by Ian Mcewan
On his arrival, Edmund is directed by the vicar’s wife, his sister-in-law, straight up to the old nursery on the top floor, where Giles has been quarantined. Even in their forties and for all their differences, the Alfredus twins share a taste for mischief. With Giles sweating, and croaking to be heard, they confer for half an hour and make their decision. For Edmund it’s a useful distraction from the trouble at home, to spend all the next day, Saturday, learning the liturgy and the order of service and thinking about his sermon. The theme, announced to the bishop in advance, is from I Corinthians 13, the famous verses in the King James translation declaring that of faith, hope and charity, ‘the greatest of these is charity’. Giles has insisted that in line with modern scholarship, Edmund is to substitute ‘love’ for ‘charity’. No disagreement here. As a medievalist, Edmund knows his Bible, and he admires the Authorised Version. And yes, he is happy to talk of love. On Sunday morning he puts on his brother’s surplice and, after combing his hair in imitation of Giles’s neat side parting, slips out of the house and makes his way across the graveyard to the church.
News of the bishop’s visit had swollen the congregation to almost forty. Prayers and hymns follow in the usual order. Everything proceeds smoothly. An ancient canon, his gaze wrenched downward by osteoporosis, assists efficiently in the service without noticing that Giles is Edmund. At the correct moment Edmund mounts the carved stone pulpit. Even the ageing regulars in the pews are aware that their soft-spoken vicar appears particularly confident, forthright even, no doubt keen to impress the distinguished visitor. Edmund begins by repeating from the first reading selected passages from Corinthians, speaking the lines with actorly rotundity – close, some might have thought, if they had ever been to a theatre (so Haley adds in aside), to a parody of Olivier. Edmund’s words resound in the near-empty church, and with tongue thrust between teeth he relishes the ‘th’ sound in the verbs. Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth …
Then he begins a passionate disquisition on love, driven in part by shame at his recent betrayals and sorrow for the wife and two children he has left behind, and the warm memories of all the good women he has known, and by the sheer pleasure in performance that a good public speaker feels. The generous acoustic and his raised position in the pulpit also help him to fresh turns of rhetorical extravagance. Deploying the very debating skills that have helped bring out the Tube train drivers on three one-day strikes in as many weeks, he sets out the case that love as we know and celebrate it today is a Christian invention. In the harsh Iron Age world of the Old Testament, ethics were pitiless, its jealous God was ruthless and His most cherished values were revenge, domination, enslavement, genocide and rape. Here some noted the bishop swallowing hard.
Against such a background, Edmund says, we see how radical the new religion was in putting love at its centre. Uniquely in human history, a quite different principle of social organisation was proposed. In fact, a new civilisation takes root. However short it may fall of these ideals, a fresh direction is set. Jesus’s idea is irresistible and irreversible. Even unbelievers must live within it. For love doesn’t stand alone, nor can it, but trails like a blazing comet, bringing with it other shining goods – forgiveness, kindness, tolerance, fairness, companionability and friendship, all bound to the love which is at the heart of Jesus’s message.
It is not done, in an Anglican church in West Sussex, to applaud a sermon. But when Edmund has finished, having quoted from memory lines of Shakespeare, Herrick, Christina Rossetti, Wilfred Owen and Auden, the impulse to cheer is palpable in the pews. The vicar, in sonorous falling tones which breathe wisdom and sadness down the nave, leads the congregation into prayer. When the bishop straightens, purplish from the effort of leaning forwards, he’s beaming and everyone else, the retired colonels and horse breeders and the ex-captain of the polo team and all their wives beam too, and beam again as they file out through the porch, where they shake Edmund’s hand. The bishop actually pumps his hand, is fulsome, then, mercifully, regrets he has another appointment and cannot stay for coffee. The canon shuffles off without a word, and soon everyone is heading towards their Sunday lunch, and Edmund, feeling the lightness of triumph in his step, fairly skips through the graveyard, back to the vicarage to tell his brother all about it.
Here, on the eighteenth of thirty-nine pages, was a space between the paragraphs adorned with a single asterisk. I stared into it to prevent my gaze slipping down the page and revealing the writer’s next move. Sentimentally, I hoped that Edmund’s high-flown talk of love would deliver him back to his wife and children. Not much chance of that in a modern story. Or he might talk himself into becoming a Christian. Or Giles could lose his faith when he hears how his congregation is stirred by clever rhetoric from the mouth of an atheist. I was drawn to the possibility of the narrative following the bishop home to witness him that night lying in the bath, brooding steamily on what he had heard. That was because I didn’t want my father the Bishop to disappear from the scene. In fact, the ecclesiastical trappings entranced me – the Norman church, the smells of brass polish, lavender wax, old stone and dust that Haley evoked, the black, white and red bell ropes behind the font with the wonky oak lid held together by iron rivets and ties across a massive split, and above all the vicarage with the chaotic back hall beyond the kitchen, where Edmund dumps his bag on the chessboard lino, and the nursery on the top floor, just like ours. I felt faintly homesick. If only Haley had gone, or made Edmund go, into the bathroom to see the waist-high tongue-and-groove panelling painted baby blue and the giant bath, stained by blue-green algae beneath the taps, standing four-square on rusty lion’s feet. And into the lavatory, where a faded bathtime duck hung from the end of the cistern chain. I was the basest of readers. All I wanted was my own world, and myself in it, given back to me in artful shapes and accessible form.
I was drawn to mild-mannered Giles by the same associations, but it was Edmund I wanted. Wanted? To travel with. I wanted Haley to examine Edmund’s mind for me, to open it up for my inspection, and to explain it to me, man to woman. Edmund reminded me of Max, and of Jeremy. And of Tony most of all. These clever, amoral, inventive, destructive men, single-minded, selfish, emotionally cool, coolly attractive. I think I preferred them to the love of Jesus. They were so necessary, and not only to me. Without them we would still be living in mud huts, waiting to invent the wheel. Three-crop rotation would never have come to pass. Such impermissible thoughts at the dawn of feminism’s second wave. I stared into the asterisk. Haley had got under my skin, and I wondered if he was one of those necessary men. I felt violated by him, and homesick and curious, all at once. So far I hadn’t made a single pencil mark. It wasn’t fair that such a shit as Edmund should give a brilliant cynical speech and be praised, but it was right, it seemed true. That image of him dancing in joy among the graves on his way back to tell his brother how well he has performed suggested hubris. Haley was intimating that punishment or downfall must follow. I didn’t want it to. Tony had been punished and that was enough for me. Writers owed their readers a duty of care, of mercy. The Kenyon Review’s asterisk was beginning to rotate beneath my fixed gaze. I blinked it to a standstill and read on.
It had not occurred to me that with almost half of the story told, Haley would introduce another important character. But she was there all through the service, sitting at the end of the third row, right against the wall by the piled-up hymnbooks, unnoticed by Edmund. Her name is Jean Alise. It is quickly established that she is thirty-five, lives locally, is a widow and somewhat wealthy, is devout, more so since the death of her husband in a motorbike accident, has some psychiatric illness in her past and is, of course, beautiful. Edmund’s sermon has a profound, even devastating, effect upon her. She loves its message and understands its truth, she loves the poetry and is powe
rfully drawn to the man who speaks it. She stays up all that night wondering what to do. She doesn’t actually want to, but she’s falling in love and is prepared to go to the vicarage and say so. She cannot help it, she’s ready to wreck the vicar’s marriage.
At nine the following morning she rings the vicarage doorbell and it is Giles in his dressing gown who answers. He’s making the beginnings of a recovery, but he’s still pale and shaky. To my relief, Jean knows right away that this is not her man. She establishes that there is a brother and follows him to London, to the address that Giles has innocently provided. It’s a small furnished flat in Chalk Farm, where Edmund is setting up a temporary base while he goes through his divorce.
It’s a stressful time and he is not able to resist a beautiful woman who appears desperate to give him everything he wants. She stays for an unbroken two weeks and Edmund makes passionate love to her – Haley describes their intimacy in detail I found difficult. Her clitoris is monstrous, the size of a prepubertal boy’s penis. He has never known such a generous lover. Jean soon decides that she is bound to Edmund for the rest of her life. Once she has learned that her man is an atheist, she understands that the task granted to her is to bring him to the light of God. Wisely, she doesn’t mention her mission and bides her time. It takes her only a few days to forgive him the blasphemous impersonation of his brother.
Edmund meanwhile is reading and re-reading in private a letter from Molly which hints strongly at a reconciliation. She loves him, and if he could only cease his affairs there might be a way they could be a family again. The children are missing him sorely. It is going to be hard to extricate himself, but he knows what he must do. Fortunately, Jean pops down to her moated house in Sussex to attend to her horses and dogs and other matters. Edmund arrives at the family home and has an hour with his wife. It goes well, she looks wonderful, he makes promises he is certain he can keep. The children come home from school and they have tea together. It’s like old times.
When he tells Jean the next day, over a fry-up breakfast in a local greasy spoon, that he is going back to his wife, he sets off a frightening psychiatric episode. He didn’t realise up until this point quite how fragile her mental health is. After breaking the plate he was eating off, she runs screaming from the cafe into the street. He decides not to go after her. Instead, he hurries to the flat and packs up his belongings, leaves what he thinks is a kindly note to Jean and moves back in with Molly. The bliss of reunion lasts three days, until Jean re-enters his life with a vengeance.
The nightmare begins with her calling at the house and making a scene in front of Molly and the kids. She writes letters to Molly as well as Edmund, she accosts the children on their way to school, she phones several times every day and often in the small hours. Daily she stands outside the house, waiting to talk to any member of the family who dares come out. The police will do nothing because they say that Jean is not breaking any law. She follows Molly to her work – she’s a headmistress at a primary school – and makes one of her awesome scenes in the playground.
Two months pass. A stalker can as easily bind a family in solidarity as break it apart. But in the Alfredus marriage, the bonds are still too weak, the damage of past years has not yet been repaired. This affliction, Molly tells Edmund in their final heart to heart, is what he has brought down on their family. She must protect the children as well as her own sanity and her job. Once more, she asks him to leave. He acknowledges an intolerable situation. As he steps out of the house with his bags, Jean is waiting for him on the pavement. He hails a cab. After a violent scuffle, witnessed by Molly from a bedroom window, Jean forces her way in beside her man, whose face she has badly scratched. He weeps for his marriage all the way to Chalk Farm, back to the apartment she has kept on as a shrine to their love. He is not aware of her comforting arm around his shoulder and her promise to love him and be with him always.
Now they are together, she is sane, practical and loving. For a while it is hard to imagine those terrible episodes ever took place, and it is easy in his distress, submitting to her kindly ministrations, to become her lover again. But now and then she drifted up towards the dark clouds where these tornadoes of emotion were formed. Even the legal confirmation of his divorce fails to bring Jean contentment. He dreads her explosive moments and does everything he can to avert them. What sets her off? When she suspects he is thinking of, or looking at, another woman, when he stays too late at the House for an all-night sitting, when he’s out drinking with his left-wing friends, when he delays yet again the registry-office wedding. He hated confrontations and was innately lazy, so by degrees her jealous eruptions trained him to her will. It happens slowly. He finds it easier to stay away from old lovers who have become friends, or from female colleagues in general, easier to ignore the division bell and the demands of the Whips’ Office and his constituents, and easier in fact to marry than face the consequences – those terrifying storms – of continuing to put off the day.
In the 1970 election that brings Edward Heath to power, Edmund loses his seat and is taken aside by his agent and told that the Party will not nominate him next time round. The newly married couple move to her lovely home in Sussex. He has become financially dependent on Jean. He carries no weight these days with the Tube train drivers’ union or other friends on the left. Just as well, because his opulent surroundings embarrass him. Visits from his children seem to precipitate nasty scenes and so, by degrees, he joins that sorry legion of passive men who abandon their children in order to placate their second wives. Easier too to attend weekly church services than have yet more shouting matches. As he advances into his fifties he begins to take an interest in the roses within the estate’s walled garden and becomes an expert on the carp in the moat. He learns to ride, though he can never shake off the feeling that he looks ridiculous on a horse. However, his relations with his brother Giles have never been better. As for Jean, in church when she sees through furtive partly opened eyes Edmund kneeling at her side during the blessing that follows the Reverend Alfredus’s sermon, she knows that though the way had been hard and she had suffered for her pains, she was bringing her husband ever closer to Jesus and this, her single most important achievement in life, had only been possible through the redeeming and enduring power of love.
There it was. Only as I reached the end did I realise that I had failed to take in the title. ‘This is love’. He seemed too worldly, too knowing, this twenty-seven-year-old who was to be my innocent target. Here was a man who knew what it was to love a destructive woman afflicted by mood storms, a man who had noted the lid of an ancient font, who knew that the wealthy stocked their moats with carp and the downtrodden kept their stuff in supermarket trolleys – both supermarkets and trolleys were recent additions to life in Britain. If Jean’s mutant genitalia were not an invention but a memory, then I already felt belittled or outclassed. Was I a touch jealous of his affair?
I was packing away the file, too tired to face another story. I’d experienced a peculiar form of wilful narrative sadism. Alfredus may have earned the narrowing of his life, but Haley had driven him into the ground. Misanthropy or self-loathing – were they entirely distinct? – must be part of his make-up. I was discovering that the experience of reading is skewed when you know, or are about to know, the author. I had been inside a stranger’s mind. Vulgar curiosity made me wonder if every sentence confirmed or denied or masked a secret intention. I felt closer to Tom Haley than I would if he’d been a colleague in the Registry these past nine months. But if I sensed intimacy, it was hard to say exactly what I knew. I needed an instrument, some measuring device, the narrative equivalent of movable compass points with which to gauge the distance between Haley and Edmund Alfredus. The author may have been keeping his own demons at arm’s length. Perhaps Alfredus – not a necessary man after all – represented the kind of person Haley feared he could become. Or he may have punished Alfredus in the spirit of moral primness for adultery and presuming to impersonate a pious man.
Haley might be a prig, even a religious prig, or he could be a man with many fears. And priggishness and fear could be twin aspects of a single larger character defect. If I hadn’t wasted three years being bad at maths at Cambridge, I might have done English and learned how to read. But would I have known how to read T.H. Haley?
9
The following night I had a date with Shirley at the Hope and Anchor in Islington to hear Bees Make Honey. I was half an hour late. She was sitting alone at the bar smoking, hunched over her notebook, with a couple of inches of beer in her pint glass. It was warm outside but it had been raining heavily and the place had a canine smell of damp jeans and hair. Amp lights glowed in a corner where a lone roadie was setting up. The crowd, which probably included the band and their pals, was hardly more than two dozen. In those days, at least in my circle, even women didn’t embrace on greeting. I slipped onto the bar stool beside Shirley and ordered drinks. It was still something back then for two girls to assume a pub was as much theirs as any man’s and to drink at the bar. In the Hope and Anchor and a handful of other places in London no one cared. The revolution had arrived and you could get away with it. We pretended to take it for granted, but it was still a kick. Elsewhere across the kingdom they would have taken us for whores, or treated us as though we were.
