Authors: Ian McEwan
Were all these parents attractive to me simply because they were not mine? Try as I might, I could not answer yes, for they were undeniably likeable. They interested me,
I picked things up. At the Langleys I learned of sacrificial practices in the Arabian desert, improved my Latin and French and first heard the ‘Goldberg’ Variations. At the Silversmiths I heard tell of the polymorphous perverse, and was enraptured by tales of Dora, Little Hans and the Wolf Man, and ate lox, bagels and cream cheese, latkes, and borscht. At the Nugents, Janet talked me through the Profumo scandal and persuaded me to learn shorthand; her husband once gave an imitation of a man suffering the bends. These people treated me like a grown-up. They poured me drinks, offered me their cigarettes, asked my opinions. They were all in their forties, tolerant, relaxed, energetic. It was Cy Silversmith who taught me to play tennis. If any pair of them had been my parents (if only) I was certain I would have liked them more.
And if my parents had been alive, would I not be breaking for freedom like the rest? Again, I could not answer yes. What my friends were pursuing seemed to me the very antithesis of freedom, a masochistic lunge at downward social mobility. And how irritatingly predictable of my contemporaries, especially of Toby and Jo, that they should consider my domestic set-up as a very paradise: the stinking coven of our uncleaned apartment, its licentious late-morning gin, my stunning, chain-smoking sister, a Jean Harlow look-alike, one of the first of her generation into a mini-skirt, the adult drama of her hammer-blow, whip-crack marriage, and sadistic Harper, the leather feticheur with red and black tattoos of strutting cockerels on his tuberous forearms, and no one there to nag about the state of my room, my clothes, my diet, or my whereabouts, or my school work or my prospects or my mental or dental health. What more could I want? Nothing, except, they might add, to be shot of that kid who was always hanging around.
Such was the symmetry of our respective disaffections that it happened one winter’s evening that Toby was at my place, pretending to relax in the freezing squalor of our kitchen, smoking cigarettes and attempting to impress Jean who, it should be said, detested him, with his voice of the people – while I was at his, comfortable on the Chesterfield in front of an open fire, a glass of his father’s single malt warming in my hand, under my shoeless feet the lovely bokhara that Toby claimed was a symbol of cultural rape, listening to Tom Langley’s account of a deadly poisonous spider and the death throes of a certain third secretary on the first landing of the British Embassy in Caracas, while across the hall, through open doors, we heard Brenda at one of Scott Joplin’s lilting, syncopated rags which at that time were being rediscovered and had not yet been played to death.
I realise that much of the above tells against me, that it is Toby pursuing in impossible circumstances a beautiful crazy young woman beyond his reach, or his and Jo’s and the Silversmith kids’ excursions into the neighbourhood which display a proper appetite for life, and that a seventeen-year-old’s infatuation with comfort and the conversation of his elders suggests a dull spirit; and that in describing this period of my life I have unconsciously mimicked not only, here and there, the superior, sneering attitudes of my adolescent self, but also the rather formal, distancing, labyrinthine tone in which I used to speak, clumsily derived from my scant reading of Proust which was supposed to announce me to the world as an intellectual. All I can say for my younger self is that although I was hardly aware of it at the time, I missed my parents terribly. I had to build up my defences. Pomposity was one of them, another was my cultivated disdain for my friends’ activities. They could range freely because they
were secure; I needed the hearths they had deserted.
I was prepared to do without girls, partly because I thought they would distract me from my work. I rightly assumed that the surest route out of my situation – by which I mean living with Jean and Harper – was university, and for that I needed A levels. I worked fanatically, putting in two, three, even four hours a night long before the run-up to exams. Another reason for my timidity was that my sister’s first moves in that direction, when I was eleven and she was fifteen and we were living with our aunt, had been so noisily successful, with a faceless horde processing through the bedroom we were supposed to share (our aunt finally ejected us both), that I felt quite cowed. In that apportioning of experience and expertise that goes on between siblings, Jean had spread her beautiful limbs – to adapt Kafka’s formulation – across my map of the world and obliterated the territory marked ‘sex’, so that I was obliged to voyage elsewhere – to obscure islets marked Catullus, Proust, Powis Square.
And I did have my affair of the heart with Sally. With her I felt responsible and intact, and I did not need anyone else. She was a pale little girl. No one took her out much; when I came in from school I never felt like it, and Jean was not at all keen on outdoors. Much of the time I played with Sally in the big room. She had the three-year-old girl’s imperious manner. ‘Not on the chair! Come down here on the floor with me.’ We played Hospitals, or Houses, or Lost in the Woods, or Sailing to a New Place. Sally kept up a breathless narrative of our whereabouts, our motives, our sudden metamorphoses. ‘You’re not a monster, you’re a king!’ Then we might hear from the far end of the apartment a shout of rage from Harper, followed by a yelp of pain from Jean, and Sally would render a perfect, miniature adult grimace, a beautifully timed wince-cum-shrug
and say in the melodiously pure tones of a voice still new to grammatical construction, ‘Mummy and Daddy! What silly billies they are being again!’
And indeed they were. Harper was a security guard who claimed to be studying for an external degree in anthropology. Jean had married him when she was barely twenty and Sally was eighteen months. The following year, when Jean’s money came through, she bought the flat and lived off the change. Harper gave up his job, and the two of them hung around all day, drinking, fighting, making up. Harper had a gift for violence. There were times when I looked uneasily at my sister’s red cheek or swollen lip and thought of obscure manly codes which required me to challenge my brother-in-law and defend her honour. But there were also times when I went into the kitchen and found Jean at the table reading a magazine and smoking while Harper stood at the kitchen sink, naked but for his purple jock strap, with half a dozen bright red weals across his buttocks, humbly washing the dishes. I was grateful to acknowledge that I was out of my depth, and I retreated to the big room and the games with Sally I could understand.
I shall never understand why I did not know or guess that Jean and Harper’s violence extended to my niece. That she let twenty years go by before she told anyone shows how suffering can isolate a child. I did not know then how-adults can set about children, and perhaps I would not have wanted to know; I would be leaving soon, and already my guilt was growing. By the end of that summer, soon after my eighteenth birthday, Harper had left for good and I had my A levels and a place at Oxford. I should have been overjoyed a month later when I carried out my books and records from the apartment to a friend’s van; my two-year plan had worked, I was out, I was free. But Sally’s dogged, suspicious questions
as she tracked me backwards and forwards between our room and the pavement were an indictment of betrayal. ‘Where are you going? Why are you going? When are you coming back?’ To this last, sensing my evasiveness, my clotted silence, she returned again and again. And when she thought to lure me back, to divert me from a History degree with the suggestion, so pertly, so optimistically put, that we play instead, Sailing to a New Place, I put down my armful of books and ran out to the van to sit in the passenger seat and weep. I thought I knew only too well just how she felt, or how she would feel; it was nearly midday and Jean was still sleeping off the gin and pills with which she was mourning Harper’s departure. I would wake her before I left, but in some important respect Sally was on her own. And so she remains.
Neither Sally, Jean nor Harper play a part in what follows. Nor do the Langleys, Nugents or Silversmiths. I left them all behind. My guilt, my sense of betrayal would not permit me to return to Notting Hill, not even for a weekend. I could not bear to undergo another parting from Sally. The thought that I was inflicting on her the very loss I had suffered myself intensified my loneliness, and obliterated the excitement of my first term. I became a quietly depressed student, one of those dull types practically invisible to their contemporaries, apparently excluded by the very laws of nature from the process of making friends. I made for the nearest hearth. This one was in North Oxford and belonged to a fatherly tutor and his wife. For a short while I shone there, and a few people told me I was clever. But this was not enough to stop me leaving, North Oxford first, then, in my fourth term, the University itself. For years afterwards I continued to leave – addresses, jobs, friends, lovers. Occasionally I managed to obscure my irreducible sense of childish unbelonging by
making friends with someone’s parents. I would be invited in, I would come to life, then I would leave.
This sorry madness came to an end with my marriage, in my mid thirties, to Jenny Tremaine. My existence began. Love, to borrow Sylvia Plath’s phrase, set me going. I came to life for good, or rather, life came to me; I should have learned from my experience with Sally that the simplest way of restoring a lost parent was to become one yourself; that to succour the abandoned child within, there was no better way than having children of your own to love. And just when I no longer had need of them, I acquired parents in the form of in-laws, June and Bernard Tremaine. But there was no hearth. When I first met them they were living in separate countries and were barely on speaking terms. June had long before retreated to a remote hill top in southern France and was about to become very ill. Bernard was still a public figure who did all his entertaining in restaurants. They rarely saw their children. For their part, Jenny and her two brothers had despaired of their parents.
The habits of a lifetime could not be instantly erased. Somewhat to Jenny’s annoyance, I persisted in a friendship with June and Bernard. In conversations with them over several years, I discovered that the emotional void, the feeling of belonging nowhere and to no one that had afflicted me between the ages of eight and thirty-seven had an important intellectual consequence: I had no attachments, I believed in nothing. It was not that I was a doubter, or that I had armed myself with the useful scepticism of a rational curiosity, or that I saw all arguments from all sides; there was simply no good cause, no enduring principle, no fundamental idea with which I could identify, no transcendent entity whose existence I could truthfully, passionately or quietly assert.
Unlike June and Bernard. They began together as communists, then went their separate ways. But their capacity, their appetite, for belief never diminished. Bernard was a gifted entomologist; all his life he remained committed to the elation and limited certainties of science; he replaced his communism with thirty years’ devoted advocacy of numerous causes for social and political reform. June came to God in 1946 through an encounter with evil in the form of two dogs. (Bernard found this construction of the event almost too embarrassing to discuss.) A malign principle, a force in human affairs that periodically advances to dominate and destroy the lives of individuals or nations, then retreats to await the next occasion; it was a short step from this to a luminous countervailing spirit, benign and all-powerful, residing within and accessible to us all; perhaps not so much a step as a simultaneous recognition. Both principles were incompatible, she felt, with the materialism of her politics, and she left the Party.
Whether June’s black dogs should be regarded as a potent symbol, a handy catch phrase, evidence of her credulity or a manifestation of a power that really exists, I cannot say. In this memoir I have included certain incidents from my own life – in Berlin, Majdanek, Les Salces and St Maurice de Navacelles – that are open equally to Bernard and to June’s kind of interpretation. Rationalist and mystic, commissar and yogi, joiner and abstainer, scientist and intuitionist, Bernard and June are the extremities, the twin poles along whose slippery axis my own unbelief slithers and never comes to rest. In Bernard’s company, I always sensed there was an element missing from his account of the world, and that it was June who held the key. The assurance of his scepticism, his invincible atheism made me wary; it was too arrogant, too much was closed off, too much denied. In conversations with June, I found myself
thinking like Bernard; I felt stifled by her expressions of faith, and bothered by the unstated assumption of all believers that they are good because they believe what they believe, that faith is virtue, and, by extension, unbelief is unworthy or, at best, pitiable.
It will not do to argue that rational thought and spiritual insight are separate domains and that opposition between them is falsely conceived. Bernard and June often talked to me about ideas that could never sit side by side. Bernard, for example, was certain that there was no direction, no patterning in human affairs or fates other than that which was imposed by human minds. June could not accept this; life had a purpose and it was in our interests to open ourselves to it. Nor will it do to suggest that both these views are correct. To believe everything, to make no choices, amounts to much the same thing, to my mind, as believing in nothing at all. I am uncertain whether our civilisation at this turn of the millennium is cursed by too much or too little belief, whether people like Bernard and June cause the trouble, or people like me. But I would be false to my own experience if I did not declare my belief in the possibility of love transforming and redeeming a life. I dedicate this memoir to my wife, Jenny, and to Sally, my niece, who continues to suffer the consequences of her childhood; may she too find this love.