16. It was all so strange and new. The house in which she had grown up evoked a whole past on which I had missed out, and which I would have to take on board in order to understand her. The meal was largely spent on a question–answer volley between Chloe and her parents on various aspects of family folklore: Had the insurance paid for Granny's hospital bills? Was the water tank mended? Had Carolyn heard from the estate agency yet? Was it true Lucy was going to study in the States? Had anyone read Aunt Sarah's novel? Was Henry really going to marry Jemima? (All these characters who had entered Chloe's life long before I had – and might, with the tenacity of everything familial, still be there when I was gone.)
It was intriguing to see how different the parents' perception of Chloe could be from my own. Whereas I had known her to be both accommodating and generous, at home she was known to be bossy and demanding. As a child she had been thought of as miniature autocrat whom the parents had nicknamed Miss Pompadosso after the heroine of a children's book. Whereas I had known Chloe to be levelheaded about money and her career, the father remarked that his daughter 'did not understand the first thing about how things work in the real world', while the mother joked about her 'bullying all her boyfriends into submission'. I was forced to add to my understanding of Chloe a whole section that had unfolded prior to my arrival, my vision of her colliding with that imposed by the initial family narrative.
In the afternoon, Chloe showed me around the house. She took me into the room at the top of the stairs into which she'd been afraid to go as a child, because her uncle had once told her a ghost lived inside the piano. We looked into her old bedroom that her mother now used as a studio, and she pointed out a hatch that she had used to get into the attic in order to escape with her elephant Guppy whenever she'd been miserable. We took a walk in the garden, past a still-bruised tree at the bottom of a slope into which the family car had ploughed when she had once dared her brother to release the handbrake. She showed me the neighbours' house, whose blackberry bushes she had picked clean in the summers, and whose former owner's son she had kissed on the way back from school. He had since died, added Chloe with curious indifference, 'in an incident with a corn-thresher'.
19. Later in the afternoon, I took a walk in the garden with her father, a donnish man to whom thirty years of marriage had imparted some distinctive views on the subject.
'I know my daughter and you are fond of one another. I'm no expert on love, but I'll tell you something. In the end, I've found that it doesn't really matter who you marry. If you like them at the beginning, you probably won't like them at the end. And if you start off hating them, there's always the chance you'll end up thinking they're all right.'
20. On the train back to London that evening, I felt exhausted, weary at all the differences between Chloe's early world and mine. While the stories and settings of her past had enchanted me, they had also proved terrifying and bizarre, all these years and habits before I had known her, but that were as much a part of who she was as the shape of her nose or the colour of her eyes. I felt a primitive nostalgia for familiar surroundings, recognizing the disruption that every relationship entails – a whole new person to learn about, to suggest myself to, to acclimatize myself to. It was perhaps a moment of fear at the thought of all the differences I would find in Chloe, all the times she would be one thing, and I another, when our world views would be incapable of alignment. Staring out of the window at the Wiltshire countryside, I had a lost child's longing for someone I could already wholly understand, the eccentricities of whose house, parents, and history I had already tamed.
8
Love or Liberalism
If I can return for a moment to Chloe's shoes, it might be worth mentioning that their inauguration did not end with my negative yet privately formulated analysis of their virtues. I confess that it ended in the second greatest argument of our relationship, in tears, insults, shouting, and the right shoe crashing through a pane of glass onto the pavement of Denbigh Street. The sheer melodramatic intensity of the event aside, the matter sustains philosophical interest because it symbolizes a choice as radical in the personal sphere as in the politicaclass="underline" a choice between love and liberalism.
The choice has often been missed in an optimistic equation of the two terms, with the former considered a handmaiden of the latter. But if the terms have been linked, it is always in an implausible marriage, for it seems impossible to talk of love and letting live, and if we are left to live, we are not usually loved. We may well ask why the viciousness witnessed between lovers would not be tolerated anywhere outside conditions of open enmity. Then, to build bridges between shoes and nations, we may ask why countries that have no language of community or citizenship usually leave their members isolated but unmolested and yet why countries that talk most of love, kinship, and brotherhood routinely end up slaughtering great swathes of their populations.
3. 'How do you mean, did I keep the receipt?’ shouted Chloe. 'I just mean if things go wrong with them.' 'They're not televisions.'
'I don't know, the heel might get stuck between two paving stones while you're stepping out of a gondola. Or you might suddenly decide you hated them.'
"Why not just tell me you hate them?'
'I don't hate them. (Pause.) I do hate them.'
'You're just jealous.'
'I've always wanted to look like a pelican.' 'And a bastard.'
'I'm sorry, but I really don't think they're suitable for the party tonight.'
'Why do you have to spoil everything?'
'Because I care for you. Someone has to let you know the truth.'
'Gemma said she liked them. And Leslie would definitely like them. And I can't imagine Abigail having a problem with them either. So what's wrong with you?'
'Your girlfriends don't love you. Not in the proper way. Not in the way that means you have to break bad news to someone even if it pains you terribly.'
'You're not upset.'
'I am.'
'You deserve to be.'