Saving Agnes

by Rachel Cusk

  ‘Council,’ said Merlin as she bypassed the group on her way upstairs. As if urging her to join in, he added: ‘They’ve come to pass the death sentence.’

  Agnes lingered reluctantly. She wanted to be alone.

  ‘How long have we got?’ she said.

  Neither of the men appeared to hear her, so Merlin repeated the question.

  ‘Hard to say,’ said one of them. ‘Could be ten months, a year tops. What d’you say, Gavin?’

  ‘I’d give ’em three months, mate,’ said Gavin cheerfully. ‘First you got your subsidence, right? That won’t really bother you for a good while yet but then, this time of year, you’ve got your damp and cold to think about. It’s exposed all down that side, see? ’Less someone cares to pay a few grand to get that crack seen to and the wall supported on the other side, well, as I say, I’d give you three months.’

  ‘So what you’re saying, Gavin, is it’s their choice.’

  ‘Quality of life,’ said Merlin as an aside to Agnes.

  ‘As I say, unless someone wants to have it fixed up, that’s about the size of it,’ said Gavin.

  ‘But what if we can stand it?’ interjected Agnes. ‘What if we don’t mind the cold and damp? We could stay here for another year?’

  Both men looked at her and grinned.

  ‘You’ve got a right one here,’ one of them said to Merlin. ‘A right masochist.’

  On Thursday Agnes pleaded a headache at work and went home early. She got in the bath and lay there until the water grew lukewarm and her body appeared to be marbled with a bluish tinge. She remembered at school the nuns used to have giant bath sheets which fitted over their heads and draped over the sides of the bath so that they wouldn’t be able to see their own naked body lying there in the water. At least that’s what some of the girls had said, claiming to have seen these strange plastic contraptions hung out to dry in the kitchen garden. Agnes would have liked to have had one now. She could lie still beneath it like a subterranean canal, cavernous and secret. She wanted to be hidden from herself. She would feel safe then, protected, like the time her father and brother had buried her up to her neck in sand on the beach and she hadn’t been able to move; but she had felt warm, and light with the irresponsibility of it. Just her head grinning bizarrely out of the sand. She would be a limpet clinging to a rock, she thought now, if she could. She thought of a room full of bathing nuns, their shaven heads sprouting from the plastic in rows like tomato plants, and she began to laugh. Her laughter sounded all through the empty house. She thought of her father and brother running away down the beach, shrieking with delight at her predicament. She had laughed then, too, until it had begun to dawn on her that they might leave her like that and never come back.

  On Friday, Agnes was called into Jean’s office. They each sat down on the appropriate side of the desk.

  ‘Now,’ said Jean, arranging her small hands neatly in her lap. ‘You probably know that this is the time of year when we try and give people a little extra money if we think their work is up to standard.’

  ‘No,’ replied Agnes. ‘No, I didn’t.’

  She saw her lover as if from the prow of a boat. She was being borne off to sea while he lounged nonchalantly on the quayside, looking at her like a stranger as she passed. She waved her hand and he peered back, as if into strong sunlight.

  ‘Well, we do,’ said Jean. ‘Anyway, dear, I’m afraid we’ve decided to withhold your bonus for a while.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He had never had any intention of coming with her, after all. She had just happened to pass randomly through his life, like a tourist.

  ‘I discussed it with the Managing Director, and it seemed to us that you haven’t really settled down yet. We decided to give it a bit longer and then make a decision.’ She paused, and then continued in a sharper tone: ‘You do understand what I’m saying, dear, don’t you? You haven’t settled down!’

  Jean spoke loudly, as if to a deaf person. Agnes looked at her. She had no eyebrows, merely pencilled lines which, perhaps applied in haste, gave her the look of one apprehending a surprise attack. The delayed import of what her employer had been saying became clear to her. Agnes understood she was about to lose her job. Jean was right. She suddenly felt decidedly unsettled.

  ‘You’re right,’ she said.

  ‘You haven’t settled down,’ replied Jean, repeating herself with surprise. ‘You haven’t really come to terms with the system. We just don’t think you’re putting your all into it.’

  Agnes felt strangely comforted by these words. Having never really cared about the office or the people contained within it, she had assumed that she, likewise, had eluded their notice. The attention such criticism implied was almost warming. She began to cry.

  ‘I’m sorry!’ she sobbed. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Jean, fumbling nervously on her desk-top for a tissue. ‘There, there.’

  ‘It’s just all been so awful. So awful!’

  ‘There are other jobs, you know, dear,’ replied Jean briskly. ‘You don’t have to work here if you find it so awful. Perhaps it’s for the best.’

  ‘No!’ Agnes reached over the desk and clutched her hand dramatically. ‘It’s not the job, I promise! I like it here, I – please don’t make me go!’ she pleaded. ‘I’ve just had a bit of a hard time recently. Personal reasons.’

  While there was little in her life that wasn’t personal, nevertheless the term shamed her. She disliked underselling the drama of her turbulent heart. Jean creased her pencilled eyebrows with puzzlement.

  ‘I promise I’ll make it up to you,’ swore Agnes impetuously. She released Jean’s hand, which had been lying limply in her own for some time. ‘I’ll settle down, I promise! Just give me a month and I’ll show you. Please!’ She fixed her with martyred eyes. ‘Please.’

  Having always nurtured a secret belief that she had been born in the wrong century, and would have been far better employed in one where she could have spent her days on a chaise-longue scheming how to ensnare a wealthy husband, Agnes had disdained the modern world of work in the hope of better things. Such a perspective, subverted though it was, sat uncomfortably alongside the egalitarian flavour of her political beliefs. In private moments she reasoned that her idiosyncratic personality would not conform to iron-cast office hierarchies; and while she was haunted by the idea that she might not be normal, she religiously avoided any activity which might serve to make her more so.

  Working late on Friday brought upon her a plethora of new sensations, not all of them pleasant. On the evening in question she expended as much effort on quelling her emotional uprisings as on any extraneous proof-reading. Her whole being seemed to revolt against the engagement of her mind with anything which did not directly concern it; but as she took the bus home through the night-time city, she caught a glimpse of a small but comforting interface. The truth was that she felt rather better. Indeed, she felt almost virtuous. She settled back wearily into her seat, meditating upon the integrity of labour.

  The days in which he had not called had accumulated like dust on a mantelpiece. She had raked through the ashes in the hope of uncovering something the flame of his rejection had spared. The truth, in the end, was that with no one around any longer to take responsibility for wasting her time, even she could not bear the thought of doing it for herself.

  Chapter Eighteen

  AGNES started walking home from work at night. It was a long way from Finchley Central, and the money saved did not justify the expenditure of effort involved. This new practice was, however, not part of a plan for economic stringency. It was more of an extension of the secret life of solitude Agnes had lately felt herself to be living.

  The first time she had attempted the strenuous hike through the congested hills and vales of north London, it had not been through choice. She had arrived at the bus stop to find her purse empty of change, and with the uncertain logic of such trying moments had decided she could as easi
ly walk the three or four arduous miles homes as the two hundred yards up the high street to the nearest bank. It had taken her over an hour, and she had arrived weary but exhilarated, to find the house dark and silent. The others had apparently gone to bed, and as she made a solitary cup of tea in the kitchen and carried it upstairs she realised this state of affairs was rather pleasant. The part of the day in which one had to field questions and explain oneself now seemed to her the most arduous. She drifted around her darkened room for a while like an intruder, touching things. The next morning she got up early and left for work before the others were awake.

  Agnes had never been one for being alone. She had always felt herself becoming blurred around the edges after an hour or two and had gone to seek more stimulating company. Now she began rather to enjoy the sensation of encroaching invisibility. It became something of a challenge. How long could she go without calling on her friends for support? Would they worry, wondering what had happened to her? Would she become mysterious and desirable with absence, returning to find herself somehow nicer, her life enhanced? In the old days the house had been her nerve-centre, for as well as providing the solaces of friendship it had been a hub of news: phone calls, letters, unexpected callers, all of the things which pumped her heart like a life-support machine emanated from home. The fact that now she dreaded its quiet telephone and reminders of bills unpaid did to some extent facilitate her protracted absences.

  She walked down into East Finchley, under the railway bridge, and on towards Highgate. The winter darkness was sharp and clear, but the streetlamp turned the sky a muddy brown. Her feet pounded on the pavement. Her breath came out in misty dragonish puffs. The rhythm was almost mechanical. She liked the way her mind emptied of nebulous worrying thoughts when she was walking, and housed instead a set of honed perceptions. She had little experience of such intentness.

  As she approached Highgate she stopped at one of the garish late-night garages, which hummed and glowed incongruously by the roadside like spaceships, to buy some chocolate. Normally Agnes would never have eaten such a thing, let alone in the street, but her midnight perambulations had begun to lend her a certain immunity to the common gaze. Initially she had been troubled by the stares of occasional passers-by on the lonely pavements, especially the men, who looked at her first as if wondering what she was doing out alone so late at night, and then away, perhaps frightened of the implications, already seeing themselves accused. She wondered if they sensed her fear of them and were ashamed. Later, when habit had dissolved her fear of strangers, she thought it was they who were afraid. She knew how she must look: peripatetic, unwanted, a mad glint in her eye. It was almost enjoyable.

  She passed through Highgate village and began to walk down the long hill to Archway. Buses lit up like moving blocks of flats whooshed past her. A car sped by, its horn blaring, arms waving from the windows like streamers. Her heart pounded with surprise. A film of sweat sprang up beneath her clothes. She took out her bar of chocolate and began to unwrap it with shaking hands. Only a moment before she had felt immune, her identity a faint question mark over her head. Now she wondered what on earth she was doing at this sordid roundabout, when it was so late and cold that any normal person would have longed to be home. Suddenly she too longed to be home. A delayed flame of pain shot through her, illuminating her in the darkness. She tried to cross the road and was met with a barrage of horns.

  Finally she reached the Holloway Road. She took a piece of chocolate and put it in her mouth just as a man walked past her on the pavement.

  ‘You’ll get fat,’ he said. His face was concerned.

  ‘Just – just piss off!’ Agnes shrieked as she hurried away.

  By the time she reached Drayton Park she was almost running. She crammed more chocolate in her mouth, but her breath seemed unfortunately to collide with it on its way out and she began to choke.

  ‘Hey!’ someone shouted from across the road. ‘Hey, you!’

  She quickened her pace with terror. She could hear footsteps behind her.

  ‘Good God, Agnes,’ said Merlin, overtaking her and then stopping in her path. ‘What on earth are you doing?’

  ‘I – I don’t know,’ replied she between coughs and gasps. ‘Someone was shouting. I was scared.’

  ‘Oh, that was me. I was only joking. Hey, you’ve got chocolate all over your mouth.’

  They walked back to Elwood Street. Agnes wiped her mouth surreptitiously on her sleeve.

  ‘Do you fancy a drink?’ said Merlin when they got in. ‘We could go to that pub on the Blackstock Road. We could have a chat.’

  It was a long time, Agnes realised, since she had been out. She went upstairs to change into other clothes. She wondered what Merlin wanted to talk to her about.

  She and John had always used to argue when they went out. It was something to do with the ritual of spending money on formalised pleasure – it begged to be despoiled. Once, in a restaurant, he had spied a female friend on the other side of the room and had gone to stand at her table like a suitor, talking and waving his arms animatedly. Their food had come and still he did not return. Agnes had tried vainly to catch his eye but he hadn’t looked at her. She didn’t dare to go over there herself and drag him back to the table. She had waited for over half an hour in a sweat of embarrassment and jealousy, ridiculous and alone at a table laden with food, like a mad old divorcée. Eventually she had begun to cry. When he returned to find her like that he had been disgusted and had left the restaurant, flinging a ten-pound note down on the table.

  She took off her clothes and chose different ones, but was distressed to find that they would not fit her. She had put on weight. She climbed back into the first outfit. Merlin called up the stairs to her. She fumbled with a lipstick, sweating with panic.

  ‘I feel like I haven’t seen you for ages,’ said Merlin when they were ensconced in a velveteen booth. The table before them was scattered with unused beer mats, beside which crisps floated soggily in dark liquid circles. ‘You’ve got a secret life. You never come home any more.’

  ‘Overtime,’ said Agnes. It sounded more like a comforting hot drink than a spiritual struggle.

  ‘Really?’

  Merlin regarded her with grinning amazement. She stared back at him, and was disconcerted at her sense of having never really looked at him before. He had new glasses.

  ‘You’ve got new glasses,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ He looked bemused. ‘Oh, these. No, I’ve had them for ages. Come on, Ag, don’t change the subject. Tell me about your secret life.’ He peered at her suspiciously. ‘What are you up to?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Oh.’ He seemed disappointed. ‘So why don’t you ever come home?’

  ‘I told you. Overtime.’

  ‘Oh. I thought you were joking.’

  ‘Well, what did you expect me to say? I’m having some affair that I can’t tell you about?’

  ‘I’ll admit I was thinking along those lines.’

  ‘God, well, I’m sorry I can’t give you anything as exciting as a man to talk about. It’s just my boring old job.’ A gorge of anger rose up into her throat. ‘Maybe you’d like to find someone more desirable to have a drink with, Merlin. I mean, God forbid that I should dare to talk about my boring old life. I probably shouldn’t be out, should I? I should be in purdah. I should ring a bell and shout “single”!’

  Merlin, to her surprise, began to smile. His reaction would have driven Agnes to further excesses of outrage had she not soon perceived that he seemed to be looking at someone else. He smiled again and waved his hand.

  ‘Friend of mine,’ he said. ‘Hang on a second. I’ll be back.’

  He got up and went to a table where a blond girl was sitting. They greeted each other effusively. Agnes fiddled uncomfortably with a beer mat. A man came into the pub and sat down at the bar. He was looking at her. She looked back defiantly. She felt rather audacious after her outburst. He was bearded and wore a respectable suit. Presen
tly, he got off his bar stool and came over to her table.

  ‘I suck girls’ cunts,’ he said calmly, standing before her.

  Agnes looked at him dumbfounded. His choice of vocabulary left her own impoverished. She managed to shake her head. He shrugged, smiled at her briefly, and then turned and went back to the bar.

  ‘Who was that?’ said Merlin, sitting down.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She was still in a state of shock. She had never heard anything so disgusting in her life. One never knew. Really, one knew nothing at all.

  ‘I want to go home,’ she said.

  ‘Oh. Whatever you say.’ Merlin drained his glass, his Adam’s apple moving up and down like something alive trapped in his throat. ‘Okay, let’s go.’

  They got up to leave. The man turned around and stared at her; like someone normal, someone in a crowd, his face boarded up like a derelict place.

  ‘It’s happening to me,’ Agnes told Greta. ‘What happens to you – you know, when people come up and say strange things? Well, it’s happening to me.’

  ‘Maybe the world’s just getting meaner.’ Greta shrugged.

  ‘But there must be more to it than that!’ Agnes cried impatiently. ‘Haven’t you ever wondered why it happens? What makes people think they can just come up and – and say anything they like?’

  ‘Yup, it’s a mean old world,’ sighed Greta. ‘All you can do is be mean back.’

  Agnes gave up. She sat down at her desk and found herself too distracted to work. Finally, she got up and decided to get some fresh air, albeit at the risk of further accosting.

  ‘You can’t show people you’re sad,’ Greta announced as Agnes reached the door. ‘What goes around comes around. They sniff it out. Like goddamned dogs. Then they give it right back to you, only worse.’

  The crack in the wall now stretched from floor to ceiling. Agnes had tried to camouflage it with posters but they peeled off with the damp, resulting in a worse defect on display than the concealed original. It was November now, a month of iron skies and stormy nights. As the cold seeping into the house turned from an invigorating freshness to a disturbing presence, Agnes felt the sensibility of change being forced upon her; for she saw in the long, cavernous fault intimations of the irretrievable sundering of future from past.