Their romance has been concluded and now, perhaps, they are murderously angry with one another. Perhaps she thought the baby would make him love her more, but in fact she seems to have lost him: he has used it, the baby, to make his escape from her. She doesn’t want a doll after all — she wants a man, a man to love her and desire her. Iphegenia, led out in her saffron-coloured wedding dress, is perhaps the sacrifice that lies at the heart of all marriages, the death on which the whole enterprise is built.
Everywhere I see couples, but when I get close enough to hear them the impression changes. Image becomes reality: I am briefly entangled in the net of marital conversation as it passes, am momentarily webbed in its tensions and politics, its million-threaded illusion of harmony. When couples talk, everything they say means something else. Their talk is referential, but the reality it refers to is hidden from view. You see the shadow, but not the object that casts it.
Most evenings now Rupert and I meet in the kitchen. He is always in: I go downstairs and there he is. It is the opposite of marriage, this endlessly recurring randomness through which we find ourselves thrown together. While his supper revolves we talk. He asks me about my situation. He’s interested in the house and in the nature of its energy supply. One evening he opens a bottle of wine and offers me a glass. He offers me a share of his meal, pasta with a red sauce that comes from a Heinz jar. He says he thinks he can arrange a cheaper deal for me, if I give him all the paperwork. He loosens his tie. Outside the kitchen windows is a dry, violet-coloured darkness, and from the neighbouring gardens comes the sound of people talking and laughing in the warm evening. In my garden cats prowl through the overgrown grass and recently I saw a huge fox, mangy and ruddy, standing on the back wall on its four cankered legs in the dusk. Upstairs the children lie asleep in their beds: I imagine them there, like people sleeping in the cabin of a ship that has sailed off its course, unconscious of the danger they’re in. We have lost our bearings, lost our history, and I am the ship’s captain, standing full of dread at the helm. Rupert sloshes more wine into our glasses. He tells me I’m doing a great job. He tells me he thinks I’m a very nice person. He tells me we’re in the same boat, in a way. After a while I say goodnight, and go and shut myself in my room.
I book our summer holiday, the same holiday we always take, to a much-loved familiar place. I tell my husband that we can split the holiday in half, changing over like runners in a relay race, passing the baton of the children. He refuses. He says he will never go to that place again. He wants only what is unknown to him, what is unfamiliar. He thinks there is something ruthless and strange in my intention to revisit a place where once we were together, and the truth is I don’t yet realise the pain this intention will cost me, the discipline I will have to inculcate to endure it. Great if it doesn’t bother you, he says. I say, you want to deny our shared history. You want to pretend our family never happened. That’s about right, he says. I say, I don’t see why the children should lose everything that made them happy. Great, he says. Good for you.
Rupert is gone in the mornings by the time I get the children up for school, and in the evenings I avoid him. I stay in my room, fencing with the long nights. I can no longer sleep: I’m too frightened of dreaming, and of waking from the dreams. I’m frightened of my house. I’m frightened of my own bed. I feel as though I have walked out into a world that looked through the windows to be balmy and warm, only to discover that the sun was the frozen sun of winter, the dazzling light that of polar regions and glaciers. It is colder out here than I could ever have imagined.
One night I hear the front door violently slam: Rupert has gone out. He does not return until the next morning. He does not go to work. All day I am aware of him in his room. At nightfall he emerges in his white robe, ill-looking and sheepish. He says he called in sick; he overdid it a bit last night, at the pubs and clubs in the town centre. Did he go out with friends? Well, no, not exactly, though he seems to remember meeting a few people in the course of things. But no, he went out drinking alone. He came back at about three and slept the rest of the night in his car. He’s been sleeping most of the day, but he’s a bit the worse for wear. He looks at me dartingly, his eyes yellow with drink.
I go away for a few days with the children and when I return my neighbour calls round. There’s been a disturbance, she says. She hates to have to tell me. Your lodger, she says. She says she’s written to him threatening the police if it goes on. She hopes I don’t mind her doing that, but she was really at her wits’ end. He was out there, she says, pointing. Out there in the garden. It was gone midnight and she had gone to bed, when she heard the most excruciating, demoniacal noise. She got up; other people began to open their windows and call down, and eventually she opened her window too. There he was on the lawn in the darkness, wearing nothing but his boxer shorts. She said to him, people are trying to sleep and you’re making the most dreadful noise. You’re creating a disturbance. But he didn’t seem to hear; he didn’t really seem to know she was there. The next day she came and rang on the bell. She said she hoped there would be no more nonsense, and he agreed that there wouldn’t. But then there he was again, the next night. He started at about one and it went on until five or six in the morning, out in the garden with not a stitch on. But it was the noise, this simply awful noise he made, on and on and on until she thought she’d go mad.
What sort of noise? I said. What was he doing?
Well it’s funny, she said, but I think he was trying to sing.
In the biblical story, Abraham also binds his child to an altar and raises a knife over his head. At least Isaac remains ignorant as he’s led up the mountainside of what his fate is to be. Abraham, like a good father, tells him a half lie: he makes out that they are going up there to sacrifice a lamb. Is it because there’s nothing in this for him that Abraham is capable of that small act of mercy? His sacrifice won’t oil the wheels of civilisation; he isn’t doing it to make the wind blow, to turn things his way. His God has merely required it of him, with the cruelty that can only be born of intimacy, for God knows that Abraham cherishes Isaac more than anything else. Recently Abraham criticised God for his plan to lay waste the iniquitous cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, killing the righteous side by side with the sinners, for there is always good to be found even where evil has the upper hand, and why, Abraham wanted to know, should people who had struggled to resist evil receive the same punishment as those who had succumbed to it? In reply God merely thundered at him for having the temerity to hold an opinion, like a parent thundering at an inquisitive child. Now God retaliates by directing Abraham to destroy what he loves the most. He is teaching him a lesson, for isn’t that precisely how God feels about the prospect of destroying those righteous residents of irredeemable Sodom? It’s hard to be God, hard to be responsible, to be in charge: that’s the lesson here, that responsibility means putting moral duty above personal feeling. If Agamemnon’s was a lesson in the harsh politics of self-interest, in the suppression of feeling as a winning move in the pursuit of success and the human power play with the gods, then Abraham’s is precisely the reverse. It’s a lesson in the discipline of objectivity, a discipline that is nowhere more exacting than in its governing of the moral core of love.