In Between the Sheets

by Ian Mcewan

  Sally Klee places her hand on mine as it moves across her head, either to forestall or to acknowledge tenderness—her head is still bowed and I cannot see her face. Knowing nothing, I compromise and hold her hand and seconds later our hands drop limply to our sides. I say nothing and, like the perfect friend, begin to clear away the plates and cutlery, tins and tin opener. In order to assure Sally Klee that I am not at all piqued by or sulking at her silence I whistle “Lillibullero” cheerfully through my teeth, rather in the manner of Sterne’s Uncle Toby in times of stress.

  Exactly so. I am stacking the plates in the kitchen and sulking, almost to the point of forgetting to whistle. Despite my negative sentiments I set about preparing the coffee. Sally Klee will have a blend of no less than four different kinds of bean in emulation of Balzac, whose life she read in a lavishly illustrated volume while attending to the proofs of her first novel. We always call it her first novel. The beans must be measured out carefully and ground by hand—a task to which my physique is well suited. Secretly, I suspect, Sally Klee believes that good coffee is the essence of authorship. Look at Balzac (I believe she says to herself), who wrote several thousand novels and whose coffee bills present themselves to the well-wisher from behind glass cases in tranquil suburban museums. After the grinding I must add a little salt and pour the mixture into the silver cavity of a compact stainless-steel machine sent here by post from Grenoble. While this warms on the stove, I peer in at Sally Klee from behind the dining-room door. She has folded her arms now and is resting them on the table in front of her. I advance a few paces into the room, hoping to catch her eye.

  Perhaps from the very beginning the arrangement was certain to fail. On the other hand, the pleasures it afforded—particularly to Sally Klee—were remarkable. And while she believes that in my behavior towards her I was a little too persistent, too manic, too “eager,” and while I for my part still feel she delighted more in my unfamiliarity (“funny little black leathery penis” and “your saliva tastes like weak tea”) than in my essential self, I would like to think there are no profound regrets on either side. As Moira Sillito, the heroine of Sally Klee’s first novel, says to herself at her husband’s funeral, “Everything changes.” Is the quiet, assertive yet ultimately tragic Moira consciously misquoting Yeats? So, no lasting regrets, I hope, when, this afternoon, I carried my few personal effects from Sally Klee’s spacious bedroom to my own small room at the top of the house. Yes, I rather like to climb stairs, and I left without a murmur. In effect (why deny it?) I was dismissed, but I had my own reasons for quitting those sheets. This liaison, for all its delights, was involving me too deeply in Sally Klee’s creative problems and only a final act of good-natured voyeurism could show me how far out of my depth I was. Artistic gestation is a private matter and my proximity was, and perhaps is still, obscene. Sally Klee’s gaze lifts clear of the table and for an immeasurable moment meets my own. With a slight affirmative motion of the head she indicates she is ready to take coffee.

  Sally Klee and I sip our coffee “in pregnant silence.” This at least is how Moira and her husband, Daniel, a rising young executive at a local bottling factory, sip their tea and digest the news that there are no medical reasons why between them they should be incapable of producing a child. Later the same day they decide to try (a good word, I thought) yet again for a baby. Personally speaking, sipping is something at which I rather excel, but silence, of whatever kind, makes me uncomfortable. I hold the cup several inches away from my face and propel my lips towards the rim in a winsome, tapering pout. Simultaneously I roll my eyes into my skull. There was a time—I remember the first occasion particularly—when the whole performance brought a smile to the less flexible lips of Sally Klee. Now I excel uncomfortably and when my eyeballs are facing outwards into the world once more I see no smile but Sally Klee’s pale, hairless fingers drumming on the polished surface of the dining table. She refills her cup, stands and leaves the room, leaves me to listen to her footsteps on the stairs.

  Though I remain below I am with her every inch of the way—I have said my proximity is obscene. She ascends the stairs, enters her bedroom, sits at her table. From where I sit I hear her thread into her typewriter a single sheet of paper, off-white, A4, 61 mg per square meter, the very same paper on which she effortlessly composed her first novel. She will ensure the machine is set at double space. Only letters to her friends, agent and publisher go at single space. Decisively she punches the red key which will provide, when there are words to surround it, a neat, off-white emptiness to precede her first sentence. An awesome silence settles over the house, I commence to writhe in my chair, an involuntary high-pitched sound escapes my throat. For two and a half years Sally Klee has grappled not with words and sentences, nor with ideas, but with form, or rather, with tactics. Should she, for instance, break silence with a short story, work a single idea with brittle elegance and total control? But what single idea, what sentence, what word? Moreover, good short stories are notoriously hard to write, harder perhaps than novels, and mediocre stories lie thick on the ground. Perhaps then another novel about Moira Sillito. Sally Klee closes her eyes and looks hard at her heroine and discovers yet again that everything she knows about her she has already written down. No, a second novel must break free of the first. What about a novel set (my tentative suggestion) in the jungles of South America? How ridiculous! What then? Moira Sillito stares up at Sally Klee from the empty page. Write about me, she says simply. But I can’t, Sally Klee cries out loud, I know nothing more about you. Please, says Moira. Leave me alone, Sally Klee cries out louder than before. Me, me, says Moira. No, no, Sally Klee shouts, I know nothing, I hate you. Leave me alone!

  Sally Klee’s cries pierce many hours of tense silence and bring me to my feet trembling. When will I ever accustom myself to these terrible sounds which cause the very air to bend and warp with strain? In calmer retrospection I will be reminded of Edvard Munch’s famous woodcut, but now I scamper about the dining room, unable to stifle the agitated squeals which well from me in moments of panic or excitement and which, to Sally Klee’s ears, diminish my romantic credibility. And at night when Sally Klee shouts in her sleep, my own pathetic squeals render me dismally incapable of giving comfort. Moira has nightmares too, as is established with chilling economy in the first line of Sally Klee’s first novel: “That night pale Moira Sillito rose screaming from her bed…” The Yorkshire Post was one of the few papers to take notice of this opening but, sadly, found it “too energetic by half.” Moira of course has a husband to soothe her and by the foot of page two she is “sleeping like a little child in the young man’s strong arms.” In a surprise review the feminist magazine Refractory Girl quotes this line to evidence the redundance of both “little” and the novel’s “banal sexism.” However, I found the line poignant, more so when it describes the very solace I yearn to bring in the dead of night to its begetter.

  I am silenced by the scrape of a chair. Sally Klee will come downstairs now, enter the kitchen to fill her cup with cold, black coffee and then return to her desk. I climb on to the chaise longue and arrange myself there in an attitude of simian preoccupation in case she should look in. Tonight she passes by, her form framed briefly in the open doorway, while her cup, rattling harshly in its saucer, announces her nervous wretchedness. Upstairs again I hear her remove the sheet of paper from her typewriter and replace it with a fresh piece. She sighs and presses the red key, pushes her hair clear of her eyes and begins to type at her steady, efficient forty words per minute. Music fills the house. I stretch my limbs on the chaise longue and drift into an after-dinner sleep.

  I familiarized myself with Sally Klee’s ritual ordeals during my brief residence in her bedroom. I lay on her bed, she sat at the desk, in our separate ways doing nothing. I luxuriated in, I congratulated myself hourly on, my recent elevation from pet to lover and, stretched out on my back, arms folded behind my head, legs crossed, I speculated upon further promotion, from lover to husband. Yes, I s
aw myself, expensive fountain pen in hand, signing rental-purchase agreements for my pretty wife. I would teach myself to hold a pen. I would be man-about-the-house, scaling drainpipes with uxorious ease to investigate the roof gutters, suspending myself from light fittings to redecorate the ceiling. Down to the pub in the evening with my husband credentials to make new friends, invent a name for myself in order to bestow it on my wife, take up wearing slippers about the house, and perhaps even socks and shoes outside. Of genetic rules and regulations I knew too little to reflect on the possibility of progeny, but I was determined to consult medical authorities who would in turn inform Sally Klee of her fate. She meanwhile sat before her empty page, pale as screaming, rising Moira Sillito, but silent and still, progressing ineluctably towards the crisis which would bring her to her feet and propel her downstairs for unwarmed coffee. In the early days she cast in my direction nervous encouraging smiles and we were happy. But as I came to know of the agony behind her silence, my emphatic squeals—so she was to insinuate—made it harder to concentrate and the smiles in my direction ceased.

  They ceased and, therefore, likewise my speculations. I am not, as you may have gathered, one to seek confrontations. Think of me rather as one who would suck yolks from eggs without damage to the shells, remember my dextrous sipping. Beyond my silly noises, which were more evolutionary than personal, I said nothing. Late one evening, overwhelmed by a sudden intuition, I scampered into the bathroom minutes after Sally Klee had left it. I locked the door, stood on the edge of the bath, opened the small, scented cupboard in which she kept her most private, womanly things and confirmed what I already knew. Her intriguing cap still lay inside its plastic oyster, dusted and somehow disapproving of me. I passed rapidly then, in the long afternoons and evenings on the bed, from speculation to nostalgia. The long prelude of mutual exploration, she counting my teeth with her ball-point pen, I searching in vain for nits in her copious hair. Her playful observations on the length, color, texture of my member, my fascination with her endearingly useless toes and coyly concealed anus. Our first “time” (Moira Sillito’s word) was a little dogged by misunderstanding largely due to my assumption that we were to proceed a posteriori. That matter was soon resolved and we adopted Sally Klee’s unique “face to face,” an arrangement I found at first, as I tried to convey to my lover, too fraught with communication, a little too “intellectual.” However, I rapidly made myself comfortable, and not two afternoons later was bringing to mind:

  And pictures in our eyes to get

  Was all our propagation.

  Fortunately it was not, at this stage, quite all. “The experience of falling in love is common but nevertheless ineffable.” These sentiments are offered to Moira Sillito by her brother-in-law, the only one of a large family to have been to a university. I should add that Moira, though familiar with the word from the hymns of her schooldays, does not know what “ineffable” means. After a suitable silence she excuses herself, runs upstairs to the bedroom, finds the word in a pocket dictionary there, runs downstairs to the living room and says cozily as she comes through the door, “No, it is not. Falling in love is like floating on clouds.” Like Moira Sillito’s brother-in-law, I was in love and, as will happen, it was not long before my tirelessness began to oppress Sally Klee, nor was it long before she complained that the friction of our bodies brought her out in a rash, and that my “alien seed” (alien corn, I quipped fruitlessly at the time) was aggravating her thrush. This and my “bloody gibbering on the bed” precipitated the end of the affair, the happiest eight days of my life. I will be two and a half next April.

  After speculation, after nostalgia, and before my removal to the room upstairs, I had leisure to pose myself certain questions concerning Sally Klee’s creative ordeals. Why, after a long day of inactivity before one blank sheet of paper, did she return to the room in the evening with her unwarmed coffee and replace that sheet with another? What was it she then began to type so fluently that each day took up only one sheet of paper and was afterwards filed with a thick bank of other such sheets? And why did this sudden activity not offer her relief from her quiet suffering, why did she rise from her table each night still pained, preoccupied with the emptiness of the other sheet? Certainly the sound of the keys was release for me, and invariably at the very first stroke I fell into a grateful sleep. Have I not left myself dozing in the crystalline present on the chaise longue downstairs? Once, instead of falling asleep I sidled up to Sally Klee’s chair on the pretext of affection and glimpsed the words “in which case the whole thing could be considered from” before my lover—as she still was then—kissed me gently on the ear and shoved me tenderly in the direction of the bed. This rather pedestrian construction dulled my curiosity, but only for a day or two. What whole thing? What whole thing could be considered from what? A few days later the plastic oyster had ceased to yield up its rubber pearl and I began to feel that I, as Sally Klee’s rejected lover, had the right to know the contents of what I had come to regard as a private diary. Between them curiosity and vanity concocted a balm to ease my prying conscience, and like an out-of-work actor I longed to see a favorable notice of myself, even one relating—as it were—to a past production.

  While Sally Klee sat at her table I had lain in luxury, planning her future and mine, I then had lain there in remorse and now, as our incommunicativeness became firmly established, I lay in wait. I stayed awake late into the evening in order to watch her as she opened a drawer in her desk, removed from it a faded blue clasp file, peeled from her typewriter the completed sheet, placed it face downwards in the file to ensure (I surmised through half-closed eyes) that the earliest entries were on top, closed the file and returned it to its drawer, closed the drawer and stood, eyes dulled by exhaustion and defeat, jaw slack, spirit oblivious to the lover-turned-spy feigning sleep on her bed, making his silent calculations. Though not remotely altruistic, my intentions were not purely selfish either. Naturally I hoped that by gaining access to Sally Klee’s most intimate secrets and sorrows I might, by pitting my strength against selected locales of her clandestine frailty, persuade her that itch, thrush and gibbering were small prices to pay for my boundless affection. On the other hand I did not think only of myself. I ran and re-ran fantasy footage which shows me poring over the journal while its author is out of the house, me confessing to Sally Klee on her return my slight treachery and congratulating her with passionate embrace before she can draw breath on having written a masterpiece, a colossal and devastating psychic journey, she sinking into the chair I deftly proffer, eyes widening and glowing with the dawning realization of the truth of what I say, us, shot here in tight close-up, studying the journal long into the night, me advising, guiding, editing, the publisher’s rapturous reception of the manuscript outdone by that of the critics and that in turn by the reading, buying public, the renewal of Sally Klee’s writing confidence, the renewal, through our cooperative endeavors, of our mutual understanding and love … yes, renewal, renewal, my film was all about renewal.

  It was not until today that an opportunity finally offered itself. Sally Klee was obliged to visit her accountant in town. In order to sublimate my near-hysterical excitement I performed kind services at high speed. While she retired to the bathroom to arrange her hair before the mirror there, I searched the house for bus and train timetables and pushed them under the bathroom door. I climbed the hat tree and plucked from its highest branch Sally Klee’s red silk scarf and ran to her with it. After she had left the house, however, I noticed the scarf back in its position. Had I not offered it, I conjectured sulkily as I watched her at the bus stop from the attic window, she would most likely have worn it. Her bus was a long time coming (she should have consulted the timetables) and I watched her pace around the concrete post and finally engage in conversation with a woman who also waited and who carried a child on her back, a sight which communicated to me across the suburban gables a chemical pang of generic longing. I was determined to wait until I had seen the bu
s carry Sally Klee away. Like Moira Sillito gazing, in the long days that followed her husband’s funeral, at a snapshot of his brother, I did not wish to appear, even to myself, precipitate. The bus came and the pavement was suddenly and conspicuously vacant. Touched by a momentary sense of loss I turned away from the window.

  Sally Klee’s desk is unpretentious, standard office equipment of the kind used by middle-stratum administrators of hospitals and zoos, its essential constituent being plywood. The design is simplicity itself. A plain writing surface rests on two parallel banks of drawers, and the whole is backed by one lacquered sheet of wood. I had long ago noted that the typed sheets were filed in the top left side drawer, and my initial reaction on descending from the attic and finding it locked was one of anger rather than despair. Was I not to be trusted then after so long an intimacy, was this how one species in its arrogance treated another? As an insult of omission, all the other drawers slid out like mocking tongues and displayed their dull stationery contents. In the face of this betrayal (what else had she locked? the fridge? the greenhouse?) of our shared past I felt my claim to the faded blue clasp file utterly vindicated. From the kitchen I fetched a screwdriver and with it set about prising loose the sheet of flimsy wood that bound the back of the desk. With a sound like the crack of a whip a large piece detached itself along a line of weakness, and left in its place an ugly rectangular hole. I was not concerned with appearances however. I thrust my hand deep inside, found the back of the drawer, insinuated my fingers farther, finding the file began to lift it clear and, had not its leading edge caught on a nail and tipped its contents in a white swarm on to the splinter-strewn floor, could have congratulated myself on an impeccable appropriation. Instead I gathered as many sheets as my left foot could convey to my right hand in one continuous movement, and retired to the bed.