Outline: A Novel (22 page)
Authors: Rachel Cusk
‘There was something so final,’ she said, ‘in that remark that I realised our conversation was over. And it was true that even though the flight had another half an hour to go we didn’t say one more word to each other. I sat beside this man and felt the power of his silence. I felt, almost, as though I had been chastised. Yet all that had happened was that he had refused to take the blame for his own failure, and had rejected my attempt to read any kind of significance into it, a significance he saw that I was all too ready to articulate. It was almost a battle of wills, his discipline against my emotion, with only the armrest between us. I waited for him to ask me a question, which after all would have been only polite, but he didn’t, even though I had asked him so many questions about himself. He sealed himself in his own view of life, even at the risk of causing offence, because he knew that view to be under threat.’
She had sat there, she said, and thought about her own lifelong habit of explaining herself, and she thought about this power of silence, which put people out of one another’s reach. Lately, since the incident – now that things had got harder to explain, and the explanations were harsher and bleaker – even her closest friends had started to tell her to stop talking about it, as though by talking about it she made it continue to exist. Yet if people were silent about the things that had happened to them, was something not being betrayed, even if only the version of themselves that had experienced them? It was never said of history, for instance, that it shouldn’t be talked about; on the contrary, in terms of history silence was forgetting, and it was the thing people feared most of all, when it was their own history that was at risk of being forgotten. And history, really, was invisible, though its monuments still stood. The making of the monuments was half of it, but the rest was interpretation. Yet there was something worse than forgetting, which was misrepresentation, bias, the selective presentation of events. The truth had to be represented: it couldn’t just be left to represent itself, as for instance she had left it to the police after the incident, and found herself more or less sidelined.
I asked her whether she would mind telling me about the incident, and her face took on a look of alarm. She put her hands to her throat, where two blue veins stood out.
‘Bloke jumped out of a bush,’ she squawked. ‘Tried to strangle me.’
She hoped I would understand, she added, but despite what she’d said earlier she was in fact trying not to talk about it any more. She was trying her very best to sum it up. Let’s just say that drama became something real to me that day, she said. It ceased to be theoretical, was no longer an internal structure in which she could hide and look out at the world. In a sense, her work had jumped out of a bush and attacked her.
I said it seemed to me that at a certain point a lot of people felt that, not about work but about life itself.
She sat silently on the sofa for a while, nodding her head, her hands folded across her stomach. Presently she asked me when I was leaving. I told her my flight was in a few hours.
‘That’s a shame,’ she said. ‘Are you looking forward to going back?’
In a way, I said.
She asked whether there was anything I felt she particularly ought to see, while she was here. She knew the place was packed with sites of global cultural importance, but for some reason she found that idea a bit overwhelming. If there was something smaller, something I personally valued, she would be glad to know about it.
I said she could go to the Agora, and look at the headless statues of goddesses in the colonnade. It was cool there, and peaceful, and the massive marble bodies in their soft-looking draperies, so anonymous and mute, were strangely consoling. I once spent three weeks here alone with my children, I said, when we were stuck because all the flights out had been cancelled. Though you couldn’t see it, it was said that there was a great cloud of ash in the sky; people were worried little pieces of grit might get stuck in the engines. It reminded me, I said, of the apocalyptic visions of the medieval mystics, this cloud that was so imperceptible and yet so subject to belief. So we stayed here for three weeks, and because we weren’t meant to be here I felt that we became, in a sense, invisible. We didn’t see anyone or speak to anyone except each other in all that time, though I had friends in Athens I could have called. But I didn’t call them: the feeling of invisibility was too powerful. We spent a lot of time in the Agora, I said, a place that had been invaded, destroyed and rebuilt many times in its history until finally, in the modern era, it had been rescued and preserved. We got to know it, I said, fairly well.
Oh, she said. Well if I wanted to see it again and if I had the time, perhaps we could go there together. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to find it on her own. And she could do with a walk – it might take her mind off food.
I said she could try souvlaki: she would never be hungry again.
Souvlaki, she said. Yes, I think I’ve heard of that.
My phone rang, and the cheerful, undaunted tones of my neighbour came pealing down the line.
He hoped I found myself well this morning, he said. He trusted there had been no further incidents to upset me. I had not, he noticed, responded to his texts, so he thought he would call me directly. He had been thinking of me; he was wondering whether I had time for an excursion out to sea, before my flight.
I said I was afraid not – I hoped we would meet again the next time he found himself in London, but for now I had an engagement with someone, to do some sightseeing.
In that case, he said, I will spend the day in solicitude.
You mean solitude, I said.
I do beg your pardon, he said. Of course, I mean solitude.
FICTION
The Bradshaw Variations
Arlington Park
In the Fold
The Lucky Ones
The Country Life
The Temporary
Saving Agnes
NONFICTION
Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation
The Last Supper: A Summer in Italy
A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother
Rachel Cusk is the author of three memoirs—
A Life’s Work
,
The Last Supper
, and
Aftermath
—and seven novels:
Saving Agnes
, winner of the Whitbread
First Novel Award;
The Temporary
;
The Country Life
, which won a Somerset
Maugham Award;
The Lucky Ones
;
In the Fold
;
Arlington Park
; and
The Bradshaw Variations
. She
was chosen as one of
Granta
’s 2003 Best
of Young British Novelists. She lives in
London.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2014 by Rachel Cusk
All rights reserved
Originally published in 2014 by Faber and Faber Ltd., Great Britain
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2015
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cusk, Rachel, 1967–
Outline: a novel / Rachel Cusk.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-374-22834-7 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-374-71236-5 (e-book)
1. English teachers—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6053.U825 O68 2015
823'.914—dc23
2014016969
