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Authors: Rachel Cusk

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I wanted to live with my father, Sonia says. But his new wife didn’t like it.

What about your mother? the woman says.

She didn’t want me there. She doesn’t like me. I stayed a lot of the time with my grandmother. My mother doesn’t like my grandmother either. She ran away from home when she was sixteen. She ran away with my father.

The woman raises her eyebrows. She has a stricken expression on her face. How old was your mother when you were born? she says.

She was already pregnant with me when she ran away, Sonia says. She was sixteen.

So she’s the same age now as me, the woman says.

Younger than you, Sonia says.

I want to say, the woman says after a pause, I want to say that I’m sorry these things have happened to you. I’m really sorry.

Sonia gazes at her. Her head swims with a warm liquid feeling. She feels soft suddenly, soft as dough.

Someone should apologise to you, the woman says. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m saying sorry.

She gets up and before she leaves the room she comes and gives Sonia a hug. Her body is hard and bony. Sonia can still feel the imprint of it on her own soft flesh long after she’s gone.

The man says, Sonia I need you.

He is packing his things. He wants her to help him. He tells her what to do. She fills boxes and folds clothes neatly into suitcases. She smoothes her hands over the folded shirts and aligns the tightly paired socks.

In the evening Kurt calls.

At last I’ve saved the money for a ticket, he says. I’m coming to visit you.

She thinks about it.

Let’s meet in London, she says. I want to see Buckingham Palace and Big Ben. I want to go to some clubs.

OK, Kurt says admiringly. It’s easier for me, anyhow.

I know somewhere cheap we can stay, she says.

They stay in a hostel in Leicester Square, the two of them crammed into a single bed. She and Kurt have never made love. He has never asked her to. They stay out at a club all night and then sleep all day.

My next job will be in London, Sonia says. London is a great city.

He asks about the family she lives with.

They’re great, she says.

And the children?

The children are really cute, she says.

She shows him pictures she’s taken of them on her phone.

When she gets back the man has gone. His room is empty. It is raining outside; she watches the rain for a while through the windows
of his empty room. Later he phones her and asks her to bring the children round to his new house after school. She cooks dinner for them all in the unfamiliar kitchen. She goes back to the other house to sleep: there isn’t enough room for her to sleep at the man’s house. She doesn’t see the woman, though she hears her walking around during the night.

The next day she takes the children to the man’s new house again. Towards evening the woman rings the bell. The older girl goes to let her in. Sonia and the man are sitting around the table having dinner. The younger girl is sitting on Sonia’s lap. Sonia has plaited her hair.

The woman comes in and stares at them. She looks at Sonia. Her face is shocked. She and the man go off somewhere to talk. Then she goes away again, taking the children with her. Before they go, they hug Sonia. They cling to her. Be good girls, she says to them. Go with your mummy.

She and the man are left alone. She clears the dishes and tidies up. Eventually he tells her she can go. I don’t need you for anything else, he says.

At home, the woman is waiting for her in the hall.

I want you to leave, she says. You can’t stay here any more.

Sonia looks at her with wide-open eyes.

There’s no job for you any more, the woman says. I’m sorry.

Sonia has trouble recognising the woman’s power to make this decision. Surely it’s up to the man too?

There’s no job for you there either, the woman says. Then she adds, We have to do this ourselves.

Sonia thinks she will find out about that in private. She has the man’s number on her mobile phone. He calls her all the time with instructions. He needs her.

Believe me, the woman says. Believe me, that isn’t going to work.

The woman looks terrible. She is so thin she looks like a skeleton. One side of her face is swollen and she keeps her hand there, holding it over her cheek.

They pulled out my tooth, she says. It still hurts where they pulled it out.

Where will I go? Sonia says.

The woman swallows, closes her eyes, presses her hand to her cheek.

I’ve found you a job with another family, she says. In London.

For a moment a kind of chasm seems to open up beside her, disclosing a vast grey cityscape where the walls of the house ought to be. Sonia is frightened. She wants to run to her room and lock herself inside. She wants to crawl under the bed and hide there.

No, she says. No I don’t want.

She can’t speak. They stand there face to face in the electric light of the hall. The woman’s face is anguished, ugly. She stands at the foot of the stairs, as though barring Sonia’s way up. She is expelling her.

It’s all right, the woman says then, taking her hand from her cheek and resting it on Sonia’s arm. It’s my sister’s family. You met her once, remember? She knows all about you. She’s happy to have you. It’s the least we can do, she says, and she closes her eyes again.

London is great. London is a great city. At the new place Sonia has her own separate flat on the lower floor of the family’s house. She joins a gym. She’s out almost every night. There are four children
here instead of two, but there is less work because the new woman likes to do most things for them herself.

At Christmas she thinks of the old family. Something makes her think of them. It is winter now, and darkness falls at four o’clock. Sonia walks in her new coat, a fake fur she bought for herself on Oxford Street. She is walking home through the residential streets of her neighbourhood. It is a wealthy neighbourhood, all family houses with clipped hedges and neat front gardens. The lights are on inside and as she passes she looks through the windows, looks at the people in their warm bright rooms. And she remembers then how she left the old house; how the woman had called her a taxi to the train station, how they said goodbye on the front step. The woman went back inside and closed the door. Sonia carried her suitcase alone to the taxi, but before she got in she looked back, back at the house whose windows were all dark; and she saw, dimly, the shape of the woman inside, saw her sitting there alone in the darkness.

When she gets home she finds her grandmother’s recipe and she makes a big stollen in the kitchenette of her flat. It takes her all evening and half the night. The little room gets so hot she has to open the windows and let the freezing air in. She takes off her sweater and works in her vest, her arms bare. When it’s cooked and cooled she takes a long sharp knife and she cuts it carefully into two equal pieces, and she wraps each piece in muslin and then in foil and then in bright Christmas paper, and she puts the pieces in two boxes to post in the morning, one to the man and one to the woman.

ALSO BY RACHEL CUSK

FICTION

Saving Agnes

The Temporary

The Country Life

The Lucky Ones

In the Fold

Arlington Park

The Bradshaw Variations

NONFICTION

A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother

The Last Supper

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Certain people made it possible for me to write this book and I would like to thank them. My sister Sarah has been my mainstay and friend: for the past year not just her time but also her gift for happiness and family life have been on semi-permanent loan to my household. Russell Celyn Jones has lived through and been instrumental in the creation of these chapters; to him I owe, among so many other things, the notion of aftermath that is the book’s elemental theme. Hannah Griffiths remained endlessly faithful to the feminist principle of autobiographical writing, even when it hurt. Andrew Wylie and Sarah Chalfant continued to treat me as a writer until eventually I became one again. David Rogers, Meg Jensen and Adam Baron of Kingston University were generous colleagues as well as good friends. My parents have been tirelessly supportive, and at a crucial moment provided me with time to write. And thank you most of all to my fine daughters, Albertine and Jessye, who have endured hard times with such dignity and fortitude. It is impossible to meet them and not feel cheered by their triumph over sadness. I am prouder of them than I can say; I hope one day they will read this and feel, at least, not ashamed.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Originally published in 2012 by Faber and Faber Limited, Great Britain

Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

www.fsgbooks.com

eISBN 9781466820180

First eBook Edition : July 2012

First American edition, 2012

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cusk, Rachel, 1967 –

Aftermath : on marriage and separation / Rachel Cusk.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-374-10213-5 (alk. paper)

1. Cusk, Rachel, 1967—Marriage. 2. Cusk, Rachel, 1967—Divorce. 3. Authors, English—20th century—Biography. 4. Marriage—Psychological aspects. 5. Divorce—Psychological aspects. I. Title.

PR6053.U825Z46 2012
823’.914—dc23
[B]

2012003807

BOOK: Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation

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