Rachel Cusk - Saving Agnes

‘Nothing’s the matter!’ she would retort, aged seventeen and passionate. ‘I just don’t think we should all be stuffing ourselves when people in the Third World are starving, that’s all.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ her mother would say, nervous at the sudden intrusion of several emaciated, hungry-eyed nomads in her beige-carpeted dining-room. ‘Honestly, what a waste.’

‘Why don’t you send them your leftovers?’ Tom would opine. ‘Cold carrots and congealed gravy. Yum, yum.’

At that point Agnes would stand up.

‘I hate you all!’ she would cry, bursting into tears and leaving the room. As she slammed the door, a wave of badly suppressed laughter would gather and break ignominiously over her furious head.

‘I’m fine, Mum,’ she said now, staring into a swamp of green vegetables and gravy in which pieces of beef sported and swam. ‘I think I’m a bit car-sick, that’s all.’

‘Well,’ replied her mother. ‘At least it’s not all that business about starving children any more.’

Agnes, ruminating on her youthful protests, felt amazed that she should ever have dared to care so passionately. Now the wanting, begging world frightened her. It occurred to her that these days she seemed to care about little other than herself.

‘Don’t let her fool you.’ Tom spoke with his mouth full. ‘We passed within a mile of some poor people on the way down. Agnes is on hunger strike.’

‘She does look awfully thin,’ said her mother to no one in particular. She raised her voice a few decibels for the benefit of Agnes’s father, whose hearing defect was no less severe for being wilful. ‘Don’t you think she looks thin, Alex?’

‘Appetites like birds,’ came the mumbled reply. ‘The lot of them.’

‘I like a nice red,’ Tom said, raising his wine-glass to Agnes.

‘If she’s in a skirt,’ Agnes witheringly replied.

‘Children!’ their mother breathed uncertainly. She appeared to require reassurance that these strange, rather good-looking young professionals who had come from London for lunch were in fact her offspring. ‘Honestly,’ she sighed, bearing off their half-finished plates. ‘What a waste. And with so many people in the world starving.’

After lunch they walked the dogs, Duke and Duchess, titles bestowed on them, Agnes hoped, more in the spirit of anarchy than aspiration. Tom, when he had heard what they were to be called, had suggested they call them Muck and Brass instead.

‘Whatever can you be thinking of?’ their mother had cried aghast, ‘Imagine calling a dog Muck!’

‘Why don’t we call them Simon and Garfunkel,’ said Agnes, who, aged twelve, had just purchased her first album.

‘We’ll end up calling them Belt and Braces at this rate,’ interjected her father to the bemusement of them all. In his younger days he had been known to enjoy the occasional joke, but had since retreated from the front line for reasons which his daughter expressed more succinctly and volubly than he ever could when she claimed that nobody understood her.

The dogs were old now and resembled ambulant barrels as they trotted heavily over the meadow. Tom chucked a stick far ahead of them and they lumbered after it.

‘You love it, don’t you?’ said Agnes as they walked.

‘Love what?’

‘All this.’

She swept a regal hand airily over their surroundings. Tom pursed his lips and looked at his boots, which were kicking up a fine spray of recent rainwater from the grass as he walked.

‘Don’t you?’

‘Of course. It’s home, isn’t it?’

‘But?’

Agnes considered her next comment. It disturbed her to realise that she had become distanced from her egalitarian plans for society. It had begun to occur to her since they had arrived that she quite possibly might never attain for herself the standard of living to which her upbringing had accustomed her. The world of work had surprised and dismayed her with its terms. It did not seem to respond to the methods by which she had hitherto always achieved success. There might come a time, all too soon, when she herself would need to be saved from the perdition of economic failure.

‘But it’s not fair. It’s not fair that we should have all of this when other people have nothing.’

‘Ha!’ Tom turned abruptly on his heel and continued walking. Agnes had to run to catch up with him. ‘So what do you suggest? What would make you feel better about it? How about, say, we sell the house and put Mum and Dad in a council flat?’

‘Don’t be childish,’ retorted Agnes. ‘You know that’s not what I mean.’

‘Explain to me, then. Tell me what you mean. I’ve always wanted to know what people mean when they say things like that.’

He smiled and shook his head in a manner which Agnes found most infuriating, and to which her immediate reaction was to cry and stamp her feet with frustration. Knowing, however, that such a response would do nothing to advance her cause, she groped for something more ingenious.

‘Why do you have to be so aggressive about it? I’m entitled to my point of view.’

‘Oh, sorry,’ said Tom gleefully. ‘I forgot. Human rights. So, Ag, tell me the point of your bloody view.’

Agnes had not intended to precipitate an ideological exchange of such ferocity, and felt now that she was somewhat out of her depth. Admittedly, Tom himself was being insufferably shallow, but his graphic illustration of the effects of her causes had unsettled her, for in truth she would not have wished tower-blocks or penury upon anyone. She was passionate, of that she was sure: her emotions on viewing certain television documentaries were reassuringly genuine. But when it came to whiting her own sepulchre, things became rather unclear. None of her family, now that she came to think of it, had ever seemed remotely threatened by her plans to vanquish them. Her colourful polemic had always been taken as a spicy sauce of dissent to flavour the bland taste of conformity. Indeed, she sometimes felt they almost expected it of her. Perhaps it gave them pleasure to watch her capitulate at the altar of élitism and ingest the fruits of capitalist exploitation.

‘You just don’t want other people to have what you can’t get,’ Tom was saying. ‘You don’t really care about the poor or the homeless. It’s your fear of failure that’s behind it. If nobody wins, you can’t lose.’

‘What do you call winning?’ Agnes rejoined, inflamed anew. ‘Sitting around and making money out of other people’s misfortune, like you? What about people who actually do care about things, who reject a system they didn’t choose in the first place? Are they losers just because they refuse to play the game?’

‘Don’t talk to me about caring! You’re the one who wants to turf her own parents out of their home, remember? I’ll tell you what I care about — I care about them.’ He pointed towards the house but his gesture also encompassed the dogs, who, splayed on their sides in the long grass and breathing heavily, bore a poignant enough resemblance to their masters to further his cause. ‘They’ve worked all their lives for this. How do you think they feel when you throw it back in their faces just to make yourself feel better? I feel sorry for you.’

‘Watch out, Tom,’ sneered Agnes. ‘You’re becoming a bleeding heart.’

‘Actually, it’s your brain I’m worried about. Your precious brain, with all those years of private —’ he emphasised the word — ‘ private education that have gone into it.’ Tom had always nursed a sizeable chip on his shoulder about Agnes’s superior academic prowess, but would not have seen this as any reason to identify with her protagonists. ‘Well, it’s rotted with self-pity, if you ask me. You’ve overfed it with your precious socialism and your bloody feminism so it’s got fat and lazy. You’ve given it so many excuses that it’s stopped working, along with all your leftie feminist friends.’