Black Dogs

by Ian Mcewan

  After twenty minutes the berger turned through a gap in the pines and the dog steered the flock through. Bernard and June had passed this way three or four times before. They found themselves standing in a small clearing on the edge of a cliff, with the lowering sun, the receding ridges of purplish low hills, and the distant sea spread before them. It was the very prospect they had admired in morning light from above Lodève three days before. They were on the edge of the plateau, about to descend. They were returning home.

  Thrilled, already seized by an excited premonition of a joy that would fill her life, then Jenny’s, then mine and our children’s, June turned with sheep bumping her in the narrow space in front of the cliff edge to thank the berger. The dog was already edging the flock down a narrow cobbled path which ran under a great mass of rock, the Pas de l’Azé. ‘It’s so beautiful,’ June shouted against the bells. The man looked at her. Her terms meant nothing to him. He turned, and they followed him down.

  Perhaps thoughts of home were having their effect on the berger too, or perhaps, and this was Bernard’s more cynical interpretation, he already had a plan in mind by becoming more talkative during the walk down. It was not usual, the berger explained, to bring the sheep off the Causse as early as this. The transhumance started in September. But his brother had died in a motorbike accident not so long ago and he was coming down to arrange various affairs. Two flocks would merge and some of the sheep would be sold off, there was property to sell and debts to settle. This account, with long pauses, took them along a path which descended through an oak wood, past a ruined bergerie which belonged to the man’s uncle, across a dry gully, then through more holm oaks until they emerged finally round a hill topped with pines on to a broad sunlit shelf of terraced land which overhung a valley of vineyards and oaks. Down there, barely a mile away was the village of St Privat, perched on the edge of a small gorge cut by a tiny stream. Sitting comfortably among the hanging terraces, facing full on down the valley into the setting sun was a bergerie of grey stone. Immediately to one side was a small field into which the dog was chasing the last of the sheep. Over to the north, rising sheer and bending round towards the north-west in a vast amphitheatre of rock were the cliffs of the plateau’s edge.

  The berger invited them to come and sit outside the bergerie while he went off to his spring for water. June and Bernard sat on a stone ledge with their backs to the warm irregular wall and watched the sun sink down behind the hills towards Lodève. As it did the light turned purplish and through it a new cool breeze sifted, and the cicadas modulated their key. Neither spoke. The berger returned with a wine bottle full of water and they passed it around. Bernard carved Mme Auriac’s peaches into pieces and shared them out. The berger, whose name they still did not know, had used up his conversation and had retreated into himself. But his silence was soothing, companionable, and as they sat there, three in a row, June in the middle, watching the western sky flare, she felt a peace and spaciousness spread in her. Her contentment had a depth and tranquillity that made her think she had never really known happiness before. What she had experienced two nights earlier at the Dolmen de la Prunarède had been a premonition of this, frustrated by busy talk, good intentions, schemes for improvements in the material conditions of strangers. What lay between that time and this were the black dogs, and the oval of light which she could no longer see, but whose existence underpinned her joy.

  She was safe on this little piece of land which crouched under the high cliff of the plateau. She was delivered into herself, she was changed. This, now, here. Surely this was what existence strained to be, and so rarely had the chance, to savour itself fully in the present, this moment in all its simplicity – the smooth darkening summer air, the scent of thyme crushed underfoot, her hunger, her slaked thirst, the warm stone she could feel through her shirt, the after-taste of peach, the stickiness on her hand, her tired legs, her sweaty, sunny, dusty fatigue, this obscure and lovely place, and these two men, one whom she knew and loved, the other whose silence she trusted and who was waiting, she was certain, for her to take the next, inevitable step.

  When she asked if she might see inside the bergerie he seemed to be on his feet before her question was complete, and walking to the front door at the north end. Bernard said he was too comfortable to move. June followed the berger into total darkness. He lit a lamp and held it high for her. She advanced one or two paces and stopped. There was a sweet smell of straw and dust. She was in a long, barn-like structure with a pitched roof, divided into two storeys by an arched stone ceiling which had collapsed in one corner. The floor was trodden earth. June stood in silence for a minute, and the man waited patiently. When at last she turned and asked, ‘Combien?’ he was immediately ready with his price.

  It cost the equivalent of thirty-five pounds, and came with twenty acres of land. June had enough saved at home to go ahead, but it was not until the following afternoon that she summoned the courage to tell Bernard what she had done. To her surprise he did not try to oppose her with a barrage of sensible arguments about their needing to buy a house in England first, or the immorality of owning two houses when so many people everywhere were homeless. Jenny was born the following year and June did not return to the bergerie until the summer of 1948 when she set in hand a number of modest improvements. Various new buildings in the local style were added to accommodate the growing family. The spring was properly tapped in 1955. In 1958 the electricity supply was installed. Over the years June repaired the terraces, tapped a second smaller spring to irrigate the peach and olive orchards she had planted, and made a charming and very English maze out of the box shrubs that grew on the hillside.

  In 1951, after her third child was born, June decided to live in France. Most of the time she kept the children with her. Occasionally, they had long periods with their father in London. In 1957 they attended the local schools in St Jean de la Blacquière. In 1960 Jenny went to the lycée in Lodève. Throughout their childhood, the Tremaine children were posted back and forth between England and France, shepherded by kindly ladies on trains or by brisk Universal Aunts, between parents who would not live together or separate definitively. For June, convinced of the existence of evil, and of God, and certain that both were incompatible with communism, found she could neither persuade Bernard, nor let him go. And he in his turn loved her and was infuriated by her self-enclosed life devoid of social responsibility.

  Bernard left the Party and became a ‘voice of reason’ during the Suez Crisis. His biography of Nasser brought him to attention and it was shortly after this that he became the lively, acceptable radical on BBC discussion programmes. He stood as the Labour candidate in a by-election in 1961 and failed honourably. In 1964 he tried again and succeeded. It was about this time that Jenny went off to university and June, fearing that her daughter was too much under Bernard’s influence, wrote during her first term one of those old-fashioned, advice-filled letters that parents sometimes write to their departing children. In it June wrote that she had no faith in the abstract principles according to which ‘committed intellectuals think to engineer social change’. All she could believe in, she told Jenny, ‘are short-term, practical, realisable goals. Everyone has to take responsibility for his own life and attempt to improve it, spiritually in the first instance, materially if need be. I don’t give a damn about a person’s politics. As far as I’m concerned, Hugh Wall (a political colleague of Bernard’s) whom I met last year at a dinner in London and who talked the whole evening over everyone at the table is no better than the tyrants he loves to denounce ...’

  June published three books in her lifetime. In the mid-fifties, Mystical Grace: Selected Writings of St Teresa of Avila. A decade later, Wild Flowers of Languedoc, and two years after that, a short practical pamphlet, Ten Meditations. As the years passed, her occasional trips to London became less frequent. She remained at the bergerie, studying, meditating, tending the property, until her illness forced her to England in 1982.

  Recentl
y, I came across two pages of shorthand dating from my very last conversation with June, a month before she died in the summer of 1987: ‘Jeremy, that morning I came face to face with evil. I didn’t quite know it at the time, but I sensed it in my fear – these animals were the creations of debased imaginations, of perverted spirits no amount of social theory could account for. The evil I’m talking about lives in us all. It takes hold in an individual, in private lives, within a family, and then it’s children who suffer most. And then, when the conditions are right, in different countries, at different times, a terrible cruelty, a viciousness against life erupts, and everyone is surprised by the depth of hatred within himself. Then it sinks back and waits. It’s something in our hearts.

  ‘I can see you think I’m a crank. It doesn’t matter. This is what I know. Human nature, the human heart, the spirit, the soul, consciousness itself – call it what you like – in the end, it’s all we’ve got to work with. It has to develop and expand, or the sum of our misery will never diminish. My own small discovery has been that this change is possible, it is within our power. Without a revolution of the inner life, however slow, all our big designs are worthless. The work we have to do is with ourselves if we’re ever going to be at peace with each other. I’m not saying it’ll happen. There’s a good chance it won’t. I’m saying it’s our only chance. If it does, and it could take generations, the good that flows from it will shape our societies in an unprogrammed, unforeseen way, under the control of no single group of people or set of ideas ...’

  As soon as I had finished reading, Bernard’s ghost was before me. He crossed his long legs and made a steeple of his fingers. ‘Face to face with evil? I’ll tell you what she was up against that day – a good lunch and a spot of malicious village gossip! As for the inner life, my dear boy, try having one of those on an empty stomach. Or without clean water. Or when you’re sharing a room with seven others. Now, of course, when we all have second homes in France ... You see, the way things are going on this overcrowded little planet, we do need a set of ideas, and bloody good ones too!’

  June drew breath. They were squaring up ...

  Since June’s death, when we inherited the bergerie, Jenny and I and our children have spent all our holidays here. There have been times in the summer when I have found myself alone in the last purple light of the evening, in the hammock under the tamarisk tree where June used to lie, wondering at all the world historical and personal forces, the huge and tiny currents, that had to align and combine to bring this place into our possession: a world war, a young couple at the end of it impatient to test their freedom, a government official in his car, the Resistance movement, the Abwehr, a penknife, Mme Auriac’s walk – ‘doux et beau’, a young man’s death on a motorcycle, the debts his shepherd brother had to clear, and June finding security and transformation on this sunny shelf of land.

  But it is the black dogs I return to most often. They trouble me when I consider what happiness I owe them, especially when I allow myself to think of them, not as animals, but as spirit hounds, incarnations. June told me that throughout her life she sometimes used to see them, really see them, on the retina in the giddy seconds before sleep. They are running down the path into the Gorge of the Vis, the bigger one trailing blood on the white stones. They are crossing the shadow line and going deeper where the sun never reaches, and the amiable drunken mayor will not be sending his men in pursuit for the dogs are crossing the river in the dead of night, and forcing a way up the other side to cross the Causse; and as sleep rolls in they are receding from her, black stains in the grey of the dawn, fading as they move into the foothills of the mountains from where they will return to haunt us, somewhere in Europe, in another time.