Transit(6)

‘In a way it’s like we’re still living in a shopfront,’ he said. ‘It’s a construction but it’s also real.’

I told him that when I had moved with my children to London, back in the summer, it was all so unfamiliar at first that my older son had said it felt like he was acting a part in a play: other people spoke their lines and he spoke his, and everything that happened and everywhere he went felt unreal somehow, like scripted events unfolding on a stage set. They had to start at a different school, where they were required to be far more independent: in the old life they had depended on me for everything, but here almost immediately they both became less indolent, and had begun to organise themselves in ways I now knew nothing of. We spoke very little about the old life, so that had started to seem unreal too. When we first came here, I told Gerard, we would sometimes walk around the local streets in the evenings, looking around us like tourists. At first my sons would surreptitiously hold my hands while we walked but then they stopped and kept their hands in their pockets instead. After a while the evening walks ceased because the boys said they had too much homework. They ate dinner quickly and then went back to their rooms. In the mornings they were gone early into the grey dawn, loping away down the littered pavements with their heavy school rucksacks jolting up and down on their backs. The people we knew, I said, applauded these changes, which they obviously thought were a matter of necessity. I was told so often that it was good to see me getting back on my feet that I had started to wonder whether I represented more than an object of sympathy; whether I had in fact come to embody some particular fear or dread for the people who knew me, something they would prefer not to be reminded of.

‘I thought everything had worked out perfectly for you,’ Gerard said slowly. ‘I thought you were living the perfect life. When you left me,’ he said, ‘what made me sad was the idea that you were giving love to someone else when you could just as easily have given it to me. But for you it made a difference who you loved.’

I remembered then Gerard’s unreasonableness and childishness in the old days, his volatility and occasional exhibitionism. I said it seemed to me that most marriages worked in the same way that stories are said to do, through the suspension of disbelief. It wasn’t, in other words, perfection that sustained them so much as the avoidance of certain realities. I was well aware, I said, that Gerard had constituted one such reality at the time those events had occurred. His feelings had to be ridden roughshod over; the story couldn’t be constructed otherwise. Yet now, I said, when I thought about that time, these discarded elements – everything that had been denied or wilfully forgotten in the service of that narrative – were what increasingly predominated. Like the objects I had left in his flat, these discarded things had changed their meanings over the years, and not always in a way that was easy to accept. My own indifference to Gerard’s suffering, for example, which at the time I had barely considered, had come to seem increasingly criminal to me. The things that I had jettisoned in my pursuit of a new future, now that that future had itself been jettisoned, retained a growing power of accusation, to the extent that I had come to fear that I was being punished in direct proportion to something I hadn’t even managed to assess or enumerate. Perhaps, I said, it is never clear what should be saved and what destroyed.

Gerard had stopped, and was listening to me with an expression of growing astonishment on his face.

‘But I forgave you,’ he said. ‘I said so in my letter.’

The letter had arrived, I said, in a time when I wasn’t able properly to read it, and my guilt about it had grown to the extent that I had avoided reading it even when I might have been able to look at it more objectively.

‘I forgave you,’ Gerard said, putting his hand on my arm, ‘and I hope that you forgive me too.’

We had stopped outside the pub and after a while he asked whether I remembered the dismal establishment that had once stood on this spot.

‘The off-whitewash of gentrification,’ he said. ‘It’s happening everywhere, even in our own lives.’

What he objected to was not the principle of improvement itself but the steady levelling, the standardising that these improvements seemed to entail.

‘Wherever it puts itself,’ he said, ‘it blots out what was there before – and yet it’s designed to look as though it’s been here for ever.’

He told me that over the summer he and Clara had spent several weeks walking in the north of England, completing a large section of the Pennine Way. Diane had to work, back in London; in any case, walking wasn’t something she enjoyed. They had carried their own tents and cooked their own food every night, swum in rivers and weathered storms and basked on sunny hillsides, and travelled on foot for more than a hundred miles in total. These, it seemed to Gerard, were the only authentic experiences that remained. It had seemed impossible to believe that come September they would find themselves back here, straightjacketed in routine, but here they were all the same.

I expressed amazement that the delicate child I had just seen could walk that distance.

‘She’s stronger than she looks,’ Gerard said.

The mention of Clara had evidently sent Gerard’s thoughts on a different course and I watched as he suddenly reached behind himself and patted the violin case on his back.

‘Damn,’ he said. ‘She needs this today.’