Rachel Cusk - Saving Agnes

The telephone was for Agnes a symbol of pure, unsolicited intention, containing none of the ambiguity of other more complex forms of encounter; but her loathing was, of course, an equal match for her love. As a tool of common communication, she accepted the telephone with the normal technological indifference of the age. It was in its role as ambassador to the affairs of the heart that her feelings about it became more political. Days when she was expecting a call stretched out before her like empty motorways, banked on either side with anticipation and dread. In the early, optimistic hours she would be as attentive to it as a mother with a child; never out of earshot, constantly checking that it had not met with a misplaced receiver or other mishap, anxious if anyone else picked it up for too long. But as the dark of evening swept in she would grow fractious and impatient with its intractability. It would become ugly to her with its cyclops eye and distended curly arm. She would implore, plead and cajole; and then it would be war.

It was usually about then that she would begin to indulge in the witchery of her pagan rites, baiting it with long baths and loud music over which its cries, if there were any, would barely be heard. Often it would respond with cruel tricks: calls for other people, wrong numbers, and so on. Agnes, cresting the wave of expectation, would bear down on these innocent bystanders with the full weight of her disappointment, dashing them with her hopes and disposing of them with scarce civility. As the night wore on she would become morose and despondent, and would retire to bed, vigilant even in sleep lest it should call for her.

Sometimes, of course, the call would come before the drama had even got under way; better still, it would occasionally even surprise her and come unexpectedly of its own volition. Had she compared the joy of these occasions with the grief of their remission, she might have found their emotional expenditure did not tally; but for Agnes the intervention of fact was enough, a blessed relief from the pyrotechnics of speculation that she sometimes felt she would burst in the effort to contain. Like a secret drinker, she would view her emotional binges the next morning through a hangover of guilt and self-loathing. At these times she inhabited a world more private than confession, and it followed that to confess would have been unthinkable. When the errant caller casually achieved too late what he had so dramatically failed to perform some twenty-four hours earlier, Agnes would accept with admirable indifference the vague apologies handed over as gracelessly as wilted flowers.

‘Oh,’ she would say, her night of despair now tame as a kitten. ‘Did you say you would call? I completely forgot.’

It came as some surprise, then, that as Agnes lay in her bed signing over her soul to the Mephistopheles of the telecommunications network, all at once she heard the distinct sound of the telephone ringing. She sat up in bed, her heart beating as if she had heard the cry of a wolf from her log cabin. The shrill bell repeated itself unashamedly, twice, thrice. It seemed somehow to be saying her name. Before she could swing her legs over the bed, however, she heard the soft patter of Nina’s feet on the stairs. She lay back for the second she knew it would take him to ask for her. A murmur and a low laugh. More murmuring, and then the sound of Nina bounding up the stairs to Agnes’s room. Agnes’s heart bounded with her. The door opened tentatively.

‘I’m awake!’ she cried impatiently.

Nina crept to her bedside and sat down in a manner which did not suggest the desired urgency.

‘He called,’ she said.

Agnes’s heart was sinking.

‘Who?’

‘Jack, of course.’

Even in the darkness, Agnes could hear Nina smiling to herself. You too? she thought. You?

Nina lay down and Agnes, unbecomingly wrapped in her duvet like a giant caterpillar, shuffled over to make room for her.

‘Hey.’ Nina raised herself up on an elbow. ‘I’m sorry about before. I didn’t mean to bite your head off. I was just a bit on edge.’

‘Animal lovers of the world, unite,’ said Agnes nastily; but Nina, her conscience cleared, appeared to have gone to sleep without catching the snipe. The taste of it stayed in her mouth, undigested. What good were they, these slashes and parries, when all she wanted was the birthright of damsels in distress? There came a point when one tired of things hard-won. To be favoured, now that was something else; to be so privileged as to sleep, as now Nina slept beside her, with a face innocent of artifice. Agnes looked at her as a lover might and saw that her superiority lay in the very quality of being effortless. Fortune attended her in sleep unasked, while Agnes’s fate snored wildly in cold cream and curlers. Like two laboratory experiments, they had started at the same point that morning: yet already Nina had results, secret catalysts which made nature seem like magic. She had taken the scenic route, while Agnes ploughed hopelessly forward over dry reaches of treeless desert, sand-blind and lonely, knowing nothing but the straightness of her own line.

FIVE days was a long time at Diplomat’s Week. Agnes, who had once thought days existed merely for identification purposes, temporal name-tags to facilitate social confluence, came to know each one as a prisoner does her jailers. Of course Monday was the worst, a jack-booted Nazi of a day; people did suicidal things on Mondays, like start diets and watch documentaries. Fear of Monday also tended to ruin Sunday, an invasion which Agnes resented deeply. Moreover, it made her suspicious of Tuesday; a day whose unrelenting tedium was deceptively camouflaged by the mere fact of its not being Monday. Wednesday, on the other hand, was touch and go, delicately balanced between the memory of the last weekend and the thought of the weekend to come. Wednesday was a plateau and dangerous things could happen on plateaux. For example, one could forget one was in prison at all. Thursday was Agnes’s favourite, a day dedicated to pure anticipation. By then she was on the home stretch, sprinting in glorious slow-motion towards the distant flutter of Friday’s finishing line; which, however, when reached, often felt to her like nothing but a memento mori of the next incarceration.

‘What’s the time?’ asked Agnes.

‘Eleven o’clock,’ said Greta. ‘Almost lunchtime.’

He had called on Tuesday. Agnes’s hopes had been beaten to a pulp by then, but she managed somehow to manufacture a tone of mild surprise at the promptness of his overture, as if she had not spent the past two days dreaming of whispered midnight conversations, gravel against her window in the moonlight, desperate unexpected callers at the door and mysterious floral deliveries. They arranged to meet; and with the certainty of happiness now firmly embedded in her heart, Agnes was amazed at the transformative light it shed on things which had previously seemed unbearable. She ceased to balk at the slow passing of time, knowing as she now did that it would terminate in her future assignation. She proof-read the details of the Tongan High Commissioner’s ambassadorial career with admiration and joy. She speculated with Greta on the tragic demise of Jean’s love life in the manner of one who pitied but could not empathise. Their prearrangement assuaged all memory of pain. In moments of doubt she could call on it and it would run to her side, faithful as a dog. Moreover, like a good exam result it confirmed both future and past; for she had in the past few days endured several private flashes of an agony too raw to be acknowledged, as memories of her performance in the sweaty arena of their intimacy jumped out at her unbidden. His call permitted this testing hour, which she had all but blanked out, to be received back into history: she had passed; she was normal. She could now squirm and smile secretively with valid pleasure at the memory.