Lessons

by Ian McEwan

Here, he had nothing to do but be a bed for his son. Against his chest he felt the baby’s heartbeat, just under twice the rate of his own. Their pulses fell in and out of phase, but one day they would be always out. They would never be this close. He would know him less well, then even less. Others would know Lawrence better than he did, where he was, what he was doing and saying, growing closer to this friend, then this lover. Crying sometimes, alone. From his father, occasional visits, a sincere hug, catch up on work, family, some politics, then goodbye. 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.

In the hall the watery trail of shoe-dirt across the low-grade Edwardian tiles led him back to Browne himself. Yes, yes, it was bad. But here was the place to start. Eliminate. 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.

To some women a man caring alone for a baby was an attractive even heroic figure. To the men he would seem a dupe. But he was a little proud of himself, of the laundry churning in the washing machine even now, of the clean hallway floor, of the contented well-fed child. He would buy some flowers from a zinc bucket he had passed two days before.

He imagined it was his love that protected his child. But when a public emergency erupts it becomes an indifferent leveller. Children welcome. Roland had no special privileges. He was in there with the rest and would have to listen out for public announcements, the quarter-credible assurances of leaders who, by convention, talked down to the citizenry. What was good for a politician’s idea of the masses might not be good for any individual, especially for him. But he was the mass. He would be treated like the idiot he always was.

The headline was not as alarming as the line above it in smaller print. ‘Health officials insist there is no risk to public’. Exactly. The dam will hold. The disease will not spread. The president is not seriously ill. From democracies to dictatorships, calm above all.

Elsewhere were warnings that experts had given long ago about this design of reactor. Bottom of the page, an overview of British power stations of roughly similar design. An editorial advised that it was time to shift to wind power. A columnist asked what happened to Gorbachev’s policy of openness. It was always a fraud. Someone wrote in the letters page that wherever there was nuclear power, East or West, there were official lies.

The day after next he and his parents would travel seventy miles from London to inspect his new school. The term would not begin for several days. The other boys would not be there. He was glad, for the thought of them made his stomach contract. The word ‘boys’, boys en masse, conferred on them an authority, a thuggish power. When his father referred to them as ‘lads’ they became taller in his thoughts, stringier, irresponsibly strong.

When they reached a newsagent, the Captain bought, unasked, along with his cigarettes, a chocolate bar for his son. Years of being an infantryman in barracks in Fort George, Scotland before the war, low-paid and always hungry, had made Roland’s father appreciative of the treats he could bestow on his son. He was also stern, dangerous to disobey. It was a powerful mix. Roland feared and loved him. So did Roland’s mother.

He began to cry. He moved away so that his father wouldn’t see. 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.

Across the Middle East, Arab nationalism was a growing political force whose immediate enemy were the colonial and ex-colonial European powers. The new Jewish state of Israel, set on land Palestinians knew as their own, was also a goad. When President Nasser of Egypt nationalised the British-run Suez Canal in late July he became a hero to the nationalist cause. It was assumed that anti-British feeling would run high in neighbouring Libya.

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 missed many chances that way and submitted to periods of prolonged boredom.

There were some Scottish songs, old Harry Lauder numbers he sang well. ‘A Wee Deoch an’ Doris’, ‘Stop Your Tickling, Jock!’ and ‘I Belong to Glasgow’. It was his keenest pleasure in life to be drinking beer with his army mates, to play or sing to the company and get them to join in. His greatest regret was that he never learned to play the piano, never had the opportunity. Roland must have what he had missed. The chap who could play the piano, he often told his son, would always be popular.

In the first instance, the shock was not separation from his parents 2,000 miles away. The immediate assault was on the nature of time. It would have happened anyway. It had to happen, the transition into adult time and obligation. Before, he had flourished in a barely visible mist of events, careless of their sequence, drifting, at worst stumbling, through the hours, days and weeks. Birthdays and Christmas were the only true markers. Time was what you received. His parents supervised its flow at home, at school everything happened in one classroom and occasional shifts in routine were orchestrated by teachers who escorted you and even held your hand. Here, the transition was brutal. The new little boys had to learn quickly to live by the clock, be its servants, anticipate its demands and pay the toll for failure: a telling-off from an irritable teacher, or a detention or, in the final resort, the threat of ‘the slipper’.

She could humiliate him and make him tearful. When he repeatedly failed at an exercise and risked saying he could not do it, she told him he was a useless little girl. She had a frilly pink frock at home belonging to her niece and would bring it to the next lesson, confiscate his clothes and make him wear it to class. All that week he lived in terror of the pink frock. At night he was sleepless. He wondered about running away but then he would have to confront his father, and he had nowhere to run to. He had no money for the train and buses to get to his sister’s. He did not have the courage to drown himself in the River Orwell. When the dread lesson came round at last there was no evidence or mention of the pink frock. The threat was not repeated. Perhaps Miss Cornell did not even have a niece.

Miriam Cornell appeared more and more frequently in arousing daydreams. These reveries were vivid and obliterating but there could be no conclusion, no relief. His young smooth body with its treble voice and a child’s soft gaze was not yet ready. At first she was one of a small cast – the others were girls in their late teens, friendly, delightful in their nakedness, their faces remembered from photographs in his mother’s clothing catalogues. But by the time he was thirteen, Miss Cornell had driven them out. She stood alone on stage in the theatre of his dreams to supervise with her indifferent gaze his first orgasm. It was 3 a.m.

A cloud of self-deception was general across Europe. A West German TV channel persuaded itself that the radioactive miasma would contaminate not the West but the Soviet Empire alone, as if to take revenge. An East German ministry spokesman referred to an American plot to wreck the people’s power stations. The French government appeared to believe that the cloud’s south-western edge matched the Franco-German border, which it had no authority to cross. The British authorities announced that there was no possible risk to the public, even as they set about closing 4,000 farms, forbidding the sale of 4.5 million sheep, impounding tons of cheese and emptying a sea of milk down drains. Moscow, reluctant to concede an error, let its infants and children drink irradiated milk.

Roland the child had been in a state of shock, refusing food or drink. The orange cordial in paper cups smelled of pigs’ guts. He had seen slaughter and blood as in a nightmare. Squealing victims herded from a sealed truck, running in panic down a concrete ramp towards men in rubber aprons and gumboots inches deep in blood, in their hands electric stunners, the flash of knives slitting throats, naked bodies suspended by chains round ankles approaching massive doors swinging open to a white jet of roasting flame, then corpses spinning in boiling water scoured by revolving drums with steel teeth, whining power blades, heads with eyes and mouths open in stacks, tipped vats of gleaming viscera sliding down steep tin chutes towards roaring grinder machines making dog food.

‘Entschuldigung. Guten Morgen!’ She was writing an article about the White Rose movement for a famous London magazine. Could anyone help her with some names of people she might approach? She was ready for an unfriendly response. Six key members, Hans and Sophie Scholl, three close student friends and a professor, were sentenced to death and guillotined. Other executions followed. When news of the deaths spread, 2,000 students gathered to shout their approval. Traitors. Communist scum. And now? Too soon, too shameful perhaps for anything beyond an embarrassed silence. Instead, there was a friendly murmur. A couple of typists were standing from their desks and smiling as they came towards her. Three years before, these clerks might have felt obliged to spit at the mention of the White Rose. In the new dispensation, the University of Munich wished to identify itself with the group, take pride in its courage and moral clarity.

How small and ill-defined her own life seemed to her now. A shapeless mass of weeks were piled behind her.

The immediate answer to And now? was to work through her list of White Rose contacts, write her piece, then set off for Lombardy. Among the ruins of Munich, her existence seemed to her ‘quite brilliant’. She was casting herself as an honorary member of the group. She would continue its work, help build the new Europe they had dreamed of. Even a modest contribution would count, like improving English cuisine, she wrote in skittish mood, ‘by describing the art of osso buco!’

It was a pleasure to settle in the small armchair by the cot. The night visit could be a two-way arrangement – Roland was soothed by watching his son sleep, face up, arms thrown back, his hands barely reaching the full extent of his head. A big fat brain and its bone protection was such an encumbrance starting out. So heavy it wouldn’t let Lawrence sit up during his first six months. Later it might think of other ways to be a burden.

Was it possible to find happiness and be a genius? Einstein did well enough, playing the violin, sailing, loving fame, finding pure joy in his General Theory. But a messy divorce, battle for the children, distressing love affairs, paranoia that David Hilbert would steal his show, never making peace with the quantum, with the brilliant young men who owed him everything.

Then he was on the bed again, clean, calm, near naked, uselessly alert at 3 a.m. He could no longer blame alcohol and he was in no mood for reading. He wanted to give himself a good talking to. Plan your life! You cannot continue to meander. Assume she is not coming back. Correct. Then what? Then … Whenever he reached this point there lay like a fog across his future the quotidian struggle with parenting and fatigue. There could be no conceivable plan, no uplift, when all he could do was stay close to the ground, keep going, keep Lawrence going, keep tending him and playing with him and taking the state support, then housework, cooking, shopping. The common tightly encircled fate of single mothers was his.

By the time he was twenty Marlow had been at sea six years. He had been up the mizzen mast in rolling seas, furling the sails, shouting commands over the wind at men more than twice his age. Against that Roland had five years at boarding school among the easy air of the boys. He had sailed or crewed, crouching under the boom, pulling on a rope attached to a corner of the jib while an older boy called Young screamed at him for two hours. Back then it was thought that this was how sea captains should be. In Marlow’s view such pottering about on a river was ‘only the amusement of life’. His existence at sea was ‘life itself’. Roland had once capsized on that River Orwell, a lovely blue from a distance, an open sewer up close.

In your mid-thirties you could begin to ask what kind of person you were. The first long run of turbulent young adulthood was over. So too was excusing yourself by reference to your background. Insufficient parents? A lack of love? Too much of it? Enough, no more excuses. You had friends of a dozen years or more.

Every spring there was a school trip to an open day at the American airbase at Lakenheath, which kept a fleet of giant B52 planes armed with nuclear bombs to deter or destroy the Soviet Union.

In single file the boys came onto the stage and stood close together facing the head. He stood still, tight about the jaw, staring at them with contempt. The murmur swelled as the realisation spread through the assembly – they were still wearing the forbidden badges on their lapels! One in the group, a sixth-form hero of the first fifteen, began to read a prepared statement. The assembly fell silent. The bomb was a threat to humanity, to life on earth, a moral abomination, a tragic waste of resources. The headmaster cut him off as he strode past to leave the stage. He would see them all in his study right away.

Many years later Roland heard the four-year-old daughter of a friend declare to her father, ‘I’m unhappy.’ Simple, honest, obvious and necessary. No such sentence was ever spoken by Roland as a child.

The beach they visited every day was forbidden to Libyans. They did not know that a building they passed on the school bus was the notorious Abu Salim prison. In a few years King Idris would be overthrown in a coup and a dictator, Colonel Gaddafi, would take his place. He would order the execution of thousands of dissident Libyans in Abu Salim.

At the apex of the hierarchy were the prefects. They were entitled to take short cuts across the grass and shout at anyone lower down the scale who dared do the same.

Politics bored them, as they liked telling each other. As a group they went for human interest, which was why they preferred the Express. A woman set on fire by her hairdryer. A madman with a knife shot dead by a farmer who ended up in prison, to general disgust. A brothel unearthed not so far from the Houses of Parliament. A zookeeper swallowed whole by a python. Adult life.

Flying their U2 reconnaissance jets at impossible heights, using cameras with exciting telescopic power, the Americans had revealed to the world Russian nuclear missiles on Cuba, only ninety miles from the Florida coast. Intolerable, everyone agreed. A gun to the head of the West. The sites would have to be bombed before they became operational, then the island invaded. What might the Russians do?

Classes went on as usual. No teacher referred to the crisis and the boys were not surprised. These were separate realms, school and the real world.

The two sides, protesting that they stood for peace, would, for pride and honour’s sake, stumble into war. One small exchange, one ship sunk for another, would become a lunatic conflagration. Schoolboys knew that this was how the First World War began. They had written essays on the subject. Each country said it didn’t want war, and then they all joined in with a ferocity the world was still discussing and trying to understand. This time there would be no one left to try. Then what of that first encounter, that beautiful dangerous mountain range? Blown away with the rest. As he lay waiting for sleep he remembered his friend’s question: what if you died before you had it? It.

He had prepared something to say, an opening, but he had forgotten it. ‘Almost three years late. Lunch is cold.’ He said it quickly. ‘I had a long detention.’ She smiled and he blushed with helpless pride in his smart reply. It had come from nowhere. ‘Come on then.’

Suddenly she pushed the bed covers away and rolled on top of him, sat up – and it was complete, accomplished. So simple. Like some trick with a vanishing knot in a length of soft rope. He lay back in sensual wonder, reaching for her hands, unable to speak. Probably only minutes passed. It seemed as if he had been shown a hidden fold in space where there was a catch, a fastener, and that as he released it and peeled away the illusory everyday he saw what had always been there. Their roles, teacher, pupil, the order and self-importance of school, timetables, bikes, cars, clothes, even words – all of it a diversion to keep everyone from this. It was either hilarious or it was tragic, that people should go about their daily business in the conventional way when they knew there was this. Even the headmaster, who had a son and a daughter, must know. Even the Queen. Every adult knew. What a facade. What pretence.

There, under a bare oak on a little grassy promontory overlooking the shoreline’s first muddy pools he allowed himself the luxury of crying in hopelessness. There was no one around, so he let go, he blabbed, then he filled his lungs and shouted in frustration. He had brought the disaster upon himself. He could have kept quiet about Thelonious Monk. There was no need to challenge her. A magnificent edifice toppled, a palace of sensuality, music, homeliness – in ruins. It was no longer about sex. This was the homesickness for which he had never shed tears.

When they were downstairs, she described driving to Aldeburgh to hear Benjamin Britten give a talk about string quartets. Roland said that the name meant nothing to him. She drew him closer to her and kissed his nose and said, ‘We’ve got a lot of work to do on you.’ That was it, and that was how it was going to be. This was what the far-off belligerent gods, Khrushchev and Kennedy, had arranged for him.

What mattered was that he had been forgiven. She was taking him back and she loved him. She had been upset and angry and now she was not. That was enough for her, and so it was for him. He was too young to know about possession, to understand that his interest in jazz had threatened to remove him from her sphere of command.

‘As I was saying. In Britain, we’re at breaking point. Mass unemployment, inflation, racism, an openly anti-socialist government just installed—’ Someone said, ‘Gute Idee.’ There was quiet laughter. Dave continued. ‘People in the UK are organising. They’re on the move. They’re looking to you.’ Florian said in English, ‘Thank you. Not to me.’ ‘Seriously. I know you have your problems. But objectively, this is the world’s only truly viable socialist state.’ There was silence. Dave added, ‘Think about it. Daily life can blind you lot to your own achievements.’ The East Berliners, all of them under forty, were too polite to say what they thought.

Each return to London from Berlin brought bitter confrontations. Roland was arguing with too many of his friends and with the left wing of the Labour Party. Here was the awkward association. He was a member in good standing, had leafleted and knocked on doors for Wilson in ’70 and ’74 and had borrowed a car to get the old and disabled to the polls for Callaghan in the spring of ’79. Now, just back from Berlin, he went along to his local party meetings. In the general discussion Roland spoke of gross abuses in the GDR and, by report, of violations of basic human rights across the Soviet Empire. He reminded the room of the psychiatric ‘treatment’ of Russian dissidents. He was booed and shouted down.

A couple he had known for years came to his place for dinner. He was living in Brixton at the time. They had remained members of the Communist Party of Great Britain out of old loyalties. After two hours arguing over the invasion of Czechoslovakia (they insisted that Soviet forces went in at the ‘behest’ of the Czechoslovakian working class), he told them wearily to leave. In effect, he threw them out. They left behind an unopened bottle of Hungarian wine, Bull’s Blood, which he could not bear to drink.

Friends who belonged to no party were also unsympathetic. But how did the atrocities of Vietnam make Soviet Communism more loveable? he kept asking. The answer was clear. In the bipolar Cold War, communism was the lesser of two evils. To attack it was to sustain the grisly project of capitalism and US imperialism. To ‘bang on’ about abuses in Budapest and Warsaw, to remember the Moscow show trials or the imposed Ukr...

Two years passed, the Falklands War was fought and won, somewhere, beyond most people’s awareness, the foundations of the Internet were laid, Mrs Thatcher and her party won a 144-seat majority in Parliament. Roland turned thirty-five. He had one poem published in the Wisconsin Review and was making an adequate living, writing pieces for in-flight magazines. His life as a patient serial monogamist continued. He remained privately fixated on a life he knew he would never have.

Roland tried to tell his father about the White Rose and Heinrich Eberhardt’s role. But the Major, somewhat deaf, was in too good a mood to be listening, especially to new information.

The Major, lifted by their marriage news, was already well ahead of his nightly drinking schedule.

Every now and then, between long pulls on his after-dinner beer, the Major repeated, ‘Never mind, son.’ He wanted the whole business forgotten. On the train back to London the next day Roland was silent. Alissa took his hand. ‘Do you hate him?’ It was the only question. He said, ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’ After a while and more silence, she added, ‘Don’t hate him. It will make you unhappy.’

Roland said, ‘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.’

After twenty-six months it came in a single payment, £24,000. It should have been uncomfortable for a left-of-centre voter like Roland that courtesy of Mrs Thatcher the top rate of tax was at 40%. Down from 83% under Labour. More awkward was the matter of his pride. His integrity as a poet was in ruins. Since Grand Street returned his revised submissions without comment he had written nothing. One more failed career to add to the list. Daphne was aggrieved on his behalf. He was able to tell her he was no longer a burden on the state. What he couldn’t confess to anyone was his lightness of being. To have money! Why had no one told him, it was a physical thing? He felt it in his arms and legs. Especially in his neck and shoulders. Mortgage paid off, son brightly clothed, two weeks together on an overlooked Greek island reached by a three-hour speedboat dash across a flat cerulean sea.

Daphne, like Roland, disliked and on occasions loathed the Thatcher government but, like him, she was prospering under its edicts. They often discussed the contradiction, but they would never resolve it. They had voted for Labour and its higher tax rate, but their side had lost. Their consciences were clear. Peter had the more coherent position. He had voted for Mrs Thatcher from the start.