Authors: Ian McEwan
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.’
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 top 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.