Unlike Artemis, this Christian God is satisfied by willingness: Abraham binds his terrified child to the altar and raises the knife, and at that moment God sends an angel to stay his hand. Blood no longer has any value, in this new world of ideas. Justice has become cerebral, logical, academic. But I imagine Abraham and Isaac walking back down the mountainside afterwards in silence, their story of love in tatters. The father has learned that he is capable of harming his child. The child has learned that parental love is not the safety he believed it to be. What will the new story be, grown from this terrible knowledge?
DARK WINDOWS
My daughters and I do not leave home very often: a kind of numbness has settled on our household that any movement can transform into pain. For a while I thought that going elsewhere created possibilities of consolation, even of recovery, but I have discovered that every welcome is also a form of exposure. It is as though, in other people’s houses, we become aware of our own nakedness. At one time I mistook this nakedness for freedom, but I don’t any more.
It is my mother’s seventieth birthday party, a high occasion: everyone is there. The driveway of my brother’s house is crammed with cars. We too came by car, along the motorway and then on smaller roads that took us through countryside and villages, little redbrick places that reminded me of the village where I used to visit my grandmother as a child. We lived in America then, and that English village, so damp and miniature-seeming, so full of twists and turns and cavities, constituted my education in the country of my parents, where soon I would come to live for good. In California I wasn’t quite sure who I was: large pieces of the jigsaw were missing, and it seemed that the missing pieces were here, in this twisting rain-darkened place. I half-recognised them, the antiquity and the expressive weather, the hedgerows with their mysterious convoluted interiors, the sense of a solid provenance that underlay the surface movements of life like wood beneath the burnish: they were part of me and yet they lay outside me. It was difficult to say — to prove — that they were mine. In the gas-smelling kitchen, rain at the windows, my grandmother buttered the cut face of the cottage loaf before she sliced it, and I watched her like a savage observing a missionary, or perhaps it was the other way around. Either way, I was an onlooker, though I didn’t want to be. I wanted to live in the moment instead of always being lifted out of it into awareness, like a child lifted out of its warm bed half-asleep in the thick of night.
But awareness was the consequence and the curse of that divided life. I couldn’t help noticing England more perhaps than the people who lived there, just as now I notice the unbroken home, the unified lives that I see through lit windows. When I lived behind those windows I wondered about what was outside. Now that division has been externalised again, has become actual, like the geographical division of my youth. I am no longer a participant: once more, I am an observer. To observe is not to not feel — in fact it is to put yourself at the mercy of feeling, like the child’s warm skin meeting the cold air of midnight. My own children, too, have been roused from the unconsciousness of childhood; theirs too is the pain and the gift of awareness. ‘I have two homes,’ my daughter said to me one evening, clearly and carefully, ‘and I have no home.’ To suffer and to know what it is that you suffer: how can that be measured against its much-prized opposite, the ability to be happy without knowing why?
A white limousine pulls out of a junction into the road in front of us, a wedding car, as stately as a hearse. Through its darkened windows I see a lattice of white ribbons; I see the empty back seat, all decked with arrangements of waxy pale flowers. I see the driver in cap and uniform, staring straight ahead. His solemnity, his self-importance, are striking. In his role as functionary to the eternal rites, he seems to make no distinction between life and death. I wonder whether he is on his way to discharge his duties, or returning from them. In the back of our own car is an enormous cake. I baked it the day before, in one of those vague states that sometimes descend on me now, where a slight uncoupling from reality occurs: I seem to skate or float down an incline of time, and only realise I can’t steer or stop when something concrete and hazardous appears in my path. There is at first a consumptive glamour to suffering, for suffering is the corollary of health just as drunkenness is of sobriety. It is the move away from normality that is glamorous. A veil is torn down — how delirious it is, how curiously liberating, to tear it! For a while the old state lends its light to the new, like the sun lending light to a whirling dead star, but gradually I have become conscious of a vast cold, a silence, advancing across it like a shadow. I see the magnitude of the suffering in the same instant as I understand that I can no longer avoid it. It is frightening then to be stranded in that delirium, like the drunk for whom sobriety is as inaccessible as a locked house to which the keys have been mislaid. You can try the handle, look in through the dark windows, but you can’t get inside.
The cake is a three-tiered cake, the tiers cemented and then the whole edifice plastered from top to bottom with icing. The children decorated it, with hard little icing rosebuds and silver balls that came from a packet. In different-coloured icing they wrote ‘Happy Birthday’ on the top. The cake is so large that it has to travel in an enormous cardboard box. I keep glimpsing its summit in the rear-view mirror, a gaudy mountain. It seems both cheap and extravagant: from the back of the car it emanates waves of grandiosity and shame. I realise that the cake is a failure. There was something fanciful in my conception of it that was somehow allowed to run riot, unconstrained by a proper recognition of the labour involved in bringing it to life. My vision — three different tiers of lemon, chocolate and vanilla — had become detached from my competence. I remember from childhood how easy it was to imagine, how hard to create: the difference between what I could conceive of and what I could actually do was bewildering. In adulthood I have learned that to envisage is nothing: success is a hard currency, earned by actual excellence. The vision has to be externalised, and in the case of the cake it remains the prisoner of my imaginings. Dimly I recall my hours in the kitchen the day before, mixing and baking the different tiers. I didn’t use a recipe: utterly at the service of my vision, I was operating by blind faith alone. Yet I was neglectful, careless, not measuring things properly, taking shortcuts wherever I could. Was it because the vision was mine that I was so careless with it? I see the same impatience sometimes when my children undertake something they can’t execute, a sort of disregard — almost a contempt — for practicality, perhaps even for reality itself. What they like is what is in their heads — how boring it is, how hard and intransigent, this plane on which their imaginings aren’t recognised, where their visions are translated into shapeless nonsensical things! I too forgot, during those hours, the hard standard of success; forgot that people would be eating this cake, judging it. When the tiers were cooked I removed them from their tins, three rubbery discs whose indeterminate colour and smell I apprehended from a great psychological distance. I buried them in icing, as though burying the product of my shame; and the children decorated the mound with flowers and inscriptions like a freshly dug grave. Children have a knack for the funereal, a certain authority where death is concerned. Unlike their creativity, this is pure competence. It looks nice, Mummy, they both said, as we interred it in its cardboard box.
My family requires several tables laid end to end to accommodate it. In my brother’s house the biggest room has been cleared to make way. The tables have been brought in, amassed from all over: the dining-room table and the kitchen table, the leaf-strewn garden table, desks and side tables from around the house, and lastly a huge piece of chipboard laid across two trestles carried over from the garage. It is autumn, a cold bright Sunday, and the light comes without warmth through the sitting-room windows. The different tables stand in a long line, their ends touching in the hard light. My sister-in-law unfolds an enormous tablecloth: it is two cloths, in fact, of the same material, with a runner laid across the centre to hide the join. As she spreads them out the oddity of different surfaces, the cheap beside the costly, the jigsaw of inadequacy and splendour, is transformed into a vision of wholeness. No one would now guess at the compromise that lies beneath the smart tablecloths; the fact that the underlying structure is both less and more than it seems has been lost to the conformity of the surface.