They had stayed on in Toronto for another eighteen months, Gerard went on, during which time Clara was born. They couldn’t afford to buy even the smallest apartment in Toronto, while back in London flats such as the one Gerard still owned, which he had bought for a modest sum all those years before, were selling for hundreds of thousands of pounds. Besides, Clara needed relatives: it was Diane’s view that bringing up a completely undamaged child was in bad taste.
‘Diane’s family are pretty dysfunctional,’ he said. ‘By comparison mine just exercise the immune system.’
They had moved back to London when Clara was three months old: she would have no memory of the pale, arid city where she was born, no memory of the great moody lake along whose windblown shores Gerard had walked with her in a pouch against his chest, no memory of the quaint clapboard house beside the tramline that Gerard and Diane had shared with a revolving community of artists and musicians and writers. The house had once been a shop and the large glass shopfront had been retained: it formed part of the main living space, so that the inhabitants could be viewed from outside, going about their lives. Many times Gerard had returned home and been struck – particularly at evening, when the lights were on and the shopfront became a great illuminated stage – by the human tableaux he saw there, the scenes of love and argument, of solitude, industry, friendship, sometimes of boredom and dissociation. He knew all the actors – as soon as he went inside he became one of them – but often he remained outside and watched, mesmerised. In a sense it was all, he knew, just an artistic pose, but for him it summed up something about Toronto and his life there, some vital distinction that he recognised while being unable properly to grasp it, though the word that always occurred to him in trying to describe it was ‘innocence’.
‘I don’t think it would have been possible,’ he said, ‘in London, among the people I knew, to have lived that way. There’s too much irony. You can’t be a poseur here – everything is already an imitation of itself.’
Nevertheless he and Diane had come back, and if the atmosphere of knowingness was sometimes stifling – ‘even the pub is ironic,’ he said as we approached it, the once-sordid building now a refurbished allusion to its own non-existent history – the force of continuity was these days acting as a favourable wind. Theirs was a life of remarkable stability, which was pretty miraculous, he said, when you considered what they were both capable of. Superficially, for him at least the facts of that life were unchanged since the days I had known him: he lived in the same flat, had kept the same friends, went to the same places on the same days as he always had; he still even wore many of the same clothes. The difference was that Diane and Clara were with him: they constituted a kind of audience; he doubted he could have carried it on otherwise. Increasingly, he went on, he saw his time in Toronto as having funded this continuity, a foreign foray in which he found elsewhere the resources that would enable him to cement his existence here for good. It was an interesting thought, that stability might be seen as the product of risk; it was perhaps when people tried to keep things the same that the process of decline began.
‘In a way it’s like we’re still living in a shopfront,’ he said. ‘It’s a construction but it’s also real.’
I told him that when I had moved with my children to London, back in the summer, it was all so unfamiliar at first that my older son had said it felt like he was acting a part in a play: other people spoke their lines and he spoke his, and everything that happened and everywhere he went felt unreal somehow, like scripted events unfolding on a stage set. They had to start at a different school, where they were required to be far more independent: in the old life they had depended on me for everything, but here almost immediately they both became less indolent, and had begun to organise themselves in ways I now knew nothing of. We spoke very little about the old life, so that had started to seem unreal too. When we first came here, I told Gerard, we would sometimes walk around the local streets in the evenings, looking around us like tourists. At first my sons would surreptitiously hold my hands while we walked but then they stopped and kept their hands in their pockets instead. After a while the evening walks ceased because the boys said they had too much homework. They ate dinner quickly and then went back to their rooms. In the mornings they were gone early into the grey dawn, loping away down the littered pavements with their heavy school rucksacks jolting up and down on their backs. The people we knew, I said, applauded these changes, which they obviously thought were a matter of necessity. I was told so often that it was good to see me getting back on my feet that I had started to wonder whether I represented more than an object of sympathy; whether I had in fact come to embody some particular fear or dread for the people who knew me, something they would prefer not to be reminded of.
‘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.