, quiescent panels on the oak floors. These moments came and they were beautiful, fragile pauses, like bubbles, in which Amanda experienced a feeling of summation, almost of symbolism. They were representations: they were advertisements, for something that lay half-way between the life that was lived here and her own feelings about it. It irked her that more people were not there to witness them.
Recently Amanda and James had invited two couples over for dinner, and when their guests left at eleven-thirty after lasagne, chocolate mousse, coffee, and a quantity of wine that fell somewhere between modesty and correctness, Amanda had felt an uneasy sense of completion, as though she had accomplished a reputedly difficult task with greater speed and facility than expected. A day or two later she met one of the women in the street: she had thanked Amanda profusely and then laughingly confessed that after leaving Western Gardens the four of them had gone back to her house and drunk a whole bottle of whiskey—her hand went ruefully to her forehead—and danced to music in her sitting room until three o’clock in the morning.
Like a settler in a new, uncharted country, Amanda was aware of movements in her terrain: of the deep habits of herds migrating and convening across the reaches of Arlington Park, engaged in the unconscious business of their own survival. She was aware of them passing and feeding and gathering in groups to graze or rest, but try as she might, she could not bridge their distance from her. When she worked for Pembroke Recruitment these things had not concerned her. She spent most of her time in her car, neat and powerful in her suit, driving from one regional office to another. But the stationary life of Western Gardens required a different knowledge. It was not enough to have subjugated the rooms of her house, to have mastered the weekly disciplines of shopping and cooking, to have penetrated her husband, her children, her possessions with such sanitary force that their very natures seemed to recur, like laundry, in a transfigurative cycle of cleanliness; it was not enough—sometimes she wondered if it was anything at all—to be in control.
Today the women standing in the rain outside the school had looked lost, unfocused, like a demoralised troop of soldiers in the middle of a long, obscure campaign. She had discerned in them an unusual vulnerability, an exposure of flank, and she was right: for the first time, her offer of coffee aroused their interest, or at least silently generated the possibility of obedience. It might have been that they merely forgot to oppose her, as Jessica sometimes did when for no particular reason she did what she was told. She said she would be back in Western Gardens by ten, and she saw this information pass into their sense of the coming day. She had bought pastries on the High Street: their flaky, disastrous forms were sealed in a plastic bag which she placed ambivalently on the counter. There were crumbs there, and a smear of butter, which James had left behind like the small, modest mark of his indelible masculinity. She put on her yellow rubber gloves and with an aerosol gun of Flash she annihilated it. Then she went over all the worktops and doors, as well as the hob, oven, and fridge.
There was nothing in the hall for her to neutralise, or in the sitting room either, except for Eddie, who remained motionless on the cream sofa with the determination of someone playing a party game from which even the smallest movement would disqualify him. Amanda went soundlessly up the beige-carpeted stairs to Jessica’s room, where the bed was already made and all the toys and clothes put away, as though there were some doubt over the question of whether Jessica would ever return to it. On her wall Jessica had a large framed poster of a lion’s face. Its amber eyes met Amanda’s with a look of godlike enquiry. She returned to the kitchen and dismantled the coffee machine in order to wash all the separate parts. Her yellow-gloved hands were immersed in foam when the telephone rang, like the first, startling clarion call of the coming invasion. She removed her gloves in order to answer it.
“Mandy? Is that you?”
It was her sister Susannah: no one else called her Mandy any more. Mandy Clapp—it was the name on the badge of someone working at a supermarket check-out—did not exist; and as for Mandy Barker, she had been left behind on the da
y Amanda married James, left behind like someone standing on a pier waving at the departing ship, abandoned with all her dubious habits, her liking of ready meals and red carnations from petrol stations, her scarlet fingernails and ankle chain—she had been left to go her own ignorant way in the irretrievable past.
“Oh my God, Mandy!”
Susannah was crying. Amanda could hear her gasping and sobbing in the distances of the telephone.
“What’s the matter?” she said. “What is it? What’s happened?”
“It’s Gran—she’s dead, she just died. Oh my God, Mandy, she died right next to me—I was holding her hand!”
Amanda saw her grandmother, a white, wordless slip of a woman in an institutional armchair.
“Are you at the hospice?”
“Yes—I—Mum asked me to call in while she and Dad were on holiday, and I came last night and they said she’d had a s-s-stroke—” Susannah receded in a paroxysm of sobs. “So I stayed the night here,” she said, more clearly.
“You stayed the night?”
“I thought, I can’t leave her alone, I can’t let her die all alone! So they made up a bed for me and I stayed, and in the morning I was sitting with her and she opened her eyes and looked at me, just looked and looked at me, and then she started to let out these great big breaths. It was like all the air coming out of a balloon. Oh, Mandy, it was awful! Then she took one of these breaths and she didn’t take another one, she just didn’t take another one, and she was holding my hand and I felt her die—”
Amanda looked around the room with frantic eyes while her sister wept. It was ten to ten. The dismantled coffee machine lay in the cooling water.
“It must have been horrible,” she said.
“No,” Susannah said faintly, coughing, “it wasn’t horrible, it was—sad. It was so, so sad. One minute I was in this room with her and the next it was empty, she was still there, but it was empty, and I was so alone. And I knew. Suddenly I knew then, for certain.”
“Knew what?”
“That there’s nothing else. That you just die and that’s all there is. I felt it—I was sitting there looking out of the window at the car park, and I thought, this is all there is.”
Amanda could have guessed that Susannah wouldn’t take a straightforward view even of the death of a ninety-three-year-old, but nevertheless she said:
“She was ninety-three. I expect she wanted to go.”
“She didn’t!” her sister cried. “She didn’t want to—she was sad, and frightened, and she looked just like a little child lying there, like a child with nobody to protect it—”
Amanda wondered why her mother hadn’t asked her to call in on Gran while they were away on holiday—she was the eldest, after all. And she had always been the responsible one, with Gran and with everyone else. She was the one who sent cards and presents, who called in with bits of shopping while Susannah was in London, out of touch for weeks at a time, living a life whose emotional peaks and troughs she expected everyone to take account of, as though they were geographical features that presented exceptional challenges to those brave enough to scale them.
Susannah had never bought red carnations in a petrol station. Since childhood she had distinguished herself cheerfully but unfalteringly from the suburban dogma of the family home. She was an actress: she had been on television a few times, but mostly she acted in plays in London. Amanda did not like her sister being on television: it tainted the river of anonymity that she liked to have flowing steadily through her house from the screen. It made her think that she ought to switch the television off, and then what would she be left with?
For a while Amanda had lived in fear of Susannah becoming famous, but she was thirty-five now and Amanda felt she could take her eye off her sister, though every time she saw her it seemed that Susannah had found a new way of being beautiful. She reverberated amidst the stringencies of the Clapp household long after she had departed: she left behind her the suggestion that life should tend less towards a killing orderliness and more in the fruitful direction of risk and whimsicality. She would sit in Amanda’s kitchen and shout “Oh, stop!” as Amanda washed the floor or wiped down the cupboards; as she exercised what was nothing less than her entitlement to perform the daily task of being herself. In Susannah’s presence Amanda discovered that her perfectionism was a compulsion. She hoovered in front of the sofa so that Susannah had to raise her feet, even though she knew her sister would laugh at her for it.
James always looked at Susannah with an expression of indecision on his face, as though Susannah and Amanda were two things in a shop he thought he had to choose between. He was petulant and slightly rebellious when she was around: he would go along with her brazen critiques (“Oh, stop!”) of the situation, giving them a weak, spiteful twist of his own. “It’s so tidy here!” Susannah always said when she crossed their threshold; once, in Amanda’s hearing, James had replied, “Well, you know what they say—clean house, boring woman,” and then looked around at them all as though expecting them to laugh at his wit.
It was Susannah who had first pointed out to Amanda the fact that Jocasta Fearnley was beautiful, or had been. She liked—no, loved—famous paintings, for reasons that appeared to be her own. She would pick up a fat, racy paperback from Amanda’s bedside table, read the back cover, and then fling the book with a groan on to the immaculate covers.
“My life will never be the same,” she said now in a low, sonorous, breaking voice. “Nothing can ever be the same.”
“Of course it can,” said Amanda. “You’ll feel better once you get home.”
“I can’t go home. I can’t. I couldn’t stand it.”
“Is Marcus there with you?”
Marcus was Susannah’s boyfriend.
“I don’t want Marcus. I don’t ever want to see him again. I want to be on my own. I want to change everything.”
It was one minute to ten.
“I can’t be the same, not with this—this knowledge. If I go home I’ll forget it, I’ll forget the way I feel right now and I’ll have missed my chance, you know, the chance to discover what life really is, to see death in life, actually in it—”
Amanda recalled what she had said to Jocasta Fearnley about Susannah and the rabbit. It was a lie: Susannah had not killed her rabbit. It was Amanda who killed it. She felt that she had only just realised that she had. At the time, what she had said to Jocasta Fearnley seemed true. But Susannah’s weeping reminded her: it insisted on itself in the very teeth of her confusion. She looked out of the window at the garden, as though expecting to see her grandmother there, with her face at the glass.
Then the doorbell rang.
Through the mullioned window panes she could see them standing in the rain. There were four of them.
“This is nice!” Christine Lanham exclaimed when Amanda opened the door.
The rain fell on the path. One of the women had a pushchair and water ran down its plastic cover. Through it Amanda could see the blurred, fleshy folds of a child. The spongy green rectangle of the lawn lay behind them, silently absorbing water.
Amanda looked at her car, which stood with silvered fidelity on the gravel. It occurred to her to get in it and drive away; or perhaps not even drive. She felt she would have liked merely to live in it, within the confines of her provable successes.
In the hall she took their wet coats and bags and umbrellas. They prised their water-stained shoes, muddy, perilously garnished with soaked leaves, from their feet. It was messy work, the unending struggle to maintain separation between outside and in.
“This is nice,” Sally Gibson said to Christine.
“Isn’t it? They had such a lot of work done. I’m just saying what a lot of work you had done on the house, Amanda. It took them nearly a year.”
Sally Gibson raised her eyebrows.
“That must have been a strain.”
“Oh, it was all done by the time they moved in. They kept their flat in Fenton Road while the work w
as being done.”
“Fenton Road’s lovely,” said Sally, mollified.
“I’m just saying how sensible you were to keep Fenton Road,” said Christine. She removed her coat and shook out her brown hair. “When I think that Joe and I had the builders in for six months when Danny was three and Ella was still in nappies! What were we like? I used to go round all the beds every night and shake out the covers before they got in, and you could hear all the nails hitting the floor. Ting, ting, ting!”
The women laughed.
“I’m not being funny,” said Christine. “We were in Casualty so often they knew the children’s names. It was a sort of race to paint everything off-white before we got divorced.”
The women laughed again, all except Liz Connelly, who was manoeuvring the rain-drenched form of the pushchair over the front step. She lifted the plastic hood.
“There,” she said sourly, to the child who was revealed.
“Isn’t this nice?” said Dinky Smith, bunching up her shoulders with pleasure. “Lovely house!” she added, straying into the kitchen.
It was Dinky who the week before had inferred havoc from Amanda’s description of Jessica roller-skating on the kitchen floor. As it happened, the floors were sealed and tanalised and entirely scratch-proof; all the same, Amanda disliked it when Jessica put on her roller-skates. The thumping sounds delivered hammer-blows to her nerve ends. She wondered whether this was what Dinky had meant.
