‘I forgave you,’ Gerard said, putting his hand on my arm, ‘and I hope that you forgive me too.’
We had stopped outside the pub and after a while he asked whether I remembered the dismal establishment that had once stood on this spot.
‘The off-whitewash of gentrification,’ he said. ‘It’s happening everywhere, even in our own lives.’
What he objected to was not the principle of improvement itself but the steady levelling, the standardising that these improvements seemed to entail.
‘Wherever it puts itself,’ he said, ‘it blots out what was there before – and yet it’s designed to look as though it’s been here for ever.’
He told me that over the summer he and Clara had spent several weeks walking in the north of England, completing a large section of the Pennine Way. Diane had to work, back in London; in any case, walking wasn’t something she enjoyed. They had carried their own tents and cooked their own food every night, swum in rivers and weathered storms and basked on sunny hillsides, and travelled on foot for more than a hundred miles in total. These, it seemed to Gerard, were the only authentic experiences that remained. It had seemed impossible to believe that come September they would find themselves back here, straightjacketed in routine, but here they were all the same.
I expressed amazement that the delicate child I had just seen could walk that distance.
‘She’s stronger than she looks,’ Gerard said.
The mention of Clara had evidently sent Gerard’s thoughts on a different course and I watched as he suddenly reached behind himself and patted the violin case on his back.
‘Damn,’ he said. ‘She needs this today.’
I said I hadn’t realised the case was hers.
‘History repeating itself,’ he said. ‘You’d think I’d know better, wouldn’t you?’
I remembered him telling me once that his mother, when he’d declared his intention of giving up the violin, had spat in his face. His parents had both been orchestral musicians: Gerard had learned to play the violin so early and been required to practise so hard that the two smallest fingers on his left hand remained deformed from pressing the strings. Clara’s teacher, Gerard said now, had gone so far as to call her talents exceptional, though Gerard was far from sure that he wanted that life, by whose possibilities he himself had been tormented for so long, for her. Sometimes he almost wished he had never shown her a violin in the first place, which goes to show, he said, that we examine least what has formed us the most, and instead find ourselves driven blindly to re-enact it. Maybe it’s only in our injuries, he said, that the future can take root.
‘Though to be perfectly honest,’ he added, ‘it never even occurred to me that a child could be brought up without music.’
He had tried to remain indifferent to Clara’s violin playing: he was determined she shouldn’t grow up with the clear impression he had had of his own parents, that their love for him was conditional on his acquiescence to their desires. And perhaps the true reason, he said, for abandoning the violin had been to discover the answer to that question, the question of love. There was a boy at his school, he went on, a boy in his year he’d never particularly got to know, who was appallingly bad at music. His tone deafness was a sort of running joke, not an especially malicious one, but when they sang the hymns at school assembly, his voice – clearly audible – was the cause of a certain ribaldry, and at the public Christmas concert he’d even been asked, so they’d heard, to mouth the carols rather than sing. Mystifyingly this boy had taken up the clarinet, through which he made equally discordant sounds, but his tenacity in learning this instrument was absolutely unshakable. Over and over again he would ask to join the school orchestra, where Gerard was the star performer, and be refused; with agonising slowness and effort he plodded through the grades. His grasp of music was the very opposite of instinctive, yet one day, having finally worked his way up to the minimum standard, the school orchestra accepted him. At around the same time, Gerard abandoned the orchestra; he barely gave the boy another thought. But a couple of years later, in Gerard’s last term, he happened to see a school performance of Mozart’s concerto for clarinet. The soloist was none other than this boy; and a few years later still, Gerard saw his name featured in bold on a flyer for a concert at the Wigmore Hall. Now, Gerard said, he is a famous musician – often Gerard turns on the radio and there he is, playing his clarinet. I’ve never quite been able to grasp, Gerard said, the moral of that story. I think it might have something to do with paying attention not to what comes most naturally but to what you find most difficult. We are so schooled, he said, in the doctrine of self-acceptance that the idea of refusing to accept yourself becomes quite radical.
He slung his leg over his bicycle seat and jammed his helmet down over his wild hair.
‘I’d better go back and hand this in,’ he said. He looked at me with genuine affection. ‘I hope it’s right for you back here,’ he said.
I said I didn’t know yet: it was too soon to tell. Often, I said, I still went out for a walk at night, after the boys were asleep, and it always surprised me how quiet it was, how empty the dark streets were. In the distance the faint drone of the city could be heard, so that the nearby silence seemed somehow man-made. This feeling, I said to Gerard, of the very air being constructed, was to me the essence of civilisation. If he wanted to know how I felt about being back here, the overwhelming sensation was one of relief.
‘I’d love you to meet Diane,’ Gerard said. ‘And I’d like you to see the old place. It might surprise you.’
His first act, he admitted, in the period of upset after I had left him had been to knock down all the internal walls in the flat to create one enormous space. For weeks the flat was a chaos of rubble and dust; Gerard was unable to eat or sleep, the neighbours complained ceaselessly, and a vast steel beam had to be transported up the stairs in order to support the roof. People thought he was absolutely mad, but Gerard was possessed by a frenzy, which was to be able to stand at the windows at one end of his flat and see all the way through the windows at the other. He remained pleased with the results, though he had to admit it was less practical now that Clara was growing up. But the point was, he said, as he moved his bicycle out into the road, the point was that though it might not feel like it now, the move to London was in fact a great opportunity. This was one of the pre-eminent cities of the world, he said, and adapting to it would make me strong in ways he believed I would recognise very soon.
The builder said I was trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.