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  ‘Someone told me you were moving back here. I didn’t know whether to believe it or not.’

  He asked if I’d bought somewhere and which street I was living in and I told him while he stood vigorously nodding his head.

  ‘I haven’t even moved house,’ he said. ‘It’s strange,’ he said, ‘that you always changed everything and I changed nothing and yet we’ve both ended up in the same place.’

  A few years ago, he went on, he had gone for a short while to Canada, but other than that things had remained pretty much as they always had been. He used to wonder, he said, how it felt to leave, to go away from what you knew and put yourself somewhere else. For a while after I had left, he would come out of his house each morning to go to work and would look at the magnolia tree that stood beside the gate, and the thought that I no longer saw that tree would overwhelm him with its strangeness. There was a picture we had bought together – it was still hanging in exactly the same place, between the big windows that looked over the back garden – and he would sit and look at it and wonder how I could bear to have left it there. In the beginning he saw these things – the magnolia tree, the picture, the books and other objects I hadn’t taken with me – as the victims of abandonment, but over time that had changed. There was a period in which he realised that it would hurt me to see those things again, the things that I had left. Then, later still, he began to feel that I might by now be glad to see them again. He had kept it all, incidentally, and the magnolia tree – though there had been talk among the other residents of cutting it down – was still there.

  A growing crowd of parents and uniformed children was massing around the gates and it was becoming difficult to talk above the noise. Gerard kept having to move his bicycle, which he held lightly by the handlebars, out of the way. Most of the other parents were women: there were women with dogs on leashes and women with pushchairs, smartly dressed women with briefcases and women carrying their children’s bags and lunchboxes and musical instruments. The sound of their voices grew in the crush, against the swelling noise from behind the walls as more and more children filled the playground. There was the feeling of an inexorable crescendo, almost of hysteria, which would abruptly cease when the school bell rang. Occasionally one of the women shouted a greeting to Gerard and I watched him reply with the enthusiasm that had always been the camouflage for his social mistrust.

  He moved his bicycle out of the mêlée and into the road, where the first russet-coloured leaves had started to fall around the parked cars. We crossed over to the other side. It was a warm, dull, windless morning: in contrast to the loud scene we had just witnessed, here the world suddenly felt so muted and stationary it was as if time had stopped. Gerard admitted that he was still uneasy at the school gate, despite the fact that he had been taking Clara there for years now. Diane worked long hours, and besides, she found the school culture even less amenable than he did: his maleness provided him with at least a degree of disguise. When Clara was smaller, it was he who did the round of playgroups and coffee mornings. He had learned a lot, not about parenthood but about other people. He had been surprised to discover that women were hostile to him at the baby groups, despite the fact that he had never thought of himself as particularly male. He had always had close female friends; his best friend all through his teenage years had been Miranda – I probably remembered her – and the two of them had at one time seemed interchangeable, often sharing a bed or undressing in front of one another without embarrassment. But in the world of mothers, his masculinity was suddenly a stigma: the others seemed to view him by turns with resentment and contempt, as though he could win neither by his presence nor by his absence. He had often been lonely, looking after Clara in the early days, and was frequently overwhelmed by the new perspectives on his own upbringing which having a child gave him. Diane had returned to work full-time, and while sometimes he was surprised by her unsentimentality about motherhood and her aversion to maternal activities, he gradually came to understand that this knowledge – of nurture and its consequences – was not something she required for herself. She knew as much about being a woman as she needed to: it was he who had to know, to learn. He needed to know how to care for someone else, how to be responsible, how to build and sustain a relationship, and she had let him do it. She had given him Clara with a completeness he was sure most women wouldn’t have been capable of, and it had been hard but he had stuck it out.

  ‘Now I’m their favourite househusband,’ he said, nodding at the now-dispersing women with their dogs and pushchairs.

  We began to walk slowly away from the school and up the gradual incline towards the Tube station. There was something automatic in this choice of direction: I wasn’t intending to get on the Tube and evidently Gerard, with his bicycle, wasn’t either, but the complexity of our encounter, after so long, seemed to have created the tacit agreement that until we were sure of our ground we should remain on neutral territory and navigate by public landmarks. I’d forgotten, I said to him, how relieving the anonymity of city life could be. People weren’t forever having to explain themselves here: a city was a decipherable interface, a sort of lexicon of human behaviour that did half the work of decoding the mystery of self, so that you could effectively communicate through a kind of shorthand. Where I had lived before, in the countryside, each individual was the unique, often illegible representation of their own acts and aims. So much got lost or mistaken, I said, in the process of self-explanation; so many unfounded assumptions were made; so many words failed to maintain an integral meaning.

  ‘How long ago was it that you left London?’ Gerard said. ‘It must have been – what – fifteen years?’

  There was something feigned about his vagueness: he gave the impression – the opposite of what he presumably intended – that he was deeply familiar with the facts he affected not to know, and I felt a shamed pang of guilt for the way I had treated him. I was struck again by how little he had altered since that time, except that he seemed somehow to have been filled in. In those days he was a sketch, an outline; I had wanted him to be more than he was, without being able to see where the extra would come from. But time had given him density, like an artist filling in the sketched-out form. He raked his fingers frequently through his wild hair; he looked very healthy and tanned, and wore a loose red-and-blue plaid shirt of the kind his younger self had favoured, considerably opened to show his brown throat. The colours were so soft and chalky with age and washing that I wondered whether this was in fact the same shirt I remembered him wearing all those years before. He had always been thrifty, to the extent that waste and excess genuinely upset him, as well as leading him into involuntary judgement of other people; yet I remembered him admitting once that in fantasies he indulged in the very acts of pointless extravagance and destructiveness that he reviled.

  I said that very little seemed to have altered here in my absence: I had noticed, I went on, that when my neighbours came out of their front doors in the morning immaculately dressed for work, they would often pause to look around themselves, faintly smiling, as though they had just remembered something pleasant. Gerard laughed.

  ‘It’s hard not to become self-satisfied,’ he said, ‘with so much self-satisfaction around you.’

  One benefit of going away, he understood now, was that it made it easier to change. It was precisely that, he supposed, that he had always feared: turning up somewhere else and realising that in the process he had lost himself. Diane, he went on, was Canadian, and it didn’t seem to bother her at all, living on a different continent from the one where she’d grown up. On the contrary, she believed she had saved herself the trouble of dealing with a number of paralysing emotional issues – her mother chief among them – by simply moving to the other side of the world. But there was an inexorability, Gerard admitted, to his habitation of London and the fate it had mapped out for him: most people, he had come to understand, weren’t hindered by their origins in the same way. He had spent two years living with D
iane in Toronto, and even though he had felt liberated there – freed, if he were honest, from what felt like a crushing weight – his sense of guilt was more powerful. And once Clara was born, the dilemma got worse: the only thing more unimaginable than the idea that Clara should have a childhood that resembled his own was the idea that she shouldn’t, that she might live her whole life in ignorance of everything that for Gerard constituted reality.

  I asked him why he had used the word ‘guilt’ to describe what other people might have called homesickness, and what in any case was really just the absence of his own familiar world.

  ‘It felt wrong to be choosing,’ Gerard said. ‘It felt wrong for the whole of life to be based on choice.’

  He had met Diane by chance, in a cinema queue. He had gone to Toronto on a six-month research scholarship offered by a film-studies department there. He had applied for it with the absolute certainty he wouldn’t be awarded it but suddenly there he was, far from home in minus twenty degrees and queuing to see a comforting old favourite, Night of the Living Dead. Diane, it transpired, was a horror fan too. She worked for CBC in a job that entailed long hours. They had been seeing each other on and off for a few weeks when the person Diane paid to walk her dog – a large and vigorous poodle named Trixie – left town. The dog was already a source of anxiety to Diane: at the time she was embroiled in a particularly stressful work project, leaving the house early and returning late at night, and Trixie’s hour with the dog walker had in any case not been nearly enough. Diane was an ardent dog lover and regarded the cruelty of Trixie’s situation with the utmost seriousness. Now that this crisis had occurred, she would have to rehome her, ‘which in Diane’s case,’ Gerard said, ‘was like being asked to rehome your child.’

  Gerard, though he didn’t know Diane all that well – and knew nothing about dogs at all – offered to help her. He was teaching an evening class at the college but during the day his time was more or less his own. He was planning to return to London at the end of the semester, but for now he was willing to go to Diane’s apartment each day, clip Trixie’s lead to her collar, and take her bounding and writhing out to the park.

  At first the dog had made him nervous – she was so big and wilful and mute – but before long he began to enjoy the walks, which took him to parts of Toronto he had never seen before, and which also had the benefit of erasing the element of choice from his daily life, though he did sometimes look at himself walking a large dog through a foreign city and wonder how on earth he had got there. After a week or so he seemed to have settled into a routine with Trixie, or at least to find her less alarming when he let himself into the apartment and she sprang to her feet and growled. She came with him willingly enough; she trotted proudly by his side, her head erect, and he found that he carried himself a little more proudly too, with this silent beast trotting next to him. He and Diane barely saw one another, but he felt a growing intimacy with Trixie, and one day it occurred to him that it wasn’t actually necessary to keep her on the lead – in fact, it was slightly insulting to her – since she walked with such discipline and self-control at his heels. Without pausing to reflect, he bent down and unclipped the lead, and in an instant Trixie was gone. He was standing at a busy intersection on Richmond Avenue. He had one glimpse of her, streaking like a brown arrow uptown through the traffic, and then she had completely vanished.

  It was strange, he said, but standing there on the sidewalk with the great grey chasms of Toronto’s streets extending away to every side of him and the leash dangling from his hand, he had felt for the first time that he was at home: the feeling of having unwittingly caused an irreversible change, of his failure being the force that broke new ground, was, he realised standing there, the deepest and most familiar thing he knew. By failing he created loss, and loss was the threshold to freedom: an awkward and uncomfortable threshold, but the only one he had ever been able to cross; usually, he said, because he was shoved across it as a consequence of the events that had brought him there. He had returned to Diane’s apartment and waited while the rooms grew dark, the leash still in his hand, until she got home. She knew instantly what had happened; and strange as it may sound, Gerard said, their relationship began at that point. He had destroyed the thing she loved most; she, in her turn, had exposed him to failure through expectations he was unable to fulfil. Without meaning to, they had found one another’s deepest vulnerabilities: they had arrived, by this awful shortcut, at the place where for each of them a relationship usually ended, and set out from there.

  ‘Diane tells that story better than I do,’ Gerard added, with a smile.

  By now we had entered the small park that formed a shortcut through the phalanx of residential streets to the Tube station. At this hour of the morning it was virtually empty. A few women with preschool-aged children stood in the railed play area, watching them clamber over the equipment or looking at their phones.

  They had stayed on in Toronto for another eighteen months, Gerard went on, during which time Clara was born. They couldn’t afford to buy even the smallest apartment in Toronto, while back in London flats such as the one Gerard still owned, which he had bought for a modest sum all those years before, were selling for hundreds of thousands of pounds. Besides, Clara needed relatives: it was Diane’s view that bringing up a completely undamaged child was in bad taste.

  ‘Diane’s family are pretty dysfunctional,’ he said. ‘By comparison mine just exercise the immune system.’

  They had moved back to London when Clara was three months old: she would have no memory of the pale, arid city where she was born, no memory of the great moody lake along whose windblown shores Gerard had walked with her in a pouch against his chest, no memory of the quaint clapboard house beside the tramline that Gerard and Diane had shared with a revolving community of artists and musicians and writers. The house had once been a shop and the large glass shopfront had been retained: it formed part of the main living space, so that the inhabitants could be viewed from outside, going about their lives. Many times Gerard had returned home and been struck – particularly at evening, when the lights were on and the shopfront became a great illuminated stage – by the human tableaux he saw there, the scenes of love and argument, of solitude, industry, friendship, sometimes of boredom and dissociation. He knew all the actors – as soon as he went inside he became one of them – but often he remained outside and watched, mesmerised. In a sense it was all, he knew, just an artistic pose, but for him it summed up something about Toronto and his life there, some vital distinction that he recognised while being unable properly to grasp it, though the word that always occurred to him in trying to describe it was ‘innocence’.

  ‘I don’t think it would have been possible,’ he said, ‘in London, among the people I knew, to have lived that way. There’s too much irony. You can’t be a poseur here – everything is already an imitation of itself.’

  Nevertheless he and Diane had come back, and if the atmosphere of knowingness was sometimes stifling – ‘even the pub is ironic,’ he said as we approached it, the once-sordid building now a refurbished allusion to its own non-existent history – the force of continuity was these days acting as a favourable wind. Theirs was a life of remarkable stability, which was pretty miraculous, he said, when you considered what they were both capable of. Superficially, for him at least the facts of that life were unchanged since the days I had known him: he lived in the same flat, had kept the same friends, went to the same places on the same days as he always had; he still even wore many of the same clothes. The difference was that Diane and Clara were with him: they constituted a kind of audience; he doubted he could have carried it on otherwise. Increasingly, he went on, he saw his time in Toronto as having funded this continuity, a foreign foray in which he found elsewhere the resources that would enable him to cement his existence here for good. It was an interesting thought, that stability might be seen as the product of risk; it was perhaps when people tried to keep things the same that the process
of decline began.

  ‘In a way it’s like we’re still living in a shopfront,’ he said. ‘It’s a construction but it’s also real.’

  I told him that when I had moved with my children to London, back in the summer, it was all so unfamiliar at first that my older son had said it felt like he was acting a part in a play: other people spoke their lines and he spoke his, and everything that happened and everywhere he went felt unreal somehow, like scripted events unfolding on a stage set. They had to start at a different school, where they were required to be far more independent: in the old life they had depended on me for everything, but here almost immediately they both became less indolent, and had begun to organise themselves in ways I now knew nothing of. We spoke very little about the old life, so that had started to seem unreal too. When we first came here, I told Gerard, we would sometimes walk around the local streets in the evenings, looking around us like tourists. At first my sons would surreptitiously hold my hands while we walked but then they stopped and kept their hands in their pockets instead. After a while the evening walks ceased because the boys said they had too much homework. They ate dinner quickly and then went back to their rooms. In the mornings they were gone early into the grey dawn, loping away down the littered pavements with their heavy school rucksacks jolting up and down on their backs. The people we knew, I said, applauded these changes, which they obviously thought were a matter of necessity. I was told so often that it was good to see me getting back on my feet that I had started to wonder whether I represented more than an object of sympathy; whether I had in fact come to embody some particular fear or dread for the people who knew me, something they would prefer not to be reminded of.