Rachel Cusk - The Temporary

‘Are we ever going to eat this?’ he said almost gaily.

‘Why not?’

She laughed and looked at the risotto with mock-suspicion. He picked up the serving spoon and brandished it comically, warmed by the flicker of friendliness.

‘Many reasons,’ he said sternly. ‘But we haven’t time to go into them.’

‘Right.’

She laughed again as he plunged the spoon into the centre of the resistant crust and tried to pry some of it loose.

‘Need to get some muscle behind it,’ said Ralph, standing up and leaning forcefully on the handle of the spoon. A large clod sprang from the dish and was catapulted into the air. ‘Oh God — where’s it gone?’

Francine collapsed into giggles as Ralph searched the area around the table. His mind was humming with humour and he played the fool, crouching down and looking under a rug to fresh shrieks of laughter. He felt drunk again, a light and ebullient sensation which lifted him above his inhibitions and made a success of the smallest things.

‘It’s escaped,’ he said, standing up. ‘We’ll have to send out a search party.’

‘Never mind,’ said Francine.

‘Shall I try again?’

She nodded, her face alive with responses to him. She leaned forward encouragingly and Ralph was all at once dizzied by her acquiescence. She was offering herself to him — she wanted him to accept her; it was all he had to do! — and he suddenly saw where it might end. He met her gaze for a moment and felt a clear current pass between them. If he understood it correctly, he was being given an opportunity; there would be no further tests, nothing for him to do but accept it. Excitement leapt up in his throat, unchained. The tangible presence of a fantasy unalloyed by a complex object was so altogether new that it struck him with the force of a revelation. He wondered shamefully what Francine’s requirements were, and searched his memory of the silly evening for the mysterious point at which he must have met them; but then he realized, in another bright shaft of comprehension, that she was merely different from other girls he had known. There was no baffling maze through which he was expected to fumble his way, trying to make a good case for himself according to the tortuous laws of confluence. She perceived herself — and this thought caused the spoon to tremble in his hand as he fearfully met her eyes once more and clearly saw its confirmation there — as an object of pleasure. Her profit, her share, was simply that he should do so too.

‘You’d better duck,’ he said, digging his spoon in a second time.

She put her hands amusingly over her face and bent over the table. He forked the risotto out of the dish and howled with laughter as it splintered into grainy fragments around them. Francine’s face was wide with comic astonishment and her eyes brightened with approval of his performance.

‘I did say I wasn’t that hungry,’ she said.

‘Did any of it get on you?’

‘I don’t think so.’

She sat back slightly in her chair and smoothed her hands slowly over her blouse and skirt. Ralph felt a fresh lurch of disbelief as he watched her. She met his eyes and giggled.

‘That’s good,’ he said.

A pause shimmered, filling the room, and Ralph knew his moment had come. For a second he drew back, hovering on the edge of action. His body seemed to swell and bloom around him, its machinery unfolding, and he suddenly felt the heaviness of his own flesh, the million pumping intricacies beneath it. He walked stiffly round to the other side of the table and felt the air thicken around him as he forced his way through it. Francine was watching his approach and as he drew near he saw something in her eyes which he couldn’t identify. It occurred to him dimly that his touch would be her triumph, and when he did it, clasping her cool hand in his, he experienced a sudden flash of loss at the unfamiliar feel of her skin. He put his other hand on her shoulder, anchoring himself, and his hands felt all at once so implicated there, so guilty with greed, that it seemed as if a strange glue had trapped his fingers and was preventing him from removing them. Francine raised her head and looked at him, a faint smile on her lips. He knew then the impossibility of escape, felt doors slam around him, and his struggle stiffened and died.

‘Shall we sit on the sofa?’ he said.

The words were loud in his ears.

The day had been very tiresome, and when Francine shut the front door of her flat against the windy, dark grey late afternoon, she had a satisfying sensation of slamming it also on the administrative harness of the office and the dumb moon faces yoked within it. It had been dark all day, the great wads of cloud pressing down and sending people scuttling through the streets as if beneath the sole of a large, descending boot. The atmosphere of force had found its way into the building: there was a sudden assertion of regimes, a resistance to leisure, and when the rain began to hurl itself against the windows people bent their heads and worked faster.

She had anticipated an idle day, one in which she would sit and steep pleasurably in thought, perhaps sharing a little of it with anyone who happened by her manner to scent the presence of a drama; but instead she had been driven reluctantly into productivity, with not even a stint by the photocopier or a run to the Italian café near by for the office cappuccinos to provide any opportunity for reflection. Her night away from home had left her with an enlarged sense of the personal, and combined with the detachment wrought by little sleep and the red wine, the cuffs and chains of duty were tight and painful. By the end of the afternoon a helmet was clamped around her aching head and her tongue was thick and bitter with instant coffee. At five thirty she left the office for the weekend, not even lingering to be ensnared in the customary Friday evening drift of the City to the local pubs.

She had phoned Lynne at the agency that morning to ask if she had any work for the next week, and Lynne had said that Personnel at Lancing & Louche were pleased with her and wanted her to stay on. There might be a chance of a permanent, Lynne said, seeing as the lady away on leave was still phoning in sick and didn’t know when she’d be back. She was called Sally, and Francine disliked her for the fact that, even though Sally was middle aged, overweight, and had greying, frizzy hair — facts revealed in a framed photograph of Sally dancing in a disco opposite a bald man with flailing arms and red eyes which Francine had found on her desk — Mr Lancing kept calling her Sally as well. Sally was a ‘career’ secretary and had been there a long time: she had put luminous pink stickers with her name on on all her files and a large one on her telephone extension too, as if to remind herself of who she was in case anyone called for her. She had a pair of slippers in flowered material which she changed into when she got to work. One of the secretaries had told Francine that when she found them beneath her desk, positioned neatly side by side in front of the chair as if Sally had been snatched from them by illness where she sat. Francine had put them in a drawer, along with the photograph, the roll of stickers, and a manicure set which also belonged to Sally, feeling confident that her superiority would bring its own rewards.

She was glad she would be staying at Lancing & Louche for a while: it was a big company and she liked the youthful commerce of the corridors, the legions of smart secretaries, the young men with sleek hair who rushed in and out of the broking rooms, the hushed acres of carpet and confidential mahogany doors of the executive floor at the top of the building where meetings were held. She was usually asked to take coffee into Mr Lancing’s meetings, prepared on a tray by one of the aproned women in catering and handed to her outside the door, and although she disliked its suggestion of servitude, the sudden silence and raised circle of heads as she entered the room made the duty more gratifying. Their eyes followed her to the door, and sometimes, after she’d shut it, she could hear different tones in their voices and the occasional burst of meaningful male laughter.