by Rachel Cusk
‘Francine?’ He stopped and faced her, not daring to put a hand on her arm. ‘What’s wrong?’
Her eyes evaded him, but the sulky fall of her face told him that he was to be presented with a complaint. He groaned silently with the burden of her dissatisfaction, so much heavier now that he was on the brink of shrugging it off, and wondered what was stopping him from just leaving her there and then.
‘Why do you care?’ she said.
‘Of – of course I care,’ he replied. He had an odd sensation of not knowing which words were at his lips until he heard them. ‘I want us to be friends.’
‘I get it!’ she said. He heard rather than saw that she was angry, for her face was curiously expressionless, except her mouth, which, loosened from its fine circumference, reminded him for a moment of Roz’s. ‘Don’t worry, I get it!’
‘Francine, you don’t understand,’ he began, seeing his mark but suddenly afraid to drive his point home on it. He felt a frantic urge to retract. ‘It’s not like that at all, please don’t be upset. It’s my fault, there’s something wrong with me—’
‘I’m pregnant,’ she said loudly over him. ‘I’m pregnant.’
She said it again, although he had heard her clearly, and for a moment Ralph didn’t feel anything at all. The silence of the park thronged around him like an invisible crowd and everything appeared suddenly rather deadened and remote, eroded until he experienced the most luminous solitude he had ever felt. His skin was very warm. For a delirious few seconds it seemed as if his body was not going to produce a reaction. He gazed curiously at Francine, trying to see her and thus tell himself at least that he would remember this moment for the rest of his life; but it was as if there were nothing beyond him but empty space, while inside him the whole world was contained. Her face was the face of a statue or a portrait in a frame, and as he looked at it he had a feeling of something else trying to communicate with him through it, of having been singled out by a hidden intelligence for the bestowal of some great secret. Significance moved across his thoughts, at large. Moments later it struck him that Francine seemed to be growing impatient, and it was then that he understood what was being expected of him. She was telling him something she thought he should know, returning what belonged to him like a wallet dropped in the street. She expected him to take charge. Faster than he would have thought possible, a torrent of fear tore through and drenched him.
‘I’m completely sure,’ she said, watching him as nervously as if she were lying. ‘I found out yesterday. I did a test.’
Ralph felt an awful laughter well up in him for the way in which she recited her answers, regardless of his failure to question her. Astonishing, inappropriate reactions were beginning to dance in him like broken puppets. Beneath the patina of personal novelty, the well-worn nature of the scene engendered in him an uncontrollable resistance to its clichés. He understood that he must do something, and the only quandary that offered itself up for resolution was his embarrassment at being in the park. Francine stood before him, tense with requirements.
‘We’d better go home,’ he said, taking her arm and guiding her back to the gate.
*
On the bus to work on Monday morning, Ralph found himself wishing that the unusually rapid stream of cars which rushed past the vehicle, quickly dividing and re-forming like water flowing around a rock, would tangle and clog to obstruct their progress. The journey constituted the first real opportunity for reflection which he had been permitted – not that he hadn’t been able to think in Francine’s presence over the weekend, for she had been silently expectant for most of it, but he had known that his meditations would take a different, although unguessable, form once he was alone – but the speed with which he was hurtling towards the Holloway Road gave him an odd sensation of falling, and he found himself gripping his seat with little thought for anything but his survival.
There wasn’t that much to think about in any case, he supposed, and even the small freedoms of consciousness which he had so far allowed himself merely reinforced his greater physical imprisonment. He had been called up, and the incontestable nature of his conscription summoned deep mechanisms of acceptance to quell the cunning instincts of evasion. The trajectory of his responsibilities was long, its demarcation unmistakable, and although he had sufficient memory of small desertions in the past to know that the stuff of self-interest was within him, escape from the current crisis required a crime larger than he was able to commit. It was easy, having been so comprehensively caught, then to detect the seeds of a harder salvation in his predicament. It offered a strange security from fear, the potential for absolution from himself, and having recognized the face of his enemy it was but a short step to believing that everything he had ever done – things, indeed, which had been done before he even existed! – had brought this moment upon him.
It seemed to him that Francine had reached the same conclusions, although by a blunter route. They hadn’t talked about it much over the weekend – hadn’t talked about anything at all, in fact – but her stolid, automatic presence in his flat bespoke intransigent atavisms to which he dared not even suggest modern solutions. He had tried to detect the surface movements of consciousness beneath her veiled expression, but had seen nothing beyond the certain obstinacy of a claimant, a look of stubborn patience which had filled him with apprehension. It had shamed him to wonder, as he had done once or twice with fantastical desperation, if she might at any moment reveal her intention to dismiss him from his duties, but by the end of the weekend it had become clear to him that she saw nothing in the tenuous nature of their experiment with each other which should invalidate its result. Her aspect, in fact, was more accusatory than troubled, and when finally he had asked her, late on Sunday night, what she was going to do, she had fixed him with a look of such disdain – almost of hatred, in fact – that a terrible panic had beaten like wings about his head as he watched her.
‘What do you mean, what am I going to do?’
Over the course of the weekend Ralph had read a whole lexicon of new expressions in Francine’s face, and he wondered if her features would learn them, would progress with them from her pristine prettiness to something more complex.
‘I only meant that I wanted it to be your decision,’ he had replied. A note of weariness crept into his voice.
‘Don’t think you’re getting out of this!’ she shrieked, sitting up in her chair.
‘Of course I’m not.’ He was horrified, but he forced himself to sit down beside her and place an arm around her shoulders. He was surprised to realize that it almost repelled him to touch her. ‘I don’t want to get out of it. All I’m saying is that you should choose, and whatever you choose is fine by me.’
The implication of his words was appalling, and for once he was grateful for Francine’s lack of expertise in meaning. She pursued him no further, and although Ralph was too frightened to ask her whether she intended to go home, she soon made it clear that she didn’t by telling him she was going to bed. He had sat up late on his own, tempted to fall asleep in his chair and pretend in the morning that he had done so by accident. In the end he had dozed for a while, and when he awoke after an hour with a stiff neck he forgot for a moment what he was doing there and endured a few seconds of dreadful confusion. Often, when he took himself by surprise by coming to in this manner, he even found it difficult to remember into which phase of his life he was surfacing; and he sometimes feared that his dreamlike grasp of things could be loosed by one of these sleepy interludes, returning him to the custody of a past he had thought escaped or, worse still, to a future he was attempting to flee. On this occasion he recalled the presence of someone in his bedroom and thought for a while that it was his mother, before the memory of Francine opened a door on reality and let the cold wind of her revelation rush in. He stood up and switched off the lights, and when he entered the bedroom the anonymous huddle of her form beneath the blankets filled him again with confusion. She didn’t stir as he lay down
on the bed, not bothering to undress, but he heard her say something. It sounded like a name, ‘Mark’ or ‘Mike’, but when he said ‘What?’ she didn’t reply and he knew she must be asleep.
The bus stopped and Ralph got off. His head hurt, and fatigue lent the crowded pavement and grey, busy road a ghostly quality which made him walk carefully lest the ground should disappear beneath him. A small boy stood by the door to his office building, and as Ralph approached he turned and stared; not a rude or hostile stare, but more of an innocent, inquisitive look, as if in expectation of something. He hadn’t thought much about the notion of a child, but gazing into this boy’s dark, open eyes the singularity of what he had engendered broke from a crowd of possibilities and appeared to come and stand by his side. He stopped by the door, close to the boy now, and felt an inexplicable urge to take him inside off the street and perhaps take care of him for the day. The boy was still looking at him, but a woman’s shout from further down the pavement turned his head.
‘Rick! Rick!’
Ralph saw a young girl thundering towards them, a pram in front of her. Tails of hair flew about her face and her mouth was an angry rip.
‘You come away from there!’ she yelled. A stream of passers-by backed up around her and stared. She put out an arm without slowing her progress, as if with the intention of hooking the boy up as she passed. Ralph felt him flinch beside him.
‘I thought he was on his own,’ he said to the woman.
She stopped and grabbed the boy’s hand, yanking him towards her.
‘You leave him alone,’ she said, thrusting the fist of her face at Ralph. The boy still looked impassively at Ralph, his manacled arm raised above his head. ‘You dirty bugger.’
‘Really, I think that’s quite unnecessary,’ said Ralph stiffly, but the woman had already turned and continued her furious progress up the road. As he watched, he saw her let go of the boy’s arm for a moment and slap him hard across the backs of his legs, before seizing his hand again. He dangled for a moment, losing his balance, and then scuttled after her.
Roz was at her desk, her finger already clicking, and Ralph could hear the tinny acoustics of warfare buzz from the screen as he sat down.
‘Hello,’ he said loudly. ‘Nice weekend?’
‘Hello,’ said Roz. Her eyes didn’t move.
She had ceased to exchange pleasantries with him since his admission of treachery, and although Ralph had thought at first that the remission of her interest would improve things at the office, the sense of invisibility it forced upon him actually made his days less bearable than ever. He thought of describing for her the scene which had just taken place downstairs, but knew instantly that his sociability was merely a misguided nervous impulse guaranteed to earn a punishing silence.
‘How’s Frances?’ she said suddenly. Her voice was so loud that Ralph started. He looked up and met her eyes. They were guileless, but in his tremulous state he thought he saw a blade of malice glint behind them.
‘Francine,’ he said. ‘She’s fine.’
‘Oh,’ said Roz.
*
He hadn’t asked Francine to stay at his flat that evening and nor had she requested an invitation, but the mute agreement of their new complicity informed him that she would come and he hurried home earlier than his usual time. A few hours away from her had introduced him to the urgency of their situation, and he wondered why they had spoken so little of it over the weekend. He supposed they had each been waiting for the other to formulate an opinion strong enough to begin the business of action and reaction, but beneath the passivity of Francine’s aspect he feared the presence of something stronger, a predator which might be stirred by a glimpse of its prey. He had no way of knowing which of his tangled thoughts would prove the bait for her attack, and his diffuseness left him feeling unguarded and afraid.
She rang the doorbell moments after he had let himself in, with an eerie promptness which heightened his hunted spirits. He opened the door and she walked past him without saying anything, but the brief impression he had of her face told him that she looked oddly better than she had done over the weekend. He followed her into the sitting-room and in the stronger light saw that the solidity had returned to her features. He wondered if it signified resolution, and his heart began to pound in his chest.
‘How are you feeling?’ he said with ridiculous solicitude as she sat down on the sofa.
‘OK,’ she replied. ‘A bit sick, that’s all.’
She smiled at him, and he felt a companionable nausea rise up in his throat.
‘Francine.’ He sat down beside her. ‘Look, I don’t mean to alarm you, but I think we must decide soon what we’re going to do.’
‘Do you think you could make me some tea?’ she said. Her voice was sweet, but a momentary strain paraded across her features and she laid a hand on her stomach. ‘It helps.’
‘Of course, sorry,’ said Ralph.
He went into the kitchen and leaned against the fridge with his eyes closed. Already he was beginning to feel dangerously detached and he pressed hard on his face with his hands to remind him of the imminence of his predicament. It amazed him that Francine could continue to defeat him when he could see her so clearly, every mechanism on display like the guts of a clock. Worse still, he could also see that he was conspiring with her against himself, promulgating the consciousness of her advantage. She knew that there was no chance of him deserting her, and her knowledge – provided by him! – made her unassailable. There was nothing he could do but wait, in the faint hope that her muddled formulas would end in a passable result for both of them. His helplessness dragged at him, amplifying his first faint identification that morning with the mysterious entity of which Francine had such complete and bewildering charge into a stronger allegiance. It was a mistake, he knew, to start getting ideas about this captured pawn, this knot by which he had been tied, but the power of relation, of bound blood, both frightened and drew him. He felt its absolutes mired in the sinking ground of his dispossession. It hadn’t flowered yet into any definable emotion but its sturdy roots and trunk were exerting their pressure inside him. Feeling it there, growing tight in his chest all day, he had had to fight off hourly the temptation of thinking that he was no longer alone.
He carried the scalding tea back into the sitting-room, and, as he lowered it on to the table in front of Francine, was ambushed by a violent image of throwing it at her. He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he next looked up Francine was lapping at the cup contentedly.
‘So,’ he said again. His persistence reminded him of times when he had dialled a continuously engaged number with little hope of getting through. ‘What are we going to do?’
She looked him through a pale shimmer of steam.
‘What do you want to do?’ she said.
He sensed from her calmness that she had already thought of this exchange and that she didn’t really care what he said during it. It occurred to him that she was enjoying the extended interlude of their uncertainty, was perhaps even protracting its entangled hours.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s not easy. Obviously, we have two choices.’ He felt rather foolish putting it so formally, but his longing for something concrete to displace the stifling vagueness of Francine’s evasions urged him on. Her look of sweetness had begun to cool into a less yielding expression, and he realized, his understandings coming at him now as fast as flying fists, that she actually saw something romantic in it all which his mention of choices was about to destroy. ‘Come on, Francine,’ he said, more gently. ‘I know it’s hard, but we’ve got to face it. It happens all the time—’ He heard the suggestion in his voice and reared away from it, frightened for a moment, before plunging over. ‘People do it every day, I promise. There’s nothing wrong with it – I know loads of women who’ve done it. It’s easy. It was an accident, that’s all. It doesn’t mean anything.’
She had turned away from him slightly while he spoke, and her face had found a certain
angle from which she was utterly unfamiliar to him. Through this point, this tiny gap of dissociation, rays of alienation and loneliness fanned coldly over him. He wanted desperately to be away from her, for their whole rambling disaster to compress itself into a noxious pellet which he could spit from his mouth. It was only when she turned her head again and met his eyes that he saw the mesh which webbed his limbs and felt the sting of hooks in his tender flesh.
‘What do you mean?’ she said. Her eyes were full, though whether of ammunition or feeling he could not tell.
‘I only mean that it’s not such a big thing.’ It was an effort to remind himself of how charged she was, how filled with the capacity to hurt him. ‘It was a mistake. You shouldn’t get too – upset, you know, about getting rid of it.’
To his relief, she didn’t say anything. As he watched her, he suddenly felt such a surge of pity that he rose from his chair and went to put his arm around her. The action returned to him his sense of normality, of propriety, and with it came a feeling of acceptance – almost warmth – for the grain of intimacy at the heart of their situation and the common history which wrapped it. He was suddenly convinced of the fact that these things happened all the time, just as he had said, and that their unpleasantness was as controllable as that of an injection or a dental appointment.
‘There, there,’ he said awkwardly, patting her shoulder. ‘There, there, darling.’
‘I’m keeping it,’ she said.
‘What?’
Her form felt so lifeless beneath his arm that her voice seemed separate from it, as if there were someone else in the room who spoke.
‘It’s mine. I’m keeping it.’
‘But you can’t!’
She stood up, shrugging his arm from her shoulders.
‘I can do what I want.’
