by Rachel Cusk
“Bloody photocopiers!” she exclaimed to the empty room.
She lay and looked at the ceiling. She could hear movements from the children’s room above her head. In a minute she would have to get up and deal with them. Benedict wouldn’t go. It was Juliet who did everything. Everything! She would put them in their uniforms and take them out into the rain. Then she recalled that it was Friday, the last Friday of the month, the day Benedict collected the children from school.
Juliet and Benedict did not know the Milfords well. Louisa Milford always seemed very fractured and busy and distrait, as though she had some difficult secret, some difficult burden at home she was unable to tell you about. It might have been her husband, it was hard to tell: he ran his own business and was hardly ever seen. They lived in one of the Georgian houses on the park, in Parry’s Place to be exact, which Juliet was told—she liked to pretend not to know that sort of thing—was the most expensive address in Arlington Park.
Though they did not know them well, Louisa’s invitation—“supper in the kitchen at Parry’s Place, just us, totally informal”—did imply knowledge of a kind: Louisa’s knowledge of the Randalls as a level at which an invitation could be pitched. Juliet and Benedict walked, and once across the park began to pass grand houses, standing behind Bath-stone walls and closed gates. By night they had the monolithic appearance of temples, rearing up from the shadowy mass of grass and trees, their façades fabulous with a particular kind of amber light. It was strange, to be amidst this little aristocracy of houses. In Guthrie Road, as elsewhere in Arlington Park, the solid, bourgeois, profitable ordinariness of life was generally ascendant. But here things existed at a pitch of striking ostentation. It was hard to know exactly what it signified. Juliet felt at one minute that she and Benedict might be eaten, or enslaved; and at the next that some form of reward awaited them. It was exciting, in a way.
But then, glimpsing the armoured forms of the big, expensive cars crouched among the shadows in driveways all along the park, she had a sort of oceanic sense of malevolence, of a great, diffuse evil silently undulating all around them in the darkness. In the Milfords’ own driveway an enormous glittering Mercedes crouched on the gravel on giant, ogreish tyres. Its tinted windows seemed to cast on everything their shuttered, annihilating gaze. Juliet had felt a force of pure aggression emanating from its metal surfaces. It was the car of an assassin, a killer. Louisa Milford opened the panelled front door and looked at the Randalls rather blankly. Was she a killer? Juliet wasn’t sure.
“Did you walk?” exclaimed Louisa. “You are marvellous.”
The hall was full of amber light. There was a smell of flowers, and of cooking, and of wax polish, and Juliet was overpowered by a new realisation, the realisation that life was meant to be wonderful. She felt she had known this at some point before, but had inexplicably forgotten it. Benedict handed over the bottle of supermarket wine and Bendick’s mints, which his sense of irony permitted him on such occasions.
“Oh, you are marvellous!” said Louisa, examining her booty and then smiling at them with her head on one side, as though they had just made a donation to some charitable cause she was supporting.
People like the Milfords invariably thought the Randalls, both teachers, were marvellous. (“I really think you two and the work you do are just marvellous.”) Of course, it was Benedict they meant. They would never have dreamt of sending their own children to Hartford View Comprehensive, famed centre of violence and anomie; but it was thrilling to have contact, however indirect, with those whose misfortune it was to do so. Juliet’s afternoons at Arlington Park High School for Girls gained a referred lustre of significance from Benedict: the denizens of the temples on the park found it a satisfying evening’s entertainment, this little drama of male force and female sensibility. Also, people of the Milfords’ sort preferred to think of the Randalls as non-materialistic, a condition they seemed to regard as being in some way irresponsible, as though materialism were an aged parent they liked to rail about while believing themselves bound to it by chains of honour and duty.
The four of them sat in a kitchen like a ballroom, around a heavy, square dining table with carved feet. When Louisa Milford smiled she disclosed a sinister jumble of grey teeth like a bouquet of tombstones. Her daughters went to the High School: it was on their account that she thought Juliet was marvellous, and might cease to think it. Her husband, Matthew, was a big red man, as plump and sleek as a seal, whose teeth were white and prominent and even; he kept them continually a little bared as though to refute his wife’s inferior set. He had folds of pink skin at the back of his neck. He was like a big sleek seal sitting barking on its rock, or so Juliet thought. He and Benedict talked, and Louisa and Juliet fed on the scraps of the men’s conversation that fell to them. Benedict sat twisted around in his chair: the more Matthew spoke, the more contorted Benedict’s posture became. It was a sign, recognisable only to Juliet, that he disagreed with Matthew; or rather, that he was listening to him with studied detachment, which was as close as Benedict generally cared to come to conflict. Louisa repeatedly sat down and got up again from the table, moving around the vast kitchen in bemusement, like a woman whose servants have been given their first evening off. She was attentive to the candles, and kept lighting new ones, placing them fancifully all around the room as though she could never tire of this trick of making light. Matthew brought out bottle after bottle of wine. Each time he carefully wrapped a white napkin around the neck with his thick fingers before he poured.
Juliet drank, with a prodigiousness that at first seemed like a response to the prodigiousness of her setting, a need to equalise herself with it. It all seemed to invite her to cast herself off into a sea of wine. But as she drank, the evening grew tarnished. Life did not seem to be meant to be as wonderful as it had done earlier. Wherever she looked she saw the sheen coming off it.
Louisa kept saying, “I do think Matthew’s got a point.”
Matthew talked on and on. He talked about politics and taxes and the people who got in his way. He talked about people who were lazy and people who were dishonest. He talked about women. Every time he employed a woman, he said, he spent a year training her and sending her on courses and getting her up to scratch, and then she promptly got pregnant and went off on maternity leave. Well, he wasn’t going to employ women any more. Flatly refused to. Didn’t care if it wasn’t politically correct. Wasn’t going to do it.
“I do think Matthew’s got a point,” Louisa said to Juliet.
“You ask your boss,” Matthew said to Benedict. “He’ll tell you the same thing. It’s the same story everywhere. And don’t start saying that a school isn’t like a business. A school is exactly like a business. You don’t need to tell me that yours is different. They’re all the same in one respect. What they’re interested in are results.”
The headteacher of Hartford View was a woman. Last year, encountering him in a crowded school corridor after Benedict’s exam results had come in, she had apparently gone down on her knees in front of him, in full view of the passing pupils and teachers.
“They’re certainly interested in them,” Benedict said. “They just can’t get them.”
“Well, I’ll tell you why they can’t—half the staff will be on long-term maternity leave!” Matthew said, looking virtually ecstatic.
“Tell them about Sonia,” Louisa urged him.
Matthew nodded and raised a hand to stay her.
“I had a girl phone in the other day,” he said. “Mr. Milford , she says, Mr. Milford.” He put on a silly, high-pitched voice as the girl. “Mr. Milford, I’m afraid I can’t come back when I said I would. Why not, I say. Well, Mr. Milford, the thing is, my baby needs me.” He paused, and pantomimed bemusement. “I need you, I say. But it’s not the same, she says. It’s not the same thing, Mr. Milford. All I’m asking for is a little more time, she says. Darling, I say, how much time do you think you’ll need? Will eighteen years be enough? See him off to university? On sec
ond thought, send him here when you’ve finished and I’ll give him a job!”
Matthew laughed loudly.
“But did you let her have more time?” Juliet asked shakily.
Adrift on a sea of wine, she had not prepared herself for the unexpected necessity of setting herself apart from him. She had let the wine carry her away, and then she found she was not prepared, for the coldness of life.
“Of course I didn’t. I’m not running a bloody NCT group. I told her she could come back when her three months were up or not come back at all. No hard feelings, I said. As far as I was concerned she could spend the rest of her life folding nappies if that was what she wanted to do with that fluff between her ears. As I say, no hard feelings.”
“People don’t fold nappies any more, darling,” said Louisa. “They buy them from the supermarket.” She winked at Juliet. “That tells you how many he’s changed.”
“She could stay at home playing happy families,” resumed Matthew. “Or she could come back and work for me on the day and time we agreed. End of story.”
“That’s illegal,” said Juliet.
There was a silence. Matthew stared down at his own powerful arms, folded across his chest. A dark red colour rose into his neck and face.
“I don’t think you can really say it’s actually illegal, Juliet,” said Louisa.
“I can. That’s exactly what it is.”
“But you can’t blame Matthew!”
Louisa looked around at them all with an air of gracious incredulity.
“Look, sweetie,” Matthew presently said to Juliet. “I’m not saying I don’t value all the wonderful work you women do. It’s a big job, running a family. It’s hard work. I know because it’s all Lou ever talks about, how hard it is managing the kids and the house and how tired she gets all the time. I’m the last person to say it’s an easy job, making a home and raising the next generation. What I do say is that sometimes you don’t think about how it’s all going to get paid for. I pay for the house, the cars, the school fees, the au pair, the cleaner, the holidays, the gym membership, Lou’s wardrobe”—he counted it with his thick fingers in front of Juliet’s face, as though she ought to be grateful—“and most of the time I’m not even here. So when the girl phones in and says she wants to spend more time with baby, and she wants me to pay for that too, I’m going to tell her where to get off.”
“You have to admit he’s got a point,” said Louisa, while Matthew took a long, bellicose swallow from his wineglass.
“She could take you to court,” said Juliet.
He lifted his head a little with predatory alertness.
“She won’t,” he said steadily.
“Well, she should.”
And that was when he said it.
“You want to be careful,” he said. She saw how close she was to his hatred: it was like a nerve she was within a millimetre of touching. “You want to take care. You can start to sound strident at your age.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at Juliet as though she were naked. “The problem with women like you is that you don’t know how to play to your strengths.”
It was now that she felt herself to be drunk; now that her aversion to him wanted to be born in all its intensity but could not be, tied up as it was in imprecision, in paralysing layers of numbness. Benedict was staring at the tip of his shoe, where it nearly touched the white damask hem of the tablecloth. Juliet watched as he moved it carefully until it touched the hem and then moved it away again.
“Actually, Juliet’s got a fine pair of strengths,” he said, craning his neck a little to see his shoe.
There was a silence, and then Matthew laughed explosively.
“A fine pair!” he shouted, rocking back in his chair and laughing deliriously at the ceiling.
Juliet was astonished. Never, in all the time she’d known him, had Benedict said such a thing. Louisa gave a little reproving, shrieking laugh of her own. Matthew flung his arm across the table and grasped Juliet’s hand.
“A bloody fine pair.” He laughed, squeezing her fingers, his eyes fixed on Benedict.
All men are murderers, Juliet thought. All of them. They murder women. They take a woman, and little by little they murder her.
Now Juliet lay still and looked at the map of Venice that hung in a frame on the wall opposite their bed. She looked at the intestinal canals all held against each other in a knot. Now, just as the stone walls of Venice endured the dark water that lay between them, and the water endured its confinement in the twisting walls that held it there, and as their eternal involvement was something that had a name, a being, a kind of beauty, so Juliet could endure the coming day.
And it was Friday, the last Friday of the month! Juliet taught English part-time at Arlington Park High, and in the normal course of things her last lesson concluded at half past three. At the same time, half a mile away at Arlington Primary, the white-faced teachers were opening the doors, releasing great waves of used air while the children—Katherine and Barnaby amongst them—crushed in the doorway in their coats. Over near the park, at the sound of the bell, Juliet would run. She would leave her fair-haired, faintly astonished class and run down the waxed corridors, run out into the grounds where well-dressed women stood in groups, run through the gates and into the street. She would run along the pavements clutching her bag of exercise books. Seven or eight minutes later she would arrive, breathless, sweat cascading down her sides. Katherine and Barnaby weren’t always the last. There was usually at least one other child there, following the teacher around. Juliet didn’t hit the bottom, quite: there was always one child resignedly helping put things away, like a ward of the state, apparently without hope of ever being collected.
But still, it required her to run.
On the last Friday of every month, however, Juliet took the school Literary Club. These Fridays were like a dividend from which she eked out a whole secretive life. She was a giant organism depending for its life on the single capillary that issued from her Friday afternoons. The Literary Club was open to the whole senior school, and was quite popular. It commenced at four o’clock and lasted an hour. On those days, Juliet did not run. Benedict collected the children. They had to get a supply teacher in to cover for him, because Benedict’s school was down in the city and it took him an hour to get back to Arlington Park. Normally, what with one thing and another, he was never home before six. Juliet, convening the Literary Club on the last Friday of the month, would think of that supply teacher. She felt that he—she always saw him as a man—and she were linked in some strange way. Together they made a little mechanism, of the sort that might be used to bypass an organ. It was a complicated arrangement that ensured the continuance of life. While the supply teacher taught, Juliet chugged into a siding of time and Benedict collected the children from school.
All through that leaden hour, the hour when children were released from school and manacled themselves once more to one’s breathless form, she sat and discussed literature with fourteen or so privileged girls of assorted ages. Or at least, she gave the appearance of discussing it: there was always something else that crept in, an element of display, almost of exhibitionism. It was as if, in this atmosphere that was at once less formal and more rarefied than the classroom, she displayed herself to them in all her textured humanity. Look at me, she said, a woman, a woman journeying, manacled, to the shrine of art. She presented herself to them as an artefact of human drama, a sculpted piece of life, almost as an artwork herself. In the classroom, teaching one form after another by rote, it was not generally possible to appear to them thus: she was an oddity, an adult in the child’s world of school. They saw her, even the sixth-formers, as an isolated figure, a sort of lone pillar in their midst who for one reason or another had elected to support the roof above their heads. They could not imagine her married, or as the mother of children; and to impute humanity to her—lust or sinfulness or plain subjectivity—was, she knew, a kind of joke. She knew because sh
e had felt the same way about her own teachers, that they were like strange little gods in their benevolence and fury, their fixity. They weren’t human at all: rather, they were like carved figures that symbolised human attributes.
At the Literary Club, however, for an hour, Juliet took a human form. She displayed herself to fourteen girls, aged thirteen upwards, who had gathered in their own time to discuss matters of a higher order. She showed herself to them, half warning, half enigma. You will never understand me, she seemed to say; and at the same time: This is what one day you might become.
She rose from the bed and went out onto the landing. Benedict was emerging from the bathroom in a voluminous, smock-like shirt.
“Are you going to London today?” she said.
He looked at her as if she were mad. “To London?” he said.
Murderer, she thought.
“It’s just for some reason I remembered you saying you were going to London. For a conference or something. And it’s Literary Club today.”
“I’m here today,” he said. “Why, were you hoping to have me out of the way so you could have your lover round to breakfast?”
She turned to the window that gave a view out to the side of the house. There was Guthrie Road in the rain, at the junction with Arlington Rise. A delta of brown water obscured a whole section of pavement at the corner. A woman stood by it holding an umbrella, hesitating. Just then a car passed and unearthed a great root of brown water from the puddle, which toppled and crashed at her feet. Going the other way, into town, the cars stood end to end, not moving. Clouds of vapour rose from their exhausts. Their lights glowed through the grey atmosphere with a sort of diabolical suggestion. The spinsterly rows of Victorian houses looked puny, dreary, next to the rows of expensive, obstructed cars.
“Funny kind of lover you’d have round for breakfast,” she said.
Arlington Park in the rain: a maze of grey, orderly streets with cars passing through them like private thoughts. This was what it boiled down to, all of history: a place of purely material being, traversed by private thoughts. She had never expected to find herself here, where women drank coffee all day and pushed prams around the grey, orderly streets, and men went to work, went there and never came back, like there was a war on. She had thought she would be in a university department somewhere, or on the staff of a national newspaper. Other people had thought so too. At school she was the exceptional one. She was the one everybody talked about. She came top in all her subjects; she got a scholarship to university. They even made her Head Girl. It was funny, in a way, that she had ended up as a teacher, back at school. It made it seem as though school was her natural habitat. It made it seem that she wasn’t bright or gifted or exceptional at all. She was merely good at going to school.