Antigone is Polylectes’s sister, daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta. She inhabits an aftermath of her own: hers has been the experience of intimate loss. Her family has been atomised; questions of identity, of moral choice, that might once have been family matters have devolved to her. She has been awoken and forced into active being. She has become herself, yet this self has been contaminated by the drama of her parents. Therefore she is only as good as what she does, as what she chooses to do. And what she chooses to do is bury Polylectes, because having thought about Creon’s edict she can find no justice or logic in it. She challenges his authority with an emotional authority of her own that has stronger links with justice, with truth. Creon asks, astonished, whether she realises the punishment for her act will be death. Isn’t she afraid to die? No, she replies, she isn’t afraid of death. What she’s afraid of is neglecting to do something that she knows to be right. Doesn’t she realise she’s breaking the law? he says. It was only you who made that law, she replies. Why should I obey it?
‘Now she would be the man, not I, if she defeated me and did not pay for it,’ Creon says to himself. ‘Though she [is] my niece, or closer still than all [my] family, she shall not escape the direst penalty.’ And so Creon manoeuvres himself into a position where his authority will directly attack and destroy what he himself loves and values the most, in order to nourish and sustain itself. He summons Teiresias the seer for reassurance. Creon believes Teiresias to be wise, prizes his advice, as one prizes the advice of certain friends until they say what you don’t want to hear. And Teiresias, indeed, gives him the darkest warnings: ‘Once more you tread the razor’s edge,’ he says. What he means is that Creon’s authority is recreating the very perversity from which it was born. It has become the form that imprisons truth and must be broken. Creon falls out with Teiresias and insults him in every possible way, but afterwards he is more honest with himself. This, after all, is aftermath, the second harvest: life with knowledge of what has gone before. He admits that he is frightened. He admits that what frightens him most is the idea that he will have to sacrifice himself in the name of authority, that true responsibility is an act of self-destruction.
‘To yield is very hard,’ he says. ‘But to resist and meet disaster, that is harder still.’
In the school holidays I take my children horse riding in Devon. Their desire to ride horses is so consistent it almost seems impersonal. It seems to be something I can bank on.
I rent somewhere to stay near a riding school where they will ride every day. I drive west, through unfamiliar hills. I am shaking with nerves; in fact, I can’t remember what it feels like to be at ease. This ceaseless effort to manufacture normality is a kind of forger’s art, so laborious compared with the facility that created the original. It is a fine evening and the sun slants long and golden from the horizon. For me these voyages are like the first outings of the Vikings into the mystery of the ocean, by turns terrifying and thrilling: I have no idea what will happen, what we will find. It is the idea that we won’t find anything at all that terrifies me. Yet what exactly we are looking for I don’t know.
At a service station we stop, and stand in the car park drinking hot chocolate with the sharp western sunset in our eyes. The place we are going is a picturesque country town near Dartmoor: everyone seems to agree it’s lovely there, though I’m not sure anyone I spoke to had actually been. Like tales of America, these were the rumours that drew us from the safety of home. But I feel buoyed up all the same, by the obliging beauty of the landscape and by the feeling — so powerful and so fleeting, so hard to understand or defend — that we have been liberated from the strictures of some authority and are free. I don’t identify this authority as my husband: the authority is marriage itself, and in these moments of liberty I feel him to be just as browbeaten by it as me, feel, almost, that I could conscript him into my own escape and reencounter him there, in non-marriage, both of us free.
It is dark by the time we get to the town. The place is deserted: at the house the owner has left us a scribbled note and a key. We stand on the long, sloping cobbled street with our bags. Through the darkness comes the sound and smell of water. A broad river is just below us: it turns like a dark snake in its courses; its black surface gleams. The town is a soundless heaped outline in the night, of roofs and spires and well-kept streets. Its beauty and its desertion are unnerving. It is as though some disaster has just occurred here and all the people have run away.
Inside, the house is a dank-smelling labyrinth of corridors and fire doors. There is torn carpet underfoot and heaps of junk and old furniture piled against the walls. Instantly I know that it has found me out, chaos, malevolent disorder: for the past few months it has shadowed me and I have fended it off, day and night, and now it seems I have opened the door to it. The thing is, I believe in chaos now: it’s normality I’ve lost faith in. It transpires that we have not rented the whole house but only a section of it: the note directs us upstairs, up steep tenebrous staircases boxed in by irregular partition walls to a door at the top. We let ourselves into a dark flat. The electric lights reveal a crush of brown furniture, some beds with padded floral headboards, some gilt-framed posters of rural scenes. I decide that I’ve over-reacted. I decide there’s nothing actually intolerable here.
It’s quite nice really, I say to the children, as though we make a habit of staying in places such as this, and can compare them to one another. In fact they have had the good fortune never to have been somewhere like it before. But I’m not interested in teaching them a lesson.
Yes, they repeat, standing in the doorway with their coats on, it’s quite nice really.
And tomorrow you’re going riding, I say.
They fall silent. They’re not sure they want to go riding after all. They’re not sure they feel like it.
I make them supper on the two-ring electric burner in the kitchenette. I tuck them up beneath the floral headboards. I sympathise, I console, I sit at their bedsides until far into the night, but in the morning I drive them to the riding school and I leave them there.
At mid-morning there is a great commotion out in the hall, loud voices and banging and then a thumping sound that gets louder and louder until I realise it’s coming up the stairs. There is a pause, the sound of noisy breathing on the landing; the door to the flat flies open and a woman barges into the cramped hall.
Oh hello, she says at the sight of me sitting at the table. I didn’t realise you were in here.
I take this to be the owner of the building. She is so dishevelled it is hard to get a sense of her. Vaguely I apprehend a large mounded body, a shock of grey frizzy hair, a clutch of big yellow teeth, a red leathery face grotesquely made up. The teeth are bared: she is either panting or smiling, I can’t tell. She has a pair of crutches strapped to her arms on which she leans forward and with which she occasionally gestures, like the forelegs of some gigantic insect.
It’s a long way up, she pants, but I make a point of doing it, no matter what they say. You can’t let things get out of bounds, can you? It happens without you noticing, then all at once you find you’re bedridden.
Looking at her, I’m surprised she did manage to get up the stairs, for she has only one leg. I ask her if she would like to sit down.