Rachel Cusk - Saving Agnes

‘Council,’ said Merlin as she bypassed the group on her way upstairs. As if urging her to join in, he added: ‘They’ve come to pass the death sentence.’

Agnes lingered reluctantly. She wanted to be alone.

‘How long have we got?’ she said.

Neither of the men appeared to hear her, so Merlin repeated the question.

‘Hard to say,’ said one of them. ‘Could be ten months, a year tops. What d’you say, Gavin?’

‘I’d give ’em three months, mate,’ said Gavin cheerfully. ‘First you got your subsidence, right? That won’t really bother you for a good while yet but then, this time of year, you’ve got your damp and cold to think about. It’s exposed all down that side, see? ’Less someone cares to pay a few grand to get that crack seen to and the wall supported on the other side, well, as I say, I’d give you three months.’

‘So what you’re saying, Gavin, is it’s their choice.’

‘Quality of life,’ said Merlin as an aside to Agnes.

‘As I say, unless someone wants to have it fixed up, that’s about the size of it,’ said Gavin.

‘But what if we can stand it?’ interjected Agnes. ‘What if we don’t mind the cold and damp? We could stay here for another year?’

Both men looked at her and grinned.

‘You’ve got a right one here,’ one of them said to Merlin. ‘A right masochist.’

On Thursday Agnes pleaded a headache at work and went home early. She got in the bath and lay there until the water grew lukewarm and her body appeared to be marbled with a bluish tinge. She remembered at school the nuns used to have giant bath sheets which fitted over their heads and draped over the sides of the bath so that they wouldn’t be able to see their own naked body lying there in the water. At least that’s what some of the girls had said, claiming to have seen these strange plastic contraptions hung out to dry in the kitchen garden. Agnes would have liked to have had one now. She could lie still beneath it like a subterranean canal, cavernous and secret. She wanted to be hidden from herself. She would feel safe then, protected, like the time her father and brother had buried her up to her neck in sand on the beach and she hadn’t been able to move; but she had felt warm, and light with the irresponsibility of it. Just her head grinning bizarrely out of the sand. She would be a limpet clinging to a rock, she thought now, if she could. She thought of a room full of bathing nuns, their shaven heads sprouting from the plastic in rows like tomato plants, and she began to laugh. Her laughter sounded all through the empty house. She thought of her father and brother running away down the beach, shrieking with delight at her predicament. She had laughed then, too, until it had begun to dawn on her that they might leave her like that and never come back.

On Friday, Agnes was called into Jean’s office. They each sat down on the appropriate side of the desk.

‘Now,’ said Jean, arranging her small hands neatly in her lap. ‘You probably know that this is the time of year when we try and give people a little extra money if we think their work is up to standard.’

‘No,’ replied Agnes. ‘No, I didn’t.’

She saw her lover as if from the prow of a boat. She was being borne off to sea while he lounged nonchalantly on the quayside, looking at her like a stranger as she passed. She waved her hand and he peered back, as if into strong sunlight.

‘Well, we do,’ said Jean. ‘Anyway, dear, I’m afraid we’ve decided to withhold your bonus for a while.’

‘Oh.’

He had never had any intention of coming with her, after all. She had just happened to pass randomly through his life, like a tourist.

‘I discussed it with the Managing Director, and it seemed to us that you haven’t really settled down yet. We decided to give it a bit longer and then make a decision.’ She paused, and then continued in a sharper tone: ‘You do understand what I’m saying, dear, don’t you? You haven’t settled down!’

Jean spoke loudly, as if to a deaf person. Agnes looked at her. She had no eyebrows, merely pencilled lines which, perhaps applied in haste, gave her the look of one apprehending a surprise attack. The delayed import of what her employer had been saying became clear to her. Agnes understood she was about to lose her job. Jean was right. She suddenly felt decidedly unsettled.

‘You’re right,’ she said.

‘You haven’t settled down,’ replied Jean, repeating herself with surprise. ‘You haven’t really come to terms with the system. We just don’t think you’re putting your all into it.’

Agnes felt strangely comforted by these words. Having never really cared about the office or the people contained within it, she had assumed that she, likewise, had eluded their notice. The attention such criticism implied was almost warming. She began to cry.

‘I’m sorry!’ she sobbed. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Jean, fumbling nervously on her desk-top for a tissue. ‘There, there.’

‘It’s just all been so awful. So awful!’

‘There are other jobs, you know, dear,’ replied Jean briskly. ‘You don’t have to work here if you find it so awful. Perhaps it’s for the best.’

‘No!’ Agnes reached over the desk and clutched her hand dramatically. ‘It’s not the job, I promise! I like it here, I — please don’t make me go!’ she pleaded. ‘I’ve just had a bit of a hard time recently. Personal reasons.’

While there was little in her life that wasn’t personal, nevertheless the term shamed her. She disliked underselling the drama of her turbulent heart. Jean creased her pencilled eyebrows with puzzlement.

‘I promise I’ll make it up to you,’ swore Agnes impetuously. She released Jean’s hand, which had been lying limply in her own for some time. ‘I’ll settle down, I promise! Just give me a month and I’ll show you. Please!’ She fixed her with martyred eyes. ‘Please.’

Having always nurtured a secret belief that she had been born in the wrong century, and would have been far better employed in one where she could have spent her days on a chaise-longue scheming how to ensnare a wealthy husband, Agnes had disdained the modern world of work in the hope of better things. Such a perspective, subverted though it was, sat uncomfortably alongside the egalitarian flavour of her political beliefs. In private moments she reasoned that her idiosyncratic personality would not conform to iron-cast office hierarchies; and while she was haunted by the idea that she might not be normal, she religiously avoided any activity which might serve to make her more so.

Working late on Friday brought upon her a plethora of new sensations, not all of them pleasant. On the evening in question she expended as much effort on quelling her emotional uprisings as on any extraneous proof-reading. Her whole being seemed to revolt against the engagement of her mind with anything which did not directly concern it; but as she took the bus home through the night-time city, she caught a glimpse of a small but comforting interface. The truth was that she felt rather better. Indeed, she felt almost virtuous. She settled back wearily into her seat, meditating upon the integrity of labour.

The days in which he had not called had accumulated like dust on a mantelpiece. She had raked through the ashes in the hope of uncovering something the flame of his rejection had spared. The truth, in the end, was that with no one around any longer to take responsibility for wasting her time, even she could not bear the thought of doing it for herself.

AGNES started walking home from work at night. It was a long way from Finchley Central, and the money saved did not justify the expenditure of effort involved. This new practice was, however, not part of a plan for economic stringency. It was more of an extension of the secret life of solitude Agnes had lately felt herself to be living.