Transit(43)

There was a literature of adoption, he went on, and when he looked back on his childhood he almost saw it as a series of theoretical instances: what at the time had been reality now – in certain lights – looked almost like a game, a drama of withheld knowledge, like the game where someone is blindfolded and everyone watches them fumbling and groping to find out what they – the audience – already know. His sister had been a very different child from himself, disobedient and wild: he had read since that this was a common – almost an inevitable – characteristic of adoptive siblings, one taking the part of compliance and the other of rebellion. His teenage explosion, his secretiveness and his desire to please, his feelings towards women, his two marriages and subsequent divorces, even the nameless sensation he held at his core, the thing he believed to be most himself: all of it was virtually preordained, accounted for before it had even occurred. He had found himself, lately, drifting away from the moral framework to which he had adhered all his life, because this sense of preordination made the exercise of will seem almost pointless. What I had said about passivity had struck a chord with him, but in his case it had caused him to see reality as absurd.

I noticed that he hadn’t eaten anything, while I had eaten everything in front of me. The waiter came and he waved away his untouched plate. He and his sister, he said in answer to my question, lived very different lives that nonetheless strangely mirrored one another. She was an air stewardess, and he too spent nearly all his time on aeroplanes, travelling to meetings and conferences all over the world. Neither of us belongs anywhere, he said. Like him she had been married and divorced twice: other than the travelling, that was about all they had in common. But as children they had loved one another with a passionate, unscripted love. He remembered that on the rare occasions when their strict parents had left them at home unsupervised, they would put a record on the family turntable and take off all their clothes and dance. They had danced ecstatically, wildly, shrieking with laughter. They had bounced on the beds, holding one another’s hands. They had promised, at the age of six or seven, to marry one another when they grew up. He looked at me and smiled.

Shall we go and get a drink somewhere? he said.

We took our coats and bags and left the restaurant. Outside in the dark, windy street he paused. It was here, he said. Right here. Do you remember?

We were standing in the same place where, a year earlier, we had met. I had been waiting on the pavement beside my car: someone was coming to tow it away because I had lost the keys. The man that I was with at the time had smashed the window with a piece of breeze block he had found in a nearby building site in order to get his bag, which was locked inside. He had left me there – he had an important meeting to go to – and although I understood what he had done I had found myself unable to forgive him for it. The alarm had been set off when the window was smashed. For three hours I had stood there with the shrieking sound in my ears. At a certain point, someone I knew – the mutual friend – came out of a café on the other side of the road. He was with another man, and when they saw me standing there they crossed the road to speak to me. I told the mutual friend what had happened, and I remembered, as I was speaking, becoming more and more aware of his companion, until I found that I was addressing my remarks to him instead. This was the man who stood beside me now. He had chosen the restaurant specially, he admitted, smiling. After that conversation beside the car, he told me, he and the mutual friend had walked away, but no sooner were they round the corner than he had stopped and said to the mutual friend that they ought to go back and help me.

But for some reason, he said now, we didn’t. I should have made him, he said. I should have insisted. It had taken him a whole year to reverse that moment in which he had walked away. He had interpreted the difficulty of getting hold of me as the punishment that was equal to the crime. But he had served his sentence.

He put out his hand and I felt his fingers circling my arm. The hand was solid, heavy, like a moulded marble hand from antiquity. I looked at it and at the dark woollen material of his coat sleeve and the mounded expanse of his shoulder. A flooding feeling of relief passed violently through me, as if I was the passenger in a car that had finally swerved away from a sharp drop.

Faye, he said.

Later that night, when I got home and let myself into the dark, dust-smelling house, I found that Tony had put down the insulating panels over the joists. They were all perfectly nailed and sealed. He and Pavel must have stayed late, I realised, to get the floor down. The rooms were silent, and solid underfoot. I walked across the new surface. I went to the back door and opened it and sat on the steps outside. The sky was clear now and bursting with stars. I sat and looked at the points of light surging forward out of the darkness. I heard the sound of the basement door opening and the scuffing noise of footsteps and the heavy sound of Paula’s breathing in the dark. She approached the fence that divided us. She couldn’t see me, but she knew that I was there. I heard the rasping noises of her clothes and her breath as she drew close and put her face to the fence.

Fucking bitch, she said.





On Friday night I drove west out of London to see my cousin Lawrence, who had recently moved house, having left his wife Susie for a woman named Eloise and in the process been forced to relocate from one Wiltshire village to another of similar size and type a few miles away. These events had elicited the outrage and consternation of friends and family alike, but had barely left a mark on the outward appearance of Lawrence’s life, which seemed to go on much as it had before. The new village, Lawrence said, was in fact far more desirable and picturesque than the old one, being closer to the Cotswolds and more unspoiled. Lawrence and Eloise and Eloise’s two children constituted the new household, with Lawrence’s young daughter shuttling back and forth between her parents.