by Ian Mcewan
Had I gone too far? While I was speaking June stared across the room towards the window. The silence was ruffled by her protracted intake of breath; then a tighter silence still, followed by a noisy exhalation. She looked straight at me.
‘It’s true. Of course it’s true ...’ She paused before making up her mind to say, ‘Everything I’ve ever done of any value I’ve had to do alone. I didn’t mind at the time. I was content – and by the way, I don’t expect to be happy. Happiness is an occasional, summer lightning thing. But I did find peace of mind, and during all those years I used to think I was all right on my own. I had family, friends, visitors. I was glad when they came, and I was glad when they left. But now ...’
I had needled her out of reminiscence into confession. I turned a fresh page in my notebook.
‘When I was told how ill I was and I came here to seal myself off for one last time, solitude began to look like my biggest single failure. A huge mistake. Making a good life, where’s the point in doing that alone? When I think over those years in France I sometimes feel a cold wind blowing back in my face. Bernard thinks I’m a silly occultist, and I think he’s a fish-eyed commissar who’d turn in the lot of us if it would buy a material heaven on earth – that’s the family story, the family joke. The truth is we love each other, we’ve never stopped, we’re obsessed. And we failed to do a thing with it. We couldn’t make a life. We couldn’t give up the love, but we wouldn’t bend to its power. The problem’s easy enough to describe, but we never described it at the time. We never said, look, this is how we feel, so where do we go from here? No, it was always muddle, arguments, arrangements about the children, day-to-day chaos and growing separation and different countries. Shutting it all out was how I found peace. If I’m bitter it’s because I haven’t forgiven myself. If I’d learned to levitate a hundred feet in the air it wouldn’t have made up for the fact that I never learned how to talk to or be with Bernard. Whenever I’m complaining about some latest social breakdown in the newspapers, I have to remind myself – why should I expect millions of strangers with conflicting interests to get along when I couldn’t make a simple society with the father of my children, the man I’ve loved and remained married to? And there’s another thing. If I go on sniping at Bernard it’s because you’re here and I know you see him from time to time and – I shouldn’t say this – you remind me of him. You don’t have his political ambitions, thank God, but there’s a dryness and distance about both of you that infuriates and attracts me. And ...’
She withheld the thought and melted back into the pillows. Since I was supposed to consider myself to have been complimented, I felt constrained by a degree of politeness, a formal requirement to accept what had been offered. There was one word in her confession I wanted to return to as soon as possible. But first, ritual niceties to be despatched.
‘I hope my visits don’t upset you then.’
‘I like it when you come.’
‘And you’ll tell me if you think I’m being too personal.’
‘You can ask me anything you want.’
‘I don’t want to intrude on your ...’
‘I said you can ask me anything you want. If I don’t want to answer, then I won’t.’
Permission granted. I thought she knew, shrewd old bird, where my attention had snagged. She was waiting for me.
‘You say that you and Bernard were ... obsessed with each other. Do you mean, well, physically ...?’
‘Such a typical member of your generation, Jeremy. And getting old enough to start sounding coy about it. Yes, sex, I’m talking about sex.’
I had never heard her use the word. In her BBC wartime broadcast voice she constricted the vowel conspicuously, almost to a ‘six’. It sounded crude, quite obscene, on her lips. Was it because she had to force herself to utter it, then repeat it to overcome her distaste? Or was she right? Was I, a sixties man, though always a fastidious one, beginning to choke on the feast?
June and Bernard, sexually obsessed. Since I had only ever known them elderly and hostile, I would have liked to tell her that, like a child with the blasphemous notion of the Queen on the lavatory, I found it hard to imagine.
But instead I said, ‘I think I can understand that.’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said, pleased with her certainty. ‘You can have no idea what it was like then.’
Even as she was speaking, images and impressions were tumbling through space like Alice, or like the detritus she overtakes, down through a widening cone of time: a smell of office dust; corridor walls painted in cream and brown gloss; everyday items from typewriters to cars, well-made and heavy and painted black; unheated rooms, suspicious landladies; farcically solemn young men in baggy flannels biting on pipes; food without herbs or garlic or lemon juice or wine; a constant fiddling with cigarettes considered a mode of eroticism, and everywhere, authority with its bossy, uncompromising latinate directives on bus tickets and forms and hand-painted signs whose solitary fingers point the way through a serious world of brown and black and grey. It was a junkshop exploding in slow motion, my idea of what it was like then, and I was glad June could not sense it too for I saw no place for sexual obsession.
‘Before I met Bernard I’d been out with one or two other young chaps because they had seemed “quite nice”. Early on I used to take them home to meet my parents for the judgment: were they “presentable”? I was always measuring men up for possible husbands. That’s what my friends did, that was what we talked about. Desire never really came into it, not my own anyway. There was only a vague general sort of longing for a friend who was a man, for a house, a baby, a kitchen – the elements were inseparable. As for the man’s feelings, that was a question of how far you let him go. We used to huddle up and talk about it a great deal. If you were going to be married sex was the price you must pay. After the wedding. It was a tough bargain, but reasonable enough. You couldn’t have something for nothing.
‘And then, everything changed. Within days of meeting Bernard my feelings were ... well, I thought I was going to explode. I wanted him, Jeremy. It was like a pain. I didn’t want a wedding or a kitchen, I wanted this man. I had lurid fantasies about him. I couldn’t talk to my girlfriends honestly. They would have been shocked. Nothing had prepared me for this. I urgently wanted sex with Bernard, and I was terrified. I knew that if he asked, if he insisted, I would have no choice. And it was obvious that his feelings were intense too. He wasn’t the kind to make demands, but one afternoon, for a set of reasons I’ve now forgotten, we found ourselves alone in a house belonging to the parents of a girlfriend of mine. I think it had something to do with the fact that it was raining very hard. We went up to the guest bedroom and started to undress. I was about to have what I had been thinking about for weeks, but I was miserable, full of dread, as if I were being led off to my own execution ...’
She caught my quizzical look – why misery? – and drew an impatient breath.
‘What your generation doesn’t know, and mine has almost forgotten, is how ignorant we were still, how bizarre attitudes were then – to sex, and all that went with it. Contraception, divorce, homosexuality, VD. And pregnancy outside marriage was unthinkable, the very worst possible thing. In the twenties and thirties respectable families were locking their pregnant daughters away in mental institutions. Unmarried mothers were marched through the streets, humiliated by the organisations that were supposed to be looking after them. Girls killed themselves trying to abort. It looks like madness now, but in those days a pregnant girl was likely to feel that everyone was right and that she was mad and deserved everything she got. Official attitudes were so punitive, so harsh. There was no financial support, of course. An unmarried mother was an outcast, a disgrace, dependent on vengeful charities, church groups or whatever. We all knew a half-dozen terrible, cautionary tales to keep us on the straight and narrow. They weren’t enough that afternoon, but I certainly thought I was fixing my doom as we went up the stairs to this tiny room at the to
p of the house where the wind and the rain were beating at the window, just like today. We had no precautions, of course, and in my ignorance I thought pregnancy was inevitable. And I knew that I was not able to turn back. I was miserable about it but I was also tasting freedom. It was the freedom I imagine a criminal must experience, even if only for a moment, as he sets about his crime. I’d always done more or less what people expected of me, but now I knew myself for the first time. And I simply had to, had to Jeremy, get close up to this man ...’
I cleared my throat softly. ‘And, um, how was it?’ I could not credit that I was asking June Tremaine this question. Jenny would never believe me.
June gave another of her hoots. I had never seen her so animated. ‘It was a surprise! Bernard was the clumsiest of creatures, always spilling his drink or banging his head on a beam. Lighting someone’s cigarette was an ordeal for him. I was sure I was the first girl he’d been with. He hinted otherwise, but that was just the form, that was what he was supposed to say. So I rather thought we’d be babes in the wood together, and I honestly didn’t mind. I wanted him on any terms. We climbed into this narrow bed, me giggling with terror and excitement and would you believe it – Bernard was a genius! All the words you’d find in a romantic novel – gentle, strong, skilful – and, well, inventive. When we’d finished he did this ridiculous thing. He suddenly leaped up and ran to the window, threw it open to the storm and stood there naked, long and thin and white, beating his chest and yodelling like Tarzan while leaves came swirling in. It was so stupid! D’you know, he made me laugh so hard that I widdled on the bed. We had to turn the mattress over. Then we picked hundreds of leaves off the carpet. I took the sheets home in a shopping bag and washed them and got them back on the bed with my friend’s help. She was a year older than me and so disgusted she didn’t speak to me for months!’
Experiencing in myself something of June’s criminal freedom of forty-five years ago, I was close to bringing up the matter of the size Bernard ‘took’. Was it merely, as now seemed the case, June’s occasional slander? Or the paradoxical secret of his success? Or again, when he was so long in the body, wasn’t this simply an error of relative judgment? But there are things one may not ask one’s mother-in-law, and besides, she was frowning, trying to formulate.
‘It might have been a week later Bernard came home and met my parents, and I’m almost certain that was the time he knocked a full teapot over the Wilton. Apart from that he was a success, perfectly appropriate – public school, Cambridge, a nice shy way of talking to his elders. So we began a double life. We were the darling young couple who gladdened all hearts by engaging to be married as soon as the war was over. At the same time, we continued what we had started. There were unused rooms in Senate House and other government buildings. Bernard was clever at getting hold of keys. In summer, there were the beech woods around Amersham. It was an addiction, a madness, a secret life. We were taking precautions, by then, but quite honestly by that time I couldn’t have cared less.
‘Whenever we talked about the world beyond ourselves, we talked about communism. It was our other obsession. We decided to forgive the Party its stupidity at the beginning of the war, and to join as soon as there was peace and we had left our jobs. Marx, Lenin, Stalin, the way forward, we agreed on everything. A fine union of bodies and minds! We’d founded a private utopia, and it was only a matter of time before the nations of the world followed our example. These were the months that shaped us. Behind all our frustration over all these years has been the wish to get back to those happy days. Once we began to see the world differently we could feel time running out on us and we were impatient with each other. Every disagreement was an interruption of what we knew was possible – and soon there was only interruption. And in the end time did run out, but the memories are still there, accusing us, and we still can’t let each other alone.
‘One thing I learned that morning after the dolmen was that I had courage, physical courage, and that I could stand alone. That’s a significant discovery for a woman, or it was in my day. Perhaps it was a fateful discovery too, a disastrous one. I’m not so sure now I should have stood alone. The rest is harder to tell, especially to a sceptic like yourself.’
I was about to protest, but she waved me down.
‘I’m going to say it again anyway. I’m getting tired. You’ll have to go soon. And I want to go over the dream again too. I want to be sure you’ve got that right.’
She hesitated, gathering strength for the one last talking bout of the afternoon.
‘I know that everyone thinks I’ve made too much of it – a young girl frightened by a couple of dogs on a country path. But you wait until you come to make sense of your life. You’ll either find you’re too old and lazy to make the attempt, or you’ll do what I’ve done, single out a certain event, find in something ordinary and explicable a means of expressing what might otherwise be lost to you – a conflict, a change of heart, a new understanding. I’m not saying these animals were anything other than what they appeared to be. Despite what Bernard says, I don’t actually believe they were Satan’s familiars, Hell Hounds or omens from God, or whatever he tells people I believe. But there is a side of the story he doesn’t care to emphasise. Next time you see him, get him to tell you what the Maire of St Maurice told us about those dogs. He’ll remember. It was a long afternoon on the terrace of the Hôtel des Tilleuls. I haven’t mythologised these animals. I’ve made use of them. They set me free. I discovered something.’
She pushed her hand out across the sheet towards me. I could not quite bring myself to stretch out my own hand and take hers. Some journalistic impulse, some queer notion of neutrality prevented me. As she talked on, and I continued to transcribe in the dashing arabesques of my shorthand, I felt myself to be weightless, empty-headed, suspended in my uncertainty between two points, the banal and the profound; I did not know which I was hearing. Embarrassed, I hunched over my writing so that I did not have to meet her eye.
‘I met evil and discovered God. I call it my discovery, but of course, it’s nothing new, and it’s not mine. Everyone has to make it for himself. People use different language to describe it. I suppose all the great world religions began with individuals making inspired contact with a spiritual reality and then trying to keep that knowledge alive. Most of it gets lost in rules and practices and addiction to power. That’s how religions are. In the end though it hardly matters how you describe it once the essential truth has been grasped – that we have within us an infinite resource, a potential for a higher state of being, a goodness ...’
I had heard this before, in one form or another, from a spiritually inclined headmaster, a dissident vicar, an old girlfriend returning from India, from Californian professionals, and dazed hippies. She saw me shifting in my seat, but she pressed on.
‘Call it God, or the spirit of love, or the Atman or the Christ or the laws of nature. What I saw that day, and on many days since, was a halo of coloured light around my body. But the appearance is irrelevant. What matters is to make the connection with this centre, this inner being, and then extend and deepen it. Then carry it outwards, to others. The healing power of love ...’
The memory of what happened next still pains me. I could not help myself, my discomfort was simply too intense. I could not bear to hear any more. Perhaps the years of my loneliness were the culture that nourished my scepticism, my protection against those clarion calls to love, to improve, to yield up the defensible core of selfhood and see it dissolve in the warm milk of universal love and goodness. It is the kind of talk that makes me blush. I wince for those who speak this way. I don’t see it, I don’t believe it.
Mumbling an excuse about leg-cramp, I got to my feet, but too quickly. My chair tipped backwards and smacked against the cupboard with a loud crack. I was the one who was startled. She was watching me, slightly amused, as I began to apologise for the interruption.
She said, ‘I know. The words are tired, and so am I. Another tim
e it would be better if I could show you what I mean. Another time ...’ She did not have the strength to move against my disbelief. The afternoon was at an end.
I was trying again to apologise for my rudeness, and she spoke over me. Her tone was light enough, but it could well have been that she was offended.
‘Would you mind rinsing out those teacups before you go. Thank you Jeremy.’
As I stood at the washbasin with my back to her, I heard her sigh as she settled deeper into the bed. Outside, the branches were still shaking in the wind. I felt a momentary pleasure that I would be rejoining the world, letting the westerly wind blow me back to London, into my present, out of her past. While I dried the cups and saucers and returned them to the shelf I tried to frame a better apology for my rude behaviour. The soul, an after-life, a universe filled with meaning: it was the very comfort this glad-hearted believing gave that pained me; conviction and self-interest were too tightly entwined. How could I tell her that? When I turned back towards her, her eyes were closed and her breathing was in its shallow rhythm.
But she was not yet asleep. As I was gathering up my bag from near her bed she murmured without opening her eyes, ‘I wanted to go over the dream again.’
It was in my notebook, the short, unvarying, pre-sleep dream that had haunted her for forty years: two dogs are running down a path into the Gorge. The larger leaves a trail of blood, easily visible on the white stones. June knows that the mayor of a nearby village has not sent out his men to track the animals down. They descend into the shadow cast by the high cliffs, down into the thickets, and up the other side. She sees them again, across the Gorge, heading into the mountains, and even though they are going far away from her, this is the moment of terror that jolts her; she knows they will return.
