The Temporary

by Rachel Cusk

  ‘Yes, it’s me.’ She felt aggrieved that he did not recognize her voice, and her excitement at the sound of his, along with all the pleasant contrivances of the past hour which had made things seem so much better, disappeared. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he said. His voice was surprised.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong.’

  Janice rolled her eyes on the sofa.

  ‘You sounded a bit upset, that’s all. I was wondering why you didn’t come round tonight. I thought something might have happened to you.’

  ‘I’m fine. I just wanted to be on my own.’ The phrase sounded triumphant to Francine. She looked at Janice, but she had leaned back and closed her eyes, as if she were asleep. ‘I am allowed to be on my own, aren’t I?’

  ‘Of course you are. You might have told me what you were doing, though. I was worried.’

  ‘You don’t own me,’ said Francine. ‘I can do what I want.’

  Ralph was silent for several seconds and her heart quickened with the delivery of provocation as she awaited his reply.

  ‘So you keep telling me,’ he said finally. Something crackled dangerously in his voice and a wave of apprehension rose in her stomach at the sound. She sensed that he was not going to respond to her challenge in the manner she might have wished. ‘But in case you hadn’t noticed, we seem to be stuck with each other, so why don’t you just stop messing around and start acting like a decent person?’ The last words were delivered at a shout, and a tremble of awe warmed her at the emotional force of their interchange. ‘Now, if you want to sit around with your – your bitch of a flatmate talking about how awful I am, then that’s fine, but don’t come round tomorrow expecting sympathy!’ He paused, out of breath. ‘OK?’

  Francine was surprised to feel the prickle of tears at her eyes, and having no better weapon to hand, she seized on them, forcing them out with sobs loud enough to inform Ralph on the other end of her distress. Janice looked up, suddenly alert, her face a picture of outrage. She made slamming signals with her hand which suggested that Francine should put the phone down.

  ‘Francine?’ said Ralph nervously. ‘Francine, I’m sorry. Please don’t cry. I’m sorry about that. I’m just tired, that’s all.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ said Francine, sniffing softly.

  Janice shook her head dramatically.

  ‘Come round on Thursday. Can you do that? We’ll have a good talk. Everything will be fine, I promise. Will you come?’

  ‘I – I’m not sure,’ she demurred. ‘You frightened me.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake—’

  She could hear impatience rising again in his voice, and knew that an aspect of surrender was her only refuge.

  ‘What time shall I come?’ she said weakly.

  Janice put a despairing hand to her forehead.

  ‘Whenever you like. No, come at about seven. I won’t be able to get away much before that.’ He paused. ‘I’ll see you, then.’

  ‘See you,’ said Francine.

  Fourteen

  Ralph sat at his desk and looked out of the window at the sky, where swift, muscled clouds were chasing the sun, intermittently cloaking the nervous glare of the Holloway Road with their grey pallor. He was finding it difficult to work, although only a few minutes ago Neil had visited his desk, straightening his sportive mustard-yellow tie to signal the imminent assertion of his authority.

  ‘Watch at the mender’s?’ he had said jovially, gripping the back of Ralph’s chair with his large hands and leaning close to his ear.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  He had shrunk from the sudden assault of Neil’s breath, which was warm and bitter with coffee. His physical proximity, only an hour or so after Ralph had reluctantly emerged from the clean, tight bud of sleep, was ripe with odours. Seeing Ralph flinch, Neil drew back stiffly.

  ‘You’re late again, mate,’ he said, cold with offence. ‘We start business here at nine o’clock sharp and not even flipping royalty comes in at half-past.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Ralph. Roz was staring at him, her face empty as a plate. ‘I got stuck in traffic. I’ll leave home earlier tomorrow.’

  ‘If you would,’ said Neil. He observed a calculated pause before delivering his final blow. ‘Pull your finger out, mate. All right?’

  Ralph didn’t reply and Neil walked back to his desk, his retreating shoulders awkward with importance. Roz continued to stare. Ralph could feel her drifting at the periphery of his vision like a moon.

  ‘I went to my grandad’s last night,’ she said suddenly.

  He looked at her in astonishment. His life seemed to have taken on an atmosphere of unreality in which he had been rendered powerless.

  ‘Really?’ he said.

  ‘We sorted out his attic.’ She nodded. ‘It was a right mess.’

  ‘He must have been pleased,’ said Ralph. He held her gaze for a minute longer and then directed his eyes deliberately back to his work.

  ‘He’s dead,’ said Roz.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

  ‘I saved something for you. Do you want it?’

  Ralph felt hot with desperation. His throat was tight. He stared at her helplessly.

  ‘What is it?’ he said.

  ‘Magazines,’ replied Roz. ‘I got a whole box full.’

  ‘What sort of magazines?’ He tried to sound interested and alert, but thoughts of a fingered pile of obscenities, rancid with second-hand loneliness, made his voice unsteady.

  ‘Cars. Do you want them?’

  ‘Oh – OK.’ Relief made him biddable. ‘Thanks very much, Roz.’

  ‘I’ll bring them in tomorrow,’ she said.

  The desire to avoid any further communications on the subject infused Ralph with application. He bent over his work, willing it to occupy him, as hungry for its oblivion as an insomniac begging for sleep. Gradually he was absorbed, and by lunchtime he had completed his whole day’s ration of copy. He put it on Neil’s desk.

  ‘I’ve finished,’ he said ridiculously.

  Neil looked at him and suddenly emitted a high-pitched laugh.

  ‘Got your knickers in a twist, did I?’ he said. ‘It’s that posh school you went to, old boy. Next time I’ll give you a good caning and me and Roz can take the day off. Ha, ha!’ He bent over his desk, convulsed with humour.

  Ralph left the office to go shopping. Francine was coming that night, and the thought of buying delicacies for her made him feel less guilty for the fact that he recoiled from the prospect of her arrival. He imagined arranging things on plates, sentimental offerings behind which he could disguise himself and skirt the void of his affection for her, frightened of what might happen if he tripped and fell into it. It had been good spending a night away from her. He had slept deeply, marinated for hours in the dreamless essence of himself, and when he woke it had been just as he had feared: incandescent with autonomy, he couldn’t even stand the thought of her. He had tried to warn her of that on the phone, the fragility of their concord, the risk she ran by taking even a small step back that he would see her too clearly. Sometimes he felt that it would require only a breath to extinguish his guttering feelings for her completely. As he joined the shabby flow of people drifting along the littered pavement outside the building, he grew fascinated by the sudden sense of his own hollowness, his transparency; so much so that within minutes he had collided painfully with a man coming the other way. Stammering his apologies, he felt the blood burn again in his skin and he walked on towards the shops, clumsy now with physical solidity as an ache glowed in his shoulder.

  He supposed it didn’t matter what he felt, in any case. He had recently begun to think, as he had done when he was younger, that unhappiness could be conquered merely by the denial of its rights, the dissolution of its property: it had no claims outside those which he permitted it, manifested itself in no physical way, and simply by declaring that the part of himself in which it lived did not exist, he felt sure he could actually make it disappear. He had
always drawn a strange comfort from thinking that it didn’t really matter what happened to him. It was interesting to see how just the idea of it could cancel out fear. The problem with fear, though, he realized, was that it was hard to kill at the root. It had ways of springing again to life just as one turned one’s back on its slain form, breeding at the blink of an eye into multitudes. He felt it now, gnawing at the membrane of his sleep, penetrating the glassy, muted morning. Thinking of Francine, his skin suddenly prickled as if it were about to burst into boils.

  He reached the bank and anchored himself at the end of a long queue. Ahead of him people stood mired in different postures, an alphabet of inertia. Watching them, Ralph considered the fact that in each of them a torrent of consciousness bubbled or raged, or was perhaps still, and for a while the bank was so quiet that he imagined he could hear their thoughts.

  ‘I keep telling them, but no one listens to me, of course,’ said a woman loudly in front of him. She was well spoken and he could see the shiny black haunch of a handbag protruding from beneath her elbow. The back of her head was level with Ralph’s eyes, and her chalky scalp was visible through the erosion of brittle hair. ‘It’s so easy, isn’t it, if you think about it?’

  There was a brief silence and Ralph suddenly realized that the woman was alone. Several people in the queue turned round and then quickly looked away, their faces thick with embarrassment.

  ‘You go out at night and just put them somewhere quiet, under a tree or behind a hedge, and if it’s a cold night they’ll be gone by morning.’ She paused and turned to Ralph. Her face was bloodless and grainy with powder, but her eyes were alive, trapped in pincers of wrinkles. She smiled, showing him hoary teeth. ‘Girls always did it when I was younger. Just put them in a basket and they’ll be quite comfortable. It won’t hurt them at all. They just – drift away!’ She gestured lightly with her hand and leaned towards him confidentially. ‘It must be a cold night, you understand. And it’s so much better for them in the end.’

  The queue shuffled disparately forward and a girl further up caught Ralph’s eye and giggled.

  ‘I’m quite, quite against cruelty, you know,’ said the woman, turning again to Ralph. ‘Quite against it.’

  He smiled at her briefly and then looked down at his shoes, praying that she would be quiet.

  ‘A little gas would do,’ she said, this time to the man in front of her.

  ‘All right, love,’ he replied gruffly. ‘Give it a rest.’

  Ralph got his money and left the bank quickly. In the air-conditioned avenues of the supermarket next door he felt better, and as he plucked things from shelves and put them in his trolley the growing pile of what he had chosen reassured him. Minutes later, staring at rows of tins, it all seemed rather burdensome and unnecessary and he considered the possibility of abandoning his botched selection and leaving unencumbered. The difficulty of escaping the intestine of the supermarket by any means other than natural ejection through a till discouraged him from this plan, and he trudged once more along its lulling passages. He hesitated over cheeses, wondering what to make. Beyond his considered forecast of dinner, a legion of unpredictabilities massed. He grabbed the nearest thing to hand and tossed it into the now-heavy trolley. When he pushed it, the freight of his anxieties seemed to trundle along with them.

  Joining the end of the queue for a till the din of his consciousness grew louder. His situation cried out for his attention and yet, like a fight come upon in the street or the random witnessing of some injustice, he feared the consequences of his involvement with it. Things were clearly outside of his control; how much easier to wait it out than to wade in with flailing feelings and possibly achieve nothing but self-injury. Being with Francine reminded him of films he had seen in which men were trapped with ticking bombs and were forced to defuse them by blind instinct alone. He knew he should feel sorry for her, of course – it was she, after all, who housed this horror – and yet she confounded his sympathy just as she always had. Their bitter exchange haunted him, a silent presence which had grown more menacing over the past few days with each failure to acknowledge it. Now, whenever he thought of broaching it, the subject seemed to have grown too vast and unassailable and he backed off.

  He watched the bright hills of food travelling along the conveyor belt ahead of him, dismantled at the end by industrious hands. If he were honest, he was horrified by the vacuity of it all. He had always assumed that somewhere in him was lodged a compass of certain feelings, a device which would direct him in times of crisis to the points of some fitted morality which he had never really tested but which, like the nameless components of an engine, he had taken for granted all along as being there. His reactions now seemed to him like postures, emissaries of selfishness locked in endless conference to settle distant fates. It terrified him to think, remembering that night, that Francine might have more of the stuff of nature – of life – in her than he himself did. When the words fell from his lips, all his talk of accidents and women he knew, they had felt as dry and nerveless as shavings carved from a block of wood. In fact he only knew one woman – Belinda – and remembering that made him feel as if he had died some time ago and only just noticed.

  ‘My God!’ he had said softly when she’d told him; told him quite casually, only when it came up in conversation. He had felt a peculiar desire to envelop her scoured body with his own and fill it with life.

  ‘It was nothing,’ she had replied. ‘It was a long time ago.’

  She might even have shrugged, he couldn’t remember; but what had struck him was how surprised she had seemed by his reaction. Nervously, wanting to love her, he had concluded that this must be the first time he had seen her lying. She obviously still felt very unhappy about it, perhaps even ashamed. He had ached with sorrow for her, his thoughts weeping, but even so a thread of dissociation had wormed its way doubtfully through him.

  Now, of course, he felt that he understood her indifference; and yet, had he not detected some failure in her, some unpleasant hardness, a discovery by which he could now judge himself? Loading his shiny packets of food on to the conveyor belt, he wondered what had happened to his blood, his heart, his burning, joyful nerves: all dried up, broken, rusty, abandoned like derelict implements in some forgotten corner of a house.

  *

  That evening Ralph stood in the kitchen and stirred a cheese sauce. He had been late getting home in the end, unable somehow to leave the office, and Francine had been waiting on the doorstep shaking with cold.

  ‘I’ve bought things!’ he had cried hopefully, showing her the loaded panniers with which he had struggled back from the Tube station.

  She hadn’t replied, and his instant conviction for neglect had removed his freedom to create the new atmosphere between them on which he had decided. Now she sat forbiddingly in the other room with a blanket she had ordered him to fetch, while he made the dinner he had wanted to present as a gift but which had suddenly become a minimum requirement. She was watching television, and the sound of its imperturbable voices made him feel excluded and horribly free. He imagined himself leaving the flat beneath the cover of its noise and going somewhere else. The sauce began to heave and he turned down the flame, his forehead flushing. He remembered the first time she had come to his flat, when he had had an eerie, premonitory sense of her entrenchment. Thinking of that evening, it seemed curious to him that he had not foreseen that his life would become locked to hers, known that those hours were the last in which he would be himself. For a moment he imagined that he was back there now, alone in the kitchen while Francine waited in the next room. The illusion was surprisingly easy to substantiate. He felt light with the unravelling of the past few weeks, a quite blissful feeling actually, awoken from them as if from a frightening dream, and he stayed still, not wanting to jolt himself.

  ‘Is it nearly ready?’

  He started round. Francine stood in the doorway, watching him. He fancied her unnerved, as if she had seen his thoughts like ghos
ts, and he smiled awkwardly to cover his feeling of having been caught. Her expression was more obviously assumed than usual and there was something uncertain and self-critical in her posture, a rare failure of projection which aroused in him a sudden and unexpected affection. He felt rather sorry for her, for he sensed that for once her inability to comprehend certain things irked her. He saw her straining to master the situation, but like blindness her lack was so fatal, so complete, that it rendered a whole world – even the description of that world! – obsolete. There were things she would never learn, for she had somehow evolved, he knew, without the proper instruments of feeling and thought. He had used to think that those tools must lie dormant in her somewhere, awaiting discovery, but now he regarded it almost as a biological impossibility that she would ever understand him.

  ‘Soon,’ he said kindly, like a mother. He considered putting an arm around her. ‘Have you warmed up a bit?’

  She didn’t reply, catching a dark strand of hair and twirling it amongst her fingers. Her face was lowered, absorbed in something at which he did not want to guess, and he felt the sudden tug of her inescapability. It lay like a leash about his neck, forgettable sometimes, but always tightening when he strained at it.

  ‘We’ll have supper and then you can go to bed,’ he said. A feeling of despair martyred him. ‘I’ll move the television into the bedroom if you like.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to bed! I want to talk! You said we’d talk.’

  ‘All right,’ he said. His sympathy knocked aside, sent carelessly scurrying like a leaf as her words sped unstoppably along the immutable grooves of habit, he felt unutterably weary. ‘Go and sit down. I’ll be there in a minute.’

  *

  It had only just started to rain, but the sudden outburst was so fierce that long, glassy streaks were already pouring down the window-pane, vainly carving their writhing currents on its surface. Ralph watched the mesmeric patterns of flow, his heart quieted by this generosity of water, its sympathy with him. Francine sat on the other side of the table. She too, he felt, was becalmed by the rain, and a rare harmony was growing between them; not of concupiscence, Heaven knew, but a fragile accord which seemed to have arisen from a silent admission of shared trouble. He had cleared away the wreckage of dinner and had lit candles, not through any desire to set a scene, but rather in honour of this sudden deluge of softness from which he wished to gain nothing but an interlude of peace between their noisy acts. Francine’s face opposite him was unusually unconscious, for once not busy with intentions; rather solemn and pale, in fact. Her features seemed more real to him like that, and he studied the miraculous way in which their lines composed beauty. He wondered, as he had done countless times before, how the genius of her design could merely be a felicity of surfaces, a lucky stroke from the hand of an inferior artist. He had used to think, of course, that such a face must have emanated from the heart, and even though he had since seen the rougher clay beneath its glaze, its riddle still had the power to beguile him.