‘Are you going to the shops today?’
Thomas muses, rubbing his chin.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘Why, what do you want?’
‘I need batteries.’
He stands at the window, looking out at the garden. It is September. The year has always been fixed at this point, pinned to its backing of time like a butterfly in an exhibition case: September is the skewering place, the heart, where the pin of routine is thrust in. But this year it is different. For almost the first time in his life he has not gone back into harness at the summer’s end. He has not returned to work: the pin has not been driven home. He is free or he is cast out, one or the other. Alexa is speaking to him.
‘— size for my clock,’ she says.
‘What? What are you talking about?’
‘You need to get the right size for my clock.’
‘What clock?’
‘My alarm clock. It’s stopped.’
He sighs. A little thread of headache is inching across his brow. Why does an eight-year-old child need an alarm clock? It is the pin of routine again, searching for its mark. She is standing in front of him now.
‘I’ll try to remember,’ he says.
She has something in her hand. She places it on the counter in front of him.
‘That’s the size of battery you need,’ she says.
‘Where did you get that?’
‘I took it out of the clock. It doesn’t work any more. I need two. Please don’t forget.’
‘I might forget. I said I’ll try.’
She is frustrated. She wants to impose her will on him, to exact his promise. It is artificial, this conversation. He sometimes has conversations with Tonie that are like this, that are showcases for the determination of one or other of them.
‘Please,’ she says.
‘I’ll do my best.’
The doorbell rings. It is her friend Georgina, tall and strong-limbed and responsible, reassuringly earnest. They walk to school together in the mornings, Georgina gripping Alexa’s arm when they go over at the crossing and looking wildly about her for cars, as though they might at any moment find themselves under enemy fire. He kisses Alexa goodbye. Later, when she comes back, she doesn’t ask about the batteries. He has forgotten all about them. It is only when he is putting her to bed that he remembers.
‘I’ll get them tomorrow,’ he says.
She nods unhappily. Then she says:
‘Can I borrow your clock for tonight?’
He is almost angry with her, but instead he feels sorrowful. He pities her for the inanity of her persistence. He is disappointed in her.
‘All right,’ he says.
‘I want to wake up early,’ she says.
‘I can wake you up.’
She looks at him. She doesn’t trust him.
‘I’d rather have the clock.’
‘All right.’
‘Will you set it for seven?’
He laughs. ‘All right.’
She sits back in her pillows, contented.
‘From now on I’m going to get up early and have breakfast with Mummy,’ she says. ‘I’ve decided.’
His heart clenches, just as it does when the music gains its highest note, grasping and grasping out of its own confusion until it reaches its mark and the screw of emotion is turned. The confusion, he sees, is necessary, for it is what the resolution is born from. It was necessary, in other words, for him to misunderstand Alexa in order that he might understand her. He is satisfied by this perception. He opens a book and begins to read to her. Every night he does this, sometimes for as long as an hour. At first he was self-conscious reading aloud, but he isn’t any more. When he reads he feels as though he is flying through darkness, lit by the single bulb of Alexa’s bedside lamp; he is unbodied, a soaring arrow, a force of pure narration. In her books he finds explanations for everything, for love and survival, struggle and pleasure, happiness and grief, for belief, for the shape and arc of life itself. The only thing that is never explained is reality. He sprawls on her bed while she sits neatly beneath the covers. Her eyes are brown, tawny: in the half-light they seem rich with age, like mahogany. Their beauty is at once his and not his. He does not own them, yet they are within his possession. She does not look at him while he reads. She looks into empty space — she is visualising. This is one of the causes of his lack of inhibition. Were she to look at him, he would instantly regain the formality of personality. As it is, he can forget himself. At some point, usually, he begins to weep. Unlike most of the people he knows, Thomas has never mislaid his ability to cry. They are clear, abundant tears that roll soundlessly down his cheeks as he reads. It is the stories that release them. Freed from reality, he weeps over the image of life.
Afterwards he wipes his cheeks and kisses her goodnight, and goes downstairs to wait for Tonie to come home.
II
On the train, Tonie thinks about sex. It’s like some old friend she hasn’t seen in years and then bumped into on the platform. She rides with it in the carriage, her old friend sex, who one way and another she lost touch with, somewhere around the time when Alexa was born, when love seemed like a mathematical problem to which, all of a sudden, she had found the answer.
The other passengers, daylight chorusing in their faces, the mood transitive, a shedding of properties: the train flies through the September morning and Tonie feels it, an element that is all surface, all publicity. She is a little suspicious, almost resentful. It is as though she has blundered uninvited into some event and discovered that everyone she knows is there. So! This is what people are up to, while women care for babies in wholesome rooms, while they push strollers through the slow afternoon, satisfied that they have solved the problem of love. The rest of the world doesn’t care about love at all. The rest of the world is pure self, present tense, neither bad nor good, just flying free through the morning’s instant. And it comes over her in a rush, the memory of what it used to feel like, being alive.
On the way home she bumps into it again.
A month into her new job, the evening train, the mood reflective. There is a rushing darkness at the windows and yellow portraits on the glass, like the steady images a light makes from a black river of film. What has she been doing all this time? This is the question, after an eight-year absence. At intervals, her husband has turned to her in their bed and posed questions with his body: do you still love me? Is everything all right? And she has acceded, as often as she has been able to, not wanting to trouble him with her strange numbness, her indifference. What else? Giving, caring, watching, remembering, feeling, but not — not truly — participating. It’s been like reading a great book, life represented as fully and beautifully as it could be but the commodity itself suspended. All her sympathies have been engaged, and left her body motionless, inert.
At the station she gets a taxi.
Thomas, in the kitchen, slightly tired-looking, the crow’s feet standing in bright starbursts around his eyes. It is nine fifteen. He has made food for her, something heaped on a plate in the oven, keeping warm. He is wearing an apron. She laughs. She reaches around his waist, trying to untie the strings. He looks bashful, a little foolish. He looks shy, embarrassed, like a young girl with someone trying to undo her bra strap.
‘I’ll do it,’ he says.
When they kiss it is fumbling, slightly awkward, and Tonie laughs again, against his teeth. There seem to be folds and folds of blankness between them. She struggles to break through it. He is like a well-packaged object she is trying to get to, tearing away the blank wrapping. It is as though he is resisting her, as though he doesn’t want to be found. Her determination begins to drain away. There is too much reality, too much light in the kitchen, too much visual detail of ordinary things. And she has a sudden fraternal sense of Thomas that is like a bucket of cold water poured over her head. He is over-familiar. They have stood together in this kitchen too many times.