Rachel Cusk - Saving Agnes

‘I didn’t,’ he replied. ‘I had to go and see someone in Finsbury Park on business. That’s why I’m up here. He gave it to me.’

Having ascertained the spirit of the occasion, Agnes went to the kitchen in search of two matching glasses. She opened cupboards aimlessly, unable suddenly to remember what she was looking for. Tom’s impromptu visits often disturbed her in this way. This was not so much the fault of their differences — in Agnes’s environment Tom often took on the aspect of one who recognised nothing within it, coming as he did from an element of corporate largesse — as of a sense she had of two worlds colliding which hitherto had been kept apart. It made her unsure of how to behave.

Back in the sitting-room, Merlin had just come home. Agnes emerged from the kitchen to see Tom slapping him on the back in the jovial pantomime of manhood he always employed with Agnes’s friends, and possibly even with his own. Merlin, visibly shaken by the blow, took to the sofa.

‘Look what Tom brought.’ Agnes waved the bottle in front of him. ‘Do you want some?’

‘Yes please,’ said Merlin politely, recovering his spirits. ‘That’s very generous of you, Tom.’

Agnes fled to the kitchen for another glass.

‘Don’t mention it,’ said Tom behind her. ‘Actually, do mention it. Mention it often.’

When she returned, Tom was easing the cork from the bottle with his large thumbs. Merlin cringed. Agnes, confident that Tom’s removal of the cork would be consistent with his general demeanour — a smooth pop and fizz as opposed to a loud racing-driver’s bang and a foaming geyser — remained calm.

‘Hey presto.’ He put the cork on the table and began pouring champagne into the glasses.

‘You’ve done that before,’ said Merlin.

‘All in a day’s work,’ replied Tom. He was a management consultant in the City, and, Agnes reflected, was probably being truthful.

‘How’s work?’ she inquired.

‘Fine.’ He leaned back into the sofa, his legs firmly spread in a V emanating from his crotch. Agnes looked away, obscurely embarrassed. ‘I’m on a job for a publishing firm, actually, which might interest you.’

‘Oh, really?’ said Agnes brightly. She was unaccustomed to talking shop, and was prepared now to enjoy its new intimations of adulthood. ‘What are you doing for them?’

‘Usual sort of thing. Getting rid of dead wood, tightening things up. It’s not difficult, seeing as they’ve got three people doing one person’s job. We’re slimming down editorial at the moment.’

‘Oh.’ Agnes felt rather cold. ‘So what happens to the other two?’

Merlin shifted on the sofa, perhaps made uncomfortable by the prospect, albeit theoretical, of brother reducing sister.

‘Sacked.’ Tom elaborated his succinct reply with a throat-cutting gesture.

‘But — but what are they supposed to do? What’s to become of them?’

She fixed him with a glance intended to mortify him. He looked back at her for a minute and then stared into mid-air, as if considering the problem for the first time.

‘Oh dear,’ he said finally. ‘They’ll all probably kill themselves, won’t they?’ He sighed exaggeratedly. ‘Don’t be so soft, Agnes. They’ll get other jobs, of course. Better ones, hopefully. It’s not my problem.’

‘No!’ she cried. ‘But it’s theirs! They might have — circumstances. For all you know, they might have five children each and sick relatives to look after!’

Merlin guffawed delightedly.

‘Christ.’ Tom clasped his forehead. ‘Look, they could have enough dying aunts to hold a wheelchair rally for all I care. It still doesn’t make sense to keep them on.’

‘Sense!’ shrieked Agnes. ‘How does it make sense to sacrifice innocent people on the — on the altar of capitalist greed? And even if it does make sense to you, why does that make it right?’

‘I never said it did. You said that.’

‘But don’t you care ?’

‘No.’ He grinned infuriatingly. ‘That is what you wanted me to say, isn’t it? I’m an unprincipled capitalist pig. I drink the blood of unemployed people.’

‘I think I’ll leave you guys to it,’ said Merlin, getting up to leave. ‘Nice to have seen you, Tom.’

‘Bye, Merlin.’ Tom raised his hand in farewell. ‘I mean, oink.’

Merlin laughed as he retreated up the stairs. Agnes glowered after him. They all banded together in the end, she thought.

Had Agnes had a sister, she might have found that feelings of sisterhood came to her more easily; as it was, such emotions were left to her imagination. Her early needy conjectures had sculpted only a more perfect version of herself in their quest for female companionship, and while at first Agnes had been content to trail around adoringly after her demigoddess, her later suspicions that in Grace she had created a monster were perhaps a more accurate simulation of sibling rivalry than she realised.

Agnes’s wistful longings for sisterly love had been if anything intensified by her years in the convent. Although the word ‘sister’ underwent temporary etymological corruption — denoting as it did those creatures of habit who glided like phantoms down dark corridors — the dormitories aflame with cruel whispers and classrooms echoing with malice served only to drive thoughts of gentle love and cheering loyalty deep into her heart like a stake. Agnes’s imaginary sister, who looked something like Doris Day, was not required to vanquish these uniformed imposters; she just smiled and sang as she lay beside Agnes in the dark, remembering the time they tried on their mother’s lipstick, the time they dressed up in her clothes, the countless times they played house and baked cakes and talked about the boy who worked in the village shop. Tom, who had been the most pliant of playmates, had at first indulged in these unliberated fantasies with her; but their differences, she soon learned, went beyond his inability to sustain any sort of credible interest in the boy at the village shop. The sweet, secretive mystery of the feminine continued to dog Agnes like her own shadow. Whipping round to capture it in the mirror with a glance, she would be met only with her own eyes, which were brown and plain as daylight.

Apparently there had been a little girl, or so her mother told her, before Agnes; a little sleeping, dreaming coil whose heart beat in a warm ocean of blood. A curled pearl who smiled and sang, a tiny white angel, too good for life. She had come out to see the world, with its dust and glare and noise and men in white masks, and had closed her eyes. She had flown away and never come back. She had to make room for you, her mother told her kindly. She was too tiny for life, too delicate. Agnes held her like a feather in the palm of her hand. Agnes, with her big bawling mouth and her destiny gnarled and heavy as a tree trunk, had chased her away.

UNDER ground, Agnes felt the world was stripped down to its bare essentials. Her lover, in a rare and uncomfortable moment of loquacity, confessed that he rarely took the underground and only then to see how the other half lived. Later it became plain to Agnes that he drove his car to keep that distinction alive, but at the time she was strangely relieved to hear him express an opinion so different from her own. He seemed so indistinct to her sometimes, flimsy as a ghost on the treadmill of his deepest moments. They came back to her in the full moon of her loneliness, the odd things he said, little islands of identity marooned in an inscrutable ocean. The memory of them sustained her on the long journey until the next sighting of land.

Agnes boarded the train and headed for an empty seat in the middle of the carriage, but was beaten to it by a woman laden down with plastic bags, who elbowed her out of the way with the expertise of one who has had to fight to get what she wanted in life. Agnes, who didn’t even know what she wanted, conceded the territory with an awkward twist of her body, as if she had never intended to sit there in the first place. People stared. She edged her way back into the space by the doors and hung on to one of the straps dangling from the ceiling.