A Life's Work

by Rachel Cusk

  I become confined to one room, a development that represents a surrender, a battle lost. As my daughter becomes both more complex and more dangerous, my respect for her increases in proportion to others’ disdain. The prospect of protecting her and the adult world from each other grows dark and unappealing. I can no longer face dragging her around after me. She is crawling now and has likes and dislikes. She has changed from rucksack to escaped zoo animal. Being in places that do not contain her requires me to be her tamer. Increasingly I remain at home with her, and as first stairs and then drawers and bookshelves and coffee tables acquire the potential for danger and riot, we become fenced in, cornered in the one safe space: the kitchen. My daughter zig-zags around it, maddened by confinement. It is winter and the garden is too wet and cold for her to crawl in. She beats on the door with her fists, desperate to escape. The floor is flooded to ankle height with her toys. Unidentifiable matter describes paths, like the trail of a snail, over walls and surfaces. The room has acquired a skin, a crust of dried milk upon which old food sits like a sort of eczema. The kitchen is pollinated with every substance with which my daughter comes into contact: mess spreads like a force of nature, unstoppable. My clothes are limed with it; I find gobbets in my hair, on my shoes. I wash and rinse and scrub but a strong undertow of entropy appears to govern this overheated little space and chaos is forever imminent, encroaching. Time hangs heavy on us and I find that I am waiting, waiting for her days to pass, trying to meet the bare qualification of life which is for her to have existed in time. In this lonely place I am indeed not free: the kitchen is a cell, a place of no possibility. I have given up my membership of the world I used to live in. Sometimes I listen to music or read, and it is like a ray of light coming in from outside, bright and painful, making me screw up my eyes. When we go for a walk I see young women in the street, beautiful and careless, and a pang of mourning for some oblique, lost self makes my heart clench. I look down at my daughter sleeping in her push-chair, the dark fringe of her lashes forming arcs on her pale skin, and a contrary wind of love gusts over me; and for some time this is how I am, blown this way and that, careering around like a crazy, febrile gauge trying to find north.

  It is during this phase, when my relish for the job of motherhood approximates that of the average filing clerk, when love and grief have me in a tug-of-war and the world outside wears the strange glitter of the past, of the unreachable, that I read again Coleridge’s poem ‘Frost At Midnight’.

  The frost performs its secret ministry,

  Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry

  Came loud – and hark, again! loud as before.

  The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,

  Have left me to that solitude, which suits

  Abstruser musings: save that at my side

  My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.

  ’Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs

  And vexes meditation with its strange

  And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,

  This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,

  With all the numberless goings on of life,

  Inaudible as dreams!

  This has always been one of my favourite poems, but reading it again I realise with a shock that like many childless people I had never noticed the baby. It is, admittedly, a well-behaved baby: even so, its presence causes me now to feel resentment and some awe. I am grudgingly amazed that Coleridge managed to write a poem at all with a baby in the room, let alone one that claims to find conditions over-quiet. I begin to see my predicament as the result of some deep failure of sensibility, some meanness of soul. I remember once, as a student, reading an advertisement in the paper for summer jobs in a fish factory on a remote ice-floe in Greenland. You were flown out there for three months, made to work sixteen-hour shifts, shuttled between barracks and factory by bus. There would be continuous daylight, nothing to do except work in the factory, and communication with the outside world would be extremely difficult. At the end of three months – stunned, mad, reeking of fish – you were dumped on the tarmac with your money and allowed to go home and get on with your life. My experience of motherhood is beginning to bear an alarming resemblance to this advertisement. I have been waiting, I realise, to come back, to return to thought and beauty and meaning, and when I read ‘Frost at Midnight’ it is slightly painful, as if blood were returning to a numbed limb.

  It is a poem about sitting still, about the way children act as anchors on the body and eventually the mind. The father frets at this stillness as at the quiet of imprisonment: he is listening for the world, so hard that he can hear the frost being laid down outside. Presently he begins to fathom the depths of himself, to dive deeper into the moment he inhabits. He remembers himself as a child, at boarding school, his loneliness and the harshness of his teachers, the terrible hope he cherished that at any minute the door to the classroom would open and someone would come in, someone he loved. These memories arouse in him the profoundest feelings of love for his child, as if every separation he has endured in his life can be mended by this moment of their closeness.

  Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,

  Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,

  Fill up the interspersed vacancies

  And momentary pauses of the thought!

  My Babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart

  With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,

  And think that thou shalt learn far other lore

  And in far other scenes! For I was reared

  In the great city, pent ‘mid cloisters dim,

  And saw naught lovely but the sky and stars.

  This love is a restitution; it is like a new place, from which the old country, the unhappy past, can safely be viewed. For a writer such a love can represent the attainment of narrative authority over life itself. He imagines his baby grown up, wandering the world, seeing marvels. Confinement becomes freedom, ugliness beauty: parenthood is redemptive, transformative, creative. It is the means by which the self’s limits are broken open and entrance found to a greater landscape. Coleridge does not mention nappies, noise, bits of old food. I don’t think this is just because it’s the night shift. His poem is written in the present tense: it describes a moment, surrounded, by implication, by other moments, by noise and disarray. Perhaps moments, now, are all there is. But this is a moment to which he brings his gift, which is language, a moment in which his love finds a voice. In this moment he contains the world, its good and its bad. In this moment he experiences an elemental greatness.

  Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,

  Whether the summer clothe the general earth

  With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing

  Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch

  Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch

  Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eavedrops fall,

  Heard only in the trances of the blast,

  Or if the secret ministry of frost

  Shall hang them up in silent icicles,

  Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

  Help

  When summer came I started to feel stuck. My daughter was five months old and she was everywhere, like something sweet but sticky on my life, like molasses, like glue. It wasn’t her fault: it was in her nature, so I read in books, to attach herself, as if I was a wall and she was the vine growing up it. What I wanted was to train her on to something else so that she could stay standing for periods while I briefly absented myself. In the stories I used to read as a child parents were remote, romantic figures who were frequently out or away on some mysterious business, or kept late hours, holding elegant parties downstairs while the children hung perilously over the banisters eavesdropping. These parents were often fated for tragic early deaths: their liner would sink or their automobile plunge, furs and cigarette holders flying, off a cliff in St Tropez, leaving the children apparently unaffected and free to pursue wonde
rful adventures. There was usually a nanny figure in the background of these stories, someone warm and comfortable who covered every inch of the house like a deep-pile carpet, later to be rolled up and kept in an upstairs room when she was old: a palliative for feelings of loneliness and abandonment, a magical solution to the problem of missing parents.

  My own parents always cared for us themselves. Once they went away on holiday, leaving us with a woman who presented us at breakfast with whatever parts of our supper we had refused to eat the night before, but generally they operated a system of credit with a few other families. We would go to their houses, or they would come to ours. Now, those of my friends who had children seemed to labour under the stress of lean, contingent arrangements which added to rather than relieved their enslavement: racing out of the house to drop them at a childminder, racing back from work to collect them, frantically bargaining over minutes with au pairs or nannies; panicked negotiations conducted against the threat of some certain expiry, as if at six o’clock the nanny would vanish in a puff of smoke, or the childminder put the baby outside in the rain. There was no slack, no lubricant empty hours. It was precisely the luxury of those hours, those free and careless hinges between this event and that, that I secretly desired to purchase back, for with the birth of my daughter they had disappeared and were not expected to return for some years. Months after her birth I still found myself affronted and incredulous, as if at some foreign and despicable justice, by the fact that I could no longer sleep in or watch a film or spend a Saturday morning reading, that I couldn’t stroll unfettered in the warmth of a summer’s evening or go swimming or wander down to the pub for a drink. The loss of these things seemed a high, an exorbitant price to pay for the privilege of motherhood; and though much was given back to me in the form of my daughter it was not payment in kind nor even in a different coin, was not in fact recompense of any sort. My loss and my gain were unrelated, were calculated without the aim of some final, ultimate balance.

  The deep-pile nanny, the nanny who exists to cushion the impact of parenthood, was, I discovered, the preserve of the wealthy. All other forms of childcare appeared to operate on the principles of a public callbox. You push coins into the slot. When your money runs out you are abruptly and unceremoniously cut off. Among people I knew, this rudimentary facsimile of freedom was used to cover the precise hours when the parents were at work. Babysitters were brought in to cover those futile stretches of time – evenings – when children are asleep and adults confined to the house. The times in between seemed to be your own affair. I knew of only one couple whose childcare arrangements extended to the weekend: they were rich and unsentimental.

  My experiences with babysitters had, so far, been comical and sad. When my daughter was asleep, and hence unaware of the counterfeit I was manoeuvring into my place for those stolen hours, the babysitter would arrive. I would sit with her talking about my daughter, about what to do should she awake, about every aspect of her care. These precautions, like the safety demonstrations routinely given on airplanes, had a certain pointlessness: the occasion for their use would almost certainly not arise; if it did, a catastrophe would have occurred that was somewhat beyond their powers of rescue. Nevertheless, I enjoyed these conversations. Some loneliness was relieved by them, as if in the babysitter I had encountered a kindred spirit, someone who would, for a few hours, understand what it was to be me. Sometimes it seemed that I was enjoying the conversation so much that I did not intend to go out after all. ‘She’ll be fine,’ the babysitter would say, over and over again until the phrase penetrated my consciousness sufficiently to inform me that I should leave. Having left, I would telephone, repeatedly. ‘She’s fine,’ the babysitter would say. I would vow to call again in half an hour, to come home early. When I returned I would go and stare at her asleep in her baby carriage and her sleep would seem to me to be knowing and mysterious and slightly wounded, to be full of some experience in which I had not played a part, as if she had just come back from university or from a trip around the world.

  Sometimes this encounter with a babysitter would remind me of the possibility of finding someone to care for my daughter for some of the time she spent awake. Thinking of it, I would become suffused with feelings of relief and happiness, and with a sort of disbelief: first that such a possibility existed, and second that I had not made use of it, was not at this very moment making use of it. I would go instinctively to the telephone, as if a kindly person were waiting on the other end who would offer to send someone straight over, and stand there dumbly with the receiver in my hand. Who should I call? How should I begin my search? The person I had in mind was to be found not in the Yellow Pages but amidst choirs of heavenly angels, or in the pages of a storybook. She was wise, competent, kind, loving. Her salary was modest and vocational; her hours were love’s own. She had no earthly existence, but sort of materialised on my doorstep each morning, took the baby reassuringly from my arms, wiped away my tears and said things like, You just go off and enjoy yourself, we’ll have a lovely time here, won’t we? She was the projection of my conflicted self; she resolved the fact that I never wanted to leave my daughter with the unfortunate truth that if I didn’t I would never again be able to do anything else. The only way this truth could be made palatable was for its essence to be disguised. Handing over my child was to be not an act of dereliction but of gracious and logical concession, of glad surrender.

  A friend of mine knew a woman called Rosa, who sometimes cleaned her house. Rosa came from Spain. She was saving up to emigrate to America, and wanted work. I asked my friend whether she thought Rosa might be able to look after my daughter. Cautiously, my friend replied that she thought she would not. She admitted that she had left her own children with her once or twice and had been disappointed. Tactfully she did not specify the reasons for her disappointment: I gained an impression of something vague and insubstantial, an impression my enthusiasm was easily able to overpower. Rosa was a small woman, tiny and nervous as a bird. She rode a bicycle around London, pedalling fast, she said, to keep commitments that stacked up each day in an unstable tower; for she had recently lost all her savings, a matter of some ten thousand pounds, to what appeared to be a sort of confidence man, a trickster who had offered to invest the money for her, and now she was driven to recoup it by taking on more work than she could really do in the time. She had grown up on a farm in northern Spain, she told me, running wild with her brothers and sisters. She had been happy in this innocent era: since then, she seemed to have found the world disappointing. She had lived in Switzerland for some years with a man. Now she lived with her sister, a hairdresser, in a council flat in south-east London.

  I felt sorry for Rosa, and felt, too, that my own need intersected with hers: her need for money and my need for time were limitless and apparently perfectly matched. I agreed an arrangement of hours with her. The appointed day was rainy and dark. My daughter and I awaited Rosa, nervously, like people at an airport. An hour passed before the telephone rang. It was Rosa, who had been wandering around in the rain unable to find our house. I gave her directions. On the phone she had been apologetic, but when she arrived she was angry. She cursed the British weather. She cursed our house, which had been so difficult to find. She did not acknowledge my daughter, who lay in my arms with startled eyes; and a hard knot of unease lodged itself in my chest, a strong presentiment of trouble and of wrong. I offered Rosa tea and coffee, took her wet things, and yet behind these ministrations I suddenly knew that I was captive in my house, held hostage by a stranger whom I had to find some way of convincing to leave. My daughter began to cry. I sat down with her to give her a bottle of milk. Rosa asked me if she could look around the house and helplessly I agreed. She was gone a long time. I heard her upstairs, moving slowly around. A strange sort of terror came over me, so that my thoughts drifted far away and my mind lapsed into a blank sleep. This interlude was so preoccupying that when Rosa materialised again in the doorway the sight of her made me jump,
as if I had forgotten she was in the house. It’s nice, she said softly. I began to talk, gabbling nonsensically, asking her questions. She told me how she and her brothers and sisters used to spend their time killing bees that lived in a hive in their garden, squashing them with knives. She told me about her employers, their dirty homes, their disgusting habits. She asked me if I made a lot of money. My daughter had fallen into a deep, stunned sleep and so I put her in her crib. Rosa, I said shrilly, I’m afraid we’ve changed our plans. I told her we were moving house, leaving the country, had been called away suddenly. I offered to pay her for the whole day. I apologised, repeatedly. To my surprise she took the news without protest and was gone.

  Having failed in one bid for escape, it was some time before I attempted another. Presently a friend suggested Celia, a Brazilian woman who was trying to get a teaching qualification in the afternoons and wanted work in the mornings. Celia came garlanded with encomiums. She had looked after my friend’s children, with success. She was good with babies, and kind to older children. When she took them for walks she put slips of paper in their pockets with their address and telephone number written down, in case they got lost. I found this an unnerving precaution, but decided to take my friend’s word for it. Celia was a large, gentle person with long black hair. She had come to England ten years earlier to be with her boyfriend, and when the relationship broke up she stayed. She desired, fervently, to better her circumstances; she dreamed of being a primary school teacher, a dream kept beyond her reach by her stubbornly and profoundly accented English, an accent that no amount of classes and courses could erase. Celia’s discourse was full of the struggles of her existence: she was what people cruelly call a victim, of herself and others. Bad luck pursued her; pitfalls lay forever in her path. She suffered from headaches and depression, and from extreme reactions to bad weather and darkness. The menial nature of part-time work ground her down. One employer had made her vacuum stairs so incessantly that she had damaged her back. Another insisted that she spend hours ironing his collection of flamboyant shirts, standing over her as she went over the ruffles and cuffs, making her do them again. She had gone to work in a shop and been accused of stealing, threatened with the police. Some lack of assertiveness, some bleak tendency to acceptance, left her unable to convince others of her innocence. Celia came to my house on the understanding that her contract would be terminated at any minute by her hopes: that she would return to Brazil, that she would get a teaching job, that her computer course would bear some unspecified fruit. In the meantime, she laid my daughter on a rug on the kitchen floor and spoke to her in soft Portuguese, dangling a toy before her eyes like a hypnotist’s pendant.