What happened was that all those years ago, she fell in love with the house: she fell in love with it, and then as she came to know more and more about it the love was divided and subdivided until each piece of knowledge was larger than its allotted share of affection. This is the lesson, the sermon: that facts outlive emotions, and that knowledge is therefore more powerful than love. There are infinite things to know, but the capacity for love is just that, a capacity, a space that can hold so much and no more.
*
Six months ago, the head of the university English department where Tonie teaches retired. It was a strange time, no one rushing forward to replace her, a feeling everywhere of indifference bordering on decline, until someone asked Tonie whether she would consider applying for it. It was out of the question, a big administrative job a whole world away from the part-time lecturing she was used to, a job for someone like Angela Deacon, who had done it for years; an older woman with a wardrobe full of cashmere and earth-tones, a woman with grown-up children and an interest in Etruscan art, a still-married woman who nonetheless wanted to keep the little flame of her wickedness alive, who wanted her well-preserved body out in the world, safe in its armour of bureaucratic procedure. Tonie couldn’t do a job like that, that needed funds of time brought to it like a dowry. Tonie’s time did not seem to belong to her any more. Her work had been shaped around Alexa’s presences and Thomas’s absences for so long that she forgot it had a form and force of its own, a power of its own.
There was a conversation in the kitchen, late at night. Thomas’s eyes were watering. He said he had hay fever. Every few minutes he would produce a handkerchief and sneeze into it, and Tonie couldn’t keep her fingers still. Sitting at the table she shredded stray bits of paper, orange peel, pieces of wax from the candle on the table, prising off the rivulets that had run down its sides. They looked so soft, so liquid, but they came away as stiff as branches, beaded with hard drops. She and Thomas talked about their life the way they might have talked about a film they had just seen, or a book they’d both read. They analysed it, their situation; they discussed it, and by discussing it seemed to emerge from it and set off somewhere, the two of them heading out over dark waters in the vessel of their companionship. It was as though all this time they’d been acting, playing parts, and now could finally be themselves again. In this atmosphere careers seemed trivial, interchangeable, to be picked up and put down again at will. Tonie snapped the petrified branches of wax into smaller and smaller pieces: they lay on the table like a heap of little bones. Every time she looked at Thomas he had water running from the corners of his eyes, like a saint in a religious painting. She remembers noticing that he was talking about his job in the past tense. He got a bottle of whisky out of the cupboard and poured an enormous measure for each of them. He said,
‘I seem to have experienced a revelation.’
But it is true that Thomas has never been quite that sure again, that he became more doubtful as Tonie’s promotion became more of a certainty, that even now he appears to be going through a process, an adjustment, as though life has simply hardened around him again in its new forms and the revelation that set it in motion is nowhere to be found. It has no concrete existence, this revelation. It has no reality. It merely changed, for an instant, reality’s properties, as the flame changed the candle and sent it running over the edge of itself, running and running into new paths as though it sought to be free of what it was, of what it became once more as soon as it reached the air and stiffened in its tracks.
*
On the train, she looks at men. Some of them are whole-some-looking, attractive, but most of them aren’t. She sits opposite a large, sandy-coloured man with thick white freckled arms protruding from the sleeves of his T-shirt. His hair is flattened in places and shock-straight in others, like a patch of long grass an animal has lain down in. He is fat, thighs melting over the serge seat, stomach lying in pleats over his trousers, white fingers as thick as sausages. It is eight o’clock in the morning. He has tiny speakers in his ears. He sits opposite her and eats an Aero. He stands a can of Coke on the table between them and cracks it open, his finger squeezed through the metal ring.
Compared with him Tonie is disciplined, almost professionally physical. She has entered the phase of atemporality that lies between childbearing and visible decay. And yet she feels taut with expectation, as though now that it has finished its biological work the real life of her body is about to begin. In three months’ time she will turn forty, but she was more frightened of getting older when she was younger, when she was thirty-five and seemed all husk, Alexa at three or four the eager unripe kernel, shedding Tonie by degrees. But now it is Alexa who grows older: Tonie stays the same. And she roams around this sameness, excited and anxious, as though there is something in it she fears she won’t find.
It is raining when she gets off the train. She takes the bus the rest of the way, pressed up against the other passengers, the windows blank with condensation. The wet smells of skin and hair and cosmetics and shoe leather make a pattern in the silence, an extension into non-language, as though everyone here is trying to describe themselves in a way that words have never accounted for and never will. The bus sways. A grey view of wet pavements and shopfronts flows and stops and flows again past the fogged-up windows. The university buildings — low, concrete, municipal-looking — make their sluggish approach through the middle distance. It is surprising, how many people are picking up their bags and coats and umbrellas, preparing to get off. It’s like religion, people rising out of their anonymity, thronging and moving, all in the name of higher education. She sees Janine, shuffling in the crowd towards the doors.
‘Hey,’ Tonie says.
Janine makes a face, strangulation. ‘I’m starting to feel antipathy towards certain social groups,’ she says when she’s close enough. ‘It’s the weak I can’t stand. Old people, mothers, children in prams.’