Black Dogs

by Ian Mcewan

  I reassured her. ‘I’ve got it down.’

  ‘You need to remember that it comes when I’m still half-awake. I actually see them, Jeremy.’

  ‘I won’t forget.’

  She nodded, eyes still closed. ‘Can you see yourself out?’

  It was almost a joke, an enfeebled irony. I leaned over her and kissed her cheek and whispered in her ear, ‘I think I can manage.’ Then I went quietly across her room and stepped out into the corridor, on to the swirling red and yellow carpet, thinking, as I always did when I left her, that this would be the last time.

  And it was.

  She died four weeks later, ‘peacefully in her sleep’, so said the senior nurse who phoned Jenny with the news. We did not believe it had been that way, but neither did we want to doubt.

  She was buried in the churchyard of the village near Chestnut Reach. We drove down with our children and two of our nephews, and we took Bernard. It was an uncomfortable journey. The day was hot, it was cramped in the car, and there were road works and heavy traffic on the motorway. Bernard sat in the front, silent all the way. Sometimes he put his hands over his face for a second or two. Mostly he stared ahead. He did not seem to be crying. Jenny sat in the back with the baby on her lap. At her side the children discussed the death. We sat listening helplessly, unable to steer the conversation away. Alexander, our four-year-old, was aghast that we were planning to put his granny, of whom he was very fond, in a wooden box and lower her into a hole in the ground and cover her with earth.

  ‘She doesn’t like that,’ he said confidently.

  Harry, his seven-year-old cousin, had the facts. ‘She’s dead, stupid. Stone cold dead. She doesn’t know anything about it.’

  ‘When is she coming back?’

  ‘Never. You don’t come back when you’re dead.’

  ‘But when is she?’

  ‘Never ever ever ever. She’s in heaven, stupid.’

  ‘When is she coming back? Grandad? When is she, Grandad?’

  It was a relief that in such a remote place the crowd was so large. Along the road from the Norman church dozens of cars were tilted at angles on the grass verges. The air above their hot roofs rippled. I was only just beginning to attend funerals regularly, so far exclusively secular affairs for three friends who had died of AIDS. The Anglican service today was more familiar to me from movies. Like one of the great Shakespeare speeches, the graveside oration, studded in fragments in the memory, was a succession of brilliant phrases, book titles, dying cadences that breathed life, pure alertness, along the spine. I was watching Bernard. He stood on the vicar’s right, hands straight down at his sides, staring forward, as he had in the car, keeping himself well under control.

  After the service I saw him detach himself from June’s old friends and wander off among the headstones, stopping here and there to read one, and go towards a yew tree. He stood in its shade, resting his elbows on the graveyard wall. I was going towards him to say the few clumsy sentences I had half-prepared when I heard him call June’s name over the wall. I went closer and saw he was sobbing. He leaned his long thin body forwards, then straightened again. Up and down he bobbed in the shade as he cried. I turned away, guilty at my intrusion, and hurried back, passing two men filling in the grave, to catch up with the chattering crowd, its sadness fading in the summery air as it wound its way out of the graveyard, along the road, past the parked cars, towards the entrance to a field of unmowed grass in the centre of which stood a creamy marquee, its sides rolled up for the heat. Behind me, dry earth and stones chinked against the sextons’ shovels. Ahead, this was how June must have imagined it: children playing in and out of the guy ropes, waiters in starched white jackets serving drinks from behind trestles draped in sheets and, already, the first of the guests, a young couple, lolling on the green.

  Part Two

  Berlin

  A LITTLE MORE than two years later, six-thirty on a November morning, I woke to discover Jenny in the bed beside me. She had been away ten days in Strasbourg and Brussels and had returned late in the night. We rolled into a sleepy embrace. Minor reunions like this are one of the more exquisite domestic pleasures. She felt both familiar and novel – how easily one gets used to sleeping alone. Her eyes were closed and she half-smiled as she fitted her cheek into the space below my collar bone that seemed to have formed itself over the years to her shape. We had at most an hour, probably less, before the children woke to discover her – all the more of a thrill for them because I had been vague about her return in case she did not make the last plane. I reached down and squeezed her buttocks. Her hand moved lightly across my belly. I felt for the homely bump at the base of her pinkie where a sixth finger was amputated shortly after her birth. As many fingers, her mother used to say, as an insect has legs. Some minutes later that may have been interrupted by a brief doze, we began the companionable love-making that is the privilege and compromise of married life.

  We were just waking to the urgency of our pleasure, and stirring more vigorously on each other’s behalf, when the phone on the bedside table rang. We should have remembered to unplug it. We exchanged a look. In silence we agreed that it was still early enough for a phone call to be unusual, perhaps an emergency.

  Sally was the most likely caller. She had come to live with us twice, and the strain on family life had been too great for us to keep her. Several years before, at the age of twenty-one, she had married a man who had beaten her and left her with a child. Two years later, Sally had been found unfit, too violent, to care for her little boy who was now with foster parents. She had beaten the alcoholism after years, only to make a second disastrous marriage. She now lived in a hostel in Manchester. Her mother, Jean, was dead, and Sally counted on us for affection and support. She never asked for money. I could never rid myself of the idea that her unhappy life was my responsibility.

  Jenny was on her back, so I was the one who leaned across. But it was not Sally, it was Bernard, already half way through a sentence. He was not talking, he was jabbering. I could hear excited commentary behind him which gave way to a police siren. I tried to interrupt, calling out his name. The first intelligible thing I heard him say was ‘Jeremy, are you listening? Are you still there?’

  I felt myself shrinking inside his daughter. I kept a sensible tone. ‘Bernard, I didn’t catch a word of that. Start again, slowly.’

  Jenny was making signs, offering to take the receiver from me. But Bernard had started again. I shook my head and turned my gaze into the pillow.

  ‘Turn your radio on, dear boy. Or the television, even better. They’re streaming through. You won’t believe it ...’

  ‘Bernard, who is streaming through what?’

  ‘I just told you. They’re taking down the Wall! It’s hard to believe, but I’m watching it now, East Berliners coming through ...’

  My first, selfish thought was that nothing was immediately required of me. I did not have to leave my bed and go out and do something useful. I promised Bernard I would call him back, put the phone down and told Jenny the news.

  ‘Amazing.’

  ‘Incredible.’

  We were doing our best to keep its full importance at arm’s length, for we did not yet belong to the world, to the striving community of fully dressed people. An important principle was at stake, that we maintain the primacy of the private life. And so we resumed. But the spell had been broken. Cheering crowds were surging through the early morning gloom of our bedroom. We were both elsewhere.

  Finally it was Jenny who said, ‘Let’s go downstairs and look.’

  We stood in the living room in our dressing-gowns with mugs of tea, staring at the set. It did not seem right to sit. East Berliners in nylon anoraks and bleached-out jeans jackets, pushing buggies or holding their children’s hands, were filing past Checkpoint Charlie, unchecked. The camera bobbed and weaved intrusively into wide-armed embraces. A tearful woman, her complexion rendered ghoulish by a single TV spotlight, spread her hands, went to speak a
nd was too choked up to utter the words. Crowds of West Berliners cheered and thumped good-naturedly on the roof of each brave ludicrous Trabant nosing into freedom. Two sisters clung to each other and wouldn’t be parted for an interview. Jenny and I were in tears, and when the children came running in to greet her, the little drama of reunion, the hugs and cuddles on the living-room carpet, drew poignancy from the joyful events in Berlin – and made Jenny cry outright.

  An hour later Bernard phoned again. It was four years now since he had started to call me ‘dear boy’, ever since, I suspected, he had joined the Garrick Club. Such, Jenny maintained, was the distance travelled since ‘comrade’.

  ‘Dear boy. I want to get over to Berlin as soon as possible.’

  ‘Good idea,’ I said straight away. ‘You should go.’

  ‘Seats are gold dust. Everyone wants to go. I’ve put a hold on two places on a flight this afternoon. I have to let them know in an hour.’

  ‘Bernard, I’m just off to France.’

  ‘Make a diversion. It’s a historic moment.’

  ‘I’ll phone you back.’

  Jenny was scathing. ‘He has to go and see his Big Mistake put right. He’ll need someone to carry his bags.’

  When it was put like that, I was ready to say no. But during breakfast, roused by the tinny triumphalism of the black and white portable we had balanced by the kitchen sink, I began to feel an impatient excitement, a need for adventure after days of domestic duties. Again the set gave out a miniature roar, and I was feeling like a boy locked out of the stadium on Cup Final day. History was happening, without me.

  After the children had been delivered to their playgroup and schools, I raised the matter with Jenny again. She was pleased to be back home. She moved from room to room, cordless phone always within reach, tending the house plants that had wilted under my care.

  ‘Go,’ was her recommendation. ‘Don’t listen to me, I’m jealous. But before you go, you’d better finish what you started.’

  The best of all possible arrangements. I rerouted my flight to Montpellier through Berlin and Paris, and confirmed Bernard’s booking. I phoned Berlin to ask my friend Günter if we could borrow his apartment. I called Bernard to tell him that I would collect him in a taxi at two o’clock. I cancelled engagements, left instructions and packed my bag. On the TV was a half-mile queue of East Berliners outside a bank, waiting for their hundred Deutschmarks. Jenny and I returned to the bedroom for an hour, then she left in a hurry to an appointment. I sat in the kitchen in my dressing-gown and ate an early lunch of warmed-up left-overs. On the portable, other parts of the Wall had been breached. People were converging on Berlin from all over the planet. A huge party was in the making. Journalists and TV crews could not find hotel rooms. Back upstairs, standing under the shower, invigorated and clarified by lovemaking, bellowing the snatches of Verdi I could remember in Italian, I congratulated myself on my rich and interesting life.

  An hour and a half later I left the taxi waiting in Addison Road and sprinted up the flight of steps to Bernard’s flat. He was actually standing just inside the open doorway, holding his hat and coat, and with his bags at his feet. He had only lately acquired the fussy exactitude of old age, the necessary caution to accommodate a reliably useless memory. I picked up his bags (Jenny was right) and he was about to pull the door to, but already he was frowning and raising a forefinger.

  ‘One last look round.’

  I put the bags down and followed him in, in time to see him scoop up his housekeys and passport from the kitchen table. He held them up for me with a told-you-so look, as though I were the one who had forgotten them, and he were to be congratulated.

  I had shared London cabs with Bernard before. His legs almost reached the partition. We were still in first gear, still pulling away, and Bernard was making a steeple of his fingers under his chin and beginning, ‘The point is ...’ His voice did not have June’s clipped, wartime mandarin quality; instead, it was pitched slightly high and was over-precise in its enunciation, the way Lytton Strachey’s might have been, or Malcolm Muggeridge’s was, the way certain educated Welshmen used to talk. If you didn’t already know and like Bernard, it could sound affected. ‘The point is that German unity is an inevitability. The Russians will rattle their sabres, the French will wave their arms, the British will um and ah. Who knows what the Americans will want, what will suit them best. But none of it matters. The Germans will have unity because they want it and they’ve provided for it in their constitution and no one can stop them. They’ll have it sooner rather than later because no Chancellor in his right mind is going to let the glory go to his successor. And they’ll have it on West German terms because they’re the ones who’ll be paying for it.’

  He had a way of presenting all his opinions as well-established facts, and his certainties did have a sinuous power. What was required of me was to present another view, whether I believed in it or not. Bernard’s habits of private conversation had been formed by years of public debate. A fair bout of adversarial discussion was what would bring us to the truth. As we headed towards Heathrow I obligingly argued that the East Germans might retain attachments to some features of their system and therefore might not be so easy to assimilate, that the Soviet Union had hundreds of thousands of troops in the GDR and could certainly affect the outcome if it wanted, and that marrying the two systems in practical and economic terms could take years.

  He nodded in satisfaction. His fingers still supported his chin, and he was waiting patiently for me to finish so that he could set about my arguments. Methodically, he took them in order. The enormous popular momentum against the East German state had reached a stage where lingering attachments would only be discovered too late, in the form of nostalgia; the Soviet Union had lost interest in controlling its eastern satellites. It was no longer a super-power in any but military terms, and it badly needed Western goodwill and German money; as for the practical difficulties of German union, they could be dealt with later, after the political marriage had ensured the Chancellor his place in the history books and a good chance of winning the next election with millions of new and grateful voters.

  Bernard was still talking and seemed unaware that the taxi had stopped outside our terminal. I leaned forwards and settled the fare while he was addressing at length the third of my points. The driver turned round in his seat and opened his sliding glass door to listen. He was in his fifties, completely bald, with a rubbery, babyish face and large staring eyes of a blazing fluorescent blue.

  When Bernard was done he chipped in. ‘Yeah, and then what, mate? The Krauts’ll start throwing their weight around again. That’s when the bother’ll start ...’

  Bernard flinched the moment the driver began to speak, and fumbled for his bag. The consequences of German unity were probably the next subject for debate, but instead of being drawn in, even for a condescending minute, Bernard was embarrassed and scrabbling to get out.

  ‘Where’s yer stability?’ the driver was saying. ‘Where’s yer balance of power? On your eastern side you got Russia going down the tube and all them little countries, Poland and stuff, deep in the shit with debts and everything ...’

  ‘Yes, yes, you’re right, it is indeed a worry,’ Bernard said, as he gained the safety of the pavement. ‘Jeremy, we mustn’t miss that plane.’

  The driver had wound down his window. ‘On the west, you got Britain, not a European player is it, not really. Still got its tongue up the American fundament if you’ll pardon my French. Which leaves the French. Christ, the French!’

  ‘Goodbye, and thank you,’ Bernard cooed, and was even prepared to seize his own bags and totter with them to open up some distance. I caught up with him by the terminal’s automatic doors. He put his bag down in front of me and rubbed his right hand with his left as he said, ‘I simply cannot stand being harangued by cabbies.’

  I knew what he meant, but I also thought that Bernard was rather too fastidious about whom he debated with. ‘You’ve lo
st the common touch.’

  ‘Never had it, dear boy. Ideas were my thing.’

  Half an hour after take-off, we ordered champagne from the drinks trolley and toasted ‘freedom’. Then Bernard returned to the matter of the common touch.

  ‘Now June had it. She could get along with anybody. She would have taken on that taxi driver. Surprising in someone who ended up a recluse. She was a far better communist than I was, really.’

  These days, a mention of June sent a little charge of guilt through me. Since her death in July 1987 I had done nothing with the memoir I was supposed to be writing beyond sorting the notes into order and putting them away in a box file. My work (I run a small publishing company specialising in text books), family life, a house-move last year – the usual kind of excuses did not make me feel easier. Perhaps my trip to France, the bergerie and its associations, would set me going again. And there were still things I wanted to know from Bernard.

  ‘I don’t think June would think that was much of a compliment.’

  Bernard held up his perspex goblet to allow the sunlight flooding the cabin to be refracted by the champagne. ‘These days who would? But there was a year or two when she was a real tigress for the cause.’

  ‘Until the Gorge de Vis.’

  He knew when I was pumping him. He leaned back and smiled without looking at me. ‘Is this the life and times we’re on now?’

  ‘It’s time I did something about it.’

  ‘Did she ever tell you about the row we had? In Provence, on our way home from Italy, at least a week or so before we reached the Gorge.’

  ‘I don’t think she mentioned it.’

  ‘It was on a railway platform near a little town whose name I don’t remember now. We were waiting for a local train to take us into Arles. It was an uncovered station, barely more than a stop really, and terribly smashed up. The waiting room had been burned down. It was hot, there was no shade, and there was nowhere to sit down. We were tired and the train was late. We also had the place to ourselves. Perfect conditions for our first matrimonial set-to.