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A Novel
by Rachel Cusk
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The man to my right turned and asked me the reason for my visit to Athens. I said I was going there for work.
'I hope you are staying near water,' he said. 'Athens will be very hot.'
I said I was afraid that was not the case, and he raised his eyebrows, which were silver and grew unexpectedly coarsely and wildly from his forehead, like grasses in a rocky place. It was this eccentricity that had made me answer him. The unexpected sometimes looks like a prompting of fate.
'The heat has come early this year,' he said. 'Normally one is safe until much later. It can be very unpleasant if you aren't used to it.'
In the juddering cabin the lights flickered fitfully on; there was the sound of doors opening and slamming, and tremendous clattering noises, and people were stirring, talking, standing up. A man's voice was talking over the intercom; there was a smell of coffee and food; the air hostesses stalked purposefully up and down the narrow carpeted aisle and their nylon stockings made a rasping sound as they passed. My neighbour told me that he made this journey once or twice a month. He used to keep a flat in London, in Mayfair, 'but these days,' he said with a matter-of-fact set to his mouth, 'I prefer to stay at the Dorchester.'
He spoke a refined and formal kind of English that did not seem wholly natural, as though at some point it had been applied to him carefully with a brush, like paint. I asked him what his nationality was.
'I was sent to an English boarding school at the age of seven,' he replied. 'You might say I have the mannerisms of an Englishman but the heart of a Greek. I am told,' he added, 'it would be much worse the other way around.'
His parents were both Greeks, he continued, but at a certain moment they had relocated the whole household – themselves, four sons, their own parents and an assortment of uncles and aunts – to London, and had begun to conduct themselves in the style of the English upper classes, sending the four boys away to school and establishing a home that became a forum for advantageous social connections, with an inexhaustible stream of aristocrats, politicians and money-makers crossing the threshold. I asked how it was that they had gained access to this foreign milieu, and he shrugged.
'Money is a country all its own,' he said. 'My parents were ship-owners; the family business was an international enterprise, despite the fact that we had lived until now on the small island where both of them were born, an island you would certainly not have heard of, despite its prolixity to some well-known tourist destinations.'
Proximity, I said. I think you mean proximity.
'I do beg your pardon,' he said. 'I mean, of course, proximity.'
But like all wealthy people, he continued, his parents had long outgrown their origins and moved in a borderless sphere among other people of wealth and importance. They retained, of course, a grand house on the island, and that remained their domestic establishment while their children were young; but when the time came to send their sons to school, they relocated themselves to England, where they had many contacts, including some, he said rather proudly, that brought them at least to the peripheries of Buckingham Palace.
Theirs had always been the pre-eminent family of the island: two strains of the local aristocracy had been united by the parental marriage, and what's more, two shipping fortunes consolidated. But the culture of the place was unusual in that it was matriarchal. It was women, not men, who held authority; property was passed not from father to son but from mother to daughter. This, my neighbour said, created familial tensions that were the obverse to those he encountered on his arrival in England. In the world of his childhood, a son was already a disappointment; he himself, the last in a long line of such disappointments, was treated with a special ambivalence, in that his mother wished to believe he was a girl. His hair was kept in long ringlets; he was clothed in dresses and called by the girl's name his parents had chosen in expectation of being given at long last an heir. This unusual situation, my neighbour said, had ancient causes. From its earliest history, the island economy had revolved around the extraction of sponges from the sea bed, and the young men of the community had acquired the skill of deep diving out at sea. But it was a dangerous occupation and hence their life expectancy was extraordinarily low. In this situation, by the repeated death of husbands, the women had gained control of their financial affairs and what's more had passed that control on to their daughters.
Here is an excerpt, credit line: Excerpted from Outline by Rachel Cusk, published in January 2015 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2014 by Rachel Cusk. All rights reserved.
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