by Ian Mcewan
He is about to describe to her the Chapman girl, and how well she's come through, when Lily suddenly speaks up. Her mood is anxious, even a little querulous. “And you know that this . . . you know, Aunty, what people put on their shoes to make them . . . you know?”
“Shoe polish?” He never understands why she calls him Aunty, or which of her many aunts is haunting her.
“No, no. They put it all over their shoes and rub it with a cloth. Well, anyway, it's a bit like shoe polish. It's that sort of thing. We had side plates and God knows what, all along the street. We had everything but the right thing because we were in the wrong place.”
Then she suddenly laughs. It's become clearer to her.
“If you turn the picture round and take the back off like I did you get such a lot of pleasure out of it. It's all what it meant. And the laugh we had out of it!”
And she laughs gaily, just like she used to, and he laughs too. It's all what it meant. Now she's away, describing what might be a disintegrated memory of a street party, and a little watercolour she once bought in a jumble sale.
Some time later, when Jenny arrives with the refreshments, Lily stares at her without recognition. Perowne stands and clears space on a low table. He notices the suspicion Lily is showing towards what she takes to be a complete stranger, and so, as soon as Jenny leaves, and before Lily can speak, he says, “What a lovely girl she is. Always helpful.”
“She's marvellous,” Lily agrees.
The memory of whoever was in the room is already fading. His emotional cue is irresistible and she immediately smiles and begins to elaborate while he spoons all six tea bags out of the metal pot.
“She always comes running, even if it's narrow all the way down. She wants to come on one of them long things but she doesn't have the fare. I sent her the money, but she doesn't have it in her hand. She wants some music, and I said you might as well make up a little band and play it yourself. I worry about her though. I said to her, why do you put all the slices in one bowl when no one's standing up? You can't do it yourself.”
He knows who she's talking about, and waits for more. Then he says, “You should go and see her.”
It's a long time since he last tried to explain to her that her mother died in 1970. It is easier now to support the delusion and keep the conversation moving along. Everything belongs in the present. His immediate concern is to prevent her eating a tea bag, the way she almost did last time. He piles them onto a saucer which he places on the floor by his foot. He puts a half-filled cup within her reach and offers her a biscuit and a napkin. She spreads it over her lap and carefully places the biscuit in its centre. She raises the cup to her lips and drinks. At moments like these, when she's skilful in the long-established routines, and looks demure in her colour-matched clothes, a perfectly well-looking seventy-seven-year-old with amazing legs for her age, athlete's legs, he can imagine that it's all been a mistake, a bad dream, and that she'll leave her tiny room and come away with him into the heart of the city and eat fish stew with her daughter-in-law and grandchildren and stay a while.
Lily says, “I was there last week, Aunty, on the bus and my mum was in the garden. I said to her, You can walk down there, see what you're going to get, and the next thing is the balancing of everything you've got. She's not well. Her feet. I'll go there in a minute and I can't help losing her a jersey.”
How strange it would have been for Lily's mother, an aloof, unmaternal woman, to have known that the little girl at her skirts would one day, in a remote future, a science fiction date in the next century, talk of her all the time and long to be home with her. Would that have softened her?
Now Lily is set, she'll talk on for as long as he sits there. It's hard to tell if she's actually happy. Sometimes she laughs, at others she describes shadowy disputes and grievances, and her voice becomes indignant. In many of the situations she conjures, she's remonstrating with a man who won't see sense.
“I told him anything that's going for a liberty and he said, I don't care. You can give it away, and I said don't let it waste in the fire. And all the new stuff that's going to be picked up.”
If she becomes too agitated by the story she's telling, Henry will cut in and laugh loudly and say, “Mum, that's really very funny!” Being suggestible, she'll laugh too and her mood will shift, and the story she tells then will be happier. For now, she's in neutral mode—there's a clock, and a jersey again, and again, a space too narrow to pass through—and Henry, sipping the thick brown tea, half listening, half asleep in the small room's airless warmth, thinks how in thirty-five years or less it could be him, stripped of everything he does and owns, a shrivelled figure meandering in front of Theo or Daisy, while they wait to leave and return to a life of which he'll have no comprehension. High blood pressure is one good predictor of strokes. A hundred and twenty-two over sixty-five last time. The systolic could be lower. Total cholesterol, five point two. Not good enough. Elevated levels of lipoprotein-a are said to have a robust association with multi-infarct dementia. He'll eat no more eggs, and have only semi-skimmed milk in his coffee, and coffee too will have to go one day. He isn't ready to die, and nor is he ready to half die. He wants his prodigiously connected myelin-rich white matter intact, like an unsullied snowfield. No cheese then. He'll be ruthless with himself in his pursuit of boundless health to avoid his mother's fate. Mental death.
“I put sap in the clock,” she's telling him, “to make it moist.”
An hour passes, and then he forces himself fully awake and stands up, too quickly perhaps, because he feels a sudden dizziness. Not a good sign. He extends both hands towards her, feeling immense and unstable as he looms over her tiny form.
“Come on now, Mum,” he says gently. “It's time for me to go. And I'd like you to see me to the door.”
Childlike in her obedience, she takes his hands and he helps her from her chair. He piles up the tray and puts it outside the room, then remembers the tea bags, half concealed under the bed, and puts them out too. She might have feasted on them. He guides her into the corridor, reassuring her all the while, aware that she's stepping into an alien world. She has no idea which way to turn as they leave her room. She doesn't comment on the unfamiliar surroundings, but she grips his hand tighter. In the first of the sitting rooms two women, one with snowy hair in braids, the other completely bald, are watching television with the sound off. Approaching from the middle room is Cyril, as always in cravat and sports jacket, and today carrying a cane and wearing a deerstalker. He's the home's resident gent, sweet-mannered, marooned in one particular, well-defined fantasy: he believes he owns a large estate and is obliged to go around visiting his tenants and be scrupulously polite. Perowne has never seen him unhappy.
Cyril raises his hat at Lily and calls, “Good morning, my dear. Everything well? Any complaints?”
Her face tightens and she looks away. On the screen above her head Perowne sees the march—Hyde Park still, a vast crowd before a temporary stage, and in the far distance a tiny figure at a microphone, then the aerial shot of the same, and then the marchers in columns with their banners, still arriving through the park gates. He and Lily stop to let Cyril pass. There's a shot of the newsreader at her space-age desk, then the plane as he saw it in the early hours, the blackened fuselage vivid in a lake of foam, like a tasteless ornament on an iced cake. Now, Paddington police station—said to be secure against terrorist attack. A reporter is standing outside, speaking into a microphone. There's a development. Are the Russian pilots really radical Muslims? Perowne is reaching up for the volume control, but Lily is suddenly agitated and trying to tell him something important.
“If it gets too dry it will curl up again. I told him, and I told him you have to water it, but he wouldn't put it down.”
“It's all right,” he tells her. “He will put it down. I'll tell him to. I promise you.”
He decides against the television and they come away. He needs to concentrate on his leavetaking, for he knows that s
he'll think she's coming with him. He'll be standing once more at the front door, with his meaningless explanation that he'll return soon. Jenny or one of the other girls will have to distract her as he steps outside.
Together they walk back through the first sitting room. Tea and crustless sandwiches are being served to the ladies at the round table with the chenille cloth. He calls a greeting to them, but they seem too distracted to reply. Lily is happier now, and leans her head against his arm. As they come into the hall they see Jenny Lavin by the door, already raising her hand to the high double security lock and smiling in their direction. Just then his mother pats his hand with a feathery touch and says, “Out here it only looks like a garden, Aunty, but it's the countryside really and you can go for miles. When you walk here you feel lifted up, right high across the counter. I can't manage all them plates without a brush, but God will take care of you and see what you're going to get because it's a swimming race. You'll squeeze through somehow.”
It is a slow haul back into central London—more than an hour to reach Westbourne Grove from Perivale. Dense traffic is heading into the city for Saturday-night pleasures just as the first wave of coaches is bringing the marchers out. During the long crawl towards the lights at Gypsy Corner, he lowers his window to taste the scene in full—the bovine patience of a jam, the abrasive tang of icy fumes, the thunderous idling machinery in six lanes east and west, the yellow street light bleaching colour from the bodywork, the jaunty thud of entertainment systems, and red tail lights stretching way ahead into the city, white headlights pouring out of it. He tries to see it, or feel it, in historical terms, this moment in the last decades of the petroleum age, when a nineteenth-century device is brought to final perfection in the early years of the twenty-first; when the unprecedented wealth of masses at serious play in the unforgiving modern city makes for a sight that no previous age can have imagined. Ordinary people! Rivers of light! He wants to make himself see it as Newton might, or his contemporaries, Boyle, Hooke, Wren, Willis—those clever, curious men of the English Enlightenment who for a few years held in their minds nearly all the world's science. Surely, they would be awed. Mentally, he shows it off to them: this is what we've done, this is commonplace in our time. All this teeming illumination would be wondrous if he could only see it through their eyes. But he can't quite trick himself into it. He can't feel his way past the iron weight of the actual to see beyond the boredom of a traffic tailback, or the delay to which he himself is contributing, or the drab commercial hopes of a parade of shops he's been stuck beside for fifteen minutes. He doesn't have the lyric gift to see beyond it—he's a realist, and can never escape. But then, perhaps two poets in the family are enough.
Beyond Acton the traffic eases. In the late-afternoon dusk a single slab of red in the western sky, almost rectangular, an emblem of the natural world, of wilderness somewhere out of sight, fades slowly as it pursues him in his rear-view mirror. Even if the westbound lanes out of the city were free, he's glad not to be heading that way. He wants to get home and collect himself before he starts cooking. He needs to check that there's champagne in the fridge, and bring some red wine into the kitchen to warm. The cheese too needs to be softened in the centrally-heated air. He needs to lie down for ten minutes. He's certainly in no mood for Theo's amplified blues.
But this is parenthood, as fixed as destiny, and at last he's parking in a street off Westbourne Grove, a couple of hundred yards from the old music hall theatre. He's forty-five minutes late. When he reaches it, the building is silent and in darkness and the doors are closed. But they open easily when he pushes against them, so that he stumbles as he enters the foyer. He waits to let his eyes adjust to the low light, straining to hear sounds, aware of the familiar smell of dusty carpeting. Is he too late? It would almost be a relief. He moves deeper into the lobby, past what he thinks must be the ticket office, until he comes to another set of double doors. He gropes for a metal bar, pushes down and enters.
A hundred feet away, the stage is in soft bluish light, broken by pinpricks of red on the amplifier racks. By the drums, the high hat catches the light and projects an elongated purple disc across the floor of the theatre which is without seats. There's no other light apart from an orange exit sign beyond the stage. People are moving and crouching by the equipment, and stirring beside the gleam of a keyboard. Just discernible above the low fuzzy hum of the speaker banks is a murmur of voices. A silhouetted figure stands at the front of the stage adjusting the heights of two microphones.
Perowne moves to his right, and in total darkness follows the wall with his hand until he's facing the centre of the stage. A second person appears by the microphones carrying a saxophone whose intricate outline is sharply defined against the blue. In response to a call, the keyboard sounds a single note, and a bass guitar tunes its top string to it. Another guitar plays a broken open chord—all in tune, then a third does the same. The drummer sits in and moves his cymbals closer and fiddles with the pedal on a bass drum. The murmur of voices ceases, and the roadies disappear into the wings. Theo and Chas are at the front of the stage by the microphones looking out across the auditorium.
It's only at this point that Perowne realises they've seen him come in and that they've been waiting. Theo's guitar starts out alone with a languorous two-bar turnaround, a simple descending line from the fifth fret, tumbling into a thick chord which oozes into a second and remains hanging there, an unresolved fading seventh; then, with a sharp kick and roll on the tom, and five stealthy, rising notes from the bass, the blues begins. It's a downbeat “Stormy Monday” kind of song, but the chords are dense and owe more to jazz. The stage light is shifting to white. Theo, motionless in his usual trance, goes three times round the twelve bars. It's a smooth, rounded tone, plenty of feedback to mould the notes into their wailing lament, with a little sting in the attack on the shorter runs. The piano and rhythm guitar lay down their thick jazzy chords. Henry feels the bassline thump into his sternum and puts his hand to the sore spot there. It's building into a big sound, and he's uncomfortable, and resists it. In his present state, he'd prefer to be at home with a Mozart trio on the hi-fi, and a glass of icy white wine.
But he doesn't hold out for long. Something is swelling, or lightening in him as Theo's notes rise, and on the second turnaround lift into a higher register and begin to soar. This is what the boys have been working on, and they want him to hear it, and he's touched. He's catching on to the idea, to the momentum of their exuberance and expertise. At the same time he discovers that the song is not in the usual pattern of a twelve-bar blues. There's a middle section with an unworldly melody that rises and falls in semitones. Chas leans into his microphone to sing with Theo in a close, strange harmony.
Baby, you can choose despair,
Or you can be happy if you dare.
So let me take you there,
My city square, city square.
Then Chas, with all his fresh tricks from New York, turns aside, lifts his sax and comes in on a wild and ragged high note, like a voice cracking with joy that holds and holds, then tapers and drops away in a downward spiral, echoing Theo's intro, and delivers the band back into the twelve-bar round. Chas too goes three times round. The sax is edgy, with choppy rhythms and notes held against the chord changes, then released in savage runs. Theo and the bass guitarist are playing in octaves a tricksy repeated figure that shifts in unexpected ways and never quite returns to its starting point. This is a blues at walking speed, but a driving rhythm is building up. On Chas's third turnaround, the two boys come back to the mikes, back to the lilting refrain whose harmonies are so close they're discords. Is Theo paying tribute to his teacher, to Jack Bruce of Cream?
So let me take you there
City square, city square.
Then it's the keyboard's break, and the others join in the difficult, circular riff.
No longer tired, Henry comes away from the wall where he's been leaning, and walks into the middle of the dark auditorium, toward
s the great engine of sound. He lets it engulf him. There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything you have to others, but lose nothing of yourself. Out in the real world there exist detailed plans, visionary projects for peaceable realms, all conflicts resolved, happiness for everyone, for ever—mirages for which people are prepared to die and kill. Christ's kingdom on earth, the workers' paradise, the ideal Islamic state. But only in music, and only on rare occasions, does the curtain actually lift on this dream of community, and it's tantalisingly conjured, before fading away with the last notes.
Naturally, no one can ever agree when it's happening. Henry last heard it for himself at the Wigmore Hall, a utopian community briefly realised in the Schubert Octet, when the wind players with little leaning, shrugging movements of their bodies, wafted their notes across the stage at the string section who sent them back sweetened. He also heard it long ago at Daisy and Theo's school, when a discordantly wailing school orchestra, with a staff and pupil choir, attempted Purcell, and made with cracked notes an innocent and blissful concord of adults and children. And here it is now, a coherent world, everything fitting at last. He stands swaying in the dark, staring up at the stage, his right hand in his pocket gripping his keys. Theo and Chas drift back to centre stage to sing their unearthly chorus. Or you can be happy if you dare. He knows what his mother meant. He can go for miles, he feels lifted up, right high across the counter. He doesn't want the song to end.
