Transit(36)

Amanda worked in fashion.

‘And in that world,’ she said, ‘no one ever tells you the truth about what you look like.’

It’s strange, she went on, how sometimes you can believe something to be true when in fact the exact opposite is the case. I suppose I see it all the time in my work, she said. People wear things simply because they’re in vogue: at the time they think they look great, but when they look back a few years later they realise they looked awful.

I said that perhaps none of us could ever know what was true and what wasn’t. And no examination of events, even long afterwards, was entirely stable. To take her point about fashion, if one waited long enough those embarrassing old clothes often started to look right again. The same forms and styles that from one distance seem to emanate shame, and to prove that we are capable of self-delusion, from another might be evidence of a native radicalism and rightness that we never knew we had, or at least that we were easily persuaded to lose faith in.

Amanda started to raise her cup to her lips again and then put it down.

I don’t want this, she said, grimacing.

Fashion was a young person’s industry, she went on after a while. She herself had entered it at precisely the point – her early thirties – when a lot of the people she knew were starting to settle down and have families. In a way, she supposed, it was the inevitability of that fate that had impelled her to resist it and to move instead into a world that represented a prolongation of the very things her friends were giving up: fun, parties, travel. Even her best and oldest friend Sophia – I might remember her from the old days – even Sophia, her flatmate and long-time partner in crime, was at that time getting married and buying a house with her boyfriend Dan, who was in many ways Amanda’s male ideal: she had been happy living with Sophia and him; the three of them even went on holiday together, she in one hotel room and them in another, as if she was their strange grown child. At night she would feel a mingled sadness and security as they closed their door, behind which she could hear their voices murmuring while she went to sleep. In that period Amanda was offered a job, one that entailed the most hectic social life she had ever known. While her friends signed mortgages and announced pregnancies, Amanda existed in a whirl of fashion shows and parties and staying up all night, travelling to Paris or New York, going from nightclubs to meetings with barely time to shower and change her clothes, flirting with whichever men she met along the way.

She had never found it hard to get men, she went on, or not very nice ones at least, but at a certain point it became clear to her that men like Dan were not to be found just wandering around the place. They were taken, owned, spoken for; in a way she despised it, their life of possession; they were like expensive paintings hung in the safety of a museum. You could look as hard as you liked, but you weren’t going to find one just lying in the street. For a while she did look, and felt as if she was inhabiting some netherworld populated by lost souls, all of them searching, searching for some image that corresponded with what was in their heads. Sleeping with a man she would very often have this feeling, that she was merely the animus for a pre-existing framework, that she was invisible and that everything he did and said to her he was in fact doing and saying to someone else, someone who wasn’t there, someone who may or may not even have existed. This feeling, that she was the invisible witness to another person’s solitude – a kind of ghost – nearly drove her mad for a while. Once, lying in bed with a man whose name she couldn’t even recall, she suddenly had a long, bereft fit of weeping. He was nice to her; he made her tea and toast, and suggested that she see a therapist.

When I think about that time, she said, what is hardest to remember are my clothes. I remember the things I did, the places I went, the men and the parties and even the conversations, and in those memories it’s always as if I was naked. Sometimes, she said, I’ll dream about a piece of clothing, or the memory of something – a jacket or a pair of shoes – will come floating into my head; and I’m never certain whether it was something I actually owned, even if it seems so familiar that I’m sure at one point I wore it all the time. But I can never prove it. All I know, she said, is that I don’t have those things any more and I don’t know where they went.

Her parents, she added, had made all their money from buying and selling property. Her childhood memories were of living in houses that were effectively building sites, houses that were always in a process of transformation. Her parents would painstakingly refurbish them and then, once the work had been done and the house felt like a home, promptly sell them. I learned, Amanda said, that as soon as things began to feel clean and nice and comfortable, that was the sign we were going to leave. She didn’t doubt that part of her attraction to Gavin lay in his association with the vocabulary of her childhood, as if he spoke a language only she could understand. She had been distant from her parents during her twenties and early thirties but these days they had re-entered her life to some degree: they liked being able to talk to her about insulation and subfloors and the pros and cons of converting the loft; the refurbishment of the house had given them some common ground. Perhaps when it’s done, she said, they won’t talk to me any more.

She said she ought to be going: she had a meeting in town she was already late for. She stood up and began brushing dust off her clothes, darting frequent glances at me, as she had done throughout our conversation. It was as if she was trying to intercept my vision of her before I could read anything into what I saw.