Transit(50)

‘Darling, eat,’ Eloise urged him. ‘Everyone else has finished.’

Lawrence picked up his fork and took a sliver of foie gras and put it slowly in his mouth.

‘How are the boys?’ he said, to me.

I told him they were with their father for two weeks while some work was being done on the house. Now that we had moved to London, I said, such visits were a possibility.

‘About time he took some responsibility,’ Lawrence said grimly. ‘Eloise’s ex is the same. I don’t know how they get away with it. Those aren’t men,’ he said, taking a long swallow of wine. ‘They’re children.’

‘It isn’t so bad,’ Eloise said, patting his hand.

‘You only had a year of it,’ he said to her. ‘Not like you,’ he said, to me.

‘What’s been the worst thing you’ve had to do?’ Eloise said, almost excitedly, her hands clasped at her chest.

I said I wasn’t sure – different things were difficult for different reasons. There was a period, I told them, when the boys’ pets kept dying. First it was the cat, then both their hamsters, then successive hamsters bought to replace the dead ones, then finally the guinea pigs, who lived in a hutch out in the garden and whose matted corpses I had had to dig out with a shovel from where they had buried themselves in the straw. I didn’t know why, I said, but the facts of these deaths and the disposal of the bodies had seemed a particularly hard thing to cope with alone. It felt as though something in the house had killed them, some atmosphere I was forever trying to deny or dispel. Like a curse, I said, that fulfils itself in ways you can never foresee. For a long time, it seemed as if every attempt I made to free myself from it just made its defeat of me more complex and substantial. What Lawrence’s remarks about desire and self-control had left out, I said, was the element of powerlessness that people called fate.

‘That wasn’t fate,’ Lawrence said. ‘It was because you’re a woman.’

Eloise burst into loud laughter.

‘What a ridiculous thing to say!’ she said.

‘Nothing good was ever going to happen to you there,’ Lawrence went on, unperturbed, ‘on your own with two kids. He left you for dead – and them,’ he added. ‘He wanted to punish you. He wasn’t going to let you get away with it.’

What that was about, Lawrence said, was revenge: like he said, these people were children. When he’d said that he’d sometimes forgotten he and Susie were separate people, what he’d meant was that the realisation that they were separate had extinguished his anger towards her and at the same time permitted him to leave her. He respected her far more in divorce then he ever had in marriage: he honoured her as his daughter’s mother; if she was in crisis, she knew that she could come to him for help, and he knew that likewise she would try to help him.

‘We’re good at being divorced,’ he said. ‘It’s the first thing we’ve ever been good at.’

Looking at him and Susie now, you would almost find it hard to understand why marriage between them had been a disaster, yet it very publicly had been.

‘But you,’ he said to me, ‘you were the last people I ever thought this would happen to.’

When Susie and he were turned inside out, he went on, what you found was a set of good intentions that in their bondage to one another they had never been able to fulfil. For you, he said to me, it was the opposite: something that looked good on the outside turned out to be full of violence and hatred. And in that scenario, he said, to be female was to be inherently at a disadvantage, just as it would have been in a physical fight.

‘Someone like you,’ he said to me, ‘would never accept that femininity entailed certain male codes of honour. For instance, a man knows not to hit a woman. If those boundaries aren’t there, you’re basically powerless.’

I said that I wasn’t sure I wanted the kind of power he was talking about. It was the old power of the mother; it was a power of immunity. I didn’t see why, I said, I shouldn’t take my share of blame for what had happened; I had never regarded the things that had occurred, however terrible, as anything other than what I myself – whether consciously or not – had provoked. It wasn’t a question of seeing my femaleness as interchangeable with fate: what mattered far more was to learn how to read that fate, to see the forms and patterns in the things that happened, to study their truth. It was hard to do that while still believing in identity, let alone in personal concepts like justice and honour and revenge, just as it was hard to listen while you were talking. I had found out more, I said, by listening than I had ever thought possible.

‘But you’ve got to live,’ Lawrence said.

There was more than one way of living, I said. I told him that I had recently come across an old diary of my son’s, while I was packing up the house. He’d written on the front: You read, you take the consequences.

Lawrence laughed. Eloise had stolen away from the table while we were talking and I watched his eyes tracking her around the room. She was carrying two bowls of something down to the far end of the table.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘She’s giving them bloody pasta.’

He got out of his chair and went to follow her, grasping her elbow and saying something in her ear.

‘Why doesn’t he just let her do it?’ the leopard-print woman said to me. ‘They’re her kids.’