Outline: A Novel

by Rachel Cusk

  Appearances, my neighbour replied, were highly valued in his own family, but he had learned – perhaps fatally – to view them as a mechanism of deception and disguise. And it was in the closest relationships that the deception had to be greatest, for obvious reasons. He knew, for instance, that many of the men of his experience – his uncles, and people of their social circle – had a series of mistresses while remaining married to one woman all their lives. But it had never occurred to him that his father might have sustained his relationship to his mother in the same way. He perceived his father and mother as unitary while his uncle Theo, for instance, he knew to be duplicitous, though he wondered more and more whether that distinction had actually existed; whether, in other words, he had spent his adult life attempting to follow a template of marriage that had been, in fact, an illusion.

  There had been a hotel Theo liked to stay in, not far from my neighbour’s boarding school, and Theo would often call in and take him out to tea, always with a different ‘friend’ in tow. These friends were as scented and beautiful as aunt Irini was swarthy and squat; she had a number of warts on her face that sprouted coarse black hairs of an extraordinary girth and length, and my neighbour had been mesmerised his whole life by this feature, which was still real to him though Irini had been dead for thirty years and which symbolised the enduring nature of repulsion, while beauty was seen once and never seen again. When Irini died, at the age of eighty-four after sixty-three years of marriage, uncle Theo refused to allow her to be buried and instead had her encased in glass and kept in the vaults of a Greek chapel in Enfield, where he visited her every day of the six months that remained to him. My neighbour had never kept company with Theo and Irini without witnessing scenes of the most extraordinary violence: even a telephone call to the house usually involved an argument, with one of them picking up the extension to abuse the other while the caller played referee. His own parents, though fiercely combative, never approached the heights of Theo and his wife – theirs was a colder though perhaps a bitterer war. It was his father who died first, in London, and his body was stored in the same vault where Irini had lain, for his mother had taken it into her head to commission the construction of a family tomb back on the island, an undertaking so grandiose that it had fallen well behind schedule and was not ready to receive him when he died. She had conceived this idea when his father first fell ill, and the last year of his father’s life was spent receiving almost daily bulletins on the progress of the tomb being built to envelop him. This unique method of torture might have seemed to be the conclusive move in their lifelong argument, but in fact when his mother herself came to die – a year to the day, as he believed he had already told me, after his father – the tomb was still not finished. She joined her husband in the vault in Enfield, and it wasn’t until several months later that their bodies were flown together back to the island on which both of them had been born. It had fallen to my neighbour to oversee the interring, and also the exhumation of other family members – his grandparents on both sides, numerous uncles and aunts – from their places in the cemetery and their relocation in the enormous new tomb. He flew back, with his parents’ corpses in the hold, and spent all day immersed with the gravediggers in the grisly business of transporting and arranging the various coffins. He was particularly unnerved to witness the return to the earth’s surface of his grandfather, his mother’s father, who had been a man of great mischief and the cause – to the end of their days – of many of his parents’ arguments, for the power even in memory that he continued to hold over his daughter. In the late afternoon, his parents were the last to be lowered into the vast marble structure. My neighbour had a taxi waiting to take him back to the airport, as he was due to return to London straight away. But midway through the journey, sitting in the taxi, a terrible realisation struck him. In all the rearranging of the family bodies, he had somehow failed to place his parents side by side: worse still, he distinctly recalled, there in the back of the taxi, that it was his grandfather’s coffin that lay between the two. Immediately he ordered the taxi driver to turn around and take him back to the cemetery. As they approached, he told the taxi driver that he would have to help him, for by now it was nearly dark and everyone else would have gone home. The taxi driver agreed, but no sooner had they entered the cemetery gates in the darkness than he took fright and ran away, leaving my neighbour alone. He did not recall, my neighbour said, quite how he managed to unseal the tomb single-handed: he was still a fairly young man, but even so he must have been endowed in that moment with a superhuman strength. He climbed over the edge and descended into the tomb and there, sure enough, he saw his parents’ two coffins with the grandfather between them. It was not so hard to slide them into their proper positions, but once he’d done it he realised that owing to the steepness and depth of the tomb it was going to be impossible for him to get out again. He called and shouted, to no avail; he leapt and scrabbled at the smooth sides of the tomb, trying to find a foothold.

  But I suppose I must have got out somehow, he said, because I certainly didn’t spend all night there, though I thought I might have to. Perhaps the taxi driver came back after all – I don’t remember. He smiled, and for a while the two of us watched the family on the other boat, across the bright water. I said that when my sons were the ages of those two leaping boys, they were so intimate it would have been hard to disentangle their separate natures. They used to play together without pause from the moment they opened their eyes in the morning to the moment they closed them again. Their play was a kind of shared trance in which they created whole imaginary worlds, and they were forever involved in games and projects whose planning and execution were as real to them as they were invisible to everyone else: sometimes I would move or throw away some apparently inconsequential item, only to be told that it was a sacred prop in the ongoing make-believe, a narrative which seemed to run like a magic river through our household, inexhaustible, and which they could exit and re-enter at will, moving over that threshold which no one else could see into another element. And then one day the river dried up: their shared world of imagination ceased, and the reason was that one of them – I can’t even recall which one it was – stopped believing in it. In other words, it was nobody’s fault; but all the same it was brought home to me how much of what was beautiful in their lives was the result of a shared vision of things that strictly speaking could not have been said to exist.

  I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see, and in this case it proved to be an impermanent basis for living. Without their shared story, the two children began to argue, and where their playing had taken them away from the world, making them unreachable sometimes for hours at a time, their arguments brought them constantly back to it. They would come to me or to their father, seeking intervention and justice; they began to set greater store by facts, by what had been done and said, and to build the case for themselves and against one another. It was hard, I said, not to see this transposition from love to factuality as the mirror of other things that were happening in our household at the time. What was striking was the sheer negative capability of their former intimacy: it was as though everything that had been inside was moved outside, piece by piece, like furniture being taken out of a house and put on the pavement. There seemed to be so much of it, because what had been invisible was now visible; what had been useful was now redundant. Their antagonism was in exact proportion to their former harmony, but where the harmony had been timeless and weightless, the antagonism occupied space and time. The intangible became solid, the visionary was embodied, the private became public: when peace becomes war, when love turns to hatred, something is born into the world, a force of pure mortality. If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse. And what is astonishing is how much detail it gathers to itself, so that nothing remains untouched by it. They were struggling to free themselves from one another, yet the very last thing they could do wa
s leave one another alone. They fought over everything, disputed ownership of the most inconsequential item, were enraged by the merest nuance of speech, and when finally they were maddened by detail they erupted into physical violence, hitting and scratching one another; which of course returned them to the madness of detail again, because physical violence entails the long-drawn-out processes of justice and the law. The story of who had done what to whom had to be told, and the matters of guilt and punishment established, though this never satisfied them either; in fact it made things worse, because it seemed to promise a resolution that never came. The more its intricacies were specified, the bigger and realer their argument grew. Each of them wanted more than anything to be declared right, and the other wrong, but it was impossible to assign blame entirely to either of them. And I realised eventually, I said, that it could never be resolved, not so long as the aim was to establish the truth, for there was no single truth any more, that was the point. There was no longer a shared vision, a shared reality even. Each of them saw things now solely from his own perspective: there was only point of view.

  My neighbour was silent for a while. Presently he said that in his case his children had been his mainstay, through all the ups and downs of his marital career. He had always felt himself to be a good father: he supposed, in fact, that he had been more able to love his children and feel loved by them in return than he had their various mothers. But his own mother had once said to him, in the period after his first marriage had ended when he was deeply concerned about the effect the divorce was having on the children, that family life was bittersweet no matter what you did. If it wasn’t divorce it would be something else, she said. There was no such thing as an unblemished childhood, though people will do everything they can to convince you otherwise. There was no such thing as a life without pain. And as for divorce, even if you lived like a saint you would still experience all the same losses, however much you tried to explain them away. I could weep just to think that I’ll never see you again as you were at the age of six – I would give anything, she said, to meet that six-year-old one more time. But everything falls away, try as you might to stop it. And for whatever returns to you, be grateful. So he has tried to be grateful, even for his son, who has failed so spectacularly to survive out in the world. His son had become, like so many vulnerable people, obsessed with animals, and my neighbour had involved himself in more headaches than he could possibly recount by giving in to the unceasing requests that this or that helpless creature be rescued and given a home. Dogs, cats, hedgehogs, birds, even once a baby lamb half-killed by a fox, into whose mouth my neighbour had sat up a whole night spooning warm milk. During that vigil, he said, he had willed the lamb to live, not especially for its own sake but for the affirmation this would have provided of the lonely route he had chosen in relation to his son, which was to treat him with the utmost sensitivity and indulgence. Had the lamb lived, it might have constituted a kind of approval – if only from the universe – of my neighbour’s decision to act in direct contradiction to the boy’s mother, who would have abandoned him to a mental hospital. But of course he found himself burying the thing the next morning, while Takis was still asleep; and this was just one of countless incidents whereby he had come to feel foolish for deciding to treat the child without resort to cruelty. It seems, he said, that the universe favours those like his ex-wife, who disown that which reflects badly on them; though in stories, of course, the bad things return to haunt them. His current problems stemmed from an evening last week, when his son’s companion had closeted himself away to work on his Ph.D. and Takis had stolen out under cover of darkness, and taken it upon himself to attempt the liberation of numerous animals kept in fenced enclosures on the island, including an eccentric sort of menagerie being raised as a pet project by a local entrepreneur, so that now there were a number of exotic beasts – ostriches, llamas, tapirs, and even a herd of tiny ponies no bigger than dogs – roaming loose across the island. Their owner was a newcomer, less respectful of the family’s ancestry, and was very angry at the damage to his property and his livestock: in his eyes Takis was a hooligan, a criminal, and there wasn’t a great deal my neighbour could say or do in his defence. You learn very quickly, he said, that your children are exempt only from your own judgement. If the world finds them wanting, you have to take them back. Though this, of course, is something he supposes he has always known, for his mentally disabled brother, now a man in his early seventies, has never even left the place where he was born.

  He asked whether I would like to swim again before we returned to the mainland and this time I remained within sight of the two boats and swam close to the cove, where the baby’s cries echoed among the high rocks. The father was pacing up and down the deck with the little body clasped to his shoulder and the mother was fanning herself with her book while the three children sat at her feet cross-legged. The boat was hung with pale cloths and draperies to provide shade and the breeze occasionally sent them billowing in and back out again, so that the group was hidden briefly from view and then revealed once more. They held their positions, waiting, I could see, for the baby to stop crying, for the moment to release them and for the world to move forward again. On the other side of the cove my neighbour had swum out in a short straight furrow and immediately returned, and I watched him climb up the small ladder back on to the boat. He moved around the deck in the distance with his slightly rolling gait, towelling his fleshy back. A few feet away from me a black cormorant stood perched on a rock, staring motionless out to sea. The baby stopped crying and the family immediately began to stir, changing their positions in the confined space as though they were little clockwork figures rotating on a jewellery box; the father bending and putting the child in its pram, the mother rising and turning, the two boys and the girl straightening their legs and joining their hands so that they made a pinwheel shape, their bodies glittering and flashing in the sun. I suddenly felt afraid, alone in the water, and I returned to the boat, where my neighbour was packing things away and opening the compartment in readiness to bring up the anchor. He suggested I lie down on the bench seat, as I was probably tired, and try to sleep while he drove across to the mainland. He gave me a kind of shawl to cover myself with, and I drew it up all the way over my head, so that the sky and the sun and the dancing water were blotted out; and this time, when the boat made its surging leap forward amid the deafening noise of the engine, I experienced it as a kind of comfort and found that I did go into a half-sleep. Occasionally I would open my eyes and see the unfamiliar cloth just in front of them and then I would close them again; and feeling my body being borne blindly through space I had the sense of everything in my life having become atomised, all its elements separated as though an explosion had sent them flying away from the centre in different directions. I thought of my children and wondered where they were at this moment. The image of the family on the boat, the bright rotating circle on the jewellery box, so mechanically and fixedly constellated and yet so graceful and correct, turned behind my eyes. I was reminded, with extraordinary clarity, of lying half-asleep as a child on the back seat of my parents’ car on the interminable winding journey home from the seaside, where we often drove for the day during the summer. There was no direct road between the two places, just a rambling network of country lanes that looked on the map like the tangled illustrations of veins and capillaries in a textbook, so that it made no particular difference which way you went as long as it was generally in the right direction. Yet my father had a route he preferred, because it seemed to him to be marginally more direct than the others, and so we always went the same way, crossing and recrossing the alternative roads and passing signposts to places we had either already been through or would never see, my father’s notion of the journey having established itself over time as an insurmountable reality, to the extent that it would have seemed wrong to have found ourselves passing through those unknown villages, though in fact it would have made no difference at all. We children w
ould lie on the back seat, drowsy and nauseous with the swaying motion, and sometimes I would open my eyes and see the summer landscape passing through the dusty windows, so full and ripe at that time of year that it seemed impossible it could ever be broken down and turned to winter.