Free Saving Agnes by Rachel Cusk Page A

swim over her naked body like eels. Once his fascination had disturbed her, but now she had come to know, if not to understand it. She knew she could rely on it if all else failed.
    â€˜Why do you love me?’ he marvelled, shaking his head. ‘I see other men looking at you. You’re so much better than me. What do you see in me?’
    He said things like that sometimes. He said they were his rape fantasies. Agnes, not understanding, was frightened of such allegations of superiority. She perceived within them intimations of incompatibility and hence desertion, little landmines of truth in a desert of lies. He pulled her down on top of him.
    â€˜Why?’ he whispered. His white teeth shone in the dark like a crescent moon.
    â€˜Because,’ said Agnes.
    Her body felt like it was melting into his. She clung to the moment. A second skin, irremovable.
    â€˜Agnes? It’s Tom.’
    â€˜Oh!’ Agnes disengaged the telephone cord from where it had wound itself round a table leg and sat down. ‘How are you?’
    â€˜Well, this phone box stinks of piss but apart from that I’m okay.’ The tinny roar of traffic drowned his voice.
    â€˜Where are you?’
    â€˜Outside your house. Can I come in?’
    A minute later her brother stood on the doorstep. He looked too big for it. Tom had always had the dubious ability to make his surroundings appear exiguous and rather shoddy.
    â€˜Nice suit,’ said Agnes.
    â€˜Savile Row.’ He flicked at his shoulder. ‘Hand made. The ladies love it.’
    He grinned and negotiated the doorway by lowering his head exaggeratedly.
    â€˜My sister the cave-dweller,’ he said, strolling into the sitting-room. He looked around. ‘Nice place. Good ventilation too,’ he added, running his fingers over the crack in the wall.
    â€˜Where did you think I’d be?’ Agnes inquired. ‘In a cardboard box under Waterloo Bridge?’
    â€˜I’ll admit you’ve always been a bit prolier-than-thou,’ replied Tom, ‘but I think that would be stretching it.’
    Such power struggles tended to characterise the early stagesof their meetings. While the exaggeration of their differences had long since been employed as a method of partly ameliorating them, Agnes had begun to nurture an unspoken anxiety of late that on one of these ice-breaking occasions she would discover Tom had actually become the person he caricatured so expertly.
    â€˜Do you want something to drink?’ she said.
    â€˜Great.’ He grinned. ‘I’ll have some champagne.’
    Agnes was astounded.
    â€˜We don’t have any,’ she replied.
    Tom rummaged in his bag and produced a bottle with a flourish.
    â€˜You do now,’ he said.
    â€˜You shouldn’t have,’ she murmured penitently.
    â€˜I didn’t,’ he replied. ‘I had to go and see someone in Finsbury Park on business. That’s why I’m up here. He gave it to me.’
    Having ascertained the spirit of the occasion, Agnes went to the kitchen in search of two matching glasses. She opened cupboards aimlessly, unable suddenly to remember what she was looking for. Tom’s impromptu visits often disturbed her in this way. This was not so much the fault of their differences – in Agnes’s environment Tom often took on the aspect of one who recognised nothing within it, coming as he did from an element of corporate largesse – as of a sense she had of two worlds colliding which hitherto had been kept apart. It made her unsure of how to behave.
    Back in the sitting-room, Merlin had just come home. Agnes emerged from the kitchen to see Tom slapping him on the back in the jovial pantomime of manhood he always employed with Agnes’s friends, and possibly even with his own. Merlin, visibly shaken by the blow, took to the sofa.
    â€˜Look what Tom brought.’ Agnes waved the bottle in front of him. ‘Do you want