The youngest person sitting down to lunch is two, the oldest — my grandmother — ninety-two. There has never been a divorce in this clan. Some children are the first in their family history to go to university: mine are the first to experience the public breakdown of their parents’ marriage. Other than myself, of the many assembled adults only my grandmother is without her mate. My grandfather died when my grandmother was in her sixties: for nearly thirty years she has lived without a husband. These three decades begin to rival the decades of her marriage like the outskirts of a town engulfing its historic centre, yet that centre holds, remains the explanation, the cause. Unlike me, my grandmother never ended the story; it goes on, with or without certain of its main characters.
When I was younger I thought she must be relieved to be alone, after all those years. Though I had loved my grandfather I saw it as a disencumbrance, a liberation, like taking off shoes that hurt. Marriage appeared to me as a holding-in, a corseting, and it seemed to my eyes that the force of constraint was male; that it was men who imposed this structure, marriage, in order to make a woman unavailable, and with her the gifts of love and warmth that otherwise might have flowed freely out into the world. But men provided shelter, and money: I understood that a woman could not merely liberate herself, couldn’t just take herself off with her gifts of love and warmth and go elsewhere. What had happened to my grandmother seemed the ideal solution, to be left with the chattels but freed from the male authority that had provided them, though admittedly it had taken an awfully long time to happen. It never occurred to me that she might remarry, might enter again into that bondage, and indeed she never did. And it never occurred to me either that she might have remained alone out of loyalty to the familial enterprise; that she might have been lonely, have sickened for companionship, but continued to play her part for the sake of her children; that she might have understood, as I did not, that the jigsaw is frail, not strong, is a mirage, not a prison. It is not to dismantle but to conserve it that strength is required, for it will come apart in an instant. It will come apart, that image, and what remains is not a new or different image but a pile of pieces that mean nothing at all.
At the end of lunch the enormous cake is brought in, amid exclamations in which I believe I can detect notes of uncertainty. For a moment the threat — or rather the knowledge — of failure is unbearable, the inescapable knowledge that is the essence of this second life, this aftermath. As a child, I read the book of life through the adults I knew, just as now I read it through my children, the second reading perhaps a form of atonement for the first, for I know what it is to be a child. That first reading was savage and revelatory where the second is empathetic and philosophicaclass="underline" eyes strained against the darkness of my own ignorance, I struggled to comprehend the grandeur and violence of the adult world, to grasp its double nature of seeming and being. And in this duplicity, this difference between how things looked and what they were, was something to which I couldn’t be reconciled, just as now I can’t forget that under the pretty tablecloths lies a makeshift structure that has no form or beauty of its own. In much the same way, I saw the romance of marriage as a covering for something unapologetically practical, saw it as the metaphor for woman, the beautiful creature who cooks and cleans. Why couldn’t the outside and the inside be the same? Beneath the surface of my cake is something worse than practical, worse than makeshift: it is the reversal of meaning; it is failure itself. Far better to be practical than to make a foul-tasting cake. Better to go to a shop and buy a cake than to produce this extravagant travesty of love.
The first Christmas after my grandfather died, my grandmother cried at the table, a paper hat from a Christmas cracker on her head. I remember the way the flimsy hat sat jauntily on her greying hair as she wept. It seemed to readmit her to the world of childhood; and indeed I sensed around the table a slight impatience with her conduct to which my own frequent emotional outbursts had long since accustomed me. For some reason her tears were not permitted: the obligation to romanticise marriage had been, somehow, reversed by my grandfather’s absence. The covers were off: why on earth was she trying to put them back on again? My grandmother had been brave in marriage: for more than forty years the surface was maintained. It seemed unfair that she shouldn’t be allowed to sentimentalise now, when it could do no harm. In her jaunty hat, husbandless, she had been returned to the caste and strictures of childhood, to our end of the table, where people were told when they could and couldn’t cry.
There is no crying now, at my mother’s birthday party. I look around at my family as though through a million-splintered pane of glass. The world on my side of the glass is as white and cold and silent as an Arctic plain. A song is sung; the cake is cut and cut, divided and redivided into numberless sections. I feel a certain relief at its dismantling, but a cake is not a jigsaw. Its character survives: no matter how finely you cut it, each section replicates the strata of the whole. A piece is put in front of me, my portion, but the others take their portions too. I watch the plates go around the table. I am inflicting failure on my family, or else they are relieving me of it. We lift our glasses in a toast. My mother tells me to eat: she can see my bones. My father says he thinks my driving has improved since I’ve been on my own. My grandmother pats my hand. Mark my words, she says, you two will make it up. Just you wait and see.
My sister comes to stay and we take our children to the park. It is a grey weeping Sunday afternoon. In the greyness the colours hurt, the red of passing buses, the yellow vests of men drilling in the road nearby, the drab fluorescent pink and blue of children’s bicycles passing on the tarmac paths. The grass is sodden underfoot. I watch the people, the mothers with their buggies, the old men standing while their dogs sniff at the verges, the fathers in sports clothes kicking balls in the drizzle, the children roaming the fenced playground with a kind of stillborn exhilaration, like animals in captivity. We take the children to the swings. I watch my daughters: sometimes, when I look at them, it is as though they are wearing masks. Their faces take on the immobility of representation, like the white masks of antiquity with their downturned mouths, though quite what they are representing — their own unhappiness or mine — I am not sure. Either way, something that should be hidden is suddenly visible. The unselfconsciousness of childhood is reversed: they are children turned inside out.
When it starts to rain we leave the park and walk through the leafy Victorian streets of this neighbourhood, which is not my own. I have been thinking I might move over here, away from the disturbances of the sea; might move away from the strain of ceaseless change, the heaving water always so naked, so abandoned, rolling in darkness and light. I imagine a home here, in this redbrick clamp of streets, imagine it as safe and faintly purgatorial, a continuing sameness in which my sins will not devour me but will be dutifully paid off over a lifetime in small increments, like a mortgage. It is the annual weekend where the city’s artists open their houses to show the public their work, and when we pass one we go inside, out of the rain. On the walls there are framed photographs, watercolours, oil paintings; further in there are racks of handmade postcards, and prints stacked up in cellophane wrappers on a table. Again and again their subject is the sea. Here it is in its stormy mood, and there in its benign; here a sheet of empty glare, there a broken surface releasing light. We see it with and without sailing boats, at dawn and dusk, peopled and deserted, wintry, balmy and dull. There are pictures of seaweed, of driftwood, of the pebbles on the beach. There are pictures of the painted huts that line the esplanade: they remind me of the lined-up saints that surround early Renaissance portraits of the Madonna, for in its devotion and repetition this too is a display of religious iconography, its goddess the ocean. In these streets there is no sight or atmosphere of the sea: this could be a pleasant neighbourhood in any landlocked town. There is something obsessive, something almost fetishistic in these images, preoccupied as they are with what is absent, or rather with what is just out of reach. I mistrust this exposure of that which already exposes itself, the naked sea; the mind feeding off its dramas from the safety of the suburb. Yet I imagine moving here, and hanging a picture of the sea on my wall. It has been my belief that the only way to know something is to experience it, that the truest forms of knowledge are personal. Now I imagine a different kind of knowledge, knowledge without exposure, without risk; the knowledge of the voyeur, watching, assessing, staying hidden.