What We Can Know

by Ian McEwan

At times like this, and she couldn’t help it, she was irritated by his certitude, his entitlement, his capacity for repetition. A brilliant man, and such a fool.

Like us, the Blundys had good reason to think they might be living at the end of time. And this was what we had in common: even if we occasionally thought of history’s victims, we went on loving, playing, cooking, surviving somehow, attending or, Vivien, Rose and I, teaching classes, on Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Mabel Fisk and the rest.

His single typed sheet was like a relic of a teenage past, the sort of thing a once-feisty girl might come across years later in an attic shoebox of ardent letters from forgotten boyfriends.

She loved him and thought she could not live without him. After he died, she found she could, most pleasurably, and that was when her retrospective anger took hold.

For him and me it would have been trivial or retrograde to declare an open relationship. Deception conferred significance. It implied that our marriage was important enough to be worth the hazard of a lie.