by Ian Mcewan
Father and children were the words that undid her. She set down the mug, snatched a balled-up tissue from the sleeve of her sweater, and pressed it, screwed it, into the space between her eyes. She went to rise from her chair, but its lowness defeated her. I felt that empty, numbing neutrality that comes when one person in the room appears to monopolize all the available emotion. There was nothing for me to do for the moment but wait. I thought she was probably the kind of woman who hates to be seen crying. Lately she would have got used to it. I looked past her, into the garden, past the cherry blossom, and saw the first evidence of the children. Partly obscured by shrubbery was a tent, a brown igloo-style tent on a patch of lawn. The struts had collapsed on one side and it was teetering into a flower bed. It had a sodden, abandoned look. Had he put it up for them not long before he died, or had they erected it to make contact with the sporty outdoor spirit that had fled the house? Perhaps they needed somewhere to sit and be beyond the penumbra of their mother’s pain.
Jean Logan was silent. Her hands were clasped tightly in front of her and she stared at the floor, still needing to be, as it were, alone. The skin between her nose and her thin upper lip was raw. My numbness disappeared with the simple thought that what I was seeing was love, and the slow agony of its destruction. Imagining what it would mean to lose Clarissa, through death or by my own stupidity, sent a hot pricking sensation up through the skin of my back, and I felt myself drowning in the small room’s lack of decent air. It was urgent that I return to London and save our love. I had no course of action in mind, but I would have been glad to get to my feet and make an excuse. Jean Logan looked up and said, “I’m sorry. I’m glad that you came. It was kind of you to make the journey.”
I said something conventionally polite. The muscles in my thighs and arms were tensed, as though ready to push me out of my chair, back toward Maida Vale. What I saw in Jean’s grief reduced my own situation to uncomplicated elements, to a periodic table of simple good sense: when it’s gone, you’ll know what a gift love was. You’ll suffer like this. So go back and fight to keep it. Everything else, Parry included, is irrelevant.
“You see, there are things I want to know …”
We heard the front door opening and closing and footsteps in the hall, but no sound of voices. She paused, as though waiting for a summons. Then the footsteps—three people, perhaps—went up the stairs and she relaxed. She was about to tell or ask me something important, and I knew I could not possibly leave. Nor could I make my legs relax. I wanted to suggest that we talk in the garden, under the blossom, in the fresh air.
She said, “There was someone with my husband. Did you notice?”
I shook my head. “There was my friend Clarissa, two farm laborers, a man called—”
“I know about them. There was someone in the car with John when he stopped. Someone got out when he did.”
“He came from the other side of the field. I didn’t see him until we were all running toward the balloon. There was no one else then, I’m sure of that.”
Jean Logan was not satisfied. “You could see his car?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t see someone standing beside it, watching?”
“If there’d been someone there, I’d remember.”
She looked away. These were not the answers she wanted. She assumed a let’s-start-again voice. I didn’t mind. I sincerely wanted to help.
“Do you remember the car door being open?”
“Yes.”
“One door or two?”
I hesitated. The summoned image held both doors open, but I wasn’t sure and I didn’t want to mislead her. There was something at stake here, perhaps a powerful fantasy. I didn’t want to feed it. But in the end I said reluctantly, “Two. I’m not absolutely sure, but I think two.”
“And why do you think two doors would be open if he was on his own?”
I shrugged and waited for her to tell me. She rolled the amber of her necklace faster than before. A pained excitement had replaced the sorrow. Even I, knowing nothing, could tell that vindication in this was going to mean more distress. She had to hear what she didn’t want to know. But first she had questions, roughly put, in the tone of an aggressive barrister. For the moment I had become the surrogate object of her bitterness.
“Tell me this. Which way is London from here?”
“East.”
“Which way are the Chilterns?”
“East.”
She looked at me as though a substantial proof had been concluded. I continued to look blank and helpful. She was having to lead me by the hand toward the self-evident center of her torment. She had lived so long in her head with it, she could barely keep the irritation out of her voice at having to say, “How far is London?”
“Fifty-five miles.”
“And the Chilterns?”
“About twenty.”
“Would you drive from Oxford to London by way of the Chilterns?”
“Well, the motorway cuts right through them.”
“But would you go to London by way of Watlington and all the little lanes around there?”
“No.”
Jean Logan stared at the threadbare Persian carpet at her feet, lost to her case, to the misery that could never be set free by a confrontation with her husband. I heard footsteps in the room above us, and a voice, a woman’s or a child’s. Two or three minutes passed, then I said, “He was supposed to be in London that day.”
She closed her eyes tight and nodded. “At a weekend conference,” she whispered. “A medical conference.”
I cleared my throat softly. “There’s probably a perfectly innocent explanation.”
Her eyes were still closed and her voice dropped to a low monotone, as though she were speaking under hypnosis to recall the unspeakable day. “It was the police sergeant from the local station who brought the car back. It was on a breakdown lorry because they couldn’t find the keys. They should have been in the car, or in John’s pocket. That was why I looked inside. Then I said to the sergeant, ‘Have you gone through the car? Did you look for fingerprints?’ And he said they didn’t look and they didn’t take prints. Do you know why? Because there hadn’t been a crime.”
She opened her eyes to see if I had taken in the significance of this, the full impact of its absurdity. I didn’t think I had. I parted my lips to echo the word, but she said it first, repeating it loudly.
“A crime! There hadn’t been a crime!” She was suddenly on her feet and crossing the room and seizing a plastic bag from a corner where books were piled waist high. She returned and thrust it at me. “You look. Go on. Tell me what it is.”
It was a heavily weighted white carrier bag printed with a crude picture of children dancing in and out of a supermarket’s name. Whatever was in there sagged heavily to the bottom. As soon as it was in my hands I was aware of the smell that rose from it, the coarse, intimate whiff of rotting meat.
“Go on. It won’t hurt you.”
I held my breath and parted the top of the bag, and for a moment the contents made no sense. There were plastic wrappers buckled around a grayish paste, a sphere of tinfoil, a brown mess on a square of cardboard. Then I glimpsed dark red, curved in glass, mostly obscured by paper. It was a bottle of wine, the reason for the bag’s heaviness. And then everything else fell into place. I saw two apples.
“It’s a picnic,” I said. The queasiness I felt was not entirely due to the smell.
“It was on the floor by the passenger seat. He was going to picnic with her. Somewhere in the woods.”
“Her?” I felt I was being pedantic, but I thought I ought to continue to resist the suggestive power of her fantasy. She was pulling something from the pocket of her skirt. She took the bag from me and put in my hand a small silk scarf with gray and black zebra markings in stylized form.
“Smell it,” she commanded as she carefully stowed the bag in its corner.
It smelled salty, of tears or snot, or of the sweat of Je
an’s clenched hand.
“Take a deeper breath,” she said. She was standing over me, rigid and fierce in her desire for my complicity.
I raised the scrap of silk to my face and sniffed again. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It doesn’t smell of anything much to me.”
“It’s rosewater. Can’t you smell it?
She took it from me. I no longer deserved to hold it. She said, “I’ve never used rosewater in my life. I found it on the passenger seat.” She sat down and seemed to be waiting for me to speak. Did she feel that as a man I was somehow party to her husband’s transgression, that I was the proxy who should come clean and confess? when I didn’t speak, she said, “Look, if you saw something, please don’t feel you have to protect me. I need to know.”
“Mrs. Logan, I saw no one with your husband.”
“I asked them to look for fingerprints in the car. I could trace this woman …”
“Only if she has a criminal record.”
She didn’t hear me. “I need to know how long it was going on and what it meant. You understand that, don’t you?”
I nodded, and I thought I did. She had to have the measure of her loss, and to know what to grieve for. She would have to know everything and suffer for it before she could have any kind of peace. The alternative was tormented ignorance and a lifetime’s suspicion, black guesses, worst-case thoughts.
“I’m sorry,” I started to say, but she cut me off.
“I simply have to find her. I have to talk to her. She must have seen the whole thing. Then she would have run off. Distressed, demented. Who knows?”
I said, “I’d have thought there was a good chance of her making contact with you. It might be impossible to resist, coming to see you.”
“If she comes near this house,” Jean Logan said simply as the door behind us opened and two children came into the room, “I’ll kill her. God help me, but I will.”
Fourteen
It was with a touch of sadness that Clarissa sometimes told me that I would have made a wonderful father. She would tell me that I had a good way with children, that I leveled with them easily and without condescension. I’ve never looked after a child for any length of time, so I’ve never been tested in the true fires of parental self-denial, but I think I’m good enough at the listening and talking. I know all seven of her godchildren well. We’ve had them for weekends, we’ve taken some on holiday abroad, and we devotedly cared for two little girls for a week—Felicity and Grace, who both wet the bed—while their parents tore each other apart in a divorce hearing. I was of some use to Clarissa’s eldest godchild, an inwardly stormy fifteen-year-old befuddled by pop culture and the oafish codes of street credibility. I took him drinking with me and talked him out of leaving school. Four years later he was reading medicine at Edinburgh and doing well.
For all that, there’s an uneasiness I have to conceal when I meet a child. I see myself through that child’s eyes and remember how I regarded adults when I was small. They seemed a gray crew to me, too fond of sitting down, too keen on small talk, too accustomed to having nothing to look forward to. My parents, their friends, my uncles and aunts, all seemed to have lives bent to the priorities of other, distant, more important people. For a child it was, of course, simply a matter of local definition. Later I discovered in certain adults dignity and flamboyance, and later still these qualities, or at least the first, stood revealed in my parents and most of their circle. But when I was an energetic, self-important ten-year-old and found myself in a roomful of grownups, I felt guilty, and thought it only polite to conceal the fun I was having elsewhere. When an aged figure addressed me—they were all aged—I worried that what showed in my face was pity.
So when I turned in my chair to meet the stare of the Logan children, I saw myself configured in their eyes—yet one more dull stranger in the procession lately filing through their home, a large man in a creased blue linen suit, the coin of baldness on his crown visible from where they stood. His purpose here would be unintelligible, beyond consideration. Above all, he was yet another man who was not their father. The girl was about ten, and the boy must have been two years younger. Standing behind them, just out of the room, was the nanny, a cheerful-looking young woman in a track suit. The children looked at me and I returned their stare while their mother uttered her death threat. They both wore jeans, trainers, and sweaters with Disney motifs. There was an appealing scruffiness about them, and they didn’t look crushed to me.
The boy did not take his eyes off me as he said, “It’s completely wrong to kill people.” His sister smiled tolerantly, and since Jean Logan was now giving instructions to the nanny, I said to the boy, “It’s just a way of speaking. It’s what you say when you really don’t like someone.”
“If it’s wrong to do it,” the boy said, “it’s wrong to say you’re going to do it.”
I said, “Have you ever heard someone say, ‘I’m so hungry I could eat a horse’?”
He gave this honest consideration. “I’ve said that,” he admitted.
“Isn’t it wrong to eat horses?”
“It’s wrong here,” the girl said. “But it isn’t wrong in France. They eat them all the time.”
“That’s true,” I said. “But if something’s wrong, I don’t see why crossing the Channel should make it right.”
Still standing shoulder to shoulder, the children came closer. After what had gone before, a discussion of moral relativism was pure relief.
The girl said, “People in different countries have different ideas. In China it’s polite to burp after a meal.”
“It’s true,” I said. “When I was in Morocco I was told that I should never pat children on the head.”
“I hate people who do that,” the girl said, and her brother spoke over her excitedly. “My dad saw them cut off a goat’s head in India.”
“And they were priests,” the girl added. The mention of the father brought no outward change, no remorse. He was still a living presence.
“So,” I said. “Aren’t there any rules the whole world can agree on?”
The boy was triumphant. “Killing people.”
I looked at the girl and she nodded, and at the sound of the door closing we all turned to look at their mother, who had just finished with the nanny.
“This is Rachael and Leo. And this is Mr.—”
“Joe,” I said.
Leo went and sat on his mother’s lap. She locked her hands firmly around his waist. Rachael crossed to the window and stared out at the garden. “That tent,” she said quietly to herself.
“I have to find her.” Jean Logan resumed our conversation in a businesslike way. “If you didn’t see her, that’s too bad. But perhaps you can still help me. The police are completely useless. One of the others might have seen something. I can’t speak to them myself, but if you wouldn’t mind …”
“What are you talking about, Mummy?” Rachael asked from the window. I caught the anxious, protective tone of her hesitant question, and with it a glimpse of her ordeal. There must have been scenes whose repetition the girl dreaded and had to head off.
“Nothing, darling. Nothing that concerns you.”
I could not think of a way of refusing, much as I wanted to. Was my life to be entirely subordinate to other people’s obsessions?
“I’ve got the phone numbers of the farm people,” she said. “That young man’s number won’t be difficult to find. I’ve got his address. His name is Parry. Three phone calls, that’s all I’m asking.”
It was too complicated to refuse. “All right,” I said. “I’ll do it.” Even as I agreed, I realized that I would be in a position to censor the information and perhaps save the family some misery. Wouldn’t Rachael and Leo agree, there were times when it was right to lie?
The boy slid from his mother’s lap and went over to his sister. Jean Logan, having smiled her thanks, straightened her skirt with a smoothing movement of her palms, a gesture that suggested she was ready now for me to leav
e. “I’ll write the phone numbers down for you.”
I nodded and said, “Look, Mrs. Logan. Your husband was a very determined and courageous man. You mustn’t lose sight of that.” Rachael and Leo were fooling about by the window, and I was obliged to raise my voice. “He was determined to save that boy, and he hung on to the end. The power lines were a real danger. The kid could easily have died. Your husband just wouldn’t let go of that rope, and he put the rest of us to shame.”
“The rest of you are alive,” she said, and then paused and frowned as Leo squealed from behind the long curtains that framed the french windows. His sister was tickling him through the fabric. Their mother seemed about to tell them to pipe down, but she changed her mind. Like me, she had to speak louder. “Don’t think this isn’t going round in my mind all the time. John was a mountaineer and a good sailor. But he was also a doctor. He was on rescue teams, and he was a very, very cautious man.” On each very she clenched her fist tighter. “He never took stupid chances. They used to make fun of him on the climbs because he was always weighing up the possibilities of a change in weather, or loose rock or hazards that no one else would think about. He was the group’s pessimist. Some people even thought he was timid. But he didn’t care. He never took unnecessary risks. As soon as Rachael was born he gave up serious climbing. And that’s why this story doesn’t make sense.” She half turned to speak to the children, who were making even more noise now, but she was intent on finishing what she had to tell me, and she had more privacy behind their din. She turned back. “This business of holding on to the rope … You see, I’ve thought about it, and I know what killed him.”
At last we were at the center of the story. I was about to be accused, and I had to interrupt her. I wanted my own account in first. There came to me, as encouragement, an image of something, someone, dropping away in the instant before I let go. But I also knew the old cautionary tag from my distant laboratory days: believing is seeing. “Mrs. Logan,” I said, “you might have heard something from one of the others, I don’t know. But I can honestly say—”