by Ian Mcewan
A journalist friend who had served three years on the crime desk of a tabloid had advised me that the only way to get the police even faintly interested in my case was to make an official complaint about the way it had been handled so far. This way I could get past the woman in glasses who guarded the reception desk. The complaint would have to be dealt with, at least, and I could explain my problem to someone a little further up the station hierarchy. The same friend warned me not to expect too much. My man would be looking at retirement and wanting a quiet life. His brief was to suppress complaints while appearing to address them.
Linley waved me into one of two metal stacking chairs. We faced each other across a Formica table patterned in coffee rings. At every point on its surface my cold chair was greasy to the touch. The ashtray was the sawn-off butt of a plastic Coke bottle. Near it squatted a used tea bag on a spoon. The squalor in here was laconic in its challenge: who was I going to report it to?
I had submitted my complaint, Linley had eventually phoned me, and I had given him the story. At the time I had trouble deciding whether he was slightly clever or very stupid. He had one of those strangulated voices with which comedians sometimes characterize officialdom. Linley’s had suggested a degree of imbecility. On the other hand, he hadn’t said much. Even now, as he opened the file, no good morning or where were we or hum and hah. Just the electronic whistle of breath through nasal hair. Into such silences, I guessed, suspects and witnesses said more than they intended, so I kept quiet too as I watched him turn the couple of pages of his slanting spiky handwriting in which he had recorded his notes.
Linley raised his eyes, but he didn’t look at me. He was staring into my chest. It was only when he drew breath to speak that the focus of his tiny gray eyes brushed past mine. “So. You’re being harassed and threatened by this character. You’ve reported it, and got no satisfaction.”
“That’s it,” I said.
“The harassment consists of …?”
“As I told you before,” I said, trying to read his writing upside down. Had he not been listening to me? “He sends three or four letters a week.”
“Obscenities?”
“No.”
“Lewd suggestions?”
“No.”
“Insults?”
“Not really.”
“Sexual sort of things, then.”
“It doesn’t seem to be about sex. It’s an obsession. He’s completely fixated on me. He doesn’t think about anything else.”
“Does he phone you?”
“Not anymore. It’s just the letters.”
“He’s in love with you.”
I said, “He’s suffering from a condition known as de Clerambault’s syndrome. It’s a delusional state. He thinks I started it, he’s convinced I’m encouraging him with secret signals—”
“Are you a psychiatrist, Mr. Rose?”
“No.”
“But you are a homosexual.”
“No.”
“How did you meet?”
“I’ve already told you. The ballooning accident.”
He twitched a page of his notes. “I don’t seem to have a record of that.”
I gave him a brief account while he rested his heavy symmetrical head on his hands, still untempted to write the story down. When I had done, he said, “How did it start?”
“He phoned late that night.”
“He said he loved you and you hung up. You must have been upset.”
“Disturbed.”
“So you discussed it with your wife.”
“The next morning.”
“Why the delay?”
“We were very tired and stressed out from the accident.”
“And what’s her reaction to all this?”
“She’s upset. It’s put quite a strain on us.”
Linley looked away and made a show of pursing his lips. “Does she ever get angry with you about this business? Or you with her?”
“It’s put a lot of pressure on our relationship. We were very happy before.”
“Any history of psychiatric illness, Mr. Rose?”
“None at all.”
“Stress at work, that sort of thing?”
“Nothing like that.”
“Pretty tough business, journalism, isn’t it?”
I nodded. I was beginning to detest Linley and his curious globular face. I said into the pause that followed, “I’ve got good reasons to believe this guy will turn nasty. I came to the police for help.”
“Quite right,” said Linley. “I’d do the same myself. And it looks like the law on this sort of thing is about to be tightened up. So he stands outside the house and bothers you when you come out.”
“He used to. These days he just stands there. If I try to talk to him, he walks away.”
“So he’s not actually …” He trailed off and looked, or pretended to look, through his notes. He was muttering to himself. “That’s the harassment, um …” Then to me, brightly, “Now what about the threats?”
“I’ve copied out some passages. They’re not right out front. You’ll need to read carefully.”
Duty Inspector Linley settled back to read, and while his gaze was lowered I stared at his face. It wasn’t the pallor that was repellent, it was the puffy, inhuman geometry of its roundness. A near-perfect circle was centered on his button nose and encompassed the white dome of his baldness and the curve of his fattened chin. This circle was inscribed on the surface of a barely misshapen sphere. His forehead bulged, his cheeks rolled out tightly from below his little gray eyes, and the curve was picked up again in the bluish undimpled bulge between his nose and his upper lip.
He dropped my pages onto the desk, clasped his hands behind his head, and contemplated the ceiling for a few seconds, then looked at me with a hint of pity. “As stalkers go, Mr. Rose, he’s a pussycat. What do you want us to do? Arrest him?”
I said, “You’ve got to understand the intensity of this delusion and the frustration that’s building up. He needs to know he can’t just do anything—”
“There’s nothing here that’s threatening, abusive, or insulting as defined by Section Five of the Public Order Act.” Linley was talking faster. He wanted me out of there. “Nothing in the Offenses Against the Person Act of 1861. We couldn’t even caution him. He loves his God, he loves you, and I’m sorry about that, but he hasn’t broken the law.” He picked up the extracts and let them drop. “I mean, where’s the threat, exactly?”
“If you read carefully and think logically, you’ll see he’s implying that he can get someone, hire someone, to beat me up.”
“Too weak. You should see what we get in here. He hasn’t trashed your car, has he, or waved a knife at you, or tipped the dustbin over your front path. He hasn’t even sworn at you. I mean, have you and your wife considered asking him in for a cup of tea and a chat?”
I was doing well to keep so calm, I thought. “Look, he’s a classic case. De Clerambault’s, erotomania, stalking, call it what you want. I’ve gone into it in some depth. The literature shows that when he realizes that he’s not going to get what he wants, there’s a real danger of violence. You could at least send a couple of officers round to his place and let him know he’s on your books.”
Linley stood, but I remained obstinately sitting. He had his hand on the doorknob. His show of patience was a form of mockery. “In the kind of society we have, or want to have, not to mention our limited manpower, we can’t send officers to Citizen A on account of Citizen B reading a few books and deciding there’s violence in the air. Nor can my men be in two places at once, watching him, protecting you.”
I was about to answer, but Linley opened the door and stepped out. He spoke to me from the corridor. “But I’ll tell you what I will do. I’ll send our home beat officer to your house sometime in the coming week. He’s got ten years’ experience in community problems, and I’m sure he’ll be able to make some useful suggestions.” Then he was gone and I heard him in the
waiting room, saying in a loud voice, presumably to the lads in bomber jackets, “Complaint? You two? What a joke! Listen to me. You both kindly fuck off now and I just might see my way to losing that file.”
I was late for lunch and I walked quickly up the street, away from the station, glancing over my shoulder for a taxi. I should have been angry or alarmed, but somehow the brush-off from Linley was clarifying. I had made two attempts to get the police interested. I needn’t bother again. Perhaps it was the weight of Clarissa’s present in my pocket that brought my thoughts to her instead, and all our unhappiness. I couldn’t quite take seriously her insistence that we were finished. It had always seemed to me that our love was just the kind to endure. Now, hurrying along the Harrow Road, prompted also by a phrase Inspector Linley had used, I found myself remembering her last birthday, when we had celebrated without a trace of complication in our lives.
The phrase was “in two places at once,” and the memory was of early morning. I left her sleeping and went to make the tea. I probably gathered up the mail from the hallway floor and sorted the birthday cards from the rest and put them on a tray. While I was waiting for the kettle, I looked at a radio talk I was going to record that afternoon. I remember it well because I used the material later for the first chapter of a book. Might there be a genetic basis to religious belief, or was it merely refreshing to think so? If faith conferred selective advantage, there were any number of possible means, and nothing could be proven. Suppose religion gave status, especially to its priest caste? Plenty of social advantage in that. What if it bestowed strength in adversity, the power of consolation, the chance of surviving the disaster that might crush a godless man? Perhaps it gave believers passionate conviction, the brute strength of singlemindedness.
Possibly it worked on groups as well as on individuals, bringing cohesion and identity and a sense that you and your fellows were right, even—or especially—when you were wrong. With God on our side. Uplifted by a crazed unity, armed with horrible certainty, you descend on the neighboring tribe, beat and rape it senseless, and come away burning with righteousness and drunk with the very victory your gods had promised. Repeat fifty thousand times over the millennia, and the complex set of genes controlling for groundless conviction could get a strong distribution. I floated in and out of these preoccupations. The kettle boiled and I made the tea.
The night before, Clarissa had braided her hair into a single plait, which she had secured with a strip of black velvet. When I came in with the tea and birthday cards and morning paper, she was sitting up in bed, loosening her hair and shaking it out. Being in bed with your lover is a fine thing, but returning to her in its night-long warmth is sweet. I toasted her in tea, we read the cards and set about the birthday cuddle. Clarissa weighs eighty pounds less than me, and she sometimes likes to start out on top. She gathered the bedclothes around her like a bridal train and sat sleepily astride me. On this particular morning we had a game going. I lay on my back pretending to read the newspaper. While she drew me in and sighed and wriggled and shivered, I made a show of being unaware of her, of turning the pages and frowning at the piece before me. It gave her a little masochistic thrill to feel she was ignored; she wasn’t noticed, she wasn’t there. Annihilation! Then she took a controlling pleasure in destroying my attention, drawing me from the frantic public realm into the deep world that was entirely herself. Now I was the one who was to be obliterated, and along with me, everything that was not her.
However, on this particular occasion she did not quite succeed, for I briefly achieved what Linley had claimed to be impossible for his policemen. I was excited by Clarissa, but I was actually reading about the queen. She was off to visit a town called Yellowknife in the remote Northwest Territories of Canada, a region the size of Europe with a population of fifty-seven thousand, most of whom, apparently, were drunks and hoodlums. What caught my attention as Clarissa writhed above me was a paragraph about the territory’s appalling weather, and these two desultory sentences: “Recently a blizzard engulfed a football match north of Yellowknife. Unable to find their way to safety, both teams froze to death.” “Listen to this,” I said to Clarissa. But then she looked at me, and that was as far as I got. I was hers.
The act of reading and understanding engages a number of separate but overlapping functions of the brain, while the region that controls sexual function operates at a lower level, more ancient in evolutionary terms and shared by countless organisms but still available to the intercession of higher functions—memory, emotion, fantasy. If I remembered that morning of Clarissa’s birthday so well—cards and torn envelopes scattered across the bed, intrusive sunlight burning through the curtained gap—it’s because one of our little playful episodes brought me for the first time in my life to a full and complete experience in two places at once. Aroused by Clarissa, fully sentient and appreciative, and yet gripped by the tragedy behind the newspaper tidbit, the two teams scattering midplay in the violent winds to die in their boots on the edge of the invisible field. All copulating creatures are vulnerable to attack, but selection over time must have proved that reproductive success was best served by undivided attention. Better to allow the occasional couple to be eaten midrapture than dilute by one jot a vigorous procreational urge. But for seconds on end I had wholesomely and simultaneously indulged two of life’s central, antithetical pleasures, reading and fucking.
“Don’t you think,” I had asked Clarissa later in the bathroom, “that I’m some kind of evolutionary throw forward?”
Clarissa the Keats scholar was crouching naked on a cork stool, painting her toenails—a gesture toward birthday festivity. “No,” she had said. “You’re just getting old. And anyway”—and here she had mimicked a know-all radio voice—“evolutionary change, speciation, is an event that can only be known in retrospect.”
Now, inwardly, I congratulated her on her grasp of the idiom, and as a taxi drew up for me I realized how sharply I missed our old life together, and I wondered how we would ever return to such love and fun and easy intimacy. Clarissa thought I was mad, the police thought I was a fool, and one thing was clear: the task of getting us back to where we had been was going to be mine alone.
Nineteen
I arrived twenty minutes late. The place was doing good lunchtime business; conversation was at a roar, and stepping in from the street was like walking into a storm. It was as if there were a single topic—and an hour later there would be. The professor was already seated, but Clarissa was on her feet, and even from across the room I could see that she was in that same elated mood. She was creating a little fuss around her. A waiter was on his knees at her feet, praying style, wedging a table leg; another was bringing her a different chair. When she saw me she came skipping through the din and took my hand and led me to the table as if I were blind. I put the skittishness down to celebratory mood, for we had some cause to raise a glass: it wasn’t only a birthday. Professor Jocelyn Kale, Clarissa’s godfather, had been appointed to an honorary position on the Human Genome Project.
Before I sat down, I kissed her. These days our tongues never touched, but this time they did. Jocelyn half rose from his seat and shook my hand. At the same moment champagne in an ice bucket was brought to the table and we pitched our voices in with the roar. The ice bucket sat within a rhombus of sunlight on a white tablecloth; the tall restaurant windows showed off rectangles of blue sky between the buildings. I had a hard-on from the kiss. In memory, it was all success, clarity, clatter. In memory, all the food they brought us first was red: the bresaola, the fat tongues of roasted pepper laid on goat cheese, the raddiccio, the white china bowl of radish coronets. When later I remembered how we had leaned in and shouted, I seemed to be remembering an underwater event.
Jocelyn took from his pocket a small parcel done up in blue tissue. We drew down an imaginary silence on our table while Clarissa unwrapped her present. Perhaps that was when I glanced to my left, at the table next to ours. A man whose name I learned afterward wa
s Colin Tapp was with his daughter and his father. Perhaps I noticed them later. If I registered at the time the solitary diner who sat twenty feet away with his back to us, it left no trace in memory. Inside the tissue was a black box, and inside the box, on a cumulus of cotton wool, was a golden brooch. Still without speaking, she lifted it out, and we examined it on her palm.
Two gold bands were entwined in a double helix. Crossing between them were tiny silver rungs in groups of three representing the base pairs, the four-letter alphabet that coded all living things in permutating triplets. Engraved on the helical bands were spherical designs to suggest the twenty amino acids onto which the three-letter codons were mapped. In the full light gathered from the tabletop, it looked in Clarissa’s hand more than a representation. It could have been the thing itself, ready to cook up chains of amino acids to be blended into protein molecules. It could have divided right there in her hand to make another gift. When Clarissa sighed Jocelyn’s name, the sound of the restaurant surged back on us.
“Oh God, it’s beautiful,” she cried, and kissed him.
His weak yellow-blue eyes were moist. He said, “It was Gillian’s, you know. She would have loved you to have it.”
I was impatient to produce my own present, but we were still in the spell of Jocelyn’s. Clarissa pinned the brooch on her gray silk blouse.
Would I remember the conversation now if I did not know what it preceded?
We began by joking that the Genome Project gave out such jewelry free by the dozen. Then Jocelyn talked about the discovery of DNA. Perhaps that was when I turned in my seat to ask a waiter to bring us water and noticed the two men and the girl. We finished the champagne and the antipasto was cleared away. I don’t remember what food we ordered after that. Jocelyn began to tell us about Johann Miescher, the Swiss chemist who identified DNA in 1869. This was supposed to be one of the great missed chances in the history of science. Miescher got himself a steady supply of pus-soaked bandages from a local hospital (rich in white blood cells, Jocelyn added for Clarissa’s benefit). He was interested in the chemistry of the cell nucleus. In the nuclei he found phosphorous, an improbable substance that didn’t sit with current ideas. An extraordinary find, but his paper was blocked by his teacher, who spent two years repeating and confirming his student’s results.