Arlington Park Read online

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  Title Page

  ALSO BY RACHEL CUSK

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  For Penny, with affection

  All night the rain fell on Arlington Park.

  The clouds came from the west: clouds like dark cathedrals, clouds like machines, clouds like black blossoms flowering in the arid starlit sky. They came over the English countryside, sunk in its muddled sleep. They came over the low, populous hills where scatterings of lights throbbed in the darkness. At midnight they reached the city, valiantly glittering in its shallow provincial basin. Unseen, they grew like a second city overhead, thickening, expanding, throwing up their savage monuments, their towers, their monstrous, unpeopled palaces of cloud.

  In Arlington Park, people were sleeping. Here and there the houses showed an orange square of light. Cars crept along the deserted roads. A cat leapt from a wall, pouring itself down into the shadows. Silently the clouds filled the sky. The wind picked up. It faintly stirred the branches of the trees, and in the dark, empty park the swings moved back and forth a little. A handful of dried leaves shuffled on the pavement. Down in the city there were still people on the streets, but in Arlington Park they were in their beds, already surrendered to tomorrow. There was no one to see the rain coming, except a couple hurrying down the silent streets on their way back from an evening out.

  “I don’t like the look of that,” said the man, peering up. “That’s rain.”

  The woman gave an exasperated little laugh.

  “You’re the expert on everything tonight, aren’t you?” she said.

  They let themselves into their house. The orange light showed for an instant in their doorway and was extinguished again.

  On Arlington Rise, where the streetlamps made a tunnel of hard light and the road began its descent down into the city, the wind lifted stray pieces of litter and whirled them around. Further down, the black sky sagged over the darkened shop-fronts. An irascible gust made the signs rattle against the windows. From here the city could be seen, spread out below in the half-splendour of night. A brown haze stood above it. In its heaped centre, cranes and office blocks and the tiny floodlit spires of the cathedral stood out in the dark against the haze. Red and yellow lights moved in little repeating patterns as though they were the lights of an intricate mechanism. All around it, where the suburbs extended to the north and the east, brilliant fields of light undulated over the blackened landscape.

  In the centre of the city the pubs and restaurants were closed, but people were queuing outside the nightclubs. When the rain started to fall, a few of the girls shrieked and held their handbags over their heads. The boys laughed uneasily. They hunched their shoulders and put their hands in their pockets. The drops fell from the fathomless darkness and came glittering into the orange light. They fell on the awning of the Luna nightclub and twisted in the beams of the streetlamps. They fell into the melancholy, stained fountain in the square, where men in T-shirts sat with cans of lager and hooded boys made graceful circles in the dark on their skateboards. There were people milling in doorways, shrieking girls in stilettos, boys with sculpted hair, middle-aged men furtively carrying things in plastic bags. A woman in a tight raincoat tick-tacked hurriedly along the pavement, talking into her mobile phone. One of the men by the fountain took off his T-shirt and rubbed his startled chest in the rain while the others cheered. The traffic moved slowly through the spray. A group of men in a passing car blared their horn at the queuing girls and shouted out the windows as they went by.

  The rain fell on the tortuous medieval streets and the grimy Victorian streets and on the big bombed streets where shopping centres had been built. It fell on the hospital and the old theatre and the new multiplex cinema. It fell on multistorey car parks and office blocks. It fell on fast-food restaurants and pubs with Union Jacks in the windows. It fell on newly built blocks of flats whose windows were still in their plastic wrappers and whose foundations stood in mud, and it fell on their hoardings. Along the river, commercial buildings—insurance buildings and banks—stood one after another, geometric-shaped, and the rain fell in their empty, geometric-shaped plazas. On the black river, under the bridge, swans sheltered from the dark drops amidst the floating rubbish. All along the rain-blackened High Street people were waiting at bus stops: people from desolate parts of the city, from Weston or Hartford, where the rain fell on boarded-up shops and houses and the concrete walkways of insomniac estates. They crowded into the bus shelters, a man with a giant sheaf of dreadlocks, a man with an enormous suitcase, an old lady neatly parcelled into a tweed coat, a couple in tracksuits who kissed and kissed beneath the plastic roof where the rain beat down, so that when the bus came in a great dark arc of water the old lady had to tap the boy on the shoulder and tell them to get on.

  The bus went through the rain up Firley Way, which passed from the centre all the way through the suburbs to the retail park, where rain fell on featureless warehouses and superstores and tumbled down in sheets over their empty car parks. It fell on the roofs of darkened garage forecourts. It fell on car showrooms and builders’ merchants. It battered the plastic verandas where supermarket trolleys clung together in long, chattering rows. It fell on the business park, and on the shrubs adorning its desolate roundabout. It fell on the black, submissive fields from which the new places were unrepentantly carved. Over Merrywood shopping mall the rain fell hard on the giant neo-classical roof, so that water streamed down its indifferent façade.

  On Arlington Rise the rain was running downhill in the gutters. Below, a kind of vapour hung over the city, muffling the red and yellow lights. The sounds of car horns and a siren rose up the hill from the glittering, steaming heap of the city.

  A little further up, around a bend in the road, the vista disappeared. The darkness deepened. The buildings grew more graceful and the pavements more orderly. As the road ascended to Arlington Park the big, brash shops down below were succeeded by florists and antique shops: the off-licences became wine merchants, the fast-food chains became bistros. To either side tree-lined roads began to appear. In the rain these roads had the resilient atmosphere of ancient places. Their large houses stood impassively in the dark, set back amidst their dripping trees. Between them, a last, panoramic glimpse of the city could be seen below: of its eternal red and yellow lights, its pulsing mechanism, its streets always crawling with indiscriminate life. It was a startling view, though not a reassuring one. It was too mercilessly dramatic: with its unrelenting activity it lacked the sense of intermission, the proper stops and pauses of time. The story of life required its stops and its pauses, its days and nights. It didn’t make sense otherwise. But to look at that view you’d think that a human life was meaningless. You’d think that a day meant nothing at all.

  The rain fell on Arlington Park, fell on its empty avenues and its well-pruned hedges, on its schools and its churches, on its trees and its gardens. It fell on its Victorian terraces with their darkened windows, on its rows of bay-fronted houses, on its Georgian properties behind their gates, on its maze of tidy streets where the little two-storey houses were painted pretty colours. It fell joyously over the dark, deserted sward of the park, over its neat paths and bushes. It beat down, washing the pavements, sluicing along the drains, drumming on the bonnets of the parked cars. All night it fell, until with a new intensity, just before dawn, it emptied a roaring cascade of water over the houses so that the rain was flung against the darkened windows.

  In their sleep they heard it, people lying in their beds: the thunderous noise of the water. It penetrated their dreams, a sound like the sound of uproarious applause. It was as if a great audience were applauding. Louder and louder it grew, this strange, unsettling sound. It filled the night: it rattled the window
s and made people turn beneath their covers and children cry in their sleep. It made them feel somehow observed, as if a dark audience had assembled outside and were looking in through the windows, clapping their hands.

  Juliet Randall parted her hair before the mirror and there it was: a thing like a cockroach, three inches long and two across, embedded in her scalp, waving its legs triumphantly. She showed it to her husband. Look, she said, look! She bent her head forward, still holding aside her hair. Benedict looked. Oh, how it itched! How revolting it was, how unbearably revolting! Was there no way of getting it out? Her husband didn’t seem to think so. He was evidently glad the thing hadn’t decided to make its nest in his hair. Do something! Juliet shrieked, or tried to, but it was one of those dreams where you tried to say something and then suddenly found you couldn’t. She struggled in the shroud of sleep. Then, with a great effort, she tore it from her and opened her eyes.

  What a horrible dream—horrible! Juliet clutched her head and frantically searched her hair. The cockroach both was and wasn’t there. She was full of its presence and yet she couldn’t touch it; she could only feel it, the hideous stirring of its legs, the crawling feeling of infestation. Oh, the way it had greedily moved its legs! And the terrible knowledge that there was no way of getting it out, that she would have to endure it for ever! The daylight began to break down that knowledge a little. She felt a measure of relief, and then another. But the thing, the insect, was still real to her, more real than the unharmed patch of scalp her fingers went over and over. Where had it gone? What was it, to remain so real to her? It almost infuriated her in its non-existence: it was maddening, almost, to be tormented by something that wasn’t there.

  It wasn’t there! She acknowledged that it wasn’t. Steadily the sense of it diminished. All she could think of now was that Benedict hadn’t helped her. He had pitied her, but he had accepted her fate. He had accepted her future, as the host of a giant cockroach. He was glad it hadn’t happened to him. She looked into the deep innards of the dream and searched them again for their information. The moment she had parted her hair and showed him: that was when she realised. She had realised the true significance of a fact that was well known to her. She knew it, and yet it seemed that only in that moment did she finally understand its significance. Only then did she see what it meant, that she and Benedict were separate.

  The house was silent, except for the steady sound of rain at the window and the submerged roar of the traffic on Arlington Rise. It was early, yet already the streets were awake, subversively going about their business in the dawn. What were people up to at this hour? What illicit advantage were they pursuing in their cars, going to and fro along Arlington Rise? The room stood muffled in tentative, crêpey light. Juliet scratched the place where the cockroach had been. Benedict was asleep. She drew away from the lump of him, moving further to the other side of the bed. Upstairs, above their heads, the children were still silent in their room. She listened to the sound of the rain. During the night—earlier, before the cockroach—she had woken and heard the thunderous water in the dark. It had made a sound like the sound of applause. She didn’t know why, but it had made her afraid: she had felt a fear of something it was too late to prevent, something that had already occurred. It was as if she could have gone and stood at the window and seen it standing there in the garden in the rainy dark, completed.

  The indistinct light proceeded with its modest inventory of their room. There was the brown wardrobe and the inelegant chest of drawers; there was the ladder-backed chair with two rungs missing, the framed map of Venice, the chipped gilt mirror with its opaque oval of glass, all having survived the darkness unaltered. At the window the sagging curtains began to show their ancient folds and formations. Beside her, on the floor, her clothes lay in a heap: she had stepped out of them where she stood the night before. They had got back late and she had shed them, uncaring, and got straight into bed.

  What an evening they’d had! It was the sort of evening that left a bitter taste in the mouth, that sat on your chest in the morning with its feeling of shame. It was an evening, in a sense, to which the cockroach had been the conclusion—the cockroach and the realisation that she and Benedict were not joined but separate. She couldn’t even summon up a clear sense of outrage about it: she had drunk too much, and the feeling of shame sat on her chest. The bitterness lay in her veins like lead. Apparently, she had been slightly obnoxious. Benedict had told her so on the walk home. She, Juliet, aged thirty-six, mother of two, a teacher at Arlington Park High School for Girls—a person regarded in her youth as somewhat exceptional, a scholarship student and at one time Head Girl—had been slightly obnoxious to their hosts, the Milfords: Matthew Milford, the vilely wealthy owner of an office supplies company in Cheltenham, and his horse-faced, attenuated, raddled wife, Louisa.

  She thought of their house, into whose kitchen alone the whole of the Randalls’ shoddy establishment in Guthrie Road would comfortably have fitted. What had they done to deserve such a house? Where was the justice in that? She recalled that Matthew Milford had spoken harshly to her. The lord of the manor had spoken harshly from amidst his spoils, from his unjust throne, to Juliet, his guest. And Benedict called her obnoxious!

  What was it he’d said? What was it Matthew had said, sitting there at the table like a lord, a bull, a red, angry bull blowing air through his nostrils? You want to be careful. He’d told her she wanted to be careful. His head was so bald the candlelight had made it shine like a shield. You want to be careful, he’d said, with the emphasis on you. He had spoken to Juliet not as if he’d invited her to his house but as if he’d employed her to be there. It was as if he’d employed her as a guest and was giving her a caution. That was how a man like that made you feel: as if your right to exist derived from his authority. He looked at her, a woman of thirty-six with a job and a house and a husband and two children of her own, and he decided whether or not she should be allowed to exist.

  Beside her Benedict sat up.

  “Right,” he said, ruffling his thin, downy hair with his fingers.

  Today it annoyed her, the way Benedict came to life in the mornings: as though life were a river he had rested beside, before climbing back into his one-man canoe and paddling off upstream. Benedict had not defended her from that man Matthew Milford, any more than he had removed the cockroach from her scalp.

  “You were on the sauce last night,” he observed.

  He got out of bed and went to the window. Juliet still lay there with her head on the pillow and her hair spread around her in a fan.

  “We all were,” she said.

  “Not me.”

  “Everyone except you, then.”

  Benedict was naked. In clothes he looked very slightly effeminate, but naked he did not. His freckled chest had a burly, bunched-up look. Benedict’s nakedness had an extrovert quality, like that of people in nudist colonies.

  “Incredible house,” he said, parting the folds of the curtain a little with one finger and then letting them fall back again.

  “Ridiculous,” Juliet said.

  “Ye-es, I suppose it was, in a way.”

  “It was,” Juliet asseverated. “How can people who are so idiotic be so successful?”

  “I thought you thought it was ridiculous.”

  “It was! All those hunting prints—and the antlers in the loo! Who do they think they are—the aristocracy? All he does is sell photocopiers to secretaries in offices!”

  Benedict tutted.

  “It’s true,” Juliet said bitterly. She was determined to exonerate herself. “I hate the way men like that think they’re important. They expect you to defer to them, just because they run a business! What’s so important about a business? It’s just selling things for your own personal profit. It’s just greed, dressed up as usefulness.”

  Benedict withdrew to the bathroom. Juliet lay and listened to the rain, and the muffled sound of the traffic going through it.

  “Who is he to go aroun
d telling people to be careful?” she called. “He should be careful himself. People might decide to stop using photocopiers. I hope they do decide to stop using them,” she added, though there was no reply.

  She scratched the place where the cockroach had been.

  “How dared he!” she resumed when Benedict returned.

  “Who?”

  “Matthew Milford, last night. Women your age can start to sound strident,” she mimicked. “Who does he think he is?”

  “I don’t suppose he meant any harm,” Benedict said vaguely. “It was probably nothing to do with you.”

  “That wasn’t what you said last night.”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  “You said it was my fault. You said I’d been obnoxious.”

  She saw he had forgotten that he’d even said it. In fact, he wasn’t really attending to her at all. He was thinking about the coming day. He was thinking about school, where his ravenous classes awaited him. Last year his classes had attained exam results unheard of in the annals of the comprehensive’s grim history. It had made the front page of the Arlington Gazette, the miracle of Benedict’s results. Boys with knives and shaved heads, boys who were more than slightly obnoxious, boys with drug problems and drink problems, commended for their essays on Shakespeare’s late plays! It was extraordinary. Juliet’s classes got results that were entirely in line with the high school’s reputation. But at Benedict’s school the boys were searched for weapons before they were allowed on the premises. Benedict’s results were extraordinary.

  Juliet never thought about school until the moment she walked through its wrought-iron gates. It was Benedict who thought, in order to be extraordinary. He ran off their joint life as if it were a generator fuelled by Juliet, and then he separated himself and thought.

  He unhooked his dressing gown from the back of the door, put it on, and with a rueful expression returned to the bathroom.