Transit

by Rachel Cusk

  I asked what it was that had caused that dissonance, and for a while she didn’t reply, fingering the green stone she wore on a silver chain around her neck that had evidently been chosen for its resemblance to her eyes.

  It was true, she said, that at a certain point – when she was perhaps twelve or thirteen – something had altered in her participation in their family life, something so subtle and imperceptible that she struggled even to give it a name. Yet she remembers quite clearly the moment when this change occurred, walking home from school on an ordinary grey weekday afternoon. She was stepping off the pavement into the road and she felt it, a sudden sense of dislocation, almost a sensation of something giving way. She waited for the feeling to pass but it didn’t: she returned home with it, and when she woke the next morning it was still there. She couldn’t, as she said, give a name to it, but one consequence of it was that from that day she felt she was watching life from the outside rather than being part of it. She began to watch her parents and her siblings as they sat talking and eating around the table, and though she wanted more than anything to get back inside those dinners and conversations, she couldn’t. It was perhaps this feeling of unreality that had caused her, at a certain point, to begin recording her family without them realising. She used a cassette player she’d been given, positioning it on a shelf near the kitchen table and changing the tape each day. Her parents never noticed it, but after a while her siblings did, and for a time it became a sort of obsession for them, listening to the repetition of the hour or more they had spent sitting around the table eating dinner. None of them was particularly interested in hearing their own voices: what they were listening for were the voices of their parents. Sometimes they would make her play a particular snatch of conversation between their mother and father over and over again. They would analyse it thoroughly, trying to unravel every possible meaning behind the words. They were trying, she now realises, to penetrate their parents’ relationship, and persistently failing to do so, because night after night they made new recordings and started the process again. They must in the end have listened to hundreds of hours of their parents talking, and never once did either her mother or her father utter a word that provided a crack or opening into the mystery of their love.

  I asked her whether she still had the tapes.

  Of course, she said. I had them digitised several years ago. The originals are all filed by date in a big cabinet in my office. When our mother died, she said, my siblings asked for them back and I refused. We quarrelled over it, she added. It’s a little sad. Now we don’t see each other any more.

  After her mother died, she went on, her father quickly married again. A woman had come to the house one day selling cleaning products door to door and he had married her just like that. They had sold the beautiful home of her childhood and moved to a hideous bungalow in a bad part of the town. The woman was hideous herself, coarse and obese, the very opposite of Birgid’s slim and lovely mother. These days her father lived like a tramp, ragged and unwashed, all his money gone. Her siblings had tried to take the woman to court but it turned out that their father had freely given her everything, including all the artefacts of their family life, which she had either sold or thrown away. She allowed him to remain in the bungalow with her but she treated him like a dog. Birgid herself had already left for England when these events occurred: in her absence, her whole past had been dismantled. Even the photograph albums were gone – she would never have been able to prove that it had happened at all, were it not for the tapes.

  Lawrence was calling us to the table to eat and the others rose from the sofa.

  I asked her whether she still had the feeling of unreality, and why she thought it had come in the first place. Ella had returned to stand beside us and she presently slipped herself on to Birgid’s lap and rested her head against her chest, sucking her thumb. Birgid absently stroked her dark hair and lifted her strange eyes to meet mine.

  ‘I like it that you ask these questions,’ she said. ‘But I don’t understand why you want to know.’

  Lawrence called us again and she tried to put the child down but Ella clung to her, protesting, and so she struggled to her feet with Ella still in her arms and stood there somewhat helplessly, until Lawrence came to take her.

  ‘Come on, you monkey,’ he said, bearing her off to the far end of the long table under the fog-bound windows that had been elaborately laid for dinner.

  The children were sitting at one end of the table; the adults were at the other. The red-haired girl sat in the middle. I had been placed opposite Eloise and for a while I watched her as her eyes darted anxiously around her guests, her fingers frequently fluttering over her own dress and hair, which she touched as though to reassure herself of something. She had a mild, pretty face, with small pink-rimmed eyes that seemed always to be on the verge of tears and a valiant smile that she showed often as though to counterbalance them. She was quite unlike Susie, who had been a tall, strong, voluble woman given to issuing orders and to the management of practicalities, and whose organisational grip was so fierce that she had timetabled her and Lawrence’s life far into the future and was often able to tell you where they would be and what they would be doing on a date months and sometimes years away. In Susie’s company Lawrence had become increasingly truculent and uncooperative, something she alone appeared not to have noticed, for she was, I supposed, insensitive. Nonetheless it seemed peculiarly cruel that in all her obsessive forecasting of the future, Lawrence’s absence from it had never been permitted to cross her mind. She was lonely these days, Lawrence had told me, and was trying – not always successfully – to behave with civility and even generosity towards Eloise and himself. I told him that she had sent my sons Christmas presents. They were so carefully and beautifully wrapped that the sight of them had caused me to feel a disproportionate sadness, as though what lay beneath the wrapping was not some toy or game but innocence itself, the innocence of good intentions that would eventually be worn out or discarded once they had been exposed. This innocence suddenly seemed much realer than all the documented aberrations in Susie’s conduct both before and after Lawrence had left her: in that moment – I did not say to him – I wanted nothing more than that he should go back and honour his promises to her.

  Eloise had noticed me looking at her and she immediately gathered her straying attention and directed it in a single smiling beam towards me. She clasped her hands over her bosom, leaning as though confidentially across the table.

  ‘I want to know everything!’ she said.

  Her younger son Jake had left his place at the other end of the table and was standing at her elbow. He tapped her arm.

  ‘What is it, Jakey?’ she said, turning her head distractedly.

  He stood on tiptoe to whisper in her ear and she listened with an expression of bright patience on her face. When he’d finished she excused herself and got up and went to speak to Lawrence, who was taking food out of the oven, an apron tied around his waist.

  While she was gone Jake asked me if I had ever been to Mars. I said that I hadn’t.

  ‘I’ve got a photograph of it,’ he said. ‘Do you want to see it?’

  He went away and came back with a book and laid it open on the table in front of me.

  ‘Do you see what that is?’ he said, pointing.

  I said it looked like a footprint. He nodded his head.

  ‘That’s what it is,’ he said. ‘I thought you might have seen it in real life,’ he added, disappointed. He said he was going to live on Mars, just as soon as he was old enough to get a rocket. Sounds like a good plan, I said.

  Lawrence came over and told Jake to sit back down in his place.

  ‘And don’t go asking Mummy for different food,’ he said. ‘We’re all going to eat the same thing.’

  Jake looked immediately anxious.

  ‘But what if I don’t like it?’ he said.

  I saw that Lawrence was struggling to keep his temper. His face was brick
red and his mouth was set in a line.

  ‘Then don’t eat it,’ he said. ‘But you’ll be hungry.’

  Eloise came and sat back down, straightening her dress. She leaned across the table to address me in her confidential whisper.

  ‘Have you ever noticed how controlling Lawrence is about food?’ she said. ‘He’s positively French. We were in a restaurant the other day and he made Angelica eat a snail.’

  Angelica was Lawrence’s daughter.

  ‘The poor child was like Joan of Arc at the stake,’ Eloise said. ‘Jakey and Ben were absolutely goggle-eyed. You could see they were thinking they’d be next. Jakey only eats sugar,’ she added. ‘And Ben won’t touch anything that’s not basically white. They wouldn’t go near her for hours afterwards. They said they could smell it on her breath.’

  She glanced around the table and then leaned even further across towards me.

  ‘He gets so angry when I give them what they want,’ she whispered. ‘He’s appalled at their lack of discipline. You know Jakey doesn’t sleep,’ she said. ‘He comes into our room four or five times a night and Lawrence won’t let him get into our bed. He doesn’t approve of it. The thing is,’ she said, ‘Jakey always used to get into my bed. It was what made him go back to sleep. But now I have to get up with him and take him downstairs in the middle of the night.’

  I asked her what they did together at that hour.

  ‘We watch television,’ she said. ‘The thing is,’ she went on, leaning even closer, ‘Susie was very organised. She got it all out of books. They had a whole library of them. Every time a child did something you’d have to stop and wait while she went and looked it up. Some of it,’ she added, ‘was actually quite Victorian.’

  I remembered once visiting Susie and Lawrence’s house and coming across Angelica aged three or four sitting alone at the bottom of a staircase. It was the naughty step, she told me when I asked. She was still there when I left.

  ‘I say to Lawrence, honey, we’ve just got to love them.’ Eloise’s eyes were filling with water. ‘It’s true, isn’t it? They just need you to love them.’

  I said I didn’t know. For someone like Lawrence that kind of love was indistinguishable from self-abnegation.

  ‘I think people are frightened,’ Eloise said. ‘Frightened of their own children.’

  If that was true, I said, it was because they saw in their children the register of their own failings and misdemeanours.

  ‘You’re not frightened, are you?’ she said, looking at me beadily.

  I found myself telling her about an evening some years before, when I was alone at home with my two sons. It was winter; it had been dark since mid-afternoon and the boys were becoming restless. Their father was out, driving back from somewhere. We were waiting for him to come home. I remembered the feeling of tension in the room, which seemed to be related to the provisionality of the situation, the fact that we were waiting. The boys kept asking when he would be back and I too kept looking at the clock, waiting for time to pass. Yet I knew that nothing different or particularly important would happen when he got back. It was merely that something was being stretched to breaking point by his absence, something to do with belief: it was as though our ability to believe in ourselves, in our home and our family and in who we said we were, was being worn so thin it might give way entirely. I remembered the pressing feeling of reality, just under the surface of things, like a secret I was struggling to contain. I realised that I didn’t want to be there, in that room. I wanted to go out and walk across the fields in the dark, or go to a city where there was excitement and glamour, or be anywhere where the compulsion of waiting wasn’t lying on me like lead. I wanted to be free. The boys began to argue and fight, in the way that they often did. And this too seemed all at once like a form that could be broken, could be suddenly and shockingly transgressed. We were in the kitchen and I was making something for them to eat at the long stone counter. The boys were at the other end, sitting on stools. My younger son was pestering the older one, wanting him to play with him, and the older one was becoming increasingly irritated. I stopped what I was doing, intending to intervene in their fight, when I saw my older son suddenly take his brother’s head in his hands and drive it down hard against the countertop. The younger one fell immediately to the floor, apparently unconscious, and the older one left him there and ran out of the room. This show of violence, the like of which had never happened in our house before, was not simply shocking – it also concretised something I appeared already to know, to the extent that I believed my children had merely acted in the service of this knowledge, that they had been driven to enact something that they themselves didn’t realise or understand. It was another year before their father moved out of the house, but if I had to locate the moment when the marriage had ended it would be then, on that dark evening in the kitchen, when he wasn’t even there.

  Eloise was listening with a sympathetic expression on her face.

  ‘Was he all right?’ she said. ‘Did you have to take him to hospital?’

  He was shocked and upset, I said, and he had a big lump on his head, but he didn’t need to go to hospital.

  She was silent for a while, her hands clasped in front of her, her eyes downcast. She wore numerous delicate silver rings on her fingers, and the big dazzling gem Lawrence had given her as an engagement ring.

  ‘You don’t regret it, though, do you?’ she said. ‘It must have been right, or you wouldn’t have done it.’

  I said I had no answer to that, because I still didn’t know precisely what it was I had done.

  She gave a mischievous little smile and peeped up at me from beneath her short pale lashes. She had been meaning to introduce me, she said, to some of her single male friends. There was one in particular she had in mind – he was very good-looking and very, very rich. He had the most stunning flat in Mayfair – he was an art collector – as well as a house on the Côte d’Azur. Lawrence, who had by now sat down beside us, groaned.

  ‘Why are you always trying to palm Freddie off on your female friends?’ he said. ‘He’s an absolute lout.’

  Eloise pouted and gave a little sniff.

  ‘All that money,’ she said. ‘At least it would be going to a good cause. It seems such a waste.’

  ‘Not everyone cares about money as much as you do,’ Lawrence said.

  Eloise didn’t seem offended by this remark. Instead she laughed.

  ‘But I didn’t care about it,’ she said. ‘That’s the whole point.’

  Lawrence had served everyone with slivers of foie gras surrounded by little balls of choux pastry.

  ‘What’s in here?’ Eloise’s older son called out, holding one up in his fingers.

  ‘Bone marrow,’ Lawrence called back unrepentantly.

  He had become increasingly interested in cooking, he told me, and had even started growing things in the garden – rare herbs, esoteric vegetables – that were difficult to find locally. This transformation had occurred after he had been sitting in his office one day mechanically eating a cheese sandwich he’d bought from a shop, and the realisation had struck him that he could have been eating something better. That was about eighteen months ago, he said, and it had had some interesting consequences, one of which had been his experiencing an intense craving – after six months or so of eating finer foods – for the very cheese sandwich that had caused him to forswear mindless eating in the first place. He had become so used by then to reading the subtle impulses of his own desires – often not eating at all if he couldn’t lay his hands on the very thing he wanted – that he automatically set out to act on this one, regarding it as some kind of pun or beau geste his now more sophisticated appetite had thought to come up with. He had gone to the same shop and bought the same sandwich, and out on the street, as he opened his mouth to take a bite, he was suddenly overwhelmed by sense-memories: of the malty dustiness of the sliced bread, the tang of the processed cheese, the thickness and whiteness of the mayonnaise coa
ting the shreds of lettuce. My mouth, Lawrence said, was literally watering. In those seconds he went further, into the memory of biting and chewing the sandwich, of swallowing it and feeling an obscure relief momentarily flooding his system. Then, Lawrence said, I put the whole thing back in its package and threw it in the bin.

  What he had realised, he said, standing there on the street, was that he was in a process of shaping his own desires, of harnessing them with thought, and it was only when he had found himself momentarily in the grip of the old sensory impulses that he had realised this process was, ultimately, about discipline. He did not, in other words, desire his lunch of smoked duck with the same mouth-watering blindness with which he had desired the processed cheese sandwich. The former had to be approached consciously, while the latter relied on the unconscious, on needs that were never examined because they were satisfied by mere repetition. He had to decide to be a person who preferred smoked duck to processed cheese: by deciding it, he by increments became it. What the cheese sandwich had represented was comfort, and once he had looked at it that way the whole can of worms was well and truly opened.

  ‘At least he doesn’t eat worms,’ Eloise said, resting her small hand devotedly on his big one. ‘Or not yet, anyway.’

  ‘What kind of world is it,’ Lawrence said, ‘where comfort can be found in a mass-produced sandwich? What kind of person am I, that that’s what I think I deserve?’