Coventry

by Rachel Cusk

  *

  My husband has observed that two thirds of our conversation is spent discussing our children. He is not the father of my children, and I am not the mother of his. We’re like the chief executives of a large corporation: we’re in the business of successful management rather than sentimentality. He is careful not to posit this claim as a Bad Thing – it’s just a fact, which may or may not be avoidable. Or rather, it’s a choice. In choosing to spend two thirds of our time talking about our children, we are perhaps choosing to re-enter the narrative paradigm. We are starting to tell the story again. We are suspending our disbelief.

  He doesn’t imply that it’s my choice more than his, though history makes that the supposition. In marriage, the woman compensates for her lack of external power by commandeering the story. Isn’t that right? She fills the silence, the mystery of her own acts and aims, with a structured account of life whose relationship to the truth might sometimes be described as voluntary. I am familiar with that account: I spent my childhood listening to it. And what I noticed was how, over the years, its repetitions and elisions and exaggerations ceased to exasperate its listeners so much as silence them. After a while, people stopped bothering to try to put the record straight: on the contrary, they became, in a curious way, dependent on the teller of this tale, in which they featured as central characters. The sheer energy and wilful, self-constructing logic of narrative, which at first made one cringe and protest every time the truth was dented, came over time to seem preferable to elusive, chaotic reality.

  My husband and I have both come from other marriages: at a certain point our disbelief came crashing down on our heads like the roof of Coventry Cathedral. We live on the coast now, in a village holidaymakers of a certain age like to visit. In the local pub we watch tourist couples sitting in silence over enormous platters of fish and chips. It is unwise, I have learned, to put one’s faith in how things look, but it’s not often that silence presents itself as a visual event. And other people, it seems, notice the silent couples too. Like the seal colony out on the sound, it turns out they’re a sort of local feature. The waiters in the pub treat them with especial tenderness; children gaze at them with what might be wonderment or concern. Our friends discuss them, the men with nervous jocularity, the women with a remote and finely judged pity. Everyone agrees that it is sad. I notice that they are often very well turned out, the woman carefully made up, the man pressed and groomed. They sit erect among the untidy holidaying families with their shoals of tousle-haired children, their dogs, their footballs and frisbees and bicycles, their aura of action and noise as they pass through life like a company of soldiers going over the top. The families are on display – it’s part of how they function. Families tend to be conscious of being looked at: they perform themselves as though in expectation of a response, a judgement. I suppose they are exposing what they have created, as an artist feels compelled to do. The exposure ought, in a sense, to correct the subjectivity of parenthood, though it doesn’t always seem to work like that. There are families whose children run through the pub shouting and laughing and knocking over chairs. There are families where the children sit miserably at the table with downcast eyes while their parents relentlessly chastise them. Jacob, you’re annoying the lady, says one mother, mildly and with unmistakable pride, while her son fires his water pistol at another child across my table. Your needs aren’t a priority right now, a father is saying at a table on the other side. He is addressing a pallid girl of six or seven, with square-framed glasses and hair in tight, flaxen plaits tied with ribbons. You always get your own way, he adds, raising his glass slowly to his lips.

  The silent couples display themselves too, but theirs is an exposure far more mysterious. They sit like monuments, like commemorations of some opaque history: in their silence and their stillness time seems almost to come to a halt. They are like effigies of the dead standing among the living, mute and motionless amid the helter-skelter families and the noise and bustle of the pub. They eat slowly, carefully; they don’t, as a rule, look at one another. It is as if, each in themselves, they are alone. I wonder why they have come to this public place to enact their silence. They seem to represent failure: have they come to warn us, like ghosts from purgatory might enjoin us to mend our ways lest we too get caught on the treadmill of our sins? Or have they come just to warm themselves for a few hours with the conversation of others? It could be supposed that they are unhappy, but I wonder whether this is true. Perhaps what they represent is not the failure of narrative but its surpassing, not silence but peace. They are all talked out: this is a notion other people find unsettling. It can be assumed that many of the silent couples have children, now grown up and gone away. What other people don’t like, I suppose, is the idea that on the other side of all that effort, all those years of joy and toil and creation, all that suspension of disbelief, there is nothing – or nothing palpable – to look forward to; that one might wake from family life as from a bacchanal into the cold light of day. I wonder whether the silent couples once spent two thirds – or more – of their time talking about their children. I wonder whether their silence represents the problem of reconnecting to reality once the story has ended.

  In the day I often walk on the salt marsh, along the coastal path. The marsh is flat and low-lying: from a distance it is merely a strip of grey or brown, banded by the blue line of the sea. It is reached by descending through a copse of trees whose trunks have been sculpted and bleached over time into strange, pale forms by the coastal weather. They glimmer in the copse’s half-light like headless bodies held in curious, balletic poses; they are both sensual and unearthly, like a race of nymphs with the glade as their home. The path winds amongst them and out the other side, down to the place where the marsh meets the land. There is always something startling about arriving out of the trees on to the marsh. No matter how much you try to retain its image, the physical sensation of arrival there presents itself anew. It is a feeling of clarity and expansion, as though a word you’d been trying and trying to remember had suddenly come back to you. The marsh has many moods, so it’s curious that it delivers these sensations so unfailingly. It is an involuted landscape whose creeks form intestinal patterns amid the springy furze. Twice a day the tide fills these channels silently with water beneath the huge dome of the sky: narrow and deep, they shine like a maze of open cuts. If you try to walk out across it to the sea, you quickly find yourself unable to progress. In Venice, the uninitiated attempt to travel by following their sense of direction and unfailingly get lost, obstructed by the blank walls of culs-de-sac or cut off by a canal with their destination tantalisingly close across the water. Venice obfuscates the notions of progress and self-will, and the marsh does the same. There are paths, but so narrow and faint as to be recognisable only to those who know they are there. The one nearest our house is called the Bait-diggers, the product of years – perhaps centuries – of accumulated knowledge, the knowledge of men who had to trudge across the marsh in all weathers to dig in the distant sands for worms, and who finally identified the merest thread of land that travelled through the sunken archipelago in a more or less straight line from one point to the other. Knowledge is so slender and hard-won, and ignorance so vast and dangerous. Usually I keep to the coast path, a well-travelled route that skirts these tensions. Often I meet the holidaying families there, in their diurnal guises. From a distance, across the flat landscape, they are tiny figures moving untidily but with an overarching logic, like scraps being blown along by a directional wind. They advance slowly but inexorably, scattering and regrouping, occasionally pausing as though snagged on some obstacle. As they get closer the pattern becomes more readable and distinct; the figures acquire identity, the story begins to shape itself. They become recognisable as mother, father, children; their movements begin to form the integument of narrative. The scattering and regrouping becomes a meaningful drama of self and others, of human emotion. I watch this drama as it approaches across the marsh, as tho
ugh on a moving stage. I notice that the adults are often separated: one will walk musingly ahead or behind while the other herds the children along the path. Occasionally they will change roles, like a changing of the guard. The herding parent is released and the solitary muser will rejoin the family reality. I often study the lone parent as they pass, noting the particular quality of their self-absorption. They don’t, as a rule, look like people taking in their surroundings: theirs is the self-absorption of someone driving a car through long distances, seeing the world but shut off from it, both free and unfree.

  Like any drama, this one involves a lot of talking. I listen to the familiar lines, the cadences of call and response, the river of commentary, the chastisements and encouragements, the opportunities for humour and tension navigated badly or well. The parental script and the script of childhood are more or less adhered to; the performances vary. Excess, the writer Aharon Appelfeld said, is the enemy of art: and it’s true that from the outside the family drama is imperilled as a form by the exaggeration of any of its constituent parts, by too much love or too much anger, too much laxity or discipline, too much honesty or not enough. Sometimes, as I watch, the families cross one or other of these boundaries, and I am struck then by the difference between the people inside the drama and the people watching. Often the family actors aren’t aware that they’ve made their audience wince. I remember once, herding my small children through Paris, an elegant elderly man approaching us along the pavement, clearly intending to speak. I remember wondering what he wanted; I remember thinking, vaguely, that he might be going to congratulate us. As he reached me, he raised a long, slender finger to his lips and made a sshing sound. Madame, he said, too much noise.

  *

  I am a woman of nearly forty-nine, nearly fifty. My children are teenagers; they spend some of their time with me and some with their father. The family script we once followed was abandoned long ago: the stage was struck; that play is no longer performed. I am conscious sometimes of the fact that no new script has come to replace it. There have been pilots, synopses, ideas thrown around; but fundamentally, the future is a blank. For my children that blank is perhaps subsumed into the greater question of what and how they will be in their lives; a patch of thin ice, as it were, at the brink of a larger and more solid expanse of untried whiteness. For me, the possibilities are less clear. Throughout my adult life, I have used the need to earn money as the central support of a sense of self-justification: as a woman, that always seemed at least preferable to the alternatives. The need still remains, of course, but increasingly I find it less of a spur. I struggle to suspend my disbelief, but in what? What is there left to disbelieve in?

  One weekend, my parents come to stay. It is winter; the coast path is frozen into ruts of black mud and the darkness starts to fall at four o’clock. My husband and I make the house as welcoming as we can. We turn the heating up and put flowers in the rooms. My husband prepares an elaborate meal. When my parents arrive we give them glasses of champagne. But when they leave in their car on a hard and sparkling Sunday morning, I happen to glimpse their faces through the glittering windscreen just before they round the bend and see that their smiles have already vanished and their mouths are moving grimly in talk. I know then that it has happened again: I am going once more to Coventry.

  A week of silence passes. My husband is surprised and a little affronted. He had expected a card, a call. He is not familiar with this world in which people accept your hospitality, eat your food and drink your wine and leave with every appearance of bonhomie, then cast you into the outer darkness. Finally he confesses: he believes it is his fault. Late on the last evening, he reminds me, when the dinner had been eaten and the wine drunk, he had brought up the subject of honesty. He had put his arm around me and asked my parents where they thought my honesty had come from. This, he is now convinced, has caused the rift, though he has no idea why: but he remembers feeling it, he says, at the time, a retraction, a jolt in his audience. He blurts it out like a child who has caused damage by playing with something he didn’t understand; he wishes me to know it was unintentional.

  While his comment may possibly have expedited my journey to Coventry, I know it wasn’t the cause of my being sent there; yet his remarks have a strange effect on me. In the following weeks, as the silence grows and expands and solidifies, I find myself becoming, if not exactly fond, then increasingly accepting of it. All my life I have been terrified of Coventry, of its vastness and bleakness and loneliness, and of what it represents, which is ejection from the story. One is written out of the story of life like a minor character being written out of a soap opera. In the past I have usually been summoned back after a time, because the scriptwriters couldn’t find a convincing enough reason for my disappearance: a family occasion or social event would arise whose appearance of normality my absence would threaten. And I have gone back eagerly, relievedly, like a dog being let back inside from the cold garden, for whom the possibilities of freedom are obscured by the need for acceptance and shelter. Once it has shown itself unwilling to be free, you can treat that dog how you like: it won’t run away. Sometimes, in Coventry, I would ponder the idea of freedom. I believed occasionally that I was free. Freedom meant living in Coventry for ever and making the best of it; living amid the waste and shattered buildings, the desecrated past. It meant waking every day to the realisation that what once existed has now gone. It meant living in the knowledge of waste, of all one’s endeavours having been pointless. It meant leaving the story unfinished, like a writer failing to complete the book that, whatever its qualities, has nonetheless been his life’s work.

  But this time, I start to feel safer in Coventry, safer in the silence. After all, Coventry is a place where the worst has already happened. Theoretically, there should be nothing there to fear. If some kind of accounting is called for, Coventry strikes me as a good place for that to occur. And I wonder whether, if I looked, I would find that other people had decided to come here too; had, as it were, sent themselves to Coventry, searching for the silence, for whatever truth might be found amid the smoking ruins of the story. My friend with her imaginary mountain of tat, for instance, or the silent couples in the pub. Who knows, I might even meet the Parisian gentleman here, and this time impress him with my reticence, my subtlety, my peace.

  *

  When I first met my husband I often didn’t catch what he said. He spoke too quietly, or so it seemed to me; I’d ask him to repeat himself. He was often silent, and sometimes I found the silences unnerving. They caused me to feel panic: I feared it meant the story was faltering, breaking down; I feared it giving way beneath me. After a while they stopped making me nervous. It even gave me a sense of accomplishment to participate in them: like learning to ride a bicycle, silence was something that looked impossible from the outside but, once mastered, afforded a certain freedom. It demanded trust, trust in the dynamics. One can’t teach someone to ride a bicycle by describing how it’s done. A flight into the non-verbal is required. And so I tried it out, silence.

  My husband, meanwhile, was trying out talking. After six months or so, he claimed that he had talked more in his time with me than in the whole of his previous life put together. I was struck by the quantity and richness of his vocabulary: it was as if he had opened a vault and showed me his collection of gold bars. I felt glad he’d decided to spend them on me. I have always lived among noisy people, laughers and bellowers, shouters and door-slammers; opinionated people, wits, people who tell good stories. In such company there were words that often got drowned out, shy words like empathy, mercy, gentleness, solicitude. That’s not to say they weren’t there – it’s just that one didn’t know for sure, and would forget to look for them in all the noise. My husband uses these words: I sit in Coventry, mulling them over. My parents send him an email, a birthday card, a card for his son; they seem to be inviting him to leave me there and rejoin the story. It seems they now feel they were perhaps a little careless, in how much they chose t
o waste; they’d like to recoup some of their losses. These approaches make him angry. He was adopted by his own parents as a baby: he does not take abandonment lightly. His father is dead now, but my husband tells me that in the days of their marriage his parents, on the rare occasions they went out for dinner, would often spend the evening in silence. They took pride in it; for them, he said, it signified that their intimacy was complete. When he and I look at the silent couples in the pub, then, we are perhaps seeing different things. My husband doesn’t worship silence but he isn’t afraid of it either. It is my parents, I begin to understand, who are afraid.