In the Light of What We Know: A Novel

by Zia Haider Rahman

  He seemed an unlikely consort to Penelope, shorter than her by an inch and far from the full six feet of Robin. He was a chain-smoker, and the stale odor of burned tobacco was always on him. Spiderwebs of broken blood vessels clung to each cheek.

  I never grasped the sequence of events involving Dudley and the Hampton-Wyverns but learned only vaguely that certain things happened within a space of a few years: the demise of a marriage; the separation, before which the beginning of an affair between Penelope and her builder; Penelope’s hospitalization with depression; Robin, too, sneaking about with the woman who would become his second wife; and a divorce. All these things I learned but never with precise dates attached to them—why would anyone take care with dates? Or with conflicting dates attached, so that the events spoken of coalesced in my mind on a formless period sometime in Emily’s early teens when her family life, I understood, was a tempest of dishonesty and infidelities.

  When Penelope once broached with me the topic of her divorce—a very short conversation that took on the character of confession, with its underlying intimation of guilt for the impact on her children—she described the new wife as the woman for whom Robin had left her. But when Dr. Villier described the same episode to me, later, he did not give me to believe that it was Robin who had initiated the breakup, but instead I gathered that Penelope’s relationship with Dudley was in full swing before Robin’s departure. It is remarkable to me, by the way, that Villier was prepared to discuss as much as he did. There were moments of hesitation, when circumspection seemed to give his eyes the look of someone editing himself, but in the end he shared so much that I must wonder, as I imagine did Villier, if Penelope had understood the scope of the license she had granted him.

  I do know one story that has a date to it, related to me by Emily herself. It was her first year at Oxford, when she received word that her father was to marry again. Apparently, on the day of the wedding, she came down to London and staged a protest with her brother outside the Chelsea Register Office, raising a banner they’d both made bearing the words DON’T DO IT, DADDY. When Emily told me this story, the image moved me. We were lying in bed, we had made love, and we were exchanging affectionate chatter in the drowsy moments when people come closest to intimacy, never very much intensity in the conversation and perhaps that’s the nature of the thing, the reassurance of one mate to another that offspring will be tended together, which might also go some way toward explaining why Emily chose that moment to relate the story of her protest against her father’s remarrying and why, for that matter, I myself wondered if she was making a statement to me, too, a plea for reassurance. I’m not nearly as skeptical as some people are of psychoanalysis, but I certainly don’t need to wake up Freud for help—there’s nothing I detected that wasn’t visible on the surface. And perhaps this was Emily’s governing fear, I have thought: the fear of abandonment.

  And yet—and yet, I ask again whether in fact there was also a manipulativeness about it. You might remember a TV commercial for The Guardian newspaper, in the nineties, I think it was, in which a young skinhead in bomber jacket, jeans, and Doc Martens boots is seen running full tilt toward an elderly man standing on the street. The skinhead was an icon of Britain in those years. The scene projects imminent violence; at least that’s what we’re lured into seeing. But the camera pulls back and the frame widens, bringing into view what is going on above the elderly man. As I recall, a pallet of bricks is tied by rope to scaffolding. But the rope is fraying, its threads unraveling, and the pallet of bricks, now sagging, threatens to come crashing down on the old fellow, who is oblivious of the danger looming overhead. It was rather a mischievous commercial, since the left-leaning Guardian reader, who sees the skinhead running toward the old man, is likely to fall for the misdirection—the viewer’s own misdirection—before the final reveal.

  I do remember it, I said. Zafar was describing one of a series of commercials that all ran to the same theme: Things are not as they first appear, and you need to get the bigger picture in order to understand what’s going on—you need, presumably, to read The Guardian.

  It was a neat little commercial, he continued, rather good for its time, but quite aside from its political statement, it illustrates something about human motivation and action. In fact, it actually relies on the observation that the same action can be produced by different motivations, even opposite ones. You’re rather fond of Graham Greene?

  I am, as a matter of fact, I replied.

  Years ago, at Oxford, when I asked you who your favorite authors were, you said Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. An interesting group. Do you remember?

  Indeed they are—my favorite authors, I replied. I didn’t tell Zafar that I had no recollection of his having asked me. Nor did I share with him the fact that I’d actually read only one or two of each of their books; nor, to make my confession here complete, did I share the fact that I’d read so little fiction since my youth that my favorites, such as they were, had remained the same.

  In The End of the Affair, continued Zafar, Graham Greene writes: Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?*

  I think now, at the end, that Emily was not manipulative, not in a Shakespearean way, not like Iago, even if her actions were the same actions as those of a manipulative person. A different kind of motivation or disposition can produce the same actions, just as different situations can produce the same action. I think she told me about the protest because it would elicit sympathy and deepen the bond.

  What’s wrong with that? I asked him, although I was unsure whether he was exonerating her or accusing her.

  Zafar fell silent. He seemed distracted. What motivation did he have in mind? If I am truthful, I must admit that I wasn’t quite following him. And then the description of those authors was irksome. What did he mean when he said they were an interesting group? I had always suspected a condescension toward me in literary matters.

  Why are they an interesting group? I asked.

  Zafar smiled at me.

  If those writers put themselves in their stories, they do so invisibly. That character, a narrator who’s in the story but not really of it, that’s an interesting character for you, no? I wonder if you like them because you know what it’s like to stand on the sidelines.

  I had not read all of their works, but as far as what I’d read went, Zafar was right about the presence of a narrator—in the story but not of it, as he put it.

  I might like those writers for other reasons, I responded; they might just all happen to have that feature.

  Perhaps you like them because those stories bring you close to your own experience of experiencing the world. They don’t really get involved, people like Carraway, not just in the sense that the plot doesn’t turn on them but because they resist forming profound attachments to anyone and only stand silently and watch. They are not the authors of their own lives, so to speak. Carraway takes his detachment a step further by giving it a name. He calls it reserving judgment, but he fails completely. To reserve judgment is to maintain an infinite distance. But nothing is visible at that remove. Is it an act of kindness, which is an act of engagement, that calls forth tenderness, when there is presented before us a human being with all his flaws?

  I did not follow what Zafar was getting at then and, to be honest, I cannot be absolutely sure that I’ve grasped it now. But I’ve had a chance to think. Writing this has helped, this effort of looking in while looking out. That is what it is to consider the life of another, someone who made an impression, and in the course of writing discover—no, not discover, not quite, not even learn or understand, but simply sit and listen and fully embrace the risk of disrupting one’s precious outlook on the world that such listening entails. Zafar was right. Every story belongs
to the teller, and the teller’s lesson to himself lies in the very way he tells the story. Writing has helped in many ways, helped me to think about a lot of things, to do with work, to do with Meena and family, and to do with Zafar also. I don’t know now, for instance, if Zafar was quite as lost as I have thought him to be, quite as lost as at times he seemed even before he met Emily; perhaps I was the one who’d never really had much sense of bearings. It could all be just a midlife crisis: People who do the studies and run the statistics, they say that the so-called midlife crisis actually happens to men when they’re in their late thirties, earlier than convention has it, which would make mine right on time or even a touch overdue. But it’s more than that, or just different. It’s true that I’ve lived as someone who stands aside, choices determined by the sweep of ease and opportunity—and the corollary of standing by is not participating. At the very beginning of The Great Gatsby, the narrator, Nick Carraway, tells the reader about his father’s advice to keep in mind that others never had the advantages he had. Reserving judgment, be it heroically difficult, is what he should do. It becomes an ironic point, as one reads on, for the people Carraway meets who are most deserving of adverse judgment are, I think, people who had every advantage Carraway had—and then some. But as I again consider that opening statement, having just retrieved the book from my shelves and reread the passage, but with Zafar’s remarks in my mind, I see something else in it, which is that Carraway’s attitude keeps him one step removed. It keeps him one step removed from the play, in the mind of the reader—in mine, in any event—but it also keeps the man himself separated from the mess of life. In this light, his father’s advice actually reads like a statement of disqualification. I never studied literature, so there’s likely little store to be set in what I say about these things. But that is what the opening now says to me. And though I surprise myself not to have thought so before, for now it seems obvious, I wonder if our experience of a novel is enriched by our experience of life.

  One thing I do question is whether Zafar was correct to include The End of the Affair. In fact, that book seems rather obviously—bizarrely so—out of step with his thesis. True enough, Bendrix, the narrator, is a writer like Greene, but he is not some sterile bystander, for who could be more caught in the plot than the man who consorts with an adulteress?

  * * *

  You were saying you moved into Penelope Hampton-Wyvern’s house when you came out of hospital. How long did you stay with her?

  You and I had lost contact by then, two years or so before I went into hospital.

  That long?

  What did Emily tell you? Zafar asked me.

  When?

  She told me she spoke to you when I was in hospital.

  When did she tell you that?

  Six months and seven days after I came out of hospital. Which is when—and why—I began to wonder.

  That’s very precise.

  My notebooks.

  Is it important, then?

  It turns out everything hangs on precise mathematics. Not complex but simple and precise. Funny really that it came down to simple arithmetic.

  Go on.

  When she told me—six months after I’d come out, as I say—that she’d spoken to you while I was in hospital, it struck me that you never called me when I was there, never left a message or sent word. Something had happened when you met Emily that discouraged you from calling then or later, not once in six months, seven including my stay in hospital, seven and counting. What could that have been?

  Zafar’s question sounded rhetorical, as if the answer was obvious, and that is what I hid behind in order to avoid answering, when a part of me wanted to tell him everything. But what was that everything? It now seemed like nothing of consequence, meaningless, nothing to speak of. Yet I felt like the pupil who understands that his teacher is not disappointed in him only because she never expected any better.

  Why did she tell you that she’d spoken to me? I asked Zafar. She must have wanted to tell you something, I said.

  But even as I said this, I wondered how much Emily had told him.

  Should she not have done so? he asked.

  I mean, what prompted her to tell you?

  I asked her one day if she’d heard anything from you. Her reply was that she’d not spoken to you since I came out of hospital.

  That’s true, I said, with a plea in my voice that alarmed me, as if to say, That was the only time. It was a one-off. How absurd. Next thing I’d be saying is It didn’t mean anything to me. She meant nothing.

  And you, Zafar continued, hadn’t contacted me in all that time, when you knew I’d been in hospital: came out of hospital, she’d said. For all you knew, I must have still been in hospital. Or, to be precise, as far as you knew, I thought you thought that I was still in hospital. There must have been a reason for not calling me. As for her wanting to tell me something, I’m not so sure she actually did.

  Not sure she told you?

  Not sure she wanted to.

  Then why did she tell you? I asked Zafar, but it was the question I wanted to ask Emily right then. I would have demanded an answer from her.

  She was looking for her powder kit.

  Excuse me?

  In the old days, they used to call them vanity bags. I like that. Do you know what cognitive load is?

  As a matter of fact, I do. You know, that’s another thing you and my father have in common. You both have this weird fascination with experimental psychology, I said.

  I wanted to change the subject. It was clumsy.

  Your father’s explained it to you?

  His weird fascination? I replied.

  Cognitive load.

  I do read, you know.

  You mentioned your father.

  As I understand it, cognitive load is when you give someone a task to occupy his cognitive functions and then ask him questions while he’s performing the task.

  It’s a way of getting past conscious censors. When I asked Emily about you, she was rummaging for her compact in her handbag. We were in a cab nearing our destination, a restaurant.

  That was the cognitive load?

  The rummaging. Emily was such a shifty thing, so secretive and unforthcoming—as you yourself say—that I had to find my own sneaky ways of eliciting information from her. Funny thing is, I don’t even think I was conscious of my own scheming, not at the beginning. Only later, on reflecting, did I realize what I was doing: asking Emily questions when her conscious attention was taken up elsewhere. And when I looked back over other occasions, I recognized that I’d been doing it. We end up doing things we’re unaware of because of another’s behavior. So much for autonomy.

  This tendency—can you call it a strategy when to begin with I wasn’t fully aware of it? This tendency was really only useful when the question required a yes or no answer and didn’t require conscious effort on her own part to figure out the answer, a question about where or when something did or did not happen, for instance. Of course, sometimes the cognitive load was too much, and she wouldn’t hear the question or would just wave it off for later.

  If she’d been sufficiently distracted, continued Zafar, then later she wouldn’t even remember I’d asked her a question. That was another incidental effect of a question posed at an opportune moment. But you’re so busy worrying about where this conversation is going, you’re not asking the obvious question.

  I’m sorry?

  Why did I think I might not get a clear or truthful answer if I just asked her straight out? Well, I suppose there’s the fact that she was shifty. But that’s general; there was something specific, too, although I don’t think I could tell you what. I’ve thought about it, of course, but I can’t put my finger on it. Intuition, a sense that something had been kept unsaid. Remember, it was six months since I was in hospital. When I went in, whom would she have called who knew me? Not my parents, certainly. If she’d called anyone, she would have called you. Maybe, in those six months, she’d acted evas
ively whenever your name was mentioned, but I don’t remember you coming up in conversation. All I knew—however I knew it—was that I had to ask her when she wasn’t listening.

  Conversation with Zafar was, from time to time, rather peculiar, but here it had taken a decidedly bizarre turn. We were talking about everything but the thing we were talking about.

  Why are we talking about this? I asked him.

  I asked her if she’d spoken to you and she replied that she hadn’t, not since I was in hospital.

  * * *

  When I left the hospital, I stayed at Penelope’s house, as I’ve said, with Emily there, too. I was feeling much better, and everything seemed so much slower, somehow more manageable. Most days, the house was empty. One day in that first week, Penelope asked me if I would mind dropping off her car at the service center on Thursday afternoon. On Thursday evening, when she came into the house, she said she’d seen the car outside and wondered if I’d not had a chance to take it in for servicing. I said I thought she’d said Thursday. It is Thursday, she replied. I’d lost account of the passage of time, lost the feeling for it. I used to sit on a bench in the garden watching the hydrangea and dahlias shriveling and the leaves browning on the sycamore and apple trees. I took to writing things down in my notebooks, not just the usual things but the more mundane, too, and it is because of them that I can now put timings to certain matters. Later, when I tried to figure out how I could have overlooked the obvious, matters that I now see were obvious—not just an error of calculation but rather a basic failure to see—I trace the cause to the untethering from time. If I had retained a sense, not on paper but in my mind, of the proportions of an hour, a day, a week, and a month, then perhaps I would not have been so foolish.