Rachel Cusk - Saving Agnes

Agnes seemed to hear, as if from around her, dissenting voices which appeared to take exception to her vast cultural exchange programme. Condescending! they cried. Racist! Her thoughts short-circuited with self-doubt. It was so hard sometimes, having to think for oneself. A loud blare of horns from the surrounding traffic seemed to chorus their disapproval. A stream of cars backed up and ground to a halt on the road ahead. She got off the bus and walked.

ON Monday morning Greta arrived later than usual at the office. Agnes was sitting alone proof-reading the details of the embassy of St Martin and the Grenadines, and had been transported in spirit if not in body to a palm-fringed beach on which she and her lover sat while a warm ocean fawned at their feet like an affectionate cat.

‘Is there anyone in there?’ whispered Greta volubly, while occluding herself behind the doorframe.

‘The coast is clear,’ said Agnes.

‘Good.’ Greta bounded with more agility than grace on to Agnes’s desk. She produced a paper bag from which she extracted a cake that looked like a road accident. ‘Sorry to leave you in it. I got tied up.’

Agnes leaned back in her chair and looked at Greta’s shoes, which were high-heeled and festooned with a bondage of straps and laces.

‘I met this guy on my way here,’ continued Greta between bites. ‘I was going to be on time for once, too.’ She yawned, displaying mashed vistas of jam and cream. ‘We met in the tube station, so I knew it was destiny. You can’t ignore things like that. Anyway, I showed him my ticket and we just sort of got talking. He was really nice.’

‘Why did you show him your ticket?’ Agnes wondered if she had missed something. It was a suspicion she often entertained about herself.

‘What? Oh, I get you. He works for them, you know, the tube people. He’s the guy you show your ticket to. He was really nice,’ she repeated, shaking her head and smiling. ‘We had a good time together.’

‘So—’ Agnes hesitated before requesting further elucidation. Greta’s details tended to obscure rather than clarify. ‘So what exactly did you do?’ she asked finally, overcome by curiosity.

‘We went for a ride.’

‘You mean you just went off with him in his car? But you don’t know anything about him! He could be anybody!’

‘I told you,’ said Greta calmly. ‘He works on the tube. He had one of those neat tickets where you can go anywhere you want without paying. So we just rode the trains together for a while.’

‘How far did you go?’ asked Agnes, with some anxiety.

‘Northwood.’

‘Do you want some coffee?’

‘Sure.’ Greta smiled. ‘That would be nice.’

Making coffee, Anges grew increasingly troubled. The mysteries of social intercourse had never seemed to elude her so completely. Beside Greta’s chance meetings, her own encounters seemed both laboured and conservative. Did not everyone ponder, observe and ruminate before electing a mate? Or perhaps she was blind to it; perhaps the world around her crackled with fusion and fission, while she blundered with every step through electric fields of sexual activity, secret currents of attraction! How else had they come about, the infinite pairings on which the world had depended through all its ages? Had it been left to her, she thought glumly, Adam and Eve would even now remain absorbed in the round of art galleries and cinema trips which her romantic protocol judged the fit testing ground for love.

Within a very few minutes, however, her mind had found reassurance in the further contemplation of Greta’s predicament. What matter was there for envy, after all, in the attentions of those not encountered by recommendation or reference? She had been right to disapprove Agnes did not condone social separatism, but nor did she attempt to subvert it. While largely ignorant of those details which distinguished one echelon from another, she was growing increasingly expert in the machinations of that underworld which underpinned them all. The subtle propinquity of this realm, mingling as it did with the city’s pattern, was almost disarming. One could be blind to its close mystery, and yet be ambushed by its missionaries on every corner. Their individual plights concealed their numbers. Agnes pitied their predicament but remained disabused of their innocence. They had nothing to lose, and therefore would stop at nothing. She must take it upon herself to salvage Greta from the clutches of despots and dissemblers. She must set her on a course where malicious chance could not intervene. She would invite her to a dinner party.

‘What are you doing on Saturday?’ she said as she went back into the office.

‘Nothing,’ Greta replied. ‘Unless you can make me a better offer.’

The first time Agnes kissed a boy she was thirteen. There had probably been other kisses before then, pecks on the cheek and such, little moth-like eruptions of schoolroom fantasies; but her first proper kiss occurred when she was invited to a party at a large house owned by a local farmer, where the surrounding gentry landed, bomb-like, for frequent such festivities, with explosive consequences.

Agnes, understandably nervous in the face of such a mountainous social opportunity, deliberated long and hard over the choice of the outfit in which she would most expeditiously scale its heights. In the end, fear had made her suggestible; and she had worn an old dress of her mother’s, a boned black affair with breastplates like ice-cream cones which projected an unsubstantiated pertness, and which, she was assured, had smoothed many a path to social congress in its time. Once arrived, however, Agnes speedily understood that that time had long since passed. She grew uncomfortable as her attire drew an excess of wry, comical glances, and a noticeable deficiency of admiring ones. Some of the boys, wearing their fathers’ dinner jackets, seemed equally uncomfortable; but it was the others, the ones with the arrogant, laughing mouths, the tall ones who tossed their lank hair out of their eyes and smoked cigarettes, whom Agnes watched. Her heart sank as groups of girls with long curly hair and cloud-like dresses came into the room, laughing and smoking cigarettes with mouths which were more delicate but just as arrogant.

Made polite by desperation, she had allowed herself to become engaged in conversation with a tall, spotty boy who believed her when she lied about her age. He was with a friend, one of those boys whom Agnes had so liked the look of, and who seemed to be looking at her. Agnes ignored the spotty boy and instead giggled and jabbered at his friend. The friend stared at her, his hands in his pockets.

‘That dress makes you look fat,’ he said finally, sauntering off.

Left with the tall spotty one, Agnes allowed herself to be drawn outside and comforted. She recoiled at the feeling of his tongue in her mouth. It seemed rather unhygienic. Their teeth knocked together as they kissed.

‘Don’t,’ she said, as his hand crept under her skirt and attempted to inveigle itself into her knickers.

Her father, come to collect her at midnight, had caught them thus intertwined and had observed a tense silence on the way home. Agnes had spent the next few days in an orgy of alternating guilt and self-congratulation, and had worn poloneck sweaters for two weeks in the height of summer to hide the lovebite which swelled painful as a boil on her neck.

‘You know guys?’ said Greta.

‘I suppose so,’ Agnes replied.

‘Well, they say dumb things, right? Like this friend of mine, okay, her boyfriend says to her that she’s got a really big butt. All the time, like she really wants to talk about it, right? I mean, change the fucking record.’