‘You’re so cold. You’re like a room I’m trapped in that just gets colder and colder. You don’t touch me or hurt me — no one could ever say you’ve done anything wrong. That’s what matters, doesn’t it? It’s really very clever, Michael. No one can connect you with the crime!’
‘I haven’t committed any crime.’
‘You see!’ she shrieked triumphantly. ‘Do you see how you move to protect your reputation? You want to come out of this with exactly what you had when you went in. You don’t want to pay the price. But that isn’t living, Michael. You can’t live without getting your hands dirty.’
‘You seem very confident that you know what living is.’
‘Everything has to furnish your sense of reality. Yours is the only consciousness. Your morality is the only morality.’
‘I think you only feel alive when you’re destroying something.’
Rebecca laughed.
‘That’s an old tactic, Michael. I’m not going to fall for that one.’
‘I think it has something to do with your unsatisfied need to free yourself from your parents.’
At this she looked virtually ecstatic.
‘That’s right! That explains it! It isn’t your fault — it isn’t your fault you’ve messed up your life!’
‘I haven’t messed up my life.’
‘Look at your violin!’ she cried. We were inside the house by now and Rebecca was walking up and down in front of me with her arms folded. ‘Look at it sitting there in its little case!’
I learned to play classical violin when I was younger, but for years I had played folk and Irish music and every other Friday I spent the evening at a pub in Bath where a group of us played together. Sometimes a tiny freckled girl called Dolores sang with us, when the strange scribble of her life happened to cross our more linear arrangements. We were paid in beer from the bar. I had an old leather jacket and a red scarf and cap I kept for these occasions. It might have seemed that my Friday evenings were a hobby but I had a sense of them that was disproportionate to their frequency, a feeling that when I addressed myself in the privacy of my own consciousness it was to the figure in the jacket, scarf and cap that I spoke. I attributed to that figure particularly sustaining qualities of loyalty. Playing the violin was the only real skill that I possessed. I often thought that if my life ever became intolerable I could always put on my cap, sling my violin case over my shoulder and wander out into the world to make my way. Rebecca herself played the piano, quite soulfully: at least, she started well, but before long the music would begin to unravel in her fingers, and the image I had of us playing together would come apart in separate pieces. When this happened I felt that I partook momentarily of her artistic frustrations: I felt that I understood what it was to hold something in the mind that I was unable to bring to life.
‘Sometimes I want to take that violin and break it over the table,’ said Rebecca. ‘Do you want to know why? Because it represents control. It represents perfectionism. It represents the selfish way you possess things.’
The case was lying open. Rebecca was standing right next to it. It did not strike me as being out of the question that she actually would take out my violin and break it over the table.
‘When I hear you playing scales on that violin I want to weep. A grown man, practising his scales!’
‘If you’d kept up your piano you could accompany me,’ I said.
Rebecca shrieked and clawed the air with her fingers.
‘The arrogance!’ she said. ‘The presumption!’
‘I thought you were the one who cared about art.’
‘You think I’m the enemy of self-expression?’ she cried. ‘You think I’m the enemy of art? That isn’t art! That’s the triumph of methodology! The only thing you can do on that violin is play tunes that have been played a thousand times before. It should be smashed — it should be broken! Better to be broken than to be the slave of method!’
‘You’re not actually that original, you know. That’s what everybody wants. Everybody wants to destroy things! You think destruction is an honourable response to your feelings of containment but it isn’t. What you’re destroying is the chance to understand yourself.’
Rebecca appeared to give this idea momentary, involuntary consideration, as though it were something I had thrown towards her which she was unable to prevent herself catching.
‘I’ll say one thing for you, Michael,’ she said finally, as though regretfully. ‘You’re consistent. You always have been.’
*
The houses in Nimrod Street had balconies on the first floor at the front. They were large, ornamental Georgian things: each one was made of a single slab of limestone fifteen feet long and four feet wide that extended across nearly the entire width of the house. They had cast-iron railings around them that bowed slightly outwards and then curled around delicately at the top in the shape of a stave. They gave the houses a privileged, slightly exotic appearance, extending out into the air with a little clean wedge of shadow underneath. I never looked at our house without this lofty shape imprinting its stony grace on me. It registered itself silently, repeatedly, as the symbol of some aspect of miracle, some necessary excess that embellished my existence yet could never entirely be within my possession; so that my comings and goings at Nimrod Street were always accompanied by the vague sense that my life was both more beautiful and more difficult than it needed to be. Often, when it rained, Rebecca and I had sat on our doorstep in the evenings with the stone roof overhead, but increasingly I stood under it alone, shutting myself out of the house in order to consider the possibility that my life with Rebecca was unsustainable, a thought that was like a small, panicked pet I wasn’t allowed to keep indoors, and hence was forced to exercise outside, where it ran crazily up and down the front steps in the dark, occasionally venturing a few feet out into the street.
One morning, when I left to go to work, I closed the front door and was on the second or third step down to the pavement when the balcony dropped off the front of the building just behind me. The impact was so great that it was virtually soundless. It made a sort of void or vacancy in time. A tremor rose from the earth beneath my feet and passed through me like a momentary torrent of electricity, exiting with a burning sensation from the top of my head. I didn’t turn around, or run: it was too late to move. Presently I noticed that the street was utterly deserted. For some reason I found this disconcerting, that there were no witnesses to this strange event. I looked behind me and saw the giant slab lying broken on the steps. It had broken into no more than three or four pieces. It broke like a heart, I thought. After a while I climbed over the pieces and with a shaking hand rang the doorbell. I could hear Hamish crying inside. Rebecca took a long time to answer.
It was only because I happened to be at home when the surveyor came that I was the one to whom the explanation for the falling balcony was given. The surveyor was a slim, clean-smelling man of about my own age. His name was Ed Reynolds. When I saw him standing on the doorstep amidst the rubble and the broken railings I understood how dangerous my life had become. Crystal fruit bowls did not come flying through the air at Ed Reynolds. Balconies did not fall on him from above. Standing there he explained to me how a small crack in the limestone had gone for several years unfilled, allowing a plant to grow up through the slab. I knew that plant: it used to put out purple flowers that waved outside our bedroom window in summer. In fact I had noticed before how it seemed to be growing out of the wall. It had a thick, twisted brown stem. At the time I found it quaintly characteristic of the Alexanders that flowers should be allowed to grow out of their walls: it seemed to add to the impression I had formed of them, that they acknowledged few rules and yet went joyously unpunished. In conditions of frost, the surveyor continued, the plant had expanded and contracted. This caused the crack to become unstable. A simple programme of repairs and maintenance over time would have prevented the accident. For these reasons it was excluded from the terms of most insurance policies. When I relayed this information to Rick and Ali they acted as though some personal stupidity in my dealings with Ed Reynolds had resulted in his presenting us with this verdict. For the first time I felt a coldness, an insubstantiality in their attitude to me. They didn’t seem to understand how many times fate had loomed over Rebecca and Hamish and me in the form of the limestone slab, how nearly it had caught us. I had showed Ed Reynolds a photograph I had found of Hamish, aged two, sitting on the doorstep, under the balcony, in the sun. I had thrust it before his eyes repeatedly, as though I were possessed. I couldn’t stop looking at this photograph. I couldn’t separate myself from it. For a time it seemed almost to replace Hamish himself.