Saving Agnes by Rachel Cusk

my eyes. Next thing I know, I wake up and it’s eight o’clock!’
    She slapped her forehead and gazed at Agnes in entreaty.
    â€˜You could still have made it,’ observed Agnes stiffly. ‘No one even got here until eight thirty. Failing that, you could have phoned. I was worried about you. All of us,’ she added, resorting to numbers, ‘were worried about you.’
    â€˜Eight in the
morning
!’ wailed Greta pitifully, ‘I slept all night. In fact, I was halfway here before I realised anything was wrong – it was dark when I left, you see, but then it started to get light. It was kind of weird.’ She grinned. ‘I was totally freaked.’

Chapter Thirteen
    AGNES walked to the tube station every morning. In the first few weeks of her employment she had undergone this journey in a haze induced by the unaccustomed earliness of the hour, but now that she was used to it it had become almost enjoyable. It was a free space, a few liberated minutes of prologue in which she could regard the forthcoming day with unbridled optimism. This optimism was rarely borne out in the dreary dawn of activity at
Diplomat’s Week,
but Agnes’s early ruminations gave her the strength to endure at least some of its hours. She found it hard to renounce her faith, however unfounded, in the ultimate, inexorable improvement of things.
    As she emerged from her house into a particularly iridescent eight o’clock mist, the tincture of sky and air recalled in her the memory of similar auroral practices from long ago. As a child, she had often used to wake early – sometimes six or seven o’clock – and had become acquainted with the quiet hours, before the rest of the world awoke, like a new and secret friend. She would open her curtains and rejoice at the newborn blueness of the sky, the lawns wet and golden with dew, the great trees shaggy with leaves and hung with choiring birds. It seemed to her then as if she had woken into the world of castles and fairy tales in which she had found sleep the night before; and she would run lightly downstairs in her bare feet, struggling with the locks on the front door untilthey released her into the magic beyond. She knew she had discovered a region grimly disbarred by the adult world with its fortresses and fastenings, and she would run out into it, cavorting on the wet lawn in her nightdress. In autumn she would dance in a whirl of leaves; in winter, she would put on boots and forge small tracks beside the spiky delicate imprints of birds.
    Agnes thought of her small pagan self all the way to the tube station. She remembered the feeling of clean air against her body, naked beneath its nightdress. So far was she now from nature, she realised then, that she didn’t even know what month it was; and as she perused Gillespie Road for clues, there was to be seen neither tree nor flower to help her.
    She stopped at the news-stand on the corner to buy a paper. Normally she did not do so, preferring to daydream her way to Finchley Central, but she had often pitied the withered old man who perched in the kiosk as one of the few whose job was possibly less rewarding than her own.
    â€˜Fank you, fank you,’ he was saying as strangers grabbed newspapers and thrust jangling coins into his outstretched hand. Agnes gave him her money and awaited his reply, but he turned away and began fumbling with the neat stacks of cigarettes behind him instead. She reddened, her heart lurching with rejection, and buried her embarrassment in the front page.
    It was late September, it seemed, the very glorious and glowing nub of autumn. She could scarcely believe that summer had sickened, died, and been buried without her even noticing. Looking around, there was little evidence now of mellow fruitfulness. She longed suddenly for the lost seasons of her youth, whose verdant memory had not been withered by time. She had surely been more alive then; had felt cold