The Temporary

by Rachel Cusk

  ‘Well, it’s all in the mind, anyway,’ said Janice briskly. ‘Everything that happens in your body is under your control. I mean, maybe you’re feeling that you want a bit more attention, Francine, or a bit more security, and this is your body’s way of telling you. You have to listen to it. Just try and relax. Try and visualize’ – she gestured dramatically with her hands – ‘visualize the blood coming, pouring out. I can teach you some meditation techniques. They’re really effective.’

  Francine gleaned some comfort from Janice’s advice, and as her inability to visualize the torrent of reassurance which any day must visit her was matched by a curious blank shielding her efforts to foresee what would happen if it didn’t, a neutral mood settled upon her which permitted several days to pass without much trouble. It was surprisingly easy to forget the threat which shadowed her. Had she seen Ralph it might have taken on a clearer, more imminent form, but a faintly sinister calm beset her whenever she thought of calling him and it barely troubled her to notice that he did not interrupt her silence. She had seldom been less conscious, and had a cure for anxiety been what was required Francine felt she had surely effected it.

  It was only when she was walking home from the Tube station on Thursday night, towards one of the many suddenly empty evenings she had lately endured, that a piercing sense of her own loneliness visited her and opened with it the tightly barred gates of fear. An overcast sky understudied a precipitant darkness, and a harrying wind struck up while she walked, pulling at her clothes as if in an effort to attract her attention to a nearby danger. As she passed the petrified estate which silently crowded the road, large drops of rain began to hurl themselves at her like spit, and thus besieged Francine felt a bloated wave of self-pity surge forcefully through her and brim at her eyes. In the vacuum which followed it, an irresolvable panic construed itself, as if she had been caught in the sights of a weapon. The troubled sky puppeted the drama of her exposure, and for the first time Francine felt herself to be without shelter, cornered by facts she could not outwit. At lunch-time, still in her mood of slippery certainty, she had gone to a pharmacy and bought a small kit, the allure of whose pastel-packaged chemistry had at the time appealed to her as gentle. Now, with it unopened in her bag, it seemed impossible that so slight a device could still the cauldron of terror which had begun to boil within her.

  When she got home, however, her tranquillity resurfaced from the tumult of her fears and she felt the tide of inevitability driven back once more by the magic of possibilities. She laid her bag carelessly on the kitchen table and went to run a bath. Submerged in warm water, she felt rapt in ignorance, and the elasticity of unknowing gave her a momentary sense of returned power. For a while she felt she could exist for ever in the current void, could make it habitable enough, but as the water cooled the merciless progress of time dragged her once more in its wake. She delayed her ministrations, drifting aimlessly to the bedroom and then the sitting-room in a vague pretence of occupation, but when finally she came to open the packet she felt raw and wet with fright. The execution of the test constituted a mild distraction from itself, and as Francine performed it she found herself forgetting the pressing intimacy of its conclusions. The instructions informed her that the interval of its diagnosis might be lengthy, and so when it began immediately to metamorphose before her eyes, she found herself unprepared for the translation of its results. Its filter had turned a bright and unmistakable pink, and her heart thudded like a drum as she scanned the leaflet for meaning. For a moment she could make no sense of it, and when finally she located the interpretation a malfunction of understanding caused the words to inform her that the test had been negative. Seconds later, reading it again, she gained the opposite impression. A terrible stupidity webbed her thoughts, as sticky as tar. She breathed deeply, trying to regain control over the insurrection of her powers of comprehension, and then allowed her eyes to travel slowly along the lines, enacting every sentence. The colour pink indicated that she was pregnant. She considered this, trying to find some concrete quality in the words which might hold down their meaning. They slipped and rose like balloons before her. She repeated them aloud, and it was then that a cold blade of acceptance penetrated her heart. She threw the leaflet away and wrapped the kit in the paper bag from the pharmacy. In her room, she opened a drawer and placed the bag in it.

  Janice was out and had not said when she would be back. Francine went to the sitting-room and sat down, waiting for some direction to indicate where the rest of the evening might go. Once or twice she thought she would turn on the television or open a magazine, but the flicker of energy generated by the idea was inadequate to make her body perform it. Besides, the time was passing quite quickly as it was, and before long she would be able to go to bed. After a while, she had an odd sensation of looking at herself sitting on the sofa as if she were somebody else on the other side of the room. The image was unpleasant and she struck about, trying to find something on which she could fix her eyes. Janice kept a poster on the sitting-room wall, a blown-up photograph of a chimpanzee, and Francine looked at it for what seemed like the first time. Its hairy eyes held her until she was overpowered and for a while she disappeared, absorbed into its kindly, old man’s face. An explosion of exhaust from the road startled her and she wondered if she had been sleeping. She looked at her watch. It was ten o’clock. She picked up the telephone and dialled Ralph’s number.

  Twelve

  ‘Oi, it’s Friday night!’ called Neil from the door of the office. ‘Haven’t you got a home to go to, mate?’

  He was wearing an overcoat which had a strip of fur around the collar. Its attempted projection of prosperity had somehow mutinied to make Neil look even shiftier than usual and Ralph felt a smile pull at his lips.

  ‘Soon,’ he said. ‘I’m going soon. I just want to finish something.’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ said Neil.

  He waved his hand as if across a great distance and stepped awkwardly back into the corridor while still facing the room, as though worried that some physical attack might be launched on him if he turned his back, to complement the psychological assault already being perpetrated. Ralph stretched pleasantly and looked at his watch. It was seven o’clock, later than either he or Neil had ever stayed before. Although he had clearly finished his day’s work Neil had lingered stolidly in what Ralph understood to be the spirit of competition, shielding with a clumsy, subversive hand the newspaper he was reading at his desk, as innocent and obvious as a child. From the corner of his eye Ralph had seen the broad blank of Neil’s face turn regularly on its axis in nervous observation and had rather enjoyed the clockwork motion with which he looked, paused, and then lifted his wrist to glance incomprehendingly at his watch. Finally, with a raucous and guttural clearing of the throat, Neil had risen from his desk in defeat. After he had gone Ralph felt rather guilty at keeping him, for in truth he didn’t have much to do and in any case had no interest in making a show of his industry. He was merely compelled by a new access of energy which, although it had been generated to drive a specific part of his life into action, seemed also to infuse the rest of it with secondary force.

  In the days since his afternoon with Stephen a new resolve had taken him in its grip, and he felt an earnest zeal at the thought of purging shadowy corners of the habits which had been allowed to gather there unseen. In the flurry of his activity he had not yet had pause to consider what actually had been achieved by it, and although he dimly knew that the most disorderly part of himself remained untackled, the atmosphere of regeneration often gave him the mistaken impression that the opposite was true. Francine’s disappearance over the recent days deepened his sense of liberation, and a residual cowardice suggested to him that he might be spared a detailed confrontation with her merely by upholding his end of the silence.

  He had stayed gradually later at the office every evening, often achieving little but a pleasant, unimplicated solitude as darkness fell beyond the windows, and the freer nature o
f his journey home once the clamouring rush-hour crowds had dispersed permitted him to see himself more clearly than he had for weeks. Normally recalcitrant in matters of social contact, he had recently telephoned one or two flagging friends and had spent enjoyable evenings in the pub rejuvenating their interest. His later hours at the office meant that he could travel directly to these assignations after work, and he had spent little time alone at his flat. Coming home and going directly to bed, he would occasionally feel a mild and inappropriate guilt, as if he were attempting to smuggle himself into his room unseen by some vigilant authority. It seemed then, especially if he returned in a state of drunkenness, that his flat had allied itself with Francine and was awaiting him accusatorily. In those muddled hours he had even felt once or twice as if he missed her.

  Nevertheless, her telephone call late on Thursday evening had still taken him unpleasantly by surprise, particularly as his presence at home had failed to represent the trend of his many recent absences. Being found thus, he had suddenly felt unkind for the fact that he hadn’t communicated to her his change of heart. She had sounded different to him on the telephone, her voice spare with intent and acceptance, which informed him beyond doubt that at least she had read his misconduct correctly and was demanding a meeting merely to finalize its terms. She had wanted to meet the next evening, and Ralph, glad again to have reinforced his life with activity and thus protected himself from things he didn’t want to do, had said that he couldn’t.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’m busy. I’m going out with some friends.’

  ‘You’ll have to tell them you can’t come.’

  ‘I can’t do that,’ said Ralph gently. The swingeing ferocity of her demands, in trying to grip him, merely knocked him further from acquiescence. ‘It’s too little notice. It’s all been arranged.’

  He had insisted on meeting her instead on Saturday afternoon, convinced by a sudden access of inherited wisdom that, while the inception of such romances belonged to the soft, veiling influence of the night, their termination was best performed in broad daylight. She had reluctantly agreed and the conversation came swiftly to an end.

  Thinking about it now Ralph felt inexplicably sad, and a sudden consciousness of his loneliness in the empty office worsened his condition. Even through the spreading miasma of emotion, however, he could still recognize that his mistake had been at the beginning, in taking up with Francine at all, and that the palliative for his pains – the sweet oblivion of inaction, the peculiar dreaminess of lies; in short, the ease of doing nothing – which was at that moment suggesting itself would inflame rather than cure them. Once he had finished things for good, he would feel better. He did feel better, even with the flogged form of the dreadful past few weeks still on his hands. Soon he would be rid of it. The thought that he had in some way duped Francine dimmed slightly the honest allure of his future freedom. She had sounded so hurt on the telephone. It would be even worse on Saturday. For a moment he ached sentimentally for her, and then hardened as he remembered how he had learned to inflict pain – from experience! Everyone got hurt at some point. Why should she be spared? He looked at his watch and saw that half an hour had passed. He was late. He put on his coat and left the office.

  It was past midnight by the time he got home, and as he unlocked the door to his flat he had an odd sense of a menacing delegation rising to greet him from the dark, a group of troubles whom he had kept waiting during his forgetful hours away. He was tired and he carried his sense of unease with him to bed, hoping to dissolve it with sleep. As he lay down, however, a horrible alertness visited him: every thought in his head seemed to ignite and rage until his mind was a furnace, and he lay awake in its uncomfortable heat, often unsure whether he was conscious or dreaming. He hadn’t lain thus since he was a child, and he was surprised to see how much shorter the night was now, its later hours, which once had filled him with terror, made familiar to him at parties and in late-night conversations. When the clock beside his bed began to approach three, he felt the swelling tide of sleep finally rise in him, and when he awoke it was almost with a feeling of excitement for the day ahead. As he bathed and dressed, the false promise of his arrangement with Francine continued to trick him, sending stabs of inarticulate anticipation through his stomach from which, seconds later, came more conscious trickles of dread. It was still too early to leave by the time he had readied himself, and he sat aimlessly in the sitting-room with a book, as if he were waiting at an airport. He hadn’t wanted Francine to come to the flat, and the ethereal but none the less obstructive presence of Janice had ruled out a visit to West Hampstead, so in the end Ralph had suggested a walk in Regent’s Park; a place to which he rarely went, but whose foreignness was, he felt, countermanded by the advantages of the open air. It was the least intimate of settings, and the possibilities for escape from it were unlimited. He had calculated it would take him fifteen minutes to make the journey, and he ruled his impulses sternly until the appointed time for departure so as to blockade all possible diversions.

  He saw her as he came up Prince Albert Road, standing on the pavement by the entrance to the Outer Circle beside a pedestrian crossing. She was looking across the road, her posture held in that attitude of vacant stillness which he could never decide signified poise or inertia, and as he approached he saw several cars slow down to permit her to cross, their headlights empty as leering eyes, and then buck irritably on as she remained immobile. He proceeded towards the pedestrian crossing himself, but a sudden stream of traffic prevented him from going over. As he stood there stupidly, she caught sight of him and he saw her face change oddly with a kind of backstage movement, like a mask behind which a living face had briefly appeared. Seconds later she looked away again, as if pretending she hadn’t seen him, and as he waited to cross the road he found himself struck again by her beauty, by its precarious quality of aloofness which could move him either to worship or indifference. From a distance he noticed a new fragility in her features, accentuated by the black coat which she had wrapped tightly around her, pinning it with self-embracing arms. He had remembered her as robust and fully coloured, a dominating presence in which only the most obvious things survived, while paler, more delicate effects were lost. Even though only a week had passed since last he had seen her, her face seemed thin and translucent, and as he looked he saw something in it, some evidence of emotion, which hazily informed him that she had changed.

  ‘Just coming!’ he shouted awkwardly over the noise of passing cars, as he lunged forward into the road with one cautionary hand raised like a policeman. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said, reaching the other side. He could hear himself panting, although the exercise had been mild.

  ‘Shall we go?’ said Francine quietly, turning to face the park. He glanced at her and saw the perilous thinness of her neck, from which it appeared her bone-china skull might at any moment tumble.

  ‘Right, yes,’ he replied, setting off exaggeratedly so that she would know which way they were going. ‘Sorry, that was my invisible man routine again back there.’ He laughed, but the sound came back unabsorbed from her unresponding face. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Francine.

  She spoke only a trifle too wanly, but it was enough to inform Ralph that she wanted him to know that she wasn’t fine at all. Even through the beginnings of perturbation at her unstated crisis, Ralph felt himself withdraw from her, the reaction he always had when the frigid barrier of her self-consciousness rose up between them. A brief anger warmed him for the way in which she overplayed herself, like a second-rate actor too enamoured with theatre to serve the reality it shadowed: even now, when she had for once affected him merely with the eloquence of a look, her clumsy demands stood up to conduct their loud negotiations. He had forgotten how impenetrable she was, how devoid of any depths into which feelings could sink, any softness to cushion reactions. Her surfaces were hard and extensive, and the little routines she devised were embarrassingly visible to the naked eye.


  ‘Let’s go this way,’ he said, leading her towards a gate which gave access to the upper part of the park. As they proceeded down a small avenue of trees, the noise of traffic was muffled, and in the sudden silence Ralph realized how still the day was beneath the rigid, toneless grey of the sky. Nothing moved, no leaves flickered, and the thick, paralysed air gave him the impression that time had stopped. Once or twice, when he was younger, he had woken in the dark to a similar stillness, and had lain nervously waiting for some noise or movement to signal that the world had not ground to a halt.

  ‘You’re obviously not fine,’ he said finally, hating himself for being led so easily away from his purpose. ‘Is anything wrong?’

  Francine didn’t reply, and as her silence wrapped itself around him Ralph felt a strangling panic at his throat. He could feel her coat brushing against him as they walked, and her proximity struck him just then as more impertinent, more inappropriate, than even their sexual closeness had been. Thinking of that, his memories of it were barely visible. It was as if it had never happened, a renegade adventure of bodies, a desertion of consciousness by flesh. It had left no traces in his thoughts. He felt their limbs locked in brutal conversation as they walked, while his mouth – and the realization seemed suddenly awful to him, bothered him more than anything else – had nothing to say to her.