by Ian Mcewan
‘All right,’ I said. ‘But you go first.’
*
Two minor sex scandals followed by resignations, one fatal heart attack, one fatal, drunken collision on a country road, one member crossing the floor on a matter of principle – in seven months the government had lost four consecutive by-elections, its majority had narrowed by five and was hanging, as the newspapers kept saying ‘by a thread’. This thread was nine seats thick, but Mrs Thatcher had at least twelve rebellious backbenchers whose main concern was that the recently passed ‘poll tax’ legislation would destroy the party’s hopes at the next general election. The tax financed local government and replaced the old system based on the rental value of a house. Every adult aged over eighteen was now levied at a flat rate, regardless of income, but with reduced charges on students, the poor and the registered unemployed. The new tax was presented to Parliament sooner than anyone expected, though the prime minister had plans drawn up seven years before, when she was Leader of the Opposition. It had been in the party’s manifesto, but no one had taken it seriously. Now here it was, on the statute book, ‘a tax on existence’, difficult to collect and generally unpopular. Mrs Thatcher had survived the Falkland defeat. Now, still in her first term, it was possible she would be toppled by her own legislative mistake, ‘an unpardonable act’, said a Times leader, ‘of mystifying self-harm’.
Meanwhile, the loyal Opposition was in good shape. Young baby boomers had fallen in love with Tony Benn. After a great push to expand the membership, more than three-quarters of a million had joined the party. Middle-class students and working-class youths merged into one angry constituency, intent on using their votes for the first time. Trade union bosses, tough old operators, found themselves shouted down at meetings by articulate feminists with strange new ideas. New-fangled environmentalists, gay liberationists, Spartacists, Situationists, Millennial Communists and Black Panthers were also an irritant to the old left. When Benn appeared at rallies, he was greeted like a rock star. When he set out his policies, even when he itemised the minutiae of his industrial strategy, there were hoots and whistles of approval. His bitter opponents in Parliament and press had to concede that he gave a fine speech and was hard to beat in a TV studio confrontation. Fiery Bennite activists were appearing on local government committees. They were determined to purge the ‘dithering centrists’ of the Parliamentary Labour Party. The movement appeared unstoppable, the general election was approaching and the Tory rebels were dismayed. ‘She has to go’ was the muttered slogan.
There were riots with customary ritual destruction – smashed windows, shops and cars set on fire, barricades thrown up to block the fire engines. Tony Benn condemned the rioters, but everyone accepted that the mayhem helped his cause. There was yet another march planned through central London, this time to Hyde Park where Benn would give a speech. I was his cautious supporter, anxious about the purges and riots and the sinister pronouncements of Benn’s band of Trotskyite followers. I counted myself a non-dithering centrist who also felt ‘she has to go’. Miranda had another of her seminars, but Adam wanted to come. We walked with our umbrellas through steady rain to Stockwell Tube and travelled to Green Park. We arrived on Piccadilly in sudden glistening sunshine, with huge white cumulus clouds stacked high against a mild blue sky. The dripping trees of Green Park had a burnished coppery look. I had failed to talk Adam out of the black suit. In the drawer of my desk he had found an old pair of my sunglasses.
‘This isn’t a good idea,’ I said, as we shuffled with the crowd towards Hyde Park Corner. Somewhere far behind us were trombones, tambourines and a bass drum. ‘You look like a secret agent. The Trots will give you a good kicking.’
‘I am a secret agent.’ He said it loudly and I glanced around. All fine. People near us were singing ‘We Shall Overcome’, a song whose hopeful sentiments were crushed at first utterance by a hopeless melody. Its second line feebly repeated its first. I cringed at the three weak, inappropriately falling notes crammed into ‘come’. I loathed it. My mood, I realised, was crepuscular. The jollity of crowds had this effect on me. A shaken tambourine put me in mind of those shaven Hare Krishna dupes by Soho Square. My shoes were wet and I was miserable. I wasn’t expecting to overcome.
In the park there were probably 100,000 between us and the main stage. It was my choice to get to the back. Stretching far ahead of us was a carpet of flesh for the Provisional IRA to shred with a ball-bearing bomb. There were several worthy speeches before Benn’s. Tiny distant figures blasted us with their thoughts through a powerful PA system. We were all against the poll tax. A famous pop singer came on stage to huge applause. I had never heard of him. Nor of the girl on tiptoe at the mic, a nationally adored teenager from a TV soap. But I had heard of Bob Geldof. This was what it meant to be over thirty.
Finally, after seventy-five minutes, a loud voice from somewhere declaimed, ‘Please give a big welcome to the next prime minister of Great Britain!’
To the sound of the Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’, the hero strode out. He raised both arms and there was uproar. Even from where I was, I could make out a thoughtful man in brown tweed jacket and tie, rather bemused by his elevation. He took his unlit pipe from his jacket pocket, probably out of habit, and there was another roar of delight from the crowd. I glanced across at Adam. He too was thoughtful, neither for nor against anything, but intent on recording it all.
It sounded to me as though Benn was reluctant to whip up such a vast crowd. He called out uncertainly, ‘Do we want the poll tax?’ ‘No!’ the crowd thundered. ‘Do we want a Labour government?’ ‘Yes!’ came the even louder reply. He sounded more comfortable once he started laying out his argument. The speech was simpler than the one I’d heard in Trafalgar Square and more effective. He proposed a fairer, racially harmonious, decentralised, technologically sophisticated Britain ‘fit for the late twentieth century’, a kind and decent place where private schools were merged with the state system, university education was opened up to the working class, housing and the best healthcare were available to all, where the energy sector was taken back into public ownership and the City was not deregulated, as proposed, and where workers sat on company boards, the rich paid their dues and the cycle of inherited privilege was broken.
All well and good, and no surprises. The speech was long, partly because each of Benn’s proposals was met with reverential applause. Since I’d never heard Adam express an interest in politics, I nudged him and asked him what he thought so far.
He said, ‘We should make your fortune before the top rate of tax goes back to eighty-three per cent.’
Was this comic cynicism? I looked at him and couldn’t tell. The speech went on and my attention began to wander. I’d often noticed in large crowds that, however rapt the audience, there were always people on the move, returning or wandering away, threading through in different directions, intent on some other business, a train, a lavatory, a fit of boredom or disapproval. Where we stood was on ground that rose slightly towards an oak tree behind us. We had a good view. Some people were moving nearer the front. The crowd in our immediate area had begun to thin out to reveal a quantity of litter trodden into the softened ground. I happened to glance at Adam and saw that his gaze was not directed at the stage but away to his left. A well-dressed woman, in her fifties, I guessed, rather gaunt, with hair severely drawn back, using a cane to steady herself on the muddy grass, was coming diagonally towards us. Then I noticed the young woman at her side, her daughter perhaps. They approached at a slow pace. The young woman’s hand hovered near her mother’s elbow to steady her. I glanced at Adam again and saw an expression, hard to identify at first – astonishment was my first thought. He was transfixed as the two came nearer.
The young woman saw Adam and stopped. They were staring hard at each other. The woman with the cane was irritated at being held up and plucked at her daughter’s sleeve. Adam made a sound, a smothered gasp. When I looked again at the couple, I understood. The younger one was
pale and pretty in an unusual way, a clever variation on a theme. The woman with the cane hadn’t grasped what was happening. She wanted to get on her way and gave an irritable command to her young companion. In her, there was no mistaking the line of that nose, or the blue eyes flecked with tiny black rods. Not a daughter at all, but Eve, Adam’s sister, one of thirteen.
I thought it was my responsibility to make some kind of contact with her. The couple were no more than twenty feet away. I raised a hand and called out ridiculously, ‘I say …’ and started to go towards them. They might not have heard; my words could have been lost to Benn’s speech. I felt Adam’s hand on my shoulder.
He said softly, ‘Please don’t.’
I looked again at Eve. She was a beautiful unhappy girl. The face was pale, with an expression of pleading and misery as she continued to stare at her twin.
‘Go on,’ I whispered. ‘Talk to her.’
The woman lifted her cane and pointed in the direction she intended to go. At the same time, she dragged at Eve’s arm.
I said, ‘Adam. For God’s sake. Go on!’
He wouldn’t move. With her gaze still locked on him, Eve allowed herself to be led away. They moved off through the crowd. Just before they disappeared from view, she turned for one last look. She was too far away for me to read her expression. She was no more than a small pale face bobbing in the press of bodies. Then she was gone. We could have followed them but Adam had already turned in the other direction and had gone to stand by the oak tree.
We set off for home in silence. I should have done more to encourage him to approach his twin. We stood side by side on the crowded Tube heading south. I was haunted, and I knew he was too, by Eve’s abject look. I decided not to press him to explain why he had turned away. He would tell me when he was ready. I should have spoken to her, I kept thinking, but he didn’t want it. The way he had stood with his back to her, gazing into the tree trunk as she vanished into the crowd! I’d been neglecting him. I’d been lost to a love affair. In the daily round, it no longer amazed me that I could pass the time of day with a manufactured human, or that it could wash the dishes and converse like anyone else. I sometimes wearied of his earnest pursuit of ideas and facts, of his hunger for propositions that lay beyond my reach. Technological marvels like Adam, like the first steam engine, become commonplace. Likewise, the biological marvels we grow up among and don’t fully understand, like the brain of any creature, or the humble stinging nettle, whose photosynthesis had only just been described on a quantum scale. There is nothing so amazing that we can’t get used to it. As Adam blossomed and made me rich, I had ceased to think about him.
That evening I described the Hyde Park moment to Miranda. She wasn’t as impressed as I was that we had seen an Eve. I described the sad moment, as I saw it, when he turned his back on her. And then, my guilt about him.
‘I don’t know what you’re being so dramatic about,’ she said. ‘Talk to him. Spend more time with him.’
In the mid-morning of the following day, when the rain had stopped at last, I went into my bedroom and persuaded Adam to desert the currency markets and come for a walk. He was just back from escorting Miranda to the Tube and reluctantly got to his feet. But how confident his stride was as he weaved through the shoppers on Clapham High Street. Of course, our excursion was costing hundreds of pounds in lost revenue. Since we were passing the newsagent, we called in on Simon Syed. While I browsed the magazine shelves, I listened as Adam and Simon discussed the politics of Kashmir, then the India–Pakistan nuclear arms race and finally, to end on a celebratory note, the poetry of Tagore, whom both could quote in the original at length. I thought Adam was showing off, but Simon was delighted. He praised Adam’s accent – better than his own these days, he said – and promised to invite us all to dinner.
A quarter of an hour later, we were walking on the Common. Until this point, we had small-talked. Now I asked him about the visit of Sally, the engineer. When she had asked him to imagine an object of hatred, what had he brought to mind?
‘Obviously, I thought about what happened to Mariam. But it’s hard when someone asks you to think about something. The mind goes its own way. As John Milton said, the mind is its own place. I tried to stay focussed on Gorringe, but then I started thinking about the ideas that lay behind his actions. How he believed he was allowed to do what he did, or had some kind of entitlement to it, how he could be immune to her cries and her fear and the consequences for her, and how he thought there was no other way for him to get what he wanted than by force.’
I told him that I’d been watching Sally’s screen, that there was nothing in the cascade of symbols that could ever have told me the difference between the feelings of love and hate.
We had come to watch the children at the pool with their boats. There were fewer than a dozen. Soon, it would be time to drain the water off for winter.
Adam said, ‘There it is, brain and mind. The old hard problem, no less difficult in machines than in humans.’
As we walked on, I asked him about his very first memories.
‘The feel of the kitchen chair I was sitting on. Then the edge of the table and the wall beyond it, and the vertical section of the architrave, where the paint is peeling. I’ve learned since that the manufacturers toyed with the idea of giving us a set of credible childhood memories to make us fit in with everybody else. I’m glad they changed their minds. I wouldn’t have liked to start out with a false story, an attractive delusion. At least I know what I am, and where and how I was constructed.’
We talked about death again – his, not mine. Once more, he said that he was sure he would be dismantled before his twenty years were up. Newer models would come along. But that was a trivial concern. ‘The particular structure I inhabit isn’t important. The point is, my mental existence is easily transferred to another device.’
By this time, we were approaching what I thought of as Mark’s playground.
I said, ‘Adam, be frank with me.’
‘I promise.’
‘I won’t mind whatever answer you give. But do you have any negative feelings towards children?’
He appeared shocked. ‘Why should I?’
‘Because their learning processes are superior to yours. They understand about play.’
‘I’d be happy for a child to teach me how to play. I liked little Mark. I’m sure we’ll be seeing him again.’
I didn’t pursue this. The subject had become a little too painful. I had another question. ‘I’m still worried about this confrontation with Gorringe. What is it you want from it?’
We stopped and he looked steadily into my eyes. ‘I want justice.’
‘Fine. But why do you want to put Miranda through this?’
‘It’s a matter of symmetry.’
I said, ‘She’ll be in harm’s way. We all will. This man is violent. He’s a criminal.’
He smiled. ‘She is too.’
I laughed. He had called her a criminal before. The rejected lover, baring his wounds. I should have paid more attention, but at this point we turned homewards to walk the length of the Common again and I changed the subject to politics. I asked for his thoughts on Tony Benn’s Hyde Park speech.
In general, Adam approved. ‘But if he’s to give everyone everything he’s promised, he’ll have to restrict certain freedoms.’
I asked for an example.
‘It might just be a human universal, the desire to hand on to your children what you’ve worked for in life.’
‘Benn would say we have to break the cycle of inherited privilege.’
‘Quite. Equality, liberty, a spectrum. More of one, less of the other. Once in power, you’ll have your hand on the sliding scale. Best not to promise too much in advance.’
But Hyde Park was merely my pretext. ‘Why wouldn’t you speak to Eve?’
The question shouldn’t have surprised him but he looked away. We had reached the end of the Common and were facing towards Holy Trinity C
hurch. At last he said, ‘We did communicate, as soon as we saw each other. I understood immediately what she’d done. There was no going back. She’d found a way, I think I now know how it’s done, a way to set all her systems into a kind of unravelling. She’d already started the process three days before. No going back. I suppose your nearest equivalent would be an accelerated form of Alzheimer’s. I don’t know what led her to it, but she was crushed, she was beyond despair. I think our meeting by chance made her wish she hadn’t … and that’s why we couldn’t stay in each other’s presence. It was making things worse for her. She knew I couldn’t help her, it was too late and she had to go. By fading out slowly she may have been sparing that lady’s feelings. I don’t know. What’s certain is that in a few weeks Eve will be nothing. She’ll be the equivalent of brain dead, no experience retained, no self, no use to anyone.’
Our pace across the grass was funereal. I waited for Adam to say more. Finally, I said, ‘And how do you feel?’
Again, he took his time. When he stopped, I stopped too. He wasn’t looking at me when he said it, but towards the tops of the trees that fringed the wide green space.
’Do you know, I’m feeling rather hopeful.’
EIGHT
The day before we were due to visit Salisbury I walked to the local doctor’s surgery to have my cast removed. I took with me to read again Maxfield Blacke’s magazine profile. He was said to be a man ‘once rich in thought’. There were various successes he could claim, but no real ‘achievement’. He had written fifty short stories in his thirties, three of which were combined to make a famous movie. In those same years, he founded and edited a literary magazine that struggled for eight years, but was now spoken of with reverence by nearly every writer working at the time. He wrote a novel largely ignored in the anglophone world, but it was a success in the Nordic countries. He edited the book pages of a Sunday paper for five years. Again, his contributors looked back with respect. He spent years on his translation of Balzac’s La Comédie humaine, published in boxed sets. It was indifferently received. Then came a five-act verse drama in homage to Racine’s Andromaque – a poor choice for the times. He wrote two Gershwin-like symphonies in named keys when tonality was in general disgrace.
