Outline: A Novel (3 page)

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, warring 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.’

But I do accept, he said, that it was not unreasonable for her to want me to go to Athens. He hadn’t quite given me the full story – in fact her mother had been taken ill. It was nothing too serious, but she needed to be admitted to the hospital on the mainland, and his wife’s Greek wasn’t all that good. But he thought they could manage, his wife and her father together. The father-in-law’s parting remark, then, was more ambivalent than, in the first version, it had seemed. We had by now fastened our seat-belts, as the voice on the intercom had asked us to, and for the first time I saw lights below as we swung quivering downwards, a great forest of lights rising and falling mysteriously through the darkness.

In those days I was so worried all the time about my children, my neighbour said. I couldn’t think about what I needed or what she needed; I thought they needed me more. His words reminded me of the oxygen masks, which had not, of course, put in an appearance over the past few hours. It was a kind of mutual cynicism, I said, that had resulted in the oxygen masks being provided, on the tacit understanding that they would never be needed. My neighbour said he had found that to be true of many aspects of life, but that all the same the law of averages was not something it paid to base your personal expectations on.

II

I noticed that when we walked along narrow stretches of pavement beside the roaring traffic, Ryan always took the place on the inside.

‘I’ve been reading up on statistics for road deaths in Athens,’ he said. ‘I’m taking this information very seriously. I owe it to my family to get home in one piece.’

There were often dogs lying collapsed across the pavement, big ones with extravagant shaggy pelts. They were insensate in the heat, motionless except for the breath faintly moving in their sides. From a distance they sometimes looked like women in fur coats who had fallen down drunk.

‘Do you step over a dog?’ Ryan said, hesitating. ‘Or do you walk around it?’

He didn’t mind the heat, he said – in fact he was enjoying it. He felt like years of damp were drying out. His only regret was that it had taken him till the age of forty-one to get here, because it seemed like a really fascinating place. It was a shame the wife and kids couldn’t see it too, but he was determined not to ruin it by feeling guilty. The wife had had a weekend with her girlfriends in Paris just now, leaving him to take care of the kids alone; there was no reason he shouldn’t feel he’d earned it. And to be perfectly honest, the kids slowed you down: first thing this morning he’d walked up to the Acropolis, before the heat got too intense, and he couldn’t have done that with them in tow, could he? And even if he had, he’d have spent the whole time worrying about sunburn and dehydration, and though he might have seen the Parthenon sitting like a gold and white crumbling crown on the hilltop with the fierce pagan blue of the sky behind, he wouldn’t have felt it, as he was able to feel it this morning, airing the shaded crevices of his being. Walking up there, for some reason he’d remembered how, in the bedroom of his childhood, the sheets always smelled of mould. If you opened a cupboard in his parents’ house, as often as not there’d be water running down the back of it. When he left Tralee for Dublin, he found that all his books were stuck to the shelves when he tried to take them down. Beckett and Synge had rotted and turned to glue.

‘Which suggests I wasn’t much of a reader,’ he said, ‘so it’s not a detail I give out that often.’

No, he had never been to Greece before, nor to any country where you could take the sun for granted. His wife was allergic to it in any case – to the sun, that was. Like him she’d been raised in the damp and shade and the sun brought her out in purple spots and blisters; she couldn’t cope with heat at all, which induced migraines and vomiting. They took the kids to Galway for holidays, where her parents had a house, and if they were desperate for a break from Dublin they could always go back to Tralee. It’s a case of home is where when you have to go there they have to take you in, he said. And his wife believed in all that, in the family network and Sunday lunch and children having grandparents on both sides, but if it was left to him he’d probably never cross his parents’ threshold again. Not that they did anything particularly wrong, he said, they’re nice enough people, I just don’t think it would occur to me.

We passed a café with tables in the shade of a large awning, and the people sitting at the tables looked superior, so cool and watchful in the shadows while we toiled incomprehensibly through the heat and turmoil of the street. Ryan said he might stop and drink something; he’d come here earlier, he said, for breakfast, and it had seemed like a nice place. It wasn’t clear whether he wanted me to sit down with him or not. In fact he had phrased it so carefully that I got the impression inclusion was something he actually avoided. After that I observed him for this characteristic, and I noticed that when other people were making plans, Ryan would always say ‘I might come along later’ or ‘I might see you there’ rather than commit himself to a time and place. He would only tell you what he was doing after he’d done it. I met him by chance once in the street and noticed that his slicked-back hair was wet, so I had asked him outright where he’d been. He admitted he’d just swum at the Hilton hotel, which had a large outdoor pool, where he had posed as a guest and done forty lengths alongside Russian plutocrats and American businessmen and girls with surgically enhanced bodies. He had felt sure the pool attendants were watching him, but no one had dared interrogate him. How else were you meant to exercise, he wanted to know, in the middle of a traffic-choked city in forty degrees of heat?

At the table he sat, like the other men, with his back to the wall so that his view was of the café and the street. I sat opposite him, and because he was all I could see I looked at him. Ryan was teaching alongside me at the summer school: from a distance he was a man of conventional sandy-coloured good looks, but close up there was something uneasy in his appearance, as though he had been put together out of unrelated elements, so that the different parts of him didn’t entirely go together. He had large white teeth which he kept always a little bared and a loose body poised somewhere between muscle and fat, but his head was small and narrow, with sparse, almost colourless hair that grew in spikes back from his forehead and colourless eyelashes that were hidden for now behind dark glasses. His eyebrows, however, were fierce and straight and black. When the waitress came he took the glasses off and I saw his eyes, two small bright blue chips in slightly reddened whites. The rims were red too, as though they were sore, or as though the sun had singed them. He asked the waitress if she had non-alcoholic beer and she leaned towards him with her hand cupped around her ear, not understanding. He picked up the menu and together they studied it.