Transit(41)

When he had finished speaking the other students began to pack away their books and papers: the two hours were up. I walked to the Tube station and got on the train. I was meeting a man for dinner, someone I barely knew. He had got my number from a mutual friend. When I arrived at the restaurant he was already there, waiting. He was reading a book, which he replaced in his bag before I could see the title. He asked me how I was and I found myself saying that I was very tired, to the extent that I might not have all that much to say for myself. He looked a little disappointed at this news, and asked if I wanted to hang up my coat. I said I would keep it on: I felt cold. There were builders in my house, I added. The doors and windows were constantly open and the heating had been turned off. The house had become like a tomb, a place of dust and chill. It was impossible to eat or sleep or work – there wasn’t even anywhere to sit down. Everywhere I looked I saw skeletons, the skeletons of walls and floors, so that the house felt unshielded, permeable, as though all the things those walls and floors ought normally to keep out were free to enter. I had had to go into debt to finance the work – a debt I had no immediate prospect of being able to repay – and so even when it was done I wasn’t sure I would feel entirely comfortable there. My children, I added, were away. I told him the story of the Saluki dogs following the hawk: my current awareness of my children, I said, was similarly acute and gruelling, except that I was trying to keep sight of them on my own. On top of that, I said, there was something in the basement, something that took the form of two people, though I would hesitate to give their names to it. It was more of a force, a power of elemental negativity that seemed somehow related to the power to create. Their hatred of me was so pure, I said, that it almost passed back again into love. They were, in a way, like parents, crouched malevolently in the psyche of the house like Beckett’s Nagg and Nell in their dustbins. My sons call them the trolls, I said. The boys were still young enough to see morality in terms of character, I said, as the fairy tales they’d read in childhood had taught them to do. They were still willing to give evil an identity.

He had removed his glasses at the word ‘evil’ and placed them in a case on the table. He had looked slightly owlish with them on. Now he looked like something else again.

I had been thinking lately about evil, I went on, and was beginning to realise that it was not a product of will but of its opposite, of surrender. It represented the relinquishing of effort, the abandonment of self-discipline in the face of desire. It was, in a way, a state of passion. I told him about Tony and his visit downstairs. Tony, I felt sure, had been afraid: talking to the trolls he had been unable either to resist or control them; instead he had found himself placating them by mirroring their hatred, and then had given me an account of his behaviour afterwards that attempted to turn that failure into an act of will and even heroism. But part of him, I saw, had retained what the trolls had said about me. It was possible, I had realised, to resist evil, but in doing so you acted alone. You stood or fell as an individual. You risked everything in the attempt: it might even be the case, I said, that evil could only be overturned by the absolute sacrifice of self. The problem was that nothing could give greater pleasure to your enemies.

He smiled and picked up the menu.

It sounds to me like you’re getting on top of things, he said.

He asked me what I wanted to eat, and ordered two glasses of champagne to be brought to the table. The restaurant was small and dimly lit: the softness of the light and of the upholstered surfaces seemed to blunt the sharpness of what I was trying to communicate. He said that it was strange it had taken us so long to meet: in fact it was almost exactly a year to the day since we had been – albeit briefly – introduced by a mutual friend. Since then, he had asked the mutual friend several times for my number; he had attended parties and dinners where he had been told I would be present, only to find that I wasn’t there. He didn’t know why the mutual friend had resisted putting him directly in touch with me, if it was anything so deliberate as resistance. But one way or another, he had been obstructed; until – again without knowing why – he had recently asked the mutual friend once more for my number and promptly been given it.

I said that my current feelings of powerlessness had changed the way I looked at what happens and why, to the extent that I was beginning to see what other people called fate in the unfolding of events, as though living were merely an act of reading to find out what happens next. That idea – of one’s own life as something that had already been dictated – was strangely seductive, until you realised that it reduced other people to the moral status of characters and camouflaged their capacity to destroy. Yet the illusion of meaning recurred, much as you tried to resist it: like childhood, I said, which we treat as an explanatory text rather than merely as a formative experience of powerlessness. For a long time, I said, I believed that it was only through absolute passivity that you could learn to see what was really there. But my decision to create a disturbance by renovating my house had awoken a different reality, as though I had disturbed a beast sleeping in its lair. I had started to become, in effect, angry. I had started to desire power, because what I now realised was that other people had had it all along, that what I called fate was merely the reverberation of their will, a tale scripted not by some universal storyteller but by people who would elude justice for as long as their actions were met with resignation rather than outrage.