Dear Thief

42

Just this last week at work I was told a story that I’d like to recount for you. It was Gene who told me. The two of us sat outside in the wind and sun, and he told me that when he was in his early thirties he became involved with a married woman. He wasn’t married himself. When he came home from war aged twenty-eight after three years’ service he didn’t feel he had enough humanity left to marry. Many felt that way, he said, even the ones who were married already. An affair seemed the most and best he could manage — this in a world in which casual relationships between men and women were not the norm, but also in a world in which war had forced years of celibacy on young men.

A year after the war he met a woman whom he called, mysteriously, M. I will always be left to wonder — Maria? Martha? Madeline? When he told me how he felt the first time he saw her, he started to embark on a theory of attraction. It is Plato’s theory of the missing half — a famous story, but I will summarise it anyway. Once upon a time a single human being was both genders, with eight legs, eight arms, two heads, two sets of genitals, each human both male and female and also a third gender, androgynous, and each parented by the sun, the Earth and the combination of these, the moon. Fearing their power, Zeus cut them in half so that they became distinct, one man, one woman. The combination of both, the third gender, disappeared. He cut them — here Gene quotes Plato—as you would cut hard-boiled eggs with hairs. Ever since this separation, men and women have longed for one another, and the longing has been a desperate one for completion and for the healing of the wound of separation.

I think Gene referred to this theory because other more earthly explanations completely escaped him when he thought of his attraction to M. He ran out of words when he stopped referring to Plato and he just stared ahead for perhaps as long as a minute. When he started again it was to take up the facts: they met, they went out for dinner and a drink, they met again, they slept together, they slept together again. Though she was married she was childless; nevertheless, she said she couldn’t, wouldn’t and didn’t want to leave her husband, and he told her he understood. He told himself it would have been disastrous if she had wanted to, since he had nothing left in him to give a woman except his lust, which, despite its tyrannising power, he would always try to be gentle enough in giving. You don’t want to become one of those brutes, he said, and I nodded, though I can only imagine what brutality it was he had seen and was refusing.

She was a good woman, he said, and he seemed to want to bring this point to the fore. Good as in kind, gentle, compassionate, decent. When he told me this I think he was challenging me to disagree, but I nodded. I expect she was all of those things. And it went on for a few months, he said, seeing one another once in a while, and it seemed a convenient arrangement. For him it was something physical, and although their opportunities were scarce, even in the weeks of no or little contact it was enough that he still had in her a place for his desire to go, somewhere for the thoughts to land. For her it was the intake of fresh air in a life that had become otherwise still and — stale. Then he recanted: No, not stale, that’s my word, M never used words like that. If she referred to her marriage at all it was briefly, with tenderness and without judgement. The only impression he ever got of that marriage was that it was still. Not stale, not bitter, not going to pieces, just not going at all.

But you fall in love, he said. This is the problem. That attraction — and again, when he tried to describe the attraction, it fell to his hands to do the talking; they came tensely towards one another as magnetically loaded things do, and he pulled them apart and they came together — that attraction doesn’t come from nowhere and is not accidental. When you feel that the other person is your missing half, you will fall in love. And then. . .

He let his hands drop to his knees and he let his gaze drop to his hands. They were not charged any more, they were a pair of old man’s hands, which were used, but not used up. The fact is that the affair went on for years, he said, and was full of love. It became, almost, a marriage in itself, one that rode out circumstance and evolved in massive, unnoticeable shifts, and passed with quietly celebrated anniversaries. Where it was most unlike a marriage was in its physicality, which never waned and which changed only in order to intensify. No doubt this was partly down to its ongoing novelty; they once went for over two years without sleeping together. M would enforce laws of celibacy on them once in a while in despair and guilt, and they would see one another every fortnight for a walk, for tea, as if friends. It was like trying to push the rain back up into the clouds. How could it ever do anything but fail? Their bodies were very insistent on one another, and it never waned, never. These were his exact words. Never waned, never. No amount of abstinence or self-control ever did anything but increase the insistence.

He asked me if it was normal to feel like you had died while making love. I told him I didn’t know. He said: To feel like you had died and passed beyond your body into the mind of God. Then he retreated from this line of enquiry, as though speaking these clumsy words had got him only further from the phenomenon they described and which he was trying, somewhere in his old body, to hold onto.

As for M, there were any number of theories about her that might shed light on why she didn’t leave her husband, and how somebody so otherwise loyal and fair had managed to construct a life of deceit. He had his theories, she had hers; they exchanged them. But people are not reducible to theories, isn’t that true? This was more true for M than for any other human being he had met, M who was so curious and oblique and held together by her inconsistencies. M who was very witty and loved a joke, but whose face became almost laughably serious at the smallest thing. She told him once that she had always wanted to be one of those women who threw their heads back in laughter, but that she always forgot, and when something funny happened she instead wrinkled her nose and smiled soundlessly into her lap. It’s very hard to escape who you are, he said, and in saying so he implied that M could not have done or been anything other than what she did and was, and, loving what she did and was, he could never have wanted her to try.

Yet when we slept together, he said, then she threw her head back, then she became fierce and free. Once again he approached the depths of this thought and retreated, and only said — by way of shorthand perhaps for this baffling carnal force that so evaded words — that he had never much wanted to be a father, but that he wanted to be the father of her children. Furthermore, that it made no sense for him not to be and for them to create nothing together. These were things he didn’t tell her, or if he did he told her in diluted and un-urgent ways that were easily dismissed as abstract talk. Which they did, repeatedly, dismiss as abstract talk.

After six years the affair ended; why? Why then? No particular thing happened to force its end and neither did it peter out or drift away. It seemed that it simply buckled to inevitability. The love became too big, the time for it insufficient, and he believed that she felt the same. It sounded so perverse and pitiable a reason. If their love was so big, why didn’t it forge for itself a relationship it deserved? Why didn’t she leave? Why didn’t he insist she leave? Why didn’t he tell her husband? Why didn’t he fall out of love with her for her cowardice? Again he looked at me as if he wanted me to judge them. When I didn’t, he seemed galvanised. It just doesn’t work like that, he said.

Gene is not a weak man. In his room he has a photograph of himself in his thirties or forties and he is strong and sturdy and his skin glows, and he has a smile that shows a mixture of childish pleasure and adult forbearance. In that mix I can see perfectly how he might be the kind of man to hunt treasure with unfading optimism, and at the same time to be able to keep his hands off that treasure with unfading patience. Both characteristics come from the same place, an absolute belief that, one day, the treasure would be his reward, at whatever cost to himself along the way. When he told me he slept with no other women during those six years, and that he waited for her without regret, and that in some way he went on to wait for her until the day she died, he told me as though simply to convey, without sorrow, that this was the structure his life took. He could more easily live with the knowledge that he never quite had her than he could have with the knowledge that he lost her through greed and snatching, which pushed her out of reach.

As it turned out, he did not ever marry. You don’t, he said, it wouldn’t ever feel right. I think I can understand what he means. It is not that you can’t settle for anything less, because you do, several times. I know he has a son because his notes from the hospital say the son had been to visit him there, though only once — and I suppose he must come from a later relationship. Yes, you do settle for less, it’s just that the things you settle for never make sense. Somewhere deeply felt, you can never understand why you couldn’t have that simple thing you wanted so much, and your whole life is pervaded by this incomprehension. You come to look like somebody who is blinking into bright light.

Butterfly, for the first time it occurred to me that you might have felt some of the things Gene felt, that the years you spent on the periphery of Nicolas’ life might have been spent waiting for something that never happened. I have always been so convinced by the notion that in some way both Nicolas and I were victims of you that I have never stopped to consider the possibility that you might have been the victim. Suddenly I wonder if you loved him, and if you ever asked him to leave me, and whether, by the time he did, it was too late. Perhaps you wanted a child. I entertain this thought just for a moment; I try to squint the wrong way down the lens and see you small and consumed, a half person looking for her other half, and there, momentarily, you are. And I feel a compassion for you I cannot describe. And then you throw your head back in laughter in the way M never could and I think: No, this is not how it was. Gene’s story is Gene’s, not ours.

43

Yes, our story is quite different; our story is splattered with the blood of bulls. Gene’s was the quiet emotional aftermath of war, ours is the war, the war itself, one soul grinding repeatedly against another.

You are exaggerating, you say. But I contend that no exaggeration is equal to the task of summing up the battle between us. We are in southern Spain, in Almería’s Plaza de Toros, a Friday evening in July. We watch six bulls die; the rule is that if the bull shows special courage he might be saved and put out to stud, but this is rare and it does not happen for any of our bulls. Each of them is dragged out of the arena and the blood trail is covered with sand.

At the time I thought it was like watching an Argentine tango. You remember the videos my mother had of European dance-hall competitions when she was learning (briefly, before she bored of it) to tango; you remember, specifically, the reproachful magnetism between the two dancers as they flicked their heels up around one another’s legs. I thought — though I need to make it clear I no longer see it this way — that the bull and matador were tentative like this; the matador flicks the cape, the bull advances, the matador toe-steps away, the bull quivers.

But then, who would not quiver? The picadors come out on horses that have their eyes covered and their ears stuffed. They gather in on the bull and lance its shoulders and neck, and that is when it becomes tentative, demure, as if wooed into an unplanned engagement. It lowers its head. In one of the fights the picador is too enthusiastic and lances it to its knees so that by the time the matador enters the ring it is barely able to stand, let alone fight. The crowd jeers and throws cushions; they wanted to see a fair contest. You waft your polka-dot fan restlessly around Teddy’s sleeping head. But this is only one of the six fights, and in the others the bull is lanced into a kind of taut energy. The banderilleros run into the ring and towards the bull with their spikes. These sticks, like the feathered arrows in Teddy’s archery set, festoon its shoulders. It looks like a morris dancer, Nicolas says, with his chin drawn back in concern.

By the time the matador enters with his cape and sword, the bull is already swaying sideways and forwards as if at sea, with punctured and twitching muscles — surprised, I think, and offended, but here is the thing — seeing itself for the first time in true relation to something else, no longer alone and dominant, but suddenly half of a two-way exchange. You can see this in the way it makes and keeps eye contact with the matador and maintains both closeness and space. They circle one another; the matador swishes his cape, the bull scrapes at the ground. The blood on its flank thickens in the heat, everybody is hot inside the bullring.

Maybe the bull has a moment of love then. You might laugh, but if all you ever do is live unthreatened in the bubble of your absolute autonomy, eating, shitting, inseminating, replicating yourself over and over, what can you really love? Now it has the man at eye level and it understands the invitation. The cape communicates between them, beckoning, repelling, this way, that way, charge, hold back. The band plays. We shouldn’t think the bull is just meat thrown into a ring, it is an intelligence and it wants something it sees, it wants to be reckoned with. And the matador — we shouldn’t be fooled by his gold silk, he is an animal and he wants to be reckoned with. You see that for a moment — only a moment — the bull recognises himself in the man, and the man in the bull.

Why can’t this moment go on longer between them? As in the tango, which never resolves. When the bull finally realises that the man is cruel, there is no longer recognition. The bull is not cruel, why does the man have to be; why must it end like this? The matador draws his sword and pushes it down through the shoulders into the bull’s heart, or lungs, or whatever meets the sword first. The bull’s eyes become humid. In two fights the kill is clean, in the other four a second sword has to be used to cut through the spine. The result is the same: one way or another the bull staggers and drops like a rock into its short shadow, and is dragged away to music.

The heat is flattening and Teddy has slept through the whole thing, with his head on Nicolas’ lap. Your thumbs twitch in rage but you have become otherwise still and quiet. Nicolas has been watching you out of the corner of his eye. I have been wondering why a sword had to be drawn; slaughter is so unintelligent, so colourless, it forces us to think the least interesting thoughts. It makes us think that the strong one wins and the weak one loses. It makes us think the winner does not limp.

44

You look pleased with yourself. Have you been out stealing hens?

You have that blush you get when winning at cards, which in this case might be to do with remembering Spain; you mentioned that holiday for a long time after — the villa we stayed in with the big, cool, marble-floored living room and virtually nothing in it, save for five cheap armchairs and a vast table that converted into a platform for table tennis when the net was clipped on.

You liked the villa, didn’t you — the villa and its garden. Cool and uneventful inside, hot and busy out, with its wild grasses rubbing drily together and its geckos darting and cicadas creaking in the juniper tree and its — as you put it — slatternly flowers. You enjoyed our daily struggle of sun versus parasol as we tried to construct movable shade on the beach. We made a circle of shade and it became an ellipse and then a sliver. We made another and another the entire day long and the sun hovered and swooped in on each one. I think this thankless task appealed to you, probably even amused you — when Nicolas, Teddy and I went in the sea, you stayed onshore to crawl about spearing the two parasols into the sand, draping towels or T-shirts across the gap. Then you would sit in the sun and let yourself burn. In the dried-up riverbeds of the Tabernas Desert you found a sprawling oleander and what you thought was an edible prickly pear, which you tried to pick, before our guide bent and stopped your hand. Squinting up at the gallows in the main street at Fort Bravo film studios, you held your blouse away from your body, red-faced, hair wet with sweat, and grinned at a crack of gunshot as though you were the happiest you had been.

Yes, I’d say Spain has flushed you. On the screen your geese are sheeting, gliding out of frame. Sliding, gliding, slipping through a narrow gap in existence towards freedom and something more real than all this table-hut-bed-forest-city-man-woman debacle we call reality. But suddenly, because I brought it up, you are thinking of Spain, and every time you think of Spain it brings to mind that bit in the Aitareya Upanishad, that bit about the bull. What is it? God pulls a bull out of the water, then a horse, then a man. There is God, going about creation messily, engaged in the hot, dark, slick, wet process by which life is dredged from the depths. You like this bit — God the diver and delver, slumping his finds onto the bank and giving them life with his breath.

You left before the end of the bullfight and sat outside the plaza in the street, chain-smoking some little pencil-thin cigarillos. By the time we found you there was a handful of spent ends piled up by your toes. ‘How could you watch it?’ you said. ‘It was like watching Henry VIII slaying his wives. You two would have been the kind of people who went to public hangings.’

We thought then that you would be unbearable for the rest of the evening; Nicolas looked glad it was the last day. Forgive us for thinking that everything you had enjoyed about Spain had been undone in one afternoon in a bullring — we were wrong. You said something that evening as we were walking back through Almería in the dusk that I have maybe only recently interpreted fully. Teddy commented that there was no grass, or no green bumps, as he called it — hills, pasture, meadow. He was right, it was just coastal plain, mountain or desert canyon. And when, at the thought of English greenness, Nicolas began humming ‘Jerusalem’, you said something like, ‘The Jesus who walked upon England’s mountains green was a fop, that is the truth, a fop who got lynched.’

I remember it, because it was only half an hour or so after leaving the plaza, and if ever the green pleasantness of England was going to come into your favour it should have been then, in your recoil from the bullfight. But instead you opened up from your tall stoop and walked so as to maximise the evening air on your chest, and back at the villa you cut yourself a fringe with kitchen scissors so that your face was an open window and Spain could come flooding in, like fresh air into a sickroom. It was the emboldening a person gets when they see another behave more despicably than themselves; it was a final sealing of a friendship that you and Spain had been developing all week.

I have thought about this since. England has always seemed to you sort of jolly, neat, falsely gay. Unable to contend with the prospect of a God who gets his hands dirty. But Spain was another matter; from the moment you set foot in Spain you felt it was the kind of place that could worship a God who got down with the slick and seminal things. Maybe an irrational thought, but even so. Something about the way the land itself had seemed to sink through the hot air like a layer of sediment, and felt dense and warm to walk on, whereas in England the fields and hills sit pertly, like some nervous pre-pubescent girl.

Almería had scorched afternoons and clammy dark evenings, oversized insects and locals with oily overcooked skin, steep orange desert canyons, red dust that stuck to sweat, warm, slow-moving tides pulled by distended moons towards the unknownness of Africa, viscous bull blood, a lump of unfamiliar animal on a dinner plate. This overgrowth, this slight impure libidinous danger — it always makes you draw a connection with that hot messy passage in the Upanishads where God opened the suture of the skull and entered the first human. We are egg-born, it says: egg-born, womb-born, sweat-born, soil-born. God is passed on in the exchange of seed. England turns its head politely, either too pragmatic for God, or too squeamish for this God. But in Spain, where people were so much freer with their flesh, touched more, laughed more, were irrational and passionate and callous and more easily angered; in Spain you would not be laughed at if you tried to get to heaven by going downwards rather than upwards, if you tried to get there by passing through another’s flesh.

This is what it says in the Aitareya Upanishad: a man is inside himself in the form of a seed. It is only when he ejects that seed into a woman that he is born. But he must be born again and again before he can break out of the body and be free. Your road to freedom passes through the bodies of others; it does not involve some levitation of your spirit or the quelling of the things that stir in your loins. God put that stirring in your loins so you could be born into another, and thus start your journey to immortality.

So now, flushed, I see you. You are thinking back to the Plaza de Toros, and even now you can feel the sweat between your thighs and see the crowd tossing cushions into the air, which is beginning to feel like boiled milk. In the noisy heat of the bullring you need something; not a cigarette, it is too hot for smoking, maybe a shot of something dissolved in water. Needle better, but no needles on this holiday. It is not that you need a lift, but that you feel lifted and want to celebrate it. You cannot even say why you feel this way in this heat, which is insufferable, at this bullfight, which is disgusting — but something has risen in you that feels like religious feeling, or divine licence, which is close to rage and hate and love all at once.

Something of that mood was with you from the moment you set foot on Spanish tarmac, heightening at the sight of the desert badlands and in the markets of La Chanca and in the orange spears of the bird of paradise that grew in the garden. And oh, I know, I know — you will be finding my memory of it all a little too stagey and false. The blood and the heat and the flora and the sex; the lust in the dust. True enough, Spain has become a filmset to me, the whole of it barely more real than Fort Bravo itself. It has become a piece of strange theatre in the otherwise prosaic run of my life, and maybe this is the only way I can understand it. But all the same there are the facts, whereby on the last night, after the bullfight, with the moon hanging between the villa and the sea, you, feeling irrepressible, lay naked on the grass when you thought everyone else was in bed, and might have been surprised — though maybe not all that surprised — when Nicolas came to you.

Do you not think I know how many times you have wished this letter had not arrived, since all it does is remind you of things you are no longer interested in. You think I don’t know how uninterested you are, but I know. You are not interested in the recriminations that so tediously follow what you and Nicolas did that night; it is like recriminating a woman for slingshotting a dove, without acknowledging that she did so to feed her starving child. Sometimes the ends justify the means, and you are tired with this banal preoccupation with the means only. But the very mention of Spain from a third party, from a source outside your own mind, is one of the more interesting turns the letter has taken. You read the section from the Upanishads again and your heart swells. Sage Wāmadewa, broke out of the body, did all that he desired, attained the Kingdom of Heaven, became immortal; yes, became immortal.

Suddenly the geese on the screen look no more substantial or significant than puddles that have evaporated. It is their sound you now notice, that rough feverish call to adventure, calling you back to the realm of things that exert themselves with living. If you are ashamed at all of what you did, it is because you now know better; Nicolas, or any other man or woman or living or non-living thing, was never going to save you. But you are not ashamed of adultery, which is, as the name suggests, adults being as such. So when I got out of bed and came out to the garden to see where Nicolas had gone, and saw you no more than fifteen feet away, astride him on the grass facing the villa, you did not freeze with guilt, but looked at me and shook your head, left, then right: a firm, complicit no.

One of your hands was resting on his chest, trying to feel for the banging, longing muscle of heart inside. Spain has shown you a tunnel out of yourself, into the world of action. As Nicolas joins you in the tunnel you think of that very passage in the Upanishads that starts with God dredging a bull from the depths and culminates in Sage Wāmadewa’s immortality. And now sex feels like a religious act; the whole holiday feels like a religious act, and England and marriages and pastures and cool summers are a blasphemy.

Sage Wāmadewa did all that he desired; why not you? More fool those who do not. Life is short. Life shoots you a lethal dose of time. Time is a drug that wears off. You seem to stare at me from under that crooked fringe as if to say, You brought this up. Or worse, as if to say: Put your pen down, my friend, forget it; I will never be sorry. I was trying to save myself; I failed, but at least I had the dignity to want to be saved. More fool you, if you don’t want to save yourself too.

45

But really, is that what you call saving yourself?

When I last saw you, you did not look like a person who was saving herself. I always see that platform empty of trains, and you at the far end. When I see this I have to wonder if you are even alive, and I tell myself you must be, simply because death has a strangely efficient grapevine and we would have heard if you weren’t; this is my only consolation, and maybe an empty one at that. You left us in the winter with a little bit of Spanish tan still on your arms, and you came back pale and thin as paper. A little under two years without sight or word of you, and there you were all of a sudden with your weight off one foot, an animal that has been shot in the flank, not the heart. Like I said before, a wounded wolf. The flank slack; head hung, shoulders dropped, eyes half closed. Sore is the word that comes. You were always quite solemn and meek in profile, something that surprised me every time I caught you from the side; this day you were especially meek and harmless — maybe it was the dip of your head, or the way your head looked too heavy for your shoulders. But when I walked nearer you looked up, flashing pure irony, and you smiled ruefully in the way people do when they think something morbid is funny.

I wonder if not being able to see ourselves is one of the great paradoxes of being alive — knowing oneself intimately and also not at all. You turn to look at your own profile in the mirror and it is gone. It means we can harbour all kinds of illusions about ourselves that others can see through as clear as day. What I mean is that if you had been able to see yourself objectively that afternoon you might have realised that the game was lost, but instead I think you fancied yourself in some little role in some little story in which you were the heroic returner, the one much waited for, the one who would be forgiven by some obscure law of justice that grants immunity to the tragic.

It was late October, and I suppose there is something heroic and melancholy about autumn and these monolithic trees unable to keep for themselves a single leaf, and things coming home and coming in and coming back and preparing to shelter again. And the world is going down onto its knees. You show up on a station platform in October of 1986, after almost two years without word. One train after another pulling in and out of the station while you stood watching and waiting for nothing. You had been there for hours before you called us to pick you up. To your mind’s eye you might have been positively operatic, a woman in her late thirties alone at a station in an ankle-length out-of-fashion dress and a shawl and her hair wrapped up in a green scarf, standing beneath the transom of the waiting-room window where she holds defiantly to the burden of her beauty. Leaves gathering at her suitcase and feet, like the children she never had. Tell me you did not think like this.

You think like this because it is difficult to accept that when we find ourselves most operatic we are usually just farcical. I could cry to think of you now, the way you turned to smile at me when I walked up to you. You had the Devil dull and black in your eye. You were too thin and you were not old enough to look as old as you did, which is not to say you were no longer beautiful — for an overwhelming minority of people, beauty is an affliction they have to bear regardless of what they do to themselves, and which prompts other people to expect too much from them. Fools others, I mean, into thinking that the beautiful always have cause for hope. I expect you had already fooled fifty people that day. Maybe you could have fooled me too, had it not been for one thing, your shawl, the tear at its left shoulder. Or maybe that is overstating it. But it was the torn shawl that I remember most. How can one ripped piece of fabric call up such loss, somehow, of dignity, or of eligibility in this world, of care for oneself? And it was a cold windy day, but your shoulder through the hole was bare. Because of this blind spot we find ourselves in, you won’t have known how scandalous that shoulder looked, sharp and white, with its little collection of thrusting bones. You exposed yourself on that chilly platform like a degenerate in a city park. Scandalous; a strong word, but I mean it. Even the trains hurried their passengers in, with a sort of motherly protectiveness, and rattled away.

Our conversation in the car at the station went something like, ‘What happened to you?’, to which you replied, ‘What happened to me? I happened to me. That’s always my problem.’

‘You look terrible.’

‘It’s kind of you to notice.’

‘Where have you been?’

‘Somewhere north of your opinion, where it’s cold.’ You might be interested to know that I since realised this was a vague and spliced bit of Twelfth Night (which I happened to see with Ruth last year). You might have also said something like, ‘I’ve been walking through the blizzards of your disapproval. I have been in the Arctic of your disgust.’ I don’t know; whatever it was you said while we sat in the car at the station, it was oblique and facetious and aloof, purposefully insincere. I turned the ignition key.

‘So you haven’t come back to say you’re sorry, then,’ I said. ‘Or to see if I’ll forgive you. Just to stretch out like a cat on your old territory.’

I have a feeling you didn’t answer, but watched me all the way home out of the corner of your eye.

46

This music we hear now is vocalese; it is not your favourite. You would call it mewling or warbling. You would say, Why are you listening to a record played backwards?

Well, it is not my favourite either, but when you hear somebody do it well, the singing voice sounds just like the instrument, not so that you can’t tell them apart, but so that the voice takes on the instrument’s qualities in the way that a Cézanne painting finds the qualities of a given landscape, without slavishly reproducing it. It just looks, and picks out what it considers true. I like this about it. I have had the window open all evening and let the music from Jimmie’s drift in while dusk comes and the buildings disintegrate. The best song I’ve heard (which isn’t to say I have heard them all) was a woman’s rendition of ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’, her voice had the saxophone’s hollow depth that most other singers never manage. Climbing up and down the scales to a background of percussion.

This evening Yannis called by for a short time, and two things are strange about this. Today is Friday and the only evening Yannis has away from his shop is Tuesday, which is his day off. Also, although he knows which building is mine, he has never been to my flat before and he had to ring all four buzzers. So when I heard him on the intercom and when I opened my front door and called merrily hello as I watched him come up the stairs, I knew more or less that either his shop had burnt down or his wife had asked for a divorce; and there had been no fire engines that I had noticed going past, so I said, ‘Is she going back to Crete?’ He nodded.

Inside, I poured us each a vodka and water and offered him some cashew nuts and dried apricots, which was all I had. You must offer Yannis food; to not offer him food is akin to not offering somebody else a seat. (Yannis would not mind if you forgot to offer him a seat, he likes to stand, which is why he has only two small tables in his café.) He took a clump of apricots and read from the packet. ‘Stoned and ready to eat,’ he said sadly. ‘This sounds like my son in his early twenties.’ He went to the window and leant out as if trying to see the sound. ‘When is she going?’ I asked, and without turning he slashed his throat with his hand. This is something he does, which is how I recognised the gesture even with his back turned. ‘Already gone?’ I asked, and again he nodded.

‘Can you believe that she came to me on Tuesday,’ he said, ‘to tell me that by Thursday she would be gone? You can’t believe this, can you? She has her ticket, she is going. Akis is meeting her at the airport, her witch of a sister is coming to me sometime soon to pack the things she wants to ship home, and I may visit any time from June, if I want to talk about a reconciliation. This is what she said, and then she was gone.’

‘A reconciliation, though,’ I said. ‘That’s good news?’ To which he replied, ‘No no no no, because you don’t know my wife. By reconciliation she means surrender. We may stay married if I surrender. Do you know what I think of that?’ I said yes, I did; he told me anyway. ‘What I think of that is she can put it in her spare hole and sit on it.’ I said yes, that’s what I thought he thought. Although I have no idea where he got this phrase from, or which, in his view, is her spare hole. For a moment I felt happy for her that she had left. ‘Do you want to play cards?’ he said. He stood by the rocking chair then and finished his drink, so I poured him another, which he finished, and I poured him another.

I did not want to play cards, you have to be in the mood, you have to feel alright about losing or otherwise feel invincible; I told him I was sorry. ‘She treats me as if I am a monster,’ he said. ‘What have I done? You’re a woman — tell me what did I do?’ It was here that the music at the club started up, or that I noticed it had started up, so I stood with my arms open and beckoned him with a quick flick of the fingers of one hand, like I used to with Teddy when he knocked his knee and was about to cry. We held each other loosely and danced in slow steps around the room to these drifting sounds of bebop. Yannis put his big head on my shoulder. How dare she do this to him? I thought suddenly. This wife, whose name I don’t think I have even imparted to you and which I now don’t think I will, in case she is not deserving of it. How dare she simply escape like this, as if she has no responsibilities?

I have always felt a kind of solidarity with Yannis, maybe in part because we both have just one child, a son, from whom we are far too estranged. Sometimes I feel we are both like disused sea ports, no longer harbouring anything. But this is self-pitying and ridiculous, I see it; we made our children, we were not made for them, we are not nothing without them. This is a coward’s view of life. And then I felt that his wife, Stefania — perhaps she does deserve a name after all — was precisely not a coward because she was doing what she wanted without giving quarter. Why should we give quarter? It is so hard in life to know what we want that surely, when we do know, we must act. She and Yannis had been together since they were teenagers; she had been a mother since the age of eighteen or nineteen. She had earnt herself some autonomy. This is when I heard your voice: The tyranny of possession! it said. The greatest tyranny of all is men’s possession of women and women’s possession of men. We want to own one another so that the other cannot outgrow us. You know how Chinese women bind their feet until the feet are deformed? This is what we do to one another’s hearts.

I want you to know that I had these thoughts quickly, and that although I heard you say all those words, I heard those quickly too, so that the song we were dancing to — it might have been ‘Cotton Tail’, I don’t remember — was not even a third of the way through by this point. I found I was humming into Yannis’ ear, and that my shoulder, which was bare because of it being a warm night, was moist with his tears.

Then, just as I had made peace with Yannis’ wife, I became angry with Lara. I thought, how can Lara escape her religion? I remembered her phrase, about carrying a sack of stones. A sack of stones that can be picked up and put down, dipped into as and when. But religion is not like this; the weight of God is upon those who believe, a burden from above, and love is the shouldering of this burden, the glad acceptance of it. Lara wants to think there is nothing higher than her head, and that she can orchestrate her own salvation through her acts. Next she will become a humanist, without realising that humanism is to a Christian what methadone is to a heroin addict, a way of weaning off. She will begin to believe in humans instead of God because it is hard to give up believing all at once. And then, when humans fail her, she will become a spiritualist and decide she can flee this illusory world like a bird sliding obliquely off the screen, slip through its gauze, as if religion’s sole purpose is to make escape artists of us.

Of course, I was not angry with Lara. It is strange how unwilling anger is to alight directly on its object. Yannis’ hand slipped to my lower back and then down a little further still, and I let him because it did no harm. I said to him: ‘Yannis, the student asks the master why Japanese teacups are so delicate and easy to break. The master says that the teacups aren’t too delicate, it’s just that the person who drinks from them is too heavy-handed.’ He drew his head back and looked at me with the same slightly hostile incomprehension he had shown over the word humus. I concluded: ‘It’s not for teacups to change, but for us to adapt to what is.’

It was the wrong thing to say, I know, because he raised his hand to my waist again in disapproval. And it was not really even all that relevant to him, but I said it because I was pressed upon by a feeling of — what can I say? — stringency, or obedience. It is not for us to try to change the world to something that suits us better, but for us to change, to bend to a greater weight. When he left ten or fifteen minutes later, at the end of the next song, which was ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’, which we danced to in thoughtless silence, I stood at the window and watched him lope down the street towards his shop. He was going to get ready for the others who were coming at ten-thirty to play Poker. All I could think of was how I had used to dance with Nicolas and how unexpectedly gifted he was at finding a coherent stream of movement in a piece of music and how he would thread us both along it. We danced, you know, a lot, never formally but around the house, especially the big, decrepit house we rented in London just after we were married and before Teddy came. He was not a good dancer as such, he was just good at finding what others could not beneath the surface — mining, I suppose, mining the music for its rhythm. He had a way of holding my waist as if it were a piece of machinery he had undergone five years of training to use.

We lived in that house for eight months. It didn’t have a single useable surface that he had not danced me towards and laid me on and entered me at. There was no surface that both my back and front had not become intimately familiar with, and no view of the floorboards or ceiling’s coving I had not had through the blind or ecstatic or gentle vision of being made love to by him, and no part of the bathroom mirror that had not reflected our daily selves doing their daily things, our white teeth bared for the brush, our bodies lowered into the bath, no spring in the bed that had not known the weight of our deepest of sleeps, no knot of the hallway rug that had not known the precise indent of our four feet, no inch of brass on the doorhandles that had not been dulled with our palms.

Shall I tell you what I think? I think Yannis should go after his wife. I think he should rush after his wife and bind his feet in front of her.

47

Here we are, you and I, just back from Spain. We oppose each other across a table with a fan of thumbed cards. Twist, you say. Twist again. Like we did last summer, I reply. Your cards pressed onto the table add up to twenty, mine to eighteen, there is a flurry of dealing in which fingers fly and a twist and a twist and a stick; maybe I win. The games are quick and thoughtless and fill a post-supper lull while Teddy sleeps and the cottage becomes a dark missable shape in the lane. The cards are dealt, the pack settled, the trivial risks taken; if you are going to twist you flare your nostrils, if you are going to stick you suck in your cheeks: this is how I know your next move and how I have the card ready when you ask for it.

In the two or more years you’ve been staying with us you have been trimming your hair by increments and oiling it, so that it is thick and dark and seems to flesh out your features, and the fringe you cut for yourself in Spain makes your eyes look startled. There is none of that flaming orange grease on your lids, and without that your eyes are freer and wider and the space between them more emptily purposeless. You have taken to looking at me squarely while your pupils expand and shrink with the movement of candle flame. You ask me if you should leave. Where would you go? I reply, and you shrug one shoulder as if this is irrelevant. I don’t give you a yes or no, and so you stay.

I deal you four low cards, which leave you on something like sixteen. Deal me a queen or a king, you say, with a jut of chin and a short laugh. Bust me. Your face is surprisingly tender with its Spanish tan. When you make this invitation for me to bust you (half teasing, half morbidly serious), I know you know that there have been poisonous words hissed in your name in a marble-floored room at the back of the villa; you seem to know that I pummelled my fist uselessly into the side of Nicolas’ neck, how I saw that new light you put in his eyes and flailed my hands at it. You look at my hands holding the spread of cards as if they are something quick and savage that has, by mercy, gone temporarily still. Your moist bright eyes seem to say, Did you feel like strangling him, like strangling me? — then maybe you should have. You should kill me or leave him, your expression suggests. Or both, do both. And so, asserting my only power, I do neither. It is like we have turned a corner with one another. You have wronged me, and you dare me to care.

I deal you a nine. Not a theatrical bust, but bust all the same. You say we should pray, just in case. Pray for what? In case of what? In case God exists and praying makes a difference, you say. So we pray separate silent prayers while we bend cards from pack to hand and we agree not to tell the other what was asked for. Whoever wins, you decree, will have their prayer answered. It comes down to the next game. I win again. You gather our cards in a small, neat heap and say that in this case I shall have my prayer. But I prayed I would lose, I say.

You dip your hands into the gloom beneath the reach of the two wall lights, re-deal and remind me with a smile and a sigh, and with no words, that the victorious never pray to lose. Without discussion, we switch to Poker and gamble with a stack of coppers, undisturbed by the universe until two in the morning when Nicolas arrives home from a show in London and almost wordlessly shifts away upstairs to sleep, like an animal that has been ousted from the pack and is too tired to fight its way back in.

Without him we go on in this sweet, smoky, murmured combat of yours, which is the only way of loving you know, just like a dog loves a bone. With its teeth and also its tongue. I win a hand, you win a hand; we play so long we start to read one another’s cards with our minds.

48

Afight broke out at work today. One of the residents commented that in Australia there was a ban on smoking in restaurants. His daughter had been there and had reported this news back; I bet England will soon be doing the same, he said. You watch.

I couldn’t have anticipated the reaction to this. These are people who receive news of fatal heart disease or nephritis or the death of a spouse or child with a certain aged poise, yet rumour of a smoking ban in restaurants inflames them to violence. One of the more dispassionate residents, Claudia, pointed out that they didn’t go to restaurants anyway, so what did it matter? This was where Frances, who has been made bent and quiet by months of pleurisy, found her verve again for a minute. Nothing in life stays where it is, she said; it starts in a restaurant in Australia and suddenly it’s everywhere — not just restaurants but every last place, including their smoking room at the back of the lounge and their summer house in the garden. Everything spreads like a joke, and suddenly you’re eighty-seven and you can’t smoke in your own summer house. Then you have to stand out in the rain, and life’s bad enough without that.

Claudia replied that they shouldn’t smoke anyway. Uproar ensued. Frank, sitting next to her in the lounge, reached across and grasped her wrist with a fervour I cannot say I have ever seen in him before, and Claudia’s response was fast and majestic — an arcing slap to the face, her pink-nailed hand flying so elegantly towards the nice flat mottled surface of his cheek. I intervened. Please, I said, be calm. But by then there was shouting and rebellion against Frank for his violence towards Claudia, which lasted only so long. As soon as Frank reminded them of what Claudia had said, the judgement she had made about them, opinion swung. Who was she to say they shouldn’t smoke? Who were the Australians to say they shouldn’t smoke? When you’ve fought in a war in the East African mountains or driven an infantry tank into a destroyed Normandy village and put your own neck on the line for your country, why not smoke your lungs down to prunes? They’re your own lungs, that’s the thing, why not?

And suddenly somebody took off his shoe and threw it at the wall, and so more shoes flew, and magazines, and cups were overturned, and even non-smokers became incensed. I am not sure anybody really knew what they were incensed about — but then I have always been amazed and amused by how quickly causes crumble and general childishness and petulance begin. Part of me wanted to applaud them. It is good to get angry, to throw your shoe! I wanted to throw mine. Instead I had to calm them down, which I did by standing in their firing line with my eyes closed and arms open. The shouting died down and the last of the flung things hit the wall or floor with apologetic thuds.

Then I collected and reallocated possessions. In all of this, Gene had been sitting at the table in the corner taking apart the TV remote control, which has broken. He had laid out its component pieces and started putting them together again with only an occasional glance up at the furore. I made tea in two large stainless-steel pots, took one pot out to the summer house for the smokers who had made an emergency congregation there, and the other to the lounge. They all drank with those glassy fevered eyes that you only see in the elderly; even Claudia joined their larger cause and drank with them. Frank stroked her wrist and muttered warmly, Bastards! A swear word thrown back at the things that deny us, I suppose. Anger at the brutality of getting old. Later I found a teaspoon wedged in the bars of the gas fire, now bent because I had to prise it out. When I found it, there was a pool of tea in its belly still, held down by some centripetal force while the thing spun across the room. I stole it. Because it reminds me of your hurled fork I will enclose this little trinket of rebellion with the letter.

49

Where are the younger selves in these people? Did we see them just then? Was that a thirty-year-old Claudia who unleashed a slap across Frank’s face? Was it a teenage Frank who muttered, Bastards? Did the eighty-year-old man throw the shoe, or did some stubborn child inside him do it? Some child who doesn’t understand the concept of eighty, let alone the practicality of getting there. A strange thing happened at The Willows during that fight, a truly strange thing: ghosts appeared. For a few minutes our number was doubled and we had the company of ghosts of selves past. I saw them at everyone’s backs, I felt them. Young, lean rebels; I felt them, Butterfly. And then what? When we settled back down into our chairs, where did they go? When will they come back? Do they mind our betrayal of them?

I am not only talking about getting older, no, I am talking about splintering. We hit certain points, we splinter, and bits of ourselves are left behind. I don’t know why this should be, only that time isn’t a slick medium that we slide through into old age, it is lumpy and irregular and breaks us into pieces. I see Nicolas dancing in the house in London or I see the man with leaves in his hair, who walked tall and was happy one autumn morning, or I see myself somewhat vaguely (it is always vague with myself) taking bones out of the sedge at the shore or standing with my arms crossed in the kitchen doorway watching Teddy immerse his hands in puddles on the patio. There is freedom there; there is always freedom in the past. The self you left behind lives in endless possibility. The older you get, the bigger and wilder the past becomes, a place that can never again be tended and which is therefore prone to that loveliness that happens on wastelands and wildernesses, where grass has grown over scrap metal and wheat has sprung up in cracks between concrete and there is no regular shape for the light to fall flat on, so it vaults and multiplies and you want to go there. You want to go there like you want to go to a lover.

Have I stumbled on an answer to Nicolas’ proposal, is that why I’m telling you this? Doesn’t this amount to the conclusion that we cannot remarry? We will not be faithful to each other, I will have to tell him, and then he’ll frown as if I want to invent problems, just as he thinks I always do. Then I will have to tell him that as we get older — if we are honest — there are no longer only two people in a relationship, there is who you are now and also the person each of you used to be, or the one you always wanted to be, the one you split from at some point in the past, and try as you might you cannot get rid of these others. Just as you try to start again and let the past go, they wander into the house and hell breaks loose.

They point out all the things you should be dissatisfied with and suddenly you fall in love with them. Their courage, their unwillingness to compromise, their passion! They went off and saw the world, they took risks, they played the high cards for big money while you dabbled with the low ones, and they have come back strong and empty-handed to show that your own clinging is pointless. They are commendable in every way you are not — they haven’t gone back on their principles or put out their fire or need forgiving for the unforgivable, that is, for becoming unattractive, frightened, despicable, for falling in on themselves like a mountain in an avalanche. How can a person be forgiven that? It is such hard work to love you now, they say. Who will love you now? It used to be so easy, back when. But now, so much has to be made out of so little, more effort than Christ had to make with the fish and the bread. They like to remind you of all these battles you have lost. They haven’t lost any! You become besotted with them, hungry for them, like an old man for a schoolgirl who makes him forget he is ineligible, had it, finished.

This is what I think I want to explain to Nicolas when he comes back, that we are all more than one person and we all conduct love affairs with the selves that we were — it is a sort of lurid duplicity in which we creep off back into our own pasts and try to make ourselves whole by becoming jealously infatuated with the self that got away. Any marriage we had now would have to be bigger and more generous than we could make it, because I bring into it another woman, he another man. I want to warn him: if we lived together again as husband and wife neither of us could be faithful, we would sneak downstairs every night to that other person.