Rachel Cusk - The Last Supper - A Summer in Italy

We get out of the car and knock at the door. After a while a girl opens it. She is twenty or so, fine-skinned and tousle-haired, cheerful. She has an air of casual sophistication, of groomed self-absorption, like someone who has returned for the holidays from her small, elite university. She shows us inside: her aunt is not here, she has gone shopping in St. Jean. She will be back in an hour. In the meantime she will show us to our rooms. She consults a vast ledger with yellowed pages that stands on a wooden bureau in the hall. She chews her clean fingernail: she is not entirely certain where her aunt intended to put us. She will go and ask Hélène. We will do her the kindness of waiting in the salon for a moment.

We pass through a doorway into a large, low-ceilinged room. It is dark: the shutters are closed against the afternoon sun. Seams of white light show around their edges. The room is full of furniture. There are antique dressers and cabinets, desks and ornamental tables, a grand piano, bookshelves with glass-fronted doors. On every surface there are great numbers of things: dancing china figurines, items made of bronze and silver and glass, bowls and boxes and lampstands, glass paperweights with tiny flowers imprisoned in their depths, goblets of colored crystal, tapestries and sprays of silk roses, sea chests full of old lace, clocks and bells and a music box beneath a glass dome, faded photographs, tea sets, books with threadbare spines, hats and tiny pairs of pearl-buttoned gloves, and in a corner a mannequin, an antique dressmaker’s headless dummy with a rope of beads around her amputated neck. These things are not here by chance: there is no disorder, no element of chaos in this curious spectacle. Everything has been arranged, that much is clear. There is no dust on the dome of the music box; the velvet-upholstered chaise and chintz-covered armchairs are in their proper places in the gloom. There is no one sitting in them, but they have an atmosphere of animation. An invisible presence animates them. It is like a room in a doll’s house: at any moment, it seems, a large hand could descend, pluck something from its place, and rearrange it, in order to further the game.

The girl returns. She has a woman with her, a smooth, rounded, thickset woman in her thirties, with sallow skin and fair hair in two thick plaits. She emanates a stormy kind of vitality. Her powerful eyes are long and dark and heavy-lidded; her mouth is large and plastic. She is like one of Picasso’s colossal, Hellenic women who run by the blue water with uplifted arms. She looks at us, unsmiling. She speaks in a low voice to the girl. Then she vanishes again through the doorway.

We are led upstairs, up a creaking staircase and into a room with windows to the front and dark red wallpaper and a four-poster bed with white curtains. There is another room adjoining it; it is all perfectly pleasant. We thank the girl and she goes away. I sit on the bed. There is a book on the table beside it. I pick it up: it is a small paperback book, very old and faded. The spine crackles when I open it. It is in English. It is a handbook of advice issued by the War Office for soldiers departing for the Western Front. There is a man’s name, written inside the front cover in ink, and a date, 1917. I read a section on the care and maintenance of your rifle and uniform in the trenches. I read about what to do if you encounter your enemy in the road. How will you know he is your enemy? I read instructions for bravery. How will you know how to be brave? To be brave, it is necessary to place a restraint on your self-love. Love has left few traces in this world. Instead: courage, honor, duty. Without love there would be no tragedy. That would be easier, would it not? One might deny the existence of love, for this reason. I look at the man’s name again, at his handwriting. It is very sad, this book. Why has it been left beside my bed? There is something a little barbed, a little ironic, in its placement. It wishes, almost, to laugh at the quaintness of male valor. It wishes to conjure up the rigidity, the conservatism, the compliance of the male soul.

The children want to go out to the garden. There is a lawn, with winding paths and bushes and trees that mass and obscure one another, so that it is impossible to see where the garden ends. We go down, and out through a pair of glass doors. A warm, dry wind is blowing. I sit on the grass, and the children run away down the paths and disappear. I watch the tops of the trees, turning and bowing in the wind. I watch the grass, its dry shifting filaments electric in the sunlight. Suddenly I am cold: I feel a prickling of the skin, a sense of exposure. I go back upstairs to get a jacket. Passing the bed, I notice that the soldier book is no longer on the table. A different book is there. Someone has come in and changed it. It seems that I am being directed. I do not like being directed. I do not touch the book: I do not want to know what it is. The room is silent, full of white light. I get my jacket and quickly go back outside again. I sit on the grass, and then lie down, on my side. I am very tired. I close my eyes. The white light and the wind feel as though they are in my head. I only know that I have gone to sleep when the sound of a bell wakes me up. It is ringing in the garden, somewhere nearby. It is a handbell: it makes a loud, sonorous, clanging sound. I can hear a woman’s voice calling. Les enfants! she shouts. Les enfants! I wonder which children she is calling: I haven’t seen any here. I sit up, and observe the fair-haired woman with the strange eyes striding down toward the end of the garden. It is she who is ringing the bell, and calling. Les enfants! La maison de jeux est ouverte! La maison de jeux est ouverte! Les enfants! A while later she returns, with my daughters running behind her. They stop to speak to me. They are excited. They say that the lady is going to show them the house of games. She has walked on ahead and vanished through the glass doors. They run after her, and I get stiffly up to follow.

In the house, in the gloom of the salon, there is a woman. She is tall, erect, gray-haired. She has a broad, bare face that is full of creases. She has small, penetrating, merciless eyes. She holds out her hand to greet me. She is Madame, the mistress of this faintly unsettling domain. She is the third and, I can see, the most powerful of the household triumvirate. While she speaks, I calculate: she is the aunt of the young girl, and the mother of the saturnine Hélène, the fair-haired woman who was ringing the bell. I see that they are a caucus, a set. I compliment her on her house, her wondrous collection of objets , and she eyes me, smiling like a snake.

The children have gone to the maison de jeux , she says. My daughter has opened it for them.

I say that it is very kind of her: the children will be pleased to find some toys to play with. It is very sensible, I say, to have such a facility. It might stop them trying to play with her antiques.

They can touch whatever they like, she says, smiling, as long as they do not break it.

Unexpectedly, the children return. I hear them running down the hallway. They fly into the salon: their faces are strange. I ask if they have seen the house of games. Yes, they say. Why did they not stay there? They do not reply. Madame is looking at them. She wears an expression of cold amusement on her face. I sense that she is offended, or disappointed: I sense that they have failed. I take their hands and ask them to show it to me, and they lead me through the hall and out across the white light of the drive toward the barn. At the door, they stop. It’s in there, they say. They do not want to come in. They have seen it already.

I go through the door, out of the white light. The barn is dark. There is music playing. It is piano music, Debussy, coming from somewhere in the middle of the large, open room. I am in a kind of tunnel of black draperies. I push my way through and find myself face-to-face with a mannequin. She is tall and flaxen-haired, and she wears a long sequined gown. For a moment I am startled: I thought she was real. Her hand is outstretched, fingers splayed, as though I might be expected to bend down and kiss them. But her eyes — her eyes are so large and liquid, so intricate in their irises, so filled with painted expression. In the end it is her hair that gives her away. She wears a beaded headdress with a blue feather stitched in the band, and her yellow synthetic hair curls stiffly around it. Beside her there is a wardrobe with its doors open. Inside there are many shelves. They are crammed with female finery, with delicate shoes and evening bags, with fans and feather boas and costume jewelry. It is a little sinister — it is a kind of mausoleum: there is something of the bureaucracy of death about the rows of old handbags, the neatly stacked pairs of worn shoes.