by Rachel Cusk
‘I remember always being frightened that one day she would eat me,’ he said. ‘So I made things to show her, to take her mind off it.’
He learned to draw by studying animals and their anatomy. The slaughterhouse gave him unlimited material: the thing about dead animals was that they stayed still long enough for you to draw them. His father looked carefully at all his drawings and gave him advice.
‘I’ve often thought it’s fathers who make painters,’ he said, ‘while writers come from their mothers.’
I asked him why he thought that.
‘Mothers are such liars,’ he said. ‘Language is all they have. They fill you up with language if you let them.’
He had thought about taking up writing himself a few times over the years. He thought he might be able to make continuity that way, writing down the things he remembered and joining them together. But all that happened was that he realised how little he had remembered about any of it. Or maybe it was just that he didn’t enjoy remembering as much as he thought he would. He never saw any member of his family again, Jeffers, after his father died and he ran away from home. Occasionally he was casually adopted by other families for a period. These were generally positive experiences, and I suppose they taught him to value choice and desire over acceptance and fate. I realised, hearing him talk, that he was without any fibre of morality or duty, not out of any conscious decision but more in the way of lacking an elemental sense. He simply couldn’t conceive of the notion of obligation. More than anything, this was what drew me to him, even as it dictated that he himself could not be drawn and even though I could see clearly that only catastrophe could come from it. I suppose he allowed me to realise the extent to which I had let my own life be defined by others. Do such people have, in fact, a higher moral function, which is to show us what our own assumptions and beliefs are made of? To put it another way, does the purpose of art extend to the artist himself as a living being? I believe it does, though there’s a certain shame in biographical explanations, as though it’s somehow weak-minded to look for the meaning of a created work in the life and character of the person who created it. But perhaps that shame is merely the evidence of a more general cultural condition of denial or repression, with which the artist himself is very often tempted to become complicit. I believe L had succeeded somehow in avoiding that temptation, and felt no need to dissociate himself from his own creations or claim that they were anything other than the product of a personal vision. Yet he himself, at that time, had evidently met an obstacle that he was unable to overcome. There was something, as he had said, that he had missed. But how would he ever find it, incomplete as he was?
‘Why do you play at being a woman?’ he asked me suddenly, with a slightly idiotic grin.
I didn’t object to being asked that question, because it struck me as correct that it was what I did. What I didn’t like was a joke being made out of it.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I know how to be a woman. I believe that no one ever showed me.’
‘It isn’t a question of showing,’ he said. ‘It’s a question of being permitted.’
‘You said when we first spoke that you couldn’t see me,’ I said. ‘So maybe you’re the one who isn’t permitting.’
‘You always try to force things,’ he said. ‘It’s as if you think nothing would ever happen, unless you made it.’
‘I believe nothing would,’ I said.
‘No one has ever broken your will.’ He took his eyes off me and looked around musingly at the room. ‘Who pays for all this?’ he asked.
‘The house and the land belong to Tony. I have some money of my own.’
‘I can’t imagine your little books make all that much.’
This was the first time, Jeffers, that he had alluded to my own work – if it can be called that. But up until that point his refusal to know anything about me had felt like a refusal to grant my existence, and now I understood it was because he didn’t like the feeling of being compelled by my will. Yet I was convinced that he needed my will, needed it to get over the obstacle in front of him and over to the other side. We needed one another!
‘I came into some money a few years ago,’ I told him. ‘My first husband, Justine’s father, had some shares he once put in my name as a kind of dodge. He forgot that he did it, and then years later, after we were divorced, the value of these shares went through the roof. He tried to get me to sign them back over to him, but the lawyer told me I didn’t have to and that the money was legally mine. So I kept it.’
The light was burning again in L’s eyes.
‘Was it a lot?’ he said.
‘On the scales of justice,’ I said, ‘it more or less equalled what he owed me.’
L gave a kind of hoot.
‘Justice,’ he said. ‘What a quaint notion.’
It had felt more like an ending than a levelling, I told him, the end of an exhausting race. My little books, as he called them, had indeed made hardly any money, partly because they presented themselves to me so infrequently, and only when life had taken an ethical shape by which I had to be thoroughly broken down before I could assume that shape myself in words. I had done every kind of job in between, and lived off nerves and adrenalin, and now the greatest vice I could think of was to do nothing at all.
‘I’ve never had enough fun,’ I said to him. ‘I’ve had other things, but never that. Perhaps it’s as you say, that I force things to happen, and it’s in the nature of fun not to be forced.’
When I said that, what did he do but suddenly spring to his feet and to my very great surprise leap onto the tabletop like a cat!
‘Shall we have fun?’ he said, cavorting there like a blazing-faced devil while I sat dumbfounded and watched him. He shouted my name over and over, stamping his feet on the table. ‘Let’s have some fun, shall we? Let’s have some fun!’
I really can’t recall, Jeffers, how I took my leave of him that day, but I do remember walking back down through the glade with a feeling that was like a wound in my chest, the way a wound is both weight and light, is fresh but fatal. I thought then of what Tony had said about L, and wondered how it was that Tony always seemed to know far more about the way things really were than anyone else.
Kurt announced that he had decided to be a writer. He wished to begin writing a book straight away. He had once heard a writer say that writing with a pen and paper was preferable to any other way, because the muscular movement of the hand was conducive to the formation of sentences. Kurt had decided that he would follow that advice. He asked for a number of pens and two big blocks of plain paper to be bought, the next time anyone went to town. I said he could use the little downstairs study if he wanted, since it was quiet and no one else needed it. It had a good-sized desk that faced away from the window – I believed most writers agreed, I said, that it was better not to have anything to look at.
As a choice of costume for his new career, Kurt decided on a long black velvet housecoat, a red tam-o’-shanter jammed far back on his head, and to top it off, rope-soled espadrilles on his bare feet. He walked fatefully off to the study in those espadrilles, carrying a block of paper under each arm and the pens in the pocket of the housecoat, and closed the door. Later, walking past the window, I saw that he had moved the desk to face the garden and the glade, so that he could see, and be seen by, everyone who passed. He was there in the window when you went out, and he was there when you came back in again. He wore a very doleful expression, looking into the far distance, and appeared not to know you if you happened to meet his eye. I wondered whether part of his intention – far from hiding himself away – was to attract attention, specifically Justine’s, while at the same time keeping her under surveillance, since she was now spending a lot of her time outdoors with Brett. They did all sorts of things together, exercises, watercolour painting, even archery, using a beautiful old wooden bow Brett had apparently found in the junk shop in town and had repaired and polished up, and since
the weather continued to be windless and warm they did most of it outside on the lawn or in the shade of the trees in the glade, all beneath the baleful gaze of Kurt. A few times they took Tony’s boat out for the day, while Kurt remained at his window, though they had invited him to go with them. He had become a sort of icon fixed in a frame, reproaching us all for our triviality and wasted time.
By spending most of the day in the study, Kurt had effectively declared himself occupied with matters of a higher order than fence-mending or mowing, and so his affiliation to Tony quickly receded. It was now L he appeared to identify as his natural ally. I sometimes saw them in the early evening, walking in the glade and talking, though I don’t know how these conversations had come about or who had initiated them. I heard Kurt say to Justine that he and L had discussed their respective crafts, and I was quite surprised to hear it, since it was difficult to talk straight with L on any subject in an ordinary way, let alone his work. Tony didn’t care that Kurt no longer followed him around: what he couldn’t stand was the idea of him having nothing to do.
In a way I admired Kurt’s change of direction, since at least it was some sort of constructive response to the change in Justine and to her unwillingness to content herself with playing the little wife any longer. Who knew, perhaps he was writing a masterpiece! Justine asked me, shyly, if I thought that was the case. I told her it was impossible to tell from the outside. Some of the most interesting writers could pass as bank managers, I said, while the wittiest raconteur could become dull once he had recognised the necessity of explaining his anecdotes piece by piece. Some people write simply because they don’t know how to live in the moment, I said, and have to reconstruct it and live in it afterwards.
‘At least he’s sticking to it,’ I said.
‘He’s used up one whole block of paper already,’ she said. ‘He asked me to get him some more in town.’
I was concerned about Justine’s future, and something in her recent blossoming and her growing independence tore at my heartstrings – it almost felt like the less I had to worry about, the sadder I became. She had applied to do a further course of study at university in the autumn, and been accepted. She didn’t say whether Kurt would be going with her – it didn’t seem to be one of her considerations.
‘She’s starting to go out there,’ Tony said to me, when I confessed these feelings to him in bed at night. He was pointing at the dark window, by which I understood him to mean the wider world.
‘Oh Tony,’ I said, ‘it’s as if I wanted her to get married to Kurt and spend the rest of her life dowdily waiting on him and being held back by him!’
‘You want her to be safe,’ Tony said, and that was exactly right: by revealing her true beauty and potential, she was somehow less safe than she had been before. I couldn’t bear the thought of the hopes and possibilities that might come from this revelation, and what their crushing might do to her. Safer to go around in a Mother Hubbard, not risking anything!
‘She’s safer out there,’ Tony said, still pointing at the window. ‘As long as she has your love. You should practise giving it to her.’
He meant give it to her as something belonging to her, that she was free to take away. What was the significance of this gift? The truth was that I questioned the value of my love – I wasn’t sure how much benefit it could be to anybody. I loved Justine as it were self-critically: I was working, somehow, to free her from myself, when it appeared that what she needed was to take some of me along with her!
I realised, once I thought about it, that my main principle in bringing up my daughter had been simply to do the opposite with respect to her of what had been done to me. I was good at finding those opposites and at recognising where I needed to turn left instead of right, and my moral compass had frequently led me past scenes from my own childhood that filled me with frank amazement, now that I was visiting them in reverse. But there are some things that don’t really have an opposite – they need to come out of nowhere. This is perhaps the limit of honesty, Jeffers, this place where something new has to be created that bears no relation to what was there before, and it was a place I often found myself flailing in with Justine. The quality that I felt I lacked was authority, and it’s difficult to say quite what the opposite of authority is because almost everything seems to be its opposite. I’ve often wondered about where authority comes from, whether it’s the result of knowledge or character – whether, in other words, it can be learned. People know it when they see it, yet they still might not be able to say exactly what it’s composed of or how it operates. When Tony said that I didn’t know my own power, in fact he might have been saying something about authority and its role in shaping and cultivating power. Only tyrants want power for its own sake, and parenthood is the closest most people get to an opportunity for tyranny. Was I a tyrant, wielding shapeless power without authority? What I felt a lot of the time was a sort of stage fright, the way I imagine inexperienced teachers must feel when they stand at the front of the class looking at a sea of expectant faces. Justine had often looked at me in just that way, as though expecting an explanation for everything, and afterwards I felt I had never explained anything quite to her satisfaction, or mine.
In the past she had bristled and fought me off like a porcupine putting out her quills when I tried to show her physical affection, and so I had got into the habit of not touching her terribly often, in the end forgetting which of us this undemonstrative behaviour belonged to. I decided to begin there in any case, with the physical approach, in my practise of giving love. In the kitchen the morning after my conversation with Tony I went to her and put my arms around her, and for a while it was like hugging a small tree that doesn’t move or respond but is nonetheless willing to be hugged – pleasant, but with no particular structure or sense of time. The important thing was that she didn’t seem all that taken aback and she let me do it long enough for me to understand that it was something I was entitled to do. When she had decided the hug was over, she gave a little laugh and stepped back and said:
‘Shall we get a dog?’
Justine often asked me why Tony and I didn’t get a dog, since our life was ideally suited to having one and since she knew Tony had always had dogs before he met me. He kept a photograph of his favourite, a brown spaniel called Fetch, beside our bed. The truth was, Jeffers, I feared that if Tony got a dog, it would become the centre of his attention, and he would give it friendship and affection that should have come to me. I was in a sense in competition with this theoretical pet, many of whose characteristics – loyalty, devotion, obedience – I believed I already demonstrated. Yet I knew that Tony did in fact yearn for a dog, and that whatever he got from me, he did not confuse it in his mind with the rewards and responsibilities of animal ownership. I took this to mean that he was not entirely convinced of my loyalty or obedience, and perhaps even that a part of him would find it easier to fondle a dog than a grown woman, and only his stating that he personally did not any longer desire a dog would have persuaded me otherwise. But he had no intention of stating such a thing – all he knew, or would confess to knowing, was that I wouldn’t like it, and for him the subject was therefore closed.
If I were a psychologist, I would say that this non-dog had come to stand for the concept of security, and its reappearance at the scene of my hug with Justine seemed to confirm that surmise. I mention this because it illustrates how in matters of being and becoming, an object can remain itself even at the mercy of conflicting perspectives. The non-dog represented the necessity for trusting and finding security in human beings: I preferred it that way, but Tony and Justine only had to get a sniff of that proposition to take fright. Yet the non-dog was a fact, at least for Tony and for me, and we were able to agree on it, even while it meant different things to each of us. The fact represented the boundary or separation between us, and between any two people, that it is forbidden to cross. This is very easy for someone like Tony, and very difficult for someone like me, who has trouble rec
ognising and respecting such boundaries. I need to get at the truth of a thing and dig and dig until it is dragged painfully to light – another doglike quality. Instead all I could do was suspect, from my side of the boundary, that the two chief recipients of my love – Tony and Justine – both privately yearned for something mute and uncritical to love them instead.
Justine is very musical, and she often sang to us in the evenings and played her guitar, while we sat around the fire. She has a very sweet voice and a wistful, penetrating air when she sings that I have always found affecting. She had been practising a song with Brett, for which she had written a harmony, and they decided to perform it for us one evening at the house after dinner. Kurt then announced that he would like to use the occasion to read from his work in progress. Tony and I bustled around tidying things and arranging chairs and setting out drinks, for I had a sense that L might attend this cultural soirée and I wanted the house to look welcoming, even while his remarks about my playing at being a woman were ringing in my ears. I was beginning to understand that L had a way of making you see yourself without being able to do terribly much about what you saw. While I went on with the preparations I imagined being a different kind of person, someone careless and selfish who was confident that those same qualities would produce a successful evening. How I wished, sometimes, to be that person!
At the appointed hour I saw through the window that my guess had been right, and that two figures were approaching through the glade. Brett came in wearing a startling little dress, a kind of slip or negligee that showed more of her than it covered, and this revelation of flesh instantly created an atmosphere of awkwardness, since it seemed to be part of something private that was happening between her and L. Brett’s face was flushed and her strange letterbox mouth hung blackly open. Her expression had a certain wildness, and I began to feel the blankness and dread that always overcome me in the presence of social tension. There was a wild light in L’s eyes too, and every now and then the two of them would look at one another and laugh.