Intermezzo

by Sally Rooney

This way accepting consolation he must accept also that he needs it. Because his father, with whom he was never particularly close, has died in his sixties after five years of cancer treatment. An eventuality, once expected, so long delayed that he began to think it would never come, until it did. Peter somehow inexcusably unprepared for the anticipated event. Somehow suddenly head of a family which has at the same time ceased to exist.

You can drive yourself crazy thinking about different things you could have done in the past. But sometimes I think, actually, I didn’t have that much power over my life anyway. I mean, I couldn’t give myself a new personality out of nothing. And things just kind of happened to me.

She tells him not to apologise. Then he kisses her again. It is, of course, a desperately embarrassing situation – a situation which seems to render her entire life meaningless. Her professional life, eight years of marriage, whatever she believes about her personal values, everything. And yet, accepting the premise, allowing life to mean nothing for a moment, doesn’t it simply feel good to be in the arms of this person? Feeling that he wants her, that all evening he has been looking at her and desiring her, isn’t it pleasurable? To embody the kind of woman he believed he couldn’t have – to incorporate that woman into herself, and allow him to have her. Pressed against her, his body is thin and tensed and shivering. And what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?

She has been contained before, contained and directed, by the trappings of ordinary life. Now she no longer feels contained or directed by these forces, no longer directed by anything at all. Life has slipped free of its netting. She can do very strange things now, she can find herself a very strange person. Young men can invite her into holiday cottages for sexual reasons. It means nothing. That isn’t true: it means something, but the meaning is unfamiliar.

Thinking about that day, the dog running for the tennis ball, the pasta that they ate together, the feeling wells up inside him painfully. Wanting to say and hear the words again, that can never again be said or heard. To return to the house once more, and not find it dark and empty, but airy and bright again with open windows. To spend an afternoon together, playing with the dog, eating dinner, doing nothing, only being together, just once more.

I feel like maybe I still don’t accept it. The idea that my dad is gone. I don’t really get how it could be the case, if you see what I mean. I think I do, she says. Like he just sort of exited from time, and we all have to keep going, within time. Do you know what I mean?

He wipes at his nose, his eyes, and tries to swallow. I just feel like there were certain things left unfinished, he says. You know, that we didn’t talk about, or that I didn’t understand. It is young actually, for your parent to die, if you’re twenty-two. I didn’t really think that before, but I do now. Because I didn’t understand certain things. Another few years, honestly, would have been better. Is that a bad thing to say? No, it’s not bad, she says, of course not.

Just a few more years to think things over, it would have helped me. When I look back, I can’t believe how much things I never discussed with him. And even when we did talk, nothing got written down. It’s all just memory, and what if the memories fade?

Passing together through the central open space of the Green. The stilled fountain, empty benches, empty plots of soil. Maybe you don’t want to go over all this, he says. But I just want to tell you, it wasn’t what you said. An exit strategy, it wasn’t. What happened between us the other day. I know I’ve hurt you, and you don’t have to forgive me. But you should know I love you, and I loved being with you. I was very happy then. There was no other reason. And actually, I’m not sorry. I am sorry for a lot of things, but not that. Quietly she only answers: No, I’m not sorry for that either.

A little silence falls. Hands still buried in his pockets Ivan casts his eyes up at the church. You believe in God? he asks. Oh, says Peter. I’m not sure, I don’t know. I suppose I would say, I try to. Ivan looks back at him calmly, somehow wisely. Same, he says. That I try to. Although it doesn’t always work, but I do my best. In his chest a sweet stirring pain like a hand catching holding tight. Mm, he says. Me too.

Thou know’st ’tis common; all that lives must die. Everyone in the end of course, even he, Ivan, strange to think. To make meaning of something so fleeting, life. Here and gone. Think of him there inside the closed room tonight with the sound of cheering, people calling his name, feet stamping. That is life as well as loss and pain. This married woman he’s hanging around with, how did that start. Ask them maybe over Christmas dinner. Her horrified laughter. Crossing over now towards the Abbey, brown brickwork, handful of rain he thinks he feels and turns up his collar. Picture them all there together. To imagine also is life: the life that is only imagined. Clatter of saucepans, steam from the kettle. Even to think about it is to live. Hard cold wind blowing in from the sea, blowing his coat back, raising white hackles on the river. Nothing is fixed. She, the other. Ivan, the girlfriend. Christine, their father, from beyond the grave. It doesn’t always work, but I do my best. See what happens. Go on in any case living.