The Temporary

by Rachel Cusk

  ‘I like it.’

  There was another pause which almost took Ralph to the brink of his endurance as he waited for some sequel to qualify this bleak statement of their differences. Over Francine’s shoulder he could see the other girl waiting, shifting irritably from one leg to the other. She caught his eye and gave him a sudden, encouraging smile. Francine was gazing downwards again. Her eyelashes were so thick and dark against her pale cheek that he wondered clumsily if they were false.

  ‘Well—’ he said finally, looking around him in a manner suggestive of departure. His heart writhed with such acute embarrassment that he could feel no disappointment through it, just a humble acceptance of his own foolishness which rendered him desperate to put a stop to the encounter as quickly as he could. ‘Well, I suppose I’d better be off.’ To his astonishment he saw something happen in her face as he spoke, a small acknowledgement of exigence which inflamed him with hope. ‘Did you – would you like to meet up some time?’ he said hurriedly as she watched him. Panic gripped at him as things slipped outside his control, like a silent prisoner escaping over a moonlit roof. ‘Just say – please do say if you’d rather not. I’ll quite understand.’

  ‘All right.’ She smiled faintly. ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s just that when you didn’t call back,’ he rushed on, ‘I thought perhaps you weren’t – for whatever reason—’

  ‘Call back?’ She furrowed her untrammelled skin with a child’s perplexity. ‘I didn’t get any message.’

  ‘Yesterday!’ cried Ralph, a suffocating relief welling up in his throat. ‘I spoke to your flatmate – she said she’d tell you.’

  ‘Oh, she probably meant to,’ said Francine wistfully. Her eyes implored him and she glanced behind her. ‘But things have been – a bit difficult with Janice lately.’

  Ralph’s righted injury combined with this whispered confidence to fill him with new allegiance. He felt himself swell before Francine’s fragility. In the distance, Janice’s serpentine eyes glowed with cunning.

  ‘Really?’ he said. His eyes pricked ridiculously with the forewarning of tears.

  ‘Yes. It’s, well – never mind. I’d better go.’

  ‘Listen, if you need anything, I mean if there’s anything I can do—’ She was retreating from him into the crowd. ‘I’ll call!’ he said.

  Three

  Francine Snaith was lodged in the gloomy oesophagus of the Metropolitan Line, where her enjoyment of the single customary pleasure of underground travel – that of observing her reflection in the dark windows opposite her seat – had been obstructed since Baker Street by the disorderly herd of standing passengers which had been driven by overcrowding down the narrow corridor in front of her. The enforced contemplation of a mis-shapen male belly which rose from a sea of pinstripe and thrust itself towards her had been bad enough at speed, but since the train had suddenly and inexplicably shuddered to a halt Francine’s ears were filled with the acoustics of its physical proximity. She heard breath complaining from obstructed nostrils above her, and from much closer the whining sounds of blockage. The mountain heaved alarmingly before her eyes. There was a gurgle of clearance and then the rush of fluids draining. Above the forest of flesh, a canopy of inquisitive faces turned at the sound. Francine closed her eyes, lest the thought of this hot, human filling in a dark pastry of steel and black earth should inspire feelings of panic. From the deluge of silence, a rank and humid mist of sweat rose thickly. The sea of bodies shifted impatiently, swelled and settled. Just as the stoppage seemed most permanent, the train suddenly lunged forward with a jolt as if it had been punched. People gathered themselves to a rising dissonance of coughs and clearing throats. Francine stirred also in anticipation of her imminent release as the train sped darkly through the tunnel. Finally the rolling scenery of the station slid tiled past the windows, its appearance an order to begin work on the already botched canvas of the day.

  Minutes later, Francine was walking briskly to the front desk across the hushed marble reception hall of Lancing & Louche. She announced herself to the man sitting behind it, who picked up his telephone to dial Personnel.

  ‘Frances?’ he said, screwing his face up uncomprehendingly.

  ‘Francine.’

  ‘Yes, we’ve got a Francine for you in reception,’ he said into the receiver. He paused for a moment, listening, and then laughed. ‘That’s right. Yes.’ He guffawed and put down the phone. ‘Take a seat over there, love. Someone’ll be down to fetch you.’

  Francine did not feel like sitting down, but the porter’s eyes were on her and she knew that such mild anarchies were disturbing to those in whose jurisdiction they occurred. She crossed obediently to the other side of the reception area where a bank of brown leather sofas waited. A muted rabble of voices was growing along a corridor near by, like a dog barking behind a closed front door, and their amplification as they entered the vast hall caused her to start. A group of men in dark, expensive suits burst through the glass doors and passed her as she sat down. Several of them glanced at her as they walked by. Their voices lowered once they were past her and then erupted into loud laughter. One or two of them looked back. A middle-aged woman came through the glass doors behind them, her aspect telegraphing the search for a misplaced object, and Francine stood up.

  ‘Francine?’ The woman smiled and held out her hand. Her teeth were large and yellow, and saliva glittered over them as if with the threat of mastication. ‘I’m Jane. Thanks for coming. Do you want to follow me?’

  Francine followed Jane back through the glass doors. From behind her blonde hair appeared not to move as she walked, whisked into stiff peaks like beaten egg whites. They stopped at a wall of lifts and Jane pressed a button. Francine straightened herself as they waited and breathed deeply. The impending mountain of the day rose reluctantly before her, with its steep slopes of novelty and idle plateaux. Had she been able to walk in the fresh air after her journey perhaps she would have felt better, but the ascent directly from the station to the office block gave her the impression that she was still trapped in the now-carpeted intestines of a dream.

  ‘Did you have far to come?’ enquired Jane as they stepped into the lift.

  ‘West Hampstead,’ said Francine. ‘It’s not far.’

  She could feel Jane’s eyes examining her, intimately but impartially like a pair of doctor’s hands.

  ‘I’m pretty, aren’t I?’ she almost blurted out. She had opened her mouth to speak. ‘Where do you live?’ she said.

  ‘Welwyn,’ said Jane.

  ‘Gosh,’ said Francine. ‘That must be a long journey.’

  ‘Actually, it’s very convenient.’

  The lift rose like a lump in the building’s throat. Jane’s perfume, warmed by the confinement of her skin, dispersed and settled around them in a musky cloud. Francine felt a strong desire to escape.

  ‘You’ll be working for Mr Lancing himself,’ said Jane as they approached the top floor. She smiled. Her vast, moist teeth were alive, and seemed to perceive more than the tiny, carbonized eyes above them. Francine felt it was appropriate to look at them while she spoke. ‘Don’t worry, his bark is worse than his bite.’

  The doors opened with a sigh and they emerged into a windowless corridor identical to that which they had left below, except for a gold-plated 5 stuck to the opposite wall in place of the large G downstairs. The brown carpet beneath Francine’s feet absorbed the noise of her shoes, amplifying instead the swishing sounds of clothing and the quick exchanges of their breaths. Jane turned to the right and began walking briskly, and Francine hurried to keep abreast of her. She felt disturbed by Jane’s air of permanent unfamiliarity, until she remembered that Personnel were always like that. She never usually saw them again after the first day. Francine was often left with disembodied impressions of people from these first intense exposures, a moustache here or large bosom there, a smell or a set of teeth, which together formed an area of clutter in her mind like spare parts littering a garage floor. O
ccasionally one of these strange, useless memories would rise unbidden in her thoughts and she would find herself unable to remember how she had acquired it or where it belonged. She would suddenly recall jobs she had done from which she could not retrieve a single face, while those faces which had become separated from their owners would drift about among her recollections like detached and meaningless ghosts.

  ‘This way,’ said Jane, listing suddenly and sharply to the left. She opened a door and the brown, mummified silence of the corridor was all at once broken by the familiar chatter and hum of the office and a bank of dull natural light emanating from the large windows to the far side. Francine followed Jane into the room. She felt dazed, as if she had just emerged from beneath deep water. The office was instantly recognizable, a flat, immaculate vista of steely geometry and manicured synthetic fibres, its variations in tone all conducted in the key of grey. Through the windows the low cloudy sky and iron hives of companion office blocks were visible. From the fifth floor one could see other fifth floors, the heads of buildings like a crowd of adults.

  Several people looked up at the intrusion and Francine suddenly remembered herself. It was one of the advantages of her position that her novelty, the most fragile of all her arts, rarely had the opportunity to wear off. There was a perceptible lull and swell as things shifted to accommodate her. One or two people allowed their glances to linger like tenacious guests into stares. Seconds elapsed and eventually everyone bent their heads, or turned to gaze blankly into computer screens while their fingers tapped at keyboards in an imitation of tedium. Francine’s eyes swept the surface of the secretarial pool and then rose to confront what instinct informed her was a masculine inspection. The man wore a dark pinstriped suit and was examining her in an authoritative manner. His desk was on a raised podium, like a car in a showroom. Francine looked away and then back once or twice until the persistence of his stare caught her eyes and held them. At that moment he assumed a bored expression and dropped his attention back down to the slim pile of pages in front of him. He made a mark or two on the top sheet with a heavy gold fountain pen and crossed his legs away from her.

  ‘This is Francine,’ said Jane loudly. She threw her voice in the direction of another man on the far side of the room and then followed keenly after it like a dog chasing a stick. The man wore a pinstriped suit identical to that of his colleague, but sat behind a desk whose podium raised it just perceptibly higher. At the sight of Jane advancing briskly towards him he stood up and put out his hand, as if anticipating the transfer of a baton. His gesture had been automatic, but as he comprehended the nature of the interruption Francine saw him waver in his maintenance of it, his arm flopping feebly as if the mechanism designed to retract it had suddenly failed.

  ‘Francine, this is Mr Lancing. Francine will be looking after you,’ said Jane, raising her voice for Mr Lancing in the manner of a matron in an old people’s home.

  ‘Hi,’ said Mr Lancing in an American accent. The blood appeared to flow back into his dysfunctional arm and it twitched perkily, inviting Francine to shake it. He had a boyish, grinning face over which a map of age had been laid as if artificially. His clear eyes peering through the tanned and withered skin gave him the appearance of a child wearing a rubber mask. ‘Great!’ he said enthusiastically.

  ‘Hello,’ said Francine, shaking his hand.

  Mr Lancing continued to grin at her and she noticed a slightly dead expression behind his eyes.

  ‘Well, that’s the introductions over with,’ said Jane. ‘I’ll just show Francine to her desk, Mr Lancing.’

  ‘Give ’em hell!’ said Mr Lancing. He clenched his fist and punched it into the air.

  Jane laughed shrilly. ‘We will, Mr Lancing,’ she said.

  Francine’s desk was a right-angle of grey counter-top positioned near the foot of Mr Lancing’s podium. The desk was fenced in by a capacious window to the side and a wall on which shelves were hung to the rear. Along the shelves were arranged a large number of box files, their vertical labelled spines inscribed like tombstones. In front of the desk stood what appeared to be a coffee station, a small table on which a kettle fumed in a dry and dissolving landscape of shiny brown pools and white hillocks of sugar, interspersed with tiny dark granular boulders, stained spoons, and damp fists of used teabags. Francine’s objections to this arrangement were strong and immediate, not least because it formed a second channel of interference – the first being the rows of files – which permitted the unrestricted access of office traffic to her territory. She moved behind her desk and saw that it put her in view of the whole room. From beyond the plastic plain of the desktop, a chirping forest of computers appeared to monitor her movements with their single unblinking eyes. She wrestled for a moment with her faint-heartedness, knowing that if she cowered from this corporate ecology she would disable herself for survival within it, becoming victim to a new range of cruelties whose invisibility did not lessen her faith in their existence. Mr Lancing and his colleague sat atop their rival podia, dumb and vigilant as marble dogs at a gate.

  ‘I’ll just run you through one or two things,’ said Jane. She manoeuvred her broad hips round to the other side of the desk, as powerful and clumsy as a car. ‘Do you mind if I just sit on your chair for a minute?’

  ‘Not at all,’ replied Francine. In such a place territories were as quickly and fiercely marked out as they were returned to their anonymity. She moved to stand behind Jane so as to observe her instructions. On the chair, the cheeks of her buttocks were forced sideways like a tomato crushed underfoot.

  ‘You’ll be in sole charge of Mr Lancing’s diary,’ said Jane, lifting a large ledger from the far end of the desk. It had scraps of paper stuck to its cover and protruding from amongst its pages, scribbled relics of other hands. She opened it and began to leaf through the blueprints of days long since passed, with their emergencies of meetings and lunches. The diary was thick with arrangement and rearrangement, its pages gnarled into relief by the hieroglyphics of rounded handwriting. ‘Here’s today’s schedule,’ said Jane, turning to reveal a fresher page. ‘11.30 Haircut’ read Francine.

  The phone on her desk began suddenly to shriek. Francine started and stepped automatically aside so that Jane could pick it up.

  ‘Let’s see if you can answer it,’ said Jane, revealing her large teeth.

  ‘All right,’ Francine replied, bright with loathing. She picked up the vibrating receiver, and in the imperative of its sudden silence felt necessity overpower apprehension. ‘Mr Lancing’s office,’ she said smoothly.

  ‘Gary there?’ barked a voice in reply. Its American accent took her by surprise, disabling her comprehension as if it were a foreign language.

  ‘Excuse me?’ she said, after a pause.

  Jane lifted her head like a guard-dog detecting an intruder.

  ‘I said gimme Gary.’

  Francine paused.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know who Gary is.’

  ‘Who is this?’ said the man impatiently.

  ‘Francine,’ said Francine stupidly. She felt herself beginning to drift away and pulled herself back sharply. Jane writhed beside her in her seat. ‘I’m new here,’ she added. Her blunder had brought heat to her face.

  ‘Well, Francine, all I can say is you must be pretty new,’ said the man. ‘Gary’s your boss, honey.’ There was a pause. ‘Ha! Ha!’ he suddenly shouted. ‘Ha!’

  Francine giggled politely.

  ‘We’re not on first-name terms yet,’ she said.

  ‘First-name terms!’ said the man after a pause. ‘Ha! Gary! Gimme Lancing, honey. That all right for you?’

  ‘Who shall I say is calling?’ said Francine, keeping the warm edge of humour in her volce.

  ‘Jim – no, Mr Vernon. Ha! Tell him Mr Vernon’s on the line for him.’

  ‘Just a moment, Mr Vernon,’ said Francine.

  ‘Nice to know you, Francine,’ said Jim as she put him on hold.

  ‘Mr Lancing!’ she called fi
rmly, humming with success. Jane’s examination burned beside her and she turned away slightly, blocking her out. Mr Lancing looked up, his mouth agape.

  ‘Somebody call me?’ he said.

  ‘Mr Vernon for you,’ said Francine. He appeared confused and she waved the receiver helpfully.

  ‘Put him on.’

  Mr Lancing gripped his phone expectantly and Francine ran her eye down a list of numbers attached to her extension. She located his number and put the call through.

  ‘Hello?’ said Mr Lancing loudly, as if uncertain whether his voice would travel down the wire without reinforcement.

  ‘Well,’ sniffed Jane as Francine turned triumphantly to face her. ‘You seem fairly confident. You shouldn’t have any trouble coping.’

  ‘Oh, I’m used to this sort of thing.’

  ‘I think you’ll find this position rather more demanding than what you’re used to, actually. Mr Lancing is a very important man.’

  ‘I think I’m going to like him.’

  ‘Well, I think the point is rather more whether he likes you, isn’t it?’ Jane’s teeth made a menacing reappearance. She stood up and smoothed her furrowed skirt tightly over her hips. ‘Let me know if you have any problems.’

  She eased herself out from behind the desk and walked towards the door.

  ‘Bye, everyone!’ she called out when she reached it. One or two people looked up but there was no audible reply. Jane smiled widely and disappeared.

  As soon as she had gone, Francine saw Mr Lancing’s colleague move smoothly from behind his desk and approach her across the office, his eyes fixed with studied absorption on a piece of paper in his hand. She sat down, busying herself with Mr Lancing’s diary. He loomed before her and she bent her head in concentration.

  ‘I haven’t had the pleasure,’ he said finally.

  She looked up and he smiled urbanely. He was younger than Mr Lancing and quite good looking, Francine thought, but his handsomeness was fatigued through over-use and his skin had a slightly thickened, curdled quality suggestive of decline. His belly strained at the waist of his trousers. As if sensing her looking at it, he pulled it in sharply without removing his eyes from her face.