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  ***

  Eight, and they were locked into yet one more urgent conversation in the bar at the end of her street in West Hampstead: lovers trying to be friends trying to be sensible trying to be good trying to be anything but lovers trying to be friends.

  Midnight. And oh, but how the subtle logic of desire mocks the plodding reason of the mind.

  Tuesday morning. He awoke beside her. Instantly he knew he wasn't going in to work.

  They drank tea and talked and ate sweet pears with broken pieces of chocolate. And he watched her kneeling on the floor in her white sweater and nothing else as she watered her plants—all brought inside to protect them from the frost and placed on the money pages of the weekend papers, side by side, in their little pots beneath her bedroom windowsill.

  "I still don't agree," she said. "When lies are thought to be okay—more interesting than being honest. And when what is true carries no weight—in the family, or in the country, or in the press, whatever; it's the same principle—when what is true carries no weight, then everything becomes equal and alike and there's no firm ground. Everything is everything. Everything is nothing. We can't find our way."

  He sipped his tea. "And so what happens then?"

  She turned to look at him and smiled. "If we are clever, we glamorize amorality as our defense. And we burnish this defense until it shines brighter than any other. We strip the truth of its privileges. And we become powerful. Because we can destroy anything we wish." She pointed the old kitchen spray bottle that she was using as a watering can at him. "As in the family, so in politics, so in the press."

  He wanted to pick her up, carry her the three steps back to bed, kiss her pretty knees.

  "You're right. In one way. Maybe it is a defense. But not against others."

  "Against who, then?"

  He reached out to touch her, but she kept her distance, weapon at the ready. "I think that when everything is everything, as you put it, then the result is not really power—no, it's more like obsessive doubt. A distrust of all sides of the argument. Or a belief in all sides of the argument. It amounts to the same thing. Belief and doubt become identical twins."

  "You're too clever and too stupid to deal with," she said.

  "When everything is discredited—when everything is discreditable—then we are able to believe only to the extent that we can doubt. Neither one outbraves the other."

  "But I like you." She met his eyes and held them. "This is the last time, Gabriel."

  The first snow started that afternoon as they climbed Parliament Hill. Though they had left her bed only an hour earlier, it was past four and the light was fading. They walked side by side. There was almost nobody else abroad, and even the path ahead was vanishing as they went on. Despite the cold, his hands felt warm and his blood was easy. They reached the top and halted, standing together. London lay before them, but disappearing now, house by house, quarter by quarter, as the city wrapped itself deeper in its shroud. A fresh flurry bent in from the north, heavier still, and she let go of his hand to pull up her hood so that all he could see as he turned to her was her face framed, and the snow alighting in the escaping wisps of her fair hair, half melting, running clear down her cheek to her lips, which beckoned as though the very pair to his own. And gradually it seemed to Gabriel that once again the world itself was fading—that time and space themselves were in retreat, and that there was only he and she standing there alone in the holiness of the snowfall.

  Later, when they came to a place where the path was muddy and there was no way around, even though she insisted that there was no need, he bent and lifted her onto his back because he wanted to carry her across. He held her legs in his arms and he felt her warm breathing by his ear, her body against his; and if he could have halted everything, if he could have commanded the world to cease its turning and all creation to end, he would not have hesitated. Without a moment's pause, he would have stopped the beating of every other creature's heart—all in the name of his selfish certainty that he would never again know a moment as pure and replete with happiness and love as that instant.

  38 A Proposal

  My dear Isabella,

  I write with a proposal. Why don't you come here for Christmas? You don't have to answer straightaway. But do have a think about it. I need hardly sell you Paris as a "destination." (Aren't they awful, these words the journalists come up with? I assume it's they. It usually is.) Do you remember the Île St. Louis—the place where we used to have those ice creams? It's just upstream from Notre Dame. I can't remember the last time we were all here together. I think it must have been when you and G were much younger. Twelve, ten? I daresay you've been here many times since then, though—probably know the city inside out. In any case, everywhere is nearby, and you must feel free to bring whomsoever you choose so that you can do as you please. There's plenty of room. And I'm very lucky: it's a beautiful apartment—the original buildings date from the 1400s, though there have been one or two rebuilds since then. You should see the place for yourself: the front windows face the Seine, and the guest bedroom (yours whenever) looks out over the courtyard. It's really no great leap of the imagination to see the horses drawing in and the servants bustling about and all of that. Perhaps I am spending too much time indoors—I cannot get out without help at the moment—but you know what I mean, I think.

  No word from you for a while ... Perhaps you are away or busy at your job. I confess, ever since your last, I have been looking forward to hearing from you. How is New York? I find it hard even to imagine your life there. I've started to think I might never see the place ... I'd love to have your impressions—though I suppose they are more than that now. How long have you been there—four years, five? America needs a fundamental rethinking, I would say. They all seemed so much happier over there in the sixties and seventies. Maybe it's just the folk that make the news bulletins these days, but suddenly the country seems so terribly adolescent again. It's as if they're going backward. (This was a favorite idea of YKW, of course...) The new Americans all seem so embattled and apprehensive and overwrought all the time. Whatever it is that they feel they have to assert, defend, uphold, it doesn't appear to be doing them any good. I'm going on, I know.

  Frustratingly, my recovery is much slower than I had first hoped. It seems to go in stages. Quick spurts and then nothing tangible for a week or two. I still can't really walk properly, though my speech is almost fully recovered, thank god. I can't describe the sheer irritation that comes with not being able to do at all that which only a few weeks back one could do without thinking.

  Anyway, I don't know what your plans are, and you may well have something lined up for Christmas by this stage. If so, New Year's? It would be lovely to see you. I know you will be cross, but my circumstances are different now, and I feel that I can claim the invalid's privilege of directness. I am happy to pay for your flights (and those of your friend), and if you really do not wish to stay here (and I would quite understand), there is a fine hotel just around the corner; I'm sure I could arrange for you to stay there.

  As you see, I have managed to write a fair amount without addressing a single one of your questions about Masha, our lives together, or anything else! I'm sorry, but I don't think I yet have the energy to write all that down in an e-mail. It seems so cold, apart from anything else. But I would dearly like to talk to you again—about that, about everything. So do please have a think about my offer, and maybe I will see you for Christmas!

  Yours with love,

  Nicholas

  39 Gabriel Decides

  The following Saturday, the sky was like the underbelly of a sick gray seal. They were out searching for he did not know what—a desk, new covers for the futon that matched the old, stripy tea towels, a fashionable garlic press? He could not remember. Camden Market was as thoroughly wet and cold as he had ever known it. Damp saturated the bones and the winter rain fell—unremitting, unenthusiastic, unwholesome. The old brickwork of the arches above the bigger sto
res seemed to be cold-sweating out two hundred years' worth of fever and toxins; the awnings of the smaller stores sagged and threatened calamity; the hot-food booths were lost in steam, and it was impossible to see any of their offerings through the glass counters for all the pinguid condensation.

  Somehow time had managed to crawl as far as three-twenty, and Gabriel was now crammed up at one end of a damp bench, thigh to thigh with a family of tourists from Salford. Doggedly, he was forking his way through a medley of multicolored Chinese food, all the favorites thrown in together—sweet and sour, black bean, oyster mushrooms, nonprawn prawn, reconstituted chicken, debeefed beef. Imagining that he was an astronaut helped: then it tasted kind of interesting, and he felt oddly grateful, appreciative of human science.

  It seemed as if it had been three-twenty for ages; as if the whole day had subsided at three-twenty and now lay in a slag heap of wet dust, rubble, and contorted masonry. It felt as if old Father Time himself—exhausted, depressed, sick to the back teeth of the endless tick-follows-tock of it all—had simply downed tools (at long last) and strode offsite, bound for the recruitment agent's office—I want to switch dimensions, chief, I'm through with the fourth; it's not a job, it's bloody slavery, that's what it is. It's about time I traded up. Something out of the range of these ignorant bastards, please. I hear the ninth is cushdie.

  The last other time Gabriel could remember was seven-seventeen, when he had been woken by Lina's alarm clock. She liked to set it three minutes before she wanted to get up. And about three hours before he did.

  The outer edge of the nearest plastic awning did not quite cover his table, and an uneven veil of runoff water was dripping onto the heads of the poor tourist children opposite as they waited for their oblivious parents to finish ramming spring rolls into themselves. Lina had disappeared.

  He returned his attention to his own carton. He wondered how far from an actual chicken a piece of chicken in a Chinese chicken dish could go and still get away with being called a piece of chicken. Of course, these nameless cubes (tasting of chalk and chamois leather) had nothing to do with young hens roaming around the farmyard; nothing to do with the main bits of even a battery bird, not leg nor breast; and nothing to do with the secondaries either—the wings or the feet; nothing to do with livers, gizzards, or neck; nothing to do with bones or beaks or feathers. No—at best, it was just about possible that these bits he was now eating had once been on the same factory floor as other meats that had known a few chicken pieces in their youth. And that was probably all the acquaintance with chicken they had ever garnered. So you had to credit them for their audacity—they were quite prepared to go out into the world armed with nothing by way of a briefing save these old-timers' stories of what chicken used to be and just ... just fake it, just belligerently pretend. Come on, then, you fuckers, if we're not chicken, then what are we? Huh? If we're not chicken, then don't eat us. Ha ... see ... you are doing it! You're eating us! Fucking A.

  They had been attempting to have their lunch together amid the busy food booths in Camden Market because it was here that Lina had arrived at the end of her endurance. Having wandered from place to place all the way up Camden High Street, turning down each with some (admittedly accurate) remark on the decor or menu or staff or seating plan, she had become so hungry that she could barely speak. And for some reason her hunger increased at the same rate as her annoyance, so that by the time they arrived at the Old Stables booths at the Chalk Farm end, she was furious. She could go no farther; she had to eat. Like Joan of Arc sacrificing herself (for God, for France), she had thrown herself into the midst of the antiprawn prawns in sauces unnamed and unnamable. Do unto me what you will; I care no longer.

  Mercifully (or even more destructively), Lina's rages were always speechless and internal. And though Gabriel genuinely felt for her—was he not a fellow soldier in the silent wars of the subconscious?—he had learned to say nothing when she got this way, as she did three of four times a year. No species of humor, no mode of cordiality, no method of clowning or conversation could draw her out of the tight angry spiral into which her spirit plunged. His every gambit only made it worse. A few days later, when she was herself again, she would calmly explain that a whole host of troubles contributed—her parents' divorce, things not exactly perfect, local rudenesses suffered (perceived or actual), the cold, the wet, the passages of the moon—but no, he was not to worry, it certainly wasn't anything to do with him. More and more, though, he had started to doubt her. No, that too was disingenuous. Actually, he had long been utterly convinced that he was the root cause—the dark energy that caused her universe to continue falling apart when it should by now have stabilized. And if she was not lying to avoid some deeper conflict or issue (and he could think of one or two), then her endlessly generous subconscious was protecting them both from the same by citing the moon. She was displacing. Yes, it was all him.

  And so there they were, an hour later, with plastic chopsticks, cartons, and sodden napkins. Desperate. The rain and the cold did not help. Nor that she had not found whatever it was that they were supposed to be looking for. Nor that the whole expedition had been her idea because she wanted to "do something" with her Saturdays. Nor that he was, if anything, in far greater disarray than she. Nor, indeed, that he still loved her with a confusing conviction.

  He had watched supportively as she had bought herself her carton's worth. He had watched tenderly as she carefully spread three purpose-recruited plastic bags across her side of the bench to ensure no possibility of dampness. He had watched gingerly as she had put a chopstick's worth into her pretty mouth. He had watched forlornly as she promptly spat it out into her napkin in disgust.

  "I can't eat that," she had said, a look of horror on her face—as if they two were alone in some forgotten Vietcong camp facing roach fried rice forever. "I can taste the dye."

  "Get something else, then." He was deep into his own carton already.

  "How can you eat it?"

  "It's not too bad."

  She had looked at him as if he were a man capable of surprising her only in his ability to conjure up new lows from human existence. And of course he felt there was nothing else to do but go for another mouthful.

  He had meant to antagonize her, perhaps. But he had also actually meant it: there were a million worse meals being served up on the planet every second, and a whole lot of meals not being served up at all. It wasn't too bad. He had watched her fold the napkin neatly (almost madly, he thought), lean over, and place it in the nearby bin, following it quickly with the rest of her food. Then she rose silently—incandescent—and set off to get something else to disgust her.

  Now she had disappeared

  He wondered how much time he had.

  Preoccupied wasn't really the word for it.

  He was disintegrating.

  And even this he wasn't doing properly, because every time one part of his mind began to address the questions, every time he felt the emotional panic rising as he tried once again to confront himself, another part of his mind would remind him of something horrific happening elsewhere on the planet and in so doing render his own problems and predicament infinitely unimportant, unworthy of thought or time or even feeling. And in this way he continually hijacked himself. But this too he only managed to do unsatisfactorily. (Mania, definitely a mania of some sort.) Because of course he continued to live and think within himself, and within himself the questions remained, returning every few hours, cycling back up to the forefront of his mind regardless of the rest of the world and all its undeniably greater misery. Despite these hijacks, despite everything, he was still himself; still young enough, not subjugated, not tortured, not diseased, not dying, but still living where he lived, a healthy representative of the first adult generation of the new century. The very latest wave of humanity. And he was still required to make an intelligent fair-hearted go of it, just as all the parallel Gabriels he imagined among the Victorians or the Renaissance courtiers or the flappers
or the Athenian senators or the Minoans or the Aborigines or the Jutes or the twelve tribes of Israel or the Mongols had been required to make a go of it before him. (Curiously, the beef tasted of ... of real chicken.) And yet it seemed to him that he was uniquely required to live and act against a social background of near-total doubt. Any other Gabriel from any other time and place would at least have been able to believe in something. Sure, these other Gabriels might have had a lot of shit on their plates—war, disease, violent death, and so on. (And better chicken.) But not this ... not this complete and utter evaporation of all possible belief, or consistency, or any good way for the intelligent man to live. (Might this pale and watery sphere once have been a proud water chestnut?) These other Gabriels had not had to face the fact that God was now well and truly dead, over, a calamitous joke. They had not had to face the fact that the medieval religions had grown senile, demented, and crazed, unable to contend with or relate to the present world in all its instant and tentacled reality (the flavor was inconclusive—might just as well have been a lychee); that, devoid of any great countervailing idea or ideal, capitalism was sweeping all before it (definite oyster mushroom); that conventional politics had been reduced to little more than a fretful soap ("crab" "stick"); that art was now measured not by any external litmus of quality or skill or even endeavor, and that so many seeming acts of creation turned out to be mere gesture and these were celebrated out of all proportion (prawns again, or maybe ... goat); that all ideas had become small or embarrassing or superficial, languishing in the lowercase (bean sprout—GM, definitely GM); that the strength of an argument was now gauged only by the emotional temperature at which it was delivered; that science had become too fast for the executive or legislative to understand; that the media had grown mad with chasing what they thought the public wanted and the public mad with what the media fed it; that personal experience had become the tyrant of truth (rind? squid? pig's ear?); and that right and wrong were now as lost to the world as a pair of penguins in an underground car park long ago sealed off by an earthquake and flooded over by a tsunami.