Aren’t you having any? my daughters ask me. They are anxious, just like my mother was, but for the opposite reason. As a teenager I felt lumpish and slow, weighted down: I was in no danger of starving. When I left home I lost weight, as though the weight were the weight of these family relationships themselves. I succumbed to the ascetic purity of that alternative religion, hunger. And now I have left home again, am in that white light again; the tree has been cut down and the light comes pouring through.
My daughter makes a new friend, S. She and S don’t have much in common, as far as I can see. In fact, I don’t like S much. She has a great collection of electronic gadgets and devices she stares at, the morbid blue light of the screen on her face. She is forever drawing my daughter aside to show her what she’s looking at; the two of them stare together. Once, I go to collect my daughter from S’s house and through the windows see them sitting on a large beige sofa. On the wall in front of them is a huge screen with a film playing on it. As I get closer I see that S is holding another, smaller screen in her hands: the two of them are watching that, heads together, the blue light on their faces, like incidental figures in a religious canvas, absorbed in their own corner of life while at the painting’s centre Jesus is declaiming the Sermon on the Mount.
My daughter would like S to stay the night. She arrives with her overnight bag, her nail varnish collection, her gadgets. From elsewhere in the house I can hear them talking, but whenever I come in they fall silent. Over supper S replies to my questions in squeaking monosyllables. Her silence is portentous, smooth and sealed. She eats almost nothing. Later she produces packets of sweets and crisps from her overnight bag. I go in to say goodnight to them and find them lying side by side, looking at one of S’s devices under the covers, the blue light of the screen on their faces. They are quiet, almost inert, but later when I go to bed I hear them murmuring and giggling. I tell them to go to sleep but as soon as I leave the murmuring starts again. Several times in the night I wake and hear it, a sound like the sound of running water or a door banging in the wind, something I know I should get up and fix but don’t.
I go to London to meet my brother. At the sight of me his face slackens. My God, he says.
He takes me to an expensive restaurant for lunch and I eat everything on the table, eat the contents of the bread basket and the sugar lumps that come with the coffee. Afterwards he hugs me. Come and stay, he says. Bring the girls and stay for as long as you like.
My daughters worry that they are getting fat. They stand in front of the mirror, frowning. They prod their own flesh. It is as though some rigour has gone from our household, the rigour of the male; as though we have lost something rodlike and firm at our centre, our female bodies waxing and waning like pale moons.
A friend invites us for dinner. The children don’t want to go — do we have to? they say. They seem genuinely unhappy at the prospect. When we arrive they stand right next to me; they hold on to my clothes. They seem to fear losing me in the maze of someone else’s house, someone else’s family. Every few minutes they yank at my sleeve. Can we go now? they say, though we’ve only just arrived. It strikes me that they don’t like adults very much any more. When they are addressed they barely speak. Their faces are anguished.
My friend and his wife are good cooks. Theirs is a happy marriage, a joint creation of great delicacy and skill; I have always admired it, have liked to look at it and be in its presence. The food they make is expressive of themselves, healthy, moderate, and the opposite of punitive or dull. I have admired them, but things are different for me now. My admiration has become a kind of voyeurism, the broken perception of the vagabond roaming at lit windows. My children hover, tugging at my sleeve. I don’t want to put people to the test: it has struck me that along with all the other losses, I might lose friendship too. I’m not equal any more with the people I know, and what is friendship but a celebration of equality?
My friend sets the table. I watch him bring out the clean plates and glasses, the gleaming cutlery. I watch him lay the places. I watch him bring out fish and bread and bowls of greenery. The kitchen is warm and comfortable. To be at this ceremony of the table again is almost painful; my daughters hover, not wanting to sit down. Can we go now? they say. My friend pulls out chairs for them, fills their plates. If you don’t like it I can make you something else, he tells them. I’ve got other things, or maybe you just feel like eating bread. He offers the bread, and they take some. Then they eat what’s in front of them, all of it. When we leave my friend gives me a loaf of his good bread. He and his wife suggest meeting again in a few days’ time; they offer to take my daughters swimming with their son. My daughters don’t say very much but later, when we go home, they admit that they enjoyed themselves.
I meet my oldest friend — J — for a drink. The children are with their father: I have begun to think that in these periods alone I ought to socialise. I see it as a kind of duty arising out of a vast and possibly terminal neglect, for I have no sense of a future: when I go out to see my friends it is in the service of an illusion. I am trying to pretend that nothing has happened, that nothing has changed, like the orchestra still playing while the Titanic sinks.
But it’s a bad day, the day on which I meet J. Things are difficult; it’s hard to talk about anything else. I can talk to J without anxiety. She knows my life and I know hers: our talk is the talk of episodes; the story itself never needs to be explained. All the same I feel guilty. The drama of my life dominates, uses up the fuel of conversation like an ugly army tank guzzling petrol. This is not equality. I’m sorry, I say, I’m sorry. I’m just so tired. I admit to J that I find it almost intolerable when the children are away. I admit that the night before I lay awake until it was light again and I could get up. I admit that I often spend these vigils in tears.
J leans across the table, grips my hand. Don’t ever do that again, she says. Call me. I don’t care what time of night it is, but don’t ever cry on your own again. Call me instead.
My daughter’s friendship with S has been augmented by her friendship with P. The three of them make a little giggling murmuring organism, their heads together. S’s gadgets are sidelined to a degree in this more complex social structure. The blue light can’t encompass three: there’s always one who’s out of it, who can’t quite see. The entrancing properties of the screen fail to mesmerise them. It strikes me that it is like love, a trance of two that is broken by a third.
Yet the new structure of three is more boisterous, noisier, happier on the surface. I quite like P. She has some of the traits of S — crisps and nail varnish — but shares similarities with my daughter too. She is more loquacious than either of them; she chatters away, her face bright and smiling. The three of them are always together. When one goes to another’s house, the third has to come along too. I am pleased for my daughter, pleased that she’s found friends, though in my heart I’m disappointed. Privately I feel they’re not good enough for her. Her distinct qualities, the things I know her by, don’t feature much in this new social world. Who is she without those qualities? I’m not quite sure. She has taken on the interests and opinions of S and P but she doesn’t seem to have rubbed off on them in quite the same way. Her old friendship with H was a relationship of greater equality, of mutual influence, of qualities shared. They were mingled together, my daughter and H, in a way that reflected well on both of them. Yet that friendship has mysteriously come to an end.