Rachel Cusk - The Temporary

‘It’s not like you’ll be staying here that often,’ he had said. ‘And what will you do on the nights when you’re at home?’

She had explained to him, faintly touched by his concern, that what he saw was merely an emergency consignment of the greater stockade which remained in West Hampstead, and besides, as Janice had said when Francine told her of their difficulties, the proper maintenance of a beauty routine constituted an effort from which both parties benefited. Francine was surprised to suspect that Janice didn’t think much of Ralph, although on the few occasions they had met she had certainly made a point of giving the opposite impression. She would drift around the flat in a silk robe when Ralph was there, asking him if he wanted anything and putting her hand on his arm. Once, Francine had been disturbed to notice that Janice’s robe had come loose at the front, and when she bent over Ralph to give him a cup of coffee it became clear that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath. Ralph had looked uncomfortable, but his eyes had flown through the gap just the same, and Francine had decided there and then to reduce their visits to West Hampstead. It was Ralph, in fact, who ensured her continuing appearances at home with his frequent appointments with himself. Two or three times a week he would declare that he needed to be ‘on his own’, and Francine, at first thinking that the request referred to a fashionable occupation of which she had been unaware, and only later seeing the slight it made against her company, was eventually forced to take matters into her own hands. She pre-empted him with arrangements of her own, both fictitious and concrete, which meant that she was unable to see him as often as he didn’t want to see her.

Things weren’t perhaps going as well as she had hoped, and feeling increasingly certain that Ralph was harbouring one or two criticisms — whose presence she caught leaking through his manner, even if she couldn’t exactly identify their source — of her, she permitted herself some grudges of her own. He was so boring, never wanting to go out except to see films, and even then only films in which nothing much seemed to happen either and of which the girls at work had never heard. He was always reading, too, even though she had been brought up to think that it was rude to read when there was someone else in the room. She had told him that once, enjoying the thought of how he would react to her knowing more about manners than he did.

‘Why is it rude?’ he had said, sounding more interested than perturbed. He hadn’t even put down his book when she said it, just lowered it a couple of inches so that he could see her.

‘It just is. It’s bad manners.’

‘What, like burping?’ He began to laugh. ‘Or picking one’s nose?’

‘It’s not like you have to do it,’ she had replied, disgruntled. ‘You’re not revising for an exam or anything.’

Her aversions, though, were the product of slightly unnatural impulses: it was easy to cultivate indifference in an atmosphere of intense interest, but the business was thwarted by unfriendly conditions and Francine found her stratagems ailing and refusing to yield. She would make accusations of his dullness or his unwillingness to take her out, or give displays of restlessness in the evenings, to which he would respond unnervingly.

‘Feel free to go out if you’re bored,’ he would say, rooting himself more firmly behind his newspaper. ‘I won’t mind at all.’

The proliferation of her freedom, the suggestion that it could be returned to her at any time, undeniably cheapened the commodity. It was hard to hold Ralph accountable for the fact that he rarely went out, that he didn’t particularly like to spend money, and that he didn’t come accompanied by a glittering entourage of friends, when he seemed willingly to accept the charge. What was easier was to suspect that he had conspired to give the impression of his glamour — his elegant flat, his educated manner, even his invitation to the party at which she had met him, where her own presence had been importunate; all of this had suggested the existence of greater things, a whole world of which this was merely the residue! — and, easier still, that this now-punctured illusion rendered his ability to resist her a sign not of the refinement of his tastes but of their mediocrity. This was her most substantial complaint — the fact that Ralph didn’t appear to be infatuated with her — and it was also the most difficult to lodge. The decline of his character in the light of his failure to find her enchanting was inevitable, but her own disaffection offered little hope for progress against the current of his. Her self-love would occasionally rally from his blows and return with zealous contempt for its injury; but eventually she would subside into paralysis, the helplessness of realizing that, being apparently unable to attain what she wanted, she might have to settle for what was being offered.

Leaving Ralph’s flat sometimes in the mornings, she would catch people looking at her as she walked to the Tube station and would touch her face secretly with her fingers or strain to get a glimpse of it in passing shop windows, sure that some deformity must be drawing their attention. It was often several hours before the gloom of Ralph’s indifference dispersed and Francine realized that the glare from which she shrank was nothing but the friendly sun of admiration. Even the mirror seemed to have lost something of its magic, and Francine would wonder with a lurch of bereavement if her most companionable and delighting ally — herself — was gone for ever.

‘He’s dark,’ concluded Janice, when Francine revealed to her something of her troubles. ‘I knew it from the start. He’s crying inside. Look out for post-nasal drip — it’s supposed to be a sign of life-sorrow.’

Francine tried to enjoy the approval of those in her path, gleaning from it the confirmation of Ralph’s stupidity, and she had recently had the idea that when next she became the subject of concerted advances, her acceptance of them would provide the final triumph. Sitting at her desk, though, she would feel a yawning emptiness in her thoughts when she tried to consider her possibilities and would long for the return of their once-bright clutter. In these moments she could take no pleasure from the cheerful lust of the men who came into the office or the longing eyes which met her when she went out to buy her sandwich. She had lost the taste for her own imagination and it was suddenly hard to believe in the adventures it haltingly enacted. It was not love for Ralph, she was sure, which depressed her. She had never supposed herself to be in love with anybody, although she was prepared to accept that they might be in love with her. No, it was the suspicion, which daily gathered more evidence to it, that in Ralph’s eyes she lacked something which was dragging her with unjust fingers down into its pit. Why she didn’t run from it, loosen its grip with a minute’s denial that she cared what he thought, was a question she heard only faintly. Her motives were listless things, grown diffident from her failure to examine them, and while once she had enjoyed the recumbent ease with which she could drift along with only the force of others’ desires to fuel her, she now found herself unable consequently to propel herself away from danger. She had finished affairs certainly, in the past, but it had always been easy: someone new had arrived to rescue her, or she had merely woken one day to find herself liberated by boredom or the facility of change. The infliction of pain, besides, was often a source of pleasure, reflecting as nothing else could the real depth and accuracy of her penetration, and she had found that the pinnacle of a man’s interest could be recognized by her own sudden natural impulse to flight once she had arrived at it.