Outline: A Novel

IV

My neighbour from the plane was a good foot shorter than me and twice as wide: since I had got to know him sitting down, it was difficult to integrate these dimensions with his character. What located me was his extraordinary beak-like nose with the prominent brow jutting out above it, which gave him the slightly quizzical appearance of a seabird, crowned with his plume of silver-white hair. Even so it took me a moment to recognise him, standing in the shade of a doorway opposite the apartment building, dressed in buff-coloured knee-length shorts and a red checked shirt, immaculately ironed. There were various points of gold around his person, a fat signet ring on his little finger, a chunky gold watch, a pair of glasses on a gold chain around his neck and even a flash of gold when he smiled, all immediately noticeable, and yet I hadn’t been aware of any of them during our conversation on the airplane the day before. That encounter had been, in a sense, immaterial: above the world, objects didn’t count for so much, differences were less apparent. The material reality of my neighbour, which up there had seemed so light, was concretised down here, and the result was that he seemed more of a stranger, as though context were also a kind of imprisonment.

I was certain he saw me before I saw him, but he waited for me to wave before he acknowledged me in return. He looked nervous. He kept glancing up and down the street, where a fruit seller stood yelling inchoately beside a cart mounded with peaches and strawberries and chunks of watermelon that seemed to grin in the heat. His face took on an expression of pleased surprise when I crossed the road towards him. He kissed me slightly drily and fumblingly on the cheek.

‘Did you sleep well?’ he asked.

It was nearly lunchtime, and I had been out all morning, but it was apparent that he wished to create a sphere of intimacy in which our knowledge of one another was continuous and in which nothing had happened to me since we had said goodbye at the airport taxi rank the evening before. In fact I had slept very little in the small blue bedroom. There was a painting hanging on the wall opposite the bed, of a man in a trilby hat throwing back his head and laughing. When you looked you saw that he had no face, just a blank oval with the laughing void of his mouth in the middle. I kept waiting for his eyes and nose to become visible as the room got light, but they never did.

My neighbour said that his car was parked just around the corner and after a hesitation he placed his hand in the small of my back to guide me in the right direction. His hands were very large and slightly claw-like, and covered with white hair. He was concerned, he said, that I would not think much of his car. It had struck him that I might have imagined something far grander, and he was embarrassed if that was the case; but he himself didn’t set much store by cars. And for driving around Athens, he had found that this was all he needed. But you could never tell, he said, what other people expected; he hoped I wouldn’t be disappointed, that was all. We reached the car, which was small and clean and otherwise unremarkable, and got in. The boat, he said, was moored about forty minutes’ drive away along the coast. He used to keep it at a marina much closer to the city, but the mooring was very expensive and so a couple of years ago he had decided to move it. I asked him where his house was, in relation to the centre, and he gestured vaguely with his hand toward the window and said that it was half an hour or so away over there.

We had pulled out on to the broad, six-lane avenue along which the traffic thundered ceaselessly through the city, where the heat and noise were extreme. The car windows were wide open, and my neighbour drove with one hand on the steering wheel while the other rested on the window sill so that his shirtsleeve flapped madly in the wind. He was an erratic driver, lunging from one lane to the next, and turning his head entirely away from the road while he talked, so that red lights and the backs of other cars would come rushing up to the windscreen before he noticed them. I was frightened and fell silent, staring out at the dusty lots and verges that had by now succeeded the big glinting buildings of the centre. We passed over an arching concrete intersection in a blare of horns and engine noise, the sun pounding on the windscreen and the smell of petrol and asphalt and sewage flooding through the open windows, and for a while drove alongside a man on a scooter, who had a little boy of five or six seated behind him. The boy was clinging to the man with both arms around his middle. He looked so small and unprotected, with the cars and metal palisades and huge junk-laden lorries rushing inches past his skin. He wore only shorts and a vest and flip-flops on his feet, and I looked through the window at his unshielded tender brown limbs and at his soft golden-brown hair rippling in the wind. Then the arching road curved around and began to descend, and there was the sea, blazing blue beyond a khaki-coloured scrubland littered with low abandoned buildings and unfinished roads and the skeletons of houses that had never been completed, where skinny trees now grew through the glassless windows.

I’ve been married three times, my neighbour said, as the little car flew down the hill towards the glittering water. He was aware, he said, that in yesterday’s conversation he had only admitted to two, but he had come here today vowing to be honest. There had been three marriages, and three divorces. I’m the full disaster, he said. I was thinking about how to reply when he said that another thing he needed to mention was his son, who was presently living at the family house on the island and who was rather unwell. He was in an extremely anxious state, and had been calling his father all morning. Those calls would no doubt continue over the next few hours, and though he didn’t want to answer them he would, of course, be obliged to. I asked what was wrong with his son and his birdlike face grew sombre. Was I familiar with the condition called schizophrenia? Well, that was what his son suffered from. He had developed it in his twenties after leaving university, and had been hospitalised several times over the past decade, but for a number of reasons too complicated to explain he was currently in his father’s care. My neighbour had judged that he was safe enough on the island, so long as he didn’t get his hands on any money. People were sympathetic there, and still held the family in sufficient esteem to tolerate small difficulties, of which there had already been a number. But a few days ago there had been a more serious episode, as a consequence of which my neighbour had had to ask the young man he had hired to be his son’s companion on the island to keep him under, as it were, house arrest. His son couldn’t bear incarceration, hence the constant phone calls, and when it wasn’t his son phoning it was the companion, who felt that the job was exceeding the terms of his contract and wanted to renegotiate his salary.

I asked whether this was the same son his second wife had locked in the cellar, and he said that it was. He had been a sweet child, but then he had gone to university, in England as it happened, and had developed something of a drug habit. He left without completing his degree and came drifting back to Greece, where various attempts were made to find employment for him. He was living with his mother, on the large estate outside Athens she shared with her ski-instructor husband, and my neighbour didn’t doubt that she found him a trial and a drag on her freedom, as his behaviour was deteriorating by the day; but all the same her first move, which was to have him committed without discussing it first with his father, was somewhat extreme. He was put on medication that made him so fat and inert he became, in effect, a vegetable; and his mother departed Athens with her husband, to take up their customary winter residence in the Alps. This was, of course, several years ago now, but the situation hadn’t fundamentally changed. The boy’s mother would have nothing more to do with him; if his father chose to remove him from hospital and have him live in the world, that was his responsibility.

I said it surprised me that his first wife, whom my neighbour had seemed rather to idealise in our earlier conversation, should behave with such coldness. It didn’t seem to fit with the impression I had formed of her character. He considered this, and then said that she hadn’t been like that in the time of their marriage: she had changed, had become a different person from the one that he knew. When he spoke of her fondly, it was the earlier version of herself he was speaking of. I said that I didn’t believe people could change so completely, could evolve an unrecognisable morality; it was merely that that part of themselves had lain dormant, waiting to be evoked by circumstance. I said that I thought most of us didn’t know how truly good or truly bad we were, and most of us would never be sufficiently tested to find out. But there must have been moments when he had glimpsed — even if only briefly — what she would become. No, he said, he didn’t think there were: she had always been an excellent mother, devoted above everything else to the children. Their daughter had become a great success and had been awarded a scholarship at Harvard; subsequently she was poached by a global software firm and was now in Silicon Valley, a place I must surely have heard of. I said that I had, though I had always found it difficult to envisage; I could never establish to what degree it was conceptual, and to what degree an actual place. I asked whether he had ever visited her there; he admitted that he had not. He never found himself in that part of the world, and besides, he would be worried about leaving his son for the length of time such a visit would require. But it was true that he hadn’t seen his daughter for several years, as she hadn’t returned to Greece. It seems success takes you away from what you know, he said, while failure condemns you to it. I asked whether she had any children, and he said that she didn’t. She was in a partnership — was that what you called it? — with another woman, and other than that her work was everything to her.

He supposed, he said, now that he thought about it, that his wife was something of a perfectionist. One argument, after all, was all it had taken to end their marriage: if there was a sign of what she might become, perhaps it was that failure was something she was unable to tolerate. After their separation, he said, she had immediately taken up with a very rich and notorious boyfriend, a ship-owner, a relative of Onassis: he was really fabulously wealthy, this man, and good-looking, and also a friend of her father, and my neighbour had never been able to find out why the relationship had ended, for it was his impression that this man was everything she had ever wanted. In a way it had helped him to understand the failure of their marriage, her choice of this handsome billionaire; he could accept his own defeat at the hands of such an adversary. Kurt the ski instructor, on the other hand, was baffling, a man without charm or money, a man who only came alive for a few months a year, when there was snow on the mountains; a man, moreover, of fanatical religious beliefs and observances, to which he apparently insisted his wife and her children — while they still remained at home — submit. The children told him tales, of enforced prayers and silences, of being made to sit at table — for hours if necessary — until they had finished every piece of food on their plates, of being asked to call him ‘father’ and forbidden television and entertainments on Sundays. Once my neighbour had had the temerity to ask her what she saw in Kurt and she replied, he is the exact opposite of you.

We were driving along by the water now, past scruffy-looking beaches where families were picnicking and swimming, past roadside shops selling parasols and snorkels and swimming costumes. My neighbour said that we were nearly there; he hoped I hadn’t found the journey too long. He should mention, he said, lest I was expecting something grand, that his boat was quite small. He had owned it for twenty-five years, and it was steady as a rock in a gale, but it was of modest proportions. It had a small cabin where one person could comfortably spend the night, ‘or two people,’ he said, ‘if they are very much in love’. He often spent the night there himself, and at certain times of year he would take the boat across to the island, a journey of three or four days. It was, in a sense, his hermitage, his place of solitude; he could motor just offshore, anchor it, and be completely alone.

At last we came in sight of the marina, and my neighbour pulled off the road and parked the car alongside a wooden pontoon where a line of boats were tied to their moorings. He asked me to wait there, while he went and bought some supplies. Also, he said, there were no facilities on the boat, so I should make myself comfortable before we left. I watched him walk back up toward the road and then I sat down on a bench in the sun to wait. The boats moved up and down in the bright water. Beyond them I could see the clear, crenellated shapes of the coast, and of a number of rocks and small islands that lay further out to sea, strung all across the bay. It was cooler here than in the city. The breeze made a dry, shuffling sound in the vegetation that stood in tangled clumps between the sea and the road. I looked at the boats, wondering which one belonged to my neighbour. They all seemed more or less alike. There were people around, mostly men of my neighbour’s age, padding up and down the pontoon in deck shoes or working on their boats, their grizzled chests bare in the sun. Some of them stared at me, slack-jawed, their great ropy arms hanging by their sides. I took out my phone and dialled the number of the mortgage company in England, who were processing an application I had made just before I left for Athens to increase my loan. The woman who was dealing with the application was called Lydia. She had told me to call her today, but every time I tried I got her voicemail message. The message said that she would be out of the office on holiday until a date that had already passed, which gave the impression that she didn’t listen to her voicemail very often. Sitting on the bench I got the message again, but this time — perhaps because I didn’t have anything else to do — I left a message myself, saying that I had called as agreed and asking her to call me back. After this apparently pointless exercise, I looked around and saw that my neighbour was returning holding a carrier bag. He asked me to take it while he made the boat ready, and then he crossed the pontoon and getting down on his knees drew a length of sodden rope out of the water, with which he proceeded to pull the boat attached to the other end towards him. The boat was white, with wooden cladding and a bright blue canopy. There was a large black leather steering wheel at the front and an upholstered bench seat along the back. When it was close enough my neighbour hopped heavily on board and stretched out his hand for the carrier bag. For a while he busied himself stowing things away and then he held out his hand again to help me over. I was surprised to find myself not especially sure-footed in this exercise. I sat on the bench seat while he took the covers off the steering wheel and lowered the engine into the water and tied and untied numerous ropes, and then he stood at the wheel and started the engine, which made a watery growling sound, and we began to reverse slowly out of the marina.

We would drive for a while, my neighbour called above the noise of the engine, and when we reached a nice place he knew, we would stop and swim. He had removed his shirt, and his bare back faced me while he drove. It was very broad and fleshy, leathery with sun and age, and marked with numerous moles and scars and outcrops of coarse grey hair. Looking at it I felt overcome with a sadness that was partly confusion, as though his back were a foreign country I was lost in; or not lost but exiled, in as much as the feeling of being lost was not attended by the hope that I would eventually find something I recognised. His aged back seemed to maroon us both in our separate and untransfigurable histories. It struck me that some people might think I was stupid, to go out alone on a boat with a man I didn’t know. But what other people thought was no longer of any help to me. Those thoughts only existed within certain structures, and I had definitively left those structures.

We were out by now in the open water, and my neighbour put the boat into a different gear so that it suddenly leaped forward, with such force that unnoticed by him I nearly fell over the back. The thunderous noise of the engine instantly displaced every other sight and sound. I grabbed the rail that ran along one side and clung on as we roared across the bay, the front of the boat rising and thumping down again repeatedly on to the water and a great spray fanning out to all sides. I felt angry that he hadn’t warned me of what was about to happen. I couldn’t move or speak: I could only cling on, my hair standing up on end and my face growing stiff with the pressure of wind. The boat thumped up and down and the sight of his bare back at the wheel made me angrier and angrier. There was a certain self-consciousness in the set of his shoulders: this was, then, a performance, a piece of showing off. He didn’t once glance back at me, for people are at their least aware of others when demonstrating their own power over them. I wondered what he would have felt if he’d arrived at our destination to discover that I was no longer there; I imagined him explaining this latest piece of carelessness to the next woman he met on an airplane. She kept pestering me to go out on the boat, he would say, but it turned out she didn’t know the first thing about sailing. To be perfectly honest, he would say, it was the full disaster: she fell overboard, and now I am very sad.

At last the sound of the engine died away; the boat slowed, and puttered towards a small rocky island that rose steeply out of the sea. My neighbour’s phone rang and he looked quizzically at the screen before answering it. He began to speak mellifluously in Greek, pacing about the small deck and occasionally checking the steering wheel with a finger. I saw that we were approaching a clear little cove where many seabirds perched on the rocky promontories, and where the glittering water whirled and retreated against a tiny curl of sand. The island was too small to have anything human on it: it was untouched and deserted, except for the birds. I waited for my neighbour’s conversation to conclude, which took a considerable amount of time. Eventually, though, he hung up. That was someone I haven’t spoken to in many years, he said — in fact I was very surprised that she should call me. He was silent for a while, his finger on the steering wheel, his face sombre. She just heard about my brother’s death, he continued, and she was calling to give her condolences. I asked when his brother had died. Oh, four, five years ago, he said. But she lives in the States and hasn’t been back to Greece for a long time. She’s here now on a visit, so she’s only just got the news. His phone rang again almost immediately, and again he answered it. It was another Greek conversation, this one also lengthy but a little more businesslike. Work, he explained when it concluded, making a brushing gesture with his hand.

The boat drifted to a halt in the lapping water. He came to the back and opened a compartment, inside which lay a small anchor, and he hauled it by its chain over the side. This is a good place to swim, he said, if you would like to. I watched the anchor fall down through the clear water. When the boat was secured my neighbour stepped up on to the stern and dived heavily over the side. Once he had gone I wrapped a towel around myself and changed awkwardly into my swimming costume. Then I jumped in, swimming out in the opposite direction all the way to the perimeter of the island so that I could see the open sea beyond it. The other way, the distant shore was a bobbing line full of tiny shapes and figures. In the meantime another boat had arrived and was anchored not far from ours, and I could see the people sitting out on deck and hear the sound of their voices talking and laughing. They were a family group, with numerous children in bright costumes jumping in and out of the water, and now and again the sound of a baby wailing echoed thinly around the cove. My neighbour had got back on the boat and was standing there with his hand screening his eyes, watching my progress. It felt good to swim, after the tension of sitting still, of the heat of Athens and of spending time with strangers. The water was so clear and still and cool, and the shapes of the coastline so soft and ancient, with the little island nearby that seemed to belong to nobody. I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had. The thread led nowhere, except into ever expanding wastes of anonymity. I could swim out into the sea as far as I liked, if what I wanted was to drown. Yet this impulse, this desire to be free, was still compelling to me: I still, somehow, believed in it, despite having proved that everything about it was illusory. When I returned to the boat, my neighbour said he didn’t like it when people swam too far out: it made him nervous; there were speedboats that could come out of nowhere, without warning, and such collisions were not unheard of.

He offered me a Coke from the coldbox he kept on deck, and then proffered a box of tissues, from which he took a large handful himself. He blew his nose lengthily and thoroughly, while both of us watched the family on the neighbouring boat. There were two little boys and a girl playing there, shrieking as they leapt off the side and then clambering one after another back up the ladder, their bodies glittering with water. A woman in a sunhat sat on deck, reading a book, and beside her in the shade of the canopy was a baby’s pram. A man in long shorts and sunglasses paced up and down the deck, speaking into his phone. I said that I found appearances more bewildering and tormenting now than at any previous point in my life. It was as if I had lost some special capacity to filter my own perceptions, one that I had only become aware of once it was no longer there, like a missing pane of glass in a window that allows the wind and rain to come rushing through unchecked. In much the same way I felt exposed to what I saw, discomfited by it. I thought often of the chapter in Wuthering Heights where Heathcliff and Cathy stare from the dark garden through the windows of the Lintons’ drawing room and watch the brightly lit family scene inside. What is fatal in that vision is its subjectivity: looking through the window the two of them see different things, Heathcliff what he fears and hates and Cathy what she desires and feels deprived of. But neither of them can see things as they really are. And likewise I was beginning to see my own fears and desires manifested outside myself, was beginning to see in other people’s lives a commentary on my own. When I looked at the family on the boat, I saw a vision of what I no longer had: I saw something, in other words, that wasn’t there. Those people were living in their moment, and though I could see it I could no more return to that moment than I could walk across the water that separated us. And of those two ways of living — living in the moment and living outside it — which was the more real?

Appearances, my neighbour replied, were highly valued in his own family, but he had learned — perhaps fatally — to view them as a mechanism of deception and disguise. And it was in the closest relationships that the deception had to be greatest, for obvious reasons. He knew, for instance, that many of the men of his experience — his uncles, and people of their social circle — had a series of mistresses while remaining married to one woman all their lives. But it had never occurred to him that his father might have sustained his relationship to his mother in the same way. He perceived his father and mother as unitary while his uncle Theo, for instance, he knew to be duplicitous, though he wondered more and more whether that distinction had actually existed; whether, in other words, he had spent his adult life attempting to follow a template of marriage that had been, in fact, an illusion.

There had been a hotel Theo liked to stay in, not far from my neighbour’s boarding school, and Theo would often call in and take him out to tea, always with a different ‘friend’ in tow. These friends were as scented and beautiful as aunt Irini was swarthy and squat; she had a number of warts on her face that sprouted coarse black hairs of an extraordinary girth and length, and my neighbour had been mesmerised his whole life by this feature, which was still real to him though Irini had been dead for thirty years and which symbolised the enduring nature of repulsion, while beauty was seen once and never seen again. When Irini died, at the age of eighty-four after sixty-three years of marriage, uncle Theo refused to allow her to be buried and instead had her encased in glass and kept in the vaults of a Greek chapel in Enfield, where he visited her every day of the six months that remained to him. My neighbour had never kept company with Theo and Irini without witnessing scenes of the most extraordinary violence: even a telephone call to the house usually involved an argument, with one of them picking up the extension to abuse the other while the caller played referee. His own parents, though fiercely combative, never approached the heights of Theo and his wife — theirs was a colder though perhaps a bitterer war. It was his father who died first, in London, and his body was stored in the same vault where Irini had lain, for his mother had taken it into her head to commission the construction of a family tomb back on the island, an undertaking so grandiose that it had fallen well behind schedule and was not ready to receive him when he died. She had conceived this idea when his father first fell ill, and the last year of his father’s life was spent receiving almost daily bulletins on the progress of the tomb being built to envelop him. This unique method of torture might have seemed to be the conclusive move in their lifelong argument, but in fact when his mother herself came to die — a year to the day, as he believed he had already told me, after his father — the tomb was still not finished. She joined her husband in the vault in Enfield, and it wasn’t until several months later that their bodies were flown together back to the island on which both of them had been born. It had fallen to my neighbour to oversee the interring, and also the exhumation of other family members — his grandparents on both sides, numerous uncles and aunts — from their places in the cemetery and their relocation in the enormous new tomb. He flew back, with his parents’ corpses in the hold, and spent all day immersed with the gravediggers in the grisly business of transporting and arranging the various coffins. He was particularly unnerved to witness the return to the earth’s surface of his grandfather, his mother’s father, who had been a man of great mischief and the cause — to the end of their days — of many of his parents’ arguments, for the power even in memory that he continued to hold over his daughter. In the late afternoon, his parents were the last to be lowered into the vast marble structure. My neighbour had a taxi waiting to take him back to the airport, as he was due to return to London straight away. But midway through the journey, sitting in the taxi, a terrible realisation struck him. In all the rearranging of the family bodies, he had somehow failed to place his parents side by side: worse still, he distinctly recalled, there in the back of the taxi, that it was his grandfather’s coffin that lay between the two. Immediately he ordered the taxi driver to turn around and take him back to the cemetery. As they approached, he told the taxi driver that he would have to help him, for by now it was nearly dark and everyone else would have gone home. The taxi driver agreed, but no sooner had they entered the cemetery gates in the darkness than he took fright and ran away, leaving my neighbour alone. He did not recall, my neighbour said, quite how he managed to unseal the tomb single-handed: he was still a fairly young man, but even so he must have been endowed in that moment with a superhuman strength. He climbed over the edge and descended into the tomb and there, sure enough, he saw his parents’ two coffins with the grandfather between them. It was not so hard to slide them into their proper positions, but once he’d done it he realised that owing to the steepness and depth of the tomb it was going to be impossible for him to get out again. He called and shouted, to no avail; he leapt and scrabbled at the smooth sides of the tomb, trying to find a foothold.

But I suppose I must have got out somehow, he said, because I certainly didn’t spend all night there, though I thought I might have to. Perhaps the taxi driver came back after all — I don’t remember. He smiled, and for a while the two of us watched the family on the other boat, across the bright water. I said that when my sons were the ages of those two leaping boys, they were so intimate it would have been hard to disentangle their separate natures. They used to play together without pause from the moment they opened their eyes in the morning to the moment they closed them again. Their play was a kind of shared trance in which they created whole imaginary worlds, and they were forever involved in games and projects whose planning and execution were as real to them as they were invisible to everyone else: sometimes I would move or throw away some apparently inconsequential item, only to be told that it was a sacred prop in the ongoing make-believe, a narrative which seemed to run like a magic river through our household, inexhaustible, and which they could exit and re-enter at will, moving over that threshold which no one else could see into another element. And then one day the river dried up: their shared world of imagination ceased, and the reason was that one of them — I can’t even recall which one it was — stopped believing in it. In other words, it was nobody’s fault; but all the same it was brought home to me how much of what was beautiful in their lives was the result of a shared vision of things that strictly speaking could not have been said to exist.

I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see, and in this case it proved to be an impermanent basis for living. Without their shared story, the two children began to argue, and where their playing had taken them away from the world, making them unreachable sometimes for hours at a time, their arguments brought them constantly back to it. They would come to me or to their father, seeking intervention and justice; they began to set greater store by facts, by what had been done and said, and to build the case for themselves and against one another. It was hard, I said, not to see this transposition from love to factuality as the mirror of other things that were happening in our household at the time. What was striking was the sheer negative capability of their former intimacy: it was as though everything that had been inside was moved outside, piece by piece, like furniture being taken out of a house and put on the pavement. There seemed to be so much of it, because what had been invisible was now visible; what had been useful was now redundant. Their antagonism was in exact proportion to their former harmony, but where the harmony had been timeless and weightless, the antagonism occupied space and time. The intangible became solid, the visionary was embodied, the private became public: when peace becomes war, when love turns to hatred, something is born into the world, a force of pure mortality. If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse. And what is astonishing is how much detail it gathers to itself, so that nothing remains untouched by it. They were struggling to free themselves from one another, yet the very last thing they could do was leave one another alone. They fought over everything, disputed ownership of the most inconsequential item, were enraged by the merest nuance of speech, and when finally they were maddened by detail they erupted into physical violence, hitting and scratching one another; which of course returned them to the madness of detail again, because physical violence entails the long-drawn-out processes of justice and the law. The story of who had done what to whom had to be told, and the matters of guilt and punishment established, though this never satisfied them either; in fact it made things worse, because it seemed to promise a resolution that never came. The more its intricacies were specified, the bigger and realer their argument grew. Each of them wanted more than anything to be declared right, and the other wrong, but it was impossible to assign blame entirely to either of them. And I realised eventually, I said, that it could never be resolved, not so long as the aim was to establish the truth, for there was no single truth any more, that was the point. There was no longer a shared vision, a shared reality even. Each of them saw things now solely from his own perspective: there was only point of view.

My neighbour was silent for a while. Presently he said that in his case his children had been his mainstay, through all the ups and downs of his marital career. He had always felt himself to be a good father: he supposed, in fact, that he had been more able to love his children and feel loved by them in return than he had their various mothers. But his own mother had once said to him, in the period after his first marriage had ended when he was deeply concerned about the effect the divorce was having on the children, that family life was bittersweet no matter what you did. If it wasn’t divorce it would be something else, she said. There was no such thing as an unblemished childhood, though people will do everything they can to convince you otherwise. There was no such thing as a life without pain. And as for divorce, even if you lived like a saint you would still experience all the same losses, however much you tried to explain them away. I could weep just to think that I’ll never see you again as you were at the age of six — I would give anything, she said, to meet that six-year-old one more time. But everything falls away, try as you might to stop it. And for whatever returns to you, be grateful. So he has tried to be grateful, even for his son, who has failed so spectacularly to survive out in the world. His son had become, like so many vulnerable people, obsessed with animals, and my neighbour had involved himself in more headaches than he could possibly recount by giving in to the unceasing requests that this or that helpless creature be rescued and given a home. Dogs, cats, hedgehogs, birds, even once a baby lamb half-killed by a fox, into whose mouth my neighbour had sat up a whole night spooning warm milk. During that vigil, he said, he had willed the lamb to live, not especially for its own sake but for the affirmation this would have provided of the lonely route he had chosen in relation to his son, which was to treat him with the utmost sensitivity and indulgence. Had the lamb lived, it might have constituted a kind of approval — if only from the universe — of my neighbour’s decision to act in direct contradiction to the boy’s mother, who would have abandoned him to a mental hospital. But of course he found himself burying the thing the next morning, while Takis was still asleep; and this was just one of countless incidents whereby he had come to feel foolish for deciding to treat the child without resort to cruelty. It seems, he said, that the universe favours those like his ex-wife, who disown that which reflects badly on them; though in stories, of course, the bad things return to haunt them. His current problems stemmed from an evening last week, when his son’s companion had closeted himself away to work on his Ph.D. and Takis had stolen out under cover of darkness, and taken it upon himself to attempt the liberation of numerous animals kept in fenced enclosures on the island, including an eccentric sort of menagerie being raised as a pet project by a local entrepreneur, so that now there were a number of exotic beasts — ostriches, llamas, tapirs, and even a herd of tiny ponies no bigger than dogs — roaming loose across the island. Their owner was a newcomer, less respectful of the family’s ancestry, and was very angry at the damage to his property and his livestock: in his eyes Takis was a hooligan, a criminal, and there wasn’t a great deal my neighbour could say or do in his defence. You learn very quickly, he said, that your children are exempt only from your own judgement. If the world finds them wanting, you have to take them back. Though this, of course, is something he supposes he has always known, for his mentally disabled brother, now a man in his early seventies, has never even left the place where he was born.

He asked whether I would like to swim again before we returned to the mainland and this time I remained within sight of the two boats and swam close to the cove, where the baby’s cries echoed among the high rocks. The father was pacing up and down the deck with the little body clasped to his shoulder and the mother was fanning herself with her book while the three children sat at her feet cross-legged. The boat was hung with pale cloths and draperies to provide shade and the breeze occasionally sent them billowing in and back out again, so that the group was hidden briefly from view and then revealed once more. They held their positions, waiting, I could see, for the baby to stop crying, for the moment to release them and for the world to move forward again. On the other side of the cove my neighbour had swum out in a short straight furrow and immediately returned, and I watched him climb up the small ladder back on to the boat. He moved around the deck in the distance with his slightly rolling gait, towelling his fleshy back. A few feet away from me a black cormorant stood perched on a rock, staring motionless out to sea. The baby stopped crying and the family immediately began to stir, changing their positions in the confined space as though they were little clockwork figures rotating on a jewellery box; the father bending and putting the child in its pram, the mother rising and turning, the two boys and the girl straightening their legs and joining their hands so that they made a pinwheel shape, their bodies glittering and flashing in the sun. I suddenly felt afraid, alone in the water, and I returned to the boat, where my neighbour was packing things away and opening the compartment in readiness to bring up the anchor. He suggested I lie down on the bench seat, as I was probably tired, and try to sleep while he drove across to the mainland. He gave me a kind of shawl to cover myself with, and I drew it up all the way over my head, so that the sky and the sun and the dancing water were blotted out; and this time, when the boat made its surging leap forward amid the deafening noise of the engine, I experienced it as a kind of comfort and found that I did go into a half-sleep. Occasionally I would open my eyes and see the unfamiliar cloth just in front of them and then I would close them again; and feeling my body being borne blindly through space I had the sense of everything in my life having become atomised, all its elements separated as though an explosion had sent them flying away from the centre in different directions. I thought of my children and wondered where they were at this moment. The image of the family on the boat, the bright rotating circle on the jewellery box, so mechanically and fixedly constellated and yet so graceful and correct, turned behind my eyes. I was reminded, with extraordinary clarity, of lying half-asleep as a child on the back seat of my parents’ car on the interminable winding journey home from the seaside, where we often drove for the day during the summer. There was no direct road between the two places, just a rambling network of country lanes that looked on the map like the tangled illustrations of veins and capillaries in a textbook, so that it made no particular difference which way you went as long as it was generally in the right direction. Yet my father had a route he preferred, because it seemed to him to be marginally more direct than the others, and so we always went the same way, crossing and recrossing the alternative roads and passing signposts to places we had either already been through or would never see, my father’s notion of the journey having established itself over time as an insurmountable reality, to the extent that it would have seemed wrong to have found ourselves passing through those unknown villages, though in fact it would have made no difference at all. We children would lie on the back seat, drowsy and nauseous with the swaying motion, and sometimes I would open my eyes and see the summer landscape passing through the dusty windows, so full and ripe at that time of year that it seemed impossible it could ever be broken down and turned to winter.

The hurtling motion of the boat began to slow and the sound of the motor to die away. My neighbour asked me courteously, when I sat up, whether I had managed to switch off for a while. We were drawing close to the marina, its white boats startling against their background of blue, and beyond them the brown roadscape, desultory in the heat, all of it seeming to move unstoppably up and down in the sunshine though in fact the motion was ours. If I was hungry, my neighbour said, there was a place he knew just over there that made souvlaki. Had I eaten souvlaki before? It was very simple but could be very good. If I would just be patient while he moored the boat and went through the necessary procedures, we could be eating shortly, and afterwards he would drive me back to Athens.