by Rachel Cusk
“She’s completely selfish. She’s the most selfish person I’ve ever met.”
Christine was outraged. “How can you say that?”
“Look at what she was like with your dad. Completely selfish. Always on at him to get rid of his boat and stop going to the pub and stop enjoying himself. She couldn’t stand to see him enjoying himself without her. She wanted all his attention. You’re not like that.”
“I can’t be bothered to be,” said Christine.
“That’s not what you used to say,” said Joe, with a wounded expression. “You used to say you thought it was important that we both had separate lives.”
“That was before I realised that separate lives meant you going off surfing for the weekend while I look after the children.”
“You had that weekend in Barcelona,” Joe observed.
“You’re right,” said Christine. “I did. I should never have come back, that was my mistake.”
She picked up Ella, carried her to her bedroom, dropped her on the bed, then switched off the light and closed the door.
“Mum had a difficult childhood,” she said, returning to the bathroom.
“That’s what you always say.”
“Well, it’s true.”
“You can’t blame everything on your childhood. I don’t go around blaming everything on my childhood. What would be the point? It’s over and done with. There’s nothing you can do about it. You might just as well get on with your life.”
Wet towels lay all over the bathroom floor. One by one Christine picked them up and dropped them into the laundry basket. Then she sat down on the edge of the bath and watched Joe put in his cufflinks.
“Do you know what she did?” she said.
“What?”
“She went back to look at the home she was in. She drove all the way to Cornwall to look at it. Apparently they’ve turned it into a hotel.”
Joe washed out his shaving brush and put the soap and razor back in the bathroom cabinet. He was always tidy, at least when it came to his own things.
“I think that must have been quite upsetting,” Christine reflected. “To go back to the place where you felt so much misery and see people there just enjoying themselves.”
“She would have preferred it full of unwanted children, would she?”
“She nearly booked herself into her old room,” Christine said.
Joe laughed. “That would have been good,” he said. “She’d really have had the last laugh then, sitting there ordering room service. Why didn’t she do it?”
“She just didn’t.”
“I expect she was worried she might have a good time.”
“Just lay off!” said Christine. “I’m sick of you. Just leave her alone.”
Joe slapped aftershave on to his glowing cheeks.
“That’s me done,” he said.
“Get you,” said Christine morosely.
He looked at her. “Are you staying like that?”
“Why, don’t I look nice?”
“It’s just I thought you might, you know, get changed. Put on some make-up.”
Christine opened her eyes wide. “You don’t think I look nice as I am?”
“Your shirt’s got something all down the front.”
Christine examined it. “That’s all right,” she said. “That’s just butter. And a bit of garlic. From stuffing the chicken. Just, you know, from getting dinner ready for eight people downstairs while you were up here shaving.”
“You’ve made your point,” said Joe.
“Have I? Are you sure?”
Joe sidled towards the door.
“You really piss me off sometimes,” she said after him, as he went out.
Christine took off her shirt in front of the mirror. She put her hands under her breasts and pushed them upwards. Then she looked at herself smoukleringly from the side.
“Christ,” she said.
She tore open her make-up bag and tipped everything out. With her fingers she rubbed foundation all over her face. Then she scrabbled about for her compact case of eyeshadows. There were four different shades in it, like little bruises. She used them all, starting with the darkest and working all the way up to her eyebrows. She went round her eyes with a pencil and then, leaning into the mirror, applied two coats of mascara. With a brush she rouged her cheeks and then rouged them again, because she still looked a bit white and worried. Then she unscrewed her jar of powder and plunged in the same brush, in her haste spilling half of it over the worktop. Powdered, her face looked frozen, suspended, like a face in a painting. She regarded it with narrowed eyes. She made a moue with her mouth and a little fan of wrinkles sprang up around her lips. If she grimaced the other way, two transverse wrinkles would appear down her cheeks. She took a lipstick and drew a big red mouth on herself. Then she blotted some of it off with tissue paper and smouldered again in the mirror.
In the bedroom she removed the rest of her clothes and opened the wardrobe, where the long mirror fixed to the inside of the door showed her reflection full length. She’d had enough of herself today, after the changing rooms at Merrywood. What she wouldn’t give to have the body she’d had ten years earlier. She hadn’t appreciated it at the time. When she met Joe she’d had a nice little figure, big chest, slender hips, white skin like elastic. The funny thing was, all she could think about in those days was social status. She was mesmerised by the sense of a hierarchy. It seemed to stand there, like a big mountain she couldn’t lose sight of but everyone else ignored. It stood there, the question of who she was and what she was worth. Everywhere she turned, it gave out its challenge to her, the great big hard fact of itself. She didn’t know exactly what it meant or even what it was. She just knew she was at the foot of it.
That changed the minute she met Joe. Suddenly she was closer: suddenly there was detail, texture, sensation—the texture of his cotton shirts and sheets, the food he ate, the wine he drank, the sounds that came out of his mouth, the things he lived with and for and touched every day. When she was with him she had to think with the front of her brain. She didn’t think with her body. It all happened at the front of her brain. Entering his house for the first time all those years ago, and seeing his pictures, his antique furniture, his architecture books, the rugs, the chess set, the dried flowers in a bowl, the front of her brain had burned with pressure. It was like being held upside down, the desire to laugh meeting the total certainty that she was wrong, that she was ignorant; it felt like a vein in the centre of her forehead was about to burst. A man buying antique furniture! A man living by himself, not ignominiously but well: for Christine, it was uncharted territory. When they made love, she did it not with her body but with the front of her brain. He was like a patch of sunlight she had to keep herself in. The dread, the terror of falling into shadow, of going back to where she’d been before: she pretended she was easy, that this was just another passage of life, but she was not. She lived in terror of her expulsion from the light. She lived in the front of her brain until it hurt. Somehow, her life had become contingent on this one chance, this opportunity of Joe: it was some flaw in her upbringing, in her parents, perhaps in her own personality too, that she found it so difficult to better herself and yet so ardently desired to. Expelled from Joe, she saw quite clearly a life like her parents’ life, a semi in Newton Abbot that was waiting—minatory, patient—to claim her. She saw that another chance might never come her way. She thought and thought her way through it. She adhered to Joe with the front of her brain until it seemed as though she was awake even when she was sleeping next to him.
It was a shame really, she thought now, regarding her heavy thighs in the mirror, her mottled mound of stomach. After all, she’d had a nice little figure. Somewhere inside her it was still there, straining to come out. When she thought of men it did a little dance. It strutted, it moved its slender hips. She thought of a young man, broad-chested, eager. There was a boy she saw sometimes who lived across the road, with brown eyes like
chocolates. She thought of him. She could teach him a thing or two. She’d do it with her body, not like the girls he probably knew, self-conscious girls who did it with the front of their brains. She’d ravish him in her brass bed, amidst her antique furniture, and he’d be grateful for it. Or perhaps she’d go across the road, to whatever pitiful room he lived in, and stand there fearless, powerful, blind. It’d be a bit much, doing it in her and Joe’s bed. She would go to his room, bringing with her her aura of the mountain.
Downstairs the doorbell rang. She pulled the new top from its bag and tore off the labels. She remembered the tarty one, the one Stephanie liked. Should she have bought that instead? The new top, the purple top, was ample and respectable. She’d bought it with the front of her brain; she couldn’t stop herself. She thought of the men who were coming, married men, and they seemed to her like children, hard work and only indirectly rewarding. She poured her efforts and energy into them and it seemed to go into the masonry, into the foundations. It seemed to ensure not satisfaction but continuance, the future continuation of everything that could never be brought to a resolution. It seemed to ensure that she would never, herself, receive any attention. Why was it always her, cementing the masonry, the foundations? When would she be free of it, this feeling that all life was work, this strange, compelling sense that without her the sky would fall in on Arlington Park, its avenues darken, its households revert to some oblique and savage condition? She could not imagine not being here, that was the thing: her hold on existence was manifested solely in these streets and these houses, and the people in them. None of them, not even Joe, understood what it was to be so proximate to oblivion. They were hallmarked, like silver: they saw the world as categorised, not chaotic. But she, Christine, was only one generation removed from abandonment: she, the offspring of a scrap, a piece of litter blowing in the wind, felt always the presence of the enormous darkness from which she had come.
She put on a brown skirt with the purple top. It wasn’t an outfit for seducing the boy over the road, but at least it was slimming. She thought that perhaps she would end like her mother, sitting alone on the floor in a room somewhere, drinking a bottle of wine, a misshapen fruit dropped off the tree of love. She could hear voices downstairs, men’s voices booming and a woman’s laugh. She turned to leave the room, but then she stopped, and looking over her shoulder at herself in the mirror, she lifted her skirt and thrust her bottom towards the glass.
“The English race,” said Joe Lanham to the men, “is dying out.”
He leaned across and offered the wine around. Benedict Randall and Dom Carrington were sitting side by side on the sofa. Dave Spooner was perched on the footstool by the fireplace. Joe, seigneurial, was in his favourite chair, an original Georgian chesterfield he had once quietly removed from a manor house the firm were refurbishing into flats before the reclamation people took it. They were in the upstairs sitting room. It was one of the features of the Lanhams’ house, the upstairs sitting room. It went all the way across the building, with windows on each side. The Lanhams’ was a Georgian house, tall and narrow. The kitchen was on the ground floor and went all across the building too. It often happened, on evenings such as this, that the women congregated on one floor and the men on another.
“What do you mean?” Dave said. “Do you mean morris dancing and all that?”
The Spooners—Dave and Maggie—were among the Lanhams’ oldest friends. They appeared in the Lanhams’ wedding photographs. Dave always went along on Joe’s Wednesday nights at the pub. You knew where you were with the Spooners. They were part of the bedrock: they were solid.
“I mean the race itself,” said Joe. “The Anglo-Saxon race.”
“And is that a bad thing, for you?” said Benedict. He was slumped into the corner of the sofa with his legs crossed at the knee and again at the ankle. He held his glass by the stem and swirled the wine around in it, and plunged his nose into it before drinking.
“It’s a Wine Society wine,” Joe told him. “I find they’re usually pretty good.”
Dave held his glass up to the light appreciatively.
“Excellent,” he said.
“I’m asking whether it’s a tragedy, in your view,” reiterated Benedict. “The end of the English.”
“I think it’s sad,” said Joe.
“In what way sad?”
“Sad that we won’t exist.”
“What’s your evidence that we won’t?”
“I don’t need evidence,” said Joe. “I see it with my own eyes.”
Benedict swirled the wine around in his glass again. Precipitately, he tipped his head back and drank, draining the glass to the bottom.
“Do you?” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He looked around at them. “We all seem pretty English here to me.”
Dom cleared his throat and leaned towards Dave Spooner.
“What do you do, Dave?”
“I make labels,” Dave said.
Dom was sitting on the edge of the sofa with his knees jutting out and his elbows digging into them, as if he were playing strategic chess. He nodded once, acknowledging Dave’s move.
“Labels?” he said. “Do you mean, as in clothes?”
“Labels,” Dave repeated. “They come on an adhesive strip. We make them blank, and then you print on them whatever you want.”
“It’s one of those funny things, isn’t it?” Joe said. “We all use them, but we never stop to think about where they actually come from.”
“Well, yours probably come from China,” Dave said. “If you’re talking about general administrative labelling, like what you’d use in the office. We sell to a smaller, high-quality market. Home businesses, a few art galleries. Even the National Trust. You’d be surprised.”
Silence fell.
“And how long have you been doing that for?” Dom said.
Dave considered. “About six years.”
“Right.” Dom nodded.
Joe leapt out of his chesterfield.
“Let’s put some music on,” he said. “Liven things up a bit.”
“I can’t stand those morris dancers,” Dave said to the other two. “All that skipping about shaking bells. And those shoes they wear with the buckles, and the white frilly trousers. Skipping about like a pack of ponces.” He shuddered. “It sends a shiver down my spine.”
Downstairs Christine was admiring Maggie Spooner’s exquisite mohair shawl.
“Look at you,” she said, fingering the soft grey wool. “Look at you, all soft and gorgeous and womanly.”
Maggie was pregnant. She looked like she had a cushion stuffed down her front, Christine thought. Her stomach was big, but she was as thin as a stick everywhere else. She had a kind of pride about her, with her lithe, pregnant body and her exquisite mohair and her face that looked recast somehow, flushed, bronzed. She looked like a woman in the wilderness, a pioneer woman or an Amazon, who might spend the day running through the jungle hunting with her spear before squatting down in a grove of banana leaves and giving birth. It wasn’t an idea you would normally associate with Maggie Spooner. Only she looked so powerful all of a sudden, so—iconic.
Wasn’t it amazing, Christine thought. Wasn’t it incredible how the spring of life just bubbled up, rose up in these thousands of houses, amidst all this solidity: in the midst of everything that was so fixed and hard, the spring of life bubbled up eternally, giving and giving. She imagined Maggie running barefoot with her spear across Arlington Park. She seemed to be alone in some definitive way in her lithe, pregnant body. Her face was the bronzed face of a warrior woman. Having drunk from the spring of life she had shed her association with men, had left Dave mending his motorbike in the back garden and run out with her spear.
Christine drank deeply from her glass. It had to be admitted that the two children Maggie already had were among the least attractive Christine had encountered. But still—she was ploughing her patch of life, wasn’t she? She was getting everything out of it s
he could, and Christine saw nothing wrong in that. And to see her now, tonight, as she was, all bronzed and warlike—well, you could see she was really living. What did it matter what the future held, what it all added up to in the end? What did it matter if the child in Maggie’s belly was another tow-headed dwarf in the style of her younger son, Harry? The point was, you had to live in the moment. What was the good of getting and getting if you couldn’t look back and say there, there I was really living! A lot of the people Christine knew were obsessed with money. What was the point of that? It was experience that made you rich: it was life itself, bubbling up through the floorboards. When she thought of this house she shared with Joe! It was a casket, a coffer of riches, memories piled high in every room, every corner full of the sense of life growing, accruing, amassing interest.
No, give her Maggie any day. Give her Maggie over people who were prettier or more intelligent, people who were wealthier, more important, more exciting. Give her Maggie every time, over people who questioned everything and complained and were never satisfied. They were the ones she couldn’t stand, the ones who criticised and complained. What did they ever do for anybody? What difference had they ever made?
“Look at you,” she said to Maggie, touching the single pearl Maggie wore on a silver chain around her neck. “That’s nice as well, isn’t it? Sort of understated. Elegant but understated.”
“Oh, that,” Maggie said. “Dave gave me that for our anniversary.”
“Of course he did,” said Christine, satisfied. “Isn’t he a nice bloke? Just, you know, gives you a gorgeous necklace for your anniversary. Isn’t he lovely? You don’t get famous for doing that, do you? You don’t get social status, or people thinking you’re important for giving your wife a necklace on your anniversary. Do you?”
