Authors: Ian McEwan
I stopped outside the dark house in the car I had rented at Montpellier airport. Then I got out and stood a while in the orchard looking at the starry November sky, overcoming my reluctance to go in. It was never a pleasant experience to return to the bergerie when it had been closed down for months, or even weeks. No one had been here since the end of our long summer holiday, since our noisy, chaotic departure one morning in early September, after which the last echoes of children’s voices had faded into the silence of old stones and the bergerie had settled again into its longer perspective, not of holiday weeks, or children’s growing years, or even the decades of ownership, but of centuries, rural centuries. I did not really believe this, but I could imagine how, in our absence, June’s spirit, her many ghosts, might stealthily re-assert possession, recapturing not just her furniture and kitchenware and pictures, but the curl of a magazine cover, the ancient Australia-shaped stain on the bathroom wall, and the latent body shape of her old gardening jacket still hanging behind a door because no one could bear to throw it out. After an absence, the very space between objects was altered, tilted, washed a pale brown, or the essence of that colour, and sounds – the first turning of the key in the lock – acquired a subtly transformed acoustic, a dead echo just beyond the aural range that suggested an invisible, almost answering presence. Jenny hated opening up the house. It was more difficult at night; the place had expanded piecemeal over forty years, and the front door was nowhere near the electricity switchboard now. You had to walk right through the living room
kitchen to reach it and I had forgotten to bring a torch.
I opened the front door and stood before a wall of darkness. Then I reached inside, up to a shelf where we tried to remember to keep a candle and a box of matches. There was nothing there. I stood and listened. Whatever sensible thing I told myself, I could not banish the thought that in a house where a woman had given herself for so many years to the contemplation of eternity, some delicate emanation, a gossamer web of consciousness inhered and was aware of me. I could not bring myself to say June’s name aloud, but it was what I wanted to do, not to summon up the spirit, but chase it away. Instead I cleared my throat noisily, a sceptical, masculine sound. With the lights full on, the radio going, the whitebait I had bought at a road-side stall frying in June’s olive oil, the ghosts would retreat to the shadows. Daylight would help too, but it would be a couple of days, a couple of uneasy evenings, before the house was mine again. To take immediate possession of the bergerie you had to arrive with children. With their re-discovery of forgotten games and projects, their laughter and the squabbling over bunk beds – the spirit gracefully conceded to the energies of the living, and you could go anywhere in the house, even into June’s bedroom or her old study, without a thought.
With my hand stretched out in front of my face, I walked across the hall. Everywhere was a sweet smell I associated with June. It came from the lavender soap she had bought in bulk. We were not even half way through her supply. I groped my way across the living room and opened the door to the kitchen. The smell here was of metal and, faintly, butane gas. The fuse box and mains switch were in a cupboard on the wall on the far side of the room. Even in this darkness it showed as a blacker
patch ahead of me. As I edged around the kitchen table, the sensation that I was being watched intensified. The surface of my skin had become an organ of perception, sensitised to darkness and to every molecule of air. My bare arms were registering a threat. Something was up, the kitchen did not feel the same. I was moving in the wrong direction. I wanted to turn back, but that would have been ridiculous. The car was too small to sleep in. The nearest hotel was twenty-five miles away, and it was almost midnight.
The shapeless deeper black of the switchboard cupboard was twenty feet or so away and I was guiding myself towards it by trailing my hand along the edge of the kitchen table. Not since childhood had I been so intimidated by the dark. Like a character in a cartoon, I hummed softly, without conviction. No tune came to mind, and my random sequence of notes was foolish. My voice sounded weak. I deserved to be harmed. Once again, the thought came, clearer this time, that all I needed to do was leave. My hand brushed against something hard and round. It was the knob on the end of the kitchen-table drawer. I almost pulled on it, but I decided not to. I made myself go on, until I was standing free of the table. The patch on the wall was so black it throbbed. It had a centre, but no edges. I put my hand up towards it, and it was then that my nerve failed. I did not dare touch it. I took a step back and stood there, locked in indecision. I was trapped between my reason, which urged me to move quickly, turn on the power and see by bright artificial light how ordinariness simply continued, as it always did; and my superstitious dread, whose simplicity was even greater than the everyday.
I must have stood for more than five minutes. At one point I almost strode forwards to wrench open the
switchboard door, but the first signals to my legs did not get through. I knew that if I left the kitchen, I would not be able to return to it that night. And so I stood there until at last I remembered the kitchen drawer and why I had been about to open it. The candle and the box of matches that should have been by the front door might be there. I slid my hand back along the table, found the drawer, and groped among the secateurs and thumb tacks and string.
The stub of a candle, barely two inches long, lit at first attempt. The shadows of the switchboard cupboard bobbed against the wall at my approach. It looked different. The little wooden handle on its door was longer, more ornate and set at a new angle. I was two feet away when the ornamentation resolved itself into the form of a scorpion, fat and yellow, its pincers curved about the axis of the diagonal, and its chunkily segmented tail just obscuring the handle beneath.
These creatures are ancient chelicerates who trace their ancestry back to Cambrian times, almost 600 million years ago, and it is a kind of innocence, a hopeless ignorance of modern post-Holocene conditions that brings them into the homes of the newfangled apes; you find them squatting on walls in exposed places, their claws and sting pathetic, outdated defences against the obliterating swipe of a shoe. I took a heavy wooden spoon from the kitchen counter and killed this one with a single blow. It dropped to the floor and I stamped on it for good measure. I still had to overcome a reluctance to touch the place where its body had been. I remembered now that years ago we had found a nest of baby scorpions in this same cupboard.
The lights came on, the bulbous fifties fridge shuddered and began its familiar rattling lament. I was anxious not to reflect immediately on my experience. I brought in my
luggage, made up a bed, cooked the fish, played an old Art Pepper record at full volume and drank half a bottle of wine. I had no trouble falling asleep at three in the morning. The following day I set about preparing the house for our December holiday. I worked my way through the beginning of my list, spending several hours on the roof, fixing tiles dislodged in a September storm, and the rest of the day on jobs about the house. The weather was warm and towards the late afternoon I slung the hammock in June’s favourite spot, under the tamarisk tree. Lying here I had a view of golden light hanging in the valley towards St Privat, and beyond, the winter sun low over the hills around Lodève. I had been thinking about my fright all day. Two indistinct voices had followed me about the house as I did my work, and now as I sprawled with a pot of tea at my side they grew clearer.
June was impatient. ‘How can you pretend to doubt what’s staring you in the face? How can you be so perverse, Jeremy? You sensed my presence as soon as you stepped into the house. You had a premonition of danger and then confirmation that you would have been badly stung if you had ignored your feelings. I warned you, protected you, it was as simple as that, and if you’re prepared to go to such lengths to keep your scepticism intact, then you’re an ingrate and I should never have put myself out for you. Rationalism is a blind faith. Jeremy, how can you ever hope to see?’
Bernard was excited. ‘This really is a useful illustration! Of course, you can’t rule out the possibility that a form of consciousness survives death and acted here in your best interests. You should always keep an open mind. Beware of dismissing phenomena that don’t accord with current theories. On the other hand, in the absence of certain proof either way, why leap straight to such a radical
conclusion without considering other simpler possibilities. You’ve frequently “sensed June’s presence” in the house – simply another way of saying that it was once her place, is still full of her things and that being here, especially after an absence and before your own family has filled up the rooms, is bound to prompt thoughts of her. In other words this “presence” was in your mind, and projected by you on to the surroundings. Given our fear of the dead, it’s understandable that you were wary as you stumbled through the house in darkness. And given your state of mind, the electricity cupboard on the wall was bound to seem a frightening object – a patch of extra blackness in the dark, wasn’t it? You had the buried memory of finding a nest of scorpions there. And you ought to consider the possibility that in poor light you discerned the scorpion’s shape subliminally. And then the fact that your presentiments were justified. Well, dear boy! Scorpions are common enough in this part of France. Why shouldn’t one be sitting on the cupboard? And then again, suppose it had stung you on the hand? The poison would have been easy to suck. There would have been pain and discomfort for no more than a day or two – it wasn’t a black scorpion after all. Why should a spirit from beyond the grave put itself out to save you from a minor injury? If this is the level of the dead’s concern, why aren’t they interceding to prevent the millions of human tragedies that happen every day?’
‘Pah!’ I heard June say. ‘How would you know if we did? You wouldn’t believe it anyway. I looked after Bernard in Berlin, and you last night because I wanted to show you something, I wanted to show you how little you know about the God-made, God-filled universe. But there’s no evidence a sceptic can’t bend to fit his own drab tiny scheme ...’
‘Nonsense,’ Bernard murmured into my other ear. ‘The world that science is revealing is a scintillating, wondrous place. We don’t have to invent a god just because we don’t understand it all. Our investigations have hardly begun!’
‘Do you think you’d be hearing me now if some part of me did not still exist?’
‘You’re hearing nothing, dear boy. You’re inventing us both, extrapolating from what you know. There’s no one here but you.’
‘There’s God,’ said June, ‘and there’s the Devil.’
‘If I’m the Devil,’ said Bernard, ‘then the world’s no bad place at all.’
‘It’s Bernard’s innocence that’s precisely the measure of his evil. You were in Berlin, Jeremy. Look at the damage he and his kind have done in the name of progress.’
‘These pious monotheists! The pettiness, the intolerance, the ignorance, the cruelty they’ve unleashed in their certainty ...’
‘It’s a loving God and he’ll forgive Bernard ...’
‘We can love without a god, thank you very much. I detest the way Christians have hijacked that word.’
These voices took up residence, they pursued me and began to afflict me. The next day, when I was pruning the peach trees in the orchard, June said the tree I was working on and its beauty were God’s creation. Bernard said we knew a great deal about the way this and other trees evolved and our explanations did not require a god. Statements and counter-statements chased their tails as I chopped wood, unblocked gutters and swept out rooms. It was a drone that would not be banished. It continued, even when I managed to turn my attention away. If I listened, I learned nothing. Each proposition blocked the one before, or was blocked by the one that followed. It was a self-cancelling argument, a multiplication of zeros,
and I could not make it stop. When all my jobs were done and I spread out the notes for my memoir on the kitchen table my in-laws raised their voices.
I tried joining in. ‘Listen, you two. You’re in separate realms, you’re out of each other’s area of competence. It’s not the business of science to prove or disprove the existence of God and it’s not the business of the spirit to measure the world.’
There was an embarrassed silence. They seemed to wait for me to go on. Then I heard Bernard, or made him, say quietly, to June, not to me, ‘That’s all very well. But the Church always wanted to control science. All knowledge, for that matter. Take the case of Galileo ...’
And June cut across him to say, ‘It was the Church that kept learning alive for centuries in Europe. Remember when we were in Cluny in 1954, that man who showed us round the library ...?’
When I phoned home and complained to Jenny that I thought I might be going mad, she was gleefully un-consoling.
‘You wanted their stories. You encouraged them, you courted them. Now you’ve got them, quarrels and all.’ She recovered from a second fit of laughing and asked me why I didn’t write down what they were saying.
‘There’s no point. It just goes round and round.’
‘That’s just what I always said. You wouldn’t listen. You’re being punished for stirring it up.’
‘By who?’
‘Ask my mother.’
It was another clear day when, shortly after breakfast, I abandoned all responsibilities, absolved myself of all mental tasks and with a luxurious sense of truancy put on
my walking-boots, found a large-scale map, and stowed a water bottle and two oranges in my day pack.
I set off along the track that rises behind the bergerie and ascends northwards above a dry gully, through woods of scrub oak, winds under the massive rock of the Pas de l’Azé to reach the high plateau. At a firm pace it takes only half an hour to be up there, on the Causse de Larzac, with a cool breeze among the pines and a view towards the Pic de Vissou, and beyond, forty miles away, a silvery splinter of the Mediterranean. I followed a sandy track through the pine woods, past limestone outcroppings weathered into the shapes of ruins, then on to open ground that rises towards the Bergerie de Tédenat. From there I had a view over the plateau of the few hours’ walk to the village of St Maurice de Navacelles. Less than a mile beyond it was the huge fissure of the Gorge de Vis. Somewhere to the left, on its edge, was the Dolmen de la Prunarède.