by Rachel Cusk
On her last day in the sixth form her English teacher, Mrs. Mountford, had hugged her with tears glittering in her hard, unhappy little eyes and said, “Well, I expect I’ll be hearing about you.” Juliet should write her a letter. Dear Mrs. Mountford, just to let you know that I found another school that was kind enough to take me in. Dear Mrs. Mountford, just to let you know what I did with all that education you gave me. I found some other girls and gave it to them. That was good, wasn’t it, Mrs. Mountford? Dear Mrs. Mountford, you may have been wondering why you haven’t heard from me in all these years. The thing is, I was murdered, Mrs. Mountford. My husband, Benedict, murdered me. He was very gentle about it; it didn’t really hurt at all. In fact, I hardly knew it was happening. But I’m all right now, Mrs. Mountford. You’ll be glad to hear that I’m being careful.
Behind her, Benedict touched her hair. She shrank from the feeling of his hand. She turned around so that he couldn’t touch her any more and his hand was left suspended in midair. There was his face, smooth and red-cheeked like a baby’s face, with his little knowing eyes in the middle of it. In his smock, with his red cheeks and his eyes that were like the twinkling eyes of an old man, he looked like an illustration from a fairy tale. He looked like a woodcutter, or a shoemaker. She did not want to be touched by a shoemaker from a fairy tale. She was prepared to acknowledge his magical qualities, but she didn’t want him touching her.
“It’s so long,” he said.
She realised he meant her hair. It was nearly down to her waist. Since childhood she’d had long hair. Year in and year out she’d kept it, though it had vexed her mother. It was unpractical, her mother said. In those days, Juliet had had no intention of being practical. She had defended her hair against her mother’s punitive, twice-yearly appointments with the hairdresser. She would sit in the chair and cry, so that the woman didn’t have the heart to take off more than an inch. It’s just a form of attention-seeking, her mother would tell the hairdresser: she seemed to be referring to the tears, but really, Juliet knew, she was talking about the hair itself. It’s not like it’s particularly special hair, her mother used to say. It’s one thing having long hair if it’s an unusual colour. But yours is mouse. It looks strange, having all that mouse-coloured hair. I like it! Juliet would shout. It wasn’t so much that she liked it, more that she regarded it as a kind of symbol, a sign: it was the outward growth of the inner conviction she held about herself, that she was exceptional.
Benedict had loved her hair. He had loved it so much that he had climbed all the way up it, like the man in the fairy tale. He had climbed up it to the top of the tower, to Juliet’s place, and somehow he had made it more his place than hers.
“Don’t forget we’re going out tonight,” she said, ducking her head away from his hand, which was still hovering near her face as though looking for somewhere to put itself.
Benedict looked displeased.
“Are we? Again?”
“We’re having dinner with the Lanhams.”
He frowned. He didn’t know any Lanhams. How could he be expected to know about Lanhams when another day awaited him at Hartford View, where giant sixth-formers threw tables across the classrooms and people got down on their knees before Benedict in the corridors?
“Christine Lanham,” Juliet said. “She was at school with me. I told you, I met her in the street.”
She had met Christine Lanham on her way back from the supermarket. Juliet was carrying her shopping in plastic bags. She had Katherine and Barnaby with her, and she was carrying her shopping because Benedict took the car to work. How are you, Christine said, amazed. She hadn’t known Juliet lived in Arlington Park. Had she just arrived? Juliet said she’d been here for nearly four years and Christine was amazed again. In fact, she was more than amazed, Juliet saw: she was disappointed. I don’t know why, Christine said, but I always thought of you in London. Isn’t that funny? Juliet didn’t think it was particularly funny. Actually, it was one of the least funny things she’d ever heard. She wanted to say that personally she hadn’t thought of Christine at all, not once in all these years, and that if she had ever thought of her for even one second she’d have seen her right here where she was, in Arlington Park. She hardly knew Christine, but still, she would not have been mistaken, because she, Juliet, remained in some sense exceptional. So how are you, Christine said, opening her eyes very wide, wide enough to accommodate the shopping, the two children, Juliet’s clothes that were the clothes of someone who no longer cared. How are you, Christine said, and Juliet nearly replied, Actually, I’m dead. I was murdered a few years ago, nearly four years ago to be exact.
“Oh yes,” Benedict said now, nodding, with the vague look of a person encouraging her to go on so that he could think about something else.
“Christine Lanham and her husband, Joe,” Juliet said. She emphasised Joe. Benedict had the unnerving habit of confidently addressing people by names that did not belong to them.
“Joe,” he said. “Right you are.”
Benedict’s hand hovered and then with an awkward movement laid itself once more on her hair. He looked at her halfbeseechingly out of his little eyes. Where on earth had he got that smock? How did he get away with it, facing down the giant sixth-formers in that smock?
“I’ve got to get the children to school,” she said.
He twined his fingers in the mouse-coloured tresses. He wasn’t even thinking about it, she realised. He had forgotten why his hand was there in her hair. He just wound it absently round and round his fingers, forgetting what he had felt only a minute earlier. He had felt that she was remote from him. She knew it: he had caught sight of her there on the landing and remembered that she kept herself far away from him. It was like when Juliet sometimes stood in front of the television with the remote control, switching channels to find something for the children to watch, and a fragment of news would come on the screen. She would see a war or an earthquake, the faces of people in pain or people holding guns, see regions of dust and mountains far away. She would see it, a few instants of turmoil on the other side of the world, and then she would switch over.
Upstairs there was the sound of feet running to and fro and a door slamming.
“Get dressed, you two!” she bawled, so loudly that Benedict, whose face was six inches from her own, was forced to take a step back and let go of her hair.
What she’d actually said to Christine Lanham was: We came here for my husband’s job. She’d explained it to her, every detail. She’d said, My husband likes to move around every few years, you see. He’s a teacher, she’d said. He specialises in failing schools. He sounds fascinating, Christine had said, so that a bitter feeling of pride had risen into Juliet’s mouth. Well, she’d said, laughing, I suppose he is. As I say, he likes to move around and find new challenges. So I—She’d tossed back her mouse-coloured hair and moved her shopping to the other hand. She’d acted as if it was no concern of hers what she did. So I usually just find work locally, she’d said.
She was in her room getting dressed when Katherine came in. Katherine was in her school uniform, though she’d done up the buttons wrongly over her tubby chest. Only five years old and she got herself dressed when she was told to. What a good girl she was, sensible and good.
“Where’s Barnaby?” Juliet said.
“He’s upstairs,” Katherine informed her. “Barnaby’s being stupid. He says he won’t get dressed.”
“Does he?”
Katherine was good, but Barnaby would win. Katherine would toil and try, but in the end he would defeat her.
“And he’s taken all the things off his bed,” Katherine said. “I told him not to, but he did. I told him you said not to. He’s taken all the sheets off and everything. He made a mountain with it.”
“Damn him,” said Juliet.
She brushed her hair in front of the mirror. Behind her Katherine sat down on the edge of the bed. Juliet could see her in the glass. In her navy-blue uniform she made a sort of dark ell
ipsis in the pale covers. It was strange, that she had created these uniformed beings. The uniforms were like another exam certificate: they seemed to certify the private, tangled strain of her achievement. It had grieved her at first, to clothe Katherine’s unfinished little body in uniform. She had felt that she wanted to keep Katherine for herself.
“Mummy,” Katherine said.
Juliet gathered her hair at her shoulder and brushed the ends until they were straight.
“What?”
“At school they taught us a song.”
“Did they?”
“They taught us a funny song. Shall I tell you how it goes?”
“All right.”
Katherine sang it in a clear little voice:
Mr. Clickety-Cane
He plays a silly game.
And all the children in the street
They like to do the same.
Wash your face with orange juice!
Wash your face with orange juice!
“Mummy—it says wash your face with orange juice!”
She rolled around in the covers with mirth.
Juliet had wanted to keep Katherine for herself, but instead she’d had to surrender her, as though called upon to make a sacrifice to her own implacable gods. It was hard, harder than she’d expected it to be, to take the vigorous, joyful, wild body of Katherine and clothe it in a school uniform. Until that moment the possibilities for Katherine had seemed endless. Katherine’s femaleness had seemed like a joyful, a beautiful thing. It had seemed invincible, even in its halfformed fragility. She had not realised what she was. She had only delighted in it, in her female being. Now, though, she was different. She knew she was a girl. She returned from school full of a kind of programmatic agony. Her soul was in training. They had told her what she was, and now she knew. She didn’t play with the boys in the playground, she told Juliet. Juliet asked why not, and Katherine shrugged. None of the girls do, she said.
“Let’s go and find Barnaby, shall we?” said Juliet, holding out her hand.
Immediately Katherine jumped off the bed and came to her. Now, when Juliet spoke, Katherine answered. She heard in her mother’s voice the call of her sex and she replied with her answering femaleness.
It had to be admitted that Juliet didn’t know what she’d have done with Katherine, had she been allowed to keep her. She only wanted to protect her, that was all. As she had made Katherine with her body, so she could only think of her in terms of a physical expense. She wanted to protect her. She wanted to throw herself in her path. She wanted to shield her, from the bullet of an ordinary life.
Upstairs, Barnaby was standing on his mountain, naked, with his dressing-gown cord tied around his head.
“Time to get dressed,” Juliet said. “Time for school now.”
Barnaby did not seem to hear her. He was holding a little horse in his hand, brown, plastic, tanalised in mid-gallop with its mane and tail rippling out behind. He was making it canter. Up and down it went in his hand.
“Barnaby, did you hear me?”
Up and down went the horse, oblivious to all but the gods of carefree cantering, so preferable to those of Juliet’s ugly, autocratic regime. She began to pick things up off the floor. She worked closer and closer to him, and when she got close enough she grabbed his bare arm and yanked him off the mountain.
“Get dressed,” she said.
“I was playing,” he protested.
“I don’t care what you were doing. Get dressed.”
She gathered up all the bedclothes and hurled them onto the bed. Oh, how differently she felt when it came to Barnaby! How punitively she yearned to have him in uniform, to have him straitjacketed! When he played, as he was playing just now with the little horse, it felt as if he were stealing something from her. She started to make his bed.
“In this house, Barnaby,” she said, “we don’t have servants.”
“We do,” he said. “You’re our servant.”
Tightly she strapped the sheets beneath the mattress. Tightly she tucked the covers round.
“You’re stupid, Barnaby!” Katherine cried.
Juliet shook the pillow until it made a sort of blur before her eyes. Then she flung it into place with everything else.
“You can tidy up the rest,” she told him.
He looked at her with round blue eyes.
“I can’t,” he said. “I’ve got to go to school.”
It was what Benedict said, at least a dozen times each week.
“I’ll ring the school,” she said. “I’ll ring them and tell them why you’re late.”
His eyes grew a little rounder. Would she? Would she really? She could see him wondering. The problem was that the next time he would wonder a little less.
“I’ll ring and talk to Mr. Masters about it.”
Mr. Masters was the headteacher. She imagined talking to him about the state of Barnaby’s room. It would have a certain finality, that conversation. It would be in a sense the last, the final conversation. Where would you go, after a conversation like that? What would you have to live for?
“No, you won’t,” said Barnaby. He appeared to have decided. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“Wouldn’t I? He’s not my headteacher, you know. He’s just another adult, like me.”
“He’s more important than you,” Barnaby said.
“Perhaps he is,” said Juliet.
“You’re stupid, Barnaby!” Katherine shouted.
“Perhaps he is more important. And that’s why,” she continued, making her way to the door, “you’re going to have to explain to him that you couldn’t come to school because you wouldn’t put your uniform on.”
Outside the room she stood for a minute with Katherine and listened. There was silence, and then the sound of drawers being opened.
“He’s doing it,” Katherine said to her mother, half satisfied and half, Juliet felt, afraid. She wore a little look of discomfort. She seemed to be digesting the politics of the situation. She seemed to be chewing on their tough, inedible fibres and extracting the bitter juices.
When they came downstairs they found Benedict in the hall, putting things into a cardboard box. He put in some books, and his portable CD player, and a handful of discs in their cases. Outside, the rain fell. A cliff of shadow seemed to lean over Benedict where he stood at the bottom of the stairs.
“Purcell today, I think,” he said, flinging another disc into the box.
Benedict took his things to school in a box every day. He wouldn’t leave them there in case they got stolen. He liked to play music during his lessons. He liked to bathe the giant sixth-formers in the sound of the early English composers. He felt it enhanced their understanding of the period.
“Hello!” he said to Katherine—rather, Juliet felt, as though he hadn’t specifically met her before. In his shoemaker’s smock he was a red-cheeked man who loved children generally, and was pleased to see another one coming down the stairs.
“Daddy,” she said, “Barnaby’s being stupid.”
“Is he?” Benedict filleted out a disc and put it to one side. “Well, boys are a bit stupid, don’t you think?”
“He said he wouldn’t get dressed. He said Mummy was his servant. Mummy said she was going to tell Mr. Masters.”
“Did she now?” Benedict gave a bark of laughter. “Did she really?”
“Yes,” said Katherine.
“That would have been funny, don’t you think?”
Katherine did not reply. She didn’t seem to think it would have been funny. She stood beside him and waited, as if for a more satisfactory response.
“I hope she doesn’t tell Mr. Masters about me,” Benedict said. “He might give me detention.”
At this, Katherine laughed. Benedict handed her the disc he had kept out of the box.
“Let’s put this on now, shall we?” he said.
“All right,” she said. “What is it?”
“It’s a beautiful lady singing.”
> “Oh.”
She followed him into the sitting room and Juliet stood at the door. The rain fell at the window. It was so grey, so grey and unavailing! It was like sorrow: it seemed to preclude every possibility, every other shade of feeling. Benedict put the disc into the machine and the room filled with music. She recognised it as a song by Ravel. It was the Melanie Barth recording Benedict had bought last year. The sound of it brought tears to Juliet’s eyes. It was the voice, that woman’s voice, so solitary and powerful, so—transcendent. It made Juliet think she could transcend it all, this little house with its stained carpets, its shopping, its flawed people, transcend the grey, rainsodden distances of Arlington Park; transcend, even, her own body, where bitterness lay like lead in the veins. She could open somewhere like a flower. She could find a place less cramped, less confining, and open out all the petals packed inside her.
“Her French is just exquisite, don’t you think?” Benedict said to her.
He was reading the sleeve notes, where a photograph showed Melanie Barth standing in a green ball-gown on a beach, gazing out to sea. Juliet wanted to tear it from his hand, tear it and destroy it, rip Melanie with her exquisite French to shreds. Of course her French was exquisite! She hadn’t had to spend her life looking after Benedict, buying food for him, washing his clothes, bearing and caring for his children! Instead, she had thought about herself: she had brushed up her French and then she had gone down to the beach in her ball-gown.