by Rachel Cusk
Maggie looked at her, perplexed, out of her bronzed Amazonian face. Her eyes were round and blue. They were like two little blue flowers blowing thoughtless in a meadow.
“I don’t know,” Christine sighed, tipping more wine into her glass. Maggie’s glass was still full. It rested on the table beside her like a misted goblet of light. “You have to wonder sometimes, don’t you?”
She looked at Maisie and Juliet Randall, who were standing talking by the kitchen units. Why had they separated themselves? Why didn’t they come and sit down at the table, where the wine was flowing freely and Christine had lit a scented candle; where she was trying to build up a warm core of female association, a little warm fire out of the fact of them all being women, in it together while the men sat upstairs? Instead, Maisie and Juliet stood by the kitchen units, as far away as they could get. They stood there conversing like people at a convention, not touching, not warm, not clinging together on this raft of life as it went over the black waves of oblivion. Christine didn’t know why she’d invited them. Give her Maggie every time. She scrutinised Maisie’s attire and decided that she’d evidently smartened herself up a bit. She was strikinglooking, in a way. She was entirely in black, a black shirt that was quite smart and a black pair of trousers. It was all right, but Christine never liked it when people wore all black. It just seemed like such a negative statement. It was like saying you’d given up hope. At least she was wearing mascara, which helped.
And Juliet had finally cut off that terrible hair! She’d had it since she was a schoolgirl, when Christine first knew her. Juliet was the year above. She’d gone about with that hair down to her waist as though it was against her religion to cut it. She was all clever and superior in those days. She’d seemed full of information, programmed, like a rocket being prepared for a long journey into space. It had surprised Christine no end to find her all these years later, come to earth in Arlington Park. She’d bumped into her on the High Street a month ago with two small children, carrying her shopping. She didn’t know why, but she’d expected Juliet to be miles away, out there in space, in a different orbit altogether. She’d often thought of her since school, thought of her twinkling in a distant constellation, a university professor maybe, or a writer—a person, anyway, who gave Christine in Arlington Park a sense of perspective, of the reach of the universe, of its strange but necessary dimensions. It was this sense of order that allowed life in Arlington Park to be what it was. You had to have the professors and the politicians, the clever and the rich; and equally, she supposed, you had to have the starving millions, God help them. You had to have the top and the bottom for the middle to become possible. So it did not please her to find Juliet here, carrying her shopping in plastic bags. But then again, why not? Why not have her here, enriching the soil, ploughing her information back into it—what harm could that do? Perhaps one of those girls she taught would shoot out into space one day and burn there like a star. Then they’d be able to say that Arlington Park had given the world a prime minister or a best-selling author, a person of note, someone to fix this place more firmly still at its core, to fortify its connections with life at every level. Wouldn’t that be nice?
Upstairs the men had music on so that she couldn’t hear the timbre of their conversation. She didn’t fancy the look of any of them really, except Dave Spooner. Juliet’s husband was all bandy legs and no neck, and Dom Carrington was a little too refined for her tastes: he looked at you with those eyes as if it really mattered what you said next, and then was silent for a minute after you’d said it, which Christine found disconcerting. Also, he had a little perfect look about him which contradicted Christine’s sense of what the opposite sex should be. What was a man if not a rough thing you rubbed up against that gave you all your smoothness? A man should be a rough, splintered thing, solid, imperfect, abrasive, and thick-skinned, like a tree-trunk with a rough bark. You needed to feel yourself purified by your contact with a man. You needed to come up against him and feel the attrition of conflict that sent you back smoother, polished, rubbed clean. But Dom was like marble. With a man like marble, like glass, where was the friction? Where was the sticking point that relieved you of the questing sense of irritation, the itch, the crawling, questing need for some roughness to find a purchase on? Dom would make you feel like a rhinoceros trying to relieve its itch against the stalk of a daisy.
No, tonight it was Dave she liked, simple Dave, his hands greasy with motorbike oil fastening a pearl on a silver chain around your neck. You just didn’t want to get stuck talking to him, that was all.
“I’ve had one of those days today,” she said to Maggie, suddenly bleary. “You know, those days when you don’t stop.”
Maggie nodded sympathetically with her face like an Amazon’s bronze shield.
“It’s all been coffee here and lunch there and tearing around to drop off one child and pick up another and solving the world’s problems in between, and then suddenly I’m stuffing chicken breasts for eight. Do you know what I mean?”
“It’s just so busy sometimes, isn’t it?” said Maggie.
“And then you think, you know, I could just have stayed here. I could have put Ella down for a nap, sat in a chair, and read a magazine. What would have been so wrong with that?”
“I’ve been doing yoga,” said Maggie. “I find that really helps.”
“Yoga.” Christine stared into the revolving depths of her wineglass. “Why not? Why not fit in a bit of yoga while you’re at it? Why not make space for a bit of transcendental meditation while you’re planning the day?”
“You’ve just got to make the space,” agreed Maggie.
Christine gazed at Juliet with her bobbed hair, at Maisie frowning and nodding, her arms folded defensively across her chest.
“The thing is,” she said, “we’re all so different, aren’t we? You’ve just got to steer your own course. That’s all you can do really, is steer your own course through it and not think too much.”
“That’s right,” said Maggie.
“Because it’s hard sometimes, seeing all these differences as positive. Sometimes you can look at it all and think, you know, what’s it all about? Where’s the logic behind it?”
“That’s right,” said Maggie.
“You can start to see the world as a terrible place.”
“That’s right.”
Christine emptied the remains of the bottle into her glass.
“Speaking of which,” she said. “Has there been any news about that girl? The one who went missing in the park.”
Maggie winced and closed her eyes. “They found her,” she said.
“Did they?”
Maggie opened her eyes again and there were the blue meadow flowers.
“They found her in a field a few miles away from where she was taken. She was dead.”
“Was she?” Christine considered it, her glass at her lips, and then swiftly downed the contents. “Oh well.”
“You say you’re a teacher,” said Joe.
Benedict nodded. He looked surprised.
“Where do you teach?”
“Hartford View.”
“Blimey.” Joe whistled and sat back in his chesterfield. “That was a bit of bad luck. Couldn’t they have found a job for you up here?”
“I quite like it,” said Benedict.
“There are plenty of good schools up here,” Joe said. “There’s even that private one, you know, the College. You’d probably get paid more, going private.”
Benedict appeared to consider it.
“Probably,” he said.
“What I can’t stand about schools,” said Joe, leaning forward, “is all the political correctness. You know what I mean. You can’t call a blackboard a blackboard.”
“They’re whiteboards now,” said Benedict.
“Exactly!” bellowed Joe, laughing.
“No, I mean they’re actually white. We don’t use blackboards any more. We use interactive whiteboards.”
Joe was nodding enthusiastically.
“And if a teacher lays a hand on a pupil they’re either a racist or a paedophile, aren’t they? And the whole class has to be held back because Aqbul can’t understand English. It’s just ridiculous, isn’t it?”
“I know a chap whose son goes to Hartford View,” said Dave. “He says to look at some of them coming out at the end of the day would shrivel your balls to peanuts. He says they’re like animals, some of them. These sixth-formers, great big black guys six feet tall, you know, with their trousers half-way down their arses. He says it’s a nightmare.”
“And if you laid a hand on them you’d get called a racist, right?” said Joe. “Even though you’re half their size.”
“Most likely you’d get your head kicked in first,” Dave observed.
“You’re braver than me,” Joe said to Benedict. “You wouldn’t catch me walking past it, let alone going to work in it.”
“It’s not so bad,” said Benedict. “Most of the students are perfectly nice.”
“Nice!” repeated Joe, shaking his head and laughing. “That’s a new one—nice!”
Benedict sat with his nose lifted slightly into the air, as though waiting for order to be restored. Joe crossed his legs and looked at him, red-faced, with his hand over his mouth to suppress further outbursts of mirth.
“The thing is,” Benedict continued, “you’re all they’ve got.”
“How do you mean?”
“For a lot of them, school is the only organized thing in their day.”
“And whose fault is that?” Joe demanded.
Benedict looked surprised again.
“Among other things, it’s the parents’ fault.”
“My point exactly!” said Joe, slicing a broad finger through the air.
“But the parents aren’t really the issue,” said Benedict, gently rapping the arm of the sofa. “What you’ve got are these children.”
“Some of them six feet tall,” Joe said to Dave.
“And you’ve got to do what you can for them.”
“I know what I’d do for them,” said Joe. “I’d make them speak bloody English. I’d say, you want to come to our schools, then you’ve got to speak our language. By force if necessary.”
Benedict laughed loudly.
“I would,” Joe said. “I’m not joking. Where do you think Christine is with this food?”
“She probably got lost on her way to the cooker,” said Dave.
“Got sidetracked by a bottle of wine, you mean,” said Joe. “She’s been going since about six. We’ll have to keep her airborne somehow. We don’t want her crash-landing before we’ve had a chance to eat something.”
“How long have you lived here?” Dave asked Dom.
“About six months.”
“Oh, not long, then. Where were you before?”
“London.”
“Well, you’re well out of that, at least.”
“Maisie doesn’t always think so,” said Dom, ducking his head. “But yes, I suppose we are.”
“Doesn’t think she’s better off here?” said Joe. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“She’ll get used to it.”
“You couldn’t pay me to live in London,” said Joe. “Bloody terrorist capital of the world. There they all are, hobnobbing in Bayswater, free as birds, and getting their teeth done on the National Health Service while they’re at it.”
He got up and went to put on more music. His eye alighted on something on a shelf and he lifted it carefully down and took it over to show the others.
“Look at this,” he said. “I found it the other day in a junk shop in Weston-super-Mare. It was just sitting there in a box of old rubbish. I cleaned it up and it works like a charm. It’s a collector’s item, original eighteenth century.”
It was a pair of painted figurines beside a painted palm tree, carved in wood and mounted on a wooden plinth. The standing figure was a man in military uniform with an intricately carved moustache, holding a sword in his clasped hands. The other was a dark-skinned man in a loincloth, kneeling with his head bent forwards over a carved tree stump and his wrists delicately bound behind his back.
“Watch this,” said Joe.
He turned the key in the side and wound up the mechanism. In little jerks the soldier’s tiny sword ascended until it was held above his head. Then it came down on the back of the dark-skinned man’s neck. There was a hesitation and a little click, and then the man’s head came off and fell into a basket. Joe laughed uproariously.
“Isn’t that terrific?” he said. “Look, the head’s attached to the shoulders by a piece of string that comes out of his arse. You just pull it and it pops back up again.”
He pulled the piece of string and the little head rose out of the basket and made its ghostly way back up to the severed neck. Then he wound the key and showed them how it worked again.
Christine didn’t see how she was supposed to know if the chicken was done. She’d given it a good innings—it was as roasted as the contents of a charter flight home from Tenerife. She stabbed one of the parcels of flesh and tried to peer inside.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, slamming it back into the oven for another precautionary blast.
“Tell me how I can help,” said Maggie, manifesting herself before Christine’s eyes. She had even shed the mohair shawl in preparation. That was what you got from people like Maggie: real support.
“Aren’t you nice?” said Christine.
She went to the bottom of the stairs and bawled her husband’s name. Then she returned to contemplate the salad, which seemed to have deflated to half the level it was before.
“This looks a bit tired,” she said to Maggie. “What do you think?”
Maggie peered fastidiously into the bowl. Above their heads came the sound of footsteps, as the men mobilised themselves to descend.
“I’d have been quite happy to leave them up there,” said Christine. “I don’t fancy them tonight. I feel like they’re no bloody use to anybody.”
“Have you got any cucumber?” Maggie said. “Any spring onions, or chives? I’ll go and look in the fridge and see what I can find,” she concluded when Christine didn’t reply.
Christine was mutinous. Couldn’t Joe have helped, instead of spending most of the evening out in his workshop and the rest up in the bathroom with his face six inches from the mirror? He hadn’t even put the children to bed! And now here she was, worrying about salmonella poisoning and the fact that her salad looked like a compost heap, and the funny way Maisie Carrington stared at her, and the way Juliet seemed sort of superior and above it all, and her top, that Stephanie said made her look like the bloody Archbishop of Canterbury. It just wasn’t on! She bet Dom didn’t make Maisie cook dinner for eight while he stared at himself in the mirror; even old bandy legs probably lent a hand when Juliet was tired. Yet there was Joe sitting upstairs like the lord of the manor, drinking wine, while Christine was fighting it out down here alone!
“You’re useless, you are,” she hissed in his ear when he came strolling through the doorway, glass in hand.
He looked around absently, as though wondering who had said it.
“You heard me,” she said, turning on her heel.
Was this what they meant when they talked about sexual inequality? Was this it, the front, the hump, the line of battle? She’d never seen her father so much as boil an egg, but then her mother had never mowed the lawn or mended the kitchen cupboards either. It had never seemed worth the bother to Christine, trying to sort it out when it was all so much of a muchness; but now she wondered whether that wasn’t exactly what kept you in your place, this acceptance of things, so that you were forever going round and round in a circle and never getting anywhere. If you accepted things, where were you meant to go when it got unacceptable? Who were you meant to tell? There had to be room for change—there had to be room for a contingency! Like her father: even when Viv was ill once with pneumonia, sh
e had to get up to make his tea. That was no way to live, was it?
“Look at that,” she said, gazing into the salad bowl, where Maggie was briskly hurling little fresh chopped-up pieces of things with her sleeves rolled up to the elbows. “You’ve really made that look lovely and inviting, haven’t you?”
Maggie’s face darkened with pleasure. That was all you needed, a bit of encouragement! Someone to thank you once in a while and tell you you’d done well—everyone needed that, didn’t they? Christine felt warm, weightless with wine. The room revolved in its spangled depths. It seemed to arrange itself around a dense centre, like the petals of a flower. To feel discontent, when you were revolving, warm, in the petals of a flower! It was a worm, a pest, a black blight of feeling! It could never come to anything—it could only blacken you, blacken you where you stood!
“What’s eating you, then?” Joe said over her shoulder.
He was standing behind her. His rough voice was in her ear. She was conscious, in the distances of the kitchen, of other men: they sat or stood, dark and imperfect, roughly made. Beneath their clothes their bodies were imperative, full of entitlement, full of a half-forgotten violence. Yet this man had come to her. He had left the others and come to her. Why didn’t he touch her? Why didn’t he grip her arms, rub the rough bark of his cheek against her throat? She thought of taking off her archbishop outfit. She thought of tearing it off and running through Arlington Park, naked, gyrating.
“I’m fed up with you,” she said.
“What’ve I done, for Christ’s sake?”
“Bloody nothing,” said Christine. “I’m fed up with it.”
“They’re your friends,” he said indignantly. “I didn’t invite them.”
Was that what Dom Carrington said to Maisie, in the middle of a dinner party? She didn’t think so.
She saw Maggie, the Amazon, still chopping away at the sideboard.
“Look, it’s Maggie that’s doing all the work!” Christine exclaimed. “Seven months pregnant and she’s doing the work in your house!”
Joe looked sullen.
