Rachel Cusk - The Temporary

‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ said Francine.

‘No, please do — please, go ahead.’

She put down her glass and crossed the room to find her bag with a sense of liberation in the movement and the noise of her heels knocking against the wooden floor. The commotion seemed also to arouse Ralph.

‘Have you come straight from work?’ he said, raising his voice behind her.

She rummaged gracefully in her bag and came back across the room towards him before she answered. His eyes, awaiting her reply, were fixed on her as she approached.

‘Oh, yes. I often have to stay late. Would you like one?’

‘Oh — OK, why not?’

His tone was warmer now, and the exchange of the cigarette manufactured a successful intimacy. He met her eyes, and Francine felt confident that she had magnetized his thoughts and was drawing them out of their dark recess towards her. She was unused to having to do so much to secure her victories: the normal pattern of such engagements invariably permitted her a defensive position, from which she would admit or repel foreign advances. Ralph’s seclusion, however, demanded some form of attack, and the discovery of a small but none the less unexpected body of resistance barring the path to his surrender was beginning to inspire in Francine the idea that what lay beyond it must be of greater worth than she had thought.

‘What exactly is it that you’re doing?’ said Ralph. He seemed to comprehend the stiffness of his own question, and added: ‘I don’t believe I’ve ever even asked you.’

‘I work for the director of a company in the City,’ said Francine. She waved her cigarette distractingly. ‘I don’t have a light.’

‘Oh — let’s see, there’ll be some matches in the kitchen. Come on, I’ll give you a guided tour.’ He led the way across the sitting-room. ‘So is your director a bit of an ogre?’ he said over his shoulder. ‘It sounds like he works you very hard.’

‘He does.’ Francine followed him. ‘But a lot of it’s my own work too.’

‘How’s that?’ said Ralph.

‘Well—’ Francine was glad that he couldn’t see her face. ‘I’m trying to learn a bit about the business.’

‘So is this a long-term thing?’ They entered the kitchen and Ralph began searching the counter-tops. ‘For some reason I thought you did temporary work.’

He opened and shut drawers loudly. The end of a metal bottle-opener flew up and jammed at a right-angle from one of them, and Ralph tried unsuccessfully to slam it shut two or three times without noticing the impediment. His face was red, and in the strong light Francine could see it was covered with a boisterous mask of sweat.

‘I can’t seem to find them — oh, hang on, I can just light it from the cooker, can’t I?’

He put the cigarette in his mouth and bent down over the hob, turning a knob with his hand. A ring of blue flame leapt up towards his face and he shied slightly, straightening up seconds later with the smouldering cigarette still hanging from his lips. An oddly sweet smell of burning drifted towards Francine in a cloud of cigarette smoke, and she saw that Ralph’s face was screwed up as if a bright light were shining in it.

‘There we are,’ he said, handing her the cigarette. His voice wavered with physical strain. ‘Can you light yours from that?’ He rubbed his hand across his face as she lit her cigarette and then touched his eyebrows tentatively with his fingers. ‘Oh dear,’ he said.

‘It’s a nice kitchen,’ said Francine, looking around to avoid giving the situation her attention. Suddenly she remembered a time, a few years ago, when she had gone to meet a man in a bar which was in a basement and had a long, steep flight of steps down to the entrance. She had stumbled and fallen all the way down, and although the pain had been severe, she had picked herself up, examined her clothing to make sure that no trace of her accident remained, and had walked into the bar as if nothing had happened. Fortunately, there had been no one else on the stairs at the time to witness her mishap. When she got home that evening, she had found large, black bruises across her back and legs which had taken weeks to disappear.

‘Thanks,’ said Ralph, composing himself. He leaned against the cupboards and drew deeply on his cigarette. ‘Which business is it that you’re learning?’

For a moment Francine couldn’t think of what he was talking about.

‘Oh, I’m sure you don’t want to talk about this,’ she said, smiling. ‘It’s pretty boring.’

‘No, I’m interested,’ said Ralph. ‘I don’t know anything about the City. I just twiddle my thumbs on the Holloway Road all day writing things that no one’s ever going to read.’ He laughed, as if to himself. ‘Tell me what your company — what’s it called?’

‘Lancing & Louche.’

‘There you go! You’d never find Lancing & Louche on the Holloway Road. Tell me what they do.’

‘They’re financial,’ said Francine. Her thoughts writhed against the bent of the conversation.

‘What, an investment bank?’

‘That sort of thing.’ She looked around her as if she had lose something. ‘I think I’ve left my glass in the other room.’

‘Oh, sorry — let’s go and sit down, shall we?’

Francine headed gratefully for the hall. For a minute Ralph didn’t follow her, and when she looked back she saw him rubbing his face. He blinked his eyes fiercely several times, his eyebrows moving up and down as if in astonishment, and then turned to the oven and opened it. Sensing Francine standing there, he straightened up guiltily.

‘Look, I’ve got a confession to make,’ he said. ‘I know I said we’d go to a restaurant, but then I thought it might be nicer to have something here instead. What do you think?’

The news of a confession had set Francine’s heart thudding and it was a minute before she could understand the meaning of what he had said. When it came, the revelation was something of a disappointment. She was immediately gripped by the suspicion that he had lost interest in her, and didn’t want to be put to the expense or effort of taking her out. The sundry collection of clues which, when amassed, testified to Ralph’s odd and irrational character reinforced this conclusion; but vanity told a different story, and Francine shortly found herself more attracted to the idea that he wanted her all to himself, in a shuttered seclusion where developments could be allowed freely to unfold.

‘Oh, I’m not that hungry anyway,’ she said, weighing up the sacrifice of a restaurant’s glamour, with its opportunities for public appreciation and its tokens of private expense, against this new and uncertain plan. ‘Don’t go to any trouble on my account.’

‘But I want to!’ Ralph replied. ‘I mean, I already have, it’s in the oven — I don’t know if you’ll like it very much, that’s all. It’s only a risotto.’

His presupposal of her agreement to having dinner in his flat was held in the balance, Francine felt, by his already having prepared it. She had heard of girls beings asked to dinner and expected to help, or worse still to do the whole thing themselves. It was not what she had hoped for, but nevertheless Francine could see how Ralph’s behaviour could be construed as heroic when she described it to Janice and perhaps one or two of the secretaries at work. That it was ‘only’ a risotto was more unsettling, but her ignorance of risotto, combined with its admittedly exotic sound, left her no choice but to attribute his qualification to modesty.

‘I love risotto,’ she said, finding, as the word fell easily from her lips, that in fact she really did.

The blind was up over the kitchen window and Ralph could see himself clearly reflected in it, a strange photograph of a private, incoherent moment into which he could gaze and fall. The tide of self-absorption began mounting again in his veins, as it had all evening, and when it drummed insistently behind his eyes he turned away from the window and began busying himself at the kitchen counters to drive it back down into the pool of his stomach.