Arlington Park

by Rachel Cusk

  When she descended, Paola asked:

  “What is the name Solly?”

  She was wearing white jeans and a white sweater, a uniform Solly looked at in alarmed, darting little glances. No one in the Kerr-Leigh household had ever worn white: it was inappropriate for the local conditions, which required clothing suitable for manual labour. Solly could not have been more surprised if Paola had appeared naked.

  “It’s Solange, really,” she said. “That’s a French name.”

  She was frying sausages for the children. Their little fat impertinent forms hissed and spat at her from the pan.

  “Solange.” Unlike Solly, Paola pronounced it correctly. “Your mother was French?”

  “No, she’s English. I suppose she just liked it.”

  “It was a little—what—daydream?” Paola twirled her hand fancifully in the air.

  Solly saw William approach Dora where she lay on the carpet watching television with her thumb in her mouth and kick her in the head.

  “William!” she shrieked, moving swiftly towards him from the stove with the frying pan full of sausages still in her hand. Smoke and grease billowed up into her face. “I saw that! And you were wearing your shoes!”

  Dora wailed, her hand to her head, her thumb still in her mouth and her eyes never leaving the screen. William stood there sullenly. Solly felt that she hated him. She noticed that his eyes were too close together. In fact, his whole face looked as though at some point it had been squeezed hard on either side. She returned to the stove, where Paola was delicately picking lint off her sweater.

  “You were saying—about your mother,” she said.

  “Oh yes.” Solly felt flustered. “She did love France. She’d have liked to live there.”

  Paola shrugged. “Why didn’t she?”

  “I suppose no one would let her,” Solly said, a little daringly.

  “You as well? You wouldn’t let her?”

  “She could go now. There’s nothing to stop her now, you know.”

  “Maybe it’s too late,” Paola said. “You have to save up some life for that. Maybe she spent it all.”

  Solly considered this while she served the children their supper. She considered it as she dragged them up the stairs and stripped the clothes from their strong, writhing bodies. She thought about it as she waded, exhausted, a kind of red light showing around the edge of her vision, through the devastations of their rooms. She threw the covers on top of them, snapped off the lights, closed the door on their screams, and trod heavily back downstairs, gripping the banister and wondering what—if anything—remained to her of the fund of life she had been given.

  “I will make a light vegetarian dinner,” Paola said when Solly returned to the kitchen. “I have all the ingredients. I would be pleased if you would share it with me.”

  She had stacked the children’s plates in a neat pile beside the sink. The candles were lit. The television had been turned off. There was music playing, unidentifiably soft.

  “Are you sure?” Solly said, feeling that her world had been twitched to the side, like a curtain that is obscuring the view, and not particularly minding the feeling.

  “Of course,” Paola responded, with proprietorial severity.

  Solly collapsed into a chair.

  In one month’s time she would have another baby; she thought that perhaps she had changed her mind and would not be needing it now. Suddenly she saw her life as a breeding ground, a community under a rock. This baby had occurred almost by itself: it seemed to her to have arisen out of an abject mulch of flesh, out of bodies so long confined together that they spawned other bodies. There was a lack of light, a lack of higher purpose to it all. How could she have forgotten to find out what else there was? How could she have stayed there, under her rock, down in the mulch, and forgotten to take a look outside and see what was going on? All at once she didn’t know what she’d been thinking of.

  “Where in Italy do you come from, Paola?” she asked blearily.

  Paola was chopping something very finely with a knife.

  “Bologna,” she said.

  “Oh.” Solly yawned. “Like the sauce.”

  Paola tilted her head sceptically to one side, as though to an English foul committed at football, and continued chopping.

  “I hope the children won’t bother you,” Solly added.

  “They are not mine,” Paola replied.

  “You’re meant to like them more if they’re yours.”

  This was the type of thing you were permitted to say in Arlington Park at the end of a long day’s domestic slavery, but Paola appeared to take it seriously.

  “You don’t like them?” she said. “They seem quite normal to me.”

  Solly laughed, but tears surged painfully to her eyes.

  “I’m glad they do,” she said, and in a way she was quite glad.

  She was surprised to discover that Paola was thirty-four.

  “What have you been doing all this time?” she wanted to ask, but instead she said, “What brought you to England?”

  “There was a man,” Paola said. “When the man left, I decided to stay.”

  “An Italian man?”

  Barely perceptibly, Paola nodded.

  “He had a job here. He is an”—she paused—“aeronautical engineer. After a year he had to go home.”

  Solly was seething with questions. It was strange: in Paola’s presence she felt herself to be a failure, yet a part of her believed that a woman of thirty-four with no husband or children was the greatest failure of all. It was a kind of unstoppable need for resolution that grew from her like ivy over the prospect of freedom and tried to strangle it. She couldn’t bear the idea of loose threads, of open spaces, of stories without endings. Did Paola not want to get married? Did she not want children, and a house of her own? She sat there in her white sweater, delicately eating. Solly, a sack stuffed with children, a woman who had spent and spent her life until there was none left, sat opposite her, impatient for more.

  “My husband goes away for work on Tuesdays and Wednesdays,” Solly said.

  Slowly Paola nodded.

  “Then on those days we can eat together like this,” she said.

  When Paola was at the language centre and the children were at school, Solly went into the spare room. For a while she stood, alert, as though listening. She heard the sounds of a bird singing in the tree outside and cars passing along the road. She heard the sound of Paola’s clock on the bedside table, ticking slow, Italian seconds. The room was full of a new, pillowy scent. Presently she opened the wardrobe door. There was the white sweater on a hanger. Other things hung there too: a pair of black trousers, a tiny jacket with embroidery on the collar, a beautiful ruffled shirt. She put her fingers to the fine cloth. She took out a pair of high-heeled leather boots with narrow toes and stood them next to her own swollen feet. Then she went to the mahogany chest of drawers and looked at all the bottles and jars that stood on it. She found the bath oil, in a glass bottle with a stopper. She looked in Paola’s pink satin washbag and found make-up in heavy little black enamelled cases and a foil packet of contraceptive pills. She opened one of the drawers and took out lace garments, things with buttons and ribbons, a garter belt, and a long, fine, gossamer-like pair of stockings. There was a small black leather case hidden amongst the underwear and she opened it and saw a pair of pearl earrings lying in a white satin bed.

  She felt a terrible pain at the sight of these things. It seemed both an ally of the pain she had been caused by the primroses and a negation of it. What were her threadbare jeans and her string of beads compared with this? They were the abortion, the pitiful remnant of her feminity. She felt she had nothing—nothing! She forced herself to look in the mirror that hung above the mahogany chest, and the sight of her face brought tears to her red-rimmed eyes. It was blotchy, lined, pixillated with stress. Her hair stood in a sort of brown frizz around it. Was it real, this terrible feeling of injustice? Was it rational and real, or
was she mistaken, was there some explanation for it, something that could make it all equal and right?

  At the back of the drawer she found a photograph of a child, a little boy of two or three: a nephew, she supposed, or perhaps a godson. He had thick, dark, curly hair. A kind of yearning rose automatically in her breast. She felt like a machine, like an animal—she was automatic, voracious, unstoppable. She would have sucked the little boy right out of the frame if she could. Oh, to have self-control! To keep a child in a frame at the back of your drawer, next to a pair of pearl earrings!

  She returned to the kitchen and sat in her chair. An intense feeling of shame descended on her. In her belly the baby squirmed powerfully. She clutched at it with her hands. No one could ever understand the feeling of a human body struggling inside you. It defied understanding. If you thought about it, you would go mad. If you thought about it, you would feel you were all alone in the world, and that even the baby wanted you gone.

  In the evening, when Martin returned, Solly immediately went and lay down on the sofa in the sitting room. She stayed there until she had heard the children be fed, bathed, and taken away upstairs. She felt that if she had to spend even one more minute with them she would explode. She heard Martin bellowing on the top landing, and the sounds of multitudinous footsteps running this way and that. Really, Martin was wonderful. He was what you called a hands-on father. The trouble was, he was never here.

  “Any—ah—thoughts about dinner?” he said at one point, creeping into the sitting room and looking at her over the back of the sofa.

  “No,” she said.

  “Right.” He furrowed his brow and went away again.

  Later she heard the sound of the front door. It was Paola. She listened to the sound of Martin and Paola talking in the kitchen. Martin would say something, and after a long pause Paola would say something much shorter. Presently she heard the soft sound of Paola’s footsteps going up the stairs and the little thud of the spare-room door closing.

  “She seems all right,” Martin said when they were in bed.

  “She’s nice,” Solly said.

  “A bit—you know—mysterious and all that,” Martin ventured.

  Solly wondered what “all that” might be, but was too tired to ask.

  “How old do you think she is?” Martin said.

  “She’s thirty-four.”

  “Really?” He seemed surprised. “Then she’s only two years younger than you.”

  “And you.”

  “I suppose so,” Martin said. “I’d have thought she was younger than that,” he added, somewhat professorially, as though working out women’s ages was something for which he had a certain renown.

  “That was what she said.”

  “Did she? Oh.”

  Martin turned out the light. Solly lay on her back with the great dome of her belly gilded by yellow light from the street-lamp outside. The thought of the coming night filled her with dread. Now that the baby was almost here she could not find non-being even in sleep. All night she was held in a kind of ante-room of unconsciousness, a place of movement and noises and yellow light.

  “Do you think she likes, you know—girls?” Martin said next to her in the darkness.

  Solly did not answer. After a while she wasn’t even sure he’d said it. In the strange, whirling, light-cluttered realm of her body she felt only an immense confusion. She felt she contained everything, all good and evil, every possibility, everything in the world all jumbled together, shaken up like the sea by a storm so that nothing was clear and separate; it was all opaque, nauseating, full of litter and rubbish. She burned to expel from her this great, mounting force of debris, to clarify herself. In this state she did not feel hyphenated with Martin. All night, in her skimming, whirling sleep, she felt merged with him, unshielded, indistinct. She had no protection from him. It was the worst kind of terror really, to live in a body and yet feel it offered you no protection. It became difficult even to distinguish dreams from reality. Everywhere things merged and were jumbled all together, bad and good.

  What separated you, Solly dimly thought, was your moral sense. That was all you really had. That was the only way you could tell things apart. Once you’d lost that, you’d lost everything.

  It transpired that Paola had a job. Three afternoons a week she gave advice at a law centre down in the city. It was just a little hobby, she said. She didn’t know enough about English law to get a real job. That was why she was here trying to improve her language, to get a qualification.

  “What sort of people do you—advise?” Solly asked.

  “People with problems,” Paola said severely. “Poor people.”

  In the kitchen cupboards, where Solly had cleared a space for Paola to put her things, there was now a little collection of fascinating items. There were jars of herbs and packets of lentils and dried beans, and a wooden box filled with sachets of something called a tisane. When Paola was out Solly would unscrew the jars and smell what was inside. She would gaze at the fragrant sachets in their box, all neatly arranged. Paola was a vegetarian. It seemed, somehow, to emphasise her distance from the crude life of the body. Opening Paola’s cupboard, Solly was overcome by the same sensory feeling of femininity she had experienced amidst the contents of Paola’s underwear drawer. It gave her an innocent, unsullied feeling of sex. Solly’s cupboards were full of giant supermarket value-packs and bottles of Martin’s Worcestershire sauce. In the past Solly had felt proud of these things, practical and proud, but now they seemed monstrous to her in a way. Why had she required such bulk, so much heaviness? What was she afraid of?

  She had gone outside with a pair of scissors and cut the primroses, and arranged them in a glass on the kitchen table. By the end of the day they had wilted.

  “In Bologna I had my own law practice,” Paola said.

  “Did you?” Solly was amazed. “What happened?”

  “Nothing.” Paola shrugged. “I gave it up. I couldn’t see the future there. I lived only in one dimension.”

  Solly was silent. Did Paola believe that a life with the Kerr-Leighs was a life of more than one dimension?

  “I prefer my little hobby. It has more reality.”

  “But you must have had friends, and family, and—all sorts of things!” Solly blurted out.

  They were sitting at the kitchen table, around the wilted primroses. The children were in bed and Martin was in Reading. Solly had opened a bottle of wine. In a surfeit of emotion she sloshed some more of it into Paola’s glass.

  “For me those things were not reality,” Paola said. “They had become a kind of—”

  She put a slim brown hand in front of her eyes.

  “A blindfold,” Solly said, surprising herself.

  “Esattamente,” Paola said. “A blindfold.”

  “Did you never think of getting married?” Solly said. She was a little ashamed of her own vulgarity, but she couldn’t help it, eight months pregnant and overblown as she was.

  Paola laughed, staring down at her wineglass, around which she had arranged her fingers in a kind of web on the tablecloth.

  “I was married,” she said. “For four years I lived with my husband.”

  Mortified, Solly said no more. Presently Paola got up.

  “Just a minute,” she said. “I am coming back.”

  She returned a few minutes later and placed a glass bottle with a stopper on the table in front of Solly.

  “I got you this,” she said. “For the bath. It is my own favourite. I saw it in a shop on the way home.”

  In the night Solly flipped open her eyes. A great sense of reality had summoned her out of her kaleidoscopic sleep. She lay, drinking in the hard surfaces of the room, the unleavened darkness. Her whole being seemed to be pressing against this reality. She wanted to cast herself into it, but it was depthless and flat. It was like wanting to cast yourself from a diving board into a pool empty of water.

  Was the photograph in the drawer a photograph of Paola’s own chil
d? She believed, with an insane, hormonal intensity, that it was. It was this realisation that had woken her up. The child must have died! Her distended stomach heaved at the thought. Her heart pounded in her chest. Tears sped profusely out of the corners of her eyes and ran down through her hair on to the pillowcase. She lived at one moment in the burning core of this knowledge and the next in the fearful apprehension of herself as the harbour for it. Somehow she had been found as the harbour for this terrible occurrence! A woman with a dead child had found her, lost in the grey folds of Arlington Park, had found her and come to lodge in her brimming nest, had embedded the void of herself right here, like a clot next to Solly’s heart! She couldn’t bear it—it was too much, too much!

  Outside, it began to rain. It rained hard, hard and suddenly. A thunderous noise began to beat at the windows in the dark, a deafening, joyous, uncontrollable sound like the sound of applause. Solly clung on. She clung on, as though to the deck of a ship in a storm. The rain beat at the windows and she clung on, to the solid matter of her life, to her flawed possession of it. It seemed the windows might break and the storm sweep her from the deck; she wanted to rouse the children from their beds and lash them to her under the covers, to find Martin and bind herself to him as though to the mast. Oh, it was terrifying, this journey of life, this turbulent passage through days and nights, never stopping, never knowing what it meant, only that you must cling, cling and never let go!

  In the morning, in the jaded light, the grey rain still falling steadily at the windows, Solly rose and looked at herself in the long mirror. She seemed sharply in focus. She seemed full of new information, as though a page had been turned in her soul. She felt becalmed, solid, ordinary. She took the children to school and returned with Joseph, who moved quietly around the kitchen all morning, rudimentary, absorbed, as if demonstrating the simplicity of existence. Solly sat in her chair. The issue of Paola had receded, like the sea at low tide: it lay still, a blue line on the horizon. Solly felt cured of a kind of restlessness. She felt able to distinguish herself. She sat in her chair identifying herself, as the chair identified itself, as the table did.