Rachel Cusk - Saving Agnes

‘I’ve seen you around the place,’ he said, smiling calmly at her in a manner which hinted that he did not find anything in her stature to suggest the conquest might be somewhat over his head. ‘My name’s John. Some of my friends think we look alike.’

She did not, then or afterwards, point out the obvious dissimilarity between them. He found her in the dining hall the next day and asked her to meet him later that evening. For the next two weeks he visited her constantly, and when he found her out even left notes adorned with small drawings apparently etched by his own hand.

Agnes took her dilemma to Nina, who, she was assured, had seen it all before. Every man had a short man inside him, Nina explained, but those whose shortness took a physical form felt that a world of injustices had been heaped upon them for which they must be compensated. Consequently, the short man would make it his mission to have everything he felt his deficit precluded. Look, for example, at how many of the world’s richest men were short.

Agnes, feeling that this seminar, elegant though it was, had little relevance to her original query, took it upon herself to mention that the deficit in question was a matter merely of an inch, two at the most, and surely did not, therefore, merit such suspicions of megalomania. Nina advised her not to be deceived, but nevertheless hastened towards her point. The spoils just mentioned, she explained, were but the preliminaries, the foothills of the short man’s Himalaya. For what, after all, was the only thing in whose procurement the short man would realistically be disadvantaged? What did the tall man automatically lay claim to, the laws of nature and attraction admitting him entrance, on which his shorter companion had no purchase? The answer? Tall women. And what did every short man want? A woman taller than him. The fame and fortune, Nina added, were merely the currency by which such an accessory could, according to male logic, be bought.

But what of those who failed to complete this arduous course? Agnes asked. The man in question seemed even shorter of cash than he was of limb. Pity them not, said Nina, for they have long since given in to hubris and despair; which description made Agnes feel that perhaps she had more in common with him than she’d thought and should look again.

She began to anticipate his visits, and had trouble sleeping at night. Before long, she found it difficult to think of anything other than him. Soon she found she could not eat, and she grew thin. Her physical metamorphosis, however, could not be wholly explained by her loss of appetite.

‘You’ve shrunk,’ he said one day, as they were walking in the park.

She made reference to the biological findings which claimed the effects of vertical growth were irreversible.

‘You have!’ he insisted. ‘Look, measure yourself against me.’

She did, and did it again before a critical audience when they returned home. All were agreed upon this rarest of phenomena. She had, it seemed, grown smaller. At the time she had marvelled at this evidence of the force of his personality. Through sheer love, it seemed, he had made her his perfect match. It did not occur to her to wonder why, if this were indeed so, he had not succeeded instead in making himself taller.

Greta, whose logic hit the mark with the spectacular arbitrariness of someone jumping off a building and surviving at the cost of those below, took a more succinct view when Agnes related this story, some years later, in the offices of Diplomat’s Week. ‘There’s nothing in the whole world more depressing than sitting next to a guy whose thighs are smaller than yours,’ she said, nodding sagely.

People used to take them for brother and sister in a manner Agnes found morally reprehensible. For her, it was more like looking into a mirror and being greeted with a reflection of herself that she liked. He instructed her not just in the art of love, but in the gentler, narcissistic skills of self-acceptance.

‘You’re like a black hole,’ he said when he left. ‘You consume me.’

‘I hate Sundays,’ said Nina, her entire body appearing to go limp with exhaustion at her aversion. ‘They were obviously designed by someone who thought stimulation was a row of closed off-licences and a feature-length episode of Songs of Praise.’

‘But isn’t that the point?’ Agnes shifted back into the shade. ‘I mean, for some people Sunday is the most interesting day of the week.’

Their garden was no Eden, but at least it got the sun and was the uniform khaki colour which generally passed for green in London. Agnes and Nina sat on two deckchairs Merlin had found in the cellar. Bloated flies straying from next door’s garbage-infested garden revolved around their heads, droning against a monotonous bass-line of traffic from the Blackstock Road.

‘Name one.’

‘The Archbishop of Canterbury.’

‘Name another one.’

‘Look, all I’m saying is that maybe — well, maybe you feel that way because there’s something missing from your life.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Nina from behind the shield of her newspaper. She was angry, but for reasons unconnected with Agnes’s position on the decline of Christian beliefs in the western world. ‘Are you telling me that I’ve got a problem because I don’t want to spend half my weekend dancing round an altar with a bunch of God-squad maniacs or filching money off innocent people for the bloody Seventh Day Adventists, or even hanging out with a load of lapsed Catholics whingeing on about the bloody meaning of life for that matter?’

Agnes groped for her sunglasses. Her white face felt porous and blasted in the sunlight. In this grim square of atrophied horticulture she felt like no living thing.

‘I mean, are you?’ Nina persisted.

An explosion of exhaust from the road just then caused them both to jump. Agnes felt an acrid tide of sweat prickle over her. Her heart was beating fiercely.

‘Not necessarily,’ she said.

Agnes and Nina had had company the night before. While neither guest had specifically confirmed their reservation, Nina had been either confident or peremptory enough to warn her housemates of her putative night of passion several days in advance. Agnes, forced by her indirect nature to run the gauntlet of suspense in such matters, had been unable to make a similar promise. She did not suppose, in any case, that the presence of an additional love-interest would be cause for conflict. A discreet form of apartheid was normally employed on such occasions which kept things from taking on the aspect of a production-line. The trouble had started when, the next morning, these carefully segregated individuals had succeeded in encountering one another in the kitchen and had revealed themselves to be old friends from college. Despite their mutual surprise at the unexpected nature and location of their reunion, they immediately formulated a plan.

‘Do you come here often?’ one of them was heard to ask the other as they left together to find breakfast.

Agnes had consoled herself with the thought that any doubts which might have been lingering in her own lover’s mind from the night before would, at least, have been partly compensated for by the events of the morning after.

‘Just as long as we’ve got that straight,’ snapped Nina.

Agnes picked up the business section of the Sunday papers and applied herself to learning the art of mergers.

Rumour had it that as a child Agnes had once been discovered walking with her eyes shut and one arm outstretched beside her.

‘Agnes, what on earth are you doing?’ her mother had cried nervously. They were on a family walk, and their bewilderment as they stopped and stared had eddied uncomfortably through the reassuring crunch of Wellington boots on frosty grass and the caws of winter birds.