Lessons

by Ian McEwan

Her perfume overwhelmed his senses and deafened him. It was a rounded cloying scent, like a hard object, a smooth river stone, pushing in on his thoughts. Three years later he learned it was rosewater.

the mistake was coming towards him, arms outstretched like a mother, ready to scoop him up, always the same mistake coming to collect him without the promise of a kiss.

Her fingers found his inside leg, just at the hem of his grey shorts, and pinched him hard. That night there would be a tiny blue bruise. Her touch was cool as her hand moved up under his shorts to where the elastic of his pants met his skin. He scrambled off the stool and stood, flushed. ‘Sit down. You’ll start again!’ Her sternness wiped away what had just happened. It was gone and he already doubted his memory of it.

Collective reluctance moved them in time like a corps de ballet

Until then, he knew everything about him, where he was in every minute, in every place. He was the baby’s bed and his god. The long letting go could be the essence of parenthood and from here was impossible to conceive.

Please try to forgive me, she should have said, as I have forgiven myself. The self-pity of the absconder against the bitter clarity of the left-behind, the abscondee.

In a complicated movement, she lowered and inclined her head, so that her face approached his in a swooping arc that ended in a kiss, her lips full on his, a soft prolonged kiss.

Detective Inspector Douglas Browne, the flesh of whose cheeks hung in swags,

The self-made hell was an interesting construct. Nobody escaped making one, at least one, in a lifetime. Some lives were nothing but. It was a tautology that self-inflicted misery was an extension of character. But Roland often thought about it. You built a torture machine and climbed inside. Perfect fit, with a range of pain on offer: from certain jobs, or a taste for drink, drugs, from crime coupled with a knack of getting caught. Austere religion was another choice.

Soundlessly, Lawrence was crapping in his sleep. The odour wasn’t so bad. One of the discoveries of middle life – how soon you came to tolerate the shit of the one you loved. A general rule.

One-handedly he fetched a mop, filled a bucket and cleared up the mess, spreading it widely. This was how most messes were cleared up, smoothed thin to invisibility. Tiredness turned everything to metaphor.

He stopped by a letter box. Its quaint red and royal insignia, George V, were already a memento of another time, of risible faith in continuity by way of posted messages.

Everyone could see clearly, and he could not. This was his shameful secret.

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.

But he sensed he was at the beginning of a new life and now he understood that the world was sympathetic and fair. It would embrace and contain him kindly, justly and nothing bad, really bad, could happen to him or to anyone, or not for long.

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

The episode, a taste of unreal freedom, had lasted eight days. It sustained him at boarding school, it shaped his restlessness and unfocussed ambitions in his twenties and strengthened his resistance to a regular job. It became a hindrance – whatever he was doing, he was pursued by an idea of a greater freedom elsewhere, some emancipated life just beyond reach, one that would be denied him if he made unbreakable commitments.

He did not know what – in the real world – he was waiting for. In the dimensions of the unreal, it was to relive the eight days he spent in the confines of 10 Armoured Workshops, REME, at Gurji camp in the autumn of 1956.

Time, which had been an unbounded sphere in which he moved freely in all directions, became overnight a narrow one-way track down which he travelled with his new friends from lesson to lesson, week to week until it became an unquestioned reality.

The tree, like the scores around it, had made a portion of the rainbow its own. The oak was an intricate giant being that knew itself. It was performing for him, showing off, delighting in its own existence.

He had caught sight of himself for the first time. He was a particular person – more than that, a peculiar one.

The trick of keeping control of oneself was to avoid any thoughts of kindness his parents, especially his mother, had ever shown him. But he could feel the sweet in his pocket.

When she unbuttoned his shorts to straighten out his shirt the back of her hand brushed across his crotch. But that was accidental.

His Miss Cornell belonged in a private world separate from friends and school.

she established complete rights or control, mental and physical,

As the weeks passed, she bound him to her and there was nothing he could do about it.

She had seeded herself into the fine grain not only of his psyche but of his biology.

To stop now would be to concede he had been wrong all along. Also, a respect for order derived from his father insisted that what was started must be finished.

It was not a good state, pretending to be out of his mind.

The centralised system, Napoleonic and paranoid, of registering and collating all guests in French hotels was still in place.

Memories had a long half-life.

‘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.’

Reading this 2 days after Sunak’s government has pushed electrification back another 5 years, with the ongoing nonsense about the “small boats” and Rupert Murdoch bequeathing his empire to his oldest son, it feels like there is nothing new under the sun.

the inane stupefaction of the German people encourages these fascist criminals’.

By then German forces had been repelled at Stalingrad. The slaughter there was on an unimaginable scale. This was rightly identified as a turning point in the war. ‘330,000 Germans have been pointlessly and recklessly driven to death and destruction by the brilliant planning of our World War 1 Private First Class. Führer, we give you thanks.’

He had reached that point – late thirties was common – when one’s parents set off on their downhill journey. Up until that time they had owned whoever they were, whatever they did. Now, little bits of their lives were beginning to fall away or fly off suddenly like the shattered wing mirror from the Major’s car. Then larger parts came away and needed to be gathered or caught mid-air by their children.

His generation was also more fortunate than the one that followed. His lot lolled on history’s aproned lap, nestling in a little fold of time, eating all the cream.

This was a tragedy played out on a stage constructed by men possessed by a wild and vicious dream. Their savagery had become the encompassing norm.

The Greeks were right to invent their gods as argumentative unpredictable punitive members of a lofty elite. If he could believe in such all-too-human gods they would be the ones to fear.

Books are difficult to tidy. Hard to chuck out. They resist.

At school he lived the mental life of a dog chained to a constant present.

Then there was the woman of his nightly daydreams who did as he made her do, which was to deprive him of his will and make him do as she wished.

Certain events were safely preserved in memory, but states of mind, like snowflakes on a mild day, were lost before they settled.

This inward moment was captured and laid down for life: as he turned away from Miriam Cornell, he became aware that his heart was beating hard.

Even the Telegraph carried photographs of smiling girls in the news with bouffant hair and eyelashes as thick and dark as prison bars.

autodidact.

His real life, the boundless life, was elsewhere.

always regretting the setting sun and the call home, the Edenic expulsion into the next day and its usual concerns.

The only happiness and purpose and proper paradise was sexual. A hopeless dream lured him from one relationship to the next. If it had come real once, it could, it must do so again.

Something reptilian, single-minded and greedy, had been aroused in him. If he had been told he was pathologically addicted to sex as others were to drugs, he would have owned up gaily. If he was an addict, he must be an adult.

His was a dream of crazed monogamy, total mutual devotion and dedication to a common pursuit of the sexual and emotional sublime.