The residency was in Perthshire, in a house that had been a shooting lodge and was now the kind of place that organisations with enough funding and enough faith in the work rented for six weeks at a time and filled with eight writers and the particular silence of Scottish upland in October. There was no WiFi in the main house. The mobile signal required a walk to the east lawn. The nearest town was fourteen miles, and there was one car shared between eight people, which was a deliberate arrangement and, in practice, an effective one.
I had known about Thomas Avery’s work for six years before I met him. This is not unusual in literary circles, where you can be familiar with a person’s sentences for a decade before you encounter the person who wrote them. But “familiar” understates it, in my case. I had written about his first novel at length — had spent three months with it in the way you spend time with a text that does something you didn’t think could be done — and had, by the time of the residency, read everything he had published and several things he hadn’t.
He was, at the residency, the person his work had led me to expect: precise, unhurried, with the kind of attention to what was being said that came from the same place his sentences came from. He introduced himself on the first evening without any indication that he had read my work, which was fine — it would have been stranger if he had led with it — and which I noted as a small fact and set aside.
I was, at the time, three years into what I would describe, to anyone who asked, as a functioning long-term relationship. The word “functioning” was not, in that description, a euphemism. It was a precise word. The relationship functioned. It was built on real things and maintained with care and had, over three years, the character of something that had been tested adequately and had held. I was not unhappy. I was not, in any ordinary sense, looking.
The evenings at the residency were the structural problem. The days organised themselves around the work: you wrote, you ate, you walked if you needed to. The days had a shape. The evenings — from seven o’clock, when dinner ended, until whenever the last person went to bed — had no shape at all. Eight writers in a drawing room with whisky and the kind of conversations that happen when the work has been done and the ordinary social inhibitions that professional context provides are absent.
Thomas talked about writing the way some people talk about mathematics — with the authority of someone who has thought about it longer and more rigorously than the conversation requires, and who calibrates what they say accordingly. This was not performance. I had read his essays. The calibration was constant and consistent with the private thinker as much as the public one.
By the end of the first week I was aware of two things that I had been pretending not to be aware of. The first was that he had, at some point between Monday and Saturday, read my work — I could tell by the way he listened when I talked about specific problems, in the way a person listens when they already have some of the context. The second was that the problem I had identified on the first evening — the evenings, their shapelessness, the specific quality of the drawing room at nine o’clock — was not a general problem. It was a specific one, and it was specific to the hour between ten and eleven when everyone else had gone to bed and the two of us had not.
We did not address this. We talked about the work. We talked about other books, other writers, the specific technical problems that each of us was working on. These were real conversations and I valued them genuinely. But they were also — I was honest enough to know this — being held in a room at eleven o’clock at night by two people who were aware of a thing neither of them was naming.
On the ninth day he said, without preamble: “You wrote the piece on The Lacunae.”
“Yes,” I said.
“I read it three times,” he said. “I don’t usually read criticism of my own work. But I read that one three times.”
I looked at him. Outside, the Perthshire dark was complete in the way that Scottish upland dark is complete — not just the absence of light but the presence of something older and more patient. “Why?”
“Because you understood what I was trying to do,” he said. “And I hadn’t been sure, when I finished the book, that I had done it. You made an argument that I had. I wanted to know if the argument was right.”
“Is it?”
“I think so,” he said. “Now that I’ve talked to the person who wrote it.”
There was a pause. The fire was low. The other seven residents were in bed. The house held the particular silence of a place designed for a different century, with thick walls and windows that faced the wrong direction for the prevailing wind.
“This is a problem,” I said. I meant it to cover everything — the drawing room, the hour, the conversation, the nine evenings that had built toward it.
“Yes,” he said. He did not pretend not to understand what I meant.
“We’re both —” I started.
“I know,” he said. “I’ve known since the first evening.”
What I came to understand, over the six weeks of the residency, was that the problem was not the attachment — mine, his — but the specific irrelevance of the attachment to the situation we were in. I do not mean this as a justification. I mean it as an observation about the way certain environments restructure the usual coordinates. The residency had created a world with its own rules — the work, the evenings, the fourteen miles to the nearest town, the shared car, the drawing room at eleven — and within that world the rules of the world outside it had a different weight. Not no weight. A different weight.
Thomas Avery was, in that world, not primarily someone with a life elsewhere. He was the person who had written The Lacunae and who understood what I was trying to do with the thing I was working on in a way that nobody else at the residency did, and who was present in the evenings with the particular quality of presence that I had recognised on the first night and been unable, in six weeks, to become accustomed to.
What happened between us happened in the evenings, in the drawing room, in the later part of the residency when the other six residents had established their own patterns and had stopped noticing when two of them stayed later than the others. It happened with the specific honesty of two people who knew what they were doing and had decided — without consulting each other on the decision, and without pretending the decision was smaller than it was — to do it.
We did not talk about what we were leaving. We talked about the work — before, and after, and sometimes during the evenings in the way that two people who are fundamentally oriented toward the work talk about it even when the work is not the only thing present. This was, I thought, appropriate. The residency had been given to us for the work. The evenings were the work’s remainder, the hours left over when the day’s writing was done. We were using them, both of us, as honestly as we knew how.
On the last evening, with the car booked for six the following morning, we sat in the drawing room until past midnight. Outside, the first frost of November was settling over the east lawn. The fire was the same low fire it always was at that hour.
“What do we do now?” I said. It was the first time either of us had asked it.
He looked at the fire for a long moment. “We go home,” he said. “We do what we came here to do, which is write. We do it better than we would have if the residency had been different.”
“That’s not a complete answer,” I said.
“No,” he said. “It’s not.” He looked at me. “I don’t have a complete answer. I have a life that exists outside this house, and you have a life that exists outside this house, and I think we both knew from about the ninth evening that neither of those facts was going to resolve this.”
“We went ahead anyway.”
“We did,” he said. “I would do it again.”
I did not say whether I would or not. I thought: I am a person who has spent six years with a body of work, and six weeks with the person who made it, and the person is more than the work and also inseparable from it, and I do not know what to do with that.
Outside, the frost completed itself on the lawn. In the morning the car would come. The residency would end in the way residencies end: with the house returning to its own silence, the work going home with the people who had made it, the particular world of six weeks in Perthshire available only as memory and as whatever the work had absorbed of it.
I stayed in the drawing room until the fire went out. Thomas had gone to bed. In the morning I would go home to the life I had left six weeks earlier, which was waiting for me as intact and as real as I had left it. And I would go back to it carrying something I had not had before — not a decision, not a resolution, but a knowledge. The knowledge of what it felt like to be fully present to someone, and to have that presence returned, in a place designed for exactly six weeks of exactly that kind of life.
Whether that knowledge was something I could carry without it changing anything was a question the residency could not answer. That was, perhaps, the question the work would eventually have to.