Outline: A Novel

by Rachel Cusk

  It was decided that the windows should be opened but the door shut, and the person nearest to each side got up to do so. Ryan’s boy observed that it did seem odd to be opening the windows to warm up a room, but that science had involved us in many such inversions of reality, some of which were more useful than others. We should accept occasionally being inconvenienced by our conveniences, he said, just as we had to tolerate flaws in our loved ones: nothing was ever perfect, he said. Many of his fellow Greeks, he continued, believed that air conditioning was severely deleterious to health, and there was now a nationwide movement to keep it switched off in offices and public buildings, a sort of back-to-nature idea which was itself perfectionism of a kind, though it meant that everybody got very hot; which, he concluded somewhat delightedly, could only result in air conditioning being invented all over again.

  I took a piece of paper and a pen and drew the shape of the large square table at which we all sat. I asked them for their names, of which there were ten in all, and wrote each one down in their place around the square. Then I asked each of them to tell me something they had noticed on their way here. There was a long, shuffling silence of transition; people cleared their throats, rearranged the papers in front of them or gazed blankly into space. Then a young woman, whose name, according to my diagram, was Sylvia, began to speak, having glanced around the room apparently to ascertain that no one else was going to take the initiative. Her small, resigned smile made it clear that she often found herself in this position.

  ‘When I was getting off the train,’ she said, ‘I noticed a man standing on the platform with a small white dog on his shoulder. He himself was very tall and dark,’ she added, ‘and the dog was quite beautiful. Its coat was curly and as white as snow, and it sat on the man’s shoulder and looked around itself.’

  Another silence ensued. Presently a man of very neat and diminutive appearance – Theo, according to my diagram – who had come formally dressed in a pinstriped suit, put up his hand to speak.

  ‘This morning,’ he said, ‘I was crossing the square opposite my apartment building, on my way to the metro, and I saw on one of the low concrete walls around the square a woman’s handbag. It was a large and very expensive-looking handbag,’ he said, ‘made of the shiniest black patent leather with a gold clasp at the top, and it was standing there quite open on the wall. I looked around for a person likely to own such a thing, but the square was deserted. I wondered then whether the owner had been robbed, and the handbag left there while its contents had been stolen, but when I approached and looked inside – for the clasp was undone and the top was wide open, and I could examine the interior without touching it – I saw that everything was still there, a leather wallet, a set of keys, a powder compact and lipstick, even an apple that was presumably intended for a snack during the day. I stood there for quite a while, waiting to see who would turn up, and when nobody did I walked to the metro after all, because I had seen that otherwise I would be late. But I realised, while I was walking, that I should have taken the bag to a police station.’

  Theo stopped, his story apparently at an end. The others immediately flew at him with a volley of questions. Having realised he should have handed the bag in to the police, why didn’t he turn around and go back? If he was late, why had he not simply handed the bag in at a nearby shop or even a kiosk, for safe keeping, or at the very least told a passer-by about the situation? He could even have taken the bag with him, and made the necessary calls at a more convenient time – better that than just to leave it there, for anyone to steal! Theo sat through this interrogation with his arms folded across his chest, a benign expression on his small, neat face. After a considerable length of time, when the questions had died down, he spoke again.

  ‘I had just crossed the square,’ he said, ‘and had turned around, in that moment having had this thought about the police, when what should I see but a young policeman, exactly halfway between myself and the bag, which I could still see sitting on the wall along the far side. He was coming up the path, at the end of which you must turn in one of two directions: right, which would have brought him to me, or left, which would take him straight to the bag. If he turned right, I saw that I would have no choice but to inform him, and to embroil myself in all the paperwork and wasted time that such acts entail. Fortunately for me,’ Theo said, ‘he turned left, and I stood there long enough to see him reach the bag, look around himself for its owner and peer inside at its contents as I had done, and then pick it up and take it with him on his way.’

  The group applauded this performance heartily, while Theo continued to smile benignly in their midst. It was interesting to consider, said the longhaired boy – Georgeou, as my diagram now told me – that a story might merely be a series of events we believe ourselves to be involved in, but on which we have absolutely no influence at all. He himself had noticed nothing on his journey here: he habitually did not notice things which did not concern him, for that very reason, that he saw the tendency to fictionalise our own experiences as positively dangerous, because it convinced us that human life had some kind of design and that we were more significant than we actually were. As for him, his father had driven him here: they had had a very interesting conversation on the way about string theory, and then he had got out and come upstairs to this room.

  ‘It is surely not true,’ the girl sitting next to him said, with an expression of perplexity, ‘that there is no story of life; that one’s own existence doesn’t have a distinct form that has begun and will one day end, that has its own themes and events and cast of characters.’ She herself, on the way here, had passed an open window from which had drifted the sound of someone practising the piano. The building, it so happened, was a music college of the kind she herself had left two years before, abandoning her lifelong hopes of becoming a professional musician; she recognised the piece as the D minor fugue from Bach’s French Suites, a piece she had always loved and that caused her, hearing it so unexpectedly, to feel there on the pavement the most extraordinary sense of loss. It was as though the music had once belonged to her and now no longer did; as though she had been excluded from its beauty, was being forced to see it in the possession of someone else, and to revisit in its entirety her own sadness at her inability, for a number of reasons, to remain in that world. Certainly another person, she said, passing that window and hearing the D minor fugue, would have felt something completely different. In itself, the music coming out of the window means nothing at all, and whatever the feelings that might be attached to it, none of them had caused the music to be played in the first place, or the window to be left open so that the sound of it could be heard by passers-by. And even a person observing these events, she said, from across the road, could not have guessed, simply by seeing and hearing, what the story really was. What they would have seen was a girl walking past, at the same time as hearing some music being played from inside a building.

  ‘Which in fact’, Georgeou responded, his finger lifted in the air and a wild grin appearing on his face, ‘is all that actually happened!’

  The girl – her name, when I looked, was Clio – was perhaps in her late twenties, but she had a childlike appearance, her dark hair drawn straight back into a ponytail and her pale, sallow skin bare of make-up. She wore a sleeveless kind of tunic, which added to her air of simplicity. I could imagine her in the monasticism of a practice room, her fingers flying surprisingly across the black and white keys. She looked at Georgeou with a face entirely passive and still, clearly in the expectation that he would have a great deal more to say.

  Thankfully, Georgeou continued, there was an infinite thing called possibility, and an equally useful thing called probability. We had an excellent piece of evidence in terms of the music college, a place the majority of people would understand to be in the business of turning out professional musicians. Most people would have some concept of what a professional musician was, and would understand that the possibility of failure in such a profession w
as as great as the possibility of success. Hearing the music coming out of the building, therefore, they could envisage the person playing it as one who was running this risk, and whose fate could therefore take one of two basic forms, both imaginable by the average person.

  ‘In other words,’ Georgeou said, ‘I could deduce your story from the facts alone, and from my own experience of life, which is all that I know for a certainty, most importantly in this case my experience of failure, such as my failure to memorise the constellations of the southern hemisphere, which never ceases to upset me.’ He folded his hands and looked at them with a downcast expression.

  I asked Georgeou how old he was, and he replied that he had turned fifteen last week. His father had bought him, as a birthday gift, a telescope, which they had set up on the flat roof of their apartment building and through which he was now able to study the sky, and most particularly the phases of the moon, in which he had a special interest. I said that I was glad he had received such a satisfying present, but that it was perhaps time to listen to what the others had to say. He nodded his head, his face brightening. He just wished to add, he said, that he was familiar with the D minor fugue from the French Suites: his father had played him a recording of it, and personally he had always found it to be quite an optimistic piece of music.

  At this, the person sitting next to him began to speak.

  ‘Music,’ she said, in a languorous and dreamlike manner. ‘Music is a betrayer of secrets; it is more treacherous even than dreams, which at least have the virtue of being private.’

  The woman who said this was of a glorious though eccentric appearance, somewhere in her fifties, with a demolished beauty she bore quite regally. The bones of her face were so impressively structured as to verge on the grotesque, an impression she had chosen to accentuate – in a way that struck me as distinctly and intentionally humorous – by surrounding her already enormous blue eyes in oceans of exotic blue and green shadow and then drawing, not carefully, around the lids with an even brighter blue; her sharp cheekbones wore slashes of pink blusher, and her mouth, which was unusually fleshy and pouting, was richly and inaccurately slathered in red lipstick. She wore a great quantity of gold jewellery and a dress, also blue, of gathered chiffon that left her neck and arms exposed, where the skin was very brown and intricately creased. Her name, according to my chart, was Marielle.

  ‘For example,’ she continued after a long pause, her enormous blue eyes travelling the faces around her, ‘it was when I heard my husband singing “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” in the shower that I realised he was being unfaithful to me.’ She paused again, closing her fleshy lips together with difficulty over her distinctly large and protuberant front teeth as though to moisten them. ‘He was of course singing the part of Carmen herself,’ she resumed, ‘though I don’t think he realised his mistake, or would even have cared had he known. He has always been lazy about details, since he is a person of extremes, and prefers not to be detained by facts. As far as he was concerned he was simply singing out of sheer joy, so good was it to be him in our apartment on that sunny morning, with his mistress tucked away somewhere on the other side of town while he showered in his stall of travertine and gold, where he even likes to keep a few hardier artworks, as well as a small piece of the Parthenon frieze that is still presumed to be missing and that he uses as a soap dish; with the new high-pressure hot-water system we had just had installed and the towels he had ordered all the way from Saks Fifth Avenue in New York, which enveloped you like a baby in its mother’s arms and made you want to go back to sleep again.

  ‘I myself was in the kitchen,’ she said, ‘squeezing oranges. I had just made myself the most delicious breakfast, with the ripest little melon I had found in the market and a slice of fresh cheese I bought from a woman who keeps beautiful goats on a hillside near Delphi, when I heard the sound of him singing. I knew immediately what it meant. The idiot, I thought – why does he have to holler it out so that I can hear it all the way in the kitchen? I, the only one who knows what could have caused that soap opera of betrayal to pop into his head, taking for himself the best part, just as he would always take the best part of whatever was on my plate, simply reach across and take whatever he liked the look of, even though I had saved it until last. Why couldn’t he have kept his mouth shut? And all before I had had the chance to eat my beautiful breakfast, which now he would find waiting for him untouched on the counter when he came out of the shower: his happiness, I knew, would be complete.’

  She paused to tuck a strand of hair, which was dyed a bright yellow blonde, behind her ear, and moistened her lips again before she resumed. ‘This morning,’ she said, ‘I had arranged to call in at his office on my way here, to discuss financial matters, about which in any case we always agree. My husband’s lack of consideration is matched by his complete lack of spite. He is a man,’ she sighed, ‘of very good taste, which for me has always been a form of torture, because I am a good student and have been unable to prevent myself from learning his taste very thoroughly, to the extent that I have come to know what he wants before he even wants it himself, and in the matter of women I have become positively prophetic, almost to the extent that I see them with his eyes and feel his own desire for them. So I learned in the end to close my eyes; and if only I had remembered to close my ears too, that morning in the kitchen, I might still be looking down at my plate to find that the nicest and most delicious morsel had somehow vanished.

  ‘Today, when I took the glass lift up to his office, which is on the thirteenth floor, I emerged to see that everything there had changed. A complete redecoration had occurred: the new theme was white, and being a man of extremes my husband had evidently decided that everything not white – including some of the people – had to be removed. And so Martha, my dear friend, his secretary, was no longer to be found in her place by the big window, at her old desk where she kept her packed lunch and her photographs of her children and a pair of flat shoes for walking, where we used to sit and talk and she would tell me all the things I needed to know and none of the things I didn’t – Martha was gone, though my husband assured me that she had not been actually eradicated, merely given a big office of her own at the back, where she wouldn’t be seen by visitors. In her place by the window, in the all-white world that reminded me of nothing so much as that morning in the kitchen and the slice of fresh white goat’s cheese I had to leave behind forever on its plate, sat a new girl. She, of course, wore white, and had skin pale as an albino’s; and her hair, too, was entirely white, except for one long strand which came out like a plume from her head and was dyed – the only piece of colour in the place – the brightest blue. In the lift on the way down I marvelled at the sheer genius of the man, who had also managed, while I was there, to exact my forgiveness as stealthily as a pickpocket removes your wallet, and was returning me to the street lighter, though poorer, with that quill of blue perched in my thoughts like a feather in a beggar’s cap.’

  Marielle fell silent, her ridged face lifted, her enormous glittering eyes gazing straight ahead. It was quite common, the man to her left presently observed, for young people now to use their appearance as a means of shocking or disturbing others: he himself – and he was sure the same was true for all of us – had seen hairstyles far more extreme than the one Marielle described, not to mention tattoos and piercings of sometimes an apparently violent nature, which all the same said nothing whatever about their owners, who were often people of the greatest sweetness and docility. It had taken him a long time to accept this fact, for he was predisposed to be judgemental and to find the meaning of a thing commensurate with its appearance, and also to be frightened of what he didn’t understand; and though he didn’t, strictly speaking, comprehend the reasons why people might choose to mutilate themselves, he had learned not to read too much into it. If anything, he saw such outward extremes as the symbols of a correspondingly great inner emptiness, a futility that he believed came from the lack of engagement with
any meaningful system of belief. His peers – and he was only twenty-four, though he was aware he looked somewhat older – were for the most part quite astonishingly indifferent to the religious and political debates of our times. But for him, political awakening had been the awakening of his whole sensibility, had given him a way of existing in the world, something about which he felt pride but also a certain anxiety, almost a kind of guilt, which he found difficult to explain.

  This morning, for instance, on his way here he had walked through the part of the city where last summer – as everyone would recall – there were demonstrations, in which he and his political friends had proudly participated. He found himself following the exact route they had followed that day, treading streets he had not visited again until now, and found himself filled with emotion at the memories they brought back to him. Then, at a certain point, he passed through an alleyway on both sides of which the buildings were burnt-out shells: he could see through the glassless windows into the cavernous, ruined interiors, all blackened and ghostly and still filled with the mess and detritus of their own destruction, for in the whole year that had passed no one had come to clear it away. Quite how these buildings had been set alight he did not recall, but it had been towards evening, and the fires had been seen from all over Athens. News agencies had broadcast footage of the smoke billowing across the city that had been relayed all over the world; it was, he could not deny, part of the excitement of that night, as well as a necessary means – he believed – of getting the demonstrators’ message across. Yet all he could feel, looking through into the desolate ruins, was shame, to the extent that he actually thought he heard his mother’s voice, asking him whether it was really he that was responsible for all that mess, because people had told her so and until he confirmed it she wouldn’t know whether or not to believe them.