He smiled again and I noticed his crooked teeth, which seemed somehow connected to the instances of rebellion and abandonment he had described. He said that he still owned and wore many of his father’s clothes. His father had been much bigger and taller than him: wearing the clothes he felt that he was somehow re-enveloping himself in what had been good about his father, in his physical and moral strength.
I asked him whether he had ever tried to find his biological parents and he said that it had taken him until his early forties, after his adoptive father’s death, by which time his biological father was also dead. He had never been able to find any record of his mother. His father’s twin brother was still alive: he had driven out to a bungalow in the Midlands and there, in the plush-carpeted overheated lounge where the television remained on for the duration of his visit, he had for the first time met his blood relatives. He had also researched the adoption agency and was put in contact with a woman who had worked there at around the time of his birth. She had described the room – a room at the very top of a building in Knightsbridge – where the transaction actually occurred. It was reached by several flights of stairs, which the mother would climb holding her child. At the top she would enter a room that was empty except for a wooden bench. She would place the baby on that bench, and only when she had left the room and returned down the stairs would the adoptive parents enter from the room next door – where they were waiting – and pick up the baby from the bench where it had been left.
He had been six weeks old when his parents adopted him and gave him the name they preferred to the one his biological mother had chosen. He had been told that once they got him home he had started to cry and he hadn’t stopped. He had cried day and night, to the point where his parents began to wonder whether they hadn’t made a mistake in adopting a child. He supposed – if it wasn’t too fanciful to ascribe the will to survive to a two-month-old baby – that at that point he stopped crying. A year later they adopted a girl – his non-biological sister – and the family was considered to be complete. I asked whether he would tell me the name he had been given when he was born. He looked at me for a moment with his naked-seeming eyes. John, he said.
There was a literature of adoption, he went on, and when he looked back on his childhood he almost saw it as a series of theoretical instances: what at the time had been reality now – in certain lights – looked almost like a game, a drama of withheld knowledge, like the game where someone is blindfolded and everyone watches them fumbling and groping to find out what they – the audience – already know. His sister had been a very different child from himself, disobedient and wild: he had read since that this was a common – almost an inevitable – characteristic of adoptive siblings, one taking the part of compliance and the other of rebellion. His teenage explosion, his secretiveness and his desire to please, his feelings towards women, his two marriages and subsequent divorces, even the nameless sensation he held at his core, the thing he believed to be most himself: all of it was virtually preordained, accounted for before it had even occurred. He had found himself, lately, drifting away from the moral framework to which he had adhered all his life, because this sense of preordination made the exercise of will seem almost pointless. What I had said about passivity had struck a chord with him, but in his case it had caused him to see reality as absurd.
I noticed that he hadn’t eaten anything, while I had eaten everything in front of me. The waiter came and he waved away his untouched plate. He and his sister, he said in answer to my question, lived very different lives that nonetheless strangely mirrored one another. She was an air stewardess, and he too spent nearly all his time on aeroplanes, travelling to meetings and conferences all over the world. Neither of us belongs anywhere, he said. Like him she had been married and divorced twice: other than the travelling, that was about all they had in common. But as children they had loved one another with a passionate, unscripted love. He remembered that on the rare occasions when their strict parents had left them at home unsupervised, they would put a record on the family turntable and take off all their clothes and dance. They had danced ecstatically, wildly, shrieking with laughter. They had bounced on the beds, holding one another’s hands. They had promised, at the age of six or seven, to marry one another when they grew up. He looked at me and smiled.
Shall we go and get a drink somewhere? he said.
We took our coats and bags and left the restaurant. Outside in the dark, windy street he paused. It was here, he said. Right here. Do you remember?
We were standing in the same place where, a year earlier, we had met. I had been waiting on the pavement beside my car: someone was coming to tow it away because I had lost the keys. The man that I was with at the time had smashed the window with a piece of breeze block he had found in a nearby building site in order to get his bag, which was locked inside. He had left me there – he had an important meeting to go to – and although I understood what he had done I had found myself unable to forgive him for it. The alarm had been set off when the window was smashed. For three hours I had stood there with the shrieking sound in my ears. At a certain point, someone I knew – the mutual friend – came out of a café on the other side of the road. He was with another man, and when they saw me standing there they crossed the road to speak to me. I told the mutual friend what had happened, and I remembered, as I was speaking, becoming more and more aware of his companion, until I found that I was addressing my remarks to him instead. This was the man who stood beside me now. He had chosen the restaurant specially, he admitted, smiling. After that conversation beside the car, he told me, he and the mutual friend had walked away, but no sooner were they round the corner than he had stopped and said to the mutual friend that they ought to go back and help me.
But for some reason, he said now, we didn’t. I should have made him, he said. I should have insisted. It had taken him a whole year to reverse that moment in which he had walked away. He had interpreted the difficulty of getting hold of me as the punishment that was equal to the crime. But he had served his sentence.
He put out his hand and I felt his fingers circling my arm. The hand was solid, heavy, like a moulded marble hand from antiquity. I looked at it and at the dark woollen material of his coat sleeve and the mounded expanse of his shoulder. A flooding feeling of relief passed violently through me, as if I was the passenger in a car that had finally swerved away from a sharp drop.