Rachel Cusk - Saving Agnes

She had never been able to remember the conclusion to that story. She had no memory of tearful reunions. Sometimes, she used to think that perhaps another family had found her crying there on that doorstep, and had taken her in and brought her up as one of their own, without telling her.

Things between them had, she supposed, come to a stage where the phrase suggested mutual obstruction; and yet there was a lack of verbiage, of event and gesture, which, though she knew herself to possess flaws, hinted at the additional presence of a mystery which might redeem them. He was holding something back; or rather, he was letting it out, for had she not noticed it? Normally the best kept of secrets, now he was dropping clues. His evasions and silences were becoming pointed and obvious. He longed to be away from her, that much was plain. Pleased with her detective work, Agnes did not trouble to peer too closely at its implications for fear their content, like something artificial, might harm her.

She had never thought their relationship would be ended, for the simple reason that it had never really seemed to begin. They had merely drifted together, she supposed, like a commonplace; the soggy detritus of two gappy lives which would drift apart again at the next convenient tide. She had heard of such a thing as a casual encounter, and yet she had applied her old formulas to the stark patina of its reality as if she knew nothing. She had dragged out her suitcase of emotions and strewn its contents over a chair like a travelling saleswoman.

Once, in the darkness of her north London room, she had gazed upon his tender neck and told him that she loved him. He had said nothing, of course, fixing her with eyes which could have been empty or full depending on the light, and had left her to draw whatever conclusions she wished. She had said it again, and again, as if trying to shock him, but the threat of madness had stopped her before he did. She expected at least a dénouement in exchange for all this mystery.

She got up from the step and looked out of the window. It gave out on to the garden, and she realised she must be directly below the large drawing-room in which she had last seen him. A low filter of mist hung beneath the pale afternoon sky. The sand-coloured paths carved into the smooth lawn fanned symmetrically out from her vantage point like sunless rays. This, after all, was the very centre of things. Perhaps it would not be so bad, being without him. She would have the time to do other things: she could take up sport, clean her room, get things done. It would be like recovering from a long illness.

She saw him then, strolling past a tree and over a lawn as if he owned it. His separateness pained her. The house ticked quietly around her. He was, perhaps, readying the executioner’s axe before her very eyes. She pressed her face against the cool glass and felt it joined by other ghostly faces. He had left her here in this feminine mausoleum, this connubial death-row, as if to do so conformed with his sense of etiquette. She was not like Henry, the master of ceremonies, the magician with his disappearing wives. She was a Christian, not a lion. She was a wife, six-fingered.

The tree, which was in fact two trees grown from a single root, was beneath its glamorous foliage a sharp-clawed and vicious thing. With its dragon hide and single chicken foot, it crouched like an old woman in the cave of its skirts where Agnes, hiding from the truth, took shelter. Once there she felt a momentary shame, as if in spying its arthritic limbs and ugly knotted joints she had violated its privacy, like a voyeur at a drowning gorging on the veined blubber of a dead woman. It had always troubled her that she might suffer humiliation at the hands of death as well as those of life; might be found with her nightdress hitched ignominiously over her head, her body white and flaccid as a fallen moon on some dark river bank. Or perhaps smashed open like a watermelon on tarmac, her juices messy, the stench of her making policemen gag. Then again, something less dramatic: old age and desertion could find her three days’ dead in a council flat, tumescent and blue in a bath-chair. What could one do? Except surrender to it, long for it, as now with the secrets of her body on her lips like a tactless remark. She crouched by the crippled trunk in the dirt, uncaring. The gardens were quite still beneath the pale bowl of the sky, flat on their back in the late afternoon sunlight. Agnes sensed an air of virginal subjugation in their exquisitely trimmed and flowered beds; the lawns too smooth, the trees honed and shaped like ice-cream cones. There were no wild and clumpy patches, no grinning daisies or feisty nettles or other imperfection to proclaim life.

There would — and nothing was more certain than this — come a time when she was no longer expected to behave so properly. The thought almost cheered her up. She would be sundered from herself as surely as Anne Boleyn’s head from her shoulders, watching it all from a great height and laughing, perhaps, at those who were cleaning up the mess and thinking as she had a moment ago that they would not want to be seen dead anywhere. She wondered that the mere thought of it did not drive people to greater extremities: hiding madly beneath trees, peering out between the branches, a lover nowhere to be seen.

When Agnes spent her first night with John, they had known each other for several weeks, she recalled, and in that time had seen many films, some of which had laid out unsparing as a map the details of nights as yet unspent, words unspoken, injuries unfelt and partings unimaginable. When, after several lifetimes of experience in dark cinemas, the subject of sex seemed to Agnes to be accompanying them like a grumbling chaperone on their outings, she had begun to worry at his failure to acknowledge it. She had brought it up one evening herself as he walked her home, and though she knew she had not managed to pronounce the word with the comfortable familiarity she had aimed for, she was still astonished to be met by shrieks of mysterious laughter.

‘Why are you laughing?’ she had cried, stopping in the street and facing him furiously.

‘I’m sorry,’ he had said wiping his eyes. ‘It was just the way you said it. “Shall we have ‘sex’?” ’ He mimicked her cruelly, with a school-marmish emphasis on the last word. ‘Look, I don’t want to rush you, okay? The ball’s in your court.’

Left to content herself with that rather lewd-sounding epithet, Agnes went to the doctor and got a prescription for the Pill. Following the instructions on the packet carefully, she had taken them for a full month and during that time had developed a knowing air which suggested she was a woman of the world. As her time of readiness approached, she had informed John of the imminent arrival of his visa to her unexplored territories, and he had marked the date as if arranging a business meeting. Spontaneity, then, had not been a noticeable feature of her blooding; and it was for this reason, perhaps, that when they met on the day in question, and spent it assiduously together as if preparing for an exam, their conversation had been somewhat laden with uncomfortable silences and tense asides. As evening drew near, Agnes had become stricken by terror at his oddness. Surely he wanted to do this? Surely everyone wanted to? She had thought at the time there must be something wrong with her, but it was not until their innocuous fumblings had somehow come to a fruition she had observed rather than shared that she knew for sure.

‘Are you all right?’ he had said, rolling off her and staring at the wall.

She allowed herself to move her limbs, which ached from the rigid concentration with which she had maintained the position he had indicated for her to adopt some time ago. She turned on to her side and extended an awkward arm towards him, draping it over his ribcage like something tranquillised. Her lack of affliction worried her. Why shouldn’t she be all right? What was supposed to have happened?