Saving Agnes (19 page)

‘What do you mean?' said Agnes. For one so recently initiated into the working world, such claims to liberation outside it were hard to bear.

‘Well, it's not exactly living, is it?' Tom stretched languorously. ‘Cooped up in an office all day long with people you don't really like. At someone else's beck and call from morning till night. And what's it all for?'

He sat up and glared expectantly at Agnes, who found herself without a reply immediately to hand.

‘Money,' he revealed finally.

‘Well, of course it is,' she replied. ‘What else did you think it would be for?'

‘But don't you see?' cried Tom exasperatedly. ‘It doesn't mean anything! There's no meaning!'

Agnes stared at him.

‘Look,' he continued. ‘I've spent most of my life thinking that it didn't really matter what happened to the rest of the
world as long as I was all right. And I thought I was all right! But now I realise I was just – half-asleep, dreaming, and now I've woken up and really started to see things. I was living a lie, but I was so involved in it I thought it was the truth. My life was a kind of imprisonment, Agnes. I've set myself free.'

‘You didn't exactly have much choice,' Agnes reminded him. ‘You were sacked, after all.'

‘Yes!' said Tom. ‘Being sacked was just the beginning. It was like a sign. It opened my eyes!'

‘A sign,' said Agnes.

‘And shall I tell you what I see? I see that the world is dying, destroying itself with greed. All my life I've taken, without a thought to the consequences. So, now I reckon it's time for me to give something back!'

‘You're going to save the world?' said Agnes. ‘Well, thank heavens for that. We were all getting a bit worried there. Good thing you had a change of heart.'

‘I understand it might take time for you to get used to it,' said Tom. ‘After all, I used to give you a pretty hard time about things like this. But I hope that sooner or later you'll be pleased. I remember something you said to me, last time we were home. It's kept coming back to me the last few days. You said something about my making money out of other people's misfortune. I'll never forget that. That's what started me thinking. I thought, is that really what I want to do? When I die, do I want people to say, Oh, Tom, yes, of course, he made his money screwing people who'd already screwed up their own lives. It was the way you said it, you make it sound so – so
evil.
Making money out of other people's misfortune.'

‘I was probably just jealous,' said Agnes, ‘I couldn't make money out of my own misfortune, let alone anyone else's.'

‘But I admire that, Agnes. You do your job for the love of it. That takes character, and guts.'

‘So what exactly are you going to do?' inquired Agnes, moving hastily on from this undeserved eulogy. It disturbed her even more than his plans for global salvation, although she was reassured by her certainty that Tom's creative views
on unemployment would evaporate with the first whiff of a lucrative job opportunity.

‘I thought I might try and find something in conservation, actually,' he replied. ‘There's these companies which are like environmental hired guns. They keep an eye on industry and big business. I know the field, so I thought I may as well put it to good use. I've been writing letters.'

‘Do you mean to say you're serious about this?'

‘Of course I am.' He looked surprised. ‘I thought you'd be pleased. You've certainly changed your tune these days.'

He got up and began brushing grass from his trousers. Agnes suddenly became aware of how cold it was. She rose from the hard November ground and followed him slowly back to the house.

Agnes went up to her room that night to find her mother sitting on the bed.

‘I brought you up a blanket,' she said as Agnes appeared in the doorway. ‘It seemed rather cold.'

Agnes sat down beside her on the bed and waited to be afforded the real purpose of her visit. She knew her mother to be no handmaiden of domestic drudgery. She was not a bringer of blankets or provider of packed lunches. While this deficiency had certainly been a source of grief in the past, when Agnes had seen the dotingly cut sandwiches and fond crisp-packets of others of proof of a somehow superior love, these days she would not have suffered being the progeny of an unpaid servant. Now she would rather see herself descended from a harbourer of ulterior motives.

‘How did you find Tom?' asked her mother. Years of suffering at the hands of over-smart children had not apparently taught her to avoid questions which could beg such precocious answers as ‘I just looked up and there he was.'

‘Oh, Tom's fine,' Agnes replied bitterly. ‘Tom's found the meaning of life. Apparently it has to do with shooting people who drop litter.'

She waited for the torrent of uncomprehending concern which her over-literal reply would undoubtedly provoke. She did not want to talk about Tom. She did not want to discuss the worrying proclivities of others. Right now, she wanted to be warm and hidden, nursed and held like something precious; taken back inside the body beside her, for example, to float and hum wordlessly. For a while, her mother said nothing.

‘What about you?' she volunteered presently. ‘You don't seem quite yourself, if you don't mind my saying so. Is there anything wrong?'

‘Everything!' burst out Agnes, who had not really thought anything was. ‘Everything's wrong! I hate myself! I hate my life, I do!'

She began noisily to cry. Her mother, although slightly taken aback by this outburst, nevertheless held out her arms and enfolded Agnes within them. Agnes howled. Soon she had clambered on to her mother's lap, still weeping, and the two of them effected an embrace which their various ages and sizes might have rended improbable.

‘There, there,' soothed her mother. ‘Now what's this all about, hmm? What's it all about? Agnes, dear, you may have to get off my lap. It's a bit of a strain on my silly old knees. You know what they're like in cold weather.'

This instruction precipitated a fresh overture of grief.

‘I'm too big!' Agnes cried.

‘Oh, really, darling!' sighed her mother. ‘I agree you are a bit plumper, but it's just my arthritis. There's absolutely no need to take it personally.'

‘No, not like that!' Agnes hid her face in her mother's arm. ‘I want to be a child again. I don't know what's wrong with me. I just want to be small and have someone protect me and look after me!'

‘Well, we all feel like that,' said her mother firmly.

‘Do we?' Agnes peered at her through watery eyes.

‘Of course. Life can be very frightening sometimes, darling. Everyone finds it so, no matter what impression they might give to the contrary. Of course we all want to be children
again. Why do you think people love routine and security so much? It makes them feel safe. It reminds them of when they were children. But it's most important to take life by the horns and not let it push you around. Things will come right in the end.'

‘But when is the end?' Agnes wiped her nose on the back of her hand. ‘I mean, what's to say things have to come right? I always believed there would be a point where I would definitely know if I was happy – when I would become myself, if you see what I mean, instead of just impersonating what I thought I should be. And now I feel as if I've suddenly woken up and things have gone by without me seeing them. They've just gone by in the night!'

‘That's life,' nodded her mother uncertainly.

‘But there must be more!' she cried. ‘There must be more to this than
life.
There must be a point where things are infinite – where something is just infinitely sad, or where you've definitely failed, and who's to say things will get better? Why should we be so sure of life, if we don't even know what it is? Half of us are afraid to live, the other half are afraid to die! You're right, we're like children – we think we have to come top at life. But what happens if we just fail? Do we get expelled? Do we have to do detention?'

‘I felt as if I'd failed,' interjected her mother, evidently recognising something of her own in the jumble of her daughter's philosophical yard-sale. ‘When I had my miscarriage, before you were born, I felt as if I'd failed dreadfully.'

‘Did you?' said Agnes, her tirade ambushed by the arrival of incontrovertable fact. ‘Why?'

Her mother's face bore within its lines the imprint of other times, of feelings mapped out and revisited secretly, perhaps, by night. She was suddenly aware that she wanted her mother to have cared deeply, to have darkly nurtured a private grief. It might change things, like a magic trick. She would become a stranger with wounds. She might be able to shed new light on the situation.

‘We wanted that baby so much, you see. That little girl.
It's like that, you invest them with personality.' She hugged her arms around herself. ‘It used to amaze me, feeling her move about. I would think, this tiny creature needs me like no one else does. You'll know when it happens to you, it's an extraordinary kind of love in those first months. So when she died I felt unimaginably guilty. She was so tiny and vulnerable and there was nothing I could do to help her. It seems ridiculous now, but I really blamed myself.'

‘But it wasn't your fault!' said Agnes.

‘That's what I mean, dear. Things rarely are. And what I've been trying to say to you is that you have to go on, because as much as life knocks you down, really life is the only thing that can pick you up again. I couldn't have known it then, but now I think, well, if that hadn't happened, there wouldn't have been room for Agnes. It all turned out for the best, because here you are.'

Agnes knew her debts were being called in. She could not but read an element of accusation in the tale. Things – indeed, whole lives! – had been sacrificed to bring her here, and what was she doing but criticising everything in sight? One could take nothing for granted. Even the ambiguous gift of her birth depended upon a miscarriage of justice. Her mother patted her hand comfortingly. Agnes felt as if she had drifted off to sleep halfway through a film, and had jolted back to consciousness, bleary-eyed, to find the plot had lurched forward and the characters taken on an unsettling air of mystery.

In the village churchyard, headstones jutted unevenly out of overgrown winter grass like mouldering, superfluous teeth. Agnes examined a few empty plots in the diffident manner of one comparing hotel rooms, noting their situation and aspect. One had to make provision for the future.

Perusing some of the grimier tablets, she found that they dated back as far as a hundred years or more. She wondered if anyone visited them now: people in bright tracksuits and shiny cars proudly displaying their ancestors to indifferent
children, as if forbearance were something unusual. She lingered, sharing their silence. Patience was probably
de rigueur
for those under ground.

‘In Memory of Our Son Mark,' read a newer one. ‘Who Died at the Age of Twenty-One.' The implied tragedy drew her like a tabloid headline. Who was this Mark, cut down in his prime? Agnes leaned closer to examine the inscription. He had left loving memories, apparently; all his ends tied, his bills paid, his laundry clean and folded. What had he known to make him so prepared, leaving the neat equation of himself to be applied later to the incomprehensible fact of his absence? She could see them using it, those who had known him, figuring out the arithmetic of his imaginary life. Mark would be twenty-three by now, for instance; by now, Mark would perhaps be getting his first job; now Mark would say this and do that.

It couldn't have been easy for him, remembering his future as well as his past. She herself would have botched the job, with the muddled, sprawling sum of her parts. If, for example, a piece of masonry from the church's crumbling roof were now to fall upon her, her disappearance would leave an uncertain taste in the mouth. They would find dirty underwear, rent demands, unfinished arguments. People would come to the door asking for that ten pounds they had lent her, that apology she never gave, that explanation for herself she had promised. Things would come up. Her parents would grow terse and resentful. She would boil beneath their surface, spoiling things. Before long, her death would begin to lend life a guilty ease. There would be more room in the car. They could watch what they liked on television. Eventually they would murder the memory of her, scratching the uncomfortable itch of her lingering absence. Mark was unscratchable, it seemed; a bunch of burning nerve ends projecting himself like an amputated leg. He was good at it. She was half in love with him already.

Agnes ambled around the hard, mud-rutted path to the door of the church. It looked shut. She had used to go in
sometimes when she was a child, loving its sanctuary, the dark womb and whale-belly. She loved its mouldy smell and dank air. It was the smell of history. It told her there had been other times; that these times, too, would pass. Now she was unsure about things. She wondered if it had a door policy, or opening hours, like a pub. She leaned on the weatherbeaten wooden slab, and found that it opened easily.

Inside, the church was cold and empty, and seemed somehow frozen in an attitude of suspended action; as if, a moment before, the wooden pews had been jiggling in the aisles, the candlesticks hopping on the altar, the stained-glass saints quaffing communion wine. There was about it an aspect of unsupervision which should have provoked anarchy.

Agnes's feet echoed on the stone slabs of the floor as she approached the altar. It was covered with a cloth like something in a morgue. Before, when she was younger, she had come here to pray; or to complain, rather, presenting a list of woes and requests to the management as if there were some kind of democratic machinery in place to deal with them. Compensation! She had wanted compensation for daily disappointments and injustices. She had believed justice would be done! Agnes almost laughed aloud at the very thought of it. She would never have guessed that growing older was merely the process through which certainties became doubts. The grey areas grew larger, more amorphous. It showed around the eyes and over the hips: a gradual yielding to disappointment, a comfortable acceptance of pain. One acquired a glazed look. Indeed, had she not begun to see in herself the re-routed wires of fear, the concealed pipes and drains of desolation? She had hovered over bottles of shampoo in supermarkets, not knowing which one to buy, something fluttering in her eye like a tic, like an absence of want, like a malfunction of greed; wondered why she didn't know, why she couldn't choose, what else there could be if this wasn't important!