Rachel Cusk - Saving Agnes

‘And does she?’

‘Does she what?’

‘Have a big — you know.’

Greta leaned back in her chair and thought about it.

‘I guess,’ she said.

Once, in a tone of mild surprise, her lover had told her that her shoulders were actually quite tiny, as if someone had just accused them of the opposite. Surprised by his attention to her detail, she had allowed herself to be warmed and flattered by his compliment; if compliment it was. Over the next few days, catching sight of her reflection with a renewed increase of zeal, she was surprised to notice that her shoulders, far from receding, appeared to be growing larger with every glance. At first she assumed that their bulkiness was directly attributable to her own magnified interest in them; but eventually, trying on without success one of the close-fitting jackets which she now plucked eagerly from every shop rail she passed, she was forced to admit a more pedestrian and disturbing truth. Her shoulders were not tiny; in fact, by some standards, they could be judged quite broad. His comment, which for some time had been casting its bright and attentive beam around her troubled mind, became all at once rather menacing. It circled her like the fin of a shark, hinting at a black and malicious force beneath.

‘What really gets me,’ Greta concluded, ‘is that it’s kind of like they think they’re trying to get on our level. Like they’re being kind of friendly, you know? I mean, they think we really think about that stuff.’

Agnes’s dinner party on Saturday was an unremitting failure. Her Brylcreamed and blazered guests, selected as if from a line-up for their suitability as companions for Greta, had seemed to detect something untoward in their gathering and had remained diffident and ill-at-ease. Agnes had spent the early part of the evening luring their interest with Greta’s forthcoming attractions; but as the night wore on, it became apparent that Greta would have to be taken off the bill of fare.

‘I can’t believe she didn’t come!’ fumed Agnes as she and Nina were clearing up. ‘After all the trouble I went to — all the effort I made!’ She clattered plates noisily in the sink. ‘It was for her. I wanted her to meet nice people. Is there anything wrong with that? I just wanted her make some friends.’

‘She’d have had more chance at a bloody outpatients’ Christmas party,’ said Nina. ‘I don’t know where you found that bunch of bank clerks.’

‘They weren’t that bad! Anyway, it doesn’t make it right. She should at least have phoned to make an excuse. Maybe — maybe something’s happened to her. Maybe she’s been hurt.’

Nina cackled. ‘Grievous bodily harm has never looked so good,’ she said.

‘How can you say that?’ cried Agnes furiously.

‘Okay, but it’s still a bit suspect. It’s like you’re trying to control her.’ Nina began putting things away. ‘You’re not her mother, you know. You can’t relive things through her. You just have to get on with your life and let other people get on with theirs.’

A loud knock on the door just then inflamed Agnes’s heart with hope at her own defence. Nina ran to open it. It was Jack.

‘How’s it going?’ he said as Nina hustled him past the kitchen and into her room. A few minutes later, Agnes heard muffled whispers and giggles escaping from beneath the door. She continued clearing up in a desultory way and then decided to phone her lover. She let it ring for several minutes but there was no answer. She wondered where he was.

The next day, Greta appeared on Agnes’s doorstep clutching a bottle of wine.

‘You must be really pissed,’ she said penitently.

Agnes stared at her, uncomprehending.

‘About last night,’ elaborated Greta. ‘I’m really sorry.’

‘Oh.’ Agnes stood back to let her in. ‘What happened to you?’

‘Well,’ Greta flopped down in an armchair and threw up her hands despairingly. ‘I was all set to go, right? I bought the wine, I changed my clothes, and then I thought, well, I’ll have a little nap, right? It was still pretty early, so I just lay down on the bed and closed my eyes. Next thing I know, I wake up and it’s eight o’clock!’

She slapped her forehead and gazed at Agnes in entreaty.

‘You could still have made it,’ observed Agnes stiffly. ‘No one even got here until eight thirty. Failing that, you could have phoned. I was worried about you. All of us,’ she added, resorting to numbers, ‘were worried about you.’

‘Eight in the morning !’ wailed Greta pitifully, ‘I slept all night. In fact, I was halfway here before I realised anything was wrong — it was dark when I left, you see, but then it started to get light. It was kind of weird.’ She grinned. ‘I was totally freaked.’

AGNES walked to the tube station every morning. In the first few weeks of her employment she had undergone this journey in a haze induced by the unaccustomed earliness of the hour, but now that she was used to it it had become almost enjoyable. It was a free space, a few liberated minutes of prologue in which she could regard the forthcoming day with unbridled optimism. This optimism was rarely borne out in the dreary dawn of activity at Diplomat’s Week, but Agnes’s early ruminations gave her the strength to endure at least some of its hours. She found it hard to renounce her faith, however unfounded, in the ultimate, inexorable improvement of things.

As she emerged from her house into a particularly iridescent eight o’clock mist, the tincture of sky and air recalled in her the memory of similar auroral practices from long ago. As a child, she had often used to wake early — sometimes six or seven o’clock — and had become acquainted with the quiet hours, before the rest of the world awoke, like a new and secret friend. She would open her curtains and rejoice at the newborn blueness of the sky, the lawns wet and golden with dew, the great trees shaggy with leaves and hung with choiring birds. It seemed to her then as if she had woken into the world of castles and fairy tales in which she had found sleep the night before; and she would run lightly downstairs in her bare feet, struggling with the locks on the front door until they released her into the magic beyond. She knew she had discovered a region grimly disbarred by the adult world with its fortresses and fastenings, and she would run out into it, cavorting on the wet lawn in her nightdress. In autumn she would dance in a whirl of leaves; in winter, she would put on boots and forge small tracks beside the spiky delicate imprints of birds.

Agnes thought of her small pagan self all the way to the tube station. She remembered the feeling of clean air against her body, naked beneath its nightdress. So far was she now from nature, she realised then, that she didn’t even know what month it was; and as she perused Gillespie Road for clues, there was to be seen neither tree nor flower to help her.

She stopped at the news-stand on the corner to buy a paper. Normally she did not do so, preferring to daydream her way to Finchley Central, but she had often pitied the withered old man who perched in the kiosk as one of the few whose job was possibly less rewarding than her own.

‘Fank you, fank you,’ he was saying as strangers grabbed newspapers and thrust jangling coins into his outstretched hand. Agnes gave him her money and awaited his reply, but he turned away and began fumbling with the neat stacks of cigarettes behind him instead. She reddened, her heart lurching with rejection, and buried her embarrassment in the front page.

It was late September, it seemed, the very glorious and glowing nub of autumn. She could scarcely believe that summer had sickened, died, and been buried without her even noticing. Looking around, there was little evidence now of mellow fruitfulness. She longed suddenly for the lost seasons of her youth, whose verdant memory had not been withered by time. She had surely been more alive then; had felt cold winters and hot summers, had rejoiced in the ebullience of spring. An old taste of innocence and freedom rose salty in her mouth and was gone. The bare pavements and monotonous skies of her exile echoed everywhere the stark chords of disenfranchisement, and in the thrall of its hideous music she was suddenly hit by a terror so large and black she thought it would surely crush her.