by Ian Mcewan
Self-consciousness is the destroyer of erotic joy. In bed, only an hour and a half before, we had been unconvincing somehow, as though there lay between our mucous membranes a fine dust or grit, or its mental equivalent, but as tangible as beach sand. Sitting in the kitchen after Clarissa had left, I conjured a morose causal sequence shading from psyche to soma—bad thoughts, low arousal, minimal lubrication—and pain.
What were these bad thoughts? One was a suspicion that in those realms of feeling that defy the responsibility of logic, Clarissa considered Parry my fault. He was the kind of phantom that only I could have called up, a spirit of my dislocated, incomplete character, or of what she fondly called my innocence. I had brought him upon us, and I was keeping him there, even while I disowned him.
Clarissa said I was wrong or ridiculous to think this, but she did not say much else about her own attitude. She had spoken about my own as we got dressed that morning. I was disturbed, she said. I was pulling on my boots and did not interrupt. She said she hated to see me back with that old obsession about getting back into science when I had such an enjoyable working life and was so good at what I did. She was trying to help me, but I had become in the space of just a couple of days so manic, so feverish in my attention to Parry, so … She had paused a second to locate the word. She was standing in the doorway, hitching a silk-lined pleated skirt round her waist. In morning light her pallor made her eyes appear all the greener. She was beautiful. She seemed unattainable, an impression intensified by the word she chose. “… Alone, Joe. You’re so alone in all this, even when you speak to me about it. I feel you’re shutting me out. There’s something you’re not telling me. You’re not speaking from the heart.”
I simply looked at her. Either I’ve always spoken to her from the heart in times like this, or I never have and I don’t know what it means. But that wasn’t what I was thinking. My thought was one I used to have when I first knew her: how did such an oversized, average-looking lump as myself land this pale beauty? And a new bad thought: was she beginning to think she had a poor deal?
She was about to leave the room to go down the hallway, where, unknown to us, Parry’s letter was waiting. She misread my expression. Pleading with me rather than accusing me, she said, “I mean, the way you’re looking at me now. You’re making calculations that I’ll never know about. Some inner double-entry bookkeeping that you think is the best way to the truth. But don’t you see how it cuts you off?”
I knew it would not have convinced her to say, “I was only thinking how lovely you are and how I don’t deserve you.” The fact that it wouldn’t made me think as I got to my feet that perhaps she was the one who didn’t deserve me. There. Balance, double entry. She was right, and twice over, for I had said nothing, and she would never know. I smiled at her and said, “Let’s talk about it over breakfast.” But what we talked about was Parry’s letter, and we didn’t do that well.
After she had left, after I had cleared the table, I remained sitting in the kitchen with my lukewarm coffee, sliding Parry’s pages back into their tight little envelope as though to contain the viral spores that were invading our home. More bad thoughts; it was a daydream, really, but I had to let it run. It occurred to me that Clarissa was using Parry as a front. It was strange, after all, her reaction in this case. She seemed to be aggravating the difficulties by implicating me with Parry. What was the explanation? Was she beginning to regret her life with me? Could she have met someone? If she wanted to leave me, she’d find it easier if she could convince herself that there was something between Parry and me. Had she met someone? At work? A colleague? A student? Could this be an exemplary case of unacknowledged self-persuasion?
I got to my feet. Self-persuasion was a concept much loved by evolutionary psychologists. I had written a piece about it for an Australian magazine. It was pure armchair science, and it went like this: if you lived in a group, as humans have always done, persuading others of your own needs and interests would be fundamental to your well-being. Sometimes you had to use cunning. Clearly you would be at your most convincing if you persuaded yourself first and did not even have to pretend to believe what you were saying. The kind of self-deluding individuals who tended to do this flourished, as did their genes. So it was we squabbled and scrapped, for our unique intelligence was always at the service of our special pleading and selective blindness to the weaknesses of our case.
As I crossed the kitchen, I could honestly have said that I had no idea where I was going. When I reached the door of Clarissa’s study, I had a notion I was entering to retrieve my stapler. As I crossed the small room to her desk, I might have told myself I wanted to see if the rest of my morning’s post was mixed up with hers, as sometimes happened. There was a moral barrier I needed to hoist myself over, and I suppose the means was the very self-persuasion I ascribed to her.
The study was not quite the serious place Clarissa had intended. She had an office at the university where her real business was done. The study was a transit point, a dump bin between home and work, where papers, books, and student essays were piled. It was a tracking station for godchildren. Their letters were answered here, their presents wrapped, their drawings and gifts untidily displayed. She came in here to pay bills and to write to friends. She could always be relied on for stamps and good-quality envelopes and art postcards from last year’s major exhibitions.
When I arrived at her desk, I actually put myself through the motions of looking for the stapler, which I discovered under a newspaper. I even made a little sound of satisfaction. Was there a presence, a godly bystander in the room I was hoping to convince? Were these gestures the remnants—genetically or socially ingrained—of faith in a watchful deity? My performance, as well as my honesty and innocence and self-respect, fell apart the moment I slid the stapler into my pocket but did not leave the room and instead continued to sift the litter on the desk.
Of course, I could no longer deny what I was doing. I told myself that I was acting to untie knots, bring light and understanding to this mess of the unspoken. It was a painful necessity. I would save Clarissa from herself, and myself from Parry. I would renew the bonds, the love through which Clarissa and I had thrived for years. If my suspicions had no basis in fact, then it was vital to be able to set them aside. I pulled open the drawer in which she kept her recent correspondence. Each successive act, each moment of deeper penetration, was coarsening. I cared less by the second that I was behaving badly. Something tight and hard—a screen, a shell—was forming to protect myself from my conscience. My rationalizations crystalized around a partial concept of justice: I had a right to know what was distorting Clarissa’s responses to Parry. What was stopping her from being on my side? Some hot little bearded fuck-goat of a postgraduate. I lifted an envelope clear. It had been postmarked three days before. The address was written in small, artfully disordered italic. I pulled a single sheet of paper clear. The salutation alone clutched my heart. Dear Clarissa. But it was nothing. An old woman friend from school days sending family news. I chose another—her godfather, the eminent Professor Kale, inviting us to lunch in a restaurant on her birthday. I already knew about that. I glanced at a third—a letter from Luke—then a fourth, a fifth, and their cumulative blamelessness began to sicken me. I looked at three more. Here is a life, they implied, the life of the woman you say you love, busy, intelligent, sympathetic, complex. What are you doing in here? Trying to stain us with your poison! Get out! I started to open one last letter, then I changed my mind. I was so loathsome that as I retreated from the room I touched my pocket to confirm, or give the impression of confirming, the presence of the stapler.
Now I was in a queue of traffic entering the cluttered ordinariness of Headington. A double-decker bus had broken down beyond the lights, where the road was already narrowed by a repair team. Cars were having to wait their turn to squeeze past. My intrusion was a landmark in our decline and in Parry’s insidious success. When Clarissa came home that night she was friendly, even
vivacious, but I was too ashamed of myself to relax. More self-consciousness. Now I really did have something to conceal from her. I had crossed and recrossed the line of my own innocence.
The following morning, when I sat in my study alone, it seemed a parallel development, the death of an innocent dream, when I opened a letter from my professor and learned that there could be no question of a place being found for me in the department. Not only were there the problems of admittance procedures and of diminishing funds for pure science, but my proposal for work on the virtual photon was redundant. “I should assure you that it is not because the answers have been found, rather that the questions have been radically re-framed in the past five years. This redefinition appears to have passed you by. My advice to you, Joseph, would be to continue with the very successful career you already have.”
I was getting nowhere. For twenty-five minutes I sat in Headington High Street, waiting for my turn to pass the bus, watching people go in and out of the bank, the chemist’s, and the video store. In fifteen minutes or less I would arrive outside Mrs. Logan’s house, and I did not know what I wanted to say. My motives in coming were no longer clear. Originally I had wanted to tell her of her husband’s courage, in case nobody else did, but there had been coverage in the papers since. When I spoke to her on the phone, she sounded calm and said she was glad I was coming, and that seemed reason enough to make the visit. I had thought then that I would simply let it take its course, but now that I was almost there I was not so sure. First thing in the morning I had been happy enough at the prospect of being out of the house, in my car, out of the city. Now all that had worn off. I was keeping a rendezvous with real grief, and I was confused.
It was a semidetached house choking in fresh greenery, deep in the heart of the North Oxford garden suburb. My theory was that one day we would rediscover the true ugliness of Victorian domestic architecture, and that would be the day after we had defined for our own time what a well-designed house should look like. Until then we could think of nothing better, and a Victorian house was just fine. Getting out of the car may have entailed a slight reduction in blood supply to my head and a corresponding backward drift in my thoughts. I don’t trust myself was what I thought. Not since my attack on Clarissa’s privacy. I paused by the front gate. A brick path flanked by dandelions and bluebells ran to the front door. It would have been too easy to assume that the sadness coming off the house was mere projection, and I made myself find the signs: the neglected garden, closed curtains in two upstairs windows, and, below the steps by the door, broken glass—of a milk bottle, perhaps. I didn’t trust myself. What I was thinking of again as I pressed the doorbell was that stapler, and how dishonestly we can hold things together for ourselves. I heard a stirring inside the house. I hadn’t come to tell Mrs. Logan of her husband’s courage; I had come to explain, to establish my guiltlessness, my innocence of his death.
Thirteen
The woman who came to the door was surprised to see me, and we looked at each other a full two seconds before I hurriedly reminded her of our arrangement. The eyes that held mine were small and dry, not reddened by grief but sunk, and glazed by weariness. She looked a long way off, out on her own in unspeakable weather, like a lone Arctic explorer. She brought to the door a warm, home-baked smell, and I thought she might have been sleeping in her clothes. She wore a long necklace of irregular chunks of amber, in which her left hand was awkwardly entwined. Throughout my visit she rolled and worried one piece, smaller than the rest, between forefinger and thumb. When I spoke she said, “Of course, of course,” heroically animating her features and opening the door wider.
I knew this kind of North Oxford interior from visits I had made over the years to various professors of science. It was a vanishing type now that nonacademic money was buying up the suburb. The conversion had been made in the fifties or sixties. The books and a few pieces of furniture had been moved in, and since then, no change. No colors but brown and cream. No design or style, no comfort, and in winter, very little warmth. Even the light was brownish, at one with the smells of damp, coal dust, and soap. There would be no heating in the bedrooms, and it looked like there was just one telephone in the house, a dialer kept in the hall, far from any chair. There was lino, and grimy electrical piping on the walls, and from the kitchen the sour scent of gas, and a glimpse of laminated shelves on metal brackets supporting bottles of brown and red sauce. This was the austerity once thought appropriate to the intellectual life, unsensually aligned to the soul of English pragmatism—unfussy, honed to the essential, to the collegiate world beyond the shops. In its time it might have appeared to strike a blow at the Edwardian encumbrances of an older generation. Now it seemed a perfect setting for sorrow.
Jean Logan led me into a cramped back room that gave onto an enormous walled garden dominated by a cherry tree. She bent stiffly to gather up a blanket from the floor by a two-seater sofa whose cushions and covers were tangled and skewed. Bunching the blanket against her stomach with two hands, she asked me if I would like some tea. I guessed she had been asleep when I rang the doorbell, or lying inert beneath her cover. When I offered to help her in the kitchen, she laughed impatiently and told me to sit down.
The air was so thick that breathing was a conscious effort. There was a gas fire on, burning yellow and probably leaking carbon monoxide. That and the holed-up sorrow. While Jean Logan was out of the room, I tried to adjust the flame, and when that failed, I pushed open the french windows an inch or so, and then I straightened the cushions and sat down.
There was nothing in the room to suggest that children lived here. Jammed into an alcove, weighed down with books and heaps of magazines and academic periodicals, was an upright piano whose candleholders bore some sprays of dried twigs—last year’s buds, perhaps. The books on either side of the chimney breast were uniform collected editions of Gibbon, Macaulay, Carlisle, Trevelyan, and Ruskin. Along one wall was a dark leather chaise longue with a gash in the side stuffed with yellowing newspapers. Layers of faded and thinning rugs covered the floor. Facing the poisonous fire, set opposite the sofa, were two chairs of what I thought were forties design, with high wooden armrests and low-slung boxy seats. Jean or John Logan had surely inherited the house unchanged from parents. I wondered whether the sense of sorrow in the place pre-dated John Logan’s death.
Jean returned with two workman’s mugs of tea. I had by now prepared a little opening speech, but as soon as she was seated on the edge of her uncomfortable low chair she started in on her own.
“I don’t know why you’ve come,” she said. “I hope it isn’t to satisfy your curiosity. Since we don’t know each other, I’d rather not hear condolences, consolations, that kind of thing, if you don’t mind.” The attempt to say this without emotion conveyed it all the more powerfully by way of brisk and breathy phrasing. She tried to soften the effect by smiling wonkily and adding, “I mean, I’m trying to save you the awkward bits.”
I nodded and attempted to sip the scalding tea from the small china bucket in my hands. For her, suffering the way she was, a social encounter like this must have been like drunk driving—hard to gauge the right conversational speed, easy to overcompensate with reckless steering.
It was difficult to see her beyond the terms of her bereavement. Was the brown stain on her pale blue cashmere sweater, just below her right breast, anything other than the self-neglect of the grieving? Her hair was greasy and pulled back harshly across her scalp and held in a ragged bun by a red rubber band. Grief too, or was it a certain kind of academic style? I knew from the newspaper stories that she taught history at the university. If you knew nothing, you might guess by her face that she was a sedentary sort of person with a heavy cold. Her nose was sharpened and bloomed pink at the tip and at its base, around the nostrils, from the friction of sodden tissues. (I had seen the near-empty box on the floor at my feet.) But it was an attractive face, almost beautiful, almost plain, a long pale uncluttered oval, with thin lips and nearly invisi
ble eyebrows and lashes. The eyes were an irresolute sandy color. She gave the impression of a stringy kind of independence, and of a temper easily lost.
I said to her, “I don’t know if any of the others, the people who were there, have been to see you. My guess is they haven’t. I know you don’t need me to tell you that your husband was a very courageous man, but perhaps there are things you want to know about what happened. The coroner’s court doesn’t sit for another five weeks …”
I tailed off, uncertain why the coroner had come into my thoughts. Jean Logan still sat on the edge of her chair, hunched forward over her mug, breathing its heat into her face, perhaps to soothe her eyes. She said, “You thought I’d like to go over the details of how he lost his life.”
Her sourness surprised me and made me meet her gaze. “There could be something you want to know,” I said, speaking more slowly than before. I felt more at ease with her antagonism than with the embarrassment of her sadness.
“There are things I want to know,” Jean Logan said, and the anger in her voice was suddenly there. “I’ve got lots of questions for all sorts of people. But I don’t think they’re going to give me the answers. They pretend they don’t even understand the questions.” She paused and swallowed hard. I had tapped into a repeating voice in her head, I was overhearing the thoughts that tormented her all night. Her sarcasm was too theatrical, too energetic, and I felt the weight of exhausted reiteration behind it. “I’m the mad one, of course. I’m irrelevant, I’m in the way. It’s not convenient to answer my questions, because they don’t fit the story. There, there, Mrs. Logan! Don’t go fretting about things that don’t concern you and aren’t important anyway. We know it’s your husband, the father of your children, but we’re in charge and please don’t get in the way …”