Rachel Cusk - In the Fold

‘Mark doesn’t want her to go,’ said Rebecca. She said it to me, with an air of unspecific accusation.

‘I don’t really want to go either,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s just that I think I should. I’m seeing it as an opportunity for spiritual advancement.’

‘People don’t often come to Bath for that,’ I said.

‘Oh, I could be going anywhere. It just so happened that it was here. The thing is, I’ve never been alone in my life and I’m banking on it being good for me. You’re right, though — I’d hate to be too comfortable. It would spoil the penitent effect.’

‘You won’t be alone,’ Rebecca said. ‘You’ve got hundreds of friends here.’

‘You see?’ said Charlie to me. ‘That’s the problem. When it comes down to it I’m not prepared to suffer at all.’

‘At least Mark will suffer,’ I said.

Charlie gave a little melancholic smile.

‘That wasn’t really the idea. I’m beginning to see that my plan is flawed.’

‘It isn’t your fault! You can’t tailor your life to suit other people. You have to go where the opportunities are,’ declared Rebecca, for whom opportunities had only ever dared to present themselves in one way, which was to her immediate convenience.

Charlie said: ‘Do you remember when I was doing my doctorate?’

‘I remember you were obsessed with a brown cloud,’ said Rebecca.

I said: ‘What was your doctorate on?’

‘Climate change. Signs and portents thereof. It was a little idea I had, that we were recreating the concept of an apocalypse in the form of anxieties about the environment. Then I had to turn it into a much bigger idea, and in the process I rather became the victim of these anxieties myself. I’d spend all day in the library reading about glaciers melting and the world getting hotter and hotter and the fact that half of it was going to be under water in fifty years’ time, and I would sit at my desk and become distraught at the thought of this ruination, this doom, actually nauseous with terror — I felt I could see the whole planet darkening and dying, and I was consumed with this hatred of human beings and at the same time fear for them, pity for them. Then I’d walk home looking at everything, the sky and the people and the buildings and it would seem so sort of heedless and alien, you know, someone in a car getting angry with someone for pulling out, and people talking on their mobiles and the sky all grey and boring, and I would think, well, maybe we get what we deserve. Then I’d go home and Sam and I would argue.’ Sam was the name of Charlie’s ex-husband. ‘Quite often I’d find myself distraught again before bedtime, except this time it would be about housework, or the fact that Sam said I’d spent too much money. There was no connection,’ said Charlie, shaking her head. ‘There was no connection anywhere.’

Through the window the sky was blue-grey. The indistinct green furze of the little garden stood rigid beyond the glass. Rebecca looked perplexed.

‘I don’t think anyone could blame you because you couldn’t reconcile your marriage with global warming,’ she said.

‘It made me think for the first time that I needed to be better than I was. Because otherwise there was nothing. It’s different for you. You’ve had a child.’

Rebecca shrugged. ‘So have one.’

Charlie laughed. ‘I can’t! Or not yet, anyway. Possibly not ever.’

‘Anyway, having a child doesn’t make you a better person,’ Rebecca declared presently.

‘Doesn’t it?’ Charlie raised her eyebrows. ‘I’d have thought it gives you less time to be a bad one.’

‘It doesn’t have anything to do with it,’ said Rebecca.

She looked as though she’d meant to say it matter-of-factly, but I saw a tremor of awareness pass through her, as though at the unexpected magnitude of her realisation.

‘It doesn’t have anything to do with it,’ she said again. ‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘I thought everything with Mark was perfect.’

Her ironic intonation of the word “perfect” suggested a well-known abhorrence of the idea.

Charlie shook her long black hair self-consciously away from her face. ‘It is, in a way. But to be honest that’s a bit of an illusion too. If he ever found out what I’m really like it wouldn’t be perfect any more.’

‘God!’ cried Rebecca, so unexpectedly that the rest of us started. ‘That’s so bloody typical!’

She thumped the table top with her hand and I felt Hamish jump on my lap.

‘How do they do it?’ she asked wonderingly, shaking her head. ‘How do they do it?’

‘It’s just that he’s so good,’ Charlie said. ‘And I’m so bad that I have to lie to make myself seem better. I’ve lied about everything! So now there’s that on top of all the other things.’ She put her head in her hands and laughed. ‘Not that he ever asks me anything.’

‘That’s so typical,’ said Rebecca again.

‘No, I mean he never pries. Of course, he already knows about Sam and he doesn’t like it, I can tell. He doesn’t like the fact that I left. Poor Sam — I embellish his villainy mercilessly. You know, I’d really like to do something I could be proud of,’ she said, looking fervently at Rebecca and me. ‘I’d like to do something hard. Sometimes I even think that I should go back to Sam. That really would be hard. It would make the perfect cross.’

‘You can’t do that!’

‘Why not? I’d only be keeping all those promises I made. Think how much Mark would admire me!’

‘That’s just silly,’ Rebecca said petulantly.

‘All I’m saying is that I have a distorted nature. I’ve never felt the right sort of pain. I’ve felt the pain of being wrong but I’ve never felt the pain of being right. I’ve never suffered out of forbearance.’

‘Why should you suffer? What would be the point of that?’

Charlie laughed. ‘I have the feeling that the health of the organism depends on it.’

‘Is that what he says?’

‘Oh, it’s completely selfish! Otherwise what story do you have to tell about yourself? That all you’ve done is gorge on emotion — that you’ve just lived in yourself? The problem is that when I get close to it, virtue begins to seem like another bizarre illusion.’

‘What have you done that’s so terrible?’ Rebecca burst out. ‘I mean, really, compared to — compared to the Nazis , what have you actually done wrong? I mean, you haven’t killed anybody, have you?’

The two women looked at each other.

‘In a way, I have,’ Charlie said.

‘I don’t accept that,’ said Rebecca defiantly. ‘Everybody has abortions. I nearly had one.’

I felt Charlie’s eyes flicker questioningly over my face. To my knowledge, Rebecca had only been pregnant once. I had noticed before her growing tendency to lay claim to an identity more chequered than her own. Suddenly, it seemed, she couldn’t bear the idea that she was more straight-laced than other people: it struck me that in her thirties she was experiencing an explosion of adolescent feelings of rebelliousness. Her clothes, her demeanour, her pretence of being “bad” — she had even, I noticed, taken up smoking, a heartbreaking spectacle of ineptness that she determinedly staged two or three times each day. Rebecca had often told me how obedient and sensible she was as a child and teenager, a position she adopted in answer to her parents’ refusal to behave in a ‘normal’ way. She felt she had no entitlement to youth and irresponsibility: Rick and Ali would not relinquish them. I remembered with what rational belligerence she had wanted a baby, as though this were the next foothold, the next stepping stone in her faltering progress across the torrent of life. She was on the verge, I saw, of flinging herself into this maelstrom; which was not, in fact, life but subjectivity, was the treacherous expanse of everything pre-existing that she needed to make her way over before she could consider herself safe. I felt pity for her, and guilt that I had not helped her more, but more than anything I felt fear.