The Comfort of Strangers

by Ian Mcewan

  Robert stood up too. The geometric lines of his face had deepened and his smile was glassy, fixed. Colin had turned back momentarily to set down his empty glass on the arm of the chair, and as he straightened Robert struck him in the stomach with his fist, a relaxed, easy blow which, had it not instantly expelled all the air from Colin’s lungs, might have seemed playful. Colin jack-knifed to the floor at Robert’s feet where he writhed, and made laughing noises in his throat as he fought for air. Robert took the empty glasses to the table. When he returned he helped Colin to his feet, and made him bend at the waist and straighten several times. Finally Colin broke away and walked about the room taking deep breaths. Then he took out a handkerchief and dabbed at his eyes and glared blearily across the furniture at Robert who was lighting a cigarette and walking towards the kitchen door. Before he reached it he turned and winked at Colin.

  Colin sat in a corner of the room and watched Mary help Caroline set the table. Mary glanced at him worriedly from time to time. Once, she crossed the room and squeezed his hand. Robert did not appear until the first course was on the table. He had changed into a pale cream suit and wore a thin black satin tie. They ate a clear soup, steak, green salad and bread. There were two bottles of red wine. They sat at one end of the dining-table, close together, Caroline and Colin on one side, Robert and Mary on the other. In response to Robert’s questions Mary talked about her children. Her ten-year-old daughter had finally been selected for the school football team, and had been so savagely tackled by the boys in her first two matches that she had had to spend a week in bed. Then she cut her hair for the next match to avoid persecution and had even scored a goal. Her son, two and a half years younger, could run round the local athletics track in less than ninety seconds. When she had finished explaining all this, Robert, clearly bored, nodded to himself and turned his attention to his food.

  There was a prolonged silence at the very heart of the meal, broken only by the sound of cutlery against plates. Then Caroline asked a nervous, complicated question about the children’s school which obliged Mary to talk at length about recently-enacted legislation, and the collapse of a movement for reform. When she appealed to Colin for corroboration, he answered in the briefest possible way; and when Robert leaned across the table, touched Colin’s arm and pointed to his nearly empty glass, he looked away, over Caroline’s head towards a bookcase piled with newspapers and magazines. Mary broke off suddenly and apologized for talking too much, but there was irritation in her voice. Robert smiled at her and took her hand. At the same time he sent Caroline into the kitchen for coffee.

  Still holding Mary’s hand, he turned his smile to include Colin. ‘Tonight there is a new manager starting work in my bar.’ He raised his glass. ‘To my new manager.’

  ‘To your new manager,’ Mary said. ‘What happened to the old one?’

  Colin had picked up his glass but had not raised it. Robert watched him intently, and when at last Colin drank, Robert said, as though teaching etiquette to a simpleton, ‘To Robert’s new manager’. He filled Colin’s glass and turned to Mary. ‘The old manager was old, and now he is in trouble with the police. The new manager …’ Robert pursed his lips and with a quick glance at Colin made a tense little circle with his forefinger and thumb ‘… he knows how to deal with trouble. He knows when to act. He doesn’t let people take advantage of him.’ Colin held Robert’s stare for a moment.

  ‘He sounds just your man,’ Mary said politely.

  Robert nodded and smiled at her in triumph. ‘Just my man,’ he said, and released her hand.

  When Caroline returned with the coffee she found Colin sprawled on a chaise-longue, and Robert and Mary talking quietly at the dining-table. She brought Colin his cup and lowered herself beside him, wincing as she did so and holding on to his knee for support. With a quick glance over her shoulder towards Robert, she began to ask Colin about his work and family background, but from the manner in which her eyes roved across his face as he talked, her readiness with fresh questions, it was clear that she was not quite listening to him. She appeared greedy for the fact of conversation rather than its content; she inclined her head towards him, as though bathing her face in the flow of his speech. Despite this, perhaps because of it, Colin spoke easily, first of his failure to become a singer, then of his first acting job, then of his family. ‘Then my father died,’ he concluded, ‘and my mother remarried.’

  Caroline was framing another question, but this time hesitantly. Behind her at the table Mary was yawning and standing up. ‘Will you …’ Caroline stopped, and started again. ‘You go home soon, I suppose.’

  ‘Next week.’

  ‘Will you come again.’ She touched his arm. ‘Will you promise to come again.’

  Colin was polite and vague. ‘Yes of course.’

  But Caroline was insistent; ‘No, I mean it, it’s very important.’ Mary was coming towards them, and Robert too was standing up. Caroline lowered her voice. ‘I can’t walk down stairs.’

  Mary stood before them, but hearing Caroline whisper, she moved on towards the bookcase and picked up a magazine. ‘Perhaps we should leave,’ she called.

  Colin nodded gratefully and was about to stand when Caroline took his arm and said quietly, ‘I can’t get out.’

  Robert had joined Mary at the bookcase and they were looking at a large photograph. She took it in her hands. A man stood on a balcony smoking a cigarette. The print was grainy and indistinct, taken from some distance and enlarged many times. He let her hold it a few seconds, then he took it from her and returned it to the bookcase.

  Colin and Caroline stood up, and Robert opened the door and turned on the light above the stairs. Colin and Mary thanked Robert and Caroline for their hospitality. Robert gave Mary instructions how to reach the hotel.

  ‘Remember …’ Caroline said to Colin, but the rest of her words were cut off as Robert closed the door. As they descended the first flight of stairs, they heard a sharp sound that, as Mary said later, could as easily have been an object dropped as a face slapped. They reached the bottom of the stairs, crossed a small courtyard and stepped out into the unlit street. ‘Now,’ Colin said, ‘which way?’

  7

  DURING THE NEXT four days Colin and Mary did not leave the hotel except to cross the busy thoroughfare and take a table on the café pontoon which was in sunlight two hours before their own balcony. They ate all their meals in the hotel, in the cramped dining-room where the starched white tablecloths, and even the food, were stained yellow and green by coloured glass in the windows. The other guests were friendly and curious, leaning politely towards each other’s tables, comparing notes on the less obvious churches, on an altar-piece by a more wayward member of a respected school, on a restaurant used only by locals.

  Walking back from the apartment to the hotel, they had held hands all the way; that night they had slept in the same bed. They woke surprised to find themselves in each other’s arms. Their lovemaking surprised them too, for the great, enveloping pleasure, the sharp, almost painful, thrills were sensations, they said that evening on the balcony, they remembered from seven years before, when they had first met. How could they have forgotten so easily? It was over in less than ten minutes. They lay face to face a long while, impressed and a little moved. They went into the bathroom together. They stood under the shower giggling and soaped each other’s body. Thoroughly cleansed and perfumed, they returned to bed and made love till noon. Hunger drove them downstairs to the tiny dining-room where the earnest conversation of the other guests made them titter like schoolchildren. They ate three main courses between them and shared three litres of wine. They held hands across the table and talked about parents and childhood as if they had just met. The other guests glanced at them approvingly. After a three and a half hour absence, they returned to their bed which now had clean sheets and pillowcases. While they were fondling each other they fell asleep, and when they woke in the early evening they repeated the brief, startling experience of that m
orning. They showered together again, this time without soap, and listened entranced to the man across the courtyard, also showering and singing his aria, Mann und Weib, und Weib und Mann. Aperitifs were brought to their room on a tray; fine slices of lemon were arranged on a silver dish, and there was ice stacked in a silver tumbler. They took their drinks on to the balcony where they leaned on the wall lined with geraniums, smoking a joint and watching the sunset and the passers-by.

  Thus the pattern, with minor variations, was set for three days. Though they stared across the water at the large church, and mentioned from time to time the name of a restaurant given to them by friends at home, or in the heat of midday evoked the shadowy coolness of a certain street which ran along a neglected canal, they made no serious attempt to leave the hotel. On the afternoon of the second day they dressed for an expedition, but fell on to the bed, pulling at each other’s clothes, and laughing at their hopelessness. They sat on the balcony late into the night, with bottles of wine, in the light of the neon sign which obliterated the stars, and talked again of childhood, sometimes remembering events for the first time, formulating theories about the past and about memory itself; each let the other talk for as long as an hour without interrupting. They celebrated their mutual understanding, and the fact that despite their familiarity with each other, they could still recover such passion. They congratulated themselves. They wondered at and described this passion; it meant more than it could have seven years before. They listed their friends, married and unmarried couples; none seemed quite so successfully in love as they were. They did not discuss their stay with Robert and Caroline. Their only references were in passing: ‘On the way back from Robert’s flat I thought …’ or ‘I was looking at the stars from that balcony …’

  Their talk turned to orgasms, and to whether men and women experience a similar, or radically different, sensation; radically different, they agreed, but was this difference culturally induced? Colin said that he had long envied women’s orgasms, and that there were times when he felt an aching emptiness, close to desire, between his scrotum and his anus; he thought this might be an approximation of womanly desire. Mary described, and they both derided, an experiment reported by a newspaper, the purpose of which was to answer this very question, did men and women feel the same. Volunteers of both sexes were given a list of two hundred phrases, adjectives and adverbs, and asked to ring the ten that best described their experience of orgasm. A second group was asked to look at the results and guess the sex of each volunteer, and since they made as many correct as incorrect identifications, it was concluded that men and women feel the same. They moved on, inevitably, to the politics of sex and talked, as they had many times before, of patriarchy which, Mary said, was the most powerful single principle of organization shaping institutions and individual lives. Colin argued, as he always did, that class dominance was more fundamental. Mary shook her head, but they battled to find common ground.

  They returned to their parents; which of the mothers’, which of the fathers’ characteristics they had acquired: how the relationship between mother and father exerted its influence on their own lives, on their own relationships. The word ‘relationship’ was on their lips so frequently they sickened of it. They agreed there was no reasonable substitute. Mary talked of herself as a parent, Colin talked of himself as a pseudo-parent to Mary’s children; all speculation, all anxieties and memories were marshalled into the service of theories about their own and each other’s character as if, finding themselves reborn through an unexpected passion, they had to invent themselves anew, name themselves as a newborn child, or a new character, a sudden intruder in a novel, is named. At various times they returned to the subject of ageing; of the sudden (or was it gradual?) discovery that they were no longer the youngest adults they knew, that their bodies were heavier, no longer self-regulating mechanisms that could be ignored, but rather must be watched closely and consciously exercised. They agreed that while this idyll rejuvenated them, they were not deluded; they agreed they were growing older and one day would die, and these mature reflections, they thought, gave that passion an added profundity.

  In fact it was agreement that enabled them to move through so many topics with such patience, that caused them to be still talking in low voices on the balcony at four in the morning, the polythene bag of marihuana, the Rizla packets and the empty wine bottles at their feet; agreement not simply as a consequence of their respective states of mind, but as a rhetorical mode, a means of proceeding. The unspoken assumption in previous conversations about important matters (and these, over the years, had, of course, occurred less frequently) was that a subject was best explored by taking the opposing view, even if it was not quite the view one held oneself; a considered opinion was less important than the fact of opposition. The idea, if it was an idea and not a habit of mind, was that adversaries, fearing contradiction, would be more rigorous in argument, like scientists proposing innovation to their colleagues. What tended to happen, to Colin and Mary at least, was that subjects were not explored so much as defensively reiterated, or forced into elaborate irrelevancies, and suffused with irritability. Now, freed by mutual encouragement they roamed, like children at seaside rockpools, from one matter to another.

  But for all this discussion, this analysis which extended to the very means of discussion itself, they could not talk about the cause of their renewal. Their conversation, in essence, was no less celebratory than their lovemaking; in both they lived inside the moment. They clung to each other, in talk as in sex. In the shower they joked about handcuffing themselves together and throwing away the key. The idea aroused them. Without wasting time on towels or on shutting off the water, they ran back to bed to consider it in greater depth. They took to muttering in each other’s ear as they made love, stories that came from nowhere, out of the dark, stories that produced moans and giggles of hopeless abandon, that won from the spellbound listener consent to a lifetime of subjection and humiliation. Mary muttered her intention of hiring a surgeon to amputate Colin’s arms and legs. She would keep him in a room in her house, and use him exclusively for sex, sometimes lending him out to friends. Colin invented for Mary a large, intricate machine, made of steel, painted bright red and powered by electricity; it had pistons and controls, straps and dials, and made a low hum when it was switched on. Colin hummed in Mary’s ear. Once Mary was strapped in, fitted to tubes that fed and evacuated her body, the machine would fuck her, not just for hours or weeks, but for years, on and on, for the rest of her life, till she was dead and on even after that, till Colin, or his solicitor, switched it off.

  Afterwards, once they were showered and perfumed and sat sipping their drinks on the balcony, staring over the geranium pots at the tourists in the street below, their muttered stories seemed quite tasteless, silly, and they did not really talk about them.

  Through the warm nights, in the narrow single bed, their most characteristic embrace in sleep was for Mary to put her arms round Colin’s neck, and Colin his arms round Mary’s waist, and for their legs to cross. Throughout the day, even when all subjects and all desire were momentarily exhausted, they stayed close, sometimes stifled by the very warmth of the other’s body, but unable to break away for a minute, as though they feared that solitude, private thoughts, would destroy what they shared.

  It was not an unreasonable fear. On the morning of the fourth day, Mary woke before Colin and eased herself carefully out of the bed. She washed and dressed quickly, and while her movements were not stealthy, they were not careless either; when she opened the door of their room it was a smooth, co-ordinated action, not the customary flick of the wrist. Outside it was cooler than was usual at ten-thirty, and the air was exceptionally clear; the sun appeared to sculpt objects in fine detail, and set them off with the darkest shadows. Mary crossed the pavement to the pontoon and took a table on its furthest edge, nearest the water and in full sunlight. Her bare arms felt cold however, and she shivered a little as she put on her dark glasses and
looked round for a waiter. She was the café’s only customer, perhaps its first for the day.

  A waiter parted the beaded walk-through of a door across the pavement and indicated that he had seen her. He stepped out of sight and reappeared a little later, walking towards her with a tray on which there was a large, steaming mug. When he set it down, he made it clear that it was on the house and, though Mary would have preferred coffee to hot chocolate, she accepted it gratefully. The waiter smiled and turned briskly on his heel. Mary turned her chair a little inland so she could look towards the balcony and the shuttered windows of their room. Not far from her feet water lapped soothingly against the rubber tyres that protected the pontoon from the iron barges when they moored. Within ten minutes, as though encouraged by her presence there, customers had occupied a few more tables and now her own waiter was joined by another and both were kept busy.

  She drank her hot chocolate and looked across the channel to the great church on the other side and the houses packed around it. Occasionally a car on the quayside caught the morning sun on its windscreen and signalled it back across the water. It was too distant to make out people. Then, as she set down her empty cup on the table, she looked round and saw Colin fully dressed on the balcony, smiling at her across a distance of some sixty feet. Mary returned his smile warmly, but when Colin shifted his position a little, as though stepping around something at his feet, her smile froze, and then faded. She looked down puzzled, and glanced over her shoulder across the water again. Two rowing-boats were passing, and their occupants were calling excitedly to one another. Mary looked towards the balcony, and was able to smile again, but once Colin had gone inside, and in the few seconds she had to herself before he joined her, she stared unseeing at the distant quayside, her head cocked, as though struggling, without success, with her memory. When Colin came they kissed and sat close, and remained there two hours.