Arlington Park (eBook)

Rachel Cusk (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2010 | 1. Auflage
271 Seiten
Faber & Faber (Verlag)
978-0-571-26718-7 (ISBN)

Infos

Arlington Park, a modern-day English suburb, is a place devoted to the profitable ordinariness of life. Amidst its leafy avenues and comfortable houses, its residents live out the dubious accomplishments of civilisation: material prosperity, personal freedom, and moral indifference. For all that, Arlington Park is strikingly conventional. Men work, women look after children, and people generally do what's expected of them. Theirs is a world awash with contentment but empty of belief, and riven with strange anxieties. Set over the course of a single rainy day, the novel moves from one household to another, and through the passing hours conducts a deep examination of its characters' lives: of Juliet, enraged at the victory of men over women in family life; of Amanda, warding off thoughts of death with obsessive housework; of Solly, who confronts her own buried femininity in the person of her Italian lodger; of Maisie, despairing at the inevitability with which beauty is destroyed; and of Christine, whose troubled, hilarious spirit presides over Arlington Park and the way of life it represents. Rachel Cusk's sixth novel is her best yet. Full of compassion and wit, each page laden with truth, she writes about her characters' domestic lives, their private thoughts and fears with an intelligence and insight that will leave readers reeling.

Rachel Cusk is the author of the Outline trilogy, the memoirs A Life's Work and Aftermath, and several other works of fiction and non-fiction. She is a Guggenheim fellow. She lives in Paris.

Autor

Rachel Cusk was born in 1967 and is the author of five previous novels: Saving Agnes, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award, The Temporary, The Country Life, which won a Somerset Maugham Award and The Lucky Ones, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award and In The Fold. Her non-fiction book A Life's Work was published to huge acclaim in 2001. In 2003 she was chosen as one of Granta's Best of Young Novelists. She lives in Bristol.

Textauszug

Juliet Randall parted her hair before the mirror and there it was: a thing like a cockroach, three inches long and two across, embedded in her scalp, waving its legs triumphantly. She showed it to her husband. Look, she said, look! She bent her head forward, still holding aside her hair. Benedict looked. Oh, how it itched! How revolting it was, how unbearably revolting! Was there no way of getting it out? Her husband didn’t seem to think so. He was evidently glad the thing hadn’t decided to make its nest in his hair. Do something! Juliet shrieked, or tried to, but it was one of those dreams where you tried to say something and then suddenly found you couldn’t. She struggled in the shroud of sleep. Then, with a great effort, she tore it from her and opened her eyes.

What a horrible dream – horrible! Juliet clutched her head and frantically searched her hair. The cockroach both was and wasn’t there. She was full of its presence and yet she couldn’t touch it; she could only feel it, the hideous stirring of its legs, the crawling feeling of infestation. Oh, the way it had greedily moved its legs! And the terrible knowledge that there was no way of getting it out, that she would have to endure it for ever! The daylight began to break down that knowledge a little. She felt a measure of relief, and then another. But the thing, the insect, was still real to her, more real than the unharmed patch of scalp her fingers went over and over. Where had it gone? What was it, to remain so real to her? It almost infuriated her in its non-existence: it was maddening, almost, to be torment­ed by something that wasn’t there.

It wasn’t there! She acknowledged that it wasn’t. Steadily the sense of it diminished. All she could think of now was that Benedict hadn’t helped her. He had pitied her, but he had accepted her fate. He had accepted her future, as the host of a giant cockroach. He was glad it hadn’t happened to him. She looked into the deep innards of the dream and searched them again for their information. The moment she had parted her hair and showed him: that was when she realised. She had realised the true significance of a fact that was well known to her. She knew it, and yet it seemed that only in that moment did she finally understand its significance. Only then did she see what it meant, that she and Benedict were separate.

The house was silent, except for the steady sound of rain at the window and the submerged roar of the traffic on Arlington Rise. It was early, yet already the streets were awake, subversive­ly going about their business in the dawn. What were people up to at this hour? What illicit advantage were they pursuing in their cars, going to and fro along Arlington Rise? The room stood muffled in tentative, crêpey light. Juliet scratched the place where the cockroach had been. Benedict was asleep. She drew away from the lump of him, moving further to the other side of the bed. Upstairs, above their heads, the children were still silent in their room. She listened to the sound of the rain. During the night – earlier, before the cockroach – she had woken and heard the thunderous water in the dark. It had made a sound like the sound of applause. She didn’t know why, but it had made her afraid: she had felt a fear of something it was too late to prevent, something that had already occurred. It was as if she could have gone and stood at the window and seen it standing there in the garden in the rainy dark, completed.

The indistinct light proceeded with its modest inventory of their room. There was the brown wardrobe and the inelegant chest of drawers; there was the ladder-backed chair with two rungs missing, the framed map of Venice, the chipped gilt mir­ror with its opaque oval of glass, all having survived the dark­ness unaltered. At the window the sagging curtains began to show their ancient folds and formations. Beside her, on the floor, her clothes lay in a heap: she had stepped out of them where she stood the night before. They had got back late and she had shed them, uncaring, and got straight into bed.

What an evening they’d had! It was the sort of evening that left a bitter taste in the mouth, that sat on your chest in the morning with its feeling of shame. It was an evening, in a sense, to which the cockroach had been the conclusion – the cockroach and the realisation that she and Benedict were not joined but separate. She couldn’t even summon up a clear sense of outrage about it: she had drunk too much, and the feeling of shame sat on her chest. The bitterness lay in her veins like lead. Apparently, she had been slightly obnoxious. Benedict had told her so on the walk home. She, Juliet, aged thirty-six, mother of two, a teacher at Arlington High School for Girls – a person regarded in her youth as somewhat excep­tional, a scholarship student and at one time Head Girl – had been slightly obnoxious to their hosts, the Milfords: Matthew Milford, the vilely wealthy owner of an office supplies compa­ny in Cheltenham, and his horse-faced, attenuated, raddled wife Louisa.

She thought of their house, into whose kitchen alone the whole of the Randalls’ shoddy establishment in Guthrie Road would comfortably have fitted. What had they done to deserve such a house? Where was the justice in that? She recalled that Matthew Milford had spoken harshly to her. The lord of the manor had spoken harshly from amidst his spoils, from his unjust throne, to Juliet, his guest. And Benedict called her obnoxious!

What was it he’d said? What was it Matthew had said, sit­ting there at the table like a lord, a bull, a red, angry bull blow­ing air through his nostrils? You want to be careful. He’d told her she wanted to be careful. His head was so bald the candle­light had made it shine like a shield. You want to be careful, he’d said, with the emphasis on you. He had spoken to Juliet not as if he’d invited her to his house but as if he’d employed her to be there. It was as if he’d employed her as a guest and was giving her a caution. That was how a man like that made you feel: as if your right to exist derived from his authority. He looked at her, a woman of thirty-six with a job and a house and a husband and two children of her own, and he decided whether or not she should be allowed to exist.

Beside her Benedict sat up.

‘Right,’ he said, ruffling his thin, downy hair with his fingers.

Today it annoyed her, the way Benedict came to life in the mornings: as though life were a river he had rested beside, before climbing back into his one-man canoe and paddling off upstream. Benedict had not defended her from that man Matthew Milford, any more than he had removed the cock­roach from her scalp.

‘You were on the sauce last night,’ he observed.

He got out of bed and went to the window. Juliet still lay there with her head on the pillow and her hair spread around her in a fan.

‘We all were,’ she said.

‘Not me.’

‘Everyone except you then.’

Benedict was naked. In clothes he looked very slightly effem­inate, but naked he did not. His freckled chest had a burly, bunched-up look. Benedict’s nakedness had an extrovert qual­ity, like that of people in nudist colonies.

‘Incredible house,’ he said, parting the folds of the curtain a little with one finger and then letting them fall back again.

‘Ridiculous,’ Juliet said.

‘Ye-es, I suppose it was, in a way.’

‘It was,’ Juliet asseverated. ‘How can people who are so idi­otic be so successful?’

‘I thought you thought it was ridiculous.’

‘It was! All those hunting prints – and the antlers in the loo! Who do they think they are – the aristocracy? All he does is sell photocopiers to secretaries in offices!’

Benedict tutted.

‘It’s true,’ Juliet said bitterly. She was determined to exoner­ate herself. ‘I hate the way men like that think they’re impor­tant. They expect you to defer to them, just because they run a business! What’s so important about a business? It’s just selling things for your own personal profit. It’s just greed, dressed up as usefulness.’

Benedict withdrew to the bathroom. Juliet lay and listened to the rain, and the muffled sound of the traffic going through it.

‘Who is he to go around telling people to be careful?’ she called. ‘He should be careful himself. People might decide to stop using photocopiers. I hope they do decide to stop using them,’ she added, though there was no reply.

She scratched the place where the cockroach had been.

‘How dared he!’ she resumed, when Benedict returned.

‘Who?’

‘Matthew Milford, last night. Women your age can start to sound strident,’ she mimicked. ‘Who does he think he is?’

‘I don’t suppose he meant any harm,’ Benedict said vaguely. ‘It was probably nothing to do with you.’

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Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 9.12.2010
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Schlagworte: Suburbia • three women lisa teddeo
• ISBN-10: 0-571-26718-1 / 0571267181
• ISBN-13: 978-0-571-26718-7 / 9780571267187