by Rachel Cusk
“No,” said Maisie.
Christine picked up a broad, yellow chip with her fingers, dipped it in ketchup, and handed it to Ella.
“I mean, don’t you think we all just want to have it both ways? We want our secure homes and our husbands and our lovely holidays, and most of the time we’ve earned them fair and square, and yet sometimes—”
Stephanie returned with Jasper.
Christine said, “I was just telling Maisie how one of these days I’m going to run off to Lanzarote with a sixth-former.”
She dipped another chip in ketchup and placed it whole in her mouth.
“Well, that’s a relief,” Stephanie said, with flushed cheeks.
“What is?”
“Just a little—you know, a little scare,” Stephanie whispered.
“What, you thought you were pregnant?”
“Not that it wouldn’t have been, you know, fine and everything,” Stephanie said.
“I wouldn’t think it was bloody fine,” Christine said. “Did you really think you were pregnant? No wonder you didn’t buy that dress.”
“Oh, I quite like being pregnant really,” Stephanie said wistfully.
“What, actually being pregnant?” Christine said.
Stephanie reddened further. “It feels, I don’t know—fruitful. Like when you’re walking down the street, it’s like you’ve got this big sign above your head saying I have sex.”
“Half the teenage girls in Firley have that sign, Stephanie.”
“Anyway.” Stephanie sat up straight in her chair and crossed her legs. “False alarm.”
“We never doubted you and Mark had sex,” Christine said. “We never doubted Mark was the biggest stud in Arlington Park. You’ve got four children already, for Christ’s sake. Stephanie’s got four boys,” she informed Maisie. “Let’s just hope there isn’t a war,” she added morbidly.
Beyond the windows a vast, bruised bank of cloud swept in over the grey prairie of the car park, extinguishing the spears of light that lay everywhere in disordered diagonals like discarded, faulty bolts of lightning. The restaurant darkened. A violent deluge of rain flung itself abruptly down over the defenceless landscape.
“When you think of all the terrible things that are happening in the world,” Christine said. “When you think of those earthquake victims in Indonesia. We can’t complain really, can we?”
“No,” said Stephanie.
“People losing their homes and their livelihoods. All of it destroyed in a matter of seconds before their eyes. We just can’t imagine what that’s like, can we?”
“Or those people in the lorry,” Stephanie said. “I was hearing about that on the radio this morning. That is just my worst nightmare—being trapped in a confined space.”
“What lorry?”
“You know,” Stephanie said. “That lorry. They opened the back of a lorry at Dover and found about fifty people in it, all dead.”
“Did they?” Christine wore an expression of distaste. Presently she said, “Actually, I don’t mind it so much when it’s something people have brought on themselves. I mean, you have to ask yourself, what the hell were they doing in the back of a lorry in the first place?”
“They were asylum seekers,” Stephanie said.
“Exactly. I can’t feel sorry for them. I mean, I know it’s a horrible thing to have happened, but they were breaking the law, weren’t they? They brought it on themselves, if you want my opinion. I can’t feel sorry for them.”
“Some of them were actually children,” Stephanie said. “I mean, I know I’m just being sentimental, but that was what really got to me.”
“To be honest, it doesn’t matter to me what they were. They shouldn’t have been in that lorry.”
“You’re so hard sometimes, Christine,” said Stephanie, with her downward-turning smile. “You’re so uncompromising.”
“I just think, you know, there comes a point. Like I say, I’d be the first one to come and help if it was something that was outside of your control. If an earthquake razed your house to the ground, you’d have my full sympathy. No, what I can’t stand is the guilt we’re all made to feel about people who have as much control over their lives as we do. What I can’t stand is the complaining. Take that lady at school, that black lady, what’s her name?—Cordelia.”
“Cornelia,” Stephanie said.
“Cornelia. What’s her little girl called?”
“Safari,” Stephanie said.
“Safari. I mean, what kind of name is that for a child? I’m not being funny, but it’d be like you or I calling our daughter Blackpool Sands, wouldn’t it? Anyway, what did this Cornelia do but make a complaint to the school governors about one of the teachers being racist! So now they’re having to investigate the complaint and instigate all sorts of official procedures, and basically waste a whole load of time on one single child that they should be spending on educational priorities for all of them. I mean, for Christ’s sake. She sends her child to a school where hers is more or less the only black face and then she complains that it’s racist!”
Stephanie pouted, and bent down to retrieve Jasper’s dummy from where it had fallen to the floor.
Christine said, “I think everyone agrees with me. It’s just that they don’t want to say so. Don’t get me wrong,” she added presently. “I’ve got nothing against Cornelia personally. I think she’s a nice lady. God, we’re all so politically correct!” she expostulated gloomily, looking out of the windows to where the rain was hurling itself in great careless sheets on to the roof.
“What do you think, Maisie?” Stephanie said.
Maisie looked as though Stephanie had just deposited a live snake in her lap.
“About what?” she said.
“About, you know, who we should feel sorry for.”
“I feel sorry for anyone who’s got to go out in that,” Christine interjected. “That’s who I feel sorry for. It’s like a bloody biblical visitation. If we don’t go now,” she informed them, looking at her watch, “we’ll have to park half a mile away from the school, and I haven’t got a rain cover for the buggy. You’d have thought at least I’d have been able to sort that out by now,” she said as they rose from the table. “That shouldn’t have been too hard, should it? All this time I spend sorting out the world’s problems and getting heated over asylum seekers I could have been finding the rain cover, and making sure Ella has a proper coat, and tidying up the children’s room so that Danny doesn’t have to get into the same sheets he wet last night, and buying some food for us all to eat this evening. I could just be sorting out my life, couldn’t I?”
“Oh, come on,” Stephanie said. “You were loving it, trying on all those clothes.”
“My problem is that I’ve forgotten how to have fun,” Christine said. “I think we’ve all forgotten how to just have fun. I get so worked up about asylum seekers and earthquake victims and abducted children and the bloody starving millions that I forget to enjoy myself. That’s the tragedy here. I mean, what a waste! What a waste of a good life, not to enjoy it.”
She surveyed the broken spectacle of the after-lunch restaurant. The sky was so heavy that the lights had been turned on. Dark-skinned men and women slowly trawled the tables with their big plastic sacks, sweeping rubbish into them.
Maisie, Stephanie, and Christine gathered their belongings and headed for the escalators.
Downstairs the rain fell silently beyond the automatic glass doors, to the acoustics of the perennially splashing fountain.
“Shall we wait and see if it stops?” Stephanie said, sitting on the edge of the fountain with the condescension of a decorative marble nymph.
“I think we’re talking forty days and forty nights here,” Christine said, regarding the vista of the car park through narrowed eyes. “We’re talking mating pairs only.”
“Jasper, don’t get out of your chair. No, don’t, darling.”
Jasper undid his straps and got out of his chair.
&n
bsp; “That’s silly, Jasper,” Stephanie said pettishly, swinging her hair back from her face. “We’re going out in the rain. You’ve got to stay in your chair.”
She made to pick Jasper up, but he put his hands on her thighs and braced himself against them. She struggled with him girlishly and he forced her off.
“All right, then,” she said in a high voice. “You’ll have to get wet. Silly boys get wet, Jasper.”
She turned her back on him and bent down to pick up her bags. Behind her he raised his arm, took a swift run-up, and landed a forceful slap on her bottom.
“Jasper!”
She straightened up, red in the face, and began petulantly wheeling the empty pushchair towards the automatic doors. Maisie and Christine followed. The doors exhaled them into the startling cold and wind of the car park, where long, grey needles of rain were hailing down on to the asphalt and a kind of smoky emanation of petrol fumes and condensation was hanging in a pall around the lines of cars. The women started to run, Stephanie occasionally turning around to exhort Jasper to keep up with them. Christine reached her car first and once there she opened the boot with a calm that was almost leisurely and proceeded to place her bags in the back while Ella sat in the rain, before unstrapping her and carrying her around to the side.
Christine never liked to panic. It suggested one was taking life in a spirit of entirely inappropriate severity.
She saw Maisie Carrington walking insensible as a cow through the rain, her eyes looking straight ahead, Jasper trotting just in front of her with his eyes screwed shut to keep out the water. A big black four-wheel-drive car, lavishly shiny, ablaze with lights, clouds billowing from its exhaust like smoke from a dragon’s nostrils, began to reverse out of its parking space, and Christine saw a look of horror fly into Maisie’s face, and saw her lunge forward silently—she did commend her for this, it being an article of panic to shout at children in the path of danger—in order to grab Jasper beneath the arms and lift him out of the way as the car made its black, barge-like progress out into the road.
She watched as Maisie made her way around to the side of the four-wheel-drive, water streaming down her face, with Jasper still in her hands. She held him up at the driver’s window. She held him up as Christine had seen on the news people in war zones holding up the bodies of dead children at the passing tanks. Maisie held his face at the tinted glass. She was shouting. Christine could see the woman on the other side of the glass. She could see her white-blond hair, her lipsticked mouth, her big gold earrings, the sunglasses pushed back on her head, the carrier bags on the passenger seat. She could even see her unseasonal tan.
“This is a child!” Maisie was shouting. “This is a child!”
She held the boy up in the rain, shouting. She shouted things Christine couldn’t hear. The woman was looking at her with an expression of loathing, with a hatred whose purity had been painstakingly distilled in a refinery of intricate, undisturbed selfishness.
“You stupid fucking bitch!” Maisie Carrington screamed at her, her wet hair plastered over her face, as the woman accelerated out and with a V-sign from her red-taloned fingers roared away.
Christine was surprised. She didn’t know what to make of it at all. It wasn’t as if the woman had actually hurt Jasper. She probably didn’t even see him in that great big car. You couldn’t go around shouting at people for things that weren’t actually their fault. The thing was, she thought as she drove through the rain back to Arlington Park, everyone had their particular bugbears, didn’t they? It was one of the things that made people so interesting. Everyone had particular things that got to them, that made them see red.
It was just one of those things about life.
It was Solly Kerr-Leigh who had first thought of having a foreign student in the spare room. She had seen an advertisement in the Arlington Gazette. Got a spare room? it read. Want to earn some extra cash?
She had got a spare room, and she did want to earn some extra cash: it was just that she had never regarded the two propositions as being related. Sometimes she sat in the spare room, which had a sash window overlooking the garden and a neatly made double bed whose pillows were always plumped up, and it did seem to Solly like a kind of fund, an investment, in that she expended the same efforts here as she did everywhere else in the house, yet only here did these efforts actually accrue. No one ever came in to squander them. Martin’s parents visited twice a year and tactfully left the room as they had found it. Otherwise, it remained for the most part untouched, ringing up its weekly balance of housework.
It had white curtains and a white counterpane, and a beige carpet that was as rich and promising as on the day it had been laid. It had fitted wardrobes on whose rails the coat hangers hung deliriously empty. There was a little antique bedside table with only a vase of dried flowers on it, and a mahogany chest with nothing in the drawers. When Solly sat there, the weight of her family seemed to move away from her, like a great crowded liner decked with lights moving out into a dark ocean. She imagined she was a girl, sitting in her simple girl’s room. At other times she felt like a guest in her own house, a person who might be taken care of, though she didn’t know by whom. But most of all, in the spare room Solly felt she could see what her intentions had been: it was like a little fold in the densely patterned cloth of life, which by chance had remained unexposed to the relentless glare of her household and hence retained its true colours while all the rest had faded.
And as for money—well, if you had a house to run and a husband and three children and were pregnant with your fourth, it was a question not of getting more but of pawning what you had. It seemed to Solly that her life had a lot of fat: the difficulty lay in finding a place to trim it off, when everything was connected to everything else. That was why it took the advertisement to get her started. It wasn’t that she and Martin needed money, in the sense of desperation. It was more that everything she, Solly, did, cost it; and once you started to think about it like that, you became sensitive. You saw yourself in a kind of free fall, uncontrolled, expanding and expanding into a great, expectant precariousness. Once, Solly had felt powerful in her expansiveness, but now, pregnant for the fourth time, she felt aerated, overblown, while Martin seemed correspondingly to harden into a lean, vertical masculinity. He went to work and came back again with a kind of rotary, mechanical movement, back and forth, back and forth, round and round and round like the steel arm of Solly’s electric mixer, beating her up into a more and more voluminous foam. She felt an immense need to make contact with some kind of restraining surface. She wanted to feel a boundary with the world, before she was diffused entirely into fleshly relatedness. The spare room appeared to her as the place where this boundary could be established. As her point of entry from the lost simplicity of life, so it was also to be her means of return from all this marshy expansiveness towards a new independence. Once she’d installed a television up there, apparently, she could expect to get eighty pounds a week for it.
Martin thought it was a marvellous idea.
“What about the children?” he said doubtfully.
“They won’t seem so bad to a foreigner,” said Solly. “And I’ll enjoy having company the nights you’re in Reading.”
Tuesdays and Wednesdays, Martin stayed in Reading for work.
“There’s no point having it just sitting there, is there?” he said.
“No.”
“Eighty pounds a week.” He blew out his cheeks and sat back in his chair.
“If there’s a television. They have to have a television, apparently.”
“It might do the children good, having a stranger in the house. It might put them on their best behaviour.”
“It might,” Solly said.
“They might even learn a foreign language,” Martin said.
First there was Betty. She was a Taiwanese girl with a neat, pretty face and a wide white smile, who wore beautiful clothes made of printed silks. One day she came downstairs wearing a pair of black
silk trousers with pink roses embroidered on them, little flat embroidered shoes, and a little pink jacket with silk-covered buttons; and Solly didn’t know why, but the sight of these things made her eyes fill with tears. They reminded her of something, of childhood, of things that were small and perfect and mysteriously beautiful.
Betty gave Solly’s daughter, Dora, a Chinese silk bag with a long, braided handle. She wrote little letters to the boys, William and Joseph, and left them on their pillows, wrapped around two chocolates in the shape of dragons covered in brightly coloured foil.
“Do you miss your family, Betty?” Solly asked.
“Oh yes, I miss them very much,” Betty said. “In Taiwan we are a very close family.”
She placed the palms of her hands together with the fingers ardently splayed.
Betty had a French boyfriend who came to pick her up two or three times a week. Solly would open the door and there would be Gustave, standing on the doorstep in the dark with the collar of his coat turned up, dramatically breathing out misty plumes of night air. He looked like an old-fashioned film star, with his collar turned up and his long, delicate nose.
“Ees Betty there?” he would enquire, and Solly would feel not that her life had changed exactly but that it had altered its course, that it had turned a little, away from what was fast and easy and irresistible into a slanting, sideways trajectory where the water was choppier and the winds slightly contradictory. It was more effortful, steering this course, but it yielded more sensation, more movement, more impressions of life. At first Solly wasn’t sure what it all added up to. Then she decided that it was like taking a different route to somewhere you went every day. You got to the same place in the end, but saw other things along the way.
On the nights she went out with Gustave, Betty did not return to the house until the next day. If Martin was in Reading, Solly would sit on the sofa alone, feeling slightly implicated in all the life that was being lived elsewhere, as though she had suddenly become the head of an organisation responsible for despatching agents into the field of human experience. Martin returned one Thursday to find Betty sitting at the kitchen table with the children, teaching them to use her laptop computer, and he raised his eyebrows admiringly to Solly over their heads.
