We also found comfort in planning the future. Because there was a threat that love might end as suddenly as it had begun, we tried to reinforce the present through an appeal to a common destiny. We dreamt of where we would live and how many children we would have, we identified ourselves with the wrinkled couples taking their grandchildren for walks and holding hands in Kensington Gardens. Defending ourselves against love's demise, we took pleasure in planning a mutual future in precise detail. There were houses we both liked near Kentish Town and together decorated in our heads, completing them with two small studies at the top, a large fitted kitchen with the sleekest appliances in the basement, and a garden full of flowers and trees. Though we had not discussed marriage in any concrete way, we had to believe that there was no reason why we might not contractually bind our hearts together. How is it possible to love someone and at the same time imagine decorating a house with someone else? It was indispensable that we contemplate what it would be like to grow old together and retire with our dentures to a bungalow by the sea.
My dislike of talking about ex-lovers with Chloe stemmed from a related fear of inconstancy. Ex-lovers were reminders that situations I had at one point thought to be permanent had proved not to be so. From within a relationship, there is infinite cruelty in the idea of one's indifference towards past loves. One evening, in the bookshop of the Hay ward Gallery, I caught sight of an old girlfriend, leafing through a biography of Giacometti across the room. Chloe was a few steps away from me, searching for some postcards to send to friends. Giacometti had meant much to this ex-girlfriend and me. I could easily have gone to say hello. After all, I had met several of Chloe's former lovers, one or two of whom she saw on a regular basis. But my discomfort was too deep: the woman evoked a fickleness in myself, and by extension and just as importantly in Chloe, that I lacked the courage to face.
There is something appalling in the idea that a person for whom you would sacrifice anything today might in a few months cause you to cross a road or a bookshop. If my love for Chloe constituted the essence of my self at that moment, then the definitive end of my love for her would mean nothing less than the death of a part of me.
25. If Chloe and I continued despite all this to believe we were in love, it was perhaps because the affection far outweighed the boredom and indifference. Yet we always remained aware that what we had chosen to call love might be an abbreviation for a far more complex, and ultimately less palatable, reality.
16
The Fear of Happiness
One of love's greatest drawbacks is that, for a while at least, it is in danger of making us seriously happy.
Chloe and I chose to travel to Spain in the final week of August - travel (like love) an attempt to follow a dream into reality. In London, we had read the brochures of Utopia Travel, specialists in the Spanish rental market, and had settled for a converted farmhouse in the village of Aras de Alpuente, in the mountains behind Valencia. The house looked better in reality than it had in the photographs. The rooms were simply but comfortably furnished, the bathroom worked, there was a terrace shaded by vine leaves, a lake nearby to swim in, and a farmer next door who kept a goat and welcomed us with a gift of olive oil and cheese.
We had arrived in the late afternoon, having hired a car at the airport and driven up the narrow mountain roads. We immediately went for a swim, diving into the clear blue waters and drying off in the dying sun. Then we had returned to the house and sat on the terrace with a bottle of wine and olives to watch the sun set behind the hills.
'Isn't it wonderful,' I remarked lyrically.
'Isn't it?' echoed Chloe.
'But is it?' I joked.
'Shush, you're ruining the scene.'
'No, I'm serious, it really is wonderful. I could never have imagined a place like this existing. It seems so cut off from everything, like a paradise no one's bothered to ruin.'
'I could spend the rest of my life here,' sighed Chloe.
'So could I.'
'We could live here together, I'd tend the goats, you'd handle the olives, we'd write books, paint, and fa . . .'
'Are you all right?' I asked, seeing Chloe suddenly wince with pain.
'Yeah, I am now. I don't know what happened. I just got this terrible pain in my head, like an awful throbbing or something. It's probably nothing. Ah, no, shit, there it comes again.'
'Let me feel.'
'You won't be able to feel anything, it's inside.' 'I know, but I'll empathize.'
'God, I'd better lie down. It's probably just the travelling, or the height, or something. But I'd better go inside. You stay out here, I'll be fine.'
4. Chloe's pains did not get better. She took an aspirin and went to bed, but she was unable to sleep. Unsure of how seriously to take her suffering, but worried that her natural tendency to play everything down meant it was probably extremely serious, I decided to get a doctor. The farmer and his wife were in their cottage eating dinner when I knocked and asked in fragments of Spanish where the nearest doctor could be found. It turned out he lived in Villar del Arzobispo, a village some twenty kilometres away.
5. Dr Saavedra was immensely dignified for a country doctor. He wore a white linen suit, had spent a term at Imperial College in the 1950s, was a lover of the English theatrical tradition, and seemed delighted to accompany me back to assist the maiden who had fallen ill so early in her Spanish sojourn. When we arrived back in Aras de Alpuente, Chloe's condition was no better. I left the doctor alone with her and waited nervously in the next room. Ten minutes later, the doctor emerged.
'Ess nutting to worry about.'
'She'll be OK?'
'Yes, my friend, she'll be OK in the mornin'.'
'What was wrong with her?'
'Nutting much, a leetle stomach, a leetle head, ees very common among dee 'oliday makres. I give her peels. Really just a little anch-edonia in de head, wha you espect?'
6. Dr Saavedra had diagnosed a case of anhedonia, a disease defined by the British Medical Association as a reaction remarkably close to mountain sickness resulting from the sudden terror brought on by the threat of happiness. It was a common disease among tourists in this region of Spain, faced in these idyllic surroundings with the sudden realization that earthly happiness might be within their grasp, and prey therefore to a violent physiological reaction designed to counteract such a daunting possibility.
Because happiness is so terrifying and anxiety-inducing to accept, somewhat unconsciously, Chloe and I had always tended to locate hedonia either in memory or in anticipation. Though the pursuit of happiness was our avowed goal, it was accompanied by an implicit belief that it would be realized somewhere in the very distant future - a belief challenged by the felicity we had found in Aras de Alpuente and, to a lesser extent, in each other's arms.
Why did we live this way? Perhaps because to enjoy ourselves in the present would have meant engaging ourselves in an imperfect or dangerously ephemeral reality, rather than hiding behind a comfortable belief in an afterlife. Living in the future perfect tense involved holding up an ideal life to contrast with the present, one that would save us from the need to commit ourselves to our situation. It was a pattern akin to that found in certain religions, in which life on earth is only a prelude to an ever-lasting and far more pleasant heavenly existence. Our attitude towards holidays, parties, work, and perhaps love had something immortal to it, as though we would be on the earth for long enough not to have to stoop so low as to think these occasions finite in number - and hence be forced to draw proper value from them.