Rachel Cusk - Saving Agnes

‘Bathsheba, could you pass the salt?’ her father would politely inquire.

‘ Boadicea! ’ Agnes would cry; which exhortation would usually rend from her less indulgent mother a plea along the lines of ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Agnes!’ Agnes would then be forced again to correct the form of her address, and would inevitably be rewarded with a stinging backside and the liberty to retire to her room as soon as she liked.

As Agnes approached puberty her identity crisis, escaping the contemptuous adolescent pruning of all things childish, grew, along with the other nascent buds of her evolving world-view, from a whimsical fantasy into an issue of earth-shattering importance. A rejection of all things outlandish in favour of the ephemeral trappings of peer conformity was only natural, and although she soon lost her taste for elaborate nomenclature, her desperate need for acceptability outpaced it. Seeing the Dominiques, Gemmas and Antoinettes at school become more beautiful, clever and confident than the rest, and seeing also that she had not accompanied them in this transformation, merely confirmed what she already knew to be true — that what would have been success by any other name was fast becoming failure by her own.

The adult world being impervious to the tender-hearted miseries of youth, and assuming that identity was a more or less fixed matter whose flaws were the responsibility of no one other than their owner, Agnes knew that hers would be a solitary struggle. Wishing to spare those who did not really deserve any more careful consideration than they had shown in naming her, and secretly fearful of straying too far from the terms on which her worldly existence so far had seemed to depend, she chose her own middle name, Grace. Even her elders in all their irrational mystery could not object to such a choice, as they themselves had selected the name from all the thousands which had haunted her mother’s bulging belly like wispy little-girl ghosts, as runner-up.

Why Grace, superior as she so evidently was, had not won this early contest Agnes could not imagine; but her battle for reinstatement second time around looked set for victory. To Agnes’s dumbfoundment her parents did not object to her plan, and even humoured her so far as to suggest measures for its smoother implementation. Her mother advised that she try the name at home first to see if she liked it, and Agnes, always glad of an opportunity $$o disguise apprehension with obedience, made a fine show of reluctant agreement.

For a while, then, Grace was an honoured guest in their house, a favoured foster-child who emanated sunshine and laughter wherever she went. Her pronouncements were solemnly heard, her opinions sought out, her health and happiness the priority of the household. Only her brother, the more prosaically named Tom, continued to refer to Agnes in a manner not entirely respectful to the dead.

‘Let’s say Agnes,’ he would declare as the family were bowed for grace before supper; or, if Grace declined to join him in a game of cards, ‘Don’t put on those airs and Agneses with me’ would be his scornful riposte. Tom missed Agnes and had little time for her double, but would certainly not have shared this information with either of them.

Inevitably, as the days wore on, it fell to Grace’s lot to do the share of household chores which had been Agnes’s, and which had been temporarily forestalled while her arrival was still a novelty. There was also a portion of ill-humour and reprimand to be claimed, and it surprised Grace to discover that it was indistinguishable from that which had befallen Agnes. Gradually Grace began to feel disenchanted with her new home, especially when she contemplated in the mirror the toll it was taking on her looks. She was not the ravishing creature of fantasy she once had been, and nor did she inspire the love and admiration she once had known. She began, in short, to consider taking her leave; and although the change was so gradual as almost to elude their notice, the family one day realised that Agnes was with them once more.

Their joy at this discovery did not console their prodigal daughter. Agnes was convinced that Grace had been driven away by her family’s ill-treatment — not to mention their incurable tendency to call her Agnes — and under such circumstances she could ill afford any pleasure at their very evident relief to have her back with them. Tom’s cunning wordplay, however, remained, and enjoyed frequent airings in a context which Agnes could only later begin to see, with a controllable quantity of grief, as family humour.

It would have surprised them, no doubt, to learn that some part of Agnes had been irretrievably lost through this episode; and though it would never have occurred to her to blame them, she sometimes wondered why the proliferation of selves she would have liked to be and lives she would have liked to live remained locked inside her, prisoners of utmost secrecy and shame. And while it taught her that reality meant failure, ugliness and self-contempt, it also instilled in her the belief that the good in her was but fiction. As she grew older and encountered the approbation of friends and lovers, this fiction became ever more elaborate, until she feared that one day she would crumble beneath the weight of her deception and lose all that she most valued. Once Agnes had mourned Grace, but eventually she came to loathe and fear her; for she had taken everything that she once loved in herself, every particle of hope and optimism and beauty, and made it false. Agnes did not create Grace: it was Grace who created Agnes, slapped her together with the dross and scraps she did not want herself. Agnes saw her sometimes, the model on the cover of a magazine, the byline on a witty news feature, the laughing glamorous figure in a red sports car driven by an adoring boyfriend. I wish it were me! she would think. It should have been me.

AGNES Day painted her face and starved herself; she shaved her legs and plucked her eyebrows and scrubbed the gravelly flesh on her thighs with a mitt of similar texture. She moisturised here and desiccated there, purged her skin of odour and oil and then force-fed it with creams and sprays, as if hoping that one day it would give off of its own accord the exotic fragrance and softness which were now but briefly borrowed. Occasionally, she would bleach the rather unsightly shadow of dark hairs that fell across her upper lip, a process which, albeit temporarily, necessitated that she sport an ebullient white cream moustache over the meagre but offending dark one. Sometimes it seemed to her as if her body were in a constant state of revolt, maliciously engendering odour and ugliness, coarse hair sprouting through every pore, flesh puckering here and sagging there. She was vigilant and artful in stemming protuberance and decay, but subversion was all around. Only recently she had discovered a horrifyingly virulent crop of dark hairs on the backs of her marbled — or, as Romantic poets would perhaps rather, marble — thighs. The fact that this discovery had come only days after she read of a similar complaint in a women’s magazine was, she thought, a sublime if unsettling coincidence. The magazine had suggested waxing or electrolysis as the most efficacious remedy, but to Agnes these things were redolent of mystery and pain, and were more easily applied, in her mind, to the writing of great poetry than to the backs of the legs.

Contrary to appearances, Agnes would have liked nothing better than to be natural, for she regarded this incessant pruning and weeding as burdensome. She did not see it as her womanly business to pluck and purge and preen; rather, it was with the aim of securing for herself what nature omitted generously to bestow that she occupied herself thus. She regarded Nina’s bare face and downy legs with more envy than contempt and, with a degree of humility which would have surprised no one more than herself had she been aware of it, strove not to please others but merely not to disgust them.