Outline: A Novel (8 page)

My neighbour was silent for a while. Presently he said that in his case his children had been his mainstay, through all the ups and downs of his marital career. He had always felt himself to be a good father: he supposed, in fact, that he had been more able to love his children and feel loved by them in return than he had their various mothers. But his own mother had once said to him, in the period after his first marriage had ended when he was deeply concerned about the effect the divorce was having on the children, that family life was bittersweet no matter what you did. If it wasn’t divorce it would be something else, she said. There was no such thing as an unblemished childhood, though people will do everything they can to convince you otherwise. There was no such thing as a life without pain. And as for divorce, even if you lived like a saint you would still experience all the same losses, however much you tried to explain them away. I could weep just to think that I’ll never see you again as you were at the age of six – I would give anything, she said, to meet that six-year-old one more time. But everything falls away, try as you might to stop it. And for whatever returns to you, be grateful. So he has tried to be grateful, even for his son, who has failed so spectacularly to survive out in the world. His son had become, like so many vulnerable people, obsessed with animals, and my neighbour had involved himself in more headaches than he could possibly recount by giving in to the unceasing requests that this or that helpless creature be rescued and given a home. Dogs, cats, hedgehogs, birds, even once a baby lamb half-killed by a fox, into whose mouth my neighbour had sat up a whole night spooning warm milk. During that vigil, he said, he had willed the lamb to live, not especially for its own sake but for the affirmation this would have provided of the lonely route he had chosen in relation to his son, which was to treat him with the utmost sensitivity and indulgence. Had the lamb lived, it might have constituted a kind of approval – if only from the universe – of my neighbour’s decision to act in direct contradiction to the boy’s mother, who would have abandoned him to a mental hospital. But of course he found himself burying the thing the next morning, while Takis was still asleep; and this was just one of countless incidents whereby he had come to feel foolish for deciding to treat the child without resort to cruelty. It seems, he said, that the universe favours those like his ex-wife, who disown that which reflects badly on them; though in stories, of course, the bad things return to haunt them. His current problems stemmed from an evening last week, when his son’s companion had closeted himself away to work on his Ph.D. and Takis had stolen out under cover of darkness, and taken it upon himself to attempt the liberation of numerous animals kept in fenced enclosures on the island, including an eccentric sort of menagerie being raised as a pet project by a local entrepreneur, so that now there were a number of exotic beasts – ostriches, llamas, tapirs, and even a herd of tiny ponies no bigger than dogs – roaming loose across the island. Their owner was a newcomer, less respectful of the family’s ancestry, and was very angry at the damage to his property and his livestock: in his eyes Takis was a hooligan, a criminal, and there wasn’t a great deal my neighbour could say or do in his defence. You learn very quickly, he said, that your children are exempt only from your own judgement. If the world finds them wanting, you have to take them back. Though this, of course, is something he supposes he has always known, for his mentally disabled brother, now a man in his early seventies, has never even left the place where he was born.

He asked whether I would like to swim again before we returned to the mainland and this time I remained within sight of the two boats and swam close to the cove, where the baby’s cries echoed among the high rocks. The father was pacing up and down the deck with the little body clasped to his shoulder and the mother was fanning herself with her book while the three children sat at her feet cross-legged. The boat was hung with pale cloths and draperies to provide shade and the breeze occasionally sent them billowing in and back out again, so that the group was hidden briefly from view and then revealed once more. They held their positions, waiting, I could see, for the baby to stop crying, for the moment to release them and for the world to move forward again. On the other side of the cove my neighbour had swum out in a short straight furrow and immediately returned, and I watched him climb up the small ladder back on to the boat. He moved around the deck in the distance with his slightly rolling gait, towelling his fleshy back. A few feet away from me a black cormorant stood perched on a rock, staring motionless out to sea. The baby stopped crying and the family immediately began to stir, changing their positions in the confined space as though they were little clockwork figures rotating on a jewellery box; the father bending and putting the child in its pram, the mother rising and turning, the two boys and the girl straightening their legs and joining their hands so that they made a pinwheel shape, their bodies glittering and flashing in the sun. I suddenly felt afraid, alone in the water, and I returned to the boat, where my neighbour was packing things away and opening the compartment in readiness to bring up the anchor. He suggested I lie down on the bench seat, as I was probably tired, and try to sleep while he drove across to the mainland. He gave me a kind of shawl to cover myself with, and I drew it up all the way over my head, so that the sky and the sun and the dancing water were blotted out; and this time, when the boat made its surging leap forward amid the deafening noise of the engine, I experienced it as a kind of comfort and found that I did go into a half-sleep. Occasionally I would open my eyes and see the unfamiliar cloth just in front of them and then I would close them again; and feeling my body being borne blindly through space I had the sense of everything in my life having become atomised, all its elements separated as though an explosion had sent them flying away from the centre in different directions. I thought of my children and wondered where they were at this moment. The image of the family on the boat, the bright rotating circle on the jewellery box, so mechanically and fixedly constellated and yet so graceful and correct, turned behind my eyes. I was reminded, with extraordinary clarity, of lying half-asleep as a child on the back seat of my parents’ car on the interminable winding journey home from the seaside, where we often drove for the day during the summer. There was no direct road between the two places, just a rambling network of country lanes that looked on the map like the tangled illustrations of veins and capillaries in a textbook, so that it made no particular difference which way you went as long as it was generally in the right direction. Yet my father had a route he preferred, because it seemed to him to be marginally more direct than the others, and so we always went the same way, crossing and recrossing the alternative roads and passing signposts to places we had either already been through or would never see, my father’s notion of the journey having established itself over time as an insurmountable reality, to the extent that it would have seemed wrong to have found ourselves passing through those unknown villages, though in fact it would have made no difference at all. We children would lie on the back seat, drowsy and nauseous with the swaying motion, and sometimes I would open my eyes and see the summer landscape passing through the dusty windows, so full and ripe at that time of year that it seemed impossible it could ever be broken down and turned to winter.

The hurtling motion of the boat began to slow and the sound of the motor to die away. My neighbour asked me courteously, when I sat up, whether I had managed to switch off for a while. We were drawing close to the marina, its white boats startling against their background of blue, and beyond them the brown roadscape, desultory in the heat, all of it seeming to move unstoppably up and down in the sunshine though in fact the motion was ours. If I was hungry, my neighbour said, there was a place he knew just over there that made souvlaki. Had I eaten souvlaki before? It was very simple but could be very good. If I would just be patient while he moored the boat and went through the necessary procedures, we could be eating shortly, and afterwards he would drive me back to Athens.

V

In the evening I was meeting an old friend of mine, Paniotis, at a restaurant in the centre of town. He called to give me directions, and also to tell me that someone else – a woman novelist I might have heard of – would probably be joining us. She had been very insistent; he hoped I didn’t mind. She wasn’t a person he cared to offend: I’ve been in Athens too long, he said. He described the route meticulously, twice. He was being kept in a meeting, he said, otherwise he would have come to fetch me himself. He didn’t like leaving me to find my way on my own but he hoped he had made things sufficiently clear. If I counted the traffic lights as he had told me to, turning right between the sixth and the seventh, I would not go wrong.

At evening, with the sun no longer overhead, the air developed a kind of viscosity in which time seemed to stand very still and the labyrinth of the city, no longer bisected by light and shade and unstirred by the afternoon breezes, appeared suspended in a kind of dream, paused in an atmosphere of extraordinary pallor and thickness. At some point darkness fell, but otherwise the evenings were strangely without the sense of progression: it didn’t get cooler, or quieter, or emptier of people; the roar of talk and laughter came unstaunched from the glaring terraces of restaurants, the traffic was a swarming, honking river of lights, small children rode their bicycles along the pavements under the bile-coloured streetlamps. Despite the darkness it was eternal day, the pigeons still scuffling in the neon-lit squares, the kiosks open on street corners, the smell of pastry still hanging in the exhausted air around the bakeries. In Paniotis’s restaurant a fat man in a heavy tweed suit sat alone at a corner table, delicately cutting a slice of pink watermelon into small pieces with his knife and fork and placing them carefully in his mouth. I waited, looking around the dark-panelled interior with its insets of bevelled glass, where the sea of empty tables and chairs was multiply reflected. This was not, Paniotis acknowledged when he arrived, a fashionable place; Angeliki, who intended to join us presently, would certainly be displeased, but at least it was possible to talk here, and one could be sure of not meeting anyone one knew who could interrupt. I probably didn’t share his feelings – he hoped, really, that I didn’t – but he was no longer interested in socialising; in fact, increasingly he found other people positively bewildering. The interesting ones are like islands, he said: you don’t bump into them on the street or at a party, you have to know where they are and go to them by arrangement.

He asked me to stand up so that he could embrace me, and when I came out from behind the table he looked closely into my eyes. He had been trying to remember, he said, how long it was since our last encounter – did I know? It must have been more than three years ago, I said, and he nodded his head as I spoke. We had lunch in a restaurant in Earls Court, on a day that had been hot by English standards, and for some reason my children and husband had come too. We were on our way somewhere else: we stopped to meet Paniotis, who was in London for the book fair. I went away from that lunch, he said, feeling that my own life had been a failure. You seemed so happy with your family, so complete, it was an image of how things ought to be.

His body, when we hugged, felt extremely light and fragile. He was wearing a threadbare lilac-coloured shirt, and a pair of jeans that hung from him in folds. He drew back and looked at me closely again. There is something of the cartoon character about Paniotis’s face: everything about it is exaggerated, the cheeks very gaunt, the forehead very high, the eyebrows winging off like exclamation marks, the hair flying out in all directions, so that one has the curious feeling one is looking at an illustration of Paniotis rather than at Paniotis himself. Even when he is relaxed he wears the expression of someone who has just been told something extraordinary, or who has opened a door and been very surprised by what he has found behind it. His eyes, within this rictus-like expression, are very mobile and changeable and often bulge dramatically forward, as though one day they might fly out of his face altogether with astonishment at what they have witnessed.

And now, he said, I can see that something has happened, and I have to say I would not have expected it. I do not understand it at all. That day, he said, in the restaurant, I took a photograph of you with your family – do you remember? Yes, I said, I remembered. I said that I hoped he wasn’t about to show the photograph to me and he looked sombre. If you don’t wish it, he said. But of course I have brought it with me; it’s here in my briefcase. I told him that his taking a photograph was, in fact, the thing that stood out in my mind from that day. I remembered thinking that it was an unusual thing to do, or at least a thing I would not have thought to do myself. It marked some difference between him and me, in that he was observing something while I, evidently, was entirely immersed in being it. It was one of those moments, I said, that in retrospect have come to seem prophetic to me. And indeed, being so immersed, I did not notice that Paniotis went away from our encounter feeling that his life had been a failure, any more than the mountain notices the climber that loses his footing and falls down one of its ravines. Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of. While I spoke Paniotis looked more and more aghast. That is a terrible notion that only a Catholic could have come up with, he said. Though I can’t say there aren’t quite a few people I would like to see punished in so delightfully cruel a fashion. Those are the ones, however, who are certain to remain unenlightened by suffering to the end of their days. They make sure of it, he said, picking up the menu and turning with a lifted finger to the waiter, an immense grey-bearded man clad in a long white apron, who all this time had been entrenched so absolutely motionless in the corner of the almost empty room that I hadn’t noticed him. He came and stood before our table with his powerful arms folded across his chest, nodding his head while Paniotis spoke rapidly to him.