Much later, when I am back at home and the children have returned to school, I find a novel in a second-hand bookshop. It has a bright red cover with silver writing on. It is garish, splashy — I turn it over in my hands. The novel is self-published; I vaguely recognise the name on the cover, and standing there read a chapter or two. Their subject is a woman’s loss of value as she ages, the decay of the body that was once the source of her human authority, her feelings of rage at being left alone, men and children having gone away. She shocks people with her desire to live: they expect her to give in, to go quietly, to hide herself away somewhere and politely rot. And so she has come to enjoy their shock, their disapproval. She dresses herself in garish colours. She goes out, out to skirmish with the world, and whether or not she is wounded on that battlefield, whether she is brought down and beaten and meets her end, that end is better than the end society has in mind for her, is a suicidal kind of rebellion, an attempt to go out in a blaze of glory.
I talk to my friends sometimes about my imprisonment in the witch’s house. What did you do? people say. How did you get away? What happened to the children? I don’t tell them — not quite — how difficult I found it to leave, how I stayed there while dusk fell over the hills and the rooms darkened; how I felt that this was something I ought to make right, the ugliness and disorder of this place. I felt I ought to love it, for all at once I understood that its failure came not from some evil intention but from the fact that it was unloved. That failure had frightened me, menaced me, more than the most direct threat to my safety would have; I wanted to protect myself from it, protect my children, but sitting alone in that house, I felt that the true achievement, the true safety, the true authority might lie beyond the instinct to safeguard what was mine.
I called a taxi. I wrote a note saying I was sorry and left it on the table. I called the riding school and explained. Then I waited there, in the dusk, until the taxi’s headlights swept like search-beams across the front windows as it came off the road to find me.
X Y Z
Every week I drive for forty-five minutes along the coast to see Y. I go in the morning, when my children are at school. The journey out of the city is fast at first, then slow once the road passes out into the countryside and narrows to a single lane, where the traffic constantly crawls without stopping or ceasing, a turgid metal river creeping through deserted green banks.
Y lives in a suburban cul-de-sac on the outskirts of a town that I never see, for I reach his house first and have no reason to go any further. I have been instructed not to park in the cul-de-sac itself: I have to leave my car on the road at the bottom and walk up. The black tarmacked surface winds among houses and many trees; except for the noise the wind makes in the foliage it is always silent there, and rarely do I pass another living being on the road, though sometimes I glimpse dim forms through windows set back behind lawns, on whose glass the green canopy of trees makes rippling primordial patterns of shadow and light. At the entrance to Y’s property there is an apple tree. The first time I saw it there was blossom bursting from the branches. The explosive white startled me, frothing out so wildly and yet staying so still, like a white wave frozen in the moment of its breaking. Beyond it are the gates to his driveway. His house has two entrances, one at the front and one at the side, and it is at the side door that on my visits I ring the bell, and stand listening to the wind soughing in the branches, and wait.
At a party in London I meet Z.
A room that is too warm and full of people, with plush fitted carpet underfoot in which we all seem somehow mired. There are waiters circulating with trays of canapés. There is a viscosity in the atmosphere, a thickness in which everything becomes slowed. I watch people’s faces, watch their mouths moving. I seem to hear everything and nothing. Though it is evening the sun comes hot through the city windows. I had to walk around the park across the road for an hour before I could bring myself to go in. I don’t want to talk; I have nothing to say.
Z is a man. What am I to a man, and what is he to me? I haven’t thought about it: I don’t go out very often. I feel like a soldier come back from a war, full of experiences that have silenced me. I cannot return to innocence, the innocence of the first encounter of female and male. It becomes clear that Z is a veteran too; he too is full of the swarming silence of experience. But we have fought in different wars.
I don’t know him. We talk about cities, about Bangkok and Los Angeles and Moscow. We are strangers and this conversation is a kind of rocket, fast-moving and airborne, keeping us up above the surface of things. It is as though we are orbiting the earth from a great distance and observing its landmarks, its populous centres. There is a freedom to it that at any moment could become terror. Every few minutes a waiter comes past and stops with a tray. After a while I become familiar with these rotating offerings, can begin to anticipate their sequence and character. I begin to know the tray of celery sticks standing in a glossy mound of mayonnaise, the tray of little pastry cups with something yellow and sticky inside, the tray of shiny brown cocktail sausages: when they come round I notice that the mayonnaise has formed a kind of crust, that the pastry cups have become so steeped in rejection that it is impossible to do anything but reject them again. I begin to anchor myself in this familiarity as a weed anchors itself in the merest thimbleful of soil, but then, when the waiter appears at the expected moment with his tray of cocktail sausages, Z waves him irritably away. He has had enough of these interruptions. A feeling of anxiety grips me. The waiter retreats. I feel, somehow, bereft. I feel that nothing might ever come my way again, that I am destitute, like a child lost in a hectic foreign city, in Los Angeles, in downtown Bangkok. As the waiter passes me I put out my hand and snatch a sausage from the tray and I put it in my mouth.
X calls. Our conversation is like chewing on barbed wire, like eating ground glass. Our talk is a well that has been poisoned, but all the same I drink from it.
In Y’s room I sit in the armchair. It is a stiff old-womanish chair, though like everything else in Y’s room it feels solid and clean and as if it doesn’t quite belong to anybody. Y sits in a beige leather swivel chair with a sparkling steel skeleton and a deep padded seat. He is tall and what used to be called rangy. He has a beard, grey. I see him as an assemblage of joints and rods, like a large mathematical instrument; his big straight limbs pivot in their sockets with a mechanical ease and alignment in the clear morning light of his room. He is dressed in the manner of a Christian missionary or an aid worker, in clothes whose insignificance almost constitutes a significance of its own. Other than in this room his maleness has no context for me, and so like the chair he sits in he appears to be made of steel. I don’t mind it. I am broken, and steel might repair me.
I say, I don’t ever want you to tell me that I think too much. If you say that I’ll leave.
Y is silent for a long time. When he begins to speak, it is to outline for me the codes of conduct pertaining to his consulting room. He talks about timescales, the longer view, the inflexibility of the fifty minutes that is both its weakness and its strength. He goes on to discuss the general import of our relationship, the symbolism of its contractual essence, its politics of transference, seduction and blame. I begin to feel like a horse struggling while a harness is put over its head. He refers to himself in all this rather frequently, as though he were an established landmark in my life, and I feel a spasm of vulnerability on his behalf. He is like a priest who has forgotten to check that his congregation believes in God before he sermonises them. Y’s religion is psychoanalysis, and I have not come to worship: I need to be converted first.