by Rachel Cusk
The house was full of paintings: they hung around the walls like witnesses to the proceedings, though none of them represented anything recognisable, and often I would glimpse up to see one of these confusions of paint and feel startled by the way it seemed to replicate something about myself, some interior chaos that was always silently revolving at the borders of the life I was establishing for myself. Rebecca’s father Rick owned an art gallery in the town. He liked to give the impression that a sort of precariousness was conferred on this enterprise, by a force that was conflated with creativity itself, but I never saw any sign of it. On the contrary, Rick’s gallery was constantly awash in an apparently inexhaustible fund of notoriety and success, and the more these two commodities could be observed in the infallible business of their synthesis, the clearer an impression of its elemental steadiness could be obtained. The first time Rebecca took me there Rick was in the act of hanging a painting on a wall. His sleeves were rolled up and lengths of his wiry black and grey hair kept flopping in his face as he paced repeatedly away and back again, looking at it. When he saw me he cried out, and flagged me over in the sort of masculine summons that usually precedes a request for physical assistance.
‘Just the man I need!’ he shouted.
I went and stood beside him. In front of us was a painting about which I could tell nothing but that it reminded me of myself, though not in the usual way. I recognised in it a quality of self-consciousness, as though it were not entirely immersed in what it was.
‘What do you think?’ said Rick.
He moved closer to me and folded his thick, white, hairy arms. I folded my arms too. We stood there in a kind of spectatorial intimacy.
‘What’s the title?’ I said.
‘Oh, fuck, I dunno,’ said Rick, darting heavily forward and looking at something on the frame. ‘It’s Panic II,’ he declared over his shoulder. ‘I don’t know what happened to Panic I. Maybe it saw Panic II and, you know –’ he guffawed ‘– panicked.’
Silence fell. We looked at the painting. Rebecca had disappeared. I wished Rick hadn’t asked me what I thought, but at the same time I construed it as a test, something unavoidable that would have found me out one way or another.
‘Go on,’ said Rick softly. ‘What do you think?’
‘I’m not really the person to ask,’ I said.
‘Go on,’ he said, softer still.
‘I think it’s slightly – derivative?’ I said finally.
‘That does it!’ yelled Rick. ‘I’m not taking it! Three bloody thousand pounds my arse!’
My heart jolted in my chest, as it had when Paul Hanbury threw me the keys to his car that day on Egypt Hill. On both occasions, for reasons of unintelligible benevolence, I was incorporated into the world of another man’s masculinity.
Rebecca’s mother Ali had pale green eyes that never seemed to blink. She was small and slight and olive-skinned, and she did everything slowly and with an air of deliberation, keeping herself in the light, holding herself still, as though she lived in a frame and were perpetually making pictures there. She had delicate, unblemished hands with which she touched you frequently and confidentially, and her voice was delicate too, so that her talk, which issued from a single, arterial vein of frankness, was somewhat intoxicating. After an evening spent talking to Ali I would often suffer the next day from feelings of shame and contamination. I interpreted these feelings as proof of a constitutional weakness. They were a sort of allergic reaction, to the moral ambivalence that prevailed amongst the Alexanders, although none of them had ever done anything wrong as far as I knew. It was rather that they had no interest in seeming to be virtuous – they may even have been afraid of it. Instead, they concerned themselves with domineering feats of patronage and ostentatious magnanimity. What impressed me as I came to know them was that, unlike most people, the Alexanders actually invested their integrity entirely in their ostentation. The house in Nimrod Street was a good example of this. For six years we lived there free of charge on the basis of a single conversation, in which Rebecca mentioned that we were thinking of finding a place outside Bath, in the countryside.
‘Why the fuck do you want to do that?’ said Rick.
In spite of the fact that Rebecca was its advocate, this idea had originated with me. Rebecca was pregnant at the time and was peculiarly malleable and open to the wildest suggestions.
‘I don’t want to live in a flat,’ said Rebecca. ‘In Michael’s flat people walk all over the ceiling. At night it’s like sleeping in a grave with people walking all over it.’
‘Tell them to fucking shut up then,’ said Rick. ‘Tell them to take their fucking shoes off or you’ll call the police.’
‘I think they’re doctors or something,’ said Rebecca. ‘They have these alarms that go off all night.’
‘They’re doctors,’ I confirmed.
‘Why don’t you do what anyone normal would do,’ said Rick, ‘and move house? Move around the corner. Move out of earshot. Give the doctors some elbow room. Don’t move to a fucking village.’
‘I want a garden,’ said Rebecca.
‘Why do you want a garden? So you can grow a fucking carrot? So you can sit there and eat carrot stew in some Jew-hating village –’
‘Oh, come on,’ said Rebecca.
‘He’s not exaggerating, you guys,’ said Ali over the noise, in her empty, pacific voice that always seemed to float like a lifeboat on the surface of a conversational tumult. ‘People in the countryside are actually really racist. Especially against Jews.’
‘I’m not Jewish,’ said Rebecca. ‘I’m not anything.’
I started to tell them about Doniford and the Hanburys, which was the blueprint I had in mind for our move to the countryside, but unfortunately they were now locked in debate about whether Rebecca was Jewish or not.
‘I think you’re really uptight,’ said Ali. ‘It really worries me that you’re so uptight.’
‘I don’t have to be something just because you say I am,’ said Rebecca.
‘What about your grandmother?’ said Rick. ‘What about what she went through? Did she go through that for you to go and live in some village with Miss Marple?’
‘She was Catholic,’ said Rebecca. ‘She was baptised. At least I’m not talking about living a lie.’
‘That’s not fair,’ said Ali, shaking her head.
‘Anyway,’ said Rebecca, ‘Michael isn’t Jewish. Our children won’t be Jewish.’
‘Did we ever say anything about that?’ demanded Rick, holding up his large white hands. ‘Tell me, did we ever say one thing about that?’
‘What’s so great about this big bourgeois dolls’ house anyway?’ exploded Rebecca, finally returning to the point. ‘All people do here is go shopping! All they care about is renovating their houses so they can pretend they live in the past! If you took their little museums away from them they’d be as racist as anyone else –’
‘Look,’ said Ali, laying one hand on my arm and the other on Rebecca’s. ‘Look, what you two need is a gorgeous little Georgian terrace with lots of light and some original features, and I promise you you’ll feel completely different.’
Ali often took this route in conversation, of recommending as a panacea the very thing by which you claimed to be being tormented.
‘We can’t afford that,’ said Rebecca sullenly.
‘Have Nimrod Street,’ shrugged Ali.
‘You’ve got tenants in there.’
‘Have it.’
‘In fact, darling, they’re leaving anyway,’ said Rick agreeably, with the distinctive accord the Alexanders always found in such moments.
‘Have it,’ said Ali again, dramatically, as though this were grist to her mill.
‘Hey!’ wailed Rebecca’s brother Marco, who was listening. ‘That’s not fair!’
Marco was in his last year of the sixth form at a boys’ school in the city. He was a big, thick-fleshed boy with black hair that stood out in wild curls all over his head,
and a sallow, pitted face on which he perpetually wore an expression of soporific surprise. Whenever I saw him I was reminded not of myself at his age, but of other people at that time who I’d seen but one way and another never got to know.
‘Look,’ said Ali, ‘just shut up, all right?’
‘Yeah, just fucking shut up,’ added Rick.
Rick and Ali often spoke like this to their children. With the exception of Rebecca, they all recognised verbal abuse as a form of good manners. For the Alexanders, conventionality in matters of domestic conduct was the ultimate humiliation. For example, I remember around this time an evening during which Rick repeatedly accused Marco of being cold to Ali, because he wouldn’t let her drop him off at school on her way to work, but insisted on walking there himself.
‘Why don’t you want her to take you?’
‘I just thought she might want to steer clear of school for a while,’ Marco finally disclosed.
‘Why?’
There was a pause.
‘She didn’t make the list,’ said Marco heavily.
‘What list?’
‘The list.’
‘Oh,’ said Rick.
‘What list?’ I asked.
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Rick. ‘Well, that’s a fucking disaster.’
‘There was nothing I could do,’ said Marco, holding out his hands helplessly.
‘You’ve got to get her on the list,’ said Rick.
‘Believe me, I tried. No can do. It’s a democratic process.’
‘What list?’ I asked again.
‘Go on, tell him,’ said Rebecca loudly to her father and brother. ‘Tell Michael exactly what you’re talking about! God, I don’t believe it,’ she added, putting her head in her hands.
‘What’s the list?’ I said.
‘Every year,’ said Rebecca, with disgust, ‘the pupils at Marco’s school make a list.’
‘Of what?’
‘Mothers.’
‘You know, the fit ones,’ said Marco.
‘They make a list of the mothers they’d most like to sleep with,’ said Rebecca in a sing-song voice. ‘They vote on it.’
‘This is the first time she hasn’t made it,’ Marco said.
‘It’s so embarrassing for her,’ said Rick.
‘I know, I know,’ said Marco. ‘I told them, I really did. Apparently it happens all the time with the top year, because so many younger mothers are coming up the school. Believe me, I tried, but Alex is a real stiff. He hates my guts.’
‘So make friends with him,’ said Rick. ‘Kiss his arse. Just get her on.’
‘I can’t!’
‘Why not?’
‘I’d have to nominate her myself,’ said Marco sheepishly. ‘That’s the only way. I just thought, you know, there has to be a limit.’
*
The day our son Hamish was born I woke in the early hours of the morning when it was still dark. The night seemed to have been full of shadows and motion, like a night spent on a train. Rebecca was sitting on the edge of the bed. Her great body made a depression in the mattress that seemed infinite.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said.
She sighed.
‘I’m so tired,’ she said indistinctly.
‘Can’t you sleep?’
‘I’ve been up for hours. I’ve been pacing the room, like mum said to do.’
Her voice palpitated dramatically between self-pity and common sense.
‘Does that mean it’s started?’ I said.
‘I can’t believe you didn’t wake up,’ she said.
I considered this, there in the thick, crumpled dark.
‘Well, one of us might as well get some sleep,’ I said.
‘How could you sleep with me walking around your bed? What did you think I was doing?’
‘I didn’t realise you were walking around.’
‘How could you lie there asleep while I was in pain?’ she shrieked.
I had to remind myself that what I had or hadn’t done was now irrelevant. Events were overtaking us. In the taxi Rebecca sprawled, affronted, on the back seat, while I sat next to the driver. Every time I glanced back at her, her belly seemed to rise and impose itself between us. It seemed to erupt through the surface of the life on which we had agreed, and I saw everything cascading down its numinous sides. I felt a part of that landslide: I felt myself plummeting down to a region of irreparable disorder. Occasionally Rebecca would groan, a melancholic, interior sound. I tried to hold on to her in the jolting car when she made this noise, but it was as though it were a strong current bearing her away on the waters of her own experience. I watched her recede into the darkness of herself and then return, thrown back into the yellow light of the car, each time more dishevelled and wretched; and I waited for her to retaliate with the sense of her own autonomy, to locate in herself the primitive instinct that would tell her how to negotiate this storm of her body, but she didn’t. She cried and groaned with what appeared to me to be more than pain, to be an actual constitutional flaw. I understood that I was witnessing her in the last minutes of her wholeness, as I might have watched a fragile, falling object in the seconds before it hit the floor. It was around that time that Rebecca vacated one part of my consciousness and took up residence in another. Her new home was far more crowded: it housed everyone, more or less, whom I loved under obligation. As I pretended that this change had not occurred, I felt it didn’t really matter that it had. All that had happened was that I was, at my centre, alone again.
Hamish was a big, peculiar baby with flowing blond hair and the prominent features of a general or a politician. He seemed to relish pointing out the obvious, and treated everything as a joke: in this way he was identifiably male, though in spite of his size and virile countenance there was something effeminate about him. He was like a big, exuberant, bad-mannered amphibian, or a laughing, androgynous cleric. The spectacle of Rebecca looking after him suggested that of a teenaged girl entertaining her first, unruly boyfriend in the family home. She giggled, or reddened with shame; she was by turns prim and infantile, and then, as time went on, intermittently burdened, disgusted, recondite, submissive. It was Rebecca who had wanted the baby, but from the start I had the subdued sense that Hamish would ultimately be transferred to my sphere of responsibility, like the pets people buy their tender, clamorous children; children who then harden, as though the giving, the giving in, were proof in itself that in order to survive and succeed in the world you must be more callous and changeable than those who were so easily talked into acceding to your desires. I knew Hamish and I were in it together. I knew it even as Rebecca put him in the pouch she wore on her front and picked her way, moon-faced, farouche, through the streets accepting the compliments of strangers.
Rick and Ali treated Hamish as they treated everything, with an instant familiarity that nevertheless appeared to recognise no precedent, nor any attendant codes of conduct. Ali said that Hamish reminded her of her brother Chris. She said it no matter what he did, so that over time she created the strange impression that Chris was a fiction being manifested by Hamish in instalments. When she said to Rebecca, ‘That’s just what Chris used to do,’ or, ‘When he laughs he sounds exactly like Chris,’ Rebecca would say ‘Really?’ as though she had never met Chris in her life, and had perhaps not even heard of him until that moment. Rick liked Hamish the most. He took him out for solitary walks, as though to visit some distant shrine of male heredity. He would say to Ali, ‘Shut up about your fucking brother the jailbird. What’s he got to do with anything?’ Chris was a tax exile. I don’t think he actually went to prison, but apparently he borrowed some of Ali’s money years before, and never paid it back.
When Hamish was two Rebecca was offered a part-time job at the gallery. At first I was relieved by this development, since it represented, obliquely, a slackening of the hold the concept of ‘art’ had on her. For as long as I had known her Rebecca had claimed to be an artist, while never to my knowledge producing an
item made by her own hand. A few times she got close to attempting it, a proximity which expressed itself in the immediate onset of illness and depression, accompanied by unexplained pains down the left side of her rib cage. I could not understand her insistence on giving a harbour to the tyrannical expectation that she create. This expectation came from herself, but it had its roots, I thought, in her parents and her need to surmount their capriciousness while remaining within the circle of their concerns. At university, where we met, Rebecca studied law, and though in the end she struggled to get her degree, I could see in her decision to take it something I had not seen since, namely a determination to forge for herself a more normative, classical, even useful existence than that to which she had been born. I could see in it a slightly punitive urge to stick to the facts. I wished sometimes that I had known the girl who had felt that urge. It had already begun to lose its momentum, to give way to doubt and self-consciousness, by the time we met. The law had become a source of oppression from which she wanted only to free herself; and art, whose peculiar strictures I suspected of having driven her to law in the first place, now reappeared in the guise of her liberator. What had she been thinking of, surrendering herself to a life of confinement and responsibility, of adherence to the letter of things? It was freedom that she wanted, most particularly the freedom to express herself. So requisite was this freedom that even the impingement on it of self-expression became intolerable. Yet she sought release: when she didn’t get it her freedom was tainted; it became a drag on her, a burden. She longed to give voice to something, but what? Sometimes, with an air of urgency, she would take her pad and pencils and establish herself somewhere with the intention of drawing. It was always drawing she seized upon to guide her out of this conflict, as though it were a first principle she had forgotten and to which she was now going to make her obeisance. The problem was that as far as I could see what Rebecca wanted was not to create but to discharge, to rid herself of a blackness, a pollution, that mounted inexorably in her system. The discipline of drawing was obstructive to this process: it was far too narrow a channel for her tumultuous feelings. After an hour or so of frantic marking and rubbing out on the paper she would throw her pencils on the floor as though she were throwing off her manacles or descending from a tightrope. She always looked more fleshly somehow, more earthbound, in the wake of an unsuccessful approach to the shrine of creativity, as though for an instant she gloried in the mere fact of being human. As far as I could see, all Rebecca’s masochistic female tendencies went into this abusive relationship she had with art, leaving her overly assertive and somewhat self-centred and preoccupied in her dealings with me.