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Authors: Rachel Cusk
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When it starts to rain we leave the park and walk through the leafy Victorian streets of this neighbourhood, which is not my own. I have been thinking I might move over here, away from the disturbances of the sea; might move away from the strain of ceaseless change, the heaving water always so naked, so abandoned, rolling in darkness and light. I imagine a home here, in this redbrick clamp of streets, imagine it as safe and faintly purgatorial, a continuing sameness in which my sins will not devour me but will be dutifully paid off over a lifetime in small increments, like a mortgage. It is the annual weekend where the city’s artists open their houses to show the public their work, and when we pass one we go inside, out of the rain. On the walls there are framed photographs, watercolours, oil paintings; further in there are racks of handmade postcards, and prints stacked up in cellophane wrappers on a table.
Again and again their subject is the sea. Here it is in its stormy mood, and there in its benign; here a sheet of empty glare, there a broken surface releasing light. We see it with and without sailing boats, at dawn and dusk, peopled and deserted, wintry, balmy and dull. There are pictures of seaweed, of driftwood, of the pebbles on the beach. There are pictures of the painted huts that line the esplanade: they remind me of the lined-up saints that surround early Renaissance portraits of the Madonna, for in its devotion and repetition this too is a display of religious iconography, its goddess the ocean. In these streets there is no sight or atmosphere of the sea: this could be a pleasant neighbourhood in any landlocked town. There is something obsessive, something almost fetishistic in these images, preoccupied as they are with what is absent, or rather with what is just out of reach. I mistrust this exposure of that which already exposes itself, the naked sea; the mind feeding off its dramas from the safety of the suburb. Yet I imagine moving here, and hanging a picture of the sea on my wall. It has been my belief that the only way to know something is to experience it, that the truest forms of knowledge are personal. Now I imagine a different kind of knowledge, knowledge without exposure, without risk; the knowledge of the voyeur, watching, assessing, staying hidden.
Again and again their subject is the sea. Here it is in its stormy mood, and there in its benign; here a sheet of empty glare, there a broken surface releasing light. We see it with and without sailing boats, at dawn and dusk, peopled and deserted, wintry, balmy and dull. There are pictures of seaweed, of driftwood, of the pebbles on the beach. There are pictures of the painted huts that line the esplanade: they remind me of the lined-up saints that surround early Renaissance portraits of the Madonna, for in its devotion and repetition this too is a display of religious iconography, its goddess the ocean. In these streets there is no sight or atmosphere of the sea: this could be a pleasant neighbourhood in any landlocked town. There is something obsessive, something almost fetishistic in these images, preoccupied as they are with what is absent, or rather with what is just out of reach. I mistrust this exposure of that which already exposes itself, the naked sea; the mind feeding off its dramas from the safety of the suburb. Yet I imagine moving here, and hanging a picture of the sea on my wall. It has been my belief that the only way to know something is to experience it, that the truest forms of knowledge are personal. Now I imagine a different kind of knowledge, knowledge without exposure, without risk; the knowledge of the voyeur, watching, assessing, staying hidden.
The children tug at our sleeves: they are bored, and want to go. Outside we continue along the rainy pavements. Water drips from the trees. At the end of the road there is another open house, and the children run ahead and disappear inside. We follow, and find ourselves in a front garden as fanciful as a fairy tale, full of chiming bells and odd little creatures made of clay. Behind it stands a house deep in its gloom of trees. It has stained-glass windows and gables scalloped like the hair of an eccentric milkmaid. The door is open: inside all is
sepia, and rich with dust. We pass through the hall and into a large disorderly room that is full of a strange, jewelled light. Though it is sullen and grey outside, the stained-glass windows cast their coloured oblongs inward. A lady stands at a large table, with the windows at her back. She is extremely tall, with long fair plaits. In front of her, on the table, are a number of curious hats or headdresses; and standing at the table are the children, who as we enter turn around. One of my daughters has become a stag, with dark branching antlers; the other a fox, with a long russet nose and a velvety head. My little niece has become a fieldmouse, my nephew a badger with a bushy white crest. They look at us with dark glossy eyes through the tinted light. In the few minutes of our absence they have been transformed: they are creatures startled in a forest glade by the approach of danger. The lady, too, is satisfied by the drama of their appearance. She makes the masks herself, she tells us: they are designed for adults, but they look much more lifelike on children. She herself likes to wear the stag, though it does make her terribly tall.
sepia, and rich with dust. We pass through the hall and into a large disorderly room that is full of a strange, jewelled light. Though it is sullen and grey outside, the stained-glass windows cast their coloured oblongs inward. A lady stands at a large table, with the windows at her back. She is extremely tall, with long fair plaits. In front of her, on the table, are a number of curious hats or headdresses; and standing at the table are the children, who as we enter turn around. One of my daughters has become a stag, with dark branching antlers; the other a fox, with a long russet nose and a velvety head. My little niece has become a fieldmouse, my nephew a badger with a bushy white crest. They look at us with dark glossy eyes through the tinted light. In the few minutes of our absence they have been transformed: they are creatures startled in a forest glade by the approach of danger. The lady, too, is satisfied by the drama of their appearance. She makes the masks herself, she tells us: they are designed for adults, but they look much more lifelike on children. She herself likes to wear the stag, though it does make her terribly tall.
Presently the children take the masks off, all except the stag, whose fondness for hers has perhaps been intensified by hearing that its owner has a special fondness for it too. Can I have it? she asks me. Will you buy it for me? She says this from within the face of the stag, for I can’t see her mouth. The mask is richly made, beautifully heavy and padded: its transformation of her is complete, yet it seems too to have accommodated her own nature, so that I find I’m already quite used to her looking like that. In a strange way we are both relieved by her metamorphosis. The lady tells me the price. It is high, but not as much as I expected. My stag-daughter watches me, alert, bright-eyed, perfectly still. Please, she says. Please, I love it.
Everyone waits to see what I will do, my niece and nephew, my daughters, my sister, the tall lady with the fair plaits. They sense a vacuum of authority. How is it possible that we set out for a walk in the park and have ended up embroiled in the purchase of a bohemian headdress? The only certainty I can locate in myself is that of my desire to undermine authority itself. Authority would refuse her the mask because of the randomness of her request for it. Authority would not allow itself to be led by a course of events. Yet I myself am now authority. And so although I want to buy her the mask, though I know she would love it and value it, though it is entirely up to me, what I decide to say to her is no. But before I can, she lifts the mask from her head. Her face is revealed again, flushed, a little dishevelled. She sets it carefully back on the table. I don’t need it, she says. Don’t worry. I’ve changed my mind.
Later, at the train station before she leaves, my sister says to me: you have to learn to hide what you feel from the children. They will feel what they think you feel. They are only reflections of you.
I don’t believe that, I say.
If they think you’re happy, they’ll be happy, my sister says.
Their feelings are their own, I say.
What I feel is that I have jumped from a high place, thinking I could fly, and after a few whirling instants have realised I am simply falling. What I feel is the hurtling approach of disaster. And I have believed they were falling with me, my daughters; I have believed I was looking into their hearts, into their souls, and seen terror and despair there. Is it possible that my children are not windows but
mirrors? That what I have seen is my own fall, my own terror, not theirs?
mirrors? That what I have seen is my own fall, my own terror, not theirs?
I don’t believe that, I say again.
You have to believe it, she says.
On the walk back from the station the rain stops. The sun gushes, metallic and rich, through the rending clouds. A fresh wind comes gusting up the streets after their cleansing. A feeling of freedom grips me and whirls me around, the feeling that I need recognise no authority, need serve no greater structure, that I can do as I like. It will go away again, this feeling, I know, but for now it is here. I pass slumbrous houses, a locked church, a little tattoo parlour whose shopfront is obscured by sinuous images of snakes and flowers. I pass a restaurant and through its big windows see a family sitting at a table, the mother rising and reaching across to give something to the baby in its high chair. I can smell food, hear the clatter of dishes and the sound of people talking in the kitchen. A man in a chef’s apron is standing at a side door, smoking in the sunshine. He is only a few feet away from them but the family can’t see him: they are inside in the dining room, at a table spread with a white cloth. Through the window I can see the remains of their meal, the wreckage of cutlery and crumpled napkins and dirty plates, the broken crusts of bread lying against the white. A few minutes ago, when the rain was pouring down, they must have felt fortunate to be safe and dry inside, inside where everything exists to serve them. The woman holds her reaching stance: I watch her pale transverse form through the glass. She is like a statue, frozen in the moment of her motherhood, reaching across to her child. Her husband sits erect, looking straight ahead, as though something outside has caught his attention. It is as though, in that instant, he
has seen the restaurant’s servitude become a trap: he looks across her leaning shape, looks out through the dark windows at the lifting day outside, the gold gushing sunshine, the freedom and freshness of the street. The man in the chef’s apron finishes his cigarette and goes back in. I pass on, thinking about the stag mask with its sweetly farouche expression; about my daughter’s heavy branched head turning on her delicate shoulders, about the strange relief I felt at having her masked and at the animal form she took, innocent of human pain. In that guise she could run as fast and as far as she liked to dodge the hunter’s arrows. She was free.
has seen the restaurant’s servitude become a trap: he looks across her leaning shape, looks out through the dark windows at the lifting day outside, the gold gushing sunshine, the freedom and freshness of the street. The man in the chef’s apron finishes his cigarette and goes back in. I pass on, thinking about the stag mask with its sweetly farouche expression; about my daughter’s heavy branched head turning on her delicate shoulders, about the strange relief I felt at having her masked and at the animal form she took, innocent of human pain. In that guise she could run as fast and as far as she liked to dodge the hunter’s arrows. She was free.
I have a friend I’m too frightened to see. We used to be close, but when she calls during the smashed days of late summer I shrink from the sound of her voice. I read a story about a woman whose dead grandmother keeps calling the house, leaving long messages on the answering machine in which she bewails her purgatorial loneliness. The woman was fond of her grandmother but eventually she becomes angry, pitiless, shouting down the phone at the dead woman to go away. The calls are making her feel guilty.
My friend lives with her two daughters in a town about an hour from here, in a house an estate agent would describe as ‘deceptive’. From the outside it appears tiny: the deception lies in the fact that once the scale of the street has been removed, everything inside is at least in proportion to everything else. My friend is tiny herself, with child-sized hands whose bitten nails she hides in the long sleeves of her too-big jumpers. Once she lived in London with her husband, in a grand establishment where dinner parties were held from which one would come away feeling lacerated, as though the evening had contained a hidden blade that nicked the skin unnoticed. That blade, I suppose, was the animosity between man and wife that later dismembered their household and whole way of life
so brutally. The husband met another woman, had new children, bought another grand house to replace the first; and my friend and her daughters were cut away, like the excess cloth fallen from a seamstress’s table that the pattern doesn’t require.
so brutally. The husband met another woman, had new children, bought another grand house to replace the first; and my friend and her daughters were cut away, like the excess cloth fallen from a seamstress’s table that the pattern doesn’t require.
She moved to this cheaper, less fashionable location, got a job that fitted round her children’s school day, gave up drinking, took up yoga. She sees different people, has new opinions, a new haircut. Everything in her doll’s house is dainty and white and fresh. It is as though, in the absence of man, woman seizes the opportunity to recover her innocence, to make her world virginal again, to cleanse herself of the gore of sexuality and perfect her femininity. For a while I cleaned my own house incessantly, a maternal Lady Macbeth seeing bloodstains everywhere. The messy cupboards and cluttered shelves were like an actual subconscious I could purge of its guilt and pain. In those cupboards our family still existed, man and woman still mingled, children were still interleaved with their parents, intimacy survived. One day I took everything out and threw it away.
So I’m frightened of my friend. I don’t return her calls. Her existence is virtuous, honourable, yet the thought of it paralyses me with terror.
My daughter comes back from a school trip with a long face. I ask her how it was. It was all right, she says.
All evening she is quiet, but once she’s in bed, the covers pulled up to her chin, she begins to speak. The trip was to a local nature reserve, a place I know, the broad estuary banked by desolate wetlands
and marshes. They were there all day. They were asked to choose partners, and each pair was given maps and information packs and questionnaires with which to negotiate their own way around. They were asked to make a note of birds and animals they saw, and to sketch the different wildflowers and grasses. It sounds like fun, I say. Well it was, she says, I mean it would have been. That’s what makes it so hard, she says, the fact that it would have been fun.
and marshes. They were there all day. They were asked to choose partners, and each pair was given maps and information packs and questionnaires with which to negotiate their own way around. They were asked to make a note of birds and animals they saw, and to sketch the different wildflowers and grasses. It sounds like fun, I say. Well it was, she says, I mean it would have been. That’s what makes it so hard, she says, the fact that it would have been fun.
When the class chose their partners, standing in the car park beside the coach that had brought them there, the group was an odd number and my daughter found herself left out. I ask why she wasn’t in a pair with H, her longtime best friend. H chose someone else, she says. It seems that she and H are no longer friends, and that my daughter has been slower than H to make new alliances. I don’t blame her, she says. It’s not her fault. I’d probably have done exactly the same thing. But all day I had to go around on my own. And it was such a long day, she says, and so much walking and so many things we had to do. The teacher was meant to be her partner but it didn’t really work out like that. She kept having to go and help other people, and my daughter kept finding herself alone again.
I didn’t realise, I say, about you and H. You didn’t tell me.
It’s just as much my fault as hers, my daughter says.
What happened? I say.
My daughter shrugs.
She didn’t like it when I talked to other people, she says. I wanted to be her friend but I wanted to have other friends too. And she wanted it to be just us.
In the mirror my daughters and I look at ourselves. They are growing, getting bigger, and I am shrinking. I can’t eat, like a lovesick girl. But I am not a girl and this is grief. It is the opposite of excitement.
In the mirror their faces are young and strong and richly coloured, yet blunt and half-formed, full of the unknown, of sentences not yet uttered. Their heads reach my shoulder. I stand between them, recessed, shadowy, a creature concealed in the foliage of their girlish vigour. I feel I could stay hidden like this forever, hidden in this virginal life with my daughters, but then the image breaks apart; time resumes; they vanish from the mirror to do other things and I am left there, as though holding the long and close-typed book of myself in my hands.
Grief is not love but it is like love. This is romance’s estranged cousin, a cruel character, all sleeplessness and adrenalin unsweetened by hope. I have cousins I have rarely seen, for our families did not get on: they were like us but they were not us. A few years ago I saw them at a funeral, grown up now, a group of white-faced strangers clad in black. We spoke, politely, and it was unnerving to see in these strangers the lineaments of my siblings’ faces; to see coolness in their expressions instead of warmth, indifference where usually there was interest, to feel the lack of meaning and connection in what looked, nonetheless, like intimacy. And grief is somehow the same, resembling what it negates, each cousinly attribute a denial instead of a reinforcement.
I can’t eat, and soon my clothes are too big for me, all gaping sleeves and sagging waistbands, everything seeming to be on a different scale from myself, just as my mother’s clothes were when long ago I opened her wardrobe and curiously tried them on. In a way
I enjoy the feeling of becoming a child again. It seems to acquit me of men and marriage, this loss of substance; to pair me with my daughters, as though I were rejoining them on the other side of what created them. I feel safer this way. I look at people eating, at restaurant tables, in cafes and on park benches, and compared to them I feel protected, as though what they are ingesting in all its richness and density is compromise. To need is to be compromised. They seem almost vulnerable while they eat.
I enjoy the feeling of becoming a child again. It seems to acquit me of men and marriage, this loss of substance; to pair me with my daughters, as though I were rejoining them on the other side of what created them. I feel safer this way. I look at people eating, at restaurant tables, in cafes and on park benches, and compared to them I feel protected, as though what they are ingesting in all its richness and density is compromise. To need is to be compromised. They seem almost vulnerable while they eat.
As a family we would eat around the kitchen table, but now I carry my daughters their supper on a tray. The table is covered in papers and books and electricity bills. I try to remember what our family meals were like, and though the detail escapes me I remember it as a kind of tree, nourishment, with all of us fastened to its branches, as indistinguishable as fruit. Ours was a communal body: there was no individual drama of growing or shrinking. That same tree existed in my childhood, its cycles by turns reassuring and tyrannical. One could break away from it but the tree still stood. As a teenager trying to escape family mealtimes, I remember my mother’s disapproval – almost, her fear – of such absences. There was something she wanted us to believe, something she feared we might find out the truth of if we went elsewhere. That there were other places we could eat, perhaps; that this tree, family, was not the only source of life. To reject her food was to reject her; perhaps she thought food was the only thing we really needed from her, or the only thing she could provide. Mealtimes had the religiosity and infallibility of an institution, until we stopped believing in them and they were revealed to be just my mother, providing or needing, it wasn’t clear which.
Aren’t you having any? my daughters ask me. They are anxious,
just like my mother was, but for the opposite reason. As a teenager I felt lumpish and slow, weighted down: I was in no danger of starving. When I left home I lost weight, as though the weight were the weight of these family relationships themselves. I succumbed to the ascetic purity of that alternative religion, hunger. And now I have left home again, am in that white light again; the tree has been cut down and the light comes pouring through.
just like my mother was, but for the opposite reason. As a teenager I felt lumpish and slow, weighted down: I was in no danger of starving. When I left home I lost weight, as though the weight were the weight of these family relationships themselves. I succumbed to the ascetic purity of that alternative religion, hunger. And now I have left home again, am in that white light again; the tree has been cut down and the light comes pouring through.
My daughter makes a new friend, S. She and S don’t have much in common, as far as I can see. In fact, I don’t like S much. She has a great collection of electronic gadgets and devices she stares at, the morbid blue light of the screen on her face. She is forever drawing my daughter aside to show her what she’s looking at; the two of them stare together. Once, I go to collect my daughter from S’s house and through the windows see them sitting on a large beige sofa. On the wall in front of them is a huge screen with a film playing on it. As I get closer I see that S is holding another, smaller screen in her hands: the two of them are watching that, heads together, the blue light on their faces, like incidental figures in a religious canvas, absorbed in their own corner of life while at the painting’s centre Jesus is declaiming the Sermon on the Mount.
My daughter would like S to stay the night. She arrives with her overnight bag, her nail varnish collection, her gadgets. From elsewhere in the house I can hear them talking, but whenever I come in they fall silent. Over supper S replies to my questions in squeaking monosyllables. Her silence is portentous, smooth and sealed. She eats almost nothing. Later she produces packets of sweets and
crisps from her overnight bag. I go in to say goodnight to them and find them lying side by side, looking at one of S’s devices under the covers, the blue light of the screen on their faces. They are quiet, almost inert, but later when I go to bed I hear them murmuring and giggling. I tell them to go to sleep but as soon as I leave the murmuring starts again. Several times in the night I wake and hear it, a sound like the sound of running water or a door banging in the wind, something I know I should get up and fix but don’t.
crisps from her overnight bag. I go in to say goodnight to them and find them lying side by side, looking at one of S’s devices under the covers, the blue light of the screen on their faces. They are quiet, almost inert, but later when I go to bed I hear them murmuring and giggling. I tell them to go to sleep but as soon as I leave the murmuring starts again. Several times in the night I wake and hear it, a sound like the sound of running water or a door banging in the wind, something I know I should get up and fix but don’t.
I go to London to meet my brother. At the sight of me his face slackens. My God, he says.
He takes me to an expensive restaurant for lunch and I eat everything on the table, eat the contents of the bread basket and the sugar lumps that come with the coffee. Afterwards he hugs me. Come and stay, he says. Bring the girls and stay for as long as you like.
My daughters worry that they are getting fat. They stand in front of the mirror, frowning. They prod their own flesh. It is as though some rigour has gone from our household, the rigour of the male; as though we have lost something rodlike and firm at our centre, our female bodies waxing and waning like pale moons.
A friend invites us for dinner. The children don’t want to go – do we have to? they say. They seem genuinely unhappy at the prospect. When we arrive they stand right next to me; they hold
on to my clothes. They seem to fear losing me in the maze of someone else’s house, someone else’s family. Every few minutes they yank at my sleeve. Can we go now? they say, though we’ve only just arrived. It strikes me that they don’t like adults very much any more. When they are addressed they barely speak. Their faces are anguished.
on to my clothes. They seem to fear losing me in the maze of someone else’s house, someone else’s family. Every few minutes they yank at my sleeve. Can we go now? they say, though we’ve only just arrived. It strikes me that they don’t like adults very much any more. When they are addressed they barely speak. Their faces are anguished.
My friend and his wife are good cooks. Theirs is a happy marriage, a joint creation of great delicacy and skill; I have always admired it, have liked to look at it and be in its presence. The food they make is expressive of themselves, healthy, moderate, and the opposite of punitive or dull. I have admired them, but things are different for me now. My admiration has become a kind of voyeurism, the broken perception of the vagabond roaming at lit windows. My children hover, tugging at my sleeve. I don’t want to put people to the test: it has struck me that along with all the other losses, I might lose friendship too. I’m not equal any more with the people I know, and what is friendship but a celebration of equality?
My friend sets the table. I watch him bring out the clean plates and glasses, the gleaming cutlery. I watch him lay the places. I watch him bring out fish and bread and bowls of greenery. The kitchen is warm and comfortable. To be at this ceremony of the table again is almost painful; my daughters hover, not wanting to sit down. Can we go now? they say. My friend pulls out chairs for them, fills their plates. If you don’t like it I can make you something else, he tells them. I’ve got other things, or maybe you just feel like eating bread. He offers the bread, and they take some. Then they eat what’s in front of them, all of it. When we leave my friend gives me a loaf of his good bread. He and
his wife suggest meeting again in a few days’ time; they offer to take my daughters swimming with their son. My daughters don’t say very much but later, when we go home, they admit that they enjoyed themselves.
his wife suggest meeting again in a few days’ time; they offer to take my daughters swimming with their son. My daughters don’t say very much but later, when we go home, they admit that they enjoyed themselves.
I meet my oldest friend – J – for a drink. The children are with their father: I have begun to think that in these periods alone I ought to socialise. I see it as a kind of duty arising out of a vast and possibly terminal neglect, for I have no sense of a future: when I go out to see my friends it is in the service of an illusion. I am trying to pretend that nothing has happened, that nothing has changed, like the orchestra still playing while the
Titanic
sinks.
Titanic
sinks.
But it’s a bad day, the day on which I meet J. Things are difficult; it’s hard to talk about anything else. I can talk to J without anxiety. She knows my life and I know hers: our talk is the talk of episodes; the story itself never needs to be explained. All the same I feel guilty. The drama of my life dominates, uses up the fuel of conversation like an ugly army tank guzzling petrol. This is not equality. I’m sorry, I say, I’m sorry. I’m just so tired. I admit to J that I find it almost intolerable when the children are away. I admit that the night before I lay awake until it was light again and I could get up. I admit that I often spend these vigils in tears.
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