The Course of Love (15 page)

The relationship nevertheless makes Kirsten worry a little for her daughter's future. She wonders how other men will be able to measure up to such standards of tenderness and focused attention—and whether Besti may end up rejecting a range of candidates based on nothing more than the fact that they don't come close to offering her the sort of friendship she once enjoyed with her dad. Yet what niggles Kirsten most of all is the sentimentality of Rabih's performance. She knows at first hand that the kindness he displays with their daughter is available from him only in his role as a father, not as a husband. She has plenty of experience with his drastic change in tone once the two of them are out of earshot of the children. He is unwittingly planting an image in Esther's
mind of how a man might ideally behave with a woman—notwithstanding that the ideal in no way reflects the truth of who he, Rabih, really is. Thus Esther may, in later life, ask a man who is acting in a selfish, distracted, and severe manner why he can't be more like her father, little realizing that he is actually remarkably like Rabih—just not the only version of him that she ever got to see.

In the circumstances, it's perhaps helpful that kindness has its limits and that these two parents, despite their best efforts, still manage (like all parents) regularly and deeply to annoy their children. Being outright cold, frightening, and cruel turns out to be only the first of many different means of ensuring alienation. Another quite effective strategy combines overprotectiveness, overinvolvement, and overcuddling, a trio of neurotic behaviors with which Rabih and Kirsten are deeply familiar. Rabih, the Beirut boy, frets about Esther and William every time they cross a road; he seeks a potentially vexing degree of closeness to them, asks them too often how their day was, always wants them to put on another layer of clothing, and imagines them as being more fragile than they really are—which is partly why Esther more than once snaps “Get off my case” at him, and not without cause.

Nor, indeed, can it be all that easy to have Kirsten as their mother, for this entails having to do a lot of extra spelling tests, being encouraged to play several musical instruments, and hearing continual reminders to eat healthful foods—a not entirely surprising set of priorities from someone who was the only student in her secondary-school class to go to university, and one of a minority not now living on benefits.

In certain moods Rabih can pity the children for having to deal with the two of them. He can understand their complaints about and resentment of the power that he and Kirsten wield over them, their
thirty-odd-year head start, and the droning sound of their voices in the kitchen every morning. He has sufficient trouble coping with himself that it isn't too much of a leap for him to sympathize with two young people who may have one or two issues with him. Their irritation, he also knows, has its own important role to play: it's what will guarantee that the children will one day leave home.

If parental kindness were enough, the human race would stagnate and in time die off. The survival of the species hinges on children eventually getting fed up and heading off into the world armed with hopes of finding more satisfying sources of excitement.

In their moments of coziness, when the whole family is piled together on the big bed and the mood is one of tolerance and good humor, Rabih is aware that someday, in the not too distant future, all of this will end according to an edict of nature enacted by a most natural means: the tantrums and fury of adolescence. The continuation of families down the generations depends on the young ones' eventually losing patience with their elders. It would be a tragedy if the four of them still wanted to lie here with their limbs enlaced in another twenty-five years' time. Esther and William will ultimately have to begin finding him and Kirsten ridiculous, boring, and old-fashioned in order to develop the impetus to move out of the house.

Their daughter has recently assumed a leadership role in the resistance to parental rule. As she approaches her eleventh birthday, she starts to take exception to her father's clothes, his accent, and his way of cooking, and rolls her eyes at her mother's concern with reading good literature and her absurd habit of keeping lemon halves in the fridge rather than more carelessly tossing the unused bits away. The taller and stronger Esther grows, the more she is irritated
by her parents' behavior and habits. William is still too little to cast such a caustic eye at his carers. Nature is gentle with children in this regard, making them sensitive to the full array of their forebears' flaws only at an age when they are big enough to flee them.

In order to let the separation take its course, Rabih and Kirsten know not to become too strict, distant, or intimidating. They understand how easy it is for children to get hung up on a mum or dad who is hard to read, scary-seeming, or just not around all that much. Such parents can hook in their offspring more tightly than the responsive and stable ones will ever do. Rabih and Kirsten have no wish to be the sort of self-centered, volatile figures with whom a child can become obsessed for life, and so take care to be natural, approachable, and even, sometimes, theatrically daft. They want to be unintimidating enough that Esther and William will be able, when the time comes, to park them cleanly to one side and get on with their lives. Being taken a bit for granted is, they implicitly feel, the best possible indication of the quality of their love.

“Let's do it tonight; what do you think?” says Kirsten as she puts on her makeup in the bathroom before heading downstairs to prepare the children's breakfast.

“You're on,” says Rabih with a smile, adding, “I'll put it in my diary now.” He's not joking. Friday night is a favored slot and it's been a while.

On his way to work, he thinks of Kirsten's dark, wet hair, which beautifully offset her pale skin when she stepped out of the shower. He takes a moment to appreciate his extraordinary good fortune that this elegant, determined Scottish woman has agreed to spend her life beside him.

The day turns out to be rather stressful and it's not till seven that he reaches home again. He's longing for Kirsten now, but he has to be diplomatic. There can be no rush and certainly no demands. He is going to try to tell her with particular honesty what he feels beneath the everyday turbulence. The plan is hazy, but he is hopeful.

The family are all in the kitchen, where
there's a tense discussion unfolding about fruit. Both of the children are flatly refusing to have any despite Kirsten having been out to buy some blueberries especially and laid them out on a plate in the shape of a smiling face. William accuses his mother of being mean, Esther wails that the smell of the fruit is making her ill.

Rabih attempts a joke about having missed being in the asylum, ruffles William's hair, and suggests it might be time for stories upstairs. Rabih and Kirsten alternate reading to them in the evenings, and tonight it's her turn. In their room she pulls them close to her, one on each side, and begins a story, translated from the German, about a rabbit pursued by hunters in a forest. Seeing them huddled against her reminds Rabih of how it used to be with his own mother. William likes to play with Kirsten's hair, pushing it right forward, just as Rabih used to do. When the story is over, they want more, so she sings them an old Scottish lullaby, “Griogal Cridhe,” which tells the tragic tale of a young widow whose husband was taken prisoner and executed in front of her by her own clan. He sits on the landing, moved, listening to Kirsten's voice. He feels privileged to have witnessed his wife's evolution into an exceptionally competent mother. She, at this point, would above all love a beer.

Rabih goes to lie down on their bed. Half an hour later he hears Kirsten enter the bathroom. When she emerges, it is in the tartan dressing gown that she has had since she was fifteen and which she used to wear a lot when the children were very small. He is starting to wonder how he might begin when she mentions a phone call she had that afternoon with a friend in the United States whom she knew as a student at Aberdeen. The poor woman's mother has been diagnosed with esophageal cancer; the verdict came out of the blue. Not for the first time he senses what a good friend Kirsten is and how deeply and instinctively she enters into the needs of others.

Then Kirsten mentions that she has been thinking about the children's university education. It is a long way off still, but that's exactly the point. Now is the time to start putting something aside: not much—they are squeezed—but enough to build into a useful sum eventually.

Rabih clears his throat and, somewhere inside, becomes a little desperate.

We might imagine that the fear and insecurity of getting close to someone would happen only once, at the start of a relationship, and that anxieties couldn't possibly continue after two people had made some explicit commitments to one another, like marrying, securing a joint mortgage, buying a house, having a few children, and naming each other in their wills.

Yet conquering distance and gaining assurances that we are needed aren't exercises to be performed only once; they have to be repeated every time there's been a break—a day away, a busy period, an evening at work—for every interlude has the power once again to raise the question of whether or not we are still wanted.

It's therefore a pity how hard it is to find a stigma-free and winning way of admitting to the intensity of our need for reassurance. Even after years together, there remains a hurdle of fear around asking for a proof of desire. But with a horrible, added complication: we now assume that any such anxiety couldn't legitimately exist. Hence the temptation to pretend that reassurance would be the last thing on our minds. We might even, strangely, have an affair, an act of betrayal that is all too often simply a face-saving attempt to pretend we don't need someone, an arduous proof of indifference that we reserve for, and secretly address to, the person we truly care about—but are terrified of showing that we need and have been inadvertently hurt by.

We are never through with the requirement for acceptance. This isn't a curse limited to the inadequate and the weak. Insecurity may even be a
peculiar sign of well-being. It means we haven't allowed ourselves to take other people for granted, that we remain realistic enough to see that things could genuinely turn out badly—and that we are invested enough to care.

It is getting very late now. The children have swimming practice early the next day. Rabih waits until Kirsten has finished her consideration of where Esther and William might eventually study, then reaches over and takes his wife's hand. She lets it lie there unattended awhile, then gives it a squeeze, and they begin to kiss. He opens, and starts to stroke, her thighs. As he's doing so, his gaze strays to the night-table on which Kirsten has placed a card from William: “Happy Bithrdey Mumy,” it says, alongside a drawing of an extremely good-natured and smiley sun. This makes him think of William's impish face and, strangely, also of Kirsten taking him on her shoulders around the kitchen, which she did only the previous week, when he'd dressed up as a wizard after school.

One part of Rabih very much wants to press on with seducing his wife; he's been wanting this for so long. But another side of him isn't so sure if he's properly in the mood now, for reasons he finds hard to pin down.

It's a well-known thesis: the people we are attracted to as adults bear a marked resemblance to the people we most loved as children. It might be a certain sense of humor or a kind of expression, a temperament, or an emotional disposition.

Yet there is one thing we want to do with our grown-up lovers that was previously very much off-limits with our reassuring early caregivers; we seek to have sex with the very individuals who in key ways remind us of types with whom we were once strongly expected not to have sex. It follows that successful intercourse depends on shutting down some of the overly vivid associations
between our romantic partners and their underlying parental archetypes. We need—for a little while—to make sure our sexual feelings don't become unhelpfully confused with our affectionate ones.

But the task becomes trickier the moment children arrive and directly call upon the specifically parental aspects of our partners. We might be aware at a conscious level that our partner is of course not a sexually forbidden parent—they're the same person they always were, the one who, in the early months, we once did fun and transgressive things with. And yet the idea is put under ever greater strain as their sexual selves grow increasingly obscured beneath the nurturing identities they must wear all day, exemplified by those chaste and sprightly titles (which we might even occasionally mistakenly use to refer to them ourselves): “Mum” or “Dad.”

What his wife's breasts might look like was once a subject of inordinate concern for Rabih. He remembers casting surreptitious glances at them in the black top she wore the first time they met, then later studying them beneath a white T-shirt which hinted at their fascinatingly modest size, then brushing against them ever so slightly during that initiatory kiss at the botanical gardens and then finally circling them with his tongue in her old kitchen. His obsession with them in the early days was constant. He wanted her to keep her bra on during lovemaking, alternately pushing it up and pulling it down, so as to keep at a maximum pitch the extraordinary contrast between her clothed and unclothed selves. He would ask her to cup and caress them as she might if he weren't there. He wanted to place his penis between them, as if mere hands were not enough and a more definitive indicator of possession and possibility were required to mark out this previously taboo territory.

And yet now, some years later, they lie next to each other in the marital bed with about as much sexual tension between
them as there might be between a pair of leathery grandparents tanning themselves on a Baltic nudist beach.