by Ian Mcewan
So the meanderings of narrative had given way to an aesthetics of form; as in art, so in science. I typed on into the evening. I had spent too much time on Einstein, and I was casting about for another example of a theory accepted for reasons of its elegance. The less confident I became about this argument, the faster I typed. I found a kind of inverted argument from my own past: quantum electrodynamics. This time round there was a mass of experimental verification on hand for this set of ideas about electrons and light, but the theory, especially as propounded by Dirac in its original form, was slow to gain general acceptance. There were inconsistencies, there was lopsidedness. In short, the theory was unattractive, inelegant, it was a song sung out of tune. Acceptance withheld on grounds of ugliness.
I had been working for three hours and I had written two thousand words. I could have done with a third example, but my energy was beginning to fail. I printed out the pages and stared at them in my lap, astonished that such puny reasoning, such forced examples, could have held my attention for so long. Counterarguments welled from between the neat lines of text. What possible evidence could I produce to suggest that the novels of Dickens, Scott, Trollope, Thackeray, etc., had ever influenced by a comma the presentation of a scientific idea? Moreover, my examples were fabulously skewed. I had compared life sciences in the nineteenth century (the scheming dog in the library) to hard sciences in the twentieth. In the annals of Victorian physics and chemistry alone there was no end of brilliant theory that displayed not a shred of narrative inclination. And what, in fact, were the typical products of the twentieth-century scientific or pseudo-scientific mind? Anthropology, psychoanalysis—fabulation run riot. Using the highest methods of storytelling and all the arts of priesthood, Freud had staked his claim on the veracity, though not the falsifiability, of science. And what of those behaviorists and sociologists of the 1920s? It was as though an army of white-coated Balzacs had stormed the university departments and labs.
I fixed my twelve pages with a paper clip and balanced their weight in my hand. What I had written wasn’t true. It wasn’t written in pursuit of truth, it wasn’t science. It was journalism, magazine journalism, whose ultimate standard was readability. I wagged the pages in my hand, trying to devise further consolations. I had usefully distracted myself, I could make a separate coherent piece out of the counterarguments (the twentieth century saw the summation of narrative in science, etc.), and anyway, it was a first draft, which I would rewrite in a week or so. I tossed the pages onto the desk, and as they landed I heard, for the second time that day, the creak of a floorboard behind me. There was someone at my back.
The primitive, so-called sympathetic nervous system is a wondrous thing we share with all other species that owe their continued existence to being quick on the turn, fast and hard into battle, or fiery in flight. Evolution has culled us all into this efficiency. Nerve terminals buried deep in the tissue of the heart secrete their noradrenaline, and the heart lurches into accelerated pumping. More oxygen, more glucose, more energy, quicker thinking, stronger limbs. It’s a system so ancient, developed so far back along the branchings of our mammalian and premammalian past, that its operations never penetrate into higher consciousness. There wouldn’t be time anyway, and it wouldn’t be efficient. We only get the effects. That shot to the heart appears to occur simultaneously with the perception of threat: even as the visual or auditory cortex is sorting and resolving into awareness what fell upon eye or ear, those potent droplets are falling.
My heart had made its first terrifying cold pop even before I started to turn and rise from my chair and raise my hands, ready to defend myself, or even to attack. I would guess that modern humans, with no natural predators but themselves and with all their toys and mental constructs and cosy rooms, are relatively easy to creep up on. Squirrels and thrushes can only look down on us and smile.
What I saw coming toward me rapidly across the room, with arms outstretched like a cartoon sleepwalker, was Clarissa, and who knows by what complex intervention of higher centers I was able to convert plausibly my motions of primitive terror into a tenderly given and received embrace and to feel, as her arms locked round my neck, a pang of love that was in truth inseparable from relief.
“Oh Joe,” she said, “I’ve missed you all day, and I love you, and I’ve had such a terrible evening with Luke. And oh God, I love you.”
And oh God, I loved her. However much I thought about Clarissa, in memory or in anticipation, experiencing her again—the feel and sound of her, the precise quality of love that ran between us, the very animal presence—always brought, along with the familiarity, a jolt of surprise. Perhaps such amnesia is functional—those who could not wrench their hearts and minds from their loved ones were doomed to fail in life’s struggles and left no genetic footprints. We stood in the center of my study, Clarissa and I, on the yellow diamond at the middle of the Bokhara rug, kissing and embracing, and I heard through and between kisses the first fragments of her brother’s folly. Luke was leaving his kindly, beautiful wife and bonny twin daughters and Queen Anne house in Islington to live with an actress he had met three months before. Here was amnesia on a grander scale. He was considering, he had said over the seared scallops, quitting his job and writing a play, a monologue in fact, a one-woman show, which stood a chance of being put on in a room over a hairdresser’s in Kensal Green.
“Before we go to Paradise,” I began, and Clarissa finished, “By way of Kensal Green.”
“Reckless courage,” I said. “He must be living inside a hard-on.”
“Courage to shite!” She drew her breath sharply and shot me a beam of angry green. “An actress! He’s living inside a cliché!”
For a second I had become her brother. In recognition of that she drew me close again and kissed me. “Joe. I’ve wanted you all day. After yesterday, and last night …”
Still hanging on to each other, we walked from study to bedroom. While Clarissa continued to tell me more tales from the ruined household and I described the piece I had written, we made preparations for our night journey into sex and sleep. I had already traveled some distance that evening from the time I had come in and had wanted only to talk to Clarissa about Parry. Work had settled on me a veil of abstracted contentment, and her arrival home, for all the sad story, had restored me completely. I felt frightened of nothing. Would it have been right, then, as we lay down face to face as we had the night before, to intrude on our happiness with an account of Parry’s phone call? Given what we had witnessed the day before, could I have destroyed our tenderness with fretful suspicions of being followed? The lights were dimmed; soon they would be out. John Logan’s ghost was still in the room, but it no longer threatened us. Parry was for tomorrow. All urgency had gone. With closed eyes I traced in double darkness Clarissa’s beautiful lips. She bit down on my knuckle, playfully hard. There are times when fatigue is the great aphrodisiac, annihilating all other thoughts, granting sensuous slow motion to heavy limbs, urging generosity, acceptance, infinite abandonment. We tumbled out of our respective days like creatures shaken from a net.
By our bedside in the dark, the phone remained silent. I’d unplugged it many hours before.
Six
There was a time this century when ships, white oceangoing liners such as luxuriously plowed the Atlantic swell between London and New York, became the inspiration for a form of domestic architecture. In the twenties something resembling the Queen Mary ran aground in Maida Vale, and all that remains now is the bridge, our apartment building. It gleams a peeling white among the plane trees. Its corners are rounded; there are portholes in the lavatories and lighting the shallow spirals of the stairwells. The steel-framed windows are low and oblong, strengthened against the squalls of urban life. The floors are oak parquet and could accommodate any number of jazzy quick-stepping couples.
The two apartments on the top have the advantage of several skylights and one and half twists of an iron staircase that leads onto a flat roof. Our neighbors
, a successful architect and his boyfriend, who keeps house, have made a fantasy garden in their portion, with clematis severely wound round poles and austere spiky leaves poking between large smooth stones collected from a riverbed and retained, Japanese style, in open black wooden boxes.
In the frenetic month after moving in, Clarissa and I exhausted our small reserve of decorating and nesting energies on the apartment itself, so there’s nothing on our side of the roof apart from a plastic table and four plastic chairs, bolted down in case of high winds. Here you can sit among the TV aerials and dishes, the roofing pitch underfoot wrinkled and dusty like an elephant’s hide, and look toward the greenery of Hyde Park and hear the tranquillizing thunder of West London’s traffic. From the other side of the table you have the best possible view of our neighbors’ shrine to orderly growth, and beyond, the dusky roofs of the infinite northward suburbs. This was where I sat the following morning at seven. I had left Clarissa sleeping and brought with me my coffee, the paper, and my pages from the night before.
But instead of reading myself or others, I thought about John Logan and how we had killed him. Yesterday the events of the day before had dimmed. This morning the blustery sunshine illumined and animated the whole tableau. I could feel the rope in my hands again as I examined the welts. I made calculations. If Gadd had stayed in the basket with his grandson, and if the rest of us had hung on, and if we assumed an average weight of a hundred and sixty pounds each, then surely eight hundred pounds would have kept us close to the ground. If the first person had not let go, then surely the rest of us would have stayed in place. And who was this first person? Not me. Not me. I even said the words aloud. I remembered a plumeting mass and the sudden upward jerk of the balloon. But I could not tell whether this mass was in front of me or to my left or right. If I knew the position, I would know the person.
Could this person be blamed? As I drank my coffee, the rush hour below began its slow crescendo. It was hard to think this through. Phrases, well worn and counterweighted, occurred to me, resolving nothing. On the one hand, the first pebble in an avalanche, and on the other, the breaking of ranks. The cause, but not the morally responsible agent. The scales tipping, from altruism to self-interest. Was it panic, or rational calculation? Had we killed him really, or simply refused to die with him? But if we had been with him, stayed with him, no one would have died.
Another question was whether I should visit Mrs. Logan and tell her what happened. She deserved to know from a witness that her husband was a hero. I saw us sitting face to face on wooden stools. She was draped in black, in pantomime widow’s weeds, and we were in a prison cell with a high-barred window. Her two children stood close by her side, clinging to her knees, refusing to meet my eye. My cell, my guilt? The image came to me from a half-forgotten painting in the late Victorian narrative style, in the idiom of “And when did you last see your father?” Narrative—my gut tightened at the word. What balls I had written the night before. How was it possible to tell Mrs. Logan of her husband’s sacrifice without drawing her attention to our own cowardice? Or was it his folly? He was the hero, and it was the weak who had sent him to his death. Or we were the survivors and he was the miscalculating dolt.
I was so lost in this that I did not notice Clarissa until she sat down on the other side of the table. She smiled and mouthed a kiss. She warmed her hands around a coffee mug.
“Are you thinking about it?”
I nodded. Before her kindness and our love got the better of me, I had to tell her. “Do you remember, the day it happened, just as we were falling asleep the phone rang?”
“Mmm. Wrong number.”
“It was that guy with the ponytail. You know, the one who wanted me to pray. Jed Parry.”
She frowned. “Why didn’t you say? What did he want?”
I didn’t pause. “He said he loved me.”
For a fraction of time the world froze as she took this in. Then she laughed. Easily, merrily.
“Joe! You didn’t tell me. You were embarrassed? You clot!”
“It was just one more thing. And then I felt bad about not telling you, so it got harder. And then I didn’t want to interrupt last night.”
“What did he say? Just ‘I love you,’ like that?”
“Yeah. He said, ‘I feel it too. I love you …’ ”
Clarissa put her hand over her mouth, little-girl style. I hadn’t expected delight. “A secret gay love affair with a Jesus freak! I can’t wait to tell your science friends.”
“All right, all right.” But I felt lightened to have her teasing me.
“There’s more, though.”
“You’re getting married.”
“Listen. Yesterday he was following me.”
“My God. He’s got it bad.”
I knew I had to prise her from this levity, for all the comfort it gave. “Clarissa, it’s scary.” I told her about the presence in the library and how I had run out into the square. She interrupted me.
“But you didn’t actually see him in the library.”
“I saw his shoe as he went out the door. White trainers with red laces. It had to be him.”
“But you didn’t see his face.”
“Clarissa, it was him!”
“Don’t get angry with me, Joe. You didn’t see his face, and he wasn’t in the square.”
“No. He’d gone.”
She was looking at me in a new way now and was moving through the conversation with the caution of a bomb disposal expert. “Let me get this straight. You had this idea you were being followed even before you saw his shoe?”
“It was just a feeling, a bad feeling. It wasn’t until I was in the library with time to think about it that I realized how it was getting to me.”
“And then you saw him.”
“Yeah. His shoe.”
She glanced at her watch and took a pull from her mug. She was going to be late for work.
“You should go,” I said. “We can talk this evening.”
She nodded, but she did not rise. “I don’t really understand what’s upsetting you. Some poor fellow has a crush on you and is trailing you about. Come on, it’s a joke, Joe! It’s a funny story you’ll be telling your friends. At worst it’s a nuisance. You mustn’t let it get to you.”
I felt a childish pang of sorrow when she got to her feet. I liked what she was saying. I wanted to hear it again in different ways. She came round to my side of the table and kissed me on the head. “You’re working too hard. Go easy on yourself. And remember that I love you. I love you.” We kissed again, deeply.
I followed her downstairs and watched as she prepared to leave. Perhaps it was the worried smile she gave me as she bustled past to pack her briefcase, perhaps it was the solicitous way she told me she would be back at seven and would phone me during the day, but standing there on the polished dance-floor parquet I felt like a mental patient at the end of visiting hours. Don’t leave me here with my mind, I thought. Get them to let me out. She put on her coat, opened the front door, and was about to speak to me, but the words never left her. She had remembered a book she needed. While she was fetching it, I lingered by the door. I knew what I wanted to say, and perhaps there was still time. This wasn’t “some poor fellow.” It was a man bound to me, like the farm laborers, by an experience, and by a shared responsibility for, or at the very least a shared involvement in, another man’s death. This was also a man who wanted me to pray with him. Perhaps he felt insulted. Perhaps he was some kind of vengeful fanatic.
Clarissa was back with her book, stuffing it into her briefcase while she held some papers between her teeth. She was halfway out the door. When I started to say my piece, she set the case down to free her hands and mouth. “I can’t, Joe, I can’t. I’m already late. It’s a lecture.” She hesitated, agonizing. Then she said, “Go on, tell it to me quick.” Just then the phone rang, and I was relieved. I had thought she was giving a supervision, not a lecture, and letting her off the hook would have wasted ev
en more of her time.
“I’ll get it, you go,” I said cheerily. “I’ll tell you this evening.”
She blew me a kiss and was gone. I heard her footsteps on the stairs as I reached the phone. “Joe?” said the voice. “It’s Jed.”
It was perverse of me to be surprised and, for a moment, speechless. He had phoned the day before, after all, and he was on my lips, on my mind. On my mind to such an extent that I had forgotten that he was also out there, a physical entity capable of operating the phone system.
He had paused after his name; now he spoke into my silence. “You phoned me.” We all had last number recall. The telephone was not what it was. Pitiless ingenuity was making it needlingly personal.
“What do you want?” Even as I said the words, I wanted them back. I did not want to know what he wanted, or rather, I did not want to be told. It was not really a question anyway, more a gesture of hostility. So too was “And who gave you my number?”
Parry sounded pleased. “That’s quite a story, Joe. I went to the—”
“I don’t want your story. I don’t want you phoning me.” I almost said, “Or following me,” but something held me back.
“We need to talk.”
“I don’t.”
I heard Parry’s intake of breath. “I think you do. At least, I think you need to listen.”
“I’m going to hang up. If I hear from you again, I’m calling the police.”
The phrase sounded fatuous, the sort of meaningless thing people say, like “I’ll sue the bastards.” I knew the local station. They were hard pressed down there, and they had their priorities. This was the sort of thing the citizenry was supposed to sort out for itself.