by Rachel Cusk
‘You’ll be all right,’ he said, looking into the distance like an explorer and wrinkling his eyes.
Ralph felt duly comforted. Stephen always provided him with curious remedies for the injury of his friendship. The bare assertion of his loyalty, their odd bond which had gathered so little to it over the years, was often the only thing which could palliate the pain which Stephen sometimes brought with him. Despite all that they had shared, Stephen still wrought in Ralph a unique discomfort, a feeling of terrible confinement within himself. He wondered now if that was how families felt, all that trapping knowledge, that looming history. Stephen knew too much about his past to believe in the secret alchemy of personal change. In his eyes he, Ralph, could never be more than the sum of Stephen’s knowledge, could never escape the arithmetic of those redundant selves and conjure himself from the air.
‘Maybe.’
‘Why can’t you just enjoy it?’ cried Stephen, exasperated. ‘You’re a lucky sod. Just enjoy it!’
‘I can’t. I’m not like that.’
‘Then tell her to fuck off!’
Stephen broke suddenly from his side and Ralph watched him run ahead. He began skipping and leaping wildly on the pavement, waving his arms above his head in a sudden deluge of irradiation, while the cackle of his laughter made its contorted flight back to Ralph’s unhappy ears.
Eleven
Francine’s flat was irrefutably located at the western end of Mill Lane, and much as she might try to clothe the fact in whimsically stated preferences for longer walks to leafier branches of transportation, the Tube station at Kilburn was undeniably her most expeditious point of contact with the outside world. On the occasions – really only once or twice, in fact, and more towards the beginning of things – on which Ralph had come to stay, she had directed him to the longer route, believing that her lair was better approached from the more seductive angle of West Hampstead. He had taken matters into his own hands, of course, by consulting a map, and as seemed often to be the case these days Francine had found her persuasive version of things overridden by the more logical conclusions of research. He had been so serious about it, showing her the map on his arrival and drawing the route with his finger as if she had no idea where the Tube station was, and she was forced to pretend that she hadn’t in order to keep the tedious conversation brief.
‘Actually, I might even have gone a long way round myself,’ he had said, stern with puzzlement. ‘Now that I look at it, this way’s probably quicker.’
While he spoke she had remembered another conversation, with his friend Stephen at the party, and it had kindled in her a flicker of pleasure and irritation. He had asked her where she lived and when she said West Hampstead he had laughed.
‘That’s Kilburn to the likes of me,’ he had said, winking at her conspiratorially so that she had laughed too.
She preferred to stay at Camden anyway, for the dawning of truth over her own home had illuminated other things alongside its unpleasant location to place it irremediably into disfavour. These days the flat didn’t seem nearly as nice as Ralph’s, and even the masculine flavour of his bathroom – the only thing which, in the early days, had made her long to be back amongst her impedimenta – had been sweetened with the transportation of a half share of her abundant bottles and jars to its shelves. Ralph evidently hadn’t understood the rationale behind the relocation of her things – including several key elements of her wardrobe – and kept asking her if it was really necessary.
‘It’s not like you’ll be staying here that often,’ he had said. ‘And what will you do on the nights when you’re at home?’
She had explained to him, faintly touched by his concern, that what he saw was merely an emergency consignment of the greater stockade which remained in West Hampstead, and besides, as Janice had said when Francine told her of their difficulties, the proper maintenance of a beauty routine constituted an effort from which both parties benefited. Francine was surprised to suspect that Janice didn’t think much of Ralph, although on the few occasions they had met she had certainly made a point of giving the opposite impression. She would drift around the flat in a silk robe when Ralph was there, asking him if he wanted anything and putting her hand on his arm. Once, Francine had been disturbed to notice that Janice’s robe had come loose at the front, and when she bent over Ralph to give him a cup of coffee it became clear that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath. Ralph had looked uncomfortable, but his eyes had flown through the gap just the same, and Francine had decided there and then to reduce their visits to West Hampstead. It was Ralph, in fact, who ensured her continuing appearances at home with his frequent appointments with himself. Two or three times a week he would declare that he needed to be ‘on his own’, and Francine, at first thinking that the request referred to a fashionable occupation of which she had been unaware, and only later seeing the slight it made against her company, was eventually forced to take matters into her own hands. She pre-empted him with arrangements of her own, both fictitious and concrete, which meant that she was unable to see him as often as he didn’t want to see her.
Things weren’t perhaps going as well as she had hoped, and feeling increasingly certain that Ralph was harbouring one or two criticisms – whose presence she caught leaking through his manner, even if she couldn’t exactly identify their source – of her, she permitted herself some grudges of her own. He was so boring, never wanting to go out except to see films, and even then only films in which nothing much seemed to happen either and of which the girls at work had never heard. He was always reading, too, even though she had been brought up to think that it was rude to read when there was someone else in the room. She had told him that once, enjoying the thought of how he would react to her knowing more about manners than he did.
‘Why is it rude?’ he had said, sounding more interested than perturbed. He hadn’t even put down his book when she said it, just lowered it a couple of inches so that he could see her.
‘It just is. It’s bad manners.’
‘What, like burping?’ He began to laugh. ‘Or picking one’s nose?’
‘It’s not like you have to do it,’ she had replied, disgruntled. ‘You’re not revising for an exam or anything.’
Her aversions, though, were the product of slightly unnatural impulses: it was easy to cultivate indifference in an atmosphere of intense interest, but the business was thwarted by unfriendly conditions and Francine found her stratagems ailing and refusing to yield. She would make accusations of his dullness or his unwillingness to take her out, or give displays of restlessness in the evenings, to which he would respond unnervingly.
‘Feel free to go out if you’re bored,’ he would say, rooting himself more firmly behind his newspaper. ‘I won’t mind at all.’
The proliferation of her freedom, the suggestion that it could be returned to her at any time, undeniably cheapened the commodity. It was hard to hold Ralph accountable for the fact that he rarely went out, that he didn’t particularly like to spend money, and that he didn’t come accompanied by a glittering entourage of friends, when he seemed willingly to accept the charge. What was easier was to suspect that he had conspired to give the impression of his glamour – his elegant flat, his educated manner, even his invitation to the party at which she had met him, where her own presence had been importunate; all of this had suggested the existence of greater things, a whole world of which this was merely the residue! – and, easier still, that this now-punctured illusion rendered his ability to resist her a sign not of the refinement of his tastes but of their mediocrity. This was her most substantial complaint – the fact that Ralph didn’t appear to be infatuated with her – and it was also the most difficult to lodge. The decline of his character in the light of his failure to find her enchanting was inevitable, but her own disaffection offered little hope for progress against the current of his. Her self-love would occasionally rally from his blows and return with zealous contempt for its injury; but eventually she would su
bside into paralysis, the helplessness of realizing that, being apparently unable to attain what she wanted, she might have to settle for what was being offered.
Leaving Ralph’s flat sometimes in the mornings, she would catch people looking at her as she walked to the Tube station and would touch her face secretly with her fingers or strain to get a glimpse of it in passing shop windows, sure that some deformity must be drawing their attention. It was often several hours before the gloom of Ralph’s indifference dispersed and Francine realized that the glare from which she shrank was nothing but the friendly sun of admiration. Even the mirror seemed to have lost something of its magic, and Francine would wonder with a lurch of bereavement if her most companionable and delighting ally – herself – was gone for ever.
‘He’s dark,’ concluded Janice, when Francine revealed to her something of her troubles. ‘I knew it from the start. He’s crying inside. Look out for post-nasal drip – it’s supposed to be a sign of life-sorrow.’
Francine tried to enjoy the approval of those in her path, gleaning from it the confirmation of Ralph’s stupidity, and she had recently had the idea that when next she became the subject of concerted advances, her acceptance of them would provide the final triumph. Sitting at her desk, though, she would feel a yawning emptiness in her thoughts when she tried to consider her possibilities and would long for the return of their once-bright clutter. In these moments she could take no pleasure from the cheerful lust of the men who came into the office or the longing eyes which met her when she went out to buy her sandwich. She had lost the taste for her own imagination and it was suddenly hard to believe in the adventures it haltingly enacted. It was not love for Ralph, she was sure, which depressed her. She had never supposed herself to be in love with anybody, although she was prepared to accept that they might be in love with her. No, it was the suspicion, which daily gathered more evidence to it, that in Ralph’s eyes she lacked something which was dragging her with unjust fingers down into its pit. Why she didn’t run from it, loosen its grip with a minute’s denial that she cared what he thought, was a question she heard only faintly. Her motives were listless things, grown diffident from her failure to examine them, and while once she had enjoyed the recumbent ease with which she could drift along with only the force of others’ desires to fuel her, she now found herself unable consequently to propel herself away from danger. She had finished affairs certainly, in the past, but it had always been easy: someone new had arrived to rescue her, or she had merely woken one day to find herself liberated by boredom or the facility of change. The infliction of pain, besides, was often a source of pleasure, reflecting as nothing else could the real depth and accuracy of her penetration, and she had found that the pinnacle of a man’s interest could be recognized by her own sudden natural impulse to flight once she had arrived at it.
Had Ralph been repellent to her in the way so many other men now were, she might have found it easier to escape from him; but her inability to understand him grounded her, and the more he eluded her faculties, the more resolved she became to better him. He had somehow succeeded in belittling those past conquests of which she had once been so proud, although she hadn’t told him much about them. It was in her own thoughts that she judged them, shrank from their coarseness or their stupidity, pitied the ease with which she had mastered them. He had raised a standard to which he evidently had no interest in conforming, made her dissatisfied with what she had, and yet refused to palliate her new appetites. As much as she tried to satisfy herself with thoughts of his dullness, his stiff manner, his unfashionable pursuits, the memory of his face would occasionally fill her thoughts when they were apart and she would feel a contraction in her chest which, like hunger, would direct her to seek him out. She liked to look at his face, in fact, and sometimes would forget herself for several minutes whilst looking. It seemed odd to her to do that, and the naked sensation it gave her revealed what appeared to be glimpses of her own worthlessness. She had confided to Janice that she and Ralph didn’t speak the same language, and it was true. His sensibility felt awkward in her mouth when she tried it, and he didn’t seem to understand the meaning of anything she said, either.
Lately she had begun to feel a deeper, more pressing anxiety which occasionally drew itself through her stomach in a slender, nervous thread. She had come home one night to find Janice reclining on the sofa with a hot-water bottle clutched in her arms, regarding her midriff with a look of pained tenderness.
‘Are you ill?’ said Francine. Janice’s ailments were frequent and vague, but their interpretation nevertheless dramatic. She would complain of energy blocks and decentralization, mysterious agues for which lengthy meditations on their probable causes was often the only cure.
‘I’m coming on,’ said Janice dully.
Francine had only ever heard her mother use that expression, and the moment was a confusing one, suggesting as it did unthought of affiliations between people she had considered unconnected. In that second of disjointedness, that temporary blank, an idea insinuated itself in Francine’s mind. She stared at Janice, wondering how so large a piece of her, as dependable and unexamined as an arm or leg, could have gone missing without her noticing. She stood silently, all her efforts bent on the attempt to remember the last time she had seen her own blood, to track down recent scenes of its inconveniences and look at them afresh for evidence. Before long she had located a few minutes in a ladies’ toilet somewhere, caught by surprise and pushing coins into a dispenser. Where had it been? It certainly wasn’t Lancing & Louche, for she remembered looking in a small mirror afterwards which couldn’t be mistaken for the opulent wall of glass at the office.
‘You could make some tea,’ said Janice irritably from the sofa. ‘I can’t get up.’
Francine went to the kitchen. The toilet had been at Mr Harris’s office. She had been surprised to find a dispenser there, although the only thing it provided was a giant white slab, an ancient relic like a mammoth’s tooth. She tried to number the weeks in her mind by means of their highlights, but they became blurred and resistant to her arithmetic and eventually she reached for her diary. The intractable symmetry of the pages caused her heart to clench with fear as she leafed backwards in search of Mr Harris. It was impossible that so much time should have passed, and yet the entries she glimpsed as she retreated week by week seemed horrifyingly distant and unrelated to her, as if they described the life of another person. Finally she found the Monday on which she had started with Mr Harris, and as she saw it remembered that her crisis had occurred on the second day of working there. She retraced her steps to the present moment, counting the weeks. There were just over six of them, and as they sprang up around her she felt the chill of their sudden shadow.
‘Francine!’ called Janice feebly from the sitting-room. ‘Francine!’
Francine stood in the doorway. The thought that she could be pregnant didn’t seem to have adhered to her. She felt it prowling loosed around the flat, and she had a strong desire to hide in the hope that it might forget her.
‘What’s the matter?’ said Janice. She sat up slightly, her senses pricked for excitement.
‘I think I’m pregnant,’ said Francine. The idea seemed even more remote now that she’d said it.
‘I knew you were going to say that!’ shrieked Janice. She swung her legs off the sofa. ‘I knew it! Isn’t that weird? That’s my sixth sense – just before you said it I knew what you were going to say!’
‘Really?’ said Francine.
‘God, weird.’ Janice collapsed back on to the sofa. ‘That’s the second time that’s happened to me recently.’
‘It’s been six weeks,’ said Francine. Her revelation didn’t appear to have made any impact, and she wondered if she had really said it. An unfamiliar need to be alone tugged at her, but the nervous bustle of her thoughts insisted on further attempts at socializing.
‘Sorry, I’m just in shock,’ said Janice. She breathed deeply, as if hoping to overcome her fascination
with her own clairvoyance. ‘How late are you?’
‘Six weeks,’ repeated Francine.
‘Since it should have started?’
‘No, no, since the last one.’
‘Oh, that’s not so bad. Are you regular?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s anxiety,’ diagnosed Janice. ‘Did you forget to take a pill or something? Often worrying about that can do it. I knew a girl that happened to. She—’
‘I’m not on the pill, actually,’ said Francine.
When she was younger, Francine’s mother had forcibly accompanied her to a doctor’s surgery and come away triumphant with several foil packets of tiny pills which she directed Francine to take.
‘I know you’re a good girl,’ she had said comfortingly in the car on the way there. ‘But boys your age have hormones. It gives them bad skin and worse ideas. Tell the doctor you’ve got cramps.’
Within weeks Francine’s flesh had fattened alarmingly, and she had secretly stopped taking the pills, removing one each day from the foil and dropping it down the plug hole when she brushed her teeth so that Maxine wouldn’t find out. Remembering the terror with which she had watched herself inflate before the mirror, the well-composed lines of her figure blurring, she had never tried them again; and she had learned from that same reassuringly truthful oracle that she was lucky. The passing of time, undisrupted by misfortune, monthly confirmed the news. Even treading the high-wire of personal risk Francine had felt no fear, for the aggregate of her impregnability grew with each proof of it. She had, she was sure, cultivated a certain immunity, for which indifference provided frequent boosts. The physical intrusion which was often the price of her pleasures – a pay-off for the attention, infatuation, and supplication which preceded it – was a distant thing, a remittance calculated according to the principles of fair exchange. The scope of invasion was limited to areas of public access and in the privacy of her own thoughts, where she could wander freely amongst a range of other subjects, the trespass usually didn’t trouble her. She didn’t see why she should be expected to enjoy it, for the privilege was not hers but theirs. She had always felt herself to be most untouchable when being touched, and although of course she preferred the presence of a barrier between that suspect male flesh – who knew where it had been? – and her own, it was often an effort to remember in her detachment to insist on it. Ralph, however, had protected himself so vehemently as almost to give offence, and Francine understood enough about irony to recognize that perhaps she had become the victim of it.