Outline: A Novel by Rachel Cusk Read Free Book Online Page B

slightly startling. Unlike the people in the café window downstairs, the terracotta woman made reality seem, for a moment, smaller and deeper, more private and harder to articulate.
    The apartment had a large outdoor terrace that ran across the full width of the building’s façade. From this terrace, high above the pavements, the surrounding rooftops with their baked, broken angles could be seen, and further away the smoggy distant hills of the suburbs. It faced, across the chasm of the street, the windows and terraces of the apartments opposite. Sometimes a face would appear at one or other of the windows. Once, a man came out on to his terrace and threw something over the side. A young woman came out after him and looked down over the railings at what he had thrown. Clelia’s terrace was private and leafy, filled with big tangled plants in terracotta urns and hung with small glass lanterns: in the middle there was a long wooden table and many chairs, in which it could be imagined Clelia’s friends and associates sat during the hot dark evenings. It was shaded by a huge vine in which, sitting one morning at the table, I noticed a nest. It was built into a fork amidst the tough, knotty stems. A bird was sitting in it, a pale grey dove: every time I looked, night or day, there she was. Her small pale head with its dark bead-like eyes moved around as though fretfully, yet for hour after hour she kept her vigil. Once I heard a great rustling overhead and looked up to see her clambering to her feet. She thrust her head through the canopy of leaves and gazed around her at the rooftops. Then with a snap of her wings she was gone. I watched her fly out over the street and then, circling, land on the rooftop opposite. She stayed there for a little while, calling, and then I watched her turn back and look at the place from which she had come. Having got this view of it, she opened her wings again and flew back, and with another great rustling and flapping overhead resumed her station.
    I wandered around the apartment, looking at things. I opened a few cupboards and drawers. Everything was highly orderly. There was no confusion or secrecy: things were in their correct places and complete. There was a drawer for pens and stationery, a drawer for computer equipment, a drawer for maps and guides, a filing cabinet with papers in neat dividers. There was a first-aid drawer and a drawer for sellotape and glue. There was a cupboard for cleaning materials and another for tools. The drawers in the antique oriental bureau in the sitting room were empty and smelled of dust. I kept looking for something else, a clue, something rotting or breeding, a layer of mystery or chaos or shame, but I didn’t find it. I wandered into the study and touched the brittle sails.

 
    IV
    My neighbour from the plane was a good foot shorter than me and twice as wide: since I had got to know him sitting down, it was difficult to integrate these dimensions with his character. What located me was his extraordinary beak-like nose with the prominent brow jutting out above it, which gave him the slightly quizzical appearance of a seabird, crowned with his plume of silver-white hair. Even so it took me a moment to recognise him, standing in the shade of a doorway opposite the apartment building, dressed in buff-coloured knee-length shorts and a red checked shirt, immaculately ironed. There were various points of gold around his person, a fat signet ring on his little finger, a chunky gold watch, a pair of glasses on a gold chain around his neck and even a flash of gold when he smiled, all immediately noticeable, and yet I hadn’t been aware of any of them during our conversation on the airplane the day before. That encounter had been, in a sense, immaterial: above the world, objects didn’t count for so much, differences were less apparent. The material reality of my neighbour, which up there had seemed so light, was concretised down here, and the result was that