by Ian Mcewan
‘But, you know, there was something wrong, there was a shadow. As we sat there, and the sun went down and the light became quite glorious, I was thinking, But I don’t want to go home, I think I’d rather stay here. The more I looked across the gorge, across the Causse de Blandas towards the mountains, the more I realised the obvious – that set against the age and beauty and power of those rocks, politics was a piddling thing. Mankind was a recent event. The universe was indifferent to the fate of the proletariat! I felt frightened. I’d clung to politics all my short adult life – it gave me my friends, my husband, my ideas. I’d been longing to be back in England and here I was telling myself I’d rather stay here and be uncomfortable in this wilderness.
‘Bernard was talking on, and no doubt I was chipping in. But I was confused. Perhaps I was not up to any of this, politics or wilderness. Perhaps what I really needed was a nice home and a baby to look after. I was very confused.’
‘So you ...’
‘I haven’t finished. There was something else. I had these unsettling thoughts, but I was happy at the dolmen. I wanted nothing more than to sit in silence and watch the mountains turning red and breathe in that silky evening air, and know that Bernard was doing the same, feeling the same. So here was another problem. No stillness, no silence. We were fretting about – who knows – the treachery of reformist social democrats, the condition of the urban poor – people we did not know, people we were in no position at that moment to help. Our lives had gathered to this supreme moment – a sacred site more than five thousand years old, our love for each other, the light, the great space in front of us – and yet we were unable to grasp it, we couldn’t draw it into ourselves. We couldn’t free ourselves into the present. Instead we wanted to think about setting other people free. We wanted to think about their unhappiness. We used their wretchedness to mask our own. And our wretchedness was our inability to take the simple good things life was offering us and be glad to have them. Politics, idealistic politics, is all about the future. I’ve spent my life discovering that the moment you enter the present fully, you find infinite space, infinite time, call it God if you want ...’
She lost her thread and trailed away. It was not God she was wanting to talk about, it was Bernard. She remembered.
‘Bernard thinks that attending to the present is self-indulgence. But that’s nonsense. Has he ever sat in silence and thought about his life, or the effect his life has had on Jenny’s? Or why he is incapable of living alone and has to have this woman, this ‘housekeeper’ looking after him. He’s completely invisible to himself. He’s got facts and figures, his phone is ringing all day, he’s always rushing off to give a speech, be on a panel or whatever. But he never reflects. He’s never known a single moment’s awe for the beauty of creation. He hates silence, so he knows nothing. I’m answering your question: how could someone so in demand be stagnating? By skidding around on the surface, blathering all day about how things might be if they were ordered better, and learning nothing essential, that’s how.’
She fell back against the pillows, exhausted. The long face tilted towards the ceiling. Her breathing was pronounced. We had talked about the evening at the dolmen a number of times, usually as a prelude to the important confrontation the following day. She was angry, and the fact that she knew that I could see she was would be making her angrier still. She had drifted out of control. She knew her account of Bernard’s life – the TV appearances, the radio panel discussions, the public man – was ten years out of date. No one heard much from Bernard Tremaine these days. He stayed at home and worked quietly on his book. Only family and a few old friends phoned him now. A woman who lived in the same building came in three hours a day to clean and cook. June’s jealousy of her was painful to witness. The ideas by which June lived her life were also the ones by which she measured the distance between Bernard and herself, and if these ideas were powered by a pursuit of the truth, then part of that truth was a bitterness, a disappointment in love. The inaccuracies and exaggerations gave so much away.
I wanted to say something that would make her feel that I was not repelled or dismayed. On the contrary, I warmed to her. I took comfort in June’s agitation, in the knowledge that relationships, entanglements, the heart, still mattered, that the old life and the old troubles went on, and that towards the end there was no overview, no grave-cold detachment.
I offered to make her tea and she assented by lifting a finger off the sheet. I crossed to the handbasin to fill the kettle. Outside, the rain had stopped but the wind still blew, and a tiny woman in a pale blue cardigan was making her way across the lawn with the aid of a walking frame. A strong gust could have carried her away. She arrived at a flower bed against a wall and knelt down before her frame, as though at a portable altar. When she was down on the grass on her knees, she manoeuvred the frame to one side, and took from one pocket in her cardigan a tea spoon, and from the other a handful of bulbs. She set about digging holes and pressing the bulbs into them. A few years ago I would have seen no point at all in planting at her age, I would have watched the scene and read it as an illustration of futility. Now, I could only watch.
I took the cups to the bedside. June sat up and sipped the scalding tea soundlessly, in the manner, she once told me, she had been shown by a deportment teacher at school. She was away in her thoughts and clearly not yet ready to talk again. I stared at my pages of notes, amending symbols here and there to make the shorthand legible. I then resolved to visit the dolmen the next time I was in France. I could walk from the bergerie, ascending by the Pas de l’Azé onto the Causse and walking north for three or four hours – exquisite in spring when the wild flowers are out, when whole fields are covered with orchids. I would sit on that stone and look at that view again and think about my subject.
Her eyelids were flickering, and in the time it took to rescue the cup and saucer from her drooping hand and set it down on the locker she was asleep. These sudden dozes, she insisted, were not due to exhaustion. They were part of her condition, a neurological dysfunction which made for an imbalance in the secretion of dopamine. Apparently these narcoleptic states were numbing and irresistible. It was like having a blanket thrown over your face, she had told me, but when I mentioned the matter to June’s doctor he stared at me and shook his head infinitesimally, his denial being also a suggestion that I play along. ‘She’s ill,’ he said, ‘and she’s tired.’
Her breathing had settled to a shallow panting, the wrinkle tree on her forehead was starker, less complex, as though winter had stripped its boughs. Her empty cup partly obscured the photograph. What transformations! I was still young enough to be amazed by them. There in its frame, the unwritten-on skin, the pretty round head nestling against Bernard’s upper arm. I had only known them in later life, but I felt something like nostalgia for the brief, remote time when Bernard and June had been lovingly, uncomplicatedly together. Before the fall. This too contributed to the photograph’s innocence – their ignorance of how much and for how long they would be addicted to and irritated by each other. June by Bernard’s dreary spiritual impoverishment and ‘fundamental lack of seriousness’, his blinkered reasonableness, and by his arrogant insistence, ‘against all the accumulating evidence’, that sensible social engineering would deliver mankind from its miseries, from its capacity for cruelty; and Bernard by June’s betrayal of her social conscience, her ‘self-protecting fatalism’ and her ‘unbounded credulousness’ – how pained he had been by the lengthening roll call of June’s certainties: unicorns, wood spirits, angels, mediums, self-healing, the collective unconscious, the ‘Christ within us’.
I once asked Bernard about his first meeting with June, during the war. What drew him to her? He remembered no first encounter. He became only gradually aware, during the early months of 1944, that a young woman came to his office in Senate House once or twice a week to deliver documents translated from French and to pick up more work to take away. Everyone in Bernard’s office could read French, an
d the material was low-level stuff. He could not see the point of her, therefore he did not see her. She did not exist. Then he overheard someone saying she was beautiful, and the next time he took a closer look. He began to feel disappointed on the days she did not appear, and foolishly happy when she did. When at last he engaged her in faltering small talk, he found she was easy to get along with. He had assumed that a beautiful woman was bound to resent talking to a gangling man with big ears. She actually seemed to like him. They had lunch together in the Joe Lyons cafe on the Strand where he disguised his nervousness by talking loudly about socialism, and insects – he was something of an amateur entomologist. Later he astounded his colleagues by persuading her to go with him one evening to a film – no, he could not remember which – at a theatre in the Haymarket where he found the courage to kiss her – on the back of her hand first, as though parodying an old-fashioned romance, next on her cheek, and then her lips, an accelerating, vertiginous progression, the whole thing, from small talk to the first chaste kisses, taking less than four weeks.
June’s account: her work as an interpreter and occasional translator of official documents from the French brought her one boring afternoon to a corridor in Senate House. She passed the open door of an office next to the one where she had her business and saw a rangy young man with a strange face sprawled uncomfortably on a wooden chair, feet on desk, intent on what looked like a very serious book. He glanced up, held her gaze for a moment, and returned to his reading, already oblivious to her. She lingered for as long as she could without seeming rude – a matter of seconds – and stared, ogled, while pretending to consult the manila folder in her hand. Most of the young men she had been out with she had come to like by overcoming an indefinable distaste. This one she was attracted to immediately. He was ‘her type’ – now she understood this irritating phrase from the inside. He was obviously clever – everyone in that office was – and she liked the awkward helplessness of his size, and his big, generous face, and the challenging fact that he had looked at her without taking her in. Very few men did that.
She found pretexts for visiting the room where he worked. She delivered items that should have been taken by one of the other girls in her office. In order to lengthen her stay, and because Bernard would not look in her direction, she was forced to develop a flirtation with one of his colleagues, a sad fellow from Yorkshire with spots and a high-pitched voice. She once bumped Bernard’s desk in order to spill his tea. He frowned and dabbed at the puddle with his handkerchief without interrupting his reading. She brought him packages intended elsewhere. He politely put her right. The Yorkshireman wrote a pained declaration of loneliness. He did not expect her to marry him, he said, although he was not ruling that out. But he did hope they would become the closest of friends, like brother and sister. She knew she had to act quickly.
The day she summoned her courage and strode into the office determined to make Bernard take her out to lunch was also the day that he chose to take his first good look at her. His stare was so naked, so guilelessly predatory, that she faltered on her way to his desk. In the corner her would-be brother was grinning and lurching to his feet. June put down her parcel and ran. But now she knew she had her man; now, whenever she walked in, Bernard’s big jaw wobbled as he tried to think of something conversational. Lunch at Joe Lyons required only the gentlest of prompts.
It seems odd to me that they never compared memories of those earliest days. Certainly June would have enjoyed the differences. They would have confirmed her later prejudices; Bernard, unreflective, ignorant of the subtle currents that composed the reality he insisted he understood and controlled. However, I resisted communicating Bernard’s story to June, or June’s to Bernard. It was my decision rather than theirs, to keep the accounts confidentially separate. Neither could quite believe this was really the case, and in our conversations I was aware of being used as a bearer of messages and impressions. June would have liked me to scold Bernard on her behalf – for his world view no less, and for his fast life of radio discussions and housekeeper. Bernard would have liked me to convey to June not only the illusion that he was perfectly intact without her, but also his fondness for her, despite her evident madness, thereby saving him another terrifying visit, or softening the ground for his next. On seeing me, each tried to fish, to wheedle information by drawing me out, usually by offering contestable propositions, thinly disguised as questions. Thus Bernard: have they still got her under sedation? Did she rant non-stop about me? Do you think she’ll always hate me? And June: did he go on about Mrs Briggs (the housekeeper)? Has he dropped his plans for suicide?
I was evasive. There was nothing I could say that would have given satisfaction, and besides, they could have phoned or seen each other any time they wanted. Like young, absurdly proud lovers, they restrained themselves, believing that the one who called was revealing a weakness, a contemptible emotional dependency.
June woke from a five-minute doze to find a balding man of severe expression sitting by her bed, notebook in hand. Where was she? Who was this person? What did he want? That widening, panicky surprise in her eyes communicated itself to me, constricting my responses so that I could not immediately find the reassuring words, and stumbled over them when I did. But already, before I had finished, she had the lines of causality restored to her, she had her story again, and she had remembered that her son-in-law had come to record it.
She cleared her throat. ‘Where was I?’ We both knew she had peeped into the pit, into a chasm of meaninglessness where everything was nameless and without relation, and it had frightened her. It had frightened us both. We could not acknowledge this, or rather, I could not until she had.
By now she knew where she was, just as she knew what came next. But in the brief psychic drama that attended her waking I found myself preparing to resist the inevitable prompt – ‘the next day’. I wanted to steer her somewhere else. We had been over ‘the next day’ a half-dozen times. It was family lore, a story burnished with repetition, no longer remembered so much as incanted like a prayer got by heart. I had heard of it in Poland years before, when I met Jenny. I had heard it often enough from Bernard who was not, in the strictest sense, a witness. It had been re-enacted at Christmases and other family gatherings. As far as June was concerned, it was to be the centrepiece of my memoir, just as it was in her own story of her life – the defining moment, the experience that redirected, the revealed truth by whose light all previous conclusions must be re-thought. It was a story whose historical accuracy was of less significance than the function it served. It was a myth, all the more powerful for being upheld as documentary. June had persuaded herself that ‘the next day’ explained everything – why she left the Party, why she and Bernard fell into a lifetime’s disharmony, why she reconsidered her rationalism, her materialism, how she came to live the life she did, where she lived it, what she thought.
As the family outsider, I was both beguiled and sceptical. Turning-points are the inventions of story-tellers and dramatists, a necessary mechanism when a life is reduced to, traduced by, a plot, when a morality must be distilled from a sequence of actions, when an audience must be sent home with something unforgettable to mark a character’s growth. Seeing the light, the moment of truth, the turning-point, surely we borrow these from Hollywood or the Bible to make retroactive sense of an overcrowded memory? June’s ‘black dogs’. Sitting here at the bedside, notebook in my lap, privileged with a glimpse of her void, sharing in the vertigo, I found these almost nonexistent animals were too comforting. There would have been too much security in another rehearsal of this famous anecdote.
She must have slipped down the bed while she was dozing. She made an effort to sit upright but her wrists were too weak, and her hands found no purchase in the bedclothes. I went to rise and help her but she put me off with a noise, a growl, and rolled on to her side to face me and wedged her head against the folded corner of a pillow.
I began slowly. Was I being mischievous? The
thought troubled me, but I had already begun. ‘Don’t you think the world should be able to accommodate your way of looking at things and Bernard’s? Isn’t it for the best if some journey inwards while others concern themselves with improving the world? Isn’t diversity what makes a civilisation?’
This last rhetorical question was one too many for June. The frown of neutral attention disappeared in her hoot of laughter. She could no longer bear to be lying down. She struggled up, successfully this time, while speaking to me through gasps.
‘Jeremy, you’re a dear old fruit, but you do talk such twaddle. You try too hard to be decent, and have everyone like you and like each other ... There!’
She was upright at last. The leathery gardener’s hands lay clasped together on the sheet, and she stared at me with repressed glee. Or maternal pity. ‘So why hasn’t the world improved? All this free health care and rising wages and cars and TVs and electric toothbrushes per household. Why aren’t people content? Isn’t there something lacking in these improvements?’
Now that I was being mocked, I felt free. My tone was a little rough. ‘So the modern world’s a spiritual desert? Even if the cliché is true, what about you, June? Why aren’t you happy? Every time I come you show me how bitter you still are about Bernard. Why can’t you let it rest? What does it matter now? Let him go. The fact that you haven’t or can’t doesn’t say much for your methods.’
