by Rachel Cusk
‘I love risotto,’ she said, finding, as the word fell easily from her lips, that in fact she really did.
Six
The blind was up over the kitchen window and Ralph could see himself clearly reflected in it, a strange photograph of a private, incoherent moment into which he could gaze and fall. The tide of self-absorption began mounting again in his veins, as it had all evening, and when it drummed insistently behind his eyes he turned away from the window and began busying himself at the kitchen counters to drive it back down into the pool of his stomach.
It required a surprising effort of belief to remember that Francine was in the next room, waiting for the dinner he had said he would bring if she could just leave him alone with his mess for a few moments, and although he knew that the wine had no doubt dampened the ignition of thought and made him an obscure, heavy creature of uncertain impulses, his malfunctioning sense of contingency was lodged in a deeper place more resistant to immediate repair. It was strange to think of how he had travelled so steadily towards this evening with Francine, his destination the object of joyful anticipation, his means of conveyance sure beneath the friction of nerves; the certainty that time would bring it to pass, and that for once he had the heart for the journey, making him lower his guard against the inevitable intervention of other forces to disrupt his passage to happiness. And yet really there had been no other forces; it had all happened as he had hoped it would, except for the one thing that of course he hadn’t expected, the derailment of his own desires!
He had felt a kind of dark exhilaration at moments during the evening, an almost gleeful disbelief at the scandalous abscondment of his proper feelings, and yet his inability to experience the correct sensations in Francine’s presence revealed him to himself in the sinister light of dreams, where the sight of a familiar face is accompanied by the sudden recognition of an unglimpsed evil behind it. He had thought that he knew every channel of himself, the capacity of each vat of his heart and mind and the vacillating measure of spirits within them; but here was a vast, unpatrolled space, a great cellar to which he had rarely opened the door but where he now knew the debris of his disappointments was still stored. Such things he had thought incinerated, long since consigned to dust, but now he had caught the diluted stench of it all over him he knew the residue of his miseries still lived in him, leaking its deleterious perfume daily into his thoughts. Nevertheless, he had always regarded his wounds as things inflicted on him by other people, and it was odd to be spoiling something for himself. He supposed it had happened because Francine had expected him to lead her, had been unable to draw him away from his descent, until he had found himself wishing she would just go home and leave him to plunge back into his darkness.
She had been something of a disappointment to him, in fact; he could admit that now that his hopes for the evening had subsided. When he had opened the door and first seen her, he had had the impression of someone who shouldn’t have been there at all, someone so unrelated to his own life that for a moment it had seemed impossible that the drinks and dinner would still go ahead. It was her clothes, probably, a strange executive uniform which was as resistant to his sensibilities as armour and which made her presence at his door seem unnatural. He knew she must have just come from work, and yet he hadn’t been able to find enough in the personality of her job to fill its outward appearance, and he was left with a sense of her as a strange mannequin who had come to pose in his sitting-room. She was beautiful, of course, but her beauty could find no conduit through which to flow to him: it remained forcefully packed in her face, a disruptive presence.
Of course, he had made a complete fool of himself, spinning idiocies for conversation, capering with the mimicry of charm in the absence of all his better qualities. It had astonished him to discover that even so she was willing to shine for him. He had expected her to be filled with the skills necessary to find him out, blade-sharp with social acumen, but she merely went along with it all with an air of slightly dumbfounded acceptance, for all the world as if his madness was something of which he had mastery! Then again, perhaps the poor girl was only being kind in trying to normalize him; or perhaps, Heaven help her, she too felt herself to be on trial. In his mind he rose and regarded their situation from above. From a larger perspective, things hadn’t been so bad. They had drunk and conversed in a civilized manner, and now Ralph was going to serve dinner. He saw them eating it, their bodies cold and private beneath their clothes, his thoughts swarming at the glass of his eyes.
He removed the risotto from the oven, and was amused by how appropriate its unfathomable horror now seemed. It looked uglier than ever, aged by its long, dry stint in the heat, and Ralph considered sacrificing it to save the evening in its death throes, dropping it on the floor and taking Francine out to a place where the noise of life would perhaps provide them with a clue as to their part in it, and where by imitating the people around them they could improvise their own little drama. Fatigued suddenly with drink, he decided against it. It would be unwise to animate the strange creature they made together and watch what he knew would be its ghastly, fleeting dance. He just wanted to get through it, tunnel through the hardest, shortest route which would deliver him to solitude.
He loaded everything on to a large tray and bore it down the hall and into the sitting-room. Francine was on the sofa and Ralph felt a sudden impulse of pity for her, for he had given her nothing to do while she sat and waited, and his relentless tidying had deprived the surfaces of the room of interest. She had the neat, apprehensive appearance of someone awaiting an appointment, and his pity was overcome by a fresh surge of bewilderment at her presence there.
‘Here we are,’ he said brightly, desperate to rouse her. ‘Do you want to come and sit down?’
She got up from the sofa and walked carefully towards him, and he suddenly saw that her mystery was an effect of her silence, a knowing vacancy in which people were invited to construe their own versions of her. He wondered why he had not perceived this before, and supposed it was because he too had construed, had projected a manic, bumbling effusion of self before an inscrutable object.
‘Where did you learn to cook?’ said Francine as he put the dish in the centre of the table.
‘What? Oh, nowhere. As you can probably tell,’ he added, gesturing deprecatingly at the risotto. ‘How hungry are you?’
She looked about her.
‘Have you got any candles?’ she said.
‘Um – yes, yes, I should think so.’ He found the request disconcerting, a demand for romance which made him appear churlish; yet it wasn’t really a demand, it wasn’t, Haven’t you got any candles?; it was more of a plea. ‘I’ll just find some.’
There were two candlesticks on the mantelpiece with the matches he had sought earlier beside them. He thought of his ridiculous performance at the hob, where he had singed his eyelashes and eyebrows, and, had he not had it cut, would probably have set his hair alight too. He hadn’t wanted to draw attention to himself by rushing to a mirror, although Francine hadn’t seemed to have noticed what had happened. He glanced at his reflection now in the mirror over the mantelpiece. There was an unfamiliar expression on his face, a sort of garrulous stupidity, and he barely recognized himself. His eyebrows seemed unharmed, though, and he picked up the candlesticks and went back to the table.
Once the candles had been lit and the lights turned off, Ralph had to admit that things looked better. The risotto had receded into a vague landscape of earth-brown hillocks, the glasses shone palely like translucent moons, and he found it easier to focus in the softer illumination on Francine’s face. The candlelight was a levelling element, a warm and buoyant pool in which their separateness seemed less brutal. Francine, too, seemed to respond to its gentleness, and as he watched her, only half listening to her reply to a question he had asked, he felt the gradual melting of his reserve send trickles of feeling through him. The lurching disorientation of his drunkenness settled into a more benign and fertile detac
hment, and he noticed that Francine was more attractive when she was animated and that her dark eyes were wonderfully eloquent in the dim light.
‘Are we ever going to eat this?’ he said almost gaily.
‘Why not?’
She laughed and looked at the risotto with mock-suspicion. He picked up the serving spoon and brandished it comically, warmed by the flicker of friendliness.
‘Many reasons,’ he said sternly. ‘But we haven’t time to go into them.’
‘Right.’
She laughed again as he plunged the spoon into the centre of the resistant crust and tried to pry some of it loose.
‘Need to get some muscle behind it,’ said Ralph, standing up and leaning forcefully on the handle of the spoon. A large clod sprang from the dish and was catapulted into the air. ‘Oh God – where’s it gone?’
Francine collapsed into giggles as Ralph searched the area around the table. His mind was humming with humour and he played the fool, crouching down and looking under a rug to fresh shrieks of laughter. He felt drunk again, a light and ebullient sensation which lifted him above his inhibitions and made a success of the smallest things.
‘It’s escaped,’ he said, standing up. ‘We’ll have to send out a search party.’
‘Never mind,’ said Francine.
‘Shall I try again?’
She nodded, her face alive with responses to him. She leaned forward encouragingly and Ralph was all at once dizzied by her acquiescence. She was offering herself to him – she wanted him to accept her; it was all he had to do! – and he suddenly saw where it might end. He met her gaze for a moment and felt a clear current pass between them. If he understood it correctly, he was being given an opportunity; there would be no further tests, nothing for him to do but accept it. Excitement leapt up in his throat, unchained. The tangible presence of a fantasy unalloyed by a complex object was so altogether new that it struck him with the force of a revelation. He wondered shamefully what Francine’s requirements were, and searched his memory of the silly evening for the mysterious point at which he must have met them; but then he realized, in another bright shaft of comprehension, that she was merely different from other girls he had known. There was no baffling maze through which he was expected to fumble his way, trying to make a good case for himself according to the tortuous laws of confluence. She perceived herself – and this thought caused the spoon to tremble in his hand as he fearfully met her eyes once more and clearly saw its confirmation there – as an object of pleasure. Her profit, her share, was simply that he should do so too.
‘You’d better duck,’ he said, digging his spoon in a second time.
She put her hands amusingly over her face and bent over the table. He forked the risotto out of the dish and howled with laughter as it splintered into grainy fragments around them. Francine’s face was wide with comic astonishment and her eyes brightened with approval of his performance.
‘I did say I wasn’t that hungry,’ she said.
‘Did any of it get on you?’
‘I don’t think so.’
She sat back slightly in her chair and smoothed her hands slowly over her blouse and skirt. Ralph felt a fresh lurch of disbelief as he watched her. She met his eyes and giggled.
‘That’s good,’ he said.
A pause shimmered, filling the room, and Ralph knew his moment had come. For a second he drew back, hovering on the edge of action. His body seemed to swell and bloom around him, its machinery unfolding, and he suddenly felt the heaviness of his own flesh, the million pumping intricacies beneath it. He walked stiffly round to the other side of the table and felt the air thicken around him as he forced his way through it. Francine was watching his approach and as he drew near he saw something in her eyes which he couldn’t identify. It occurred to him dimly that his touch would be her triumph, and when he did it, clasping her cool hand in his, he experienced a sudden flash of loss at the unfamiliar feel of her skin. He put his other hand on her shoulder, anchoring himself, and his hands felt all at once so implicated there, so guilty with greed, that it seemed as if a strange glue had trapped his fingers and was preventing him from removing them. Francine raised her head and looked at him, a faint smile on her lips. He knew then the impossibility of escape, felt doors slam around him, and his struggle stiffened and died.
‘Shall we sit on the sofa?’ he said.
The words were loud in his ears.
Seven
The day had been very tiresome, and when Francine shut the front door of her flat against the windy, dark grey late afternoon, she had a satisfying sensation of slamming it also on the administrative harness of the office and the dumb moon faces yoked within it. It had been dark all day, the great wads of cloud pressing down and sending people scuttling through the streets as if beneath the sole of a large, descending boot. The atmosphere of force had found its way into the building: there was a sudden assertion of regimes, a resistance to leisure, and when the rain began to hurl itself against the windows people bent their heads and worked faster.
She had anticipated an idle day, one in which she would sit and steep pleasurably in thought, perhaps sharing a little of it with anyone who happened by her manner to scent the presence of a drama; but instead she had been driven reluctantly into productivity, with not even a stint by the photocopier or a run to the Italian café near by for the office cappuccinos to provide any opportunity for reflection. Her night away from home had left her with an enlarged sense of the personal, and combined with the detachment wrought by little sleep and the red wine, the cuffs and chains of duty were tight and painful. By the end of the afternoon a helmet was clamped around her aching head and her tongue was thick and bitter with instant coffee. At five thirty she left the office for the weekend, not even lingering to be ensnared in the customary Friday evening drift of the City to the local pubs.
She had phoned Lynne at the agency that morning to ask if she had any work for the next week, and Lynne had said that Personnel at Lancing & Louche were pleased with her and wanted her to stay on. There might be a chance of a permanent, Lynne said, seeing as the lady away on leave was still phoning in sick and didn’t know when she’d be back. She was called Sally, and Francine disliked her for the fact that, even though Sally was middle aged, overweight, and had greying, frizzy hair – facts revealed in a framed photograph of Sally dancing in a disco opposite a bald man with flailing arms and red eyes which Francine had found on her desk – Mr Lancing kept calling her Sally as well. Sally was a ‘career’ secretary and had been there a long time: she had put luminous pink stickers with her name on on all her files and a large one on her telephone extension too, as if to remind herself of who she was in case anyone called for her. She had a pair of slippers in flowered material which she changed into when she got to work. One of the secretaries had told Francine that when she found them beneath her desk, positioned neatly side by side in front of the chair as if Sally had been snatched from them by illness where she sat. Francine had put them in a drawer, along with the photograph, the roll of stickers, and a manicure set which also belonged to Sally, feeling confident that her superiority would bring its own rewards.
She was glad she would be staying at Lancing & Louche for a while: it was a big company and she liked the youthful commerce of the corridors, the legions of smart secretaries, the young men with sleek hair who rushed in and out of the broking rooms, the hushed acres of carpet and confidential mahogany doors of the executive floor at the top of the building where meetings were held. She was usually asked to take coffee into Mr Lancing’s meetings, prepared on a tray by one of the aproned women in catering and handed to her outside the door, and although she disliked its suggestion of servitude, the sudden silence and raised circle of heads as she entered the room made the duty more gratifying. Their eyes followed her to the door, and sometimes, after she’d shut it, she could hear different tones in their voices and the occasional burst of meaningful male laughter.
Her last job had been a tw
o-week assignment to a dingy little office behind Waterloo station – normally she only worked in the City, and she was sure Lynne had sent her on this job to get her back for the one before, where she hadn’t left on very good terms and they’d complained to the agency – working for a fat man called Mr Harris, who wore brown shirts with stains dotted like islands over the expanse of his belly. She didn’t know what Mr Harris did, even at the end of her two weeks. The business of the companies she worked for rarely had any bearing on the work she was expected to do. Mr Harris received few telephone calls and his correspondence was featureless. She spent most of her time typing long lists of figures and addresses into a database.
She was alone in the office with Mr Harris, and the slack pace of trade meant that he was obsessed with everything she did, rushing over to her desk when she opened a file or typed a letter to make sure she was doing it properly.
‘You’ll get the hang of it,’ he would say encouragingly, while Francine prickled with irritation beside him. He would stand too close to her, his open mouth emitting clouds of rancid breath, and often a tiny rain of saliva would spatter across her desktop. He watched her continually, making comments about her mood and habits or the expression on her face.
‘You like your coffee,’ he would nod if she got up to make a cup. He would offer her biscuits, custard creams which he kept in a drawer, and she would refuse them. ‘That’s how you keep your nice slim figure, isn’t it, Francine?’
