by Ian Mcewan
It was only a few hours on and already we were headlines in the evening paper. One of the waiters went out for a copy and we gathered round, and found ourselves strangely exalted to read our experience assimilated to the common stock of “restaurant outrage,” “lunchtime nightmare,” and “bloodbath.” The maitre d’ pointed to a sentence that described me as “the well-known science writer” and Jocelyn as “the eminent scientist,” while Clarissa was simply “beauteous.” The maitre d’ inclined his head toward us with professional respect. We learned from the paper that Colin Tapp was an undersecretary at the Department of Trade and Industry. He was a businessman, recently promoted from the back benches, and was supposed to have “extensive connections as well as many enemies in the Middle East.” There was speculation about “a fearless have-a-go diner” who had saved Tapp’s life and mysteriously vanished. Inside the paper were background pieces about London as a “fanatics’ playground” and the availability of weapons, and an opinion piece on the fading of the “innocent, unviolent way of life we used to know.” The coverage seemed so familiar, as well as eerily instant. It was as if the subject had been mapped out long ago, and the event we had witnessed had been staged to give point to the writing.
There were two detective constables dealing with witness statements, but it was taking them a while to set up. After the excitement of the newspaper, we returned to our seats and a thick silence settled over us. There were frequent yawns, and weary smiles in acknowledgment of how infectious they were. At last the police were ready, and Clarissa and Jocelyn were the first to go in. She came out twenty minutes later and sat by me to wait for her godfather. She took the Keats from its wrapping and opened it to smell the pages. Then she took my hand and squeezed it, and put her lips to my ear. “It’s a wonderful present.” Then, “Look, Joe, just tell them what you saw, okay? Don’t go on about your usual stuff.”
I already knew from something she had said earlier that she hadn’t recognized Parry. I wasn’t going to argue with her now. I was on my own. I just nodded and said, “Are you taking Jocelyn to his place?”
“Yes. I’ll wait for you at home.”
He came out, we shook hands, and they left. I settled down to wait and prepare what I wanted to say. The maitre d’ came out, one of the diners went in, and later, one of the waiters. I was the second to last to be seen, and I was shown into the interview room by a polite young man who introduced himself as Detective Constable Wallace.
Before I sat down I said my piece. “I might as well tell you straightaway that I know what happened. The bullet that hit Mr. Tapp was meant for me. The man who was eating alone and who intervened is someone who’s been bothering me. His name is Parry. I actually complained to the police about him earlier today. I’d like you to contact Inspector Linley at the Harrow Road station. I even told him that I thought Parry might hire someone to harm me.”
While I said all this, Wallace was looking at me intently, though not, I thought, with any great surprise. When I finished he indicated a chair. “Okay. Let’s go from the beginning,” and he set about taking my name and address and my story from the time I arrived at the restaurant. The process was necessarily pedantic, and Wallace steered it from time to time toward irrelevancies: he wanted to know what we had talked about at our table, and at one point he asked me to characterize the moods of my companions; he also asked about the food and wanted me to comment on the service. He asked me twice if I had heard Parry or the men in coats shout out. When we were through he read my account back to me, intoning each sentence as though it were an item on a checklist. It was a prose I immediately wanted to disown. When he came to “There was a man eating lunch by himself at a table not far from our table where we were eating lunch and I recognized this man to be,” I interrupted him. “Sorry. That’s not what I said.”
“You didn’t notice him?”
“I saw him, but I didn’t realize at first who he was.”
Wallace frowned. “But you’ve seen him lots, standing outside your house and so on.”
“He’s cut his hair, and he was facing away from us.”
Wallace made an alteration and read on to the end. As I was signing my name, he said, “If you don’t mind staying on at the station, Mr. Rose, I’d like to have you back in just a little while.”
“I don’t mind waiting here,” I said. “There’s a man out there who wants to kill me.” Wallace nodded and smiled, or rather, he stretched his lips without parting them.
All the restaurant witnesses had left, and I shared the waiting space now with a group of angry American tourists whose luggage, I overheard, had been stolen as it was being loaded onto their coach outside a hotel. There was also a young woman who sat apart, shaking her head in silent disbelief and trying, without success, to hold back tears.
I had decided while I was sitting with Clarissa not to press the police too hard. The disposition of events would do the work. My complaint earlier was on file; the scene in the restaurant was confirmation of an absolute kind. Parry had to be charged with attempted murder, and until he was, I needed protection. Now that I was the only one left from the restaurant, now the excitement was fading, I felt my isolation and vulnerability. Parry was all around me. I took care to sit facing the door, well away from the only window. Each time someone came in, I felt a cold drop in my stomach. Paranoia constructed an image of him for me, standing across the street from the police station, flanked by the men in coats. I went and stood in the station entrance and looked. I felt neither surprise nor relief that he wasn’t there. Taxis and chauffeured cars were bringing the crowds in for the evening’s opera. It was nearly seven-fifteen. Time had folded in on itself. The happy people who passed by me on their way home or to bars and cafés were blessed with a freedom they did not feel and I did not have: they were unencumbered, they had no one who wanted to kill them.
A friend who had been wrongly diagnosed with a terminal illness once told me of the loneliness she had felt as she left the doctor’s office. The sympathy of friends simply marked her out with a different fate. She herself had known people who had died, and she knew well enough how life would go on without her. The waters would close over her head, her friends would feel sorrow and then recover, a little wiser, and the unrecorded workdays, parties, and dinners would tumble onward. That was how it was with me as I turned to go back into the police station. It was not quite self-pity, though there was an element of that; more a kind of shrinking into one’s core, shrinking so deeply that everything else—the irritable tourists, the stricken girl—appeared as though on the other side of a thick glass panel. As I returned to the waiting room, my thoughts swam randomly in their little aquarium; nobody had what I had; if only I could exchange my arrangements for a ticket at the opera, or even a lost bag, or for whatever afflicted the girl.
I almost collided with Wallace, who had been looking for me. He was less polite and rather more animated than before. “It’s this way,” he said, and led me back along the corridor to the interview room. As I sat down, I was glad to see on the desk some faxed pages of Inspector Linley’s notes.
Wallace was looking at me with new interest. This was no longer a routine transcription of a witness statement. “So. I had a little chat with Inspector Linley.”
“Good. You got the picture.”
He smiled. He was almost perky. “We think so. You won’t like this, Mr. Rose. But I’m going to ask you to give it to me again.”
“The statement? Why should I do that?”
“Can we start at the beginning? You were the last of your party to arrive. Take me through your movements that morning, let’s say from nine o’clock.”
Perhaps I’ve been a slow developer, but I was well into my forties before I realized that you don’t have to comply with a request just because it’s reasonable, or reasonably put. Age is the great disobliger. You can be yourself and say no. I folded my arms and smiled falsely. My refusal was friendly. “I’m sorry. I can’t improve on it. I need to know wh
at you’re going to do.”
“Ms. Mellon went off to work at about eight-thirty? Nine?”
“Have you sent a car round to Frognal Lane?”
“Let’s stick with this, if you don’t mind. What did you do then? Make phone calls? Write an article?”
It was an effort not to raise my voice. “I don’t think you understand. This is a dangerous man.”
Wallace was searching through the papers in front of him, through Linley’s pages and his own, and muttering, “There’s a note here somewhere.”
“He’s not going to stop at one attempt. I’d like to think you were doing something more than taking down a statement you’ve already heard.”
“Here it is,” Wallace said cheerfully, and he pulled out a sheet of paper torn in half.
I had my voice under control. “Unless you’re going to tell me that it’s a complete coincidence that the man I was on record complaining about at noon should be sitting a few feet away while—”
“Keats and Wordsworth?” Wallace asked.
I was momentarily thrown. On his lips, they sounded like suspects, two villains, drinking partners at the local pub.
“You were talking about them at lunch.”
“Yes.”
“One of them was putting down the other, right? Which was which?”
“Wordsworth putting down Keats—that’s the story, anyway.”
“And it wasn’t true?”
I couldn’t help myself. I’d been completely deflected. “Well, the only account we have is unreliable.” I could see now that on Wallace’s scrap of paper there was a numbered list.
He said, “That must be pretty unusual.”
“Meaning?”
“Oh, you know, educated people like yourself, book writers and all that. Don’t they all keep journals and stuff? You’d think that if anyone could get the record straight, they could.”
I said nothing. I was being led somewhere. Best to let him get me there without resistance.
Wallace consulted his list. “Listen to this,” he said. “It’s quite interesting. Item number one: Mr. Tapp’s party arrived half an hour after you.” He raised a finger to forestall my denial. “That’s from your Professor Kale. Item two, also from the professor: Mr. Tapp went to the toilet, not his daughter. Item three: Professor Kale says there was no one sitting alone near your table. And your Ms. Clarissa Mellon says there was someone sitting alone near your table but she’d never seen him before. She was very clear in her mind about that. Item four, Ms. Mellon: the gun was already on view when the two men came up to the Tapps’ table. Number five is from all the witnesses except you: one of the men said something in a foreign language. Three think Arabic, one thinks French, the rest aren’t sure. None of the three speaks Arabic. The one who says French doesn’t speak French or any other language. Six …”
Wallace changed his mind about item six. He folded the paper and put it in the top pocket of his jacket. He leaned forward with his elbows on the table and spoke in a confidential tone that had just a trace of pity. “I’ll tell you something for free. There was an attempt on Mr. Tapp’s life eighteen months ago in a hotel lobby in Addis Ababa.”
There was a silence, during which I thought how unfair it was that the man shot in error had once been shot in earnest. All I needed at a time like this was a meaningless coincidence.
Wallace cleared his throat softly. “We needn’t go right through the whole thing. Let’s talk about the ice creams. Your waiter says he was bringing them to the table at the time of the shooting.”
“That’s not how I remember it. We started to eat them, then they were covered in blood.”
“The waiter says the blood reached as far as him. The ice creams were bloodied when he set them down.”
I said, “But I remember eating a couple of spoonfuls.”
I felt a familiar disappointment. No one could agree on anything. We lived in a mist of half-shared, unreliable perception, and our sense data came warped by a prism of desire and belief, which tilted our memories too. We saw and remembered in our own favor, and we persuaded ourselves along the way. Pitiless objectivity, especially about ourselves, was always a doomed social strategy. We’re descended from the indignant, passionate tellers of half-truths, who, in order to convince others, simultaneously convinced themselves. Over generations success had winnowed us out, and with success came our defect, carved deep in the genes like ruts in a cart track: when it didn’t suit us, we couldn’t agree on what was in front of us. Believing is seeing. That’s why there are divorces, border disputes, and wars, and why this statue of the Virgin Mary weeps blood and that one of Ganesh drinks milk. And that was why metaphysics and science were such courageous enterprises, such startling inventions, bigger than the wheel, bigger than agriculture, human artifacts set right against the grain of human nature. Disinterested truth. But it couldn’t save us from ourselves, the ruts were too deep. There could be no private redemption in objectivity.
But exactly what interests of mine were served by my own account of the restaurant lunch?
Wallace was patiently repeating a question. “What flavor was the ice cream?”
“Apple. If the guy says it was anything else, then we’re talking about two different waiters.”
“Your professor friend says vanilla.”
I said, “Just tell me this. Why aren’t you talking to Parry?”
Something rippled under the skin along Wallace’s jawline, and his nostrils dilated fractionally. He was stifling a yawn. “He’s on our list. We’ll get to him. Our priority for now is finding the armed men. But if you don’t mind, Mr. Rose, let’s stay on the ice cream. Apple or vanilla?”
“Will it help you find the gunmen to know?”
“What helps is knowing that our witnesses are doing their best. It’s the details, Mr. Rose.”
“Apple, then.”
“Which of the men was taller?”
“The one with the gun.”
“Was he thinner?”
“I’d say they were both of medium build.”
“Can you remember anything about their hands?”
I couldn’t, but I went through the motions, frowning, turning my head, closing my eyes. Neuroscientists report that subjects asked to recall a scene while under a magnetic resonance imaging scanner show intense activity in the visual cortex, but what a sorry picture memory offers, barely a shadow, barely in the realm of sight, the echo of a whisper. You can’t examine it for fresh information. It folds under scrutiny. I saw the sleeves of the long black coats, as dim as blurred daguerreotypes, and at the end of the sleeves … nothing. Or rather, anything. Hands, gloves, paws, hooves. I said, “I don’t remember a thing about their hands.”
“Just keep trying for me. Was there a ring, for example?”
I conjured a hand much like my own and gave it the ring Clarissa had given me, banded silver and gold, tastefully understated, deliberately undersized. She buttered my knuckle to get it on. That I couldn’t remove it easily once gave us both pleasure. I said, “I can’t remember.” Then I added, “I think I’ll leave,” and I stood up.
Wallace stood up too. “I’d like you to stay and help us.”
“I’d like you to help me.”
He came round the desk. “Parry isn’t behind this, believe me. Although I’m not saying you don’t need help.” As he spoke, he was fishing in his jacket pocket. He pulled out a silver blister pack and waved it right in front of my face. “You know what they are? Me, I take two before breakfast. Forty milligrams. A double dose, Mr. Rose.”
As I hurried away down the corridor, I felt again that shrinking, isolated feeling. Perhaps it was self-pity after all: a maniac was trying to kill me, and all the law could suggest was Prozac.
It was already dark when I left my taxi at the bottom of my road and began walking toward our apartment building, using the line of plane trees for cover. He wasn’t in his usual place, or further along, where he sometimes went when Clarissa came out. Nor w
as he behind me, or up one of the side streets, or behind the privet hedge, or round the side of the building. I let myself in and stood in the lobby listening. From one of the downstairs apartments came a muffled symphonic climax, banal and overstated, Bruckner perhaps, and from somewhere above me, in the ceiling space, the rush of water in a pipe. I took the stairs slowly and kept to the outside of the turns. I didn’t really think he would have found a way into the building, but the rituals of caution were comforting. I let myself in and secured the front door with the dead-lock key. I knew immediately from the stillness in the air that Clarissa was asleep in the children’s room, and sure enough, there was her note on the kitchen table. “Dead tired. Talk to you in the morning, Love, Clarissa.” I looked at the Love, trying to extract meaning, or hope, from the upper-case L. I checked the locks on the skylights and went from room to room, turning on lamps and securing the windows. Then I poured myself a large grappa and went into my study.
I’ve always kept two address books. The pocket-size hardcover notebook is the one I use daily and is also the one I travel with. Two or three times now in the past twenty years I’ve left it in hotel rooms or, once, in a phone box in Hamburg and have had to replace it. The other is a scuffed, foolscap-size ledger book, which I’ve had since my twenties and which never leaves my study. Obviously, it serves as a backup or reservoir should I lose the little book, but over the years it has matured into a personal and social history. It tracks the blossoming complexity of the phone numbers themselves; the three-letter London codes of the earliest entries have an Edwardian quaintness. Abandoned addresses track the restlessness or social rise of many friends. There are names that would be pointless to transcribe; people die, or move out of my life, or fall out with me, or lose their identity altogether. There are dozens of names that mean nothing at all to me now.