Rachel Cusk - The Temporary

‘I’m fine,’ said Francine.

She spoke only a trifle too wanly, but it was enough to inform Ralph that she wanted him to know that she wasn’t fine at all. Even through the beginnings of perturbation at her unstated crisis, Ralph felt himself withdraw from her, the reaction he always had when the frigid barrier of her self-consciousness rose up between them. A brief anger warmed him for the way in which she overplayed herself, like a second-rate actor too enamoured with theatre to serve the reality it shadowed: even now, when she had for once affected him merely with the eloquence of a look, her clumsy demands stood up to conduct their loud negotiations. He had forgotten how impenetrable she was, how devoid of any depths into which feelings could sink, any softness to cushion reactions. Her surfaces were hard and extensive, and the little routines she devised were embarrassingly visible to the naked eye.

‘Let’s go this way,’ he said, leading her towards a gate which gave access to the upper part of the park. As they proceeded down a small avenue of trees, the noise of traffic was muffled, and in the sudden silence Ralph realized how still the day was beneath the rigid, toneless grey of the sky. Nothing moved, no leaves flickered, and the thick, paralysed air gave him the impression that time had stopped. Once or twice, when he was younger, he had woken in the dark to a similar stillness, and had lain nervously waiting for some noise or movement to signal that the world had not ground to a halt.

‘You’re obviously not fine,’ he said finally, hating himself for being led so easily away from his purpose. ‘Is anything wrong?’

Francine didn’t reply, and as her silence wrapped itself around him Ralph felt a strangling panic at his throat. He could feel her coat brushing against him as they walked, and her proximity struck him just then as more impertinent, more inappropriate, than even their sexual closeness had been. Thinking of that, his memories of it were barely visible. It was as if it had never happened, a renegade adventure of bodies, a desertion of consciousness by flesh. It had left no traces in his thoughts. He felt their limbs locked in brutal conversation as they walked, while his mouth — and the realization seemed suddenly awful to him, bothered him more than anything else — had nothing to say to her.

‘Francine?’ He stopped and faced her, not daring to put a hand on her arm. ‘What’s wrong?’

Her eyes evaded him, but the sulky fall of her face told him that he was to be presented with a complaint. He groaned silently with the burden of her dissatisfaction, so much heavier now that he was on the brink of shrugging it off, and wondered what was stopping him from just leaving her there and then.

‘Why do you care?’ she said.

‘Of — of course I care,’ he replied. He had an odd sensation of not knowing which words were at his lips until he heard them. ‘I want us to be friends.’

‘I get it!’ she said. He heard rather than saw that she was angry, for her face was curiously expressionless, except her mouth, which, loosened from its fine circumference, reminded him for a moment of Roz’s. ‘Don’t worry, I get it!’

‘Francine, you don’t understand,’ he began, seeing his mark but suddenly afraid to drive his point home on it. He felt a frantic urge to retract. ‘It’s not like that at all, please don’t be upset. It’s my fault, there’s something wrong with me —’

‘I’m pregnant,’ she said loudly over him. ‘I’m pregnant.’

She said it again, although he had heard her clearly, and for a moment Ralph didn’t feel anything at all. The silence of the park thronged around him like an invisible crowd and everything appeared suddenly rather deadened and remote, eroded until he experienced the most luminous solitude he had ever felt. His skin was very warm. For a delirious few seconds it seemed as if his body was not going to produce a reaction. He gazed curiously at Francine, trying to see her and thus tell himself at least that he would remember this moment for the rest of his life; but it was as if there were nothing beyond him but empty space, while inside him the whole world was contained. Her face was the face of a statue or a portrait in a frame, and as he looked at it he had a feeling of something else trying to communicate with him through it, of having been singled out by a hidden intelligence for the bestowal of some great secret. Significance moved across his thoughts, at large. Moments later it struck him that Francine seemed to be growing impatient, and it was then that he understood what was being expected of him. She was telling him something she thought he should know, returning what belonged to him like a wallet dropped in the street. She expected him to take charge. Faster than he would have thought possible, a torrent of fear tore through and drenched him.

‘I’m completely sure,’ she said, watching him as nervously as if she were lying. ‘I found out yesterday. I did a test.’

Ralph felt an awful laughter well up in him for the way in which she recited her answers, regardless of his failure to question her. Astonishing, inappropriate reactions were beginning to dance in him like broken puppets. Beneath the patina of personal novelty, the well-worn nature of the scene engendered in him an uncontrollable resistance to its clichés. He understood that he must do something, and the only quandary that offered itself up for resolution was his embarrassment at being in the park. Francine stood before him, tense with requirements.

‘We’d better go home,’ he said, taking her arm and guiding her back to the gate.

*

On the bus to work on Monday morning, Ralph found himself wishing that the unusually rapid stream of cars which rushed past the vehicle, quickly dividing and re-forming like water flowing around a rock, would tangle and clog to obstruct their progress. The journey constituted the first real opportunity for reflection which he had been permitted — not that he hadn’t been able to think in Francine’s presence over the weekend, for she had been silently expectant for most of it, but he had known that his meditations would take a different, although unguessable, form once he was alone — but the speed with which he was hurtling towards the Holloway Road gave him an odd sensation of falling, and he found himself gripping his seat with little thought for anything but his survival.

There wasn’t that much to think about in any case, he supposed, and even the small freedoms of consciousness which he had so far allowed himself merely reinforced his greater physical imprisonment. He had been called up, and the incontestable nature of his conscription summoned deep mechanisms of acceptance to quell the cunning instincts of evasion. The trajectory of his responsibilities was long, its demarcation unmistakable, and although he had sufficient memory of small desertions in the past to know that the stuff of self-interest was within him, escape from the current crisis required a crime larger than he was able to commit. It was easy, having been so comprehensively caught, then to detect the seeds of a harder salvation in his predicament. It offered a strange security from fear, the potential for absolution from himself, and having recognized the face of his enemy it was but a short step to believing that everything he had ever done — things, indeed, which had been done before he even existed! — had brought this moment upon him.

It seemed to him that Francine had reached the same conclusions, although by a blunter route. They hadn’t talked about it much over the weekend — hadn’t talked about anything at all, in fact — but her stolid, automatic presence in his flat bespoke intransigent atavisms to which he dared not even suggest modern solutions. He had tried to detect the surface movements of consciousness beneath her veiled expression, but had seen nothing beyond the certain obstinacy of a claimant, a look of stubborn patience which had filled him with apprehension. It had shamed him to wonder, as he had done once or twice with fantastical desperation, if she might at any moment reveal her intention to dismiss him from his duties, but by the end of the weekend it had become clear to him that she saw nothing in the tenuous nature of their experiment with each other which should invalidate its result. Her aspect, in fact, was more accusatory than troubled, and when finally he had asked her, late on Sunday night, what she was going to do, she had fixed him with a look of such disdain — almost of hatred, in fact — that a terrible panic had beaten like wings about his head as he watched her.