by Rachel Cusk
She was to come on Thursday, the day after tomorrow, to his flat. He had felt rather churlish about that, but they hadn’t been able to decide on a place to meet on the phone – he had foolishly left it up to her, thinking that was the gentlemanly thing to do, and the poor girl had been quite at a loss – and detecting the approach of a conversational abyss in which he would be bound to undo himself, he had told her to come here. They could have a drink, he said, and then decide together where to have dinner. She had agreed, although not, if he was honest, in a way which particularly betrayed whether she thought it was a good idea or not, and that was when he had commandingly ended the conversation.
He would have to decide on a restaurant in advance, of course, and then casually suggest it to her as if it was a regular haunt, but so far nothing had seemed quite right. He had no car – public transport was out of the question – and besides, after making her come to his house it would seem silly then to go to another part of London. He wrestled once more with the handful of local places he knew, coming inevitably again upon their shortcomings. He never really went to restaurants, in fact. He and his father had always eaten in pubs, and at university he had never had enough money, and now he just didn’t like them much. It was an area in which he felt even less able than usual to take control: he disliked being besieged by choice and felt embarrassed by the waiters, not only because of the strange contract which decreed that they serve him, but because their youthful, insolent faces, their snobbery, their very apparent desire to be mastered, rendered him hesitant and effete. They would invariably find him out, too, becoming deaf when he made his order, leaning forward and saying ‘Excuse me?’ and forcing him to repeat it, always seeming to find something in the loneliness of what he had chosen for himself to eat which merited a smirk and the implication of mockery.
He supposed he could cook dinner himself. He had done that before. The room had grown darker around the circle of lamplight in which he sat. He got up and switched on the overhead light. He would need to cheer things up if they were to spend the whole evening here. He could buy some flowers, and he’d have to clean the bathroom and get some nice soap. He remembered a conversation years ago with Stephen – what was it he’d said? – about what to do when a girl was coming round. Stephen had recited this list, as if he’d read it in a book, for God’s sake; things like leaving letters around with exotic stamps, and what else? Oh yes, some kind of intriguing book lying open on the coffee table – actually, Stephen had said by the bed, but that was out of the question. He had gone too far, of course, talking about half-finished poems on the kitchen table and God knew what else. Ralph laughed aloud.
*
Ralph’s flat was to the north of Camden, in a small labyrinth of identical streets where most of the houses were only two storeys high, like a cloned village. The area was bounded and bypassed on either side by two large roads along which streams of traffic ran, prevented from forging time-saving tributaries through the tiny residential island between them by a number of no-entry signs, dead ends, and tortuous one-way systems. This lack of circulation gave the area a curiously bloodless air, Ralph thought, an atmosphere of blockage which, though he valued the parochial quiet it guaranteed, sometimes made him forget the city which lay around it.
He had chosen Camden without hesitation when he had decided to buy somewhere to live, using the small but still inexplicable amount of money his father had left him. He knew things were probably cheaper elsewhere, but when he was younger he and Stephen had always used to come to Camden, during the half-terms and holidays it had mysteriously been decided he should spend with Stephen and his mother. Stephen’s mother lived in west London, in a white mansion house surrounded by embassies. Ralph could remember seeing the large black cars installed with dark, motionless silhouettes roll silently past the kitchen windows, their bright flags writhing in the breeze. Stephen’s mother was forgetful about money and Stephen would sometimes elicit his ‘allowance’, as it was called, from her twice in one day. Stephen’s allowance, Ralph knew, in fact arrived regularly at his bank from his father, who lived abroad, but if she was party to it Lady Sparks never referred to their arrangement. In her vague way she always seemed rather frightened of Stephen and would rifle nervously in her purse at his request, producing a fistful of notes and offering them to him as if he were holding her at gun-point.
To his initial embarrassment and later concern, she gave Ralph money too, and although his stomach would knot with anxiety at the thought that she might pay him in front of Stephen, she never did. She would leave the money in his room or catch him on his own, her manner cool and confusing with discretion, and afterwards she would sometimes stroke his hair. He was grateful for it, of course, for he had little money of his own – just what his father had left him in a policy for his weekly upkeep, the rest to be collected when he came of age – and Stephen always liked to do expensive things when they were in London. Lady Sparks seemed to know just when his supplies were dwindling, and having learnt the secret of her acuity Ralph cultivated a slightly fearful respect for her. She was a small and elegant woman, so unlike the memory he had of his own mother, with a distracted, aristocratic voice and the redundant manners, the despairing aloofness, of a displaced, abandoned queen. She could unnerve Ralph if he was left alone with her for too long without the emboldening presence of Stephen’s bravado, by looking at him so blankly that he thought she was mad. He knew Stephen had had a brother when he was very young who had fallen out of their car on a motorway and died, and although he sometimes thought that Lady Sparks perhaps liked him because of the brother, and might even want to adopt him as a replacement, the sight of her pale, empty eyes told him that she didn’t feel that way at all. Stephen would do imitations of her when they were on their own, rolling his eyes back into his head and speaking in a feeble, effeminate voice until Ralph cried with guilty laughter. He said that his father had divorced her so that he could marry his French girlfriend Isobelle, with whom he now lived in a big house in the French countryside. Stephen went to stay with them sometimes during the summer and Ralph would have to go to London alone, where he crept nervously through the great, cool rooms to avoid the drifting ghost of Lady Sparks and more often than not kept to his bedroom and read during the hot days. Usually it was only for a week or two, though, and while Stephen would often say that he was going for Easter or Christmas, or for the two whole months of the summer, when the time came more often than not something ‘came up’ and he didn’t go. Ralph had never met Stephen’s father, or Isobelle, whom Stephen used to describe to the boys at school, claiming that he had once hidden in a wardrobe in their bedroom and watched them having sex through a crack in the door. They had two small children with French names which Ralph couldn’t remember.
They would usually go to Camden in a black cab hailed in the street by Stephen. Ralph would sit in it, filled with the inebriation of awe and with a sense of how randomly this grace had fallen upon him, how little it had to do with anything that had happened to him before. He wondered now if his own occasional but nevertheless illogical habit of taking cabs existed in deference to those cloistered journeys, which he looked back on amazed that his younger self had felt no embarrassment when emerging from them into the cheerful anarchy of Camden High Street. The area had a significance for him, though, which he did not wish to escape: they had sat in pubs, had looked at people unlike themselves, had bought records and even ‘scored’, as they had called it, from skinny fetid men in the street – not like now, Ralph thought, when Stephen seemed to have a minion for every drug he used, a book full of telephone numbers to be dialled at all times, the late-night ringing of the bell. Stephen had used to ‘skin up’, another phrase which now seemed foreign to him but which once he had had tamed on his tongue, in broad daylight, and Ralph would take panicked nips at it, not really feeling anything. It couldn’t have been very good, he thought now. He had taken things since which had made him feel so far inside himself that his voice was like a mega
phone in the pit of his stomach trying to project things out of his mouth.
He smiled as he trudged over Camden Lock with the two bags of shopping he had bought at great but unheeded expense at a delicatessen opposite the Tube station. Even then, he remembered, Stephen had used to change his voice, adopting a colourful proletarian twang, like something out of an Ealing comedy, through which his precise vowels would protrude like limbs from an ill-fitting set of clothes. These days the contrast was less amusing, for the two had almost merged into a single all-purpose voice. When he telephoned Ralph, Stephen would often say things like ‘all right?’ instead of ‘hello’, or ‘see you later’ when Ralph wasn’t going to see him later at all.
He reached his street, changing the bags to opposite hands. He had told Neil he was going to the doctor and had managed to get away early, something he had used to do frequently in the first, desperate months of his job. Eventually, though, things had changed, not at work but in his own acceptance of it: he had come to believe that there was nothing else, that this was the life that had been laid out for him, like a meal at a stranger’s house, and that if he didn’t like it he must change until he did, for there was nothing else.
It was not quite dark yet, the sky watery and blue with the aftermath of the afternoon’s cold sun, but the air had grown thin and icy and Ralph was surprised to see children in T-shirts wheeling and chattering round the street on their bikes. They were a familiar motif of summer to him, but he hadn’t seen them over the past few months and they had changed, had strange, brutal haircuts and new versions of their faces.
‘Hello,’ he said none the less as he passed them.
They looked round at him but didn’t reply, their compressed mouths bursting with suspicious humour. As he reached his flat and took out his keys he heard a volley of cries behind him.
‘’Allo! ’Allo!’ they shouted in voices effete with vaudeville mimicry.
He shut the door, hoping they wouldn’t be there by the time Francine arrived. He tried to imagine her in his road, a strange and beautiful fruit suddenly appearing on the bare branches of the sentinel winter trees which lined it. For a moment he felt faint at the prospect of the evening ahead, his responsibility for it, and almost decided there and then just to take her to a restaurant and be done with it. He put the bags of food on the kitchen table and sat down with his head in his hands. A thread of self-consciousness stole through him as he did so. He was the picture of despair, like somebody in a film. He laughed aloud at his own comedy. He would do exactly what he had set out to do: he had bought food and wine, had rendered the flat unrecognizable with order the night before, had even had his hair cut on the Holloway Road at lunch-time.
‘Get the doctor to do something about your hair, mate,’ Neil had said, folding over with his own hilarity, when Ralph had left for his fictitious appointment at four o’clock.
He stood and went to look at himself in the hall mirror. The cut made his face appear rather beefy, giving it the exposed, foolish look of a passport photograph. He ruffled it a bit and saw a spray of dark filaments fall gently to his shoulders. He turned away from the mirror, his face itchy and hot. He had planned to do the cooking first and then get himself ready at the last minute. He had ruled out the temptation to make something elaborate: it wasn’t much of a temptation in any case, as his preliminary skim through his only cookery book – a strange fifteenth-birthday present from Lady Sparks, with garish photographs of prone crustaceans spewing lumpy substances from their backs – had informed him that he possessed neither the utensils nor the skills even the simplest dish demanded for its creation. He would make a risotto, something he had learned to do as a student; never properly, of course, merely approaching it by intuition and experiment, until finally he’d made it for a group of friends who’d called it risotto and said how much they’d liked it. This time, he had bought expensive things to put in it, which probably could have formed something more impressive if he assembled them in a different way, but the expansive, forgiving framework of the risotto offered an indispensable form of insurance against disaster.
He went to the sitting-room and looked at the answering machine. There was a message on it, and he regarded it for a moment with foreboding as he realized it might be Francine, saying that she couldn’t make it after all. He pressed the button and heard Stephen’s voice saying something clipped, which sounded like ‘let’s see’ – probably ‘it’s me’, Ralph thought – then a kind of long sigh and the clamour of the phone being put down. Everything was fine, then.
*
Some time later, Ralph lay in the bath. Next door, the risotto lay in the oven, warming. He had been too frightened to taste it, but he knew there was something wrong. At first it had been too liquid, and he had added more rice, in his enthusiasm rendering the whole thing rather glutinous, its parts indistinguishable. More worrying, however, was the peculiar smell it emanated, which Ralph had attempted to track down to some infestation of the fridge or kitchen cupboards but which finally he had had to admit was the perfume of his offering to Francine. He had attempted to identify it – it was a bitter, floury smell – from the parade of ingredients from which he had assembled the dish, but it had resembled none of them. In the end he had tried to disguise it with the addition of stronger presences which he had hoped would somehow crowd it out. The spices he had added had succeeded only in transforming its colour, against which he had had no complaint in the first place, and he had been forced to resign himself and place the muddy, odorous mass in a large dish in the oven.
The incident had burdened him with a sense of indifference which was prolonging his lazy, lukewarm immersion dangerously close to the half-hour zone he had cordoned off for last-minute preparations. His bath had thus far been a nihilistic event, an exercise in detachment involving the objective scrutiny and contemptuous dismissal of each immobile, ghoulish part of his body. In the day-dreams with which he had readied himself for Francine’s arrival, the bath had been a hearty, foamy affair, a steamy and fragrant series of whale-like dives and merry purgings, from which he would emerge tousled and shining to spray and slap himself with pungent substances. Only enforced contemplation of the inescapable and fast-approaching evening succeeded finally in urging him into a cursory scrubbing, and he rose from it dripping and slightly more cheerful, thinking of how he and Francine could laugh together at his risotto and how all he had to do was relax. His hair didn’t look so bad in the bathroom mirror either, and after one or two different attempts his clothes seemed all right too. He went back to confront the hall mirror, and found that he had improved himself.
In a moment of largesse, filled with the growing sense of his own urbanity, he decided to open a bottle of wine and drink some of it, just to show Francine that he knew how to be sociable with himself. She wasn’t due to arrive for half an hour yet, taking into account the fifteen minutes by which he assumed she would be late, whether by accident or design. He opened the oven door and peered in through the crack. His oven had a light in it which gave the risotto the appearance of a museum exhibit, a dish of planetary matter brought back by astronauts, or a porridgy alien captured and held hostage. He slammed the door shut and opened one of the bottles of red wine he had bought at the delicatessen. Sitting at the kitchen table with it, he realized that he hadn’t spent an evening – well, this kind of evening, anyway – with a woman for a long time. He had thought that he had, of course, but the quite suffocating excitement and fear with which he currently trembled explained to him why he had felt so awkward on those occasions, almost as if he didn’t care what happened during them. He had cared in the hours before a liaison, going through the imaginary evening like a diligent tourist would a guidebook, marking every highlight; and then registering his disappointment on arrival at each reality with equal thoroughness. This time, he had tried not to think about anything beyond the moment of Francine’s arrival. His unfamiliarity with her rendered his conjectures flimsy and unenjoyable, and it was a testament to her superior
ity, he thought, that the idea of imagining her in unplayed scenes appeared all at once rather lewd and inappropriate. He had always thought that love, or even infatuation, took him a long time to make, an old-fashioned business which would eventually produce a high-quality emotion. If he was honest about it, though, Belinda was the only person he had really loved, and when he first met her he had instantly felt much the same as he was feeling now. The disbelief at the beginning that she had agreed to go out with him, gradually eroded by the fact of her continuing presence; really, it had been the most amazing thing. He had felt disbelief at the end, too, but events had made it true, a sickening succession of votes cast against him until he had had to concede that he had lost.
His glass was empty and he poured more wine into it. He never saw Belinda now, hadn’t seen her for two years actually. She had tried to be his friend, he supposed, but he had messed it up, unable to stand the sight or sound of her, really, everything she did without him hurting him. She had said that had upset her more than anything else. It made him laugh. He laughed now, the sound ghostly in the empty flat. At least she didn’t see Stephen either, pretty much the only good thing to have come out of that time. Not that Stephen cared, of course, but it would have made Ralph’s main achievement of the last two years – never thinking about Belinda – that much more difficult. He was thinking about her now, though, he could feel himself doing it. He drained his glass and held the bottle once more at its rim. His hand shook, and the two glass lips chattered against each other loudly. At the sound, a quite unstoppable feeling of fear began to steal over him. He had worked so hard to compress all of that, to hammer it down and keep it somewhere out of sight, but here it was springing up in all its large, noisy mockery, and for a moment he couldn’t remember how he had ever managed to crush and contain it. He tried to think of something else – Francine, that was right – but everything around him suddenly seemed so foreign and far away that he could not place himself within it. A great shiver shook him as spools of memory began to unreel messily across his thoughts, scenes hurtling by in the gallop towards the blackest part of himself, the only thing he ever thought of as true and yet it was so fantastic, so easy to deny – as they had both denied it! – that he thought he had cut it off for ever, that he would never go there again. He clenched his fists on the table and felt something burn at his eyes, so hot and dry that it seemed wrung from the tight and boiling ball of his heart. His misery struggled and was born; and when it did so everything seemed to stop, to accept the impossibility of going on, as if he had some place in the world where he reigned, a small place where he could say the sun wouldn’t rise tomorrow if he didn’t want it to.