by Rachel Cusk
But by lunchtime the wind had picked up in her. Joseph cried, and spilled things, and pounded at the back door, wanting to get out; and when Solly carried him upstairs to his bed he kicked her with his thrashing feet, so that a feeling of physical panic, of excess, drove the air from her lungs. She looked at her watch and realised that in another hour she would have to go and get the children home again. She didn’t know how she would do it. She didn’t know where she would find, in a single hour, the fortitude to get through what lay ahead. Passing the door to the spare room she stopped and laid her hand on the handle. She abjured herself not to enter: she absolutely forbade it. It would signify that she had returned to a condition of weakness, for it was an addiction in its way. Desperately she wanted not to subside again into that weakness. She thought of the girl in the threadbare jeans, and the image made something stand up in her, something that enabled her to remove her hand and proceed down the stairs. On the third or fourth stair she stopped. It was the idea of weakness, the idea of it as a steady state. It made her angry. It made her wonder what there was for her in the life she had made for herself. It made her wonder what the point was of being strong. She went back up the stairs and went in. This time she found something unsatisfying, something unavailing in Paola’s things, for they were exactly the same as before: there was nothing new, except a receipt from a shop Solly found on her bedside table. She studied it for a while, before realising it was the receipt for the bath oil Paola had bought her. It was disappointing, that she herself was starting to show up in the mysteries of the spare room. It suggested they were not mysteries after all. Suddenly she felt sickened by her own prurience. She went to her and Martin’s room and put on make-up in front of the mirror, regarding her own reflection with a sinking feeling of comfort, as though it were a reliable boyfriend she had returned to after a hopeless infatuation.
At half past four, the first seed of pain planted itself at the base of her spine and slowly branched, fire-like, all around her uterus. She leaned against the kitchen counter while at the other end of the room the children and the television revolved in a grey, indistinct mêlée of noisy contradiction. Paola returned at six o’clock to find Solly on her hands and knees on the floor while grey smoke issued from the frying pan on top of the stove.
“It has started?” she said discreetly, kneeling down beside her and placing a hand lightly on her back.
Solly nodded. Something in Paola’s manner made her want both to laugh and to cry. It was her distant femininity again, her unsullied distance from this crude business of reproduction.
“Shall I phone your husband?”
“He knows,” Solly said. “He’s stuck in traffic.”
Paola snatched the frying pan from the stove with a look of determination, as though it were a barking dog she were facing down.
“My mother’s meant to be coming,” Solly added. “Only she doesn’t seem to be in.”
“I will begin with this,” Paola said. “For the children, no?”
When Solly next looked, the children seemed to be sitting at the table eating. Paola was playing a game with them involving three overturned cups and speaking to them in Italian. They observed her politely. The scene looked miniature and somehow idyllic, as though Solly were watching a film about an Italian family who had overcome various trials, or were about to embark on them. When she looked again they had gone. She looked at the clock—half an hour had passed. All that time she had been on her hands and knees on the kitchen floor while a few feet away the children ate their supper. How funny it was! Paola returned.
“Your husband phoned,” she said. “He is still late.”
Slowly Solly got to her feet. Somehow, another half an hour had passed.
“I must put the children to bed,” she said.
Paola laughed.
“They are already asleep,” she said.
“Oh!”
“Shall I phone the hospital?”
“Not yet,” Solly said. “They don’t like you to come in early.”
Paola shrugged. “As you want.”
“Really, they don’t. They try to send you home again.”
Paola had opened her cupboard and was searching amidst the packets and jars.
“Sit down,” she said. “I will bring you a herbal remedy.”
Solly wanted to remain standing. A feeling of terrible constraint choked her throat. Why should she have to submit to this stranger, now of all times? Why, in her hour of greatest need, should she be brought to heel by the eternal requirement that she be polite? Paola set a bowl of steaming water on the table. Solly felt that if she had to breathe in that steam she would suffocate.
“Please,” Paola said tersely, pulling out a chair.
Solly sat down. She put her head over the bowl and breathed in the most consoling fragrance imaginable. It was like a projection of her inner state, like something she had invented herself.
“It helps, no?” Paola said.
“Oh!” said Solly, delirious with release.
“My mother gave this to me before my son was born.”
Solly lifted her dripping face.
“Where is your son?” she said.
“He is at home,” Paola said. “In Italy.”
A great bewildering wave of knowledge passed over Solly.
“Why is he there?” she said.
“He lives with his father,” Paola said. “That is not so strange,” she added, looking Solly in the eyes. “You think it is strange, but really it is not. He is all right. He is with his father. He is alive. He is happy that he is alive.”
Sitting there, Solly felt suddenly as though she were growing smaller. She was shrinking, diminishing, while Paola seemed large, as large as a tree, as large as a house. Beside her Solly felt small, like a child. Tears ran incontinently down her cheeks and dripped into the steaming water. She was a child and Paola was a mother: large, large as a tree, in whose shade Solly felt happy to be alive.
The baby was a girl. It was lucky, Solly thought—another boy might have sunk her. But instead, like a little podium or plinth, the baby gave her a new, higher view of the world. When she was with her, Solly remembered that she had turned against Martin and the children a little: it seemed to her to be a sort of advance, a development. She would not come down again from her plinth. She would live at that new angle to them—she was determined to. And now that the baby was born and the world’s garbage, its mixed-up good and evil, had receded from her veins, she felt rather knowledgeable and grand. All the things there were to lose she had lost giving birth to the other three. So the fourth seemed more in the way of a credit: she loved it more and cared about it less. Her head was clear, and when she closed her eyes she saw mountains and valleys and great cities, cities full of people; and she felt a part of it, really, of all that monumental life, that grandeur. One day, passing two women in the street, she heard one of them say to the other, “Apparently all you have to do is remember to lift your mouth a little at the corners.” So she tried to do that too, and found that it helped.
The spare room was under threat once Paola had left. Should they get another student? Or should they extend into it, like a great glacier moving along a valley floor and driving itself with a kind of stately violence into every cavity? Martin suggested he might find a use for it as an office. William said he was sick of sharing with Joseph and wanted a bedroom of his own. Solly stood firm. As she said to her friends, she thought of putting Dora in with the boys and renting her room out too. She might even get something for the other half of her bed, the nights Martin was in Reading.
She had a postcard from Betty in Taiwan, and a letter from Paola, who had gone back to Bologna, as she put it, for a season. She sent a piece of Italian lace for the baby, but Solly kept it for herself. She bought more bottles of the bath oil, too. These were her riches. It was a sideline, and everyone had to have one of those. One was in a sense—an Arlington Park sense—living off the fat of the land. In fact, several of her fri
ends had started letting their spare rooms out too. But it was Solly who had thought of it first.
The rain had stopped. The park stood wet in the new afternoon light, as if it had just been born.
A fresh wind was blowing, stirring the bare branches of trees, lifting old leaves and bits of litter from the grass. The sun tossed in the clouds. Light fled across the sodden grass, electric, pursued by shadows. The wind ruffled the surface of the puddles and the sun unfurled along the paths and lit their muddy creases. Tangled clumps of bushes quivered, drying, in their matted greenery. Here and there jackdaws alighted in the deserted spaces and hopped speculatively over the grass. A magpie stood impudently on a path. Now that the rain had stopped, the sound of traffic from the road that circumscribed the park could be heard; steadily it refilled the emptied air.
All day the park had lain empty, forgotten in the rain, but now people were starting to arrive. They were issuing from their cars and from their houses, from streets and side-streets, and coming purposefully down the paths. They came with their dogs and pushchairs and kites and walking sticks. They filled the paths, and as more came they started to disperse, moving out over the wet, virgin grass, seeking their own regions, so that the jackdaws were forced to spread their ragged wings and yield up their lonely territories. The magpies in their black and white and navy uniforms leapt smartly up into the trees.
It was three o’clock and the children were not yet out of school. Women pushed babies in prams along the paths. Toddlers in padded jackets rode their tricycles while their mothers walked slowly behind. An elderly couple in soft shoes went hesitantly forward into the fresh wind and lingered near the benches. A young man in an anorak flew his kite, his legs astride on the grass, his arms braced against the powerfully tugging strings as if he were holding on to the world itself. The wind filled out the cheeks of the kite and it zigzagged crazily from side to side; it struggled to escape up into the sky while the man struggled to hold on to it.
The wind blew and the trees moved their bare branches and the people moved, and the sun spilled brilliant patches of light on the grass. The women pushed their prams along the paths and the clouds sailed past overhead. The old couple sat down on a bench and looked left and right. More people were coming: people in tracksuits and white shoes, running side by side. Two lean, grey-bearded men ran past dressed in black. A girl in a tight vest and headphones ran past. A man in shorts bounded by on long, fantastically muscled legs. A fat lady pattered along behind, her delicate feet barely leaving the ground. A woman with hair cut in steel-grey waves marched in step with her husband: they flung out their elbows, conversing in indignant tones. A young woman on rollerblades propelled a pram along the path and the couple moved aside, still conversing.
On the grass the man struggled valiantly with his kite. A tall, drooping girl with a melancholic face loped past him, gasping. The man in shorts came round again and the old man on the bench looked at his watch.
The mothers were taking their children to the swings. They walked slowly along the far edge of the park, in abstracted pilgrimage behind the tricycles. Against the blowing, tossing sky their dark forms moved steadily with a kind of processional grandeur. The wind lifted their hair and the sun raked them with waves of electric light. In the distance the playground looked miniature. The tiny shapes of children in red and yellow and blue went back and forth on the swings. The see-saw went up and down. Children climbed the ladder and went down the slide. Slowly the procession moved towards the clockwork mechanism of the playground.
The man in shorts came round again. The old man consulted his watch.
“Fifty-five seconds,” he said to his wife.
Suddenly, from amidst the bushes, a great dog appeared on the path. It stood proudly silhouetted in its clipped black fur, its tail erect. A woman came behind it and flung a stick out over the grass, and the dog sprang away after it. From every side of the park more dogs came: little cantering dogs, big golden dogs with fountains of hair, messy spaniels with muddy, matted coats, tiny prancing dogs, dogs that sniffed the ground and dogs that galloped wildly over the grass. They ran round in circles and figures of eight, chasing, skidding, lifting their legs against the tree trunks, diving after sticks and rolling on their backs. Round and round they ran, full of abundant, senseless life, making crazy patterns on the wet grass. People came after them, holding leads and sticks and balls, calling. They came in jackets and scarves, and they walked in straight lines that the dogs scribbled all over. Their voices filled the rinsed air.
“Angus! Angus, come here!”
“Daisy!”
“Bella, here, girl! Bella! Bella, heel!”
“Fritz! Fritz!”
“Dai-see!”
In the playground, the women did not call.
They pushed their children back and forth. They moved self-consciously, red-cheeked, the wind whipping their hair. They seemed confusedly disconsolate. It was as if they couldn’t decide what they were. They felt stiff and clumsy amidst the swings and the see-saw, yet their feelings were new and raw, like the feelings they supposed their children to have. Pushing their children back and forth they seemed to be remaking the world, building it again to exclude themselves, hammering it closed with the rise and fall of the see-saw. What would become of them? Where would they go, with the world closed to them? What would they do with their bodies that felt so stiff and clumsy, now that the future had rehoused itself in children clad in red and yellow and blue? Little piles of dried leaves lay everywhere, like piles of shorn hair. A fence stood around the playground to keep the dogs out, the mad charging dogs with their streaming tails. Oh, to be an animal! To be a mad kinetic creature tumbling forward through life, running, rolling, sniffing, charging over the grass streaming fountains of hair! The wind lifted the piles of leaves and whirled them around. The children went back and forth.
A little boy fell over into the wood chippings around the swings and stood up bellowing, bits of wood clinging to his coat, his face smeared with dirt and mucus.
“Oh dear,” his mother said, kneeling heavily in the wood chippings. “Oh dear, oh dear.”
She rose with the boy in her arms, and wood chippings stuck all over her trousers. She patted him and brushed off his clothes.
“What shall we do now?” she said. “Shall we go down the slide?”
The swings went back and forth like the pendulums of little clocks.
It was half past three and the older children were coming out of school. In their uniforms they trailed after their mothers across the park, eating apples and chocolate bars. They ambled along the paths with their flapping coats hanging down their backs and their arms free. They moved in great uniformed knots. They walked along unconsciously. Some of them shoved and chased each other. A few rode bicycles or scooters. They were carefree, unaware, yet somehow stilted in their uniforms, marked out. A boy kicked a stick towards his sister and she picked up a big handful of dried leaves, red-faced, and tried to throw them back. The handful of leaves exploded impotently and fluttered over her hair, over her shoulders. The boys shoved each other and ran around the benches.
Two mothers walked ahead of them, talking. They wore smartly buttoned coats. Their hair was cut short and firmly styled. Their arms were full of schoolbags. Sometimes they stood, talking, and waited for the children to catch up. Now and then a runner overtook them in white shoes, moving swiftly out over the grass. Though there was no need to, the women in their coats moved aside a little to let the running people past. Their children blocked the path in sprawling, ambling groups, and the runners had to overtake them anyway on the grass, but still the women moved aside, talking, their heads erect, their eyes scanning the horizon. They did it as a form of gesture. They were like politicians: they understood the ways of the world but they had become inactive in it. Their physical life was a kind of shorthand. They moved aside to indicate their own awareness, and their powerful knowledge of life, at whose centre was the realisation that nothing could be fundament
ally changed.
“Leave it, Freddie,” one of them called to her son, who had flung himself on another boy on the grass and was tearing up the green blades and throwing them in his face. “I said, leave it alone.”
The boys rolled over so that now the other one was on top. In turn he ripped up handfuls of grass and crushed them in his victim’s face. The woman tutted.
“Why waste my breath?” she said.
The other one rolled her eyes. “Sometimes you think you might as well not be here, don’t you?”
They kept their faces slightly turned away from each other as they talked, their eyes scanning the horizon.
“Dan’s away in Paris all week.”
“Is he? It’s all right for some.”
“He’s filming again.”
“Is he?”
“They were there for about six weeks earlier in the year, but they’ve had to go back because they forgot to film the Eiffel Tower.”
The other woman snorted. “That was clever.”
“It’s mad, isn’t it? I’m like, you know, just let me organise this. Just stand back and let me do it. You stay at home with the kids, and I’ll sort out Paris.”
“You feel like you could, don’t you? They act like it’s so difficult, but half the time you’re thinking, you know, I could do that.”
“I’ll do Paris, the tower, everything, and I’ll do it in half the time.”
A runner passed and they moved aside a little.
“Richard’s always going on these conferences where nobody seems to even know what they’re meant to be talking about. I say to him, you know, what do you actually do? What do you actually achieve? I think they go just to stay in the hotel and get pissed in the bar.”
“Well, why not, I suppose.”
“I suppose. It’s a bit mad, though. Even Richard admits it’s a bit mad.”
“Freddie, get off the grass! I said get off the grass! You’re getting wet!”