I say, I’m not sure this will work. I’m not sure this will do any good.
I feel jealous of Y’s beliefs. They seem to take up all his attention. I want to attack them, to damage them. I want to humiliate them by not believing in them myself.
Y looks slightly startled, but only like an actor would. He cocks his head to one side. Then tell me why you’re here, he says.
It is strange to discuss my marriage in this room; its neutrality is almost chastising, makes the story both more lurid and more sombre, like the orderly courtrooms in which suited committees analyse war crimes, carefully dissect individual acts of thoughtless brutality and havoc over matching coffee cups. It is aftermath, the thing that happens once reality has occurred. Will I ever find reality again, bloodied and pulsing, find my way out of this room and back down the road along which I came? Y listens, stroking his large knuckles. I talk and talk, as though I am on the stand. I talk in expectation of a judgement, for or against me I do not know. Finally he opens his mouth to speak.
We have to stop now, he says.
Z comes to see me. We take a walk in the countryside. I expected him to bring something — I don’t really know what — but he comes empty-handed. He is quiet, nervous, taller than I remembered. He seems different every time I look at him. His face and form change by the minute. I don’t know him. If he had brought something at least I’d know that. But he seems not to want to make himself manifest. He is mysterious.
As we walk we talk. In our conversation I keep missing my footing. It is as though I’m expecting there to be a step down and there isn’t one. I’m used to talking to someone else. Z walks quickly; I have to run to keep up. He says, narrative is the aftermath of violent events. It is a means of reconciling yourself with the past. He says, the violence in the Odyssey is a story told afterwards, in a cave.
I want to live, I say. I don’t want to tell my story. I want to live.
Z says, the old story has to end before a new one can begin.
We are in a downland valley, where warm tousling winds roll across meadows of long grass and wildflowers. A silver river runs through it in slow skating curves to the sea. It is quiet here, but there is a clamour in my head. I feel charged with tension, as the sky is charged with electricity before a storm; I feel the approach of some great disturbance. The mechanism of life is jammed, the way minutes and hours and days knit themselves, gather in the separate strands and knit them fast together into life, into being — it is jammed, blocked, broken. The clamour is like a maniacal orchestra, crashing and clanging its gongs and cymbals. I can’t process what I see or hear or feeclass="underline" impressions, sensations pour in but they can’t get out again; they mount and mount in the silent valley until I feel that I will burst with them.
Z and I drive without speaking back to the city.
That night I call X. I don’t know why I call him. I just want to talk, like a climber trapped in a snowstorm on a mountaintop calling home. It is rescue she hopes for, but perhaps she is stranded too far and too high to be rescued. Perhaps she just wants to say goodbye. The roaming itch that drove her away from home, away from ordinary satisfactions, away from the life at sea level, remains mysterious even as it devours her in that cold and lonely place. She calls what she left, calls home.
X answers. Our conversation is like chewing on razor blades, like eating caustic soda. Our talk is a well that has been poisoned, but all the same I drink from it.
I say to Y, marriage is a mode of manifestation. It absorbs disorder and manifests it as order. It takes different things and turns them into one thing. It receives chaos, diversity, confusion, and it turns them into form.
Y strokes his knuckles.
I say, marriage is civilisation and now the barbarians are cavorting in the ruins.
Yet we find ruins exquisite, Y says.
He seems to be accusing me of sentimentalising. He seems to suspect me of nostalgia.
People overthrow their governments and then they want them back, I say. They evict their dictator and then they don’t know what to do with themselves. They complain that everything is chaos now, that there is no law and order any more.
Y raises his eyebrows at the word ‘dictator’.
I tell him about the walk with Z. If I was looking for a new dictator, Z didn’t get the job. I tell him of the way I showed him around my house, bought flowers, made him a beautiful lunch, like a small country advertising itself for invasion. I tell him of the valley I took him to, the loveliest place for miles around with its band of silver running through it, the way I showed it to him as proudly as if I’d made it myself.
Yet the mechanism had jammed, the very knit and weave of life knotted into madness.
Is it male attention I want, or male authority?
Is there a difference? Y says, rummaging pleasurably in his beard.
Z attended to my vision but he wouldn’t take possession of it. He backed away and was silent; it remained my house, my valley.
X talks. X is a talker. He is like a well signposted museum: it’s easy to find your way around, to see what he chooses to display. There are new things there now, new people, new opinions, new tastes in evidence; the old ones have been taken down to the archive, I suppose, shut away in darkness, left to the mercy of rot and floods.
But he doesn’t like me to visit, doesn’t want to talk to me any more. The museum guards follow me closely; perhaps they suspect I’m going to steal or deface something. I keep enquiring after what is no longer part of the collection. X furrows his brow, as though he has difficulty recollecting it, this past to which I insist on referring. As soon as he can, he shows me out. The big institutional door, so handsome and polished, so reassuringly heavy, closes in my face.
Z comes to the house with a bag of tools. He fixes the broken shower, the rusty bicycles, the pipe that leaks water into the kitchen wall.
Are all these pieces of paper bills? he says.
I don’t know, I say. I don’t want to open them. I want to live.
Z opens one and reads it. He raises his eyebrows, gives a small smile.
It’s a speeding fine, he says.
There is at first a feeling of deceleration, of a panicky loss of power, as though the fuel tank has run dry. I feel as if I’ve broken down in the middle of nowhere. It’s so quiet here, and so unfamiliar. I don’t know where I am. I hear a whisper, see a gleam of light, a faint ripple on the surface of water. The silver river moves quietly in its courses; the bulrushes stir and shift, the meadow dissolves in the blur of advancing dusk. Darkness is coming, night, and I am far from home. In the distance the sea is soft and calm. It glimmers and grows pale as the day leaves it. The blue dusk deepens; the darkness falls. Along the shore there are other places, houses and towns, but only when the darkness comes can I see them. Distant lights, mounded like embers in the blackness, and they are there and I am here.
The tree at Y’s front gates has apples on it. They are as startlingly abundant as the white blossom was, yet they are round and hard and heavy, the pregnancy after the white bridal whirl of romance. Y wants to know where my cruelty comes from and why I am so wedded to it. Cruelty is an aspect of civilisation, I say. Cruelty is part of power; it’s like the army; you bring it out when you need to. But all your cruelty is against yourself, he says. I laugh. He is displeased. Why do you laugh? he says sharply. I tell him I don’t have much time for the doctrine of self-love. I see it as a kind of windless primordial swamp, and I don’t want to be stuck there. What he calls cruelty I call the discipline of self-criticism. A woman who loves herself is unprotected. She will be invaded, put in chains, left there in the primordial swamp to love her heart out.