Chapter 5: The List I Keep
Eleven dates. Three years.
I can give you all of them, and what each one was for, and I am aware of how that sounds.
People assume a list like that is grievance. It is not. It is the opposite of grievance. It is bookkeeping.
If you do not write it down, the house tells you it happened four times, and then twice, and then that you are difficult.
14 February, first year. I had corrected Margot on the year a hotel in Vienna closed.
I was right. That was the offence.
9 April. I answered the telephone in the hall. It was for Julian.
Apparently I had used the wrong form of words.
2 June. A wine glass. Not broken. Moved.
17 August.
I had gone for a walk at six in the morning without saying so, and a neighbour had seen me on the lane in a tracksuit.
Margot said, People will think we don't feed you.
Then she said, Twenty minutes.
That was the first time I understood the intervals were being chosen. Twenty. Then twenty-five.
Then the same twenty-five again, so that twenty-five would start to feel like the number.
23 November. I had said the word cheap. In relation to a candle.
That was the whole of the first year. Four.
Second year, three. 6 March, 19 May, 30 September.
The May one is the only one I could not write a reason beside.
I have thought about it since and I believe the reason was that I had been out four evenings in a row at the swimming baths, and it had begun to look like a schedule.
That is the thing nobody explains about a house like that. It is not offended by what you do.
It is offended by anything that has a shape of its own.
Third year, four. 8 January, 11 June, 4 September, 12 October.
The 11 June one was Damon's. Not the order, but the report.
He told his mother I had been rude to a delivery driver, which I had not.
I had told a delivery driver where the tradesman's entrance was, in an ordinary voice, because he had asked.
Margot did not check. That is the point of a house with a rule in it.
Once the rule exists, evidence stops being required.
Eighteen minutes on the eleventh of June.
The floor was cold and it had rained all day and the boiler was running long cycles, which is why I remember that one as accurately as I do.
I know the exact figures for nine of the eleven.
Two of them I lost, because I was new and had not started counting the boiler yet.
Here is the arithmetic that finally frightened me, sitting on the edge of a bath at one in the morning with a pencil.
First year: four, averaging twenty-two minutes.
Second year: three, averaging twenty-six.
Third year: four, and the average was thirty-one.
The frequency had not moved much. The duration had gone up by half.
That is not a family losing its temper. Nobody's temper does that. Temper is spiky and it apologises afterwards.
A rising average is a policy.
I sat with that for a while on the cold rim of the bath until my feet went numb, and then I did what I always did, which was to put the book back in the drawer under my passport and go to bed.
I never showed the list to Julian.
I have been asked why, many times, by people whose job it was to ask, and the honest answer is not creditable.
I did not show him because I knew what he would say.
He would say, You wrote them down?
And there would be a note in it — not anger, something worse, something like disappointment at a piece of poor sportsmanship.
And once he had said that, the list would stop being a record and become a symptom.
That is the trick of it.
Anything you do to keep hold of the truth can be read back at you as evidence that you have lost hold of yourself.
So I kept it in pencil, in a paperback, in a drawer.
There is one more thing on that page and I may as well say it now.
At the bottom, under the column, in the same small hand, there is a single line that is not a date.
It says: 22 October, 2 p.m., Salter Row.
That was the date of a hearing twelve years ago, in a magistrates' court in a town I have not been back to, and I wrote it in the book on the day I started the list.
I put it there so that whenever I looked at the eleven, I would also see the reason I was going to keep kneeling for them.
I never once looked at one without looking at the other.
That was the design.