Authors: Ian McEwan
It was impossible, I thought I had not seen it, a strong man could not hit a child this way, with the unrestrained force of adult hatred. The child’s head snapped back as the blow carried both him and the chair he was sitting on almost to my table. It was the chair’s back which cracked against the floor and saved the boy’s head from damage. The waitress was running towards us, calling for Mme
Auriac as she came. I had made no decision to stand, but I was on my feet. For an instant, I met the gaze of the woman from Paris. She was immobile. Then she nodded gravely. The young waitress had gathered up the child and was sitting on the floor making breathy, flute-like notes of concern over him, a lovely sound I remembered thinking as I arrived at the father’s table.
His wife had risen from her seat and was whining to the girl, ‘You don’t understand, Mademoiselle. You’ll only make things worse. He’ll scream, that one, but he knows what he’s up to. He always gets his way.’
There was no sign of Mme Auriac. Again, I had made no decision, no calculation as to what I was getting myself into. The man had lit his cigarette. It relieved me a little to see that his hands were shaky. He did not look at me. I spoke out in a clear, trembling voice with tolerable accuracy but virtually no idiom. I had none of Jenny’s sinuous mastery. Speaking in French elevated both my sentiments and my words into a theatrical, self-conscious solemnity, and standing there, I had a brief ennobling sense of myself as one of those obscure French citizens who blossom from nowhere at a transforming moment in their nation’s history to improvise the words that history will engrave in stone. Was this the Tennis Court Oath? Was I Desmoulins at the Café Foy? In fact all I said was, literally, ‘Monsieur, to hit a child in this way is disgusting. You are an animal, an animal, Monsieur. Are you frightened of fighting someone your own size, because I would love to smash my gob.’
This ridiculous slip of the tongue caused the man to relax. He smiled up at me as he pushed his chair back from the table. He saw a pale Englishman of medium height who still held his napkin in his hand. What did a man have to fear who had a caduceus tattooed on each of his fat forearms.
‘Ta gueule? It would make me happy to help you smash it.’ He jerked his head towards the door.
I followed him past the empty tables. I could hardly believe it. We were stepping outside. A reckless exhilaration lightened my tread and I seemed to hover above the restaurant floor. As we went out, the man I had challenged let the swing door fall against me. He led the way across the deserted road to where a petrol pump stood under a street lamp. He turned to face me and square up, but I had already made up my mind and even as he raised his arms my fist was travelling towards his face with all my weight behind it. I caught him hard and full on the nose with such force that even as his bone crunched, I felt something snap in my knuckle. There was a satisfying moment when he was stunned but could not fall. His arms dropped to his side and he stood there and watched me as I hit him with the left, one two three, face, throat and gut, before he went down. I drew back my foot and I think I might have kicked and stomped him to death had I not heard a voice and turned to see a thin figure in the lighted doorway across the road.
The voice was calm. ‘Monsieur. Je vous prie. Ça suffit.’
Immediately I knew that the elation driving me had nothing to do with revenge and justice. Horrified with myself, I stepped back.
I crossed the road and followed the woman from Paris inside. While we waited for the police and an ambulance, Mme Auriac bound my hand with a crêpe bandage and went behind the bar to pour me a cognac. And at the bottom of the fridge she found the last of the summer’s ice-creams for the boy who still sat on the floor recovering, wrapped in the maternal arms of the pretty young waitress who, it must be said, appeared flushed and in the embrace of a great happiness.
I
N THE SPRING
of 1946, taking advantage of a newly liberated Europe and favourable exchange rates, my parents-in-law, Bernard and June Tremaine, set off on a honeymoon tour of France and Italy. They had met in 1944 in Senate House, Bloomsbury, where they both worked. My wife’s father, a Cambridge science graduate, had a desk job peripherally connected with the intelligence services. It had something to do with the supply of special items. My mother-in-law was a linguist working in an office which liaised with or, as she used to put it, smoothed out the rumpled feelings of the Free French. She occasionally found herself in the same room as de Gaulle. It was translation work for a project involving the adaptation of treadle sewing machines to power generation that brought her to the office of her future husband. They were not given permission to leave their jobs until almost a year after the war ended. They were married in April. The idea was to spend the summer travelling before settling down to peace-time, married life and civilian work.
In the years when these things mattered more to me, I used to reflect a great deal on the different war work available to people of different classes, and on this lively assumption of choice, this youthful desire to experience new freedoms which, as far as I know, hardly touched my
own parents’ lives. They also married soon after the war ended. My mother had been a Land Girl, which she hated, according to one of my aunts. In 1943 she transferred to work in a munitions factory near Colchester. My father was in the infantry. He survived intact the evacuation from Dunkirk, fought in North Africa and finally met his bullet during the Normandy landings. It passed clean through his right hand without harming a bone. My parents could have travelled after the war. Apparently they inherited a few hundred pounds from my grandfather just about the time my father was demobbed. Theoretically, they were free to go, but I doubt if it occurred to them, or to any of their friends. I used to think it one more aspect of the narrowness of my background that the money was used to buy the terraced house in which my sister and I were born, and to launch the hardware business which supported us after our parents’ sudden death.
Now I think I understand a little more. My father-in-law spent his working hours on problems like silent power generation for the operation of wireless transmitters in remote French farmhouses where there was no electricity supply. In the evenings he went back to his digs and dull wartime diet in Finchley, and at weekends visited his parents in Cobham. Later in the war there was his courtship, with cinema visits and Sunday hikes in the Chilterns. Set against this the life of an infantry sergeant: enforced travel abroad, boredom alternating with severe stress, the violent deaths and terrible injuries of close friends, no privacy, no women, irregular news from home. The prospect of a life of constrained and rhythmic ordinariness must have acquired, in the slow slog eastwards through Belgium with a throbbing hand, a glow quite unknown to my parents-in-law.
Understanding these differences does not make them any more attractive, and I have always known whose
war I would rather have had. The honeymooning couple arrived in the Italian seaside town of Lerici in mid-June. The chaos and devastation of post-war Europe, especially in northern France and Italy, had shocked them. They offered themselves for six weeks’ voluntary work in a Red Cross packing station on the outskirts of the town. It was dull, arduous labour and the hours were long. People were exhausted, preoccupied with daily issues of survival, and no one seemed to care that this was a couple on honeymoon. Their immediate boss, ‘il capo’, took against them. He bore a grudge against the British he was too proud to discuss. They lodged with Signor and Signora Massucco, who were still grieving for their two sons, their only children, killed in the same week, fifty miles apart, just before the Italian surrender. Some nights the English couple were woken by the elderly parents downstairs weeping together over their loss.
The food ration, on paper at least, was adequate but local corruption kept it to a minimum. Bernard developed a skin complaint which spread from his hands to his throat and across his face. June was propositioned daily, despite the brass curtain ring she wore specially. Men were constantly standing too close, or rubbing against her as they passed in the gloom of the packing shed, or tweaking her behind or the bare skin of her forearm. The problem, the other women told her, was her fair hair.
They could have left at any time, but the Tremaines stuck it out. This was their small atonement for their comfortable war. It was also an expression of their, idealism; it was ‘winning the peace’ and helping to ‘build a new Europe’. But their departure from Lerici was rather sad. No one noticed them go. The grieving Italians were ministering to a dying parent on the top floor and the house had filled with relatives. The Red Cross station was absorbed by
an embezzlement scandal. Bernard and June slipped away before dawn one morning in early August to wait out on the main road for the bus that would take them north to Genoa. As they stood there in the half light, depressed and hardly speaking, they would surely have felt cheered about their contribution to a new Europe to have known that they had already conceived their first child, a daughter, my wife, who would one day put up a good fight for a seat in the European Parliament.
They travelled by bus and train, westwards through Provence, through flash floods and electrical storms. In Aries they met a French government official who drove them to Lodève in Languedoc. He told them mat if they presented themselves at his hotel in a week’s time he would take them on with him to Bordeaux. The skies had cleared, they were not due in England for another two weeks and so they set off on a short walking tour.
This is the region where the
causses
, high limestone plateaux, rise a thousand feet above the coastal plain. In places the cliffs drop spectacularly hundreds of feet. Lodève stands at the foot of one of the passes, then a narrow country road, now the busy RN 9. It is still a fine ascent, though with such traffic, hardly pleasant on foot. In those days you could pass a tranquil day climbing steadily between towering formations of rock, until you could see the Mediterranean shining behind you, thirty miles to the south. The Tremaines spent the night at the small town of Le Caylar where they bought broad-brimmed shepherds’ hats. The next morning they left the road and headed off north east across the Causse de Larzac, carrying two litres of water each.
These are some of the emptiest spaces in France. There are fewer people here now than there were a hundred years ago. Dusty tracks, unmarked on the best of maps, wind
across expanses of heather, gorse and box. Deserted farms and hamlets sit in hollows of surprising greenness where small pastures are divided by ancient dry-stone walls and the paths between them, flanked by tall blackberry bushes, wild roses and oaks, have an English intimacy. But these soon give way to the emptiness again.
Towards the end of the day the Tremaines came across the Dolmen de la Prunarède, a prehistoric burial chamber. Then, only several yards further on, they found themselves standing above a deep gorge carved through the rock by the river Vis. They stopped here to finish off their provisions – huge tomatoes of a kind never seen in England, two-day-old bread as dry as biscuit and a saucisson which June sliced with Bernard’s penknife. They had been silent for hours, and now, sitting on the dolmen’s horizontal slab of stone, gazing north across the chasm to the Causse de Blandas, and beyond to where the Cévennes mountains rise, an excited discussion began in which their route the next day across this glorious alien countryside became one with their sense of their lives before them. Bernard and June were members of the Communist Party, and they were talking of the way ahead. For hours, intricate domestic details, distances between villages, choices of footpaths, the routing of fascism, class struggle, and the great engine of history whose direction was now known to science and which had granted to the Party its inalienable right to govern, all merged to one spectacular view, a beckoning avenue unrolling from the starting point of their love, out across the vast prospect of causse and mountains which reddened as they spoke, then darkened. And as the dusk gathered, so too did June’s disquiet. Was she losing the faith already? An ageless silence was tempting her, drawing her in, but whenever she ceased her own optimistic prattle to attend to it, the void was filled with Bernard’s own
sonorous platitudes, the militarised vacuities, the ‘front’ the ‘attack’ the ‘enemies’ of Marxist-Leninist thought.
June’s blasphemous uncertainties were only temporarily dispelled when the two lingered on their walk through the evening to the nearby village of St Maurice to conclude, or extend, their discussion of the future by making love, perhaps on the track itself where the ground was softest.
But the next day, and the day after, and on all the succeeding days, they never set foot in the metaphorical landscape of their future. The next day they turned back. They never descended the Gorge de Vis and walked by the mysterious raised canal that disappears into the rock, never crossed the river by the medieval bridge or climbed up to cross the Causse de Blandas and wander among the prehistoric menhirs, cromlechs and dolmens scattered in the wilderness, never began the long ascent of the Cévennes towards Florac. The next day they began their separate journeys.
In the morning they set out from the Hôtel des Tilleuls in St Maurice. As they crossed the pretty stretch of pasture and gorseland that separates the village from the edge of the gorge they were silent again. It was barely nine o’clock and already too hot. For a quarter of an hour they lost the path and had to cut across a field. The din of cicadas, the aromatic dry grasses crushed underfoot, the ferocious sun in its sky of innocent pale blue, all that had seemed so exotically southern the day before was troubling to June today. It bothered her that she was walking further away from their luggage in Lodève. In the sharp light of morning the arid horizon, the dry mountains ahead, the miles they would have to cover that day to reach the town of Le Vigan were weighing on her. The days of
walking ahead of them seemed a pointless detour from her uncertainty.