Lessons

by Ian McEwan

At Florian and Ruth’s gatherings on the seventh floor of a mean apartment building the system was an active enemy.

Gauging its condition, discussing how to survive within it and not go mad or be crushed was the common currency of conversation, which was urgent, deep, sincere. Also funny.

He remained privately fixated on a life he knew he would never have. When, finally, a version of that life presented itself, nothing was required of him, no scheming, no striving.

It couldn’t last, they both thought and admitted later, this level of idiot addiction.

But the weight on him was at one remove. It barely weighed at all. The accidental fortune was beyond calculation, to have been born in 1948 in placid Hampshire, not Ukraine or Poland in 1928, not to have been dragged from the synagogue steps in 1941 and brought here. His white-tiled cell – a piano lesson, a premature love affair, a missed education, a missing wife – was by comparison a luxury suite.

But the illusion was vivid, a form of narcissism or, closely related, paranoia.

‘Do you remotely understand how difficult it’s been historically for women to create, to be artists, scientists, to write or paint? My story means nothing to you?’

He had never known such a mix of intense and contrary feelings, one of which was sadness, for he suspected that they would never meet again. Another was anger.

lapidary

Dangerously, it was down to this – he loved her novel already and he loved her for writing it. All

What stood in his way was his ridiculous pride.

The boredom of a fifteen-year-old can be as refined as Portuguese gold filigree, as the spiral orb web of the Karijini spider. Painstaking, skilful, static, like the embroidery that Jane Austen’s women persuaded themselves was work when nothing else was permitted.

These grown-up children were at that hinge of life when parents must begin to shrink and fold.

or the memory-shadow of love.

it would linger, not only in their son’s eyes and that habit of glancing away, but in his consuming seriousness. Above all, that was what Lawrence and his mother shared.

Some love affairs comfortably and sweetly rot. Slowly, like fruit in a fridge.

Tyres, coffee, baby clothes, dog parlours, burgers, new exhausts infested a land whose rich soil and decent rainfall had once nurtured woodland of giant oaks, ashes and wild cherry.

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

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.

Here they kept to the old ways of flocked wallpaper, failing spider plants and a wide framed print of a lurid sunset.

The dogged fidelity of objects, to remain exactly as they had unthinkingly placed them.

Roland Baines’s progression through his late fifties and beyond took the form of premature decline.

On the way home in a minicab he acknowledged that what had passed between Alissa and himself was irrelevant.

Paraphrenia.

A new house was being built by murderers on a foundation of corpses.

our beginnings shape us and must be faced.

Children, however loved underneath it all, were to be managed, not listened to. They were not there to be engaged with in serious conversation. They were not beings in their own right, for they were just passing through, transient proto-humans, endlessly, year after year in the graceless act of becoming.

To most people, including himself, life just happened. Alissa fought it.

For years her life had been one long receding tide. As it withdrew it left behind random pools of stranded memory.

They could have learned the real history of the family. She was round the corner, staring at her lunch and could tell them nothing of her hidden son because she was, in effect, dead.

If Roland included himself and his boarding school, then all four of Rosalind’s children were expelled, banished to their new postings.

The young woman in the photograph vanished on Reading station in 1942.

Impossible not to stare at the coffin where Rosalind lay in the dark. But she wasn’t there, or anywhere, and here it was again, the simplest feature of death, always startling – absence.

This was how to steer a life successfully, Roland thought. Make a choice, act! That’s the lesson. A shame not to have known the trick long ago.

Good decisions came less through rational calculation, more from sudden good moods. But so too did some of his worst decisions.

The answer was simple – ‘yes, a thousand times yes!’

But he missed in himself what he remembered so well, that impatience, that hunger to be there at the crucial event.

She had her mother’s blueish-black eyes, an oceanographer’s submarine gaze.

‘In the face of this crap, being here, doing this is the very best, the most joyous thing I can imagine.’

Worse than pop music. It was the Eurovision Song Contest in oils and gilt frames.

Sitting with her day after day, tending to her, watching her grotesque decline, he had to have someone, something to blame. Blasphemously, he longed for her to die. He wanted it almost as much as she did.

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.

it was something else besides and this was the problem. She couldn’t have said it, and he wouldn’t have listened. They lied by omission. She had loved him and made him love her. The hostage fell in love with his captor – the Stockholm Syndrome.

That was the damage, the forbidden matter – the attraction. The memory of the love remained inseparable from the crime.

Parts of the world were burning or drowning. Simultaneously, in the old-fashioned glow of close family, made more radiant by recent deprivation, he experienced happiness that could not be dispelled, even by rehearsing every looming disaster in the world. It made no sense.

was the tone of calm and playful reassurance that did for him, and the knowledge that none of it was true.

But there was that essence everyone forgets when a love recedes into the past – how it was, how it felt and tasted to be together through seconds, minutes and days, before everything that was taken for granted was discarded then overwritten by the tale of how it all ended, and then by the shaming inadequacies of memory.

She had made unnecessary enemies in the trans debates when she said on an American TV chat show that a surgeon might sculpt a ‘kind of a man’ out of a woman but there was never enough good stuff to carve a woman out of a man. It was said provocatively in the Dorothy Parker mode and got a quick bark of laughter from the studio audience. But these were not Parker’s times. ‘Kind of a man’ brought the usual trouble.

In all her outpouring what still held him was the news that he was the only man she had loved. True or not, it was extraordinary that she should say it.

By what logic or motivation or helpless surrender did we all, hour by hour, transport ourselves within a generation from the thrill of optimism at Berlin’s falling Wall to the storming of the American Capitol?