by Rachel Cusk
Before she came to live with Janice, Francine had shared a flat in High Barnet with two other secretaries. Her stay with them had been the briefest of all her tenancies, but she found herself occasionally looking back on it with a vague longing for the home which had included amongst its luxuries the ease of feeling contempt for those with whom she shared it. In return for the condescensions her sense of her own superiority had permitted her to make, Lisa and Michele had admired her unflinchingly, and when she announced her intention to move to a location more central to her expectations, had encouraged her to do so with the selfless wistfulness of plain sisters. Francine rather missed their easy company now, for at least they had all been going out to work, and she had enjoyed watching their eyes widen as she told them of her adventures in the City after their dull days at the local estate agent. Janice only did two mornings a week at a boutique in Hampstead, where she seemed to earn enough not to need anything else and was always getting free clothes, and when Francine came home in the evenings Janice would never ask her anything about her day. In fact, she often seemed to have forgotten that Francine went to work at all, and would say things like, ‘So where have you been today?’ Francine would tell her and she would say ‘Again?’ or ‘Still?’ and look vaguely sympathetic. Of course, on the days when Janice had to go in she would always make such a drama out of it, and would be in the bathroom for hours so that the mirror was steamed up by the time Francine managed to get in to do her make-up.
Nevertheless, she knew that she had been lucky to find Janice, and her first instinct that she would learn things from her which might result in personal advancement had quickly been borne out in the utter unfamiliarity of her habits. Often she had come back from work to find Janice curled on the sofa in a circle of lamp-or candlelight while night filled the rooms around her, irradiating an intimate warmth which, although it came in fact from the portable heater which panted continually at her side, seemed somehow to be the result of personal projection. Janice habitually remained indoors, where she would install herself before the television for the day, its volume subdued, on a bed of cushions, turning the pages of magazines and stirring only to glide to the kitchen in bare feet to make cups of instant coffee. Francine had emerged from her first startling plunges into this quite tangible aura of softness and languor with a hoard of rare and mysterious self-criticisms. Janice was thin and ethereal in appearance and whimsical in deed, and for the first time Francine found her own physique clumsy, her habits too regulated. Janice would wince at the bold voice Francine brought back with her from the office and shrink from the clamour of her return, watching with mildly astonished interest as she prepared her evening meal. It was unpleasant to feel so noisy, but Francine’s dedication to matters of self-improvement could always overwhelm her pride and she accepted the proffered apprenticeship to Janice’s atmosphere with subdued gratitude. Her affection for Janice once she had learned to resemble her more closely was certainly fond, but Francine’s impulses for domination were beginning to rally from their exile. She wondered when their friendship would be established on its proper footing, with its missing element – the open acknowledgement of Francine’s ordination to the exceptional – restored.
Francine had been surprised to discover that Janice didn’t have a boyfriend, and the mood of instruction which still dogged their partnership had so far conferred its chastity also on Francine. Janice was more critical of men than other girls Francine knew. They were always ringing for her, though, and she would whisper into the phone, her lips at the receiver as if she were drinking from it, but she rarely went out. On those occasions when she did, two pale fingers of lipstick on her mouth, she would come back an hour or two later on her own. She never asked Francine to go with her, even though once Francine had invited her out with some people from work. It had annoyed her to see how all the men had behaved around Janice, and so many of them had asked about her the next day at work that she had felt quite insulted, especially when she considered that they had all been trying to get her own attention up until then. One or two had actually asked if Janice had a boyfriend and Francine had lied and told them that she did. Afterwards she had felt a bit guilty about it, but Janice had told her once that she was in love with a man who was getting married to someone else, so it wasn’t absolutely untrue. Janice hadn’t really mentioned the man again, except recently to tell Francine that it was the day of the wedding, whereupon she had drunk vodka straight from a bottle for several hours and then disappeared to her room. She had laughed about the men from Francine’s office when they had got home and then done various quite funny imitations of them involving the type of snorting noises made by pigs. Francine had been forced to laugh, and after that she hadn’t really been interested in them at all.
She crossed the bridge over the railway tracks and for a moment looked along its gorge towards the dark, distant crowd of buildings with its bright mass of nocturnal eyes. There was something in the vista which unsettled her and she hurried past it to her front door. As usual the flat was dark when she let herself in, but along the hall she saw a glow hint seductively from beneath the sitting-room door at Janice’s presence and she went automatically towards it. Janice looked blankly up at her from the sofa when she entered the cave of the room’s warmth, with the mild amnesia which Francine was always required to penetrate even after the smallest separation.
‘It’s ever so cold outside,’ she said.
‘Is it?’ Janice received the message with wonder. ‘God.’
‘I went to that park, but it was pretty boring,’ Francine confessed.
Janice picked up a packet of cigarettes which lay beside her and offered one to Francine. The gesture conveyed a certain intimacy and Francine took one gratefully. As she did so, Janice touched her arm lightly.
‘Ralph called for you,’ she said, keeping her hand there as if it were the conduit for her information.
‘Ralph?’
Janice had pronounced the name with such familiarity that for a moment Francine was confused.
‘Ralph.’ She nodded darkly. ‘He says can you call him back.’
Francine felt the pleasurable anxiety of an emergency. Janice held a lighter towards her and in its piquant illumination she ignited her cigarette and inhaled deeply. How had Ralph got her number? A dim memory of giving it to him promoted itself faintly but she pushed it back, enjoying instead the dramatic movement of Ralph from the shadows of her thoughts to their foreground. His assertion constituted a surprise, administering a forceful shock to her vanity. For a moment he glittered, but then his glory began to ebb as she admitted disappointment to her calculations. Why hadn’t Stephen called? She summoned her memory of the evening’s final exchanges from its confinement. It had been outside, on the pavement, while she was waiting for a cab with Julie, and Ralph had just been standing there on his own. Julie had written her number down on a piece of paper and given it to him, and he had acted as if he were surprised and then asked if he could have hers too. On the way home Julie had asked her what she thought of Ralph and she had shrugged.
‘He’s OK. I prefer his friend.’
‘They both like you,’ Julie had said miserably.
‘He’s got a heavy energy,’ Janice said now through a thoughtful cloud of smoke. ‘I could tell, even over the phone.’
Francine had looked for Stephen, glancing around secretly, but he had disappeared towards the end of the party and hadn’t come back to say goodbye. She had given her number to Ralph, the moment dulled by disappointment, and then realized afterwards that Stephen could always get hold of her that way. It was probably for the best, she had thought on the way home, while Julie stared mournfully from the window of their cab. If she had given him her number herself, he would have thought she was desperate. This way he might even get a bit jealous. She had felt the satisfaction which customarily arose from the discovery of a personal advantage in the work of forces outside her control, and before long had gained the impression that the work had been
her own.
Two
Ralph Loman woke to find he had become his best friend Stephen Sparks. The room – Stephen’s room? Yes, he supposed it must be, although he had never been in Stephen’s room before, an odd thing really – the room was cold, deathly cold, and blue with too-early light. It had been such a long night, a night busy with dreams. What a lot he had done! Just now he had been at a party – he had only just left, in fact – in a great glass place, a glass beehive filled with people. Everyone had been so kind. At one point a girl had given him an injection and for a while he had been terrified as something crept unstoppably along his veins, about to invade his heart; but then he had remembered that he was Stephen and felt an inquisitive rush of joy. It had gathered in him while the party murmured distantly, a beautiful, refracting thing, a lovely crystal suspended in his centre like a chandelier. He felt it there now, fading. His head hurt terribly. In fact, his whole body – Stephen’s body, he supposed you’d say – his whole body hurt. He closed his eyes and sang silently. Birmingham, Lancaster, Crewe. Birmingham, Lancaster, Crewe. It sometimes helped to calm him on those occasions when he was not feeling himself.
Crewe, Crewe. He was awfully tired. Stephen’s body tugged at him, weighted, escaping, a leaden anchor free-falling beneath the surface of things, then graceful as a dancer as sleep began to take the slack and he became light. He heard the rustle of bedclothes, felt one unfamiliar knee strangely bony against the other, and for a moment his mind raced and struggled. Stephen, yes. He opened his eyes again. Something loomed at the foot of the bed and a gorge of fear mounted in his throat. The chest of drawers. Birmingham, Lancaster, Crewe. He closed his eyes. The submarine light swam at his lids and he knew that when he opened them again Stephen would be gone and he would be alone, waking into the dead hours of an urban dawn as he always did. He kept them shut and waited, hoping that the ebbing tide of fatigue would drag him back down into unconsciousness with its diminishing fingertips; but the growing pressure of alertness in his head was forcing itself against his eyes in the effort to pry them open. As a child he had often lain like that in terror, knowing he was about to surface into the blue light, that awful, deathly light, his father lumpish and inert in the bed beside him, with hours to wait before sunlight broke like a raw egg over the room, ameliorating its unfamiliarity. There was never anywhere for him to go at that hour in the hotels they stayed in, nothing for him to do but lie still in that light which made it seem as if this time night would not progress to day, and which made monsters of the furniture while the patterned walls seemed alive with unspeakable creatures. He had seen spiders, crabs, even a lobster there. Once he had noticed a man lying on the floorboards during one of those dark dawns, a man in a bowler hat who was flat as if he were made of paper. He had smiled cheerfully at Ralph and tipped his hat, and Ralph had lain cataleptic with fear for a time which he could not quantify, his father sleeping beside him like a dead man, and had waited for this certain alchemy of night becoming day. There had been a picture on the wall opposite the bed and he had fixed his eyes on the black square of it until coloured lights danced before them. He remembered that picture still. As he watched it evolve from the darkness, he had known it primordially, off by heart. For a while it had been the only thing he knew. Birmingham, Lancaster, Crewe.
*
He woke again some time later. Cars were passing on the road outside and he heard a door slam, someone shouting. A beam of sunlight poked through a gap in the curtains. He had just been dreaming, something about a cripple and a horse, one of those wooden fairground horses with a shaft through the middle. It had been bobbing up and down, the way they do, except that there was no carousel. It had just sort of pogoed madly down the street. He turned on to his back and the warm ray settled across his face. A certain ripeness in the light made him suddenly suspect that it was late, and he jolted up in bed before remembering that it was Sunday and he didn’t have to go to work. He looked at his watch anyway. The hands pointing at one o’clock seemed so impossible, so wild in their assertion that a great swath of time had gone by without his supervision, that he immediately got out of bed to look at the clock on the chest of drawers. Its remarkable confirmation filled Ralph with a curious elation at his feat of oblivion. The telephone began to ring in the sitting-room and he went obediently to answer it. He liked the feeling of running around after himself, the compact air that delay gave to a day. There had been times recently when he had felt imprisoned in the glass sphere of every passing hour, crawling from one orb to the next in an inescapable chain he sensed was taking him far from where he wanted to go.
‘Sparks,’ said Stephen when Ralph picked up the phone.
Ralph wondered where Stephen had acquired the irritating habit of answering the phone with his last name, before remembering that it was he, Ralph, who was answering and Stephen calling. He felt a sleepy giggle rise in his throat as he saw through Stephen’s trick, and was surprised to hear it emerge from his mouth.
‘You’re sounding girlish,’ said Stephen.
‘Sorry. I just got up.’ He thought of telling Stephen that he’d dreamed of him but couldn’t find the words.
‘Aha.’ His voice seemed further away, as if he were distracted. There was a rustling sound and then a heavy thud. ‘—last night?’ he boomed into the receiver.
‘What did you say?’
Ralph sat down and realized he was naked. His penis dangled grotesquely between the mottled trunks of his thighs like a hanging. The rough cloth of the seat cover beneath his bare buttocks reminded him of dreams he used to have in which he went unclothed and everything felt rather painful.
‘I said – ah – what did you think of last night?’
‘Nothing,’ said Ralph, surprised.
A leaden disappointment hovered and then plummeted as he remembered the message he had left for Francine in the optimistic hours of yesterday afternoon. He had actually been relieved when the girl had said she wasn’t there, his timid heart diving from his mouth down to the thrashing pit of his stomach, but her voice had been so warm and interested – had made him feel as if he was a prospect, a catch! – that for a while after he had put down the phone he had felt sure that things would go his way. The long vigil of evening had cooled his hopes, solidified them in ridiculous postures. He had become nervous, braced for the shriek of the telephone, jumping up every few minutes to rupture with activity the terrible membrane of silence which thickened around him. She hadn’t called, of course, and he had watched television until his head ached and then plunged into the sleep from which he had only just awoken.
‘Party,’ mumbled Stephen. There was something in his mouth. Ralph heard the click and hiss of a lighter, the suck of Stephen’s breath.
‘Alf’s thing? The private view? That was Friday,’ said Ralph sternly. ‘Yesterday was Saturday.’
‘Was it?’ Stephen paused. After a while he gave a bark of laughter and began speaking in a silly, high-pitched voice. ‘It’s all become the most terrible blur.’
Ralph waited for Stephen to reproach himself but instead felt wearied by his own dullness, the tightening bondage of responsibility from which Stephen would never permit him to escape.
‘Ah yes,’ said Stephen. ‘Alf’s pictures. Bloody toss, if you ask me.’
‘I didn’t look at them much, I’m afraid. I don’t think anyone ever does at these things. It’s all so—
‘The temp!’ interrupted Stephen, inspired. ‘The tarty temp from Tunbridge Wells!’
Ralph was silent.
‘Francine,’ he said finally.
‘Francine!’ echoed Stephen. ‘Yes! Lovely girl. Awful voice. Awful! Francine,’ he mimicked.
‘I’ve got to go,’ said Ralph. ‘I’m late for something.’
‘I’d better run along. I was supposed to be at Mother’s half an hour ago for lunch. She’ll cook the cat if I’m not there to keep an eye on her.’
‘Give her my regards,’ said Ralph stiffly, although Stephen had already put
down the phone.
He sat for a moment in his chair. The conversation had had a derailing effect and it was a while before he remembered that he was cold and hadn’t had any breakfast yet. Stephen often did that, summoning and then abruptly dropping him so that he felt disorientated and lost afterwards. Disruption and confusion followed him like a weather system. These days, living outside Stephen’s atmosphere, Ralph was more aware of what happened when he entered it, but at school, when they were younger, he had been under the siege of Stephen’s presence most of the time. He rather missed it, despite feeling his humiliations more deeply now. The gradual severance of adulthood had left him not strong but ridiculous, marooned in his habits, so that when he saw Stephen he felt the more extraneous and lonely for the glimpses he had of their distant past. Besides, when they did meet Stephen was always spectacularly late, so that the very basis of Ralph’s presence was untethered slavishness, a foolish injury with which he swelled with every passing minute. Once, Ralph had waited an hour and a half for him in a pub which was just around the corner from Stephen’s flat. He had not been sitting alone at his table for more than fifteen minutes when an effeminate little man with wild eyes and an odd little beard – a goatee, like a courtier – had approached him and insisted on keeping him company. He hadn’t spoken much, Ralph recalled, merely sat beside him occasionally sipping from a glass of beer and giving him a sweet, fleeing smile whenever Ralph caught his eye. At one point, he had suddenly leaned over and gripped Ralph’s hand. His fingers were warm and surprisingly comforting. Had Ralph been less embarrassed, he might have wished they could have stayed like that, holding hands.