The Temporary

by Rachel Cusk

  Normally Francine found it easy to understand her life at the office. Her rank and station were clear, her duties and regalia always the same, her employer a distant, regimental figure whose peculiarities were generally substantial enough to be discussed at lunch-time. The band of her cohorts was genial, and usually manufactured a set of easily grasped distinguishing features on the surface of a deep homogeneity. Every office was at pains to possess its own character: ‘What do you think of this place, then?’ people would ask Francine at the end of her first day, and although she never really thought anything, they would proudly tell her that she would get used to it in the end.

  With Mr Harris, though, Francine had begun to feel as if she didn’t know who she was. Without the armour of a corporate identity, she had felt him clawing at her person, simulating a hideous intimacy which for the first time revealed to her the precarious contract on which her position was founded. Her transience normally safeguarded her liberty, but locked in with Mr Harris’s fascination the days had seemed long. His presence had become hourly more predatory, and although Francine knew that the termination of his lease on her was not far off, the fingering, probing quality of his ownership subdued her into the belief that it would never end. She became listless in the evenings, avoiding her reflection in the windows of the Underground train as she made her lonely journey to Waterloo the next morning. At the end of two weeks he asked her to stay on and she said that she had another job to go to the next week. She didn’t tell Lynne what she had done.

  ‘I’m sorry about that, Francine,’ Mr Harris had said, drawing close to her as she stood straining at the door with her coat. His skin was stodgy and pale, and his eyes quivered like tinned fruits in the jelly of his face. ‘It’s meant so much to me having you here.’

  Afterwards Francine had hurried down to the station, the grim scenes of her unhappy lunch hours clinging to her as she passed. It had taken a long time for the elation at her freedom to come, and she had only really felt it when Lynne phoned to tell her about the job at Lancing & Louche and sounded quite friendly, as if nothing had happened. She had even said that they only sent their top people to Mr Lancing, although in her sensitive condition Francine had detected a note of warning in the compliment.

  She turned on the kitchen lights and put her bag on the table. Janice had left dishes in the sink, minutely and elegantly smeared, and a carton of milk stood open on the sideboard. A note on the table said that she had gone out for the evening. Irritation provoked a tightening in Francine’s head, and she felt the slight tumult in her stomach which was the residue of being unable to distinguish her thoughts by discussing them with someone else. She never really assumed control over events until she had related them in some form: untold, their reality was too pressing, still sullied with the awkwardness of the moment. Once she had presented them to an audience, they came back to her purged and confirmed, interpreted, ordered scenes which could then be filed in memory. Given the unsociable nature of her day, she had hoped Janice would be on hand when she arrived home. She remembered that it was Friday night, and the thought of spending it alone worried her for a moment, until she conjured up the dispensation of her activities the night before. She was recovering, and would prove it with a long, scented bath, an arsenal of beauty treatments, and a relaxed posture later on the sofa with a magazine.

  Thus intent, Francine visited the sitting-room en route to her indulgences and listened to the messages on the answering machine. Two were for Janice, one of them the imperious manager of the Hampstead boutique, the other a man with a rough voice saying something that Francine couldn’t hear very well. Her mother’s clearer, complaining tones followed, asking why she had to have that silly machine on the whole time and would madam like to phone her when she got in, although not if it was past ten o’clock. Then it was Ralph, saying that he’d enjoyed last night and he hoped she hadn’t felt too awful at work because he certainly had. His voice sounded incongruous and polite beside the others.

  Francine immediately began the business of not returning Ralph’s call, going into the bathroom and turning on the taps. She looked in the mirror above the sink and was surprised to see that her face was haggard beneath an unfamiliar mat of lank hair. The idea that Ralph had wrought this change with the pummelling effect of his attention – wanting to talk to her before she’d even walked through the door! – was interesting, but the seeds of melodrama were blighted by the realization that his message had contained no suggestion that he wanted to see her again. In the more productive state of mild uncertainty, she removed her tired, twice-worn clothing and set about the lavish business of restoring herself while fingers of steam began to creep warmly over her skin.

  In the bath, she reflected on the fact that her mother had lately seemed to be enjoying a new lease of life, which, while it didn’t succeed in blunting the voracity of her interest in Francine’s affairs, suggested the renewal of activity in her own. Francine didn’t think about her parents very often, having some time ago realized that the profitability of her association with them would never again reach the modest peaks of her childhood years – unless they died, of course, which was a horrible thought – but she did occasionally solicit her mother’s attention, and maintained a relationship with her over the telephone which was useful in times of shortfall, when other confidantes could not be located or were found wanting. Maxine Snaith’s appetite for information was considerable, and allowed Francine the rare luxury of being asked more questions about herself than she really wanted to answer.

  Her parents had never visited her in London, and although they frequently mentioned the fact that there was always a bed for her in Kent, both parties seemed to consider the terms of Francine’s emigration so extreme as to lend her absence a certain finality. Since Frank, Francine’s father, had taken his retirement, a journey to London had been mentioned more frequently, but Francine had soon discovered that the foreign flavour of the idea made it easy to forestall. If the disincentives of bombs and bad weather failed, she could always say that she was very busy at that particular time, and Maxine would grow meek with awe and with the possibility of encountering things that she didn’t understand, making a trip later in the year sound much more acceptable.

  Francine was Frank and Maxine’s only child, and they had united their names as well as their bodies to form her. The experiment had certainly been a success; almost too great a success, in fact, for their hazy understanding of their own union made its exotic and turbulent fruit the object of a slightly fearful contemplation. Frank and Maxine hadn’t really known one another for very long when they’d got married – Frank had proposed to Maxine over the telephone from Maidstone, and had been away on business in Leicester right up to the wedding – and Francine had arrived so rapidly that they had straight away been sent into inescapable orbit around her and never really got the chance to catch up with each other. The fact that Francine resembled neither of them gave their grouping a somewhat alien atmosphere, and although any two of them could conjure a certain intimacy on the common ground of the third’s absence, seated around the dinner table in the evenings things were often awkward.

  Francine’s sex and her fast-developing loveliness eventually swung the tide of affiliation in her mother’s favour, and Frank became an increasingly extraneous presence in the house. The forces of femininity were, he soon realized, inward-looking and indifferent to his conquest, and he was not even required to do the slavish work of offsetting them. Francine’s vanity had been tended at the roots by her mother’s determination to witness and enshrine every new development, and Frank was relegated to the position of a patron observing with a slight, helpless horror the spectacle his generosity has permitted to be enacted.

  Maxine’s devotion to Francine’s physical triumphs and the social victories which the future would undoubtedly bring permitted her time only to give herself attention of a somewhat indifferent and secondary nature. She was not an attractive woman, made from small bones which easily a
ccrued quantities of bluish, intractable fat in their own defence. She found it hard to see herself clearly in the glare of Francine’s superiority, and she grew detached and confused in matters of her own upkeep. At the hairdresser’s she never really knew what she wanted, and would allow the woman to run free with her uncertain creative powers, manufacturing whimsical, ill-realized styles which didn’t seem to belong to her. She would occasionally look at herself in the mirror and would feel a mild perturbation, dutifully applying blocks of make-up to all the recognized places. The apparently meaningless reservoirs of flesh around her body she regarded rather more fearfully, and took to palliating them with the consumption of brightly coloured milkshakes instead of food. As this cruel practice became more frequent, it eventually replaced all the memories of varied and seductive forms of nourishment she had accrued during her life with the simpler image of a tall glass filled with brown, pink, or cream liquid – colours which she came to associate with the meals they represented, preferring the brown one, for example, for the evening meal – and as she shrank Maxine wondered if there would come a day when she wouldn’t be there at all.

  Frank, although slightly fearful of the vacancy in his wife’s eyes, approved of her diminution. They had long since set up twin beds in their room, but even so he liked the idea that his wife would be seen as a woman who could control herself. It suggested that she cared what he, and other people, thought. He did find her means somewhat repellent, and although she still made his usual breakfast and cooked the evening meal, the fact that she insisted on drinking those revolting things while he was eating was, for Frank, too public an expression of her problem. He would have liked to be able to tell his friends that his wife ate like a bird, but the shaming nature of her diet led him to keep it to himself.

  Since she had left home, however, Francine had several times entertained the suspicion that her parents had united in her absence, flowing together over the space she had once occupied until their surface was so smooth that she might never have been there at all. Her mother’s interest, of course, could always be recruited with a telephone call, but there was something masculine in her interrogations now, a desire for more substantial evidence of progress than had previously been required, behind which Francine detected the conspiring hand of Frank. It irritated Francine to hear how Maxine had blossomed in the wake of her desertion, dyeing her hair blonde, wearing gold jewellery, her face fashioned by a make-over.

  ‘You should see your mother,’ Frank would boom, picking up the extension in the sitting-room while Maxine regaled Francine with her improvements from the kitchen. ‘She’s a corker.’

  She had even given up her milkshakes, she said, in favour of a local exercise club which she had joined, where she had made new friends. The emergence of features in Maxine’s life meant that she expected to be able to talk, and even answer questions, about them.

  ‘You haven’t asked me how Body Conditioning went,’ she would complain to Francine at the end of a call.

  The consequence of this trend was that Francine called less often, and felt a vague and disturbing insecurity at her exclusion which, although it coincided with her desire to pare down her connection with her parents, removed from her hands all the pleasure of doing so. She had disappointed them, she knew, in her last year or so at home: they had safeguarded her through school and secretarial college, beneath the assumption that a lucrative deal would subsequently take her off their hands; but she had frittered herself, in their view, on flashy types with few intentions, getting herself a flighty reputation and probably scaring off any chance of a decent prospect into the bargain.

  Francine’s long life before the mirror, however, had given her different ideas about her own destiny. When it came, she felt sure that she would recognize it as clearly as she did her own face and that it would be a similarly pleasurable vision. She was so careless of her parents’ qualms that it was an effort to remember them at all in her schemes, and she would always feel mildly surprised when their judgements rose up in the dust of her activities. None of it was serious, in any case. She was merely awaiting the opportunity, sure that it would come to her, to move on to greater, if unspecified, things.

  It was in this mood of scornful assurance that she had allowed herself to be flattered by the attentions of the manager of a local software company, where she had been stationed for three weeks’ secretarial work. He was young and rather attractive, and when his wife came into the office one lunch-time Francine was surprised and somewhat dismayed to notice that she was quite beautiful and that David behaved like a silly, devoted dog around her. If she was honest, Francine had to admit that up until then David had done a good job of concealing his interest in her. She hadn’t really intended to do any harm, but she was always interested in testing her powers, and she perceived in this situation perhaps the greatest challenge they had yet received. After his wife had gone, she had lingered around his desk with the pretence of activity, wondering what effect her mere physical proximity would have. When nothing happened, she launched a more deliberate offensive, subjecting David to amplified versions of several devices tested and found to be successful in other trials. One night she stayed late, offering to help him with his work, until it grew dark outside and they were alone in the office. They had talked, and Francine had cleverly steered the conversation towards the personal. David had revealed that his wife ran a local advertising agency and often didn’t get home until late herself. In answer to Francine’s questions, he admitted that he did often have to make his own dinner and occasionally even iron his shirts, and she gave him her utmost sympathy. The next day, she had made sure to meet his eye frequently and they had shared several intimate glances. Eventually, after more than a week, he became flustered and tried angrily to grab her behind a filing cabinet when no one else was looking. She waited for a few days before she gave in, and one lunch-time he took her to a hotel. He must have told his wife what he’d done the same evening, because she appeared at the office the next day with a red, ruined face and started shouting that she wanted to know which one it was. Francine had fortunately retreated to the toilets as soon as she caught sight of her, but one of the other girls had told her that David had had to ask his wife to leave the office. He barely spoke to Francine during her last couple of days at the company, and remembering his rudeness at the hotel and the fact that he hadn’t even bought her lunch, she felt that he had behaved quite badly.

  News of David’s indiscretion spread quickly through the town, and over the next few weeks Francine experienced a distinct and unpleasant cooling of manners towards her as she went about her business. In this change of climate, her dormant hatred of the place where she had grown up suddenly sprang and flowered. She didn’t exactly feel guilty about what had happened, but when she looked up at the dinner table and caught her parents’ troubled eyes on her, it occurred to her how enjoyable it would be to go somewhere else. One evening she told them of her intention to move to London, and to her surprise they hadn’t seemed particularly upset and had said it was probably for the best. Francine had really only made her announcement with the purpose of getting used to the idea, but when her father said that he would give her a thousand pounds to get her on her way, she sensed that things were moving rather more quickly than she had anticipated. Still, she was glad of the money, which gave her the satisfaction of thinking that, all in all, things had worked out for the best.

  She rose from the bath and lost herself for a while in the generous administration of resources to all her surfaces. Finally she donned her bathrobe and drifted to the sitting-room to telephone her mother.

  ‘Yes, love,’ said Maxine wearily when Francine announced herself.

  ‘Don’t sound too pleased,’ snapped Francine, who disliked her mother’s latest habit of inferring that her life was one of constant, complex demands, when Francine felt sure that she was only watching television with Frank.

  ‘Don’t start, Francine. What is it?’

  ‘What’
s what?’ She would have put the phone down there and then, had she not wanted to discuss her evening with Ralph. ‘You asked me to call you.’

  ‘Well, we hadn’t heard from you for so long,’ sniffed Maxine. ‘I just wanted to know you were still breathing.’

  ‘How’s your class?’ said Francine, knowing the enquiry would put her mother in a more communicative mood. Not wishing to hear the answer, however, and confident that it would be lengthy, she put the receiver down on the table and went to the kitchen to get a glass of orange juice. When she returned, she could hear her mother’s voice squeaking with alarm from the abandoned telephone.

  ‘Francine! Francine!’

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘I was listening to you talking about your class.’

  ‘I told you, I didn’t go this week. I’ve hurt my back – as if you were interested!’ She gave an unbecoming snort of laughter. ‘Francine, it’s very rude to just go off when a person’s talking to you. I don’t know what gets into you sometimes. Your father and I sometimes sit for hours trying to remember what terrible thing it was that we did to you. I know you think my aerobics is boring, but it’s very important to me and—’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Francine.

  ‘– and you haven’t even asked how your father is yet.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘He’s been unwell, as a matter of fact. We thought he had cancer.’

  Such excursions into tragedy were a frequent feature of Maxine’s conversation.

  ‘Really?’ said Francine. She lay back on the sofa and examined her freshly shaven legs.

  ‘But the doctor said it’s just a bit of constipation. He’s got to cut down on his fats. Not that I ever give him fatty foods, mind you. I learnt that lesson long ago with my own problems. Still, we’ll get by.’