“Have you learnt nothing?” said Joanna.
The Man looked at her with the expression of a schoolboy confronted by a teacher who has acquired access to his internet history.
“Some things,” he said slowly, carefully reading her face.
“Name one.”
He considered lying, which had after all been one of the things he had learnt very well.
They were in Gdynia.
Joanna was smoking on the balcony in the old way, with annoyance, efficiency and a kind of brisk moral competence that had once made him love her and later made him lie to her.
“You’ve done exactly the same thing again,” she said.
“That’s not true.”
“You went mad in Poland. You fled to England. You wrote too much. You fell in love with someone unsuitable. You drank. You came back. You had another breakdown. You wrote another book. Honestly, Jo, if you’re going to repeat yourself at least change the ending.”
The Boy wanted to protest.
The Editor wanted to point out that the prose was considerably stronger. And that Joanna should follow protocol: “No ‘Jo’, please. It’s policy,” he says.
“But you’re using my name,” she says.
“Yes, but you’re a literary instrum…” The word trails off.
All three Jos sit there in silence while Joanna looks at them with the weariness of a woman who has already read the previous draft.
The first time had begun, as these things often do, with an airport.
Gdańsk airport. Too much glass. The strange feeling of leaving a country that one had never entirely entered.
The Man had cried in the car park, and in the departures lounge. Then on the plane.
Not attractively. Not in a meaningful or cinematic way. More in the style of a man whose drinking is becoming difficult to describe as social, and who has begun to suspect that intelligence may not, in fact, be a practical skill.
Then London.
His cousin took him in.
“You can stay as long as you like,” said the cousin.
Which is a wonderful thing to hear unless you are forty and sleeping in the spare room of a house in Limehouse beside a rowing machine, three copies of the Economist and a framed print of Ron Saunders.
The Man stayed.
He wrote.
Gazeta Wyborcza began publishing him every week.
There he was in the foreign news section, for some reason. A photograph. A byline. The Englishman in Poland who had fled to England in order to write about Poland.
There was something almost indecently satisfying about it.
Every week he produced another piece: sorrow, exile, politics, self-pity, irony, Poland seen from a distance of eleven hundred miles and several whiskies.
People read them.
One friend discovered about the divorce not because the Man told him, but because he opened the newspaper.
“You could have phoned,” the friend said.
“I was going to.”
The Editor, even now, is faintly proud of those pieces.
The slight thrill of becoming, briefly, the official correspondent of one’s own unhappiness.
Then there was Sara.
There is always a Sara.
Not necessarily called Sara. Not necessarily English.
A woman who appears after the disaster and offers Prosecco, sympathy, a bed, kindness, perhaps a hand on the forehead. Someone who says: come in, you poor thing.
To the Man, in that state, this appeared indistinguishable from salvation.
Sara looked after him. The Man had Come in from the Cold. He was debriefed at a safe house in St Albans.
Sara listened.
Sara let him sleep.
“Ah,” said Lacan. “The antidote woman.”
“The what?”
“The one who arrives to prove that the previous one was a mistake.”
“She wasn’t a mistake.”
“No,” said Lacan. “She was a symptom.”
The Man hates the idea that a person can be a symptom, but accepts it for the sake of something he can’t immediately put his finger on.
It did not last.
She had been a band aid placed over a wound that the Man preferred not to examine too closely.
Then he came back to Poland.
There was unfinished business.
He returned to Gdynia. To Joanna. To the dogs. The house by the sea.
Then, after two days back in Warsaw, he met M.
Later he would tell people that he knew the moment he saw her.
This sounded romantic, which was unfortunate, because what he meant was something worse. He knew, in the way a man sometimes knows that he is about to do something foolish and will do it anyway.
The bar. The smile. The intelligence. The slight sadness. The feeling of being seen.
“I am going to fall in love with her,” thought the Man. He had had the feeling that he was finally ready while on the bus from London to Warsaw. A 32-hour journey that does strange things to the mind.
“Again?” said the Editor.
For seven weeks they had passion.
“You mean they did it,” the Boy says.
Always in his room.
Never hers.
She came to him. Then left.
He became, as he later described it, a sex prisoner of his own making.
There was pleasure in it. The exhilarating misery of wanting more than one is being given and mistaking that for depth.
Then she cut him out abruptly one January morning. Nothing prepares for such cruelty. A surgical removal. As if the whole episode had been planned. A new life inside her. And the Man not in it.
The Man collapsed. He spent a night in police custody accused of insulting the Polish state – or it may have been treason, he forgets – after one drunken night on Nowy Świat and then a week in bed back in Gdynia.
He looked at the ceiling and repeated the story to himself until it acquired the dignity of myth.
“M wasn’t the exception,” said Joanna.
“She was the thing you needed.”
“What thing?”
“The sword.”
“The sword?”
“You wanted to leave. You couldn’t leave. So you found someone impossible and dramatic and painful and used her to cut through the marriage.”
“That’s not fair.”
“It is.”
The Man wanted to protest.
Because he had loved M.
Because he still did.
Because love had been real.
But there was something in what Joanna said that rang with the horrible, metallic sound of a truth one has been avoiding.
M had not destroyed the marriage. She had made it impossible to rearrange.
Without her, perhaps there would have been discussions. Counselling. Better behaviour. Separate bedrooms. Promises. Then ‘Room 2025.’ “This way, sir, we’ve been expecting you,” the Night Manager says.
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