Outline: A Novel

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‘Don’t mind me,’ said the woman who was sitting on Clelia’s sofa when I came out of my bedroom at seven o’clock in the morning.

She was eating honey straight from the jar with a spoon. Two large suitcases stood on the floor beside her. She was an attenuated, whey-faced, corkscrew-haired person somewhere in her forties, with an unusually long neck and a rather small head, like that of a goose. Her voice had made quite a distinctive squawking sound, which added to the impression. I noticed the pale green colour of her small, unblinking, lashless eyes beneath severe black brows: she kept the lids slightly crinkled in a kind of grimace, as though for protection against the light. It was suffocatingly hot in the apartment. Her clothes — a wine-coloured velvet jacket, a shirt and trousers, and a pair of heavy-looking black leather boots — must have felt uncomfortable.

‘I’ve just flown in from Manchester,’ she explained. ‘It was raining there.’

She was sorry to arrive so early, she added, but the timing of her flight was such that short of going to sit in a café with her suitcases there was nothing else she could think of. The taxi driver had helped her carry them up the stairs, which was the least he could do, she said, after occupying the entire half-hour journey from the airport telling her in meticulous detail the plot of the science-fiction novel he was writing, she having made the mistake of telling him she had come to Athens to teach a writing course. His English was very good, though he spoke it with a strong Scottish accent: he had spent ten years driving a cab in Aberdeen, and had once given a ride to the writer lain Banks, who had, so he said, been very encouraging. She’d tried to explain that she was a playwright, but then he’d said she was getting too technical. By the way I’m Anne, she said.

She stood up to shake my hand and then sat down again. I saw us as though through Clelia’s big windows, two women shaking hands in an Athens apartment at seven o’clock in the morning. Her hand was very pale and bony, with a firm, anxious grip.

‘This is a nice place,’ she said, looking around. ‘I didn’t know what to expect — you never do know what to expect on these occasions, do you? I think I thought it would be more impersonal,’ she said. ‘I reminded myself on the way here to imagine the worst and it obviously did the trick.’

She’d anticipated, for some reason, she continued, being shoved in a box in some anonymous dusty block of flats, where dogs barked and children cried and people hung their washing on pieces of string tied to the window ledges, hundreds of feet above the ground; she’d even envisaged a motorway below, though perhaps it was just that she had seen such places from the cab on the way in, and had memorised them without really looking at them. But she supposed she had expected to be, in some way, mistreated. Quite why that was she wasn’t sure. It was nice, she said, looking around again, to be pleasantly surprised.

She dug the spoon again into the honey jar and lifted it dripping to her mouth. ‘Sorry about this,’ she said. ‘It’s the sugar. Once I start I can’t stop.’

I said there was food in the kitchen if she wanted it and she shook her head.

‘I’d rather not know,’ she said. ‘I’m sure I’ll get there soon enough. It’s always different in a new place, but it’s rarely better.’

I went to the kitchen myself, to make us some coffee. The room was hot and stuffy and I opened the window. The sound of distant traffic passed in from outside. The blank view of the white-painted backs of buildings was entirely in shadow. It was full of strange rectilinear shapes where new structures and extensions had been added, jutting out into the empty space between the two sides, so that in places they were nearly touching, like the two halves of something that had cracked all the way down the middle. The ground was so far below as to be out of sight, hidden in the shady depths of this narrow white ravine of blocks and rectangles where nothing grew or moved. The sun showed like a scimitar at the edge of the rooftops.

‘That woman in the hall,’ Anne said when I returned, ‘gave me the fright of my life. When I first walked in, I thought she was you.’ Her voice came out in a kind of squawk again and she put her hand to her long throat. ‘I don’t like illusions,’ she added. ‘I forget that they’re there.’

She’d startled me several times too, I said.

‘I’m a bit nervous generally,’ Anne said. ‘You can probably tell.’

She asked me how long I had been here, what the students were like and whether I had been to Athens before. She wasn’t quite sure how the language barrier was going to work: it was a funny idea, writing in a language not your own. It almost makes you feel guilty, she said, the way people feel forced to use English, how much of themselves must get left behind in that transition, like people being told to leave their homes and take only a few essential items with them. Yet there was also a purity to that image that attracted her, filled as it was with possibilities for self-reinvention. To be freed from clutter, both mental and verbal, was in some ways an appealing prospect; until you remembered something you needed that you had had to leave behind. She, for instance, found herself unable to make jokes when she spoke in another language: in English she was by and large a humorous person, but in Spanish for instance — which at one time she had spoken quite well — she was not. So it was not, she imagined, a question of translation so much as one of adaptation. The personality was forced to adapt to its new linguistic circumstances, to create itself anew: it was an interesting thought. There was a poem, she said, by Beckett that he had written twice, once in French and once in English, as if to prove that his bilinguality made him two people and that the barrier of language was, ultimately, impassable.

I asked her whether she lived in Manchester, and she said no, she had just been up there to teach another course, and had had to fly straight from there to here. It was a bit exhausting but she needed the money. She had hardly done any writing lately — not that you got rich from writing plays, at least not the kind of plays she wrote. But something had happened to her writing. There had been — well, you’d call it an incident, and as a playwright she knew that the problem with incidents is that everything gets blamed on them: they become a premise towards which everything else is drawn, as though seeking an explanation of itself. It might be that this — problem would have occurred anyway. She didn’t know.

I asked her what the problem was.

‘I call it summing up,’ she said with a cheerful squawk. Whenever she conceived of a new piece of work, before she had got very far she would find herself summing it up. Often it only took one word: tension, for instance, or mother-in-law, though strictly speaking that was three. As soon as something was summed up, it was to all intents and purposes dead, a sitting duck, and she could go no further with it. Why go to the trouble to write a great long play about jealousy when jealousy just about summed it up? And it wasn’t only her own work — she found herself doing it to other people’s, and had discovered that even the masters, the works she had always revered, allowed themselves by and large to be summed up. Even Beckett, her god, had been destroyed by meaninglessness. She would feel the word start to rise, and she would try to hold it down but it kept coming, rising and rising until it had popped irreversibly into her head. And not just books either, it was starting to happen with people — she was having a drink with a friend the other night and she looked across the table and thought, friend, with the result that she strongly suspected their friendship was over.

She scraped her spoon around the bottom of the honey jar. She was aware, she said, that this was also a cultural malaise, but it had invaded her inner world to the extent that she herself felt summed up, and was beginning to question the point of continuing to exist day in and day out when Anne’s life just about covered it.

I asked her what the incident — if that was the word she had used — what the incident was that she had referred to earlier. She took the spoon out of her mouth.

‘I was mugged,’ she squawked. ‘Six months ago. Someone tried to kill me.’

I said that was awful.

‘That’s what people always say,’ she said.

She had by now finished the honey and was licking every last trace of it off the spoon. I asked whether I really couldn’t get her something else to eat, since she was obviously so hungry.

‘I’d better not,’ she said. ‘As I said, once I start I can’t stop.’

I suggested it might help if I gave her something defined, something limited whose ending was clear.

‘Maybe,’ she said doubtfully. ‘I don’t know.’

I opened the pink box Rosa had given me, which was sitting on the coffee table between us, and offered her the single cake that remained. She took it and held it in her hand.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

One consequence of the incident, she said, was that she had lost the ability to eat in a normal way — whatever that was. She supposed she must have known how to do it once, because she had got this far without ever really thinking about eating, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember how she had, or what she had eaten for all those years. She used to be married, she said, to a man who was a very good cook and who possessed generally an almost fanatical sense of order around food. The last time she had seen him, which was several months ago, he had suggested they go for lunch. He had chosen a fashionable restaurant, of a kind she no longer went to, for reasons of economy and also, she supposed, because she now lacked the necessary sense of entitlement, in that she felt she had no right to be in such places any more. She had sat and watched him order and then slowly consume a starter, main course and dessert, each dish very moderate and in its own way perfect — the starter had been oysters and the dessert, if she recalled, had been fresh strawberries with a dash of cream — followed by a small espresso which he had downed in one swallow. She herself had ordered a side salad. Afterwards, when they had parted, she had passed a donut shop and had gone inside and bought four donuts, which she consumed one after the other standing in the street.

‘I’ve never told anyone that before,’ she said, raising Rosa’s cake to her lips and taking a bite.

Watching him eat the food, she continued, she had experienced two feelings that seemed directly to contradict one another. The first was longing; and the second was nausea. She both wanted and didn’t want whatever it was that sight — the sight of him eating — had invoked. The longing was easy enough to understand: it was what the Greeks called nostos, a word we translated as ‘homesickness’, though she had never liked that word. It seemed very English to try to pass off an emotional state as a sort of stomach bug. But that day she had realised that homesickness just about summed it up.

Her ex-husband had not been much help after the incident. They were no longer married, so she supposed she had been wrong to expect it, but all the same it had surprised her. When it happened, he was the first person she thought to call — out of habit, it might seem, but if she were honest she still regarded them as being bound in some indissoluble sense. Yet it was immediately apparent, when she spoke to him on the phone that day, that he did not share her view. He was polite, distant and curt while she was angry, sobbing and hysterical: polar opposites was the phrase that had, during those difficult moments, popped into her mind.

It was through other people, some of them strangers, that the incident had to be unravelled: policemen, counsellors, one or two good friends. But it had been a descent into chaos, a whirling realm of non-meaning, in which the absence of her husband had felt like the absence of a magnetic centre so that without it nothing made any sense at all. The polarisation of man and woman was a structure, a form: she had only felt it once it was gone, and it almost seemed as though the collapse of that structure, that equipoise, was responsible for the extremity that followed it. Her abandonment by one man, in other words, led directly to her attack by another, until the two things — the presence of the incident and the absence of her husband — came almost to seem like one. She had imagined the end of a marriage, she said, to be a slow disentangling of its meanings, a long and painful reinterpretation, but in her case it hadn’t been like that at all. At the time, he had got rid of her so efficiently and so suavely that she had felt almost reassured even as she was being left behind. He had perched beside her in his suit on a counsellor’s sofa for the mandatory number of sessions, looking discreetly at his watch and occasionally assuring everybody that he wanted only what was fair, but he might as well have sent along a cardboard cut-out of himself, for he was clearly elsewhere in his mind, galloping towards pastures new. Far from a reinterpretation, their ending had been virtually wordless. Shortly afterwards he had set up house with the daughter of an aristocrat — the Earl of somewhere — who was now pregnant with their first child.

In a way, she accepted that he was only leaving her as he had found her a decade earlier, a penniless playwright with some actor friends and a large and worthless collection of second-hand books. Yet she was not, she had soon discovered, that person any more: she had become, through him, someone else. In a sense he had created her, and when she phoned him that day of the incident, she was, she supposed, referring herself back to him as his creation. Her links to the life before him had been completely severed — that person no longer existed, and so when the incident occurred it had been two kinds of crisis, one of which was a crisis of identity. She didn’t know, in other words, quite who it had happened to. This question of adaptation, therefore, might be said to be at the forefront of her mind. She was like someone who had forgotten their native language, an idea that likewise has always fascinated her. She found, after the incident, that she lacked what might be called a vocabulary, a native language of self: words, as the phrase goes, failed her for the first time in her life. She couldn’t describe what had happened, to herself or to other people. She talked about it, sure enough, talked about it incessantly — but in all her talk the thing itself remained untouched, shrouded and mysterious, inaccessible.

On the flight over she had happened to get talking to the man sitting next to her, she said, and it was really their conversation that had set her mind to work around these themes. He was a diplomat, newly stationed at the embassy in Athens, but his career had caused him to live all around the world and consequently to acquire many of its languages. He had grown up, he said, in South America, and so his native language was Spanish; his wife, however, was French. The family — he, his wife and their three children — spoke the universal currency of English when they were together, but they had been stationed in Canada for several years and so the children spoke an Americanised English while his own had been learned during a long period he spent in London. He was also entirely fluent in German, Italian and Mandarin, had some Swedish from a year spent in Stockholm, a working understanding of Russian, and could get by very well and without much effort in Portuguese.

She was a nervous flyer, she said, so the conversation really started as a distraction. But in fact she had found his whole story, of his life and the different languages it had been conducted in, increasingly fascinating, and had asked him more and more questions, trying to get as much detail from him as she possibly could. She had asked him about his childhood, his parents, his education, about the development of his career, the meeting with his wife and the marriage and family life that ensued, his experiences at different postings around the world; and the longer she listened to his answers, the more she felt that something fundamental was being delineated, something not about him but about her. He was describing, she realised, a distinction that seemed to grow clearer and clearer the more he talked, a distinction he stood on one side of while she, it became increasingly apparent, stood on the other. He was describing, in other words, what she herself was not: in everything he said about himself, she found in her own nature a corresponding negative. This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.

She asked if I would mind if she took off her boots: she was beginning to feel hot. She took off the velvet jacket too. She had been constantly cold, she said, in these recent months. She had lost a lot of weight: she supposed that explained it. This man, her neighbour on the plane, had been very small — one could almost have described him as petite. He had made her feel, for the first time in ages, quite big. He was very little and dapper, with child-sized hands and feet, and sitting next to him at such close quarters she had become increasingly aware of her body and how much it had changed. She had never been particularly fat, but after the incident she had certainly shrunk, and now, now she didn’t really know what she was. What she realised was that her neighbour, so neat and compact, had probably always been the way he was right now: sitting beside him this distinction had become apparent to her. In her life as a woman, amorphousness — the changing of shapes — had been a physical reality: her husband had been, in a sense, her mirror, but these days she found herself without that reflection. After the incident she lost more than a quarter of her body weight — she remembered meeting an acquaintance in the street who had looked at her and said, there’s nothing of you any more. For a while people had kept saying things of this kind to her, telling her she was fading away, vanishing, describing her as an imminent absence. For most of the people she knew, people in their forties, this was a time of softening and expanding, of expectations growing blurred, of running a little to seed or to fat after the exhaustion of the chase: she saw them beginning to relax and make themselves comfortable in their lives. But for her, coming back out into the world again, the lines were still sharp, the expectations undimmed: sometimes she felt as if she’d arrived at a party just as everyone else was leaving, leaving to go home together and sleep. She didn’t sleep much, by the way — it was lucky I was going back today, because she could see the apartment was quite small and she’d have woken me up, roaming around at three o’clock in the morning.

But sitting next to her neighbour, as she was saying, she’d felt a sudden urge to know herself again, to know what she was like. She found herself wondering what it would be like to have sex with him, whether being so different they would disgust one another. The more he spoke the more she considered this question, of whether their differences, at this point, could only bring them to a state of mutual disgust. For this difference, this distinction, had formulated itself by now, had moved beyond size and shape and attitude into a single point that she could see quite clearly in her mind: the point was this, that he lived a life ruled by discipline, where hers was governed by emotion.

When she had asked him how he had mastered the many languages he spoke, he had described his method to her, which was to build a city for each one in his mind, to build it so well and so solidly that it would remain standing, no matter what the circumstances of his life or how long he had been absent from it.

‘I imagined all these cities of words,’ she said, ‘and him wandering in them one after the other, a tiny figure amid these big towering structures. I said his image reminded me of writing, except a play was more of a house than a city; and I remembered how strong it had once made me feel, to build that house and then walk away from it, and look behind me to see it still there. At the same time as I remembered this feeling,’ she said, ‘I felt an absolute certainty that I would never write another play, and in fact couldn’t even recall how I’d ever written one in the first place, what steps I’d taken, what materials I’d used. But I knew it would have been as impossible for me to write a play now as to build a house on water, while floating in the sea.

‘My neighbour then said something that surprised me,’ she continued. ‘He confessed that since his arrival in Athens six months ago, he had been absolutely unable to make any headway whatsoever in Greek. He had tried his very best, had even hired a personal language tutor who came to the embassy for two hours each day, but not one word of it would stick. As soon as the tutor had gone, everything my neighbour had learned dissolved: he found himself opening his mouth, in social situations, in meetings, in shops and restaurants, upon a great blankness like a prairie that seemed to extend all the way from his lips to the back of his head. It was the first time in his life that this had ever happened to him, and so he was at a loss as to whether the fault was his or whether blame could be assigned, somehow, to the language itself. She might laugh at that idea, he said, but his confidence in his own experience meant that he could not rule it out entirely.

‘I asked,’ she said, ‘how his wife and children had got on with the language and whether they had encountered similar difficulties. He admitted, then, that his wife and children had remained behind in Canada, where their life, at this point, was established to the degree that it couldn’t have been uprooted. His wife had her work and her friends; the children didn’t want to leave their schools and their social lives. But it was the first time the family had been separated. He was aware that he hadn’t told me this initially, he said; he wasn’t quite sure why he hadn’t. He hadn’t anticipated that it would become relevant.

‘I asked him,’ she said, ‘whether it had occurred to him that his inability to learn Greek was related to the absence of his family. It didn’t even need to be a question of sentimentality, simply that the conditions in which he had always achieved success were no longer there. He thought about this for a while, and then said that to an extent it was true. But in his heart, he believed it was because he did not consider Greek itself to be useful. It was not an international language; everyone in the diplomatic world here communicated in English; it would have been a waste, in the end, of his time.

‘There was something so final,’ she said, ‘in that remark that I realised our conversation was over. And it was true that even though the flight had another half an hour to go we didn’t say one more word to each other. I sat beside this man and felt the power of his silence. I felt, almost, as though I had been chastised. Yet all that had happened was that he had refused to take the blame for his own failure, and had rejected my attempt to read any kind of significance into it, a significance he saw that I was all too ready to articulate. It was almost a battle of wills, his discipline against my emotion, with only the armrest between us. I waited for him to ask me a question, which after all would have been only polite, but he didn’t, even though I had asked him so many questions about himself. He sealed himself in his own view of life, even at the risk of causing offence, because he knew that view to be under threat.’

She had sat there, she said, and thought about her own lifelong habit of explaining herself, and she thought about this power of silence, which put people out of one another’s reach. Lately, since the incident — now that things had got harder to explain, and the explanations were harsher and bleaker — even her closest friends had started to tell her to stop talking about it, as though by talking about it she made it continue to exist. Yet if people were silent about the things that had happened to them, was something not being betrayed, even if only the version of themselves that had experienced them? It was never said of history, for instance, that it shouldn’t be talked about; on the contrary, in terms of history silence was forgetting, and it was the thing people feared most of all, when it was their own history that was at risk of being forgotten. And history, really, was invisible, though its monuments still stood. The making of the monuments was half of it, but the rest was interpretation. Yet there was something worse than forgetting, which was misrepresentation, bias, the selective presentation of events. The truth had to be represented: it couldn’t just be left to represent itself, as for instance she had left it to the police after the incident, and found herself more or less sidelined.

I asked her whether she would mind telling me about the incident, and her face took on a look of alarm. She put her hands to her throat, where two blue veins stood out.

‘Bloke jumped out of a bush,’ she squawked. ‘Tried to strangle me.’

She hoped I would understand, she added, but despite what she’d said earlier she was in fact trying not to talk about it any more. She was trying her very best to sum it up. Let’s just say that drama became something real to me that day, she said. It ceased to be theoretical, was no longer an internal structure in which she could hide and look out at the world. In a sense, her work had jumped out of a bush and attacked her.

I said it seemed to me that at a certain point a lot of people felt that, not about work but about life itself.

She sat silently on the sofa for a while, nodding her head, her hands folded across her stomach. Presently she asked me when I was leaving. I told her my flight was in a few hours.

‘That’s a shame,’ she said. ‘Are you looking forward to going back?’

In a way, I said.

She asked whether there was anything I felt she particularly ought to see, while she was here. She knew the place was packed with sites of global cultural importance, but for some reason she found that idea a bit overwhelming. If there was something smaller, something I personally valued, she would be glad to know about it.

I said she could go to the Agora, and look at the headless statues of goddesses in the colonnade. It was cool there, and peaceful, and the massive marble bodies in their soft-looking draperies, so anonymous and mute, were strangely consoling. I once spent three weeks here alone with my children, I said, when we were stuck because all the flights out had been cancelled. Though you couldn’t see it, it was said that there was a great cloud of ash in the sky; people were worried little pieces of grit might get stuck in the engines. It reminded me, I said, of the apocalyptic visions of the medieval mystics, this cloud that was so imperceptible and yet so subject to belief. So we stayed here for three weeks, and because we weren’t meant to be here I felt that we became, in a sense, invisible. We didn’t see anyone or speak to anyone except each other in all that time, though I had friends in Athens I could have called. But I didn’t call them: the feeling of invisibility was too powerful. We spent a lot of time in the Agora, I said, a place that had been invaded, destroyed and rebuilt many times in its history until finally, in the modern era, it had been rescued and preserved. We got to know it, I said, fairly well.

Oh, she said. Well if I wanted to see it again and if I had the time, perhaps we could go there together. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to find it on her own. And she could do with a walk — it might take her mind off food.

I said she could try souvlaki: she would never be hungry again.

Souvlaki, she said. Yes, I think I’ve heard of that.

My phone rang, and the cheerful, undaunted tones of my neighbour came pealing down the line.

He hoped I found myself well this morning, he said. He trusted there had been no further incidents to upset me. I had not, he noticed, responded to his texts, so he thought he would call me directly. He had been thinking of me; he was wondering whether I had time for an excursion out to sea, before my flight.

I said I was afraid not — I hoped we would meet again the next time he found himself in London, but for now I had an engagement with someone, to do some sightseeing.

In that case, he said, I will spend the day in solicitude.

You mean solitude, I said.

I do beg your pardon, he said. Of course, I mean solitude.