Arlington Park

by Rachel Cusk

  The door had not been opened all afternoon. The hours that had passed behind it, and the scenes that had taken place there, had elapsed so slowly and with so little expectation of interruption or rescue that Dom Carrington might have been making his entrance, miraculously and inexplicably, through a slab of granite. No one had come in and no one had gone out, since Maisie Carrington had returned to the house with her two children at half past three; and when the door opened—as though of its own accord, her husband being in possession of a key—Maisie experienced a vertiginous sense of event, of sound and change and movement, and of a strange uprushing of time, as though the whole compressed day had suddenly been uncorked and allowed to come loudly exploding out.

  In the grey, homogenous spaces of such a day—a bottled weekday that stood in its ranks of identical fives, for whose contents repetition could give you a sort of taste, and equally, or consequently, a distinct aversion—Maisie could enter a rarefied state in which she was continuously aware of the fact of her own existence. This fact was either trivial or overwhelming: either way it enveloped her and held her suspended, like a foetus in its fluids, within itself. She could spend a whole day—a whole set of days—thus ensnared, without knowing how she had been caught or when she might be released. Like a leaf borne along one minute by a rushing river and the next snagged on the tines of a fallen branch, or misled to whirl aimlessly in a marginal little pool, she remained static amidst the tumult, the continuing onrush of things close by. It struck her as quite possible, in this state, that the same random forces that had put her there might forget to retrieve her; that the day might never end and the front door never open, discharging her husband from the world through whose viscera he had been steadily making his way since nine o’clock that morning. Sometimes, when he appeared, Maisie believed that not one minute had been added to the personal aggregate of her life. At others she seemed to have lived a century since she saw him last, or retreated one: for the first half-hour or so they derived from different eras, whose manners and mores were so mutually unfamiliar that a special clarity of diction seemed to be required for communication between them to become possible. Dom would explain to her the principles of his employment at the solicitors’ firm of Salter, Dixon & Wray. She, in turn, would describe his children to him, as though he had never met them before, or as though they were something of which he might eventually be persuaded to make a considered purchase. They were like people in an advertisement, or a play: this was something Maisie had said on occasion, to break the tension. Dom did not seem to want to be in a play—or he didn’t want her to say that that was what he was in, anyway. Increasingly she thought that, after all, he did want to be in a play. He looked slightly desolate when the tension was broken, as though it were something she had dropped that he considered privately to be important. Sometimes, when he walked through the door, he looked for a second like he thought he had walked into the wrong house.

  He looked like that now: he moved his head around furtively, casting little darting glances at everything. He said:

  “What’s been happening here?”

  The overhead lights were on all around the ground floor. Their hard orange brilliance was reflected in the black uncurtained windows. The rooms—kitchen, sitting room, a room at the front, the cluttered hall where Dom stood enquiringly—had the yellowed appearance of a network of well-lit underground tunnels.

  Maisie said, “What do you mean, what’s been happening? Nothing’s been happening.”

  The direction of the light made the sitting room look as though it were listing to one side. Big, sagging bookshelves went in uneven stripes across one wall. The empty black mouth of the fireplace stood open in a frozen protest. In front of it an Indian rug lay twisted in an attitude of torment. Discarded toys made patterns over the floor like the patterns of land masses on a globe, halting where they met the obstacle of the sprawling sofa indented with craters where people had sat and eventually got up again. Maisie felt rather than saw the reality of the kitchen, whose full extent was shielded by the half-shut door. It receded from her in a long, soiled, debrisstrewn segment.

  “Where are the girls?” Dom said. He said it as he might have turned the key in the ignition a second time, having failed to start the engine with the first.

  “They’re upstairs.”

  “Oh. Everything all right?”

  “Everything’s fine.”

  “They’re just—what—playing on their own?”

  “I don’t know,” said Maisie. “I don’t know exactly what they’re doing.”

  Despite the fact that Maisie suffered, she did pity her husband in the moments of his homecoming. When he opened the door, her implication in the domestic life of the household, and his innocence of it, were each at their furthest extent: it was in those minutes that 32 Roderick Road, steeped in her presence, gave off its strongest atmosphere of sordid confinement, like an old shoe. She felt sorry for him as the first rancid wave hit his senses; she didn’t doubt that it occurred to him to wonder whether the same door that had just manifested him might make him disappear again. She imagined his nightly progress along the dark pavements, past rows of shops, beneath streetlights, through the damp, mottled air, along numberless avenues where numberless people lived, as he journeyed towards this warm den of compromise; as he unearthed it again and again, night after night, from its fundamental anonymity. Why did he bother? Why didn’t he just keep walking? Dom ducked his head and made for the stairs, passing her as she emerged from the core of the house like a hermit crab from its shell to stand at the doorway of the sitting room. Their eyes met.

  “I’ll just go up and say hello,” he said; he meant, to “the girls,” which was the collective name by which the two distinct solar systems—Clara and Elsie—that perennially revolved, star-spangled, in the centre of the black universe of Roderick Road were known to those responsible for taking care of them.

  Earlier in the afternoon Maisie had thrown Elsie’s lunch-box at the kitchen wall, where it burst like a firework and sent up a great fountain of wrappers and crumbs and sandwich crusts that pattered slowly down on the worktops. Elsie and Clara watched her do this with a certain confused admiration, until she shouted at them, “You’re ruining my life! You’re ruining my life!”—which dispelled their confusion but illuminated their small white faces dramatically with fear, so that they had clung together like children in a fairy tale before a fulminating ogre. Maisie did not recall her own mother coming out with accusations of this sort: rather, her parents had organised their resentments into scheduled episodes of authorised violence, of a dispassionate, patronising kind. Maisie had frequently been chastised with a wooden spatula whose special duties did not excuse it from the usual work of scraping the sides of the mixing bowl, manoeuvres Maisie would regard with anxiety; she had been told that she was rude, or lazy, or naughty, or spoilt, and even that final charge was levelled without a quiver from the regime, a sign that there was anyone to blame for it but herself.

  There were times, in the hours she spent with Clara and Elsie, when she believed herself to be compensating them for these small, incessant brutalities that they had neither witnessed nor, mostly, knew about, and for the unyielding atmosphere in which they had occurred, the years of her childhood that unfurled behind her like a bolt of thick, unpatterned cloth. At other times they themselves appeared to her as people who had come into the world to constrain and criticise her, to record her comings and goings from the concept of normal behaviour, as though they were small, reincarnated versions of her parents. When this happened, her soul rose up against the injustice of it: she saw herself as imprisoned for life—violent feelings poured from her in a righteous torrent, feelings that came as though from some geological past, like lava. These feelings—hot, illuminated, solidifying greyly in seconds where they happened to come to rest—spoke to her momentarily and thrillingly of her own essence. They were like great, bright discharges of power, which unfortunately could not make their way throu
gh the world in some theoretical, unbodied state. They sought a more permanent record of themselves. They sought an object—Elsie’s lunchbox—on which to make the mark of catastrophe.

  Maisie had told her children about the spatula, partly to make them feel sorry for her, and partly to provide them with a category in which to place their memories of her own delinquent outbursts. They listened with the same half-admiring expression they had worn in the kitchen this afternoon, but they seemed distinctly troubled too: she saw the realisation pass across their faces that if that had happened to Maisie, there was no reason why it couldn’t also happen to them. Maisie did not find this a particularly satisfactory response. It seemed both to disregard her feelings and to accuse her of something, which was more or less the spirit in which the original punishment had been administered.

  Now Dom was downstairs again: he said something to her as he passed through the sitting room on his way to the kitchen, where he took off his suit jacket and hung it on the back of a chair, unbuttoned his cuffs, rolled up his sleeves, and turned to the sink, like a nurse arriving at the beginning of her shift. She followed him and stood in the doorway. The kitchen was the dingiest room in the house. Everything in it—the walls, the ceiling, the cupboards and doors and window-frames—was thickly and uniformly painted the same colour, as though something terrible had happened there, something that had resulted in the walls and cupboards being indelibly stained so that someone had decided to paint them rather than clean them. Elsewhere in 32 Roderick Road the Carringtons’ possessions had leavened the sterile atmosphere of the house, but in the kitchen they could make no impression. It was here that Maisie felt most divorced from her own motives, saw her husband and children most as the strangers they occasionally were. It was here she felt most often that they were in a play, and that it was not a play she liked.

  The kitchen was like a person with whom she had tried to get on and failed: barely tried, so impatient was she to settle into her enmity with it. The Carringtons had never met the people from whom they rented the house: they had been away, for years apparently, so that to Maisie their lives had taken on a cast of failure whose roots appeared to lie here, in Roderick Road. She felt it might have been to escape the kitchen, or what they had done in it, that they concealed themselves. The room, the house, even Arlington Park itself, increasingly wore for her the lineaments of a lived past into which future possibilities were unable to intrude; of a fundamental sadness that was the unalterable relic of experience. She was so accustomed to feel the presence in herself of a power of renewal that she had been slow to sense that it was no longer there; that she now existed on a kind of loop or circuit that took her round the same places and brought her back again and again to the same things. It was not defiance but inability that explained her failure to impose herself on the kitchen: an appetite for cleanliness and order, for things to be cleared away so that they could be begun again, was simply no longer a desire she visited on her circuit. Instead, she closed the door, as though on an invalid who sickened and worsened behind it, steeped in his own germs; and that was how things remained until her husband, the nurse, came home, hung his jacket on a chair, and silently commenced his shift.

  “Guess where I went today,” she said to his back.

  He stood at the sink, his hands plunged in a ferment of water from the taps. A white drift of foam bloomed and expanded in the bowl, as though magically issuing from his fingertips. She could see his reflection in the black window in front of him. He looked creased with electric light, like a drawing of himself that had been crumpled up. She saw that he had disentangled the wreckage of plates and saucepans and cutlery in the sink and stacked everything into soiled, categorised piles on the sideboard.

  “Where?”

  “Merrywood.”

  She saw him smile in the window.

  “Did you? What were you doing there?”

  “I went with Christine Lanham, and the lovely Stephanie Sykes.”

  She wasn’t sure he’d heard her: he was making a noise with the plates. The water beat down into the sink. He moved up and down the sideboard like a member of an orchestra playing a xylophone, generating noise with gestures that articulated themselves mutely through the back of his shirt.

  Sometimes Maisie was awed and intimidated by the classical way her husband’s shirt clothed his shoulders, by his slim waist and the strainless fall of his dark-blue trousers around his hips. He looked to her like a statue: he had a lot of what she thought of as finish. He particularly looked like this in his suits, although naked his pale, fine, muscled body had it too. Most people of their age looked in their own bodies like they were carrying bags, or parcels, or sometimes even heavy suitcases, but her husband looked carefree, like a child. She saw his white neck and his fine, light-brown hair. She saw his face in the window, his wide, slanting eyes and mouth, his pointed nose and chin. His eyes were green. He was as beautiful as a girl, or a cat: she did not always think this, but when she did, he seemed to have nothing to do with her. Next to him she felt swarthy and burdened. Sometimes he looked shifty, seedy even, when he said or did the wrong thing and the mistake was smeared over his transparent surfaces. Also, when he was angry with Maisie, he got restless and guilty and petulant and spoke in a high-pitched voice, more like a hamster’s than a cat’s.

  “They went into all the shops and tried on clothes,” she said. “Then we had lunch in this restaurant that was like purgatory. It was on the top floor and it had big photographs of green fields on the walls, and windows all around so that you could see all the roads and the motorway.”

  “It sounds nice,” he said impenetrably.

  “There were all these people there. It was like lost property, but for people. I didn’t know why they were there. They looked like someone had forgotten to come and get them.”

  Dom said, casually, “They were there for the same reason you were there, weren’t they?”

  “I don’t know why I was there. I had a fight with a woman in the car park.”

  “Did you?” In the window he was not smiling. “What did you have a fight about?”

  “It was about her car. She had this stupid car. It was like a giant black stag beetle. She was this stupid little woman with dyed blond hair and gold earrings and she sat up there about ten feet above my head behind her tinted windows, driving this car like it was a Sherman tank.”

  “What did you have a fight about?” he said, a little more indulgently.

  A bubble of indignation rose into Maisie’s throat and lodged itself there. “She tried to run over Jasper.”

  “Who’s Jasper?”

  “My boyfriend,” Maisie said in a strangled voice. After a while she said, “He’s Stephanie’s son.”

  “And he’s your boyfriend?”

  “He’s three. I was joking.”

  “Why did she try to run over Jasper?”

  “How should I know? She wasn’t looking where she was going. She was sitting there having an orgasm with her seat vibrating and her foot on the pedal, feeling four litres of fuel injection from her big black—”

  “All right, all right. That’s enough.”

  “If you hit a child,” she persisted, “with one of those cars, then you’re more likely to kill them, and you’re more likely to hit them because you can’t see them, not to mention the mushroom cloud of carbon monoxide you’re spewing out getting your lazy, ignorant little arse to Merrywood just so you can indulge your other source of sexual gratification, which is fucking shopping—”

  “Did you say that to her?”

  “I said it, but she had the window shut.”

  Her husband looked as though he wished to know whether human civilisation always took this form.

  “She said some things too. I could see her mouth moving behind the glass. She looked like she’d sat on the gearstick.”

  “And what did Stephanie make of it?”

  “She didn’t particularly seem to mind that this Nazi was about to reverse over her so
n.”

  Dom had finished washing up and was now energetically drying the plates with a tea towel, which he flourished like a maitre d’.

  “No,” he said. “I can’t see her getting hysterical.”

  “She’d get pretty fucking hysterical if someone stole her hairdryer,” Maisie observed. “She’d get pretty damned jumpy if her husband’s salary didn’t come rolling in like a Pacific breaker every month, or if people stopped thinking she looked like Felicity Kendall.”

  Dom opened the cupboard and lifted the plates into it in a white celestial stack.

  He said, “It’s just that she always seems very calm.”

  A couple of months earlier, Maisie had gone away for two full weeks to stay with her sister Georgina in Edinburgh, leaving Dom to take care of the children. It had pleased her, in a malevolent way, to imagine him assuming her existence in Roderick Road: it was part of a private strategy with which she hoped to meet the bleak necessity, the onerous task, of implanting him with the uncomfortable knowledge that she could not endure the life they were making for themselves. It was a first move, a pre-emptive strike: all the time she was away, the thought that she might return to find that Dom had packed up the house and handed back the keys, declaring that he hadn’t known, that she, they, couldn’t possibly stay in Arlington Park, that thought was like a torch of hope she carried in her breast. In the event, he had taken an earnest, faintly condescending pleasure in it, as though she had asked him to learn some obscure language in her absence; for it had been her idea to leave London for this green, ruminative, inchoate suburb, and if he acted—not just then but increasingly—as though he were going along with her, as though it were not just his intention but his life’s sad purpose to master the pointless hobby of her, then whose fault was it but her own?

  Georgina had pneumonia, and children the same age as Maisie’s. She seemed to find it curious that Maisie, in a fever of emergency, had abandoned her responsibilities in order to assume a more or less identical set elsewhere: it hinted at an unstable level of dissatisfaction. It was true that Maisie believed that if she herself had got pneumonia she would die, of despair if nothing else. She was in a sense rushing to her own bedside, much as she sometimes cared for her child self through her children. Georgina took antibiotics; her husband looked after their son and daughter. There was nothing really for Maisie to do except talk, conversations punctuated by the phrase “But are you happy?” which her sister pronounced with striking, corrective regularity from the depths of her pillows, so that by the end of her stay an impression had been formed of Maisie herself as sick, enfeebled, and demonstrably astray. She wandered around Edinburgh, with its meat-smell, its hard light, its cold and invigoratingly arrogant buildings. When she returned to Roderick Road, Dom was in possession of the map of her unhappiness: he knew its tracks and paths, its features, knowledge he now called on every time she attributed some special perniciousness to the school gate, or the supermarket, or the park; he could refute her, in the very lair of her discontent.