Outline: A Novel (7 page)

At last the sound of the engine died away; the boat slowed, and puttered towards a small rocky island that rose steeply out of the sea. My neighbour’s phone rang and he looked quizzically at the screen before answering it. He began to speak mellifluously in Greek, pacing about the small deck and occasionally checking the steering wheel with a finger. I saw that we were approaching a clear little cove where many seabirds perched on the rocky promontories, and where the glittering water whirled and retreated against a tiny curl of sand. The island was too small to have anything human on it: it was untouched and deserted, except for the birds. I waited for my neighbour’s conversation to conclude, which took a considerable amount of time. Eventually, though, he hung up. That was someone I haven’t spoken to in many years, he said – in fact I was very surprised that she should call me. He was silent for a while, his finger on the steering wheel, his face sombre. She just heard about my brother’s death, he continued, and she was calling to give her condolences. I asked when his brother had died. Oh, four, five years ago, he said. But she lives in the States and hasn’t been back to Greece for a long time. She’s here now on a visit, so she’s only just got the news. His phone rang again almost immediately, and again he answered it. It was another Greek conversation, this one also lengthy but a little more businesslike. Work, he explained when it concluded, making a brushing gesture with his hand.

The boat drifted to a halt in the lapping water. He came to the back and opened a compartment, inside which lay a small anchor, and he hauled it by its chain over the side. This is a good place to swim, he said, if you would like to. I watched the anchor fall down through the clear water. When the boat was secured my neighbour stepped up on to the stern and dived heavily over the side. Once he had gone I wrapped a towel around myself and changed awkwardly into my swimming costume. Then I jumped in, swimming out in the opposite direction all the way to the perimeter of the island so that I could see the open sea beyond it. The other way, the distant shore was a bobbing line full of tiny shapes and figures. In the meantime another boat had arrived and was anchored not far from ours, and I could see the people sitting out on deck and hear the sound of their voices talking and laughing. They were a family group, with numerous children in bright costumes jumping in and out of the water, and now and again the sound of a baby wailing echoed thinly around the cove. My neighbour had got back on the boat and was standing there with his hand screening his eyes, watching my progress. It felt good to swim, after the tension of sitting still, of the heat of Athens and of spending time with strangers. The water was so clear and still and cool, and the shapes of the coastline so soft and ancient, with the little island nearby that seemed to belong to nobody. I felt that I could swim for miles, out into the ocean: a desire for freedom, an impulse to move, tugged at me as though it were a thread fastened to my chest. It was an impulse I knew well, and I had learned that it was not the summons from a larger world I used to believe it to be. It was simply a desire to escape from what I had. The thread led nowhere, except into ever expanding wastes of anonymity. I could swim out into the sea as far as I liked, if what I wanted was to drown. Yet this impulse, this desire to be free, was still compelling to me: I still, somehow, believed in it, despite having proved that everything about it was illusory. When I returned to the boat, my neighbour said he didn’t like it when people swam too far out: it made him nervous; there were speedboats that could come out of nowhere, without warning, and such collisions were not unheard of.

He offered me a Coke from the coldbox he kept on deck, and then proffered a box of tissues, from which he took a large handful himself. He blew his nose lengthily and thoroughly, while both of us watched the family on the neighbouring boat. There were two little boys and a girl playing there, shrieking as they leapt off the side and then clambering one after another back up the ladder, their bodies glittering with water. A woman in a sunhat sat on deck, reading a book, and beside her in the shade of the canopy was a baby’s pram. A man in long shorts and sunglasses paced up and down the deck, speaking into his phone. I said that I found appearances more bewildering and tormenting now than at any previous point in my life. It was as if I had lost some special capacity to filter my own perceptions, one that I had only become aware of once it was no longer there, like a missing pane of glass in a window that allows the wind and rain to come rushing through unchecked. In much the same way I felt exposed to what I saw, discomfited by it. I thought often of the chapter in
Wuthering Heights
where Heathcliff and Cathy stare from the dark garden through the windows of the Lintons’ drawing room and watch the brightly lit family scene inside. What is fatal in that vision is its subjectivity: looking through the window the two of them see different things, Heathcliff what he fears and hates and Cathy what she desires and feels deprived of. But neither of them can see things as they really are. And likewise I was beginning to see my own fears and desires manifested outside myself, was beginning to see in other people’s lives a commentary on my own. When I looked at the family on the boat, I saw a vision of what I no longer had: I saw something, in other words, that wasn’t there. Those people were living in their moment, and though I could see it I could no more return to that moment than I could walk across the water that separated us. And of those two ways of living – living in the moment and living outside it – which was the more real?

Appearances, my neighbour replied, were highly valued in his own family, but he had learned – perhaps fatally – to view them as a mechanism of deception and disguise. And it was in the closest relationships that the deception had to be greatest, for obvious reasons. He knew, for instance, that many of the men of his experience – his uncles, and people of their social circle – had a series of mistresses while remaining married to one woman all their lives. But it had never occurred to him that his father might have sustained his relationship to his mother in the same way. He perceived his father and mother as unitary while his uncle Theo, for instance, he knew to be duplicitous, though he wondered more and more whether that distinction had actually existed; whether, in other words, he had spent his adult life attempting to follow a template of marriage that had been, in fact, an illusion.

There had been a hotel Theo liked to stay in, not far from my neighbour’s boarding school, and Theo would often call in and take him out to tea, always with a different ‘friend’ in tow. These friends were as scented and beautiful as aunt Irini was swarthy and squat; she had a number of warts on her face that sprouted coarse black hairs of an extraordinary girth and length, and my neighbour had been mesmerised his whole life by this feature, which was still real to him though Irini had been dead for thirty years and which symbolised the enduring nature of repulsion, while beauty was seen once and never seen again. When Irini died, at the age of eighty-four after sixty-three years of marriage, uncle Theo refused to allow her to be buried and instead had her encased in glass and kept in the vaults of a Greek chapel in Enfield, where he visited her every day of the six months that remained to him. My neighbour had never kept company with Theo and Irini without witnessing scenes of the most extraordinary violence: even a telephone call to the house usually involved an argument, with one of them picking up the extension to abuse the other while the caller played referee. His own parents, though fiercely combative, never approached the heights of Theo and his wife – theirs was a colder though perhaps a bitterer war. It was his father who died first, in London, and his body was stored in the same vault where Irini had lain, for his mother had taken it into her head to commission the construction of a family tomb back on the island, an undertaking so grandiose that it had fallen well behind schedule and was not ready to receive him when he died. She had conceived this idea when his father first fell ill, and the last year of his father’s life was spent receiving almost daily bulletins on the progress of the tomb being built to envelop him. This unique method of torture might have seemed to be the conclusive move in their lifelong argument, but in fact when his mother herself came to die – a year to the day, as he believed he had already told me, after his father – the tomb was still not finished. She joined her husband in the vault in Enfield, and it wasn’t until several months later that their bodies were flown together back to the island on which both of them had been born. It had fallen to my neighbour to oversee the interring, and also the exhumation of other family members – his grandparents on both sides, numerous uncles and aunts – from their places in the cemetery and their relocation in the enormous new tomb. He flew back, with his parents’ corpses in the hold, and spent all day immersed with the gravediggers in the grisly business of transporting and arranging the various coffins. He was particularly unnerved to witness the return to the earth’s surface of his grandfather, his mother’s father, who had been a man of great mischief and the cause – to the end of their days – of many of his parents’ arguments, for the power even in memory that he continued to hold over his daughter. In the late afternoon, his parents were the last to be lowered into the vast marble structure. My neighbour had a taxi waiting to take him back to the airport, as he was due to return to London straight away. But midway through the journey, sitting in the taxi, a terrible realisation struck him. In all the rearranging of the family bodies, he had somehow failed to place his parents side by side: worse still, he distinctly recalled, there in the back of the taxi, that it was his grandfather’s coffin that lay between the two. Immediately he ordered the taxi driver to turn around and take him back to the cemetery. As they approached, he told the taxi driver that he would have to help him, for by now it was nearly dark and everyone else would have gone home. The taxi driver agreed, but no sooner had they entered the cemetery gates in the darkness than he took fright and ran away, leaving my neighbour alone. He did not recall, my neighbour said, quite how he managed to unseal the tomb single-handed: he was still a fairly young man, but even so he must have been endowed in that moment with a superhuman strength. He climbed over the edge and descended into the tomb and there, sure enough, he saw his parents’ two coffins with the grandfather between them. It was not so hard to slide them into their proper positions, but once he’d done it he realised that owing to the steepness and depth of the tomb it was going to be impossible for him to get out again. He called and shouted, to no avail; he leapt and scrabbled at the smooth sides of the tomb, trying to find a foothold.

But I suppose I must have got out somehow, he said, because I certainly didn’t spend all night there, though I thought I might have to. Perhaps the taxi driver came back after all – I don’t remember. He smiled, and for a while the two of us watched the family on the other boat, across the bright water. I said that when my sons were the ages of those two leaping boys, they were so intimate it would have been hard to disentangle their separate natures. They used to play together without pause from the moment they opened their eyes in the morning to the moment they closed them again. Their play was a kind of shared trance in which they created whole imaginary worlds, and they were forever involved in games and projects whose planning and execution were as real to them as they were invisible to everyone else: sometimes I would move or throw away some apparently inconsequential item, only to be told that it was a sacred prop in the ongoing make-believe, a narrative which seemed to run like a magic river through our household, inexhaustible, and which they could exit and re-enter at will, moving over that threshold which no one else could see into another element. And then one day the river dried up: their shared world of imagination ceased, and the reason was that one of them – I can’t even recall which one it was – stopped believing in it. In other words, it was nobody’s fault; but all the same it was brought home to me how much of what was beautiful in their lives was the result of a shared vision of things that strictly speaking could not have been said to exist.

I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see, and in this case it proved to be an impermanent basis for living. Without their shared story, the two children began to argue, and where their playing had taken them away from the world, making them unreachable sometimes for hours at a time, their arguments brought them constantly back to it. They would come to me or to their father, seeking intervention and justice; they began to set greater store by facts, by what had been done and said, and to build the case for themselves and against one another. It was hard, I said, not to see this transposition from love to factuality as the mirror of other things that were happening in our household at the time. What was striking was the sheer negative capability of their former intimacy: it was as though everything that had been inside was moved outside, piece by piece, like furniture being taken out of a house and put on the pavement. There seemed to be so much of it, because what had been invisible was now visible; what had been useful was now redundant. Their antagonism was in exact proportion to their former harmony, but where the harmony had been timeless and weightless, the antagonism occupied space and time. The intangible became solid, the visionary was embodied, the private became public: when peace becomes war, when love turns to hatred, something is born into the world, a force of pure mortality. If love is what is held to make us immortal, hatred is the reverse. And what is astonishing is how much detail it gathers to itself, so that nothing remains untouched by it. They were struggling to free themselves from one another, yet the very last thing they could do was leave one another alone. They fought over everything, disputed ownership of the most inconsequential item, were enraged by the merest nuance of speech, and when finally they were maddened by detail they erupted into physical violence, hitting and scratching one another; which of course returned them to the madness of detail again, because physical violence entails the long-drawn-out processes of justice and the law. The story of who had done what to whom had to be told, and the matters of guilt and punishment established, though this never satisfied them either; in fact it made things worse, because it seemed to promise a resolution that never came. The more its intricacies were specified, the bigger and realer their argument grew. Each of them wanted more than anything to be declared right, and the other wrong, but it was impossible to assign blame entirely to either of them. And I realised eventually, I said, that it could never be resolved, not so long as the aim was to establish the truth, for there was no single truth any more, that was the point. There was no longer a shared vision, a shared reality even. Each of them saw things now solely from his own perspective: there was only point of view.