Outline: A Novel

by Rachel Cusk

  Sylvia said she had written nothing at all. Her contribution yesterday, if I recalled, had in fact concerned an animal, the small white dog she had seen perched on the shoulder of the tall dark man. But after the others had spoken she wished she had chosen something more personal, something that would have allowed her to express an aspect of her own self, rather than a sight that was asking, as it were, to be seen. She had looked out for that man again on the train home, as it happened, feeling that she had something to say to him. She wanted to tell him to take the dog off his shoulder and let it walk, or better still get a dog that was ordinary and ugly, so that people like her wouldn’t feel so distracted from their own lives. She resented him for his attention-seeking behaviour and for the fact that he had made her feel so uninteresting; and now here she was, mentioning him in class for the second time!

  Sylvia had a small, pretty, anxious face, and great quantities of ash-coloured hair worn in maidenly rolls and tresses – which she touched and patted frequently – around her shoulders. In any case, she continued, she obviously didn’t see him again on the way home, because life wasn’t like that: she returned to her apartment, which since she lives alone was exactly as she had left it that morning. The telephone rang. It was her mother, who always phones her at that time. How was school today, her mother wanted to know. Sylvia works as a teacher of English literature, at a school in the suburbs of Athens. Her mother had forgotten she had the week off to do the writing course. ‘I reminded her of what I had been doing,’ Sylvia said. ‘Of course, my mother is very sceptical about writing, so it’s typical that she wouldn’t remember. You should have gone on holiday instead, she said, you should have gone out to one of the islands with some friends. You should be living, she said, not spending more time thinking about books. To change the subject I said to her, Mum, tell me something you’ve noticed today. What would I have noticed? she said. I’ve spent all day in the house, waiting for the man to come and fix the washing machine. He never even turned up, she said. After our conversation I went and looked at my computer. I had set my students an essay assignment, and the deadline had now passed, but when I checked my emails I saw that not a single one of them had sent the essay. It was an essay about Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence, the book that has inspired me more than anything else in my life, and none of them had a single word to say about it.

  ‘I went and stood in my kitchen,’ she continued, ‘and thought about trying to write a story. But all I could think of was a line describing the exact moment I was living in: a woman stood in her kitchen and thought about trying to write a story. The problem was that the line didn’t connect to any other line. It hadn’t come from anywhere and it wasn’t going anywhere either, any more than I was going anywhere by just standing in my kitchen. So I went to the other room and took a book off the shelf, a book of short stories by D. H. Lawrence. D. H. Lawrence is my favourite writer,’ she said. ‘In fact, even though he’s dead, in a way I think he is the person I love most in all the world. I would like to be a D. H. Lawrence character, living in one of his novels. The people I meet don’t even seem to have characters. And life seems so rich, when I look at it through his eyes, yet my own life very often appears sterile, like a bad patch of earth, as if nothing will grow there however hard I try. The story I started to read’, she said, ‘was called “The Wintry Peacock”. It is an autobiographical story,’ she said, ‘in which Lawrence is staying in a remote part of the English countryside in winter, and one day when he is out on a walk he hears an unusual sound and discovers that it is a peacock trapped out on the hillside, submerged in the snow. He returns the bird to its owner, a strange woman at a nearby farm who is waiting for her husband to return home from the war.

  ‘At this point,’ she said, ‘I stopped reading: for the first time, I felt that Lawrence was going to fail to transport me out of my own life. Perhaps it was the snow, or the strangeness of the woman, or the peacock itself, but suddenly I felt that these events, and the world he described, had nothing to do with me, here in my modern flat in the heat of Athens. For some reason I couldn’t bear it any longer, the feeling that I was the helpless passenger of his vision, so I closed the book,’ she said, ‘and I went to bed.’

  Sylvia stopped speaking. My phone rang on the table in front of me. I saw the number of Lydia at the mortgage company flashing on the screen, and I told the group that we would take a short break. I went out and stood in the corridor among the notice-boards. My heart was beating uncomfortably in my chest.

  ‘Is that Faye?’ Lydia said.

  Yes, I said.

  She asked me how I was today. She could hear from my dial tone that I was abroad, she said. Whereabouts are you? Athens, I said. That sounds nice, she said. She was sorry she hadn’t been in touch earlier. She’d been out of the office the last couple of days. A few of them in the department had been given some corporate seats for Wimbledon: yesterday she’d watched Nadal get knocked out, which was a big surprise. Anyway, she hoped it wasn’t going to spoil my holiday, but she had to tell me that the underwriters had rejected my application to increase my loan. They don’t need to give a reason, she said, when I asked her why. That was just their decision, based on the information they were provided with. As I say, she said, I hope it won’t affect your holiday too much. When I thanked her for calling to tell me, she said it had been no problem at all. I’m sorry it couldn’t have been with better news, she said.

  I moved along the corridor and through the glass front doors at the entrance to the building and out into the ferocious heat of the street. I stood there in the glare while the cars and people passed, as though I was expecting something to happen or for some alternative to present itself. A woman in a polka-dot sun hat with an enormous camera hung on a strap around her neck asked me the way to the Binyaki Museum. I told her and then I returned inside and went back to the classroom and sat down. Georgeou asked me if everything was all right. He had noticed, he said, that I had closed the door, and wondered if that meant I now wanted the windows to be opened. He was happy to perform that service if so. I told him to go ahead. He bounded out of his chair with such eagerness that he knocked it backwards. Surprisingly deftly, Penelope shot out her hand to catch it, and set it carefully back on its feet. She had been certain, she said somewhat enigmatically, that she would have nothing whatsoever to bring to class today, except her dreams, which were often so lurid and strange she thought she ought to tell someone about them. But generally speaking it was not possible, she had accepted after yesterday’s class, for a person in her position to be a writer, someone whose time was not their own. And so she had spent the evening in the way she usually did, cooking dinner for her children and ministering to their ceaseless demands.

  While they were eating the doorbell had rung: it was Stavros from next door, who had just dropped by to show them a puppy from the new litter his bitch had just produced. Of course the children were wild about this puppy: they left their food to get cold on its plates and went to stand around Stavros, begging in turn to be allowed to hold it. It was a very tiny puppy, its eyes barely open, and Stavros said they would have to be very careful, but he let each of them hold it one by one. ‘I watched each child’, she said, ‘become transformed, as it received the puppy into its arms, into a creature of the utmost gentleness and caution, so that it was almost possible to believe the puppy had brought about an actual refinement in their characters. Each of them stroked the little soft head with their fingers and whispered into its ears, and this would apparently have gone on and on had Stavros not said that he needed to go. The puppies, he mentioned, were for sale; and at these words the children began to bounce up and down with the most genuine, infectious excitement, so that much to my own astonishment,’ she said, ‘I began to feel excited too. The thought of relenting, and of the love I would receive if I did, was almost irresistible. Yet my knowledge of Stavros’s bitch, who is a fat and disagreeable animal, was stronger. No, I said to him, we weren’t going to have a dog; but I
thanked him for showing it to us and he left. Afterwards the children were very disappointed. You always spoil everything, my son said to me. And it was only then, when the spell the puppy had cast had completely worn off, that logic returned to me, and with it a sense of reality that was so harsh and powerful it seemed to expose our household as mercilessly as if the roof had been torn off the building in which we stood.

  ‘I sent the children to their rooms, without finishing their supper, and with my hands trembling I sat at the kitchen table and began to write. I had in fact once bought them a puppy, you see, two years before, under circumstances almost indistinguishable from those I have just recounted, and the fact that we had returned to that same moment, having learned nothing, made me see our life and particularly the children themselves in the coldest possible light. It was, as I say, two years ago now: the dog was a very pretty animal we called Mimi, with a curly tobacco-coloured coat and eyes like two chocolates, and when she first came to live with us she was so tiny and charming that the work I had to do looking after her was balanced against the pleasure the children took in playing with her and showing her off to their friends. It could almost be said that I didn’t actually want them to have to clean up after Mimi, who made the most foul-smelling messes all over the house, for fear that their pleasure would be spoiled; but as Mimi grew bigger and more demanding I came to want them to take some responsibility for her, since it was through their choice – as I constantly told them – that we had got a dog in the first place. But very quickly they grew inured to these remarks: they didn’t want to take Mimi for walks or clean up after her; what’s more, they began to get annoyed by her barking, and by the fact that she would sometimes go into their rooms and create havoc and destroy their things. They didn’t even want her in the sitting room with them in the evenings, because she wouldn’t sit still on the sofa but paced around and around the room, obstructing their view of the television.

  ‘Mimi, as well as quickly growing to be far bigger and more energetic than I had expected, was also obsessed with food, and if I took my eye off her for a moment she was up on the kitchen counters, foraging and eating everything she could find. I quickly learned to put things away, but I had to be very vigilant, and also to remember to shut all the doors in the house so that she couldn’t go into the other rooms, doors the children were forever leaving open again; and of course I had to take her for walks, when she would pull me along so fast I thought my arm would come out of its socket. I could never let her off the lead, because her love for food sent her running off in all directions. Once she ran into the kitchen of a café by the park and was found by the furious chef eating a whole string of sausages he had left on the counter; another time she snatched the sandwich right out of the hand of a man who was sitting on a bench eating his lunch. Eventually I realised I would have to keep her tied to me forever while we were out, and that in the house I was similarly bound to her, and it began to dawn on me that in getting Mimi for my children I had, without much thought, entirely given away my freedom.

  ‘She was still a very pretty dog, and everybody noticed her. So long as I kept her on the lead, she would always receive the most lavish compliments from passers-by. Harassed as I was, I started to become curiously resentful and jealous of her beauty and of all the attention she got. I began, in short, to hate her, and one day, when she had been barking all afternoon and the children had refused to take her out, and I discovered her in the sitting room chewing to shreds a new cushion I had just bought while the children stared, unconcerned, at the television, I found myself seized by such an uncontrollable fury that I hit her. The children were deeply shocked and angry. They threw themselves on Mimi, to protect her from me; they looked at me as though I were a monster. But if I had become a monster, it was Mimi, I believed, who had made me one.

  ‘For a while they reminded me constantly of the incident, but gradually they forgot about it, and so one day under similar provocations it happened again, and then again, until my hitting Mimi became something they almost accepted. The dog herself began to avoid me; she looked at me with different eyes and became very devious, sneaking around the house destroying things, while the children developed a very slight coolness in their manner towards me, a new sort of distance, which liberated me in a way but also made my life less rewarding. Perhaps to compensate for this feeling and to try to close the distance between us, I decided to make a great fuss of my son’s birthday and stayed up half the night baking him a cake. It was a cake of the greatest beauty and extravagance, with chestnuts in the flour and shaved chocolate curls on top, and when it was finished I put it well out of Mimi’s reach and went to bed.

  ‘In the morning, after the children had gone to school, my sister stopped by to see me. In my sister’s company I am always a little distracted from my own purpose; I have a sense that I need to perform things for her, to present them to her, to show her my life rather than let her see it naturally, as it really is. And so I showed her the cake, which she would have seen in any case as she was coming to the birthday party later. Just then there was the sound of a car alarm from the street, and thinking it must be her car – which was new, and which she disliked parking outside my house because the area, she says, is not as safe as where she lives – she panicked and ran outside. I followed her, because as I have already said, when I am with my sister I see things from her point of view rather than my own, am compelled to enter her vision, as I used to be compelled to enter her room when we were children, always believing it to be superior to my own. And as we stood out in the street making sure that her car was intact, which of course it was, I became aware of this feeling of having deserted my own life, as once I would desert my room; and I was suddenly filled with the most extraordinary sense of existence as a secret pain, an inner torment it was impossible to share with others, who asked you to attend to them while remaining oblivious to what was inside you, like the mermaid in the fairy story who walks on knives that no one else can see.

  ‘I stood there while my sister talked, about her car and what might have set off the alarm, and felt this compelling pain of loneliness; in admitting which, I knew, I was also admitting the blackest vision of life. I knew, in other words, that something terrible would happen, was happening right then, and when we returned inside and found Mimi on the counter with her face thrust deep into the birthday cake, her jaws churning, I was not the slightest bit surprised. She looked up as we came in, frozen in the act, the chocolate curls still hanging around her muzzle; and then she seemed to make a decision, for instead of jumping off the counter and running away to hide, she looked me defiantly in the eye and bending over it again, thrust her face wolfishly into the cake once more to finish it off.

  ‘I crossed the kitchen and grabbed her by her collar. In front of my sister, I yanked her off the counter and sent her scrambling to the floor, and I proceeded to beat her while she yelped and struggled. The two of us fought, me panting and seeking to punch her as hard as I could, she writhing and yelping, until finally she succeeded in pulling her head free of the collar. She ran out of the kitchen, her claws scrabbling and sliding on the tiled floor, and into the hall, where the front door still stood open, and then out into the street, where she tore off up the pavement and disappeared.’

  Penelope paused and placed her fingers first gently and then probingly to her temples.

  ‘All afternoon,’ she continued presently, ‘the telephone rang. Mimi, as I have said, was a very distinctive and beautiful dog, and she was well known to people in the area, as well as to my acquaintances elsewhere in Athens. And so people were calling me to tell me they had seen her running away. She was seen everywhere, running in the park and the shopping centre, past the dry cleaner and the dentist’s, past the hairdresser, past the bank, past the children’s school: she ran everywhere I had ever been forced to take her, past the houses of friends and the piano teacher’s house, the swimming pool and the library, the playground and the tennis courts, and everywhere she ran peopl
e looked up and saw her and picked up the telephone to tell me that they had seen her. Many of them had tried to catch her; some had given chase, and the window cleaner had driven after her for a while in his van, but no one had been able to catch her. Eventually she got to the train station, where my brother-in-law happened to be getting off a train: he phoned to say that he had seen her and tried to corner her, with the help of the other passengers and the station guards, and she had eluded their grasp. One of the guards had been slightly injured, colliding with a luggage trolley when he lunged to grab her tail; but in the end they had all watched her run off down the tracks, to where nobody knows.’

  Penelope let out a great heaving breath and fell silent, her chest visibly moving up and down, her expression stricken. ‘That is the story I wrote,’ she said finally, ‘at the kitchen table last night, after the visit of Stavros and the puppy.’

  Theo said it sounded like the problem was that she had chosen the wrong dog in the first place. He himself had a pug, he said, and he had never experienced any difficulties.