Outline: A Novel (14 page)

The hour was nearly up. The woman sitting directly opposite me, whose somewhat startled face was positioned beneath the face of the clock on the wall, so that the two shapes had become joined or connected in my perception to the extent that I had almost forgotten she was there, now said that it had been interesting for her to realise how little she noticed of the objective world. Her consciousness, at this point – she was forty-three years old – was so crammed full not just of her own memories, obligations, dreams, knowledge and the plethora of her day-to-day responsibilities, but also of other people’s – gleaned over years of listening, talking, empathising, worrying – that she was frightened most of all of the boundaries separating these numerous types of mental freight, the distinctions between them, crumbling away until she was no longer certain what had happened to her and what to other people she knew, or sometimes even what was or was not real. This morning, for instance, her sister had called her very early – neither of them sleeps very well, so they often talk at this hour – to tell her of the evening she and her husband had spent at a friend’s house, where they were invited for dinner. The friend had just had her kitchen completely extended and refurbished, and the centre-piece was an enormous sunken glass panel in the ceiling that made the room as light and airy as a cathedral.

‘My sister’, she said, ‘complimented her friend on this stunning effect, and the friend admitted that in fact she had borrowed the idea from another friend, who had had her kitchen refurbished some months before. Since then, however, a most terrible thing had happened. The friend’s friend had invited a large number of guests to dinner. Shortly before their arrival she had noticed a tiny crack in the glass of the panel, as though something small but sharp had fallen on it from above. She was annoyed, because the panel had cost a considerable amount of money, and being all of one piece she didn’t see any alternative but to replace the whole thing, despite the fact that only one small area had been affected. The guests arrived, and during the course of the evening an incredible storm came in over Athens. The rain came down in torrents as the group sat and ate beneath the glass panel. They were marvelling at the acoustic and visual effect of the water on the glass when, with a great groaning and creaking, the whole thing suddenly collapsed on top of them, the flaw in the glass apparently having weakened the structure to the point where it could not bear the weight of the water falling on it.’

The woman paused. ‘This,’ she said, ‘you will recall, was told to me by my sister over the telephone, a story that neither affected her nor, strictly speaking, concerned her. And since no one, amazingly, was hurt, it wasn’t a story that would shock people and that you would tell for that reason. Nor did it really affect the friend who had told it to her in the first place, except by association, because she had a panel in her ceiling of the same type. So I received it, as it were, third-hand, but it is as real to me as if I had experienced it myself. All morning I was troubled by it. Yet like most people I hear of terrible occurrences – nearly all of them far worse – every day, through the newspapers and the television, and I wondered why this one had taken a place in my mind among my own memories and experiences, so that I was having difficulty telling them apart. The reality of my life is largely concerned with what are called middle-class values – the people that I know refurbish their houses often, as I do myself, and they invite other people to these houses for dinner. But there is a difference, because the people in the story sound a little grander than the people I know, most of whom could not afford to put a glass panel in the ceiling, though they would very much like to. My sister, however, moves in slightly more exalted circles than I do: this is something I am aware of as a source of tension in our relationship. I am, I admit, slightly jealous of her social life and of the kinds of people she meets, and sometimes I think she could do more to include me in the more interesting world she inhabits.

‘The second reason,’ she continued, ‘has to do with the story itself, and with the tiny flaw in the glass panel that eventually led to its entire collapse under pressure: the actual pressure of the water, and the more mysterious and intangible pressure of the people beneath it, who were admiring it while assuming absolutely that it would hold. When it did not, it became the cause of unutterable damage and destruction, almost an instrument of evil, and the symbolism of this arrangement of facts has a certain significance for me.’ She was silent for a while, the juddering second hand moving around the clock face above her head. I looked at my chart and found that her name was Penelope. ‘I would like’, she resumed, ‘to see the world more innocently again, more impersonally, but I have no idea how to achieve this, other than by going somewhere completely unknown, where I have no identity and no associations. But how such a thing could be accomplished, and even where such a place might be, I have no idea; not to mention the relationships and responsibilities themselves,’ she concluded, ‘which drive me mad but at the same time make escape from them impossible.’

Each member of the group had now spoken, except for one, a woman whose name on my chart was Cassandra and whose expression I had watched grow sourer and sourer as the hour passed, who had made her displeasure known by a series of increasingly indiscreet groans and sighs, and who now sat with her arms implacably folded, shaking her head. I asked her whether she had anything, before we concluded, to contribute, and she said that she did not. She had obviously been mistaken, she said: she had been told this was a class about learning to write, something that as far as she was aware involved using your imagination. She didn’t know what I thought had been achieved here, and she wasn’t all that interested in finding out. At least Ryan, she said, had taught them something. She would be asking the organisers to refund her money, and would make damn sure they got her feedback. I don’t know who you are, she said to me, getting to her feet and collecting her things, but I’ll tell you one thing, you’re a lousy teacher.

VII

My neighbour asked whether I’d had time to do any sightseeing yet. We were in the car again, on the rackety road to the marina, with the windows down and his shirtsleeves flapping madly in the breeze.

I said that I had visited Athens several times before, and was familiar with the sights, though that did not altogether explain why I had as yet felt no urge to seek them out. He was surprised: he hadn’t realised I’d been here so often. He himself went to London, for example, all the time, but for some reason it hadn’t occurred to him that the same principle could work in reverse. When was the last time I had come? Three years ago, I said. He was silent for a while, his small eyes narrowed with a faraway look on the horizon.

‘Three years ago,’ he said musingly. ‘At that time, I had just moved back to Athens myself.’

I asked where he had gone to, and why, and he said that he had spent a period living and working in London. He had been offered a very good job by a bank there, he continued, and though he didn’t particularly want to give up the freedom of his life here, and especially his boat, he had a sense it might be the last such offer that came his way. And Athens at the time seemed full of his failures, or at least of things that had come to an end and in which he could find no possibility of renewal. In fact, he felt quite surprised, he said, to have been offered this job, because his opinion of himself had become very low. That is always a dangerous moment, he said, to make a big decision, when you are not sure of what you deserve. Evidently his friends shared his opinion, because all of them urged him, without hesitation, to take it. It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiastically they drive you to your own destruction: even the kindest ones, the ones that are most loving, can rarely have your interests truly at heart, because usually they are advising you from within lives of greater security and greater confinement, where escape is not a reality but simply something they dream of sometimes. Perhaps, he said, we are all like animals in the zoo, and once we see that one of us has got out of the enclosure we shout at him to run like mad, even though it will only result in him becoming lost.

I said his image reminded me of a scene from an opera I liked – in fact I had found a recording of it in Clelia’s apartment – called
The Cunning Little Vixen,
in which a fox is caught by a hunter and kept in a farmyard with the other animals. He keeps her because he loves her, despite the fact she is destructive, and there is a value for her too in his attention, though its consequence is her captivity. But her nature drives her to seek the wild, and one day she escapes the farmyard and finds her way back into the forest; but instead of feeling liberated she is terrified, for having lived in the farmyard most of her life she has forgotten how to be free. He was not familiar with that opera, my neighbour said; he, however, approached the prospect of the job in London with a reverse kind of fatalism, as though the very freedom of his life was something for which he was at last going to pay by going into harness. He, the scion of playboys and millionaires, would finally observe the penal servitude of a nine-to-five: he sold his house in Athens, bought a small flat in an upmarket part of the English capital, and took the boat out of the water. It is the only time, he said, in the twenty-five years of its history that the boat has left the element in which it lives. He had made arrangements for it to be stored in a warehouse in the centre of Athens; it is difficult, even now, for him to convey the emotion he felt watching it be lifted out of the sea and placed on a flatbed truck, which he drove behind all the way in his car, and then interred in its container deep in the city. And then off he went to London, sensing that he himself was about to suffer much the same fate.

I asked him what it was that brought him back from that interment, and he smiled. A phone call, he said. It was his second winter in London, and he was sunk in a dreary and lonely existence, trudging through the rain to work and back again, putting in eighteen-hour days at the bank and eating takeaways late at night in his carpeted prison, when the owner of the warehouse in Athens called him to say that there had been a break-in and that the boat’s engine had been stolen. The next day he handed in his resignation and was on a flight back. How refreshing it was, he said, how affirming, to feel such certainty. He had come almost to believe he was a person with no clear feelings about anything, particularly since the history of his loves had led him into such swamplands of failure, yet this attack on his property returned him to joy and life as though he had won the lottery. For the first time in years he knew what he wanted. The first thing he did, on his return, was buy the best engine he could find, though it did, he accepted, have a little more power than he needed.

We were by now approaching the marina, and he asked whether I wouldn’t like to stop for some coffee or a drink before we set sail. There was no need to hurry, after all; we had all the time in the world. He seemed to remember hearing there was a new place that had just opened, somewhere along the beach; he took his foot off the accelerator and dawdled, peering through the windscreen at the dusty roadside and its string of bars and restaurants, beyond which lay the sand and the water with its frill of surf. Abruptly he steered off into the dirt at the side of the verge and stopped, outside a place with palm trees in white cubic planters and a terrace open to the sea with arrangements of white cubic furniture. There was the sound of jazz, and waiters dressed in black were gliding around the empty furniture, in the shade of an asymmetric white canopy like a giant sail. He asked me if this was all right. I said it looked very impressive, and we got out of the car and went and sat at a table, beside one of the palm trees.

It was important, my neighbour said, to remember to enjoy yourself along the way: in a sense, this had become his philosophy of life these days. His third wife, he said, had been so puritanical that he sometimes felt no amount of pit-stops and pauses would make up for the years he spent with her, in which every event was faced head-on, unanaesthetised, and every little pleasure interrogated and either deemed unnecessary or else written down – with tax added on, he said – in a notebook she kept with her at all times for the purpose. Never had he met someone who was so unmediatedly the product of their family, a Calvinist household obsessed with thrift and the avoidance of waste, though she did, he said, have one weakness, for Formula One racing, which she would sometimes indulge by watching on television, being particularly riveted by the scenes of the winner spraying the cheering crowd with wasted champagne. He had met her at a time when his finances had been devastated by his second divorce, and so her song of parsimony had been, briefly, music to his ears. At the wedding, asked by friends what it was she saw in him – a pertinent enough question, he conceded, at the time – she had replied, I find him interesting.

He ordered two coffees from one of the circling waiters, and for a while we watched the people on the beach from our shady seclusion, their bare bodies smudged by the haze of heat, so that they looked somehow primordial, lying or moving slowly, half naked, along the shore. I said that it didn’t sound such a bad reason to marry someone, and he looked somewhat darkly out to sea. She knew nothing whatever of the physical side of life, he said, despite the fact that she was nearly forty when they met. Her purity and simplicity attracted him, after the knowing seductiveness of his second wife, but in fact she was a woman entirely without romance, entirely without sex, and the nun-like existence she had led previously – and as far as he knew, had resumed when they parted – was not the consequence of a lack of opportunity but was the accurate reflection of her nature. The intimate side of their marriage was an unmitigated disaster, for once they had conceived a child, which they did almost straight away, she simply could not understand why there was any further need for them to have relations. It was a blow for him, and one he tried hard to forestall, but one night she asked him very frankly how many more times she ought to expect that he would require her to participate in an act she evidently found unenjoyable as well as incomprehensible, and after that he lost heart.