Outline: A Novel by Rachel Cusk Page B

longer. Finally it seemed to be concluded and the waiter moved heavily and slowly away, but then Angeliki summoned him back with a little intake of breath and a lifting of her finger, having had, apparently, a few afterthoughts. Her doctor had put her on a special diet, she said to me once he had departed for the second time and vanished through the mahogany louvred doors at the far end of the restaurant, since she had become unwell on her return to Greece from Berlin. She had found herself overwhelmed by the most extraordinary lethargy and – it didn’t trouble her to admit it – by sadness, which she had supposed to be a sort of cumulative physical and emotional exhaustion from so many years abroad, and had spent six months more or less incapacitated in bed; months in which she had discovered, she said, that her husband and son could manage without her far better than she might have imagined, so that when she got up again and returned to normal life she found that her role in the household had diminished. Her husband and son had become used to doing much of what had been her work around the house – or to having it left undone, she said – and in fact had evolved new habits of their own, many of which she disliked; but she recognised, at that moment, that she was being given a choice, and that if she wanted to escape her old identity then this was her opportunity. For some women, she said, it would be the realisation of their greatest fear, to discover that they were not needed, but for her it had had the opposite effect. She found, too, that illness had enabled her to view her life, and the people in it, with greater objectivity. She realised that she was not so bound up with them as she had thought, particularly with her son, on whose account she had always, from the moment of his birth, suffered an immense preoccupation, seeing him as uniquely sensitive and vulnerable, to the extent that she was unable – she now realised – to leave him alone even for a minute. Returning to the world after her illness, her son seemed if not quite a stranger to her then less painfully connected to her by every filament. She still loved him, of course, but she no longer saw him and his life as something she needed to resolve into perfection.
    ‘For many women,’ she said, ‘having a child is their central experience of creativity, and yet the child will never remain a created object; unless,’ she said, ‘the mother’s sacrifice of herself is absolute, which mine never could have been, and which no woman’s ought to be these days. My own mother lived through me in a way that was completely uncritical,’ she said, ‘and the consequence was that I came into adulthood unprepared for life, because nobody saw me as important in the way she did, which was the way I was used to being seen. And then you meet a man who thinks you’re important enough to marry you, so it seems right that you should say yes. But it is when you have a baby that the feeling of importance really returns,’ she said, with growing passion, ‘except that one day you realise that all this – the house, the husband, the child – isn’t importance after all, in fact it is the exact opposite: you have become a slave, obliterated!’ She paused dramatically, her face lifted, her hands flat on the table top amidst the silverware. ‘The only hope,’ she continued more quietly, ‘is to make your child and your husband so important in your own mind that your ego has enough sustenance to stay alive. But in fact,’ she said, ‘as Simone de Beauvoir observes, such a woman is nothing but a parasite, a parasite on her husband, a parasite on her child.’
    ‘In Berlin,’ she continued after a while, ‘my son attended an expensive private college, paid for by the embassy, where we met a great number of rich and well-connected people. The women were of a kind I had never known before in my life: nearly all of them worked in a profession – doctors, lawyers,