Free Kudos by Rachel Cusk

she said, ‘despite the fact that I didn’t expect you to and that probably I only wanted to make my life seem enviable so that I could accept it myself. My wholecareer,’ she said, ‘has involved interviewing women – politicians, feminists, artists – who have made their female experience public and who are willing to be honest about one aspect or another of it. It has been up to me to represent their honesty,’ she said, ‘while at the same time being far too timid to live life in the way they do, according to feminist ideals and political principles. It was easier to think,’ she said, ‘that my own way of life involved its own courage, the courage of consistency. And I did come to revel in the difficulties such women experienced, while at the same time appearing to sympathise with them.
    â€˜As a child,’ she said, ‘I used to see my sister, who was two years older than me, take the brunt of whatever came, while I watched it all from the safety of my mother’s lap, and every time she went wrong or made a mistake, I made a note to myself not to do the same thing when it was my turn. There were often terrible arguments,’ she said, ‘between my sister and my parents, and I profited from them simply by not being the cause of them, so that when it came to these interviews I found I was in a familiar position. I seemed to profit,’ she said, ‘from the mere fact of not being these public women, while they were in a sense fighting my cause, just as my sister had fought my cause by demanding certain freedoms that I was then easily granted when I reached the same age. I wonderedwhether one day I might have to pay for this privilege, and if so whether the reckoning might come in the form of female children, and each time I was pregnant I hoped so ardently for a boy that it seemed impossible that my wish would be granted. Yet each time it was,’ she said, ‘and I watched my sister struggle with her daughters as I had always watched her struggle with everything, with the satisfaction of knowing that by watching closely enough I had avoided her mistakes. Perhaps for that reason,’ she said, ‘it was almost unbearable to me when my sister made a success of something. Despite the fact that I loved her, I couldn’t tolerate the spectacle of her triumph.
    â€˜The friend that I told you about earlier,’ she said, ‘was in fact my sister, and it did seem to me that her divorce and the destruction of her family was the thing I had been waiting for all my life. In the years that followed,’ she said, ‘I would sometimes look at her daughters and I would almost hate them for the damage and suffering that showed in their faces, because the sight of these damaged children reminded me that it was not, after all, a game any more, the old simple game where I profited by watching – as it were – from the safety of my mother’s lap. My own sons continued to live normal lives full of security and routine, while my sister’s house was racked by the most terrible troubles, troubles she continued to be honest about, to thepoint where I told her I thought she was damaging the children even more by not putting up a pretence for them. In the end I became reluctant to expose my own children to it, because I worried they would find the sight of such violent emotion disturbing, and so I stopped inviting them to our house and to come on holiday with us, as I had regularly done up until then.
    â€˜It was at that point,’ she said, ‘when I took my eyes off my sister’s household, that things began to change for her. I noticed, in the communications I still had with my sister, that she sounded calmer and more optimistic; I began to hear stories of her daughters’ small successes and improvements. One day,’ she said, ‘I was on my bicycle and it began suddenly to pour with rain. For once I had come out without my