by Rachel Cusk
“What do you want me to do?” he said.
“Just get them sitting down,” Christine said wearily. “Decide where they’re going to sit and sit them there.”
Behind her Joe was gone. She took the chicken out of the oven. The little lumps were sizzling away in their fat. They seemed full of helpless agitation: they seemed unhappy in their world of scorching heat.
“That’ll do,” said Christine, kicking the oven door shut with her heel.
Christine was sitting next to Dave, after all. Joe had positioned himself at the other end of the table, as far away from her as he could get.
“You’re not eating much,” Dave observed.
“You don’t want it, once you’ve gone to all the bother of cooking it,” she said, pushing away her plate.
“You eat it,” he urged. “Go on. It’ll do you good.”
Oh, she could have wept! Dave, so solicitous, despite having problems of his own, a seven-months-pregnant wife of his own! Since when would Joe have even noticed if the woman sitting next to him at dinner had dropped dead into her food?
“Listen to you,” she said. “Going around making sure everyone’s all right.”
“It’s lovely,” he said, chewing.
On her other side was old bandy-legs Benedict, but he had his hands full with Maisie Carrington. She didn’t know what they were talking about, but Maisie looked worried. Or perhaps she always looked like that. Christine gazed at the people talking and eating. Wasn’t it strange, to invite all these people to your house and then serve them like they’d be served in a restaurant? Why did they all have to do it? What was the point? She didn’t want to be knocking up bloody dinner for eight and then serving it. She didn’t want to be passing the butter, and clearing away the starters. She wanted to be living—living!
One minute she was looking at the back of Benedict’s head and the next he’d sort of spun around and there was his face, six inches from hers. He had a funny little tipping-up nose and two red dots on his cheeks, and his little blue eyes sparkled like tiny furious fireworks.
“Having fun?” he said.
“I was just thinking what a lot of frigging hassle it all is,” said Christine.
He gave a strange bark.
“Do you know what I mean?” she said. She upended the wine bottle over her glass so that the wine came gushing out and made a foaming whirlpool that sent a wave over the rim. “I mean, why aren’t we all dancing? Why are we sitting here like the district council discussing a frigging planning application?”
He smiled and folded his arms and looked down into the fold. He was a funny little bloke. He looked like a little elf, with his pointy ears and his red cheeks and his sparkling eyes. Where on earth had Juliet dug him up from?
“Do you know what I mean?” she said.
“I do.”
“I mean, talk about being old before your time. Why don’t we just push the table against the wall and dance?”
“I don’t know,” he said amusedly.
“What are we so frigging worried about?”
“I don’t know. Making fools of ourselves.”
Christine was amazed. “Do you think so? I don’t think it’s that at all.”
“What is it, then?”
The room rested in its destructive beauty, candlelight gilding the table laden with spoiled dishes, the smeared glasses and crumpled napkins, the scattered cutlery and discarded brown remains of food. She saw faces, intricately contoured. Darkness seemed to stand expectantly in the corners, a great expectant darkness whose relationship to the struggling, intricate light expressed itself in these faces, so that they seemed to arise from the commingling of two things, darkness and light. The faces were the manifestation of this destructive beauty: they were so intricate, so full of detail, and yet so precarious. If you blew out the candles they would be gone.
“We’re worried about what we might do,” said Christine. “And what’s the point of that?”
She looked at her husband at the other end of the table. He was talking to Dom, leaning right across Juliet Randall to do it, so that Juliet was pressed back in her chair with a tight, resigned little expression on her face, as if she was stuck in a tunnel with people always pushing past her. He looked big: he looked colossal, the block of his head on the beam of his shoulders, his arms like girders, his hands like shovels. You couldn’t get past Joe. You had to reckon with him or quit the field. She wasn’t going to get past Joe into a new field of life. She studied his blue shirt: he filled it out nicely with the beam of his shoulders. You’d have to run away, into the rotten places. You’d have to go where a stealthy, insidious rot ate its way through all the solid things. You couldn’t come up against him and win: you’d have to go elsewhere, far from Arlington Park and the colossal fact of Joe.
But what you did get from Joe was a feeling of certainty, she thought. She didn’t know what it was like to be married to a little bandy-legged elf—but with Joe you got certainty, straight up. She thought of a harbour wall with the sea hurling itself against it. Her parents took her to Lyme once, where the sea hurled itself against the Cobb and made great glittering arabesques in the air. She had thought it would come right over. They had stood there in the lee of the wall, terrified, while the sea tried to throw itself over and the spray soaked them to the skin. They had gone too far out, to where the sea was like a beast hurling itself against the wall, fighting it, fighting to get over and engulf the orderly little town that lay along the shore; and they’d had to wait to get back, wait while the spray soaked them to the skin, wait for the boom and the angry splat of water at their feet. Then they’d run a few yards and and wait again. They thought they’d never get back. They thought they were done for. That was how you got yourself swept out to sea, her father said afterwards. It was that easy.
They were all so lucky in the end, weren’t they? Lucky to be here, alive—warm and dry and alive, fed and sheltered, helping each other out when they could. And nothing was perfect. Nothing! You could eat your way through the world like rot, looking for perfection. The point was, you set yourself challenges. You worked with what you had and tried to improve it. Look at Dave and Maggie, look at Juliet: look at Maisie if you wanted, trying to make a new life for herself, giving them her own individual perspective on things. Look at Juliet, bringing her skills and qualifications to the table. Look at Maggie, just being generally inspiring, keeping herself together and inspiring them all. They all had a contribution to make, didn’t they? They all did their bit, did their best to make life interesting. And what, Christine wished to know, was life meant to be, if not interesting?
“What would you do?” the little elf Benedict said beside her. “Do you know?”
She felt confused: she wasn’t sure what he meant.
“What’s the point of all this worrying?” she said indistinctly. “Where does it get you in the end?”
He seemed to be looking at her enquiringly.
“Maisie!” she said loudly, so that Maisie jumped in her chair and turned a troubled face towards her. “What are you looking so worried for? What’s the point of it, all this worrying?”
“What do you mean?” said Maisie.
“Only that you looked like you thought the world was about to end,” Christine observed morosely.
“Sometimes I think it already has,” said Maisie, with a kind of tentative dignity. “Or our bit of it, anyway.”
“‘The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,’” said the elf. “‘The guildhalls, the carved choirs.’”
“What’s that?” said Christine. “What’s that you’re saying?”
“It’s a poem,” said the elf.
“Say it again,” said Christine. “Say just what you said then.”
The elf recited it with his head tilted slightly forward and to the side, as though the words were coming in by a very narrow thread through his ear and then going out through his mouth.
And that will be England gone
The shadows,
the meadows, the lanes
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There’ll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.
“Look at that,” said Christine, in admiration. “Aren’t you clever, knowing all that off by heart?”
The elf acknowledged her with a nod and a little smile.
“What does it mean?” she said.
“It’s about what’s beautiful being destroyed,” said the elf.
“Is it? Oh.”
“Specifically England,” said the elf. “But I suppose it could be anywhere.”
Christine considered it, there in the revolving room.
“I never understand why people get so worked up about that,” she said.
“You don’t?” The elf seemed surprised.
“You can’t live in the past, can you? Your happiness can’t depend on things staying the same. You’ve got to embrace change! You’ve got to embrace the future!”
“In that case,” the elf said, “I suppose you are the future.”
Christine liked that. He really put it in a nutshell for her. She wanted to give him her vision then and there. She wanted to explain to him the importance of steering a course. It was a combination of stewardship and navigation. You had to protect what was worthwhile, while at the same time moving forward. You had to look after what you had, while at the same time getting everything you could out of life. That was why it never did any good worrying about things that had nothing to do with you. You had to steer a course and get what you could, never forgetting what the limitations were.
She wanted to explain it to him, but she couldn’t be bothered. She was too drunk.
“We’re all building the future in our way, aren’t we?” she said instead. “There’s Joe, building the flats and offices. There’s Dave, doing his bit, making things that make life easier. There’s all us women, carrying the future generations, nurturing them, bringing them up. There’s you”—she tried to think of a polite way of putting it—“preparing them to go out into the world.”
She put her hands around the stem of her glass and tried to stay upright in her chair. What a day she’d had! What a day! She was nearly all talked out. She’d come almost to the bottom. She needed the spring of life to bubble up again, bubble up through the floorboards and fill her to the brim with tomorrow.
“What about love?” said the elf.
She thought she hadn’t heard him right. “What about it?”
“Is it important? Does it have any importance, in all this future-building frenzy of activity?”
Christine lifted her glass and saw there was nothing in it.
“I don’t know why you’re asking me,” she said.
He shrugged. “I thought you might know, that’s all.”
She put her glass down on the table and it fell on its side. She watched a last little dark drop, like a tear, run out and over the rim.
“You’ve got to love life,” she said blearily. “You’ve got to love just—being alive.”
“But how will anyone know you loved it?” said the elf.
The room took a great tilt. It turned on its axis with all its ill-fixed clutter, its plates and people and furniture, its painstaking, ill-fixed record of time. Christine righted her glass, but the room remained tilted.
“Why would anyone need to know that?” she said.
People were standing up. Suddenly there was upheaval, as though the evening had been turned over, like a clod of earth turned over by a spade. There was a kind of exhalation of the used day. People were standing up and pairing themselves, joining together like so many pairs of hands. It was beautiful, in a way, to watch them joining, clasping together like hands. She looked at the clock. It was midnight. Dave and Maggie were standing by the door and Maggie had her shawl on.
“You’re not leaving, are you?” said Christine. “Not you two! I was just about to start rolling back the rug—I was getting the music on and dancing.”
There was no music, but she danced anyway. She danced in front of them. She raised her arms above her head and snapped her fingers and moved her hips from side to side.
“Sorry!” Maggie said. She squeezed her eyes shut. “I know it’s really boring.”
“Oh come on,” said Christine, grasping Maggie’s hands and dancing.
Awkwardly Maggie danced. Self-consciously she shook back her shining hair and danced to the inaudible music. Christine shrieked with laughter. Dave looked at his watch.
“Come on, love,” he said.
“The lemon tart!” Christine exclaimed. “I forgot the lemon tart—it’s still sitting in its box in the fridge! You can’t go till we’ve had the lemon tart,” she said, spinning Maggie clumsily round in a circle so that Maggie stumbled against a chair.
“That’ll have to wait, then,” said Dave, sententious as a policeman, taking hold of Maggie’s arm.
“Oh, listen to him,” said Christine. “Listen to him being all boring and sensible. Joe, listen, I forgot the lemon tart!”
Joe was out in the hall with the others. The electric lights were on. They were getting their coats.
“I forgot my lemon tart,” she said. “It’s still sitting in the fridge.”
Joe put his arm around her.
“You’re a right handful,” he said into her ear. “A right bloody handful, that’s what you are.”
“There was I, thinking I’d be all posh with my lemon tart,” murmured Christine, leaning against him. “I just can’t get it right, can I?”
The front door was open. A cold, fresh wind was blowing through it. It blew into the hall and made the pictures rattle in their frames and bits of paper fly off the hall table. They all went senselessly in different directions. They followed their crazy trajectories. They somersaulted: they made loop-theloops as they glided to the floor. People were leaving, going out on to the path. Through the door she saw the great dome of night pulsing with stars. She saw the black treetops waving wildly in the wind. When Maggie passed her, Christine did a little dance and snapped her fingers above her head and Maggie giggled.
“Goodbye!” boomed Joe, his arm still around her shoulders. “Goodbye!”
They were going down the dark path. They moved in a body, out into the street, into the night. And then she saw them scatter and break apart, calling, going this way and that, like an armful of birds released into the sky. She stood on the doorstep and watched them until she couldn’t see them any longer. Then she went inside and closed the door. Joe was still standing in the hall. His face was full of expression. It was like a little stage with all sorts of things being acted on it. It was as if everything had made its way there, everything she knew: it had all found its way to Joe’s face as a form of safekeeping, the whole world of herself concentrated on this little stage.
She did her dance again, snapping her fingers. Joe looked at her with bottomless eyes.
“Come here,” he said.
ALSO BY RACHEL CUSK
FICTION
Saving Agnes
The Temporary
The Country Life
The Lucky Ones
In the Fold
NONFICTION
A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother
Copyright © 2006 by Rachel Cusk
All rights reserved
Originally published in 2006 by Faber and Faber Ltd, Great Britain
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003
www.fsgbooks.com
Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott
eISBN 9781429952026
First eBook Edition : June 2011
First American edition, 2007
“Going, Going” from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin. Copyright © 1988,
2003 by the Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Farrar,
Straus an
d Giroux, LLC, and Faber and Faber Ltd.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cusk, Rachel, 1967–
Arlington Park / Rachel Cusk.—1st American ed.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-374-10080-3 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-374-10080-2 (alk. paper)
1. Parents—Fiction. 2. Middle class—Fiction. 3. England—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6053.U825A89 2007
823’.914—dc22
2006007952