Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation by Rachel Cusk Read Free Book Online Page B

are long and as blank as paper. People stay out late on the streets calling and shouting, music pouring from open windows, cars revving and honking in the dusk. Someone new has moved in next door and erected his sound system on the other side of my bedroom wall. All night the electronic pulses probe and torment the space between us. I wander through the dark house, checking the locks on the doors and windows, for it feels as though the outside is coming in, as though a wall of defence has come down, as though the doors and windows may as well not be there at all. We are a house of
women and children, but I wonder whether our vulnerability is anything more than something invented to make men feel brave. When there’s a war men go off to it, leaving the women and children behind, and when they return perhaps it is to find that they have made themselves dispensable, like Agamemnon returning to Argos from Troy. I wonder whether we will be safer with Rupert in the house or more at risk. There is a space here, an impression, like a footprint in the sand or a cast, a male declivity in the shape of my husband. Vaguely I try to fit Rupert into it. I imagine him fixing the drains, the door handles, having a look inside the dishwasher to see what’s wrong. Man is either protector or predator, I can’t quite remember which.
    Rupert is efficient with his paperwork, his deposit, his references. He brings his iron and his humorous posters, his suits. He brings his television, which stands on a plinth in his room like a vast black blinking god. I give him two shelves in the fridge and he fills them with ready meals for one, the plastic containers neatly stacked in the cold lit chamber like things in a morgue. My husband comes to collect something while Rupert is in the hall and the two of them shake hands.
    ‘Pleased to meet you,’ they both say.
     
     
    Agamemnon, in the Oresteia of Aeschylus, returns to his palace in Argos, the victor after ten years’ war against the Trojans. He is murdered by his wife Clytemnestra as soon as he sets foot in the hall, walking over the costly crimson tapestries with which she has laid the palace floor as his bitter homecoming tribute. Later she is murdered
in her turn by their children, Orestes and Electra, who cannot forgive her for disposing of their father, imperfect though he was.
    My children are interested in the ancient Greeks. They have a surprising knowledge of Greek mythology, know its twists and turns, are familiar with its cast of characters. When they talk about it it’s as though they are talking about something they personally remember. I suppose this knowledge can only have come from books, so it is memory in a way. For a child a book and a memory can be difficult to tell apart. All the same it’s surprising, how much they know. Freud viewed the formation of individual personality as analogous to human history: I like this way of understanding a life, as a re-enactment in miniature of civilisation. According to this analogy the ancient Greeks are the formative phases of infancy, in which the psyche is shaped and given its irrevocable character. So it’s fitting, I suppose, that a child should have a special attraction to these tales of gods and mortals, to the joy and anarchy of the early world, in which fantasy and reality have not yet been separated, in which the moral authority of God the father has not yet been asserted and guilt and conscience do not yet exist.
    We once visited what is said to be Agamemnon’s tomb, on a family holiday in the Peloponnese. It is a vast conical space dug beneath a hot hillside at Mycenae where bees buzz amid the wildflowers, the tomb itself beehive-shaped, as though in acknowledgement of what is really the only immortality, the return of all things human to the eternal substances of nature. Clytemnestra’s tomb is there too: the two are far apart, for this is a story not of marriage but of separation, of the attempt to break the form of