‘I haven’t even moved house,’ he said. ‘It’s strange,’ he said, ‘that you always changed everything and I changed nothing and yet we’ve both ended up in the same place.’
A few years ago, he went on, he had gone for a short while to Canada, but other than that things had remained pretty much as they always had been. He used to wonder, he said, how it felt to leave, to go away from what you knew and put yourself somewhere else. For a while after I had left, he would come out of his house each morning to go to work and would look at the magnolia tree that stood beside the gate, and the thought that I no longer saw that tree would overwhelm him with its strangeness. There was a picture we had bought together – it was still hanging in exactly the same place, between the big windows that looked over the back garden – and he would sit and look at it and wonder how I could bear to have left it there. In the beginning he saw these things – the magnolia tree, the picture, the books and other objects I hadn’t taken with me – as the victims of abandonment, but over time that had changed. There was a period in which he realised that it would hurt me to see those things again, the things that I had left. Then, later still, he began to feel that I might by now be glad to see them again. He had kept it all, incidentally, and the magnolia tree – though there had been talk among the other residents of cutting it down – was still there.
A growing crowd of parents and uniformed children was massing around the gates and it was becoming difficult to talk above the noise. Gerard kept having to move his bicycle, which he held lightly by the handlebars, out of the way. Most of the other parents were women: there were women with dogs on leashes and women with pushchairs, smartly dressed women with briefcases and women carrying their children’s bags and lunchboxes and musical instruments. The sound of their voices grew in the crush, against the swelling noise from behind the walls as more and more children filled the playground. There was the feeling of an inexorable crescendo, almost of hysteria, which would abruptly cease when the school bell rang. Occasionally one of the women shouted a greeting to Gerard and I watched him reply with the enthusiasm that had always been the camouflage for his social mistrust.
He moved his bicycle out of the mêlée and into the road, where the first russet-coloured leaves had started to fall around the parked cars. We crossed over to the other side. It was a warm, dull, windless morning: in contrast to the loud scene we had just witnessed, here the world suddenly felt so muted and stationary it was as if time had stopped. Gerard admitted that he was still uneasy at the school gate, despite the fact that he had been taking Clara there for years now. Diane worked long hours, and besides, she found the school culture even less amenable than he did: his maleness provided him with at least a degree of disguise. When Clara was smaller, it was he who did the round of playgroups and coffee mornings. He had learned a lot, not about parenthood but about other people. He had been surprised to discover that women were hostile to him at the baby groups, despite the fact that he had never thought of himself as particularly male. He had always had close female friends; his best friend all through his teenage years had been Miranda – I probably remembered her – and the two of them had at one time seemed interchangeable, often sharing a bed or undressing in front of one another without embarrassment. But in the world of mothers, his masculinity was suddenly a stigma: the others seemed to view him by turns with resentment and contempt, as though he could win neither by his presence nor by his absence. He had often been lonely, looking after Clara in the early days, and was frequently overwhelmed by the new perspectives on his own upbringing which having a child gave him. Diane had returned to work full-time, and while sometimes he was surprised by her unsentimentality about motherhood and her aversion to maternal activities, he gradually came to understand that this knowledge – of nurture and its consequences – was not something she required for herself. She knew as much about being a woman as she needed to: it was he who had to know, to learn. He needed to know how to care for someone else, how to be responsible, how to build and sustain a relationship, and she had let him do it. She had given him Clara with a completeness he was sure most women wouldn’t have been capable of, and it had been hard but he had stuck it out.
‘Now I’m their favourite househusband,’ he said, nodding at the now-dispersing women with their dogs and pushchairs.
We began to walk slowly away from the school and up the gradual incline towards the Tube station. There was something automatic in this choice of direction: I wasn’t intending to get on the Tube and evidently Gerard, with his bicycle, wasn’t either, but the complexity of our encounter, after so long, seemed to have created the tacit agreement that until we were sure of our ground we should remain on neutral territory and navigate by public landmarks. I’d forgotten, I said to him, how relieving the anonymity of city life could be. People weren’t forever having to explain themselves here: a city was a decipherable interface, a sort of lexicon of human behaviour that did half the work of decoding the mystery of self, so that you could effectively communicate through a kind of shorthand. Where I had lived before, in the countryside, each individual was the unique, often illegible representation of their own acts and aims. So much got lost or mistaken, I said, in the process of self-explanation; so many unfounded assumptions were made; so many words failed to maintain an integral meaning.
‘How long ago was it that you left London?’ Gerard said. ‘It must have been – what – fifteen years?’