Enduring Love

by Ian Mcewan

  She was shaking her head as I spoke. “No, no. You’ve got to listen to me. You were there, but I know more about this than you.

  There was another side to John, you see. He always wanted to be the best, but he was no longer the all-round athlete he once was. He was forty-two. It hurt. He couldn’t accept it. And when men start to feel like that … I knew nothing about this woman. I suspected nothing, it didn’t occur to me, I don’t even know if she was the first, but I know this. She was watching him, and he knew she was watching, and he had to show her, he had to prove himself to her. He had to run right into the middle of the scene, he had to be the first to take the rope and the last to let go, instead of doing what he usually would—hanging back and seeing what was best. That’s what he would have done without her, and it’s pathetic. He was showing off to a girl, Mr. Rose, and we’re all suffering for it now.”

  This was a theory, a narrative that only grief, the dementia of pain, could devise. “But you can’t know this,” I protested. “It’s so particular, so elaborate. It’s just a hypothesis. You can’t let yourself believe in it.”

  She gave me a pitying look before turning to the children. “This really is too much noise. We can’t hear ourselves speak.” Then she stood impatiently. Leo had wound himself up in the curtain until only his feet were visible. Rachael had been prancing around him, chanting something and poking him and eliciting in return a chanted response. Now she stood back as her mother unwound the boy. Jean Logan’s tone was hardly scolding, more a gentle reminder. “You’ll bring the curtain rail down again. I told you yesterday, and you promised me.”

  Leo emerged flushed and happy. He caught his sister’s eye and she began to giggle. Then he remembered me and squared up to his mother for my benefit. “But this is our palace and I’m the king and she’s the queen and I only come out when she gives the signal.”

  There was more from Leo, and the mildest of censure from his mother, but I heard none of it. It was as though delicate lacework were repairing its own torn fabric by the power of its intricacy alone.

  It all came at once, and it seemed impossible that I could have forgotten. The palace was Buckingham Palace, the king was King George the Fifth, the woman outside the palace was French, and the time was shortly after the Great War. She had traveled to England on a number of occasions and wanted nothing more than to stand outside the palace gates in the hope of catching sight of the king, with whom she was in love. She had never met him and never would, but her every waking thought was of him.

  I was on my feet and Rachael was saying something to me, which I did not hear, but I nodded all the same.

  This woman was convinced that all of London society was talking of her affair with the king and that he was deeply perturbed. On one visit, when she could not find a hotel room, she felt the king had used his influence to prevent her from staying in London. The one thing she knew for certain was that the king loved her. She loved him in return, but she resented him bitterly. He turned her away, and yet he never stopped giving her hope. He sent her signals that she alone could read, and he let her know that however inconvenient it was, however embarrassing and inappropriate, he loved her and always would. He used the curtains in the windows of Buckingham Palace to communicate with her. She lived her life in the prison gloom of this delusion. Her forlorn and embittered love was identified as a syndrome by the French psychiatrist who treated her, and who gave his name to her morbid passion. De Clerambault.

  When Jean Logan saw me stand up, she assumed I was about to leave. She had gone over to a desk and was scrawling names and numbers down.

  The children approached again and Rachael said, “I’ve thought of another one.”

  “Really?” It was difficult to concentrate on her.

  “Our teacher said that in most of the world they don’t have hankies and it’s okay to blow your nose like this.” She pinched the bridge of her nose between forefinger and thumb, with the other fingers lifted clear of the nostrils, and blew a raspberry at me. Her brother yelped in glee. I took the folded piece of paper from Jean Logan, and together we left the room and went down the brown hall to the front door. Even before we reached it, I was back with de Clerambault. De Clerambault’s syndrome. The name was like a fanfare, a clear trumpet sound recalling me to my own obsessions. There was research to follow through now, and I knew exactly where to start. A syndrome was a framework of prediction, and it offered a kind of comfort. I was almost happy as she opened the front door for me and the four of us crowded out onto the brick path to say our goodbyes. It was as if I had at last been offered that research post with my old professor.

  Jean Logan thanked me for coming, and I told her I would phone as soon as I had made the calls. Now that I was leaving, the children hung back. I was a stranger again. I pinched my nose and made a politer version of Rachael’s sound. They indulged me with forced smiles. I made them shake my hand. I couldn’t help feeling as I went up the path that my leaving would return them to their father’s absence. The family was grouped by the front door, the mother’s hands resting on her children’s shoulders. When I reached my car and unlocked the door, I turned to call out one last goodbye, but all three had gone back inside the house.

  Fifteen

  On the way home I turned south off the motorway where the Chilterns rise and drove to the field. I parked exactly where Logan had, with the car banked on the grass verge. Standing by the passenger door, she would have had a clear view of the whole drama, from the balloon and its basket dragging across the field to the struggle with the ropes and the fall. She wouldn’t have been able to see where he landed. I imagined her, pretty, in her early twenties, frantic in distress, running back up the road to the nearest village. Or she might have gone the other way, down the hill toward Watlington. I stood there in her place and daydreamed of the secret phone calls or notes that might have preceded their picnic. Perhaps they were in love. Did he suffer tortures of guilt and indecision, the honorable family man? And what violent transformation for her, from the anticipated idyll with the man she adored to the nightmare, the moment round which the rest of her life would pivot. Even in her terror she would have remembered to snatch her things from the car—her coat and bag, perhaps, but not the picnic and her scarf—and she would have started running. It made sense to me that she did not come forward. She stayed at home and read the newspapers and lay whimpering on her bed.

  With no particular aim, I set off across the field. Everything looked different. In less than two weeks the hedgerows and surrounding trees had thickened with the first spring growth, and the grass underfoot gave a hint of the extravagance to come. As though walking through a police reconstruction, I picked up the path Clarissa and I had taken and followed it to the patch where we had sheltered from the wind. It seemed like a half-remembered place from childhood. We were so happy in our reunion, so easy with each other, and now I could not quite imagine a route back into that innocence.

  From here I walked slowly into the center of the field, along the direction of my sprint, to the point where our fates converged, and then along the route the wind had driven us, right to the edge of the escarpment. There, traversing the field, was the footpath that brought Parry into my life. Back there, where my car was now, was where Logan had stopped. This was where we stood and watched him fall from the sky; it was also where Parry caught my glance and became stricken with a love whose morbidity I was now impatient to research.

  These were my stations of the cross. I went down the hill, into the field, and toward the next place. The sheep were gone, and the minor road beyond the hedge was closer than I remembered. I looked for an indentation in the ground, but there was only the beginning of a nettle patch that extended almost to the gate the policemen had climbed. This was where Parry had wanted to pray, and it was from here that I had walked away. I walked away now, trying to imagine how he could have read rejection in my posture.

  It cost me more effort than last time to climb the hill. Then adrenaline ha
d powered my limbs and accelerated every thought. Now my reluctance was deep in the muscles of my thighs, and I could feel my heart knocking in my ears. While I paused at the top to recover, I looked about me. A hundred acres or so of fields and one steep slope. Now I was here, it seemed as though I had never really left, for this was the stage, the green painted flats, of my preoccupations, and it would not have been such a surprise to have seen approaching me from different corners Clarissa, John and Jean Logan, the unnamed woman, Parry and de Clerambault. Imagining this, seeing them arrive to back me against the escarpment’s edge in a horseshoe, I had no doubt they would come to accuse me collectively—but of what? Had I known immediately, I would not have been so indictable. A lack, a deficiency, a failed extension into mental space as difficult to describe as one’s first encounter with the calculus. Clarissa I would listen to at any time, even though we didn’t trust each other’s judgment at present, but it was the Frenchman in the double-breasted suit who fascinated me now.

  I began to return across the field toward my car. It was a simple idea, really, but a man who had a theory about pathological love and who had given his name to it, like a bridegroom at the altar, must surely reveal, even if unwittingly, the nature of love itself. For there to be a pathology, there had to be a lurking concept of health. De Clerambault’s syndrome was a dark, distorting mirror that reflected and parodied a brighter world of lovers whose reckless abandon to their cause was sane. (I walked faster. The car was four hundred meters or so away, and seeing it now, I knew for certain the front doors had stood wide open, like wings.) Sickness and health. In other words, what could I learn about Parry that would restore me to Clarissa?

  The traffic into London was heavy, and it was almost two hours before I parked outside our apartment building. I had thought about it on the way, and I expected him to be there, but seeing him waiting for me as I got out of the car gave me a jolt to the heart. I paused before I crossed the road. He had taken up a position by the entrance where I would have to walk by him. He looked dressed up—black suit, white shirt buttoned to the top, black patent shoes with white flashes. He was staring at me, but his expression told me nothing. I walked toward him quickly, hoping to brush right by him and get indoors, but he stood across my path and I had to stop or push him aside. He looked tense, possibly angry. There was an envelope in his hand.

  “You’re in my way,” I said.

  “Did you get my letter?”

  I decided to try to squeeze past him by pushing into the low privet hedge that flanked the path, but he closed the gap and I didn’t want to touch him.

  “Let me through or I’ll call the police.”

  He nodded eagerly, as though he had heard me inviting him up for a drink. “But I’d like you to read this first,” he said. “It’s very important?”

  I took the envelope from him, hoping he would then stand aside for me. But it was not enough. There was something he wanted to tell me. First he glanced at the presence over his shoulder. When he spoke his voice was breathy, and I guessed his heart was racing. This was a moment he had prepared for.

  He said, “I paid a researcher and he got me all your articles. I read them last night, thirty-five of them. I’ve got your books too.”

  I just looked at him and waited. Something had shifted in his manner. The yearning was there, but there was a hardness too, a change around the eyes. They looked smaller.

  “I know what you’re trying to do, but you’ll never succeed. Not even if you wrote a million and I read them all, you’ll never destroy what I have. It can’t be taken away.”

  He seemed to expect to be contradicted, but I folded my arms and continued to wait, concentrating my attention on a shaving cut, a black hairline nick on his cheek. What he said next appeared at the time to refer to the ease of hiring a researcher, although I wasn’t completely sure. Afterward I considered his words carefully and began to think that perhaps I was being threatened. But then, it was easy to feel threatened, and I ended up with no clear idea at all.

  He said, “I’m pretty well off, you know. I can get people to do things for me. Anything I want. There’s always someone who needs the money. What’s surprising is how cheap it is, you know, for something you’d never do yourself?” He let this pseudo question hang, and watched me.

  “I’ve got a phone in the car. If you don’t let me through, I’m calling the police now.”

  I got the same warm look as before. The hardness dropped from Parry as he gratefully accepted the affection he had detected in my warning. “It’s okay, Joe. It really is. It’s difficult for me too. I understand you just as well as you understand me. You can be open with me. You don’t have to wrap it up in code, really you don’t.”

  As I stepped back and turned toward my car, I said, “There is no code. It would be better if you accepted that you need help.”

  Even before I had finished he laughed, or rather he whooped and slapped his thigh, cowboy style. He must have heard from me a rallying cry to love. He was almost shouting in his joy. “That’s right. I’ve got everyone and everything on my side. It’s going to go my way, Joe, and there’s nothing you can do!”

  Mad as this was, he also took the trouble to stand back and let me pass. Was there calculation here? I couldn’t even trust his derangement, and for that reason alone I was glad to end the conversation and go indoors. Also, it was obvious the police wouldn’t have helped. I did not even look back to see if he was going to wait around. I did not want to give him the satisfaction of knowing that it bothered me.

  I put his envelope in my back pocket and took the stairs two at a time. It was like a painkiller, the distance and height I opened between us in fifteen seconds. Studying Parry with reference to a syndrome I could tolerate, even relish, but meeting him yet again in the street, especially now that I had read his first letter, had frightened me. Fearing him would grant him great power. I could well imagine preferring not to come home. As I reached the landing outside the apartment door, I was wondering whether he had in fact threatened me; if a researcher was easy to hire, so too were a few goons to thrash me within an inch of my life. Perhaps I was overinterpreting. The ambiguity fed my fear. As threats went, it was perfectly nuanced.

  These were my thoughts as I unlocked the door and stepped into the hall. I stood there a moment, recovering my breath, reading the silence and the quality of the air. Although her bag was not on the floor by the door, nor was her jacket draped across the chair, I sensed through my skin that Clarissa was back from work and something was wrong. I called her name and, hearing nothing, walked into the sitting room. It is L-shaped, and I had to go several paces in before I was certain she was not there. I thought I heard a sound in the hall I had just left, and I called her name again. Buildings have their own archives of creaks and clicks, mostly prompted by small changes in temperature, so I was not surprised to see no one when I went back, though I still did not doubt that Clarissa was somewhere in the apartment. I went into the bedroom, thinking she might be taking a nap. The shoes she wore to work were lying side by side, and the bedspread had an indent where she had lain. There was no sign she had used the bathroom. I made a quick search of the other rooms—the kitchen, her study, the children’s bedroom—and I checked the bolt on the door that led out onto the roof. It was then that I changed my mind and devised a logical sequence: she had come home, kicked off her shoes, lain on the bed awhile, put on another pair of shoes, and gone out. In my anxiety following the encounter with Parry, I had simply misread the air.

  I went into the kitchen to fill the kettle. Then I wandered into my study, and that was where I found her. It was so obvious, and it was such a shock. I saw her as if for the first time. She was barefoot, slumped in my swivel chair, with her back to the desk, facing the door. With all that had happened that day, I should have guessed it. I returned her stare as I came into the room and said, “Why didn’t you answer?”

  She said, “I thought this would be the first place you’d look.” When I fro
wned she added, “Didn’t you think I’d be going through your desk while you were out? Isn’t that how it is with us these days?”

  I sat wearily on the couch. Being so entirely in the wrong was a kind of liberation. No need to struggle, no point marshaling arguments.

  She was calm, and very angry. “I’ve been sitting here half an hour, trying to tempt myself to open one of these drawers and take a look at your letters. And do you know, I couldn’t raise the curiosity. Isn’t that a terrible thing? I don’t care about your secrets, and if you’ve got none, I don’t care either. If you’d asked to see my letters I’d’ve said yes, go ahead. I’ve got nothing to hide from you.” Her voice rose a little, and there was a tremor in it too. I had never seen such fury in her before. “You even left the drawer open so I’d know when I came in. It’s a statement, a message, from you to me, it’s a signal. The trouble is, I don’t know what it means. Perhaps I’m being very stupid. So spell it out for me now, Joe. What is it you’re trying to tell me?”

  Sixteen

  Dear Joe,

  The student I hired rang my bell at four yesterday afternoon and I went out to meet him at the gate. I gave him five hundred pounds for his work and he handed the bundle through the bars. Thirty-five photocopied articles by you. He went off happy, but what about me? I had no idea then what kind of night lay ahead. Perhaps they were the worst few hours of my life. It was torture, Joe, coming face to face with your sad dry thoughts. To think of the fools who paid you good money for them, and the innocent readers who had their day polluted by them!