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

my grandmother was in her sixties: for nearly thirty years she has lived without a husband. These three decades begin
to rival the decades of her marriage like the outskirts of a town engulfing its historic centre, yet that centre holds, remains the explanation, the cause. Unlike me, my grandmother never ended the story; it goes on, with or without certain of its main characters.
    When I was younger I thought she must be relieved to be alone, after all those years. Though I had loved my grandfather I saw it as a disencumbrance, a liberation, like taking off shoes that hurt. Marriage appeared to me as a holding-in, a corseting, and it seemed to my eyes that the force of constraint was male; that it was men who imposed this structure, marriage, in order to make a woman unavailable, and with her the gifts of love and warmth that otherwise might have flowed freely out into the world. But men provided shelter, and money: I understood that a woman could not merely liberate herself, couldn’t just take herself off with her gifts of love and warmth and go elsewhere. What had happened to my grandmother seemed the ideal solution, to be left with the chattels but freed from the male authority that had provided them, though admittedly it had taken an awfully long time to happen. It never occurred to me that she might remarry, might enter again into that bondage, and indeed she never did. And it never occurred to me either that she might have remained alone out of loyalty to the familial enterprise; that she might have been lonely, have sickened for companionship, but continued to play her part for the sake of her children; that she might have understood, as I did not, that the jigsaw is frail, not strong, is a mirage, not a prison. It is not to dismantle but to conserve it that strength is required, for it will come apart in an instant. It will come apart, that image, and what remains is not a new or different image but a pile of pieces that mean nothing at all.
    At the end of lunch the enormous cake is brought in, amid exclamations in which I believe I can detect notes of uncertainty. For a moment the threat – or rather the knowledge – of failure is unbearable, the inescapable knowledge that is the essence of this second life, this aftermath. As a child, I read the book of life through the adults I knew, just as now I read it through my children, the second reading perhaps a form of atonement for the first, for I know what it is to be a child. That first reading was savage and revelatory where the second is empathetic and philosophical: eyes strained against the darkness of my own ignorance, I struggled to comprehend the grandeur and violence of the adult world, to grasp its double nature of seeming and being. And in this duplicity, this difference between how things looked and what they were, was something to which I couldn’t be reconciled, just as now I can’t forget that under the pretty tablecloths lies a makeshift structure that has no form or beauty of its own. In much the same way, I saw the romance of marriage as a covering for something unapologetically practical, saw it as the metaphor for woman, the beautiful creature who cooks and cleans. Why couldn’t the outside and the inside be the same? Beneath the surface of my cake is something worse than practical, worse than makeshift: it is the reversal of meaning; it is failure itself. Far better to be practical than to make a foul-tasting cake. Better to go to a shop and buy a cake than to produce this extravagant travesty of love.
    The first Christmas after my grandfather died, my grandmother cried at the table, a paper hat from a Christmas cracker on her head. I remember the way the flimsy hat sat jauntily on her greying hair as she wept. It seemed to readmit her to the world of childhood; and indeed I sensed around the table a slight impatience with her conduct
to which my own frequent emotional outbursts had long since accustomed me. For some reason her tears were not