Rachel Cusk - The Temporary

It required a surprising effort of belief to remember that Francine was in the next room, waiting for the dinner he had said he would bring if she could just leave him alone with his mess for a few moments, and although he knew that the wine had no doubt dampened the ignition of thought and made him an obscure, heavy creature of uncertain impulses, his malfunctioning sense of contingency was lodged in a deeper place more resistant to immediate repair. It was strange to think of how he had travelled so steadily towards this evening with Francine, his destination the object of joyful anticipation, his means of conveyance sure beneath the friction of nerves; the certainty that time would bring it to pass, and that for once he had the heart for the journey, making him lower his guard against the inevitable intervention of other forces to disrupt his passage to happiness. And yet really there had been no other forces; it had all happened as he had hoped it would, except for the one thing that of course he hadn’t expected, the derailment of his own desires!

He had felt a kind of dark exhilaration at moments during the evening, an almost gleeful disbelief at the scandalous abscondment of his proper feelings, and yet his inability to experience the correct sensations in Francine’s presence revealed him to himself in the sinister light of dreams, where the sight of a familiar face is accompanied by the sudden recognition of an unglimpsed evil behind it. He had thought that he knew every channel of himself, the capacity of each vat of his heart and mind and the vacillating measure of spirits within them; but here was a vast, unpatrolled space, a great cellar to which he had rarely opened the door but where he now knew the debris of his disappointments was still stored. Such things he had thought incinerated, long since consigned to dust, but now he had caught the diluted stench of it all over him he knew the residue of his miseries still lived in him, leaking its deleterious perfume daily into his thoughts. Nevertheless, he had always regarded his wounds as things inflicted on him by other people, and it was odd to be spoiling something for himself. He supposed it had happened because Francine had expected him to lead her, had been unable to draw him away from his descent, until he had found himself wishing she would just go home and leave him to plunge back into his darkness.

She had been something of a disappointment to him, in fact; he could admit that now that his hopes for the evening had subsided. When he had opened the door and first seen her, he had had the impression of someone who shouldn’t have been there at all, someone so unrelated to his own life that for a moment it had seemed impossible that the drinks and dinner would still go ahead. It was her clothes, probably, a strange executive uniform which was as resistant to his sensibilities as armour and which made her presence at his door seem unnatural. He knew she must have just come from work, and yet he hadn’t been able to find enough in the personality of her job to fill its outward appearance, and he was left with a sense of her as a strange mannequin who had come to pose in his sitting-room. She was beautiful, of course, but her beauty could find no conduit through which to flow to him: it remained forcefully packed in her face, a disruptive presence.

Of course, he had made a complete fool of himself, spinning idiocies for conversation, capering with the mimicry of charm in the absence of all his better qualities. It had astonished him to discover that even so she was willing to shine for him. He had expected her to be filled with the skills necessary to find him out, blade-sharp with social acumen, but she merely went along with it all with an air of slightly dumbfounded acceptance, for all the world as if his madness was something of which he had mastery! Then again, perhaps the poor girl was only being kind in trying to normalize him; or perhaps, Heaven help her, she too felt herself to be on trial. In his mind he rose and regarded their situation from above. From a larger perspective, things hadn’t been so bad. They had drunk and conversed in a civilized manner, and now Ralph was going to serve dinner. He saw them eating it, their bodies cold and private beneath their clothes, his thoughts swarming at the glass of his eyes.

He removed the risotto from the oven, and was amused by how appropriate its unfathomable horror now seemed. It looked uglier than ever, aged by its long, dry stint in the heat, and Ralph considered sacrificing it to save the evening in its death throes, dropping it on the floor and taking Francine out to a place where the noise of life would perhaps provide them with a clue as to their part in it, and where by imitating the people around them they could improvise their own little drama. Fatigued suddenly with drink, he decided against it. It would be unwise to animate the strange creature they made together and watch what he knew would be its ghastly, fleeting dance. He just wanted to get through it, tunnel through the hardest, shortest route which would deliver him to solitude.

He loaded everything on to a large tray and bore it down the hall and into the sitting-room. Francine was on the sofa and Ralph felt a sudden impulse of pity for her, for he had given her nothing to do while she sat and waited, and his relentless tidying had deprived the surfaces of the room of interest. She had the neat, apprehensive appearance of someone awaiting an appointment, and his pity was overcome by a fresh surge of bewilderment at her presence there.

‘Here we are,’ he said brightly, desperate to rouse her. ‘Do you want to come and sit down?’

She got up from the sofa and walked carefully towards him, and he suddenly saw that her mystery was an effect of her silence, a knowing vacancy in which people were invited to construe their own versions of her. He wondered why he had not perceived this before, and supposed it was because he too had construed, had projected a manic, bumbling effusion of self before an inscrutable object.

‘Where did you learn to cook?’ said Francine as he put the dish in the centre of the table.

‘What? Oh, nowhere. As you can probably tell,’ he added, gesturing deprecatingly at the risotto. ‘How hungry are you?’

She looked about her.

‘Have you got any candles?’ she said.

‘Um — yes, yes, I should think so.’ He found the request disconcerting, a demand for romance which made him appear churlish; yet it wasn’t really a demand, it wasn’t, Haven’t you got any candles?; it was more of a plea. ‘I’ll just find some.’

There were two candlesticks on the mantelpiece with the matches he had sought earlier beside them. He thought of his ridiculous performance at the hob, where he had singed his eyelashes and eyebrows, and, had he not had it cut, would probably have set his hair alight too. He hadn’t wanted to draw attention to himself by rushing to a mirror, although Francine hadn’t seemed to have noticed what had happened. He glanced at his reflection now in the mirror over the mantelpiece. There was an unfamiliar expression on his face, a sort of garrulous stupidity, and he barely recognized himself. His eyebrows seemed unharmed, though, and he picked up the candlesticks and went back to the table.

Once the candles had been lit and the lights turned off, Ralph had to admit that things looked better. The risotto had receded into a vague landscape of earth-brown hillocks, the glasses shone palely like translucent moons, and he found it easier to focus in the softer illumination on Francine’s face. The candlelight was a levelling element, a warm and buoyant pool in which their separateness seemed less brutal. Francine, too, seemed to respond to its gentleness, and as he watched her, only half listening to her reply to a question he had asked, he felt the gradual melting of his reserve send trickles of feeling through him. The lurching disorientation of his drunkenness settled into a more benign and fertile detachment, and he noticed that Francine was more attractive when she was animated and that her dark eyes were wonderfully eloquent in the dim light.