The Temporary by Rachel Cusk Page B

in his throat, unchained. The tangible presence of a fantasy unalloyed by a complex object was so altogether new that it struck him with the force of a revelation. He wondered shamefully what Francine’s requirements were, and searched his memory of the silly evening for the mysterious point at which he must have met them; but then he realized, in another bright shaft of comprehension, that she was merely different from other girls he had known. There was no baffling maze through which he was expectedto fumble his way, trying to make a good case for himself according to the tortuous laws of confluence. She perceived herself – and this thought caused the spoon to tremble in his hand as he fearfully met her eyes once more and clearly saw its confirmation there – as an object of pleasure. Her profit, her share, was simply that he should do so too.
    ‘You’d better duck,’ he said, digging his spoon in a second time.
    She put her hands amusingly over her face and bent over the table. He forked the risotto out of the dish and howled with laughter as it splintered into grainy fragments around them. Francine’s face was wide with comic astonishment and her eyes brightened with approval of his performance.
    ‘I did say I wasn’t that hungry,’ she said.
    ‘Did any of it get on you?’
    ‘I don’t think so.’
    She sat back slightly in her chair and smoothed her hands slowly over her blouse and skirt. Ralph felt a fresh lurch of disbelief as he watched her. She met his eyes and giggled.
    ‘That’s good,’ he said.
    A pause shimmered, filling the room, and Ralph knew his moment had come. For a second he drew back, hovering on the edge of action. His body seemed to swell and bloom around him, its machinery unfolding, and he suddenly felt the heaviness of his own flesh, the million pumping intricacies beneath it. He walked stiffly round to the other side of the table and felt the air thicken around him as he forced his way through it. Francine was watching his approach and as he drew near he saw something in her eyes which he couldn’t identify. It occurred to him dimly that his touch would be her triumph, and when he did it, clasping her cool hand in his, he experienced a sudden flash of loss at the unfamiliar feel of her skin. He put his other hand on her shoulder, anchoring himself, and his hands felt all at once so implicated there, soguilty with greed, that it seemed as if a strange glue had trapped his fingers and was preventing him from removing them. Francine raised her head and looked at him, a faint smile on her lips. He knew then the impossibility of escape, felt doors slam around him, and his struggle stiffened and died.
    ‘Shall we sit on the sofa?’ he said.
    The words were loud in his ears.

Seven
    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