Saving Agnes

by Rachel Cusk

  Merlin nodded vaguely. Nina looked pensive. They didn’t believe her. They thought her strange, she knew. They would not blame the difficult world. Everyone else dealt with it. Why couldn’t she?

  ‘What’s wrong?’ demanded John, slamming the door to his bedroom. He lunged towards her pugnaciously and then brought himself up short.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Agnes, attempting flippancy. ‘Your bedside manner could stand some improvement, though.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ he said more softly. He sat down beside her and put his head in his hands. ‘What have I done to deserve this? I thought I was being reasonable. I mean, what is this?’ He indicated the half-shut drawer of his desk, out of which letters and papers, hastily replaced, erupted incriminatingly. ‘What are you looking for?’

  ‘I just want to know if you’re seeing someone else.’

  He wasn’t, of course, she knew that. He would never have denied himself the pleasure of telling her. She would have found that simple, in any case, a jealous ague, mild in comparison to the mad fever which currently gripped her. She phoned him in the middle of the night, too, not saying anything, just wanting to hear what he sounded like when he was alone. He made a fist and swung it in the air, then walked to the other side of the small room. Maybe small rooms were the problem. They could never see each other properly.

  ‘You won’t find what you need there,’ he said, looking at the burgled drawer. ‘In fact, I don’t even know what you need.’

  ‘You should do,’ she replied. He had made her need it, after all.

  ‘But I’ve given you everything,’ he said. His tone was quizzical, interested, as if she were an experiment that had got out of control, a monster he had inadvertently created. ‘What do you want to do?’ he said then, jokingly. ‘Eat me?’

  She felt his cruelty slide insidiously into her like a knife. How could she explain, when he made a mockery of the truth, that the smoke in his eyes was but a whiff of the raging inferno below? That what she showed him were but tiny lesions atop a deep and raging cancer? She wanted him to be mother and father to her, to rewrite her history in his hand, to exhume all her years and bury him in their place; kill all of her that never knew him and forget the rest. She wanted him dead or alive, and her feelings were terminal.

  ‘I want – I want to believe in you,’ she said finally.

  ‘Like fucking God!’ he exclaimed almost gleefully. ‘That figures.’

  He exalted for a moment at this pinnacle, as if it were what he had always wanted, as if he had wanted all along to see how far he could make her go. Then he got up and strolled impatiently around the room, losing interest. She felt then as if she would surely die of him. Outside the summer evening faded quietly to darkness. She sat perfectly still and waited for him to turn around. She needed to see his face. When he finally faced her, he appeared surprised that she was still there. He looked at her doubtfully, appraisingly; as if, she thought, he’d never seen her before. As if she were something in a shop he was deciding whether to buy. He looked at her with a kind of weary langour: he wanted to be home, unencumbered by packages, away from this madness; he wanted to be alone.

  ‘You’re like – you’re like some kind of black hole,’ he said curiously. He sat down in an armchair and for the first time looked at her as if she frightened him. ‘You consume me.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  LOVE was uncourtly at Hampton Court: it divorced, beheaded and died; divorced again, was beheaded an improbable twice, but still, ultimately, survived. Love conquered all but the loveless, and even then sometimes other things got you first.

  Like disease, Agnes thought, or maybe childbirth. The dimly ornate bedchamber, which they were surveying from behind its restraining rope like visitors to an asylum, seemed suddenly racked with screams as an heir clawed his way out from a cloying, unanaesthetised womb; his mother two-headed then, like a mythic beast. The rules were different in those days, she thought, but the game was the same.

  The house and gardens lay posing like two beauty queens, competing for the beholder in whose eye they might see their rival beauties briefly borrowed. He was beguiled by the gardens, she transfixed by the house; each sensing something of their own shadow in the other’s choice which made them defend their favourite hotly. A strange discomfort arose between them, a kind of twinnish mistrust, as they remembered that while each possessed the properties of beauty, together they formed something that made people stare.

  It had occurred to her to wonder if he might simply be tired of her; had crossed her mind like a delayed commuter over a busy station, too frenzied and obvious to be interesting. As an insomniac of the heart, Agnes found such admissions unwise; they could keep her awake at night, tucking the darkness round her like an eiderdown of oblivion. The worst of it was that she sympathised with him.

  As they crossed the moat into the cool belly of the palace she felt them both to be absurd. Like fish, their confluence depended on a common environment without which they flopped and gasped separately. It was easy to love in dim bars and dark bedrooms, but their bond could not withstand historic transposition. The fact that he was tired of her actually came as no surprise; that she was tired of herself even less so. What disturbed her was the alertness of her need for him amidst all this somnambulance. It beat in her like a heart, unfathomable. Something had been exchanged in those early hours when he had still been free to choose her, and he had been paying for it ever since. She would appear on his doorstep in years to come while he hid behind curtains with a frightened wife and bewildered children, reminding him that once he had singled her out. It was not about affection or delight. It was a game she had to win.

  As they walked into the courtyard, straining and chaffing like strangers, it all became sadly plain: this addiction, this great mistake, this misdiagnosis that was love.

  Henry VIII, many-headed and self-perpetuating, regenerated lives and wives like an earthworm. Agnes felt they would have understood each other well, she and this builder of mazes; his house a virtual reality of simulated tricks, with its secret gardens and hidden doors, corridors of lust and back passages of intent. It spoke of a mistrust she shared. They would indeed have got on well; both lovers, neither beloved.

  She perused their portraits: six wives, love’s carrion. She and Henry could have compared notes. Henry VIII, in love with love, fat with the flesh of women. There was, she knew, no satisfaction for that kind of hunger. Like her, what he sought was but his own reflection. What he fought for was but the survival of his own fittest self. He looked for love and he found a beast; and the beast was no one but himself. The nature of the beast, then and now, was that it destroyed what it craved the most.

  The courtyards boring through the centre of the house gave the surrounding buildings a prisonish look, their windows bound with steel bodices through which wan, womanly faces might be supposed to peer. These orifices, together with the several low doors which studded the walls at regular intervals, seemed almost elided by the lacy skirts of mosaic and brick, through which the leering tongues of gargoyles erupted beside stony cameo faces trapped like sailors behind portholes. Above, pairs of narrow chimney stacks soared to the sky like outflung legs, cross-bound and gartered. Straggling groups of late tourists hovered uncertainly in the October sunlight.

  Agnes saw her lover disappearing beneath a cool arch at one end of the courtyard and followed behind at a safe distance. Once inside, she discovered a great stone staircase which appeared to lead to the body of the house, and the sound of receding footsteps furthermore informed her that he was but a short distance ahead. She climbed the stairs quietly. He had seemed distant and inclined to solitude, and she did not want to jettison what she knew was her last chance by yapping at his heels like a vexing dog. Reaching the landing, she caught him drifting into one of the vast drawing-rooms, and she watched him from the doorway as he paused in front of a large canvas. On it, a naked woman reclined against a grassy bank, the geography of her copious flesh bruised and mountain
ous compared to the manicured green of her setting. Agnes felt rather offended that he should so mysteriously choose to contemplate such an object – and she in all her lissome superiority so close at hand!

  She crossed the room quietly and stood by him, the breath of acknowledgement between them as faint as that of two strangers at an art gallery, each cowed into dalliance by the erudition of the other.

  ‘She’s beautiful,’ Agnes ventured, hoping with the lie to provoke a denial which would affirm both her charity and her own charms. Moments later, casting a glance beside her to check upon the progress of her missile, she saw it had been vainly fired. He had sauntered off, leaving but a mirage of scent and an airy bodily impression behind him.

  When she was younger, she had used to indulge in romantic daydreams concerning the as yet unspecified character of her future partner. She had wondered where he was and what he was doing, and had vaguely hoped by such contemplation to establish psychic links between them which might one day render him more securely hers. She wondered now if she had ever been visualised thus in a stranger’s mind. Beams of sunlight slanted across the empty room, whirled with motes of dust. It seemed important, just then, that she should be tethered here by something stronger; that being here was part of something larger, someone else’s plan.

  She no longer observed the future as if from the passenger seat of an aeroplane: a pleasant trip, with but the slightest frisson of fear, to a certain and even more pleasant destination; the high peaks of mountains in view, with fluffy clouds obfuscating the terrible plunge to their craggy feet. Now she was earth-bound and afraid, grinning stupidly at the sky and wondering how things stayed up there. She fingered her future like a set of flimsy negatives: a world of dark skies, glaring shadows, black smiles and certain death.

  Agnes Day was lost, but only in so much as her lover was not to be found. She wandered down a long corridor and read from a sign that Anne Boleyn had fled over those very boards after receiving news of her imminent execution. For reasons which did not require elucidation, the passage had been named the Screaming Gallery.

  Anne Boleyn had six fingers, Agnes recalled. Despite her deformity, Henry had loved her passionately. She wondered how he felt as her head thudded to the ground. It was an act of power, but also perhaps one of love. She thought of the desecrated Anne. To be so loved – what must it feel like?

  She perused the tapestried dining-hall and imagined it full of bearded men spearing unspecified cuts of meat with knives. She examined faded tapestries depicting one-dimensional horses and women with shrunken bodies and enormous heads like embryos. She had hoped he would see her thus absorbed and be impressed by her self-sufficiency. After a while, however, she grew tired of her attentive posture and set out towards the kitchens, as if there might be some titbit there to comfort her.

  Some time later, lodged in a circuitous passage like something indigestible, she knew she was lost. She retraced her steps and recognised nothing surrounding her. She hadn’t been paying attention. The corridor was deathly quiet and she supposed she must have wandered into a tourist backwater at the back of the house. She sat down on a step and remembered a time when her parents had taken her to a market in Mexico, where they had gone for a family holiday. It was dark, and they were cruising the chattering streets in a leisurely manner before dinner, fingering the stalls in a desultory way but really there to absorb the music and cheerful banter, the foreign faces and smells of cooking. They had all been rather uplifted by the scene, she remembered, until they had come upon a stall selling silver jewellery where Agnes, aged six and voraciously acquisitive, had become fixated by a small ring with a blue stone.

  She had asked at first politely for a deal to be struck in her favour, and once refused had offered bravely to sacrifice several weeks of future pocket money in its preferment. Her father, who knew perhaps from experience better than to broker in futures, had cruelly cited the several smaller and inferior purchases with which her pockets were already filled. Had she known then, she calmly explained, what awaited her now, she would never have squandered her means so thoughtlessly. Her father had seemed to find this an amusing reply, and had claimed it was an apposite enough description of life. Far from rewarding her for her philosophy, however, the adult party had shortly after wandered off to sample other diversions. The assumption that she would merely follow behind them inflamed her with rebellion. She stayed exactly where she was, despite the grinning stallholder’s increasingly frantic and incomprehensible gesticulations in the direction of her retreating parents’ backs. Some time later, when they did not return, her sensations of power began quickly to evaporate; and compounded by the double blow of the failed purchase, which had created in its wake an aversion to what was already hers, she became engulfed by misery.

  Finally she had run after them, but the scene which only minutes ago had seemed so bright soon became dark and menacing. Her family was nowhere to be seen amongst the leering faces, their putative cries drowned by jangling music and harsh foreign voices. She darted down alleyways and through unfamiliar squares until finally she had sat down on a step and cried at her punishment; for that, surely, was what it was? She had ceased to please them and they had dropped her in the street like an empty sweet-wrapper, never to return.

  She had never been able to remember the conclusion to that story. She had no memory of tearful reunions. Sometimes, she used to think that perhaps another family had found her crying there on that doorstep, and had taken her in and brought her up as one of their own, without telling her.

  Things between them had, she supposed, come to a stage where the phrase suggested mutual obstruction; and yet there was a lack of verbiage, of event and gesture, which, though she knew herself to possess flaws, hinted at the additional presence of a mystery which might redeem them. He was holding something back; or rather, he was letting it out, for had she not noticed it? Normally the best kept of secrets, now he was dropping clues. His evasions and silences were becoming pointed and obvious. He longed to be away from her, that much was plain. Pleased with her detective work, Agnes did not trouble to peer too closely at its implications for fear their content, like something artificial, might harm her.

  She had never thought their relationship would be ended, for the simple reason that it had never really seemed to begin. They had merely drifted together, she supposed, like a commonplace; the soggy detritus of two gappy lives which would drift apart again at the next convenient tide. She had heard of such a thing as a casual encounter, and yet she had applied her old formulas to the stark patina of its reality as if she knew nothing. She had dragged out her suitcase of emotions and strewn its contents over a chair like a travelling saleswoman.

  Once, in the darkness of her north London room, she had gazed upon his tender neck and told him that she loved him. He had said nothing, of course, fixing her with eyes which could have been empty or full depending on the light, and had left her to draw whatever conclusions she wished. She had said it again, and again, as if trying to shock him, but the threat of madness had stopped her before he did. She expected at least a dénouement in exchange for all this mystery.

  She got up from the step and looked out of the window. It gave out on to the garden, and she realised she must be directly below the large drawing-room in which she had last seen him. A low filter of mist hung beneath the pale afternoon sky. The sand-coloured paths carved into the smooth lawn fanned symmetrically out from her vantage point like sunless rays. This, after all, was the very centre of things. Perhaps it would not be so bad, being without him. She would have the time to do other things: she could take up sport, clean her room, get things done. It would be like recovering from a long illness.

  She saw him then, strolling past a tree and over a lawn as if he owned it. His separateness pained her. The house ticked quietly around her. He was, perhaps, readying the executioner’s axe before her very eyes. She pressed her face against the cool glass and felt it joined by other ghostly faces. He had left her here i
n this feminine mausoleum, this connubial death-row, as if to do so conformed with his sense of etiquette. She was not like Henry, the master of ceremonies, the magician with his disappearing wives. She was a Christian, not a lion. She was a wife, six-fingered.

  The tree, which was in fact two trees grown from a single root, was beneath its glamorous foliage a sharp-clawed and vicious thing. With its dragon hide and single chicken foot, it crouched like an old woman in the cave of its skirts where Agnes, hiding from the truth, took shelter. Once there she felt a momentary shame, as if in spying its arthritic limbs and ugly knotted joints she had violated its privacy, like a voyeur at a drowning gorging on the veined blubber of a dead woman. It had always troubled her that she might suffer humiliation at the hands of death as well as those of life; might be found with her nightdress hitched ignominiously over her head, her body white and flaccid as a fallen moon on some dark river bank. Or perhaps smashed open like a watermelon on tarmac, her juices messy, the stench of her making policemen gag. Then again, something less dramatic: old age and desertion could find her three days’ dead in a council flat, tumescent and blue in a bath-chair. What could one do? Except surrender to it, long for it, as now with the secrets of her body on her lips like a tactless remark. She crouched by the crippled trunk in the dirt, uncaring. The gardens were quite still beneath the pale bowl of the sky, flat on their back in the late afternoon sunlight. Agnes sensed an air of virginal subjugation in their exquisitely trimmed and flowered beds; the lawns too smooth, the trees honed and shaped like ice-cream cones. There were no wild and clumpy patches, no grinning daisies or feisty nettles or other imperfection to proclaim life.

  There would – and nothing was more certain than this – come a time when she was no longer expected to behave so properly. The thought almost cheered her up. She would be sundered from herself as surely as Anne Boleyn’s head from her shoulders, watching it all from a great height and laughing, perhaps, at those who were cleaning up the mess and thinking as she had a moment ago that they would not want to be seen dead anywhere. She wondered that the mere thought of it did not drive people to greater extremities: hiding madly beneath trees, peering out between the branches, a lover nowhere to be seen.