Outline: A Novel Read online

  My neighbour turned to me again, and asked me what work it was that was taking me to Athens. For the second time I felt the conscious effort of his enquiry, as though he had trained himself in the recovery of objects that were falling from his grasp. I remembered the way, when each of my sons was a baby, they would deliberately drop things from their high chair in order to watch them fall to the floor, an activity as delightful to them as its consequences were appalling. They would stare down at the fallen thing – a half-eaten rusk, or a plastic ball – and become increasingly agitated by its failure to return. Eventually they would begin to cry, and usually found that the fallen object came back to them by that route. It always surprised me that their response to this chain of events was to repeat it: as soon as the object was in their hands they would drop it again, leaning over to watch it fall. Their delight never lessened, and nor did their distress. I always expected that at some point they would realise the distress was unnecessary and would choose to avoid it, but they never did. The memory of suffering had no effect whatever on what they elected to do: on the contrary, it compelled them to repeat it, for the suffering was the magic that caused the object to come back and allowed the delight in dropping it to become possible again. Had I refused to return it the very first time they dropped it, I suppose they would have learned something very different, though what that might have been I wasn’t sure.

  I told him I was a writer, and was going to Athens for a couple of days to teach a course at a summer school there. The course was entitled ‘How to Write’: a number of different writers were teaching on it, and since there is no one way to write I supposed we would give the students contradictory advice. They were mostly Greeks, I had been told, though for the purposes of this course they were expected to write in English. Other people were sceptical about that idea but I didn’t see what was wrong with it. They could write in whatever language they wanted: it made no difference to me. Sometimes, I said, the loss of transition became the gain of simplicity. Teaching was just a way of making a living, I continued. But I had one or two friends in Athens I might see while I was there.

  A writer, my neighbour said, inclining his head in a gesture that could have conveyed either respect for the profession or a total ignorance of it. I had noticed, when I first sat down beside him, that he was reading a well-thumbed Wilbur Smith: this, he now said, was not entirely representative of his reading tastes, though it was true he lacked discrimination where fiction was concerned. His interest was in books of information, of facts and the interpretation of facts, and he was confident that he was not unsophisticated here in his preferences. He could recognise a fine prose style; one of his favourite writers, for example, was John Julius Norwich. But in fiction, admittedly, he was uneducated. He removed the Wilbur Smith from the seat pocket, where it still remained, and plunged it into the briefcase at his feet so that it was out of sight, as though wishing to disown it, or perhaps thinking that I might forget I had seen it. As it happened I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even of self-definition – I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another: in fact, if I read something I admired I found myself increasingly disinclined to mention it at all. What I knew personally to be true had come to seem unrelated to the process of persuading others. I did not, any longer, want to persuade anyone of anything.

  ‘My second wife,’ my neighbour said presently, ‘had never read a book in her life.’

  She was absolutely ignorant, he continued, even of basic history and geography, and would say the most embarrassing things in company without any sense of shame at all. On the contrary, it angered her when people spoke of things she had no knowledge of: when a Venezuelan friend came to visit, for instance, she refused to believe that such a country existed because she had never heard of it. She herself was English, and so exquisitely beautiful it was hard not to credit her with some inner refinement; but though her nature did contain some surprises, they were not of a particularly pleasant kind. He often invited her parents to stay, as though by studying them he might decipher the mystery of their daughter. They would come to the island, where the ancestral home still remained, and would stay for weeks at a time. Never had he met people of such extraordinary blandness, such featurelessness: however much he exhausted himself with trying to stimulate them, they were as unresponsive as a pair of armchairs. In the end he became very fond of them, as one can become fond of armchairs; particularly the father, whose boundless reticence was so extreme that gradually my neighbour came to understand that he must suffer from some form of psychic injury. It moved him to see someone so injured by life. In his younger days he almost certainly wouldn’t even have noticed the man, let alone pondered the causes of his silence; and in this way, in recognising his father-in-law’s suffering, he began to recognise his own. It sounds trivial, yet it could almost be said that through this recognition he felt his whole life turning on its axis: the history of his self-will appeared to him, by a simple revolution in perspective, as a moral journey. He had turned around, like a climber turns around and looks back down the mountain, reviewing the path he has travelled, no longer immersed in the ascent.

  A long time ago – so long that he had forgotten the author’s name – he read some memorable lines in a story about a man who is trying to translate another story, by a much more famous author. In these lines – which, my neighbour said, he still remembers to this day – the translator says that a sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a process of intuition to which exaggeration and force are fatal. Those lines concerned the art of writing, but looking around himself in early middle age my neighbour began to see that they applied just as much to the art of living. Everywhere he looked he saw people as it were ruined by the extremity of their own experiences, and his new parents-in-law appeared to be a case in point. What was clear, in any case, was that their daughter had mistaken him for a far wealthier man: the fatal yacht, on which he had hidden out as a marital escapee and which was his sole remaining asset from that time, had lured her. She had a great need for luxury and he began to work as he never had before, blindly and frantically, spending all his time in meetings and on airplanes, negotiating and securing deals, taking on more and more risk in order to provide her with the wealth she took for granted was there. He was, in effect, manufacturing an illusion: no matter what he did, the gap between illusion and reality could never be closed. Gradually, he said, this gap, this distance between how things were and how I wanted them to be, began to undermine me. I felt myself becoming empty, he said, as though I had been living until now on the reserves I had accumulated over the years and they had gradually dwindled away.

  It was now that the propriety of his first wife, the health and prosperity of their family life and the depth of their shared past, began to smite him. The first wife, after a period of unhappiness, had married again: she had become, after their divorce, quite fixated on skiing, going to northern Europe and the mountains whenever she could, and before long had declared herself married to an instructor in Lech who had given her back, so she said, her confidence. That marriage, my neighbour admitted, remained intact to this day. But back in the time of its inception, my neighbour had begun to realise he had made a mistake, and had endeavoured to restore contact with his first wife, with what intentions he wasn’t quite clear. Their two children, a boy and a girl, were still quite small: it was reasonable enough, after all, that they should be in touch. Dimly he remembered that in the period immediately following their separation, it was she who was always trying to get hold of him; and remembered too that he had avoided her calls, intent as he was on the pursuit of the woman who was now his second wife. He was unavailable, gone into a new world in which his first wife appeared barely to exist, in which she was a kind of ridiculous cardboard figure whose actions – so he persuaded himself and others – were the actions of a madwoman. But now it was she who c
ould not be found: she was plunging down cold white mountainsides in the Arlberg, where he did not exist for her any more than she had existed for him. She didn’t answer his calls, or answered them curtly, distractedly, saying she had to go. She could not be called upon to recognise him, and this was the most bewildering thing of all, for it made him feel absolutely unreal. It was with her, after all, that his identity had been forged: if she no longer recognised him, then who was he?

  The strange thing is, he said, that even now, when these events are long in the past and he and his first wife communicate more regularly, she only has to speak for more than a minute and she begins to irritate him. And he didn’t doubt that had she rushed back from the mountains, in the time when he seemed to have had a change of heart, she would quickly have come to irritate him so much that the whole demise of their relationship would have been re-enacted. Instead they have grown older at a distance: when he speaks to her he imagines quite clearly the life they would have had, the life they would be sharing now. It is like walking past a house you used to live in: the fact that it still exists, so concrete, makes everything that has happened since seem somehow insubstantial. Without structure, events are unreal: the reality of his wife, like the reality of the house, was structural, determinative. It had limitations, which he encounters when he hears his wife on the telephone. Yet the life without limitations has been exhausting, has been one long history of actual and emotional expense, like thirty years of living in one hotel after another. It is the feeling of impermanence, of homelessness, that has cost him. He has spent and spent to rid himself of that feeling, to put a roof over his own head. And all the time he sees at a distance his home – his wife – standing there, essentially unchanged, but belonging to other people now.

  I said that the way he had told his story rather proved that point, because I couldn’t see the second wife half as clearly as I could see the first. In fact, I didn’t entirely believe in her. She was rolled out as an all-purpose villain, but what wrong, really, had she done? She had never pretended to be an intellectual, as for instance my neighbour had pretended to be rich, and since she had been valued entirely for her beauty, it was natural – some would say sensible – that she should want to put a price on it. And as for Venezuela, who was he to say what someone ought or ought not to know? There was plenty, I felt sure, that he himself didn’t know, and what he didn’t know didn’t exist for him, any more than Venezuela existed for his pretty wife. My neighbour frowned so deeply that clownish furrows appeared on either side of his chin.

  ‘I admit,’ he said after a long pause, ‘that on this subject I may be somewhat biased.’

  The truth was that he could not forgive his second wife her treatment of his children, who spent the school holidays with them, usually at the old family house on the island. She was particularly jealous of the eldest, a boy, whose every movement she criticised. She watched him with an obsessiveness that was quite extraordinary to behold, and she was always putting him to work around the house, blaming him for the smallest evidence of disorder and insisting on her right to punish him for what she alone thought of as misdemeanours. Once, he returned to the house to find that the boy had been shut in the extensive, catacomb-like cellars that ran all the way under the building, a dark and sinister place at the best of times, where he himself used to be afraid to go as a child. He was lying on his side, shaking, and told his father he had been put there for failing to clear his plate from the table. It was as though he represented everything that was burdensome in her wifely role, as though he were the incarnation of some injustice she felt pinioned by: and he was the proof, too, that she had not come first and never would, so far as her husband was concerned.

  He could never understand this need of hers for primacy, for after all it wasn’t his fault that he had lived a life before he met her; but increasingly she seemed bent on the destruction of that history, and of the children who were its ineradicable evidence. They had, by then, a child of their own, also a boy, but far from rounding things out this had only seemed to make her jealousy worse. She accused him of not loving their son as much as he loved his older children; she watched him constantly for evidence of favour, and in fact she favoured their own child blatantly, but she was often angry with the little boy too, as though she felt that a different child could have won this battle for her. And indeed she more or less abandoned their son, when the end came. They were spending the summer on the island, and her parents – the armchairs – were there too. He was fonder of them than ever by now, for he saw their flatness, sympathetically, as the evidence of their daughter’s cyclonic nature. They were like a terrain forever being hit by tornadoes; they lived in a state of permanent semi-devastation. His wife got it into her head that she wanted to return to Athens: she was bored, he supposed, on the island; there were probably parties she wanted to go to, things she wanted to do; she had got tired of always spending the summers here, in the family mausoleum; and besides, her parents were due to fly back shortly from Athens, so they could all go together, she said, leaving the older children here in the care of the housekeeper. My neighbour replied that he couldn’t go to Athens now. He couldn’t possibly leave his children – they were staying with him for another two or three weeks. How could he desert them, when this was the only time he had with them? Well if he didn’t come, she said, he could quite simply consider their marriage to be over.

  This was, then, the actual contest: finally he was being asked to choose, and of course it felt to him like no choice at all. It felt utterly unreasonable, and a terrible argument ensued, at the end of which his wife, their son and her parents boarded a boat and returned to Athens. Before they left, his father-in-law made a rare excursion into speech. What he said was that he could see it from my neighbour’s point of view. It was the last my neighbour ever saw of them, and more or less the last he ever saw of his wife, who returned with her parents to England and from there divorced him. She hired a very good lawyer, and he found himself near financial ruin for the second time in his life. He sold the yacht, and bought a small motor boat that reflected the state of his fortunes more accurately. Their son, though, came drifting back once his mother remarried, having found herself an English aristocrat of demonstrably enormous wealth – and discovered that the child impeded her second marriage in much the same way my neighbour’s children had impeded his. In this last detail there was evidence if not of his ex-wife’s integrity, then at least of a certain consistency.

  So much is lost, he said, in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments, and if you don’t hold on to them the sea will take them too. Yet I still, he said, believe in love. Love restores almost everything, and where it can’t restore, it takes away the pain. For example, you, he said to me – at the moment you’re sad, but if you were in love the sadness would stop. Sitting there I thought again of my sons in their high chairs, and of their discovery that distress magically made the ball come back. At that moment the plane took its first, gentle lurch downward in the darkness. A voice began to speak over the intercom; the air hostesses began to stalk up and down, herding people back into their seats. My neighbour asked me for my telephone number: perhaps we could have dinner some time, while I was in Athens.

  I remained dissatisfied by the story of his second marriage. It had lacked objectivity; it relied too heavily on extremes, and the moral properties it ascribed to those extremes were often incorrect. It was not wrong, for instance, to be jealous of a child, though it was certainly very painful for all concerned. I found I did not believe certain key facts, for instance that his wife had locked his son in the cellar, and nor was I entirely convinced by her beauty, which again seemed to me to have been misappropriated. If it wasn’t wrong to be jealous, it certainly wasn’t wrong to be beautiful: the wrong lay in the beauty being stolen, as it were, by the narrator, under false pretences. Reality might be described as the eternal equipoise of positive and negative, but in this story the two poles had become dissociated and ascribed separate, war
ring identities. The narrative invariably showed certain people – the narrator and his children – in a good light, while the wife was brought in only when it was required of her to damn herself further. The narrator’s treacherous attempts to contact his first wife, for instance, were given a positive, empathetic status, while his second wife’s insecurity – well founded, as we now knew – was treated as an incomprehensible crime. The one exception was the narrator’s love for his boring, tornado-swept parents-in-law, a bittersweet detail in which positive and negative regained their balance. But otherwise this was a story in which I sensed the truth was being sacrificed to the narrator’s desire to win.

  My neighbour laughed, and said that I was probably right. My parents fought all their lives, he said, and no one ever won. But no one ran away either. It is the children who have run away. My brother has been married five times, he said, and on Christmas Day he sits alone in his apartment in Zurich, counting his money and eating a cheese sandwich. Tell me the truth, I said: did she really lock your son in the cellar? He inclined his head.

  ‘She always denied it,’ he said. ‘She claimed Takis had shut himself in there, to get her into trouble.’