Rachel Cusk - The Temporary

‘You go out at night and just put them somewhere quiet, under a tree or behind a hedge, and if it’s a cold night they’ll be gone by morning.’ She paused and turned to Ralph. Her face was bloodless and grainy with powder, but her eyes were alive, trapped in pincers of wrinkles. She smiled, showing him hoary teeth. ‘Girls always did it when I was younger. Just put them in a basket and they’ll be quite comfortable. It won’t hurt them at all. They just — drift away!’ She gestured lightly with her hand and leaned towards him confidentially. ‘It must be a cold night, you understand. And it’s so much better for them in the end.’

The queue shuffled disparately forward and a girl further up caught Ralph’s eye and giggled.

‘I’m quite, quite against cruelty, you know,’ said the woman, turning again to Ralph. ‘Quite against it.’

He smiled at her briefly and then looked down at his shoes, praying that she would be quiet.

‘A little gas would do,’ she said, this time to the man in front of her.

‘All right, love,’ he replied gruffly. ‘Give it a rest.’

Ralph got his money and left the bank quickly. In the air-conditioned avenues of the supermarket next door he felt better, and as he plucked things from shelves and put them in his trolley the growing pile of what he had chosen reassured him. Minutes later, staring at rows of tins, it all seemed rather burdensome and unnecessary and he considered the possibility of abandoning his botched selection and leaving unencumbered. The difficulty of escaping the intestine of the supermarket by any means other than natural ejection through a till discouraged him from this plan, and he trudged once more along its lulling passages. He hesitated over cheeses, wondering what to make. Beyond his considered forecast of dinner, a legion of unpredictabilities massed. He grabbed the nearest thing to hand and tossed it into the now-heavy trolley. When he pushed it, the freight of his anxieties seemed to trundle along with them.

Joining the end of the queue for a till the din of his consciousness grew louder. His situation cried out for his attention and yet, like a fight come upon in the street or the random witnessing of some injustice, he feared the consequences of his involvement with it. Things were clearly outside of his control; how much easier to wait it out than to wade in with flailing feelings and possibly achieve nothing but self-injury. Being with Francine reminded him of films he had seen in which men were trapped with ticking bombs and were forced to defuse them by blind instinct alone. He knew he should feel sorry for her, of course — it was she, after all, who housed this horror — and yet she confounded his sympathy just as she always had. Their bitter exchange haunted him, a silent presence which had grown more menacing over the past few days with each failure to acknowledge it. Now, whenever he thought of broaching it, the subject seemed to have grown too vast and unassailable and he backed off.

He watched the bright hills of food travelling along the conveyor belt ahead of him, dismantled at the end by industrious hands. If he were honest, he was horrified by the vacuity of it all. He had always assumed that somewhere in him was lodged a compass of certain feelings, a device which would direct him in times of crisis to the points of some fitted morality which he had never really tested but which, like the nameless components of an engine, he had taken for granted all along as being there. His reactions now seemed to him like postures, emissaries of selfishness locked in endless conference to settle distant fates. It terrified him to think, remembering that night, that Francine might have more of the stuff of nature — of life — in her than he himself did. When the words fell from his lips, all his talk of accidents and women he knew, they had felt as dry and nerveless as shavings carved from a block of wood. In fact he only knew one woman — Belinda — and remembering that made him feel as if he had died some time ago and only just noticed.

‘My God!’ he had said softly when she’d told him; told him quite casually, only when it came up in conversation. He had felt a peculiar desire to envelop her scoured body with his own and fill it with life.

‘It was nothing,’ she had replied. ‘It was a long time ago.’

She might even have shrugged, he couldn’t remember; but what had struck him was how surprised she had seemed by his reaction. Nervously, wanting to love her, he had concluded that this must be the first time he had seen her lying. She obviously still felt very unhappy about it, perhaps even ashamed. He had ached with sorrow for her, his thoughts weeping, but even so a thread of dissociation had wormed its way doubtfully through him.

Now, of course, he felt that he understood her indifference; and yet, had he not detected some failure in her, some unpleasant hardness, a discovery by which he could now judge himself? Loading his shiny packets of food on to the conveyor belt, he wondered what had happened to his blood, his heart, his burning, joyful nerves: all dried up, broken, rusty, abandoned like derelict implements in some forgotten corner of a house.

*

That evening Ralph stood in the kitchen and stirred a cheese sauce. He had been late getting home in the end, unable somehow to leave the office, and Francine had been waiting on the doorstep shaking with cold.

‘I’ve bought things!’ he had cried hopefully, showing her the loaded panniers with which he had struggled back from the Tube station.

She hadn’t replied, and his instant conviction for neglect had removed his freedom to create the new atmosphere between them on which he had decided. Now she sat forbiddingly in the other room with a blanket she had ordered him to fetch, while he made the dinner he had wanted to present as a gift but which had suddenly become a minimum requirement. She was watching television, and the sound of its imperturbable voices made him feel excluded and horribly free. He imagined himself leaving the flat beneath the cover of its noise and going somewhere else. The sauce began to heave and he turned down the flame, his forehead flushing. He remembered the first time she had come to his flat, when he had had an eerie, premonitory sense of her entrenchment. Thinking of that evening, it seemed curious to him that he had not foreseen that his life would become locked to hers, known that those hours were the last in which he would be himself. For a moment he imagined that he was back there now, alone in the kitchen while Francine waited in the next room. The illusion was surprisingly easy to substantiate. He felt light with the unravelling of the past few weeks, a quite blissful feeling actually, awoken from them as if from a frightening dream, and he stayed still, not wanting to jolt himself.

‘Is it nearly ready?’

He started round. Francine stood in the doorway, watching him. He fancied her unnerved, as if she had seen his thoughts like ghosts, and he smiled awkwardly to cover his feeling of having been caught. Her expression was more obviously assumed than usual and there was something uncertain and self-critical in her posture, a rare failure of projection which aroused in him a sudden and unexpected affection. He felt rather sorry for her, for he sensed that for once her inability to comprehend certain things irked her. He saw her straining to master the situation, but like blindness her lack was so fatal, so complete, that it rendered a whole world — even the description of that world! — obsolete. There were things she would never learn, for she had somehow evolved, he knew, without the proper instruments of feeling and thought. He had used to think that those tools must lie dormant in her somewhere, awaiting discovery, but now he regarded it almost as a biological impossibility that she would ever understand him.