By the time we got back to London I was feeling somewhat better. Bernard helped me to pack, and promised to collect my umbrella, which I had forgotten, and said that he was going to discuss the basic facts with Norman, which I felt strongly that he ought to do. We agreed to go on talking to each other every day. He was sure my mother was going to like her birthday present. He made a whole toasted breakfast for me in the morning, which I more or less managed to eat, and then we put my suitcase back into his faded green car and headed out through the newly arrived sunshine toward Heathrow. I walked up to check-in feeling much better than I had felt ten days earlier, despite the mild aftereffects of my twenty-four-hour virus. And it was not until I had hugged Bernard goodbye—what a long time it had been since I had hugged him in that same terminal building, on the way back from France with Freddy—that the reality hit me, and that I thought about the long trip home.

IV: Winter

IV

WINTER

It is not the case that all happy families are the same. I often think that there are no new sad stories; the ways in which my life has been sad are so much like the ways in which the lives of those I know and love have been sad. Perhaps that is just as well: on the analyst’s couch or in the muted discourses of friendship, I learn that it is sadness that binds humanity, that the sadness I claim has been claimed, in some version or another, by everyone on earth. But my happiness, and the happiness of my family! There are thousands of happy families, but they are too private to earn the documentation tragedy claims as its due, and every one is so radically unlike every other, so frighteningly particular, that language itself shrinks from the task of describing them. Happiness is not too sentimental or too hackneyed to portray; it is too obscure, too personal, too strange to find a universal rhetoric. Sadness comes along well-worn paths and finds you, but since happiness is something you find yourself, it comes shaped in your own crazy image. The things that made my family happy were so much our own: no one else has ever touched them, nor will anyone touch them again. Our joy is forever ours, and its obscurity protects it; the unknowable is immune to decay. As for our sadness: it is only another version of the sadness that rings in everyone’s lives every day, and with the clockwork monotony of the run from birth to death, it unfolds along a course as predestined as the last notes of a scale.