Rachel Cusk: Saving Agnes

‘I’m holding hands with God,’ Agnes had loudly declared before drifting imperviously ahead to leave them standing, a group of sudden strangers huddled in the pale bowl of field and sky like people waiting for a bus.

At the time they might not have known whether to laugh or cry, but later, large and boisterous in the pagan glowing hub of the kitchen, their confidence in their own grasp of what was essentially what regrouped and sent gales of hilarity whooping up the chimney stacks. Agnes, small and sulky, had sent her own thoughts with them, martyred orbs of saintly passion which found better company amidst the glittering spheres of the heavens than amongst the rabble of her earthly station. Lord, give me the strength to deal with these infidels, she would implore before retiring to read her Lives of the Saints in which her namesake, worryingly rouged and buxom, appeared to be struggling beneath the weight of the large sheep in her arms.

Later Agnes denied the truth of this anecdote with almost as much fervour as she had given it life. Her protests inevitably ensured its endurance in family folklore, and it continued to provoke a hilarity with every repetition which her own more deliberate attempts at humour could somehow never match. At such times the possibility of Agnes experiencing some sense of relief that the tip, rather than the underlying iceberg, of her spiritual life had been made public was cold comfort indeed. She was proud of her beliefs, and with the confidence which often accompanies such convictions looked forward patiently to the time when her family would be made to pay for their good humour in this life with the cold flame of perdition in the next. The last laugh, she was sure, would be hers. Nevertheless, their certain punishment did not make hers any easier to bear; and she hid from them the full extent of her love, creeping off to converse in solitude with the Almighty. Such concealments were in fact superfluous. Her mother had often paused by the bedroom door at the sound of Agnes weeping and had judiciously let her alone, surmising that her daughter’s tender age and burgeoning affections had doubtlessly led her to nurture unfulfilled passions for some reassuringly untouchable icon of popular culture. Had she known all passion was being spent in contemplation of a naked man nailed to two sticks of wood she would probably have made some effort to intervene. Uninformed, however, her conclusion that it was all hormonal was in any case accurate enough.

At university Agnes reclaimed herself as a Catholic, an ethnic minority which, she decided, had undergone enough persecution in the past to make allegiance to it defensible. While no match for the children of Israel on this score, she was surprised to discover that Catholicism held a peculiar attraction for her peers. Agnostics and atheists alike confessed that if they were ever to surrender their religious bachelorhood, their thoughts would in all probability turn lightly to the Vatican.

‘But why?’ said Agnes with ill-concealed amazement, confusing herself and all her dubious charms with those of the creed whose acolytes had murdered and martyred in liberal quantities to spread the good news.

The reasons, it appeared, were twofold. On the one hand were the attractions of ritual, of incense and jewel-encrusted robes, of transubstantive cannibalism and the horror film of crucifixion. On the other were subtler individual perversions like sin and guilt. The former seemed to function as a kind of spiritual scenery; the latter were the regions wherein unfolded the real drama. It had been some years since Agnes’s own idolatry had faded to a kind of grudging, habitual affection; and there lay within the ripe ground for proselytism she had discovered amongst her peers a golden opportunity to resuscitate the honeymoon period of her youth. Strangely uninfected by their enthusiasm, however, Agnes began to experience instead the contagion of doubt. The public purchase of her private world rendered her disaffected with it. Her goods appeared soiled with handling. She — if not her sins — was no longer original.

The feminist lobby, meanwhile, questioning her on the subject of her beliefs with mingled fascination and dismay, unwittingly extinguished the final, guttering flame of belief. The Catholic Church was sexist, hierarchical, capitalist and corrupt! they cried. It put an embargo on women’s sexual freedom and forced them to stay at home and have babies. You don’t abide by the rules, they argued. Why do you bother? Agnes, who in truth had been practising certain deceptions, saw that she could not claim to have done so in the spirit of subversion and civil disobedience, her acceptance of spiritual authority being voluntary rather than enforced. She had, she supposed, just hoped that He wouldn’t notice; that He wouldn’t come home unexpectedly in the middle of the day to find her in a tangle of rumpled bedclothes and milkman’s limbs. She had cheated, but in doing so had assumed that the very fact of her bothering to believe that that was what she was doing would absolve her of it.

Eventually she surrendered outwardly to the forces of agnosticism, but there was some corner of her that would remain forever faithful. Contemplating a lovely sunset, for example, or a summer field full of flowers, tears would well in her eyes for the beauty of it all and her heart would instinctively rise in praise. There was also, it must be said, a subtle worm of fear wandering vagrant through the unlocked passages of her mind. She had been told He would come like a thief in the night, and at night she prayed.

‘Almost a full house last night,’ remarked Merlin later in the kitchen. ‘If the rest of the world were not so immune to my charms it could have been a hat-trick.’

‘Well, don’t blame me,’ said Nina sharply. ‘I told all of you last Wednesday that Jack was coming over. I wasn’t to know the place would end up like the bloody Friends Meeting House.’

‘Oh, it wasn’t a criticism,’ said Merlin mildly. ‘More of a cry for help.’

They were watching Merlin make lunch. Outside, a low grey blanket of cloud had long since covered up the sun.

‘Look, Nina, I’m sorry,’ blurted out Agnes finally. ‘I didn’t ask him to come back. He just sort of — did.’

‘Nasty man!’ pounced Nina. ‘Poor little Agnes.’

‘That’s not what I mean!’ rejoined Agnes. People always misunderstood her. ‘It wasn’t like that.’

It really hadn’t been like that, although her memories of that particular stage in the evening were akin to a blanketed criminal’s recollections of being bustled from police van to courtroom.

‘Oh, come on,’ said Nina. ‘It’s not as if his reputation didn’t precede him. You must have known he wasn’t there to admire the upholstery.’ She picked up a magazine and began leafing indifferently through it. ‘I don’t know where you get off on all this helplessness, Agnes. It’s such an act.’

‘What do you mean?’ Agnes considered the alternatives being offered up for elucidation and opted for the lesser of two evils. ‘What has he got a reputation for?’

‘It’s obviously not much of a reputation,’ said Merlin kindly. He cast a meaningful glance at Nina.

‘Shut up, Merlin,’ snapped Nina, ignoring it.

‘Tell me,’ said Agnes.

Nina sighed reluctantly, surrendering responsibility for the pain she was about to inflict.

‘He’s a bit of a womaniser, that’s all. I thought you knew that.’

Agnes, who did not readily identify herself with the species on which her suitor was so widely supposed to prey, had, while being vaguely aware of his rumoured skills, not thought herself a likely medium for their application. The idea that he should judge her fit to be womanised, as it were, struck her now as more complimentary than degrading.