The Temporary

by Rachel Cusk

  ‘Do you ever wish you had brothers and sisters?’ he said, suddenly wanting to hear her speak.

  She looked bemused by his question, and he almost laughed aloud at how much impossibility was written in that sulky, incomprehending glance, what a bitter death it would be to live beneath it.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said finally.

  ‘I used to be desperate for them,’ he said gaily. ‘I used to invent them, in fact.’

  ‘I suppose I used to do that,’ said Francine. She appeared surprised at the memory. ‘I don’t really remember.’

  ‘What are your parents like?’ said Ralph.

  ‘My mum and dad? Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Oh – just interested, that’s all.’

  ‘They’re normal.’ She sounded slightly affronted, as if his interest in her parents were unnatural.

  ‘Do you look like them?’

  ‘No. My dad’s got a beard.’

  Ralph began to laugh encouragingly, thinking her reply hilarious, but she looked at him so strangely that he stopped.

  ‘What about your mother?’

  ‘What, you mean what does she look like? I don’t really know. Normal, I suppose.’

  ‘Do you see them often?’ he persisted.

  ‘Oh, they’re boring.’ She dismissed them with a wave of the hand. ‘They never do anything, except my mum goes to aerobics and my dad has his night out at the pub every Thursday. It’s not exactly exciting. They always say they’ll come up, but they never do.’ She sighed. ‘They don’t understand why I live in London.’

  ‘Why do you live here?’ said Ralph.

  He didn’t really know why he had asked the question, but he suddenly found himself wanting its answer. Francine’s eyebrows furrowed, as if she were trying to decide whether he was joking.

  ‘Everyone lives here,’ she said.

  They were silent for a while and Ralph noticed that the rain had stopped. In its hush he felt again their hopelessness, and the panic which had momentarily been driven away burst back into his thoughts. As he bore it once more he realized how much he longed to be clear of their endless, muddled communications, their intimate bureaucracy before which he knew his own poverty and powerlessness, to rise above it and gulp down drafts of honesty and sense. He felt his anchor lodged in rock, jammed deep down in the blackest and most inaccessible cave of fear. He had to get out of this – he had to! He caught Francine’s eye and she gave him an unnerving look, a look which seemed to have rounded up his thoughts and calmly admonished him for them. He saw her confidence, the fastness of her locks. Surely he could outwit her! He reasoned with himself while panicked seconds passed. He was beginning at least to understand with what force Francine’s reactions held sway over her initiatives. She required the greatest delicacy in her handling, and although at that moment he was gripped by a violent urge to rip that part of himself she owned from within her, the fortresses of her flesh, he knew, could only be negotiated by cunning.

  ‘Do you want anything?’ he said, half standing in anticipation of a pretext to go to the kitchen and be alone.

  ‘You know what I want.’ She looked rather pleased with her own reply, as if she had been awaiting a cue to deliver it. Ralph sat down again. His head began abruptly to ache. ‘I want to talk,’ she added after a pause, which she had evidently expected him to fill.

  ‘What about?’

  He looked at her with what he judged to be an expression of polite interest. He knew he was being cruel, but at that moment it seemed like the only liberty he had.

  ‘God!’ She implored the ceiling with her eyes. ‘That’s so typical.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I mean, you act like this is just my problem. It’s like you don’t even care.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s like you want to pretend it’s not happening. You never even want to talk about it!’

  ‘Well, what is there to talk about?’ said Ralph. He realized amazedly that his behaviour had been aptly surmised. ‘I was just trying to be nice. I didn’t know you wanted to talk about it any more. You gave me the impression that you’d decided everything.’

  ‘I’m allowed to change my mind, aren’t I?’ she said. ‘It’s not against the law, is it?’

  She stared at him provocatively, a vague smile twisting her lips, and for the first time, without really expecting it, he experienced such a wrench of resistance that his skin abruptly flamed and his heart seemed to fly from his chest. For a moment he could not ascertain what it meant: it was as if he had been told that he would suffer pain, and then been made to wait so long for it that when it came, it felt not like pain at all but reassurance.

  ‘Have you changed your mind?’

  ‘Maybe.’ She fiddled with something on the table. ‘I don’t know.’

  He opened his mouth but found that he didn’t have anything to say. Something strained at the locks and bolts of his thoughts and grew frantic, pounding at its walls. He fought it back, panicked by the things he might feel if he let it out. It wasn’t up to him! It had nothing to do with him, none of it! Disturbance sang through his veins, and with it every part of him seemed to find its note, loud as the keys of a piano. He chorused silently his own despair. Francine was watching him now, waiting to see what he would do. He saw himself quite clearly lunging across the table and clawing at her plump cheeks with his blunt, innocuous fingers.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said nervously. ‘You must know what you mean.’

  He met her gaze, willing her to let him go, but her sharp eyes pricked his swollen, dreamy detachment and he felt its poisons rush over him. He understood then that she wanted to hurt him, to draw him out and show him his own helplessness. What had he done? Why was he being punished so? As he wondered, everything – Francine, the germ she carried, the room itself – seemed to gather against him and accuse him of his own significance.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said obstinately. ‘How should I know? It’s too complicated. How do you expect me to just decide?’

  ‘I don’t.’ He was surprised to feel tears leap to his eyes. ‘I thought you had.’

  ‘That’s just so pathetic,’ she spat. ‘I mean, you act like it’s just nothing, you know, like it’s my decision and it doesn’t have anything to do with you.’

  He saw to his amazement that she hadn’t really thought about it at all, that she just said things to engage him; that all the time he had thought her to be moving in a particular direction, however obliquely, she had only been spinning threads around him, a web in which he now knew himself to be caught. Their predicament rose before him, new again, as raw as an untended wound.

  ‘I—’ He felt all at once terribly confused and his voice sounded thin, as if he were forcing it through something dense. ‘I don’t know,’ he said weakly. He dragged his eyes to her face. ‘I just can’t seem to believe in it.’

  As he said it, he suddenly knew that at last he had jumped and that something would now happen. He watched Francine as he fell airily away from her, and she appeared to grow so hard before his eyes that he wondered if she might break like a glass bottle if she fell with him.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she said finally. Her voice sounded harsh and deliberate, retaliating for his obscurity with belligerence.

  ‘I don’t think you can either! I don’t think you’ve actually realized that you’re going to have a baby. A baby.’ He said it again, understanding that he hadn’t really known it until that moment. His acceptance of it came in a rush, whole, as if he had solved a mathematical enigma, and he felt the knowledge begin to function in him as efficiently as a machine.

  ‘You don’t know anything!’ said Francine. Her words rattled like dice, looking randomly for victory. Ralph realized that he was frightening her, and the sense of returned power, its possibilities, aroused him. ‘You don’t know what it’s like.’

  ‘Go on, then. Tell me. Tell me what it’s like.’

  She settled back in her se
at, confident again, and examined her fingers with studied self-deprecation.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ she said, more sweetly.

  ‘I want to know why you’ve decided not to keep it.’ He felt utterly unlike himself, and he trusted his new incarnation, loved the sound of his voice. ‘Tell me what’s going on in your mind. I want to know how you made the decision.’

  Her eyes brightened at his mistake.

  ‘I didn’t say I’d decided, in case you’d forgotten. I only said I might have changed my mind.’

  She straightened in her chair and looked at him defiantly. His hatred for her snapped its leash and leapt unbounded at her throat.

  ‘But what if I said that I wanted you to have it?’

  Ralph heard the air gasp. A silence teetered between them. Francine looked down at her hands again, and when her eyes returned to him they had assumed a new softness.

  ‘Do you?’ she said.

  He almost laughed aloud as he realized that she was actually flirting with him. A smile strained at his lips and seeing it, she coyly fiddled with something on the table.

  ‘I’m not talking about us,’ he said, surprised to hear the gentleness in his voice. It felt wonderful to say what he was saying. His life flowered before him, a future filled with a person he now knew he could be. ‘I’m talking about what’s the right thing to do.’

  ‘I can’t do it on my own!’ she said, thumping the table wildly with her fist. She appeared to have shrunk before his eyes, her words coming in enraged squeaks. ‘It’s your responsibility too!’

  ‘I know it is.’ He paused and then said what all at once seemed perfectly natural. ‘What I’m suggesting is that I look after it.’

  His meaning launched itself, rose, drifted between them. Ralph watched it anxiously, wondering whether it would work, whether it were plausible and true, a thing that could be said.

  ‘It makes sense when you really think about it,’ he continued hurriedly. ‘I can provide financial support and’ – he felt himself growing horribly ridiculous, his confidence draining – ‘and take full responsibility for it, and you can get on with your life as if nothing had happened, if you want.’

  Francine was so still that it seemed impossible that she would ever again come to life. His words echoed around her as if in an empty room. Ralph prayed for her to speak, to clothe the nakedness of what he had said.

  ‘Without me?’ she said finally.

  ‘Yes.’ Her comprehension fuelled him for his last leap. ‘I – I don’t love you. You must know that.’

  It seemed odd to him that he should suddenly have found the means to tell her that which, in the uncomplicated weeks before all of this happened, had been so impossible to pronounce. He was astonished by his own courage, which he seemed to have found lying idle in him as if it had been there all along; an ungainly tool whose beauty he had discovered only in its use. Now that he had it, he could see with one frenzied examination that his life was broken and that he could repair it all. Already he had built a firm platform of righteousness, and from it he steadily viewed the range of what he could do, whole reaches of himself he had never explored. It was as if he had laboured all this time in a dark, unfavoured comer, scratching life from a soil so blighted that it multiplied his efforts far beyond its yield; while all along a whole kingdom had been in his possession to which only truth gave entrance. He had never felt more certain of his recognition of this key, more expert in his ability to pluck it from amongst its thousand glittering imitations.

  ‘I want to go home,’ said Francine suddenly.

  She stood up, pushing her chair. It fell back, thudding to the floor like an executed man.

  ‘Francine—’

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  She looked straight at him, drawing her eyes like knives. His heart flailed in his chest.

  ‘Please stay. We’ve got to talk – please!’

  She picked up her coat and bag and left the room before he could even stand up. He heard her open the front door and he waited a few seconds, praying for her to slam it. The soft and distant click signalled his condemnation.

  *

  ‘What’s this?’ said Ralph, gesturing helplessly at a large cardboard box which sat on the top of his desk. He put his arms around it to lift it to the floor, buckling beneath the weight, and straightened up to find a dusty embrace imprinted on the front of his shirt. ‘Oh, damn it!’ he said irritably, brushing himself down. ‘Roz, who the bloody hell put this here? My desk is not a dumping ground for boxes of rubbish.’

  ‘It’s them magazines you wanted,’ said Roz. Her eyes were fixed on her computer screen, but they jumped from side to side in an effort not to look up. ‘I brought them in.’

  ‘Oh.’ Ralph sat down and bent guiltily over the box. ‘That’s very kind of you. Did you carry them up on your own? They’re very heavy.’

  ‘It was all right,’ shrugged Roz. He opened the box and took a magazine from the top of the pile. There were hundreds of them, all with the title Auto Week emblazoned across their tattered covers in red. He put the magazine on his desk and regarded it with polite interest. On the front was a photograph of a stationary car. A woman in a swimming costume lay on her back on the bonnet, as if the car had just hit her. She looked rather like Francine. He looked at the date, and saw that the magazine was almost fifteen years old.

  ‘Thanks very much, Roz,’ he said loudly. ‘I shall enjoy reading these.’

  Roz was silent, but he saw a noisy blush begin to march across her cheeks. She sat still for a moment, as if waiting for something, and then began to tap at her keyboard. Ralph pushed the magazine discreetly to one side and stared at his empty desktop. He was tired, his limbs heavy with the residue of a fractious night filled with flickering half-dreams in which he had been visited hourly by the horrible succubus of fear. He had woken feeling smothered and his thoughts still sounded tinny and distant, like a radio playing in another room. Having no alternative, he had put on his life again like a set of old, grubby clothes, hating their smell and feel the more for having removed them. Now and again a fierce pain of recollection stabbed at his chest as memories of the night before struggled free of his attempt to suppress them.

  ‘How do you spell inflation?’ said Roz.

  She was typing avidly, staring at the screen and sighing as she jabbed a finger at the keyboard to annihilate a word. Ralph watched her, faintly distracted by the rare sight of her industry. She pressed a button and then turned to gaze expectantly at the printer. It began to whirr, disgorging a single white sheet. She picked it up and turned back to her desk, mouthing the words and nodding her head as she read. Then, to Ralph’s surprise, she got up and walked in a half circle to his side of the desk, placing it squarely before him.

  ‘What’s this?’ he said.

  She didn’t reply and he looked at the sheet of paper. It was a formal office memorandum, addressed to him, from Roz L. Corby. It was headed ‘Re: Sale of Magazines’. Ralph looked up, but Roz had disappeared. He turned back to the sheet of paper.

  ‘With regards to the copies of Auto Week which I delivered to you this morning, I would like to remind you of the matter of payment for these magazines. The charge will be as is on the cover, which when you consider the matter of inflation is less than you would pay for them these days!’

  It was signed, ‘yours sincerely, Roz L. Corby’. Ralph put his head in his hands and began to laugh.

  Fifteen

  ‘Can I talk to Gary?’ demanded an American voice.

  It was mid-afternoon, a time of lassitude and meetings, and the office was half-empty.

  ‘He’s not here,’ snapped Francine, who found interruptions of languor even more irritating than those of occupation. ‘Call back later.’

  Lorraine looked up from the neighbouring desk, her fingers petrified in the air above her keyboard. Francine felt her gaze loiter and then wander away.

  ‘I see,’ said the man sternly. ‘And what’s your name, little lady?’


  ‘Francine Snaith.’

  Lorraine’s eyes were on her again, avid now with interest.

  ‘Well, Francine, do you always talk to your boss’s clients that way? Because if you do, I think he should know about it.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Francine sourly.

  ‘You don’t sound too sorry,’ said the man. ‘What’s going on, Francine?’

  ‘I’m busy,’ Francine replied. ‘I haven’t got all day.’

  ‘Well, if you can find the time in your schedule, tell Gary that Harry Rosenthal wants to talk with him.’

  ‘Who was that?’ said Lorraine excitably when Francine put the phone down.

  ‘Harry Rosenthal,’ said Francine coolly. She could feel her legs shaking beneath her desk.

  ‘Mr Rosenthal?’

  Lorraine raised her eyebrows in pencilled astonishment and turned reluctantly back to her work, looking as if she were about to burst with the import of what she had just witnessed. Francine could see her shaking her head as she typed. She got up and made herself some coffee without offering to make any for Lorraine. It was still only three o’clock, but Francine was already straining with an almost uncontainable desire to leave the office. Mr Lancing was out for the afternoon and wouldn’t come in until the next morning, but Lorraine was watching her now, glancing vigilantly up from her screen every few minutes with the mistrustful aspect of a security guard. It would be impossible for her to leave unnoticed, and she had already gone home twice in the middle of the afternoon during the past week under the cover of illness and didn’t dare try it again. There were only two hours to wait before she could walk away free. Surely she could make them pass? She forced herself back into her chair and cast about for something to do. A tape recorded by Mr Lancing earlier in the day lay on her desk, awaiting transcription. Francine considered the possibility of typing it up, and felt her frame go limp at the prospect of something so laborious. Now that her sense of duty had run dry, she required not industry but entertainment to propel her through the long minutes. It had proved impossible, since that shrouded moment in which she had ceased to be interested in Lancing & Louche, to tame herself again into the habits of work, and her belief that she needed a change permitted the impulses of disruption to rule her in their stead. How could she be expected to carry on, when everything about the place now bored her? She needed excitement, variety! People didn’t look up any more when she came into the office – even Mr Louche no longer loitered at her desk – and Francine knew that, once extinguished, the quality of novelty could not be revived. Occasionally, faint warnings of a danger up ahead reached her ears, and when she heard them unpleasant anxieties crept across her thoughts. The agency would be angry with her if she lost this job. What if she didn’t find anything else? What if, when she dug into her resources, she found their seams exhausted, the future used up, all her luck gone? The idea was enough to induce panic, and Francine would try to struggle back into her harness, but in doing so she was faced with a still more disagreeable fate: her belief that she always deserved something better than that which she possessed was her engine, and without it she would surely grind to a halt. The thought of what might happen if she did filled her head with such noise that the sound of other perils was lost. She put Mr Lancing’s tape into the machine and switched it on. He had placed his mouth too close to the microphone, and when she put on her headphones she could hear his breath grating against her ears. She fixed her eyes on the screen and began to type.