The Temporary

by Rachel Cusk

  ‘I’m Francine.’

  ‘Roger Louche, co-Director,’ he said, putting out his hand. She shook it, and was surprised to feel coarse hair on his skin beneath her fingers. The intimacy of her discovery seemed inappropriate in the atmosphere of the office and she felt herself begin to blush. ‘Glad to have you with us, Francine.’ He sat down on the edge of her desk, his manner abruptly changed. ‘So how long do you think you’ll stay?’

  ‘As long as I’m needed,’ said Francine, shrinking from the proximity of his bulk. From its fringes she could see one or two of the other secretaries watching them. ‘I’m only temporary.’

  ‘Oh, don’t say “only”! We need girls like you around here, otherwise we’d die of boredom. It’ll be nice to have something good to look at for a change. No, don’t be embarrassed!’ He lowered his voice and leaned towards her. Close up, his face was large and porous. ‘You’re a very attractive girl. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.’

  Francine giggled with mingled pleasure and anxiety. At the sound he stood up again suddenly and dropped the piece of paper on the desk in front of her.

  ‘Type that up for me by lunch-time, will you?’ he said, turning and walking back to his desk.

  Francine watched his retreating back with astonishment. The piece of paper had slid from her desk to the floor and she bent to retrieve it. When she re-emerged she saw Mr Louche watching her from his podium. She caught his eye and he looked away. Francine sat with a beating heart. She wished Jane would come back. An older woman sat at a desk identical to Francine’s at the foot of Mr Louche’s podium. She was plump with short permed hair and wore a cardigan over her shoulders instead of the tailored jacket worn by most of the other secretaries. Francine hadn’t noticed her until that minute, but now she realized that the woman must be Mr Louche’s own secretary. She sat for a moment, paralysed by the necessity for asserting herself.

  ‘Hey you!’ said Mr Lancing suddenly. ‘You!’

  Francine looked up and saw that he was speaking to her.

  ‘Yes, Mr Lancing?’

  ‘Get me Bill,’ he said, picking up his telephone and dialling a number.

  Francine waited for further instructions but Mr Lancing had begun speaking into the receiver. She searched her desk for a list of numbers which might help her and soon found a plastic wheel bristling with hundreds of cards at the far end. She began to flick hopelessly through them. Beside her, Mr Louche’s letter lay unresolved.

  ‘It’s a vanilla reit, dumbo,’ said Mr Lancing into the phone.

  Her own telephone rang and she froze at the sound. It shrilled again and she picked it up, but as she opened her mouth to speak she suddenly lost all memory of where she was.

  ‘Hello? Hello?’ said a man’s voice impatiently.

  ‘Yes, hello!’ said Francine. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘Don’t they teach you how to answer the phone over there?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I was—’

  ‘I need Lancing,’ said the man.

  ‘He’s on the phone,’ said Francine shortly, desperate to be rid of this latest interference.

  ‘Well, do you take a message too, or do they just programme you to pick it up?’

  ‘Who may I tell him called?’

  ‘Tell him it’s Bill.’

  ‘Oh, Bill!’ gushed Francine gratefully. ‘I know he’s been trying to get hold of you!’

  ‘I was here,’ said Bill, audibly shrugging.

  ‘I mean, I know he wanted to speak to you, I don’t know if he’s actually tried—’

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘I’ll just see if I can get him off the phone for you,’ said Francine, jamming her finger over the hold button. Mr Lancing was still talking, his back turned towards her. ‘Mr Lancing!’ she said. ‘Mr Lancing!’ When there was no response she snapped her fingers in desperation and the other secretaries raised their heads in horrified unison. Eventually Mr Lancing looked round.

  ‘What?’ he said, holding the receiver against his neck.

  ‘Bill’s on the line for you.’

  ‘Oh, put him on!’ he said, waving his arm. ‘Dial the other phone. Larry, can you hold a second? I gotta talk to Bill,’ he added, although the telephone was still pressed to his neck.

  ‘Just putting you through,’ said Francine, releasing the hold button. To her despair, the handset was emiting a dull tone. ‘Hello?’ she said, pressing buttons indiscriminately. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Where’s Bill?’ said Mr Lancing.

  ‘I think I lost him,’ admitted Francine.

  ‘Well, get him back!’

  ‘But I don’t have his number—’

  ‘Larry? You still there? Sorry, we got a new girl here. Look, like I was saying—’

  Francine replaced the phone and fixed her eyes on the desktop. They stung with tears and she held herself rigid until they receded. Finally she stood up, Mr Louche’s letter in her hand, and walked determinedly to his desk.

  ‘Excuse me?’ she said, standing before him. He was reading something and didn’t look up. Beside him his secretary sat neatly tapping at her keyboard, her eyes fixed on the screen. Apart from her fingers, her soft body was motionless. ‘Mr Louche?’

  ‘Sorry, yes?’ he said, looking up in surprise. His face was blank.

  Francine felt herself grow cold with anxiety. She held the letter before him.

  ‘Mr Louche, I don’t think I’m supposed to do this.’

  He was silent for a moment.

  ‘Why not?’ he said finally, as if he were interested.

  ‘I’ve been employed to do Mr Lancing’s work.’

  ‘You’ve been employed,’ said Mr Louche slowly after a pause, ‘to do whatever you’re told.’

  A sudden faintness stole over her.

  ‘But surely,’ she persisted, smiling in an attempt to infuse her words with charm, ‘surely your own secretary should type your correspondence?’

  ‘Barbara has enough work to do,’ said Mr Louche.

  At the sound of her name, Barbara turned her head and stared at Francine with mute eyes. Her face was very plain. The three of them were locked for a moment in silence. Francine turned and went back to her desk, the letter still in her hand.

  At 11.25 Francine reminded Mr Lancing of his haircut. He hadn’t spoken to her since her earlier mistake with the telephones, and although she feared that his silence was the signal of his displeasure, she was relieved at least that he seemed to have forgotten about Bill.

  ‘See you later,’ she said foolishly, as he put on his suit jacket. The collar was turned up and she wondered if she should tell him.

  ‘I’ll be back!’ he said with a crooked grin.

  Their eyes met as if by mistake, and she saw his dim with the lack of recognition. After he had left the office, she imagined him seeing his upturned collar in the barber shop mirror and wished that she’d told him. He would know that she had seen it. She turned to her computer screen and began to type Mr Louche’s letter. His writing was neat, and she was glad that she didn’t have to go to his desk and ask him to explain anything. Before long she had finished, and seeing how easily the task had been accomplished she felt oddly warm with gratitude for her humiliation. She fussed with it, adding touches on the screen to improve its appearance. In a moment of inspired alertness, she took down one of the files of past correspondence from the shelves behind her and looked at one or two of the letters to make sure that she had typed Mr Louche’s according to the correct format. Finally she printed it out and, crossing the office, placed it before him on his desk. He read it while she stood there, without looking up. After a long time, he raised his head.

  ‘Good girl,’ he said, smiling brilliantly.

  Four

  Ralph unlocked the door to his flat and as he entered the dark, motionless hall experienced that momentary qualm of ownership which, even after three years of it, still lightly besieged him sometimes when he returned alone at the end of the day. When he had first bought the flat, he used t
o come home in an eager, questioning mood – often as early as he could – as if it were a lover or a new child, wondering what it had been doing during the hours he had been away. In those days it had represented a form of welcome to him, a region in which his focus was undisputed and reliable. He supposed that he should have worried about intruders or burst drains in that moment of reunion, and prepared himself for the sight of the spilled guts of drawers, the sounds of dripping and desecration to greet him with their anarchic protest at his absence; but his flat had always been as good as gold, sitting waiting for him with an expression either of independence or of neglect, depending on whether he’d left it tidy or not, and in the end he had begun to regard it merely as another cloistered annexe of himself, a space into which the stuffy chambers of his heart and head had gradually overspilled their contents and rendered indistinguishable. He had grown impatient with its inability to be transformed, beyond the small, angular puddle of letters which sometimes gathered by the door and the staring red eye of the answering machine which could occasionally be found resuscitated and blinking with life when he returned, and although of course he was grateful that the glassy eyes of its windows hadn’t been smashed nor its contents ravished with violence, still, he wondered what it would look like afterwards.

  Two calling-cards from taxi companies lay on the hall carpet at his feet and he stepped over them as if demonstrating his indifference before an invisible audience. Halfway down the hall he turned back and went to pick them up, deciding instead to find them useful and perhaps pin them on the kitchen noticeboard. With this in mind he continued back down the hall, bypassing the sitting-room where the tawdry drama of the answering machine might or might not have been playing.

  The kitchen made a spectral tableau in the falling gloom of early evening, the rigid great-aunts of the chairs around the table, the fridge a tall, stern butler hovering in a corner, the face of the clock obscured to a halt by shadows. He switched on the light and felt immediately comforted by its generic familiarity, its resemblance to other kitchens he had seen. Putting the cards on the table, he opened the fridge and was rather pleased to see a bottle of beer in it, for a moment having no memory of actually buying one. Its further contents – margarine, milk, a yellow square of cheese sealed in plastic, something leafy on one of the lower shelves – reminded him of his trip late the night before to a mini-market two streets away, a dingy place in whose overcrowded aisles nothing ever seemed real or distinct enough to purchase, but where nevertheless he had gone in a sudden burst of life and bought the beer with the intention of its meeting him the next evening in precisely the manner it was now doing. The bottle had been lukewarm and dusty when he took it from the market shelf, but in the cold sunlight of the fridge had been transformed into a green and frosted icon, which in turn elevated the items around it to a more appealing plane. He took the beer and, seeing the cards still lying on the table, picked them up and threw them into the bin.

  From the dreary distance of his shabby third-floor office on the Holloway Road, Ralph often looked forward to his three or four solitary evenings at home each week. The fact that, once he had fled the fabricated world of the office and felt the memory of himself begin patchily to return on his bus journey home, he no longer needed to be on his own, seemed continually to elude him in his social calculations. Sitting exposed at his desk he would crave isolation, unlimited draughts of time alone amongst his possessions, but the relief of escape drained him and he would vainly wait for the spring of selfhood which the rock of his daily round had seemed all day to be blocking to begin to flow. Instead, there was merely a resounding emptiness, which made him suspect during his long hours of loneliness that the alien exercise of doing work which did not suit him had forced him to change, moving him further and further from the mouth of his resources until he had become stranded and unable to find his way back. He would often read or listen to music as the night deepened outside, familiar habits which now, however, he would find himself asking for whom or what he did them. His points of reference had grown dim, his signposts muddied: sensations and ideas would arrive and then get lost, circulating around the junctions of his mind, unable to find a connection.

  There had been a time, he supposed, when he had not felt this powerlessness, when, had he but perceived his own fluidity, he might have escaped the machinery which was now making him; but he had been so eager to fix himself that all the more discreet aspects of his volition had been swept along by this one great desire for something, and he had followed the first course which presented itself as if it had been ordained that he should do so. He had tried, of course, after he left university, to formulate some plan for his own betterment, but it hadn’t really surprised him to find, when he searched himself for ambition, merely the desire unobtrusively to survive. He had applied for the types of jobs which had become familiar to him through the talk of his peers, had latched himself wearily on to their futures and jogged behind as they rushed towards them, but his inability to imagine that he might be put to some use which would manufacture as its by-product his own happiness meant that the waves of rejection which his activity generated had washed back over him warm with his acceptance of them. He had attended his only interview gratefully, and in the fever of examination did not think to test the position – an inexplicit editorial role on a free local newspaper – for its own merits. Relieved at having pulled off twenty minutes of pleasant conversation with Neil, his boss, he had not considered the future of lengthy encounters by which he was now daily assaulted. Neil had offered him the job there and then, telling him he was the only graduate who had applied; a revelation which at the time Ralph had obscurely taken as a compliment.

  ‘I’m something of an intellectual myself,’ Neil had said, straightening a tie across which autonomous golf clubs roamed.

  The paper was a dreadful thing. Neil wrote most of it, copying stories assiduously from a heap of other newspapers on his desk while Ralph transcribed television listings and local events. Roz, the secretary, typed them up uncertainly. The majority of its flimsy pages were occupied by local advertisers and a long classified section, with which Ralph had at first been fascinated – the things people tried to sell! On his first day he had found one which read ‘Pair of brown men’s shoes, one missing, £5’, and had made his friends laugh telling them about it – but at which now he could scarcely bear to look. The office was terribly cramped, although Neil told him that once the paper had occupied the entire third floor of the building. Since then it had been shouldered into its small corner by a more successful copywriting firm, whose suite of rooms encased behind giant plate-glass windows displayed immaculate grey prairies of executive carpet and desktop. The Holloway Journal emerged weekly from the compressed adjacent clutter, and seeing as it had little organized means of distribution – Neil had tried hiring door-to-door delivery boys, but found out that they were just dumping their consignments in the nearest bin – it was mostly touted on the pavements outside the building where Neil could keep an eye on things. Much as Ralph tried to avert his gaze from the paper during the week, he could not avoid witnessing its fortunes when he left the office on Friday evening. It pained him to see the feeble trajectory of his labours, and the fact that the scrawny boy buckling beneath the weight of his bag couldn’t even manage to give the things away – Ralph watched passersby shy from his thrusting arm, digging their hands in their pockets as he approached them – meant that he usually felt compelled to accept a copy himself and display it as proudly as he was able until he found somewhere to throw it away unseen.

  Nevertheless, the pay he received, like the work he did for it, was automatic, and Ralph would feel the soothing rhythms of his stability even through its worst oppression of him. He would occasionally rise with thoughts of liberation, but feeling himself teeter dangerously on the brink of change would withdraw quickly back into the ever-knitting security of his routine. His only alternative – that of transforming the fixed nature of his work – had been remov
ed before he had even seen out the first month of his employment. He had attempted to infuse his listings with something of his own personality, but to his humiliation Neil had routed out every flourish and confronted him with its lifeless form.

  ‘What’s this “seminal” lark, then?’ he had demanded once, brandishing a sheet of Ralph’s copy before him. Ralph had lovingly ascribed the term to one of his favourite French films, which was showing on television that week. ‘Is that dirty or what?’

  It had been possible to accept his intransigent portion with mild amusement, and now he rarely strained beneath its strictures. His job paid him enough, and was capable, as long as he observed some restraint in his descripition of it, of standing up to the glancing attention he generally received. He did not require, for the time being at least, more than that.

  The answering machine was undisturbed, and with the possibility of human intervention more or less ruled out for the evening, Ralph sat down with his beer and drew up the blind with which the distractions of his journey and return had concealed his thoughts. All week he had felt his mind leaning towards the prospect of his oncoming evening with Francine, a process which seemed so to have corralled every part of him in agreement with it that the customary position from which he saw things appeared to have altered. The ballasts of his life, he knew, were too flimsy to protect him from such slippage, and though he had tried, really there was nothing else he wanted to think about. He had negotiated with himself what he saw as a compromise, caging his wild and fluttering thoughts in the stronghold of their one agreed liaison, and he was relieved at least that he had managed to prevent his desires from running ahead to a region of fantasy where they would almost certainly perish.

  He had telephoned Francine the day after their miraculous meeting – he saw it as that now, a wonderful and significant chance that had been given to him, like a golden key – and the boldness which his good fortune had inspired had seemed to round up the miscreant possibilities and force them into an orderly march in his favour. Francine had been at home, and had even answered the phone instead of Janice – whom he now treated, in his own mind at any rate, with the greatest mistrust – and he had secured their evening with such an assertion of will, such force, really, that when he had put down the phone after what he had already decided should be the briefest possible conversation, the communication which would least allow for any mistakes on his part and consequently any second thoughts on hers, he had felt quite unlike himself.