by Rachel Cusk
‘What? Oh, my boss, actually.’
‘Your boss? I didn’t know your boss was a woman. That’s really interesting.’
‘Agnes, this is hardly the time for a feminist corporate headcount. I’m trying to bare my soul here.’
‘Sorry. God, Merlin, you’re in love with your boss. How did it happen? Did it just sort of creep up on you?’
‘She did sort of creep up on me, yes. You could say that.’ He pursed his lips into a grim smile and dug his hands in his pockets. ‘But just for the record, I’m not in love with her. She’s in love with me.’
‘What?’
He laughed.
‘Do I have to be pretty and submissive, et cetera, et cetera—’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Well, surely it’s not that hard to believe, is it?’
‘No, of course not,’ said Agnes, wondering if he might just be imagining it. ‘But what form exactly does this – ah – love take?’
‘A good question,’ said Merlin. ‘She’s using it as a power thing, actually. That’s why I’ve been working so late recently. She invents all this work for me, really stupid stuff. She makes me run errands for her just as I’m about to go home. It’s not my job, but it’s all legitimate work, so there’s nothing I can do about it.’
‘But mightn’t she just be a slave driver?’
‘You mean, am I just flattering myself? Give me some credit, Agnes. You’ll be asking me if I dress provocatively to go to work next.’
‘I was only trying to help! I just thought it might not be as serious as you think.’
‘It’s bloody sexual harassment is what it is. She puts her hand on my leg every time I go near her desk, for God’s sake.’
‘Well, in that case you can take her to court.’
‘Who’d believe me? You hardly do. Anyway, I’d lose my job, and I can’t afford to right now. God, it’s such bloody poetic justice that this should happen to me!’ He looked up at the darkening sky, blinking and gasping like a fish. ‘Why me? I’m a feminist!’
‘Maybe it’s a sign,’ said Agnes, attempting levity. ‘Maybe your tribe are calling you back.’
‘Maybe.’ He laughed. ‘I shall cultivate the wild man within. Do you know, I could buy an Oriental wife if I wanted one? The perfect wild man accessory.’
‘Where from?’
‘An agency. I saw it in the personals, it’s called “Thai the Knot”. Isn’t that sick?’
‘That’s disgusting. You’re disgusting, in fact, for looking in the personals.’
‘Boys are meant to be disgusting. Girls, on the other hand, must be innocent and pure. I do it all the time, actually. I saw one today which said “Emma Woodhouse desperately seeks Mr Knightley”.’
‘And were you tempted?’
‘No. In fact, it really annoyed me. People are so illiterately romantic these days. Mr Knightley wouldn’t look in the personal columns, for heaven’s sake. The whole point of him is that he’s already there. Women have got some very peculiar ideas. They want to get laid, but they want it to look like Jane Austen.’
Agnes stared at him. They continued walking and she shook her head. Merlin certainly was behaving rather oddly, although this often happened to people, in her experience. One brush with the rudiments of love and they became card-carrying experts on the opposite sex.
‘Where are the proofs for the restaurant section?’ asked Agnes.
‘Sorry, dear,’ said Jean after a lengthy hiatus. ‘I didn’t quite catch that. What did you say?’
Greta came into the office and sat down leadenly at her desk. Her eyes were wide and filmy, like a sleepwalker’s.
‘Proofs,’ repeated Agnes. ‘Restaurant section. This week’s issue. Remember?’
‘Someone called,’ interjected Greta, appearing to wake up. ‘There was a call for you earlier, Jean. Some guy.’
‘Who?’ Jean suddenly became mysteriously alert. ‘Who was it? A man, you say?’
‘Yup.’ Greta grinned slyly. ‘He did mention his name, but I forget what it was.’
‘Well, how did he sound?’
‘He sounded kind of – dignified.’
‘Was it a deep voice?’ persisted Jean. ‘Deep and well-spoken, with a slight lisp? A very charming lisp, actually. You’d hardly notice it.’
‘Yup.’ Greta nodded. ‘Sounds like ole Dignified.’
‘I’ll be back shortly,’ said Jean, dashing for the door. ‘I’m just going to my office.’
‘That woman kills me,’ said Greta, yawning. ‘She’s such a card.’
Agnes slammed into the house in a state of considerable distemper. She had been forced by the nonchalance with which the editorial department was approaching its deadline to stay late in the office, working alone while the cleaners emptied bins and vacuumed floors around her. Watching them sanitise the unsavoury detritus of her day she had been besieged by feelings of shame and guilt, and had attempted to engage them in pleasantries. Not beguiled by her condescension, however, they had roundly rebuffed her overtures and left her feeling that a mysterious exchange of power had taken place, the precise manoeuvres of which she was not able to fathom.
She went into the sitting-room and found Nina and Merlin huddled on the sofa like two conspirators.
‘We have great news!’ Merlin exclaimed, seeing her. He nudged Nina. ‘Go on, tell her.’
Agnes sat down on the edge of an armchair. She didn’t like news these days.
‘What?’ she said suspiciously.
‘We’re not telling you until you look more excited,’ said Merlin obstinately.
Agnes felt her backbone sag with frustration. She restrained herself from informing them that, had she been able to manufacture such pleasant emotions at will, her life would undoubtedly today be very different.
‘I got the job,’ said Nina abruptly. ‘I’m quite pleased, actually.’
Agnes had not known she was applying for one. She looked from one to the other of them in bewilderment.
‘Just think,’ said Merlin, coming to her rescue. ‘Our girl on the pages of a national newspaper! Elwood Street at the whirling vortex of the mass media!’
‘That’s great,’ said Agnes, more confused than enlightened by Merlin’s rather baroque explanation. ‘Great.’
Nina looked at her closely and then shrugged.
‘Don’t overdo it,’ she retorted. ‘You might actually sound as if you meant it.’
She got up and left the room. Merlin watched her go and drummed his fingers anxiously on the arm of the sofa.
‘It wasn’t my fault!’ Agnes protested. ‘I didn’t know about her job.’
‘I know,’ sighed Merlin. ‘But couldn’t you – well, couldn’t you at least have pretended to be pleased?’
Agnes had many memories of doing things against her will, but one occasion had always stuck particularly prominently in her mind.
It had happened when she and John had gone back to his house one night after a party. Sometimes they went back to her house, but more often these days they each went home alone. On this particular night, however, although comforted by the acceptance his invitation implied, Agnes had not felt much in the mood for the rites which were its usual conclusion. She was tired and had drunk too much, and had broadcast these symptoms several times on the way home in the hope that he would not press her into further denials once ensconced there.
‘Let’s go to bed,’ he had said as soon as they arrived; and Agnes did, snuggling up against the far wall so that their bodies would not touch, with as much of the aspect of an ailing child as she could muster.
He switched off the lights and got in beside her at a respectable distance, but scarcely five minutes had passed before his hand reached over and began caressing her. She sighed and attempted to feign sleep. His hand continued its wanderings undeterred. Suddenly, with one jerk of his body, he was pressed up behind her.
‘I – I don’t really feel like it,’ she said, troubled more by her own aversion th
an his persistence.
He hadn’t replied, appearing for a moment to desist, but seconds later she felt his hands on her again. He sat up in the darkness and turned her reluctant body on to its back.
‘I don’t want to!’ she had daringly cried.
His face was cloaked in shadow, but all the same she could have sworn she saw him smile. While it was going on, a curious form of revenge had occurred to her. She would do nothing. She would play dead and see how he felt about that. Her body lay inert, as if on a marble slab. Her arms lay still be her sides. Unperturbed, he had merely arranged her limbs for her. She waited for what seemed like hours while he gasped and sighed above her, but he did not seem troubled by her lack of participation. She imagined then that he was raping her. On to the oval blur of his face she imposed that of a stranger. So this is what it feels like, she thought. As he pumped and shuddered, her mind seemed to be growing further and further away until she appeared to be observing events from the ceiling. A lump of anger sat heavily on her chest. She tasted resentment, oppression and rage on her tongue like foreign foods. She had always known those things were there – she had read about them, after all, in books – but it seemed then as if she had simply never chosen to experience them for herself.
‘Thank you,’ he said finally, flopping down beside her while she lay still and opaque as a moonlit sea. ‘Thank you.’
He hugged and kissed her passionately. At one and the same time she suddenly felt deeply, achingly guilty, and terribly afraid. He got out of bed and paused to look down on her benignly and touch her cheek.
‘Agnes, will you marry me?’ he said.
‘What?’ She sat up. ‘What did you say?’
She felt she had finally discovered how to make him love her. She felt punished, grateful, devious and rather sick. It was so easy!
‘I said,’ he repeated, a smile which in the shadowy room appeared oddly contemptuous spreading slowly over his face. ‘I said, would you like a cup of tea?’
St Joan’s in Highbury Barn was an arkish construct. Agnes would eye it nervously as she passed, disapproving of its squat modern form and wide wooden belly. Such aesthetic disdain was a natural by-road off her main omission. Had the church been more attractive, the implication ran, she would surely have entered it by now. As it was she slunk guiltily past it like an old people’s home in which a decrepit, lonely great-uncle sat forlornly awaiting her visit.
Of late, however, things had changed. Agnes had begun to nurture a dawning awareness of a lack, a growing vacancy at her core. She was ripe for conversion, but while in others such a need brought with it the danger of being brainwashed by a religious sect or enrolling in night classes, Agnes’s mettle had since birth been cast in a mould which dictated its own modus operandi. Feeling the call, then, she had taken her sorrows up the hill to St Joan’s in the hope that by now some wonder of modern theology might have invented a panacea for them.
Once inside she felt slightly disappointed. She had missed the service and the church was empty save for a few worthies busying themselves with the tidying up of hymn-books and parish newsletters. She sat down in one of the wooden pews and waited for her spirit to be claimed. The pedestrian setting, however, did not facilitate access to the Presence. Perhaps she needed incense and a pre-pubescent choir. She found herself thinking about the new issue of Diplomat’s Week. It was to carry another of her articles, which she hadn’t quite finished yet. Merlin crossed her mind and she considered his predicament briefly. She thought about Tom. She ought to phone him.
While it was at least pleasant to have time to think, her ruminations had the effect of making her want to leave the church so that she could attend to them. Her eye wandered impatiently over the altar, behind which hung a crucifix bearing the usual gorged and bloodied simulation of agony. She regarded it indifferently, liiere had been a time when such representations had transfixed her with their animate, piercing gaze, causing her heart to sing with hope and grief. She had changed, she knew, but she didn’t quite know how or when. Like an old car, the addition of new parts over the years had left little of her original material, but her form remained unaltered. Could she, she wondered, still be said to be the same person?
Indeed, it seemed to her now that there had been a time when all her emotions had been as spectacular and colourful as a firework display. She had always known she was meant to feel things. She had believed she was special, so open was she to pain and love. Or was it only that she had indulged such emotions to protect herself from any lengthy contemplation of duller things: boredom, loneliness, failure, all of the things which hovered outside the door like tax inspectors, vigilant and malign?
Sitting there, it all became horribly clear. This dullness that seemed to inhabit every corner of her spirit was nothing but the unpainted, unadorned face of reality. She had no resources herself to enliven it. She had always captured emotions and then visited them like animals at a zoo, saddened by their moulting pelts and mournful eyes. And as for love, well! Had she not once felt herself to be rich with it? Had she not once ruled her world like a queen with palaces? It angered her that John had created a version of herself which she could somehow never imitate afterwards. Try as she might to accommodate them, her subsequent lovers had stood in her life like Ming vases in a council flat.
Agnes sat slumped in her pew for some time. It seemed that she could no longer shelter in the conviction of her own sanctity. Once he had wanted her, but that didn’t mean she was chosen. There was, however, she saw, a certain liberation to be found in ordinariness. Without John, without the myth of his faith in her, the cursed claim it made for her own exceptionalness, she was free to be as miserable as she liked.
Chapter Twenty-one
IN daydreams Agnes had construed her future as a career woman with elaborations which at the time had not seemed particularly fantastical: herself at the frantic centre of office life, fielding calls and making deals, jittery with caffeine and wearing a suit perhaps. The reality was at once more demanding and more pedestrian.
On Monday morning she sat alone at her desk with an interminable set of galleys for the new issue. A wet stain from a cup of coffee spilled moments before over her leg was beginning to cool, and her trousers adhered damply to the flesh of her thigh. It was eleven thirty and Greta had not yet appeared. The office was overheated, although outside the winter air was unusually damp and sticky. Agnes leafed disconsolately through the pages and grew tearful. She could sit here and weep and no one would notice. This realisation alone was enough to make her cry. Instead she stamped her foot and, in a fit of daring, brought back her hand in order to sweep the pile from the desk and send it flying, disordered, to the floor.
‘Not in yet?’ said Jean, putting her head round the door before Agnes could follow through her sabotaging blow.
‘Not yet.’ Agnes replaced her hand on the desk and suddenly found herself strangely absorbed in her work. She creased her forehead at the page in front of her and scribbled something in the margin. ‘Is that hotel feature ready for layout?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know,’ replied Jean, with the ineffable certainty of her position. She hovered in the doorway. ‘When you have a moment, dear,’ she continued presently, ‘perhaps you could give her a little ring on the telephone. Make sure all is well.’
Jean disappeared from view, leaving Agnes to nurture feelings of resentment that Greta’s failure to come to work should be met with a tender concern somewhat lacking in the admonishments she received for her own shortcomings. In the spirit of defiance she loitered over her proof-reading for a further half-hour before making the call. She was sure Greta would not be at home in any case. Her lapses tended to occur in transit. She would emerge from the grey area of hazard and adventure which was the transport system with the triumphant aspect of one who had overcome great odds and gambled with death to do so.
To Agnes’s surprise, however, the phone was picked up after several rings, albeit without any of the usual pleasantries.
‘Greta?’ she ventured into the silence. ‘Is that you?’
‘Who is this?’
The voice sounded so unfamiliar that Agnes thought she must have dialled a wrong number; but while her feelings on such occasions were normally a mixture of horror and fascination as she landed with the arbitrariness of a falling meteor on the house of a complete stranger, her prevailing sense of Greta’s essential oddness led her to persevere.
‘It’s me. Agnes. From the office,’ she added stupidly.
‘Oh,’ said Greta (for it was indeed she), apparently enlightened by this latest addition. ‘What do you want?’
‘Well – nothing really. It’s just that you didn’t come to work and we wondered what had happened to you. We thought you might have overslept so we decided to give you a wake-up call!’
‘Just leave me alone.’
Greta’s voice had at least the effect of distracting Agnes from uncomfortable ruminations about her own tone of asinine plural jollity. Greta put the phone down. Agnes stared at the receiver in her hand and felt unutterably wounded. How could she speak to her like that, she who was only trying to help? As if she, Agnes, were in the wrong, sitting here alone in the office at twelve o’clock with no one to help or comfort her! Worse still, as if Agnes were not a friend or a sharer of confidences! As if she didn’t have her own cross to bear on this muggy Monday morning, with Finchley Central loitering on her doorstep like a persistent beggar and a stack of work dull as a telephone directory on her desk!
The receiver in her hand began to emit an alarmist noise. She recognised within its unrelenting blare the possibility that Greta had come to some harm which she was not prepared to divulge over the telephone. She wondered what she should do. To phone again would be futile; to raise the alarm somehow presumptuous. To do nothing would assist neither of them, for she would surely not be able to concentrate on her work with such a conversation so recently in her memory? The only remaining option appeared to be an impulsive act. She must go to Greta’s house herself and offer succour.
‘I’m going out!’ she cried, barrelling into Jean in the corridor, who wisely stood back as if from the path of a wailing ambulance.