Transit(44)

One evening the previous summer, standing in the long shadows of my kitchen at the old house, I had answered the phone with a feeling of presentiment and had heard Lawrence’s voice, sounding as it had never sounded to me before. Rome, he said, when I asked him where he was. And in fact I could hear the noise of the city in the background, but my initial impression – which was that Lawrence was in that moment alone and surrounded by infinite empty distances which he gazed down on in terror and awe – remained. He did not reply to my questions about what he was doing in Rome and so I fell silent and allowed him to tell me that he was on the brink of ending his marriage, in order to be with a woman he believed he loved. This crisis had been building for a few months, he said, but here in Rome it had burst its bounds and become imminent. The woman, Eloise, was with him in the city – he was there for work and Eloise had accompanied him, a fact of which Susie remained in ignorance – but he had come out for a walk alone in order to think. It was on that walk that he had called me. It’s thirty-eight degrees here, he said. Everything feels completely unreal. I’ve just walked past a woman lying in the street unconscious, covered in mud. I don’t know where I am: the sun has gone down but for some reason it isn’t getting dark. The light feels like it’s coming from nowhere. It’s like time has stopped, he said, which I supposed was a way of saying that he could no longer identify or even imagine a future.

It’s all right, I said.

I don’t know if it is or not, he said.

There on the phone he began to talk to me about a book he was reading on Carl Jung.

My whole life has been a fake, he said.

I said there was no reason to believe that that perception wasn’t fake too.

This is about freedom, he said.

Freedom, I said, is a home you leave once and can never go back to.

‘God,’ Lawrence said, ‘God, I don’t know what to do.’

But it was obvious he had already made up his mind.

Since then I hadn’t seen much of Lawrence but as far as I knew he and Eloise were living together peaceably, Susie’s anger having stopped somewhere short of destroying their happiness entirely. She had phoned me up once, at the beginning, to give me her side of the story, a long and lurid narrative which had the presumably unintended effect of creating sympathy for Lawrence; she had phoned all their friends and relatives, apparently, in the same vein. Lawrence endured this onslaught silently, blackly – for a period his face wore a fixed expression of gritted teeth. Susie eviscerated him in their financial settlement and then, if not satisfied then presumably at least appeased, she withdrew. Lawrence was fond of luxury, and I wondered how the loss of money had affected him, but he never said anything to suggest that he and Eloise were hard up.

After a stretch of motorway the journey followed a series of narrow, circuitous roads that never seemed to pass through any settlement but wound lengthily through dark countryside shrouded in thick fog. Sometimes a car would come from the other direction, its headlights boring two yellow holes in the whiteness. The submerged shapes of trees showed faintly along the roadside like objects imprisoned in ice. At certain points the fog became so thick that it was blinding. The car felt its way along, sometimes nearly colliding with the steep verge when a corner loomed up unexpectedly. The road unfurled with an apparently inexhaustible slowness and monotony, only ever showing the part of itself that lay immediately ahead. It was entirely possible that I would crash at any moment. The feeling of danger was merged with an almost pleasurable sense of anticipation, as though some constraint or obstruction was about to be finally torn down, some boundary broken on the other side of which lay release. A text sounded on my phone. Please be careful, it said. When I reached Lawrence’s house I switched off the engine with shaking hands and sat in the dark and silence of the gravelled driveway looking at the golden, lit-up windows.

After a while Lawrence came out. His pale face loomed enquiringly at the car window. The house was a long low farmhouse with aged, bulging brick walls, surrounded by a walled garden. Even in the dark and fog it was evident that everything was very well tended and immaculate. The carriage light above the front door gave out a big bright beam. The gravel was raked and the bushes and hedges had been trimmed into smooth shapes. Lawrence had a cigarette in his hand. I got out of the car and we waited while he finished it.

‘Eloise hates me smoking,’ he said. ‘She says it makes her feel like our life is in a state of crisis. If it’s a crisis –’ he tossed the cigarette butt into the dark bushes – ‘then it’s a permanent one.’

Lawrence had lost weight. He was expensively dressed and his appearance was sleeker and more groomed than it had been in the past. There was an air of faintly portentous vitality about him, almost of excitement. Despite his disavowal of crisis, standing outside his country house he did look a little like an actor in some drama of bourgeois life. There were other guests besides me, he told me before we went inside: a friend of Eloise’s from London and also a mutual friend of theirs who lived locally. The mutual friend was how he and Eloise had met and was a frequent visitor to the house.

‘We try to keep up the libations,’ Lawrence said, with a grimace-like smile.

He opened the big, gnarled front door and we passed through a dark hall to another door edged in light, from beyond which came the sounds of music and conversation. It opened on to a large, low-ceilinged room that was illuminated by so many candles it seemed for an instant to be on fire. It was very warm, and furnished with things I didn’t recognise from Lawrence’s former existence: modern, cuboid sofas; a vast glass-and-steel coffee table; a rug made of an animal’s pelt. A number of unfamiliar modern paintings hung around the walls. I wondered how Lawrence had created it all so quickly, as if it were a stage set. Eloise and two other women sat around the coffee table on the low sofas drinking champagne. At the other end of the room, a number of children were sitting and lying in a group on the floor, playing a game. An older girl was beside them, sitting on a chair. She had striking straight red hair that fell like a veil to her waist and she wore a very short sleeveless red dress that showed the whole extent of her large bare white limbs. On her feet was a pair of strappy red shoes with pointed heels so high that it would have been difficult for her to walk more than a few paces.