Rachel Cusk - The Temporary

Had Ralph been repellent to her in the way so many other men now were, she might have found it easier to escape from him; but her inability to understand him grounded her, and the more he eluded her faculties, the more resolved she became to better him. He had somehow succeeded in belittling those past conquests of which she had once been so proud, although she hadn’t told him much about them. It was in her own thoughts that she judged them, shrank from their coarseness or their stupidity, pitied the ease with which she had mastered them. He had raised a standard to which he evidently had no interest in conforming, made her dissatisfied with what she had, and yet refused to palliate her new appetites. As much as she tried to satisfy herself with thoughts of his dullness, his stiff manner, his unfashionable pursuits, the memory of his face would occasionally fill her thoughts when they were apart and she would feel a contraction in her chest which, like hunger, would direct her to seek him out. She liked to look at his face, in fact, and sometimes would forget herself for several minutes whilst looking. It seemed odd to her to do that, and the naked sensation it gave her revealed what appeared to be glimpses of her own worthlessness. She had confided to Janice that she and Ralph didn’t speak the same language, and it was true. His sensibility felt awkward in her mouth when she tried it, and he didn’t seem to understand the meaning of anything she said, either.

Lately she had begun to feel a deeper, more pressing anxiety which occasionally drew itself through her stomach in a slender, nervous thread. She had come home one night to find Janice reclining on the sofa with a hot-water bottle clutched in her arms, regarding her midriff with a look of pained tenderness.

‘Are you ill?’ said Francine. Janice’s ailments were frequent and vague, but their interpretation nevertheless dramatic. She would complain of energy blocks and decentralization, mysterious agues for which lengthy meditations on their probable causes was often the only cure.

‘I’m coming on,’ said Janice dully.

Francine had only ever heard her mother use that expression, and the moment was a confusing one, suggesting as it did unthought of affiliations between people she had considered unconnected. In that second of disjointedness, that temporary blank, an idea insinuated itself in Francine’s mind. She stared at Janice, wondering how so large a piece of her, as dependable and unexamined as an arm or leg, could have gone missing without her noticing. She stood silently, all her efforts bent on the attempt to remember the last time she had seen her own blood, to track down recent scenes of its inconveniences and look at them afresh for evidence. Before long she had located a few minutes in a ladies’ toilet somewhere, caught by surprise and pushing coins into a dispenser. Where had it been? It certainly wasn’t Lancing & Louche, for she remembered looking in a small mirror afterwards which couldn’t be mistaken for the opulent wall of glass at the office.

‘You could make some tea,’ said Janice irritably from the sofa. ‘I can’t get up.’

Francine went to the kitchen. The toilet had been at Mr Harris’s office. She had been surprised to find a dispenser there, although the only thing it provided was a giant white slab, an ancient relic like a mammoth’s tooth. She tried to number the weeks in her mind by means of their highlights, but they became blurred and resistant to her arithmetic and eventually she reached for her diary. The intractable symmetry of the pages caused her heart to clench with fear as she leafed backwards in search of Mr Harris. It was impossible that so much time should have passed, and yet the entries she glimpsed as she retreated week by week seemed horrifyingly distant and unrelated to her, as if they described the life of another person. Finally she found the Monday on which she had started with Mr Harris, and as she saw it remembered that her crisis had occurred on the second day of working there. She retraced her steps to the present moment, counting the weeks. There were just over six of them, and as they sprang up around her she felt the chill of their sudden shadow.

‘Francine!’ called Janice feebly from the sitting-room. ‘Fran cine !’

Francine stood in the doorway. The thought that she could be pregnant didn’t seem to have adhered to her. She felt it prowling loosed around the flat, and she had a strong desire to hide in the hope that it might forget her.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Janice. She sat up slightly, her senses pricked for excitement.

‘I think I’m pregnant,’ said Francine. The idea seemed even more remote now that she’d said it.

‘I knew you were going to say that!’ shrieked Janice. She swung her legs off the sofa. ‘I knew it! Isn’t that weird? That’s my sixth sense — just before you said it I knew what you were going to say!’

‘Really?’ said Francine.

‘God, weird.’ Janice collapsed back on to the sofa. ‘That’s the second time that’s happened to me recently.’

‘It’s been six weeks,’ said Francine. Her revelation didn’t appear to have made any impact, and she wondered if she had really said it. An unfamiliar need to be alone tugged at her, but the nervous bustle of her thoughts insisted on further attempts at socializing.

‘Sorry, I’m just in shock,’ said Janice. She breathed deeply, as if hoping to overcome her fascination with her own clairvoyance. ‘How late are you?’

‘Six weeks,’ repeated Francine.

‘Since it should have started?’

‘No, no, since the last one.’

‘Oh, that’s not so bad. Are you regular?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s anxiety,’ diagnosed Janice. ‘Did you forget to take a pill or something? Often worrying about that can do it. I knew a girl that happened to. She—’

‘I’m not on the pill, actually,’ said Francine.

When she was younger, Francine’s mother had forcibly accompanied her to a doctor’s surgery and come away triumphant with several foil packets of tiny pills which she directed Francine to take.

‘I know you’re a good girl,’ she had said comfortingly in the car on the way there. ‘But boys your age have hormones. It gives them bad skin and worse ideas. Tell the doctor you’ve got cramps.’

Within weeks Francine’s flesh had fattened alarmingly, and she had secretly stopped taking the pills, removing one each day from the foil and dropping it down the plug hole when she brushed her teeth so that Maxine wouldn’t find out. Remembering the terror with which she had watched herself inflate before the mirror, the well-composed lines of her figure blurring, she had never tried them again; and she had learned from that same reassuringly truthful oracle that she was lucky. The passing of time, undisrupted by misfortune, monthly confirmed the news. Even treading the high-wire of personal risk Francine had felt no fear, for the aggregate of her impregnability grew with each proof of it. She had, she was sure, cultivated a certain immunity, for which indifference provided frequent boosts. The physical intrusion which was often the price of her pleasures — a pay-off for the attention, infatuation, and supplication which preceded it — was a distant thing, a remittance calculated according to the principles of fair exchange. The scope of invasion was limited to areas of public access and in the privacy of her own thoughts, where she could wander freely amongst a range of other subjects, the trespass usually didn’t trouble her. She didn’t see why she should be expected to enjoy it, for the privilege was not hers but theirs. She had always felt herself to be most untouchable when being touched, and although of course she preferred the presence of a barrier between that suspect male flesh — who knew where it had been? — and her own, it was often an effort to remember in her detachment to insist on it. Ralph, however, had protected himself so vehemently as almost to give offence, and Francine understood enough about irony to recognize that perhaps she had become the victim of it.