Outline

by Rachel Cusk

suppose it’s a bit like marriage, he said. You build a whole structure on a period of intensity that’s never repeated. It’s the basis of your faith and sometimes you doubt it, but you never renounce it because too much of your life stands on that ground.

In his marriage, he now realised, the principle of progress was always at work, in the acquiring of houses, possessions, cars, the drive towards higher social status, more travel, a wider circle of friends, even the production of children felt like an obligatory calling-point on the mad journey; and it was inevitable, he now saw, that once there were no more things to add or improve on, no more goals to achieve or stages to pass through, the journey would seem to have run its course, and he and his wife would be beset by a great sense of futility and by the feeling of some malady, which was really only the feeling of stillness after a life of too much motion, such as sailors experience when they walk on dry land after too long at sea, but which to both of them signified that they were no longer in love.

If the relationship is going to end, in other words, I want to know it and confront it as soon as possible. Sometimes,’ she said, ‘this process is so quick that the relationship is over almost as soon as it has begun. Very often I have felt that my relationships have had no story, and the reason is because I have jumped ahead of myself, the way I used to turn the pages of a book to find out what happens in the final chapter. I want to know everything straight away. I want to know the content without living through the time span.’ The person she was involved with now, she said – a man named Konstantin – had given her for the first time in her life a cause to fear these tendencies in herself, for the reason that – unlike, if she was to be honest, any other man of her experience – she judged him to be her equal. He was intelligent, handsome, amusing, an intellectual: she liked being beside him, liked the reflection of herself he gave her. And he was a man in possession of his own morality and attitudes, so that she felt – for the first time, as she had said – a kind of invisible boundary around him, a line it was clear, though no one ever said as much, she ought not to cross. That line, that boundary, was something she had never encountered so palpably in any other man, men whose defences were usually cobbled together out of fantasies and deceptions that no one – themselves least of all – would blame her for wanting to break through. And so not only did she feel a sense of pr...

Looking back, those were some of the best times of her life, though at the time they had had the feeling of a prelude, a period of waiting, as though for the real drama of living to begin.