by Ian Mcewan
The next question was slow in coming. ‘And what news do you have of him?’
‘He’s moved to the country with his wife. They sold their house.’
‘Yes, yes. But has he had a breakdown, is he ill?’
Stephen resisted an urge to make himself important by telling everything of the little he knew. ‘His wife sent me a postcard inviting me down. She said they were happy.’
‘Was it his wife who made him resign?’
They arrived at the head of the stairs and stood, flanked by the two bodyguards, looking down into the broad marbled stairwell.
For a moment he looked straight into the Prime Minister’s face. He did not know whether this conversation was important or trivial. He shook his head. ‘Charles spent a long time in public life.’
‘Quite. No one gives it up without a very good reason.’
On the way back to the committee door the tone changed. ‘I liked Charles Darke. More than most people imagined. He’s a talented man, and I had hopes for him.’ They were almost within earshot of the waiting aides and their pace slowed. ‘Personal information becomes rather bland by the time it reaches me, do you see what I mean?’
‘You want to persuade him to come back?’ But it was not in order for Stephen to ask the questions.
The Prime Minister raised a small hand on one finger of which was a plain gold ring. An aide detached himself from the group. ‘Perhaps after your visit you could let me know how you found him?’ The aide had reached into a leather document holder and was passing a small card to Stephen.
He was about to say that he could not promise much, but a signal had gone out that their interview was at an end. Another of the retinue was at the Prime Minister’s side and was opening an appointment diary as they and all the others headed back at speed towards the stairs.
Stephen found his seat amid silence. Only Lord Parmenter seemed genuinely uninterested, even mildly irritated at the interruption. He waited until Stephen was settled then suggested that Professor Brody might like to speak again.
The gaunt young man nodded and with a deft, barely conscious movement of his fingers tucked away some black strands between his shirt buttons before clasping his hands before him and announcing that if the committee did not mind, he would take the points in the order in which they were raised.
Restrictions on water use had reduced the front gardens of suburban West London to dust. The interminable privets were crackling brown. The only flowers Stephen saw on the long walk from the tube station – the end of the line – were surreptitious geraniums on window ledges. The little squares of lawn were baked earth from which even the dried grass had flaked away. One wag had planted out a row of cacti. Stronger representations of pastoral were to be found in those gardens which had been cemented over and painted green. The little men in red coats and rolled-up sleeves who turned the windmills were motionless, sunstruck.
The street in which his parents lived ran straight and shop-less for a mile and a half, part of a single nineteen-thirties development, once despised by those who preferred Victorian terraces, and made desirable now by migrations from the inner city. They were squat, grubbily rendered houses dreaming under their hot roofs of open seas; there was a porthole by each front door, and the upper windows, cased in metal, attempted to suggest the bridge of an ocean liner. He walked slowly through the hazy silence towards number seven hundred and sixty-three. A lozenge of dog turd crumbled underfoot. He wondered, as he did each time he came, how there could be so little activity in a street where there were so many houses close together – no kids kicking a ball around or playing hopscotch on the pavement, no one stripping down a gear box, no one even leaving or entering a house.
Twenty minutes later he was sitting on a shaded patio with his father drinking a beer from the fridge and feeling quite at home. The orderliness of cleaned, sharpened garden tools stowed in their proper place, the pink flagstones recently swept and the hard brush hanging between its rightful pegs on the wall, the garden hose neatly and tightly wound on to its drum and the proscribed garden tap with its hint of brass polish – details which had oppressed him as an adolescent now cleared the mind and left it uncluttered for more essential things. Indoors and out, there was an orderly concern for objects, their cleanliness and disposition, which he no longer took to be the exact antithesis of all that was human, creative, fertile – keywords in his furious teenage notebooks. From where they sat with their beers there was a view of similarly ordered gardens, brown lawns, creosoted fences, orange roofs and right above, against a bluish-black sky, just two arms of a pylon whose body was out of sight, straddling the unfortunate house next door.
The mind was freed to talk about the weather.
‘Son,’ his father said, reaching from his folding chair with a gasp to top up Stephen’s beer, ‘I don’t remember a hotter summer than this in seventy-four years. It’s hot. In fact, I’d say it was too hot.’
Stephen said that that was better than too wet and his father agreed.
‘I’d have this any time, whatever they’re saying about the reservoirs or what’s happened to our lawn. You can sit out. All right, in the shade if need be, but you’re sitting outside, not indoors. Those wet summers we had, when you get to our age, your Mum and I, they’re no good for anything but an ache in the bones. Give me the heat any time.’ Stephen was about to speak, but his father continued a little irritably. ‘The fact is, people are never satisfied. It’s too hot, it’s too cold, it’s too wet, it’s too dry. They’re never bloody satisfied. They don’t know what they want. No, this will do me. We never complained about weather like this in the old days, eh? On the beach there every day, beautiful water, swimming.’ And with his usual good humour restored he raised his glass and took a long pull while he tapped out with his slippered feet a triumphant rhythm.
They sat for a few minutes in homely, unawkward silence. From the kitchen where Stephen’s mother was cooking a roast came the lulling sounds of the oven door being opened and closed, a heavy spoon ladling from a saucepan. Later, at his father’s insistence, she came out to join them and drink her sherry. She removed her apron before sitting down and folded it carefully across her lap. The numerous small anxieties associated with preparing a three-course meal animated her face. She kept her head tilted towards the kitchen window, listening out for the vegetables.
The conversation about the weather resumed, this time with reference to its effect on the garden, her special love.
‘It’s such a shame,’ she said. ‘We had so much in, didn’t we. It was going to be beautiful.’
Stephen’s father was shaking his head. ‘I was just saying to Stephen. It’s better than sitting indoors all day watching it tip down and saying to yourself, maybe it will be all right tomorrow. And then it isn’t.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘But I like to see things grow. I don’t like to see them die.’ She finished her sherry and said, ‘How long are you two going to be?’ Stephen’s father glanced at his watch. ‘We’ll have another beer.’
‘So shall I serve up at half past?’
He nodded.
Frowning at a stab of pain as she rose from her chair, she said, ‘Good. As long as I know what I’m doing.’ She patted her son’s knee and walked quickly back indoors.
His father followed her and returned with two fresh cans of beer. The loud groan he gave after he had lowered himself into his chair was less an expression of pain than self-mockery. Supporting the cans on the arm rests, he slumped down and smiled, pretending for a moment to be worn out by his exertions. After they had refilled their glasses, he asked Stephen about the committee and listened patiently to an account of the meetings.
He was unimpressed by Stephen’s interview with the Prime Minister. ‘They’re all out for what they can get, son. I’ve told you before, you’re wasting your time there. This report’s already been written in secret and the whole thing’s a load of rubbish anyway. These committees are a lot of flannel as far as I can see.
Professor So-and-So and Lord So-and-So! It’s to make people believe the report when they read it, and most people are such bloody fools, they will believe it. Lord So-and-So put his name to this so it must be true! And who is this Lord? Some Joe who’s said the right things all his life, offended no one and made himself some money. The right word in the right ear and he’s on the honours list, then suddenly he’s a god, his word is law. He’s a god. Lord So-and-So said this, Lord So-and-So thinks that. That’s the trouble with this country, too much bowing and scraping, everyone kow-towing to Lords and Sirs, no one thinking for themselves! No, I’d jack it in if I were you, son. You’re wasting your time there. Get on and write a book. It’s time you did. Kate’s not coming back, Julie’s gone. You might as well get on with it.’
The speech was not planned, and it surprised both of them. Stephen shook his head, but he could think of nothing to say. Mr Lewis settled back in his chair. The two men raised their glasses and drank deeply.
There was a minute or two, just before dinner, when Stephen was alone indoors. His father had gone into the kitchen to help out. The room extended from the back to the front of the house, with the dining table at one end and the three-piece suite at the other. This was his parents’ last house, and the first they had been able to furnish to their own taste. All about were objects collected from many postings, things put away in boxes and stored for years ‘till we have our own house’ – a phrase he remembered from his earliest childhood. The ashtray with the leather thongs was in place, and the silhouetted palm trees and the North African brass pots. On the sideboard was his mother’s collection of crystal and cut-glass animals, cutely represented, spiky and heavy to hold. He balanced on his palm a mouse with bead eyes and nylon whiskers.
On the dining table were wine glasses with long, green-tinted stems. He used to think of them as ladies with long-sleeved gloves. The place mats bore the RAF insignia, the coffee spoons the crests of towns Stephen had visited – Vancouver, Ankara, Warsaw. It was odd, the ease with which a whole past could be fitted into one room, placed out of time and bound by a blend of familiar smells which had no date – lavender polish, cigarettes, scented soap, roasting meat. These objects, this particular perfume – already his resolutions, the precise importance of his enquiries, were beginning to elude him. He had some questions, some topics he wanted to raise, but he was comfortably vague from three cans of beer, and hungry too, and now his mother was passing the covered bowls of vegetables through the serving hatch and they were to be placed on the hotplates; his father had brought in a bottle of his wine, home-made in four weeks from a special kit, and was filling the glasses, topping the meniscus as was his habit; the first course was in place, each melon slice with its lurid cherry. He sat down gratefully, and when his parents had settled too, the three raised their glasses and his mother said, ‘Welcome home, son!’
When Stephen looked at his parents’ faces it was not the effects of age he saw so much as the devastation of Kate’s disappearance. She was rarely mentioned now, which was why he had been surprised twenty minutes before. The loss of their only grandchild had whitened his father’s hair in two months, and made his mother’s eyes sink into wrinkled pits. They had built their retirement years around their granddaughter for whom this room had been a paradise of forbidden objects. She could pass half an hour alone, her chin propped on the sideboard, meandering through obscure dialogues in which she did the voices of the glass menagerie in high squeaks. Beyond the physical signs, Stephen had seen nothing of his parents’ sorrow. They had not wanted to add to his burden. It was typical of what bound the three of them that they had never been able to grieve Kate together, and that to say her name, as his father had done, was to break an unspoken rule.
It was not until the end of the meal that Stephen made the effort and raised the subject of the bicycles. He had this memory, he told them, which he could not quite place. He described the child seat, the track towards the sea, the shingle bank and the thunderous noise behind it. His father was shaking his head defiantly, as he often did when faced with the irretrievable past. But Mrs Lewis was quick.
‘That was Old Romney, in Kent. We had a week there once.’ She touched her husband’s forearm. ‘Don’t you remember, we borrowed the bikes back off Stan. Those old things. We stayed a week, and not a day it didn’t rain.’
‘Never been to Old Romney in my life,’ Stephen’s father said, but he was hesitant now, waiting to be convinced.
‘Something to do with a course you were on and you had a week’s leave. We stayed in a bed and breakfast, I can’t remember her name now, but quite nice, very clean.’
‘You borrowed the bikes back,’ Stephen said.
‘That’s right. We had them years, bought them new and gave them to your Uncle Stan when we got posted overseas.’
This time his father was unequivocal. ‘We had all sorts of bikes but we never had new ones. Couldn’t have afforded it. Not then.’
‘Well, I tell you, we did, on the never-never, and we gave them to Stan and borrowed them back to go to Old Romney.’
His certainty about the bikes had fortified his resistance to Old Romney. ‘Never been near the place. Not even near it.’
To conceal her annoyance, Stephen’s mother had stood to gather in the plates. She lowered her voice in anger. ‘You forget what suits you.’
Mr Lewis was filling the glasses and giving Stephen a comical look which said, Look what I’ve got myself into now.
Good humour returned easily enough over coffee when the conversation turned to the funeral of an elderly relative who had been buried in Wimbledon cemetery the week before. Stephen’s mother told the story, breaking off to wipe the tears from her eyes. A little boy, a great grandchild of the deceased, had thrown a teddy bear into the grave during the service, and there it lay, on its back on the coffin, gazing up at the mourners with one eye missing. The kid set up a terrible commotion above the vicar’s drone. There were snorts of laughter, and angry stares from the family’s side. Nobody wanted to climb down and retrieve the thing and so it was buried with the dead.
‘And more grieved for,’ added Stephen’s father who had heard the story through again with a huge grin.
When the three set about the washing up, they followed the old routine. His mother made a start at the kitchen sink while Stephen and his father cleared away. When there were enough plates and dishes to be dried, Stephen went into the kitchen to make a start. When his father had finished clearing the table, he wiped it down. Then he joined the other two where he dried and put away. Mrs Lewis always dismissed the men from her kitchen in order to wash and dry the baking and roasting tins herself. This operation had about it elements of dance, ritual and military manoeuvre. Now that his own arrangements were so chaotic, Stephen found the process soothing where once it had filled him with despair. During the second stage, when his father was energetically buffing the dining-room table, and Stephen was alone in the kitchen with his mother, he asked about the bicycles again. When were they bought?
She was not curious why he wanted to know. Holding her gloved hands under the suds, she tilted her head and considered. ‘Before you were born. Before we were married, because we used to go courting on them. They were beauties, black with gold writing, weighed a ton.’
‘Do you know a pub called The Bell near Otford in Kent?’
She shook her head. ‘Is that near Old Romney?’ she asked as Mr Lewis entered the kitchen. With precisely the impulse he had intended to resist – the impulse to make the evening pass smoothly, not to provoke dissent, however minor – Stephen refrained from further questions.
When everything was washed and put away in its proper place, they sat and chatted until it was time for him to set off for the last train. They gathered on the front doorstep in the warm air for farewells. A familiar sadness came over his parents, their voices were muted, though their words were cheerful enough. It was partly, he supposed, because he was leaving home again, as he had so many times in thirt
y years, each occasion an unrecognised enactment of the first; and partly because he was leaving alone, without wife or daughter, daughter-in-law or granddaughter. Whatever the cause, it would remain unspoken. As always, they stayed out on the front path waving at their son as he receded in the sodium dusk, waving, resting their hands, then waving again as they had on the desert airstrip, until a slight bend in the street lost him to their view. It was as if they wanted to see for themselves that he was not going to change his mind, turn round and come back home.
Five
It was not always the case that a large minority comprising the weakest members of society wore special clothes, were freed from the routines of work and of many constraints on their behaviour and were able to devote much of their time to play. It should be remembered that childhood is not a natural occurrence. There was a time when children were treated like small adults. Childhood is an invention, a social construct, made possible by society as it increased in sophistication and resource. Above all, childhood is a privilege. No child as it grows older should be allowed to forget that its parents, as embodiments of society, are the ones who grant this privilege, and do so at their own expense.
The Authorised Childcare Handbook, HMSO
Stephen was driving a hired car along a deserted minor road, eastwards towards central Suffolk. The sunroof was open wide. He had tired of searching for tolerable music on the radio and was content with the rush of warm air and the novelty of driving for the first time in over a year. A postcard he had written to Julie was in his back pocket. She seemed to want to be left alone. He was uncertain whether to post it. The sun was high behind him, giving a visibility of luminous clarity. The road was flanked by concrete irrigation ditches and made wide curves through miles of conifer plantation set well back beyond a wide swathe of tree stumps and dried out bracken. He had slept well the night before, he remembered later. He was relaxed but reasonably alert. His speed was somewhere between seventy and seventy-five, which dropped only a little as he came up behind a large pink lorry.
