Free Kudos by Rachel Cusk Page B

another part merely wanted to win the game once and for all; to show a woman like my sister that it was possible to gain freedom and self-knowledge without having to smash up the whole world in public in the process.
    â€˜I imagined travelling,’ she said, ‘to India and Thailand, alone with a simple knapsack, moving lightly and swiftly after all the years of being weighed down; I imagined sunsets and rivers, and mountaintops visible on calm evenings. I imagined my husband at home in our house beside the canal, with our sons and his hobbies and his friends, and it seemed to me he might also be relieved,’ she said, ‘because over the two decades of our marriage our male and female qualities had become blunted on one another. We lived together like sheep, grazing side by side, huddled next to one another in sleep, habituated and unthinking. I considered that there might be other men,’ she said, ‘and indeed for a long time other men had been appearing in my dreams, which otherwise were full of familiar people and familiar situations and anxieties. But thesemen who appeared were always strangers, based on no one I had ever known or met, and yet they recognised me with a special tenderness and desire, and I would recognise them too, recognise in their faces something I felt I had once known but had forgotten or never found, and which I only remembered now, in the dream-state. Of course I could never tell anyone about these dreams, from which I woke feeling the most unbearable, exquisite happiness that quickly grew cold in the dawn light of our room and became disappointment. I have always been impatient with people who talk about their dreams,’ she said, ‘but I had a powerful desire to tell someone about these dreams of mine. Yet the only person I could think of to tell,’ she said, ‘was the man in the dream himself.
    â€˜At around this time,’ she went on, ‘my husband began to change, in ways that were so small they were impossible to identify and at the same time impossible to ignore. It was almost as if he had become a copy or forgery of himself, someone otherwise identical who nonetheless lacked the authentic quality of the original. And indeed whenever I asked him what was wrong, he would always say the same thing, which was that he wasn’t feeling quite himself. I asked our sons if they had noticed anything and for a long time they denied it, but one evening, after the three of them had gone together to a football match – somethingthey did regularly – they admitted that I was right and that he was somehow different. Again, it was impossible to say what the difference was, since he looked and behaved as normal. But he wasn’t really there, they said, and it occurred to me that this quality of absence might signify that he was having an affair. And indeed one evening in the kitchen shortly afterwards he suddenly said, very sombrely, that he had some news for me. In that moment,’ she said, ‘I felt our whole life cleave apart, as though someone had cut it open with a great bright blade; I almost felt I could see the sky and the open air through the ceiling of our kitchen and feel the wind and rain coming through the walls. I had watched other couples separate,’ she said, ‘and it was usually like the separation of Siamese twins, a long-drawn-out agony that in the end makes two incomplete and sorrowing people out of what was one. But this was so swift and sudden,’ she said, ‘a mere slicing of the rope that tethered us, that it felt almost painless. My husband was not having an affair, however,’ she said, tilting her head back towards the dull grey sky and blinking her eyes several times. ‘What he had to tell me was not that our life together was over and that I was free, but that he was ill,’ she said, ‘an illness, moreover, that would not hasten his death but would instead blight every aspect of the life