by Ian Mcewan
This was love’s prison of self-reference, but joy or despair, I could not get him to threaten me, or even to talk to me. Three times I crossed the street toward him with my hidden tape recorder turning, but he would not stay.
“Clear off, then!” I shouted at his retreating back. “Stop hanging around here. Stop bothering me with your stupid letters.” Come back and talk to me was what I really meant. Come back and face the hopelessness of your cause and issue your unveiled threats. Or phone them in. Leave them on my message machine.
Naturally, what I shouted that day did not affect the tone of the letter I received the next day. It was all happiness and hope. He was inviolable in his solipsism, and I was getting the jitters. The logic that might drive him from despair to hatred, or from love to destruction in one leap, would be private, unguessable, and if he came at me there’d be no warning. I was taking extra care locking up the flat at night. When I was out alone, especially at night, I kept track of who was behind me. I was taking taxis more frequently, and I always looked around me when I got out. With some difficulty I secured an appointment with an inspector at my local police station. I began to fantasize about what I might need for my own defense. Mace? A knuckleduster? A knife? I daydreamed violent confrontations that always fell out in my favor, but I knew in my logical heart, that organ of dull common sense, that he was unlikely to come at me head on.
At least Clarissa seemed to have disappeared from Parry’s thoughts. He made no reference to her in the letters now, and he never tried to talk to her. In fact, he actively avoided her. I watched from the living room window each time she left the flat. As soon as he saw her through the glass-fronted lobby coming down the stairs, and even before she had stepped out of the building, he hurried up the street. When she was gone, he returned to his position. Did he believe in his private narrative that he was sparing her feelings? Did he imagine that I had explained everything to her and that she was essentially out of the picture, or that he himself had somehow fixed it? Or did the story require no consistency at all?
We had been lying in silence now for ten minutes. She was on her left side, and I thought I heard the shuffling iambs of her pulse in my pillow. Perhaps it was my own rhythm. It was slow, and I was sure it was getting slower. There was no tension here in this silence. We looked in each other’s eyes and our gaze moved regularly over each other’s features, eyes to lips to eyes. It was like a long and slow remembering, and as each minute passed and we did not speak, our recovery gathered its own quiet strength. Surely the inertial power of love, the hours, weeks, and years harmoniously spent in each other’s company, was greater than the circumstances of the mere present. Didn’t love generate its own reserves? The last thing we should do now, I thought, was descend to a bout of patient explaining and listening. Too much was made in pop psychology, and too much expected, of talking things through. Conflicts, like living organisms, had a natural lifespan. The trick was to know when to let them die. At the wrong moment, words could act like so many fibrillating jolts. The creature could revive in pathogenic form, feverishly regenerated by an interesting new formulation or by this or that morbidly “fresh look” at things. I shifted my hand and faintly increased the pressure of my fingers on her arm. Her lips parted, a sensual ungluing marked by a soft plosive sound. All we had to do was look at each other and remember. Make love and the rest could take care of itself. Clarissa’s lips framed my name, but there wasn’t a sound, not even a breath. I couldn’t move my eyes from her lips. So supple, so glossily rich in natural color. Lipstick was invented so that women could enjoy a poor version of lips like these. “Joe …” the lips said again. Another reason for not talking now of our problem was that we would be bound to let Parry into our bedroom, into our bed.
“Joe …” This time she blew my name through the half-pucker of her beautiful lips, and then she frowned and inhaled deeply and gave her words their rich low tone. “Joe, it’s all over. It’s best to admit it now. I think we’re finished, don’t you?”
When she said that, I did not find myself crossing a threshold of reconceptualization, nor did the ground, or the bed, drop away beneath me, though I certainly entered the lofty space in which I could observe these things not happening. Of course, I was in a state of denial. I felt nothing at all, not a thing. I didn’t speak, not because I was speechless but because I felt nothing at all. Instead, my cold-blooded thoughts hopped, froglike, to Jean Logan, with whom Clarissa now shared a neural address, a category in my mind of women who believed themselves to be wronged and who expected something from me.
I try to be diligent. I had sat at my desk with Mrs. Logan’s scrap of paper and made the phone calls. I called Toby Greene in Russell’s Water first and got a vigorous old lady with a crackly voice who must have been his mother. I asked kindly after her son’s broken ankle, but she cut me short.
“And what would you be wanting him for?”
“It’s about the accident, the ballooning accident. I just wanted to ask him—”
“We’ve had enough reporters round here, so why don’t you just bugger off.”
It was neatly done, and she was quite calm about it. I left it a couple of hours before I tried again, and this time I got in quickly with my name and the fact that I was one of the fellows hanging on the ropes along with her son. When at last Toby Greene hobbled to the phone, he wasn’t able to help me. He had seen John Logan’s car on the far side of the field, but he had been busy with the hedging and then he was running toward the balloon and he had no idea whether Logan had been alone. It was hard to keep Greene on the subject. He wanted to talk about his ankle, or the sick pay he should have been receiving on its account. “We’ve been to the benefits people three times now …” I listened for twenty minutes to a tale of administrative bungle and condescension, until his mother called him away and he left the phone without a goodbye.
His friend in Watlington, Joseph Lacey, was not expected home for a day, so I phoned Reading and asked to speak to James Gadd, the balloonist. It was his wife who answered. Her voice was smooth and kindly.
“Tell him I’m one of the people who risked his life trying to stop his grandson being carried away.”
“I’ll have a jolly good try,” she said. “But he doesn’t like talking about it awfully much.”
I heard the sound of the television news and Gadd’s voice calling over it, “Everything I’ve got to say I’ll say in the coroner’s court.” Mrs. Gadd came back and relayed the message in a tone of resignation and mild regret, as though she too were suffering from his failure to talk.
When I reached Lacey at last, he turned out to be a more focused spirit.
“What do they want? They can’t need more witnesses.”
“It’s for his widow. She thinks there was someone with him.”
“If that someone exists, they must have a good reason for not coming forward. Sleeping dogs, I’d say.”
There was something a little too immediate and overdetermined about this, so I told him straight. “She thinks it was a woman. She found this picnic stuff in the car, and a silk scarf. She thinks he was having an affair. It’s torturing her.”
He made a clicking sound with his tongue, and there followed a long silence.
“Are you still there, Mr. Lacey?”
“I’m thinking.”
“So you saw her?”
There was another silence, then he said, “I’m not talking about it on the phone. You come down here to Watlington, then we’ll see.” He gave me the address, and we fixed a time.
When I asked her, Clarissa said she thought Logan’s car had had two doors open, perhaps even three, but she had seen no one apart from Logan himself. That left Parry. As I remembered it, the footpath he had come along had taken him closer than any of us to the car. Could I have approached him with my hidden tape recorder, made my factual inquiries, then goaded him into threatening me? Apart from the absurdity of that, the idea of obtaining linear information from him seemed fantastic. His wo
rld was emotion, invention, and yearning. He was the stuff of bad dreams, to such an extent that it was difficult to imagine him carrying through mundane tasks like shaving or paying a bill. It was almost as if he didn’t exist.
Because I hadn’t said a thing, couldn’t motivate myself to reply, Clarissa spoke again. We still held each other’s gaze. “You’re always thinking about him. It never stops. You were thinking about him just then, weren’t you? Go on, tell me honestly. Tell me.”
“I was, yes.”
“I don’t know what’s happening with you, Joe. I’m losing you. It’s frightening. You need help, but I don’t think it can come from me.”
“I’m seeing the police on Wednesday. They might be able to—”
“I’m talking about your mind.”
I sat up. “There’s nothing wrong with my mind. It’s a good mind. Sweetheart, he’s a real threat, he could be dangerous.”
She was struggling to sit up too. “Oh God,” she said. “You don’t get it,” and she started to cry.
“Listen, I’m researching this thoroughly.” I put my hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged me away. I went on, though. “From what I’ve read, it seems that people with de Clerambault’s syndrome fall into two groups …”
“You think you can read your way out of this.” She was suddenly angry and no longer crying. “Don’t you realize you’ve got a problem?”
“Of course I do,” I said. “But just listen. It really helps to know. There are those whose symptoms are part of a general psychotic disorder. They’re very easy to spot. And there are those with the pure form of the disease, who are completely obsessed by the object of their love, but they function perfectly well in all other parts of their lives.”
“Joe!” she shouted. “You say he’s outside, but when I go out there’s no one. No one, Joe.”
“When he sees you crossing the lobby, he goes a little way up the street and stands behind a tree. Don’t ask me why.”
“And the letters, the handwriting …” She looked at me, and her lower lip went slack. Something crossed her mind and made her hesitate.
I said, “What about the letters?”
She shook her head. She was out of bed now, gathering up the clothes she needed for tomorrow. She stood in the doorway with them. “I’m frightened,” she said.
“I am too. He could get violent.”
She was looking not at me but at a space above my head. Her voice was croaky. “I’m going to sleep in the children’s room tonight.”
“Please stay, Clarissa.”
But she was gone, and the next day she moved her things into that room, and in the manner of these things, an impulsive decision became a settled arrangement. We continued to live side by side, but I knew that I was on my own.
Eighteen
Saturday was Clarissa’s birthday. When I gave her a card, she kissed me full on the lips. Now it was settled in her mind I was unhinged, now she had told me we were finished, she appeared elated and generous. A new life was about to begin, and she had nothing to lose by being kind. A few days earlier her buoyancy might have made me suspicious, or jealous, but now it confirmed me in my reasoning: she had done neither the research nor the thinking. Parry’s condition could not stand still. Given that fulfillment was not on hand, his love must turn to either indifference or hatred. Clarissa thought that her emotions were the appropriate guide, that she could feel her way to the truth, when what was needed was information, foresight, and careful calculation. It was therefore natural, though disastrous for us both, that she should think I was mad.
As soon as she had left for work, I went into my study and wrapped the present I was going to give her at the lunch we had planned that day with her godfather, Professor Kale. I gathered all Parry’s letters together, arranged them chronologically, and fixed them in a clasp folder. I lay on the chaise longue turning the pages slowly from the beginning, looking out for and marking significant passages. These I typed out, with location references in brackets. By the end, I had four sheets of extracts, of which I made three copies, placing each in a plastic folder. This patient activity brought on in me a kind of organizational trance, the administrator’s illusion that all the sorrow in the world can be brought to heel with touch typing, a decent laser printer, and a box of paper clips.
I was attempting to compile a dossier of threats, and while there were no single obvious examples, there were allusions and logical disjunctures whose cumulative effect would not be lost on the mind of a policeman. It needed the skill of a literary critic like Clarissa to read between the lines of protesting love, but I knew that she would not help me. After an hour or so I realized it was a mistake to concentrate on overt expressions of frustration and disappointment—that I had started it all, that I was leading him on, teasing him with false promises, reneging on my undertakings to live with him. These assertions had seemed intimidating at the time, but in retrospect they appeared merely pathetic. The real threats, I began to see, were elsewhere.
For example, he broke off an account of how lonely he was away from me to reflect on solitude, and how he remembered when he was fourteen going to stay in the country with his uncle. Parry used to borrow a .22 rifle and go out hunting rabbits. Going creeping along the hedgerows, all senses alert, completely concentrated on the task—this was the solitude he loved most. The description would have been harmless enough had he not given quite so much energy to reliving the pleasures of the kill: “power of death that leaped from my fingers, Joe, power at a distance. I can do this! I can do this! I used to think. Getting the creature on the run, seeing it do that little skipping somersault, and then hit the ground, writhing and twitching. Then it would go still, and I would come up to it, feeling like fate itself, and loving the little thing that I had just destroyed. The power of life and death, Joe. God has it, and we who are in His image have it too.”
I copied out three sentences from another letter: “I wanted to hurt you. Perhaps even more than that. Something more, and God will forgive me, I thought.” In another recent letter there was an echo of the remark he had made to me the day I came back from Oxford: “You started this, and you can’t run from it. I can get people to do things for me—you already know that. Even as I’m writing this letter a couple of guys are redecorating the bathroom! In the old days I would have done it myself, money or not. But now I’m learning to delegate.” I stared at this one a long time. What was the precise connection between my not being able to run and his being able to get things done by others? There was a missing step. In his very latest letter he wrote, apropos of nothing, “I went to the Mile End Road yesterday—you know, where the real villains live. Looking for more decorators!”
Elsewhere there were portentous invocations of God’s darker side. “God’s love,” he wrote, “may take the form of wrath. It can show itself to us as calamity. This is the difficult lesson it’s taken me a lifetime to learn.” And related to this: “His love isn’t always gentle. How can it be when it has to last, when you can never shake it off? It’s a warmth, it’s a heat, and it can burn you, Joe, it can consume you.”
There were very few biblical references in Parry’s correspondence. His religion was dreamily vague on the specifics of doctrine, and he gave no impression of being attached to any particular church. His belief was a self-made affair, generally aligned to the culture of personal growth and fulfillment. There was a lot of talk of destiny, of his “path” and how he would not be deterred from following it, and of fate—his and mine entwined. Often, God was a term interchangeable with self. God’s love for mankind shaded into Parry’s love for me. God was undeniably “within” rather than in his heaven, and believing in him was therefore a license to respond to the calls of feeling or intuition. It was the perfect loose structure for a disturbed mind. There were no constraints of theological nicety or religious observance, no social sanction or congregational calling to account, none of the moral framework that made religions viable, however failed their cosmologies. Parr
y listened only to the inner voice of his private God.
His one concession to a source beyond himself was a couple of references to the story of Job, and even here it was not obvious that he had read the primary material. “You looked uncomfortable,” he wrote once about seeing me in the street. “You even looked as though you might have been in pain, but that shouldn’t make you doubt us. Remember how much pain Job was in, and all the time God loved him.” Again, the unexamined assumption was that God and Parry were one, and between them they would settle the matter of our common fates. Another reference raised the possibility that I was God. “We’re both suffering, Joe, we’re both afflicted. The question is, which one of us is Job?”
When I left the flat in the late morning with a brown envelope containing my meticulously documented extracts, and with Clarissa’s present in my pocket, Parry was not there. I paused to look around, half expecting him to appear from behind one of his trees. The change in routine made me uneasy. I hadn’t seen him since the morning of the day before. Now that I had read the literature and knew the possibilities, I preferred him to be where I could see him. On my way to the police station I glanced back a few times to check if he was following me.
It was a quiet time of day, but I had to sit for over an hour in the waiting room. Where the human need for order meets the human tendency to mayhem, where civilization runs smack against its discontents, you find friction, and a great deal of general wear and tear. It was there in the stringy holes in the lino on the threshold of each door, in the snaky vertical crack up the frosted glass behind the reception officer’s counter space, and in the hot, exhausted air that forced each visitor out of his jacket and each cop into shirtsleeves. It was in the slumped posture of two kids in bomber jackets who stared at their feet, too furious with each other to speak, and in the chiseled graffiti on the arm of the chair on which I sat: it was bland defiance or mounting anguish—fuck fuck fuck. And I saw it in the fluorescent pallor of Duty Inspector Linley’s large round face as he wearily showed me at last into an interview room. It looked as if he rarely went outdoors. He had no need when all the trouble filed through here.