In Between the Sheets

by Ian Mcewan

  Suddenly I heard another voice ringing in my ears. It was my own. I was talking into a brief, exhausted silence.

  “… driving across the States I saw this sign in Illinois along Interstate 70 which said, ‘God, Guts, Guns made America great. Let’s keep all three.’”

  “Hah!” Mary and Terence exclaimed in triumph. George was on his feet, empty glass in hand.

  “That’s right,” he cried. “That’s right. You can put it down but it’s right. This country has a violent past, a lot of brave men died making…”

  “Men!” echoed Mary.

  “All right, and a lot of brave women too. America was made with the gun. You can’t get away from that.” George strode across the room to the bar in the corner and drew out something black from behind the bottles. “I keep a gun here,” he said, holding the thing up for us to see.

  “What for?” Mary asked.

  “When you have kids you begin to have a very different attitude towards life and death. I never kept a gun before the kids were around. Now I think I’d shoot at anyone who threatened their existence.”

  “Is it a real gun?” I said. George came back towards us with the gun in one hand and a fresh bottle of Scotch in the other. “Dead right it’s a real gun!” It was very small and did not extend beyond George’s open palm.

  “Let me see that,” said Terence.

  “It’s loaded,” George warned as he handed it across. The gun appeared to have a soothing effect on us all. We no longer shouted, we spoke quietly in its presence. While Terence examined the gun George filled our glasses. As he sat down he reminded me of my promise to play the flute. There followed a bleary silence of a minute or two, broken only by George to tell us that after this drink we should eat dinner. Mary was far away in thought. She rotated her glass slowly between her finger and thumb. I lay back on my elbows and began to piece together the conversation we had just had. I was trying to remember how we had arrived at this sudden silence.

  Then Terence snapped the safety catch and leveled the gun at George’s head.

  “Raise your hands, Christian,” he said dully.

  George did not move. He said, “You oughtn’t to fool around with a gun.” Terence tightened his grip. Of course he was fooling around, and yet I could see from where I was that his finger was curled about the trigger, and he was beginning to pull on it.

  “Terence!” Mary whispered, and touched his back gently with her foot. Keeping his eyes on Terence, George sipped at his drink. Terence brought his other hand up to steady the gun, which was aimed at the center of George’s face.

  “Death to the gun owners.” Terence spoke without a trace of humor. I tried to say his name too, but hardly a sound left my throat. When I tried again I said something in my accelerating panic that was quite irrelevant. “Who is it?”

  Terence pulled the trigger.

  From that point on the evening collapsed into conventional, labyrinthine politenesses at which Americans, when they wish, quite outstrip the English. George was the only one to have seen Terence remove the bullets from the gun, and this united Mary and me in a state of mild but prolonged shock. We ate salad and cold cuts from plates balanced on our knees. George asked Terence about his Orwell thesis and the prospects of teaching jobs. Terence asked George about his business, fun party rentals and sickroom requisites. Mary was questioned about her job in the feminist bookshop and she answered blandly, carefully avoiding any statement that might provoke discussion. Finally I was called on to elaborate on my travel plans, which I did in great and dull detail. I explained how I would be spending a week in Amsterdam before returning to London. This caused Terence and George to spend several minutes in praise of Amsterdam, although it was quite clear they had seen very different cities.

  Then while the others drank coffee and yawned, I played my flute. I played my Bach sonata no worse than usual, perhaps a little more confidently for being drunk, but my mind ran on against the music. For I was weary of this music and of myself for playing it. As the notes transferred themselves from the page to the ends of my fingers I thought, Am I still playing this? I still heard the echo of our raised voices, I saw the black gun in George’s open palm, the comedian reappear from the darkness to take the microphone again, I saw myself many months ago setting out for San Francisco from Buffalo in a driveaway car, shouting out for joy over the roar of the wind through the open windows, It’s me, I’m here, I’m coming… where was the music for all this? Why wasn’t I even looking for it? Why did I go on doing what I couldn’t do, music from another time and civilization, its certainty and perfection to me a pretense and a lie, as much as they had once been, or might still be, a truth to others. What should I look for? (I tooled through the second movement like a piano roll.) Something difficult and free. I thought of Terence’s stories about himself, his game with the gun, Mary’s experiment with herself, of myself in an empty moment drumming my fingers on the back of a book, of the vast, fragmented city without a center, without citizens, a city that existed only in the mind, a nexus of change or stagnation in individual lives. Picture and idea crashed drunkenly one after the other, discord battened to bar after bar of implied harmony and inexorable logic. For the pulse of one beat I glanced past the music at my friends where they sprawled on the floor. Then their afterimage glowed briefly at me from the page of music. Possible, even likely, that the four of us would never see each other again, and against such commonplace transience my music was inane in its rationality, paltry in its over-determination. Leave it to others, to professionals who could evoke the old days of its truth. To me it was nothing, now that I knew what I wanted. This genteel escapism … crossword with its answers written in, I could play no more of it.

  I broke off in the slow movement and looked up. I was about to say, “I can’t go on any more,” but the three of them were on their feet clapping and smiling broadly at me. In parody of concert-goers George and Terence cupped their hands around their mouths and called out “Bravo! Bravissimo!” Mary came forward, kissed me on the cheek and presented me with an imaginary bouquet. Overwhelmed by nostalgia for a country I had not yet left, I could do no more than put my feet together and make a bow, clasping the flowers to my chest.

  Then Mary said, “Let’s go. I’m tired.”