On the train, Tonie thinks about sex. It’s like some old friend she hasn’t seen in years and then bumped into on the platform. She rides with it in the carriage, her old friend sex, who one way and another she lost touch with, somewhere around the time when Alexa was born, when love seemed like a mathematical problem to which, all of a sudden, she had found the answer.
The other passengers, daylight chorusing in their faces, the mood transitive, a shedding of properties: the train flies through the September morning and Tonie feels it, an element that is all surface, all publicity. She is a little suspicious, almost resentful. It is as though she has blundered uninvited into some event and discovered that everyone she knows is there. So! This is what people are up to, while women care for babies in wholesome rooms, while they push strollers through the slow afternoon, satisfied that they have solved the problem of love. The rest of the world doesn’t care about love at all. The rest of the world is pure self, present tense, neither bad nor good, just flying free through the morning’s instant. And it comes over her in a rush, the memory of what it used to feel like, being alive.
On the way home she bumps into it again.
A month into her new job, the evening train, the mood reflective. There is a rushing darkness at the windows and yellow portraits on the glass, like the steady images a light makes from a black river of film. What has she been doing all this time? This is the question, after an eight-year absence. At intervals, her husband has turned to her in their bed and posed questions with his body: do you still love me? Is everything all right? And she has acceded, as often as she has been able to, not wanting to trouble him with her strange numbness, her indifference. What else? Giving, caring, watching, remembering, feeling, but not – not truly – participating. It’s been like reading a great book, life represented as fully and beautifully as it could be but the commodity itself suspended. All her sympathies have been engaged, and left her body motionless, inert.
At the station she gets a taxi.
Thomas, in the kitchen, slightly tired-looking, the crow’s feet standing in bright starbursts around his eyes. It is nine fifteen. He has made food for her, something heaped on a plate in the oven, keeping warm. He is wearing an apron. She laughs. She reaches around his waist, trying to untie the strings. He looks bashful, a little foolish. He looks shy, embarrassed, like a young girl with someone trying to undo her bra strap.
‘I’ll do it,’ he says.
When they kiss it is fumbling, slightly awkward, and Tonie laughs again, against his teeth. There seem to be folds and folds of blankness between them. She struggles to break through it. He is like a well-packaged object she is trying to get to, tearing away the blank wrapping. It is as though he is resisting her, as though he doesn’t want to be found. Her determination begins to drain away. There is too much reality, too much light in the kitchen, too much visual detail of ordinary things. And she has a sudden fraternal sense of Thomas that is like a bucket of cold water poured over her head. He is over-familiar. They have stood together in this kitchen too many times.
The kissing peters out. They hug, comrades.
‘What’s in there?’ Tonie says, still in his arms but looking out, down, at the humming oven. Usually it is Alexa they look out and down at, the view from themselves, the distraction that has become a necessity. But the oven will do.
‘Fish pie. Do you want some?’
So Tonie eats it, the pale mound of fodder, the creamy potato that sticks to the roof of her mouth, and it is hard to reconcile this filling of herself with the wanting feeling she had earlier. The potato stops her tongue, sits like a boulder in her stomach. It is a kind of imprisonment, to feel so full, when it was something else that she was asking for.
But the next night it’s different.
She comes back even later, ten o’clock, and this time there’s no food and Thomas is more alert, more mysterious. They sit in the sitting room on opposite chairs.
‘It won’t always be like this,’ Tonie says. ‘I’ll get quicker. I have to read everything four times. I have to suck up to everyone.’
‘We’re all right. Do what you need to do.’
He’s wearing a dark blue shirt that makes him look sharper, clearer, less fuzzily familiar. Seen objectively Thomas is good-looking, pale fine-grained skin, fine black hair that falls over his face, something light and boyish about him though he is tall and broad-shouldered. Tonie’s female friends make envious jokes about Thomas. They see him objectively, but Tonie doesn’t. She sees him in pieces, from particular angles. Sometimes, when they are away from the house, she is amazed to see him walking down the street towards her, whole.
In the bedroom she turns away while he undresses. She waits until he switches out the light. She is determined to hang on to this gossamer inspiration, desire. She knows that if her eye falls on the alarm clock with the big ear-like bells, on the toys Alexa has left on the floor of their room, even on Thomas himself, it will break. She needs Thomas to become a stranger again. She needs to reinvent him. Is that wrong? He might think it was, if she told him. But not telling is what will make a stranger of herself.
And it is exactly as she had hoped, in the way that a performance of a play might be, the feeling of a structure, an event, passing through time unharmed. The form was honoured: nobody made a mistake or fluffed a line. It is strange, that transcendence should occur not by abandoning structure but by adhering to it exactly. Thomas turns to her, strokes her hair. In the darkness he is a shape, autonomous. It is a long time since she has felt him to be so distinct from herself. It is from the distinctness that the closeness, the harmony, has arisen.
In the middle of the night she wakes up and he is still there, the shape, draped in shadow. He is as beautifully turned as a musical instrument, as finished, as mute and solitary lying on his side in the darkness. The desire is this: to find him, to use him, to make him respond. It is the only way that she can possess him, as the musician possesses the instrument, and though it feels like youth again it is not, not at all. As a young woman she did not possess the bodies of men. They possessed her. She was the instrument, in those days. And the time in between has been a blank, a silence, because after Alexa was born she was neither instrument nor performer but creator, alone suddenly, her body a slump of giving, all untouchable aftermath. It did not recognise the discipline of performance. It wanted only to be left alone.
She puts out her hand and touches the skin of Thomas’s neck, his back, his taut rounded shoulder. He wakes up. She feels it, the vibration of life under her hand. He turns to her, mouth slightly open, eyes shut. He obeys her.
*
Montague Street runs straight downhill towards the city. It is steep, so that the bottom looks remote from the top, the hazy geometric spill of buildings levelling out below with its light-inflected blocks and angles, its wreath of pollution, its drone of traffic and sense of life as something inalienable and general rather than fragile and particular, though close up this illusion is successively unmasked as the moderate scale of the reality becomes clearer. The town is just a picturesque, convenient, middle-sized town an hour from London. But from the top, where the Bradshaws live, it has an appearance of grandeur and ruination.
Theirs is a region of parks and churches – the former small and crowded, the latter large and empty – and of row after row of red-brick two-storey Victorian terraces that rise and fall across the undulating townscape, and that again conjure up an atmosphere of generality, the image of a contented and solidly unexceptionable bourgeoisie, as opposed to the fretful-looking, badly paid liberal professionals who for the most part live in them: academics like Tonie, teachers, social workers.
In Tonie’s experience, these are people whose capacity for deep, undisclosed suffering and worldly indifference, for extreme feats of virtue or nihilism, for the repression of passions and staunchness in the face of reality, is so violent that it ought to leave some visible mark on their surroundings; and yet the surface of their lives is so bare as to suggest a reluctance to impose themselves on the world that runs deeper still. Time and again she has visited her neighbours’ houses and found them to be lacking both luxuries and necessities, found rooms empty of furniture or ornament, stained walls with no pictures on them, cardboard boxes that have never been unpacked, desolate shelves, and in the face of it all a kind of impregnable vagueness, a dreaminess, that acquaints Tonie with her own alertness, her fathomless determination, and suggests these qualities are not, after all, entirely normal. Take her friend Elsa, for instance: entering Elsa’s house for the first time, Tonie assumed they had only just moved into it, so powerful was its atmosphere of unoccupation, when in fact Elsa and her husband had lived there for years. In the hall there was a strip of wallpaper hanging loose, which Elsa admitted having torn off one day to see what was underneath – blood-coloured flowers and creeping foliage, better not to have known – and which hangs there still. Tonie would have had the whole lot off in an evening, would not have rested until it was all gone and something new and good put in its place; and yet Elsa is a virtuous woman, a woman who teaches disabled children, who would drop everything to help if Tonie was ill or in trouble, who has welcomed time into her face unprotestingly, though it has been brutal to her. When Tonie sees Elsa, sees the torn tongue of paper still lolling from the wall and the sitting room still full of boxes, she wonders what the meaning, what the moral value of her own competence is. She sees that she herself is not virtuous, in spite of the fact that she is driven by what feels like guilt or compunction. She would not rest until the imperfect was excised and the good accomplished, and it would feel like rightness itself was thrashing her and egging her on. But in Elsa’s tattered hall she acknowledges that it is not rightness: it is the desire for success.
The houses in Montague Street are different from the rest, narrow and tall and white, Georgian, impractical. The world always offers a small opportunity for difference, among a large majority of things that are all the same; and equally unfailingly Tonie takes it, only remembering afterwards that being different is not the same as being right. She was besotted with the house at first, so that rationality, calm consideration, common sense could get no hold on her. They manifested themselves as purely hostile, as things that had only and ever sought to frustrate her, which made it right – rightness again – to defy them and cast them off for good.
It’s true that the house is unusual. There is something fantastical about its narrowness and height, its overhanging windows, its quivering appearance of unfeasibility. It is more like a drawing – a sketch – than a building. It takes only a few paces to go from the front of it to the back: you walk through the door and the tiny garden is staring you in the face. When people come in there is always a moment of startled hesitation, a sense of spatial misjudgement, as though they were about to lose their footing on the edge of a cliff. They exclaim, half in wonder, but just as much out of consternation. Tonie does not like it when this happens. For seven years she and Thomas have lived in this house, and the steady disclosure of its shortcomings, its particular flaws, has had something almost sermonising about it. The rooms downstairs are dark; the windows are draughty and the garden too small; the sloping doorframes and uneven boards, most of all the ceaseless going up and down, up and down like a tune in search of a resolution – these things fray Tonie’s nerves and exhaust her. Stuck with her choice, Tonie is being taught a lesson, which is that desire is dangerous, because it is magnetised by its antithesis, actuality. And actuality, no less automatically, is drawn to desire. What are you meant to do with a desire if not act on it? Living in her thin and fantastical house Tonie has been haunted by new desires – for the anonymous, the spacious, the frankly horizontal. She has imagined large suburban lawns and garages, broad avenues, a house low and wide. It appears to her now that it would be easier to distinguish yourself in such a house; that time would stand more still; that the human subject would be picked out, highlighted against the neutrality, so that the glamour of being alive – so ineluctable, so hopelessly entrenched in the province of desire – could finally be actualised.
What happened was that all those years ago, she fell in love with the house: she fell in love with it, and then as she came to know more and more about it the love was divided and subdivided until each piece of knowledge was larger than its allotted share of affection. This is the lesson, the sermon: that facts outlive emotions, and that knowledge is therefore more powerful than love. There are infinite things to know, but the capacity for love is just that, a capacity, a space that can hold so much and no more.
*
Six months ago, the head of the university English department where Tonie teaches retired. It was a strange time, no one rushing forward to replace her, a feeling everywhere of indifference bordering on decline, until someone asked Tonie whether she would consider applying for it. It was out of the question, a big administrative job a whole world away from the part-time lecturing she was used to, a job for someone like Angela Deacon, who had done it for years; an older woman with a wardrobe full of cashmere and earth-tones, a woman with grown-up children and an interest in Etruscan art, a still-married woman who nonetheless wanted to keep the little flame of her wickedness alive, who wanted her well-preserved body out in the world, safe in its armour of bureaucratic procedure. Tonie couldn’t do a job like that, that needed funds of time brought to it like a dowry. Tonie’s time did not seem to belong to her any more. Her work had been shaped around Alexa’s presences and Thomas’s absences for so long that she forgot it had a form and force of its own, a power of its own.
There was a conversation in the kitchen, late at night. Thomas’s eyes were watering. He said he had hay fever. Every few minutes he would produce a handkerchief and sneeze into it, and Tonie couldn’t keep her fingers still. Sitting at the table she shredded stray bits of paper, orange peel, pieces of wax from the candle on the table, prising off the rivulets that had run down its sides. They looked so soft, so liquid, but they came away as stiff as branches, beaded with hard drops. She and Thomas talked about their life the way they might have talked about a film they had just seen, or a book they’d both read. They analysed it, their situation; they discussed it, and by discussing it seemed to emerge from it and set off somewhere, the two of them heading out over dark waters in the vessel of their companionship. It was as though all this time they’d been acting, playing parts, and now could finally be themselves again. In this atmosphere careers seemed trivial, interchangeable, to be picked up and put down again at will. Tonie snapped the petrified branches of wax into smaller and smaller pieces: they lay on the table like a heap of little bones. Every time she looked at Thomas he had water running from the corners of his eyes, like a saint in a religious painting. She remembers noticing that he was talking about his job in the past tense. He got a bottle of whisky out of the cupboard and poured an enormous measure for each of them. He said,
‘I seem to have experienced a revelation.’
But it is true that Thomas has never been quite that sure again, that he became more doubtful as Tonie’s promotion became more of a certainty, that even now he appears to be going through a process, an adjustment, as though life has simply hardened around him again in its new forms and the revelation that set it in motion is nowhere to be found. It has no concrete existence, this revelation. It has no reality. It merely changed, for an instant, reality’s properties, as the flame changed the candle and sent it running over the edge of itself, running and running into new paths as though it sought to be free of what it was, of what it became once more as soon as it reached the air and stiffened in its tracks.
*
On the train, she looks at men. Some of them are whole-some-looking, attractive, but most of them aren’t. She sits opposite a large, sandy-coloured man with thick white freckled arms protruding from the sleeves of his T-shirt. His hair is flattened in places and shock-straight in others, like a patch of long grass an animal has lain down in. He is fat, thighs melting over the serge seat, stomach lying in pleats over his trousers, white fingers as thick as sausages. It is eight o’clock in the morning. He has tiny speakers in his ears. He sits opposite her and eats an Aero. He stands a can of Coke on the table between them and cracks it open, his finger squeezed through the metal ring.
Compared with him Tonie is disciplined, almost professionally physical. She has entered the phase of atemporality that lies between childbearing and visible decay. And yet she feels taut with expectation, as though now that it has finished its biological work the real life of her body is about to begin. In three months’ time she will turn forty, but she was more frightened of getting older when she was younger, when she was thirty-five and seemed all husk, Alexa at three or four the eager unripe kernel, shedding Tonie by degrees. But now it is Alexa who grows older: Tonie stays the same. And she roams around this sameness, excited and anxious, as though there is something in it she fears she won’t find.
It is raining when she gets off the train. She takes the bus the rest of the way, pressed up against the other passengers, the windows blank with condensation. The wet smells of skin and hair and cosmetics and shoe leather make a pattern in the silence, an extension into non-language, as though everyone here is trying to describe themselves in a way that words have never accounted for and never will. The bus sways. A grey view of wet pavements and shopfronts flows and stops and flows again past the fogged-up windows. The university buildings – low, concrete, municipal-looking – make their sluggish approach through the middle distance. It is surprising, how many people are picking up their bags and coats and umbrellas, preparing to get off. It’s like religion, people rising out of their anonymity, thronging and moving, all in the name of higher education. She sees Janine, shuffling in the crowd towards the doors.
‘Hey,’ Tonie says.
Janine makes a face, strangulation. ‘I’m starting to feel antipathy towards certain social groups,’ she says when she’s close enough. ‘It’s the weak I can’t stand. Old people, mothers, children in prams.’
Tonie laughs. They get off, go together over the road and through the big glass doors.
‘You want coffee?’ Janine hesitates by the entrance to the staff cafeteria and they go in, join the queue. She scans the room obliquely, out of the sides of her fronded eyes. She puts a warning hand on Tonie’s arm. ‘Martin Carson at three o’clock,’ she says.
Tonie turns, sees Martin hunched at one of the far-off Formica tables, spectacled and waistcoated like a character out of The Wind in the Willows. He has a slim volume open in front of him, on which his eyes are fixed. His eyebrows are raised. He wears an expression of faint surprise.
‘He’s reading,’ Janine hisses.
‘Hey Martin, this is, like, the twenty-first century.’
Janine guffaws, bats her eyelashes at the boy behind the serving hatch, orders black no sugar. ‘I’ve realised that I actually find the sight of a man reading effeminate,’ she says to Tonie. ‘Do you know what I mean?’
Janine looks breathless, blowsy: she looks as though she’s been out until dawn, and then rushed straight from the party here. She’s wearing old-fashioned film-star clothes, a mauve chiffon dress and high-heeled silver sandals with pointed toes. Her long brown fraying hair looks windblown. She is big-boned and bosomy, frail around the wrists and ankles, the skin of her face and clavicle riven with friendly creases. She is motherly, in a way: Tonie can imagine a male desire that takes this form. Though in fact she has only one child, like Tonie, whom she brings up alone. They sit at a table with their cups.
‘God, I feel like shit,’ she says, half-closing her eyes. The lids are bruised with make-up. She opens them again. ‘Greg and I had a fight last night.’
‘What about?’
She swats the air, shakes her head.
‘I don’t know what exactly. We were just – fighting.’
Tonie wonders how this occurs: Janine’s small flat, her daughter there, two adults trying to kindle something in the ashes of everything that has been, and either failing or succeeding in full view of it all. In certain lights she has considered Janine’s life and envied it, envied its open-endedness, its lack of structure. She imagines possibilities for Janine that she cannot imagine for herself: the possibility of changing, moving, experiencing the unknown.
‘Francesca was at the Bastard’s,’ Janine says, reading her thoughts. ‘Greg came over to spend the night.’
‘Is that how it works? She goes and he comes.’
Janine nods. ‘Right,’ she says. ‘Like a French farce.’
‘I imagine it less – scheduled.’
‘Darling,’ Janine says jadedly, ‘it’s a bloody rota. There’s Greg’s three from marriage one at the weekends, one from marriage two twice a month, a stepchild who has to fit in somewhere, a dog that needs walking, a cat that has to go to the vet. I’m off-peak nights only.’
‘And you spent it fighting. Your night.’
Janine yawns, stretches her mottled arms, shows a crumpled glimpse of speckled armpit. Tonie feels it again, the mother, the taxed body, lapsing into imperfection.
‘Well, you’re sort of asking for it, aren’t you?’ Janine says. ‘You get home, stash the child, clean up, light the candles, shave your legs, open the wine – you’re really asking for your poor plans to be undone. Though in fact, that part was fine. It was later.’ She yawns again. ‘Three o’clock in the morning, I wake up and he’s standing there by the bed.’
‘Getting in?’
‘Getting out. Apparently I said something in my sleep.’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘Apparently I said –’ Janine laughs ‘– Roger.’
Tonie snorts, slaps the table top.
‘So he puts all his clothes back on and he storms out of the room. I thought he’d gone home, and I was so sleepy I thought, you know, fine. I didn’t care. I just wanted to go back to sleep. Has that ever happened to you?’
Tonie half-assents, silently.
‘I think this is the real disenchantment of later life,’ Janine says, pushing away her coffee cup. ‘The inability to care. Having cared so much.’
Tonie shudders. ‘Stop it.’
‘Anyway, after a while I hear noises and I realise he’s still here. So I drag myself out of bed and I go into the kitchen and there he is, sitting at the table with all the lights on and his laptop out. Working.’
They laugh: the apparent ridiculousness of male behaviour.
‘How are you, anyway?’ Janine says. She puts her spoon in the sugar bowl, takes it out and carefully licks it.
‘All right.’
Tonie doesn’t want to explain: language takes her further away from it, the mystery of her expectation. She remembers travelling somewhere with Thomas once, driving through miles and miles of empty wilderness, the map open on her knees; she remembers the way it looked on the page, the road threading through the emptiness, specifying itself while everything else remained unknown and untouched. They would have to stop, get out, walk. To know what was there they would have to enter it physically.
‘I’m just – here,’ she says, meaning this place, this concrete building on the roadside.
‘Is it what you wanted?’ Janine says, bright, matter-of-fact, as though they were discussing a present Tonie had received, both knowing that at their age there was no point masking your disappointment.
‘I don’t not want it. It depends. It depends how it works out.’
She can tell Janine doesn’t understand: in Janine’s eyes Tonie has done something irrational, has strayed from their particular female church with its ceaseless interpolations of the personal and the practical, its reverence for emotion, its believers-only humour where the punchline is always that you get away with whatever you can. Janine would not understand Tonie’s desire for the harsh, the literal, the coldly imposing. She would not understand her decision to set down the sack of emotion.
‘I’d miss the teaching,’ is all she says, looking over Tonie’s shoulder.
She is not the first person to say this to Tonie: here, teaching is equivalent to emotion. The women Tonie knows at home say they would miss the children, in exactly the same way.
‘You can’t teach if you’re sick of books,’ Tonie says softly.
She sees it in Janine’s eyes, a flash of fear, a spark of genuine teacher’s disapproval. There’s a second of hesitation, then Janine laughs. She has decided that Tonie is being iconoclastic.
‘Books make you sick,’ she agrees. ‘Literature. A virus.’ She screws up her eyes, looks at Tonie through the lashes. ‘Though spreadsheets can’t be all that interesting.’
Tonie shrugs. She isn’t going to defend herself.
‘I hope it works out,’ Janine says, all at once slightly formal, as though Tonie is going away somewhere and never coming back. Tonie looks up. Martin Carson is standing by their table.
‘Oops –’ Janine looks at her watch ‘– I’ve got to go and teach Hart Crane.’
‘Really?’ he says, significantly, as though Hart Crane were an opinion, not a poet. He turns to Tonie, bores into her through his thick pebbly lenses. ‘How are you?’ he says.
‘Okay,’ she says. She looks at her watch too. ‘Late.’
‘I like what you’ve done with your hair,’ Martin says. He has a transatlantic accent, difficult to place. It makes everything he says sound ironic. Tonie has seen him lash out at his students, has seen him mortify big ropey-limbed boys in baseball caps, silent overweight girls with round cheeks encrusted with make-up and acne. He strikes at them with this ironic-sounding drawl: he makes them seem unfortunate and stupid.
‘Thanks.’
‘I’ll walk with you,’ he says.
Janine rolls her eyes, waves her hand, makes a run for it in her silver shoes.
‘I have the feeling I interrupted something important there,’ Martin says, with professorial satisfaction. ‘I was watching your face. You looked – wistful. Sort of sad, but thoughtful.’
He does an imitation of it, there in the crowded corridor. He rests his fingers under his chin and gazes into the middle distance.
‘Thanks,’ she says again.
They go left and right and left along the grey-walled passages with their littered noticeboards and chipped paint, and Martin sticks to her as they push through the field of bodies, saying, ‘Hello,’ and, ‘How are you?’ to those students who raise their eyes to him. Instantly they look troubled, slightly guilty, as though their individuality was something they were meant to be concealing. She sees no blaze of youth in these faces, these bodies: they have bad skin, piercings, stiff, artificial-looking hair. They look pensive, irresolute, like people who have got off a train in the wrong town. They look like people to whom nothing has ever been explained.
‘Hello, Jamie,’ Martin says in the lift, to a chalk-white boy with a petrified fan of hair like a cockatoo’s. ‘I’m glad that you found the time to come in today. Really, I’m glad.’
They get out, leave Jamie gaping and solitary in the steel cubicle, pass through the double doors to their offices.
‘We should have coffee some time,’ Martin says, leaning against the door frame where Tonie turns off.
Tonie wants to be in her office, tucked up alone in the grey rectangle with its view of the car park, but instead she says: ‘Do you think they’re enjoying themselves?’
Martin looks nonplussed. ‘Who?’
‘The students. Do you think they’re having a good time?’
Martin looks at the floor, focuses hard, as though he were being asked to guess at the feelings of a domestic pet.
‘You’re meaning in the mythological sense, right? Are they self-consciously inhabiting the myth of their own life? Does it mean to them what it meant to you? Right?’ He adjusts his glasses, rubs his pale chin. ‘The answer’s no.’
Tonie can hear her phone ringing inside the room. She rests her fingers on the door handle.
‘Oh look,’ Martin says. ‘They’ve put up your tombstone.’
She looks. There’s a new plaque fixed to the door: Dr A. Swann, Head of Department. Martin shakes his head.
‘You seem much too young for that,’ he says.
She laughs. ‘Well, I’m not.’
He looks, shakes his head again. ‘I just can’t see it,’ he says. ‘It isn’t you at all. I had you down as the faculty rebel. Obviously,’ he fixes her, microscope-eyed, ‘I was wrong.’
She smiles, unlocks the door, closes it gently behind her. The phone has stopped ringing. The room is silent. She sees the black swivel chair, the ledger diary, the stacks of files. She sees the car park with its grid of cars, three floors below. People are coming and going there, heads down, staring at the ground. The phone starts to ring again.
Martin Carson is unperceptive. This is the most rebellious thing she has ever done, by far.