The Temporary

by Rachel Cusk

  *

  Later, he didn’t know what time it was, Ralph lay on the sofa. He was alone, but Francine was still in the flat somewhere – in bed, that was right – and he was drinking far too much considering he had to go to work the next day. He wanted to talk to Stephen but there had been no answer when he’d dialled his number and the machine wasn’t on either. Stephen was never there when he wanted him. What was strange was that earlier he had suddenly remembered the telephone number of his parents’ old house and had thought he might ring them. When he’d tried, though, all he’d got was a horrible noise. He didn’t want to talk to his mother anyway – he hated his mother, actually, he’d decided – but his father would have been all right. He’d talked about things like this with his father before. It had been a long time ago, but he felt sure his father wouldn’t have forgotten their conversation, and he’d been drunk himself then, after all, so he’d be a hypocrite if he criticized Ralph for it. He’d have understood, too, about Ralph not liking Francine much, because he’d told Ralph that time that his mother hadn’t liked him much either, but she’d married him just the same. Ralph had been his ticket home, he said. His lucky charm. She was the love of his life, he said, and after she’d gone he’d promised himself to look after Ralph, because Ralph was what had brought them together, after all. He had put his big hand on the back of Ralph’s neck. Ralph could feel it there now, warm and surprisingly steady.

  Thirteen

  The wall behind Francine’s desk was almost entirely commandeered by disciplined rows of large files, all of them presented in military grey, distinguishable only by a typed label centrally placed on the wide spine. She rarely looked at these files, for they were undisturbed historical annals of past deals, of correspondence long since read and answered, and had been superseded by the more active system on the other side of the office. Now and then, however, her aimless eye drifted over them, and she would search their dry demarcations anew for some drop of interest to relieve the boredom of her desktop. Once, she had chosen one at random – Investments (1984) – and had leafed nonchalantly through it, but her expectation that she would find nothing in its pages to amuse her had been unpleasantly confounded by the strange sensation she had experienced when contemplating the familiar, monochrome vistas of type. The letters and reports were identical in style and substance to those she daily produced, and seeing them thus interred she had received an unsettling impression of her own disposability, and with it a desire to leave in commemoration behind her artefacts which were distinguishable in some way from the remains of those who had gone before.

  Her tenure at Lancing & Louche was proving to be the most enduring of any she had had, and Francine had begun to admire her own stamina enough to believe that she deserved some relief from it. The habit of migration had been soothed rather than broken by the lulling custom of the recent weeks, and the desire for change, like a biological imperative, was manifesting its symptoms despite her attempts logically to resist it. She began to recognize the dissatisfactions which normally heralded the close of one era and the beginning of another, a sudden awareness of the grinding irritations of office life on which she rarely had time to dwell as a general danger owing to the frequency with which she moved on from the scenes of her displeasure. Constant change lent the annoyances of her job the illusion of specificity, and by the time they recurred elsewhere she had forgotten ever meeting them before, nor recognized again the allied hopefulness with which she had craved novelty.

  The munificence of her current employers, however, the splendour of their headquarters, the sheer size of their enterprise, conspired to keep her in her place with the suggestion that she had reached a limit of expectation beyond which could only lie decline. Although Francine was too schooled in the facts of her superiority to believe at heart that anything was good enough for her, she was disturbed by the recently indifferent quality of her work and the consequences it might invite. For the first time she found herself wishing that she was able to remain contentedly in one place, and she tried to suppress the evidence of her frustration – a slight carelessness in her manner, an overwhelming lethargy in the face of her duties, a compulsion to leave the office at ever earlier times – as well as images, which were fearful in nature, of what she would do next.

  It was hard to concentrate on her job when a malignant consciousness of her greater emergency resided in her so heavy with unacknowledgement that it made the performance of the simplest activity difficult. The thought that she was suffering from some injustice, although its oppressions were barely noticeable, filled her with requirements for sympathy and concern, and looking at the faces brutal with ignorance around her she felt a constant urge to announce her misfortune and thus elicit a dispensation from her responsibilities. At the same time, it was hard to believe that the crisis by which she was officially declared to be gripped would ever come to its logical conclusion. Her faith in her own good fortune was here supported by evidence of a persuasive nature. She didn’t feel as if anything had physically happened, had observed no changes in herself which might signal the presence of a serious ailment – although her general grasp of those changes which were appropriate to her diagnosis had led her to suspect them once or twice – and in this unafflicted state it really seemed as if the problem might at any moment just disappear.

  Her feelings of suspicion about this mysterious blockage, and her secret hopes for its evaporation, did not lessen her admiration of its power. It was certainly a triumph to be the proprietor of such a weapon, and it was hard, after all the awful things Ralph had done to her, not to feel some pleasure at having him at her mercy; but even with her eyes averted from the future, Francine could see that the shifting, explosive nature of her arsenal required skilful handling. The feeling of emptiness she had experienced when Ralph had made its disposal sound like a matter of course, the work of a moment, had sent her rushing to defend it; but in the delightful discovery that she had the inalienable right to do so, she had glimpsed a certain difficulty. Much as her dislike of criticism had been offended by Ralph’s suggestion that they might usefully get rid of something which could be said to be a part of her, her protective stance over what would eventually, hard as it might be to believe, effect her own overthrow resembled something of a trap. It would have been impossible at that point to tell Ralph that her feelings were largely theoretical, and hinged on what his preference inferred of his attachment to her, and even knowing that she had at least secured his attention failed to reassure her. Had he begged her to keep it, it would have been easier, she felt, to consider the possibility of not doing so; but his apparent indifference to the weight of her claims on him left her with the unpleasant responsibility of reminding him of them.

  Her life had suddenly become somewhat unrecognizable, and it surprised her, not really able to see how she had got there, to have arrived in so unexpected a place. She barely knew herself in it, and in this unfamiliar state she had a dim consciousness of new structures rising in her overnight, of hasty extensions being added to more established facets. Normally she enjoyed lingering over the design of change, but now she was being pressed for such quick reactions that she had a disagreeable sense of events not turning out as she wanted them. It was clearly Ralph’s fault: she had tried to delay any talk of decisions, having yet perceived no outcome which pleased her and certain that one would at any moment present itself, but Ralph had forced her into saying things over which premeditation had given her no control. She had never even thought of such a situation before she found herself in it, and her instincts, used to a gentle life of service at the court of her self-interest, were wild and ineffectual in the field of battle. Her skill at pleasing herself and eliciting flattery, though practised, was being severely tested, but she could conjure up at such short notice no more reserves than those on which she had always depended. Several times she had thought of how pleasant it would be if, after punishing Ralph appropriately with it, their ‘accident’, as he called it, could just someho
w be forgotten about, but this did not appear to be among her alternatives. The forked path of the future led, whichever of its vicious tongues one chose, only to what was undesirable.

  Had she been less annoyed about the way their negotiations were going – and less conscious of the fact that this uninvited third party appeared to be elbowing her away from the centre of attention – she might have found it amusing to observe how Ralph danced at her every word as if his limbs had strings attached to them. She had said things merely to see what he would do, delighting at first in the excitement of the game, the height of its stakes; but since it had become clear that he wasn’t playing as she had expected him to, she had begun to suspect that the victory she pursued conferred only uncertain advantages. For once, there was nothing to be gained from getting her own way. All this talk of it being her decision – as if there were something she wanted to do! – made her predicament more frightening than ever. She supposed that when she had first told him of it, she had done so with the expectation of better things, a romance of emergency out of which some good might come; but nothing was happening as she had expected it to, and in reaching this false summit of her experiences she had felt the cataclysm of personal change, as a new range of unimagined, impossible ascents opened out above her.

  The feeling that she was now far beyond the sphere of her abilities swamped her with the imminence of failure. She had never thought that she would be unhappy, but it was becoming clear that there was a vast world beyond the limits of her own, which her compass had been too occupied with directing her towards things that were to her liking to find: she felt its massive, secretive presence gradually unveiled in the slowly receding mists of her complacency, made out its continents of disappointment, its great seas of doubt. Yet even in the midst of these discoveries she began also to discern a more familiar route, a path which skirted complexity and meandered over care. It was still possible, she suspected, to pass through this new and frightening place with indifference, to tread these greater emotions under foot as she had learned to do lesser ones.

  Sometimes, when she caught a certain expression making its hasty exit from Ralph’s face, it would occur to her that it was not he but she who had been captured; but like half-formed ice her independence cracked beneath her when she tried it and she would come reluctantly back to him for security. His denial of it made her dependence chafe even more. He had been kind to her, she supposed, but he possessed a certain detachment which suggested that he was observing their drama rather than playing his part in it; and, moreover, that it was failing to excite him. She had spent most of the last week at his flat, returning to her own only once to gather things she needed, but although she had enjoyed an exquisite satisfaction in the exercise of her rights, she had begun to fear lately that even that comfort would be taken from her. The last few times she had arrived Ralph had behaved oddly, as if he didn’t know why she was there, opening the door with a weary expression or worse still an attitude of surprise, and once even going out for the evening, leaving her alone in front of the television. For the first time Francine felt herself to be at a loss. She had never required attention so keenly, but could think of no new tactics to secure its satisfaction. If her affliction didn’t guarantee Ralph’s interest, what would? Sitting in the office one afternoon, it occurred to her that by presenting him with her absence she would deprive him of the opportunity to act as if she was a burden on him. The only ingenuity available to her was that of not telling Ralph what she was doing, and having no more sophisticated instrument with which to inflict pain, she was forced to content herself with it.

  *

  ‘But what does he want?’ said Janice, the passion of her question undimmed by repetition. She attempted to wave one hand in order to lend it new force, but the dinner plate displaying two crackers, a slice of cheese, and a small mound of peanuts which was balanced on the arm of the sofa tipped dramatically and she withdrew her hand to steady it.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Francine again. Her reply seemed to her each time more profound. She hadn’t thought much about what Ralph wanted, and now that Janice had got her on to the subject she longed to see him so that she could ask him herself. ‘He says he’s happy with whatever I choose to do.’

  ‘But what does that mean?’ Janice thumped the sofa triumphantly with her other hand. ‘What does it actually mean?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Francine, mystified.

  She had not spent such an enjoyable evening for some time. It was so nice to be able to talk things through. Ralph never wanted to talk about anything – or at least not in any detail – but Janice seemed to understand the importance of circling a subject without needing to gain by the arrival at any conclusion. It amused her to think of how clever Ralph thought he was, when really he didn’t know anything about conversation – the art of conversation, she believed it was called – at all. She lit a cigarette and exhaled with conspicuous elegance. She hadn’t felt able to smoke recently in Ralph’s presence, unsure of what he might infer from such a gesture and conscious that it would perhaps not be to her advantage, but now it seemed the perfect adjunct to her liberation from his strictures.

  ‘God!’ Janice sighed and fell back onto the sofa. She took a cigarette from Francine’s packet and lit it in a gesture of solidarity. ‘God, that’s so – typical!’.

  ‘I think he just doesn’t want to pressurize me,’ said Francine, reconsidering Ralph’s reluctance to interfere as a matter for pride.

  ‘Don’t defend him, Francine. It’s his problem too, you know. If he thinks he can just walk away, then’ – Janice’s pronouncement hung dangerously between them – ‘then he’s wrong.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure—’

  ‘A lot of men, Francine,’ continued Janice, raising her hand, in which the cigarette smouldered ominously, against interruption, ‘a lot of men think they can make a problem like this just disappear. They think, “Well, she can go in in the morning, out by lunchtime – and Bob’s your uncle,”’ she added darkly. ‘Often they don’t even pay for a private clinic.’

  ‘Is that how long it takes?’ Francine was astounded. ‘Just a morning?’

  ‘The emotional work takes much longer,’ said Janice.

  ‘How do they do it?’

  ‘Suction.’ She demonstrated with her hands, while making a sucking noise through her lips.

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘They knock you out,’ said Janice brightly, as willing now to argue the facility of the process as she had been moments earlier to demonstrate its duresses. ‘It’s really easy. You just go home afterwards and carry on as if nothing had happened. A friend of mine did it recently. She went straight from the hospital to the pub.’

  Francine digested this news in amazement. At school, there had been a girl called Roxy who had disappeared one day in a cloud of rumour that she had got herself pregnant and had come back for the new term grey faced and alone. She had been quite a popular girl, Francine remembered, but after that no one had paid any attention to her, except to follow her through the corridors imitating the hilarious way in which she hung her head, her fringe grown long over her eyes. Francine’s mother heard of the incident and told Francine not to talk to Roxy, even though she had come to their house once or twice after school.

  ‘I knew that girl would never come to any good,’ she said, nodding her head. ‘She was always over-developed.’

  Francine had certainly worried at the time about Roxy’s misfortune, for, not quite understanding how this unpleasant fate had been visited on her, she feared becoming its victim herself. She took her mother’s advice and avoided Roxy’s contagion, and even later, when Francine used to see her sometimes at the newsagent’s where she worked, her bulky form and the continual rash of spots on her forehead occasioned by her drooping fringe still seemed to suggest the marks of her shame. Francine hadn’t really kept in touch with anyone from school after she’d left, but she knew that quite a few of the other girls had had babies. When she saw
them lumbering along the street with their squalling charges, she regarded their soft stomachs and angry maternal faces with pity and a certain contempt; but she never felt the dark fear and revulsion that belonged to Roxy. At least these girls had something. Roxy was alone, and her loneliness was to Francine the most terrible evidence of her punishment.

  ‘Straight to the pub with her boyfriend,’ said Janice. She smiled at the memory. ‘I met up with them later. They were completely pissed. We had a good laugh.’

  ‘How do you arrange it?’

  ‘You just phone a clinic. I can phone if you want, I’ve got a number. I’ll go with you if he won’t. He doesn’t even have to know what you’re doing.’ She paused for a moment, her brows furrowed with decision. ‘Are you sure it’s what you want, Francine? We don’t have to do anything against your will.’

  ‘No,’ said Francine, confused.

  They looked at each other across the cosy room.

  ‘Look at us!’ burst out Janice suddenly, laughing.

  Francine laughed too, overwhelmed with warm feelings for her friend. Janice was so supportive and easy to get along with – she wondered why she had ever thought otherwise – and she always seemed to have the answer for everything. She had such nice clothes, too, silky, expensive things. Francine wished that she could work in retail. It was so much more glamorous than secretarial. She wondered if Janice would put in a word for her at the boutique. The telephone rang, making them both start, and Francine jumped to her feet.

  ‘I’ll get it!’ she said, keen to reach the phone before Janice, in case it was Ralph. Janice always spoke to Ralph on the phone in that whispering voice she put on when she was talking to her own boyfriends.

  ‘It’s probably him,’ warned Janice.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Can I speak to Francine?’ said Ralph.