Saving Agnes by Rachel Cusk Page B

smiled.
    â€˜Absolutely,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we? Come on, Agnes – you hate your job. Why don’t you kill yourself?’
    â€˜Well.’ Agnes considered the question, which had been pronounced more in the spirit of intellectual debate than active encouragement. ‘I suppose I believe that things will get better. If I knew I had to do this for ever, it would be different.’
    â€˜Exactly,’ said Merlin. ‘And that’s the pleasure principle. Things are more valuable if they’re rare. Just imagine if you had to go to the cinema for ever or lie on a beach all day forthe rest of your life. Imagine if we spent all our time on holiday and then went to work for two weeks a year. Work would be the high point of our lives. That would be awful.’
    â€˜Maybe,’ conceded Agnes, although secretly she thought she could bear it.
    â€˜I once heard someone on the radio being asked what he would take with him if he had to spend the rest of his life alone on a desert island,’ Merlin said presently. ‘A beautiful island, mind you, with palm trees and stuff, but nothing else. You know what he said?’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜He said he would take a gun. To shoot himself with, that is.’
    â€˜That’s really dumb,’ said Greta when Agnes told her Merlin’s story. ‘Why didn’t he just take a plane with him to get him off the goddamned island?’
    Her lover hadn’t called now for two weeks. Agnes knew that the reasons underlying his lapse would not, if known, be likely to reveal anything in her favour, and she clung to the mercy of his silence as well as, more obstinately, to the hope of its interruption.
    Tom called to say that he was going to visit their parents in East Anglia on Saturday, and as her only weekend plans thus far had been to spend it fending off all arrangements lest her lover should call and want to see her, she agreed in a fit of pique, as Friday brought the unsullied vacancy of the ensuing two days perilously near, to accompany him.
    Tom drew up outside her house in a car as handsome and glossy-flanked as a racehorse, and as he bore her off within it, Agnes lived out with vicarious satisfaction the thought of her lover calling to be told she had gone away. It occurred to her then that her pleasure at the idea of his doing so was of a really rather secondary variety, and furthermore that he might share some of it on receiving news of her departure.
    She looked out of the window. The city clung interminablyto the roadside, grey and elastic as old chewing gum. They drove through parts of London she had never even heard of, battered strings of shops and houses nestling in motorway intersections or beside underpasses, festering round tatty overground stations with foreign-sounding names. They passed vast tower-blocks festooned with washing lines, purple sheets fluttering in the breeze like flags. Agnes wondered what one had to do to end up behind one of their slit-eyed apertures.
    â€˜Awful, isn’t it?’ said Tom, putting his foot down on the accelerator. ‘Poor sods.’
    Their parents were waiting for them at the end of the smooth gravel drive which wound its way to the front of the house, feigning involvement with the herbaceous borders. They liked to present an active image of country life. At the sound of the car, they looked up and waved distractedly, trowels in hand.
    â€˜Keep digging, slaves!’ yelled Tom out of the window. ‘You’ve got half an hour to grow lunch.’
    Agnes got out of the car. After months of concrete and tarmac the green of their garden was hallucinogenic. Giant trees posed along the drive like old movie actresses, their gnarled and hysterical limbs dripping with red and gold curls of leaves. The lawns rolled and billowed out beneath them, the manicured stretches of their garden giving way to the rougher fields beyond. Her parents’ small farmhouse lounged