by Ian Mcewan
In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.
This was always a generous audience, but it rarely rose to a standing ovation. That sort of thing was for pop concerts, as was shouting and whistling. But it rose as one now, with only a little hesitation from certain senior figures of the judiciary. Some younger enthusiasts shouted and whistled. But Mark Berner received the accolade alone, one hand resting on the piano, nodding and smiling in acknowledgment, and also watching with concern as his pianist walked quickly across the stage, gaze fixed on her feet, and went down the steps, pushing past the waiting members of the string quartet, and hurried toward the exit. It was generally assumed that the whole experience must have been unusually intense for her, and the benchers and their friends were sympathetic and clapped all the harder as she passed in front of them.
SHE FOUND HER coat and, careless of the fresh downpour, walked to the flat as quickly as she dared in high heels. In the sitting room, a couple of candles were as they had carelessly left them. Still in her coat, hair flattened to her scalp, water dribbling down her neck to the small of her back, she stood still, trying to remember a woman’s name. So much had happened since she last thought of her. She recalled a face, she heard a voice, then it came back. Marina Greene. Fiona took her phone from her handbag and called. She apologized for calling out of hours. They spoke briefly, for there were screaming infants in the background and the young woman sounded tired and harassed. Yes, she could confirm it. Four weeks ago. She gave the few details she knew and said she was surprised that the judge had not been informed.
Fiona remained standing in the same place, her gaze settled, for no particular reason, on the plate of food her husband had prepared, her mind a merciful blank. The music she had just played didn’t resonate in her mind, the way it usually did. She had forgotten the concert. If it was neurologically possible not to think, she had no thoughts. Minutes passed. Impossible to know how many. At a sound, she turned. The fire was in its last throes and collapsing into the grate. She went over to it, knelt down and set about building it up, lifting fragments of wood and coal, with her fingers rather than the tongs, and placing them on and near the remains of the glowing heat. After three strokes of the bellows, a splinter of pine caught fire, which spread to two larger pieces as she watched. She moved closer and let the spectacle of tiny flames, their sideways bobbing and swiping movements across the surrounding blackness of coal, fill her vision.
At last, thoughts came in the form of two insistent questions. Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you ask for my help? The answer came back in her own imagined voice. I did. She rose, aware of a pain in her hip as she went to her bedroom to retrieve the poem from the bedside table, where it had lain for six weeks. Its melodramatic tone, the puritanical suggestion that a bid for freedom, throwing the heavy cross in the river, receiving one chaste kiss, should be satanically inspired had deterred her from reading it again. There was something dank or suffocating about the Christian paraphernalia—the cross, the Judas tree, the trumpets. And she was the painted lady, the fish with rainbows on its scales, the treacherous creature that led the poet astray and kissed him. Yes, that kiss. It was her guilt that had kept her away.
She crouched down by the fire again and set the poem before her on the Bokhara rug. Her coal-dust fingerprints smudged the top of the page. She went directly to the final verse—Jesus standing miraculously on the waters of the river, announcing that the fish was Satan in disguise and the poet “must pay the fee.”
Her kiss was the kiss of Judas, her kiss betrayed my name.
May he
She reached for her glasses on the table behind her and leaned closer in to follow the crossed-out and encircled words. “Knife” was deleted; so were “pay,” “Let him” and “blame.” The word “himself” was deleted, reinstated, deleted again. “Mustn’t” was replaced by “must,” and “sinks” by “drowns.” “May” was by itself, without a balloon, floating above the fray, with an arrow indicating it should replace “And.” She was getting the hang of his methods and his handwriting. And then she had it, she saw it plainly. There was even a meandering connecting line running between the chosen words. The Son of God had delivered a curse.
May he who drowns my cross by his own hand be slain.
When she heard the front door open, she didn’t turn away, and this was how Jack glimpsed her as he passed by the sitting room on his way to the kitchen. He assumed she was tending the fire.
“Build it right up,” he called. And then, from further away, “You were brilliant! Everyone loved it. And so moving!”
When he came back with the champagne and two fresh glasses, she had stood to take off her coat and fling it over the back of a chair and remove her shoes. She was standing still in the center of the room, waiting. He didn’t notice her pallor as he gave her one of the glasses and she held it out to be filled.
“Your hair. Shall I get you a towel?”
“It’ll dry.”
He removed the metal stopper and filled her glass, then his own, which he set down while he went over to the fire and emptied the coal scuttle over it and put on three large logs, wigwam style. He turned on the hi-fi and started the Jarrett again.
She murmured, “Jack, not now.”
“Of course. After tonight! Stupid of me.”
She saw that his wish was to get back quickly to where they were before the concert, and she felt sorry for him. He was doing his best. Soon he would want to kiss her. He came back to her, and in the silence, which had hissed in her ears the instant the hi-fi was off, they touched glasses and drank. Then he talked about her and Mark’s performance, of his, Jack’s, tears of pride when they all stood at the end, and what people were saying afterward.
“It went well,” she said. “I’m so glad it went well.”
He was not a musician, his taste was strictly for jazz and blues, but he spoke plausibly enough about the concert and remembered the pieces separately. Les nuits d’été was a revelation. He was especially moved by the “Lament,” he even understood the French. The Mahler he would need to hear again, for he sensed an enormous reservoir of feeling in it but he couldn’t quite connect first time around. He was glad that Mark sang it in English. Everyone knew the urge to run from the world; few dared do it. She listened gravely, or appeared to, and gave short responses and nods. She felt like a hospital patient who longs for her kindly visitor to leave so she can resume being ill. The fire took, and Jack, noticing that she was shivering, guided her toward it, and there he poured the rest of the champagne.
They had lived in the square a long time, and he knew the Gray’s Inn benchers almost as well as she did. He began to tell her about the people he had run into that evening. The square was tightly knit; the people in it fascinated them. The late-evening postmortem was a feature of their lives together. It was easy for her to continue mumbling an occasional response. Jack remained in an elevated state, excited by her performance, and by what he thought lay ahead. He told her about a criminal lawyer who was setting up a free school with others. They needed a Latin translation for their motto, “Every child a genius.” Three words maximum, short enough to be sewn onto a school blazer, under a heraldic phoenix rising from the ashes. It was a fascinating problem. Genius was an eighteenth-century concept, and Latin renderings of “child” were mostly gender-specific. Jack had come up with “Quiusque parvuli ingenium”—not quite as strong as genius, but natural wit or ability would do nicely. At a pinch “parvuli” could encompass girls. Then the lawyer had asked him if he’d be interested in creating a lively Latin course for eleven- to sixteen-year-olds of mixed abilities. Challenging. Irresistible.
She listened without expression. No child of hers would ever wear such a wonderful badge. She was excessively vulnerable, she realiz
ed.
She said, “That would be a good thing to do.”
He caught the flatness of her tone and looked at her differently.
“Something’s up.”
“I’m all right.”
Then, frowning as he recalled the question he had failed to ask, he said, “Why did you walk off at the end?”
She hesitated. “It was too much for me.”
“When they all stood? I almost cracked up completely.”
“It was the last song.”
“The Mahler.”
“ ‘The Salley Gardens.’ ”
He assumed an amused, disbelieving look. He had heard her perform it with Mark a dozen times before. “How so?”
There was also in his manner a touch of impatience. He was wanting to fulfill the promise of a wonderful evening, to put their marriage back together, kiss her, open another bottle, take her to bed, make everything easy between them once more. She knew him well, she saw all this, and again she felt sorry for him, but she felt it from a great distance.
She said, “A memory. From the summer.”
“Yes?” His tone was only mildly curious.
“A young man played that tune to me on his violin. He was just learning. It was in a hospital. I sang along. I think we made a bit of a din. Then he wanted to play it again, but I had to leave.”
Jack was in no mood for puzzles. He struggled to keep the irritation out of his voice. “Start again. Who was this?”
“A very strange and beautiful young man.” She spoke vaguely, trailing away.
“And?”
“I suspended proceedings while I went to his bedside to see him. You remember. A Jehovah’s Witness, very ill, refusing treatment. It was in the papers.”
If he needed reminding it was because he was installed in Melanie’s bedroom at the time. Otherwise, they would have discussed the case.
He said staunchly, “I think I remember it.”
“I gave the hospital leave to treat him and he recovered. The judgment had … it had an effect on him.”
They stood as they had earlier, on each side of the fire, which now gave off a fierce heat. She stared down into the flames. “I think … I think he had strong feelings for me.”
Jack set down his empty glass. “Go on.”
“When I was on circuit he followed me up to Newcastle. And I …” She wasn’t going to tell him what happened there, and then she changed her mind. No point concealing anything now. “He walked through the rain to find me and … I did something so stupid. In the hotel. I don’t know what I was … I kissed him. I kissed him.”
He took a step away from the fire’s heat, or from her. She no longer cared.
She whispered, “He was the sweetest fellow. He wanted to come and live with us.”
“Us?”
Jack Maye had come of age in the 1970s among all its currents of thought. He had taught in a university his entire adult life. He knew all about the illogic of double standards, but knowing could not protect him. She saw the anger in his face, tightening the muscles along his jaw, hardening his eyes.
“He thought I could change his life. I suppose he wanted to make me into a kind of guru. He thought I could … He was so earnest, so hungry for life, for everything. And I didn’t …”
“So you kissed him and he wanted to live with you. What are you trying to tell me?”
“I sent him away.” She shook her head, and for the moment she couldn’t speak.
Then she looked at Jack. He stood well away from her, feet apart, arms crossed, his still-handsome, good-natured face stiff with anger. A wisp of silvery chest hair curled up through his open-necked shirt. She had sometimes seen him tease it up with a comb. That the world should be filled with such detail, such tiny points of human frailty, threatened to crush her and she had to look away.
Only now, when it stopped, were they aware of the rain that had been beating at the windows.
Into this deeper silence he said, “So what’s happened? Where is he now?”
She spoke in a quiet monotone. “I heard it tonight from Runcie. Some weeks ago his leukemia came back and he was taken into hospital. He refused the transfusion they wanted to give him. That was his decision. He was eighteen and there was nothing anyone could do. He refused and his lungs filled with blood and he died.”
“So he died for his faith.” Her husband’s voice was cold.
She looked at him without comprehension. She realized that she had not explained herself at all, that there was so much she hadn’t told him.
“I think it was suicide.”
For some seconds neither spoke. They heard voices, laughter and footsteps in the square. The musical event was breaking up.
He cleared his throat softly. “Were you in love with him, Fiona?”
The question undid her. She let out a terrible sound, a smothered howl. “Oh Jack, he was just a child! A boy. A lovely boy!” And she began to weep at last, standing by the fire, her arms hanging hopelessly at her sides, while he watched, shocked to see his wife, always so self-contained, at the furthest extremes of grief.
She was beyond speech and the crying would not stop and she could not bear any longer to be seen. She stooped to gather up her shoes and hurried across the room in her stockinged feet and along the hallway. The further away from him she was, the louder she cried. She reached her bedroom, slammed the door behind her and, without turning on the light, fell onto the bed and sank her face into a pillow.
HALF AN HOUR later, when she woke, climbing in a dream an interminable vertical ladder from the depths, she had no memory of falling asleep. Still in a daze, she lay on her side, facing the door. Along its bottom edge, a slit of light from the hallway was reassuring. But the imagined scenes before her were not. Adam falling ill again, returning home weakened to his loving parents, meeting the kindly elders, returning to the faith. Or using it as the perfect cover to destroy himself. May he who drowns my cross by his own hand be slain. In low light she saw him as she had on her visit to Intensive Care. The pale thin face, the shaded purple under huge violet eyes. The caked tongue, arms like sticks, so ill, so determined on death, so full of charm and life, pages of his poetry spilling over the bed, pleading with her to stay and play their song again when she had to return to court.
There, in court, with the authority and dignity of her position, she offered him, instead of death, all of life and love that lay ahead of him. And protection against his religion. Without faith, how open and beautiful and terrifying the world must have seemed to him. With that thought she slipped back into a deeper sleep and woke minutes later to the singing and the sighing of the gutters. Would it ever stop raining? She saw the solitary figure making his way up the drive of Leadman Hall, bent against the rainstorm, finding a way in the dark, hearing the falling branches. He must have seen ahead the lights in the house and known she was there. He shivered in an outhouse, wondering, waiting for his chance to talk to her, risking everything in the pursuit of—what exactly? And believing he could get it from a woman in her sixtieth year who had risked nothing in life beyond a few reckless episodes in Newcastle a long time ago. She should have been flattered. And ready. Instead, on a powerful and unforgivable impulse, she kissed him, then sent him away. Then ran away herself. Failed to answer his letters. Failed to decipher the warning in his poem. How ashamed she was now of her petty fears for her reputation. Her transgression lay beyond the reach of any disciplinary panel. Adam came looking for her and she offered nothing in religion’s place, no protection, even though the Act was clear, her paramount consideration was his welfare. How many pages in how many judgments had she devoted to that term? Welfare, well-being, was social. No child is an island. She thought her responsibilities ended at the courtroom walls. But how could they? He came to find her, wanting what everyone wanted, and what only free-thinking people, not the supernatural, could give. Meaning.
When she shifted position she felt against her face the pillow wet and cold. Fully awake now, she p
ushed it aside to reach for another, and was surprised to touch a warm body stretched out alongside her, at her back. She turned. Jack lay with his head propped on his hand. With the other he pushed her hair clear of her eyes. It was a tender gesture. By the light from the hall she could just see his face.
He said simply, “I’ve been watching you sleep.”
After a while, a long while, she whispered, “Thank you.”
Then she asked him if he would still love her once she had told him the whole story. It was an impossible question, for he knew almost nothing yet. She suspected he would try to persuade her that her guilt was misplaced.
He put his hand on her shoulder and drew her to him. “Of course I will.”
They lay face-to-face in the semidarkness, and while the great rain-cleansed city beyond the room settled to its softer nocturnal rhythms and their marriage uneasily resumed, she told him in a steady quiet voice of her shame, of the sweet boy’s passion for life and her part in his death.
