This is how art has eluded him, in the struggle to succeed at life. An artist, he supposes, dies to life, dies in that struggle, dies and is reborn. Tonie is moving around the room, bending and straightening. She too, he realises, knows what it is to create. She created Alexa: he remembers the way her old life died, went over the cliff and smashed itself on the rocks, unfinished; Alexa’s birth also the old Tonie’s death. And then something new struggling out of the wreckage, the new Tonie, this woman who stands here now in her work clothes, more alive than ever and full of dangerous energy.
‘Don’t do that,’ he says, watching her.
‘Someone has to do it,’ she says. ‘The place is a mess.’
It had occurred to him that they might go to bed, here in the afternoon. But it is clear that this is not a possibility. He sees that she is frustrated. She doesn’t want to be back at home, washed up on the domestic shore before her day has run its course. Her existence relies on the separation of one thing from another. She can never be whole again, having smashed herself on the rocks of creativity. It would drive her mad to find herself in bed with her husband when she would normally be at work. It isn’t that she thinks these things ought to be separate. It’s that they are separate, as the two halves of a broken plate are separate, as his right hand is separate from his left. But neither half can be anything on its own.
‘I was going to do it,’ Thomas says. ‘I was going to do it later.’
He looks at the room and sees its disorder. He sees that Tonie is wondering how he can live like this. She is looking at him as something totally separated from herself. It is possible that Tonie could betray him, betray him without conscience. The broken parts of her could neglect to correspond. They could go their different ways without a word.
‘I know,’ she says. She puts her hand to her forehead. ‘It just suddenly seems important. I don’t know why, but it does.’
He rises from the piano stool. He gathers up the music books that lie all around it on the floor and replaces them on their shelf. He collects the cups and plates — he has started having lunch up here, at the piano — and carries them down to the kitchen. There he finds more cups and plates and he gathers them, fetching and carrying, turning on the taps. Tonie appears: she has shed her jacket and rolled up her sleeves. She has an armful of things which she drops into the rubbish, one after another. Thomas finds dirty saucepans, roasting dishes, baking tins, and plunges them clanging into the foaming tumult of the sink. Tonie opens the cupboard and takes out the mop. Later he sees her washing down the shelves and doors. When he has finished the saucepans he cleans the cooker, involving himself more and more deeply in the intricacies of its plates and burners, losing himself in the black cavity of the oven. Presently, Olga returns. She comes down to the kitchen. She stands and stares.
‘What are you doing?’ she asks.
The next time Thomas looks, Olga has extracted the Hoover from the bowels of the understairs cupboard and is dismantling it with a screwdriver. She cleans the parts, reassembles it, revs it up. Thomas has moved on to the windows; Tonie is scrubbing the sills. The dishwasher is churning; the tap is dripping rhythmically into the polished sink. The thump and shriek of the Hoover recedes and comes back, recedes and comes back. Tonie dips and rinses her sponge in a bucket by her side, the water raw and slightly obscene-sounding, opening and closing around itself. His ears strain to order the noises. He hears the squeaking sound his cloth makes against the glass and he syncopates it, coming in on the Hoover’s off-beat. He feels the imminence of chaos. He feels it poised on the brink of dispersal, his creation; soon it will atomise into nothingness. There are footsteps, the sifting noise of a broom. The water closes on itself; the Hoover dies into silence. The end is coming — oh, the tension, the spurious tension of control! He understands that to create is to lose control, to become purely receptive. Yet how can he save what he has lost control of? His fingers fumble with the cloth and it falls to the floor. He bends to retrieve it; and it is there, crouching, that he hears Tonie empty the bucket, the suds and dirty water cascading into the drain, a long, low sound, perfectly measured. It gushes in his ear, the torrent; his tension is resolved. And then, coming up from the floorboards, the final vibration, the sound of Olga approaching. She has the withered yellow roses in her hands. Her footsteps grow louder, a last siege on the encroaching silence. She pauses; she waits. Then she thrusts them triumphantly into the bin, and slams shut the lid.
*
He makes things for Alexa to eat, things that she likes. He washes her hair. He polishes her school shoes and sets them on newspaper beside the door. He knows which days she needs to take her gym kit to school. He sits with her while she does her homework, and makes sure she gives it in on time. At night, when she changes into her pyjamas, he observes with an artist’s satisfaction the felicity of the white smocking against her skin, the exactitude of her inky brows and eyelashes, the sculptural rightness of her limbs. And the health of her hair and gums and fingernails, the acuity of her responses, even the sleep she takes, the restorative quality of its pause: it confirms him, reflects him, though she has her own existence. It because she has her own existence that the confirmation comes. He is forming her out of the substance of what she already is. He is guiding her to her own perfection. It would be possible to ruin Alexa, to neglect or destroy her. There is no other person over whom he has this power.
The house is orderly and clean.
XVII
At the beginning of February Tonie’s boss glances up from his desk and says,
‘The honeymoon period’s over now.’
It is a grey lightless afternoon and the darker grey interior of the building is a grid of monochrome squares and rectangles that form strange block-like avenues of perspective leading nowhere. The whole place is a maze of corridors and staircases, of anonymous rooms jigsawed with desks and metal filing cabinets and identical black-upholstered chairs. This cluttered rectilinear gloom signifies thought, intellect, impersonal endeavour. Tonie has noticed how the human form is elided by its geometry: here she seems only to see people in parts, a pair of legs in a stairwell, a back disappearing through a doorway, a profile glimpsed through a shatter-proof glass panel, bent over a desk.
‘The honeymoon period’s over now,’ Christopher says, silhouetted by the grey light of the institutional window. ‘At this point we need you to be functioning independently.’
‘All right,’ Tonie says, after a long pause.
Christopher’s office is more home-like than the others. As Head of School he has a slightly larger version of the cubes the rest of them occupy. He has lamps on low tables, cushions, a rug on the floor. Since September she has come here several times each week, assuming herself to be entering the territory of an ally and friend. She likes to sit on Christopher’s dove-grey sofa and consider the view, his orderly bookshelves, his framed Dutch prints. Now she wonders whether it is Christopher’s house that is neutral, impersonal, or whether it exists at all; whether this office in fact is all he is, a man in a room which despite its atmosphere of comfort is still only ten feet wide.
‘All right,’ she says.
‘I’m always available to answer questions,’ he says, ‘but my time is apportioned to favour the bottom end of the structure. I need to consider those younger, less experienced colleagues who have genuine reasons for requiring my help.’