Outline

by Rachel Cusk

The women were of a kind I had never known before in my life: nearly all of them worked in a profession – doctors, lawyers, accountants – and most of them had a large number of children, five or six apiece, whose lives they supervised with amazing diligence and energy, running their families like successful corporations on top of the demanding careers most of them already had. Not only that, these women were as well groomed and well turned out as could be: they went to the gym every day, ran marathons for charity, were as thin and wiry as greyhounds and always wore the most expensive, elegant clothes, though their sinewy muscular bodies were often curiously sexless. They went to church, baked the cakes for the school fete, chaired the debating society, held dinner parties at which six courses were served, read all the latest novels, attended concerts, played tennis and volleyball at the weekends. One such woman would have been enough,’ she said, ‘but in Berlin I met quantities of them. And the funny thing was, I could never remember their names, or their husbands’ names either: