Transit(3)

The street where we were standing was one of the broad tree-lined avenues of handsome Victorian houses that seemed to act as the guarantors of the neighbourhood’s respectability. Their well-pruned hedges and large, polished front windows, when I passed them, had always caused me groundless feelings of both security and absolute exclusion. The flat I had shared with Gerard had been nearby, on a street where the first faint downward cadences of tone could be heard as the neighbourhood began its transition towards the run-down, traffic-choked boroughs further east: the houses, though still handsome, bore the occasional imperfection; the hedges were a little more unruly. The flat had been a big, rambling network of rooms on the upper storeys of an Edwardian villa, whose striking views were expressive of the descent from the salubrious to the squalid, a dichotomy Gerard had seemed at the time either to be presiding over or imprisoned in. From the back was the Palladian vista westward, of well-kept lawns and lofty trees and discreet half-glimpses of other handsome houses. From the front was a bleak panorama of urban desolation of which, since the building stood on a rise, the flat had had a particularly unshielded view. Gerard had once pointed out a long, low structure in the distance and told me it was a women’s prison: our view of it was so clear that at night the tiny orange dots that were the tips of the prisoners’ cigarettes could be seen as they smoked on the walkway along their cells.

The playground noises coming from behind the high wall beside us were getting louder. Gerard put his hand on Clara’s shoulder, and bent down to speak in a low voice into her ear. He was evidently delivering some kind of reprimand, and I found myself remembering his letter again and its cataloguing of my shortcomings. She was a tiny, fragile, pretty creature but her elfin face assumed an expression of superb martyrdom while he spoke that suggested she had inherited some of her father’s melodramatic demeanour. She listened interestedly while he corrected her, her sagacious brown eyes staring unblinking into the distances of the road. Nodding very slightly in response to his final question, she turned and walked aloofly among the other children through the gates.

I asked Gerard how old she was.

‘Eight,’ he said. ‘Going on eighteen.’

I was surprised by the discovery that Gerard had a child. In the time when I knew him he had been so far from resolving the difficulties of his own childhood that it was hard to believe he was now a father. The strangeness was accentuated by the fact that in every other respect he seemed unchanged: his sallow-skinned face with its soft, long-lashed, slightly childlike eyes was unaged; his left-hand trouser leg was still held back by a bicycle clip, as it always had been; the violin case strapped across his back had always been such a permanent feature of his appearance that I didn’t think to ask what it was still doing there. When Clara had disappeared from view Gerard said:

‘Someone told me you were moving back here. I didn’t know whether to believe it or not.’

He asked if I’d bought somewhere and which street I was living in and I told him while he stood vigorously nodding his head.

‘I haven’t even moved house,’ he said. ‘It’s strange,’ he said, ‘that you always changed everything and I changed nothing and yet we’ve both ended up in the same place.’

A few years ago, he went on, he had gone for a short while to Canada, but other than that things had remained pretty much as they always had been. He used to wonder, he said, how it felt to leave, to go away from what you knew and put yourself somewhere else. For a while after I had left, he would come out of his house each morning to go to work and would look at the magnolia tree that stood beside the gate, and the thought that I no longer saw that tree would overwhelm him with its strangeness. There was a picture we had bought together – it was still hanging in exactly the same place, between the big windows that looked over the back garden – and he would sit and look at it and wonder how I could bear to have left it there. In the beginning he saw these things – the magnolia tree, the picture, the books and other objects I hadn’t taken with me – as the victims of abandonment, but over time that had changed. There was a period in which he realised that it would hurt me to see those things again, the things that I had left. Then, later still, he began to feel that I might by now be glad to see them again. He had kept it all, incidentally, and the magnolia tree – though there had been talk among the other residents of cutting it down – was still there.

A growing crowd of parents and uniformed children was massing around the gates and it was becoming difficult to talk above the noise. Gerard kept having to move his bicycle, which he held lightly by the handlebars, out of the way. Most of the other parents were women: there were women with dogs on leashes and women with pushchairs, smartly dressed women with briefcases and women carrying their children’s bags and lunchboxes and musical instruments. The sound of their voices grew in the crush, against the swelling noise from behind the walls as more and more children filled the playground. There was the feeling of an inexorable crescendo, almost of hysteria, which would abruptly cease when the school bell rang. Occasionally one of the women shouted a greeting to Gerard and I watched him reply with the enthusiasm that had always been the camouflage for his social mistrust.

He moved his bicycle out of the mêlée and into the road, where the first russet-coloured leaves had started to fall around the parked cars. We crossed over to the other side. It was a warm, dull, windless morning: in contrast to the loud scene we had just witnessed, here the world suddenly felt so muted and stationary it was as if time had stopped. Gerard admitted that he was still uneasy at the school gate, despite the fact that he had been taking Clara there for years now. Diane worked long hours, and besides, she found the school culture even less amenable than he did: his maleness provided him with at least a degree of disguise. When Clara was smaller, it was he who did the round of playgroups and coffee mornings. He had learned a lot, not about parenthood but about other people. He had been surprised to discover that women were hostile to him at the baby groups, despite the fact that he had never thought of himself as particularly male. He had always had close female friends; his best friend all through his teenage years had been Miranda – I probably remembered her – and the two of them had at one time seemed interchangeable, often sharing a bed or undressing in front of one another without embarrassment. But in the world of mothers, his masculinity was suddenly a stigma: the others seemed to view him by turns with resentment and contempt, as though he could win neither by his presence nor by his absence. He had often been lonely, looking after Clara in the early days, and was frequently overwhelmed by the new perspectives on his own upbringing which having a child gave him. Diane had returned to work full-time, and while sometimes he was surprised by her unsentimentality about motherhood and her aversion to maternal activities, he gradually came to understand that this knowledge – of nurture and its consequences – was not something she required for herself. She knew as much about being a woman as she needed to: it was he who had to know, to learn. He needed to know how to care for someone else, how to be responsible, how to build and sustain a relationship, and she had let him do it. She had given him Clara with a completeness he was sure most women wouldn’t have been capable of, and it had been hard but he had stuck it out.