The anniversary, p.23
The Anniversary, page 23
I had tried to explain this at various points, as a way of justifying my account. Reaffirming it.
I needed to get to safety. He wouldn’t follow.
I said maybe one or both these things. The motive for my action might differ but the result is the same. He was out, in the storm, while I got stuck inside trying to open the heavy door. Any appraisal of that which is occurring simultaneously is necessarily contextualised by the thing which came before. This is how it comes to matter, to be a moment, later on, of great or greater significance. But I have already said all this, here and elsewhere – Patrick and I both knew the theory well, knew the examples that went with it. What started the fire? That is the question. But if Porter had told us this, the film would be less about the American fireman and more about the woman and child.
21
Outside now, the season is starting to turn, heading into autumn. The leaves fall quickly. Come winter you can see further through the bare trees. At that time of year, when I go out walking along the marked tracks, I can see past the chain-link fence with its barbs and into the country beyond. There is not much there. A narrow, winding road. Fields. More woodland in certain directions. From the eastern corner of the boundary I can see through the trees to a neighbouring house, a fair way away but visible. Because this wasn’t always the place it is now. There would have been neighbours, country folk, landed gentry. Although this house, the one I can see in the winter, might not have belonged to the latter. It is in need of repair. The front garden is wild with overgrown grass and cluttered with odd junk. One side of the house is clad in rusting corrugated iron in the manner of a barn. We are a long way from any town, and so whoever lives there occasionally puts out by the roadside the objects they no longer need and leaves a large sign on them saying FREE. Sometimes drivers pull over to look at these things and put one or two items in their boot. At other times the discarded objects sit there for weeks. Then they disappear, back into the house I suspect. I have never seen who does this, the person who carries the objects to the side of the road and then takes them back in again.
But I am interested in these goings-on, the discarded objects – among which I have seen an exercise bicycle, a TV cabinet and a rolled-up piece of carpet – because so many other signs of life have ceased. Stalled. Run aground. I can only watch these things happening on the screen from afar: the stock markets’ plummet, the helicopters, the summer wildfires. The things outside. Here, on the inside, time is counted in an empty way, without event. During the day, when I turn up for meals and answer to the roll call and complete my duties, I do everything on repeat. The days are long and unvarying, by and large, unless I try hard to look at the small things: the changes in the garden, the sprouting of new leaves on the seedlings, the infestations of pests that I am charged to deal with: red spider mites, aphids, flea beetles. These are things of mild concern, relatively speaking. Although I have found that you can teach yourself to become interested in all manner of things, when you must. Otherwise I live, as I have always done, to write. To write and revise and then write again. I used to do this for Patrick too – I read everything of his, even the things he wished me not to see. He in turn left his mark on all my work. I let him have what we might call the power of attorney over my writing, almost up to the very end. But now I am free to say what I like.
There were questions, of course, that I didn’t answer in that last book, nor in the one before. Threads that were left unresolved, whole periods skipped over in brief. In interviews I’ve often been asked about this. It always surprises me that readers think of my characters as real people and want to see their lives resolved. And then I think, why not? Real people, experienced in our head, and real people whom we’ve lost, eventually start to feel like characters. The dividing line has never been especially clear for me. Or rather, I’ve never been overly concerned with policing it. Patrick admired my fictional version of both Henry and May. Henry, he thought, was particularly lifelike, and maybe this was why he remained a character that people continued to ask me about. Even at that reading in New York, people wanted to know what happened to him, as though he were a friend they had lost track of. I told them what I knew, which was what I had made up, but also what I had come to believe, as if I had discovered and not invented it. This is what I think happened, I tell them. This was how Henry appeared in the second-last draft. This was my last sighting of him. He’s still there, ghosting the pages in a file somewhere. Most of the time this seems to satisfy them. I used my father’s letters as a springboard, and after he died I burnt these in the fireplace in the living room where Patrick and I often spent our evenings. A room that has featured heavily in all my books. A room I have described over and over again, with minor variations. People were always surprised when they saw it in real life. In that room Patrick and I often sat on the sofa together, which was positioned in front of the television. We liked to watch movies that way, curled up. On the sofa we took the same sides as we did in bed, him on the right, me on the left. Sometimes, after the movie we were watching had ended, we would sit for a while in front of the blank screen. Faint light came from the kitchen and this made our reflection visible against the dark glass. Two blackened figures, side by side. We would half stare for a while at this image, half seeing ourselves, half seeing through these reflections, able to look both at them and past them, noting the dusty and fingerprinted screen, part of our minds still dwelling on whatever it was we had just been watching. We stared at ourselves with some detachment, because each reflected figure lacked a face. The television was placed at chest height, so that when we sat on the sofa the images in the dark glass were of two headless people. It was a portrait. A portrait of us, the portrait of a marriage. Poets are discussed in reference to phases of style: the early, middle and late periods. A marriage, in the development of its language, might be classified in the same way. One becomes less aggrandising, less persuaded by a youthful tendency to swoon, the less bearable impulses are gradually internalised and weighted down. But we caught a flash of them then, in that portrait. The decapitated couple. The potential for violence and all the violent feelings, given back to us in that dark image. Just for a moment anyway, before one of us reached over and switched on the light.
Months before I even booked the cruise, I had asked him over and over again if he could please check my manuscript. For years he was eager to read everything I wrote, and I didn’t understand this sudden reluctance. Things had been difficult all through the spring while I worked away to meet the July deadline. The novel had taken so much longer than I thought it should, and I just wanted it done. I also knew that I’d made many additions in a state of fatigued distraction, and because of this I needed Patrick’s eye more than usual. He’d read an earlier draft, but I was unaccustomed to signing off on anything without his reassurance.
I only want you to look quickly at a few sections, to double-check some changes, I had said. But he was always caught up with other things.
I’m sure it’s all fine, he replied. You’re always brilliant, he said, sounding blasé, without being convincing. Just remind me tomorrow, he would say. Or, Remember to remind me. And I’d reply, I am reminding you. I reminded you yesterday too.
Just remind me again, he said. But day after day, reminder after reminder, he claimed never to have the time, or never found the time, never made the time.
Just look at them? I said. Just the changes?
Please try not to make any more lengthy additions at this point, Ada had asked, knowing my habit of sending through reams of last-minute requests, and although I had done my best to satisfy her on this front I was nervous about the chapters that I had added to. But still the days passed, and Patrick didn’t get to these. I gave up asking; there wasn’t enough time left. The final manuscript was due in on the same day that I was booked to fly to Paris to do an author talk. I didn’t want to go. Although it was summer, I was exhausted from rushing towards the deadline and felt completely drained. My mind was elsewhere. It was impossible to focus on other things, to make small talk with a group of strangers. I always said yes to the wine at these events because it eased my nerves, but then it muddled my brain and I couldn’t think clearly to answer anyone’s questions and ended up with a terrible headache.
Besides, I said to Patrick, I can’t decide what to wear.
Wear what you normally wear. You always look great.
What do I normally wear?
I don’t know, you’ve got so many beautiful clothes.
I wanted to wear the silk shirt but it has a stain on it.
Then wash it.
I don’t have time; I have to fly out tomorrow morning, I made an appointment at the hairdresser’s and I’ve got to get the manuscript in before I leave.
I don’t know what you should wear, then. It doesn’t really matter. Just wear something that you’re comfortable in.
But that’s the point, I can’t be comfortable in anything at these things.
I had thought of cancelling but people had bought tickets, everything was organised. I complained about this to Patrick.
But isn’t this what you wanted? he said. Other people would kill for this.
I thought he might have been joking, he knew how much these events exhausted me. How I dreaded them for weeks beforehand. How I dreamt of them afterwards, castigating myself for saying such stupid things. How I increasingly disliked the feeling of even being in crowded places, of being glanced at, seen, of being visible. How I felt tired by the effort of making myself ready to be seen; even the expectation of being seen felt wearying. This intolerance had spread beyond my professional engagements; in recent months I had started to find any busy public place especially exhausting. Busy rooms, busy trains, busy shopping centres. Once, the pleasure of stepping out, all dressed and ready, had been a source of energy. Patrick used to cheer me on, praise me. I was and always would be young in relation to him, if one were measuring just the years. But what I had been wooed by, what had given him that initial charm, what had swept me up, was his overwhelming and forceful belief in the bewitching potential of my future – all that I might become, but wasn’t yet. In the intervening years this gap had closed and I suddenly found it inexplicably tiring to perform my appearance, even to myself, to have to fake this belief.
Really? No. You can’t be, he had once said, showing his surprise at my youth. He seemed amazed by it. As if youth were magical, accidental, a lucky strike, as if it only happened to the chosen few. Back then I didn’t understand that youth was not a virtue in itself, because he treated it like it was, as if I were virtuous because I was young – as though I had some inherent magic in me by way of this, and I made the mistake of taking pride in this notion, of giving myself credit for a biological phase that was in reality not mine, and did not mark me out but was entirely democratic in its manifestation within all of us, and equally fleeting. At the time he was far enough past his own youth for my very being to seem miraculous.
Eventually, however, that future caught up with us, with me. I felt his wonderment dampen. My youth was relative, defined in contrast to his experience. As my experience started to match his, and as my successes – by some measures – even exceeded his, the idea of my youth dissolved. The appeal of it. The young writers he sometimes worked with, however, were still the age I was many years ago, the kind of women who laughed at his jokes about certain books being structured like a male orgasm, women who were young enough to want to hear him talk about this, who believed him. Rising, rising, rising, he’d explain, and then bang. Everything said and done. Resolution was a version of him falling asleep on top of you. This was foolish literature, in my view, naïve, overly simplistic. He himself made light of this structure, and once added to a special guest lecture a plot diagram which, he said, echoed the female climax: more complex, nuanced, multiple. He was talking about a short story, I don’t know which one. I only heard about it afterwards. Everyone heard about it afterwards. Apparently the women giggled while the men blushed. Young men they were, scarcely more than boys. They probably didn’t even know what this was, what a female orgasm could look like. It would have been their innocence that was embarrassing, not the explicit content. Of course, such exuberances only made the women in that audience fall for my husband a little more, as I once had. Such exuberances only made them dwell on his knowledge, fantasise about it, imagine the theory in practice: his knowledge of the body, or of their bodies in particular.
And so that day, as I prepared to go to Paris, he didn’t say to me, Oh wear those blue trousers, I love seeing you in those. Once, he would have said to me, Why don’t you walk ahead of me, so I can see your arse move, misquoting a line from that favourite film of ours, Day for Night. The film we quoted to each other all the time. Alphonse says this to his fiancé as she walks down the hall. We loved that film. The way it gave you the feeling of being an insider, and you would only intermittently remember that the film about the making of a film was itself being filmed. That man will use anything! Later, on the cruise ship, Patrick would take my hands as Ferrand did Pamela’s, and rearrange them on the ship railing, just as Pamela’s hands are rearranged on the railing of the balcony. Ferrand held her hands so gently, he paid her such intimate attention, receptive to the mood of every gesture.
Instead Patrick said to me, as if to a general assembly and without looking at me, Yeah, anything will be fine. You’ll look fine. They’ll love you in anything. In fact, they probably won’t even care what you wear and it will all be over soon anyhow. I mean, doesn’t the whole thing only last an hour?
Look, he said, if it would make things easier I could drop the manuscript off for you. Save you the time.
Really?
Sure, he said, picking up a green apple from the fruit bowl and biting into it.
I remember, after the event, making the quick decision to alter my schedule and catch a late flight straight back. I felt uneasy for some reason and couldn’t imagine sleeping in a hotel bed. I didn’t yet know about the prize. At that time, when I flew home from Paris, it must have been around the second week in July. I hadn’t given a thought to our anniversary. I’d been so preoccupied with trying to finish the manuscript that I was oblivious to anything else going on and was still mulling over some proposed changes as I hopped in a taxi at Gatwick. When I got home Patrick wasn’t there. I showered and made myself some toast. Then I heard him fumbling at the front door: a man too drunk to fit his key into the lock. I opened it for him and he stumbled inside. He was surprised to see me, You? he said. He tried to stand up a little straighter. I thought you were, you know, I mean flying home in the morning? he slurred. He slipped his bag off his shoulder and let it fall to the floor.
I could see the manuscript was still in there. I was sure he’d been to the publishing house because he’d sent me a message to say he was dropping the package off on his way home.
You mean you went there, I said, and didn’t take it out of your bag?
You know I thought I did. I swear it. I remember holding it out to her.
And then what?
I don’t know, he said, I must have put it down, or gone to put it down, or maybe— we just got chatting, and she seemed really interested.
Really interested?
Yeah. Interested. I mean, she knew your books, and was telling me how much she loved them and wanted to, what’s the word, if I was planning on you know adapting this one. I don’t know. I must have held it out and somehow forgotten to put it down or put it down and picked it up. Or maybe put it back. Your publisher wasn’t there. Ada I mean. I was later than, I thought maybe I needed to— I mean Annie said—
You mean Anna-Maria, Ada’s assistant?
I think so.
You think so, but you know her well enough to call her Annie?
It all made sudden sense to me then. All the things I hadn’t understood before but which had troubled me. His distractedness, his unusual fatigue, his reluctance to read my work – his strange and sudden desire to move elsewhere.
