Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk

Author:Rachel Cusk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-06-09T04:00:00+00:00

Solly had felt before the way everything altered just before a child was born. It was how she sometimes thought it might be to approach death. Everything grew very slightly remote: the fit of life loosened, as though it were a skin preparing itself to be shed. And although when the baby came it would restart it all with its unstoppable vegetable growth, there was a layer of Solly that was always irretrievably lost. She was depleted, of some aspect of experience, of history: it was torn from her, like the wrapping paper from a present. Generally she believed that this was what she had been born for. She was grateful that she had been able to put herself to such prolific use. And the children gave so much back to you, of course. She was like a sack stuffed with their love and acknowledgement, lumpy on the outside but full, heavy with interior knowledge. It was just that sometimes she tried to think about the past and couldn’t. She couldn’t locate a continuous sense of herself. It seemed to lie all around her in pieces, like the casings of Dora’s Russian doll when all the babies were out.

Martin, on the other hand, didn’t seem to have changed at all over the years. He had only weathered a little, like a monument. The more formless and dissipated Solly became, the more astonished she was by his lean, untouched masculinity, his body that had never been plundered, the line that seemed to run unbroken from his toes to the top of his head. He was so—flat. The children were flat too. She realised that Martin was continuous with his child self and she envied him. Life seemed to stand in them all like a standing jet of water in the middle of a fountain. She couldn’t imagine what it was like. In the past few years Martin had developed little breasts. You could only see them when he took his shirt off. At night, getting undressed in their room, he would walk around shyly, like a teenaged girl. She thought it must be quite pleasant for him, after all this time, to have developed the breasts of a teenaged girl. It was a sort of consolation prize for all he’d missed out on, though she didn’t suppose he saw it like that. If he’d ever envied her her woman’s body he probably didn’t now. He was loyal to it, that was all. For Martin, her body was like a village that over time had sprawled and grown until it became a bustling centre, cut through with new roads and modern developments, some of them unsightly. It had changed, but it was where he lived.

She was in the garden when Paola arrived, and it might have been the fact that she had half forgotten she was coming, or just the shrill noise of the doorbell piercing the grey folds of the March morning, or the delayed way in which incidents penetrated the

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