Tonie wasn’t really concentrating, during Clare’s final chapter. She saw Clare on the periphery of her vision: she registered her gradual disappearance as she might have registered a city passing and ebbing and falling behind through the windows of a train, without really looking. If the train had stopped, if the city had never given way to suburbs and green fields, she might have looked up and noticed, but as it was Clare’s diminishing presence did nothing to alert Tonie or arouse her suspicions. By degrees she vanished, that was all, while Tonie and Thomas went forward into a future that seemed as full and fluid as the past was desiccated and fixed.
Clare came to the house once, with a parcel for Thomas that had been delivered to her address. She was just passing, she said; she left her car in the middle of the street, the engine running, the door wide open. She was tall and statuesque: Tonie was amazed by the solidity of her body, its grandeur, the clean healthy look of her, her breasts bouncing in a tight white jersey as she ran up the steps, her fair, well-shampooed hair in its ponytail bouncing too. Thomas always insisted that Clare’s blondeness was natural. Tonie remembers the energy she expended disabusing him of this quaint notion, but now she wonders whether she was wrong, whether everything about Clare that at the time seemed so fictitious was in fact real. It is because she was real that Tonie has not forgotten her. Nor has she been able, though ten years have passed, to forget the way that Thomas, during those night-time walks by the river, averted his face and imposed something penitential, something almost punitive on his first encounters with Tonie. Increasingly, she feels that her life has been marked by a lack of pre-eminence. She feels that the only person who has ever loved her first-hand is Alexa. Perhaps it is this authentic love that has shown her how incomplete the others were.
It strikes her now that life is not linear, a journey, a passage, but a static process of irreversible accretion. It is perspective that moves, passing over it all like the sun, now illuminating, now casting into shadow. The angle changes, the relation of one thing to another, the proportion of dark to light; but experience itself is block-like, is cumulative and fixed. That is why it surprises her, troubles her, that Thomas does not think of Clare. For Clare has not vanished. On the contrary, ten years on she casts a longer shadow than she did before. And those nights by the river, when Tonie looked at the lit-up places and yearned to be inside one of them, sitting opposite Thomas, the object of his gaze and full attention: they, too, have grown more significant, not less. The more she thinks about them, the more symbolic they become. They symbolise the impossibility of perfection, of true and perfect love. She wanted to go in and yet she pretended for Thomas’s sake that she did not. It is the extension of want and pretence into the sufficiency of love that is symbolic. While he gave unfettered expression to his guilt, his anxiety, his conception of honour, she suppressed the small, indignant voice that told her she was entitled, while taking the risk of love, to his full attention.
She thinks now about Clare’s final act of renunciation: again, she barely noticed it at the time, but it reminds Tonie that she herself could have renounced Thomas, that she could have lived the other life, the non-Thomas life, as Clare even now is presumably doing. She wonders which life has turned out to be better. She wonders why she wanted one so much more than the other, when in fact, in a way, they are the same. She realises that of the three of them, she, Tonie, is the only one who did not act decisively.
‘It’s so weird that you don’t think about her,’ she says.
He is still holding the saucepan. He is wondering what she means. She sees that for him, too, not thinking about Clare has become the same as thinking about her. All the same he is offering it to her, to Tonie, as a tribute, a gift; the latest incarnation of his sense of honour. But she wants to remind him of all that caution and concern he went in for by the river. She wants to draw his attention to the fact that once, when it mattered, he stinted Tonie’s share. He ought to know that Tonie has felt hungry ever since, that she worries about this hunger, worries that she will be driven one day to placate it.
‘I wouldn’t like that, if it were me,’ she says.
It’s true, she wouldn’t.
‘But it isn’t you,’ he says.
‘It could just as well be.’
He looks at her, puzzled. He sighs, shakes his head, puts the saucepan in the cupboard.
‘Would it be better if I said I thought about her all the time?’ he says.
XIV
The house is such an odd little house, tall and thin and spindly as a doll’s house. The Swanns joke to their friends that when they visit Antonia’s house they have to breathe in.
Recently, their elder daughter Elizabeth moved with her family to an eighteenth-century manor house with five acres, a swimming pool and superb transport links to London for James: there can be no jokes about that. Mrs Swann has encountered unexpected difficulties in describing Elizabeth’s house to her friends. She doesn’t know what tone to strike. She has always ridden Elizabeth well, like an expert jockey rides a racehorse, but lately she has felt herself to be clinging on as the pace gets faster and faster. She finds that she has little to say on the subject: she is simply trying to maintain a foothold.
So there has, unusually, been some relief to be had in the contemplation of Antonia, whose affairs Mrs Swann can encompass in conversation without effort, in the way that a novelist encompasses a minor character. It is achieved by means of repetition: when Antonia appears, it is to enact the qualities of contradiction and eccentricity that already define her to her audience. She is never developed, merely confirmed. Currently, it is far easier for Mrs Swann to revert to stock than to consider how the story of Elizabeth’s unstoppable rise, with all its dark tumult of jealousy and fear, could be told without publicly diminishing its narrator.
But as her husband turns the car up Montague Street, Mrs Swann remembers that it isn’t like that at all. Her sense of Antonia as a set of quirks, like a set of piano keys awaiting her touch, vanishes entirely. Instead there is a dense atmosphere of bitterness and failure that has not enveloped her since the last time she was here, and that tells her better than any road map that her youngest daughter’s house is nearby.
Her husband feels it too. He eyes the street. They linger, not wanting to leave the safe harbour of their fourlitre Mercedes.
‘Will the car be safe out here, do you think?’ he says.
It is Thomas who opens the door. Antonia is standing just behind, in the narrow hall. Mrs Swann sees her eyes, wide and unblinking, sees their expression of wonderment. From the street the hall looks dark, filled with shadows, and Antonia’s eyes are floating among them, gazing at Mrs Swann as though they can see into her soul.
‘Mind your head,’ she says to her husband, as he passes ahead of her beneath the door frame.
He waits for her on the threshold.