by Rachel Cusk
‘I thought everything had worked out perfectly for you,’ Gerard said slowly. ‘I thought you were living the perfect life. When you left me,’ he said, ‘what made me sad was the idea that you were giving love to someone else when you could just as easily have given it to me. But for you it made a difference who you loved.’
I remembered then Gerard’s unreasonableness and childishness in the old days, his volatility and occasional exhibitionism. I said it seemed to me that most marriages worked in the same way that stories are said to do, through the suspension of disbelief. It wasn’t, in other words, perfection that sustained them so much as the avoidance of certain realities. I was well aware, I said, that Gerard had constituted one such reality at the time those events had occurred. His feelings had to be ridden roughshod over; the story couldn’t be constructed otherwise. Yet now, I said, when I thought about that time, these discarded elements – everything that had been denied or wilfully forgotten in the service of that narrative – were what increasingly predominated. Like the objects I had left in his flat, these discarded things had changed their meanings over the years, and not always in a way that was easy to accept. My own indifference to Gerard’s suffering, for example, which at the time I had barely considered, had come to seem increasingly criminal to me. The things that I had jettisoned in my pursuit of a new future, now that that future had itself been jettisoned, retained a growing power of accusation, to the extent that I had come to fear that I was being punished in direct proportion to something I hadn’t even managed to assess or enumerate. Perhaps, I said, it is never clear what should be saved and what destroyed.
Gerard had stopped, and was listening to me with an expression of growing astonishment on his face.
‘But I forgave you,’ he said. ‘I said so in my letter.’
The letter had arrived, I said, in a time when I wasn’t able properly to read it, and my guilt about it had grown to the extent that I had avoided reading it even when I might have been able to look at it more objectively.
‘I forgave you,’ Gerard said, putting his hand on my arm, ‘and I hope that you forgive me too.’
We had stopped outside the pub and after a while he asked whether I remembered the dismal establishment that had once stood on this spot.
‘The off-whitewash of gentrification,’ he said. ‘It’s happening everywhere, even in our own lives.’
What he objected to was not the principle of improvement itself but the steady levelling, the standardising that these improvements seemed to entail.
‘Wherever it puts itself,’ he said, ‘it blots out what was there before – and yet it’s designed to look as though it’s been here for ever.’
He told me that over the summer he and Clara had spent several weeks walking in the north of England, completing a large section of the Pennine Way. Diane had to work, back in London; in any case, walking wasn’t something she enjoyed. They had carried their own tents and cooked their own food every night, swum in rivers and weathered storms and basked on sunny hillsides, and travelled on foot for more than a hundred miles in total. These, it seemed to Gerard, were the only authentic experiences that remained. It had seemed impossible to believe that come September they would find themselves back here, straightjacketed in routine, but here they were all the same.
I expressed amazement that the delicate child I had just seen could walk that distance.
‘She’s stronger than she looks,’ Gerard said.
The mention of Clara had evidently sent Gerard’s thoughts on a different course and I watched as he suddenly reached behind himself and patted the violin case on his back.
‘Damn,’ he said. ‘She needs this today.’
I said I hadn’t realised the case was hers.
‘History repeating itself,’ he said. ‘You’d think I’d know better, wouldn’t you?’
I remembered him telling me once that his mother, when he’d declared his intention of giving up the violin, had spat in his face. His parents had both been orchestral musicians: Gerard had learned to play the violin so early and been required to practise so hard that the two smallest fingers on his left hand remained deformed from pressing the strings. Clara’s teacher, Gerard said now, had gone so far as to call her talents exceptional, though Gerard was far from sure that he wanted that life, by whose possibilities he himself had been tormented for so long, for her. Sometimes he almost wished he had never shown her a violin in the first place, which goes to show, he said, that we examine least what has formed us the most, and instead find ourselves driven blindly to re-enact it. Maybe it’s only in our injuries, he said, that the future can take root.
‘Though to be perfectly honest,’ he added, ‘it never even occurred to me that a child could be brought up without music.’
He had tried to remain indifferent to Clara’s violin playing: he was determined she shouldn’t grow up with the clear impression he had had of his own parents, that their love for him was conditional on his acquiescence to their desires. And perhaps the true reason, he said, for abandoning the violin had been to discover the answer to that question, the question of love. There was a boy at his school, he went on, a boy in his year he’d never particularly got to know, who was appallingly bad at music. His tone deafness was a sort of running joke, not an especially malicious one, but when they sang the hymns at school assembly, his voice – clearly audible – was the cause of a certain ribaldry, and at the public Christmas concert he’d even been asked, so they’d heard, to mouth the carols rather than sing. Mystifyingly this boy had taken up the clarinet, through which he made equally discordant sounds, but his tenacity in learning this instrument was absolutely unshakable. Over and over again he would ask to join the school orchestra, where Gerard was the star performer, and be refused; with agonising slowness and effort he plodded through the grades. His grasp of music was the very opposite of instinctive, yet one day, having finally worked his way up to the minimum standard, the school orchestra accepted him. At around the same time, Gerard abandoned the orchestra; he barely gave the boy another thought. But a couple of years later, in Gerard’s last term, he happened to see a school performance of Mozart’s concerto for clarinet. The soloist was none other than this boy; and a few years later still, Gerard saw his name featured in bold on a flyer for a concert at the Wigmore Hall. Now, Gerard said, he is a famous musician – often Gerard turns on the radio and there he is, playing his clarinet. I’ve never quite been able to grasp, Gerard said, the moral of that story. I think it might have something to do with paying attention not to what comes most naturally but to what you find most difficult. We are so schooled, he said, in the doctrine of self-acceptance that the idea of refusing to accept yourself becomes quite radical.
He slung his leg over his bicycle seat and jammed his helmet down over his wild hair.
‘I’d better go back and hand this in,’ he said. He looked at me with genuine affection. ‘I hope it’s right for you back here,’ he said.
I said I didn’t know yet: it was too soon to tell. Often, I said, I still went out for a walk at night, after the boys were asleep, and it always surprised me how quiet it was, how empty the dark streets were. In the distance the faint drone of the city could be heard, so that the nearby silence seemed somehow man-made. This feeling, I said to Gerard, of the very air being constructed, was to me the essence of civilisation. If he wanted to know how I felt about being back here, the overwhelming sensation was one of relief.
‘I’d love you to meet Diane,’ Gerard said. ‘And I’d like you to see the old place. It might surprise you.’
His first act, he admitted, in the period of upset after I had left him had been to knock down all the internal walls in the flat to create one enormous space. For weeks the flat was a chaos of rubble and dust; Gerard was unable to eat or sleep, the neighbours complained ceaselessly, and a vast steel beam had to be transported up the stairs in order to support the roof. People thought he was absolutely mad, but Gerard was possessed by a frenzy, wh
ich was to be able to stand at the windows at one end of his flat and see all the way through the windows at the other. He remained pleased with the results, though he had to admit it was less practical now that Clara was growing up. But the point was, he said, as he moved his bicycle out into the road, the point was that though it might not feel like it now, the move to London was in fact a great opportunity. This was one of the pre-eminent cities of the world, he said, and adapting to it would make me strong in ways he believed I would recognise very soon.
The builder said I was trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
‘It’s the raw material,’ he said. ‘It just isn’t there.’
He stood staring out of the kitchen window at the small garden, where the concrete slabs had risen up at jagged angles, prised apart by tree roots that had tunnelled underneath them. There was an apple tree that drooped amidst its own rotted, fallen fruit and a dominating conifer that had forced the surrounding trees to grow at strange angles, so that they appeared frozen in postures of madness or distress. Some of them had been driven sideways across the fence and had broken it where the garden was divided across the middle.
The further half was ours and was reached along a narrow walkway from the back door. The nearer part belonged to the people who lived below, in the basement flat. Their half was full of things that were all at different stages in the process of decay, so that the boundary between ornament and junk had been obscured. There were lengths of torn plastic sheeting and broken furniture, dented saucepans, smashed flowerpots, a rusty bird feeder, a metal clothes line that lay on its side, all matted with rotten leaves; as well as a number of statues, little chipped men with fishing rods, a brown shiny bulldog with drooping jowls, and in the centre of it all the strange fabricated figure of a black angel with lifted wings that stood on a black plinth. That part of the garden was overrun with pigeons and squirrels: the bird feeder was replenished daily to its brim, despite the evidence of squalor and neglect. The animals would crowd into the heaped dish, skirmishing, and when it was empty would clamber out again and take up positions nearby, apparently waiting for the cycle to be repeated. All day, sick-looking grey pigeons sat hunched along the outside window ledges and guttering. Sometimes a noise or a movement would disturb them and their flailing wings would make a whooping sound against the windows as they rose heavily into the air and then settled again.
The back door to the basement flat stood directly beneath my kitchen window. Twice a day it would open to release a shrivelled, hobbling dog into the filthy courtyard and then slam shut again. I would watch as the creature dragged itself up the broken concrete steps to the garden, where it would release a stream of liquid from between its trembling legs that slowly trickled back down the steps again. It would sit at the top, panting, until shouts from inside compelled it with agonising slowness to make the return journey. The floor between the two flats was very thin, and the voices of the people below were clearly audible. Beneath the kitchen in particular the sound of their sudden shouts could be startling. They were a couple in their late sixties: I had met the man in the street one day and he had told me they were its longest-standing residents, having lived there for nearly forty years. They were also its last remaining council tenants, the people in our flat having conferred that honour on them by leaving.
‘They were Africans,’ he had said to me in a hoarse, conspiratorial whisper.
The council were selling these older properties, the estate agent had told me, the instant they were vacated. It was the maintenance, he said: with an older property, there were always things going wrong. As far as the council are concerned, he added, this lot can’t pop their clogs soon enough. He winked and pointed down at the floor. You never know, it might not even be that long. If you can stick it out, he said, one day you could buy downstairs and turn this back into a single house. Then, he concluded, you’d really be sitting on a gold mine.
The people below had evidently remained unreconciled to the fact of others living above their heads. On our second or third morning in the house, a startling series of ferocious thumps had shaken the floor beneath our feet. We had fallen silent and stared at one another and eventually my younger son had asked what it was. No sooner had he spoken than another volley of thumps came from below. Hearing it a second time, it was clear the basement ceiling was being forcibly struck by our neighbours as a form of complaint.
‘Can of worms,’ said the builder, turning away and casting his eyes around the kitchen, where the units rode up and down on the undulating floor. The doors had been painted, but inside they were chipped and grey with age and the shelves wobbled loose on their brackets. The walls were covered in thick paper with a rash-like raised design: they too had been painted, which had caused the paper to blister and to come away in places, pulling lumps of old plaster with it. The builder fingered one of the lolling tongues. ‘I can see you’ve had a go at patching things up,’ he said, tamping it back against the wall. He drew his breath in sharply between his teeth. ‘My advice now would be to leave well alone.’
He had a kindly face that nonetheless wore a curious look of torment, like a baby’s face in the moments before it begins to cry. He folded his slab-like arms and looked down ruminatively at the floor. A purple vein throbbed against the bald, shapely dome of his skull.
‘You’ve done exactly what I’d have told you to do,’ he stated, after a long silence, ‘which is to cover everything up in a nice thick layer of fresh paint and close the door.’ He tapped his foot on the floor, which dipped badly in the middle and was covered with plastic tiles laminated to look like wood. ‘I dread to think,’ he said, ‘what’s under these.’
A stirring and murmuring of voices rose from downstairs. At the very least, I told the builder, I had to do something about the floor. It needed soundproofing. I had no choice: it couldn’t stay as it was.
He gazed at it silently, his arms still folded, apparently pondering what I had said. Presently he moved to the centre of the dip and gave a little jump. Immediately a furious sequence of thumps erupted beneath us. The builder gave a wheezing laugh.
‘The old broom handle,’ he said.
He looked at me directly. He had small, watery blue eyes that were always half screwed up, as though the light hurt them, or as though he had looked too often at things he didn’t want to see. He asked me what I did for a living and I said I was a writer.
‘There’s money in that, is there?’ he said. ‘For your sake I hope there is, because I’m telling you, this is a money sink.’ He walked again to the window and looked down at the neighbours’ part of the garden and shook his head. ‘The way some people live,’ he said.
I told him that I had met the previous occupant of my flat when the estate agent first brought me here to look. She was there packing up the last of her things: it took her a long time to answer the door. Eventually I had noticed her peering through a gap in the net curtains that hung at the front window. The estate agent called through the window, telling her who we were, and persuaded her to let us in. She was a tiny, cowed, shrivelled woman whose voice, when she spoke, barely rose above a whisper. But after the estate agent had gone she was more forthcoming. We were upstairs in one of the bedrooms: she sat on the edge of the bed with the stained wall behind her. I asked what the people downstairs were like and she looked at me for a long time, her weary brown eyes deep and unblinking in their wrinkled sockets. The woman is worse than the man, she said finally. The people in the next-door house, she added, were kind people, good people – university professors, she said proudly. They had always helped her when trouble started with downstairs. Her eyes travelled consideringly over my face. But maybe it will be different for you, she said.
I asked her where she was moving to and she told me she was going back to Ghana: her children had all now left home and found flats of their own. She asked if I had ever been there and I said that I hadn’t. It’s beautiful, she said, her face uncrumpling and lifting. All these years she h
ad dreamed and dreamed about it. Her youngest child, a girl called Jewel, had been the last to remain at home but recently she had finally finished her studies and moved out. She had chosen to study medicine – ‘takes a long, long time!’ the woman cried, clapping her hands to her cheeks and rocking back and forth on the edge of the bed with silent mirth – but at last it was done. You’re free, I said to her, and watched as a little smile dawned across her wrinkled face. Yes, she said, nodding slowly while the smile widened, I’m free.
‘Poor cow,’ the builder said. ‘But at least you can’t say she didn’t warn you.’
A foul, meaty smell was filling the kitchen and he sniffed the air and grimaced.
‘I’m guessing that’ll be downstairs cooking their lunch,’ he said. He folded his thick, furred arms again and drummed his fingers against his biceps. ‘You won’t improve relations,’ he said, ‘by having the builders in.’
He asked if I’d had any dealings with them since I’d arrived – ‘other than through Morse code,’ he added, tapping on the floor again with his foot. He had tapped a little more forcefully this time: there was a muffled shout from below and a kind of squawk and then, shortly after, several sharp thumping sounds in reply. I told him that when we first moved in I’d gone down and knocked on the door to introduce myself.
‘What’s it like down there?’ he said. ‘Hell on earth, I’m guessing. Judging the ceiling heights from outside, they must be living like rats in a coal-hole.’
In fact, the most noticeable thing had been the smell. I had rung the bell and stood outside waiting while inside the dog yapped repetitively, and even on the doorstep its presence was overpowering. Finally, after a long time, I had heard the sounds of movement from inside and the man I had spoken to in the street had opened the door.
