Rachel Cusk - Saving Agnes

‘I was,’ replied Agnes.

She surrendered the stairs by stepping back to allow her through. Nina nodded curtly and began to proceed up them. Agnes watched her legs disappearing from view, and for what seemed like the first time, felt a physical ache of regret for the sad demise of their friendship.

‘Nina!’ she called up the stairs. ‘Nina, can we talk? Please?’

There was silence on the upper floor. Agnes took comfort from the sound, deducing that if Nina had not exactly retracted her escape, she had at least suspended it in order to consider her offer. Presently, a long sigh was emitted from the top of the stairwell.

‘Okay.’ She began a suspicious descent. ‘If you want.’

Agnes remained frozen at the foot of the stairs while Nina proceeded sullenly past her. She had not expected, after making her initial overture, to be afforded the lion’s share of the work involved in drawing up some sort of armistice. She had assumed that her concession would immediately precipitate a warm and tearful reunion. Nina sat leadenly on the sofa and looked resentful. Agnes realised she had always been rather frightened of Nina, and this thought, combined with a sudden sensation of recklessness induced by the oddly comforting realisation that what was already lost could not be lost again, conspired to make her all at once quite brave.

‘Don’t do that!’ she cried, marching into the sitting-room.

‘What? Do what?’

‘Slouch around like a — like a teenager!’

She stood in front of her and glared down. Nina, who had been caught unawares by her attack, now attempted to marshal her forces.

‘Since when were you my mother?’ she said, folding her arms and pinching up her face in a manner which somehow managed to give more truth to Agnes’s accusation than she herself had been able to do.

‘There you go again! You sound about fourteen! It’s pathetic, it’s—’ Agnes felt weak with daring. She thought of sitting down, but decided her present stance afforded her a certain authority. ‘It’s beneath you,’ she continued masterfully. ‘We don’t have to talk, okay? We don’t have to do anything! We’re grown up, in case you hadn’t noticed, so don’t give me all that grudging aquiescence.’

Nina observed a brief, dumbfounded silence.

‘My mother would never say grudging acquiescence,’ she pointed out finally.

‘Your mother is a — a suburban android with furry seat covers on the loo!’

Nina considered this.

‘How do you know that?’ she said.

‘I don’t,’ Agnes confessed.

‘Well, actually, she doesn’t have furry seat covers,’ Nina said, quite amiably. ‘That kind of thing is class war in East Sheen. Frilly valances, now that’s another story.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Agnes replied, attempting to prolong this unexpected vein of good humour. ‘I underestimated her. What is a valance, anyway?’

‘Valance,’ said Nina, getting up, ‘is where old housewives go to die. Shall I make some coffee?’

Agnes wondered if she was asking for permission, and if so, whether this suggested a new and entirely unbargained-for respect.

‘I’ll help,’ she said, leaving nothing to chance.

The strain of politeness lent things a certain awkwardness. In the kitchen, Nina filled the kettle while Agnes got mugs out of the cupboard. In the course of their duties they almost collided with one another, and found themselves engaging in a quickstep of embarrassed avoidance like strangers on a pavement.

‘Sorry,’ they said in unison.

Agnes wondered if this understated apology were sufficient to encompass the full range of their transgressions.

‘How’s Jack?’ she nobly inquired, extending the hand of friendship still further. Nina visibly stiffened.

‘Jack and I aren’t seeing each other any more.’

‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

‘What for? It wasn’t working. It was wrong. I was wrong,’ she added, plugging in the kettle.

She turned around to face Agnes, as if expecting her to speak. Agnes, taken by surprise, could only emit a stunned silence.

‘I got confused, I suppose,’ Nina continued presently. She turned away again and busied herself with the coffee cups. Her shaking hands rattled them against the counter-top. ‘I thought I didn’t need people, not really. But I started needing him. I don’t know why.’

‘You loved him,’ Agnes interjected, feeling herself once more to be on known territory.

‘Maybe,’ shrugged Nina. ‘But I didn’t like him. Is that possible? I always thought that sort of talk was for people who didn’t know their own minds, but there you go.’

Agnes found herself on the verge of agreeing wholeheartedly with the former part of this statement, but realised in time that to do so might merely provide evidence as to the truth of the latter.

‘Why didn’t you like him?’ she inquired.

‘Well, to begin with it was little things, I suppose. I found myself having to convince myself that he had reasons for doing this or that. It was as if I was making excuses for him. I just — pretended not to notice things.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Haven’t you ever done that? Wanted something so much that you’ll do anything, tell yourself any kind of lie, just to keep believing in it? It’s like — it’s like some kind of addiction.’

‘But you can’t know everything!’ Agnes cried. ‘People are more — mysterious than that, aren’t they? Perhaps he would have surprised you. How could you know?’

‘That’s the difference between you and me,’ Nina replied. She smiled. ‘You say mysterious, I say shifty. What’s your idea of mystery, anyway? Your heart’s desire ingesting hard drugs on the quiet while you wring your hands in the bedroom and wonder what you’re doing wrong?’

Agnes gasped at the cruelty of this blow.

‘But you knew,’ she said. ‘I may have been stupid, but you knew !’

‘I know,’ said Nina unhappily. ‘All I’m saying is that none of us are innocent. I was looking for a way of holding on to Jack, and that was it. Like we had a secret and we were banding together.’ She laughed strangely. ‘I was in the boys’ club for a while there. The truth is that I didn’t want to admit I was disappointed in him. I convinced myself it was in your best interests not to know — see, there’s your mystery! I thought I was saving you.’ She drew herself up. ‘But I acted disloyally and I apologise.’

‘That’s okay,’ Agnes replied, able to be generous now that her name had been cleared on at least one count. ‘But I shouldn’t be saved from things!’ she added.

‘What do you mean?’ Nina looked rather startled.

‘I don’t really know,’ Agnes confessed. ‘I suppose I meant that I shouldn’t need to be saved from things. It makes me sound so — naïve. But how else am I supposed to learn if I’m never told? How am I supposed to know?’

‘Well—’ Nina looked perplexed. ‘Like I said, it isn’t always a question of being told, is it? I mean, sometimes you just have to find things out for yourself.’

‘But how?’ Agnes cried. ‘By telepathy? I mean, where did everyone else learn how the world works? Sometimes I feel as if I’ve missed something, some vital clue that would make everything clear.’ She gazed out of the kitchen window, where the dark trees waved their long branches in the wind like frantic, keening arms. ‘And then sometimes I think that I do know things, things that no one else knows.’

‘Like what?’ said Nina suspiciously.

‘Oh, nothing useful! Things that aren’t really there, at any rate. Metaphors, I suppose you’d call them. As if everything is actually something else.’

‘Oh.’

‘So really it’s no surprise that I miss the obvious,’ Agnes continued, ‘when nothing is as it seems.’