Free Outline: A Novel by Rachel Cusk

actually existed; whether, in other words, he had spent his adult life attempting to follow a template of marriage that had been, in fact, an illusion.
    There had been a hotel Theo liked to stay in, not far from my neighbour’s boarding school, and Theo would often call in and take him out to tea, always with a different ‘friend’ in tow. These friends were as scented and beautiful as aunt Irini was swarthy and squat; she had a number of warts on her face that sprouted coarse black hairs of an extraordinary girth and length, and my neighbour had been mesmerised his whole life by this feature, which was still real to him though Irini had been dead for thirty years and which symbolised the enduring nature of repulsion, while beauty was seen once and never seen again. When Irini died, at the age of eighty-four after sixty-three years of marriage, uncle Theo refused to allow her to be buried and instead had her encased in glass and kept in the vaults of a Greek chapel in Enfield, where he visited her every day of the six months that remained to him. My neighbour had never kept company with Theo and Irini without witnessing scenes of the most extraordinary violence: even a telephone call to the house usually involved an argument, with one of them picking up the extension to abuse the other while the caller played referee. His own parents, though fiercely combative, never approached the heights of Theo and his wife – theirs was a colder though perhaps a bitterer war. It was his father who died first, in London, and his body was stored in the same vault where Irini had lain, for his mother had taken it into her head to commission the construction of a family tomb back on the island, an undertaking so grandiose that it had fallen well behind schedule and was not ready to receive him when he died. She had conceived this idea when his father first fell ill, and the last year of his father’s life was spent receiving almost daily bulletins on the progress of the tomb being built to envelop him. This unique method of torture might have seemed to be the conclusive move in their lifelong argument, but in fact when his mother herself came to die – a year to the day, as he believed he had already told me, after his father – the tomb was still not finished. She joined her husband in the vault in Enfield, and it wasn’t until several months later that their bodies were flown together back to the island on which both of them had been born. It had fallen to my neighbour to oversee the interring, and also the exhumation of other family members – his grandparents on both sides, numerous uncles and aunts – from their places in the cemetery and their relocation in the enormous new tomb. He flew back, with his parents’ corpses in the hold, and spent all day immersed with the gravediggers in the grisly business of transporting and arranging the various coffins. He was particularly unnerved to witness the return to the earth’s surface of his grandfather, his mother’s father, who had been a man of great mischief and the cause – to the end of their days – of many of his parents’ arguments, for the power even in memory that he continued to hold over his daughter. In the late afternoon, his parents were the last to be lowered into the vast marble structure. My neighbour had a taxi waiting to take him back to the airport, as he was due to return to London straight away. But midway through the journey, sitting in the taxi, a terrible realisation struck him. In all the rearranging of the family bodies, he had somehow failed to place his parents side by side: worse still, he distinctly recalled, there in the back of the taxi, that it was his grandfather’s coffin that lay between the two. Immediately he ordered the taxi driver to turn around and take him back to the cemetery. As they approached, he told the taxi driver that he would have to help him, for by now it was nearly dark and everyone else would have gone home. The taxi