Transit(2)

We were sitting in his office while this conversation occurred. Outside, the traffic moved sluggishly along the grey, dirty London street. I said that the frenzy he had described, rather than arousing me to compete, extinguished any enthusiasm I might have had for house-hunting and made me want to walk immediately away. Besides, I didn’t have the money to engage in bidding wars. I understood that in the market conditions he had described, I was therefore unlikely to find anywhere to live. But at the same time, I rebelled against the idea that creative people, as he had called them, should allow themselves to be marginalised by what he had politely described as their superior values. He had used, I believed, the word ‘imagination’: the worst possible thing for such a person was to quit the centre as an act of self-protection and take shelter in an aesthetic reality by which the outside world remained untransfigured. If I didn’t want to compete, I wanted even less to make new rules about what constituted victory. I would want what everyone else wanted, even if I couldn’t attain it.

The estate agent seemed somewhat taken aback by these remarks. He had not meant to imply, he said, that I ought to be marginalised. He simply thought I would get more for my money, and get it more easily, in a less overheated neighbourhood. He could see I was in a vulnerable position. And such fatalism as mine was rare in the world he worked in. But if I was determined to run with the pack, well, he did have something he could show me. He had the details right in front of him: it had just come back on the market that morning, the previous sale having fallen through. It was a council-owned property: they were keen to find another buyer straight away, and the price reflected that fact. As I could see, he said, it was in pretty poor condition – in fact, it was virtually uninhabitable. Most of his clients, hungry as they were, wouldn’t have touched it in a million years. If I would permit him to use the word ‘imagination’, it was beyond the scope of most people’s; though admittedly it was in a very desirable location. But given my situation, he couldn’t in all conscience offer me encouragement. It was a job for a developer or a builder, someone who could look at it impersonally; the problem was the margins were too small for that kind of person to be interested. He looked me in the eye for the first time. Obviously it’s not a place, he said, where you could expect children to live.

Several weeks later, when the transaction was concluded, I happened to pass the estate agent in the street. He was walking along on his own, a sheaf of papers clutched to his chest and a set of keys jingling in his fingers. I was careful to acknowledge him, remembering what he had said, but he merely glanced at me blankly and looked away again. That was in early summer; it was now the beginning of autumn. It was the astrologer’s remarks about cruelty that had reminded me of that incident, which at the time had seemed to prove that whatever we might wish to believe about ourselves, we are only the result of how others have treated us. There was a link in the astrologer’s email to the planetary reading she had made for me. I paid the money and read what it said.





Gerard was instantly recognisable: he was riding through the traffic on his bicycle in the sun and passed by without seeing me, his face lifted. He wore an exalted expression which reminded me of the element of drama in his persona and of the evening fifteen years earlier when he had sat naked on the windowsill of our top-floor flat with his legs dangling down into the darkness saying that he didn’t believe I loved him. The only noticeable difference was his hair, which he’d allowed to grow into an arresting mane of wild black curls.

I saw him again a few days later: it was early in the morning and this time he was standing beside his bicycle in the street, holding the hand of a small girl in school uniform. I had once lived with Gerard for several months in the flat he had owned where, as far as I knew, he still remained. At the end of that period I had left him, without much ceremony or explanation, for someone else and had moved away from London. For a few years afterwards, he would sometimes call our house in the countryside, his voice sounding so faint and far away that it was as if he was calling from some place of actual exile. Then one day he sent me a long handwritten letter covering several pages, in which he appeared to be explaining to me why he had found my behaviour both incomprehensible and morally incorrect. It had arrived in the exhausting time just after my older son was born; I was unable to read it to the end, and had added to the list of my sins by not answering it.

After we had greeted one another, and expressed an astonishment that on my side was feigned since I had already seen him once without him seeing me, Gerard introduced the small girl as his daughter.

‘Clara,’ she said in a firm, high, quavering voice, when I asked her name.

Gerard asked how old mine were now, as though the bald fact of parenthood might be softened if I were implicated in it too. He said he had seen me interviewed somewhere – it was probably years ago now, to be honest – and the description of my house on the Sussex coast had made him quite envious. The South Downs were one of his favourite parts of the country. He was surprised, he said, to find me back here in the city.

‘Clara and I walked the South Downs Way once,’ he said. ‘Didn’t we, Clara?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘I’ve often thought that’s where we’d go if we ever left London,’ Gerard said. ‘Diane lets me read the estate-agent porn, so long as it stops there.’

‘Diane’s my mum,’ Clara explained, with dignity.