by Rachel Cusk
‘I was the third woman Sam got pregnant,’ Charlie said, to me. ‘He kept the identity bracelets the others were given when they went into hospital. He had them in a little box. When I came back from the clinic he showed them to me.’
Rebecca laughed. Charlie looked at her quizzically.
‘I’m not joking,’ she said severely. ‘It’s true. Do you remember that flat I lived in after I left Sam?’
Rebecca laughed again. ‘Oh God, I do remember that flat.’
‘The door wouldn’t lock properly and the armchair looked like someone had died in it and on the wall beside the bed there was this funny shaped stain, and one day I was looking at it and I realised the shape was human, that it was the outline of a person who had sat on the bed leaning against the wall for so long that he’d left a sort of imprint there.’
‘Please,’ said Rebecca, putting her hands in front of her face.
‘Anyway, I used to have these dreams when I was there and in the dreams I was always where I actually was, in that bed, in the dark, with the mark on the wall next to me. And then I’d wake up and I’d be there, in the same room. There was no difference between my dreams and reality, do you see what I mean? That was hell,’ she said consideringly. ‘I found it in that funny room.’
Out in the street, on the far side of the house, the sounds of several car doors closing came into the sedate room like a muffled volley of gunshots.
I said: ‘I don’t think you can say that you haven’t suffered.’
‘Oh, I’m just making you feel sorry for me,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s all part of my routine. This is why no one’s ever dared to hold me to account.’
‘But what have you actually done?’ Rebecca exclaimed. She looked prepared to be amused.
‘At least you’ve resisted the temptation to be honest,’ I said.
‘I’m not sure I can resist it,’ Charlie said.
‘Is it infidelity?’ interposed Rebecca, making quotation marks with her fingers around the word “infidelity”.
I was arrested by her tone, as well as by the quotation marks.
‘Why do people make such a fuss about “infidelity”?’ she repeated. She examined her nails. I noticed her hand was shaking. ‘Rick and Ali positively use it as a sex aid.’
‘Do they have a – what’s it called? An open marriage?’ said Charlie, wide-eyed.
‘They like to speculate about other people,’ I said. ‘It’s not quite the same thing.’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Rebecca. Presently I realised that she was speaking to me.
‘It’s completely harmless,’ I said.
‘It’s not an open marriage,’ Rebecca said to Charlie, ‘it’s a bloody bazaar. It’s an end of season sale. Don’t tell me Rick’s never come on to you.’
Charlie shook her head. ‘Should I feel insulted?’
‘Come to think of it, you’re probably too old for him. He hasn’t slept with one of my friends for years. He’s got all Marco’s girlfriends to distract him now.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ I said. I wanted to put Hamish down but he had locked his legs tenaciously around the backs of my knees. ‘That is a complete misrepresentation of the facts.’
‘Don’t use that language against me!’ shrieked Rebecca, gripping the edge of the table. ‘I’m not asking for your judgement! I don’t need you to authorise my conversation!’
‘I’m only pointing out that saying things isn’t the same as doing them.’
‘Isn’t it? Isn’t it?’ Rebecca cried. ‘No, come to think of it, it’s worse! At least there’s some honesty in doing it – at least there’s some fucking implication! They’re so fucking frightened of it happening that they can’t stop talking about it!’
‘Becca,’ said Charlie, reaching out to take Rebecca’s hand.
‘I don’t understand your shame,’ Rebecca said to her in a jagged voice. A tear sped down her cheek. ‘I just can’t understand it. I wish I’d done things I couldn’t account for. I wish I had the guts. I’d tell everyone about it – I’d shout it from the fucking rooftops!’
She put her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook so that the little frilled sleeves of her dress trembled.
‘I wish I had the guts to tell them all to go to hell,’ she wept.
‘Mummy,’ said Hamish.
Rebecca sat and cried into her white hands.
‘I wish I could send them all to hell!’
Charlie gave me a look of enquiry which Rebecca raised her tear-streaked face in time to notice.
‘Oh, don’t expect him to care!’ she cried. ‘We’re all sinners in his book, you know! Don’t expect him to lift a finger – he let me go a long time ago!’
‘Mummy mummy,’ said Hamish.
‘He never stood up to them. You ask him, you see if he did! He never judged them on my account!’
‘You wouldn’t have wanted me to,’ I said.
‘I wanted you to fight for me!’ she shrieked.
‘I love you,’ said Hamish.
Rebecca put her face in her hands again and the tears dripped through the grille of her fingers.
‘I’m tired of being good,’ she sobbed. ‘I should have gone crazy – I should have gone completely crazy. I should have told them just to go to hell!’
‘I love you, mummy,’ said Hamish.
‘I want to find out what will happen if I stop being good,’ wept Rebecca wildly. ‘I want to stop being good!’
Hamish got off my lap. Charlie was leaning across the table in the gloom with her hands outstretched, her prominent features casting little blocks of shadow over her face. My wife sat weeping in her chair. The pale silky material of her dress and her light-toned skin and hair gave her a formless, undulating appearance in the unlit room: she glimmered like some unearthly creature and water streamed from her eyes. She folded herself over so that her face rested on her knee and her back shook as the long tremor of each sob passed strenuously through her. Hamish stepped around the table to where she sat and spread himself carefully over her. He laid his chest over her back and wrapped his arms around her quaking sides so that his feet were almost lifted off the ground. He pressed his cheek into the back of her neck. He covered her unresponsive body with as much of himself as he could, as though in preparation for the great indifference of the latitudes towards which he saw himself now embarking; like some creature, a barnacle, an anemone, that knows only how to adhere, to cling on for dear life.
TEN
I phoned Adam at The Meadows. He said:
‘You’ll never guess what’s happened.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Vivian’s done a bunk,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘She’s gone.’ I heard him take a drink of something. ‘Packed up her things and gone.’
‘When did that happen?’
‘Yesterday. I brought dad back from the hospital and she was nowhere to be found.’
‘Do you know where she is?’
‘We do now,’ he said. ‘She’s in Spain. She called Jilly from the airport. Said she was going to those friends of hers, the ones with the ranch.’
‘Oh well,’ I said. ‘I’m sure she’ll come back.’
There was a pause. The ice in Adam’s drink made pebbly sounds in the receiver.
‘I don’t think she can,’ he said. ‘Dad says he’ll have her arrested if she sets foot on Egypt again.’
‘That’s a bit strong, isn’t it?’ I said.
‘She killed the dogs,’ Adam said.
‘She didn’t.’
‘She did. She put rat poison in their feed. We found them locked in the stables. They were lying there in the straw as stiff as a pair of boards.’
I pictured their silent, rough-haired bodies clearly.
‘We never realised she was such a – such a bitch,’ Adam said in a thick voice. ‘Now that she’s gone, well – Caris says it’s like a spell has been lifted, a curse almost. And she’s r
ight, the whole place feels different. It’s like it used to be.’
‘When?’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Like it used to be when?’
Adam put his hand over the receiver. I heard him say, ‘It’s Michael,’ in muffled tones to someone else in the room.
‘Anyway,’ he resumed, ‘the big news is that mum’s moving back up. She’s selling her place in Doniford and moving back up to be with dad. Property in Doniford’s gone through the roof – she got a valuation today and it’s enough to make your eyes water. One thing’s for certain, she and dad won’t have to worry about money again. She’s selling right at the top of the market and she bought right at the bottom. They couldn’t have done it better if they’d planned it.’
I said: ‘Vivian seemed to think they had.’
‘Had what?’
‘Planned it.’
‘Oh, that nonsense,’ Adam said roughly. ‘Actually, when we were searching the house we found a letter. Before we knew about the dogs, this was. We were a bit, you know, concerned at that point because Vivian seemed to have vanished into thin air and her breakfast things were still on the table and her car was in the drive. It all seemed a bit suspicious. It almost looked like someone had offed her, until dad found this letter she’d put on his desk. She’d gone and got a solicitor in Doniford to write it. At least she had the decency to do that.’
‘What did it say?’
‘Oh, it was just a formal thing,’ Adam said. ‘You know, stating that she was transferring the deeds to the farm back to dad and all that. As I say, at least she had the common decency. It’s a big relief actually. For a second there …’ He tailed off. ‘Dad says it was his moment of weakness,’ he continued. ‘His one real moment of weakness in his life. Apparently she had him in an impossible situation. He let his heart rule his head – I suppose you’d say he forgot who he was. You should see him now, though. He’s like a spring lamb. They’re even talking about getting more dogs. Mum’s got some aristocratic German breed she’s after, great big things. All white, of course. Dad says it’ll look like we’ve got polar bears at Egypt. They’re at it already, as you might have guessed. The old routine.’
There was a silence in which some receding object seemed to be contained: a pause like a vista of the sea through which a boat was making its way, dwindling and becoming indistinct while barely seeming to move at all.
‘I really rang to ask about Toby,’ I said.
‘Who?’
‘Laura’s little boy. Toby.’
‘Oh!’ said Adam. ‘Yes, yes, he’s fine. Good as new. No harm done. Lisa did the right thing taking him in, it turned out.’
‘Thank Lisa for me,’ I said. ‘Tell her I appreciate everything.’
‘I will. Of course I will. I’ll tell her when she gets back.’
‘Has she gone somewhere?’
‘What? Yes, she’s gone back home. Up north, to her parents. She’s taken the girls.’
I was startled to hear this: there was something troubling in the sound of it that caused me to guess at what it meant.
‘She just wanted to, you know, go home for a bit. Get away from everything for a, ah, while. What’s that?’ he said, with his hand over the receiver again. ‘No, I’ll tell him. I said I’ll tell him. Caris says hello,’ he said garrulously, to me.
‘Is she there?’ I was surprised.
‘She says you should think about shaving off your beard. Maybe that makes more sense to you than it does to me.’ He laughed. ‘God, she’s dancing around like a big bloody gorilla! Shave it off, she’s saying. Just shave it off! She’s doing the hand motions and everything. God, you should see her!’
He laughed and laughed. I could hear her, a faint female echo shouting and laughing somewhere in the distances of the telephone.
*
I had a letter of my own. I found it on our bed one evening, resting lightly in an envelope on the cloud of the covers.
Downstairs Charlie and Hamish were cooking something. The rich smells came up into the white room. Charlie was staying for a week, maybe more. She picked her way over the rubble on the front steps as she came and went. She was on the shortlist for the teaching job at the university. She was sleeping in the room above ours and at night I could hear the creaking sounds she made as she moved around in bed. If she got the job I supposed she would move down here permanently, and though I doubted she would want to stay with us for ever I thought she could. I recognised in her presence something that spoke to my own weakness for transitoriness and dispossession. I thought that if only people lived the life that was in front of them everything would be all right. I didn’t think Rebecca could ever know how much it galled me to have become someone she thought she needed to get away from. The letter was written in pen, in large urgent scrawls and curlicues that left the paper pock-marked with indentations. It said:
Darling M,
The time has come for me to take my leave. You think that you don’t know it but you do.
I sat down on the bed and half-expected a wreath of its familiar scent to rise and lay itself over my shoulders, but all I could smell were the fumes from downstairs. I heard Charlie shrieking, ‘Quick, quick!’ and then raucous laughter.
Do you remember that lovely funny building near your old flat? The one that sat there and sat there with pigeons nesting in the roof and squatters moving in and out, and how we always talked about buying it and turning it into an art gallery or something – and then one day we saw a notice on the door that said ‘Change of Use’, and we realised someone else was doing what we’d said we would do and we felt sad, as if something had been stolen from us. That was before Hamish was born, and whenever I think about that building and wonder whether our life could have been different, I know that it couldn’t, because you can never be anything other than what you are.
You’ll laugh when you hear I’ve gone home, for now at least – but maybe you’ll be glad too. I’m sure you of all people would agree that I need to acknowledge the man who is my father, and to face my mother as a rival. A RIVAL!! Niven says that nurture for Ali is a threat to her femininity and I know he’s right. When I thought she was going to die, I realised how absent she was from my life as a nurturer. I needed HER to comfort ME! But she was the child too, she was the poor thing. I think she can only be happy with me when she’s giving me things, because then she can feel she’s got more. And the one thing she really has is HIM!! She plays the role of the child as a way of competing with me for his attention. As for HIM! I think it may take me my whole life to understand him – the way his charisma has afflicted me with the sense of my own betrayal. Michael, there was a time when I thought you could save me by possessing me, but now I know that can never be. Now I only want freedom. I want the freedom to be what you could never accept that I was.
I used to feel that you’d failed me, Michael, but now I think I can see you as the victim you really are. I think you have a very misconceived idea of morality. You seem to think that there’s a world of bad things and a world of good things whereas the truth is that there are only feelings. There is only emotion, and emotion is what you’re not good at, Michael. I think you have a lot of work to do on yourself. I don’t see your repression, your coldness, as being your fault. I think it has a LOT to do with your family and your fear of disapproval, your fear of really LIVING and your need to be close to dangerous people, to people who are dirty and vibrant and alive and who really FEEL. The problem is that you criminalise those people by trying to control them. That’s really your tragedy, Michael, as I see it.
As for Hamish – I know you will say that he should stay with you. I can give you that, Michael: I’ve decided to. Rick and Ali think I’ll change my mind but I won’t. I think you need Hamish; he’s a sort of mascot for you, isn’t he? I’ll say one thing for you, Michael, you’re a bloody good father. They thought you might want to find a house of your own, and I said I didn’t think you would. But you know I’ll be your most frequent
visitor – I’ll be like your bad fairy godmother, appearing when you least expect it. I’ll come and sit at your kitchen table and take off my silly shoes and tell you all about everything that’s going on in my mad life. I like the thought of you both there in Nimrod Street. All safe and sound, like in a fairy tale.
Rebecca
I lay back on the softness of the bed and looked at the ceiling. Then I went downstairs to find Hamish.
About the Author
Rachel Cusk was born in 1967 and is the author of six novels: Saving Agnes, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award, The Temporary, The Country Life, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, The Lucky Ones, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award, In the Fold and Arlington Park, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. Her non-fiction book A Life’s Work was published to huge acclaim in 2001 and her memoir The Last Supper was published in 2009. Her latest novel is The Bradshaw Variations. In 2003 she was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young Novelists. She lives in Brighton.
Copyright
This ebook edition published in 2010
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
© Rachel Cusk, 2005
The right of Rachel Cusk to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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