Saving Agnes Read online

  ‘What am I saying?’ Nina laughed and out it came in mirthful puffs. ‘Look at that travesty of manhood, for God’s sake. Merlin, what have we done to you?’

  Merlin smoothed his apron primly.

  ‘I’m like Agnes,’ he said. ‘I’ve had manhood thrust upon me.’

  ‘Your way is just as bad,’ cried Agnes, going on the offensive while Nina’s guard was down. ‘It’s almost like you want men to be animals so they won’t threaten you on your own terms. That’s just another form of control. In fact—’ she risked, ‘in fact, it’s sexist.’

  To her annoyance, Nina started to laugh.

  it is!’ Agnes insisted. She was stepp’d so far in the blood of her own betrayal as to make retraction impossible. ‘You can spend your whole life running away because you’re afraid of being hurt. I just want to judge people on how they behave towards me, not on how they might have behaved in the past.’

  Although she was speaking so sincerely as almost to convince herself, the pain of Nina’s recent revelation was beginning to nag at her like a tooth emerging from its anaesthetic. There had been times when her heart had felt as if it would snap beneath the weight of her lovers’ lovers, their stale laughter and dead kisses, their ghostly lips and pale bodies slipping paper-thin into the tiny hot space between flesh and living flesh. She loathed the smug self-containment of the past, and usually saw no alternative but to smash it open like a piggy-bank and trample on its mystery. She had frightened even herself with such murderousness and was no stranger to the horror that came after it. She was alive with the subtleties of endgames.

  ‘That,’ said Nina matter-of-factly, ‘is why you are always disappointed and I am usually pleasantly surprised.’

  Nina barred herself in her room for the rest of the afternoon, leaving Agnes little choice but to pick up her end of the ill-feeling and carry it around like some ugly and burdensome object. She resented such an occupation being foisted upon her but knew not how to free herself from it, pinned as she already was beneath the fallen beam of the oncoming week’s drudgery. Nina was working upstairs and her typewriter filled the house with staccato machine-gun fire.

  Agnes wandered disconsolately into the sitting-room, where Merlin was lying prone on the sofa watching television. He took his hours of leisure – and perhaps also, by implication, those of work – more seriously than she herself did. He held a can of beer in one hand and dangled the other over the carpet, as if trailing it in water from the side of a boat.

  ‘You executive types,’ she said, observing him. ‘You just don’t know how to relax.’

  ‘I’m a zen economist,’ said Merlin. ‘I go where the mood takes me. Come over here and watch Bette Davis being romanced in Rio.’

  Agnes perched uncomfortably on the arm of the sofa. On the screen, Bette leaned nonchalantly on a balcony overlooking a monochrome sea while her lover pleaded with her elegant back.

  ‘Moods!’ exhorted Agnes presently. ‘I go where other people’s moods take me. I do, Merlin,’ she insisted, although as yet he had not denied it. ‘I mean, I never upset people. I don’t think I even know how to.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, I don’t know how to upset people.’

  ‘Oh.’ Merlin put down his beer can and folded his arms patiently behind his head. ‘I’m sure Nina would teach you. She’s a bit hard up for cash at the moment.’

  ‘Very funny.’

  ‘Look, it’ll blow over.’ His eyes pulled reluctantly away from the screen and settled on her. ‘Nina gets angry. It’s her way of releasing tension. She’ll get over it.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have brought him home,’ said Agnes. Now that she had Merlin’s full attention she could afford to indulge her confessional instincts, although such remorseful forays were strictly reserved for those who could be relied on to offer absolution rather than concurrence.

  ‘I thought we’d already established that he broke and entered.’ Merlin was evidently aiming for levity.

  ‘I should have made other arrangements,’ continued Agnes. ‘Maybe I should go and apologise. It was all my fault.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t.’ He was reliable as a slot machine where saving Agnes was concerned. ‘This isn’t a bloody Middle Eastern bombing, you know – we can’t all claim responsibility. Anyway, I told you, she’ll get over it. Nina brings home a lot of guys. You only think you do.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Agnes was horrified. The implications were mushrooming. Were her actions so transparent, her assumptions so unfounded? Had she been misinformed?

  ‘It means you have a sensitive soul,’ said Merlin firmly. ‘Now stop torturing yourself and give me some details.’

  ‘What kind of details?’ said Agnes suspiciously.

  ‘Well, what’s he like? When are you seeing him again? That kind of thing.’

  ‘I don’t know when I’m seeing him again. He said he’d phone.’ She was embarrassed by her deficiency of whispered promises and heated troths. ‘Anyway, you all seem to know far more about him than I do.’

  It came out sounding more stand-offish than she’d meant it to. Merlin shrugged, giving up, and turned back to the television. Sometimes, she wanted to say, sometimes when I tell the truth it feels like I’m lying.

  Agnes lay in bed waiting for the telephone to ring, believing as she did that the former event would precipitate the latter. Her faith, though gritty, was, she knew, ill-founded, attempting as it did to harness the perversity of the universe and make consistency where there was essentially none. By taking upon herself the task of second-guessing ill-fortune, she was in fact violating the creed of her anti-faith, which, if its principles were to be understood, would presumably visit her only at her own inconvenience. The fact that she was aware of this loophole merely served to deepen the complexity of her plight; but Agnes was full of such grim closets of superstition, cob-webbed enclosures of small expectations which should have housed just deserts. She would have loved to have recourse to the protection, implore the help, and seek the intercession of the official bodies, but for her the proper channels were strewn with past disappointments and offered easy passage only for the penitent. In the past Agnes had asked and had not been given; or at least not been given what she’d asked for. It had occurred to her that within the nature of her petitions, which generally lay outside the realm of the common good, there might be concealed the reason for their speedy return to sender, redress unknown; and with the dubious workings of divine intervention thus under investigation, it seemed only natural that she should try to take things into her own more reliable hands.

  The telephone was for Agnes a symbol of pure, unsolicited intention, containing none of the ambiguity of other more complex forms of encounter; but her loathing was, of course, an equal match for her love. As a tool of common communication, she accepted the telephone with the normal technological indifference of the age. It was in its role as ambassador to the affairs of the heart that her feelings about it became more political. Days when she was expecting a call stretched out before her like empty motorways, banked on either side with anticipation and dread. In the early, optimistic hours she would be as attentive to it as a mother with a child; never out of earshot, constantly checking that it had not met with a misplaced receiver or other mishap, anxious if anyone else picked it up for too long. But as the dark of evening swept in she would grow fractious and impatient with its intractability. It would become ugly to her with its cyclops eye and distended curly arm. She would implore, plead and cajole; and then it would be war.

  It was usually about then that she would begin to indulge in the witchery of her pagan rites, baiting it with long baths and loud music over which its cries, if there were any, would barely be heard. Often it would respond with cruel tricks: calls for other people, wrong numbers, and so on. Agnes, cresting the wave of expectation, would bear down on these innocent bystanders with the full weight of her disappointment, dashing them with her hopes and disposing of them with scarce civilit
y. As the night wore on she would become morose and despondent, and would retire to bed, vigilant even in sleep lest it should call for her.

  Sometimes, of course, the call would come before the drama had even got under way; better still, it would occasionally even surprise her and come unexpectedly of its own volition. Had she compared the joy of these occasions with the grief of their remission, she might have found their emotional expenditure did not tally; but for Agnes the intervention of fact was enough, a blessed relief from the pyrotechnics of speculation that she sometimes felt she would burst in the effort to contain. Like a secret drinker, she would view her emotional binges the next morning through a hangover of guilt and self-loathing. At these times she inhabited a world more private than confession, and it followed that to confess would have been unthinkable. When the errant caller casually achieved too late what he had so dramatically failed to perform some twenty-four hours earlier, Agnes would accept with admirable indifference the vague apologies handed over as gracelessly as wilted flowers.

  ‘Oh,’ she would say, her night of despair now tame as a kitten. ‘Did you say you would call? I completely forgot.’

  It came as some surprise, then, that as Agnes lay in her bed signing over her soul to the Mephistopheles of the telecommunications network, all at once she heard the distinct sound of the telephone ringing. She sat up in bed, her heart beating as if she had heard the cry of a wolf from her log cabin. The shrill bell repeated itself unashamedly, twice, thrice. It seemed somehow to be saying her name. Before she could swing her legs over the bed, however, she heard the soft patter of Nina’s feet on the stairs. She lay back for the second she knew it would take him to ask for her. A murmur and a low laugh. More murmuring, and then the sound of Nina bounding up the stairs to Agnes’s room. Agnes’s heart bounded with her. The door opened tentatively.

  ‘I’m awake!’ she cried impatiently.

  Nina crept to her bedside and sat down in a manner which did not suggest the desired urgency.

  ‘He called,’ she said.

  Agnes’s heart was sinking.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Jack, of course.’

  Even in the darkness, Agnes could hear Nina smiling to herself. You too? she thought. You?

  Nina lay down and Agnes, unbecomingly wrapped in her duvet like a giant caterpillar, shuffled over to make room for her.

  ‘Hey.’ Nina raised herself up on an elbow. ‘I’m sorry about before. I didn’t mean to bite your head off. I was just a bit on edge.’

  ‘Animal lovers of the world, unite,’ said Agnes nastily; but Nina, her conscience cleared, appeared to have gone to sleep without catching the snipe. The taste of it stayed in her mouth, undigested. What good were they, these slashes and parries, when all she wanted was the birthright of damsels in distress? There came a point when one tired of things hard-won. To be favoured, now that was something else; to be so privileged as to sleep, as now Nina slept beside her, with a face innocent of artifice. Agnes looked at her as a lover might and saw that her superiority lay in the very quality of being effortless. Fortune attended her in sleep unasked, while Agnes’s fate snored wildly in cold cream and curlers. Like two laboratory experiments, they had started at the same point that morning: yet already Nina had results, secret catalysts which made nature seem like magic. She had taken the scenic route, while Agnes ploughed hopelessly forward over dry reaches of treeless desert, sand-blind and lonely, knowing nothing but the straightness of her own line.

  Chapter Seven

  FIVE days was a long time at Diplomat’s Week. Agnes, who had once thought days existed merely for identification purposes, temporal name-tags to facilitate social confluence, came to know each one as a prisoner does her jailers. Of course Monday was the worst, a jack-booted Nazi of a day; people did suicidal things on Mondays, like start diets and watch documentaries. Fear of Monday also tended to ruin Sunday, an invasion which Agnes resented deeply. Moreover, it made her suspicious of Tuesday; a day whose unrelenting tedium was deceptively camouflaged by the mere fact of its not being Monday. Wednesday, on the other hand, was touch and go, delicately balanced between the memory of the last weekend and the thought of the weekend to come. Wednesday was a plateau and dangerous things could happen on plateaux. For example, one could forget one was in prison at all. Thursday was Agnes’s favourite, a day dedicated to pure anticipation. By then she was on the home stretch, sprinting in glorious slow-motion towards the distant flutter of Friday’s finishing line; which, however, when reached, often felt to her like nothing but a memento mori of the next incarceration.

  ‘What’s the time?’ asked Agnes.

  ‘Eleven o’clock,’ said Greta. ‘Almost lunchtime.’

  He had called on Tuesday. Agnes’s hopes had been beaten to a pulp by then, but she managed somehow to manufacture a tone of mild surprise at the promptness of his overture, as if she had not spent the past two days dreaming of whispered midnight conversations, gravel against her window in the moonlight, desperate unexpected callers at the door and mysterious floral deliveries. They arranged to meet; and with the certainty of happiness now firmly embedded in her heart, Agnes was amazed at the transformative light it shed on things which had previously seemed unbearable. She ceased to balk at the slow passing of time, knowing as she now did that it would terminate in her future assignation. She proof-read the details of the Tongan High Commissioner’s ambassadorial career with admiration and joy. She speculated with Greta on the tragic demise of Jean’s love life in the manner of one who pitied but could not empathise. Their prearrangement assuaged all memory of pain. In moments of doubt she could call on it and it would run to her side, faithful as a dog. Moreover, like a good exam result it confirmed both future and past; for she had in the past few days endured several private flashes of an agony too raw to be acknowledged, as memories of her performance in the sweaty arena of their intimacy jumped out at her unbidden. His call permitted this testing hour, which she had all but blanked out, to be received back into history: she had passed; she was normal. She could now squirm and smile secretively with valid pleasure at the memory.

  ‘So have you guys done it?’ said Greta, colliding in mid-air with the winged passage of Agnes’s thoughts.

  ‘Yes.’ Agnes considered the addition of ‘of course’, but settled for ‘We have, actually.’

  ‘Wow.’ Greta bit vociferously into an apple. ‘That was quick.’

  Nina had once told her that if ever she felt her fancy turning to unhealthy devotion, she should imagine the object of her worship in the fifth form at a school disco: aged sixteen or thereabouts, skin crawling with adolescent pustulence, odorous and sweating and heaving himself drunkenly across the dance floor. Such a picture was bound to demote her demigod from the heaven realm to the human, or perhaps even lower, and was designed to relieve her from the discomforts of excessive admiration.

  Such practices may have allowed Nina to become the cool and distant lover she was purported to be, but Agnes, although sensing an imminent need for such stringent measures, was not by nature an iconoclast. She had tried to imagine a time when she might have found him charmless and had only been able to picture him young and lovely in a distant corner; aloof from the malodorous crowds, desperate to get away and sit beneath the moon, writing poetry perhaps. Such trains of thought, furthermore, inevitably led to the contemplation of her own ungainly youth, which, had she shared its details with her lover, she felt sure would have had the effect on him which Nina’s suggestion had designed.

  John had used to solicit tales of her adolescent embarrassments with glee. He had loved all her uglinesses and seemed to delight in the evidence they gave of her humanity. Once, when she had fallen over and cut her knee, he had watched her pick off the scab and had taken the crusty flap of skin from her hand. Agnes, who had thought she was removing the hideous excrescence unobserved, cried out in protest and shame. To her horror, and later wonderment, he held it up in the air for a moment and then put it in his mouth.

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sp; ‘There,’ he said, smiling and swallowing calmly. ‘Now I know what you taste like.’

  ‘What shall I wear?’ said Agnes, standing dolefully before her wardrobe.

  ‘Where?’

  Nina lay down on the bed and kicked off her shoes. One landed in the bin and the other hit the wall, leaving a small black mark.

  ‘Yes.’

  Agnes ran her hand along the rail where jackets and shirts hung like obedient ghosts, like escorts.

  ‘You don’t say “yes”.’ Nina screwed up her face. ‘You say “to the cinema” or something.’

  Agnes took out a jacket and held it up. It hung elegantly from the scrawny neck of the coat-hanger, svelte and poised. It looked better without her.

  ‘I’m going to the cinema with Jack, actually,’ Nina continued. She stretched her legs into the air and twiddled her bare feet on their joints like flesh-coloured periscopes. ‘Tomorrow. You know what he said when I suggested it? He said, “Oh, great, we can sit in the back row and snog.” Can you believe that? It was so funny.’

  Agnes replaced the jacket and it eyed her with disdain. She did not want to look glamorous. He would think she was trying too hard, although in reality it would be equally laborious for her to appear unadorned. There was little that taxed her art more than having to imitate nature.

  ‘I mean, I thought he was really gormless when I first met him but now I realise he’s just – well, honest. He doesn’t go in for behaviour. He just says what he wants. That way, everyone knows where they stand. I feel like he’s undermining my preconceived stereotypes all the time, which is quite a challenge.’ She yawned. ‘Especially since I didn’t think I had any.’

  ‘What shall I wear?’ said Agnes. Her voice was now tinged with panic. Nina looked up.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she said frostily. ‘Just wear anything. He won’t even notice.’