Amsterdam

by Ian Mcewan

  In a matter of minutes, it seemed, he was standing on top of the crag, regaining his breath and congratulating himself on his change of plan. He had before him a walk that Wainwright’s The Southern Fells described as “full of interest”; the path rose and fell by little tarns and crossed marshes, rocky outcrops, and stony plateaus to reach the Glaramara summits. This was the prospect that had soothed him the week before as he was falling asleep.

  He had been walking a quarter of an hour and was just climbing a slope that ended in a great tilted mottled rock slab when it finally happened, just as he had hoped it would: he was relishing his solitude, he was happy in his body, his mind was contentedly elsewhere, when he heard the music he had been looking for, or at least he heard a clue to its form.

  It came as a gift. A large gray bird flew up with a loud alarm call as he approached. As it gained height and wheeled away over the valley, it gave out a piping sound on three notes, which he recognized as the inversion of a line he had already scored for a piccolo. How elegant, how simple. Turning the sequence round opened up the idea of a plain and beautiful song in common time, which he could almost hear. But not quite. An image came to him of a set of unfolding steps, sliding and descending—from the trap door of a loft, or from the door of a light plane. One note lay over and suggested the next. He heard it, he had it, then it was gone. There was a glow of a tantalizing afterimage and the fading call of a sad little tune. This synesthesia was a torment. These notes were perfectly interdependent, little polished hinges swinging the melody through its perfect arc. He could almost hear it again as he reached the top of the angled rock slab and paused to reach into his pocket for notebook and pencil. It wasn’t entirely sad. There was merriness there too, an optimistic resolve against the odds. Courage.

  He was beginning to scribble out the fragments of what he had heard, hoping to will the rest into being, when he was aware of another sound, not imagined, not a bird call, but the murmur of a voice. He was so intent that he almost resisted the temptation to look up, but he could not help himself. Peering over the top of the slab, which jutted up over a thirty-foot drop, he found himself looking down on a miniature tarn, hardly bigger than a large puddle. Standing on the grass that fringed it on its far side was the woman he had seen hurrying past, the woman in blue. Facing her and talking in a low, constant drone was a man who was certainly not dressed for rambling. His face was long and thin, like some snouty animal’s. He wore an old tweed jacket and gray flannel trousers and a flat cloth cap, with a scrap of dirty white cloth wrapped round his neck. A hill farmer possibly, or a friend who disdained hiking and all the gear who had come up to meet her. The very assignation Clive had imagined.

  This stark surprise, these vivid figures among the rocks, seemed to be there for his benefit alone. It was as if they were actors striking up a tableau whose meaning he was supposed to guess, as if they were not quite serious, only pretending not to know that he was watching. Whatever they were about, Clive’s immediate thought was as clear as a neon sign: I am not here.

  He ducked down and continued with his notes. If he could get the known elements on paper now, he could quietly remove himself to some place farther along the ridge and work at the rest. He ignored the woman’s voice when he heard it. Already it was hard to capture what had seemed so clear a minute before. For a while he floundered, and then he had it again, that overlaid quality, so obvious when it was before him, so elusive the moment his attention relaxed. He was crossing out notes as fast as he was setting them down, but when he heard the woman’s voice rise to a sudden shout, his hand froze.

  He knew it was a mistake, he knew he should have kept writing, but once again he peered over the rock. She had turned to face in Clive’s direction now. He guessed her to be in her late thirties. She had a small, dark, boyish face and curly black hair. She and the man knew each other, then, for they were arguing—a marital row, most likely. She had put her pack on the ground and was standing in an attitude of defiance, feet apart, hands on hips, head tilted slightly back. The man took a step toward her and seized her by the elbow. She shook him off with a sharp downward movement of her arm. Then she shouted something and picked up her pack and tried to sling it across her shoulder. But he had hold of it too and was pulling. For a few seconds they tussled, and the pack was pulled this way and that. Then the man had it, and with a single contemptuous movement, a mere wave of the wrist, tossed it into the tarn, where it bobbed half submerged, slowly sinking.

  The woman took two quick paces into the water, then changed her mind. As she turned back, the man made another attempt to take her arm. All this time they were talking, arguing, but the sound of their voices reached Clive only intermittently. He lay on his tilted slab, pencil between his fingers, notebook in his other hand, and sighed. Was he really going to intervene? He imagined running down there. The point at which he reached them was when the possibilities would branch: the man might run off; the woman would be grateful, and together they could descend to the main some snouty. Even this least probable of outcomes would destroy his fragile inspiration. The man was more likely to redirect his aggression at Clive while the woman looked on, helpless. Or gratified, for that was possible too; they might be closely bound, they might both turn on him for presuming to interfere.

  The woman shouted again, and Clive, lying pressed against the rock, closed his eyes. Something precious, a little jewel, was rolling away from him. There had been another possibility: that instead of climbing up here, he had decided to go down to Sty Head, past the Day-Glo schoolchildren, to take the Corridor Route up Scafell Pike. Then whatever was happening here was bound to take its course. Their fate, his fate. The jewel, the melody. Its momentousness pressed upon him. So much depended on it—the symphony, the celebration, his reputation, the lamented century’s ode to joy. He did not doubt that what he half heard could bear the weight. In its simplicity lay all the authority of a lifetime’s work. He also had no doubt that it was not a piece of music that was simply waiting to be discovered; what he had been doing, until interrupted, was creating it, forging it out of the call of a bird, taking advantage of the alert passivity of an engaged creating mind. What was clear now was the pressure of choice: he should either go down and protect the woman, if she needed protection, or he should creep away round the side of Glaramara to find a sheltered place to continue his work, if it was not already lost. He could not remain here doing nothing.

  At the sound of an angry voice he opened his eyes and pulled himself up to take another look. The man had hold of her wrist and was trying to drag her round the tarn toward the shelter of the sheer rock face directly below Clive. She was scrabbling on the ground with her free hand, possibly looking for a stone to use as a weapon, but that only made it easier for him to jerk her along. Her backpack had sunk from sight. All the while he was talking to her, his voice having dropped again to its unceasing, indistinct drone. She made a sudden pleading whimpering sound, and Clive knew exactly what it was he had to do. Even as he was easing himself back down the slope, he understood that his hesitation had been a sham. He had decided at the very moment he was interrupted.

  On level ground he hurried back along the way he had come and then dropped down along the western side of the ridge in a long arc of detour. Twenty minutes later he found a flat-topped rock to use as a table and stood hunched over his scribble. There was almost nothing there now. He was trying to call it back, but his concentration was being broken by another voice, the insistent, interior voice of self-justification: whatever it might have involved—violence, or the threat of violence, or his embarrassed apologies, or, ultimately, a statement to the police—if he had approached the couple, a pivotal moment in his career would have been destroyed. The melody could not have survived the psychic flurry. Given the width of the ridge and the numerous paths that crossed it, how easily he could have missed them. It was as if he weren’t there. He wasn’t there. He was in his music His fate, their fate, separate paths. It was not his business. This
was his business, and it wasn’t easy, and he wasn’t asking for anyone’s help.

  At last he managed to calm himself and begin to work his way back. Here were the three notes of the birdcall, here they were inverted for the piccolo, and here was the beginning of the overlapping, extending steps …

  He stayed there for an hour, crouched above his writing. At last he put the notebook in his pocket and walked on at a quick pace, keeping all the while to the western side of the ridge and soon dropping down to the fells. It took him three hours to reach the hotel, and just as he did, the rain came again. All the more reason, then, to cancel the rest of his stay and pack his bag and ask the waitress to call him a taxi. He had got what he wanted from the Lake District. He could work again on the train, and when he was home he would take this sublime sequence of notes and the lovely harmony he had written for it to the piano and set free its beauty and sadness.

  Surely it was creative excitement that made him pace up and down in the cramped hotel bar, waiting for his taxi, stopping now and then to gaze at the stuffed fox crouching in its evergreen foliage. It was excitement that caused him to step out into the lane a couple of times to see if his car was coming. He longed to be leaving the valley. When his taxi was announced, he hurried out and swung his bag onto the back seat and told the driver to hurry. He wanted to be away, he was longing to be on a train, hurtling southward, away from the Lakes. He wanted the anonymity of the city again, and the confinement of his studio, and—he had been thinking about this scrupulously—surely it was excitement that made him feel this way, not shame.

  IV

  i

  Rose Garmony woke at six-thirty, and even before her eyes were open the names of three children were on her mind, on her mind’s tongue: Leonora, John, Candy. Careful not to disturb her husband, she eased herself out of bed and reached for her dressing gown. She had reread the notes last thing at night and met Candy’s parents in the afternoon. The other two cases were routine: a diagnostic bronchoscopy following the inhalation of a peanut, and the insertion of a chest drain for a lung abscess. Candy was a quiet little West Indian girl whose hair had been kept back by her mother all through the dreary routines of a long illness. The open-heart procedure would last at least three hours, possibly five, and the outcome was uncertain. The father ran a grocery in Brixton and brought to the meeting a basket of pineapples, mangoes, and grapes—propitiation for the savage god of the knife.

  The scent of this fruit filled the kitchen now as Mrs. Garmony entered barefoot to fill the kettle. While it heated she crossed the apartment’s narrow hallway to her office and packed her briefcase, pausing to glance at the notes once more. She returned a call to the party chairman, after which she wrote a note to her grownup son who was asleep in the guest room; then she went back to the kitchen to make the tea. She took her cup to the kitchen window and, without moving the lace curtain, looked down into the street. She counted eight of them on the pavement of Lord North Street, three more than were there the same time yesterday. There was no sign yet of the TV cameras, or of the policemen the home secretary had personally promised. She should have made Julian stay over at Carlton Gardens rather than here, in her old flat. They were supposed to be competitors, these people, but they stood in a loose, chatty group, like men outside a pub on a summer’s evening. One of them was kneeling on the ground, attaching something to an aluminum pole. Then he stood and scanned the windows and seemed to see her. She watched expressionlessly as a camera came bobbing and telescoping toward her. When it was almost level with her face, she stepped back from the window and went upstairs to dress.

  A quarter of an hour later she took another peep, this time from the sitting room window, two floors up. She felt just as she liked to be before a difficult day at the children’s hospital: calm, alert, impatient to begin the work. No guests the night before, no wine at supper, an hour with the notes, seven hours’ unbroken sleep. She would let nothing break this mood, so she stared down at the group—there were nine of them now—with controlled fascination. The man had collapsed his extendable pole and rested it against the railings. One of the others was bringing a tray of coffees from the takeaway shop on Horseferry Road. What could they ever hope to get that they didn’t already have? And so early in the morning. What sort of satisfaction could they have from this kind of work? And why was it they looked so alike, these door-steppers, as though drawn from one tiny gene puddle of humanity? Large-faced, jowly, pushy men in leather jackets who spoke with the same accent, an odd blend of fake Cockney and fake posh, which they delivered with the same pleading, belligerent whine. ’Ere, this way please, Mrs. Garmony! Rose!

  Fully dressed now and ready to leave, she carried his tea and the morning papers into the darkened bedroom. She hesitated at the foot of the bed. Lately his days had been so vile, she was reluctant to wake him into another one. He had driven from Wiltshire last night, then stayed up late sipping scotch, she knew, in front of a video of Bergman’s The Magic Flute. Then he had pulled out all Molly Lane’s letters, the ones that stupidly indulged his grotesque cravings. Thank God that episode was over, thank God the woman was dead. The letters were still spread out over the carpet and he would need to put them away before the cleaning lady came. Only the top of his head was visible on the pillow—fifty-two, and his hair still black. She ruffled it gently. Sometimes, on the rounds, a nurse might wake a child for her this way, and Rose was always touched by those seconds of confusion in some small boy’s eyes as he grasped that he was not at home and that the touch was not his mother’s. “Darling,” she whispered.

  His voice was muffled by the winter duvet. “Are they out there?”

  “Nine of them.”

  “Fuck.”

  “I’ve got to run. I’ll phone you. Take this.”

  He pushed the bedclothes clear of his face and sat up. “Of course. The little girl. Candy. Good luck.”

  They kissed lightly on the lips as she put the cup in his hands. She laid her hand on his cheek and reminded him of the letters on the floor. Then she stepped away quietly and went downstairs to phone her secretary at the hospital. In the hall she put on a thick woolen overcoat, checked herself in the mirror, and was about to pick up her case, keys, and scarf when she changed her mind and went back up. She found him as she guessed she would, on his back, arms outspread, dozing, the tea cooling by a pile of departmental memos. There hadn’t been time in the past week, with the crisis, and the photos to be published tomorrow, Friday, there simply hadn’t been a moment when she’d been able or wanted to discuss her cases with him, and though she knew it was an old politician’s skill, remembering the names, she was touched that he’d made the effort. She tapped his hand and whispered.

  “Julian.”

  “Oh God,” he said without opening his eyes. “First meeting’s at half eight. Got to walk past the snakes.”

  She spoke in the voice she used to calm desperate parents: slow, light, airy rather than grave. “It’s going to be fine, perfectly fine.”

  He smiled at her, completely unconvinced. She leaned over and spoke into his ear. “Trust me.”

  Downstairs, she checked herself in the mirror once more. She buttoned her coat fully and arranged the scarf to half conceal her face. She picked up her case and let herself out of the flat. Down in the entrance hall she paused by the front door with her hand on the lock, preparing herself to open it and make a dash for her car.

  “Oi! Rosy! This way! Looking sad now, please, Mrs. Garmony.”

  ii

  About the same time, three miles to the west, Vernon Halliday was waking from, then tumbling back into, dreams of running, or memories of running vivified by their dreamlike form, dream-memories of running down corridors of dusty red carpet toward a boardroom, late, late again, late to the point of apparent contempt, running from the last meeting to this, with seven more to get through before lunch, outwardly walking, inwardly sprinting, all week long, laying out the arguments before the furious grammarians, and then the Judge
’s skeptical board of directors, its production staff, its lawyers and then his own, and then George Lane’s people and the Press Council and a live television audience and innumerable, unmemorable airless radio studios. Vernon made his public-interest case for publishing the photographs much as he had made it to Clive, but sleekly, at greater length and speed, with more urgency and definition and proliferating examples, with pie charts, block graphs, spreadsheets, and soothing precedents. But mostly he was running, weaving dangerously toward taxis across crowded streets and out of taxis across marbled foyers and into lifts, and out of lifts along corridors that sloped exasperatingly upward, slowing him down, making him later. He woke briefly and noted that his wife, Mandy, had already left the bed; then his eyes were closing and he was back there again, lifting his briefcase high as he waded through water, or blood, or tears coursing over a red carpet that brought him to an amphitheater where he mounted a podium to make his case while all around him was a silence that towered like redwoods, and in the gloom, dozens of averted eyes, and someone walking away from him across the circus sawdust who looked like Molly but would not answer when he called.

  At last he woke fully into the calm of morning sounds—birdsong, the distant radio in the kitchen, the soft closing of a cupboard door. He pushed the covers away and lay on his back naked, feeling the centrally heated air drying the clamminess on his chest. His dreams were simply a kaleidoscopic fracturing of his week, fair comment on its pace and emotional demands but omitting—with the unthinking partisan bias of the unconscious—the game plan, the rationale whose evolving logic had in fact kept him sane. Publication day was tomorrow, Friday, with one picture held over to Monday to keep the story alive. And the story seethed with life, it had kicking legs and was running even faster than Vernon. For days, since the injunction had been lifted, the Judge had trailed the Garmony story, stoking and fine-tuning public curiosity so that photographs no one had ever seen had become an icon in the political culture, from Parliament to pub, an item of general discussion, a subject on which no important player could afford to be without an opinion. The paper had covered the courtroom battles, the icy support of fraternal government colleagues, the dithering of the prime minister, the “grave concern” of senior opposition figures, and the musings of the great and the good. The Judge had thrown open its pages to denunciations by those opposed to publication, and it had sponsored a televised debate on the need for a privacy law.