Outline: A Novel

VI

It was a curious group — a mixed bag, as Ryan had put it. Watch out for the kid with the Demis Roussos hair and the bumfluff, he said, he simply won’t shut up.

The room was small and grey, but it had large windows overlooking Kolonaki Square, a concrete enclosure where people sat reading newspapers on benches in the shade of plane trees with graffitied concrete bases. The hot spaces were already deserted at ten o’clock in the morning. Pigeons advanced in their circling, tatty formations across the paving slabs with their heads down, pecking.

The students were discussing whether the windows should be open or shut, for the room was morbidly cold and no one had been able to work out how to turn down the air conditioning. There was also the question of whether the door should be open or closed, the lights on or off, and whether the computer, which was projecting a blank blue rectangle on to the wall and making a humming noise, would be needed or could be closed down. I had already noticed the boy Ryan mentioned, who had a great shock of black curly hair that flowed down over his shoulders, and a nascent moustache of slightly paler hair nestling on his upper lip. Of the others it was hard at first to get any sense at all. There seemed to be a roughly equal number of men and women, but no two of them shared any characteristic of age, dress or social type. They had taken their places around a large white Formica table that was really a number of smaller tables pushed together to form a square. There was an atmosphere of uncertainty, almost of unease, in the anonymous room. I reminded myself that these people wanted something from me; that though they didn’t know me, or one another, they had come here with the purpose of being recognised.

It was decided that the windows should be opened but the door shut, and the person nearest to each side got up to do so. Ryan’s boy observed that it did seem odd to be opening the windows to warm up a room, but that science had involved us in many such inversions of reality, some of which were more useful than others. We should accept occasionally being inconvenienced by our conveniences, he said, just as we had to tolerate flaws in our loved ones: nothing was ever perfect, he said. Many of his fellow Greeks, he continued, believed that air conditioning was severely deleterious to health, and there was now a nationwide movement to keep it switched off in offices and public buildings, a sort of back-to-nature idea which was itself perfectionism of a kind, though it meant that everybody got very hot; which, he concluded somewhat delightedly, could only result in air conditioning being invented all over again.

I took a piece of paper and a pen and drew the shape of the large square table at which we all sat. I asked them for their names, of which there were ten in all, and wrote each one down in their place around the square. Then I asked each of them to tell me something they had noticed on their way here. There was a long, shuffling silence of transition; people cleared their throats, rearranged the papers in front of them or gazed blankly into space. Then a young woman, whose name, according to my diagram, was Sylvia, began to speak, having glanced around the room apparently to ascertain that no one else was going to take the initiative. Her small, resigned smile made it clear that she often found herself in this position.

‘When I was getting off the train,’ she said, ‘I noticed a man standing on the platform with a small white dog on his shoulder. He himself was very tall and dark,’ she added, ‘and the dog was quite beautiful. Its coat was curly and as white as snow, and it sat on the man’s shoulder and looked around itself.’

Another silence ensued. Presently a man of very neat and diminutive appearance — Theo, according to my diagram — who had come formally dressed in a pinstriped suit, put up his hand to speak.

‘This morning,’ he said, ‘I was crossing the square opposite my apartment building, on my way to the metro, and I saw on one of the low concrete walls around the square a woman’s handbag. It was a large and very expensive-looking handbag,’ he said, ‘made of the shiniest black patent leather with a gold clasp at the top, and it was standing there quite open on the wall. I looked around for a person likely to own such a thing, but the square was deserted. I wondered then whether the owner had been robbed, and the handbag left there while its contents had been stolen, but when I approached and looked inside — for the clasp was undone and the top was wide open, and I could examine the interior without touching it — I saw that everything was still there, a leather wallet, a set of keys, a powder compact and lipstick, even an apple that was presumably intended for a snack during the day. I stood there for quite a while, waiting to see who would turn up, and when nobody did I walked to the metro after all, because I had seen that otherwise I would be late. But I realised, while I was walking, that I should have taken the bag to a police station.’

Theo stopped, his story apparently at an end. The others immediately flew at him with a volley of questions. Having realised he should have handed the bag in to the police, why didn’t he turn around and go back? If he was late, why had he not simply handed the bag in at a nearby shop or even a kiosk, for safe keeping, or at the very least told a passer-by about the situation? He could even have taken the bag with him, and made the necessary calls at a more convenient time — better that than just to leave it there, for anyone to steal! Theo sat through this interrogation with his arms folded across his chest, a benign expression on his small, neat face. After a considerable length of time, when the questions had died down, he spoke again.

‘I had just crossed the square,’ he said, ‘and had turned around, in that moment having had this thought about the police, when what should I see but a young policeman, exactly halfway between myself and the bag, which I could still see sitting on the wall along the far side. He was coming up the path, at the end of which you must turn in one of two directions: right, which would have brought him to me, or left, which would take him straight to the bag. If he turned right, I saw that I would have no choice but to inform him, and to embroil myself in all the paperwork and wasted time that such acts entail. Fortunately for me,’ Theo said, ‘he turned left, and I stood there long enough to see him reach the bag, look around himself for its owner and peer inside at its contents as I had done, and then pick it up and take it with him on his way.’

The group applauded this performance heartily, while Theo continued to smile benignly in their midst. It was interesting to consider, said the longhaired boy — Georgeou, as my diagram now told me — that a story might merely be a series of events we believe ourselves to be involved in, but on which we have absolutely no influence at all. He himself had noticed nothing on his journey here: he habitually did not notice things which did not concern him, for that very reason, that he saw the tendency to fictionalise our own experiences as positively dangerous, because it convinced us that human life had some kind of design and that we were more significant than we actually were. As for him, his father had driven him here: they had had a very interesting conversation on the way about string theory, and then he had got out and come upstairs to this room.

‘It is surely not true,’ the girl sitting next to him said, with an expression of perplexity, ‘that there is no story of life; that one’s own existence doesn’t have a distinct form that has begun and will one day end, that has its own themes and events and cast of characters.’ She herself, on the way here, had passed an open window from which had drifted the sound of someone practising the piano. The building, it so happened, was a music college of the kind she herself had left two years before, abandoning her lifelong hopes of becoming a professional musician; she recognised the piece as the D minor fugue from Bach’s French Suites, a piece she had always loved and that caused her, hearing it so unexpectedly, to feel there on the pavement the most extraordinary sense of loss. It was as though the music had once belonged to her and now no longer did; as though she had been excluded from its beauty, was being forced to see it in the possession of someone else, and to revisit in its entirety her own sadness at her inability, for a number of reasons, to remain in that world. Certainly another person, she said, passing that window and hearing the D minor fugue, would have felt something completely different. In itself, the music coming out of the window means nothing at all, and whatever the feelings that might be attached to it, none of them had caused the music to be played in the first place, or the window to be left open so that the sound of it could be heard by passers-by. And even a person observing these events, she said, from across the road, could not have guessed, simply by seeing and hearing, what the story really was. What they would have seen was a girl walking past, at the same time as hearing some music being played from inside a building.

‘Which in fact’, Georgeou responded, his finger lifted in the air and a wild grin appearing on his face, ‘is all that actually happened!’

The girl — her name, when I looked, was Clio — was perhaps in her late twenties, but she had a childlike appearance, her dark hair drawn straight back into a ponytail and her pale, sallow skin bare of make-up. She wore a sleeveless kind of tunic, which added to her air of simplicity. I could imagine her in the monasticism of a practice room, her fingers flying surprisingly across the black and white keys. She looked at Georgeou with a face entirely passive and still, clearly in the expectation that he would have a great deal more to say.

Thankfully, Georgeou continued, there was an infinite thing called possibility, and an equally useful thing called probability. We had an excellent piece of evidence in terms of the music college, a place the majority of people would understand to be in the business of turning out professional musicians. Most people would have some concept of what a professional musician was, and would understand that the possibility of failure in such a profession was as great as the possibility of success. Hearing the music coming out of the building, therefore, they could envisage the person playing it as one who was running this risk, and whose fate could therefore take one of two basic forms, both imaginable by the average person.

‘In other words,’ Georgeou said, ‘I could deduce your story from the facts alone, and from my own experience of life, which is all that I know for a certainty, most importantly in this case my experience of failure, such as my failure to memorise the constellations of the southern hemisphere, which never ceases to upset me.’ He folded his hands and looked at them with a downcast expression.

I asked Georgeou how old he was, and he replied that he had turned fifteen last week. His father had bought him, as a birthday gift, a telescope, which they had set up on the flat roof of their apartment building and through which he was now able to study the sky, and most particularly the phases of the moon, in which he had a special interest. I said that I was glad he had received such a satisfying present, but that it was perhaps time to listen to what the others had to say. He nodded his head, his face brightening. He just wished to add, he said, that he was familiar with the D minor fugue from the French Suites: his father had played him a recording of it, and personally he had always found it to be quite an optimistic piece of music.

At this, the person sitting next to him began to speak.

‘Music,’ she said, in a languorous and dreamlike manner. ‘Music is a betrayer of secrets; it is more treacherous even than dreams, which at least have the virtue of being private.’

The woman who said this was of a glorious though eccentric appearance, somewhere in her fifties, with a demolished beauty she bore quite regally. The bones of her face were so impressively structured as to verge on the grotesque, an impression she had chosen to accentuate — in a way that struck me as distinctly and intentionally humorous — by surrounding her already enormous blue eyes in oceans of exotic blue and green shadow and then drawing, not carefully, around the lids with an even brighter blue; her sharp cheekbones wore slashes of pink blusher, and her mouth, which was unusually fleshy and pouting, was richly and inaccurately slathered in red lipstick. She wore a great quantity of gold jewellery and a dress, also blue, of gathered chiffon that left her neck and arms exposed, where the skin was very brown and intricately creased. Her name, according to my chart, was Marielle.

‘For example,’ she continued after a long pause, her enormous blue eyes travelling the faces around her, ‘it was when I heard my husband singing “L’amour est un oiseau rebelle” in the shower that I realised he was being unfaithful to me.’ She paused again, closing her fleshy lips together with difficulty over her distinctly large and protuberant front teeth as though to moisten them. ‘He was of course singing the part of Carmen herself,’ she resumed, ‘though I don’t think he realised his mistake, or would even have cared had he known. He has always been lazy about details, since he is a person of extremes, and prefers not to be detained by facts. As far as he was concerned he was simply singing out of sheer joy, so good was it to be him in our apartment on that sunny morning, with his mistress tucked away somewhere on the other side of town while he showered in his stall of travertine and gold, where he even likes to keep a few hardier artworks, as well as a small piece of the Parthenon frieze that is still presumed to be missing and that he uses as a soap dish; with the new high-pressure hot-water system we had just had installed and the towels he had ordered all the way from Saks Fifth Avenue in New York, which enveloped you like a baby in its mother’s arms and made you want to go back to sleep again.

‘I myself was in the kitchen,’ she said, ‘squeezing oranges. I had just made myself the most delicious breakfast, with the ripest little melon I had found in the market and a slice of fresh cheese I bought from a woman who keeps beautiful goats on a hillside near Delphi, when I heard the sound of him singing. I knew immediately what it meant. The idiot, I thought — why does he have to holler it out so that I can hear it all the way in the kitchen? I, the only one who knows what could have caused that soap opera of betrayal to pop into his head, taking for himself the best part, just as he would always take the best part of whatever was on my plate, simply reach across and take whatever he liked the look of, even though I had saved it until last. Why couldn’t he have kept his mouth shut? And all before I had had the chance to eat my beautiful breakfast, which now he would find waiting for him untouched on the counter when he came out of the shower: his happiness, I knew, would be complete.’

She paused to tuck a strand of hair, which was dyed a bright yellow blonde, behind her ear, and moistened her lips again before she resumed. ‘This morning,’ she said, ‘I had arranged to call in at his office on my way here, to discuss financial matters, about which in any case we always agree. My husband’s lack of consideration is matched by his complete lack of spite. He is a man,’ she sighed, ‘of very good taste, which for me has always been a form of torture, because I am a good student and have been unable to prevent myself from learning his taste very thoroughly, to the extent that I have come to know what he wants before he even wants it himself, and in the matter of women I have become positively prophetic, almost to the extent that I see them with his eyes and feel his own desire for them. So I learned in the end to close my eyes; and if only I had remembered to close my ears too, that morning in the kitchen, I might still be looking down at my plate to find that the nicest and most delicious morsel had somehow vanished.

‘Today, when I took the glass lift up to his office, which is on the thirteenth floor, I emerged to see that everything there had changed. A complete redecoration had occurred: the new theme was white, and being a man of extremes my husband had evidently decided that everything not white — including some of the people — had to be removed. And so Martha, my dear friend, his secretary, was no longer to be found in her place by the big window, at her old desk where she kept her packed lunch and her photographs of her children and a pair of flat shoes for walking, where we used to sit and talk and she would tell me all the things I needed to know and none of the things I didn’t — Martha was gone, though my husband assured me that she had not been actually eradicated, merely given a big office of her own at the back, where she wouldn’t be seen by visitors. In her place by the window, in the all-white world that reminded me of nothing so much as that morning in the kitchen and the slice of fresh white goat’s cheese I had to leave behind forever on its plate, sat a new girl. She, of course, wore white, and had skin pale as an albino’s; and her hair, too, was entirely white, except for one long strand which came out like a plume from her head and was dyed — the only piece of colour in the place — the brightest blue. In the lift on the way down I marvelled at the sheer genius of the man, who had also managed, while I was there, to exact my forgiveness as stealthily as a pickpocket removes your wallet, and was returning me to the street lighter, though poorer, with that quill of blue perched in my thoughts like a feather in a beggar’s cap.’

Marielle fell silent, her ridged face lifted, her enormous glittering eyes gazing straight ahead. It was quite common, the man to her left presently observed, for young people now to use their appearance as a means of shocking or disturbing others: he himself — and he was sure the same was true for all of us — had seen hairstyles far more extreme than the one Marielle described, not to mention tattoos and piercings of sometimes an apparently violent nature, which all the same said nothing whatever about their owners, who were often people of the greatest sweetness and docility. It had taken him a long time to accept this fact, for he was predisposed to be judgemental and to find the meaning of a thing commensurate with its appearance, and also to be frightened of what he didn’t understand; and though he didn’t, strictly speaking, comprehend the reasons why people might choose to mutilate themselves, he had learned not to read too much into it. If anything, he saw such outward extremes as the symbols of a correspondingly great inner emptiness, a futility that he believed came from the lack of engagement with any meaningful system of belief. His peers — and he was only twenty-four, though he was aware he looked somewhat older — were for the most part quite astonishingly indifferent to the religious and political debates of our times. But for him, political awakening had been the awakening of his whole sensibility, had given him a way of existing in the world, something about which he felt pride but also a certain anxiety, almost a kind of guilt, which he found difficult to explain.

This morning, for instance, on his way here he had walked through the part of the city where last summer — as everyone would recall — there were demonstrations, in which he and his political friends had proudly participated. He found himself following the exact route they had followed that day, treading streets he had not visited again until now, and found himself filled with emotion at the memories they brought back to him. Then, at a certain point, he passed through an alleyway on both sides of which the buildings were burnt-out shells: he could see through the glassless windows into the cavernous, ruined interiors, all blackened and ghostly and still filled with the mess and detritus of their own destruction, for in the whole year that had passed no one had come to clear it away. Quite how these buildings had been set alight he did not recall, but it had been towards evening, and the fires had been seen from all over Athens. News agencies had broadcast footage of the smoke billowing across the city that had been relayed all over the world; it was, he could not deny, part of the excitement of that night, as well as a necessary means — he believed — of getting the demonstrators’ message across. Yet all he could feel, looking through into the desolate ruins, was shame, to the extent that he actually thought he heard his mother’s voice, asking him whether it was really he that was responsible for all that mess, because people had told her so and until he confirmed it she wouldn’t know whether or not to believe them.

As a child, he continued — his name, according to my drawing, was Christos — he had been extremely shy and awkward, to the point where his mother had decided to enrol him in dancing classes as a way of building his confidence. These classes, which took place in a nearby hall and were attended by local girls and a smaller number of local boys — barbarians all — were a torment to him on a scale that even now is difficult for him to convey. It was not only that he was overweight and physically unconfident: it was that he had a fear of exposure that drove him inexplicably, in such situations, to make himself fall over. It was a kind of vertigo, he said, such as drives people who are frightened of heights to want to jump; he simply couldn’t bear being looked at, and to ask him to dance was like asking him to walk a high wire, where the thought of falling must be so ever-present that it would eventually bring itself about. And fall he did, repeatedly and with anguish, flailing humiliated among the twirling feet of the other children like a beached whale, and consequently subject to much mockery, until the dancing teacher was forced to suggest that he stop attending classes and he was allowed to stay at home.

‘Imagine, then, my horror,’ he said, ‘when I finally went to university and fell in with a group of fine, committed, like-minded individuals such as I had dreamed my whole life of having as friends, only to discover that the chief hobby and pastime of this group, their greatest love — after politics — was dancing. Night after night they would invite me to dances and I would, of course, refuse. My closest associate in this social world, Maria, a girl with whom I had the most passionate political discussions, a girl I shared everything with, even my love of crosswords, of which we would complete several together each day — even Maria was disappointed in my refusal to participate in this traumatic activity. Trust me, she said, just as my mother had said before her — trust me, you’ll enjoy it. I came to believe, in the end, that if I didn’t dance I would lose Maria’s friendship, while at the same time being certain that once she saw me dancing I would lose it anyway. There was no way out, and so I agreed one evening to accompany them to the club they always went to. It was not at all what I expected, for the reason that it had nothing to do with the modern world. It was a place devoted to the style and music of the nineteen-fifties: people came there dressed, as it were, in costume, and danced something called Lindy Hop. Seeing this, I was more terrified than ever; but perhaps,’ he said, ‘the best way to confront our fears is to put them in costume, so to speak; to translate them, for the simple act of translation very often renders things harmless. The habits — one might almost say the constraints — of one’s personality and cast of mind are slipped free of; I found myself walking on to the dance floor,’ Christos said, ‘hand in hand with Maria, convinced that I should fall, and yet when the music started — an irresistible, happy music which, to this day, I am unable to hear without every trace of melancholy and doubt evaporating — I found myself not falling but flying, flying up and up, around and around, so fast and so high that I seemed to fly clear even of my body itself.’

My phone rang on the table in front of me. It was my younger son’s number. I picked it up and said that I would call him back later.

‘I’m lost,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where I am.’

Holding the phone to my chest I told the group that there was a minor emergency and that we would take a short break. I went out and stood in the corridor, where there were noticeboards with lists and advertisements and bulletins pinned to them: apartments to rent, photocopying services, concerts forthcoming. I asked my son whether he could see a sign with a road name on it.

‘I’ll just look,’ he said.

I could hear traffic in the background and the sound of his breathing. After a while he gave me the name of the street, and I asked him what on earth he was doing there.

‘I’m trying to get to school,’ he said.

I asked why he wasn’t going to school the way I had arranged for him this week, with his friend Mark and Mark’s mother.

‘Mark isn’t coming to school today,’ he said. ‘He’s ill.’

I told him to turn around and walk back the way he had come, telling me the name of each street he passed, and when he reached the right one I told him to turn down it and carry straight on. After a few minutes, during which I listened to his puffing breath and the tapping of his feet on the pavement, he said: ‘I can see it, I can see the building, it’s all right, I can see the building.’

You’re not late, I said, looking at my watch and calculating the time in England; you’ve got a few minutes to get your breath back. I reminded him of the directions in reverse that he was to follow afterwards and said I hoped he’d have a nice day.

‘Thanks,’ he said.

In the classroom the group was waiting, just as I had left it except that one student, a very large and soft-looking young girl who wore glasses with thick black frames, was eating an enormous savoury pastry whose meaty smell was quite overpowering. She held the bottom of the pastry in its paper bag while she bit slowly from the top, to prevent crumbs from falling. Beside her sat a young man as slim and dark and compact as she was soft and formless. He put up his hand fleetingly and withdrew it again. On his way here, he said, in a quiet, precise voice — I looked down to find his name, which was Aris — on his way here he had passed, lying by the side of the road, the putrefying body of a dog, grotesquely swollen and cloaked in swarms of black flies. He had heard the sound of the flies from some way off, he added, and had wondered what it was. It was a sound that was menacing while also being curiously beautiful, so long as you couldn’t see its source. He did not come from Athens, he continued, but his brother lives here and offered him a place to stay for the week. It was a very small apartment; he was sleeping on the sofa, in a room that was also the kitchen. He slept with his head right next to the fridge, on whose door there were various magnets he had had no choice but to examine, including one made of plastic in the shape of a pair of naked breasts, so crudely formed that the nipple on the right breast was significantly off-centre, a dissonance he had considered for many hours while lying there. His brother washed his clothes in the kitchen sink and then hung them all around the room to dry: he worked in an office and needed clean shirts every day. Every available chair in the room, as well as the shelves and window ledges, had a shirt draped over it. While drying, the shirts had taken the impress of the forms beneath them. Lying on the sofa, he had noticed this.

The girl beside him had by now finished her pastry and was occupied in folding the bag into a neat square, smoothing out the creases with her fingers. When she looked up she caught my eye and immediately dropped the paper square on to the table in front of her with a guilty expression. Her name was Rosa, she said, and she wasn’t sure whether her own contribution would be permitted. She didn’t know whether she had understood the exercise correctly. In any case, hers wasn’t like the others, and it probably wouldn’t count, but it was all she could think of. She hadn’t really seen anything on her way here: all that had happened was that she had passed the park where her grandmother used to take her in the afternoons when she was smaller. There was a little playground there, with a swing she used to sit on while her grandmother pushed her. This morning she had seen the playground as she passed, and had seen the swing, and had remembered her grandmother and the pleasant afternoons they spent together. She fell silent. I thanked her, and she gazed at me mildly through her black-rimmed glasses.

The hour was nearly up. The woman sitting directly opposite me, whose somewhat startled face was positioned beneath the face of the clock on the wall, so that the two shapes had become joined or connected in my perception to the extent that I had almost forgotten she was there, now said that it had been interesting for her to realise how little she noticed of the objective world. Her consciousness, at this point — she was forty-three years old — was so crammed full not just of her own memories, obligations, dreams, knowledge and the plethora of her day-to-day responsibilities, but also of other people’s — gleaned over years of listening, talking, empathising, worrying — that she was frightened most of all of the boundaries separating these numerous types of mental freight, the distinctions between them, crumbling away until she was no longer certain what had happened to her and what to other people she knew, or sometimes even what was or was not real. This morning, for instance, her sister had called her very early — neither of them sleeps very well, so they often talk at this hour — to tell her of the evening she and her husband had spent at a friend’s house, where they were invited for dinner. The friend had just had her kitchen completely extended and refurbished, and the centre-piece was an enormous sunken glass panel in the ceiling that made the room as light and airy as a cathedral.

‘My sister’, she said, ‘complimented her friend on this stunning effect, and the friend admitted that in fact she had borrowed the idea from another friend, who had had her kitchen refurbished some months before. Since then, however, a most terrible thing had happened. The friend’s friend had invited a large number of guests to dinner. Shortly before their arrival she had noticed a tiny crack in the glass of the panel, as though something small but sharp had fallen on it from above. She was annoyed, because the panel had cost a considerable amount of money, and being all of one piece she didn’t see any alternative but to replace the whole thing, despite the fact that only one small area had been affected. The guests arrived, and during the course of the evening an incredible storm came in over Athens. The rain came down in torrents as the group sat and ate beneath the glass panel. They were marvelling at the acoustic and visual effect of the water on the glass when, with a great groaning and creaking, the whole thing suddenly collapsed on top of them, the flaw in the glass apparently having weakened the structure to the point where it could not bear the weight of the water falling on it.’

The woman paused. ‘This,’ she said, ‘you will recall, was told to me by my sister over the telephone, a story that neither affected her nor, strictly speaking, concerned her. And since no one, amazingly, was hurt, it wasn’t a story that would shock people and that you would tell for that reason. Nor did it really affect the friend who had told it to her in the first place, except by association, because she had a panel in her ceiling of the same type. So I received it, as it were, third-hand, but it is as real to me as if I had experienced it myself. All morning I was troubled by it. Yet like most people I hear of terrible occurrences — nearly all of them far worse — every day, through the newspapers and the television, and I wondered why this one had taken a place in my mind among my own memories and experiences, so that I was having difficulty telling them apart. The reality of my life is largely concerned with what are called middle-class values — the people that I know refurbish their houses often, as I do myself, and they invite other people to these houses for dinner. But there is a difference, because the people in the story sound a little grander than the people I know, most of whom could not afford to put a glass panel in the ceiling, though they would very much like to. My sister, however, moves in slightly more exalted circles than I do: this is something I am aware of as a source of tension in our relationship. I am, I admit, slightly jealous of her social life and of the kinds of people she meets, and sometimes I think she could do more to include me in the more interesting world she inhabits.

‘The second reason,’ she continued, ‘has to do with the story itself, and with the tiny flaw in the glass panel that eventually led to its entire collapse under pressure: the actual pressure of the water, and the more mysterious and intangible pressure of the people beneath it, who were admiring it while assuming absolutely that it would hold. When it did not, it became the cause of unutterable damage and destruction, almost an instrument of evil, and the symbolism of this arrangement of facts has a certain significance for me.’ She was silent for a while, the juddering second hand moving around the clock face above her head. I looked at my chart and found that her name was Penelope. ‘I would like’, she resumed, ‘to see the world more innocently again, more impersonally, but I have no idea how to achieve this, other than by going somewhere completely unknown, where I have no identity and no associations. But how such a thing could be accomplished, and even where such a place might be, I have no idea; not to mention the relationships and responsibilities themselves,’ she concluded, ‘which drive me mad but at the same time make escape from them impossible.’

Each member of the group had now spoken, except for one, a woman whose name on my chart was Cassandra and whose expression I had watched grow sourer and sourer as the hour passed, who had made her displeasure known by a series of increasingly indiscreet groans and sighs, and who now sat with her arms implacably folded, shaking her head. I asked her whether she had anything, before we concluded, to contribute, and she said that she did not. She had obviously been mistaken, she said: she had been told this was a class about learning to write, something that as far as she was aware involved using your imagination. She didn’t know what I thought had been achieved here, and she wasn’t all that interested in finding out. At least Ryan, she said, had taught them something. She would be asking the organisers to refund her money, and would make damn sure they got her feedback. I don’t know who you are, she said to me, getting to her feet and collecting her things, but I’ll tell you one thing, you’re a lousy teacher.