Outline: A Novel

by Rachel Cusk

  ‘It may have been to say something of this sort that I suddenly felt an overpowering need to talk to my wife, and I asked the owner of the inn if she had a telephone I could use. The girl scouts – who were part of a religious organisation of a kind I believe is quite common in France, and who told us they were on a walking tour of the area – had meanwhile made room on the benches around the large wooden table at which they sat and had cheerfully resumed their singing while the rain came down in torrents outside. The woman showed me the telephone, and asked if I would like her to make some hot chocolate for the children. She also produced, in her kindness, a tube of disinfectant cream for their bites. In the telephone booth I dialled the number of my wife’s new apartment in Athens, and was surprised to hear a man answer the phone. When eventually I got Chrysta on the line I told her everything about our predicament, said that we were lost somewhere in the mountains, that there was a terrible storm, that the children were frightened and covered in mosquito bites and that I doubted my ability to cope in such a crisis. But instead of responding with sympathy and concern, she was absolutely silent. The silence was only a few seconds long, but in that period, while she failed to come in on time and to take up, as it were, her part in our lifelong duet, I understood, completely and definitively, that Chrysta and I were no longer married, and that the war we were embroiled in was not merely a bitterer version of the same lifelong engagement, but was something far more evil, something that had destruction, annihilation, non-existence as its ambition. Most of all it wanted silence: and this, I realised, was what my conversations with Chrysta were all leading towards, a silence that would in the end remain unbroken, though on this occasion she did break it. I’m sure you’ll manage somehow, was what she said. And shortly after, the conversation concluded.

  ‘Returning to my children after this exchange,’ Paniotis said, ‘I felt the most extraordinary sense of insecurity, almost like vertigo. I remember clutching the wooden edge of the table for what seemed like the longest time, while all around me the girl scouts sang. But then, after a while, I felt a distinct warmth at my back and looked up to see that great yellow beams of sunlight were coming through the leaded windows. The girl scouts rose from their chairs and packed away their instruments. The storm had passed; the innkeeper opened the door to let the sunshine through. And out we all went into the dripping, sparkling world, where I stood with my children beside the car, my whole body shaking, and watched the troop of scouts marching off down the road, whistling, until they disappeared from view. What struck me most about that sight was that they did not, evidently, consider themselves to be lost, and nor did they find anything frightening in the turn the weather had taken or even in the proclivities of the mountains themselves. They did not take any of these things personally. That was the difference between them and me, and at that time it was all the difference in the world.

  ‘My daughter reminded me,’ he said, ‘on that last evening we spent here, of the walk we took later that day. She did not, in fact, remember the hotel or the storm or even the girl scouts, but she did remember our descent into the Lousios gorge, which we decided to make when we passed a sign on the road pointing down to it. There was a monastery along the gorge I had long wanted to visit, and so she and my son and I left the car by the side of the road and set off down the path. She remembered our walk down there in the sunshine beside plunging waterfalls, and the wild orchids she picked along the way, and the monastery itself, perched on the edge of an extraordinary ravine, where she was asked to put on one of the ugly long skirts made of old curtains they kept in mothballs in a basket by the door before they would permit her to enter. If there was anything traumatic about that day, she told me, it was having to put on that horrible smelly skirt. On the way back up,’ Paniotis said, ‘the sun grew so hot, and our bites began to itch so unbearably, that the three of us tore off our clothes and leaped into one of the deep pools the waterfall had made, despite the fact that it was quite close to the path and that we could have been seen at any minute by passers-by. How cold the water was, and how incredibly deep and refreshing and clear – we drifted around and around, with the sun on our faces and our bodies hanging like three white roots beneath the water. I can see us there still,’ he said, ‘for those were moments so intense that in a way we will be living them always, while other things are completely forgotten. Yet there is no particular story attached to them,’ he said, ‘despite their place in the story I have just told you. That time spent swimming in the pool beneath the waterfall belongs nowhere: it is part of no sequence of events, it is only itself, in a way that nothing in our life before as a family was ever itself, because it was always leading to the next thing and the next, was always contributing to our story of who we were. Once Chrysta and I divorced, things did not join up in that way any more, although I tried for years to make it seem as though they did. But there was no sequel to that time in the pool, nor ever will be. And so my daughter has gone to America,’ he said, ‘like her brother before her, both of them getting as far away from their parents as they possibly can. And of course I’m sad,’ he said, ‘but I can’t pretend I don’t think they’ve done the right thing.’

  ‘Paniotis,’ Angeliki exclaimed, ‘what are you saying? That your children emigrated because their parents got divorced? My friend, I’m afraid you’re mistaken in thinking you’re that important. Children leave or children stay depending on their ambitions: their lives are their own. Somehow we’ve become convinced that if we say even a word out of place we’ve marked them forever, but of course that is ridiculous, and in any case, why should their lives be perfect? It is our own idea of perfection that plagues us, and it is rooted in our own desires. For instance my mother thinks that the greatest misfortune is to be an only child. She simply cannot accept that my son will not have brothers and sisters, and I’m afraid I’ve given her the impression that this situation has not come about by choice, as a way of avoiding talking to her about it all the time. But she’s always telling me about this doctor or that doctor she’s just heard of, who can work miracles; the other day she sent me a newspaper clipping about a Greek woman who had a baby at the age of fifty-three, with a note telling me not to give up hope. Yet for my husband it is completely normal that our son should grow up alone, because he was an only child himself. And for me, of course, it would be disastrous to have more children: I would be completely submerged, as so many women are. I ask myself why it is my mother wishes to see me submerged in my turn, when I have important work to do, when it would not be in my best interests and would be, as I say, tantamount to disaster, and the answer is that her desire is not about me but about herself. I’m sure she wouldn’t wish me to consider myself a failure for not being the mother of six children, yet that is precisely what her behaviour could cause me to feel.

  ‘The parts of life that are suffocating’, Angeliki said, ‘are so often the parts that are the projection of our parents’ own desires. One’s existence as a wife and a mother, for example, is something often walked into without question, as though we are propelled by something outside ourselves; while a woman’s creativity, the thing she doubts and is always sacrificing for the sake of these other things – when she wouldn’t dream, for instance, of sacrificing the interests of her husband or son – has been her own idea, her own inner compulsion. While I was in Poland,’ she said, ‘I vowed to develop a less sentimental view of life, and if there is something I regret in my novel, it is that the material circumstances of the characters are so comfortable. It would be a more serious book, I believe, if that were not the case. Spending time with Olga,’ she said, ‘certain things came to light for me, as objects under water come to light when the water drains away. I realised that our whole sense of life as a romance – even our conception of love itself – was a vision in which material things played far too great a role, and that without those things we might find that certain feelings diminished while others became accentuated. I was very attracted to the hardness of Olga,’ she s
aid, ‘to the hardness of her life. When she spoke about her relationship with her husband it was as though she were speaking about the parts of an engine, explaining how they worked or did not work. There was no romance in it, no place that was covered up and that you weren’t allowed to see. And so I was not jealous of the husband at all, but when she spoke about her children, about the photograph of her they kept beneath their pillows, I realised I felt angry, as I used to feel angry with my sisters and my brother when our mother gave her attention to them. I was jealous of Olga’s children; I didn’t want them to love her in that way, to exert that power over her. I started to feel more sympathetic towards the husband, being treated like a car engine; and then she told me that for a period of time he had left, had left the family, unable to bear this lack of sentimentality any longer, and had gone and lived in a flat on his own. When he returned, they resumed their life as before. Was she not angry with him, I said, for deserting her and leaving her to take care of the children alone? No, on the contrary, she was pleased to see him. We are completely honest with one another, she said, and so I knew when he came back that it was because he had accepted the way things were. I tried to imagine,’ Angeliki said, ‘what this marriage was like, in which nobody had to make promises or apologise, in which you didn’t have to buy flowers for the other person or cook them a special meal or light the candles to make a flattering atmosphere, or book a holiday to help you get over your problems; or rather, in which you were made to do without those things and live together so honestly and nakedly. And still I kept coming back to the children, and to the photograph they kept beneath the pillow, because it suggested that after all Olga was guilty of sentimentality, was capable of romance, only it was a romance of mother and child – and if she was capable of that, then why not everything? I admitted to her that I was jealous of her children, whom I had never even met, and she said to me, it is obvious, Angeliki, that you have never grown up and that this is how you are able to be a writer. Believe me, Olga said, you are very fortunate: I watched my daughter grow up from one day to the next when her father went away. She became, Olga said, in that period, extremely hostile to men: Olga recalled taking her one day around an art gallery in Warsaw, and when they arrived at a religious painting of Salome holding the severed head of John the Baptist, the child had cheered. On another occasion, Olga reprimanded her for some disparaging remark concerning the opposite sex, and her daughter had said that she didn’t see why it was necessary that men exist. There don’t need to be men, she had said, there only need to be mothers and children. Olga conceded that she was partly responsible for her daughter’s perception of things, but the plain truth was that she would never have left the children in the way their father had, though undoubtedly he loved them; but she herself simply wouldn’t have been capable of it, and whether that difference was a biological fact or merely a consequence of conditioning, it still had to be accounted for. You would do the same, Olga said to me, if it ever came to it.’ Angeliki paused. ‘I said that on the contrary, I believed my son belonged more to his father than he did to me. But she refused to accept that that could ever be the case, unless I had an unusual degree of respect for male authority. At that I had to laugh: the idea of me, of all people, nurturing an undue respect for male authority! But I have thought a great deal about that remark since,’ Angeliki said, ‘for obvious reasons. In my novel, the character is compromised by her desire to be free on the one hand and her guilt about her children on the other. All she wishes is for her life to be integrated, to be one thing, rather than an eternal series of oppositions that confound her whichever way she looks. One answer, of course, is that she divert her passion to her children, where it will do no harm; and that is the answer, ultimately, that she chooses. Yet it is not what I feel myself,’ Angeliki said, rearranging the lovely grey tissue of her sleeves.

  The waiter loomed beside our table; the restaurant was apparently closing now, and Angeliki rose, looking at her little silver watch and saying that she had enjoyed herself so much she had entirely lost track of the time. She had to be up early in the morning, for a television interview; ‘but it was such a pleasure’, she said, holding out her hand to me, ‘to meet you. I think Paniotis would have preferred to have you to himself, but I’m afraid I insisted, since you were here, on my right to take part. I will treasure our conversation,’ she said, squeezing my fingertips; ‘perhaps we can meet again and continue it, woman to woman, the next time I am in London.’

  She opened her bag and took out a little card with her details on, which she handed to me; with a swirl of her dress and a flicker of her silver heels she was gone, and I saw her face passing briefly outside the window, set once more in its striking configuration of frowning lines, which brightened when she caught my eye through the glass and raised her hand in farewell.

  ‘If I may I will walk with you,’ Paniotis said, ‘as far as your apartment.’

  As we set off down the dark, hot pavement towards the main road with its throbbing lights and unceasing sound of traffic, he told me that Angeliki was angry with him, because he was editing an anthology of Greek writing from which her work had been omitted.

  ‘Vanity’, he said, ‘is the curse of our culture; or perhaps it is simply my own persistent refusal’, he said, ‘to believe that artists are also human beings.’

  I said that in fact I had liked Angeliki, though she appeared to have forgotten that we had met before, at a reading I gave several years ago in Athens where she and her husband were among the audience. Paniotis laughed.

  ‘That was another Angeliki,’ he said, ‘an Angeliki who no longer exists and has been written out of the history books. Angeliki the famous writer, the feminist of international renown, has never met you before in her life.’

  When we reached the entrance to my apartment building, Paniotis looked at the larger-than-life figures in the darkness of the café window, the woman still laughing, the man still crinkling his eyes at her in all his handsome false modesty.

  ‘At least they’re happy,’ he said. He opened his briefcase and took out an envelope and pressed it into my hand. ‘It remains your truth,’ he said, ‘whatever has happened. Don’t be afraid to look at it.’

  VI

  It was a curious group – a mixed bag, as Ryan had put it. Watch out for the kid with the Demis Roussos hair and the bumfluff, he said, he simply won’t shut up.

  The room was small and grey, but it had large windows overlooking Kolonaki Square, a concrete enclosure where people sat reading newspapers on benches in the shade of plane trees with graffitied concrete bases. The hot spaces were already deserted at ten o’clock in the morning. Pigeons advanced in their circling, tatty formations across the paving slabs with their heads down, pecking.

  The students were discussing whether the windows should be open or shut, for the room was morbidly cold and no one had been able to work out how to turn down the air conditioning. There was also the question of whether the door should be open or closed, the lights on or off, and whether the computer, which was projecting a blank blue rectangle on to the wall and making a humming noise, would be needed or could be closed down. I had already noticed the boy Ryan mentioned, who had a great shock of black curly hair that flowed down over his shoulders, and a nascent moustache of slightly paler hair nestling on his upper lip. Of the others it was hard at first to get any sense at all. There seemed to be a roughly equal number of men and women, but no two of them shared any characteristic of age, dress or social type. They had taken their places around a large white Formica table that was really a number of smaller tables pushed together to form a square. There was an atmosphere of uncertainty, almost of unease, in the anonymous room. I reminded myself that these people wanted something from me; that though they didn’t know me, or one another, they had come here with the purpose of being recognised.