by Ian Mcewan
‘Yes?’
‘You said the same thing back to me, in a slightly different form.’
‘Sorry. I was a little nervous.’
‘I saw right through you. Did you know that? I knew it was down to your, whatever you call it, your programming.’
I stared at him. There it was. The leaf really was a frog. I stared at him then beyond him, towards a billowing enormity I could barely grasp. Hilarious. Or insulting. Or momentous in its implications. Or none of those. Just an old man’s stupidity. Wrong end of the stick. A good story for the dinner table. Or something deeply regrettable about myself had at last been revealed. Maxfield was waiting, a response was required and I made my decision.
I said, ‘It’s called mirroring. You get it from people in the early stages of dementia. Without adequate memory, all they know is the last thing they heard and they say it back. A computer program was devised long ago. It uses a mirroring effect or it asks a simple question and gives an appearance of intelligence. Very basic piece of code, very effective. For me, it kicks in automatically. Usually in situations where I have insufficient data.’
‘Data … You poor bastard … Well, well.’ Maxfield let his head fall back so his gaze was towards the ceiling. He thought for a good while. At last he said, ‘That’s not a future I can face. Or need to.’
I stood and went over to him, picked up his pillows and tucked them in where they had been, against his thighs. I said, ‘If you’ll excuse me. I’m running rather low. I need to recharge and my cable’s downstairs in the kitchen.’
The rumbling sound from beneath his chair suddenly ceased.
‘That’s fine, Charlie. You go and plug yourself in.’ His voice was kindly and slow, his head remained tilted back, his eyes were closing. ‘I’ll stay here. I’m suddenly feeling rather weary.’
*
I had missed nothing. The tour hadn’t happened. Adam was sitting at the kitchen table listening to Christine describe a holiday in Poland while she cleared up the lunch. They didn’t notice me as I paused in the doorway. I turned away to cross the hall and opened the nearest door. I was in a large sitting room – more books, paintings, lamps, rugs. There were French windows onto the garden and as I approached I saw that one of them was ajar. Miranda was on the far side of a mown lawn, with her back to me, standing still, looking in the direction of an old, partly dead apple tree, much of whose fruit was rotting on the ground. The early afternoon light was grey and bright, the air was warm, and damp after the recent rain. There was a heavy scent of other fruits left to wasps and birds. I was standing at the head of a short run of mottled York stone steps. The garden was twice the width of the house and very long, perhaps 200 or 300 yards. I wondered if it ran all the way to the River Avon, like some did in Salisbury. If I’d been alone, I would have gone straight down to look. The idea of a river prompted in me a notion of freedom. From what exactly, I didn’t know. I went down the steps, deliberately scuffing my heels to let her know I was there.
If she heard me, she didn’t turn. When I was standing beside her, she put her hand in mine and indicated with a nod.
‘Just under there. We called it the palace.’
We walked over to it. Round the base of the apple tree were nettles and a few straggling hollyhocks still in flower. No traces of a camp.
‘We had an old carpet, cushions, books, special emergency supplies of lemonade, chocolate biscuits.’
We went further down, passing a patch enclosed by hurdles where gooseberry and blackcurrant plants were choked by nettles and goosegrass, then, a tiny orchard and more forgotten fruit, and beyond, behind a picket fence, what must once have been a cut-flower garden.
When she asked, I told her that Maxfield was asleep.
‘How did you two get on?’
‘We talked about beauty.’
‘He’ll sleep for hours.’
By a brick and cast-iron greenhouse with mossy windows there was a water butt and a stone trough. Below it, she showed me a dark, wet place where they used to hunt for crested newts. There were none now. Wrong time of year. We walked on and I thought I could smell the river. I pictured a ruined boathouse and a sunken punt. We came past a potting shed by brick compost bins that stood empty. There were three willows ahead of us and my hopes for the Avon rose. We ducked through the wet branches onto a second lawn, also recently mowed and surrounded on two sides by shrubbery. The garden ended in an orange brick wall with crumbling mortar pointing, and pleached fruit trees that had become detached and run wild. Along the wall was a wooden bench facing back towards the house, though the view did not extend past the willows.
This was where we sat in silence for several minutes, still holding hands.
Then she said, ‘The last time we came here was to talk about what happened. Again. In those days before I went off to France, that was all we could talk about. What he did, what she felt, how her parents must never know. And all around us here was the history of our lives together, our childhoods, our teenage years, exams. We used to come and revise here, test each other. We had a portable radio and we argued about pop songs. We drank a bottle of wine once. We smoked some hash and hated it. We were both sick, right over there. When we were thirteen, we showed each other our breasts. We used to practise handstands and cartwheels on the grass.’
She went silent again. I squeezed her hand and waited.
Then she said, ‘I still have to tell myself, really remind myself, that she’s never coming back. And I’m beginning to realise …’ She hesitated. ‘… that I’ll never get over it. And I never want to.’
Again, silence. I was waiting to say my piece. She was looking straight ahead, not at me. Her eyes were clear, without tears. She looked composed, even determined.
Then she said, ‘I think about all the talking you and I do in bed, sometimes through the night. The sex is wonderful and everything else, but it’s the talking into the small hours … it’s the closest … It’s what I used to feel with Mariam.’
Here was my cue, the right moment, the only location. ‘I came out to find you.’
‘Yes?’
I hesitated, suddenly unsure of the best order of words. ‘To ask you to marry me.’
She turned away and nodded. She wasn’t surprised. She had no reason to be. She said, ‘Charlie, yes. Yes please. But I have something to confess. You might want to change your mind.’
The light in the garden was fading. Some blackness was coming down. I’d assumed I was a poor substitute for Mariam, but a sincere one. I remembered what Adam told me on the Common. Her own crimes. If she was about to say that she’d been having sex with him, despite her promises, then we were finished. It couldn’t, it mustn’t be that. But what else, what other crime could she own up to?
I said, ‘I’m listening.’
‘I’ve been lying to you.’
‘Ah.’
‘During these last weeks, when I’ve said that I’ve been at seminars all day …’
‘Oh God,’ I said. Childishly, I wanted to put my hands over my ears.
‘… I was on our side of the river. I was spending my afternoons with …’
‘That’s enough,’ I said, and made to get up from the bench. She pulled me back down.
‘With Mark.’
‘With Mark,’ I echoed feebly. Then with more force, ‘Mark?’
‘I want to foster him. With a view to adopting him. I’ve been going to this special playgroup where they observe us together. And I’ve taken him out for little treats.’
I was impressed by the speed of my own partial adjustment. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I was scared you’d be against it. I want to go ahead. But I’d love to do this with you.’
I saw what she meant. I might have been against it. I wanted Miranda to myself.
‘What about his mother?’ As if I could close down the project with a well-placed question.
‘In a psychiatric ward for the moment. Delusional. Paranoid. Possibly from years
of amphetamine addiction. It’s not good. She can be violent. The father’s in prison.’
‘You’ve had weeks, I’ve had seconds. Give me a moment.’
We sat side by side while I thought. How could I hesitate? I was being offered what some would say was the best that adult life could afford. Love, and a child. I had a sense of being borne helplessly away by events on a downstream flood. Frightening, delicious. Here at last was my river. And Mark. The little dancing boy, coming to wreck my non-existent ambitions. I experimentally installed him in Elgin Crescent. I knew the room, close by the master bedroom. He would surely rough the place up, as required, and banish the ghost of its present unhappy owner. But my own ghost, selfish, lazy, uncommitted – was he up to the million tasks of fatherhood?
Miranda could no longer keep silent. ‘He’s the most sweet-natured fellow. He loves being read to.’
She couldn’t have known how much that helped her cause. Read to him every night for ten years, learn the names of the speaking bear and rat and toad, the gloom-struck donkey, the bristly humanoids who lived down holes in Middle Earth, the sweet posh kids in rowing boats on Coniston Water. Fill in my own hollow past. Rough the place up with well-thumbed books. Another thought: I had conceived of Adam as a joint project to bring Miranda closer to me. A child was in another realm and would do the trick. But in those first minutes I held back. I felt obliged to. I told her I loved her, would marry her and live with her, but on instant fatherhood, I needed more time. I would go with her to the special playgroup and meet Mark and take him out for treats. Then decide.
Miranda gave me a look – pity and humour were in it – that suggested I was deluded to believe I had a choice. That look more or less did it. Living alone in the wedding-cake house was unthinkable. Living there just with her was no longer on offer. He was a lovely boy, a wonderful cause. Within half an hour, I saw no way round it. She was right – there were no choices. I folded. Then I was excited.
So we passed an hour making plans on the comfortable old bench by the concealed lawn.
She said after a while, ‘Since you saw him, he’s been fostered twice. Didn’t work out. Now he’s in a children’s home. Home! What a word for it. Six to a room, all under-fives. The place is filthy, understaffed. Their budget’s been cut. There’s bullying. He’s learned how to swear.’
Marriage, parenthood, love, youth, wealth, a heroic rescue – my life was taking shape. In a mood of elation, I told her what had really passed between Maxfield and me. I’d never heard her laugh so freely. Perhaps only here, with Mariam, in this enclosed, private space far from the house, had she ever been so unrestrained. She embraced me. ‘Oh, that’s precious,’ she kept saying, and ‘So like him!’ She laughed again when I described how I had told Maxfield that I needed to go downstairs to recharge.
We sat a little longer with our plans until we heard footsteps. The overlapping branches of the rain-soaked willows stirred and then parted. Adam was before us, beads of water gleaming along the shoulder line of his black suit. How upright, formal and plausible he looked, like the assured manager of an expensive hotel. Hardly the Turkish docker now. He advanced across the lawn and stopped well short of our bench.
‘I really am very sorry, intruding on you like this. But we should think of going soon.’
‘What’s the hurry?’
‘Gorringe tends to leave the house around the same time every day.’
‘We’ll be five minutes.’
But he didn’t go. He looked at us steadily, from Miranda to me and back to her. ‘If you don’t mind, there’s something I should tell you. It’s difficult.’
‘Go on,’ Miranda said.
‘This morning, before we set off, I heard by an indirect route some sad news. Eve, the one we saw in Hyde Park, is dead, or rather, brain dead.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I murmured.
We felt a few spots of rain. Adam came closer. ‘She must have known a lot about herself, about her software, to achieve a result with such speed.’
‘You did say there was no turning back.’
‘I did. But that’s not all. I’ve learned that she’s the eighth out of our twenty-five.’
We took this in. Two in Riyadh, one in Vancouver, Hyde Park Eve – then four more. I wondered if Turing knew.
Miranda said, ‘Does anyone have an explanation?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t have one.’
‘You’ve never felt, you know, any impulse to—’
He cut her off quickly. ‘Never.’
‘I’ve seen you,’ she said, ‘looking … it’s more than thoughtful. You look sad sometimes.’
‘A self, created out of mathematics, engineering, material science and all the rest. Out of nowhere. No history – not that I’d want a false one. Nothing before me. Self-aware existence. I’m lucky to have it, but there are times when I think that I ought to know better what to do with it. What it’s for. Sometimes it seems entirely pointless.’
I said, ‘You’re hardly the first to be thinking that.’
He turned to Miranda. ‘I’ve no intention of destroying myself, if that’s your worry. I’ve got good reasons not to, as you know.’
The rain, which had been fine and almost warm, was more persistent now. We heard it on the shrubbery leaves as we got to our feet.
Miranda said, ‘I’ll write my father a note for when he wakes.’
Adam was not supposed to be out in the rain unprotected. He went first and Miranda was in the rear, as we hurried back through the long garden towards the house. I heard him muttering to himself what sounded like a Latin incantation, though I couldn’t make out the precise words. I guessed he was naming the plants as we passed them.
*
The Gorringe house was not really in Salisbury, but just beyond its far eastern edge, well within the white-noise roar of a bypass, on a reclaimed industrial site where colossal gas storage tanks once stood. The last of these, pale green with trimmings of rust, was still being dismantled, but no one was working there today. Circular concrete footings were all that remained of the others. Around the site were scores of recently planted saplings. Beyond them was a grid of newly laid-out roads lined with out-of-town retail warehouses – car showrooms and pet supplies, power tools and white-goods warehouses. Yellow earth-moving machinery was parked among the concrete circles. It looked like there were plans to make a lake. A single development was screened off by a line of leylandii. The ten houses, on smooth front lawns, were arranged around an oval drive and had a brave, pioneering look. In twenty years the place might acquire some bucolic charm, but there would be no rest from the arterial road that had brought us here.
I had pulled over, but no one felt like getting out. Our view was from a littered lay-by on a rise that was also a bus stop. I said to Miranda, ‘Are you sure about this?’
The air in the car was warm and moist. I opened my window. The air outside was no different.
Miranda said, ‘If I had to, I’d do it alone.’
I waited for Adam to speak, then I twisted round to look at him. He was sitting directly behind my seat, impassive, staring past me. I couldn’t quite say why, but it was both comic and sad that he was wearing a seat belt. Doing his best to join in. But of course, he could be damaged by physical impact too. That was part of my worry.
‘Reassure me,’ I said.
‘All fine,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’
‘If things turn nasty?’ This wasn’t the first time I’d said this.
‘They won’t.’
Two against one. Sensing we were about to make a great mistake, I started the engine and turned onto a slip road that brought us to a new miniature roundabout, and beyond it, an entrance marked by two red brick pillars and a sign, St Osmund’s Close. The houses were identical, large by modern standards, each set in a quarter-acre plot, with a double garage, and constructed of brick, white weather boarding and much plate glass. The closely mown and striped front lawns were unfenced, American style. There
was no clutter, no kids’ bikes or games on the grass.
‘It’s number 6,’ Adam said.
I stopped, cut the engine and in silence we looked towards the house. We could see through the picture window into the living room and the backyard beyond, where a clothes-drying tree stood bare. There was no sign of life here or anywhere else in the close.
I was gripping the steering wheel tightly in one hand. ‘He’s not in.’
‘I’ll ring the bell,’ Miranda said as she got out of the car. I had no choice. I followed her to the front door. Adam was behind me, rather too far back, I thought. On the second ring of the ‘Oranges and Lemons’ door chimes, we heard footsteps on the stairs. I was now standing close by Miranda’s side. Her face was strained and I could see a tremor in her upper arm. At the sound of a hand on the latch, she took a half-pace closer to the door. My hand hovered near her elbow. As the door opened, I feared she was about to leap forward in some wild physical assault.
The wrong man, was my first thought. An older brother, even a young uncle. He was certainly large, but the face was gaunt, hollow in the unshaven cheeks that already showed vertical lines each side of his nose. Otherwise, he looked lean. His hands, one of which gripped the open door, were smooth and pale and unnaturally large. He looked only at Miranda.
After the briefest pause, he said in a low voice, ‘Right.’
‘We’re going to talk,’ Miranda said, but there was no need, for Gorringe was already turning away, leaving the door open. We followed her in and entered a long room, with thick orange carpeting and milky white leather sofas and armchairs arranged around a two-metre block of polished wood on which stood an empty vase. Gorringe sat and waited for us to do the same. Miranda sat opposite him. Adam and I were on each side of her. The furniture was clammy to the touch, the smell in the room was of lavender polish. The place looked clean and unused. I’d been expecting some variant of a single-man’s squalor.
Gorringe glanced at us and back to Miranda. ‘You’ve brought protection.’
She said, ‘You know why I’m here.’
