Amsterdam

by Ian McEwan

Clive knew exactly what it was he had to do. Even as he was easing himself back down the slope, he understood that his hesitation had been a sham.

he hurried back along the way he had come and then dropped down along the western side of the ridge in a long arc of detour. Twenty minutes later he found a flat-topped rock to use as a table and stood hunched over his scribble.

At last he managed to calm himself and begin to work his way back. Here were the three notes of the birdcall, here they were inverted for the piccolo, and here was the beginning of the overlapping, extending steps …

He wanted to

be away, he was longing to be on a train, hurtling southward, away from the Lakes. He wanted the anonymity of the city again, and the confinement of his studio, and—he had been thinking about this scrupulously—surely it was excitement that made him feel this way, not shame.

Julian Garmony was typical of it and was a despicable person whose head was urgently needed on a plate.

He was aware that his finger was tapping the radiator to the beat of some new rhythm, and he imagined a shift of mood, of key, and a note sustained over changing harmonies and a savage kettledrum pulse. He turned and hurried from the room. He had an idea, a quarter

an idea, and before it went he had to get to the piano.

if Garmony ever got to be prime minister and the country was lying in ruins, people would regret

He knew only one profession, and no one would employ him in it now. He was in disgrace, and he was too old to retrain.

above all the element that Vernon considered to be the worst of human vices—personal betrayal.

The myopia and hypocrisy of Vernon and Clive knows no bounds.

Had the card arrived on Monday, he might have read it differently. This was the comic nature of their fate; a first-class stamp would have served both men well.

this was the nature of their tragedy.

It can happen sometimes, with those who brood on an injustice, that a taste for revenge can usefully combine with a sense of obligation.

to read again about that medical scandal in Holland.

wondering whether he should ring Clive and pretend to make peace, in order to invite himself to Amsterdam.

All in all, given what he’d been through and the ordeals that lay ahead, and the certainty that events now were sure to accelerate giddily, he didn’t feel so bad.

He would miss the first hours of rehearsal, but an orchestra finding its way through a

new piece—always a dog...

As for the Manchester police station, he had handled it capably,

a touch of nostalgia for the bracing ambience and those hard-pressed men with whom he had worked so well.

just how hard it must have been to write a symphony to order with a looming deadline, and what a dilemma he had been in when he was crouching behind that rock. They seemed rather keen to understand all the difficulties associated with composing the crucial melody. Could he hum it for them? He certainly could.

Social workers came and went, and most of them looked as criminally inclined, or as unfortunate, as their clients. Everybody smoked.

a lot of shouting, and routine, uncolorful swearing, and clenched-fist threats that no one took seriously. It was one huge unhappy family with domestic problems that were of their nature insoluble. This was the family living room.

Practically every member of the public

who came in, voluntarily or not, was down-at-heel, and it seemed to Clive that the main business of the police was to deal with the numerous and unpredictable consequences of poverty, which they did with far more patience and less squeamishness than he ever could.

once called t...

three-month flirtation with anarchism in 1967, that they were the cause of crime and would one day be unnecessary. The whole time he was ther...

deference. They seemed to like him, th...

They were working together as a team now, and Clive had accepted his role as a key prosecution witness.

Consider himself an honorary policeman. They had a patrol car going out toward the airport. Would he like a lift in that direction?

he thought about Vernon, and the symphony. Was the work ruined, or simply flawed? Perhaps not flawed so much as sullied, and in ways that only he could understand. Ruinously cheated of its greatest moment. He dreaded the premiere.

in all tortuous sincerity, that in making his various arrangements on Vernon’s behalf, he, Clive, was doing no more than honoring his word.

Destructive tendencies, delusions of omnipotence. A disintegrated personality. The matter of premedication was discussed. How should it be administered? A glass of champagne was suggested, which seemed to Clive to strike the appropriate festive note.

the conductor. Giulio Bo’s eyes, however, were closed.

with splayed, trembling fingers was gently lifting into being the muted trombone that now delivered, sweetly, wisely, conspiratorially, the first full statement of the melody, the “Nessun dorma” of the century’s end, the melody Clive had hummed to the detectives yesterday and for which he had been prepared to sacrifice an anonymous rambler.

A trumpet sounded a witty four-note quotation from the D major concerto—Clive’s, not Haydn’s. Ah, to be in continental Europe and be maestro! What balm. He embraced Giulio, shook the hand of the concertmaster, acknowledged the musicians with a smile, a little bow, and hands half raised in modest surrender,

the music, the wondrous transformation of thought into sound.

Sometimes Clive

could lose sight of his ultimate purpose—to create this pleasure at once so sensual and abstract, to translate into vibrating...

were forever just beyond reach, suspended tantalizingly at a point where emot...

tangled, half-suppressed crescendo that erupted at last into the melody’s final statement, a blaring, carnivalesque tutti. But fatally unvaried. Clive put his face into his hands. He was right to have worried. It was ruined goods.

Now he could not remember the exquisite change he had been about to make.

presented like this, as a simple fortissimo repetition, it was literal-minded bombast, it was bathos; less than that, it was a void: one that only revenge could fill.

It was not dissonant at all. Practically every instrument was playing the same note. It was a drone.

Suddenly Clive’s gift of perfect pitch was an affliction.

He stood on a street corner and breathed the mild Amsterdam air which always seemed to taste faintly of cigar smoke and ketchup.

Vinegar… a better choice perhaps?

experienced an auditory hallucination, an illusion—or a disillusion. The absence of the variation had wrecked his masterpiece, and he was clearer than ever now, if such a thing were possible, about the plans

he had made.

What he was about to do was contractually right, it had the amoral inevitability of pure geometry, and he didn’t feel a thing.