Amsterdam

by Ian McEwan

Garmony spoke up for the benefit of the company, two of whom were young men with the pleasant, openly dishonest look of gossip columnists. The minister was performing and Clive was a kind of prop.

It had been a while since he had met a politician close up, and what he had forgotten was the eye movements, the restless patrol for new listeners or defectors, or the proximity of some figure of higher status, or some other main chance that might slip by.

wanted to congratulate you on your commission. The Millennial Symphony.

there was still a little more to be wrung from the famous composer’s presence. “Do you know, I’ve often thought that it’s the freedom of artists like yourself to pursue your work that makes my own job worthwhile …”

Clive gazed on, no sign of his growing distaste showing in his expression.

A man twitching in front of mirrors. But surely she preferred emotional warmth. Lie still, look at me, really look at me. Perhaps it was nothing more than a mistake, Molly and Garmony. Either way, Clive now found it unbearable.

“These are the traditions that make us what we are.”

Garmony turned his back on him to say to the journalists, “A great man, Clive Linley. To air differences and remain friends, the essence of civilized existence, don’t you think?”

Three-thirty, and already dark enough to turn on lights. Molly was ashes. He would work through the night and sleep until lunch. There wasn’t really much else to do. Make something, and die.

a symphony from which could be distilled at least one tune, a hymn, an elegy for the maligned and departed century, that could be incorporated into the official proceedings, much as “Nessun dorma” had been into a football tournament.

it was time to

reassert music’s essential communicativeness, for it was forged, in Europe, in a humanistic tradition that had always acknowledged the enigma of human

time to recognize the primacy of rhythm and pitch and the elemental nature of melody.

our capacity to “read” rhythms, melodies, and pleasing harmonies, like our uniquely human ability to learn language, was genetically prescribed. These three elements were found by anthropologists to exist in all musical cultures. Our ear for harmony was hardwired.

the writing of a symphony is physically arduous. Every second of playing time involved writing out, note by note, the parts of up to two dozen instruments, playing them back, making adjustments to the score, playing again, rewriting, then sitting in silence, listening to the inner ear synthesize and orchestrate the vertical array of scribbles

and deletions; amending again until the bar was right, and playing it once more on the piano.

By four o’clock in the morning he had written out the major parts and knew exactly how the modulation would work, how the mists would evaporate.

The thought recurred to Vernon Halliday

that he might not exist.

had spoken, separately and intensely, to forty people. And not only spoken: in all but two of these exchanges he had decided, prioritized, delegated, chosen, or offered an opinion that was bound to be interpreted as a command.

it seemed to Vernon that he was infinitely diluted; he was simply the sum of all the people who had listened to him, and when he was alone, he was nothing at all.

This sense of absence had been growing since Molly’s funeral.

one of the marvels of newspaper lore,

the manner in which he had become editor of the Judge. Years back, he had been the bland and hardworking lieutenant for two gifted editors

Meanwhile, back in London, one gifted editor was falling to another in bloody battles with a meddlesome board of directors. Vernon’s return home coincided with a sudden realignment of proprietorial interests. The stage was littered with the severed limbs and torsos of titans cut down to size.

There was no one left but Vernon.

was there when he woke in the morning, continuous and indefinable, not cold, or tight, or airy, though somewhere in between. Perhaps the word was dead. His right hemisphere had died.

Vernon liked to say at the morning editorial conference, “you’re all going to have to get your hands dirty.” Everyone nodded, nobody agreed.

They felt safe in this view because no one on the paper, apart from Vernon’s predecessors, had ever been sacked.

He touched the side of his head. Now that he was in company again, back on the job, his interior absence was no longer an affliction.

“On this paper, hopefully is not a sentence adverb, nor will it ever be, especially in a leader, for godsakes. And none …”

“None usually takes a singular verb. Can we get these two things generally understood?”

the kind of thing the grammarians liked to hear. Together they would see the paper into the grave with its syntax pure.

One of his few successful innovations,

reduced the daily conference from forty to fifteen minutes by means of a few modest...

than five minutes on the postmortem—what’s done is done; no joke-telling, and above all, no anecdotes—he didn’t ...

The sensation, or the nonsensation, still occupied the right side of his head like a tight-fitting cap. When he trailed his finger across his scalp, he could identify the border, the demarcation line where feeling on the left side became not quite its opposite but its shadow, or its ghost.

Yes, if Vernon ever sacked anyone, it would be Frank, who was shaking himself vigorously, for just

a second too long, and pressing on with his apology.

Cassius is hungry, Vernon thought. He’ll head his department, then he’ll want my job. Dibben turned to the washbasin. Vernon put his hand lightly on his shoulder, the forgiving touch. “It’s all right, Frank. I’d rather hear opposing views at conference. That’s the whole point of it.”

This festival of first-naming marked the end of the exchange.

By the early eighties this was the home of a youngish, wealthy composer—by

The years and all the successes had narrowed his life to its higher purpose; he was becoming not quite zealous, but cagey, about his privacy.

The open house was no more.

mounted the steps to the front door, he experienced again, though only vestigially, a sensation

he never had these days, of genuine anticipation, the feeling that anything might happen.

Vernon saw no immediate signs of distr...

Clive

gently massaging the palm of his left hand. “I’ve been thinking about Molly,” he said at last. “The way she died, the speed of it, her helplessness, how she wouldn’t have wanted it that way. Stuff we’ve talked about before.”

Both men accepted that the nature of the request, its intimacy and self-conscious reflection on their friendship, had created, for the moment, an uncomfortable emotional proximity,