by Rachel Cusk
It was through other people, some of them strangers, that the incident had to be unravelled: policemen, counsellors, one or two good friends. But it had been a descent into chaos, a whirling realm of non-meaning, in which the absence of her husband had felt like the absence of a magnetic centre so that without it nothing made any sense at all. The polarisation of man and woman was a structure, a form: she had only felt it once it was gone, and it almost seemed as though the collapse of that structure, that equipoise, was responsible for the extremity that followed it. Her abandonment by one man, in other words, led directly to her attack by another, until the two things – the presence of the incident and the absence of her husband – came almost to seem like one. She had imagined the end of a marriage, she said, to be a slow disentangling of its meanings, a long and painful reinterpretation, but in her case it hadn’t been like that at all. At the time, he had got rid of her so efficiently and so suavely that she had felt almost reassured even as she was being left behind. He had perched beside her in his suit on a counsellor’s sofa for the mandatory number of sessions, looking discreetly at his watch and occasionally assuring everybody that he wanted only what was fair, but he might as well have sent along a cardboard cut-out of himself, for he was clearly elsewhere in his mind, galloping towards pastures new. Far from a reinterpretation, their ending had been virtually wordless. Shortly afterwards he had set up house with the daughter of an aristocrat – the Earl of somewhere – who was now pregnant with their first child.
In a way, she accepted that he was only leaving her as he had found her a decade earlier, a penniless playwright with some actor friends and a large and worthless collection of second-hand books. Yet she was not, she had soon discovered, that person any more: she had become, through him, someone else. In a sense he had created her, and when she phoned him that day of the incident, she was, she supposed, referring herself back to him as his creation. Her links to the life before him had been completely severed – that person no longer existed, and so when the incident occurred it had been two kinds of crisis, one of which was a crisis of identity. She didn’t know, in other words, quite who it had happened to. This question of adaptation, therefore, might be said to be at the forefront of her mind. She was like someone who had forgotten their native language, an idea that likewise has always fascinated her. She found, after the incident, that she lacked what might be called a vocabulary, a native language of self: words, as the phrase goes, failed her for the first time in her life. She couldn’t describe what had happened, to herself or to other people. She talked about it, sure enough, talked about it incessantly – but in all her talk the thing itself remained untouched, shrouded and mysterious, inaccessible.
On the flight over she had happened to get talking to the man sitting next to her, she said, and it was really their conversation that had set her mind to work around these themes. He was a diplomat, newly stationed at the embassy in Athens, but his career had caused him to live all around the world and consequently to acquire many of its languages. He had grown up, he said, in South America, and so his native language was Spanish; his wife, however, was French. The family – he, his wife and their three children – spoke the universal currency of English when they were together, but they had been stationed in Canada for several years and so the children spoke an Americanised English while his own had been learned during a long period he spent in London. He was also entirely fluent in German, Italian and Mandarin, had some Swedish from a year spent in Stockholm, a working understanding of Russian, and could get by very well and without much effort in Portuguese.
She was a nervous flyer, she said, so the conversation really started as a distraction. But in fact she had found his whole story, of his life and the different languages it had been conducted in, increasingly fascinating, and had asked him more and more questions, trying to get as much detail from him as she possibly could. She had asked him about his childhood, his parents, his education, about the development of his career, the meeting with his wife and the marriage and family life that ensued, his experiences at different postings around the world; and the longer she listened to his answers, the more she felt that something fundamental was being delineated, something not about him but about her. He was describing, she realised, a distinction that seemed to grow clearer and clearer the more he talked, a distinction he stood on one side of while she, it became increasingly apparent, stood on the other. He was describing, in other words, what she herself was not: in everything he said about himself, she found in her own nature a corresponding negative. This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.
She asked if I would mind if she took off her boots: she was beginning to feel hot. She took off the velvet jacket too. She had been constantly cold, she said, in these recent months. She had lost a lot of weight: she supposed that explained it. This man, her neighbour on the plane, had been very small – one could almost have described him as petite. He had made her feel, for the first time in ages, quite big. He was very little and dapper, with child-sized hands and feet, and sitting next to him at such close quarters she had become increasingly aware of her body and how much it had changed. She had never been particularly fat, but after the incident she had certainly shrunk, and now, now she didn’t really know what she was. What she realised was that her neighbour, so neat and compact, had probably always been the way he was right now: sitting beside him this distinction had become apparent to her. In her life as a woman, amorphousness – the changing of shapes – had been a physical reality: her husband had been, in a sense, her mirror, but these days she found herself without that reflection. After the incident she lost more than a quarter of her body weight – she remembered meeting an acquaintance in the street who had looked at her and said, there’s nothing of you any more. For a while people had kept saying things of this kind to her, telling her she was fading away, vanishing, describing her as an imminent absence. For most of the people she knew, people in their forties, this was a time of softening and expanding, of expectations growing blurred, of running a little to seed or to fat after the exhaustion of the chase: she saw them beginning to relax and make themselves comfortable in their lives. But for her, coming back out into the world again, the lines were still sharp, the expectations undimmed: sometimes she felt as if she’d arrived at a party just as everyone else was leaving, leaving to go home together and sleep. She didn’t sleep much, by the way – it was lucky I was going back today, because she could see the apartment was quite small and she’d have woken me up, roaming around at three o’clock in the morning.
But sitting next to her neighbour, as she was saying, she’d felt a sudden urge to know herself again, to know what she was like. She found herself wondering what it would be like to have sex with him, whether being so different they would disgust one another. The more he spoke the more she considered this question, of whether their differences, at this point, could only bring them to a state of mutual disgust. For this difference, this distinction, had formulated itself by now, had moved beyond size and shape and attitude into a single point that she could see quite clearly in her mind: the point was this, that he lived a life ruled by discipline, where hers was governed by emotion.
When she had asked him how he had mastered the many languages he spoke, he had described his method to her, which was to build a city for each one in his mind, to build it so well and so solidly that it would remain standing, no matter what the circumstances of his life or how long he had been absent from it.
‘I imagined all these cities of words,’ she said, ‘and him wandering in them one after the other, a tiny figure amid these big towering structures. I said his image reminded me of writing, except a p
lay was more of a house than a city; and I remembered how strong it had once made me feel, to build that house and then walk away from it, and look behind me to see it still there. At the same time as I remembered this feeling,’ she said, ‘I felt an absolute certainty that I would never write another play, and in fact couldn’t even recall how I’d ever written one in the first place, what steps I’d taken, what materials I’d used. But I knew it would have been as impossible for me to write a play now as to build a house on water, while floating in the sea.
‘My neighbour then said something that surprised me,’ she continued. ‘He confessed that since his arrival in Athens six months ago, he had been absolutely unable to make any headway whatsoever in Greek. He had tried his very best, had even hired a personal language tutor who came to the embassy for two hours each day, but not one word of it would stick. As soon as the tutor had gone, everything my neighbour had learned dissolved: he found himself opening his mouth, in social situations, in meetings, in shops and restaurants, upon a great blankness like a prairie that seemed to extend all the way from his lips to the back of his head. It was the first time in his life that this had ever happened to him, and so he was at a loss as to whether the fault was his or whether blame could be assigned, somehow, to the language itself. She might laugh at that idea, he said, but his confidence in his own experience meant that he could not rule it out entirely.
‘I asked,’ she said, ‘how his wife and children had got on with the language and whether they had encountered similar difficulties. He admitted, then, that his wife and children had remained behind in Canada, where their life, at this point, was established to the degree that it couldn’t have been uprooted. His wife had her work and her friends; the children didn’t want to leave their schools and their social lives. But it was the first time the family had been separated. He was aware that he hadn’t told me this initially, he said; he wasn’t quite sure why he hadn’t. He hadn’t anticipated that it would become relevant.
‘I asked him,’ she said, ‘whether it had occurred to him that his inability to learn Greek was related to the absence of his family. It didn’t even need to be a question of sentimentality, simply that the conditions in which he had always achieved success were no longer there. He thought about this for a while, and then said that to an extent it was true. But in his heart, he believed it was because he did not consider Greek itself to be useful. It was not an international language; everyone in the diplomatic world here communicated in English; it would have been a waste, in the end, of his time.
‘There was something so final,’ she said, ‘in that remark that I realised our conversation was over. And it was true that even though the flight had another half an hour to go we didn’t say one more word to each other. I sat beside this man and felt the power of his silence. I felt, almost, as though I had been chastised. Yet all that had happened was that he had refused to take the blame for his own failure, and had rejected my attempt to read any kind of significance into it, a significance he saw that I was all too ready to articulate. It was almost a battle of wills, his discipline against my emotion, with only the armrest between us. I waited for him to ask me a question, which after all would have been only polite, but he didn’t, even though I had asked him so many questions about himself. He sealed himself in his own view of life, even at the risk of causing offence, because he knew that view to be under threat.’
She had sat there, she said, and thought about her own lifelong habit of explaining herself, and she thought about this power of silence, which put people out of one another’s reach. Lately, since the incident – now that things had got harder to explain, and the explanations were harsher and bleaker – even her closest friends had started to tell her to stop talking about it, as though by talking about it she made it continue to exist. Yet if people were silent about the things that had happened to them, was something not being betrayed, even if only the version of themselves that had experienced them? It was never said of history, for instance, that it shouldn’t be talked about; on the contrary, in terms of history silence was forgetting, and it was the thing people feared most of all, when it was their own history that was at risk of being forgotten. And history, really, was invisible, though its monuments still stood. The making of the monuments was half of it, but the rest was interpretation. Yet there was something worse than forgetting, which was misrepresentation, bias, the selective presentation of events. The truth had to be represented: it couldn’t just be left to represent itself, as for instance she had left it to the police after the incident, and found herself more or less sidelined.
I asked her whether she would mind telling me about the incident, and her face took on a look of alarm. She put her hands to her throat, where two blue veins stood out.
‘Bloke jumped out of a bush,’ she squawked. ‘Tried to strangle me.’
She hoped I would understand, she added, but despite what she’d said earlier she was in fact trying not to talk about it any more. She was trying her very best to sum it up. Let’s just say that drama became something real to me that day, she said. It ceased to be theoretical, was no longer an internal structure in which she could hide and look out at the world. In a sense, her work had jumped out of a bush and attacked her.
I said it seemed to me that at a certain point a lot of people felt that, not about work but about life itself.
She sat silently on the sofa for a while, nodding her head, her hands folded across her stomach. Presently she asked me when I was leaving. I told her my flight was in a few hours.
‘That’s a shame,’ she said. ‘Are you looking forward to going back?’
In a way, I said.
She asked whether there was anything I felt she particularly ought to see, while she was here. She knew the place was packed with sites of global cultural importance, but for some reason she found that idea a bit overwhelming. If there was something smaller, something I personally valued, she would be glad to know about it.
I said she could go to the Agora, and look at the headless statues of goddesses in the colonnade. It was cool there, and peaceful, and the massive marble bodies in their soft-looking draperies, so anonymous and mute, were strangely consoling. I once spent three weeks here alone with my children, I said, when we were stuck because all the flights out had been cancelled. Though you couldn’t see it, it was said that there was a great cloud of ash in the sky; people were worried little pieces of grit might get stuck in the engines. It reminded me, I said, of the apocalyptic visions of the medieval mystics, this cloud that was so imperceptible and yet so subject to belief. So we stayed here for three weeks, and because we weren’t meant to be here I felt that we became, in a sense, invisible. We didn’t see anyone or speak to anyone except each other in all that time, though I had friends in Athens I could have called. But I didn’t call them: the feeling of invisibility was too powerful. We spent a lot of time in the Agora, I said, a place that had been invaded, destroyed and rebuilt many times in its history until finally, in the modern era, it had been rescued and preserved. We got to know it, I said, fairly well.
Oh, she said. Well if I wanted to see it again and if I had the time, perhaps we could go there together. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to find it on her own. And she could do with a walk – it might take her mind off food.
I said she could try souvlaki: she would never be hungry again.
Souvlaki, she said. Yes, I think I’ve heard of that.
My phone rang, and the cheerful, undaunted tones of my neighbour came pealing down the line.
He hoped I found myself well this morning, he said. He trusted there had been no further incidents to upset me. I had not, he noticed, responded to his texts, so he thought he would call me directly. He had been thinking of me; he was wondering whether I had time for an excursion out to sea, before my flight.
I said I was afraid not – I hoped we would meet again the next time he found himself in London, but for now I had an engagement with someone, to do some sightseein
g.
In that case, he said, I will spend the day in solicitude.
You mean solitude, I said.
I do beg your pardon, he said. Of course, I mean solitude.
ALSO BY RACHEL CUSK
FICTION
The Bradshaw Variations
Arlington Park
In the Fold
The Lucky Ones
The Country Life
The Temporary
Saving Agnes
NONFICTION
Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation
The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy
A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother
A Note About the Author
Rachel Cusk is the author of three memoirs—A Life’s Work, The Last Supper, and Aftermath—and seven novels: Saving Agnes, winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award; The Temporary; The Country Life, which won a Somerset Maugham Award; The Lucky Ones; In the Fold; Arlington Park; and The Bradshaw Variations. She was chosen as one of Granta’s 2003 Best of Young British Novelists. She lives in London.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Copyright © 2014 by Rachel Cusk
All rights reserved
Originally published in 2014 by Faber and Faber Ltd., Great Britain
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2015
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