by Ian Mcewan
“In here,” George said, and led the way into the living room. There was a large brown envelope on a chair. As George was reaching for it, Vernon had time to glance around. She could walk in at any moment. There was a book on Italian gardens lying face-down on the floor and, on a low table, three wineglasses, each with a lining of grayish green mold. Perhaps he himself had been drinking from one. He tried to remember his last visit here, but the occasions blurred. There were long conversations about her move to the main house, which she dreaded and resisted, knowing it would be a one-way journey. The alternative was a nursing home. Vernon and all her other friends advised her to stay in Holland Park, believing familiarity would serve her better. How wrong they had been. She would have been freer, even under the strictest institutional regime, than she turned out to be in George’s care.
He was gesturing Vernon into a chair, relishing the moment as he pulled the photographs from the envelope. Vernon was still thinking of Molly. Were there moments of clarity as she slid under, when she felt abandoned by the friends who did not come to visit her, not knowing they were barred by George? If she cursed her friends, she surely would have cursed Vernon.
George had placed the photographs—three ten-by-eights—face-down on his lap. He was enjoying what he took by Vernon’s silence to be speechless impatience. He piled on the supposed agony by talking with slow deliberation.
“I should say one thing first. I’ve no idea why she took these, but one thing is sure. It could have been done only with Garmony’s consent. He’s looking straight at the lens. The copyright was hers, and as the sole trustee of her estate, I effectively own it. It goes without saying, I shall expect the Judge to protect its sources.”
He peeled one off and passed it across. For a moment it made no sense, beyond its glossy blacks and whites; then it resolved into a medium close-up. Incredible. Vernon stretched out his hand for another; head to foot and tightly cropped. And then the third, three-quarter profile. He turned back to the first, all other thoughts suddenly dispelled. Then he studied the second and third again, seeing them fully now and feeling waves of distinct responses: astonishment first, followed by a wild inward hilarity. Suppressing it gave him a sense of levitating from his chair. Next he experienced ponderous responsibility—or was it power? A man’s life, or at least his career, was in his hands. And who could tell, perhaps Vernon was in a position to change the country’s future for the better. And his paper’s circulation.
“George,” he said at last, “I need to think about this very carefully.”
v
Half an hour later Vernon left George’s house with the envelope in his hands. He stopped a cab, and having asked the driver to start his clock and stay put by the side of the road, he sat in the back for a few minutes, soothed by the engine’s throb, massaging the right side of his head and considering what to do. Finally he asked for South Kensington.
The light was on in the studio, but Vernon did not ring the bell. At the top of the steps he scribbled a note, which he thought the housekeeper was likely to read first and which he therefore kept vague. He folded it over twice before pushing it through the front door and hurrying back to the waiting taxi. Yes, on one condition only: that you’d do the same for me. V.
III
i
As Clive had predicted, the melody was elusive as long as he remained in London, in his studio. Each day he made attempts, little sketches, bold stabs, but he produced nothing but quotations, thinly or well disguised, of his own work. Nothing sprang free in its own idiom, with its own authority, to offer the element of surprise that would be the guarantee of originality. Each day, after abandoning the attempt, he committed himself to easier, duller tasks, like fleshing out orchestrations, rewriting messy pages of manuscript, and elaborating on a sliding resolution of minor chords that marked the opening of the slow movement. Three appointments evenly spread over eight days kept him from leaving for the Lake District: he had said months before that he would attend a fund-raising dinner; as a favor to a nephew who worked in radio, he had agreed to give a five-minute talk, and he had let himself be persuaded into judging a composition prize at a local school. Finally, he had to delay yet another day because Vernon asked to meet him.
During this time, when he wasn’t working, Clive studied his maps, rubbed liquid wax into his walking boots, and checked his equipment—important when planning a winter walk in the mountains. It would have been possible to back out of his engagements by assuming the license of the free artistic spirit, but he loathed such arrogance. He had a number of friends who played the genius card when it suited, failing to show up for this or that in the belief that whatever local upset it caused, it could only increase respect for the compelling nature of their high calling. These types—novelists were by far the worst—managed to convince friends and families that not only their working hours but every nap and stroll, every fit of silence, depression, or drunkenness, bore the exculpatory ticket of high intent. A mask for mediocrity, was Clive’s view. He didn’t doubt that the calling was high, but bad behavior was not a part of it. Perhaps every century there was an exception or two to be made. Beethoven, yes; Dylan Thomas, most certainly not.
He told no one he was stalled in his work. Instead, he said he was off on a short walking holiday. In fact, he didn’t regard himself as blocked at all. Sometimes the work was hard, and you had to do whatever experience had taught you was most effective. So he stayed on in London, attended the dinner, gave the talk, judged the prize, and, for the first time in his life, had a major disagreement with Vernon. It was not until the first day of March that he arrived at Euston station and found an empty first-class compartment on a train bound for Penrith.
He enjoyed long train journeys for the soothing rhythm they gave to thought—exactly what he needed after his confrontation with Vernon. But settling down in the compartment was not as easy as it should have been. Coming along the platform, in a dark mood, he had become aware of an unevenness in his stride, as though one leg had grown longer than the other. Once he had found his seat he removed his shoe and discovered a flattened black mass of chewing gum embedded deep in the zigzag tread of the sole. Upper lip arched in disgust, he was still picking, cutting, and scraping away with a pocket knife as the train began to move. Beneath the patina of grime, the gum was still slightly pink, like flesh, and the smell of peppermint was faint but distinct. How appalling, the intimate contact with the contents of a stranger’s mouth, the bottomless vulgarity of people who chewed gum and who let it fall from their lips where they stood. He returned from washing his hands, spent some minutes searching in desperation for his reading glasses before finding them on the seat beside him, and then realized he had not brought a pen. When at last he directed his attention out of the window, a familiar misanthropy had settled on him and he saw in the built landscape sliding by nothing but ugliness and pointless activity.
In his corner of West London, and in his self-preoccupied daily round, it was easy for Clive to think of civilization as the sum of all the arts, along with design, cuisine, good wine, and the like. But now it appeared that this was what it really was—square miles of meager modern houses whose principal purpose was the support of TV aerials and dishes; factories producing worthless junk to be advertised on the televisions and, in dismal lots, lorries queuing to distribute it; and everywhere else, roads and the tyranny of traffic. It looked like a raucous dinner party the morning after. No one would have wished it this way, but no one had been asked. Nobody planned it, nobody wanted it, but most people had to live in it. To watch it mile after mile, who would have guessed that kindness or the imagination, that Purcell or Britten, Shakespeare or Milton, had ever existed? Occasionally, as the train gathered speed and they swung farther away from London, countryside appeared and with it the beginnings of beauty, or the memory of it, until seconds later it dissolved into a river straightened to a concreted sluice or a sudden agricultural wilderness without hedges or trees, and roads, new roads probing en
dlessly, shamelessly, as though all that mattered was to be elsewhere. As far as the welfare of every other living form on earth was concerned, the human project was not just a failure, it was a mistake from the very beginning.
If anyone was to blame, it was Vernon. Clive had traveled this line often in the past and had never felt bleak about the view. He couldn’t put it down to chewing gum or a mislaid pen. Their row of the evening before was still sounding in his ears, and he worried that the echoes would pursue him into the mountains and destroy his peace. And it was hardly just a clash of voices he still carried with him, it was growing dismay at his friend’s behavior, and a gathering sense that he had never really known Vernon at all. He turned away from the window. To think, only the week before he had made a most unusual and intimate request of his friend. What a mistake that had been, especially now that the sensation in his left hand had vanished completely. Just a foolish anxiety brought on by Molly’s funeral. One of those occasional bouts of fearing death. But how vulnerable he had made himself that night. It was no comfort that Vernon had asked the same for himself; all it had cost him was a scribbled note pushed through the door. And perhaps that was typical of a certain … imbalance in their friendship that had always been there and that Clive had been aware of somewhere in his heart and had always pushed away, disliking himself for unworthy thoughts. Until now. Yes, a certain lopsidedness in their friendship, which, if he cared to consider, made last night’s confrontation less surprising.
There was the time, for example, way back, when Vernon stayed for a year and never once offered to pay rent. And was it not generally true that over the years it had been Clive rather than Vernon who had provided the music—in every sense? The wine, the food, the house, the musicians and other interesting company, the initiatives that took Vernon to rented houses with lively friends in Scotland, the mountains of northern Greece, and the shores of Long Island. When had Vernon ever proposed and arranged some fascinating pleasure? When had Clive last been a guest in Vernon’s house? Three or four years ago, perhaps. Why had he never properly acknowledged the act of friendship that lay behind his borrowing a large sum to see Vernon through a difficult time? When Vernon had had an infection of the spine, Clive had visited almost every day; when Clive had slipped on the pavement outside his house and broken his ankle, Vernon had sent his secretary round with a bag of books from the Judge’s books page slush pile.
Put most crudely, what did he, Clive, really derive from this friendship? He had given, but what had he ever received? What bound them? They had Molly in common, there were the accumulated years and the habits of friendship, but there was really nothing at its center, nothing for Clive. A generous explanation for the imbalance might have evoked Vernon’s passivity and self-absorption. Now, after last night, Clive was inclined to see these as merely elements of a larger fact—Vernon’s lack of principle.
Outside the compartment window, unseen by Clive, a deciduous woodland slid by, its winter geometry silvered by unmelted frost. Farther on, a slow river eased through brown fringes of sedge, and beyond the floodplain, icy pastures were laced with dry-stone walls. On the edges of a rusty-looking town, an expanse of industrial wasteland was being returned to forest; saplings in plastic tubes stretched almost to the horizon, where bulldozers were spreading topsoil. But Clive stared ahead at the empty seat opposite, lost to the self-punishing convolutions of his fervent social accounting, unknowingly bending and coloring the past through the prism of his unhappiness. Other thoughts diverted him occasionally, and for periods he read, but this was the theme of his northward journey, the long and studied redefinition of a friendship.
In Penrith some hours later, it was a great relief to step away from this brooding and go along the platform with his bags in search of a taxi. It was over twenty, and he was happy to lose himself in small talk with the driver. Because it was midweek and out of season, Clive was the hotel’s only guest. He had asked for the room he had taken three or four times before, the only one with a table to work at. Despite the cold, he opened the window wide so he could breathe the distinctive winter Lakeland air while he unpacked—peaty water, wet rock, mossy earth. He ate alone in the bar under the gaze of a stuffed fox mounted in a glass case, frozen in a predatory crouch. After a short walk in total darkness round the edges of the hotel car park, he went back indoors, said goodnight to his waitress, and returned to his tiny room. He read for an hour and then lay in darkness, listening to the swollen crashing beck, knowing that his subject was bound to return and that it would be better to indulge it now than take it with him on his walk the next day. It wasn’t the disillusionment that forced itself on him now. There were his memories of the conversation, and then something beyond—what had been said, and then what he would like to have said to Vernon now that he had had hours to reflect. It was remembering, and it was also fantasizing: he imagined a drama in which he gave himself all the best lines, resonant lines of sad reasonableness whose indictments were all the more severe and unanswerable for their compression and emotional restraint.
ii
What actually happened was this: Vernon phoned in the late morning, using words so close to those Clive had spoken the week before that they seemed like conscious quotation, a playful calling in of a debt. Vernon had to talk to him, it was very pressing, the phone wouldn’t do, he had to see him, it had to be today.
Clive hesitated. He had intended to catch the afternoon train to Penrith, but he said, “Well, come round and I’ll make supper.”
He rearranged his travel plans, brought up two good burgundies from the cellar, and cooked. Vernon arrived an hour late, and Clive’s first impression was that his friend had lost weight. His face was long and thin and unshaved, his overcoat looked many sizes too large, and when he set down his briefcase to accept a glass of wine his hand was trembling.
He downed the Chambertin Clos de Beze like a lager and said, “What a week, what a terrible week.” He held out his glass for a refill, and Clive, relieved that he had not started with the Richebourg, obliged.
“We were in court three hours this morning and we won. You’d think that would be the end of it. But the whole staff’s against me, almost all of them. The building’s in an uproar. It’s a marvel we got a paper out tonight. There’s a chapel meeting going on now and they’re certain to pass a motion of no confidence in me. Management and the board are standing firm, so that’s fine. It’s a fight to the death.”
Clive gestured toward a chair, and Vernon flopped into it, put his elbows on the kitchen table, covered his face with his hands, and wailed, “These prissy bastards! I’m trying to save their arse-wipe newspaper and their piss-pot jobs. They’d rather lose everything than dangle a single fucking modifier. They don’t live in the real world. They deserve to starve.”
Clive had no idea what Vernon was talking about, but he said nothing. Vernon’s glass was empty again, so Clive filled it and turned away to lift two poussins from the oven. Vernon heaved his briefcase onto his lap. Before opening it, he took a deep, calming breath and another slug of the Chambertin. He sprang the catches, hesitated, and spoke in a lower voice.
“Look, I’d like your view on this, not just because you’ve got a personal connection and you already know a little about it. It’s because you’re not in the business and I need an outsider’s view. I think I’m going mad …”
This last he was murmuring to himself as he delved into the case and produced a large cardboard-backed envelope, from which he pulled three black-and-white photographs. Clive turned the heat off under the sauce pans and sat down. The first photograph Vernon put in his hands showed Julian Garmony in a plain three-quarter-length dress, posing catwalk style, with arms pushing away a little from his body and one foot set in front of the other, knees slightly crooked. The false breasts under the dress were small, and the edge of one bra strap was visible. The face was made up, but not overly so, for his natural pallor served him well, and lipstick had bestowed a bow of sensuality on the unkind, na
rrow lips. The hair was distinctively Garmony’s, short, wavy, and side-parted, so that his appearance was both manicured and dissolute, and faintly bovine. This was not something that could ever be passed off as fancy dress, or a lark in front of the camera. The strained, self-absorbed expression was that of a man revealed in a sexual state. The strong gaze into the lens was consciously seductive. The lighting was soft, and cleverly done.
“Molly,” Clive said, more to himself.
“You got it in one,” Vernon said. He was watching hungrily, waiting for a reaction, and it was partly to conceal his thoughts that Clive continued to gaze into the picture. What he felt first was simple relief, for Molly. A puzzle had been solved. This was what had drawn her to Garmony—the secret life, his vulnerability, the trust that must have bound them closer. Good old Molly. She would have been creative and playful, urging him on, taking him further into the dreams that the House of Commons could not fulfill, and he would have known that he could rely on her. If she had been ill in some other kind of way, she would have taken care to destroy these pictures. Had it ever moved beyond the bedroom? To restaurants in foreign cities? Two girls on the town. Molly would have known how. She knew the clothes and the places, and she would have adored the conspiracy and fun, the silliness and sexiness of it. Clive thought again how he loved her. “Well?” Vernon said.