Rachel Cusk: Saving Agnes

‘Yes, I suppose I did,’ she said after a while.

There was silence in the kitchen. Merlin watched her nervously. Nina shook her head in disbelief.

‘Don’t tell me!’ she said exasperatedly. ‘You think he’ll be different with you, is that it?’

‘I don’t think that,’ replied Agnes truthfully; she did not, in fact, know what she thought.

‘Why?’ Nina raged, it being too late to divert the passage of her rhetoric. ‘Why do women always think they can change men? They go straight for the bloody animals and they try to tame them! It perpetuates myths of masculinity. It suggests ill-treatment is attractive. Why should we let them just bloody get away with it?’

She lit a cigarette and inhaled angrily. Agnes watched her mouth, waiting for the smoke to reappear like a papal vote. She felt the exhalation was necessary as a token of forgiveness, a thin white curl of acquiescence to counter the suck of disapproval.

‘What am I saying?’ Nina laughed and out it came in mirthful puffs. ‘Look at that travesty of manhood, for God’s sake. Merlin, what have we done to you?’

Merlin smoothed his apron primly.

‘I’m like Agnes,’ he said. ‘I’ve had manhood thrust upon me.’

‘Your way is just as bad,’ cried Agnes, going on the offensive while Nina’s guard was down. ‘It’s almost like you want men to be animals so they won’t threaten you on your own terms. That’s just another form of control. In fact—’ she risked, ‘in fact, it’s sexist.’

To her annoyance, Nina started to laugh.

it is!’ Agnes insisted. She was stepp’d so far in the blood of her own betrayal as to make retraction impossible. ‘You can spend your whole life running away because you’re afraid of being hurt. I just want to judge people on how they behave towards me, not on how they might have behaved in the past.’

Although she was speaking so sincerely as almost to convince herself, the pain of Nina’s recent revelation was beginning to nag at her like a tooth emerging from its anaesthetic. There had been times when her heart had felt as if it would snap beneath the weight of her lovers’ lovers, their stale laughter and dead kisses, their ghostly lips and pale bodies slipping paper-thin into the tiny hot space between flesh and living flesh. She loathed the smug self-containment of the past, and usually saw no alternative but to smash it open like a piggy-bank and trample on its mystery. She had frightened even herself with such murderousness and was no stranger to the horror that came after it. She was alive with the subtleties of endgames.

‘That,’ said Nina matter-of-factly, ‘is why you are always disappointed and I am usually pleasantly surprised.’

Nina barred herself in her room for the rest of the afternoon, leaving Agnes little choice but to pick up her end of the ill-feeling and carry it around like some ugly and burdensome object. She resented such an occupation being foisted upon her but knew not how to free herself from it, pinned as she already was beneath the fallen beam of the oncoming week’s drudgery. Nina was working upstairs and her typewriter filled the house with staccato machine-gun fire.

Agnes wandered disconsolately into the sitting-room, where Merlin was lying prone on the sofa watching television. He took his hours of leisure — and perhaps also, by implication, those of work — more seriously than she herself did. He held a can of beer in one hand and dangled the other over the carpet, as if trailing it in water from the side of a boat.

‘You executive types,’ she said, observing him. ‘You just don’t know how to relax.’

‘I’m a zen economist,’ said Merlin. ‘I go where the mood takes me. Come over here and watch Bette Davis being romanced in Rio.’

Agnes perched uncomfortably on the arm of the sofa. On the screen, Bette leaned nonchalantly on a balcony overlooking a monochrome sea while her lover pleaded with her elegant back.

‘Moods!’ exhorted Agnes presently. ‘I go where other people’s moods take me. I do, Merlin,’ she insisted, although as yet he had not denied it. ‘I mean, I never upset people. I don’t think I even know how to.’

‘What?’

‘I said, I don’t know how to upset people.’

‘Oh.’ Merlin put down his beer can and folded his arms patiently behind his head. ‘I’m sure Nina would teach you. She’s a bit hard up for cash at the moment.’

‘Very funny.’

‘Look, it’ll blow over.’ His eyes pulled reluctantly away from the screen and settled on her. ‘Nina gets angry. It’s her way of releasing tension. She’ll get over it.’

‘I shouldn’t have brought him home,’ said Agnes. Now that she had Merlin’s full attention she could afford to indulge her confessional instincts, although such remorseful forays were strictly reserved for those who could be relied on to offer absolution rather than concurrence.

‘I thought we’d already established that he broke and entered.’ Merlin was evidently aiming for levity.

‘I should have made other arrangements,’ continued Agnes. ‘Maybe I should go and apologise. It was all my fault.’

‘No, it wasn’t.’ He was reliable as a slot machine where saving Agnes was concerned. ‘This isn’t a bloody Middle Eastern bombing, you know — we can’t all claim responsibility. Anyway, I told you, she’ll get over it. Nina brings home a lot of guys. You only think you do.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Agnes was horrified. The implications were mushrooming. Were her actions so transparent, her assumptions so unfounded? Had she been misinformed?

‘It means you have a sensitive soul,’ said Merlin firmly. ‘Now stop torturing yourself and give me some details.’

‘What kind of details?’ said Agnes suspiciously.

‘Well, what’s he like? When are you seeing him again? That kind of thing.’

‘I don’t know when I’m seeing him again. He said he’d phone.’ She was embarrassed by her deficiency of whispered promises and heated troths. ‘Anyway, you all seem to know far more about him than I do.’

It came out sounding more stand-offish than she’d meant it to. Merlin shrugged, giving up, and turned back to the television. Sometimes, she wanted to say, sometimes when I tell the truth it feels like I’m lying.

Agnes lay in bed waiting for the telephone to ring, believing as she did that the former event would precipitate the latter. Her faith, though gritty, was, she knew, ill-founded, attempting as it did to harness the perversity of the universe and make consistency where there was essentially none. By taking upon herself the task of second-guessing ill-fortune, she was in fact violating the creed of her anti-faith, which, if its principles were to be understood, would presumably visit her only at her own inconvenience. The fact that she was aware of this loophole merely served to deepen the complexity of her plight; but Agnes was full of such grim closets of superstition, cob-webbed enclosures of small expectations which should have housed just deserts. She would have loved to have recourse to the protection, implore the help, and seek the intercession of the official bodies, but for her the proper channels were strewn with past disappointments and offered easy passage only for the penitent. In the past Agnes had asked and had not been given; or at least not been given what she’d asked for. It had occurred to her that within the nature of her petitions, which generally lay outside the realm of the common good, there might be concealed the reason for their speedy return to sender, redress unknown; and with the dubious workings of divine intervention thus under investigation, it seemed only natural that she should try to take things into her own more reliable hands.