Outline: A Novel

by Rachel Cusk

  At this, Marielle readied herself to speak. The effect was of a peacock bestirring its stiff feathers as it prepared to move the great fan of its tail. She had come dressed in cerise today, high-throated, with her yellow hair gathered up in a comb and a sort of mantilla of black lace around her shoulders.

  ‘Once I too bought my son a dog,’ she said in a shocked and quavering voice, ‘when he was a little child. He loved it madly, and while it was still a puppy it was run down before his eyes by a car in the street. He picked up its body and carried it back into the apartment, crying more wildly than I have ever known a person to cry. His character was completely ruined by that experience,’ she said. ‘He is now a cold and calculating man, concerned only with what he can get out of life. I myself put my trust in cats,’ she said, ‘who at least can settle the question of their own survival, and while they might lack the capacity for power and influence, and might be said to subsist on jealousies and a degree of selfishness, also possess uncanny instincts and a marked excellence in matters of taste.

  ‘My husband left me our cats,’ she continued, ‘in exchange for certain pre-Columbian artefacts he was extremely reluctant to lose sight of, but he claimed that a part of himself was left behind with them, to the extent that he almost feared being out in the world without the sense of guidance the cats provided. And it is true,’ she continued, ‘that his choices since then have been less blessed: he bought an etching by Klimt that afterwards was shown to be a fake, and has invested heavily in Dadaism, when anyone could have told him that public interest in that era was irreparably in decline. I, meanwhile, have been unable to avoid the most generous fondlings from the gods, even finding in the flea market a small bracelet in the form of a snake that I bought for fifty cents, and that my husband’s friend Arturo caught sight of on my arm when we happened to meet one day on the street. He took it away to his institute to analyse it, and when he returned it, told me it had come from the tomb itself at Mycenae and was quite priceless, a piece of information I am certain he will have passed on to my husband in the course of their nightly conversations at the Brettos Bar.

  ‘But cats, as I say, are jealous and discriminating creatures, and since my lover came to share my apartment they have been very slow to yield, despite his constant attentions to them, which as soon as his back is turned they instantly forget. He is unfortunately an untidy man, a philosopher, who leaves his books and papers everywhere, and while my apartment is not fragile in its beauty, it needs to be dressed a certain way to look its best. Everything is painted yellow, the colour of happiness and the sun but also, so my lover claims, the colour of madness, so that very often he needs to go out to the roof, where he stands and concentrates on the cerebral blue of the sky. While he is gone I feel the happiness returning; I start to put away his books, some of which are so heavy I can barely lift them with both hands. I have conceded, after a struggle, two shelves to him in my bookcase, and he kindly chose the ones at the bottom though I know he would have preferred the top. But the top shelves are high, and the works of Jürgen Habermas, of which my lover has a large collection, are as heavy as the stones they used to build the pyramids. Men went to their deaths, I tell my lover, in building these structures whose bases were so large and whose final point so small and distant; but Habermas is his field, he says, and at this stage of his life he will be offered no other to roam in. Is he a man or a pony? While he stands gazing on the roof this is the question I ask myself, almost nostalgic for my husband’s appalling nature, which made me run so fast I always slept well at night. Sometimes,’ she said, ‘I retreat to my women friends, all of us weeping and weaving together, but then my lover will open the piano and play a tarantella, or bake a kid all afternoon in wine and cloves, and seduced by those sounds and smells I am back, lifting the rocks of Habermas and placing them on the shelves. But then one day I stopped, recognising that I couldn’t hold it off any longer and that disorder had to reign; I painted the walls in eau de nil, took my own books off the shelves and left them lying there, allowed the roses to wither and die in their jars. He was delirious and said this had been an important step. We went out to celebrate, and returned to find the cats amok in the fallen library amidst a snowstorm of pages, their sharp teeth ravaging the spines even as we watched, with the Chablis still in our veins. My novels and leather-tooled volumes were untouched: only Habermas had been attacked, his photograph torn from every frontispiece, great claw-marks scorched across The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. And so,’ she said in conclusion, ‘my lover has learned to put his books away; and no longer does he bake or open the piano, and for this mixed blessing that is the shrinkage of his persona I have the cats – if not perhaps also my husband – to thank.’

  Was it not the case, said Aris – the boy who the previous day had mentioned the putrefying dog – that we use animals as pure reflections of human consciousness, while at the same time their existence exerts a sort of moral force by which human beings feel objectified and therefore safely contained? Like slaves, he said, or servants, in whose absence their masters would feel vulnerable. They watch us living; they prove that we are real; through them, we access the story of ourselves. In our interactions with them we – not they – are shown to be what we are. Surely – for human beings – the most important thing about an animal, he said, is that it can’t speak. His own story concerned a hamster he had when he was small. He used to watch it run in its cage. It had a wheel it ran around. It was always running – the wheel whirred and whirred. Yet it never went anywhere. He loved his hamster. He understood that if he loved it he had to set it free. The hamster ran away, and he never saw it again.

  Georgeou informed me that the hour, according to the clock I could no longer see, because it was positioned directly behind my head, was now up. He had added on a few minutes for the time I had spent in the corridor: he hoped I was in agreement with that decision, which he had had to take alone, so as not to interrupt.

  I thanked him for this information, and thanked the class for their stories, which, I said, had given me great pleasure. Rosa had produced a pink box tied with a ribbon, which she passed to me across the table. These were almond cakes, she said, that she had baked herself, from a recipe her grandmother had given her. I could take them away with me; or, if I preferred, I could share them out. She had baked enough for each member of the class to have one, though since Cassandra hadn’t turned up, there would be one left over. I untied the ribbon and opened the sweet-smelling box. Inside there were eleven little cakes, perfectly arranged in white frilled wrappers. I turned the box so that all of them could see what Rosa had done before passing them around. Georgeou said he was relieved to have been given the opportunity to examine the contents of the box, which he had noticed early on and had been somewhat anxious about, thinking there might be an animal inside.

  X

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ said the woman who was sitting on Clelia’s sofa when I came out of my bedroom at seven o’clock in the morning.

  She was eating honey straight from the jar with a spoon. Two large suitcases stood on the floor beside her. She was an attenuated, whey-faced, corkscrew-haired person somewhere in her forties, with an unusually long neck and a rather small head, like that of a goose. Her voice had made quite a distinctive squawking sound, which added to the impression. I noticed the pale green colour of her small, unblinking, lashless eyes beneath severe black brows: she kept the lids slightly crinkled in a kind of grimace, as though for protection against the light. It was suffocatingly hot in the apartment. Her clothes – a wine-coloured velvet jacket, a shirt and trousers, and a pair of heavy-looking black leather boots – must have felt uncomfortable.

  ‘I’ve just flown in from Manchester,’ she explained. ‘It was raining there.’

  She was sorry to arrive so early, she added, but the timing of her flight was such that short of going to sit in a café with her suitcases there was nothing else she could think of. The taxi driver had helped her carry them up
the stairs, which was the least he could do, she said, after occupying the entire half-hour journey from the airport telling her in meticulous detail the plot of the science-fiction novel he was writing, she having made the mistake of telling him she had come to Athens to teach a writing course. His English was very good, though he spoke it with a strong Scottish accent: he had spent ten years driving a cab in Aberdeen, and had once given a ride to the writer lain Banks, who had, so he said, been very encouraging. She’d tried to explain that she was a playwright, but then he’d said she was getting too technical. By the way I’m Anne, she said.

  She stood up to shake my hand and then sat down again. I saw us as though through Clelia’s big windows, two women shaking hands in an Athens apartment at seven o’clock in the morning. Her hand was very pale and bony, with a firm, anxious grip.

  ‘This is a nice place,’ she said, looking around. ‘I didn’t know what to expect – you never do know what to expect on these occasions, do you? I think I thought it would be more impersonal,’ she said. ‘I reminded myself on the way here to imagine the worst and it obviously did the trick.’

  She’d anticipated, for some reason, she continued, being shoved in a box in some anonymous dusty block of flats, where dogs barked and children cried and people hung their washing on pieces of string tied to the window ledges, hundreds of feet above the ground; she’d even envisaged a motorway below, though perhaps it was just that she had seen such places from the cab on the way in, and had memorised them without really looking at them. But she supposed she had expected to be, in some way, mistreated. Quite why that was she wasn’t sure. It was nice, she said, looking around again, to be pleasantly surprised.

  She dug the spoon again into the honey jar and lifted it dripping to her mouth. ‘Sorry about this,’ she said. ‘It’s the sugar. Once I start I can’t stop.’

  I said there was food in the kitchen if she wanted it and she shook her head.

  ‘I’d rather not know,’ she said. ‘I’m sure I’ll get there soon enough. It’s always different in a new place, but it’s rarely better.’

  I went to the kitchen myself, to make us some coffee. The room was hot and stuffy and I opened the window. The sound of distant traffic passed in from outside. The blank view of the white-painted backs of buildings was entirely in shadow. It was full of strange rectilinear shapes where new structures and extensions had been added, jutting out into the empty space between the two sides, so that in places they were nearly touching, like the two halves of something that had cracked all the way down the middle. The ground was so far below as to be out of sight, hidden in the shady depths of this narrow white ravine of blocks and rectangles where nothing grew or moved. The sun showed like a scimitar at the edge of the rooftops.

  ‘That woman in the hall,’ Anne said when I returned, ‘gave me the fright of my life. When I first walked in, I thought she was you.’ Her voice came out in a kind of squawk again and she put her hand to her long throat. ‘I don’t like illusions,’ she added. ‘I forget that they’re there.’

  She’d startled me several times too, I said.

  ‘I’m a bit nervous generally,’ Anne said. ‘You can probably tell.’

  She asked me how long I had been here, what the students were like and whether I had been to Athens before. She wasn’t quite sure how the language barrier was going to work: it was a funny idea, writing in a language not your own. It almost makes you feel guilty, she said, the way people feel forced to use English, how much of themselves must get left behind in that transition, like people being told to leave their homes and take only a few essential items with them. Yet there was also a purity to that image that attracted her, filled as it was with possibilities for self-reinvention. To be freed from clutter, both mental and verbal, was in some ways an appealing prospect; until you remembered something you needed that you had had to leave behind. She, for instance, found herself unable to make jokes when she spoke in another language: in English she was by and large a humorous person, but in Spanish for instance – which at one time she had spoken quite well – she was not. So it was not, she imagined, a question of translation so much as one of adaptation. The personality was forced to adapt to its new linguistic circumstances, to create itself anew: it was an interesting thought. There was a poem, she said, by Beckett that he had written twice, once in French and once in English, as if to prove that his bilinguality made him two people and that the barrier of language was, ultimately, impassable.

  I asked her whether she lived in Manchester, and she said no, she had just been up there to teach another course, and had had to fly straight from there to here. It was a bit exhausting but she needed the money. She had hardly done any writing lately – not that you got rich from writing plays, at least not the kind of plays she wrote. But something had happened to her writing. There had been – well, you’d call it an incident, and as a playwright she knew that the problem with incidents is that everything gets blamed on them: they become a premise towards which everything else is drawn, as though seeking an explanation of itself. It might be that this – problem would have occurred anyway. She didn’t know.

  I asked her what the problem was.

  ‘I call it summing up,’ she said with a cheerful squawk. Whenever she conceived of a new piece of work, before she had got very far she would find herself summing it up. Often it only took one word: tension, for instance, or mother-in-law, though strictly speaking that was three. As soon as something was summed up, it was to all intents and purposes dead, a sitting duck, and she could go no further with it. Why go to the trouble to write a great long play about jealousy when jealousy just about summed it up? And it wasn’t only her own work – she found herself doing it to other people’s, and had discovered that even the masters, the works she had always revered, allowed themselves by and large to be summed up. Even Beckett, her god, had been destroyed by meaninglessness. She would feel the word start to rise, and she would try to hold it down but it kept coming, rising and rising until it had popped irreversibly into her head. And not just books either, it was starting to happen with people – she was having a drink with a friend the other night and she looked across the table and thought, friend, with the result that she strongly suspected their friendship was over.

  She scraped her spoon around the bottom of the honey jar. She was aware, she said, that this was also a cultural malaise, but it had invaded her inner world to the extent that she herself felt summed up, and was beginning to question the point of continuing to exist day in and day out when Anne’s life just about covered it.

  I asked her what the incident – if that was the word she had used – what the incident was that she had referred to earlier. She took the spoon out of her mouth.

  ‘I was mugged,’ she squawked. ‘Six months ago. Someone tried to kill me.’

  I said that was awful.

  ‘That’s what people always say,’ she said.

  She had by now finished the honey and was licking every last trace of it off the spoon. I asked whether I really couldn’t get her something else to eat, since she was obviously so hungry.

  ‘I’d better not,’ she said. ‘As I said, once I start I can’t stop.’

  I suggested it might help if I gave her something defined, something limited whose ending was clear.

  ‘Maybe,’ she said doubtfully. ‘I don’t know.’

  I opened the pink box Rosa had given me, which was sitting on the coffee table between us, and offered her the single cake that remained. She took it and held it in her hand.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  One consequence of the incident, she said, was that she had lost the ability to eat in a normal way – whatever that was. She supposed she must have known how to do it once, because she had got this far without ever really thinking about eating, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember how she had, or what she had eaten for all those years. She used to be married, she said, to a man who was a very good cook and who possessed generally an almo
st fanatical sense of order around food. The last time she had seen him, which was several months ago, he had suggested they go for lunch. He had chosen a fashionable restaurant, of a kind she no longer went to, for reasons of economy and also, she supposed, because she now lacked the necessary sense of entitlement, in that she felt she had no right to be in such places any more. She had sat and watched him order and then slowly consume a starter, main course and dessert, each dish very moderate and in its own way perfect – the starter had been oysters and the dessert, if she recalled, had been fresh strawberries with a dash of cream – followed by a small espresso which he had downed in one swallow. She herself had ordered a side salad. Afterwards, when they had parted, she had passed a donut shop and had gone inside and bought four donuts, which she consumed one after the other standing in the street.

  ‘I’ve never told anyone that before,’ she said, raising Rosa’s cake to her lips and taking a bite.

  Watching him eat the food, she continued, she had experienced two feelings that seemed directly to contradict one another. The first was longing; and the second was nausea. She both wanted and didn’t want whatever it was that sight – the sight of him eating – had invoked. The longing was easy enough to understand: it was what the Greeks called nostos, a word we translated as ‘homesickness’, though she had never liked that word. It seemed very English to try to pass off an emotional state as a sort of stomach bug. But that day she had realised that homesickness just about summed it up.

  Her ex-husband had not been much help after the incident. They were no longer married, so she supposed she had been wrong to expect it, but all the same it had surprised her. When it happened, he was the first person she thought to call – out of habit, it might seem, but if she were honest she still regarded them as being bound in some indissoluble sense. Yet it was immediately apparent, when she spoke to him on the phone that day, that he did not share her view. He was polite, distant and curt while she was angry, sobbing and hysterical: polar opposites was the phrase that had, during those difficult moments, popped into her mind.