Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation

THE RAZOR’S EDGE

My great-uncle and — aunt were husband and wife for more than seventy years, and to talk to them was to walk the razor’s edge of marriage, where self meets other. Do you like music, uncle? Oh yes I’m very fond of music, but she can’t tell the difference between Beethoven and ‘Jingle Bells’. Aunt, what are your summer plans? I’d like to go to Spain, but of course he won’t go there, he says he can’t stand the people.

As a child I liked to visit their house, where my great-uncle’s golf clubs stood in a leather stand in the hall and my aunt’s knitting machine, like a vast steel spider in its trap of yarns, could be glimpsed through the spare-room door. Unlike ours, their Christmas-tree decorations were the edible kind: they would give us one each when we left, taking the little foil-wrapped chocolate shapes down from the branches. Their sitting room smelled of Pledge and of the long, silken-haired lapdogs they kept, and under the window was a tan-coloured piano whose lid was always closed. My uncle often talked of how he used to play, but one day I asked him to and stood beside him in acute embarrassment while his large old hands moved meaninglessly around the keys. How was it possible to forget to play the piano? It was alarming to me, at eight or ten, to learn that competence could be lost as well as gained, that life was not merely a series of acquisitions and enlargements, of linear evolutions. Apparently it was possible to go backwards: blankness and ignorance were things to which one could be returned at any time.

He never bothered to keep it up, my aunt said.

She never liked it when I played, my uncle said.

To each other they were He and She, the primary object, the thing that was not I. They had met and married at nineteen, had children together, lived together through war and peace. As they grew older they became ever more concrete to one another, while their own selves grew increasingly formless; after seventy years of marriage they were imprisoned in one another like water imprisoned in its courses of sculpted rock. Often they would neglect to mention themselves at all, as though they had become less real to themselves, were vague spaces of pure inference, like shadows.

Are you enjoying the garden in this lovely weather, uncle?

She says that at our age we ought to be living in town because of the services.

Once, perhaps, their differences had invigorated them, but as time passed they seemed to find something more troubling in them, something whose deadliness became ever more apparent as they themselves neared death. It was as though, in old age, they were coming to the realisation that because of one another they had not lived. Then, one day, my uncle did die, and for a few weeks my aunt was as though lit up by a great flash of lightning. She blazed with wild, unrefined life, threatened to alter the will that represented her first experience of financial independence, played one family member off against another, bristled with new opinions and a new intransigence that could, earlier in her life, have become authority but now was a tragicomic parody of it. She uttered heresies on the subjects of marriage and motherhood that had the gunpowder smell of personal truths, argued with and disinherited her children, and then, all at once, like the sea after a storm, retracted into a profound passivity. She lay in bed, beside a small framed photograph of my uncle taken in earlier years. ‘That’s him’ was all she’d say, to those who visited and who, abruptly, she no longer appeared to recognise. She was moved to a nursing home, and in the beige hush of her featureless room lay day in and day out with the photograph in her hand, unspeaking and unmoving, until she herself was no more.

I have entered a phase of resistance, of reaction. The sight of families makes me irritable. In the park they pass me on bicycles, mother and father and children, all clad in safety helmets and luminescent strips and rucksacks containing emergency supplies. They make manifest their own fear: their obsession with their safety is evident. Of what, precisely, are they afraid? They call out orders and directions to one another, as though the rest of us were uncomprehending natives.

I blame Christianity — as far as I can see, that’s where the trouble started. The holy family, that pious unit that sucked the world’s attention dry while chastising it for its selfishness, that drew forth its violence and then in an orgy of self-glorification consigned it to eternal shame, that sentenced civilisation to two millennia of institutionalised dishonesty; compared with the households of Argos and Thebes, that family has a lot to answer for. In the park I view them through narrowed eyes, these well-organised heirs of Christian piety. They seem to me to have taken all the fun out of life: spoilsports! What happened to passionate conflict and reunion, the kinetic of man and woman that drives the life blood around the body? These men and women now wear protective helmets to pass through a public park. From a bench I ruminate on it darkly. The day feeble Joseph agreed to marry pregnant Mary the old passionate template was destroyed. That was an act of fundamental dishonesty all round: the new template of marriage — a lie! The family was reinvented, a cult of sentimentality and surfaces; became an image, bent on veiling reality — the stable in all its faux-humility, the angels and the oxen, the manger to which kings come on bended knee, the ‘parents’ gathered adoringly round the baby — an image of child-worship, of sainted unambivalent motherhood, of gutless masculinity and fatherly impotence. And it still comes through the twenty-first-century letterbox at Christmastime; I remind myself not to send any cards this year.

These days, of course, the ancient Greeks are back in fashion: we find their honesty, their emotional violence, their flouting of taboos therapeutic and refreshing. We sit in exquisitely neutral consulting rooms, discuss our Electra complex; but at the end of it all we go home to the manger and the holy child, to the roles and relationships that constitute our deepest sense of family reality, though they themselves are not real. Reality is our visceral knowledge and desires: the image exists to control them, and out of them creates a strange half-reality of its own. And I too was once in uneasy thrall to that image, directed by it as by a puppeteer unseen in the darkness of the wings. Its propriety and its safety chastised me, consigned me to eternal shame; yet it seemed the only thing it had to teach — like any image — was to be more like itself.

So now I find that the sight of those cycling families calls for the intellectual equivalent of a stiff drink, and I procure it in the form of the ancient dramas. There are no devoted mothers here, no perfect children, no protective dutiful fathers, no public morality. There is only emotion, and the attempt to tame it, to shape it into a force for good. The question of what constitutes authority, in the tempestuous Greek world of feeling and psychological fate, with its mingling of mortality and divinity, is eternal and unresolved. It is a question with which I am preoccupied too: what will authority be, where will it come from, in my post-familial household?

There’s a moment in Sophocles’s play Antigone when something new is born, or rather, when one thing becomes two; when one kind of authority is no longer enough and must produce a second, just as Christianity would itself propose two authorities, the authority of the creator — God — and the authority — Jesus — of self-sacrifice. The play is set in Thebes, in the immediate wake of the Oedipal drama. King Oedipus has blinded himself and been expelled to wander the catacombs of Athens as a beggar. His wife Jocasta, having learned that she was also his mother, has killed herself. His two sons, Eteocles and Polylectes, have murdered one another in their failed attempt to share power. Creon is Jocasta’s brother: Oedipus’s sons being dead, the burden of leadership has passed to him.

I feel a certain sympathy for Oedipus. His story expresses what to me seems the central human tragedy, the fact that we lack knowledge of the very things that drive us to our fate. We do not fully know what it is that we do, and why. Oedipus did not know that his wife was also his mother. He did not know that the rude stranger he killed at the crossroads was his father. Yet he was punished for these acts as though they had been conscious. There were people — Oedipus’s adoptive parents, for instance — who did know something of his origins but did not disclose it. It is a kind of authority, this hidden knowledge. Sometimes, when my children have done something wrong, I pretend that I don’t know it; I wait to see whether they will find their own path to contrition, their own way to make amends. But what if they don’t? I have to tell them that I know, that I saw, and in doing so somehow the truth passes from me to them. My authority is no longer truthful; the truth becomes the truth of their own acts.

In Oedipus Rex every kind of authority is damaged by precisely this process. Leadership and masculinity, the concept of family, marriage itself: all has become a perversion, the sibling bond turned murderous, motherhood mutated into self-destruction. The world Creon has inherited is a post-authority, post-familial world: it is aftermath, and Creon has the job of governing it. But how do you make people obey you, respect you, believe in you and in the new reality you represent? Creon’s idea is that you give commands and then don’t turn back on them, no matter what — a strategy the modern parent, presiding over chaos and unrule, occasionally adopts, only to find themselves insisting on a course of action long after its necessity and even its rationality have passed. This is more or less Creon’s fate. The body of Polylectes, Oedipus’s son, is still lying where it fell at the city limits. Creon decides he needs to send out a strong message of disapproval of the Oedipal household, in order to mark his separation from it. He proclaims that Polylectes will not be buried, but instead must lie there to rot, picked at by ravens and wild animals. No one is allowed to touch the body. The punishment for doing so will be death.

Antigone is Polylectes’s sister, daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta. She inhabits an aftermath of her own: hers has been the experience of intimate loss. Her family has been atomised; questions of identity, of moral choice, that might once have been family matters have devolved to her. She has been awoken and forced into active being. She has become herself, yet this self has been contaminated by the drama of her parents. Therefore she is only as good as what she does, as what she chooses to do. And what she chooses to do is bury Polylectes, because having thought about Creon’s edict she can find no justice or logic in it. She challenges his authority with an emotional authority of her own that has stronger links with justice, with truth. Creon asks, astonished, whether she realises the punishment for her act will be death. Isn’t she afraid to die? No, she replies, she isn’t afraid of death. What she’s afraid of is neglecting to do something that she knows to be right. Doesn’t she realise she’s breaking the law? he says. It was only you who made that law, she replies. Why should I obey it?

‘Now she would be the man, not I, if she defeated me and did not pay for it,’ Creon says to himself. ‘Though she [is] my niece, or closer still than all [my] family, she shall not escape the direst penalty.’ And so Creon manoeuvres himself into a position where his authority will directly attack and destroy what he himself loves and values the most, in order to nourish and sustain itself. He summons Teiresias the seer for reassurance. Creon believes Teiresias to be wise, prizes his advice, as one prizes the advice of certain friends until they say what you don’t want to hear. And Teiresias, indeed, gives him the darkest warnings: ‘Once more you tread the razor’s edge,’ he says. What he means is that Creon’s authority is recreating the very perversity from which it was born. It has become the form that imprisons truth and must be broken. Creon falls out with Teiresias and insults him in every possible way, but afterwards he is more honest with himself. This, after all, is aftermath, the second harvest: life with knowledge of what has gone before. He admits that he is frightened. He admits that what frightens him most is the idea that he will have to sacrifice himself in the name of authority, that true responsibility is an act of self-destruction.

‘To yield is very hard,’ he says. ‘But to resist and meet disaster, that is harder still.’

In the school holidays I take my children horse riding in Devon. Their desire to ride horses is so consistent it almost seems impersonal. It seems to be something I can bank on.

I rent somewhere to stay near a riding school where they will ride every day. I drive west, through unfamiliar hills. I am shaking with nerves; in fact, I can’t remember what it feels like to be at ease. This ceaseless effort to manufacture normality is a kind of forger’s art, so laborious compared with the facility that created the original. It is a fine evening and the sun slants long and golden from the horizon. For me these voyages are like the first outings of the Vikings into the mystery of the ocean, by turns terrifying and thrilling: I have no idea what will happen, what we will find. It is the idea that we won’t find anything at all that terrifies me. Yet what exactly we are looking for I don’t know.

At a service station we stop, and stand in the car park drinking hot chocolate with the sharp western sunset in our eyes. The place we are going is a picturesque country town near Dartmoor: everyone seems to agree it’s lovely there, though I’m not sure anyone I spoke to had actually been. Like tales of America, these were the rumours that drew us from the safety of home. But I feel buoyed up all the same, by the obliging beauty of the landscape and by the feeling — so powerful and so fleeting, so hard to understand or defend — that we have been liberated from the strictures of some authority and are free. I don’t identify this authority as my husband: the authority is marriage itself, and in these moments of liberty I feel him to be just as browbeaten by it as me, feel, almost, that I could conscript him into my own escape and reencounter him there, in non-marriage, both of us free.

It is dark by the time we get to the town. The place is deserted: at the house the owner has left us a scribbled note and a key. We stand on the long, sloping cobbled street with our bags. Through the darkness comes the sound and smell of water. A broad river is just below us: it turns like a dark snake in its courses; its black surface gleams. The town is a soundless heaped outline in the night, of roofs and spires and well-kept streets. Its beauty and its desertion are unnerving. It is as though some disaster has just occurred here and all the people have run away.

Inside, the house is a dank-smelling labyrinth of corridors and fire doors. There is torn carpet underfoot and heaps of junk and old furniture piled against the walls. Instantly I know that it has found me out, chaos, malevolent disorder: for the past few months it has shadowed me and I have fended it off, day and night, and now it seems I have opened the door to it. The thing is, I believe in chaos now: it’s normality I’ve lost faith in. It transpires that we have not rented the whole house but only a section of it: the note directs us upstairs, up steep tenebrous staircases boxed in by irregular partition walls to a door at the top. We let ourselves into a dark flat. The electric lights reveal a crush of brown furniture, some beds with padded floral headboards, some gilt-framed posters of rural scenes. I decide that I’ve over-reacted. I decide there’s nothing actually intolerable here.

It’s quite nice really, I say to the children, as though we make a habit of staying in places such as this, and can compare them to one another. In fact they have had the good fortune never to have been somewhere like it before. But I’m not interested in teaching them a lesson.

Yes, they repeat, standing in the doorway with their coats on, it’s quite nice really.

And tomorrow you’re going riding, I say.

They fall silent. They’re not sure they want to go riding after all. They’re not sure they feel like it.

I make them supper on the two-ring electric burner in the kitchenette. I tuck them up beneath the floral headboards. I sympathise, I console, I sit at their bedsides until far into the night, but in the morning I drive them to the riding school and I leave them there.

At mid-morning there is a great commotion out in the hall, loud voices and banging and then a thumping sound that gets louder and louder until I realise it’s coming up the stairs. There is a pause, the sound of noisy breathing on the landing; the door to the flat flies open and a woman barges into the cramped hall.

Oh hello, she says at the sight of me sitting at the table. I didn’t realise you were in here.

I take this to be the owner of the building. She is so dishevelled it is hard to get a sense of her. Vaguely I apprehend a large mounded body, a shock of grey frizzy hair, a clutch of big yellow teeth, a red leathery face grotesquely made up. The teeth are bared: she is either panting or smiling, I can’t tell. She has a pair of crutches strapped to her arms on which she leans forward and with which she occasionally gestures, like the forelegs of some gigantic insect.

It’s a long way up, she pants, but I make a point of doing it, no matter what they say. You can’t let things get out of bounds, can you? It happens without you noticing, then all at once you find you’re bedridden.

Looking at her, I’m surprised she did manage to get up the stairs, for she has only one leg. I ask her if she would like to sit down.

Are you all right? she says sharply in response. Her voice is rather loud and braying; I notice her clothes, rainbow-coloured draperies in chiffon and velvet. Like it here? Such a lovely house, isn’t it? These are our best rooms. Her glance darts around. What’s that you’re doing? she says, looking at what’s on the table.

Writing, I say.

I’m a writer too, she says, leering delightedly at me. What a coincidence!

Yes, it is, I say.

Of course, I don’t write under my own name, she adds, significantly.

There is a pause.

Are you all right? she says again. It’s nice up here, isn’t it? Perfect for writing. Really I should come up here and do some writing myself, only I’m so madly busy all the time. She gives me a hostessy kind of twinkle. Then she says:

But I’m afraid I’m going to have to move you.

Move me? I say.

It’s only downstairs, she says. It’s just that some other people want to be up here. They want to rent it long-term. They’re a family, she says. Lovely people. They’re relocating to this area and they absolutely have to have it.

I tell her that she should have told me this in advance.

Oh, but you see I didn’t know! she cries. They only called last night, and they’re desperate, poor things. The girl is absolutely at her wits’ end — they’ve just come back from Geneva I think it is, where her husband’s some big cheese, and she’s had to make all the arrangements herself, and my heart just bled for her really. The thing is, she’s got the children to think of. Such a sweet family, she says.

I ask her when she expects us to move.

Well, she says, if you don’t mind, then right away would be best. They’re coming tonight and the cleaner needs to get in — you’ll be absolutely fine downstairs. You’re really tucked away down there, she says. Perfect for writing!

‘Downstairs’, it turns out, is the basement, a big windowless room crammed with furniture, whose ceiling is so low the hairs on the top of my head brush it as I walk. It takes me three or four journeys up and down the stairs to bring down the suitcases we had just unpacked. I pass numerous people on the staircase, in the hall. It is eleven o’clock in the morning, but in the basement you wouldn’t know whether it was night or day. I stand in the electric light from the overhead bulb, the suitcases at my feet. I can hear the thump of the woman descending the cellar stairs. She puts her head around the door.

Everything all right? she says, panting. Got to run now — so much to do! You’ve got one or two people above you, Poles, lovely family, they’re usually very quiet. Oh and by the way, the men are here today doing some building work in the hall, but hopefully the noise won’t disturb you too much. Bye bye!

And with a wink of her fronded eye, she is gone.

I go for a walk. I have to: I can’t stay in the basement for even a few minutes. The clear skies of the night before have been succeeded by blustering wind and cloud. It starts to rain. I think of the children riding their horses in the bad weather. I can’t find a path out of the town into the countryside and I end up walking along busy roads, and then through a kind of forest where broad sandy tracks pass amid shaved stretches of felled trees, and lorries piled with pale logs trundle to and fro.

When I return I call the witch, as I now think of her. It takes time to track her down: I have to try several different numbers.

Oh it’s you, she says.

I tell her she needs to find us somewhere else to stay, immediately. I tell her I wouldn’t keep a dog in that basement. I tell her her conduct has been fraudulent. She needs to rectify the situation by the time my children return from the riding school.

While I’m speaking she makes little exclamations, ‘yes’ and ‘oh’ and ‘oh dear’ and ‘of course’. The more she whimpers, the more brutal I am. I enjoy it: this must be what it feels like to beat someone up. Yet I think about her missing leg and feel afraid.

She says that we can come and stay in her very own house, a lovely place out in the countryside. She’d like us to; she’d like to make amends. I don’t trust her: I say I want to see it first. She offers to drive me out there in her car to look. I sit on a suitcase in the basement and wait. The building is full of the sounds of drilling. There are footsteps going to and fro across the ceiling, voices, the noise of a television on loud. The witch arrives, clad in a miscellany of crushed velvet draperies of purple and cerise; I follow her out to her car and get in. The car is filthy. She has a special arrangement of gears and levers for driving. On the journey she talks. I don’t listen. I am silent, except to ask her how far it is. Oh, not very far, she says. It’s really very close. Just a few miles.

We pass over the snaking river and out of the picture-postcard town, out into unfamiliar countryside. I sit and stare out of the window. In the rain the patchwork of fields and buildings looks desolate. At a petrol station she stops, and I stare out of the window as she hobbles around the pump, the crushed velvet lurid in the drizzle. She goes inside. I watch her talking to the girl behind the till, watch her mouth moving, watch her throwing her head back to laugh. She talks for a long time. Eventually she returns. We drive for half an hour, forty-five minutes. I ask her when we will be there. Oh, any minute now, she says. It’s just around the corner.

Finally, as we are driving along a section of dual carriageway through low hills, she veers unexpectedly off the road and draws to a halt outside a house, so abruptly that we are thrown forward in our seats. We have pulled up at a cottage with crooked chimney-pots. There are pieces of broken furniture in the front garden, and rags hanging at the tiny windowpanes. The road lies so close to the front gate that the passing traffic makes it swing on its hinges. We get out of the car.

I need to get back soon for my children, I say.

Oh don’t worry, she says. There’ll be plenty of time for that.

We go in through the gate, through the front garden. The witch jerks open the front door.

Welcome to my humble abode, she says.

She leads me through dark dusty rooms filled with furniture, her crutches thumping across the floorboards; along crooked low-ceilinged corridors, up a creaking staircase with a cobwebbed window at the top. I look out of it, down on to a concrete yard where a big mangy Alsatian is tied by a chain. We pass a cluttered room with a wheelchair in it and a mechanical hospital bed, unmade. There is a man on the landing, holding a little girl in ponytails by the hand. He smiles, says something in a language I don’t recognise. We pass through a low doorway, into a small room with a narrow single bed, whose tiny window looks out on to the dual carriageway. On the floor there are empty wine bottles. The room is cold and smells of rot. There are bits of dirty newspaper tacked to the walls.

Well, nothing will disturb you in here, she says. Enjoy your writing!

And with that she limps out and closes the door.

I sit on the edge of the bed, my hands in my lap. An hour passes, perhaps more. Then I hear the sound of a car pulling up outside. I go to the window and look. A woman comes through the front gate and up the path. She is very fat. She wears tight clothes, a short skirt, a spangled top with a plunging neckline. Her plump neck is roped in jewellery. Her synthetic black hair is piled up on her head. She waddles to the front door and knocks. Below me the door opens. I hear the two women conversing. There is what sounds like an exchange of obscenities, then cackling laughter. Presently I see the two of them going off together down the path. The witch has dressed herself up too: she wears a tight carmine-coloured dress in which her misshapen body takes on a mournful kind of beauty. They get in the other woman’s car, a tiny battered hatchback into which it seems the two of them can’t possibly fit, and they roar away, a plume of black smoke at the exhaust.

Much later, when I am back at home and the children have returned to school, I find a novel in a second-hand bookshop. It has a bright red cover with silver writing on. It is garish, splashy — I turn it over in my hands. The novel is self-published; I vaguely recognise the name on the cover, and standing there read a chapter or two. Their subject is a woman’s loss of value as she ages, the decay of the body that was once the source of her human authority, her feelings of rage at being left alone, men and children having gone away. She shocks people with her desire to live: they expect her to give in, to go quietly, to hide herself away somewhere and politely rot. And so she has come to enjoy their shock, their disapproval. She dresses herself in garish colours. She goes out, out to skirmish with the world, and whether or not she is wounded on that battlefield, whether she is brought down and beaten and meets her end, that end is better than the end society has in mind for her, is a suicidal kind of rebellion, an attempt to go out in a blaze of glory.

I talk to my friends sometimes about my imprisonment in the witch’s house. What did you do? people say. How did you get away? What happened to the children? I don’t tell them — not quite — how difficult I found it to leave, how I stayed there while dusk fell over the hills and the rooms darkened; how I felt that this was something I ought to make right, the ugliness and disorder of this place. I felt I ought to love it, for all at once I understood that its failure came not from some evil intention but from the fact that it was unloved. That failure had frightened me, menaced me, more than the most direct threat to my safety would have; I wanted to protect myself from it, protect my children, but sitting alone in that house, I felt that the true achievement, the true safety, the true authority might lie beyond the instinct to safeguard what was mine.

I called a taxi. I wrote a note saying I was sorry and left it on the table. I called the riding school and explained. Then I waited there, in the dusk, until the taxi’s headlights swept like search-beams across the front windows as it came off the road to find me.