On the train, Thomas thinks about money. He has always had enough of it, enough money. Then, for a year, he earned nothing at all. Now the money is flowing again. What is money?
‘Excuse me, is this seat free?’
He looks up. A girl is standing there. She wants to sit down, but his briefcase is in the way.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, putting the briefcase down by his feet.
‘That’s all right,’ she says. She is extremely serious, forgiving him. She sits down and gets out sheaves of papers, a laptop computer. She begins to type rapidly with her varnished fingernails.
Money is a representation – strictly speaking, it has no authenticity. It may be that the value of a thing decreases in proportion to the power of money to represent it. The girl beside him is wearing a diamond ring on her wedding finger, in a big gold setting. The diamond is worth a lot of money. Yet it has less value than almost anything Thomas can think of. If that girl lost her finger, it would upset her far more than losing her diamond. But her finger isn’t worth anything at all.
All the same, there is danger in a life that is of high value but little worth. There is a vulnerability that comes with the absence of representation. That girl’s ring represents the fact that she is loved. But the things that Thomas has lost he has no proof of. He has nothing to show for himself, for the days that left no money-trace behind them but simply vanished, like the days of an unrecorded civilisation. He looks out of the window at the passing countryside. He wonders whether Tonie felt this once; whether she sat on this train, a year ago, and pondered the life that had vanished like smoke behind her, its love and its hours, its uncommemorated emotions. And then coming back to find Thomas in the space where she used to be, like returning to a childhood home and finding new people living there. Thus he returns to Tonie at the day’s end, and finds her intimate with what no longer belongs to him. He has noticed that Tonie tidies around the piano with particular care, dusting the closed lid, making tiny adjustments to the already orderly stacks of music books. He does not play the piano any more. Sometimes she puts flowers in a vase on the top. He sees them and laughs. It is ghoulishly touching, like the sight of a well-tended grave.
On the evening train he falls asleep, his cheek pressed against the glass. It is September, and still light. He walks home from the station. He thinks of what will happen when he gets there. Usually Tonie is solicitous of him in the evenings. She fusses around him and talks animatedly. In the mornings she is more silent, slightly rigid. It is as though she has to make it up in its entirety every day, the story of her love for him. In the morning the page is blank. He sees her watching Alexa with red-rimmed eyes that nonetheless are dry, her manner devotional and slightly shrill. Tonie has never asked him to account for what he did the day Alexa got ill, just as he has never asked her where she was that evening. There has been an exchange of territories, ratified by a treaty of silence. She did not return to work, not even for a day. She donned the plain garment of motherhood, there in the hospital. She was alone when they told her that Alexa had lost the hearing in her right ear. She had sent Thomas home to sleep, to make arrangements, to be male again. Perhaps she has forgotten that he was ever there at all.
Sometimes, in the evenings, they look at one another with eyes that seem to Thomas to be full of guilt. These looks are accidental: their roaming eyes meet, surprised, and for an instant something new discloses itself, a new separation between them, as though they are strangers whose eyes are meeting for the first time. The guilt is the guilt of experience, which only strangers admit to one another. Yet quite what they are guilty of they will never say.
Montague Street is quiet, almost silent. He walks up the pavement with his briefcase in one hand and his keys in the other. The road is silted with fallen leaves. The air is still. There is no movement, no sound. He himself has become soundless, his feet weightless on the pavement, his breath paused, the keys mute in his hand. The silence swells and swells, thick and blank. He stops and waits. At last it comes, the trill of a bird joyously piercing it, trilling and trilling, garlanding the still air with a ribbon of song.