Outline: A Novel

by Rachel Cusk

  The hurtling motion of the boat began to slow and the sound of the motor to die away. My neighbour asked me courteously, when I sat up, whether I had managed to switch off for a while. We were drawing close to the marina, its white boats startling against their background of blue, and beyond them the brown roadscape, desultory in the heat, all of it seeming to move unstoppably up and down in the sunshine though in fact the motion was ours. If I was hungry, my neighbour said, there was a place he knew just over there that made souvlaki. Had I eaten souvlaki before? It was very simple but could be very good. If I would just be patient while he moored the boat and went through the necessary procedures, we could be eating shortly, and afterwards he would drive me back to Athens.

  V

  In the evening I was meeting an old friend of mine, Paniotis, at a restaurant in the centre of town. He called to give me directions, and also to tell me that someone else – a woman novelist I might have heard of – would probably be joining us. She had been very insistent; he hoped I didn’t mind. She wasn’t a person he cared to offend: I’ve been in Athens too long, he said. He described the route meticulously, twice. He was being kept in a meeting, he said, otherwise he would have come to fetch me himself. He didn’t like leaving me to find my way on my own but he hoped he had made things sufficiently clear. If I counted the traffic lights as he had told me to, turning right between the sixth and the seventh, I would not go wrong.

  At evening, with the sun no longer overhead, the air developed a kind of viscosity in which time seemed to stand very still and the labyrinth of the city, no longer bisected by light and shade and unstirred by the afternoon breezes, appeared suspended in a kind of dream, paused in an atmosphere of extraordinary pallor and thickness. At some point darkness fell, but otherwise the evenings were strangely without the sense of progression: it didn’t get cooler, or quieter, or emptier of people; the roar of talk and laughter came unstaunched from the glaring terraces of restaurants, the traffic was a swarming, honking river of lights, small children rode their bicycles along the pavements under the bile-coloured streetlamps. Despite the darkness it was eternal day, the pigeons still scuffling in the neon-lit squares, the kiosks open on street corners, the smell of pastry still hanging in the exhausted air around the bakeries. In Paniotis’s restaurant a fat man in a heavy tweed suit sat alone at a corner table, delicately cutting a slice of pink watermelon into small pieces with his knife and fork and placing them carefully in his mouth. I waited, looking around the dark-panelled interior with its insets of bevelled glass, where the sea of empty tables and chairs was multiply reflected. This was not, Paniotis acknowledged when he arrived, a fashionable place; Angeliki, who intended to join us presently, would certainly be displeased, but at least it was possible to talk here, and one could be sure of not meeting anyone one knew who could interrupt. I probably didn’t share his feelings – he hoped, really, that I didn’t – but he was no longer interested in socialising; in fact, increasingly he found other people positively bewildering. The interesting ones are like islands, he said: you don’t bump into them on the street or at a party, you have to know where they are and go to them by arrangement.

  He asked me to stand up so that he could embrace me, and when I came out from behind the table he looked closely into my eyes. He had been trying to remember, he said, how long it was since our last encounter – did I know? It must have been more than three years ago, I said, and he nodded his head as I spoke. We had lunch in a restaurant in Earls Court, on a day that had been hot by English standards, and for some reason my children and husband had come too. We were on our way somewhere else: we stopped to meet Paniotis, who was in London for the book fair. I went away from that lunch, he said, feeling that my own life had been a failure. You seemed so happy with your family, so complete, it was an image of how things ought to be.

  His body, when we hugged, felt extremely light and fragile. He was wearing a threadbare lilac-coloured shirt, and a pair of jeans that hung from him in folds. He drew back and looked at me closely again. There is something of the cartoon character about Paniotis’s face: everything about it is exaggerated, the cheeks very gaunt, the forehead very high, the eyebrows winging off like exclamation marks, the hair flying out in all directions, so that one has the curious feeling one is looking at an illustration of Paniotis rather than at Paniotis himself. Even when he is relaxed he wears the expression of someone who has just been told something extraordinary, or who has opened a door and been very surprised by what he has found behind it. His eyes, within this rictus-like expression, are very mobile and changeable and often bulge dramatically forward, as though one day they might fly out of his face altogether with astonishment at what they have witnessed.

  And now, he said, I can see that something has happened, and I have to say I would not have expected it. I do not understand it at all. That day, he said, in the restaurant, I took a photograph of you with your family – do you remember? Yes, I said, I remembered. I said that I hoped he wasn’t about to show the photograph to me and he looked sombre. If you don’t wish it, he said. But of course I have brought it with me; it’s here in my briefcase. I told him that his taking a photograph was, in fact, the thing that stood out in my mind from that day. I remembered thinking that it was an unusual thing to do, or at least a thing I would not have thought to do myself. It marked some difference between him and me, in that he was observing something while I, evidently, was entirely immersed in being it. It was one of those moments, I said, that in retrospect have come to seem prophetic to me. And indeed, being so immersed, I did not notice that Paniotis went away from our encounter feeling that his life had been a failure, any more than the mountain notices the climber that loses his footing and falls down one of its ravines. Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of. While I spoke Paniotis looked more and more aghast. That is a terrible notion that only a Catholic could have come up with, he said. Though I can’t say there aren’t quite a few people I would like to see punished in so delightfully cruel a fashion. Those are the ones, however, who are certain to remain unenlightened by suffering to the end of their days. They make sure of it, he said, picking up the menu and turning with a lifted finger to the waiter, an immense grey-bearded man clad in a long white apron, who all this time had been entrenched so absolutely motionless in the corner of the almost empty room that I hadn’t noticed him. He came and stood before our table with his powerful arms folded across his chest, nodding his head while Paniotis spoke rapidly to him.

  That day in London, Paniotis resumed, turning back to face me, I realised that my little dream of a publishing house was destined to remain just that, a fantasy, and in fact what that realisation caused me to feel was not so much disappointment at the situation as astonishment at the fantasy itself. It seemed incredible to me that at the age of fifty-one I was still capable of producing, in all innocence, a completely unrealisable hope. The human capacity for self-delusion is apparently infinite – and if that is the case, how are we ever meant to know, except by existing in a state of absolute pessimism, that once again we are fooling ourselves? I had thought there was nothing, having lived my whole life in this tragic country, about which I could any longer deceive myself, but as you have so unhappily pointed out, it is the very thing you don’t see, the thing you take for granted, that deceives you. And how can you even know you have taken something for granted until it is no longer there?

  The waiter loomed beside us carrying several dishes, and Paniotis broke off with a final pantomimed gesture of dismay, leaning back to let him put things on the table. There was a carafe of pale yellow wine, a dish of tiny green olives on their stalks that looked bitter but tasted sweet and delicious, and a plate of cold, delicate mussels in their black shells. To fortify us, Pa
niotis said, for the arrival of Angeliki. You will find that Angeliki has become very grand, he said, since one of her novels won some prize or another somewhere in Europe and she is now considered – or at least considers herself – to be a literary celebrity. Her sufferings – whatever they were – being over she has elected herself a sort of spokesperson for suffering womanhood generally, not just in Greece but in other territories that have demonstrated an interest in her work. Wherever she is asked to go, she goes. The novel, he said, concerns a woman painter whose artistic life is gradually being stifled by her domestic arrangements: her husband is a diplomat, and the family is always being uprooted and moved to a new place, so that the woman painter comes to feel that her own work is merely decorative, a pastime, while her husband’s is considered not just by him but by the world to be important, to forge events rather than simply provide a commentary on them, and that when there is a conflict between the two – which, this being a novel by Angeliki, there often is – his needs triumph over hers. And eventually her work starts to become mechanical, a pretence; there is no passion, yet her urge to express herself remains. In Berlin, where the family are now living, she meets a young man, a painter, who reignites her passion, for painting and for everything else – but now the problem is that she feels too old for this young man, and also she feels miserably guilty, especially about her children, who have sensed that something is wrong and have started to become upset. Most of all she feels angry with her husband, for putting her in this position, for causing her to lose her passion in the first place and leaving her entirely responsible for the consequences. And the young painter is still making her feel old, with his all-night parties and his recreational drugs and his wonder at the marks experience has left on her woman’s body. There is no one she can talk to, no one she can tell – what a lonely place, smirks Paniotis. That’s the title, by the way: A Lonely Place. My argument with Angeliki, he says, concerns her substitution of painting for writing, as if the two were interchangeable. The book is obviously about herself, he says, and yet she knows nothing at all about painting. In my experience painters are far less conventional than writers. Writers need to hide in bourgeois life like ticks need to hide in an animal’s fur: the deeper they’re buried the better. I don’t believe in her painter, he says, making the children’s packed lunches in her state-of-the-art German kitchen while fantasising about sex with a young muscled androgyne in a leather jacket.

  I asked him what it was, in London, that had caused him to lose faith in his publishing house, which he had only just launched and which indeed shortly afterwards – I had heard – was taken over by a large corporation, so that Paniotis was now a company editor rather than the director of his own enterprise. My reverence for all things English, he said after a silence, his sorrowful eyes brimming and rolling in their sockets, was not reciprocated. This was when things had started to get difficult here, he continued, though no one guessed then how much worse they would become. The publishing house was to be devoted exclusively to translating and printing English-language authors unheard of in Greece, writers the commercial publishers wouldn’t touch, whose work Paniotis deeply admired and was determined to make available for his countrymen. But at a particular moment he was unable to provide the advance payments to these authors, many of whose books he had translated himself to cut costs. In London he found himself excoriated, even by the writers themselves, for non-payment of money that the books, strictly speaking, had not yet actually earned; he was treated with the greatest disdain by everyone, was threatened with legal action, and worst of all came away with the impression that these writers he had worshipped as the artists of our time were in fact cold and unempathetic people devoted to self-promotion and above all else, to money. He had made it quite clear to them that if he was forced to pay, his publishing house would collapse before it had even begun, which indeed is what happened; those same writers are regularly rejected by the company he works for now, who are interested only in turning out best-sellers. And so I learned, he said, that it is impossible to improve things, and that good people are just as responsible for it as bad, and that improvement itself is perhaps a mere personal fantasy, as lonely in its way as Angeliki’s lonely place. We are all addicted to it, he said, removing a single mussel from its shell with his trembling fingers and putting it in his mouth, the story of improvement, to the extent that it has commandeered our deepest sense of reality. It has even infected the novel, though perhaps now the novel is infecting us back again, so that we expect of our lives what we’ve come to expect of our books; but this sense of life as a progression is something I want no more of.

  In his marriage, he now realised, the principle of progress was always at work, in the acquiring of houses, possessions, cars, the drive towards higher social status, more travel, a wider circle of friends, even the production of children felt like an obligatory calling-point on the mad journey; and it was inevitable, he now saw, that once there were no more things to add or improve on, no more goals to achieve or stages to pass through, the journey would seem to have run its course, and he and his wife would be beset by a great sense of futility and by the feeling of some malady, which was really only the feeling of stillness after a life of too much motion, such as sailors experience when they walk on dry land after too long at sea, but which to both of them signified that they were no longer in love. If only we had had the sense, he said, to make our peace with one another then, to start from the honest proposition that we were two people not in love who nonetheless meant one another no harm; well, he said, his eyes brimming again, if that had been the case I believe we might have learned truly to love one another and to love ourselves. But instead we saw it as another opportunity for progress, saw the journey unfolding once more, only this time it was a journey through destruction and war, for which both of us demonstrated just as much energy and aptitude as always.

  These days, he said, I live very simply. In the mornings, at sunrise, I drive to a place I know twenty minutes outside Athens and I swim all the way across the bay and all the way back again. In the evenings I sit on my balcony and I write. He closed his eyes briefly and smiled. I asked him what it was he was writing, and his smile widened. He said, I am writing about my childhood. I was so happy as a child, he continued, and I realised a little while ago that there was nothing I wanted so much as to recall it piece by piece, with every possible detail. The world that happiness existed in has completely disappeared, not just in my own life but in Greece as a whole, for whether it knows it or not Greece is a country that is on its knees and dying a slow and agonising death. In my own case, I sometimes wonder whether it was the very happiness of my childhood that has meant I have had to be taught how to suffer. I seem to have been exceptionally slow to understand where pain comes from, and how it comes. It has taken me a long time to learn to avoid it. I read in the newspaper the other day, he said, about a boy with a curious mental disorder which compels him to seek physical risk and therefore injury wherever possible. This boy is forever putting his hand in the fire, and throwing himself off walls, and climbing trees in order to fall out of them; he has broken nearly every bone in his body, and of course is covered in cuts and bruises, and the newspaper asked his poor parents for their comment on the situation. The problem is, they said, he has no fear. But it seems to me that exactly the reverse is true: he has too much fear, so much that he is driven to enact the thing of which he is afraid, lest it should happen of its own accord. I think that if I had known, as a child, what was possible in terms of pain, I might have had much the same response. You might remember in the Odyssey, he said, the character of Elpenor, Odysseus’s crewmate who falls off the roof of Circe’s house because he is so happy he forgets he has to use a ladder to come down. Odysseus encounters him in Hades later on, and he asks him why on earth he died in such a foolish manner. Paniotis smiled. I always found that a charming detail, he said.

  A woman who was certain to be Angeliki – since there were no other diners, and no one
else had entered the restaurant in all this time – had come in and was interrogating the waiter quite energetically; a conversation of inexplicable length ensued, in the course of which the two of them went outside and shortly after came back again, whereupon it continued more energetically than ever, the woman’s tawny well-cut hair swishing with the rapid movements of her head and her lovely grey dress – made of a flimsy silk material – swirling as she shifted from one foot to another, impatient as a stamping pony. She wore striking high-heeled sandals of silver leather and carried a matching bag, and would have been the picture of elegance had she not, when she turned around to look in the direction of the waiter’s pointing arm – and seen at the end of it our table – disclosed a face so extraordinarily anxious that anyone looking at it could only feel anxious too on her behalf. As Paniotis had predicted, Angeliki was chagrinned by his choice of restaurant; she had only come in here in the first place, she said, to ask for directions to the venue Paniotis had chosen, not realising that this was it, and the waiter had had to take her outside and show her the sign to convince her; and even then she felt sure that a more suitable place must be trading under the same name nearby. But I chose it specially for you, Paniotis said, his eyes bulging. The chef is from your home town, Angeliki; all your favourite Baltic dishes are on the menu. Please excuse him, Angeliki said, placing a manicured hand on my arm. She then remonstrated rapidly with Paniotis in Greek, a tirade that ended with him excusing himself from the table and disappearing off towards the toilets.

  I’m so sorry I couldn’t be here earlier, Angeliki continued breathlessly. I had to attend a reception, and then return home to put my son to bed – I haven’t seen all that much of him lately, as I’ve been on tour with my book. It was a tour of Poland, she added before I could ask, mainly in Warsaw but I visited other cities too. She asked whether I had ever been to Poland and when I said that I had not, she nodded her head a little sadly. The publishers there can’t afford to invite many writers to come, she said, and it is a pity, because they need writers there in a way that people here do not. In the past year, she said, I have visited many places for the first time, or for the first time in my own right, but Poland was the tour that affected me the most, because it made me see my books not just as entertainments for the middle classes but as something vital, a lifeline in many cases, for people – largely women, it has to be admitted – who feel very much alone in their daily lives.