Outline: A Novel by Rachel Cusk Page A

and pencil.
    ‘Please excuse me,’ she said. ‘I just need to write that down.’ She sat writing for a moment and then glanced up and said, ‘Could you just repeat the second part?’
    I noticed that her notepad was very orderly, like the rest of her appearance, the pages neatly written in straight lines. Her pencil was made of silver too, with a retractable lead which she screwed firmly back into its casing. When she had finished she said: ‘I have to admit that I was astonished by the response in Poland, really very surprised. You know, I presume, that the women of Poland are highly politicised: my audiences were ninety per cent women,’ she said, ‘and they were very vocal. Of course, Greek women are vocal too —’
    ‘But they are better dressed,’ said Paniotis, who had by now returned. To my surprise, Angeliki took this interjection seriously.
    ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘the women in Greece like to be beautiful. But in Poland I felt this to be a disadvantage. The women there are so pale and serious: they have wide, flat, cool faces, though their skin is often bad, presumably because of the weather and their diet, which is appalling. And their teeth,’ she added with a little grimace, ‘are not good. But they have a seriousness I envied, as though they had not been distracted, were never distracted from the reality of their own lives. I spent a lot of time in Warsaw with a woman journalist,’ she went on, ‘a person of about my own age and also a mother, who was so thin and flat and hard I found it difficult to believe she was a woman at all. She had straight mouse-coloured hair that went all the way down her back, and a face as white and bony as a glacier, and she wore big workman’s jeans and big clumsy shoes, and she was as clear and sharp and beautiful as an icicle. She and her husband alternated strictly every six months, one working and the other looking after the children. Sometimes he complained, but so far he had accepted the arrangement. But she admitted to me, proudly, that when she went away for work, which she often did, the children would sleep with her photograph beneath their pillows. I laughed,’ Angeliki said, ‘and told her I felt sure my son would die rather than be caught sleeping with a photograph of me beneath his pillow. And Olga gave me such a look that I suddenly wondered whether even our children were infected with the cynicism of our gender politics.’
    Angeliki’s face had a softness, almost a mistiness, that was attractive while also being the reason for its careworn appearance. It seemed that anything could leave an impression in that softness. She had the small, neat features of a child, yet her skin was creased as though by worry, which gave her a look of frowning innocence, like a pretty little girl that has not got her way.
    ‘Talking to this journalist,’ she continued, ‘whose name as I have mentioned was Olga, I wondered whether my whole existence – even my feminism – had been a compromise. I felt it had lacked seriousness. Even my writing has been treated as a kind of hobby. I wondered whether I would have had the courage to be like her, for there seemed to be so little pleasure in her life, so little beauty – the sheer physical ugliness of that part of the world is astonishing – that I wasn’t sure, under similar circumstances, whether I would have had the energy to care. That was why I was surprised by the numbers of women who attended my readings – it almost seemed as though my work was more important to them than it is to me!’
    The waiter came to take our order, which was a lengthy process, as Angeliki appeared to be discussing each item on the menu in turn, asking numerous questions as she moved down the list which the waiter answered gravely and sometimes lengthily, never becoming the slightest bit impatient. Paniotis sat beside her, rolling his eyes and occasionally remonstrating with the pair of them, which only served to make the process even