Arlington Park

by Rachel Cusk

  Oh, it was vexing, vexing, this trap of sex! Never, never did she feel in life the sense of recognition, the companionship, the great warm fact of solidarity that she found between the covers of a book! Sometimes she could get near it, that warm spot, here in the library on a Friday afternoon: she could crank them up, these girls, get them speaking her language. But it was an effort, a great performance, a show she put on just to make them act for an hour as if she and they did speak it, the same language. She wondered whether the books she loved consoled her precisely because they were the manifestations of her own isolation. They were like little lights in a wilderness, a moor: from a distance they seemed clustered together, multitudinous, but close up you saw that miles and miles of empty blackness separated them.

  The girls were murmuring again.

  Juliet opened her copy of Wuthering Heights where she’d marked the page.

  “‘I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas,’” she read in a clear, carrying voice. “‘They’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.’”

  She put the book down. They were looking at her, all of them, like a field of flowers.

  “Who says that?” she said. “Do you remember?”

  Murmuring, they conferred.

  “Catherine Linton,” one of them said.

  Juliet sat back in her chair and folded her arms and crinkled her brow to denote perplexity.

  “What do you think she meant by it?” she said. “They ‘changed her ideas.’ They ‘altered the colour’ of her mind. What do you think she means?”

  She remembered the cockroach. The cockroach had altered the colour of her mind. It had stained her with its brown, nauseating tint. She had cut off her hair and still it was there, its legs stirring in the roots. She scratched her head and felt the little amputated tufts, the absence.

  A girl called Tiffany put up her hand.

  “Well, you know when you have dreams?” she said, in a little breathless voice, showing the intricate metalwork on her teeth. “And sometimes you get, you know, confused? And you’re not sure whether what happened in the dream really happened?”

  “She means that she has visions,” interposed a clever, rather overweight girl called Harriet Fox. “She’s saying that her dreams reveal things to her that alter her perception of ordinary life.”

  Juliet wondered if Harriet Fox ever had visions. She supposed there was no reason why not.

  “I never dream,” said someone. “Never.”

  “Everybody dreams,” Harriet said. “You just don’t remember them.”

  “I don’t! I swear!”

  “When I was little I used to sleepwalk,” someone else said. “My parents used to have to lock all the doors to keep me in. Once, in the middle of the night, I got out and went to the next-door neighbours’ house and got into their bed.”

  Everybody laughed. There were hoots and squeaks and then a great outbreak of murmuring. They did so love to talk about themselves. She supposed it was because they had come so recently to consciousness. They were what was happening in the world: they were the latest, the news.

  She decided to give up on dreams.

  “What do you think the book’s about?” she called out.

  Immediately there was silence.

  “It’s about love,” said a girl Juliet didn’t really know, a new girl. Her name was Rosa. She was pale and thin and freckled, with protuberant teeth.

  “Is it?” Juliet said, pantomiming surprise. “Who loves whom?”

  “Heathcliff loves Cathy,” said Rosa. “And Cathy loves Heathcliff. But she marries Edgar Linton.”

  “Why would anyone love Heathcliff?” Juliet scowled. “He’s horrible, isn’t he?”

  “He’s sexy,” said one of the sixth-formers, Sara Pierce. She looked around at them all unrepentantly. “In the film he’s really sexy.”

  “I preferred the other one,” said someone else. “What’s his name?—Edgar. He’s really nice.”

  There was a flurry of protestations and avowals concerning the two actors. Juliet looked out the window. The sky was grey. The light was ebbing from it, ebbing, standing back to let the darkness come.

  “Heathcliff’s a bastard, isn’t he?” she said over the noise. “He hangs Isabella’s dog and throws a knife at her. He turns Hareton into a delinquent. He goes around threatening to kill everyone.”

  “Bastards are sexy,” Sara Pierce unerringly declared.

  “What’s sexy about them?”

  Sara gave an insolent little shrug.

  “What’s sexy about bastards?” Juliet asked again. She hoped Mrs. Shaw wasn’t anywhere close. She imagined her outside the door, listening, doing her tucking motions at speed.

  “They make you think you can’t get them,” said Sara.

  “And that’s sexy, is it?”

  Sara shrugged again. “Yeah.”

  “Why does Heathcliff do it, anyway?” Juliet asked. “Why does he do all these horrible things?”

  “He’s angry,” Harriet said.

  “Why’s he angry?”

  “Because when he was a child they didn’t treat him properly.”

  “That’s right. And why didn’t they?”

  “Because he was different.”

  “Exactly,” Juliet said. “We don’t like it when people are different, do we? We like everybody to be just the same.”

  There was murmuring.

  “Take this class,” Juliet said. “Take all of you. You’re all white. You’re all pretty well off, or you wouldn’t be here. You’re all the same, really, aren’t you?”

  “You’re white,” Sara Pierce observed.

  “They wouldn’t employ me if I wasn’t,” Juliet told her.

  It was true; but all the same, it was excessive. The girls looked confused. More than that, they looked embarrassed. They all stared down into their laps, or fiddled with their hair. She imagined them going home, telling their bored, avid parents. Mrs. Randall says we’re all the same. Mrs. Randall says we’re all white. Mrs. Randall says you have to be white, or you won’t get a job. She thought of Mrs. Walker-Jay, down in the hall with her dates like the dates on a tombstone. She saw her icy, penetrating eyes. She hadn’t meant to go down this road. She hadn’t meant to go that way at all!

  “What I’m trying to say,” she said, “is that to understand a man like Heathcliff, you’ve got to understand what it’s like to be different.”

  “Like black?” Tiffany said.

  “Exactly,” Juliet said.

  “Or disabled,” said Harriet.

  “Exactly!”

  “Some people get bullied for being different,” said Rosa.

  “Exactly. Heathcliff got bullied for being different. They called him a Gypsy.”

  “In the film he’s white,” said her curse, Sara Pierce.

  “Well, in the book”—Juliet held it up—“he’s dark-skinned. More to the point, he’s an orphan, a street child. Mr. Earnshaw finds him in Liverpool, on the streets, and brings him home.”

  There was more murmuring. In a moment she would call the interval and make coffee. They always liked that. It lifted them, and made them come the next time.

  “What other ways are there of being different? What does being different actually mean?”

  “It means not being the same as everyone else.”

  “Does it? Is that all it means?”

  There was silence.

  “Do you think it might mean,” said Juliet, “not doing what’s expected of you?”

  She looked around at them all. When had she not done exactly what was expected of her? In the sixth form, before her exams, her father had promised to give her a hundred pounds if she got straight As. For him it was just a curious form of gambling, really, but it egged her on. A hundred pounds! It had seemed enough to buy freedom itself. She had imagined freeing herself from her parents. She had imagined herself freed, of human relationships
themselves.

  She had got her straight As, but somehow the cheque had never materialised. She felt sure that if she had lost the wager her father would have wasted no time in referring to the hundred pounds he was sadly unable to give her. But now that she had her As—well, what more did she want? Was she greedy?

  “Take Emily Brontë,” she said. “Take the Brontë sisters.”

  She sensed a little uprush of resistance from the circle of girls. There was the slightest rolling of kohl-lined eyes. Was Mrs. Randall off again? Was she going to lecture them again, about how awful it was a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago—anyway, long before any of them, including her, were born—to be a woman?

  “There they sat, in that cold parsonage, up on that rainy, windswept hill. It was the smallest, coldest, bleakest place imaginable. The graveyard stood right outside—they were surrounded by death! Their mother had died, and two of their sisters. Their father was a cold, puritanical man. Once,” she told them, “a family friend gave the girls a present of some boots, made of pretty-coloured leather. Their father took them and threw them all in the fire.”

  The girls found that, at least, alarming.

  “Why did he do that?” asked Sara Pierce.

  “He thought they would make the girls vain,” Juliet said.

  There was murmuring.

  “That was, like, so vicious?” said Tiffany.

  “God, I’d go mad if my dad did that!”

  She recalled reading somewhere that Patrick Brontë had furthermore ripped to shreds a dress of his wife’s, some years before. It was a valuable dress, from before her marriage. It was the only lovely thing she possessed. She had kept it locked in a chest upstairs. He had taken the key and cut it to pieces with a pair of scissors. Oh, he was a murderer, all right.

  “Who’d have expected those girls,” she said, “to write three of the finest novels in the English language?”

  He’d taken the key and cut it to pieces with a pair of scissors. She’d always, somehow, identified herself with one or another of the sisters, with Emily or Charlotte. Now, though, she found that it was with the mother that her sympathies lay. Their mother, whose dress was ripped to shreds, who did not write one of the finest novels in the English language. Instead, she had died, murdered—there was no harm in calling a spade a spade—by her husband. It was left to the daughters to avenge her, to break free. It was left to the daughters to make their mark on the indifferent world.

  She thought of the scissors tearing through the cloth. The hairdresser’s scissors had been cold on the back of her neck. They had snipped and snapped all round her, round her ears and eyes, round her throat.

  “Wuthering Heights is not a book about love,” she said to them. “It’s a book about revenge.”

  It was the sixth-formers who had the coffee, really. The younger ones just had the biscuits. Juliet asked them about the film, which she hadn’t seen, and let them chatter on. She handed them their cups. She watched as they luxuriated a little, stretched like little cats in the steam that curled around their faces. They liked it when she served them. In serving them, she saw, she was reminding them of their mothers.

  “Thank you,” said Sara Pierce, closing her eyes for an instant, smiling a satisfied little smile.

  “Thank you,” said Harriet Fox, a little startled, a little severe.

  Of their mothers, who over the years had filled them in with countless acts, like countless dabs of paint applied to a portrait. Their mothers had coloured them, shaded them, rounded them out. Each of them, each woman, had felt the sense of her own artistry as she dabbed away with her brush. Each of them had felt herself to be an artist, creating this girl, this daughter. Over the years, steadily, painstakingly, each of those mothers had transferred her soul, had lifted it from her breast, had transferred it little by little in dabs of paint. Now they waited in cars with the engines running, empty, voided, applying lipstick in the rear-view mirror to their wrinkled mouths.

  Was that what Juliet would be, one day? Empty, all poured out into Katherine, into Benedict and Barnaby? Dead, yet living? It was a quarter to five. The library was filling with purple light. It was the edge, the very edge of evening. It was the time when one thing became another: a boundary was crossed, a modulation occurred. A feeling gripped you, gripped you in your soul and hauled you over. As a student this was the time she used to love, this time of dusk, with its deep, involving modulations. She would sit in the university library and watch it happen, the passage of time, the change of one thing into another; and she would feel reconfigured, carried over into the next thing, a part of it all. This library, the school library, was similar but smaller, miniature somehow, like a library in a doll’s house. It made her feel that she had grown, or it had shrunk, she wasn’t sure which. It was like a representation of her distant past. It was, in a way, a little sad: sad in the way Katherine’s outgrown clothes were sad, or Barnaby’s discarded toys. She looked at the books on their little shelves and they seemed to urge her back on herself, to tell her to get out, get out and live while she could.

  Sara Pierce was looking at her with black-rimmed eyes over her coffee cup.

  “Why did you cut it, then?” she said.

  She had pulled her shirt-cuffs over her hands and wrapped the hands around the cup. She was perched on the edge of one chair and her feet were on another. Her knees were pulled up to her chin. It was a posture they liked, these sixth-formers. It was suggestive of a sort of grand reluctance to make contact with the brutal surfaces of the world. Juliet had probably sat like that herself at one time. But she didn’t any more.

  “Why not?” she said cheerfully, looking at Sara Pierce’s feet in their ballet slippers. Sara Pierce was the highest practitioner of the art of the ballet slipper. She had scuffed them and trodden them down until she could not really be said to be wearing shoes at all.

  Sara Pierce sipped. “You must have had a reason,” she said.

  “I was bored of it,” Juliet said.

  Sara raised her eyebrows sceptically and sipped again. “What, you just suddenly got bored? After all this time?”

  Put like that, it did seem a little irrational.

  “That’s what happens when you’re my age,” Juliet said. “You suddenly get bored.”

  Sara looked sceptical again. It seemed she was trying to decide whether she should care if that was what you did or not.

  “You realise you’re waiting for something,” Juliet said, “that’s never going to happen. Half the time you don’t even know what it is. You’re waiting for the next stage. Then in the end you realise that there isn’t a next stage. This is all there is.”

  “So you start having things done to your hair,” Sara said, so scornfully that she appeared, in fact, to be well acquainted with this phenomenon. “Or you get plastic surgery. And you start obsessing about the house so that no one’s allowed to do anything in case they mess it up. You’re like, you know, why do they have to eat? It just makes a mess. Why do they have to change their clothes? Why don’t they just wear a kind of plastic suit? Why do they have to come home at all? Why don’t they just go and stay in a hotel?”

  Juliet gave her a businesslike smile.

  “Well,” she said, “let’s hope you don’t end up like that.”

  “I won’t!” Sara spat. “No way. I’m not even going to have children. I’m going to live on my own. And I’m never, ever getting married. Marriage is just another word for hate.”

  Well, there you are, Juliet thought.

  After they’d gone she put all the tables back and all the chairs, and she took the cups out on her tray. She’d managed to get them going in the second half. She’d got them thinking, about the fair-skinned, lucky Lintons and the angry Heathcliff. She’d got them thinking about revenge. One day they would rise up, the outcasts, the unjustly treated, and smite it down, smite it all down where it stood. She hoped these girls knew which side they were on. She hoped they’d be careful.

  She went
down the stairs, down into the hall, past Mrs. Walker-Jay. She called goodnight to a crop-haired woman left in the office. She went out into the darkened, empty grounds. It was just past five o’clock: the sky was violet and black, bruised, swimming with clouds. A last faint gauze of light hung over everything. The grounds stood petrified in their stillness. She recalled that they were going to the Lanhams’, she and Benedict. She wondered what it would be like. She thought of Christine, and what she would say. How are you?

  It was strange: it didn’t really mean much to her, this school, this place, this suburb with its streets and shops and park, these people she knew. Yet she was filled suddenly with a sense of possibility. All she needed was the chance of her Friday afternoons, to step aside for a moment, to take a single step away and look out, look up. Then she saw beauty: she saw the world not filtered through her veil of anger but as it was. Could she not tear down this veil of anger? Could she not bend them a little, these rules, this rod of marriage? Might that not be her single achievement, her masterpiece? To say to Benedict, I cannot go on as we are. We have to change things, just a little.

  You had to love someone, to say that. You had to be prepared to give, in order to ask for something in return.

  She passed through the gates and out into the street. The park lay before her in the deepening dusk. She could see a few huddled figures hurrying on the paths. The park seemed to be sinking into a dark sleep. It seemed to be folding in on itself. Then suddenly Juliet saw, rising from the dark folds, rising from the trees, a pair of swans. They were flying side by side, throats outstretched, beneath the descending night. Their bodies were a pale, unearthly white; together they flew in a kind of ecstasy, lifting themselves from the shadows with their slow, labouring wings. Juliet watched them. She watched their glimmering forms fly through the dark. Side by side they flew, beautiful and alive, exulting.

  At six o’clock, when the last bruised light of afternoon had ebbed away and blackness stood at the windows, Dom Carrington opened his front door.