Lessons

by Ian McEwan

The long letting go could be the essence of parenthood and from here was impossible to conceive.

After twenty minutes he put the poem aside to contemplate his latest idea. He opened the notebook. The piano. Love, memory, harm. But the detective had been there too. In his presence privacy had been violated. An innocent pact between thought and page, idea and hand, had been ruptured. Or polluted. An intruder, a hostile presence had made him dismissive of his own phrasing. He was forced to read himself through another’s eyes and struggle against a likely misreading. Self-consciousness was the death of a notebook.

As only the well-informed knew, potassium iodide protected the vulnerable thyroid against radiation.

He heard one of them use the word “emergency.” There was a general light-headed sensation that came from there being only one subject. The country stood together, united in anxiety. The sane impulse was to run.

Roland was sorry for the man and the woman but that wasn’t it. His tears were for joy, for a sudden warmth of understanding that did not yet have these terms of definition: how loving and good people were, how kind the world was that had ambulances in it that came quickly out of nowhere whenever there was sorrow and pain. Always there, an entire system, just below the surface of everyday life, watchfully waiting, ready with all its knowledge and skill to come and help, embedded within a greater network of kindness he had yet to discover. It seemed to him then, as the ambulances receded with their distant sirens sounding, that everything worked, and was decent and caring and just.

Above all he was free of the unspoken family problems, which had a power over him as pervasive and mysterious as gravity.

During that last day they were impossible together. Like a bickering elderly couple who had long ago missed their chance of separating.

“Nothing is so dishonourable in a civilised nation as to permit itself to be ‘governed’ without resistance by a reckless clique that has surrendered to depraved instinct.”

The government’s “most despicable crimes—crimes that massively outstrip every human standard…Never forget that all citizens deserve the regime they are willing to endure…our current state is the dictatorship of evil.”

He was startled from his thoughts by a single piercing cry in the darkness. It was not the ordinary sound of a baby waking and needing comfort. He knew he was capable of projection in this period of his life, but this feline wail sounded to him like despair. What must it be, to burst out of deep infant sleep into the shocking singular fact of existence.

“What a relief,” she kept saying. “Aren’t you happy? You don’t look it.” “I am, honestly. It’s amazing. What a relief.” But she read him well. Somewhere below a layer of decorum, barely available to himself, was a sense he had been cheated. The world would go on, he would remain unvaporised. He needn’t have done a thing.

Roland observed the old tensions that had shaped his life with them. Even now, they still touched him, still had the power to revive the suffocation that became unbearable in his teenage years.

“Try not to fight with her tonight. It doesn’t matter what she thinks. You’ll make your own decisions anyway.” She took his hand. “It’s so easy to forgive other people’s parents.”

When they were standing together on the small first-floor landing, Roland said, “Are you still with that lady?” “Nah. Back with the wife and boys. Never been better.” “Glad to hear it.” As Browne glanced into Lawrence’s room, at the single bed and Thomas the Tank Engine duvet, Roland wondered why this answer suddenly lowered his spirits. Not envy. More, the grind, the labour of private lives, keeping the little ships on course. For what?

Roland, still a beginner parent, still a doting father, often marvelled at the mere fact of his son’s existence, at how he could run, think, speak, at the precise enunciation of his words and their lyrical intonation, the skin and hair beyond the fantasies of the cosmetics industry. A new intelligence had leaped from two cells merging and daily wove itself into greater complexity and surprises. The eyes were clear and thickly lashed. The unconditional love, sense of humour, embraces, confidences, the tears, the meltdowns, the 5 a.m. starts—all of it still surprised him. As they waited to cross the road the boy held his father’s forefinger in a tight grip.

He said it, even though he would have preferred not to hear her, anticipating a stream, a river, of accusation. When he was the injured party. But he did not feel like complaining or saying anything. He was in a state of helpful numbness. Unreal indifference. He might regret it later. But whatever was said here, nothing would change.

These grown-up children were at that hinge of life when parents must begin to shrink and fold. The decline of mobility, reason fading in and out like short-wave radio, the trickle of minor ailments that fed a deeper river—the subject was vast and not all of it was unfunny.

The subject was mortality and therefore limitless. They looked ahead to their not-so-distant fiftieth birthdays and knew they were discussing their own future decline. Some were already contemplating knee and cataract operations or forgetting a familiar name. There were good selfish reasons to be kindly to the old.

terrible inappropriate thought. Liberation. He stood under a bigger sky. You are no longer your father’s son. You are the only father now. No man stands between you and a clear run at your own grave. Stop pretending—elation is proper, as well as sorrow.

You buried your parents, or they buried you and grieved more piteously than you ever could for them. There was no greater affliction than losing a child. So count yourself and your father lucky.

“See? The two numbers are relatively prime. They’re co-prime!” “Meaning?” “The only number that divides them both is one. That way the teeth of the cogs wear out evenly.” “Why would that be?” But he did not follow the explanation. In the management of his life he was foolish. In mathematics, moronic. His IQ must have halved, for here was another of those moments when he knew he had reached the summit of his understanding.

How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events.

Lawrence should have phoned. But no complaining. This was the beginning of the transition, of letting go, though Roland had never heard anyone speak of it, this form of parental dismay. You think of your child as your dependant. Then, as he starts to pull away, you discover that you are a dependant too. It had always cut both ways.

The two chairs were set at the angles at which they had left them when they separately stood. The dogged fidelity of objects, to remain exactly as they had unthinkingly placed them. He shivered. It was as if he was seeing what he was not meant to see—what was there when he was not, how things would look when he was dead.

Too many photos set off memories and sessions of wondering about dead or long-lost friends or prolonged struggles to remember names and places. He wasted much time envying his youth. Too many shots from the time of his lost decade showed him with a backpack looking strong and cheerful against gorgeous backgrounds of mountains or desert, wildflowers or lakes. Where was that, who pressed the button, what year? He was a stranger to himself, a stranger he envied.

When he asked himself if he wished none of it had happened he did not have a ready answer. That was the nature of the harm. Almost seventy-two and not quite cured. The experience remained with him and he could not part with it.

It wasn’t right, and he knew it wasn’t right, but there was nothing he could do about it. It was too late.

As he waited to be called he wondered if his son had delivered him, by agreement with the rest of the family, to make sure he kept his appointment. Here was a taste of old age, the possibly paranoid awareness that matters were being settled behind his back.