by Ian Mcewan
He strained to hear her. He saw her in characteristic pose, in an armchair, one foot on the floor, her other knee raised to support her crossed arms which in turn supported her chin. She was proposing a difficult undertaking. She appeared excited as she made her proposals, but her voice was level and certain. Now he had her with legs folded beneath her, hands folded across her belly. She stared at him, silent, contentedly secretive. She wore a patched-up pair of old corduroys and a loose shirt with billowing sleeves and many pleats. She was plump and comfortable. He was remembering her pregnant. He thought of her buttocks, the smoothness of their concavities. He saw his hand resting there, and then, unaccountably, his thoughts slid away and he was thinking of her two brothers, both doctors, obsessed with their work and their large families. There came to mind the small army of her nephews and nieces, the presents he and Julie bought for them every Christmas; now he saw her tough, grizzled mother who worked for a charity and kept a small flat crammed with photographs and mementoes – old toys, cracked dolls, rock, stamp, egg and feather collections, and in thick albums numbered by years, a picture of Julie with an Alice band, displaying a pet rabbit in a passionate grip, Julie with a foot on each brother’s shoulder. And Julie’s father, dead when his children were teenagers, kept alive in family mythology and still cried for occasionally by Julie and her mother.
An inventory proliferated outwards to remoter stretches of Julie’s family: an architect uncle who had been to prison, her women friends, her ex-lovers, one of whom he was fond of, her work, the French family that adopted her in her teens and still invited her over to their dismal château; and inwards, to the pomander she kept in her drawer full of sweaters, her taste for exotic underwear and brightly coloured woollen socks, the calloused skin on her heels and the pumice stone she used, the puckered disc on her hand from an old dog bite, no sugar in her coffee, honey in her tea, an aversion to beetroot, fish roe, cigarettes, radio drama … His sorrow was in the uselessness of all this knowledge. He had made himself an expert in a subject which no longer existed, his skills were outdated.
He looked across the table at Rachael Murray. With one hand she pinched her forehead with forefinger and thumb, with the other she was taking notes. Now and then she pushed her hair clear of her eyes with an abrupt, irritable movement. He heard himself addressed in the kind of high style adopted by newspaper leaders when they pronounced on the subject of national decline – an airy harangue that had sounded all his adult life. A new role in the world had yet to be found, the challenge of the future would be the mastery of new forms of expertise, old skills must be replaced by new skills – the alternative was perpetual redundancy. Was he up to the task? Involuntarily he shook his head.
He saw his hand on Julie’s thigh just before she rose from the bed and, naked, crossed the room. The bare boards creaked. It was cold, her breath was visible as she opened a drawer and pulled on a shirt. She was standing at the foot of the bed, looking at him as she wiggled into her knickers. She dropped a thick, winter skirt over her head and as she fastened it at the waist she half smiled at him and spoke. It seemed important.
On a mild morning shortly before Christmas, Stephen stood in his underwear and examined the selection of suits in his wardrobe, and in a mood of political, or childish, defiance chose the most worn and least clean. On the jacket black threads hung where a button should have been, and there was a small burn, a precise, brown-fringed hole inches above the knee. He took out a white shirt with a faded, three-year-old, sickle-shaped bolognese stain down the front. His overcoat, which was expensive and relatively new, detracted from the effect, but that could be removed when he arrived. He sat in it in the kitchen drinking coffee and reading the paper until his doorbell rang. He went down and found a uniformed chauffeur, pallid and tubby, looking about him with distaste.
‘This your place?’ the man asked, incredulous. Stephen made no reply, and they set out across the mud and round the litter-crammed puddles to where the car was parked, four wheels up on the pavement and all indicators flashing. It was the same beaten-up model that used to call at Eaton Square for Charles.
In retaliation, Stephen called across the roof to the chauffeur who was fiddling with the door key, ‘This can’t be it, surely.’ He got in the front. With his heavy overcoat and the man’s girth it was a squeeze and their shoulders were rammed tight together.
The chauffeur breathed heavily as he fumbled for the ignition. Now his tone was almost apologetic. ‘It’s all allocated, see? Nothing to do with me. One day it’s a Rolls, the next it’s rubbish like this.’ The engine started and he added, ‘It all depends who you’re picking up, see?’
They lurched out into the stream of traffic which was moving a little faster than walking pace. A jet of very hot air was blowing against Stephen’s trouser leg, releasing a blend of odours. He reached forwards in the confined space and pushed and pulled at the ventilation controls which swung back and forth freely, attached to nothing. ‘Nah,’ said the chauffeur, shaking his head. He wound down his window. But by now the traffic had come to a halt and the temperature in the car was rising steadily. While Stephen grunted with the exertion of getting out of his coat, the chauffeur began an explanation involving split pins and wing nuts and dual connecting rods, and by the time Stephen, all irritable and hot, had thrown the coat over his shoulder on to the back seat, the account had widened to embrace deficiencies in the management of the car pool, the compulsory overtime, the victimisation of certain drivers like himself who did not falsify their petrol chits or make out fake job claims or sell whatever they happened to hear to the newspapers.
Stephen wound his window down and leaned out with both elbows on the sill.
The chauffeur was relaxing into his monologue. ‘Take the case of one Mr Symes,’ he said, and drummed on the steering wheel with extended forefingers. The traffic was starting up again. They moved slowly across the lights and then, where two streams of cars merged, they stopped again. They were taking Stephen’s morning route to Whitehall. He should have walked. They edged forwards a little further and began to draw level with the local primary and junior school. ‘Do you know when he last drove a car out? Can you make a guess?’ Because his head was half out the window Stephen’s negative was lost, but the fat chauffeur did not mind. It was late-morning break, the playground swarmed. They came alongside a football game, roughly twenty-five a side. Seven- and eight-year-olds were playing with violent competence. Passing movements swept one way and then the other across the asphalt; to the sound of first names and obscenities shouted in urgent falsetto, high balls were fought for in the air; midfield players fed the attackers and then hung back. ‘Nineteen eighty-five. That’s when. Hasn’t been out on a job since then. Nineteen eighty-five. And do you know who he took then, who he was driving, because this is the point?’
‘No,’ Stephen said into the cooler air. By the entrance where they had stopped was a group of girls with a long skipping rope which swung to a rhythmic chant in powerful arcs above the heads of two girls who danced through it in quick sideways movements, lifting their feet as late and as little as possible to clear the rope as it cut down beneath them. The two were joined by a third, then a fourth, the chant became more insistent, then the rope snagged and there was a moan of good-natured disappointment. Between these two boisterous groups, the foot-ballers and the skippers, were solitary figures, a girl tracing a line with the tip of her shoe, and further off, a ginger boy with something moving inside a brown paper bag.
‘The Foreign Secretary,’ said the chauffeur. ‘That’s who. Not even our department. Symes was lent out. And the FO with almost as many drivers as we got.’ They had stopped right by the school entrance. An argument had broken out among the children. It had something to do with which couple was to turn the rope, for one girl had it pulled from her hands. Eventually her partner at the other end left her station to console her. They had been replaced by bigger girls. ‘Do you know where he took him? It’s God’s truth.’ Stephen shook h
is head. ‘Out to a brothel near Northolt Airport. It’s a place they got out there for diplomats.’
‘Is that so?’ The rope was turning again, the chant was starting up. An impatient line had formed and now the girl at the front was pushed forward. She took up a position just a couple of feet from where the rope smacked the ground, nodding her head to the beat of the song, working the rhythm of it into her feet. The girls sang in unison, but a few were off pitch and the dense disharmonies jarred. The stresses were crudely emphatic on the down-beat. Daddy, Daddy, I feel sick, Send for the doctor, quick, quick, quick! ‘You can imagine it. Something happened. In return for a favour, something not mentioned perhaps, a word to the car-pool super, and Symes never does a day’s work again. On full pay. For life.’
Stephen watched the waiting girl. She fingered the hem of her skirt. She made a little feint, then she was in, bobbing like a Highland dancer, and the next girl was ready. Doctor, doctor, shall I die? Yes my dear, and so shall I. How many carriages shall I have? One, two, three, four … The two were face to face as they skipped. They clapped hands, left to right, right to right, both together, then left to right … The first girl was facing away from him. He was watching the blurred line of her moving shoulders, the tilt of her head, the pale crook of her knees. At the moment when the skipping song came full circle, the two leaped higher, turned in the air and landed back to back. The first girl’s face was obscured by the crowd of chanting girls who were pressing in closer. He half lifted himself out of his seat, straining to see. Ahead, the traffic was moving. They slipped forwards ten feet or so before stopping, and suddenly he had a clearer view. There were five girls in the rope, a compacted line that rose and fell to the pulse of the chant. The first girl was closest to him. The thick fringe bobbed against her white forehead, her chin was raised, she had a dreamy appearance. He was looking at his daughter. He shook his head, he opened his mouth without making a sound. She was fifty feet away, unmistakable. The chauffeur roused himself from reveries of injustice and shoved the gear stick forwards.
They were moving again, picking up speed. Stephen twisted round in his seat to look out of the rear window. The rope had snagged again, there was a lot of milling about, it was difficult to see faces. He had lost sight of Kate, then saw her briefly as she bent to retrieve something from the ground.
‘Stop the car,’ he whispered, cleared his throat and said it again, louder. ‘Stop the car.’
They were going at a steady thirty miles an hour. Ahead the lights were green, and the rush of cooler air into the dry heat was refreshing the chauffeur, generating a breezy optimism. ‘It’s not all bad, though. You’re your own boss really. It’s up to you to make what you can of it.’ The school was already half a mile behind them.
‘Stop the car!’
‘What’s up?’
‘Just do as I say.’
‘With this lot behind?’
Stephen jerked the wheel, and as the car swerved to the left the chauffeur had no choice but to brake sharply. Moving at less than five miles an hour they scraped the length of a parked van. Behind them was a chorus of horns. ‘Now look,’ the chauffeur moaned, but Stephen was out on the pavement and starting to run.
By the time he was back, the playground was deserted. Its air of having been vacated of bodies and clamour only minutes before made its emptiness more complete, its walled boundaries more remote. A residual heat hung above the asphalt. The school buildings were of the late Victorian type, with high windows and steeply pitched roofs at many angles. From these buildings came not so much a sound as an emanation of children confined in classrooms. Stephen stood still by the entrance, all senses focused. Time itself had a closed-down, forbidden quality; he was experiencing the pleasurable transgression, the heightened significance that came with being out of school at the wrong moment. From across the playground a man with a zinc bucket was approaching, so Stephen strode purposefully towards a red door and opened it. He had no particular plan, though it was clear that if his daughter were here it would be easy enough to find her. He felt no excitement now, only peaceful resolve.
He was standing by a fire hose mounted on a red drum on the wall at the beginning of a corridor which ended some sixty feet away with a set of swing doors. It looked familiar to him from schooldays; the floor was red-tiled, the walls were a creamy gloss for easy cleaning. He set off down the corridor slowly. He would search the whole building methodically, regard it not as a school so much as a set of hiding places. The first door that gave on to the corridor was locked, the second opened a broom cupboard, the third a boiler room where tea things were set out on an upturned crate. Another two doors were locked and by this time he had reached the swing doors. As he pushed them open he glanced over his shoulder to see the man with the bucket enter the corridor and turn to lock the red door behind him. Stephen hurried on.
He had arrived at a well-lit reception area where two other corridors, wider and without connecting doors, converged. There were potted plants on shelves and child art on the walls. A sign which announced ‘School Fees and Enquiries’ hung on a door which stood ajar. Beyond it someone was typing slowly. He smelled coffee and cigarettes, and as he passed, preferring not to be heard or seen, a male voice exclaimed, ‘But newts are not extinct!’ and a woman murmured reassuringly, ‘Well, almost.’
Stephen continued along one of the wider corridors, drawn by the sound of a rhythmic and resonant boom. At his feet the linoleum tiles had been worn through to the concrete beneath, making a fissure which ran ahead of him. He stopped at a door in which was set a semi-circular window with wired glass. Glancing in, and seeing nothing but an expanse of wooden floor, he pushed the door open and entered a gymnasium on the far side of which thirty children queued in silence to run at a springboard and launch themselves over a wooden horse. Standing on a rubber mat to steady them as they landed was a compact, elderly man with his glasses swinging from his neck by a silver chain. As each child bounced off the board he emitted a staccato ‘Hup!’ He glanced without interest at Stephen, who took up a position at the far end of the mat to watch the children come over.
Soon the bobbing faces had abstracted themselves into little moons, discs with a comic-book range of expressions – terrified, indifferent, determined. He had watched half the class before he became aware of the ideal form of the exercise. It was intended that the children should land on the mat with their feet together, perfectly still, at attention for a second or so before running off to re-join the queue. Since no one could achieve this, the master appeared to have settled for the next best thing – each child sprang to attention, military style, after stumbling across the mat. At no time did the teacher, who was a kind of circus ringmaster, offer encouragement or instruction. His ‘hup’s never varied in tone. It did not look as though he planned to do anything else, for there was no other apparatus in sight. The children ran straight from the mat to the end of the queue without talking or touching. It was difficult to imagine the process being brought to a halt. Stephen left when he started seeing faces for the second time. In recollection, the entire period of his search through the school took place against the background of the thwack and boom of the springboard, and the regular, strangled cry of the games master.
Minutes later he was standing at the rear of a crowded classroom watching a matronly teacher at the blackboard put the finishing touches to her picture of a Medieval village. The roads converged to form the triangular green, around which were grouped primitive huts. There was a village pump out of proportion, and in the distance, drawn with some care, the manor house. With a low buzz, the children took their crayons and started out on their own versions. The teacher waved Stephen into a vacant seat halfway down the classroom, and it was from here, squeezed tight against his desk, that he surveyed the faces as they bent over their work.
The teacher appeared at his side and whispered exaggeratedly. ‘I’m so happy you can take part in the scheme. If you’re unsure what to do just raise your hand and ask.�
� Solicitously, she spread paper before him and offered him a fistful of crayons. Stephen began to draw his village. He remembered this arrangement from thirty years ago. This was perhaps the fourth time he had represented a Medieval village in his life – and he was able to work quickly, imparting to his row of huts a degree of perspective they never had in previous attempts, and managing a life-like pump on the edge of the green no larger than half the size of the nearest hut. The manor house, which he imagined to be at least half a mile away, gave him more trouble and he began to slow down, and raise his eyes to the blackboard, finding there some useful architectural hints. To render these features, however, meant drawing out of scale, and his picture began to acquire the primitivist qualities of all his previous attempts.
As he drew he looked about him. Fortunately, all the girls were on one side of the room, but only the faces of those behind him and immediately to his left were visible. As he shifted to improve his point of view, the tiny wooden seat beneath him squeaked loudly. The teacher called threateningly without looking up from her book, ‘Someone has the fidgets.’ He ducked down and resumed his drawing. The door opened and the man with the bucket popped his head round, smiled apologetically at the teacher, glanced round the class and disappeared. There were three dark-haired girls to Stephen’s left. It was difficult to see them because they held their faces so close to their work. He turned to watch them, careful not to move too quickly in his seat. The nearest girl became aware of him, tilted her head and smiled furtively and prettily through the pencil she was biting. There was a movement up front, the harsh scrape of a chair. The teacher spoke to the class as a whole.
