Authors: Rachel Cusk
Frank, although slightly fearful of the vacancy in his wife’s eyes, approved of her diminution. They had long since set up twin beds in their room, but even so he liked the idea that his wife would be seen as a woman who could control herself. It suggested that she cared what he, and other people, thought. He did find her means somewhat repellent, and although she still made his usual breakfast and cooked the evening meal, the fact that she insisted on drinking those revolting things while he was eating was, for Frank, too public an expression of her problem. He would have liked to be able to tell his friends that his wife ate like a bird, but the shaming nature of her diet led him to keep it to himself.
Since she had left home, however, Francine had several times entertained the suspicion that her parents had united in her absence, flowing together over the space she had once occupied until their surface was so smooth that she might never have been there at all. Her mother’s interest, of course, could always be recruited with a telephone call, but there was something masculine in her interrogations now, a desire for more substantial evidence of progress than had previously been required, behind which Francine detected the conspiring hand of Frank. It irritated Francine to hear how Maxine had blossomed in the wake of her desertion, dyeing her hair blonde, wearing gold jewellery, her face fashioned by a make-over.
‘You should see your mother,’ Frank would boom, picking up the extension in the sitting-room while Maxine regaled Francine with her improvements from the kitchen. ‘She’s a corker.’
She had even given up her milkshakes, she said, in favour of a local exercise club which she had joined, where she had made new friends. The emergence of features in Maxine’s life meant that she expected to be able to talk, and even answer questions, about them.
‘You haven’t asked me how Body Conditioning went,’ she would complain to Francine at the end of a call.
The consequence of this trend was that Francine called less often, and felt a vague and disturbing insecurity at her exclusion which, although it coincided with her desire to pare down her connection with her parents, removed from her hands all the pleasure of doing so. She had disappointed them, she knew, in her last year or so at home: they had safeguarded her through school and secretarial college, beneath the assumption that a lucrative deal would
subsequently
take her off their hands; but she had frittered herself, in their view, on flashy types with few intentions, getting herself a flighty reputation and probably scaring off any chance of a decent prospect into the bargain.
Francine’s long life before the mirror, however, had given her different ideas about her own destiny. When it came, she felt sure that she would recognize it as clearly as she did her own face and that it would be a similarly pleasurable vision. She was so careless of her parents’ qualms that it was an effort to remember them at all in her schemes, and she would always feel mildly surprised when their judgements rose up in the dust of her activities. None of it was serious, in any case. She was merely awaiting the opportunity, sure that it would come to her, to move on to greater, if unspecified, things.
It was in this mood of scornful assurance that she had allowed herself to be flattered by the attentions of the manager of a local software company, where she had been stationed for three weeks’ secretarial work. He was young and rather attractive, and when his wife came into the office one
lunch-time
Francine was surprised and somewhat dismayed to notice that she was quite beautiful and that David behaved like a silly, devoted dog around her. If she was honest, Francine had to admit that up until then David had done a good job of concealing his interest in her. She hadn’t really intended to do any harm, but she was always interested in testing her powers, and she perceived in this situation perhaps the greatest challenge they had yet received. After his wife had gone, she had lingered around his desk with the pretence of activity, wondering what effect her mere physical proximity would have. When nothing happened, she launched a more deliberate offensive, subjecting David to amplified versions of several devices tested and found to be successful in other trials. One night she stayed late, offering to help him with his work, until it grew dark outside and they were alone in the office. They had talked, and Francine had cleverly steered the conversation towards the personal. David had revealed that his wife ran a local advertising agency and often didn’t get home until late herself. In answer to Francine’s questions, he admitted that he did often have to make his own dinner and occasionally even iron his shirts, and she gave him her utmost sympathy. The next day, she had made sure to meet his eye frequently and they had shared several intimate glances. Eventually, after more than a week, he became flustered and tried angrily to grab her behind a filing cabinet when no one else was looking. She waited for a few days before she gave in, and one lunch-time he took her to a hotel. He must have told his wife what he’d done the same evening, because she appeared at the office the next day with a red, ruined face and started shouting that she wanted to know which one it was. Francine had fortunately retreated to the toilets as soon as she caught sight of her, but one of the other girls had told her that David had had to ask his wife to leave the office. He barely spoke to Francine during her last couple of days at the
company, and remembering his rudeness at the hotel and the fact that he hadn’t even bought her lunch, she felt that he had behaved quite badly.
News of David’s indiscretion spread quickly through the town, and over the next few weeks Francine experienced a distinct and unpleasant cooling of manners towards her as she went about her business. In this change of climate, her dormant hatred of the place where she had grown up suddenly sprang and flowered. She didn’t exactly feel guilty about what had happened, but when she looked up at the dinner table and caught her parents’ troubled eyes on her, it occurred to her how enjoyable it would be to go somewhere else. One evening she told them of her intention to move to London, and to her surprise they hadn’t seemed particularly upset and had said it was probably for the best. Francine had really only made her announcement with the purpose of getting used to the idea, but when her father said that he would give her a thousand pounds to get her on her way, she sensed that things were moving rather more quickly than she had anticipated. Still, she was glad of the money, which gave her the
satisfaction
of thinking that, all in all, things had worked out for the best.
She rose from the bath and lost herself for a while in the generous administration of resources to all her surfaces. Finally she donned her bathrobe and drifted to the
sitting-room
to telephone her mother.
‘Yes, love,’ said Maxine wearily when Francine announced herself.
‘Don’t sound too pleased,’ snapped Francine, who disliked her mother’s latest habit of inferring that her life was one of constant, complex demands, when Francine felt sure that she was only watching television with Frank.
‘Don’t start, Francine. What is it?’
‘What’s
what
?’ She would have put the phone down there
and then, had she not wanted to discuss her evening with Ralph. ‘You asked me to call you.’
‘Well, we hadn’t heard from you for so long,’ sniffed Maxine. ‘I just wanted to know you were still breathing.’
‘How’s your class?’ said Francine, knowing the enquiry would put her mother in a more communicative mood. Not wishing to hear the answer, however, and confident that it would be lengthy, she put the receiver down on the table and went to the kitchen to get a glass of orange juice. When she returned, she could hear her mother’s voice squeaking with alarm from the abandoned telephone.
‘Francine! Francine!’
‘I’m here.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘I was listening to you talking about your class.’
‘I told you, I didn’t go this week. I’ve hurt my back – as if you were interested!’ She gave an unbecoming snort of laughter. ‘Francine, it’s very rude to just go off when a person’s talking to you. I don’t know what gets into you sometimes. Your father and I sometimes sit for hours trying to remember what terrible thing it was that we did to you. I know you think my aerobics is boring, but it’s very important to me and—’
‘Sorry,’ said Francine.
‘– and you haven’t even asked how your father is yet.’
‘How is he?’
‘He’s been unwell, as a matter of fact. We thought he had cancer.’
Such excursions into tragedy were a frequent feature of Maxine’s conversation.
‘Really?’ said Francine. She lay back on the sofa and examined her freshly shaven legs.
‘But the doctor said it’s just a bit of constipation. He’s got to cut down on his fats. Not that I ever give him fatty foods,
mind you. I learnt that lesson long ago with my own problems. Still, we’ll get by.’
There was a clamour on the line as the extension was picked up.
‘I’m fine,’ bellowed Frank. ‘Just a bit bunged up is all.’
‘Good,’ said Francine.
‘And what’s madam been up to? Out all night, I don’t doubt, causing trouble.’
‘Catting about!’ interjected Frank helpfully.
‘Oh, I’ve been busy,’ sighed Francine, relaxing into a cushion. ‘I’ve got a new job.’
‘The last one didn’t last long,’ said Maxine suspiciously. ‘Why can’t you seem to hang on to anything?’
‘It was only temporary, Mum. This one’s much better. The agency thinks it’ll be permanent.’
‘What’s it involve?’ interrupted Frank.
‘It’s with an investment bank in the City, working with the director.’
Francine enjoyed their bewildered silence.
‘Make sure you hang on to it,’ said Frank finally, hanging up.
‘How’s that Janice? Frank and I think she’s a very nice girl.’
‘She’s fine.’
Maxine had a habit of drawing unshakable conclusions about people from the way in which they comported
themselves
on the telephone.
‘You’re still getting on, are you?’
‘Of course we are.’
‘There’s no “of course” about it, Francine. You’ve quite ruined my new address book, what with all the crossings out. You can be very difficult to live with sometimes. Believe me, I’m the expert.’
‘Thanks.’
‘You say you’ve been busy,’ said Maxine after a pause, her manner warmer now after the exercise of her resentments.
‘I’ve been out a lot.’
‘I’ll say you have. I’ve got to know that machine of yours so well it invited me round for tea.’ Her laughter shrilled down the phone.
‘I went to a party in an art gallery.’
‘Very grand,’ said Maxine, catching her breath. ‘Anybody nice there?’
‘Oh, I met a lot of people. Journalists, mostly. Everyone was really nice.’
‘So nobody special.’
‘I just said, lots of people!’
‘I suppose they don’t have names.’
‘Well, there was a journalist I liked called Stephen, and a friend of his called Ralph.’
‘What sort of friend?’ said Maxine darkly.
‘Just a friend,’ said Francine, exasperated. ‘He invited me to dinner at his house.’
‘And what does the friend do for a living? He’s the arty type, I suppose.’
‘He works in television.’
‘I see. You’re going to tell me next he’s going to put you on it.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘Watch your mouth, young lady. I suppose he can cook, too.’
‘He made risotto,’ said Francine. ‘He owns a flat in Camden.’
‘Well, that’s what he says,’ said Maxine. ‘But you never know, do you? He might have it mortgaged up to the hilt. Why didn’t he take you out? Is he tight?’
‘You don’t know anything,’ sighed Francine. ‘Everyone has dinner parties these days.’
‘Pardon me for living,’ said her mother.
Afterwards, Francine felt dissatisfied by the conversation. She wished Janice would come home. Eventually she got up and walked restlessly around the sitting-room for a while. She wondered if Ralph would call again, and realized that he might have been trying all that time she was on the phone to her mother. Finally, she sat down on the sofa and picked up a magazine.
Camden Road was a flooded river of cars and from the top of the bus Ralph had watched the traffic jam take on the irremediable, erupted look of a disaster. For a while the packed chain of dirty, disparate metals had been forcing itself thickly through the gates of the traffic lights in a unified triumph of will, but suddenly it was as if the crowd of cars had lost faith in the principles of their community and people had begun breaking from lanes in an attempt to escape, skewing themselves across the white lines and nudging into other hostile queues to a rising clamour of horns. Ralph knew that he should get off the bus and walk the last half-mile to the office, but he was hindered by a strange paralysis, an inability to free himself from this vision of chaos in which he seemed so to belong. Unchained and let loose in the streets, who knew where he might wander? On a Monday morning such as this, when his membership of the city was an imprisonment and the emergent self the weekend had allowed to roam must be forced back into its cell, it was better that he should be delivered defeatedly to his door.
His patchy performance in the closing stages of the previous week made the proper execution of the day imperative. He had been distracted on Thursday, his mind crowded with what proved to be unplayed scenes, his body bent on leaving
early, and on Friday he had been morose and unwell. He had run into debt and must use today to replenish his reserves of good conduct. Once their taste was acquired, such disruptions of routine could, he knew, lead to larger rebellions. Ralph feared the prospect of his own disobedience, and although he had never really detected in himself any sign that he might one day decide, for perhaps no reason other than perversity, not to follow the path that necessity had laid down for him, still he remained vigilant against the possibility of his
insurrection
. He couldn’t afford to entertain ideas of his own freedom: once admitted, he could not be sure of ever
persuading
them to leave. It was not that he judged himself
particularly
prone to being led astray, but he had always ascribed the right to build fantastical, foolish plans as belonging to those whose foundations were secure. He didn’t regard the people he knew as dependent, exactly, but he felt sure that they would never be permitted to slide into poverty or destitution: there would always be someone, some relative who could be dug up and appealed to, someone who would feel pity or guilt at their demise. Ralph was alone, and although sometimes he could go for weeks without really thinking of his solitude, some deeper instinct always
remembered
it. It was a mercy not to think of it too often, in fact, because when he did he would often grow angry or morose at the relentless contingency of everything in his life; and what was the point of self-pity if there was nobody to pity you for it? He had learned to accept certain things: the inescapability of work, regardless of whether he enjoyed it or not; and the possibility that no one might care if he lost everything. Stephen would
mind,
probably, but he couldn’t be counted on really to care in any useful way.
Ralph supposed that his situation carried within it the danger of relying too much on love to swaddle him in illusions of security. That had been the problem with Belinda, really,
because he had somehow got the impression that his
orphaning
, his terrible aloneness, was one of the things for which she loved him. She used to ask him about it all the time, wanting to know exactly when each beam had rotted and given way and how he had felt as the sky and ground came terrifyingly into view; and he would enjoy watching her face soften with sympathy as he told her, knowing that his subscription to things he hadn’t really felt, but knew none the less to be tragic, would make her care for him. In the end, though, the feelings gave him no pleasure, for they were impersonal, humanitarian things, and Belinda had grown tired of it as her love curdled to pity and then, he feared, contempt. He suspected that the lack of visible evidence of how he had come to exist made people uncomfortable with him. For a while, certainly, he was unusual, but eventually he was only odd and difficult to fit into the scheme of things. He had come to regard his solitude as a principle by which people felt it correct to act, a feature which generated its own response: he had been deserted, therefore it was possible, necessary even, to desert him.
Stephen was different, Ralph supposed, in that it never seemed to occur to him not to be Ralph’s friend. Their alliance was what Ralph imagined to be brotherly, an unquestioned linkage which demanded no particular profit or return and which didn’t seem to have arisen out of personal choice. It irritated Ralph that he sometimes wondered why Stephen stuck with him; partly because he knew it never occurred to Stephen to wonder the same thing about Ralph, but largely because his criticisms of Stephen were deep and should not have manufactured a sense of good fortune at Stephen’s friendship as their irrational by-product. He supposed it was an unreformed conviction of their schooldays, when Stephen had been a princely character whose patronage was an asset.
If Ralph was honest it had been his only asset, the thing that had got him through it all.
Stephen had never asked about Ralph’s parents, although when his father died at the end of Ralph’s first year at the school and he had had to go to Stephen’s house for the summer holidays, Stephen had been kind to him in a clumsy way and patted him on the back once or twice. When they went back for the new term, they had gone on a school trip. As the bus wound its way through the outskirts of the town, Ralph had suddenly recognized the road in which he had lived with his mother and father when he was younger. He had gazed out of the window and as they approached his old house he had turned to Stephen to point it out.
‘
Plebsville
,’ Stephen had said before he could speak,
following
Ralph’s eyes through the window. He made the hilarious vomiting noise which they had lately been using to signal disgust or contempt. For a moment Ralph had a strange feeling in his stomach, but then he had made the noise too and had sat back in his seat, glad that he hadn’t said anything.
It made him sad to think about that now, although he scarcely remembered his mother any more and the confused, itinerant portion of his life with his father had long since supplanted the old house with a set of diffuse, unrelated memories. He remembered running into their bedroom, though, early in the morning, and climbing up on the bed beside his mother in her nightdress. Her bare arms used to seem colossal to him, riven with a delta of frightening veins, but he had loved the way she smelled in the mornings. Later in the day she would be perfumed and distant, but in the morning she had a human smell, a smell of herself, which made him burrow against her like an animal. She was called Angela, although remembering her name made her recede even further in Ralph’s mind. His father had always called
her ‘Mother’, which now struck Ralph as strange, but at the time had seemed a natural extension of his partnership with his father against her hygienic and dissatisfied leadership.
‘Better shape up,’ he would whisper to Ralph, as his mother swept in some nameless fury through the small rooms of their house. ‘Else Mother’ll have us.’
The bus had heaved itself past the traffic lights and was now thundering down the Holloway Road towards Ralph’s stop. Returning from his recollections he felt all at once rather lost and he reminded himself of the suddenly distant necessity for getting off the bus and going to work. He stood up, clinging to the metal poles as he staggered along the swaying platform. His body felt large and heavy, as if he had just woken from a dream and found it newly so. The bus stopped and he disembarked. Hurrying along the pavement towards his office building, he saw himself calling for his mother through the quiet house when he came home from school one day, worrying that she wasn’t there. He had used to call her ‘Mummy’, and he remembered now that she hadn’t liked it.
‘You sound like a little pansy,’ she had said, emerging wearily from the bedroom as he stood calling her in the hall. Her face was full of secrets. ‘What’s wrong with “Mum”?’
He opened the door and walked quickly across the foyer to the stairs. He hadn’t thought of that in years.
*
‘Good weekend?’ said Roz, who sat opposite him.
Their desks were pushed together at the front to form a square, a contact Ralph found obscurely intimate. Roz was in charge of the office computer and had discovered how to play games on the screen. She would sit for hours at solitaire, or a faster game involving spinning meteors which made explosive noises, and Ralph would grow infuriated at the incessant
clicking and the blank rapture of Roz’s face, sighing and clearing his throat to no avail.
‘It was all right,’ he said.
‘What did you do, then?’ said Roz after a pause, her hand still clicking on the desk as she spoke.
‘Not much,’ said Ralph. He bent over his work and began writing something.
He occasionally felt guilty about his unkindness to Roz, for she was always interested in him in her slow, impervious way. She would ask him questions with apparently no memory of repetition or rebuff, retaining nevertheless the few blunt details he was obliged to divulge about his activities outside the office and stringing together a little narrative from them of which it pained Ralph to be the subject. He was ashamed of his feelings of physical repulsion for Roz’s pale, doughy form, her big moon of a face with its round eyes and slack, wet mouth. He would find himself watching her occasionally in wonder at her almost impossible plainness and sometimes she would catch him doing it and would reveal her teeth in a mirthless, fleshy smile.
He didn’t know much about her, for her fascination with Ralph’s life seemed to carry within it an almost dutiful apology for the monotony of her own. She lived with her mother in Hendon and she didn’t have a boyfriend. He had asked her about boyfriends when he first started the job, trying to be friendly, but something had lit up in her eyes which told him it had been a stupid thing to ask. The result of his enquiry was the flailing rapport which now plagued him daily, and it was with dumb misery that he realized Roz liked him – and, worse, that she was now irreversibly possessed of the conviction that he liked her – and that no amount of curtness would ever erase his early blunder. He had
encountered
girls like this before, big, silent girls who required only
the acknowledgements his politeness obliged him to offer for their sad, obedient devotion to be forever nourished. At university there were several of them, and they would stop and greet him in the street, standing before him with the mute expectation that he would talk to them, until he had to excuse himself quite rudely and would go on his way with his heart thudding angrily in his chest. He perceived in their attentions some notion of affiliation, a disquieting recognition of his hopelessness which hurt him more than the disdain of loud, confident girls who had made the same discovery.
Roz never asked Neil any questions, although they talked all the time in a way Ralph knew he could not imitate; chatting about things they’d seen on television, or reading a tabloid together while they ate their sandwiches. Neil would ask her how her mum was, what she was seeing at the cinema that night, would even joke about who she was going with, and yet Ralph had never once seen her fix Neil with that dogged, injured look which suggested an outstanding debt awaiting payment. The worst thing was how, on a Monday morning, Roz would unfailingly ask him, with a dull glimmer of painful anticipation in her pale eyes, if he’d met anyone new over the weekend. The question was so audacious to Ralph, and yet bespoke a joyless void of opportunity so horribly familiar to him, that he always answered it
awkwardly
. His embarrassment made it sound as if he cared that he hadn’t met anyone, and would often inspire Neil to shrieks of effeminate laughter from the other side of the office and a high-pitched rendition of some song about searching which Ralph vaguely recognized.
‘Did you meet anyone new over the weekend, then?’ Roz asked now, her fingers momentarily stayed from their clicking but still poised over the handset as if ready to annihilate Ralph with an electronic pulse.
‘Yes,’ he said suddenly. He heard it fly from his lips and
saw Roz jerk slightly, as if the murder of her hopes had been too swift even to feel. Her eyes welled with water and for a moment Ralph wondered in terror if she was going to cry. ‘Yes, I did, actually,’ he continued hurriedly. ‘I’ve got a new girlfriend.’ The words were large and clumsy in his mouth, as if they didn’t fit.
‘What’s this?’ shouted Neil from his desk. ‘Ralph’s got a new bird? You got a bird, mate?’ he said, getting up and coming over.
‘What’s she like, then?’ said Roz.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Ralph. The conversation was unbearable to him. He could scarcely believe he had started it. ‘She’s very pretty.’
‘What’s her name?’ persisted Roz, as if in the hope of finding some ground on which she could conduct a contest.
‘Francine. She’s called Francine.’
‘Fran
cine
,’ howled Neil. ‘Fran
cine
. Not a frog, is she?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Ralph irritably.
‘Where does she work? What’s her job?’ said Roz.
Ralph looked at her with horror.
‘She’s a secretary,’ he said.
Roz didn’t speak to him for the rest of the day, but the Morse of her clicking informed him that an injustice had been perpetrated against her.
*
Ralph’s indiscretion haunted him that evening at his flat, and although he tried to subdue his memory of it by the devotion of his energies to domestic tasks, the resistance of his
surroundings
to further regulation so soon after the previous week’s reforms permitted his thoughts to churn and race as he drifted desultorily through a series of minor activities. His slip rose up before him everywhere he looked, monstrous in the familiar, cautious landscape of his communications, and
although he knew his customary reticence made a more terrible spectacle of his transgression than perhaps it really was, it seemed ridiculous to try and change the way he saw things merely to diminish it. His preposterous and
meaningless
untruth appalled him, not because of any fear of it being found out – although the thought of Francine overhearing his conversation with Roz made him grow hot with shame – but more for the burden the very idea had placed upon him, which seemed in his quiet hours to have handcuffed and marched him considerably closer to its fulfilment.