by Ian Mcewan
It was this little confrontation rather than the crash which preoccupied him as he turned the car down the Darkes’ bumpy avenue. He felt guilty of a betrayal. Here was a pale man in a white silk shirt with his bottles of champagne, here were the gypsies at the gate. For years he had convinced himself he belonged at heart with the rootless, that having money was a merry accident, that he could be back on the road any day with all his stuff in one bag. But time had fixed him in his place. He had become the sort who casts about for a policeman at the sight of the scruffy poor. He was on the other side now. If not, why had he tried to pretend they were not there? Why not accept he was outnumbered and look them in the eye as he might have once, and hand over some of the merrily accidental cash? He had stopped the car and was following an overgrown footpath to the wicket gate. The patchouli had jolted him. It was the scent of a dreamily self-destructive girl he had known in Kandahar, of chaotic flat-shares in West London, of an open-air concert in Montana. He had been shaken by the commonplace of irreversible time. He had once felt light on the ground. He used to think his life was an open-ended adventure, he used to give things away, it amused him when the unexpected happened, benevolent coincidences used to bear him along. When had all that stopped? When, for example, had he started to think that the things he owned were really his, inalienably his? He could not remember.
He stopped in the gloomy tunnel of summer shrubs, set down his overnight case and the champagne, and prepared to meet his friends. His hands glowed white in the obscurity. He covered his eyes with them. He was so unhealthily stuffed up with his recent past, like a man with a cold. If he could only live in the present he might breathe freely. But I don’t like the present, he thought, and picked up his things. As he straightened, he saw a silhouetted figure against the sky framed by overhanging roses. Thelma had been watching him.
‘How long were you hiding in there?’ she asked as they kissed.
He failed to sound lighthearted as he said, ‘Years.’ In compensation he showed her the bottles, which were already cold, and suggested they open one immediately – the last thing he felt like doing.
Thelma led him towards the house. The door and all the windows were open wide to the evening sunshine. They entered by way of a small dining room whose stone floor gave off a watery coolness. Stephen waited here while Thelma went in search of the right kind of glasses. On the bookshelves were stuffed birds in domed cases, posing in their habitats. Atawny owl had its claws deep into a stuffed mouse. In a square tank an otter was closing its jaws round a decomposing fish. Stephen rested his elbows on an unsteady round table, and cheered up. By his arm was a bottle of Burgundy and its freshly pulled cork. The smell of roast meat and garlic mingled with that of the honeysuckle which trailed along the window ledge behind him. In the kitchen Thelma was filling an ice bucket, and from the garden came a cacophony of birdsong.
They sat beneath a pear tree at a rusting wrought-iron table which stood in a patch of unmown grass, surrounded by giant poppies, snapdragons and what Stephen thought were lupins until he heard Thelma call them delphiniums.
She set down two glasses by the ice bucket and poured. ‘Charles is in the woods somewhere. You’ll have to go and find him later.’
Stephen shuddered at the acidity of the drink and thought of the red wine indoors. Another Scotch would do equally well. Because there was rather too much to talk about, they talked about the garden. Or rather, Thelma explained, and Stephen nodded intelligently. Only when he pointed at a mass of cornflowers and asked what they were did she grasp the full extent of his ignorance. She told him how the outer edges of the garden were designed to merge with the wild growth of the wood so that there was no visible barrier between the two, and how she had been growing wild flowers for their seeds which she planned to preserve for what she called the gene pool.
‘Even the primroses have all but gone. It’ll be the buttercups next.’
‘Everything’s getting worse,’ Stephen said. ‘Isn’t anything getting better?’
‘You’re out in the big world. You tell me.’
He thought hard. ‘They’re planting the Sussex downs with conifers. We’ll be self-sufficient in wood in less than twenty years.’
They drank to that, and then Stephen asked about the book. They were avoiding talking about Charles. The work was going well, Thelma said; the book was a quarter written, and another had been commissioned. She asked for the latest on the committee, and this led Stephen to report his conversation with the Prime Minister.
Thelma showed no surprise. ‘No question, Charles was favoured. It was kept a secret, although I was never quite certain why. Perhaps to prevent jealousies. There was a touch of fondness and desire in there somewhere too.’
‘Desire?’ The Prime Minister was said to be without it.
‘Stranger things happen. In politics Charles could pass as a young man, a boy.’
‘Was that why you wanted him out here?’
Thelma shook her head. ‘I’m not saying anything till you’ve seen him.’
‘But he’s happy?’
‘Go and see for yourself. Follow the path from the kitchen. Where it joins the main track, turn left. You’ll bump into him sooner or later.’
Twenty minutes later he set off. A wide grassy track ran just within the perimeters of the wood, making an irregular oval which, according to Thelma, took an hour to walk round. There were stretches where it was possible on one side to see open fields through the trees. In other places the way veered deeper into the wood and narrowed to little more than a footpath. Here there was little light, and the grass gave way to an ivy which Stephen was reluctant to tread on because the leaves collapsed underfoot with an unpleasant popping sound. The last time he had walked in these woods, when Charles was still a Government minister, everything had been skeletal and pure. Seasonal changes were just slow enough for the transformations to remain a surprise. For this hardly seemed the same place. The drought had not penetrated here. His ignorance of the names of trees and plants heightened his impression of their profusion. The wood had detonated, it was engulfed in such a chaos of vegetation it was in danger of choking on abundance.
Where the path crossed a brook, a slab of rock, the remains of an old wall, was host to a miniature Amazon, a jungle of moss, fluorescent lichen and microscopic trees. And overhead were creepers, thick as rope, filtering the light. Down on the ground there were giant cabbages and rhubarbs, palm fronds, grasses bent double by the weight of their heads. In one place open to the sky there was an extravagant crop of purple flowers, in another, darker spot, the whiff of garlic, a reminder of dinner.
It needed a child, Stephen thought, succumbing to the inevitable. Kate would not be aware of the car half a mile behind, or of the wood’s perimeters and all that lay, beyond them, roads, opinions, Government. The wood, this spider rotating on its thread, this beetle lumbering over blades of grass, would be all, the moment would be everything. He needed her good influence, her lessons in celebrating the specific; how to fill the present and be filled by it to the point where identity faded to nothing. He was always partly somewhere else, never quite paying attention, never wholly serious. Wasn’t that Nietzsche’s idea of true maturity, to attain the seriousness of a child at play?
He and Julie had once taken Kate to Cornwall. It was a short holiday to celebrate the string quartet’s first public concert. Their beach was reached by way of a two-mile footpath. Late in the afternoon they started to build a sandcastle near the water’s edge. Kate was excited. She was at the age when everything had to be just so. The walls had to be squared off, there had to be windows, shells were to be embedded at regular intervals and the area inside the keep had to be made comfortable with dry seaweed. Stephen and Julie had set out to amuse their daughter until it was time to leave. They had had their swim and eaten the picnic. But soon, and without quite realising it was happening, they became engrossed, filled with the little girl’s urgency, working with no awareness of time beyond the imperative
of the approaching tide. The three worked in noisy harmony, sharing the bucket and two spades, ordering each other about remorselessly, applauding or pouring scorn on each other’s choice of shells or window design, running – never walking – back up the beach for fresh materials.
When everything was completed and they had walked round their achievement several times, they squeezed inside the walls and sat down to wait for the tide. Kate was convinced that their castle was so well built it could resist the sea. Stephen and Julie went along with this, deriding the water when it simply lapped around the sides, booing it when it sucked away a piece of wall. While they were waiting for the final destruction Kate, who was wedged between them, pleaded to remain in the castle. She wanted them to make it their home. They would abandon their London lives, they would live on the beach for ever and play this game. And it was about this time that the grown-ups cast off the spell and began to glance at their watches and talk about supper and their many other arrangements. They pointed out to Kate they all needed to go home to collect their pyjamas and toothbrushes. This seemed to her a delightful and sensible idea, and she let herself be coaxed back along the path to the car. For days afterwards, until the matter was finally forgotten, she wanted to know when they would be returning to their new lives in the sandcastle. She had been serious. Stephen thought that if he could do everything with the intensity and abandonment with which he had once helped Kate build her castle, he would be a happy man of extraordinary powers.
He reached a point where the track made a right-angled turn towards the centre of the wood, and began a gentle descent into a hollow. The trees branched over the path to form a canopy through which the evening sun cast orange shapes on to the darkening grass. Where the track levelled out there was a dead oak, nothing more than a pillar of rotten wood. Stephen was thirty feet away from this tree when a boy stepped out from behind it and stood and stared. Stephen stopped too. The patchy light stirred when the wind blew. It was hard to see clearly, but he knew that this was just the kind of boy who used to fascinate and terrify him at school. The face was pale and fringed with sandy hair. The look was far too confident, cocky in that familiar way. He had an old-fashioned appearance – a grey flannel shirt with rolled-up sleeves and loosened tails, baggy grey shorts supported by a striped, elastic belt with a silver snake clasp, bulging pockets from which a handle protruded, and scabby, blood-streaked knees. Stephen was reminded of photographs of World War Two evacuees lining up with their teachers on a London railway platform.
‘Hullo,’ Stephen said in a friendly way as he went forward. ‘What are you up to?’
The boy steadied himself against the tree while he lifted a leg and scratched above his ankle with the tip of his scuffed shoe. ‘I dunno. Jus’ waiting.’
‘What for?’
‘For you, idiot.’
‘Charles!’ As Stephen closed the gap and extended his hand he was not certain whether it was going to be taken. It was, then Charles put his arms round Stephen’s neck and embraced him. There was a smell of liquorice and, beyond that, damp earth.
Charles sprang away and was crossing the track. ‘Want to see my place?’ he said simply, and led the way down a path lined with tall ferns. Stephen followed closely, his attention fixed on the catapult which stuck out of his friend’s pocket. The leather pouch swung dangerously on rubber thongs. They crossed a clearing where wild corn grew among the tree stumps, and re-entered the wood where the trees were all mature giants. They went quickly, and occasionally Stephen broke into a run to catch up. Charles spoke in breathy, disjointed sentences, without turning his head. Stephen did not catch them all. Charles seemed to be talking to himself.
‘It’s really good … been building it all summer … by myself … my place …’
Stephen had time to notice that his friend had not, as he had first thought, actually shrunk. He was slighter and suppler in his movements. He had grown his hair forwards into a fringe, and cut it short behind the ears. It was his wide open manner, the rapid speech and intent look, his unfettered, impulsive lurching, the way his feet and elbows flew out as they swung round a corner to take a second, even narrower path, the abandonment of the ritual and formality of adult greetings which suggested the ten-year-old.
They had arrived at another, smaller clearing in the centre of which stood a tree of tremendous girth.
Charles rummaged about in the grass and picked up a rock. ‘See this? See this?’ He would not proceed until Stephen had said yes. ‘This is what I used to bang these in with.’ He pointed to a six-inch nail driven in to the tree two feet above the ground, and then to another, two feet above that. There were a dozen or so making a curving line in the trunk and reaching up to the first branch, thirty feet above the ground. He pulled Stephen by the elbow to a worn patch of grass at the foot of the tree. ‘Up there!’ he shouted. ‘Look, look!’ Stephen tilted his head back and saw nothing but a dizzying maze of branches dividing and subdividing. The top of the tree was not visible. ‘No, no,’ Charles said. He took Stephen’s head in both hands and bent it back further. In among the topmost branches was a black speck.
‘What is it?’ Stephen said. ‘A nest?’
It was the right thing to say. Charles jumped in the air. ‘It’s not a nest, stupid. It’s my place. My own place!’
‘Amazing,’ Stephen said.
Charles pushed his catapult deeper into his pocket. ‘Ready?’
He placed his left foot on the first nail, swung his right on to the second and stood poised, his left hand holding the third nail, the right gesturing freely towards Stephen. ‘It’s easy. Just do what I do.’
Stephen ran his hand along the tree’s bark. He stalled. ‘What … er … kind of tree is it, do you think?’
‘A beech, of course. Didn’t you know that? It’s a whopper, a hundred and sixty feet, I’d say.’ He scrambled up until he was ten feet above the ground, then looked down. ‘I’ve been wanting to show you.’ Once a businessman and politician, now he was a successful pre-pubescent.
Stephen tested his weight against the first nail. He wanted to ask his friend what had happened to him, but Charles was too immersed in this new self, he was far beyond any appearance of pretence or awareness of the absurdity of his transformation, and Stephen was uncertain how to approach the matter. Perhaps Charles was in an advanced state of psychosis and had to be handled with care. On the other hand, Stephen could not fail to be affected by the excitement, the challenge in the air, and the importance his old friend seemed to attach to this moment. He did not wish to appear stuffy. He had never been much good at climbing trees, but then he had never really given it a try. He pushed upwards and found himself standing with both feet squashed together on the second nail. That was easy enough, but when he looked down he was alarmed to find that he was already rather high up.
‘I’m not sure this is for me,’ he started to say, but Charles, who by now was standing on the first branch with his hands deep in his pockets, was calling out instructions. ‘Put your hand on the nail just above your head, and bring your foot up, and get the next nail with your other hand …’
Stephen slid his hand upwards until he found the nail. Five feet might not be far to fall, but people broke their necks falling half that distance off chairs.
Minutes later he was lying face down on the first branch. It was almost as solid as the ground itself and he pressed his body to it. Inches away a wood louse was going about its business. This was its place. Charles was trying to point out to him the route ahead, but Stephen dared not look up, nor did he want to look down. He kept his eyes on the louse. ‘I think I’ll take it bit by bit,’ was all he could say. Charles offered him a sweet, threw one up in the air for himself and caught it in his mouth, then set off.
The difficult bit now was standing up, relinquishing the branch. He pushed himself against the trunk as he straightened. The next task was to lift one leg high enough so that he could place his foot in the crook formed by the branch above. But once that was
done, things became easier. There were so many branches shooting out from the trunk that it was like ascending a spiral staircase. He had to do nothing more than proceed cautiously and not look down. A satisfying fifteen minutes passed. This was something he could do, something he had missed out on in childhood, and he fully understood now why other boys bothered with it. He stopped for a rest and looked towards the horizon. He was way above the tops of the coppiced trees. In the distance there was a church spire, and closer in, perhaps a mile away, part of the red-tiled roof of the Darkes’ house. He took a tighter grip of the trunk and glanced straight down. There was a lurch in his stomach, but it was nothing too bad. He had seen the ground through a gaping arc of space and had not panicked. Emboldened, he took a deep breath, tightened his hold and angled his head back. He was hoping to see the base of the tree-house not far ahead. His field of vision rotated about a central point, and something hot and cold plummeted from his stomach to his bowels. He rested his cheek against the trunk and closed his eyes. No, that would not do either. He opened them and stared into the bark. He had seen – and he dared not recall the image – the same endless, vertiginous branching he had seen from the ground, and way, way above just a flash of Charles’s bare knees, and beyond them, leaves and branches into obscurity, with no sight of the platform.
He passed a minute calming himself. He decided it would be better to return to the ground. He wanted to please his friend, but it was pointless, after all, risking his life. Here was another problem. To find the foothold below, he had to look down, and his nerve had gone for that. ‘Oh God,’ he whispered to the tree. ‘What am I going to do?’ He did nothing. He strained to hear a comforting sound from the ground. Even birdsong would have done. But up here there was nothing, not even the wind. It occurred to him fleetingly that he was engrossed, fully in the moment. Quite simply, if he allowed another thought to distract him he would fall out of the tree. Then he thought, I don’t want to be doing this any more. I want to do something else. Take me out, make this stop.
