Amsterdam

by Ian Mcewan

  “Mr. Halliday, you have the mentality of a blackmailer, and the moral stature of a flea.”

  Vernon gasped in pained admiration, for he knew a soundbite when he heard one. The question was a plant, the line was scripted. What consummate artistry!

  She was about to say more, but he managed to lift a hand and switch off the set.

  v

  Around five o’clock that afternoon, it occurred to the many newspaper editors who had bid for Molly’s photographs that the trouble with Vernon’s paper was that it was out of step with changing times. As a leader in one broadsheet put it to its readers on Friday morning, “It seems to have escaped the attention of the editor of the Judge that the decade we live in now is not like the one before. Then, self-advancement was the watchword, while greed and hypocrisy were the rank realities. Now we live in a more reasonable, compassionate, and tolerant age in which the private and harmless preferences of individuals, however public they may be, remain their own business. Where there is no discernible issue of public interest, the old-fashioned arts of the blackmailer and self-righteous whistle-blower have no place, and while this paper does not wish to impugn the moral sensitivities of the common flea, it cannot but endorse the remarks made yesterday by …” Etc.

  Front-page headlines divided more or less equally between “blackmailer” and “flea,” and most made use of a photograph of Vernon taken at a Press Association banquet looking somewhat squiffy in a crumpled dinner jacket. On Friday afternoon, two thousand members of the Transvestite Pink Alliance marched on Judge House in their high heels, holding aloft copies of the disgraced front page and chanting in derisive falsetto. About the same time, the parliamentary party seized the moment and passed an overwhelming vote of confidence in the foreign secretary. The prime minister suddenly felt emboldened to speak up for his old friend. A broad consensus emerged over the weekend that the Judge had gone too far and was a disgusting newspaper, that Julian Garmony was a decent fellow, and that Vernon Halliday (“the Flea”) was despicable and his head was urgently needed on a plate. In the Sundays, the lifestyle sections portrayed “the new supportive wife” who had her own career and fought her husband’s corner. The editorials concentrated on the few remaining neglected aspects of Mrs. Garmony’s speech, including “love is greater than spite.” On the Judge itself, the senior staff were glad their reservations had been minuted, and it was felt by most journalists that Grant McDonald pointed the way when he was heard to say in the canteen that once his misgivings were not listened to, he did his best to be loyal. By Monday they had all remembered their misgivings and how they had all tried to be loyal.

  The matter was rather more complex for the Judge’s board of directors, which met in emergency session on Monday afternoon. In fact, it was rather trying. How could they sack an editor to whom they had given a unanimous vote of support last Wednesday?

  Finally, after two hours of meandering and backtracking, George Lane had a good idea.

  “Look, there was nothing wrong in purchasing those photographs. Actually, I can tell you this, I heard he got a jolly good deal. No, Halliday’s mistake was in not pulling his front page the moment he saw Rose Garmony’s press conference. He had plenty of time to turn it around. He wasn’t going out with it till the late edition. He was quite wrong to have gone ahead. On Friday the paper was made to look ridiculous. He should have seen which way the wind was blowing and got out. If you’re asking me, it was a serious failure of editorial judgment.”

  vi

  The following day the editor presided over a subdued meeting with his senior staff. Tony Montano sat to one side, a silent observer.

  “It’s time we ran more regular columns. They’re cheap, and everyone else is doing them. You know, we hire someone of low to medium intelligence, possibly female, to write about, well, nothing much. You’ve seen the sort of thing. Goes to a party and can’t remember someone’s name. Twelve hundred words.”

  “Sort of navel gazing,” Jeremy Ball suggested.

  “Not quite. Gazing is too intellectual. More like navel chat.”

  “Can’t work her video recorder. Is my bum too big?” Lettice supplied helpfully.

  “That’s good. Keep ’em coming.” The editor wiggled and paddled his fingers in the air to draw out their ideas.

  “Er, buying a guinea pig.”

  “His hangover.”

  “Her first gray pubic hair.”

  “Always gets the supermarket trolley with the wobbly wheel.”

  “Excellent. I like it. Harvey? Grant?”

  “Um, always losing Biros. Where do they go?”

  “Ehm, canna keep his tongue out of the wee hole in his tooth.”

  “Brilliant,” Frank said. “Thank you, everyone. We’ll continue this tomorrow.”

  V

  i

  There were moments in the early morning, after the mild excitement of dawn, with London already heading noisily for work and his creative turmoil finally smothered by exhaustion, when Clive stood from the piano and shuffled to the doorway to turn out the studio lights and looked back at the rich, the beautiful chaos that surrounded his toils, and had once more a passing thought, the minuscule fragment of a suspicion that he would not have shared with a single person in the world, would not even have committed to his journal, and whose key word he shaped in his mind only with reluctance; the thought was, quite simply, that it might not be going too far to say that he was … a genius. A genius. Though he sounded it guiltily on his inner ear, he would not let the word reach his lips. He was not a vain man. A genius. It was a term that had suffered from inflationary overuse, but surely there was a certain level of achievement, a gold standard, that was nonnegotiable, beyond mere opinion. There hadn’t been many. Among his countrymen, Shakespeare was a genius, of course, and Darwin and Newton, he had heard it said. Purcell, almost. Britten, less so, though within range. But there had been no Beethovens here.

  When he had this suspicion about himself—and it had happened three or four times since he had returned from the Lake District—the world grew large and still, and in the gray-blue light of a March morning, his piano, the MIDI, the plates and cups, Molly’s armchair, took on a sculpted, rounded appearance, reminding him of how things had looked to him once in his youth when he had taken mescaline: bloated with volume, poised with benign significance. And he saw the studio he was about to abandon for his bed as it might have appeared in a documentary film about himself that would reveal to a curious world how a masterpiece was born. He also saw the grainy reverse, the figure lingering by the doorway in grubby loose white shirt, jeans roped in tight against a convexity of gut, eyes blackened and engorged by fatigue, the composer, heroic and endearing in his stubbly dishevelment. These were truly the great moments in a period of joyous creative outpouring such as he had never known, those moments when he stood from his work in a near-hallucinatory state and floated down the stairs to his bedroom, kicked off his shoes, and rolled under the covers to succumb to a dreamless sleep that was a sick numbness, a void, a death.

  He woke in the late afternoon, pulled on his shoes, and went down to the kitchen to eat the cold plate the housekeeper had left for him. He opened a bottle of wine and took it with him up to the studio, where he would find a full coffee flask and begin a new journey into the night. Somewhere at his back, stalking him like a beast and closing in, was the deadline. In just over a week he must confront Giulio Bo and the British Symphony Orchestra in Amsterdam for two days of rehearsal and, two days after that, the premiere in the Birmingham Free Trade Hall. Given that the millennium’s end was years away, the pressure was quite ridiculous. Already his fair copy of the first three movements had been taken away and the orchestral parts had been transcribed. His secretary had called a few times to collect the latest pages of the final movement, and a team of copyists was at work. For now there could be no backward glances, and he could only push on and hope to be finished before next week. He complained, but in his heart he was untouched by the pressu
re, for this was how he needed to be working, lost to the mighty effort of bringing his work to its awesome finale. The ancient stone steps had been climbed, the wisps of sound had melted away like mist, his new melody, darkly scored in its first lonely manifestation for a muted trombone, had gathered around itself rich orchestral textures of sinuous harmony, then dissonance and whirling variations that spun away into space, never to reappear, and had now drawn itself up in a process of consolidation, like an explosion seen in reverse, funneling inward to a geometrical point of stillness; then the muted trombone again, and then, with a hushed crescendo, like a giant drawing breath, the final and colossal restatement of the melody (with one intriguing and as yet unsolved difference), which gathered pace and erupted into a wave, a racing tsunami of sound reaching an impossible velocity, then rearing up, higher, and when it seemed beyond human capability, higher yet, and at last toppling, breaking and crashing vertiginously down to shatter on the hard safe ground of the home key of C minor. What remained were the pedal notes promising resolution and peace in infinite space. Then a diminuendo spanning forty-five seconds, dissolving into four bars of scored silence. The end.

  And it was almost done. Wednesday night into Thursday morning, Clive revised and perfected the diminuendo. All that was required now was to go back several pages in the score to the clamorous restatement and vary the harmonies perhaps, or even the melody itself, or devise some form of rhythmic undertow, a syncopation that cut into the leading edge of the notes. To Clive, this variation had become a crucial feature of the work’s conclusion; it needed to suggest the future’s unknowability. When that by now familiar melody returned for the very last time, altered in a small and significant way, it should prompt insecurity in the listener; it was a caution against clinging too tightly to what we knew.

  On Thursday morning he was in bed, thinking about this and falling asleep, when Vernon phoned. The call was reassuring. Clive had been meaning to get in touch since he returned, but his work had swept him away, and Garmony, the photographs, and the Judge seemed to him like subplots in a barely remembered movie. All he knew was that he did not wish to be quarreling with anyone, least of all one of his oldest friends. When Vernon cut the conversation short and suggested coming by for a drink the following evening, it occurred to Clive that he might have finished by then. He would have written in that important change to the restatement, for it would surely take him no more than one all-night session. The last pages would have been taken away and he might ask in a few friends to make up a celebration party. These were his happy thoughts as he plunged into sleep. It was disorienting, then, to wake what seemed like two minutes later into Vernon’s bullying interrogation.

  “I want you to go to the police now and tell them what you saw.”

  This was the sentence that jolted Clive into the truth. He emerged from a tunnel into clarity. In fact, what came back to him was the train journey to Penrith, and those half-forgotten insights, and their sour taste. Each exchange was a click on the ratchet—no slipping back into civility. By invoking Molly’s memory—“meaning crapping on Molly’s grave”—Clive allowed a full flood of hot indignation to bathe him, and when Vernon outrageously threatened to go to the police himself, Clive gasped and kicked the bedclothes clear and stood in his socks by the bedside table for the concluding barter of abuse. Vernon hung up on him, just as he was about to hang up on Vernon. Without bothering to lace up his shoes, Clive ran down the stairs in a fury, cursing as he went. It wasn’t yet five o’clock, but he was having a drink, he deserved a drink and he’d punch the man who tried to stop him. But he was alone, of course, and thank God. It was a gin and tonic, though mostly it was a gin, and he stood by the draining board and sank it, without ice or lemon, and thought bitterly of the outrage. The outrage of it! He was framing the letter he would like to send to this scum he had mistaken for a friend. Him, with his loathsome daily round, his sordid cynical scheming mind, the wheedling sponging hypocritical passive-aggressive. Vermin Halliday, who knew nothing of what it was to create, because he’d never made anything good in his life and was eaten up with hatred for those who could. His poky suburban squeamishness was what passed for a moral stand, and meanwhile he was up to the elbows in shit, in fact he had verily pitched his tent on excrement, and to advance his squalid interests he was happy to debase Molly’s memory and ruin a vulnerable fool like Garmony and call up the hate codes of the yellow press and all along pretend to himself and tell anyone who would listen—and this was what took the breath away—that he was doing his duty, that he was in the service of some high ideal. He was mad, he was sick, he didn’t deserve to exist!

  These kitchen execrations saw Clive through a second drink, and then a third. He knew from long experience that a letter sent in fury merely put a weapon into the hands of your enemy. Poison, in preserved form, to be used against you long into the future. But Clive wanted to write something now precisely because he might not feel so strongly in a week’s time. He compromised with a terse postcard, which he would leave for a day before sending. Your threat appalls me. So does your journalism. You deserve to be sacked. Clive. He opened a bottle of Chablis and, ignoring the saumon en croute in the fridge, went up to the top floor, belligerently determined to start work. There would come a time when nothing would remain of Vermin Halliday, but what would remain of Clive Linley would be his music. Work—quiet, determined, triumphant work, then—would be a kind of revenge. But belligerence was a poor aid to concentration, as were three gins and a bottle of wine, and three hours later he was still staring at the score on the piano, in a hunched attitude of work, with a pencil in his hand and a frown, but hearing and seeing only the bright hurdy-gurdy carousel of his twirling thoughts and the same hard little horses bobbing by on their braided rods. Here they came again. The outrage! The police! Poor Molly! Sanctimonious bastard! Call that a moral position? Up to his neck in shit! The outrage! And what about Molly?

  At nine-thirty he stood and decided to pull himself together,. drink some red wine and get on with the work. There was his beautiful theme, his song, spread out on the page, craving his attention, needing one inspired modification, and here he was, alive with focused energy, ready to make it. But downstairs he lingered in the kitchen over his rediscovered supper, listening to a history of the nomadic Moroccan Tuareg people on the radio, and then he took his third glass of Bandol for a wander about the house, an anthropologist to his own existence. He hadn’t been in the living room for over a week, and now he drifted about the enormous room, examining paintings and photographs as though for the first time, running a hand over the furniture and picking up objects from the mantelpiece. His whole life was in here, and what a rich history! The money to buy even the cheapest of these things had been earned by dreaming up sounds, by putting one note in front of another. Clive had imagined everything here, he had willed it all to be here, without anyone’s help. And he drank to his success, down in one, and returned to the kitchen for a refill before setting out for a tour of the dining room. At eleven-thirty he was back in front of the score, whose notes now would not hold still, not even for him, and he had to agree with himself that he was seriously drunk, and who wouldn’t be after such betrayals? There was a half-bottle of scotch on a bookcase, which he took to Molly’s chair, and there was some Ravel already in the machine. His last memory of the evening was of lifting the remote control and pointing at the disk player.

  He woke in the small hours with the headphones askew across his face and a terrible thirst from dreams of crossing a desert on hands and knees, carrying the Tuaregs’ only grand piano. He drank from the bathroom tap and put himself to bed and lay there for hours, open-eyed in the dark, exhausted, desiccated, and alert, once more forced to attend helplessly to his carousel. Neck in shit? Moral position! Molly?

  When he woke from a brief sleep in the mid-morning, he knew the roll, the creative spree, was over. It was not simply that he was tired and hung over. As soon as he sat at the piano and tried out a couple of appro
aches to the variation, he found that not only this passage but the whole movement had died on him—suddenly it was ashes in his mouth. He didn’t dare think too hard about the symphony itself. When his secretary called to try to make arrangements for collecting the final pages, he was short with her and had to phone back with an apology. He took a walk to clear his head and post the card to Vernon, which today read like a masterpiece of restraint. Along the way he bought a copy of the Judge; to protect his concentration, he had been denying himself newspapers, and the TV and radio news, so he had missed the buildup.

  It was a shock, then, at home, when he spread out the paper on the kitchen table. Garmony posing before Molly, camping it up for her, and the camera in her warm hands, her living eye once framing what Clive saw now. But the front page was an embarrassment, not because, or not only because, a man had been caught out in a delicate private moment, but because the paper had worked itself up into such a lather about it and brought to bear such powerful resources. As if some criminal political conspiracy had been uncovered, or a corpse under the table in the Foreign Office. So unworldly, so misjudged, so uncool. It was inept too in the ways it tried so hard to be cruel. The overstated and contemptuous cartoon, for example, and the crowing leader with its childish pun on “drag,” the doomed crowd-pleaser of “knickers in a twist,” and the feebly opposed “dressing up” and “dressing-down.” Again the thought recurred: not only was Vernon loathsome, he had to be mad. But that wouldn’t stop Clive loathing him.

  The hangover lasted all weekend and into Monday—one didn’t get off so lightly these days—and the general nausea presented an appropriate background for bitter brooding. The work was stalled. What had been a luscious fruit was now a dry twig. The copyists were desperate to receive the last twelve pages of the score. The orchestra manager phoned three times, his voice trembling in controlled panic. The Concertgebouw had been booked from next Friday for two days’ rehearsal at huge expense; the extra percussionists Clive had asked for had been retained, along with the accordionist. Giulio Bo was impatient to have sight of the work’s conclusion, and all the arrangements had been made for Birmingham. If no complete parts score was in Amsterdam by Thursday, he, the manager, would have no option but to drown himself in the nearest canal. It was soothing to be exposed to an anguish greater than his own, but still Clive refused to let the pages go. He was holding out for his significant variation, and in the way of these things, it was beginning to seem to him that the work’s integrity depended on it.