There was something feigned about his vagueness: he gave the impression – the opposite of what he presumably intended – that he was deeply familiar with the facts he affected not to know, and I felt a shamed pang of guilt for the way I had treated him. I was struck again by how little he had altered since that time, except that he seemed somehow to have been filled in. In those days he was a sketch, an outline; I had wanted him to be more than he was, without being able to see where the extra would come from. But time had given him density, like an artist filling in the sketched-out form. He raked his fingers frequently through his wild hair; he looked very healthy and tanned, and wore a loose red-and-blue plaid shirt of the kind his younger self had favoured, considerably opened to show his brown throat. The colours were so soft and chalky with age and washing that I wondered whether this was in fact the same shirt I remembered him wearing all those years before. He had always been thrifty, to the extent that waste and excess genuinely upset him, as well as leading him into involuntary judgement of other people; yet I remembered him admitting once that in fantasies he indulged in the very acts of pointless extravagance and destructiveness that he reviled.
I said that very little seemed to have altered here in my absence: I had noticed, I went on, that when my neighbours came out of their front doors in the morning immaculately dressed for work, they would often pause to look around themselves, faintly smiling, as though they had just remembered something pleasant. Gerard laughed.
‘It’s hard not to become self-satisfied,’ he said, ‘with so much self-satisfaction around you.’
One benefit of going away, he understood now, was that it made it easier to change. It was precisely that, he supposed, that he had always feared: turning up somewhere else and realising that in the process he had lost himself. Diane, he went on, was Canadian, and it didn’t seem to bother her at all, living on a different continent from the one where she’d grown up. On the contrary, she believed she had saved herself the trouble of dealing with a number of paralysing emotional issues – her mother chief among them – by simply moving to the other side of the world. But there was an inexorability, Gerard admitted, to his habitation of London and the fate it had mapped out for him: most people, he had come to understand, weren’t hindered by their origins in the same way. He had spent two years living with Diane in Toronto, and even though he had felt liberated there – freed, if he were honest, from what felt like a crushing weight – his sense of guilt was more powerful. And once Clara was born, the dilemma got worse: the only thing more unimaginable than the idea that Clara should have a childhood that resembled his own was the idea that she shouldn’t, that she might live her whole life in ignorance of everything that for Gerard constituted reality.
I asked him why he had used the word ‘guilt’ to describe what other people might have called homesickness, and what in any case was really just the absence of his own familiar world.
‘It felt wrong to be choosing,’ Gerard said. ‘It felt wrong for the whole of life to be based on choice.’
He had met Diane by chance, in a cinema queue. He had gone to Toronto on a six-month research scholarship offered by a film-studies department there. He had applied for it with the absolute certainty he wouldn’t be awarded it but suddenly there he was, far from home in minus twenty degrees and queuing to see a comforting old favourite, Night of the Living Dead. Diane, it transpired, was a horror fan too. She worked for CBC in a job that entailed long hours. They had been seeing each other on and off for a few weeks when the person Diane paid to walk her dog – a large and vigorous poodle named Trixie – left town. The dog was already a source of anxiety to Diane: at the time she was embroiled in a particularly stressful work project, leaving the house early and returning late at night, and Trixie’s hour with the dog walker had in any case not been nearly enough. Diane was an ardent dog lover and regarded the cruelty of Trixie’s situation with the utmost seriousness. Now that this crisis had occurred, she would have to rehome her, ‘which in Diane’s case,’ Gerard said, ‘was like being asked to rehome your child.’
Gerard, though he didn’t know Diane all that well – and knew nothing about dogs at all – offered to help her. He was teaching an evening class at the college but during the day his time was more or less his own. He was planning to return to London at the end of the semester, but for now he was willing to go to Diane’s apartment each day, clip Trixie’s lead to her collar, and take her bounding and writhing out to the park.
At first the dog had made him nervous – she was so big and wilful and mute – but before long he began to enjoy the walks, which took him to parts of Toronto he had never seen before, and which also had the benefit of erasing the element of choice from his daily life, though he did sometimes look at himself walking a large dog through a foreign city and wonder how on earth he had got there. After a week or so he seemed to have settled into a routine with Trixie, or at least to find her less alarming when he let himself into the apartment and she sprang to her feet and growled. She came with him willingly enough; she trotted proudly by his side, her head erect, and he found that he carried himself a little more proudly too, with this silent beast trotting next to him. He and Diane barely saw one another, but he felt a growing intimacy with Trixie, and one day it occurred to him that it wasn’t actually necessary to keep her on the lead – in fact, it was slightly insulting to her – since she walked with such discipline and self-control at his heels. Without pausing to reflect, he bent down and unclipped the lead, and in an instant Trixie was gone. He was standing at a busy intersection on Richmond Avenue. He had one glimpse of her, streaking like a brown arrow uptown through the traffic, and then she had completely vanished.
It was strange, he said, but standing there on the sidewalk with the great grey chasms of Toronto’s streets extending away to every side of him and the leash dangling from his hand, he had felt for the first time that he was at home: the feeling of having unwittingly caused an irreversible change, of his failure being the force that broke new ground, was, he realised standing there, the deepest and most familiar thing he knew. By failing he created loss, and loss was the threshold to freedom: an awkward and uncomfortable threshold, but the only one he had ever been able to cross; usually, he said, because he was shoved across it as a consequence of the events that had brought him there. He had returned to Diane’s apartment and waited while the rooms grew dark, the leash still in his hand, until she got home. She knew instantly what had happened; and strange as it may sound, Gerard said, their relationship began at that point. He had destroyed the thing she loved most; she, in her turn, had exposed him to failure through expectations he was unable to fulfil. Without meaning to, they had found one another’s deepest vulnerabilities: they had arrived, by this awful shortcut, at the place where for each of them a relationship usually ended, and set out from there.
‘Diane tells that story better than I do,’ Gerard added, with a smile.
By now we had entered the small park that formed a shortcut through the phalanx of residential streets to the Tube station. At this hour of the morning it was virtually empty. A few women with preschool-aged children stood in the railed play area, watching them clamber over the equipment or looking at their phones.