Arlington Park

by Rachel Cusk

  She said, “Is calm what men call housewives they find sexually attractive?”

  “Stephanie’s not so bad,” he said. “That’s all I’m saying.”

  “I hate her,” Maisie said, just for something pointlessly violent to say. Clara appeared in the doorway as she said it.

  “Who do you hate? Daddy, who does Mummy hate?”

  “She’s the patron saint of this stupid place.”

  Dom raised his narrow eyebrows.

  “I thought Christine Lanham was the patron saint. Or that other one. Dewdrop.”

  “Dinky. I don’t think so. No, people just like Dinky because she’s rich. Actually, they do envy her in a way, because her husband died.”

  “They wouldn’t envy her that. No one would ever invite them to dinner if their husbands died.”

  Maisie was pleased by this idea.

  “Dinky doesn’t get a lot of dinner, it’s true,” she reflected. “She gets a lot of coffee. You could power a turbine from the caffeine in her bloodstream.” She added, “The thing about Stephanie is that if you stuck a pin into her she’d say she was really enjoying it.”

  “I think she’s just very content with what she has,” Dom observed. “And do you know what? There’s nothing actually wrong with that.”

  Do you know what had lately become, Maisie didn’t know from where, one of Dom’s catchphrases, and was a sign that they were in a play. She wrenched open one of the kitchen cupboards and dramatically removed a bottle of wine and two glasses from it.

  “Do you want some?”

  “I won’t,” Dom said. He said it in the way she imagined he might have declined to join in acts of group thuggery as a schoolboy. “Aren’t we going out later?”

  Maisie shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said, though she knew perfectly well and had arranged a babysitter.

  “We’re going to the Lanhams,” Dom informed himself. “I’d better start getting the children ready for bed.”

  “I’ll do it,” Maisie said, nevertheless pouring herself a large glass of wine and entrenching herself with it at the kitchen table. “The top of Mount Kilimanjaro’s melted,” she added. She held up the newspaper for him to see. There was an aerial picture of the brown, cloacal mountain-top, faintly streaked with the white of glaciers that were retreating like time from a middle-aged life.

  “When are we supposed to be there?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  She read the paper, which said that the mountain-top hadn’t been visible for eleven thousand years. It was that kind of fact, she thought, that discredited even the most heartfelt demonstration of concern for the situation. When she looked up she saw that Dom was still standing there, silently regarding her with a combative eye.

  “What’s wrong?” he said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Something’s wrong.”

  “I’m absolutely fine.”

  “Then why won’t you tell me when we’re supposed to be there?”

  She had an impulse to lift her shirt and reveal to him her soft, mounded stomach and her mottled breasts, but she realised that this would upset him. Instead, she said what she was supposed to say, for had they ever been expected for dinner at a time other than eight o’clock? It was her next line in the play, though she had fought to keep it down. “Eight o’clock.”

  “Right.” Dom ducked his head. “Did you realise it’s seven-fifteen?”

  She rose, wondering why he didn’t put the children to bed himself if he cared so much what the time was. She guessed the answer was that he had taken her at her word: she had said she would do it. He probably thought there was some important, sentimental reason why, a reason that might even have been himself, tired at the end of his week’s work: if this were so, it struck her as sad that he had to fabricate her generosity towards him out of so little material, or make a point of honour out of something that didn’t really exist. The fact was that she wanted to put the children to bed in order to atone for the incident of the lunchbox, and also, less reflectively, to conceal this incident from her husband lest one of the children chose the bedtime hour to reveal it. By tomorrow it would have passed from their view; until then, she could stifle them.

  She ascended the stairs heavily, and something in their tread and extent, their borders and spindles beaded with dried splashes of thick cream-coloured paint, the blue ribbed carpet that travelled up them like a penitentiary road, caused her to believe that she would always be walking up these stairs and that this moment would endure for ever: the splashes of paint were like pieces of frozen time, the line of the carpet passed like a rod through the centre of her life, skewering her manifold selves. She thought she might never move on from it: it was like a cave she had come upon, a habitable, convenient cave on a too-long journey. It seemed possible that she could just live here, here on the turn of the stairs. They would step over her as they came and went. She would sit there and think of all the stairs she had climbed over the years, and feel that by stopping she had at least acted decisively and conclusively in one area of her life.

  She wondered whether she had always been like this: she couldn’t remember. Had she always confronted each minute in this way, half-heartedly squaring up to it with the idea of backing down always somewhere in her thoughts? She wasn’t sure. There was nothing in their situation in Arlington Park she could say she hadn’t chosen, except to actually live it, yet she didn’t think that she had ever been so close to the possibility of cowardice. When she thought of her life before—of her twenties, and London, and work, and the house near Goldborne Road—she saw herself always animated by a nameless dissatisfaction: it had filled her out, like the wind fills out a sail, and propelled her along while she did her best to steer a course. She didn’t know exactly where she was going, just that it was necessary to remain in motion while avoiding outright disaster.

  And this wind, this variable force of discontent, had carried her to places whose specific and localised nature troubled her even as she was driven to accept them. The problem was that when it blew, it came from everywhere, from great vacant, generalised spaces; yet it could only send her to what was fixed and narrow, to what already existed. Always, it transformed amorphous impulses into material facts. Her need to love became her relationship with Dom; her need for significance became her research job at a small television production company in Shepherd’s Bush; her need for an object became a three-bedroom house in Goldborne Road; her need to express herself became her two daughters, Clara and Elsie. But this same noisy wind of possibility blew through it all, blew and blew, so that she felt they were wrongly positioned, that they had put themselves where they were exposed to strain, constantly fretted on every flank and in every crevice; she wanted a sheltered place where her shiftless need for change and movement couldn’t get her. That was what she had thought, anyway. Now that they were here, in Arlington Park, a new and pacific understanding had descended on her, had enveloped her like an unstirred, unending silence. She saw that they had lost what made them live: that the difficulty and necessity of managing that force grew in proportion to how strongly you felt it. And it was, after all, a necessity, perhaps the only necessity, in that without it she appeared to be paralysed. She was like a boat in a harbour where the tide has gone out, lying helplessly on her side in the mud with the neutered fin of her rudder drying in the still air.

  There was a pile of clothes on the stairs in front of her, all tangled up where the children had left them. It seemed they had stepped out of them where they stood: the sleeves and knotted tights and crumpled skirts still bore the imprint of their bodies, like discarded skins. She bent down to pick them up, and when she closed her fingers around them she saw a kind of writhing black movement in the pile, and she flung it away from her with a loud shriek and galloped up the stairs to the landing.

  “My God!” she cried. “It’s a snake!”

  Clara and Elsie had issued from their bedroom and stood quavering before her. They were both naked. T
hey stared at her from their white bodies.

  “There’s a snake!”

  “Where?” said Clara interestedly, bending to look around Maisie as though it might be sitting in a friendly coil behind her, waiting to be introduced.

  “Down there! In the clothes!”

  Her heart was pounding idiotically against her sternum. The landing reeled around her in undulating walls of electric light. She watched as Clara went past her and began making her way sturdily down the stairs.

  “Don’t!” Maisie said faintly, though it sounded ridiculous, as it was clear to them all by now that there was unlikely to be a snake on the landing. Clara continued her progress down the stairs.

  “Is this the snake?” she said. She looked disappointed.

  In her hand she held a pair of Maisie’s tights. One of the legs was strangely swollen. There was a knot tied high in the thigh.

  “We made it,” said Elsie beside her. “That’s our snake. We stuffed our knickers down it.”

  “Oh,” said Maisie.

  “Did you really think it was a snake?” said Clara, pleased.

  “We took all the ones from the drawer,” said Elsie. “Then we put it down the stairs to frighten you.”

  Clara came back up the stairs.

  “I thought there might have been a real snake as well,” she said despondently.

  Maisie walked ahead of them into their room, whose profound disorder had a sort of grace, like that of a patch of dense forest: a certain natural beauty that arises out of things moving and falling and being left undisturbed where they lie. She felt entombed, unprotestingly, in the untidiness of the house: it was draped over her like a shroud with no openings for her arms and legs, so that when she walked around it or reached out to touch it she felt a kind of dragging following movement, and a sense of amputated numbness. Little plastic figures—of horses with gaudy pink fountains of hair, of girls with encephalitic heads, of miniature train drivers and men in hard hats, of jungle animals and red Indians and tiny women with plaits and gingham aprons—lay everywhere on the floor on their sides, as though some strange conceptual explosion had flung them there. A large rough-skinned lizard with the fork of its pink plastic tongue exposed was propped victoriously on the prone body of a Barbie doll. A plastic head almost the size of a child’s head, streaming blond synthetic hair from little puncture marks in its rigid, flesh-coloured casing, lay severed in the middle of Elsie’s bed, staring at the ceiling with its blue, fronded, wide-awake eyes.

  “My God,” Maisie said, sitting down beside it and stroking its cold, silky hair.

  Beneath her feet, beneath her buttocks, were little pebbly crunching mounds of resistance that gave like dried leaves under her weight. There were balls of tissue paper and the empty lids of felt-tip pens, hair slides, and plastic combs and pencil sharpeners, marbles and rulers and crayons and the little rubber carcasses of burst balloons; there was a rocking horse draped like a tramp in layers of contradictory garments, through which his head protruded with despondent dignity; there was a multicoloured landslide of Lego that spilled out over the tracks of a toy train. There was a big disorderly heap of books on the top of which a small magnifying glass rested. There were clothes, new and old, clean and dirty, that had escaped their allotted places and were joined all together in riotous celebration.

  “Here, Mummy.”

  Elsie stood before her, proffering a crushed slip of ruled paper. Maisie looked at it. There was a faintly drawn, smudged picture of a rainbow and next to it, in large spidery writing, the words “I love you Mummy love Elsie.” The paper was torn and there were three telephone numbers written across it in an adult’s handwriting. She took it from Elsie’s trembling hand. It was a dangerous place to live in, a family: it was as tumultuous as the open sea beneath a treacherous sky, the shifting allegiances, the flurries of cruelty and virtue, the great battering waves of mood and mortality, the endless alternation of storm and calm. A downpour would come or a reprieving ray of light, and in the end you didn’t know what the difference was, what it all meant, what it added up to, when set against the necessity for just surviving and getting through.

  Maisie said, “You haven’t got any clothes on.”

  “I know.”

  “You’ve got a babysitter coming tonight.”

  Elsie’s round eyes were level with her own. She saw the troubling significance of her remark register itself in them, as though they were two round, still pools into whose dark waters she had poked a stick.

  “I don’t want a babysitter to come.”

  “Well, she’s coming.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Katie.”

  “Katie.” Elsie thought. Then she nodded unhappily. “I like Katie,” she admitted.

  “I’d much rather stay here with you,” Maisie said, because in a way it was true.

  “Are you going?” Elsie said. She thought and then she said, “Where are you going?” with a little smile, as though forgetting to say “where” was something she’d done last year, when she was three.

  “We’re going to a dinner party.”

  “Oh.” She thought again. “Are you going to like it?”

  “I like you,” Maisie said, picking up her small, dense, fleshy body and plunging her face into her neck. “You’re the only thing I like.”

  Elsie was speaking into her hair. She could feel her mouth moving, like something small that lived there, just above her ear.

  “What?”

  “I said, what about Clara?”

  “Clara too. You and Clara.”

  “And Daddy.”

  “Daddy too.”

  “And Katie.”

  In the bathroom Maisie looked in the mirror. I am thirty-eight, she thought. I am Maisie at thirty-eight. This did not seem to be the same thing as saying, this is Clara at six, this is Elsie at four, which she did far more often. She did not know whether anyone had ever crystallised her like that, had stopped her in time and commemorated her. It seemed just then a terrible thing not to know: to have to guess at, and to conclude from something unclaimed in her face, something unauthored and anonymous, that the answer was no. She could have been anything she wanted to be: that was the spirit in which she might have taken her parents’ limited and discriminatory love, rather than being left by it to wonder what she actually was.

  She saw her parents infrequently now, sporadic occasions on every one of which, nevertheless, they succeeded in repeating with crushing and meaningful regularity their mantra, the manifesto of their post-service years. It was that if an adult still blamed her parents, the problem was not theirs but hers. This nugget of self-absolution was intended to have special significance for Maisie, and it did, in that it proved that her resentments had their basis in fact—facts that her parents were eager to send to oblivion now that the regime of their household had drawn to its ambiguous conclusion and they were free of their children. They didn’t want to be put on trial for things that had happened long ago: they wanted to wallow in their guilty retirement, from which distant perspective the years of child-rearing seemed to sit on a mountain-top of accomplishment. They had climbed that mountain, and they expected to be congratulated for it, and to be allowed to congratulate themselves. They said it had been wonderful, but if you criticised them for something they spoke of the hardships of the terrain, and of the particular, stubborn obstacles their children—Maisie more than the others—had placed in their path. If those children, as adults, still blamed their parents, then evidently they knew nothing about life.

  Maisie did blame them; she didn’t see why she shouldn’t. The older she got, and the closer to the sources and perils of life she became, the more incriminated they seemed to her. She blamed them not only for the parts of herself they had damaged but for damage, wreckage, wherever she saw it: she blamed them for the brown, blighted fields that stood around Merrywood, for the roaring roads that scythed through delicate places, for the pylons and the petrol stations, the ugly overpasses and offic
e buildings, for the shops and supermarkets that stood redly in their fresh sites, as though they were stained with blood. Wherever she saw greed and carelessness and monstrous self-will she blamed them, for it all seemed to come out of a common fund of selfishness, of heedlessness before the fact of beauty.

  She even blamed them for the melting snows of Mount Kilimanjaro.

  “Can I wear this one?” said Clara. She was talking about a nightdress.

  “Whatever,” said Maisie.

  Her face: it was like a garden in winter, bare, cut back, monotonous. Once she’d got used to looking at it, it didn’t seem so bad: it answered her second enquiry with the same polite silence it had answered her first, so that she began to get the idea of it. She remembered more often now to wear make-up and it had proportionately less impact. She couldn’t remember the last time a man had looked at her as anything other than part of a boxed set that included his wife.