by Ian Mcewan
No caresses, then, that night, none of the kitchen table talk and bed that had held us together in the evening after John Logan’s death. Worse, though, at the time, was an image that afflicted me during my sleepless night in the cell and lingered for days afterward. I saw the knife on the floor, I saw Parry slumped back on the sofa clutching his arm—and then I saw the expression on Clarissa’s face. She was on her feet and she was staring at the gun in my hand with an expression of such repulsion and surprise that I thought we would never get past this moment. Lately my worst suspicions had tended to be confirmed. I was getting things right in the worst possible way. My score was depressingly high. Perhaps we really were finished.
Twenty-three
Dear Joe,
I’m sorry about our row. I’m not being sardonic—I really mean it, I genuinely regret it. We always prided ourselves on being able to get by without the occasional fights that other couples told us were necessary and therapeutic. I hated it last night. I hated being angry, and I was scared by your anger. But it’s there now, it can’t be unsaid. You said again and again that I owe you a profound apology for not standing with you “shoulder to shoulder” against Jed Parry, for doubting your sanity, for not having faith in your powers of rationality and deduction and your dedicated research into his condition. I think I gave you that apology several times last night and I’m giving it again now. I thought Parry was a pathetic and harmless crank. At worst, I thought of him as a creature of your imagining. I never guessed he would become so violent. I was completely wrong and I’m sorry, really sorry.
But what I was also trying to say last night was this: your being right is not a simple matter. I can’t quite get rid of the idea that there might have been a less frightening outcome if you had behaved differently. That apart, there’s no question that the whole experience has cost us dearly, however right you were. Shoulder to shoulder? You went it alone, Joe. Right from the start, before you knew anything about Parry, you became so intense and strange and worked up about him. Do you remember his first phone call? You waited two days to tell me about it. Then you were off on your old track about getting back into “real science,” when we’d agreed that there was no point. Are you really saying this had nothing to do with Parry? That same evening you stormed out of the flat, slamming the door on me. Nothing like that had ever happened between us. You became more and more agitated and obsessed. You didn’t want to talk to me about anything else. Our sex life dwindled to almost nothing. I don’t want to go on about it, but your ransacking my desk was a terrible betrayal. What reason had I given you to be jealous? As the Parry thing grew, I watched you go deeper into yourself and further and further away from me. You were manic, and driven, and very lonely. You were on a case, a mission. Perhaps it became a substitute for the science you wanted to be doing. You did the research, you made the logical inferences, and you got a lot of things right, but in the process you forgot to take me along with you, you forgot how to confide.
There was another thing I tried to say to you last night, but you shouted me down. That evening after the accident—it was quite clear from the things you were saying then that you were very troubled by the thought that it might have been you who let go of the rope first. It was obvious you needed to confront that idea, dismiss it, make your peace with it, whatever. I thought we would be talking about it again. I thought I could help you. As far as I was concerned, you had nothing to be ashamed of. Quite the contrary, I think you were very courageous that day. But your feelings after the accident were real enough. Isn’t it possible that Parry presented you with an escape from your guilt? You seemed to be carrying your agitation over into this new situation, running from your anxieties with your hands over your ears, when you should have been turning on yourself those powers of rational analysis you take such pride in.
I accept that Parry is mad in ways I could never have guessed at. All the same, I can understand how he might have formed the impression that you were leading him on. He brought out something in you. From day one you saw him as an opponent and you set about defeating him, and you—we—paid a high price. Perhaps if you had shared more with me, he might not have got to the stage he did. Do you remember my suggesting to you early on—the night you walked out on me in fury—that we ask him in and talk to him? You just stared at me in disbelief, but I’m absolutely certain that at that time Parry didn’t know that one day he would want you dead. Together we might have deflected him from the course he took.
You went your own way, you denied him everything, and that allowed his fantasies, and ultimately his hatred, to flourish. You asked me last night if I realized that you had saved my life. In the immediate sense, of course, that’s true. I’ll always be grateful. You were brave and resourceful. In fact, you were brilliant. But I don’t accept that it was always inevitable that Parry was going to hire killers or that I should end up being threatened with a knife. My guess was that he was always more likely to do himself harm. How wrong and how right I was! You saved my life, but perhaps you put my life in jeopardy—by drawing Parry in, by overreacting all along the way, by guessing his every next move as if you were pushing him toward it.
A stranger invaded our lives, and the first thing that happened was that you became a stranger to me. You worked out that he had de Clerambault’s syndrome (if that really is a disease) and you guessed that he might become violent. You were right; you acted decisively and you’re right to take pride in that. But what about the rest? Why it happened, how it changed you, how it might have been otherwise, what it did to us—that’s what we’ve got now, and that’s what we have to think about.
I think we need some time apart. Or at least I do. Luke has offered me his old Camden Square place until he finds new tenants. I don’t know where this takes us. We’ve been so happy together. We’ve loved each other passionately and loyally. I always thought our love was the kind that was meant to go on and on. Perhaps it will. I just don’t know.
Clarissa
Twenty-four
Two weeks after the shooting I drove to Watlington to keep my appointment with Joseph Lacey. The following day I spent the morning in my study making arrangements on the phone, and in the afternoon I walked to our local Italian food shop to collect ingredients for our picnic. It was much the same as before—a mozzarella globe, ciabatta, olives, tomatoes, anchovies, and for the children a no-frills pizza margarita. The next morning I packed the food into a backpack along with two bottles of Chianti, mineral water, and a six-pack of Cokes. The day was cloudy and cool, but there was a thin band of blue spreading from the west, and the confident forecast was a heatwave that would last over a week. I drove to Camden Town to collect Clarissa. When I had told her Lacey’s story the day before, she had insisted on coming with me to Oxford. We had come this far together in the story, had been her argument, and whatever it had done to us, she wanted to be there at its conclusion.
She must have been looking out for my car, for as soon as I parked she appeared at the top of the steps outside her brother’s flat. I got out and watched as she approached, and wondered how we were going to greet each other. We hadn’t met since the evening I had refused to help carry her suitcases of clothes and books down to her taxi. Leaning by the open car door now in the brightening air, I experienced a sudden ache—part desolation, part panic—at observing the speed with which this mate, this familiar, was transforming herself into a separate person. The print dress was new, and so were the green espadrilles. Even her skin looked different, paler, smoother. We said hi and fumbled a squeeze of hands—better than hypocritical pecks on the cheek. The familiarity of the perfume didn’t reassure me. It made the new touches seem all the more poignant.
Perhaps she was having similar feelings, for as I started the car she said too cheerfully, “I like the new jacket.”
I thanked her and said something pleasant about her dress. I had worried how we were going to pass the journey together. I didn’t want another confrontaron, nor could I ignore our dif
ferences. But in fact our week apart had granted us a supply of neutral topics. First, my interview with Joseph Lacey in his garden, and then the arrangements I had made for the day—that much took us as far as the outer western suburbs. Next we talked about work. There was a new lead in the search for Keats’s last letters. She had been in touch with a Japanese scholar who claimed he had read unpublished correspondence twelve years ago in the British Library written by a distant relation of Keats’s friend Severn. There was a reference to a letter addressed to Fanny but never meant to be posted, a “cry of undying love not touched by despair.” Clarissa had spent every spare hour trying, without success, to track down the Severn connection. The library’s transfer to King’s Cross was complicating the search, and now she was considering flying to Tokyo to read the scholar’s notes.
For my part, I had been to Birmingham to test-drive an electric car for a Sunday newspaper. I was due to fly to Miami to cover a conference about the exploration of Mars. When I described, with a degree of comic exaggeration, the horror of the public relations people when the electric prototype failed to move, Clarissa did not smile. Perhaps she was thinking of the centrifugal geography—Maida Vale and Camden Town, Miami and Tokyo—that was whirling our lives apart. There was a silence as we descended into the Vale of Oxford from the Chilterns, so I talked about the colonization of Mars. Apparently it might be possible to plant simple life forms like lichen, and then, later, hardy trees, and over the course of thousands of years an oxygen-based atmosphere could develop. The temperature would rise, and in time it could be a beautiful place. Clarissa stared through the windscreen at the road rolling under our feet and, to left and right, the thickening fields and the cow parsley just out along the hedgerows. “What’s the point? It’s beautiful here and we’re still unhappy.”
I didn’t ask her who we were. I dreaded more personal talk in such an enclosed space. Our row had been a long and grisly affair, and though I came nowhere near shouting, as she suggested in her letter, I raised my voice—we both did—and paced the sitting room in a state of dreamlike agitation. This, in addition to the bloodstain on the carpet, was Parry’s legacy—an orgy of mutual accusation, an autopsy that sent us weary and bitter to our separate beds at three in the morning. Clarissa’s letter simply drove us further apart. Fifteen years ago I might have taken it seriously, suspecting that it embodied a wisdom, a delicacy that I failed in my bullish way to grasp. I might have thought it my duty, part of my sentimental education, to feel rebuked. But the years harden us into what we are, and her letter appeared to me simply unreasonable. I disliked its wounded, self-righteous tone, its clammy emotional logic, its knowingness that hid behind a highly selective memory. A madman paid to have me slaughtered in a restaurant? What was “sharing” one’s feelings compared to that? And driven, obsessed, undersexed? Who wouldn’t be? Here was a diseased consciousness clamoring to batten itself to mine. I didn’t ask to be lonely. No one would listen to me. She and the police forced my isolation.
I had said all this on the phone the morning her letter came, and of course it got us nowhere. Now here we were in six feet of space—shoulder to shoulder, in fact—but the matter of our differences was unbroachable. I glanced at her and thought she looked beautiful and sad. Or was the sadness all mine?
We small-talked our way through Headington and the center of Oxford. I parked outside the Logans’ house in exactly the same space as before. The trees lining the tranquil street made a tunnel of green light broken by brilliant points of sunshine, and as I got out of the car I wondered about the kind of life, boring and productive, one might have here. I took the backpack and we walked up the brick path to the front door like a married couple invited to lunch. Clarissa even murmured an approving remark about the front garden. This spell of intensified ordinariness was broken when the front door opened and little Leo stood before us, naked but for face paint done in clumsy tiger stripes across his chest and the bridge of his nose. He looked at me without recognition and said, “I’m not a tiger, I’m a wolf.”
“You are a wolf,” I said. “But where’s your mum?”
She appeared behind Leo in the gloomy recesses by the kitchen and came toward us. Time had done nothing in the way of healing. The same thin nose, the same rawness over her upper lip. Perhaps her face was harder, perhaps her anger was setting into the bone. She had a handkerchief balled up in her right hand, which she transferred to her left to take Clarissa’s hand, then mine. She asked us if we would like to wait in the back garden while she got Leo cleaned up and dressed, and this was where we found Rachael, in shorts, on her front on the grass, working at a tan. When she heard us she flopped over, belly up, and pretended to be asleep, or in a trance. Clarissa knelt down and tickled the girl under the chin with a stalk.
With her eyes shut against the brightness, Rachael called out on a rising squeal, “I know just who you are, so don’t think you can make me laugh!” When she could stand it no more she sat up, and found herself looking into Clarissa’s face, not mine.
“You don’t know who I am, so I can make you laugh,” Clarissa said, “and I won’t stop until you’ve guessed my name.” The tickling continued until Rachael shouted, “Rumpelstiltskin” and begged for mercy. When I turned to go back indoors, she was taking Clarissa by the hand on a tour of the garden. I noticed that the collapsed tent had been trodden into the lawn.
I found Jean Logan on her knees in the hallway, buckling Leo’s sandal. “You’re old enough to be doing this yourself,” she was saying. He was smoothing her head with the palm of his hand. “But I like you doing it,” he said, looking at me with a smile of triumphant possession.
I said to her, “I want you to hear this story at first hand. So I need to know where we’re going to take our picnic.”
She stood and sighed, and described a stretch of the Thames on Port Meadow. Then she pointed me to the phone at the foot of the stairs. I waited for her and Leo to go out to the garden before I dialed the college and asked to speak to the Euler Professor of Logic.
The meadow was barely five minutes’ walk. Leo, jealous of his sister’s new friend, was hanging on Clarissa’s free arm and singing scraps of every Beatles song he could think of—anything to close off the conversation. Rachael simply talked louder. Jean Logan and I walked several paces behind this noisy trio. She said, “She’s very good with them. You both are.” I described the various children in our lives and the room we kept for them at the flat. Clarissa’s bedroom, and now not even that.
As we were crossing a railway bridge, the meadow and its vast spread of buttercups was suddenly before us. Jean Logan said, “I know I’ve asked to hear this, but I’m not sure I can go through with it, especially with Rachael and Leo here.”
“You can,” I said, “and anyway, you have to now.”
Followed by a curious band of young heifers, we walked straight across the field through the buttercups to the river, which we followed upstream for a few hundred yards. Where the bank was worn away by drinking cattle and ponies into a small beach, we stopped and made our camp. Jean spread a large army-surplus groundsheet, and as I was setting out the food I realized it must have belonged to John Logan and been with him on expeditions we would never know of. I poured wine for the women. Leo and Rachael were wading in the river, calling to me, daring me to join them. I took off my shoes and socks and rolled up my trousers and went after them. A whole lifetime since I had stood like this, feeling the ooze between my toes and breathing in the rich earth-and-water smell of a river. While Clarissa and Jean talked we fed the ducks, skimmed stones, and built a moated mud mound. During a lull, Rachael sidled up to me and said, “I remember when you came and we had this talk.”
“I remember it too,” I said.
“Let’s have another talk, then.”
“Okay,” I said. “What about?”
“You start.”
I thought for a moment, then I indicated the river. “Imagine the smallest possible bit of water that can exist. So tiny n
o one could ever see it …”
She was screwing up her eyes the way she had on the lawn. “Like the weeniest droplet,” she said.
“Much smaller. Even a microscope wouldn’t help you. It’s almost nothing. Two atoms of hydrogen, one of oxygen, bound together by a mysterious powerful force.”
“I can see it,” she cried. “It’s made of glass.”
“So,” I said. “Now think of billions, trillions of them, piled on top of each other in all directions, stretching almost to infinity. And now think of the riverbed as a long shallow slide, like a winding muddy chute, that’s a hundred miles long, stretching to the sea.”
We got no further. Leo had been busy on the bank, but now he was aware that something was happening without him. He came pushing in, ready to drench me if I did not include him.
“I hate you,” Rachael shouted. “Go away!”
Just then we were called to eat, but before we reached the shore, Rachael pinched my arm, to let me know we were not finished yet.
The food prompted talk of Italy and holidays. The children joined in with evidently confused memories of a beach where parrots lived, and fir trees growing by a volcano, and, from Rachael alone, a glass-bottomed boat. Leo disputed that such a thing could exist. Because the boat had been hired for a day, the volcano climbed by means of a six-hour hike, and Leo carried much of the way, we inferred the energetic presence of John Logan, though even the boy did not refer to him directly now.
