by Rachel Cusk
“Are you sure?” Clara said.
“Of course I’m sure. It doesn’t matter.”
“But it’s clean,” Clara said.
She tried to locate the statute which Clara seemed in fear of violating, but couldn’t. Had she ever told them they couldn’t wear clean clothes? Had she given them the impression, as Clara’s face seemed to indicate, that if they wore clean nightdresses without asking her she would do something unpredictable?
She said, “What’s wrong with a clean nightdress?”
Clara appeared reasonably unable to answer this question. She gave a quick little smile and pulled the nightdress over her head. When her face came through the hole she twisted her head about brightly, like a periscope. Then she thundered off to her room. The next time Maisie looked, Dom was standing at the bathroom door.
“I’m getting ready,” she said.
He looked at his watch. She realised that he was still in a play.
“I’ll read them a story, then, shall I?”
“It’s not, you know, roadworks. I’m not diverting traffic here. I’m just putting on some eyeliner.”
“I wish I could wear eyeliner,” he said obscurely. He crossed the landing to Clara and Elsie’s room.
“You could change out of your suit,” she said. “We’d all feel much safer.”
She brushed her hair and put on different clothes. When she went into the girls’ room, Elsie lifted her rosebud face and said, “You look beautiful, Mummy,” and Maisie felt strangulated, almost overcome by the fear of falsity and death, of dying without the truth having been unearthed and allowed to prevail; without justice having been done to her obscured and muffled soul. She wanted to feel cold, wet rain on her face and soft grass under her feet, and to hear sounds that were not the sounds of cars passing on the other side of the windows along Roderick Road.
“You do,” Dom said formally, bobbing his head, “look lovely.”
She sailed down the stairs like a galleon, like a great ship of war, past the snake that lay stuffed beside the skirting board and reminded her of her own roiling, delirious volatility, past the tangled pile of dead clothes, and into the hall, where she was arrested by the sight of Dom’s briefcase leaning, collapsed, against the wall. It was a scuffed brown leather satchel with brass clasps. It had belonged to his grandfather, a lawyer and amateur poet, back in the warm, liberal vaults of his family history. Nothing survived from Maisie’s ancestry: her family past was like a meadow on which her parents had built the monolithic modern structure of their marriage. But Dom had lots of things: furniture, pictures, a first edition of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories—things which suggested he had arisen not out of particular wealth or significance but out of layers of love, of care. The first evening they had spent together, Maisie was waiting for him in the dusk outside Covent Garden tube station, bent over tying her shoelace, and that briefcase had manifested itself before her eyes. He had flung it down on the pavement next to her as if it were the sign of himself, and when she stood up he had clasped her in a great hug in the warm violet light of that summer evening.
Oh, how she had loved him! How she had loved him! It was a torrent of love, of rightness and recognition: his beauty and rightness, the unspoilt feeling of him, his beautiful slanting eyes—he was like something that had come down from the highest mountain-top of her being. And it was so hard to tolerate the intrusion of time, which emptied itself into them like a sewer into a running river, which cast its litter and lumber, its detritus, upon them; it was so hard to go on from what had been sufficient, from that moment in the dusk, from what was beautiful, without destroying it! She touched his briefcase with her fingers and tears surged to her eyes, as though he were dead or absent when he was merely in the room above, reading to their daughters in his socks. How could she feel this grief, this melancholy, when that was how things were? She wondered whether, if they had never set foot on the path that had led them here, to Roderick Road, they might have survived in that evening, that moment in the purple light of Covent Garden; whether they could have lived in it, like strange flowers in a hothouse. They could just have gone on and on, and perhaps even had Clara—she wouldn’t have spoiled the symmetry of things really, the line. But Elsie! What about Elsie? She couldn’t live without Elsie—Elsie was her root, her past self! And then living with two children in the churn of London, the great rotating machine, flogging themselves across the city and back in order to work, always living their lives neck-deep in people and cars and chaos, in the thick vortex of multitudinous screaming wants …
The problem was that they had gone too far: at least if they had stayed in London she would be able sometimes to return to Covent Garden on a summer’s evening and remember. As it was, they were like a deported family with no access to the things that had brought them together: they were unhistoried, displaced. The Dom who had come down from the mountain-top now worked at a small solicitors’ firm in Arlington Park, and he did so at her urging. As for her, she did three slumberous days a week at a local post-production company that got a lot of wildlife documentaries, in which the world was made to seem as though no one had ever lived in it but the lions and the penguins, and which presumably gave unwonted succour to people who found it easier to believe that the earth was vigorous and miraculous than that their own depthless, costly existences were wrecking the place. The people she worked for would put the snow back on Mount Kilimanjaro for the duration of a shoot. They wouldn’t think there was anything strange about it at all.
And what had she done it for? For what? Because she too wanted to spend, she too wanted to destroy! Her ancestry was in her, after all: she’d wanted to cash in luck and love and see what she got for them—she’d wanted to trade them in, for something easy, for the ride! She had this idea that life in a place like Arlington Park would reveal her to herself, would show her who she really was; when in fact it had merely told her that she was only what she strove to be, what she had the guts and the good sense to go after. She had thought that if she could just put something away from herself, force it off like a fallen beam she was pinned under, then she would feel free: a lot of people thought that, though her husband wasn’t one of them. He wouldn’t have moved an inch if she hadn’t borne him along with her. She thought of him as something very valuable, in a glass case: a case she had shattered, so that he went everywhere unsheathed, unprotected, and having lost his context, it was hard to know what qualities to ascribe to him. She feared she had damaged him, so that she could no longer love him; that was why she wept beside his briefcase.
Her parents owned a villa in a new development in Portugal, a snorting four-wheel-drive Volvo, and a house in a Leicestershire village whose grounds were so saturated with weed killer that no birds sang in the trees. They didn’t think they were destructive: they thought they were admirable, and that the only reason they might be criticised was because people envied them. It was another tenet of the manifesto. Even the taxman envied them—that was why he took their money. They were delighted with Maisie’s move to Arlington Park and they feared it: the two notions stood opposite each other, on two precipices divided by the gorge of failure. They liked the idea of Dom and Maisie being devolved away from the centre, the hub, to a place where nothing was likely to happen to them of which Maisie’s parents might be forced to be jealous. They wanted them kept down, but they certainly didn’t want them to go under. With their canny, assessing eye they saw the possibility that life in Arlington Park might provoke all kinds of disorder: anomalous things that were hard to explain, hard to find a place for. There was the house, for a start. Although it was charming in a cottagey, bohemian kind of way, Maisie’s parents did not mistake it for a place where people ought actually to live. And why had they come to Arlington Park at all, if not to provide their children with a garden? Then: it was certainly a shame that Dom had taken a cut in salary and given up his partnership—but did Maisie really need to work, with the children still so small? Arlington Park itself was ra
ther nice, though: quiet and green and prosperous and, as her father noted, full of good, expensive cars.
She wiped her eyes and went into the kitchen, as she did several times each day, in order to walk once around it and then go out again. She always expected to find something, there at the furthest point of the house: it was like the end of a pier, where seagulls might wheel and waves fling themselves at the harbour wall, and you waited for some clear thought to come to you over the open sea. She saw her reflection in the black window full of glare and gave herself, her life’s companion, a strange, encouraging salute. The light adhered bleakly, slickly, to the folds of her face and clothes and then lost itself in a background of fathomless darkness, so that she seemed to be illuminated in the frame of the window out of a lowering, incipient nothingness. It was like a portrait of death; like a picture an artist might paint of himself in an access of terror and despair and self-knowledge. She felt she could have supported this nothingness, could have borne it and swallowed its dark information, if only there was something else, something elsewhere: if there was snow on Mount Kilimanjaro, for instance, she could have claimed her portion of insignificance and gone quietly in the knowledge that a righteous world of nature, of truth, survived her own incompetence.
But she was not insignificant: nobody was any more. And to fail at life when there was nothing beyond your living of it, no intransigent reality to revolve on and on in its mysterious justice! When flowers bloomed crazily in mid-winter and lakes dried up and icebergs melted, when forests died and living creatures were poisoned, made chemically hermaphrodite, when the whole well of life was poisoned, tainted, stained—
The doorbell rang. Katie, the babysitter, stood on the doorstep, her mobile phone clutched to her ear. She gave a little wave to Maisie with her ringed hand as she advanced herself over the threshold.
“Are you?” she said.
She was dressed as though for a summer’s evening on a beach. Her legs were bare and she wore turquoise flip-flops with thick rubber platform soles. She wore a short pink pleated skirt and a pink vest with the word Babycakes written in pink sequins across its straining chest. Between the skirt and the vest her midriff disclosed itself, plump, white, and unblemished.
“Do you?” she said.
An aura of scented hot air gusted from Katie’s trenchantly straightened blond hair. It had the starchy smell of ironed clothes. It was dizzying, Maisie thought, to estimate the amount of time Katie spent with her hairdryer. Her hair hung in a weirdly synthetic curtain, out of which her face looked with a kind of suspicious inquisitiveness. Maisie imagined her going over it again and again with the hot shrieking instrument, as though she were painstakingly grafting sterility on to the world, or administering some generalised punishment for waywardness.
“Will you?” she said. “Have you? Are you?”
Maisie stood with her arms folded and looked up the stairs. She could hear Dom moving around their bedroom and the rattling sound of drawers being opened and closed. Beside her Katie seemed to be moving towards a conclusion.
“All right, then,” she said. “All right, then. Okay, then. All right. All right.” She kept her head stationary throughout this string of affirmatives, as though mindful of her hair. “All right, then. Bye. Bye. Bye.”
She held the phone away from her, looked at it as though to see if it was going to tell her anything else, and switched it off with an emphatic pink enamelled finger.
“Hi,” said Maisie. “How are you?”
This question appeared to precipitate Katie instantly into dark thoughts.
“I’m not too bad,” she said bitterly. “I suppose I’ve been worse.”
She hitched her little sausage-like handbag further up under her hairless armpit.
“Did you walk here?”
“My boyfriend dropped me,” she said. She laughed mirthlessly. “He dropped me at the end of the road. He won’t drive down here because it’s too narrow. He says he can’t turn round.”
Maisie shrugged and said, “At least it wasn’t raining.”
“Horrible, isn’t it?” said Katie mysteriously. “I hate this weather. It gets me down. I like sun.”
“I think everyone likes sun.”
She wanted to tell Katie that when she held her hairdryer near her head she was transmitting radiation directly into her brain. Katie made a little moue with her small pale mouth, as though she doubted anyone liked the sun as much as she did, or had any right to.
“We’re going to Gran Canaria next month,” she said, adding a d to “Gran” and pronouncing “Canaria” heavily, like “malaria.”
“That’s nice,” said Maisie.
“It should be. My boyfriend’s dad owns a bar and some holiday flats out there.”
Destroyers! Maisie thought. Wreckers!
“It’s the third time we’ve gone out,” Katie said. “I’m really looking forward to it.”
Maisie said, melancholically, “It’s nice to have something to look forward to.”
“It’s the food I can’t stomach,” Katie said. “I don’t really like Spanish food. And the people are quite chippy. I mean, it’s not like it’s the best place in the world. It’s not like they’ve got white beaches or anything. In some places the sand is actually black. They get a lot of sun, but the beaches aren’t anything much. Not like in the Caribbean. In the Caribbean the beaches are actually white. I’d really like to go there. My boyfriend doesn’t want to, though. He says he wouldn’t like the people.”
“What people?”
“The natives. You know, the people who live there. He just thinks he wouldn’t like them.”
Katie deposited her white form on the sofa and placed her hair behind her shoulders. One day she would die, would leave this place with her piece of it, her bloodied chunk, gripped in her painted clasp. She met Maisie’s eyes meaningfully with her small, round, blue look.
“What I say is, you can’t let other people hold you back,” she said.
Maisie heard her husband’s tread on the stairs; she felt him coming towards her, as though out of the core of some unseen fire or furnace, where he was remade for her, manufactured again and again out of his absences. She felt an almost unbearable sense of his reality, of his life and of the task, her task, of keeping these representations of him together, making them continuous. That was love, that work of deciphering and interpolating and testifying: to bear witness to something in its entirety, that was love. He bounded down the stairs, ready to be himself again, ready for anything. Up for it, as Katie’s boyfriend apparently wasn’t.
“I’ll be one minute,” Maisie said.
She passed him in the doorway. He was wearing a dark-blue shirt and black trousers. He looked as stealthy as a panther. His slanting eyes followed her. He smelled clean and good. He did not look at his watch; she got away, up the stairs, and behind her she heard him say in the echoing spaces of the sitting room, “How’s it going, Katie?” and she heard Katie’s diminishing “Not so bad, I suppose.”
She went into the cluttered darkness of Clara and Elsie’s room. She looked at the twisted forms of her sleeping children. The headlights of a car passing along the road outside swept the walls with a firm, yellow shaft of light. The sound of the engine rose and died away again. Maisie stood in the centre of the room; the intrusion passed right through her, like wind through the boughs of a tree. She looked at her children in their tangled sleep and she felt that she had deceived them, that she had stolen them from their rightful homes and carried them off with her on her getaway, her flight from authority. And yet there was nothing in the world she wanted for them, nothing in the whole world except for them to live, like two stolen bars of gold in a carpet bag, within her possession. There was nothing in the world they needed, only for her to believe they belonged to her. And it was this belief, so necessary, that had marked her, as one way or another it marked everybody. It made you manifest, visible. It took away your anonymity, perhaps for ever; and wherever you went, there you st
ood, between yourself and the world.
She thought she might discuss this matter with Stephanie Sykes.
Outside, in the dark, blowing street, Dom said to her:
“What were you doing at Merrywood, anyway?”
“I wish you’d been there,” she said. “Everything would have been all right if you’d been there.”
He didn’t speak. He walked along next to her in his coat with his hands in the pockets. She looked into the lit-up windows of the houses that gave directly on to Roderick Road. She saw a man sitting in a reclining chair reading a newspaper. She saw an empty dining room, with chairs like erect ghosts around the table. She saw a woman lying on a sofa covered by a blanket, staring up at the ceiling. She saw a heavily furnished sitting room empty of life but for a little hairy dog, who jumped to his four sturdy feet and lifted his muzzle proudly when she looked in. She saw a woman holding a baby on her hip, vanishing through a doorway.
“Will it be all right?” Dom said. “At the Lanhams’?”
“I guess it will be okay,” she said. “We don’t have to worry. They have to worry.”
They walked along silently.
Dom said, “Just don’t get angry with everyone.”
Maisie thought.
“I am angry with everyone. I worry that if I don’t get angry I’ll die. So maybe I should just die. Maybe you want me to die.”
There was a pause before Dom said, annoyed, “I don’t want you to die.”
The sky overhead was big and black and billowy and heavily draped with sagging clouds; and there were no stars, just the beady red and white lights of aircraft moving in and out of the horizon, stitching their paths over the billowing purple and black; and the wind bore the sound of them to their ears, and the steady distant roar of the ring road came in great looping waves and reports. There was the smell of cooking from the houses, and of the pavement still damp in the darkness from the day’s rain, and of diesel from the road ahead, and a green, veiled smell from the park beyond that. Through a gap in the houses Maisie caught a glimpse of a little perspective that opened out, with barely perceptible drama, down the gentle slope on the other side of Roderick Road. It showed another row of houses, and another, and another, until just the roofs of the last line were visible, bristling with aerials and satellite dishes. She looked at the sky and then she looked at her shoes, at the ground they were making, the little gains they made together, one after the other in their merry servitude.