One day, in the middle of the morning, Thomas finds himself searching his mind for the moment of her departure. At breakfast she had complained that her stomach hurt. He dimly recalls her face, wan and drooping, but after that all he can remember is his own determination to send her to school. It is as though his will were a loud sound that has drowned out everything else. Why did he want her to go so much? He doesn’t exactly know. He wonders now what the trouble was. He wishes to reconstruct it, Alexa’s stomach ache, her experience of the hour they spent together, her reluctant passage out of the house, but there is only himself, crashing above everything like a symphony. At half past three he doesn’t wait for Georgina to bring her home. He goes and collects her himself.
Sometimes, standing in the tarmacked playground, he is enveloped in vague feelings of beneficence and sympathy, almost of sadness. Usually he is early: the children have not yet come out. The bright geometric climbing frames, the empty sandpit, the neat, indestructible shrubs in the flower beds seem so familiar to him. He appears to be remembering them, and yet here they are before his eyes. It is as though he is observing them from a strange afterlife. This, he realises, is where Alexa spends the majority of her waking hours.
Other people arrive; he begins to hear the mutter of conversation, babies’ cries, the shouts of small children. He has noticed that the levels of ambient noise in the playground make a virtually unimpeded ascent from piano to fortissimo in the half-hour that he is there. There is always a moment at which he is no longer able to distinguish one sound from another. It is this loss of the power of individuation that makes him feel unreal. He needs Alexa to come out; he needs something he can identify, in order to exist again. Little benches stand around the perimeter and he sits on one. He hums the adagio. He taps his fingers on his thighs.
XVI
In a jug on the kitchen table there are yellow roses. Thomas put them there. They catch his eye every time he passes, a yellow sunburst in the shadowy depths of the downstairs room.
He tries to remember what month it is. The yellow colour of the roses makes him think of summer, but the surrounding light is grey and surrendered, as though it is ready at any moment to give in to darkness. He laughs aloud — it is funny, that he doesn’t know what month it is. He says the names of the months to himself. No one name means more to him than any other. For a second he is not even sure which part of time he is in, whether the incipient darkness is rising or ebbing, whether it is day that is to come or night. He looks at his watch; he remembers that it is Thursday, that it is January. He feels better. He has accomplished a small but necessary task, something to make himself more comfortable. The year is an event he is observing, not participating in, like an audience watching a play. He has made himself comfortable in the audience, comfortable in its lack of ambition, but occasionally he is seized by anxiety, torn unexpectedly out of himself, like a small unwary creature suddenly gripped in the talons of a predator. There is something defenceless about his position. There is a vulnerability that comes with the lack of participation. Anxiety can swoop down on him at any time and bear him away.
He decides to go running. He sees Alexa to school and then he runs away into the morning, running along the pavements, along the residential roads towards the park. He does this every day. At the end of a week his body feels prouder, more assertive. He is filled with a tension-like expectation that is never acknowledged or resolved, but passes into the expenditure of the next day’s run. He feels the tension, and he feels the relief of its expenditure. The roses turn brown around their yellow hearts.
*
One day Tonie returns to the house in the middle of the afternoon. There has been a fire in the computer rooms and the university buildings have been evacuated. She comes in with her bag full of files, charged with a dangerous, unspent energy.
Thomas is sitting at the piano. He is learning the C major fugue of The Well-Tempered Clavier. The prelude is easy, but the fugue is defeating him. He can play the left hand and he can play the right hand, but when he tries to play them together he encounters an absolute deficiency in himself. The problem is that the hands are equal. In every other piece Thomas has played, the right hand has been dominant: he has come to depend on the leadership of the right hand, to identify with it, as he might identify with the hero of a novel. Usually, the left hand is purely supportive, making no particular sense on its own. But in the fugue the left hand is autonomous.
‘What a sight,’ Tonie says, standing at the sitting-room door, laughing. Her laugh is full of hard, concealed shapes, like the files in her bag.
Thomas looks up. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I just can’t do it.’
She screws her face up, quizzical. ‘You don’t have to do it.’
‘I want to. Other people can.’
Without taking her jacket off, she begins to tidy up the room. It is true that Thomas is increasingly preoccupied by the mystery of other people’s abilities. He can hardly bring himself to listen any more to his Glenn Gould recordings, to his Clifford Curzon boxed set, to Feinberg’s indistinct, primordial account of Bach, so swamped does he become in the knowledge that these men are vastly more capable than himself. And it isn’t just music, either: the same feeling besieges him when he considers literature or painting, when he leafs through the photographs in his Encyclopedia of World Art, a feeling that is beyond jealousy, that is a sort of sulkiness. All these others, born just as he was, into the same world: they are all better, more capable, more exceptional than he is. Recently he took Alexa to the circus, and even the acrobat in his sordid spangled costume, even the hula-hoop girl in her greasepaint were more exceptional. The acrobat whirled around the half-empty tent on a rope, a force of pure plasticity. All his male stiffness was entirely subjugated: he could make his body do whatever he told it to. Yet Thomas cannot make his hands play the fugue. The gyrating hula-hoop girl span twenty silver rings around her casually outstretched foot, grinning with her painted mouth. She was an artist, in her way. She has something Thomas does not have, an ability.
How has it eluded him, art, when all these others have grasped it? What has he done wrong? He remembers the afternoons of his childhood, his mother there, his own determination to secure her approval and love, to get to her ahead of his brothers. And he succeeded. He studied the situation and turned it to his own advantage. It wasn’t particularly difficult. His brothers always seemed so distracted, so chaotic, their joys and satisfactions coming randomly, haphazardly, unplanned. Though all the same they came. When his mother cherished Howard or Leo it was for no reason that Thomas could identify. Thomas, thinking about his life, sees himself always grappling with a fixed creation, wrestling with it, turning it to his own advantage. Did he ever look at his mother, really look at her? Did he observe his brothers, people who were just as real as himself? He used to defend Leo against Howard, when they were children: he remembers deciding that this was the behaviour of a successful person, the defence of the weak against the strong, a kind of qualification, like a diploma. He remembers laying it at the feet of an unseen authority, his diploma. It didn’t make him like Howard less, or Leo more. It didn’t involve him personally. And his mother: the shape of her is all he remembers, the shape of what he wanted for himself. He would be unable to describe what she was like.