Saving Agnes (3 page)

ONCE Agnes had been in love and since then she had just been in pain. The men she knew now drifted in and out of her life like ships in a harbour; some staying for a brief, inebriated night of rest and recuperation, others weighing anchor for weeks. She examined every new face for augurs of past prosperity, but her Golden Age had never been revived. Such traffic as she encountered, however, intermittent though it was, kept her a slave to hope; although she didn't know whether her renaissance would take the form of a resurgence of old joys or the onset of new ones, she was confident salvation was at hand.

Having recognised love once, she thought she would know it again, but resemblances are cruel: grinning skulls behind painted masks, deceiving the eye to fool the heart with empty promises. She had seen John's face in other faces, had pursued him on filthy pavements in the rain and then stopped, duped and foolish, her chest pounding wildly with disappointment. Then she would feel herself take wing, plunging and diving and wondering if she might not find more happiness up there among the birds and rooftops. But the pain of it dragged round after her like a ball and chain; and while she was her own jailer, he held the key. Without him she could not contrive to escape from herself. He had made her what she was and then he had left her. She was a house with no occupant, a church with no religion. She had never known loneliness until she'd had company.
Agnes's father was a tall man. Like most children Agnes had had her adoption fantasies, but as she grew older she learned to accept her own considerable height as a natural gift; and later still to seek a man who could see eye to eye with her on such matters.

Consequently she was rather mystified when, at a party in her first term at university, she found herself accosted by an unquestionably handsome, but equally indubitably diminutive, stranger.

‘I've seen you around the place,' he said, smiling calmly at her in a manner which hinted that he did not find anything in her stature to suggest the conquest might be somewhat over his head. ‘My name's John. Some of my friends think we look alike.'

She did not, then or afterwards, point out the obvious dissimilarity between them. He found her in the dining hall the next day and asked her to meet him later that evening. For the next two weeks he visited her constantly, and when he found her out even left notes adorned with small drawings apparently etched by his own hand.

Agnes took her dilemma to Nina, who, she was assured, had seen it all before. Every man had a short man inside him, Nina explained, but those whose shortness took a physical form felt that a world of injustices had been heaped upon them for which they must be compensated. Consequently, the short man would make it his mission to have everything he felt his deficit precluded. Look, for example, at how many of the world's richest men were short.

Agnes, feeling that this seminar, elegant though it was, had little relevance to her original query, took it upon herself to mention that the deficit in question was a matter merely of an inch, two at the most, and surely did not, therefore, merit such suspicions of megalomania. Nina advised her not to be deceived, but nevertheless hastened towards her point. The spoils just mentioned, she explained, were but the preliminaries, the foothills of the short man's Himalaya. For what, after all, was the only thing in whose procurement the short man
would realistically be disadvantaged? What did the tall man automatically lay claim to, the laws of nature and attraction admitting him entrance, on which his shorter companion had no purchase? The answer? Tall women. And what did every short man want? A woman taller than him. The fame and fortune, Nina added, were merely the currency by which such an accessory could, according to male logic, be bought.

But what of those who failed to complete this arduous course? Agnes asked. The man in question seemed even shorter of cash than he was of limb. Pity them not, said Nina, for they have long since given in to hubris and despair; which description made Agnes feel that perhaps she had more in common with him than she'd thought and should look again.

She began to anticipate his visits, and had trouble sleeping at night. Before long, she found it difficult to think of anything other than him. Soon she found she could not eat, and she grew thin. Her physical metamorphosis, however, could not be wholly explained by her loss of appetite.

‘You've shrunk,' he said one day, as they were walking in the park.

She made reference to the biological findings which claimed the effects of vertical growth were irreversible.

‘You have!' he insisted. ‘Look, measure yourself against me.'

She did, and did it again before a critical audience when they returned home. All were agreed upon this rarest of phenomena. She had, it seemed, grown smaller. At the time she had marvelled at this evidence of the force of his personality. Through sheer love, it seemed, he had made her his perfect match. It did not occur to her to wonder why, if this were indeed so, he had not succeeded instead in making himself taller.

Greta, whose logic hit the mark with the spectacular arbitrariness of someone jumping off a building and surviving at the cost of those below, took a more succinct view when Agnes related this story, some years later, in the offices of
Diplomat's Week.
‘There's nothing in the whole world more depressing
than sitting next to a guy whose thighs are smaller than yours,' she said, nodding sagely.

People used to take them for brother and sister in a manner Agnes found morally reprehensible. For her, it was more like looking into a mirror and being greeted with a reflection of herself that she liked. He instructed her not just in the art of love, but in the gentler, narcissistic skills of self-acceptance.

‘You're like a black hole,' he said when he left. ‘You consume me.'

‘I hate Sundays,' said Nina, her entire body appearing to go limp with exhaustion at her aversion. ‘They were obviously designed by someone who thought stimulation was a row of closed off-licences and a feature-length episode of
Songs of Praise.'

‘But isn't that the point?' Agnes shifted back into the shade. ‘I mean, for some people Sunday is the most interesting day of the week.'

Their garden was no Eden, but at least it got the sun and was the uniform khaki colour which generally passed for green in London. Agnes and Nina sat on two deckchairs Merlin had found in the cellar. Bloated flies straying from next door's garbage-infested garden revolved around their heads, droning against a monotonous bass-line of traffic from the Blackstock Road.

‘Name one.'

‘The Archbishop of Canterbury.'

‘Name another one.'

‘Look, all I'm saying is that maybe – well, maybe you feel that way because there's something missing from your life.'

‘Jesus Christ,' said Nina from behind the shield of her newspaper. She was angry, but for reasons unconnected with Agnes's position on the decline of Christian beliefs in the western world. ‘Are you telling me that
I've
got a problem
because I don't want to spend half my weekend dancing round an altar with a bunch of God-squad maniacs or filching money off innocent people for the bloody Seventh Day Adventists, or even hanging out with a load of lapsed Catholics whingeing on about the bloody meaning of life for that matter?'

Agnes groped for her sunglasses. Her white face felt porous and blasted in the sunlight. In this grim square of atrophied horticulture she felt like no living thing.

‘I mean,
are
you?' Nina persisted.

An explosion of exhaust from the road just then caused them both to jump. Agnes felt an acrid tide of sweat prickle over her. Her heart was beating fiercely.

‘Not necessarily,' she said.

Agnes and Nina had had company the night before. While neither guest had specifically confirmed their reservation, Nina had been either confident or peremptory enough to warn her housemates of her putative night of passion several days in advance. Agnes, forced by her indirect nature to run the gauntlet of suspense in such matters, had been unable to make a similar promise. She did not suppose, in any case, that the presence of an additional love-interest would be cause for conflict. A discreet form of apartheid was normally employed on such occasions which kept things from taking on the aspect of a production-line. The trouble had started when, the next morning, these carefully segregated individuals had succeeded in encountering one another in the kitchen and had revealed themselves to be old friends from college. Despite their mutual surprise at the unexpected nature and location of their reunion, they immediately formulated a plan.

‘Do you come here often?' one of them was heard to ask the other as they left together to find breakfast.

Agnes had consoled herself with the thought that any doubts which might have been lingering in her own lover's mind from the night before would, at least, have been partly compensated for by the events of the morning after.

‘Just as long as we've got that straight,' snapped Nina.

Agnes picked up the business section of the Sunday papers and applied herself to learning the art of mergers.

Rumour had it that as a child Agnes had once been discovered walking with her eyes shut and one arm outstretched beside her.

‘Agnes, what on earth are you doing?' her mother had cried nervously. They were on a family walk, and their bewilderment as they stopped and stared had eddied uncomfortably through the reassuring crunch of Wellington boots on frosty grass and the caws of winter birds.

‘I'm holding hands with God,' Agnes had loudly declared before drifting imperviously ahead to leave them standing, a group of sudden strangers huddled in the pale bowl of field and sky like people waiting for a bus.

At the time they might not have known whether to laugh or cry, but later, large and boisterous in the pagan glowing hub of the kitchen, their confidence in their own grasp of what was essentially what regrouped and sent gales of hilarity whooping up the chimney stacks. Agnes, small and sulky, had sent her own thoughts with them, martyred orbs of saintly passion which found better company amidst the glittering spheres of the heavens than amongst the rabble of her earthly station.
Lord, give me the strength to deal with these infidels,
she would implore before retiring to read her
Lives of the Saints
in which her namesake, worryingly rouged and buxom, appeared to be struggling beneath the weight of the large sheep in her arms.

Later Agnes denied the truth of this anecdote with almost as much fervour as she had given it life. Her protests inevitably ensured its endurance in family folklore, and it continued to provoke a hilarity with every repetition which her own more deliberate attempts at humour could somehow never match. At such times the possibility of Agnes experiencing some sense of relief that the tip, rather than the underlying iceberg, of her spiritual life had been made public was cold comfort indeed.
She was proud of her beliefs, and with the confidence which often accompanies such convictions looked forward patiently to the time when her family would be made to pay for their good humour in this life with the cold flame of perdition in the next. The last laugh, she was sure, would be hers. Nevertheless, their certain punishment did not make hers any easier to bear; and she hid from them the full extent of her love, creeping off to converse in solitude with the Almighty. Such concealments were in fact superfluous. Her mother had often paused by the bedroom door at the sound of Agnes weeping and had judiciously let her alone, surmising that her daughter's tender age and burgeoning affections had doubtlessly led her to nurture unfulfilled passions for some reassuringly untouchable icon of popular culture. Had she known all passion was being spent in contemplation of a naked man nailed to two sticks of wood she would probably have made some effort to intervene. Uninformed, however, her conclusion that it was all hormonal was in any case accurate enough.

At university Agnes reclaimed herself as a Catholic, an ethnic minority which, she decided, had undergone enough persecution in the past to make allegiance to it defensible. While no match for the children of Israel on this score, she was surprised to discover that Catholicism held a peculiar attraction for her peers. Agnostics and atheists alike confessed that if they were ever to surrender their religious bachelorhood, their thoughts would in all probability turn lightly to the Vatican.

‘But why?' said Agnes with ill-concealed amazement, confusing herself and all her dubious charms with those of the creed whose acolytes had murdered and martyred in liberal quantities to spread the good news.

The reasons, it appeared, were twofold. On the one hand were the attractions of ritual, of incense and jewel-encrusted robes, of transubstantive cannibalism and the horror film of
crucifixion. On the other were subtler individual perversions like sin and guilt. The former seemed to function as a kind of spiritual scenery; the latter were the regions wherein unfolded the real drama. It had been some years since Agnes's own idolatry had faded to a kind of grudging, habitual affection; and there lay within the ripe ground for proselytism she had discovered amongst her peers a golden opportunity to resuscitate the honeymoon period of her youth. Strangely uninfected by their enthusiasm, however, Agnes began to experience instead the contagion of doubt. The public purchase of her private world rendered her disaffected with it. Her goods appeared soiled with handling. She – if not her sins – was no longer original.

The feminist lobby, meanwhile, questioning her on the subject of her beliefs with mingled fascination and dismay, unwittingly extinguished the final, guttering flame of belief. The Catholic Church was sexist, hierarchical, capitalist and corrupt! they cried. It put an embargo on women's sexual freedom and forced them to stay at home and have babies. You don't abide by the rules, they argued. Why do you bother? Agnes, who in truth had been practising certain deceptions, saw that she could not claim to have done so in the spirit of subversion and civil disobedience, her acceptance of spiritual authority being voluntary rather than enforced. She had, she supposed, just hoped that He wouldn't notice; that He wouldn't come home unexpectedly in the middle of the day to find her in a tangle of rumpled bedclothes and milkman's limbs. She had cheated, but in doing so had assumed that the very fact of her bothering to believe that that was what she was doing would absolve her of it.

Eventually she surrendered outwardly to the forces of agnosticism, but there was some corner of her that would remain forever faithful. Contemplating a lovely sunset, for example, or a summer field full of flowers, tears would well in her eyes for the beauty of it all and her heart would instinctively rise in praise. There was also, it must be said, a subtle worm of fear wandering vagrant through the unlocked
passages of her mind. She had been told He would come like a thief in the night, and at night she prayed.

‘Almost a full house last night,' remarked Merlin later in the kitchen. ‘If the rest of the world were not so immune to my charms it could have been a hat-trick.'

‘Well, don't blame me,' said Nina sharply. ‘I told all of you last Wednesday that Jack was coming over. I wasn't to know the place would end up like the bloody Friends Meeting House.'

‘Oh, it wasn't a criticism,' said Merlin mildly. ‘More of a cry for help.'

They were watching Merlin make lunch. Outside, a low grey blanket of cloud had long since covered up the sun.

‘Look, Nina, I'm sorry,' blurted out Agnes finally. ‘I didn't ask him to come back. He just sort of – did.'

‘Nasty man!' pounced Nina. ‘Poor little Agnes.'

‘That's not what I mean!' rejoined Agnes. People always misunderstood her. ‘It wasn't like that.'

It really hadn't been like that, although her memories of that particular stage in the evening were akin to a blanketed criminal's recollections of being bustled from police van to courtroom.

‘Oh, come on,' said Nina. ‘It's not as if his reputation didn't precede him. You must have known he wasn't there to admire the upholstery.' She picked up a magazine and began leafing indifferently through it. ‘I don't know where you get off on all this helplessness, Agnes. It's such an act.'

‘What do you mean?' Agnes considered the alternatives being offered up for elucidation and opted for the lesser of two evils. ‘What has he got a reputation for?'

‘It's obviously not much of a reputation,' said Merlin kindly. He cast a meaningful glance at Nina.

‘Shut up, Merlin,' snapped Nina, ignoring it.

‘Tell me,' said Agnes.

Nina sighed reluctantly, surrendering responsibility for the pain she was about to inflict.

‘He's a bit of a womaniser, that's all. I thought you knew that.'

Agnes, who did not readily identify herself with the species on which her suitor was so widely supposed to prey, had, while being vaguely aware of his rumoured skills, not thought herself a likely medium for their application. The idea that he should judge her fit to be womanised, as it were, struck her now as more complimentary than degrading.

‘Yes, I suppose I did,' she said after a while.

There was silence in the kitchen. Merlin watched her nervously. Nina shook her head in disbelief.

‘Don't tell me!' she said exasperatedly. ‘You think he'll be different with you, is that it?'

‘I don't think that,' replied Agnes truthfully; she did not, in fact, know what she thought.

‘Why?' Nina raged, it being too late to divert the passage of her rhetoric. ‘Why do women always think they can change men? They go straight for the bloody animals and they try to tame them! It perpetuates myths of masculinity. It suggests ill-treatment is attractive. Why should we let them just bloody get away with it?'

She lit a cigarette and inhaled angrily. Agnes watched her mouth, waiting for the smoke to reappear like a papal vote. She felt the exhalation was necessary as a token of forgiveness, a thin white curl of acquiescence to counter the suck of disapproval.

‘What am I saying?' Nina laughed and out it came in mirthful puffs. ‘Look at that travesty of manhood, for God's sake. Merlin, what have we done to you?'

Merlin smoothed his apron primly.

‘I'm like Agnes,' he said. ‘I've had manhood thrust upon me.'

‘Your way is just as bad,' cried Agnes, going on the offensive while Nina's guard was down. ‘It's almost like you want men to be animals so they won't threaten you on your own terms. That's just another form of control. In fact—' she risked, ‘in fact, it's sexist.'

To her annoyance, Nina started to laugh.

it is!' Agnes insisted. She was stepp'd so far in the blood of her own betrayal as to make retraction impossible. ‘You can spend your whole life running away because you're afraid of being hurt. I just want to judge people on how they behave towards me, not on how they might have behaved in the past.'

Although she was speaking so sincerely as almost to convince herself, the pain of Nina's recent revelation was beginning to nag at her like a tooth emerging from its anaesthetic. There had been times when her heart had felt as if it would snap beneath the weight of her lovers' lovers, their stale laughter and dead kisses, their ghostly lips and pale bodies slipping paper-thin into the tiny hot space between flesh and living flesh. She loathed the smug self-containment of the past, and usually saw no alternative but to smash it open like a piggy-bank and trample on its mystery. She had frightened even herself with such murderousness and was no stranger to the horror that came after it. She was alive with the subtleties of endgames.