by Ian Mcewan
Clarissa told the beginning of her story in a rush, of the swaying, blundering tangle of ropes and men, of the shouting and cursing, and of how she had gone forward to help but could not find a spare line to hang on to. Together we heaped curses on the pilot, James Gadd, and his incompetence, but this could not protect us for long from thoughts of all the things we should have done to avert Logan’s death. We jumped forward to the moment he let go, as we did many other times that evening. I told her how he seemed to hang in the air before dropping, and she told me how a scrap of Milton had flashed before her: Hurl’d headlong flaming from th’Ethereal Sky. But we backed away from that moment again and again, circling it, stalking it, until we had it cornered and began to tame it with words. We went back to the struggle with the balloon and the ropes. I felt the sickness of guilt, something I couldn’t yet bear to talk about. I showed Clarissa the rope burn on my hands. We had finished the Gassac in less than half an hour. Clarissa raised my hands to her lips and kissed my palms. I was looking in her eyes, that beautiful loving green, but the moment couldn’t hold, we were not permitted that kind of peace. She winced as she cried out, “But, oh God, when he fell!” and I stood up hurriedly to reach for a bottle of Beaujolais from the rack.
We were back with the fall, and how long it had taken him to reach the ground, two seconds or three. Immediately we backed off into the peripheries: the police; the ambulance men, one of whom was not strong enough to hold his end of the stretcher carrying Greene and had to be helped across the field by Lacey; and the garage breakdown truck that had towed away Logan’s car. We tried to imagine it, the delivery of this empty car to the home in Oxford where Mrs. Logan waited with her two children. But this was unbearable too, so we returned to our own stories. Along the narrative lines there were knots, tangles of horror that we could not look at the first time but could only touch before retreating, and then return. We were prisoners in a cell, running at the walls, beating them back with our heads. Slowly our prison grew larger.
Strange to recall that with Jed Parry we felt on safer ground. She told me how he had walked over to her and said his name and she had said hers. They hadn’t shaken hands. Then he had turned and followed me down the hill. I told the prayer story as comedy and made Clarissa laugh. She locked her fingers into mine and squeezed. I wanted to tell her I loved her, but suddenly between us there sat the form of Logan, upright and still. I had to describe him. It was far worse in recollection than it had been at the time. Shock must have dulled my responses then. I began to tell her how his features appeared to hang in all the wrong places, and I broke off my description to tell her of the difference between then and now, and how a certain dream logic had made the unbearable quite ordinary, how I had thought nothing of carrying on a conversation with Parry while Logan sat shattered on the ground. And even as I was saying this it occurred to me that I was still avoiding Logan, that I had shied away from the description I had begun because I still could not absorb the facts, and I wanted to tell Clarissa this fact too. She watched me patiently as I spiraled into a regress of memory, emotion, and commentary. It wasn’t that I couldn’t find the words: I couldn’t fit the speed of my thoughts. Clarissa pushed back her chair and came round my side of the table. She drew my head against her breasts. I shut up and closed my eyes. I caught in the fibers of her sweater the tang of the open air and imagined I saw the sky spread before me.
A little later we were back in our seats, leaning over the table like dedicated craftsmen at work, grinding the jagged edge of memories, hammering the unspeakable into forms of words, threading single perceptions into narrative, until Clarissa returned us to the fall, to the precise moment when Logan had slid down the rope, hung there one last precious second, and let go. This was what she had to get back to, the image to which her shock had attached itself. She said it all again, and repeated the lines from Paradise Lost. Then she told me that she too had willed deliverance, even as he was in midair. What had come to mind were angels—not Milton’s reprobates hurled from heaven, but the embodiment of all goodness and justice in a golden figure swooping from the cloud base to gather the falling man in its arms. In that delirious thought-rich second it had seemed to her that Logan’s fall was a challenge no angel could resist, and his death denied their existence. Did it need denying, I wanted to ask, but she was gripping my hand and saying, “He was a good man,” with a sudden pleading note, as though I were about to condemn him. “The boy was in the basket, and Logan wouldn’t let go. He had children of his own. He was a good man.”
In her early twenties a routine surgical procedure had left Clarissa unable to bear children. She believed her medical notes had been confused with another woman’s, but this was impossible to prove, and a long legal action foundered in delays and obstructions. Slowly she had buried the sadness, and built her life again, and ensured that children remained a part of it. Nephews, nieces, godchildren, the children of neighbors and old friends all adored her. She remembered all their birthdays and Christmases. We had a room in our flat, part nursery, part teenage den, where children or young adults sometimes stayed. Friends considered Clarissa to be successful and happy, and most of the time they were right. But occasionally something happened to stir the old sense of loss. Five years before the balloon accident, when we had lived together for two years, Marjorie, a good friend from her university days, had lost her four-week-old baby to a rare bacterial infection. Clarissa had been to Manchester to see the baby when it was five days old and had spent a week there helping to look after it. The news of the baby’s death cut her down. I had never witnessed such disabling grief. Central to it was not so much the baby’s fate as Marjorie’s loss, which she experienced as her own. What was revealed was Clarissa’s own mourning for a phantom child, willed into half-being by frustrated love. Marjorie’s pain became Clarissa’s. A few days later her defenses were back in place, and she dedicated herself to being as useful as she could to her old friend.
This was an extreme example. Other times, the unconceived child barely stirred before the moment passed. Now, in John Logan she saw a man prepared to die to prevent the kind of loss she felt herself to have sustained. The boy was not his own, but he was a father and he understood. His kind of love pierced Clarissa’s defenses. With that pleading note—“He was a good man”—she was asking her own past, her ghost child, to forgive her.
The impossible idea was that Logan had died for nothing. The boy, Harry Gadd, turned out to be unharmed. I had let go of the rope. I had helped kill John Logan. But even as I felt the nausea of guilt return, I was trying to convince myself I was right to let go. If I hadn’t, Logan and I might have dropped together, and Clarissa would have been sitting here alone tonight. We had heard from the police late in the afternoon that the boy had come down safely twelve miles to the west. Once he had realized he was on his own, he’d had to stir to save himself. No longer frightened by his grandfather’s panic, he had taken control and done all the right things. He let the balloon rise high over the power lines and then released the gas valve to make a gentle descent onto a field by a village.
Clarissa had gone quiet. She was supporting her chin on her knuckles and staring down into the grain of the table. “Yes,” I said finally. “He wanted to save that kid.” She shook her head slowly, acknowledging some unspoken thought. I waited, content to escape my own feelings in order to help her with her own. She was aware of me watching her and glanced up. “It must mean something,” she said dully.
I hesitated. I’d never liked this line of thinking. Logan’s death was pointless—that was part of the reason we were in shock. Good people sometimes suffered and died, not because their goodness was being tested but precisely because there was nothing, no one, to test it. No one but us. I was silent too long, for she added suddenly, “Don’t worry, Joe. I’m not going weird on you. I mean, how do we begin to make sense of this?”
I said, “We tried to help and we failed.”
She smiled and shook her head. I went and sto
od by her chair and put my arms around her and protectively kissed the top of her head. With a sigh she pressed her face against my shirt and looped her arms around my waist. Her voice was muffled. “You’re such a dope. You’re so rational sometimes you’re like a child …”
Did she mean that rationality was a kind of innocence? I never found out, because her hands were working lightly across my buttocks toward my perineum. She caressed my balls and, keeping one hand there, loosened my belt, pulled my shirt clear, and kissed my belly. “I’ll tell you one thing it means, dummkopf. We’ve seen something terrible together. It won’t go away, and we have to help each other. And that means we’ll have to love each other even harder.”
Of course. Why didn’t I think of this? Why didn’t I think like this? We needed love. I had been trying to deny myself even the touch of her hand, assuming that affection was inappropriate, an indulgence, an irreverence in the face of death. Something we would come back to later, when all the talking and confronting was done. Clarissa had effected a shift to the essential. We went hand in hand into the bedroom. She sat on the edge of the bed and I undressed her.
When I kissed her neck she pulled me toward her. “I don’t mind what we do,” she whispered. “We don’t have to do anything. I just want to hold you.” She got under the blankets and lay with her knees drawn up while I undressed. When I got in she put her arms around my neck and brought my face close to hers. She knew I was a fool for this kind of encirclement. It made me feel that I belonged, that I was rooted and blessed. I knew that she loved to close her eyes and let me kiss them, and then her nose and cheeks, as though she were a child at bedtime, and only at last find her lips.
We often told ourselves off for wasting time in chairs, fully dressed, talking, when we could be doing the same lying down in bed, face to face and naked. That precious time before lovemaking is ill served by the pseudo-clinical term foreplay. The world would narrow and deepen, our voices would sink into the warmth of our bodies, the conversation would become associative and unpredictable. Everything was touch and breath. Certain simple phrases came to me, which I didn’t say out loud because they sounded so banal—Here we are, or This again, or Yes, this. Like a moment in a recurring dream, these spacious, innocent minutes were forgotten until we were back inside them. When we were, our lives returned to the essentials and began again. When we fell silent, we would lie so close we were mouth to mouth, delaying the union that bound us all the more because of this prelude.
So there we were, this again, and it was deliverance. The darkness beyond the gloom of the bedroom was infinite and cold as death. We were a pinprick of warmth in the vastness. The events of the afternoon filled us, but we banished them from conversation. I said, “How do you feel?”
“Scared,” she said. “Really scared.”
“But you don’t look it.”
“I feel I’m shivering inside.”
Rather than follow the path that must lead us back to Logan, we told shivering and shaking stories, and as often happened in these talks, childhood was central. When Clarissa was seven, she went to Wales on a family holiday. One of her cousins, a girl of five, had gone missing on a rainy morning and six hours later had still not been found. The police came, bringing with them two tracker dogs. Villagers were out combing the bracken, and for a while a helicopter hovered above the higher ground. Just before nightfall the girl was found in a barn, asleep under some sacking. Clarissa remembered a general celebration in the rented farmhouse that evening. Her uncle, the girl’s father, had just shown the last of the policemen to the door. As he came back into the room, his step faltered and he sat back heavily in an armchair. His legs were shaking violently, and the children watched in fascination as Clarissa’s aunt knelt by him and pressed her palms soothingly along his thighs. “At the time I didn’t connect it with the search for my cousin. It was just one of those odd things you observe neutrally as a child. I thought this might be what they meant by drunkenness, those two knees dancing up and down inside his trousers.”
I told the story of my first public performance on the trumpet, when I was eleven. I was so nervous and my hands were shaking so badly that I could not keep the mouthpiece against my lips, nor could I stretch my lips in the proper way to make a note. So I put the whole mouthpiece between my teeth and bit hard to hold it in place, and half sang, half tooted my part. In the general cacophony of a children’s Christmas orchestra, nobody noticed. Clarissa said, “Even now you do a good imitation of a trumpet in the bath.”
From shaking we came to dancing (I hate it, she loves it) and from there we came to love. We told each other what lovers never tire of hearing and needing to say. “I love you more now I’ve seen you go completely mad,” she said. “The rationalist cracks at last!”
“It’s just the beginning,” I promised. “Stick around.”
This reference to my behavior after Logan hit the ground broke the spell, but only for half a minute or so. We drew closer and kissed. What eventually followed was heightened by all the emotional rawness of a reconciliation, as though a calamitous week-long row with threats and insults were sweetly resolved in mutual forgiveness. We had nothing to forgive, unless, I suppose, we were absolving each other of the death, but those were the feelings that broke with each wave of sensation. A high price had been paid for this ecstasy, and I had to repel an image of a dark house in Oxford, isolated, as if set in a desert, where from an upstairs window two baffled children watched their mother’s somber visitors arrive.
Afterward we fell asleep, and when we woke, after an hour or so, we were hungry. It was while we were back in the kitchen in our dressing gowns, raiding the fridge, that we discovered a need for company. Clarissa went to the phone. Emotional comfort, sex, home, wine, food, society—we wanted our whole world reasserted. Within half an hour we were sitting with our friends Tony and Anna Bruce, eating a Thai takeaway I had ordered and telling our story. We told it in the married style, running alone with it for a stretch, talking through the partner’s interruption sometimes, at others giving way and handing over. There were also times when we talked at once, but for all that, our story was gaining in coherence; it had shape, and now it was spoken from a place of safety. I watched our friends’ wary, intelligent faces droop at our tale. Their shock was a mere shadow of our own, resembling more the goodwilled imitation of that emotion, and for this reason it was a temptation to exaggerate, to throw a rope of superlatives across the abyss that divided experience from its representation by anecdote. Over the days and weeks, Clarissa and I told our story many times to friends, colleagues, and relatives. I found myself using the same phrases, the same adjectives in the same order. It became possible to recount the events without reliving them in the faintest degree, without even remembering them.
Tony and Anna left at one in the morning. When I came back from seeing them out, I noticed that Clarissa was glancing through some lecture notes. Of course, her sabbatical was over. Tomorrow was Monday and she was due to start teaching. I went into my study and looked at my diary, even though I knew precisely what was there: two meetings, and a piece to be finished by five. In a sense we were well defended against this catastrophe. We had each other, as well as numerous old friends. And we had the demands and absorption of interesting work. I stood in the light of my desk lamp staring at the half-dozen or so unanswered letters that lay in an untidy pile, and felt reassured by them.
We stayed up another half an hour talking, but only because we were too tired to set about going to bed. At two o’clock we managed it. The light had been out five minutes when the phone rang and snatched me from the beginnings of sleep.
I have no doubt that I remember his words correctly. He said, “Is that Joe?” I didn’t reply. I had already recognized the voice. He said, “I just wanted you to know, I understand what you’re feeling. I feel it too. I love you.”
I hung up.
Clarissa murmured into the pillow, “Who was that?”
It may have been exhaustion
, or perhaps my concealment was protective of her, but I know I made my first serious mistake when I turned on my side and said to her, “It was nothing. Wrong number. Go to sleep.”
Four
Though we woke the next morning with these events still ringing in the air above our bed, the day with its blend of obligations was a balm to us. Clarissa left the house at eight-thirty to give an undergraduate seminar on Romantic poetry. She attended an administrative meeting in her department, had lunch with a colleague, marked term papers, and gave a supervisory hour to a postgraduate who was writing on Leigh Hunt. She came home at six, while I was still out. She made phone calls, took a shower, and went out to have supper with her brother, Luke, whose fifteen-year-old marriage was falling apart.
I had my shower at the beginning of the day. I took a flask of coffee into my study and for a quarter of an hour thought I might succumb to the freelancer’s temptations—newspapers, phone calls, daydreams. I had plenty of subject matter for wall gazing. But I pulled myself together and made myself finish a piece about the Hubble telescope for an American magazine.
This project had interested me for years. It embodied an unfashionable heroism and grandeur, served no military or immediate commercial purpose, and was driven by a simple and noble urge: to know and understand more. When it was discovered that the eight-foot primary mirror was ten thousandths of an inch too flat, the general reaction down on Earth was not disappointment. It was glee and gloating, rejoicing and falling-about hilarity on a planetary scale. Ever since the Titanic sank we’ve been hard on our technicians, cynical about their extravagant ambitions. Here was our biggest toy in space so far, as tall, they said, as a four-story building, set to bring marvels to our retinas—images of the origins of the universe, our very own beginnings at the beginning of time. It had failed, not through some algorithmic arcana in the software but because of an error everybody could understand: short sight, the stuff of old-fashioned grind and polish. Hubble became the staple of TV stand-up routines, it rhymed with trouble and rubble, it proved America’s terminal industrial decline.