Transit(5)

At first the dog had made him nervous – she was so big and wilful and mute – but before long he began to enjoy the walks, which took him to parts of Toronto he had never seen before, and which also had the benefit of erasing the element of choice from his daily life, though he did sometimes look at himself walking a large dog through a foreign city and wonder how on earth he had got there. After a week or so he seemed to have settled into a routine with Trixie, or at least to find her less alarming when he let himself into the apartment and she sprang to her feet and growled. She came with him willingly enough; she trotted proudly by his side, her head erect, and he found that he carried himself a little more proudly too, with this silent beast trotting next to him. He and Diane barely saw one another, but he felt a growing intimacy with Trixie, and one day it occurred to him that it wasn’t actually necessary to keep her on the lead – in fact, it was slightly insulting to her – since she walked with such discipline and self-control at his heels. Without pausing to reflect, he bent down and unclipped the lead, and in an instant Trixie was gone. He was standing at a busy intersection on Richmond Avenue. He had one glimpse of her, streaking like a brown arrow uptown through the traffic, and then she had completely vanished.

It was strange, he said, but standing there on the sidewalk with the great grey chasms of Toronto’s streets extending away to every side of him and the leash dangling from his hand, he had felt for the first time that he was at home: the feeling of having unwittingly caused an irreversible change, of his failure being the force that broke new ground, was, he realised standing there, the deepest and most familiar thing he knew. By failing he created loss, and loss was the threshold to freedom: an awkward and uncomfortable threshold, but the only one he had ever been able to cross; usually, he said, because he was shoved across it as a consequence of the events that had brought him there. He had returned to Diane’s apartment and waited while the rooms grew dark, the leash still in his hand, until she got home. She knew instantly what had happened; and strange as it may sound, Gerard said, their relationship began at that point. He had destroyed the thing she loved most; she, in her turn, had exposed him to failure through expectations he was unable to fulfil. Without meaning to, they had found one another’s deepest vulnerabilities: they had arrived, by this awful shortcut, at the place where for each of them a relationship usually ended, and set out from there.

‘Diane tells that story better than I do,’ Gerard added, with a smile.

By now we had entered the small park that formed a shortcut through the phalanx of residential streets to the Tube station. At this hour of the morning it was virtually empty. A few women with preschool-aged children stood in the railed play area, watching them clamber over the equipment or looking at their phones.

They had stayed on in Toronto for another eighteen months, Gerard went on, during which time Clara was born. They couldn’t afford to buy even the smallest apartment in Toronto, while back in London flats such as the one Gerard still owned, which he had bought for a modest sum all those years before, were selling for hundreds of thousands of pounds. Besides, Clara needed relatives: it was Diane’s view that bringing up a completely undamaged child was in bad taste.

‘Diane’s family are pretty dysfunctional,’ he said. ‘By comparison mine just exercise the immune system.’

They had moved back to London when Clara was three months old: she would have no memory of the pale, arid city where she was born, no memory of the great moody lake along whose windblown shores Gerard had walked with her in a pouch against his chest, no memory of the quaint clapboard house beside the tramline that Gerard and Diane had shared with a revolving community of artists and musicians and writers. The house had once been a shop and the large glass shopfront had been retained: it formed part of the main living space, so that the inhabitants could be viewed from outside, going about their lives. Many times Gerard had returned home and been struck – particularly at evening, when the lights were on and the shopfront became a great illuminated stage – by the human tableaux he saw there, the scenes of love and argument, of solitude, industry, friendship, sometimes of boredom and dissociation. He knew all the actors – as soon as he went inside he became one of them – but often he remained outside and watched, mesmerised. In a sense it was all, he knew, just an artistic pose, but for him it summed up something about Toronto and his life there, some vital distinction that he recognised while being unable properly to grasp it, though the word that always occurred to him in trying to describe it was ‘innocence’.

‘I don’t think it would have been possible,’ he said, ‘in London, among the people I knew, to have lived that way. There’s too much irony. You can’t be a poseur here – everything is already an imitation of itself.’

Nevertheless he and Diane had come back, and if the atmosphere of knowingness was sometimes stifling – ‘even the pub is ironic,’ he said as we approached it, the once-sordid building now a refurbished allusion to its own non-existent history – the force of continuity was these days acting as a favourable wind. Theirs was a life of remarkable stability, which was pretty miraculous, he said, when you considered what they were both capable of. Superficially, for him at least the facts of that life were unchanged since the days I had known him: he lived in the same flat, had kept the same friends, went to the same places on the same days as he always had; he still even wore many of the same clothes. The difference was that Diane and Clara were with him: they constituted a kind of audience; he doubted he could have carried it on otherwise. Increasingly, he went on, he saw his time in Toronto as having funded this continuity, a foreign foray in which he found elsewhere the resources that would enable him to cement his existence here for good. It was an interesting thought, that stability might be seen as the product of risk; it was perhaps when people tried to keep things the same that the process of decline began.