by Ian Mcewan
There were no cars, but leaning by the wooden bench out the front were two old-fashioned black bicycles. One was a lady’s, both had wicker baskets. Fear was lightening his step, making his breathing shallow. He could have turned back. Julie was expecting him, he needed to do something about his wet clothes. He had to get home soon and work on the reading list for the committee. He slowed, but he did not stop. Cars passed close by. If he stepped in their path he could not be touched. The day he now inhabited was not the day he had woken into. He was lucid, determined to advance. He was in another time but he was not overwhelmed. He was a dreamer who knows his dream for what it is and, though fearful, lets it unfold out of curiosity.
He came closer to the silent building. He was an intruder. This place both concerned and excluded him, there was a delicate negotiation whose outcome he might affect adversely. He was crossing the gravel now, placing each step carefully. From a corner of the pub came the clipped sound of rain trickling into a water butt. At a distance of thirty feet the windows of the pub showed black. The building looked deserted until he shifted his position and made out dim lights inside. He had stopped in front of the small porch. The bicycles were propped against the wall, sheltered by the eaves from the rain. Their back wheels just touched the arm of the broken bench. The man’s bike was against the wall of the pub. The lady’s leaned into an awkward intimacy. The front wheels were splayed, the pedals clumsily engaged. The machines were black and new, the maker’s name was on the upright in unblemished gold Gothic. The front baskets were clean wicker. The saddles were wide and well-sprung and gave off the delicate fecal odour of quality leather. The handlebars had off-white rubber grips with black beads of rain gathering on the chrome. He did not touch the bicycles. There was a movement inside, a figure passed in front of a light. He stepped to one side of the window, aware that he was visible to people he could not see.
It had stopped raining, but the sound of water was louder. It spilled from the cracked, mossy guttering and sounded in the rain butt, it ticked away among the leaves. He was close to the pub’s wall with an oblique view through the window into the saloon. A man was carrying two glasses of beer from the bar towards a small table where a young woman sat waiting. The table was set into a bay, and light from its windows silhouetted the couple. The man was settling himself, sedately lifting the creases of his loose, grey flannel trousers before sitting in close to the woman. They were on a bench seat built into three sides of the bay. Not recognition so much as its shadow, not its familiar sound but a brief resonance, caused Stephen to steady himself against the dry wall. His vision pulsed with the beating of his heart. Had the couple glanced up and to their left, towards the window by the door, they might have seen a phantom beyond the spotted glass, immobile with the tension of inarticulated recognition. It was a face taut with expectation, as though a spirit, suspended between existence and nothingness, attended a decision, a beckoning or a dismissal.
But the young man and woman were engrossed. He gulped his beer, a pint to her half, and talked earnestly, while her drink remained untouched. She was listening solemnly, plucking at the sleeve of her print dress, adjusting with unconscious precision the pretty clasp which kept her trim, straight hair clear of her face. They touched hands and made determined, weak smiles; then the hands came apart and they spoke at once. The matter – for it was clearly one single subject – was not yet resolved.
As far as Stephen could see, there were no other customers. The barman, a broad, slow man, had his back turned and was fiddling with something on a shelf. The obvious thing was to enter, buy a drink and take a closer look. The idea was unattractive. Stephen kept his hand on to the wall, which was warm and reassuring to the touch. Quite suddenly, with the transforming rapidity of a catastrophe, everything was changed. His legs weakened, a chill spread downwards through his stomach. He was looking into the eyes of the woman, and he knew who she was. She had glanced up in his direction. The man was talking, making an insistent point, while the woman continued to stare. Her face showed no curiosity or shock; she simply returned Stephen’s gaze as she listened to her partner. She nodded vaguely, glanced away to reply, and then looked again towards Stephen. But she could not see him. There was nothing to suggest she had registered him in any way at all. She was not ignoring him, she was looking through him at the trees across the road. She was not looking at all, she was listening. Absurdly, he raised his hand and made an awkward gesture, something between a wave and a salute. There was no response from the young woman who he knew, beyond question, was his mother. She could not see him. She was listening to his father speak – how he recognised that way his father had of making a point with an open hand – and could not see her son. A cold, infant despondency sank through him, a bitter sense of exclusion and longing.
Perhaps he was crying as he backed away from the window, perhaps he was wailing like a baby waking in the night; to an observer he may have appeared silent and resigned. The air he moved through was dark and wet, he was light, made of nothing. He did not see himself walk back along the road. He fell back down, dropped helplessly through a void, was swept dumbly through invisible curves and rose above the trees, saw the horizon below him even as he was hurled through sinuous tunnels of undergrowth, dank, muscular sluices. His eyes grew large and round and lidless with desperate, protesting innocence, his knees rose under him and touched his chin, his fingers were scaly flippers, gills beat time, urgent, hopeless strokes through the salty ocean that engulfed the treetops and surged between their roots; and for all the crying, calling sounds he thought were his own, he formed a single thought: he had nowhere to go, no moment which could embody him, he was not expected, no destination or time could be named; for while he moved forward violently, he was immobile, he was hurtling round a fixed point. And this thought unwrapped a sadness which was not his own. It was centuries, millennia old. It swept through him and countless others like the wind through a field of grass. Nothing was his own, not his strokes or his movement, not the calling sounds, not even the sadness, nothing was nothing’s own.
When Stephen opened his eyes he was lying on a bed, Julie’s bed, under an eiderdown, clasping against his chest a tepid hot-water bottle. Across the little room, most of whose space was taken by the bed, was an open door to the bathroom from which rolled a cloud of steam, yellowish in the electric light, and the thunder of running water. He closed his eyes. This bed was a wedding gift from friends he had not seen in years. He tried to remember their names, but they were gone. In it, or on it, his marriage had begun and, six years later, ended. He recognised a musical creak when he moved his legs, he smelled Julie on the sheets and banked-up pillows, her perfume and the close, soapy essence which characterised her newly washed linen. Here he had taken part in the longest, most revealing and, later, most desolate conversations of his life. He had had the best sex ever here, and the worst wakeful nights. He had done more reading here than in any other single place – he remembered Anna Karenina and Daniel Deronda in one week of illness. He had never lost his temper so thoroughly anywhere else, nor been so tender, protective, comforting, nor, since early childhood, been so cared for himself. Here his daughter had been conceived and born. On this side of the bed. Deep in the mattress were the traces of pee from her early morning visits. She used to climb between them, sleep a little then wake them with her chatter, her insistence on the day beginning. As they clung to their last fragments of dreams, she demanded the impossible: stories, poems, songs, invented catechisms, physical combat, tickling. Nearly all evidence of her existence, apart from photographs, they had destroyed or given away. All the worst and the best things that had ever happened to him had happened here. This was where he belonged. Beyond all immediate considerations, like the fact that his marriage was more or less finished, there was his right to lie here now in the marriage bed.
When next he opened his eyes Julie was sitting on the edge of the bed looking down at him. The room was silent but for the heavily accented, echoing drip of
a bathroom tap. There was restrained amusement in the tension around her lips which she held pressed together against the temptation to say something wryly unsympathetic. Her clear, grey eyes moved in steady, unpredictable triangles, from his left to his right eye and back, comparing them, measuring truth by the faint differences she detected, then down to his mouth to gauge the expression there and make further comparisons. He pushed himself into a sitting position and took her hand. It was responsive, yet cool to touch.
He said: ‘I’m sorry to be a nuisance.’
She smiled instantly. ‘It’s all right.’ Her lips closed up again, and bulged once more with the effort of retaining a humorous observation. It was not her way to ask him directly why he had arrived at her house in a state of shock. Questions, ordinary inquisitiveness, did not suit her at all. She never insisted on the answer to a question. She might ask once, and if there was no reply, then she would match the silence. There was a pleasing depth to her silence. It was difficult not to tell her things in order to draw her from her steady self-communion, to bring her closer.
He said: ‘It’s wonderful to lie in this bed again.’
‘It drives me mad,’ Julie said promptly. ‘It sags in the middle and squeaks every time you move.’
Without meaning to, he said lightly, ‘I’ll have it then,’ and Julie shrugged.
‘If you like. Take it.’
This was too bleak. Their hands disengaged and there was a silence. Stephen wanted to return to the intimacy he had woken up to, and he was tempted to explain everything as well as he could. But he could not trust himself with a long account, it could just as easily push them further apart. He kicked the bed clothes clear, leaned forwards and placed his hands on her shoulders, pressing firmly, as if to make sure she was there. She was frail to touch, the body heat through her cotton blouse was fierce and endearing. She was watchful, but the suppressed smile was there.
‘I’ll explain what happened,’ he said, still pressing.
He released her and was about to rise from the bed when she put her hand on his arm. She spoke firmly. ‘You’re not to get up. I’ve brought some tea. And I’ve made a cake.’ She pulled the covers back over his legs, up to his waist, and stood to tuck him in. She did not want him to leave the marriage bed. From the floor she picked up a tray and set it before him. ‘For once,’ she said, ‘you can stop pretending everything’s all right. You’re my patient.’
She cut the cake and poured the tea. The cups were fine, bone china. She had gone to the trouble of finding saucers which matched the side plates. Undeniably, it was an occasion. They chinked cups and said ‘Cheers.’ When he asked what time it was she said, ‘Bathtime.’ She pointed at the streaks of dried mud along his arm. In the bedroom’s half light the whites of her eyes flashed repeatedly as she glanced up from her plate to his face, as though checking it against a memory. She would not hold his gaze now. When he smiled at her she looked down. She was wearing long earrings of coloured crystal. Untypically, her hands would not keep still.
Small talk was not easy. After some time Stephen said: ‘You’re looking very beautiful.’
The reply came back immediately in an even tone. ‘So do you.’ She smiled at him and said, ‘Now …’ through an efficient sigh, and cleared away the tea things. She stood at the head of the bed, stroking his hair. He was holding his breath, the moment was holding its breath. They confronted two possibilities, equally weighted, balanced on a honed fulcrum. The moment they inclined towards one, the other, while never ceasing to exist, would disappear irrevocably. He could rise from the bed now, giving her an affectionate smile as he moved past her on his way to his bath. He would lock the door behind him, securing his independence and pride. She would wait downstairs, and they would resume their careful exchanges until it was time for him to walk across the field to catch his train. Or something could be risked, a different life unfolded in which his own unhappiness could be redoubled or eliminated.
Their hesitation was brief, delicious before the forking paths. Had he not seen two ghosts already that day and brushed against the mutually enclosing envelopes of events and the times and places in which they occurred, then he would not have been able to choose, as he did now, without deliberation and with an immediacy which felt both wise and abandoned. A ghostly, fading Stephen rose, smiled, crossed the room and closed the bathroom door behind him, and innumerable invisible events were set in train. As Stephen took Julie’s hand and felt the sinuous compliance of her body communicated along the length of her arm, and as he drew her across his lap and kissed her, he did not doubt that what was happening now, and what would happen as a consequence of now, was not separate from what he had experienced earlier that day. Obscurely, he sensed a line of argument was being continued. Here, however, there was nothing but delight as he held Julie’s head, the dear head, between his hands and kissed her eyes, where earlier, outside The Bell, he had felt terror; but the two moments were undeniably bound, they held in common the innocent longing they provoked, the desire to belong.
The homely and erotic patterns of marriage are not easily discarded. They knelt face to face in the centre of the bed undressing each other slowly.
‘You’re so thin,’ said Julie. ‘You’re going to waste away.’ She ran her hands along the pole of his collar bone, down the bars of his rib cage, and then, gratified by his excitement, held him tight in both hands and bent down to reclaim him with a long kiss.
He too felt proprietorial tenderness once she was naked. He registered the changes, the slight thickening at the waist, the large breasts a little smaller. From living alone, he thought, as he closed his mouth around the nipple of one and pressed the other against his cheek. The novelty of seeing and feeling a familiar naked body was such that for some minutes they could do little more than hold each other at arm’s length and say, ‘Well …’ and ‘Here we are again …’ A wild jokiness hung in the air, a suppressed hilarity that threatened to obliterate desire. All the coolness between them now seemed an elaborate hoax, and they wondered how they had kept it going for so long. It was amusingly simple: they had to do no more than remove their clothes and look at one another to be set free and assume the uncomplicated roles in which they could not deny their mutual understanding. Now they were their old, wise selves, and they could not stop grinning.
Later, one word seemed to repeat itself as the long-lipped opening parted and closed around him, as he filled the known dip and curve and arrived at a deep, familiar place, a smooth, resonating word generated by slippery flesh on flesh, a warm, humming, softly consonanted, roundly vowelled word … home, he was home, enclosed, safe and therefore able to provide, home where he owned and was owned. Home, why be anywhere else? Wasn’t it wasteful to be doing anything other than this? Time was redeemed, time assumed purpose all over again because it was the medium for the fulfilment of desire. The trees outside edged in closer, needles stroked the small panes, darkening the room which rippled with the movement of filtered light. Heavier rain sounded on the roof, and later receded. Julie was crying. He wondered, as he had many times before, how anything so good and simple could be permitted, how they were allowed to get away with it, how the world could have taken this experience into account for so long and still be the way it was. Not governments, or publicity firms or research departments, but biology, existence, matter itself had dreamed this up for its own pleasure and perpetuity, and this was exactly what you were meant to do, it wanted you to like it. His arms and legs were drifting away. High, in clean air, he hung by his fingers from a mountain ledge; fifty feet below was the long smooth scree. His grip was loosening. Surely then, he thought as he fell backwards into the exquisite, dizzy emptiness and accelerated down the irresponsibly steep slope, surely at heart the place is benevolent, it likes us, it wants us to like it, it likes itself.
Then everything was different. They squeezed into the narrow, lukewarm bath, taking with them wine which they drank from the bottle. Satiated desire brought on a speedy, reckless cl
arity. They talked and laughed loudly and were careless with one another. Julie told a lengthy anecdote about life in the nearby village. Stephen gave an exaggerated account of the committee members. They made harsh summaries of the recent lives of mutual friends. Even as the animated talk proceeded they were uneasy because they knew there was nothing underpinning this cordiality, no reason for bathing together. There was an indecisiveness which neither dared voice. They were talking freely, but their freedom was bleak, ungrounded. Soon their voices began to falter, the fast talk began to fade. The lost child was between them again. The daughter they did not have was waiting for them outside. Stephen knew he would be leaving soon. The awkwardness grew when they were back in their clothes. The habits of separation are not easily discarded. They were losing their voices, they were dismayed. The old, careful politeness was re-establishing itself, and they were helpless before it. They had exposed themselves too easily, too quickly, they had shown themselves to be vulnerable.
Downstairs, he watched as Julie knelt to spread a damp towel in front of a smoky log fire. There should have been something affectionate to say which would be neither flippant nor expose him further. But all there remained was small talk. He could think only of taking her hand, and yet he didn’t. They had used up the possibilities, the tension of touch, they had been to the limits. For now everything was neutralised. Had they been together still, they could have fallen back on other resources, ignored each other for a while, or undertaken some task, or faced the loss somehow. But here there was nothing. A sad pride pinned them to little exchanges over a final pot of tea. He had a glimpse of the kind of life she was leading. Pine trees grew right up to the house and the windows of the cottage were small, so all the rooms were gloomy, even on a sunny day. She kept a fire in right through the summer to control the damp. In a corner of the room was a scrubbed kitchen table on which stood her various notebooks in neat piles, candles to read by at night and on cloudy days, and a jam-jar of weeds and what few wild flowers she could find on the edges of the plantations. Another jar contained sharpened pencils. Her violins were in a corner on the floor, fastened in their cases, and the music stand was not in sight. He imagined her wandering the rural concrete tracks, thinking, or trying not to think, about Kate, and coming back to practise in the hissing silence.
