The Course of Love

The Future

It is Kirsten’s birthday, and Rabih has arranged for them to spend the night at a wildly luxurious and expensive hotel in the Highlands. They drop the children off with a cousin of hers in Fort William and drive to the nineteenth-century castle. It promises battlements, five stars, room service, a billiard room, a pool, a French restaurant, and a ghost.

The children have made their unhappiness clear. Esther has accused her father of ruining her mother’s birthday. “I just know you’re going to get bored without us and that Mummy is going to miss us,” she insists. “I don’t think you should be away for so long.” (They will be meeting again the following afternoon.) William reassures his sister that their parents can always watch television and might even find a games room with a computer.

Their room is in a turret at the top of the building. There is a large bathtub in the center, and the windows look out over a succession of peaks dominated by Ben Nevis, still carrying a light dusting of snow on its tip in June.

Once the young bellboy has dropped off their luggage, they feel awkward in each other’s presence. It has been years, many years, since they have been alone in a hotel room together, without children or anything in particular to do over the next twenty-four hours.

It feels as if they are having an affair, so differently do they act towards each other in this setting. Encouraged by the dignity and quiet of the vast, high-ceilinged room, they are more formal and respectful. Kirsten asks Rabih with unaccustomed solicitude what he might like to order from the room-service tea menu—and he runs her a bath.

The trick is perhaps not to start a new life but to learn to reconsider the old one with less jaded and habituated eyes.

He lies on the bed and watches her soak in the tub: her hair is up, and she is reading a magazine. He feels sorry for and guilty about the troubles they have caused each other. He looks at a set of brochures he has picked up off the desk. There is shooting offered in September, and options for salmon fishing in February. When she is finished, she rises from the bath with her arms crossed over her breasts. He is touched, and a little aroused, by her reserve.

They go downstairs for dinner. The restaurant is candlelit, with high-backed chairs and antlers hanging on the walls. The headwaiter describes the six-course menu in an absurdly high-flown manner which they nonetheless surprise themselves by very much enjoying. They know enough about the squalor of domesticity by now not to resist the chance to revel in a bit of elaborately staged hospitality.

They start by talking about the children, their friends, and work; and then, after the third course—venison on a bed of celeriac mousse—they move on to less familiar territory, discussing her suppressed ambition to take up an instrument again and his desire to invite her to Beirut. Kirsten even begins, finally, to speak of her father. She explains that whenever she’s in a new place, she wonders whether he might happen to be living somewhere nearby. She wants to try to get in touch with him. Her eyes shine with withheld tears, and she says she’s tired of being angry with him her whole life long. Maybe she would have done the same thing as he did, in his shoes. Almost. She’d like him to meet his grandchildren and, she adds with a smile, her horrible and peculiar Middle Eastern husband.

Rabih has ordered some recklessly expensive French wine, almost the price of the room itself, and it has begun to have its effect. He wants to get another bottle for the hell of it. He senses the psychological and moral role of wine, its capacity to open up channels of feeling and communication which are otherwise closed off—not merely to offer a crude escape from difficulties, but to allow access to emotions which daily life unfairly leaves no room for. Getting very drunk hasn’t seemed so important in a long time.

He realizes there is still so much he doesn’t know about his wife. She seems almost a stranger to him. He imagines that it’s their first date and she has agreed to come and fuck him in a Scottish castle. She has left behind her children and her awful husband. She is touching him under the table, looking at him with her clever, skeptical eyes, and spilling a bit of her wine on the tablecloth.

He’s very grateful to the waiters in their black uniforms and the locally reared lamb that has died for them and the three-layer fondant chocolate cake and the petits fours and the chamomile tea for conspiring to create a setting which places the fundamental mystery and charm of his wife on appropriate display.

She isn’t good at receiving compliments, of course, but Rabih knows this by now, knows where it all comes from—the independence and reticence which have been so upsetting to him in the past but won’t be so much in the future—and he plows on nevertheless and tells her how beautiful she looks, what wise eyes she has, how proud he is of her, and how sorry he is about everything. And instead of rebuffing his words with one of her normal stoic remarks, she smiles—a warm, wide, quiet smile—and says thank you and squeezes his hand and may even be starting to tear up slightly again just as the waiter comes and asks if he can get Madam anything else at all. She replies, slurring slightly, “Just some more loveliness,” then catches herself.

It’s gone to her head, too, making her brave—brave enough to be weak. It feels like a dam breaking inside her. She has had enough of resisting him; she wants to give herself to him again, as she once did. She knows she will survive whatever might happen. She is long past being a girl. She is a woman who has buried her own mother in the clammy soil of Tomnahurich Cemetery and put two children on the earth. She has made a boy and so has a knowledge of what men are like before they are in any position to damage women. She knows that male viciousness is mostly just fear. From her newfound position of strength, she feels generous and indulgent to their hurtful weakness.

“Sorry, Mr. Sfouf, that I haven’t always been who you wanted me to be.”

He strokes her bare arm and replies, “Yet you’ve been so much more.”

They feel a giddy loyalty towards what they have built up together: their disputatious, fractious, laughter-filled, silly, beautiful marriage that they love because it is so distinctly and painfully their own. They feel proud to have come this far, to have kept at it, trying again and again to understand the spectres in each other’s minds, hammering out one peace accord after another. There could have been so many reasons not to be together still. Breaking up would have been the natural, almost inevitable thing to do. It’s the sticking around that is the weird and exotic achievement—and they feel a loyalty to their battle-hardened, scarred version of love.

In bed back in the room, he cherishes the marks on her stomach that their children have made, how they have torn and damaged and exhausted her with their innocent primal egoism. She notices a new undulating softness to him. It is raining heavily; the wind whistles around the battlements. When they are done, they hold each other by the window and drink a local mineral water by the light of a lamp in the yard below.

The hotel has assumed a metaphysical importance for them. The effects will not be limited to these exotic premises; they will carry the lessons in appreciation and reconciliation into the colder, plainer rooms of their daily life.

The following afternoon, Kirsten’s cousin returns the children to them. Esther and William run to greet their parents in the billiard room by Reception. Esther is carrying Dobbie with her. Both parents have headaches as if they’d just stepped off a long-haul flight.

The kids complain in the strongest terms about having been abandoned like orphans and forced to sleep in a bedroom that smelt of dog. They demand explicit confirmation that this sort of trip will never happen again.

Then, as planned, the four of them go for a walk. They follow a river for a while and then ascend the foothills of Ben Nevis. After half an hour they emerge from the woods, and a landscape opens up before them that stretches out for miles in the summer sun. Far below, they can see sheep and toy-like farm buildings.

They make a base camp in a patch of heather. Esther takes off her boots and runs along a stream. She will be a woman in a few years, and the story will start all over again. William tracks a trail of ants back to their nest. It is the warmest day of the year so far. Rabih lies down on the earth, spread-eagled, and follows the path of a small, unthreatening cloud across the blueness.

Wanting to capture this moment, Rabih calls them to gather for a photo, then sets the camera on a rock and runs to get into the shot. He knows that perfect happiness comes in tiny, incremental units only, perhaps no more than five minutes at a time. This is what one has to take with both hands and cherish.

Struggles and conflicts will arise again soon enough: one of the children will become unhappy; Kirsten will make a short-tempered remark in response to something careless he has done; he will remember the challenges he’s facing at work; he will feel scared, bored, spoilt, and tired.

No one can predict the eventual fate of this photo, he knows: how it will be read in the future, what the viewer will look for in their eyes. Will it be the last photo of them all together, taken just hours before the crash on the way home, or a month before he found out about Kirsten’s affair and she moved out, or the year before Esther’s symptoms started? Or will it merely sit for decades in a dusty frame on a shelf in the living room, waiting to be picked up casually by William when he returns home to introduce his parents to his fiancée?

Rabih’s awareness of the uncertainty makes him want to hang on to the light all the more fervently. If only for a moment, it all makes sense. He knows how to love Kirsten, how to have sufficient faith in himself, and how to feel compassion for and be patient with his children. But it is all desperately fragile. He knows full well that he has no right to call himself a happy man; he is simply an ordinary human being passing through a small phase of contentment.

Very little can be made perfect; he knows that now. He has a sense of the bravery it takes to live even an utterly mediocre life like his own. To keep all of this going, to ensure his continuing status as an almost sane person, his capacity to provide for his family financially, the survival of his marriage and the flourishing of his children—these projects offer no fewer opportunities for heroism than an epic tale. He is unlikely ever to be called upon to serve his nation or to fight an enemy, but courage is required nevertheless within his circumscribed domains. The courage not to be vanquished by anxiety, not to hurt others out of frustration, not to grow too furious with the world for the perceived injuries it heedlessly inflicts, not to go crazy and somehow to manage to persevere in a more or less adequate way through the difficulties of married life—this is true courage; this is a heroism in a class all its own. And for a brief moment on the slopes of a Scottish mountain in the late-afternoon summer sun—and every now and then thereafter—Rabih Khan feels that he might, with Kirsten by his side, be strong enough for whatever life demands of him.