Lessons

by Ian McEwan

But she was good with awkward advice. Last month she told him it was time to ‘snap out of it’. He had the Epithalamium money. It was not only Lawrence who needed new clothes. Roland, she said, was still living like a student, a depressed student. Whether Alissa was coming back or not, brighten up. Move on. She had advised him to make a home with Carol. If necessary, marry her. Daphne had cooked meals for her and liked her. They discussed the governance of television, how to open it up in the public interest, not just to commercial opportunity. Daphne had connected Carol to some of her future-of-broadcasting friends who were pushing to set up a production company on Charlotte Street. The entrepreneurial spirit had seized the centre-left.

During dinner they argued about Mikhail Gorbachev. He was an innocent fool to believe that with his glasnost and perestroika he could liberalise to a minimal controllable extent the tired old tyranny and still have the party in command. This was Peter’s view. Or, as Roland and Daphne argued, he was a genius and a saint who understood, ahead of his colleagues, that the entire communist experiment, its violently imposed empire, its instinct for murder and implausible lies, had been a grotesque failure and had to be ended.

‘I don’t know,’ Roland said. His pulse had moved up. He didn’t want anything bad happening to her. Even two years ago.

She thought you were a brilliant bohemian. Your piano playing seduced her. She thought you were a free spirit. Just the way I thought Heinrich was a hero of the resistance and would go on being one. You misled her. “He’s a fantasist, Mutti, he can’t settle to anything. He’s got problems in his past he won’t even think about. He can’t achieve anything.

Soon he was walking by the Wall, along Niederkirchner Straße. In white paint a graffito read, Sie kamen, sie sahen, sie haben ein bisschen eingekauft – they came, they saw, they did a little shopping.

The Café Adler was close by and he was thirsty and feeling the cold. He had often come here in his Berlin days. The place was in the old east European style, spacious, high-ceilinged, with an air of ancient self-assurance. The waiters were real waiters, bred from birth, not aspiring actors and graduate students.

He knew her well enough. She would not let herself be the first to speak. He sounded feeble in his own ears when at last he said, ‘What incredible events.’ The end of the Cold War was their small talk. ‘Yes. I came as quickly as I could.’ He was about to ask where from but in the same breath she added quickly, ‘How is Larry?’ He missed the sorrow that lay behind her lightly posed question and heard only a trivial enquiry. It startled him, the sudden force of his own feelings. This was what he carried with him all the time and barely knew it. He leaned back in his chair to increase the distance between them. He was determined to sound level, unhurt, but his voice was hoarse.

But whatever was said here, nothing would change. She would continue with her determined business. He would go home. His life would go on as before. Lawrence was happy enough, long used to life with a single parent. The world was about to become a better place. He remembered and rehearsed his moment of optimism in no-man’s-land. Only three hours ago. Already it was expected that the satellites of the Soviet Empire would turn West, stand in line for the Common Market, for NATO. But what need of NATO? He saw it clearly – Russia, a liberal democracy, unfolding like a flower in spring. Nuclear weapons negotiated downwards to extinction. Then mega-tides of spare cash and good intentions flowing like fresh water, cleansing the dirt of every social problem. The general well-being refreshed, schools, hospitals, cities renewed. Tyrannies dissolving across the South American continent, the Amazon rainforests rescued and treasured – let poverty be razed instead of trees. For millions, time for music, dancing, art and celebration. Mrs Thatcher had demonstrated it at the UN – the political right had finally understood climate change and believed in action while there was time.

‘It’s the English proof. It’s coming out the same time as here. In six weeks.’ He slipped it into his backpack and got ready to go. ‘Thank you.’ ‘Is that all you’re going to say?’ He nodded. ‘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 shook his head and began to walk away. A grown man in a sulk? Pathetic. So he changed his mind and went back to her. ‘I’ll tell you your story. You wanted to be in love, you wanted to be married, you wanted a baby, and it all came your way. Then you wanted something else.’ The rain was starting again and falling heavily. He turned to leave but she held onto his sleeve. ‘Before you go. Tell me something about Larry. Please. Anything.’ ‘It’s just like you said. He’s OK.’ ‘You’re punishing me.’ ‘Come and see him. Anytime. He’d love that. Stay with us, or with Daphne and Peter. I mean it.’

They were all still young enough for the subject of ageing to be a running joke. It remained paradoxical that they now found themselves older than senior policemen, than their doctors, than their children’s head teacher – and now, senior to the Leader of the Opposition. A related and emerging topic was the care of elderly parents. These grown-up children were at that hinge of life when parents must begin to shrink and fold.

The Conservatives had been in power sixteen years. Labour had to become electable again. At Roland’s table and in other houses, in different combinations they dissected and welcomed ‘the third way’. Equality, always unattainable and incompatible with liberty, was to be replaced by social justice – equality of opportunity. The old Labour ambition, no longer taken seriously, to nationalise all the major industries – to be junked. The Bank of England to become independent and depoliticised. ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ – no voter, left or right, could argue with that. Education and health would be central.

Now, as the voices around him rose, he was going further as he entered a condition – hopeless to have tried to explain it – in which he took pleasure in mere existence. What luck, just to be, to have a mind, an asset never entered in the credit columns of social-capital ledgers. He remembered a fragment from the ‘Ode to Psyche’: the wreath’d trellis of a working brain.

The following evening, adults and children were standing in the garden together to watch the moon rise from behind a stand of oaks and ashes. As it coyly peeped clear of the highest branches, Lawrence, determined to be conversational, tugged at the arm of their host and made the solemn pronouncement that passed into family legend. ‘Do you know, in my country we also have a moon.’

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

Lawrence may have seen the brightness in his father’s eyes. It was the boy who would comfort the man. He said in a tone of gentle encouragement, ‘What did they have for their lunch?’

Roland remembered the coking station. Mothers used to take their children to stand about in the yard breathing the fumes to cure their colds and coughs.

Roland didn’t express surprise at this revision of the past or challenge his mother with the old account. He wanted her to keep telling her history. During her stay in Clapham she spoke less of Robert than of Jack. Before the war it was always the village policeman who brought him back after he had vanished for weeks or months. While Jack was away Rosalind would be destitute and ‘on the parish’ – living off meagre state assistance. It was obvious that Jack did not go off to sleep under hedges, or not alone. Despite that, he now appeared to flourish in Rosalind’s memory as a romantic figure, reckless and unfaithful but thoroughly interesting. He was no longer a forbidden subject. Unlike her second husband it was adventures he craved, not discipline and order. He had fought in North Africa and Italy, France, Belgium and Holland and had died for his country. He shone now and she could claim him.

Soon, she would go to live with Susan and her husband Michael. The house would be sold. When he reminded her of that, she said, ‘I haven’t seen Susan in two years. She doesn’t speak to me now.’ ‘You saw her last week.’ She looked up, startled, and struggled to make the adjustment and her confabulation. ‘Oh, that Susan.’ ‘Which Susan were you thinking of?’ She shrugged.

Stephen Hawking had once said, ‘When I hear of Schrödinger’s cat I reach for my gun.’

He assured himself that he had his freedom and he was having fun. He could control his occasional anxieties about the aimlessness of his existence.

He accepted the routine, the 7.30 alarm, the Northern Line commute, without complaint. He had a firmer work ethic than his father had at that age but he had inherited a similar sense of entitlement to pleasure. He usually went straight from work to see friends.

He walked because he was cautious. No, uptight. He did not trust the Tube. Only a minuscule faction, credulous and cruel, believed that the New York hijackers reclined in paradise and should be followed. But here, in a population of 60 million, there must be some. Chosen from among the bearers of ‘Rushdie Must Die’ placards or the burners of his novel, or from among the younger brothers, sons and daughters.

Then you started your lessons. You were quiet, shy, vulnerable, a long way from home. It set off something in me. I tried to explain it away as frustrated maternal feeling. And my loneliness. Or because little boys can be pretty, these were buried lesbian feelings I was discovering. I wanted to adopt you. You were so quiet and unhappy. But it was more than all of those. I knew that really, but I couldn’t admit it to myself. The other thing was that very soon I could tell that you were gifted. There was one time you came in. I thought I knew you well enough by then to be convinced you were lying when you said you’d been practising the first Bach prelude. But I was wrong. You played it so beautifully, expressively, with such a lovely touch. Impossible sounds, coming from a child! I had to turn away because I thought I might cry. Then, I couldn’t help myself, I kissed you. On the lips. As my feelings about your coming each week got stronger the only way I could deal with them was to be or pretend to be very strict with you. I mocked you. I even hit you, slapped you hard.’ ‘You used a ruler.’

During those years his writers were Kerouac, Hesse and Camus. From among the living, Lowell, Moorcock, Ballard and Burroughs. Ballard had been to King’s, Cambridge but Roland forgave him that, as he would have forgiven him anything. He had a romantic view of writers. They should be, if not barefoot bums, light-footed, unrooted, free, living a vagabond life on the edge, gazing into the abyss and telling the world what was down there. Not knighthoods or pearls, for sure.

The larger subject was the ruthlessness of artists. Do we forgive or ignore their single-mindedness or cruelty in the service of their art? And are we more tolerant the greater the art? That was the other reason Roland was there.

It was the professor’s view that The Dolphin was one of the poet’s finest works. Should it have been published? He thought not and believed that there was no contradiction in saying so. As to whether one’s view of Lowell’s behaviour should be tempered by the quality of the outcome, he thought it was irrelevant. Whether cruel behaviour enabled great or execrable poetry made no difference. A cruel act remained just that.

Roland thought his son had poor judgement in his women friends. Lawrence would deny it but he preferred danger, rawness, instability, emotional extremes. Some were single mothers with complicated stories. Like Lawrence, like Roland for that matter, they had no profession (Roland did not think of himself as a musician), no tradeable skills, no money. Lawrence’s affairs often terminated in an explosion, each starburst with its own spectacular quality. His ex-lovers did not remain in his life as friends. There, at least, he differed from Roland. Everyone said that Lawrence would make a wonderful father. But each affair as it ended looked like a lucky escape for both. Lucky too that so far no child was left behind.

He did not need his life to become more interesting. He wanted to read books and see the same handful of old friends.

This was a young woman of great beauty and poise. Robert said, ‘And I never knew her.’ Roland nodded. He thought but did not say that he too never knew her. The mother he knew was fretful, bowed, meek, apologetic. Now he understood that distant sorrow that hung about her and what she grieved for. The young woman in the photograph vanished on Reading station in 1942.

Roland went to the pulpit to deliver the eulogy. Henry, the eldest, had not wanted to do it and nor did Susan. Facing Roland were many who’d had only the briefest education. He did not know how much history they knew. Speaking without notes he reminded the congregation of the year of Rosalind’s birth, 1915. He said it was hard to think of another historical period when a single lifetime of ninety years could have encompassed as much change as hers did. When she was born, the Russian Revolution was two years away, the First World War was only just beginning its terrible slaughter. The inventions that would transform the twentieth century – the wireless, the car, the telephone, the aeroplane – had not yet touched the lives of the villagers of Ash. Television, computers, the Internet were years away and unimaginable. So too was the Second War, with its even greater slaughter. It would shape Rosalind’s life and the lives of everyone she knew. Ash was still a horse-drawn world in 1915, hierarchical, agricultural, tightly knit. A visit to the doctor could be a serious financial setback to a working family. Rosalind wore callipers on her legs at the age of three to correct for malnutrition. By the end of her life a spacecraft had entered the orbit of Mars, we contemplated the unknowns of global warming and were beginning to wonder if artificial intelligence might one day replace human life.

The pain, she thought, was going to be big, ‘like a tower’. It frightened her. So did the thought of losing her mind if the secondaries reached her brain. As for the sorrow – not seeing the four children further into adult life, never knowing the grandchildren to come, not being with him into old age, not discovering the marriage they should have started long ago. ‘My fault,’ Roland said. She did not contradict him, merely squeezed his hand. Later, on the walk back to the hotel, on that same subject, she murmured, ‘You were a restless fool.’

He had been in the Medical Corps, tending troops as they fought their way across the north German plain towards Berlin. He was not, she told Roland, a demonstrative man but he held her hand as he told her about his work and explained as best he could to a nine-year-old the system of triage. As their unit pushed further east, further from home he had written letters to Daphne’s mother. ‘I asked him what he wrote about. He said he described everything, even the wounds he had tended and told her that he loved her very much and that when he got back, they’d get married and one day have a little girl like me. I can’t tell you, Roland, what a joy it was to hear him say that. He was an extremely reserved man. I’d never heard him use the word love. People didn’t in those days, not to children. To hear him say that he loved my mother gave me a great glow of love for him.

I’d like you to come here alone with my ashes. Getting all the children here at the same time would be hopeless. Don’t come with a friend, don’t bring any of your lovely ex-lovers. Especially don’t let Peter barge in. He’s made me miserable too often. Anyway, he hates walking and the big outdoors. Come alone and think about our happiness here. And tip me in the river.’ Then she added, ‘If the wind’s blowing you can go down and do it from the bank.’

I fell in love as a teenager with a Bulgarian. He told me that he would one day be a famous poet. I wonder if he made it. Lives are so hard to predict. I came back to the same place more than forty years later to fall in love with you or discover that I had long ago.

The proximity and clarity of her voice sharpened his memory of her courage, of the pain she was in when she wrote her note in the overheated ward with the green curtains drawn around her narrow bed and the morphine pump’s tube fixed into the base of her thumb. Her brave words in loopy copperplate enhanced his awareness of the valley, its generous light and space, its sonorous river tumbling south-west, of the feel of the coarse grass under one hand and now, as he drank deeply, the cold water-bottle in the other. He was lucky to be alive.

Soon the drugs did nothing for her pain and she longed to die. Here was the humiliation she had always feared, but pain rendered her insensible to it. He heard her beg a doctor in a small voice to release her. She tried it with the nurses, who were now her friends, to allow her an overdose that no one would know about. But the staff, kindly as always, were bound by law to their medical duty to keep her alive in pain until she dropped. They were prepared to kill her by omission, by denying her food and drink. Intense and unremitting thirst was added to her ordeal. Roland moistened her lips with a wet sponge. Her lips were cracked as though she had crawled across a desert. Her eyes were yellow. Her breath smelled of something rotting. He took the ‘nil by mouth’ sign off the foot of her bed and went to the nurse’s station to insist that she be given water whenever she asked for it. They shrugged OK, that was fine by them. Not long before, legislation had come before Parliament yet again that would have allowed Daphne to choose the moment of her death. The Church worthies in the Lords, the archbishops, fought it. They hid their theological objections behind lurid tales of greedy relatives wanting to get their hands on the money. The divines were beneath contempt.

Roland said all this to Lawrence in a hospital corridor. One of his careless rants – doctors were probably walking by and heard him. Two centuries passed before the establishment thought it worthwhile to look down a microscope to examine the micro-organisms Antonie van Leeuwenhoek had described in 1673. They set themselves against hygiene because it was an insult to the profession, against anaesthesia because pain was a God-given element of illness, against the germ theory of disease because Aristotle and Galen thought otherwise, against evidence-based medicine because that was not how things were done. They clung to their leeches and cupping for as long as possible. Into the mid-twentieth century, they defended mass tonsillectomy of children, despite the evidence. In the end, the profession always came round. One day they would come round to the right of a rational person to choose death rather than unbearable unrelievable pain. Too late for Daphne.

He was plausible within the digital age, like a man in cunning disguise, but he remained a citizen of the analogue world.

Still, in the Second Law, which was the third because they started at zero, he was reminded of a truth obvious to all householders. Just as heat bled out into cold and not the reverse, so order bled out into chaos and never in reverse. A complex entity like a person eventually died and became a disordered pile of disparate bits which must begin to move apart. The dead never sprang into ordered life, never became the living, whatever the bishops might say or pretend to believe.

Order was a boulder to be rolled uphill. The kitchen would not tidy itself.

Roland had remembered the famous story about Sartre, told by Simone de Beauvoir. He smoked sixty a day and philosophised at length about the pleasures of tobacco. His habit was ruining his health. When his legs gave way and he had a heavy fall he was told frankly by a doctor in the hospital that if he continued smoking, first his toes would be amputated, then his feet and ultimately his legs. If he gave up the habit, his health could be restored. It was his choice. Sartre said that he would need to think it over. The joke, if it was a joke, was lost on Ingrid. Lawrence was amused.

One great inconvenience of death, according to Roland, lay in being removed from the story.

The consultant was a huge pink fellow, with a head so bald and polished it showed a faint tinge of green reflected from the shrubbery outside his window.

She spoke softly in the coaxing sing-song voice she sometimes heard her mother use on her little brother. ‘Komm, Opa. Hier lang.’ Come on, Grandpapa. It’s this way. Frowning with concern, she took his free hand in hers and began to lead him across the room.