Transit(42)

He was watching me while I spoke, with strange-coloured eyes that reminded me of peat or earth and that now seemed strangely naked, as though by removing his glasses he had also removed the shield of adulthood. I saw that there were plates of food on the table, though I couldn’t remember the waiter bringing them. He was struck, he said, by my allusion to anger: it was a biblical word and carried connotations of righteousness, but he had always believed anger to be the most mysterious and dangerous of human qualities, precisely because it had no fixed moral identity.

His father, he said, had liked to make things with his hands in his spare time: there was a shed in the garden of their family home and his father had created a workshop in it. Everything there was kept meticulously in order, each tool hanging on its designated peg, the different-sized chisels always sharp, the nails and screws arranged according to size along a shelf. His father could always, therefore, conveniently select the tools appropriate for the task in hand, and his exercise of his personal qualities – which had included a terrifying, unpredictable anger as well as an unshakeable sense of honour – seemed to lie similarly under his premeditated command. He would use anger in particular with a calculated deliberation, and this sense of his control had been perhaps more frightening than the anger itself, for anger, surely, ought to be uncontrollable; or rather, if one was capable of controlling it sufficiently to decide when and how to use it, that use of it might be described as a sin.

I said I hadn’t heard someone use that word in a long time and he smiled.

‘I never believed in an angry God,’ he said.

He had learned how to tread carefully around his father but also how to please him and elicit his approval. His father’s calculatedness, in a sense, had tutored his children in the same arts, though he had never deemed his son trustworthy of handling his beautiful set of tools: he left them all to his son-in-law in his will, an unpleasant character who divorced his daughter a year later, so that the tools passed for ever out of the family. His father was a man who took the part of rightness even when he was wrong: that piece of poetic justice, had he been alive to witness it, would probably still have eluded him. Years after his father’s death, on a dismal holiday with his wife at the time and her two children in a farmhouse in the French countryside, he had done some small favour for the elderly housekeeper and she had returned the next day with a metal chest in the back of her car. Inside was a most beautiful set of old tools, which she explained she would like to give him. They had belonged to her husband, she told him: he had died a long time ago and she had kept them, waiting for someone to whom she felt she could bequeath them.

When he was five or six years old, his parents had sat him and his sister down and told them they were adopted. He was a model son and student until, at the age of seventeen or eighteen, he had suddenly stopped behaving well. He went to parties, started smoking and drinking, failed his exams and lost his chance to go to university. His father immediately threw him out of the house and never accepted him back again. The concept of justice he had evolved as a result of these experiences was not retributive but the reverse. He had tried to develop his own capacity for forgiveness in order to be free.

I said it seemed to me that forgiveness only left you more vulnerable to what you couldn’t forgive. Francis of Assisi, I added, had been disowned by his father, who had even taken him to court to sue him for the material outlay of parenthood, which at that point amounted to little more than the clothes on his back. St Francis removed them there in court and returned them to him, and thereafter lived in a state that other people called innocence but that I viewed as utter nihilism.

He smiled again and I noticed his crooked teeth, which seemed somehow connected to the instances of rebellion and abandonment he had described. He said that he still owned and wore many of his father’s clothes. His father had been much bigger and taller than him: wearing the clothes he felt that he was somehow re-enveloping himself in what had been good about his father, in his physical and moral strength.

I asked him whether he had ever tried to find his biological parents and he said that it had taken him until his early forties, after his adoptive father’s death, by which time his biological father was also dead. He had never been able to find any record of his mother. His father’s twin brother was still alive: he had driven out to a bungalow in the Midlands and there, in the plush-carpeted overheated lounge where the television remained on for the duration of his visit, he had for the first time met his blood relatives. He had also researched the adoption agency and was put in contact with a woman who had worked there at around the time of his birth. She had described the room – a room at the very top of a building in Knightsbridge – where the transaction actually occurred. It was reached by several flights of stairs, which the mother would climb holding her child. At the top she would enter a room that was empty except for a wooden bench. She would place the baby on that bench, and only when she had left the room and returned down the stairs would the adoptive parents enter from the room next door – where they were waiting – and pick up the baby from the bench where it had been left.

He had been six weeks old when his parents adopted him and gave him the name they preferred to the one his biological mother had chosen. He had been told that once they got him home he had started to cry and he hadn’t stopped. He had cried day and night, to the point where his parents began to wonder whether they hadn’t made a mistake in adopting a child. He supposed – if it wasn’t too fanciful to ascribe the will to survive to a two-month-old baby – that at that point he stopped crying. A year later they adopted a girl – his non-biological sister – and the family was considered to be complete. I asked whether he would tell me the name he had been given when he was born. He looked at me for a moment with his naked-seeming eyes. John, he said.