Rachel Cusk - The Temporary

‘What do you mean?’ he said nervously. ‘You must know what you mean.’

He met her gaze, willing her to let him go, but her sharp eyes pricked his swollen, dreamy detachment and he felt its poisons rush over him. He understood then that she wanted to hurt him, to draw him out and show him his own helplessness. What had he done? Why was he being punished so? As he wondered, everything — Francine, the germ she carried, the room itself — seemed to gather against him and accuse him of his own significance.

‘I don’t know,’ she said obstinately. ‘How should I know? It’s too complicated. How do you expect me to just decide?’

‘I don’t.’ He was surprised to feel tears leap to his eyes. ‘I thought you had.’

‘That’s just so pathetic ,’ she spat. ‘I mean, you act like it’s just nothing, you know, like it’s my decision and it doesn’t have anything to do with you.’

He saw to his amazement that she hadn’t really thought about it at all, that she just said things to engage him; that all the time he had thought her to be moving in a particular direction, however obliquely, she had only been spinning threads around him, a web in which he now knew himself to be caught. Their predicament rose before him, new again, as raw as an untended wound.

‘I—’ He felt all at once terribly confused and his voice sounded thin, as if he were forcing it through something dense. ‘I don’t know,’ he said weakly. He dragged his eyes to her face. ‘I just can’t seem to believe in it.’

As he said it, he suddenly knew that at last he had jumped and that something would now happen. He watched Francine as he fell airily away from her, and she appeared to grow so hard before his eyes that he wondered if she might break like a glass bottle if she fell with him.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she said finally. Her voice sounded harsh and deliberate, retaliating for his obscurity with belligerence.

‘I don’t think you can either! I don’t think you’ve actually realized that you’re going to have a baby. A baby.’ He said it again, understanding that he hadn’t really known it until that moment. His acceptance of it came in a rush, whole, as if he had solved a mathematical enigma, and he felt the knowledge begin to function in him as efficiently as a machine.

‘You don’t know anything!’ said Francine. Her words rattled like dice, looking randomly for victory. Ralph realized that he was frightening her, and the sense of returned power, its possibilities, aroused him. ‘You don’t know what it’s like.’

‘Go on, then. Tell me. Tell me what it’s like.’

She settled back in her seat, confident again, and examined her fingers with studied self-deprecation.

‘What do you want to know?’ she said, more sweetly.

‘I want to know why you’ve decided not to keep it.’ He felt utterly unlike himself, and he trusted his new incarnation, loved the sound of his voice. ‘Tell me what’s going on in your mind. I want to know how you made the decision.’

Her eyes brightened at his mistake.

‘I didn’t say I’d decided, in case you’d forgotten. I only said I might have changed my mind.’

She straightened in her chair and looked at him defiantly. His hatred for her snapped its leash and leapt unbounded at her throat.

‘But what if I said that I wanted you to have it?’

Ralph heard the air gasp. A silence teetered between them. Francine looked down at her hands again, and when her eyes returned to him they had assumed a new softness.

‘Do you?’ she said.

He almost laughed aloud as he realized that she was actually flirting with him. A smile strained at his lips and seeing it, she coyly fiddled with something on the table.

‘I’m not talking about us,’ he said, surprised to hear the gentleness in his voice. It felt wonderful to say what he was saying. His life flowered before him, a future filled with a person he now knew he could be. ‘I’m talking about what’s the right thing to do.’

‘I can’t do it on my own!’ she said, thumping the table wildly with her fist. She appeared to have shrunk before his eyes, her words coming in enraged squeaks. ‘It’s your responsibility too!’

‘I know it is.’ He paused and then said what all at once seemed perfectly natural. ‘What I’m suggesting is that I look after it.’

His meaning launched itself, rose, drifted between them. Ralph watched it anxiously, wondering whether it would work, whether it were plausible and true, a thing that could be said.

‘It makes sense when you really think about it,’ he continued hurriedly. ‘I can provide financial support and’ — he felt himself growing horribly ridiculous, his confidence draining — ‘and take full responsibility for it, and you can get on with your life as if nothing had happened, if you want.’

Francine was so still that it seemed impossible that she would ever again come to life. His words echoed around her as if in an empty room. Ralph prayed for her to speak, to clothe the nakedness of what he had said.

‘Without me?’ she said finally.

‘Yes.’ Her comprehension fuelled him for his last leap. ‘I–I don’t love you. You must know that.’

It seemed odd to him that he should suddenly have found the means to tell her that which, in the uncomplicated weeks before all of this happened, had been so impossible to pronounce. He was astonished by his own courage, which he seemed to have found lying idle in him as if it had been there all along; an ungainly tool whose beauty he had discovered only in its use. Now that he had it, he could see with one frenzied examination that his life was broken and that he could repair it all. Already he had built a firm platform of righteousness, and from it he steadily viewed the range of what he could do, whole reaches of himself he had never explored. It was as if he had laboured all this time in a dark, unfavoured comer, scratching life from a soil so blighted that it multiplied his efforts far beyond its yield; while all along a whole kingdom had been in his possession to which only truth gave entrance. He had never felt more certain of his recognition of this key, more expert in his ability to pluck it from amongst its thousand glittering imitations.

‘I want to go home,’ said Francine suddenly.

She stood up, pushing her chair. It fell back, thudding to the floor like an executed man.

‘Francine—’

‘Leave me alone.’

She looked straight at him, drawing her eyes like knives. His heart flailed in his chest.

‘Please stay. We’ve got to talk — please!’

She picked up her coat and bag and left the room before he could even stand up. He heard her open the front door and he waited a few seconds, praying for her to slam it. The soft and distant click signalled his condemnation.

*

‘What’s this?’ said Ralph, gesturing helplessly at a large cardboard box which sat on the top of his desk. He put his arms around it to lift it to the floor, buckling beneath the weight, and straightened up to find a dusty embrace imprinted on the front of his shirt. ‘Oh, damn it!’ he said irritably, brushing himself down. ‘Roz, who the bloody hell put this here? My desk is not a dumping ground for boxes of rubbish.’

‘It’s them magazines you wanted,’ said Roz. Her eyes were fixed on her computer screen, but they jumped from side to side in an effort not to look up. ‘I brought them in.’

‘Oh.’ Ralph sat down and bent guiltily over the box. ‘That’s very kind of you. Did you carry them up on your own? They’re very heavy.’

‘It was all right,’ shrugged Roz. He opened the box and took a magazine from the top of the pile. There were hundreds of them, all with the title Auto Week emblazoned across their tattered covers in red. He put the magazine on his desk and regarded it with polite interest. On the front was a photograph of a stationary car. A woman in a swimming costume lay on her back on the bonnet, as if the car had just hit her. She looked rather like Francine. He looked at the date, and saw that the magazine was almost fifteen years old.