Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (4 page)
Read Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation Online
Authors: Rachel Cusk
BOOK: Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation
2.56Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
In the big upstairs room whose windows go all the way down to the floor there are two enormous, ornate gilt hooks mysteriously screwed into the high ceiling. One day, coming out of the house, I met an old woman standing outside on the pavement looking up at these windows. She told me that when she was younger she lived in this road and often used to stand where she was now, listening to the sound of singing that came out of them. It was the lady who owned the house then who was singing: she was an opera singer, and she lived here with a man who played a stringed instrument, a lute or perhaps a guitar, or maybe it was a mandolin. She it was who put the hooks into the ceiling: she hung her hammock from them and would sit at one end, singing, with her man at the other accompanying her, both of them swinging in the breezes from the open windows. At the time this image pierced me with a feeling that was almost pain, for that room was my bedroom and I often lay and looked at those hooks, seeing something in the enigma of them to which I could never give an exact name; in their golden extravagance
and lack of usefulness they tantalised me and reproached me at the same time, for though I didn’t know what they were for I knew some force had put them there whose nature I both recognised and denied. These mysterious objects, these ferocious opulent hooks, expressed its terror and its beauty; they were, I felt sure, the opposite of a gutless adornment. Other people, seeing them, would sometimes betray something of my own alarm, as though these were the golden claws of an angry deity we had forgotten to placate. And they had fastened on my room, these claws, to remind me of something I didn’t seem to know or couldn’t remember, something to do with happiness, and with the power of the unknown to undo the known. What are they for? people would ask, gazing at them quizzically. And I would always answer that I didn’t know.
and lack of usefulness they tantalised me and reproached me at the same time, for though I didn’t know what they were for I knew some force had put them there whose nature I both recognised and denied. These mysterious objects, these ferocious opulent hooks, expressed its terror and its beauty; they were, I felt sure, the opposite of a gutless adornment. Other people, seeing them, would sometimes betray something of my own alarm, as though these were the golden claws of an angry deity we had forgotten to placate. And they had fastened on my room, these claws, to remind me of something I didn’t seem to know or couldn’t remember, something to do with happiness, and with the power of the unknown to undo the known. What are they for? people would ask, gazing at them quizzically. And I would always answer that I didn’t know.
There is a more convenient dentist, in fact. Her practice is much closer to my house. This dentist is glamorous, with blonde waved hair and a slender, buxom figure like a fifties film star. Sometimes I see her slim calves disappearing up the grimy stairwell to the building, hear the rapid tick-tack of her high-heeled shoes. She wears little tailored outfits in beautiful colours, primrose and magenta, scarlet and pistachio green. She has a slightly distressed look about her as she comes and goes; an air of apprehension haunts her rosebud expression, like the film star in the suspenseful phase of the drama. Will the mystery resolve itself? Will the impossible become possible? Will our heroine win the day? In the mornings the road is full of rubbish, of litter the maritime winds blow across the pavements, of broken bottles and discarded food the seagulls tug from
the plastic bags left out for the binmen. The dentist picks her way through it, the collar of her coat turned up, like a tragic starlet in a Paris backstreet.
the plastic bags left out for the binmen. The dentist picks her way through it, the collar of her coat turned up, like a tragic starlet in a Paris backstreet.
I went to her practice once, made an appointment and climbed the narrow stairs to the first floor with my daughters. We needed to register with a dentist, and though it looked like we were simply following the promptings of fate in coming here, some secret vanity made me want the exotic dentist for her own sake, for like the golden hooks in my bedroom ceiling she represented my own forsaken sense of glamour, was another manifestation of the deity who found it so provoking to be denied. It was dark up there, and tenebrous, though outside it was a bright afternoon. A single bulb lit the gloomy hall. In the waiting room the blinds were down. I stood with my daughters at the vacant reception desk. We waited five minutes, ten. Presently I spoke to someone passing and was told to keep waiting. I could hear voices in other rooms, and footsteps going rapidly to and fro. I realised that something was happening: there was a feeling of drama here, a dark sense of incident in the muffled voices and the deserted desk. I heard the sound of drilling, and then more voices, low and urgent.
‘Has he come round?’ someone said.
‘He doesn’t want to wake up.’ This was the dentist’s voice.
‘Try again.’
I moved out into the hall and saw through the partly opened door the room the voices were coming from. I could see the dentist’s back: she was wearing a red silk blouse today, tightly cinched at the waist with a belt; and, unusually, trousers over her vertiginous heels. Her yellow hair flowed in serpentine waves over her shoulders. She was bending over the dentist’s chair, in which lay the
unconscious body of a man. Another woman, a nurse I suppose, was there too: through the gap in the door I saw the two women, together, stooped over the man’s body. They shook him and prodded him. They called in his ear. He lay there like a broken toy they had, between them, destroyed; as though, fascinated by their power over him, they had forgotten for a moment his fallibility. I went back to the waiting room, where my daughters still stood. Their faces were uncertain. Along the hall the man had begun to groan, loud and long and terrible groans that filled the gloomy half-darkness of the waiting room.
unconscious body of a man. Another woman, a nurse I suppose, was there too: through the gap in the door I saw the two women, together, stooped over the man’s body. They shook him and prodded him. They called in his ear. He lay there like a broken toy they had, between them, destroyed; as though, fascinated by their power over him, they had forgotten for a moment his fallibility. I went back to the waiting room, where my daughters still stood. Their faces were uncertain. Along the hall the man had begun to groan, loud and long and terrible groans that filled the gloomy half-darkness of the waiting room.
‘I think we should go,’ I said. ‘I think we should come back another time.’
My daughters looked more uncertain still.
‘Why?’ they said.
Their response surprised me. Could they not see for themselves that things were not right? The man groaned and bellowed down the hall. Was this what a world run by women looked like? A woman, I thought, should be more than a mere impersonator. My daughters’ anxious faces, the groaning man, the deserted reception desk in the shadowy waiting room: in the presence of these things I felt the presence of failure. It was I who had brought them here, who had made the appointment; now I was saying we had to go.
‘There’s been a mix-up,’ I said. ‘I was sure the appointment was today but they haven’t got it written down.’
‘Oh,’ they said.
‘Perhaps we’ll find a different dentist,’ I said. ‘Perhaps this one isn’t very well organised.’
They looked a little suspicious – after all, I had made much of the proximity of this dentist to our house. What was going on here?
Out in the shadowy hall, we met the dentist herself, hastening from her room. She looked flushed and harried; she had her coat on with the collar turned up. Behind her the man still lay splayed in the chair, groaning dreadfully. The nurse appeared in another doorway.
Out in the shadowy hall, we met the dentist herself, hastening from her room. She looked flushed and harried; she had her coat on with the collar turned up. Behind her the man still lay splayed in the chair, groaning dreadfully. The nurse appeared in another doorway.
‘Is he all right?’ she said.
‘He’ll live,’ said the dentist harshly. ‘He feels a bit sick, that’s all. I’m just going to buy him a can of Coke.’
She pushed past us, closing her collar around her throat with a flash of red-painted fingernails. I smelled her perfume, heard the jingle of coins in her pocket. She tick-tacked away down the stairs.
Everywhere people are in couples. On the corner of my road I pass a man and a woman, kissing in the passing traffic. I pass a heavily tattooed couple coming back side by side from the shops, their arms full of purchases, their children in a line behind them like ducklings. I pass a man and a woman with Down’s Syndrome, holding hands. They make it seem so easy, to love.
The weather is fine for the time of year. In the mornings the sun streams through the windows into the half-empty rooms, like sun falling on a ruin. The timbers creak with the unaccustomed warmth, sending the sound of footfalls around the house. They travel eerily up and down the stairs and across the ceilings overhead, as though there were someone in the room above who had crossed to the window to look out. The water mutters in the pipes; periodically the boiler ignites, choking and grumbling cholerically in the basement. One day it finally falls silent; the dishwasher breaks, the drains clog, the knobs of doors and cupboards come away unexpectedly in the hand. There is the sound of dripping water, and a dark stain spreads across the kitchen wall, the plaster bulging and flaking like afflicted skin. The children’s hamsters scuttle in their separate cages, oblivious. They can’t live together, for as a species
they are too irascible. They condemn themselves to solitude, immersed in their routines of sleeping and gnawing and burrowing. Sometimes they climb the bars at the sides of the cages and look out with inquisitive bead-bright eyes, as though, having issued from their self-absorption, they now expect something to happen. In a way they are too trusting, for no one notices their changes of circumstance. At night the high-pitched sound of them running on their separate wheels fills the dark silent house.
they are too irascible. They condemn themselves to solitude, immersed in their routines of sleeping and gnawing and burrowing. Sometimes they climb the bars at the sides of the cages and look out with inquisitive bead-bright eyes, as though, having issued from their self-absorption, they now expect something to happen. In a way they are too trusting, for no one notices their changes of circumstance. At night the high-pitched sound of them running on their separate wheels fills the dark silent house.
A man comes to look at the spare room. He is pale and flaxen-haired, with small, almost colourless eyes and sharp little wolverine teeth. He has a tiny battered car he parks in the street outside. Every now and then he goes to the sitting-room window to check for traffic wardens. The room was advertised for rent in the local paper: the phone has rung and rung every day for a week. As soon as I replace the receiver it rings again; I go out and return to find the answering machine full, the red light blinking. Nearly all the calls are from men, men from everywhere and nowhere, men of all kinds: young men and old, foreign and local, gruff and loquacious, determined and indifferent, and all apparently untethered, alone, briefly circling the fixed point of my house while held at some unbreachable distance, like barren planets orbiting a star in the blackness of outer space. Sometimes there is interference on the line, crackling, the sound of windy mountaintops. I am calling about the room. I am calling to enquire about the room. Once or twice a woman has rung: she is looking for somewhere for herself and her boyfriend. She is part of a couple – do I have a problem with that? Her boyfriend works at the bar, the casino, the club down at the marina. Her boyfriend works nights: he likes to sleep during the day. She herself wants to do a course, in aromatherapy, nutrition, languages;
she’s thinking about asking at the university; she isn’t quite sure. She and her boyfriend are very relaxed. They are very chilled. They like relaxed, chilled people, people with no worries. They don’t like to get stressed. Do I have a problem with that? I’m sorry, I say. I live here with my children. It’s their home. I’m sorry.
she’s thinking about asking at the university; she isn’t quite sure. She and her boyfriend are very relaxed. They are very chilled. They like relaxed, chilled people, people with no worries. They don’t like to get stressed. Do I have a problem with that? I’m sorry, I say. I live here with my children. It’s their home. I’m sorry.
Then one afternoon a man rings sounding anxious and purposeful, as though he’s lost something but is certain to find it again at any moment. His voice suggests neither need nor imposition: this is the man who now stands in my house, looking anxiously and purposefully out of the window at his car. His name is Rupert. For three years he has been living on the other side of the city with his girlfriend, but the relationship has come to an end and he wants somewhere to stay short-term while he looks for a more permanent home. He works long hours for an energy supply company up in town; he needs somewhere to sleep, to hang his suits, to house his television – apparently it’s quite large. While he speaks he looks at me fixedly with his small pale eyes, but whenever I reply he looks shyly down and away to the side. With his fine, almost white hair and his downcast eyes he looks either innocent or guilty, I can’t tell.
The clocks have gone forward and now the evenings are long and as blank as paper. People stay out late on the streets calling and shouting, music pouring from open windows, cars revving and honking in the dusk. Someone new has moved in next door and erected his sound system on the other side of my bedroom wall. All night the electronic pulses probe and torment the space between us. I wander through the dark house, checking the locks on the doors and windows, for it feels as though the outside is coming in, as though a wall of defence has come down, as though the doors and windows may as well not be there at all. We are a house of
women and children, but I wonder whether our vulnerability is anything more than something invented to make men feel brave. When there’s a war men go off to it, leaving the women and children behind, and when they return perhaps it is to find that they have made themselves dispensable, like Agamemnon returning to Argos from Troy. I wonder whether we will be safer with Rupert in the house or more at risk. There is a space here, an impression, like a footprint in the sand or a cast, a male declivity in the shape of my husband. Vaguely I try to fit Rupert into it. I imagine him fixing the drains, the door handles, having a look inside the dishwasher to see what’s wrong. Man is either protector or predator, I can’t quite remember which.
women and children, but I wonder whether our vulnerability is anything more than something invented to make men feel brave. When there’s a war men go off to it, leaving the women and children behind, and when they return perhaps it is to find that they have made themselves dispensable, like Agamemnon returning to Argos from Troy. I wonder whether we will be safer with Rupert in the house or more at risk. There is a space here, an impression, like a footprint in the sand or a cast, a male declivity in the shape of my husband. Vaguely I try to fit Rupert into it. I imagine him fixing the drains, the door handles, having a look inside the dishwasher to see what’s wrong. Man is either protector or predator, I can’t quite remember which.
Rupert is efficient with his paperwork, his deposit, his references. He brings his iron and his humorous posters, his suits. He brings his television, which stands on a plinth in his room like a vast black blinking god. I give him two shelves in the fridge and he fills them with ready meals for one, the plastic containers neatly stacked in the cold lit chamber like things in a morgue. My husband comes to collect something while Rupert is in the hall and the two of them shake hands.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ they both say.
Agamemnon, in the
Oresteia
of Aeschylus, returns to his palace in Argos, the victor after ten years’ war against the Trojans. He is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra as soon as he sets foot in the hall, walking over the costly crimson tapestries with which she has laid the palace floor as his bitter homecoming tribute. Later she is murdered
in her turn by their children, Orestes and Electra, who cannot forgive her for disposing of their father, imperfect though he was.
Oresteia
of Aeschylus, returns to his palace in Argos, the victor after ten years’ war against the Trojans. He is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra as soon as he sets foot in the hall, walking over the costly crimson tapestries with which she has laid the palace floor as his bitter homecoming tribute. Later she is murdered
in her turn by their children, Orestes and Electra, who cannot forgive her for disposing of their father, imperfect though he was.
My children are interested in the ancient Greeks. They have a surprising knowledge of Greek mythology, know its twists and turns, are familiar with its cast of characters. When they talk about it it’s as though they are talking about something they personally remember. I suppose this knowledge can only have come from books, so it is memory in a way. For a child a book and a memory can be difficult to tell apart. All the same it’s surprising, how much they know. Freud viewed the formation of individual personality as analogous to human history: I like this way of understanding a life, as a re-enactment in miniature of civilisation. According to this analogy the ancient Greeks are the formative phases of infancy, in which the psyche is shaped and given its irrevocable character. So it’s fitting, I suppose, that a child should have a special attraction to these tales of gods and mortals, to the joy and anarchy of the early world, in which fantasy and reality have not yet been separated, in which the moral authority of God the father has not yet been asserted and guilt and conscience do not yet exist.
We once visited what is said to be Agamemnon’s tomb, on a family holiday in the Peloponnese. It is a vast conical space dug beneath a hot hillside at Mycenae where bees buzz amid the wildflowers, the tomb itself beehive-shaped, as though in acknowledgement of what is really the only immortality, the return of all things human to the eternal substances of nature. Clytemnestra’s tomb is there too: the two are far apart, for this is a story not of marriage but of separation, of the attempt to break the form of marriage and be free. There are two tombs, just as there were two people: separation is a demand for space, the expression of the self’s
need to regain its integrity. The double tomb, like the double bed, symbolises the power of marriage to erase these distinctions. At night I used to wake up and ask myself the question, who am I? For there in the darkness, in the marital bed, I felt myself wheeling on the edge of a black chasm, wheeling with the planets in outer space, hurtling through a blackness rashed with stars. The reality of my room, my home, my life couldn’t seem to anchor me. I was frightened of dying, not because I loved life but because I couldn’t distinguish myself, couldn’t gather together as one entity this self whose existence posited the fact of non-existence. It was like seeing a shadow without being able to see what cast it. I didn’t know who I was: yet ‘I’ would one day die.
need to regain its integrity. The double tomb, like the double bed, symbolises the power of marriage to erase these distinctions. At night I used to wake up and ask myself the question, who am I? For there in the darkness, in the marital bed, I felt myself wheeling on the edge of a black chasm, wheeling with the planets in outer space, hurtling through a blackness rashed with stars. The reality of my room, my home, my life couldn’t seem to anchor me. I was frightened of dying, not because I loved life but because I couldn’t distinguish myself, couldn’t gather together as one entity this self whose existence posited the fact of non-existence. It was like seeing a shadow without being able to see what cast it. I didn’t know who I was: yet ‘I’ would one day die.
On the hot hillside above the tomb I told my children the story of the
Oresteia
, hardly knowing what it was I was telling them. Does Clytemnestra know that Agamemnon is coming home? Is the murder calculated, a plan shaped during the years of his absence, or is it a sudden, unpremeditated explosion of violence? Yes, she knows: she keeps a guard posted day and night on the palace walls as a lookout. She has had bonfires laid on every hillside between Argos and Troy, waiting to be lit in the event of the warriors’ return. It is the behaviour of a tyrant, a dictator, this obsessive news-gathering, this round-the-clock surveillance. And indeed this is how Clytemnestra’s subjects speak of her, as a kind of Iron Lady, a man in a woman’s body. They too watch for those beacons to be lit, signifying victory at Troy and the return of their king. They are uncomfortable with this female version of power. It is a kind of theft, when a woman behaves like a man, or indeed a man like a woman. There is the feeling that someone’s been murdered, been done away with in the robbery.
Oresteia
, hardly knowing what it was I was telling them. Does Clytemnestra know that Agamemnon is coming home? Is the murder calculated, a plan shaped during the years of his absence, or is it a sudden, unpremeditated explosion of violence? Yes, she knows: she keeps a guard posted day and night on the palace walls as a lookout. She has had bonfires laid on every hillside between Argos and Troy, waiting to be lit in the event of the warriors’ return. It is the behaviour of a tyrant, a dictator, this obsessive news-gathering, this round-the-clock surveillance. And indeed this is how Clytemnestra’s subjects speak of her, as a kind of Iron Lady, a man in a woman’s body. They too watch for those beacons to be lit, signifying victory at Troy and the return of their king. They are uncomfortable with this female version of power. It is a kind of theft, when a woman behaves like a man, or indeed a man like a woman. There is the feeling that someone’s been murdered, been done away with in the robbery.
Clytemnestra has had no choice but to live and rule without her husband all these years; a working mother, if you will, single parent to her son Orestes and her daughter Electra. There was another daughter, Iphegenia, the eldest, who is dead. Her absence haunts this drama, this family, for in a way a family and a drama are the same thing. Iphegenia died at the very time her father Agamemnon set sail for Troy: the two events are inseparably linked. On that day, Agamemnon and his fleet, all prepared for war, found themselves becalmed in the harbour and unable to depart. There was no wind to fill the sails: the driving force of civilisation, the whole thrusting work of men caught up in the furtherance of their aims, was brought to a standstill by a simple withdrawal of the favourable conditions. They had forgotten that they depended on this favour, this willingness of the wind. They had forgotten to propitiate Artemis, the goddess whose wind it was, as men forget at their peril to propitiate the women on whose willingness their plans and projects depend, for though women don’t fight wars or build civilisation, all is conditional on their willingness for it to be done. Were women not willing, civilisation would be halted. There the men sat in the harbour, armed to the teeth, with no means of getting where they wanted to go. What could they give Artemis to bring her round? How could they mollify her, fast, in order to get going? An extravagant gift was the answer. She liked sacrifices, the blood of virgins, a valuable girl laid on her altar like a cultured pearl. Agamemnon’s daughter Iphegenia, a virgin, a princess, and what’s more dearly loved by her parents, would make a rare present. Especially the love: the goddess would appreciate that, like the special lustre on the pearl of great price. All night Agamemnon agonised, but as Clytemnestra bitterly noted, what he decided came as no surprise. And
what is it, the agony of decision where the decision is already made? Had Agamemnon not agonised, Iphegenia’s value would have been diminished. Had he offered her up easily, the goddess might not have been satisfied. The agony was a kind of formality, but it was a perversion too, a misuse of emotion. The next day Iphegenia was led out in the saffron-coloured dress that was meant for her wedding, and lying bound on the stone altar she watched while her father raised a knife and drove it into her heart.
what is it, the agony of decision where the decision is already made? Had Agamemnon not agonised, Iphegenia’s value would have been diminished. Had he offered her up easily, the goddess might not have been satisfied. The agony was a kind of formality, but it was a perversion too, a misuse of emotion. The next day Iphegenia was led out in the saffron-coloured dress that was meant for her wedding, and lying bound on the stone altar she watched while her father raised a knife and drove it into her heart.
Rupert tells me that his girlfriend, once so clinging and dependent, has found a new lease of life in their separation. She has moved up to London; she is out every night, at bars and clubs and parties. He claims to be relieved: he was the one who brought their relationship to an end, and was prepared to do a certain amount of penance for it. He had expected long, tearful telephone calls, flashes of anger and accusation, pleas for reconciliation. But instead, when he speaks to her – which is rarely – she claims to feel liberated. He’s worried, though; after all, he knows her well. She’s a woman whose sorrows take extrovert and hedonistic forms. Yet the fact is she doesn’t seem to need him, doesn’t call.
Every day he leaves the house early, at half past six, vanished into the pale light of morning amid the seagulls’ cacophonous waking cries. He retires early too, at half past nine. Sometimes I glimpse his male form in the dusky stairwell, clad in a white towelling robe. In the kitchen his ready meals revolve in the planetary light of the microwave oven. He eats on a stool at the counter, turning the pages of a newspaper. Once a month he has
a Saturday off and takes his mother out to lunch: she lives not far away. Rupert is her only child; his father left when he was a baby and started a new family elsewhere. His second wife is rich and powerful where Rupert’s mother is fragile and impoverished. He hasn’t seen his father for years. The two of them have moved around the country, drifting like dandelion seeds troubled by breezes, too light and bewildered to find the earth. For a while Rupert attended a choir school. Despite the insubstantiality of his origins, he was discovered to have a strong voice. The school was an upper-class institution: Rupert was given a scholarship. When he speaks of that time he wears a child’s costive expression on his face. The choristers would sing in their white robes from the top of the bell tower. One day one of Rupert’s schoolfellows climbed the tower and jumped off it. I ask whether he still sings and he screws up his mouth in reply.
a Saturday off and takes his mother out to lunch: she lives not far away. Rupert is her only child; his father left when he was a baby and started a new family elsewhere. His second wife is rich and powerful where Rupert’s mother is fragile and impoverished. He hasn’t seen his father for years. The two of them have moved around the country, drifting like dandelion seeds troubled by breezes, too light and bewildered to find the earth. For a while Rupert attended a choir school. Despite the insubstantiality of his origins, he was discovered to have a strong voice. The school was an upper-class institution: Rupert was given a scholarship. When he speaks of that time he wears a child’s costive expression on his face. The choristers would sing in their white robes from the top of the bell tower. One day one of Rupert’s schoolfellows climbed the tower and jumped off it. I ask whether he still sings and he screws up his mouth in reply.
Other books
The Warrior's Bond (Einarinn 4) by Juliet E. McKenna
Acadian Waltz by Weis, Alexandrea
Sass & Serendipity by Jennifer Ziegler
Xvi by Julia Karr
Dark Melody by Christine Feehan
Demonic Temptation by Kim Knox
AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War by Kahaner, Larry
Sensual Games (Novak Springs #3) by Dawn Brower
What is the Matter with Mary Jane? by Wendy Harmer
Indefensible by Lee Goodman
