Saving Agnes

by Rachel Cusk

  Thinking his failure to be directly descended from a deficiency in her own attractiveness, Agnes had not expected, after that night, to see him again. But then he had called the next week at the usual time as if nothing – or indeed something – had happened, and the occurrence had repeated itself. Gradually Agnes got used to it. Soon, it seemed like nothing out of the ordinary; indeed, it became exceptional, for the peculiar sacrifice he offered up for her nightly removed the obstacle of his desire and left her free to love him unrestrainedly. Being with him was like being alone, like being with oneself as another person.

  The pattern of their confluence emerged and her days arranged themselves around it like petals on a stalk. The fact that really she knew nothing about him, that when he was not with her he would disappear, his phone ringing unanswered in a house she had never seen, that sometimes she wondered if he even knew who she was, ceased to matter. He arranged his attractions behind bullet-proof glass. He bore as little scrutiny of his depths as a reflecting surface. He obsessed at close quarters and then disappeared, leaving a crater his company had never filled, a space he had uncovered, not caused.

  The fact that even in their most private hour, in the secret interchange between the darkness of their bodies, that even in that moment of abandon he had given her nothing of himself, impressed upon her in some half-formed way the idea that he was cleverer than she. She would think about it sometimes after he had gone; about how he left her tired and empty when she had thought at the time it was he who was giving and she receiving. She wondered how he did it. His mysteries were auto-destructive. Like a mirror he gave her back nothing but what was already there; smash it and he would be gone, her fist too clumsy, her eye too slow to see what was behind it before it obliterated itself like a Christmas cracker, leaving her with nothing but a rearranged face and a few years of bad luck.

  Chapter Ten

  FEMINISM had discovered Agnes in her first year at university and, recognising in her the potential for prime, dissenting flesh, had been prepared to fight long and hard for her soul. While Agnes’s resistance had been what might be called textbook, her capitulation was less so. Attending the women’s group to which Nina had invited her, she had become so terrified by their proselytising and their promises of bondage that, when asked for her opinion, she had thrown them the first scrap of meat she could lay her hands on.

  ‘I like having doors opened for me!’ she had cried, scarcely believing the words – which she had heard reverberate around the counties of her youth and had thought, even then, absurd – had come from her mouth.

  Thankfully this missile, being old and ubiquitous by design, was shot down with consummate ease by her companions, who became quite friendly in their relief that she had not mounted a stauncher defence. The door to cultural emancipation had been firmly opened and Agnes found that, try as she might, it would not shut.

  What none of these genial campaigners knew was that Agnes had lived most of her life in constant fear and loathing of her own sex. The convent school where she had grown up had been red in tooth and claw with female cruelty; and when her new friends spoke of the women’s community, Agnes was beset by images of hooded nuns, ungodly punishments and peer-group persecution. Unspeakable things had gone on there, things which she had thrown into a cauldron of grief and terror in her heart and which now bubbled like a noxious soup of carping, taunting, bitching, menstruating femininity. The taste of it still rose in her throat like bile. Eventually she could talk of male oppression as freely as anybody; but in those days the cheerful indifference of men and their unemotional talk, although later a source of grief and frustration, was something of a relief.

  Agnes bought feminism because she was afraid of women; and, as with so many things in her life, when she was driven by her sense of what ought to be it was some time before truth eventually caught her up.

  The first thing she perceived about feminism was that it allowed women to be fat and ugly. As if such qualities were infectious, Agnes secretly put this idea to one side. Like aspirin, she found ideologies hard to swallow whole. Indeed, her mother had often railed at her for what she called her ‘pick and mix’ attitude to religion. Agnes’s God floated on a soft cloud of love and forgiveness and was far too busy trying to justify famines and earthquakes to care whether Agnes told lies or used contraceptives. Along the same lines, she selected equality and freedom from domestic servitude from her new creed, and disdained the promise of liberation from the trappings of the feminine stereotype.

  ‘If we’re truly free, then we’re free to wear make-up,’ she told Nina, who for some reason did not seem impressed by such logic.

  Agnes was not particularly enamoured of the feminine stereotype: it just so happened that it offered a convenient and effective means of disguise. She created herself daily, and did not want to know – or others to know, for that matter – what murky truths lay beneath her finery. That by disguising these smaller truths she was merely uncovering several larger ones was clear only to those who threatened to address the defect of her superficiality; but what to them was a disorder, was to Agnes the very thing that kept chaos at bay. Feminism was for her a war of words, a catalogue of social injustices that were as interesting but as unrelated to her as a history book. She saw in its medicines no cure, merely a placebo of self-acceptance that could aid only those with a less intimate knowledge of the rules of deception than herself.

  ‘Your understanding of the relationship between form and content needs work,’ wrote her tutor at the bottom of an essay, but Agnes saw in such comments no clues; only a vast sea wall beyond whose forbidding stone a boiling ocean crashed and foamed like a rabid dog.

  Later, Agnes found easier ways of justifying self-adornment. By exploiting the currency of their social acceptability, she argued, women could precipitate change from the heart of the patriarchal establishment. She shared this opinion with her parents when she went home one weekend.

  ‘Chaps are more likely to listen to a pretty girl,’ mumbled her father, nodding his agreement behind a newspaper.

  ‘You look amazing,’ said John, watching her undress in the shuttered light. ‘You look like a stork.’

  It was ninety-eight degrees in the dark. The white sheets were limp with sweat. They were in Seville, with the sounds of mopeds and laughter from cafés making waves through the thick air. They were melting in Seville. It seemed to Agnes they were dying in Seville.

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ she said, turning from him. Her pique fizzled and blunted itself in the heat.

  ‘Don’t.’ John sat up in bed. ‘Don’t move. Let me look at you.’

  She turned around, the bars of light from the shutters appearing to swim over her naked body like eels. Once his fascination had disturbed her, but now she had come to know, if not to understand it. She knew she could rely on it if all else failed.

  ‘Why do you love me?’ he marvelled, shaking his head. ‘I see other men looking at you. You’re so much better than me. What do you see in me?’

  He said things like that sometimes. He said they were his rape fantasies. Agnes, not understanding, was frightened of such allegations of superiority. She perceived within them intimations of incompatibility and hence desertion, little landmines of truth in a desert of lies. He pulled her down on top of him.

  ‘Why?’ he whispered. His white teeth shone in the dark like a crescent moon.

  ‘Because,’ said Agnes.

  Her body felt like it was melting into his. She clung to the moment. A second skin, irremovable.

  ‘Agnes? It’s Tom.’

  ‘Oh!’ Agnes disengaged the telephone cord from where it had wound itself round a table leg and sat down. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Well, this phone box stinks of piss but apart from that I’m okay.’ The tinny roar of traffic drowned his voice.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Outside your house. Can I come in?’

  A minute later her brother stood on the doorstep. He looked too big for it. Tom ha
d always had the dubious ability to make his surroundings appear exiguous and rather shoddy.

  ‘Nice suit,’ said Agnes.

  ‘Savile Row.’ He flicked at his shoulder. ‘Hand made. The ladies love it.’

  He grinned and negotiated the doorway by lowering his head exaggeratedly.

  ‘My sister the cave-dweller,’ he said, strolling into the sitting-room. He looked around. ‘Nice place. Good ventilation too,’ he added, running his fingers over the crack in the wall.

  ‘Where did you think I’d be?’ Agnes inquired. ‘In a cardboard box under Waterloo Bridge?’

  ‘I’ll admit you’ve always been a bit prolier-than-thou,’ replied Tom, ‘but I think that would be stretching it.’

  Such power struggles tended to characterise the early stages of their meetings. While the exaggeration of their differences had long since been employed as a method of partly ameliorating them, Agnes had begun to nurture an unspoken anxiety of late that on one of these ice-breaking occasions she would discover Tom had actually become the person he caricatured so expertly.

  ‘Do you want something to drink?’ she said.

  ‘Great.’ He grinned. ‘I’ll have some champagne.’

  Agnes was astounded.

  ‘We don’t have any,’ she replied.

  Tom rummaged in his bag and produced a bottle with a flourish.

  ‘You do now,’ he said.

  ‘You shouldn’t have,’ she murmured penitently.

  ‘I didn’t,’ he replied. ‘I had to go and see someone in Finsbury Park on business. That’s why I’m up here. He gave it to me.’

  Having ascertained the spirit of the occasion, Agnes went to the kitchen in search of two matching glasses. She opened cupboards aimlessly, unable suddenly to remember what she was looking for. Tom’s impromptu visits often disturbed her in this way. This was not so much the fault of their differences – in Agnes’s environment Tom often took on the aspect of one who recognised nothing within it, coming as he did from an element of corporate largesse – as of a sense she had of two worlds colliding which hitherto had been kept apart. It made her unsure of how to behave.

  Back in the sitting-room, Merlin had just come home. Agnes emerged from the kitchen to see Tom slapping him on the back in the jovial pantomime of manhood he always employed with Agnes’s friends, and possibly even with his own. Merlin, visibly shaken by the blow, took to the sofa.

  ‘Look what Tom brought.’ Agnes waved the bottle in front of him. ‘Do you want some?’

  ‘Yes please,’ said Merlin politely, recovering his spirits. ‘That’s very generous of you, Tom.’

  Agnes fled to the kitchen for another glass.

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ said Tom behind her. ‘Actually, do mention it. Mention it often.’

  When she returned, Tom was easing the cork from the bottle with his large thumbs. Merlin cringed. Agnes, confident that Tom’s removal of the cork would be consistent with his general demeanour – a smooth pop and fizz as opposed to a loud racing-driver’s bang and a foaming geyser – remained calm.

  ‘Hey presto.’ He put the cork on the table and began pouring champagne into the glasses.

  ‘You’ve done that before,’ said Merlin.

  ‘All in a day’s work,’ replied Tom. He was a management consultant in the City, and, Agnes reflected, was probably being truthful.

  ‘How’s work?’ she inquired.

  ‘Fine.’ He leaned back into the sofa, his legs firmly spread in a V emanating from his crotch. Agnes looked away, obscurely embarrassed. ‘I’m on a job for a publishing firm, actually, which might interest you.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ said Agnes brightly. She was unaccustomed to talking shop, and was prepared now to enjoy its new intimations of adulthood. ‘What are you doing for them?’

  ‘Usual sort of thing. Getting rid of dead wood, tightening things up. It’s not difficult, seeing as they’ve got three people doing one person’s job. We’re slimming down editorial at the moment.’

  ‘Oh.’ Agnes felt rather cold. ‘So what happens to the other two?’

  Merlin shifted on the sofa, perhaps made uncomfortable by the prospect, albeit theoretical, of brother reducing sister.

  ‘Sacked.’ Tom elaborated his succinct reply with a throat-cutting gesture.

  ‘But – but what are they supposed to do? What’s to become of them?’

  She fixed him with a glance intended to mortify him. He looked back at her for a minute and then stared into mid-air, as if considering the problem for the first time.

  ‘Oh dear,’ he said finally. ‘They’ll all probably kill themselves, won’t they?’ He sighed exaggeratedly. ‘Don’t be so soft, Agnes. They’ll get other jobs, of course. Better ones, hopefully. It’s not my problem.’

  ‘No!’ she cried. ‘But it’s theirs! They might have – circumstances. For all you know, they might have five children each and sick relatives to look after!’

  Merlin guffawed delightedly.

  ‘Christ.’ Tom clasped his forehead. ‘Look, they could have enough dying aunts to hold a wheelchair rally for all I care. It still doesn’t make sense to keep them on.’

  ‘Sense!’ shrieked Agnes. ‘How does it make sense to sacrifice innocent people on the – on the altar of capitalist greed? And even if it does make sense to you, why does that make it right?’

  ‘I never said it did. You said that.’

  ‘But don’t you care?’

  ‘No.’ He grinned infuriatingly. ‘That is what you wanted me to say, isn’t it? I’m an unprincipled capitalist pig. I drink the blood of unemployed people.’

  ‘I think I’ll leave you guys to it,’ said Merlin, getting up to leave. ‘Nice to have seen you, Tom.’

  ‘Bye, Merlin.’ Tom raised his hand in farewell. ‘I mean, oink.’

  Merlin laughed as he retreated up the stairs. Agnes glowered after him. They all banded together in the end, she thought.

  Had Agnes had a sister, she might have found that feelings of sisterhood came to her more easily; as it was, such emotions were left to her imagination. Her early needy conjectures had sculpted only a more perfect version of herself in their quest for female companionship, and while at first Agnes had been content to trail around adoringly after her demigoddess, her later suspicions that in Grace she had created a monster were perhaps a more accurate simulation of sibling rivalry than she realised.

  Agnes’s wistful longings for sisterly love had been if anything intensified by her years in the convent. Although the word ‘sister’ underwent temporary etymological corruption – denoting as it did those creatures of habit who glided like phantoms down dark corridors – the dormitories aflame with cruel whispers and classrooms echoing with malice served only to drive thoughts of gentle love and cheering loyalty deep into her heart like a stake. Agnes’s imaginary sister, who looked something like Doris Day, was not required to vanquish these uniformed imposters; she just smiled and sang as she lay beside Agnes in the dark, remembering the time they tried on their mother’s lipstick, the time they dressed up in her clothes, the countless times they played house and baked cakes and talked about the boy who worked in the village shop. Tom, who had been the most pliant of playmates, had at first indulged in these unliberated fantasies with her; but their differences, she soon learned, went beyond his inability to sustain any sort of credible interest in the boy at the village shop. The sweet, secretive mystery of the feminine continued to dog Agnes like her own shadow. Whipping round to capture it in the mirror with a glance, she would be met only with her own eyes, which were brown and plain as daylight.

  Apparently there had been a little girl, or so her mother told her, before Agnes; a little sleeping, dreaming coil whose heart beat in a warm ocean of blood. A curled pearl who smiled and sang, a tiny white angel, too good for life. She had come out to see the world, with its dust and glare and noise and men in white masks, and had closed her eyes. She had flown away and never come back. She had to make room for you, her mother told h
er kindly. She was too tiny for life, too delicate. Agnes held her like a feather in the palm of her hand. Agnes, with her big bawling mouth and her destiny gnarled and heavy as a tree trunk, had chased her away.

  Chapter Eleven

  UNDER ground, Agnes felt the world was stripped down to its bare essentials. Her lover, in a rare and uncomfortable moment of loquacity, confessed that he rarely took the underground and only then to see how the other half lived. Later it became plain to Agnes that he drove his car to keep that distinction alive, but at the time she was strangely relieved to hear him express an opinion so different from her own. He seemed so indistinct to her sometimes, flimsy as a ghost on the treadmill of his deepest moments. They came back to her in the full moon of her loneliness, the odd things he said, little islands of identity marooned in an inscrutable ocean. The memory of them sustained her on the long journey until the next sighting of land.

  Agnes boarded the train and headed for an empty seat in the middle of the carriage, but was beaten to it by a woman laden down with plastic bags, who elbowed her out of the way with the expertise of one who has had to fight to get what she wanted in life. Agnes, who didn’t even know what she wanted, conceded the territory with an awkward twist of her body, as if she had never intended to sit there in the first place. People stared. She edged her way back into the space by the doors and hung on to one of the straps dangling from the ceiling.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, half-inclining her head to the person behind her. She had leaned into him with the pull of the train as it left the station, although she did feel it wasn’t entirely her fault. He was standing rather closer than was necessary.