by Rachel Cusk
He didn’t exactly regret their evening together, merely the silliness that had gone before it. He had wrought such things in himself, such breathless spirals of hope and despair, for all the world as if he had had nothing better to think about. The ghostly apparitions of wisdom astonished him with their many illusions and tricks, making one quite sure of the existence of something which in the next moment vanished. In the end, though, the discovery that really he was just like every other man filled him with a horrifying form of relief. It was a burden to consider oneself different, and what had he done but for once in his life take something cheaply? And afterwards, what more than feel every man’s mild ache of redundancy, and the desire to move on from what was empty to what was full? For a while, certainly, it had fascinated him to see how little he could care about Francine while sharing with her what he regarded as the most precious and precarious intimacy, but it was no more than a callous experiment with himself which would prove nothing. He had emerged from it belittled, sullied with the memory of what felt afterwards like his own violation.
Their night remained oddly bereft of recollections, for all that. Searching for its reality, he found only his phantoms of thought, a heap of discarded disguises garish by daylight. She had insisted on darkness, and in it he had felt lost and detached, his body given a command for which he had feared drunkenness and muddled desires would render it unfit. He wondered what amnesia it was that time and time again generated a pleasure in the anticipation of an act which was almost always destroyed by its fulfilment. In the end he had not been as awkward as he would have thought likely, but he had been so intent on giving a correct performance that it only occurred to him afterwards, straining to remember what had happened in the darkness, that Francine had done nothing at all. The acquiescence which had so struck him modulated at the first touch into submission, and in the very granting of her permission he had felt her sudden absence, as if she had what it was that she wanted and was leaving him to the business of his own pleasure. What struck him now was how confident she had seemed that this was enough, but for him the privilege had been a lonely one. He had finished it all quite quickly and had surprised himself by going straight to sleep. When he woke up in the morning she wasn’t in the room, and he had found her in the kitchen, sitting fully dressed at the table with a piece of toast on a plate in front of her. It was then that he had felt most unnerved by her. He had tried to make a joke of it, saying how much more organized she was than he, but she had looked at him as if she didn’t understand what he was talking about. When she left he had gone back to bed and lain inertly for half an hour, his head aching and blank.
He abandoned the evening’s regime and made a sandwich, carrying it into the sitting-room with the intention of eating it in front of the television. As he sat down on the sofa, the thought of his claims for Francine came round again on the trundling wheel of his consciousness. It all seemed rather comic to him now, and he smiled at his own foolishness. He supposed he hadn’t behaved very well, but he would be kinder to her when next they met. He turned on the news, and felt all at once overwhelmed with contentment at the warmth of his flat, the correctness of its comforts, his freedom to be alone there, while beyond the drawn curtains the city night began again the long drama of its uncertainties.
Nine
When Mr Lancing was in the office the atmosphere was one of siege, and his community laboured towards the goal of his next disappearance with dedication. When he had gone, to a meeting or to lunch, his large desk remained his monument in the centre of the office, bedecked with the insignia of leadership. If the meeting was in the building, his suit jacket often stayed behind, hung on the shoulders of his high-backed chair as vigilant as a sentry, with his briefcase to heel on the floor beside it. During these periods his presence seemed more imminent and the office was guarded, its revolutions whispered beneath tapping fingers and shrilling telephones, while neat, resentful stacks of finished work automatically accrued on his desktop. If the meeting was elsewhere his exit was triumphant, with a car to be called and his briefcase prepared, and in the wake of it there rose the euphoria of actors after the performance of a play. His people would sit back in their chairs behind his retreating figure, flushed and smiling, and a celebratory coffee would be made.
Francine searched Mr Lancing’s diary, of which she was the caretaker, and found to her concern that he had no meetings at all that day. He had arrived at his desk earlier than usual, rolling up his sleeves, and his jacket decorated the back of his chair with an aspect of entrenchment. He was reading a report Francine had typed for him the day before, his forehead wrinkled with concentration.
‘What the hell is this?’ he shouted, apparently to no one in particular.
The telephone rang and Francine answered it.
‘Good morning, Mr Lancing’s office.’
‘That Gary?’
‘No, this is his secretary. May I ask who’s calling?’
‘Tell him it’s Buck.’
Francine pressed the button which put the line on hold.
‘Mr Lancing!’ she called loudly. Mr Lancing frequently failed to respond to his name, and Francine had concluded that he must be slightly deaf. He looked around, as if wondering where the noise had come from. ‘Mr Lancing, Buck’s on the line for you.’
‘Buck?’ he said. ‘Who’s Buck?’
Francine considered her options. She had already offended several of Mr Lancing’s close associates by returning to their line when he failed to recognize them and questioning them further before allowing them through. She had got to know most of them by now, but she couldn’t remember Buck having called before.
‘He’s American,’ she said hopefully.
Mr Lancing gave the matter some thought. Suddenly he grinned and bounced slightly in his chair with excitement.
‘It’s Buck!’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you just put him on?’
Francine did so, and moments later the telephone rang again.
‘Is that Sally?’ said another American voice, this time belonging to a woman.
‘I’m afraid Sally doesn’t work here at the moment,’ said Francine.
‘This is Sylvia,’ said the woman.
‘Oh, hello, Mrs Lancing,’ said Francine. She had spoken to Mr Lancing’s wife several times before and still occasionally had to explain Sally’s disappearance. ‘This is Francine.’
‘What a pretty name,’ said Sylvia vaguely. ‘Listen, is Gary there?’
‘He’s taking a call at the moment,’ said Francine. ‘Is there anything I can help you with?’
‘It’s our son’s birthday tomorrow, Francine,’ said Sylvia. ‘I was calling for some gift ideas. Is there anything you could suggest?’
‘Well – how old is he?’
‘I believe he’ll be eleven years old tomorrow, Francine,’ Sylvia sighed. ‘My little baby, all grown up.’
‘What about – what about a bicycle? No, I suppose he’s already got one.’
‘A bicycle?’ said Sylvia. ‘Gee, that’d be fun. I don’t know. You say he’s already got one?’
‘I thought he might, that’s all.’
‘I was actually thinking we could get him some stocks.’
‘Socks?’ said Francine.
‘No, stocks, you know, like stocks and shares. Maybe you could talk with Gary about that.’
‘All right,’ said Francine.
‘Thank you so much, Francine. Do you know when Sally’s coming back?’
‘I don’t know.’ Francine was beginning to tire of the conversation. ‘She’s ill.’
‘I bet you’re hoping she’ll get worse!’ said Sylvia. She shrieked with laughter.
When Mr Lancing had finished his conversation, Francine approached him about the matter of the present.
‘I thought a bicycle would be nice,’ she said, growing more attached to her own idea.
Mr Lancing looked pensive. His hair was unkempt, as though he had forgotten to brush it. He looked as if he were w
earing a wig.
‘Which one is it?’ he said.
‘Which what? Oh, I see, the one who’s going to be eleven.’
‘And you want to buy him a bike?’
‘It was only an idea. Your wife thought he might like some stocks.’
‘Stocks?’ Mr Lancing’s face lit up. ‘That’s a great idea! He’ll love it, he can hang the certificates on his wall!’ He motioned with his hands, demonstrating their placement.
Francine went to the ladies’ and stood behind the locked door in one of the cubicles. After a while she came out and looked at herself in the large mirror for a long time. When one of the other secretaries came in, she washed her hands and went back to the office. Mr Louche was cutting something from a magazine at his desk with a pair of scissors. He carried the severed page over to Mr Lancing and placed it in front of him.
‘What do you think?’ he said, beaming.
Francine was standing near by and she leaned over slightly so that she could see what it was. It was a full-page advertisement for underwear. A girl with dark hair lounged on a sofa clasped in small pieces of lace.
‘How about that?’ persisted Mr Louche. ‘Isn’t she something?’
‘She has a very kind face,’ agreed Mr Lancing, nodding. ‘She looks as though she’d be very nice.’
Mr Louche returned with the picture to his desk. Moments later Francine saw him sticking it to the wall behind him with a drawing pin. At one o’clock, Mr Lancing and Mr Louche put on their jackets and left the office for lunch.
‘Bye, girls,’ said Mr Louche from the doorway.
Francine left soon after them, trying to look as little as possible as if she were going on an expedition to the shops lest the others ask her to buy sandwiches for them. That had happened on her first day, when she had been eager to be pleasant and had asked if anyone wanted anything because she was going out. She had spent the entire lunch hour queuing in a sandwich shop with a list saying who wanted butter and mayonnaise and which of them liked salt and pepper. As she left the building and launched herself into the swarming pavement, she was met by the familiar volley of glances of which she had eventually tired in Kent; but the homage of London’s streets never failed to uplift her with the suggestion that here, at the centre of it all, she was still everything she had believed herself to be. At first she had sometimes felt fearful that the unexceptional landscape of her old town had been too flattering a foil, but now it seemed to her that people had never really looked at her there, that she had been out of scale and incomprehensible to them. For the first time, she was really being appreciated. The fact that this appreciation as yet took such an insubstantial form – a deep and searching look, sometimes an expression of brazen pleasure, occasionally even a comment – worried her only mildly, for she felt sure that time would see its maturation into something more useful. It was just a question of staying in the light long enough to be seen, of keeping herself above the surface; and although Francine had faith in her own buoyancy, lately she had seen glimpses of a subtle, unexplained terror, that if ever she disappeared from view, she would sink and sink with no one to save her.
Francine ate her sandwich at her desk. By the time she had finished, it was not yet half-past one, and she felt the day drag at her with its unsparing hours. A murmuring quietude had settled on the office after the excited swell of Mr Lancing’s departure. The other girls sat turning the pages of magazines. Lorraine was on the telephone at the desk next to Francine’s.
‘Really? Really?’ she said.
Francine had nothing to read. She wished she had bought a magazine when she was out. She thought of calling Janice, but when she considered it more closely could think of nothing to say. She found her eyes running automatically along the typed lines of a letter in front of her, which she had printed out for Mr Lancing before lunch and which now awaited his signature. Her mind emptied with the exercise and when next she looked at her watch she saw that five minutes had passed. Boredom did not usually trouble her, for her contemplations were large and continuous, and often seemed more real and colourful than her physical activities. The facility with which she found her thoughts could slip away, hurrying back to the subject of herself after the interruptions of circumstance, meant that generally she relished these vacant interludes, filling them with the enactment of things passed or to come, and even occasionally with vivid scenes featuring people she had invented and was unlikely ever to meet. Sometimes her absorption would develop into a state of trance, the crowds of her consciousness dispersed to permit higher meditations which, although they could be achieved more easily in front of a mirror, were still accessible merely through the memory of one.
On this occasion, however, as she tried to think of the meeting with Ralph scheduled for the evening ahead, she found that her mind would not pleasure her. There was something in their connection which made the contemplation of it hostile to her enjoyment, and when she touched on it, even wrapped in the deepest clouds of illusion, her thoughts came back to her punished as if an electric shock had repelled them. Dimly she knew that her telephone call, made at the end of that long Friday evening during which she had battled and lost against resolution, had been a mistake. Despite the warm contrivances of her imagination the horrible truth it had fleetingly revealed sent its chill through every passage along which Francine tried to approach their arrangement. She was unused to analysing the motivations of her admirers and the memory of Ralph’s resistance, the ultimate defeat of which had permitted her to inter it in the deepest tomb of the forgotten, began to struggle again with life. He had behaved oddly that evening at his flat, but the subsequent improvement in his affections had led her then, as it did again now, to suppose it the product of nerves, a facet of his shyness or perhaps even his intelligence – a mystery in which she had little interest except in thoughts of the more interesting consequences of its enslavement. In the end everything had happened as it always did, but in this case the greater difficulty of achieving what was recognizable left Francine with a certain reluctance to abandon the scene of her hard work. After all, she could have just turned around and gone home right at the beginning, there on the doorstep! The fact that finally he had done what was expected of him was her only place of refuge, but even there the suspicion that something was wrong tracked her down.
His coolness on the telephone could, after all, have been nothing but a habitual return to restraint, a sort of tic out of which it might take some time to train him. She examined their conversation warily in the light of this new theory. He had been polite, but there had been something weary in his voice when she had announced herself, a tone disconcertingly similar to that deployed by her mother only a few hours earlier. Afterwards she had alternately comforted and upbraided herself with the memory of his reserve, one minute assured that his manner was merely the proof of his being a different ‘type’, the next horrifyingly tempted to believe that, even so, one or two of the same rules must apply, and that if he’d wanted to see her he would have asked. Truth laboured over this point, fatigued but resilient. Try as she might to camouflage the fact that she herself had suggested they meet, the material of fabrication was simply not there. Not thinking about that particular aspect of things at all had proved her only escape, but she felt its haunting presence.
She switched on her computer and stared at the awakening screen. Her thoughts had made this long journey several times over the past few days, and as often as not arrived at defiance. As she began to type another letter for Mr Lancing, she resorted to the secondary pleasure of thinking how cool she would be with Ralph, how obvious it would be that she didn’t care about him, and, in a triumph of regained authority, how she might not even turn up at all.
‘That’s a bit keen,’ said Lorraine, putting down the telephone.
‘I’ve got to leave early,’ said Francine.
‘Up to something special tonight, then?’
‘I’m meeting my boyfriend,’ said Francine, an enjoyable feeling of satisfact
ion warming her limbs as she said the words. ‘He’s taking me out.’
‘Really?’ said Lorraine.
*
It had been milder that day, and even though darkness had fallen Francine found that she could walk with her coat unbuttoned. If she walked briskly enough, it flew behind her in a manner she interpreted as romantic, and the intermittent revelation of her legs by its flapping drew the inquisitive glances of Camden High Street.
The anxiety which had moored in her stomach all day suddenly began to churn her juices as it propelled itself in circles of apprehension. She felt uneasy with the desires that had brought her here, a shady, duplicitous tribe of impulses with whom she did not normally do business. The street was crowded, and clashing waves of frenetic music burst from the noisy, brightly lit façades of open shops as she walked by. Several people had stopped at the window of an electrical shop and were gazing dumbly at the silent, animated screens of televisions. She pushed past them, depleted by the imperviousness with which they blocked her way. The thought of Ralph waiting for her, far from strengthening her against the vicissitudes of her journey, left her only with the unpleasant suspicion that her arrival was not urgently required. She drooped slightly and summoned again the possibility of going home, leaving him to sit there alone, punished by thoughts of her. The idea fortified her with enthusiasm and she quickened her pace. A man was approaching her along the street and she could tell from the intent angle of his face that he was trying to fix her eyes with his own. She met his glance and was surprised to find it irritating, filled with suggestion, with promises of whose emptiness she was suddenly assured. It occurred to her that these men who looked at her, these hungry strangers, were taking things from her without giving anything in return. She wondered why they should be permitted to visit her face so freely and then move on, as if it were but the distraction of a moment.