Authors: Rachel Cusk
The day had been very tiresome, and when Francine shut the front door of her flat against the windy, dark grey late afternoon, she had a satisfying sensation of slamming it also on the administrative harness of the office and the dumb moon faces yoked within it. It had been dark all day, the great wads of cloud pressing down and sending people scuttling through the streets as if beneath the sole of a large, descending boot. The atmosphere of force had found its way into the building: there was a sudden assertion of regimes, a resistance to leisure, and when the rain began to hurl itself against the windows people bent their heads and worked faster.
She had anticipated an idle day, one in which she would sit and steep pleasurably in thought, perhaps sharing a little of it with anyone who happened by her manner to scent the presence of a drama; but instead she had been driven
reluctantly
into productivity, with not even a stint by the
photocopier
or a run to the Italian café near by for the office cappuccinos to provide any opportunity for reflection. Her night away from home had left her with an enlarged sense of the personal, and combined with the detachment wrought by little sleep and the red wine, the cuffs and chains of duty were tight and painful. By the end of the afternoon a helmet was clamped around her aching head and her tongue was thick
and bitter with instant coffee. At five thirty she left the office for the weekend, not even lingering to be ensnared in the customary Friday evening drift of the City to the local pubs.
She had phoned Lynne at the agency that morning to ask if she had any work for the next week, and Lynne had said that Personnel at Lancing & Louche were pleased with her and wanted her to stay on. There might be a chance of a permanent, Lynne said, seeing as the lady away on leave was still phoning in sick and didn’t know when she’d be back. She was called Sally, and Francine disliked her for the fact that, even though Sally was middle aged, overweight, and had greying, frizzy hair – facts revealed in a framed photograph of Sally dancing in a disco opposite a bald man with flailing arms and red eyes which Francine had found on her desk – Mr Lancing kept calling her Sally as well. Sally was a ‘career’ secretary and had been there a long time: she had put luminous pink stickers with her name on on all her files and a large one on her telephone extension too, as if to remind herself of who she was in case anyone called for her. She had a pair of slippers in flowered material which she changed into when she got to work. One of the secretaries had told Francine that when she found them beneath her desk, positioned neatly side by side in front of the chair as if Sally had been snatched from them by illness where she sat. Francine had put them in a drawer, along with the photograph, the roll of stickers, and a manicure set which also belonged to Sally, feeling confident that her superiority would bring its own rewards.
She was glad she would be staying at Lancing & Louche for a while: it was a big company and she liked the youthful commerce of the corridors, the legions of smart secretaries, the young men with sleek hair who rushed in and out of the broking rooms, the hushed acres of carpet and confidential mahogany doors of the executive floor at the top of the building where meetings were held. She was usually asked to
take coffee into Mr Lancing’s meetings, prepared on a tray by one of the aproned women in catering and handed to her outside the door, and although she disliked its suggestion of servitude, the sudden silence and raised circle of heads as she entered the room made the duty more gratifying. Their eyes followed her to the door, and sometimes, after she’d shut it, she could hear different tones in their voices and the occasional burst of meaningful male laughter.
Her last job had been a two-week assignment to a dingy little office behind Waterloo station – normally she only worked in the City, and she was sure Lynne had sent her on this job to get her back for the one before, where she hadn’t left on very good terms and they’d complained to the agency – working for a fat man called Mr Harris, who wore brown shirts with stains dotted like islands over the expanse of his belly. She didn’t know what Mr Harris did, even at the end of her two weeks. The business of the companies she worked for rarely had any bearing on the work she was expected to do. Mr Harris received few telephone calls and his
correspondence
was featureless. She spent most of her time typing long lists of figures and addresses into a database.
She was alone in the office with Mr Harris, and the slack pace of trade meant that he was obsessed with everything she did, rushing over to her desk when she opened a file or typed a letter to make sure she was doing it properly.
‘You’ll get the hang of it,’ he would say encouragingly, while Francine prickled with irritation beside him. He would stand too close to her, his open mouth emitting clouds of rancid breath, and often a tiny rain of saliva would spatter across her desktop. He watched her continually, making comments about her mood and habits or the expression on her face.
‘You like your coffee,’ he would nod if she got up to make a cup. He would offer her biscuits, custard creams which he
kept in a drawer, and she would refuse them. ‘That’s how you keep your nice slim figure, isn’t it, Francine?’
Normally Francine found it easy to understand her life at the office. Her rank and station were clear, her duties and regalia always the same, her employer a distant, regimental figure whose peculiarities were generally substantial enough to be discussed at lunch-time. The band of her cohorts was genial, and usually manufactured a set of easily grasped distinguishing features on the surface of a deep homogeneity. Every office was at pains to possess its own character: ‘What do you think of this place, then?’ people would ask Francine at the end of her first day, and although she never really thought anything, they would proudly tell her that she would get used to it in the end.
With Mr Harris, though, Francine had begun to feel as if she didn’t know who she was. Without the armour of a corporate identity, she had felt him clawing at her person, simulating a hideous intimacy which for the first time revealed to her the precarious contract on which her position was founded. Her transience normally safeguarded her liberty, but locked in with Mr Harris’s fascination the days had seemed long. His presence had become hourly more predatory, and although Francine knew that the termination of his lease on her was not far off, the fingering, probing quality of his ownership subdued her into the belief that it would never end. She became listless in the evenings, avoiding her reflection in the windows of the Underground train as she made her lonely journey to Waterloo the next morning. At the end of two weeks he asked her to stay on and she said that she had another job to go to the next week. She didn’t tell Lynne what she had done.
‘I’m sorry about that, Francine,’ Mr Harris had said, drawing close to her as she stood straining at the door with her coat. His skin was stodgy and pale, and his eyes quivered
like tinned fruits in the jelly of his face. ‘It’s meant so much to me having you here.’
Afterwards Francine had hurried down to the station, the grim scenes of her unhappy lunch hours clinging to her as she passed. It had taken a long time for the elation at her freedom to come, and she had only really felt it when Lynne phoned to tell her about the job at Lancing & Louche and sounded quite friendly, as if nothing had happened. She had even said that they only sent their top people to Mr Lancing, although in her sensitive condition Francine had detected a note of warning in the compliment.
She turned on the kitchen lights and put her bag on the table. Janice had left dishes in the sink, minutely and elegantly smeared, and a carton of milk stood open on the sideboard. A note on the table said that she had gone out for the evening. Irritation provoked a tightening in Francine’s head, and she felt the slight tumult in her stomach which was the residue of being unable to distinguish her thoughts by discussing them with someone else. She never really assumed control over events until she had related them in some form: untold, their reality was too pressing, still sullied with the awkwardness of the moment. Once she had presented them to an audience, they came back to her purged and confirmed, interpreted, ordered scenes which could then be filed in memory. Given the unsociable nature of her day, she had hoped Janice would be on hand when she arrived home. She remembered that it was Friday night, and the thought of spending it alone worried her for a moment, until she conjured up the dispensation of her activities the night before. She was recovering, and would prove it with a long, scented bath, an arsenal of beauty treatments, and a relaxed posture later on the sofa with a magazine.
Thus intent, Francine visited the sitting-room
en
route
to her indulgences and listened to the messages on the answering
machine. Two were for Janice, one of them the imperious manager of the Hampstead boutique, the other a man with a rough voice saying something that Francine couldn’t hear very well. Her mother’s clearer, complaining tones followed, asking why she had to have that silly machine on the whole time and would madam like to phone her when she got in, although not if it was past ten o’clock. Then it was Ralph, saying that he’d enjoyed last night and he hoped she hadn’t felt too awful at work because he certainly had. His voice sounded incongruous and polite beside the others.
Francine immediately began the business of not returning Ralph’s call, going into the bathroom and turning on the taps. She looked in the mirror above the sink and was surprised to see that her face was haggard beneath an unfamiliar mat of lank hair. The idea that Ralph had wrought this change with the pummelling effect of his attention – wanting to talk to her before she’d even walked through the door! – was interesting, but the seeds of melodrama were blighted by the realization that his message had contained no suggestion that he wanted to see her again. In the more productive state of mild uncertainty, she removed her tired, twice-worn clothing and set about the lavish business of restoring herself while fingers of steam began to creep warmly over her skin.
In the bath, she reflected on the fact that her mother had lately seemed to be enjoying a new lease of life, which, while it didn’t succeed in blunting the voracity of her interest in Francine’s affairs, suggested the renewal of activity in her own. Francine didn’t think about her parents very often, having some time ago realized that the profitability of her association with them would never again reach the modest peaks of her childhood years – unless they died, of course, which was a horrible thought – but she did occasionally solicit her mother’s attention, and maintained a relationship with her over the telephone which was useful in times of shortfall,
when other confidantes could not be located or were found wanting. Maxine Snaith’s appetite for information was
considerable
, and allowed Francine the rare luxury of being asked more questions about herself than she really wanted to answer.
Her parents had never visited her in London, and although they frequently mentioned the fact that there was always a bed for her in Kent, both parties seemed to consider the terms of Francine’s emigration so extreme as to lend her absence a certain finality. Since Frank, Francine’s father, had taken his retirement, a journey to London had been mentioned more frequently, but Francine had soon discovered that the foreign flavour of the idea made it easy to forestall. If the disincentives of bombs and bad weather failed, she could always say that she was very busy at that particular time, and Maxine would grow meek with awe and with the possibility of encountering things that she didn’t understand, making a trip later in the year sound much more acceptable.
Francine was Frank and Maxine’s only child, and they had united their names as well as their bodies to form her. The experiment had certainly been a success; almost too great a success, in fact, for their hazy understanding of their own union made its exotic and turbulent fruit the object of a slightly fearful contemplation. Frank and Maxine hadn’t really known one another for very long when they’d got married – Frank had proposed to Maxine over the telephone from Maidstone, and had been away on business in Leicester right up to the wedding – and Francine had arrived so rapidly that they had straight away been sent into inescapable orbit around her and never really got the chance to catch up with each other. The fact that Francine resembled neither of them gave their grouping a somewhat alien atmosphere, and although any two of them could conjure a certain intimacy on
the common ground of the third’s absence, seated around the dinner table in the evenings things were often awkward.
Francine’s sex and her fast-developing loveliness eventually swung the tide of affiliation in her mother’s favour, and Frank became an increasingly extraneous presence in the house. The forces of femininity were, he soon realized, inward-looking and indifferent to his conquest, and he was not even required to do the slavish work of offsetting them. Francine’s vanity had been tended at the roots by her mother’s determination to witness and enshrine every new development, and Frank was relegated to the position of a patron observing with a slight, helpless horror the spectacle his generosity has
permitted
to be enacted.
Maxine’s devotion to Francine’s physical triumphs and the social victories which the future would undoubtedly bring permitted her time only to give herself attention of a somewhat indifferent and secondary nature. She was not an attractive woman, made from small bones which easily accrued
quantities
of bluish, intractable fat in their own defence. She found it hard to see herself clearly in the glare of Francine’s superiority, and she grew detached and confused in matters of her own upkeep. At the hairdresser’s she never really knew what she wanted, and would allow the woman to run free with her uncertain creative powers, manufacturing whimsical, ill-realized styles which didn’t seem to belong to her. She would occasionally look at herself in the mirror and would feel a mild perturbation, dutifully applying blocks of make-up to all the recognized places. The apparently meaningless
reservoirs
of flesh around her body she regarded rather more fearfully, and took to palliating them with the consumption of brightly coloured milkshakes instead of food. As this cruel practice became more frequent, it eventually replaced all the memories of varied and seductive forms of nourishment she
had accrued during her life with the simpler image of a tall glass filled with brown, pink, or cream liquid – colours which she came to associate with the meals they represented,
preferring
the brown one, for example, for the evening meal – and as she shrank Maxine wondered if there would come a day when she wouldn’t be there at all.