Saving Agnes by Rachel Cusk Read Free Book Online Page A

with her. The door opened tentatively.
    â€˜I’m awake!’ she cried impatiently.
    Nina crept to her bedside and sat down in a manner which did not suggest the desired urgency.
    â€˜He called,’ she said.
    Agnes’s heart was sinking.
    â€˜Who?’
    â€˜Jack, of course.’
    Even in the darkness, Agnes could hear Nina smiling to herself. You too? she thought.
You?
    Nina lay down and Agnes, unbecomingly wrapped in her duvet like a giant caterpillar, shuffled over to make room for her.
    â€˜Hey.’ Nina raised herself up on an elbow. ‘I’m sorry about before. I didn’t mean to bite your head off. I was just a bit on edge.’
    â€˜Animal lovers of the world, unite,’ said Agnes nastily; but Nina, her conscience cleared, appeared to have gone to sleep without catching the snipe. The taste of it stayed in her mouth, undigested. What good were they, these slashes and parries, when all she wanted was the birthright of damsels in distress? There came a point when one tired of things hard-won. To be favoured, now that was something else; to be so privileged as to sleep, as now Nina slept beside her, with a face innocent of artifice. Agnes looked at her as a lover might and saw that her superiority lay in the very quality of being effortless. Fortune attended her in sleep unasked, while Agnes’s fate snored wildly in cold cream and curlers. Like two laboratory experiments, they had started at the same point that morning: yet already Nina had results, secret catalysts which made nature seem like magic. She had taken the scenic route, while Agnes ploughed hopelessly forward over dry reaches of treeless desert, sand-blind and lonely, knowing nothing but the straightness of her own line.

Chapter Seven
    FIVE days was a long time at
Diplomat’s Week.
Agnes, who had once thought days existed merely for identification purposes, temporal name-tags to facilitate social confluence, came to know each one as a prisoner does her jailers. Of course Monday was the worst, a jack-booted Nazi of a day; people did suicidal things on Mondays, like start diets and watch documentaries. Fear of Monday also tended to ruin Sunday, an invasion which Agnes resented deeply. Moreover, it made her suspicious of Tuesday; a day whose unrelenting tedium was deceptively camouflaged by the mere fact of its not being Monday. Wednesday, on the other hand, was touch and go, delicately balanced between the memory of the last weekend and the thought of the weekend to come. Wednesday was a plateau and dangerous things could happen on plateaux. For example, one could forget one was in prison at all. Thursday was Agnes’s favourite, a day dedicated to pure anticipation. By then she was on the home stretch, sprinting in glorious slow-motion towards the distant flutter of Friday’s finishing line; which, however, when reached, often felt to her like nothing but a
memento mori
of the next incarceration.
    â€˜What’s the time?’ asked Agnes.
    â€˜Eleven o’clock,’ said Greta. ‘Almost lunchtime.’
    He had called on Tuesday. Agnes’s hopes had been beaten to a pulp by then, but she managed somehow to manufacture a tone of mild surprise at the promptness of his overture, asif she had not spent the past two days dreaming of whispered midnight conversations, gravel against her window in the moonlight, desperate unexpected callers at the door and mysterious floral deliveries. They arranged to meet; and with the certainty of happiness now firmly embedded in her heart, Agnes was amazed at the transformative light it shed on things which had previously seemed unbearable. She ceased to balk at the slow passing of time, knowing as she now did that it would terminate in her future assignation. She proof-read the details of the Tongan High Commissioner’s ambassadorial career with admiration and joy. She speculated with Greta on the tragic demise of Jean’s love life in the manner of