On Chesil Beach

by Ian Mcewan

  Just near the Mayhews’ cottage, down a rutted, steeply banked track through a beech wood, past Spinney Farm, lay the Wormsley Valley, a backwater beauty, a passing author had written, which had been in the hands of one farming family, the Fanes, for centuries. In 1940 the cottage still took its water from a well, from where it was carried to the attic and poured into a tank. It was part of family lore that as the country prepared to face Hitler’s invasion, Edward’s birth was considered by the local authority to be an emergency, a crisis in hygiene. Men with picks and shovels came, rather elderly men, and mains water was channeled to the house from the Northend road in September of that year, just as the London Blitz was beginning.

  Lionel Mayhew was the headmaster of a primary school in Henley. In the early mornings he cycled the five miles to work, and at the end of the day he walked his bike back up the long steep hill to the heath, with homework and papers piled up in a wicker basket on the front handlebars. In 1945, the year the twin girls were born, he bought a secondhand car for eleven pounds in Christmas Common, from the widow of a naval officer lost on the Atlantic convoys. It was still a rare sight along those narrow chalk lanes then, a motor squeezing past the plow horses and carts. But there were many days when petrol rationing forced Lionel back on his bike.

  In the early nineteen fifties, his homecoming routines were hardly typical of a professional man. He would take his papers straightaway into the tiny parlor by the front door that he used as his office and set them out carefully. This was the only tidy room in the house, and it was important for him to protect his working life from his domestic environment. Then he checked on the children—in time, Edward, Anne and Harriet all attended the village school in Northend and walked back on their own. He would spend a few minutes alone with Marjorie, and then he would be in the kitchen, preparing the tea and clearing up breakfast.

  It was only in this hour, while supper was cooked, that housework was ever achieved. As soon as the children were old enough, they helped out, but ineffectually. Only the exposed parts of the floors not covered in junk were ever swept, and only items needed for the next day—mostly clothes and books—were tidied. The beds were never made, the sheets rarely changed, the hand-basin in the cramped, icy bathroom was never cleaned—it was possible to carve your name in the hard gray scum with a fingernail. It was difficult enough to keep up with immediate needs—the coal to be brought in for the kitchen stove, the sitting-room fire to keep going in winter, semi-clean school clothes to be found for the children. Laundry was done on Sunday afternoons, and that required lighting a fire under the copper tub. On rainy days, drying clothes were spread over the furniture throughout the house. Ironing was beyond Lionel—everything was smoothed out with a hand and folded. There were interludes when one of the neighbors acted as home help, but no one stayed for long. The scale of the task was too great, and these local ladies had their own families to organize.

  The Mayhews ate their supper at a folding pine table, hemmed in by the close chaos of the kitchen. Washing up was always left for later. After Marjorie had been thanked by everyone for the meal, she wandered off to one of her projects while the children cleared away and then brought their books to the table for homework. Lionel went to his study to mark exercise books, do administration and listen to the wireless news while he smoked a pipe. An hour and a half or so later he would come out to check on their work and get them ready for bed. He always read to them, separate stories for Edward and the girls. They often fell asleep to the sound of him washing the dishes downstairs.

  He was a mild man, chunkily built, like a farm laborer, with milky blue eyes and sandy hair and a short military mustache. He was too old to be called up—he was already thirty-eight when Edward was born. Lionel rarely raised his voice or smacked or belted his children the way most fathers did. He expected to be obeyed, and the children, perhaps sensing the burden of his responsibilities, complied. Naturally they took their circumstances for granted, even though they saw often enough the homes of their friends—those kindly, aproned mothers in their fiercely ordered domains. It was never obvious to Edward, Anne and Harriet that they were less fortunate than any of their friends. It was Lionel alone who bore the weight.

  Not until he was fourteen did Edward fully understand that there was something wrong with his mother, and he could not remember the time, around his fifth birthday, when she had abruptly changed. Like his sisters, he grew up into the un-remarkable fact of her derangement. She was a ghostly figure, a gaunt and gentle sprite with tousled brown hair, who drifted about the house as she drifted through their childhoods, sometimes communicative and even affectionate, at others remote, absorbed in her hobbies and projects. She could be heard at any hour of the day, and even in the middle of the night, fumbling her way through the same simple piano pieces, always faltering in the same places. She was often in the garden pottering about the shapeless bed she had made right in the center of the narrow lawn. Painting, especially watercolors—scenes of distant hills and church spire, framed by foreground trees—contributed much to the general disorder. She never washed a brush, or emptied the greenish water from the jam jars, or put away the paints and rags, or gathered up her various attempts—none of which were ever finished. She would wear her painting smock for days on end, long after a painting bout had subsided. Another activity—it may have been suggested once as a form of occupational therapy—was cutting pictures out of magazines and gluing them into scrapbooks. She liked to move around the house as she worked, and discarded paper clippings were everywhere underfoot, trodden into the dirt of the bare floor-boards. Paste brushes hardened in the opened pots where she left them on chairs and window ledges.

  Among Marjorie’s other interests were bird watching from the sitting-room window, knitting and embroidery, and flower arranging, all pursued with the same dreamy, chaotic intensity. She was mostly silent, though sometimes they heard her murmuring to herself as she carried through a difficult task, “There…there…there.”

  It never occurred to Edward to ask himself if she was happy. She certainly had her moments of anxiety, panicky attacks when her breathing came in snatches and her thin arms would rise and fall at her sides and all her attention was suddenly on her children, on a specific need she knew she must immediately address. Edward’s fingernails were too long, she must mend a tear in a frock, the twins needed a bath. She would descend among them, fussing ineffectually, scolding, or hugging them to her, kissing their faces or doing all at once, making up for lost time. It almost felt like love, and they yielded to her happily enough. But they knew from experience that the realities of the household were forbidding—the nail scissors and matching thread would not be found, and to heat water for a bath needed hours of preparation. Soon their mother would drift away, back to her own world.

  These fits may have been caused by some fragment of her former self trying to assert control, half recognizing the nature of her own condition, dimly recalling a previous existence and suddenly, terrifyingly, glimpsing the scale of her loss. But for most of the time Marjorie kept herself content with the notion, an elaborate fairy tale in fact, that she was a devoted wife and mother, that the house ran smoothly thanks to all her work and that she deserved a little time to herself when her duties were done. And in order to keep the bad moments to a minimum and not alarm that scrap of her former consciousness, Lionel and the children colluded in the make-believe. At the beginning of meals, she might lift her face from contemplating her husband’s efforts and say sweetly as she brushed the straggly hair from her face, “I do hope you enjoy this. It’s something new I wanted to try.”

  It was always something old, for Lionel’s repertoire was narrow, but no one contradicted her, and ritually, at the end of every meal, the children and their father would thank her. It was a form of make-believe that was comforting for them all. When Marjorie announced that she was making a shopping list for Watlington market, or that she had more sheets to iron than she could begin to count, a parallel world of b
right normality appeared within reach of the whole family. But the fantasy could be sustained only if it was not discussed. They grew up inside it, neutrally inhabiting its absurdities because they were never defined.

  Somehow they protected her from the friends they brought home, just as they protected their friends from her. The accepted view locally—or this was all they ever heard—was that Mrs. Mayhew was artistic, eccentric and charming, probably a genius. It did not embarrass the children to hear their mother tell them things they knew could not be true. She did not have a busy day ahead, she had not really spent the entire afternoon making blackberry jam. These were not falsehoods, they were expressions of what their mother truly was, and they were bound to protect her—in silence.

  It was a memorable few minutes, then, when Edward at the age of fourteen found himself alone with his father in the garden and heard for the first time that his mother was brain-damaged. The term was an insult, a blasphemous invitation to disloyalty. Brain-damaged. Something wrong with her head. If anyone else had said that about his mother, Edward would have been obliged to get in a fight and deliver a thrashing. But even as he listened in hostile silence to this calumny, he felt a burden lifting. Of course it was true, and he could not fight the truth. Straightaway, he could begin to persuade himself that he had always known.

  He and his father were standing under the big elm on a hot, moist day in late May. After days of rain, the air was thick with the abundance of early summer—the din of birds and insects, the scent of mown grass lying in rows on the green in front of the cottage, the thrusting, yearning tangle of the garden, almost inseparable from the woodland fringe beyond the picket fence, pollen bringing father and son the season’s first taste of hay fever, and on the lawn at their feet, tiles of sunlight and shade rocking together in a light breeze. In these surroundings, Edward was listening to his father, and trying to conjure for himself a bitter winter’s day in December 1944, the busy railway platform at Wycombe, and his mother bundled up in her greatcoat, carrying a shopping bag of meager wartime Christmas presents. She was stepping forward to meet the train from Marylebone station that would take her to Princes Risborough, and on to Watlington, where she would be met by Lionel. At home, Edward was being looked after by a neighbor’s teenage daughter.

  There is a certain kind of confident traveler who likes to open the carriage door just before the train has stopped in order to step out onto the platform with a little running skip. Perhaps by leaving the train before its journey has ended, he asserts his independence—he is no passive lump of freight. Perhaps he invigorates a memory of youthfulness, or is simply in such a hurry that every second matters. The train braked, possibly a little harder than usual, and the door swung out from this traveler’s grasp. The heavy metal edge struck Marjorie Mayhew’s forehead with sufficient force to fracture her skull and dislocate in an instant her personality, intelligence and memory. Her coma lasted just under a week. The traveler, described by eyewitnesses as a distinguished-looking City gent in his sixties, with bowler, rolled umbrella and newspaper, scuttled away from the scene—the young woman, pregnant with twins, sprawled on the ground among a few scattered toys—and disappeared forever into the streets of Wycombe, with all his guilt intact, or so Lionel said he hoped.

  This curious moment in the garden—a turning point in Edward’s life—fixed in his mind a particular memory of his father. He held a pipe in his hand, which he did not light until he finished his story. He maintained a purposeful grip, with forefinger curled around the bowl, and the stem poised a foot or so from the corner of his mouth. Because it was Sunday, his face was unshaven—Lionel had no religious beliefs, though he went through the motions at school. He liked to keep this one morning a week for himself. By not shaving on Sunday mornings, which was eccentric for a man in his position, he deliberately excluded himself from any form of public engagement. He wore a creased collarless white shirt, not even smoothed by hand. His manner was careful, somewhat distant—this was a conversation he must have rehearsed in his thoughts. As he spoke, his gaze sometimes moved from his son’s face to the house, as though to evoke Marjorie’s condition more precisely, or to watch out for the girls. In conclusion, he put his hand on Edward’s shoulder, an unusual gesture, and walked him the last few yards to the very end of the garden, where the rickety wooden fence was disappearing beneath the advancing undergrowth. Beyond was a five-acre field, empty of sheep, colonized by buttercups in two wide diverging swaths like roads.

  They stood side by side while Lionel lit his pipe at last, and Edward, with the adaptability of his years, continued to make the quiet transition from shock to recognition. Of course, he had always known. He had been maintained in a state of innocence by the absence of a term for her condition. He had never even thought of her as having a condition, and at the same time had always accepted that she was different. The contradiction was now resolved by this simple naming, by the power of words to make the unseen visible. Brain-damaged. The term dissolved intimacy, it coolly measured his mother by a public standard that everyone could understand. A sudden space began to open out, not only between Edward and his mother, but also between himself and his immediate circumstances, and he felt his own being, the buried core of it he had never attended to before, come to sudden, hard-edged existence, a glowing pinpoint that he wanted no one else to know about. She was brain-damaged, and he was not. He was not his mother, nor was he his family, and one day he would leave, and would return only as a visitor. He imagined he was a visitor now, keeping his father company after a long absence overseas, gazing out with him across the field at the broad roads of buttercups parting just before the land fell away in a gentle incline toward the woods. It was a lonely sensation he was experimenting with, and he felt guilty about it, but its boldness excited him too.

  Lionel appeared to understand the drift of his son’s silence. He told Edward that he had been wonderful with his mother, always kind and helpful, and that this conversation changed nothing. It simply recognized that he was old enough to know the facts. At that point the twins came running into the garden, looking for their brother, and Lionel only had time to repeat, “What I’ve said changes nothing, absolutely nothing,” before the girls were noisily among them, and then pulling Edward toward the house to deliver an opinion on something they had made.

  But much else was changing for him around this time. He was at Henley grammar school and was beginning to hear from various teachers that he might be “university material.” His friend Simon at Northend, and all the other village boys he ran around with, went to the secondary modern, and would soon be leaving to learn a trade or work on a farm before being called up for National Service. Edward hoped his future would be different. Already there was a certain constraint in the air when he was with his friends, on their side as well as his. With homework piling up—for all his mildness, Lionel was a tyrant on this matter—Edward no longer roamed the woods after school with the lads, building camps or traps and provoking the gamekeepers on the Wormsley or Stonor estates. A small town like Henley had its urban pretensions, and he was learning to conceal the fact that he knew the names of butterflies, birds, and the wildflowers growing on the Fane family’s land in the intimate valley below the cottage—the bellflower, chicory, scabious, the ten kinds of orchis and hellebores, and the rare summer snowflake. At school such knowledge might mark him out as a yokel.

  Learning of his mother’s accident that day changed nothing outwardly, but all the tiny shifts and realignments in his life seemed crystallized in this new knowledge. He was attentive and kindly toward her, he continued to help maintain the fiction that she ran the house and that everything she said really was the case, but now he was consciously acting a part, and doing so fortified that newly discovered, tough little core of selfhood. At sixteen he developed a taste for long moody rambles. It helped clear his mind to be out of the house. He often went along Holland Lane, a sunken chalk track overhung with crumbling mossy banks that ran downhill to Turville, a
nd then walked down the Hambledon Valley to the Thames, crossing at Henley into the Berkshire downs. The term “teenager” had not long been invented, and it never occurred to him that the separateness he felt, which was both painful and delicious, could be shared by anyone else.

  Without asking or even telling his father, he hitchhiked to London one weekend for a rally in Trafalgar Square against the Suez invasion. While he was there he decided in a moment of elation that he would not apply to Oxford, which was where Lionel and all the teachers wanted him to go. The town was too familiar, insufficiently different from Henley. He was coming here, where people seemed larger and louder and unpredictable and the famous streets carelessly shrugged off their own importance. It was a secret plan he held to—he did not want to generate early opposition. He was also intending to avoid National Service, which Lionel had decided would be good for him. These private schemes refined further his sense of a concealed self, a tight nexus of sensitivity, longing and hard-edged egotism. Unlike some of the boys at school, he did not loathe his home and family. He took for granted the small rooms and their squalor, and he remained unembarrassed by his mother. He was simply impatient for his life, the real story, to start, and the way things were arranged, it could not do so until he had passed his exams. So he worked hard and turned in good essays, especially for his history master. He was amiable enough with his sisters and parents, and he continued to dream of the day when he would leave the cottage at Turville Heath. But in a sense he already had.