Enduring Love (7 page)

I had
a second meeting that day—I was on a jury judging a science book prize—and by the time I got home Clarissa had left to meet her brother. I needed to talk to her. The effort of appearing sane and judicious for three hours had rather unhinged me. In our comfortable, almost tasteful apartment, the familiar mass and tone of the rooms looked tighter, and somehow dusty. I made a gin and tonic and drank it by the answering machine. The last of the messages was a breathless pause followed by the rattle of a receiver being replaced. I had to talk to Clarissa about Parry. I had to tell her about his call the night before and how he had followed me into the library, and about this discomfort, this apprehension I had. I thought of going to find her in the restaurant, but I knew that by now her adulterous brother would have begun the relentless plainsong of the divorce novitiate—the pained self-advocacy that hymns the transmutations of love into hatred or indifference. Clarissa, who was fond of her sister-in-law, would be listening in shock.

To calm myself I turned to that evening clinic of referred pain,
the TV news. Tonight, a mass grave in a wood in central Bosnia, a cancerous government minister with a love nest, the second day of a murder trial. What soothed me was the format’s familiarity: the warbeat music, the smooth and urgent tones of the presenter, the easeful truth that all misery was relative, then the final opiate, the weather. I returned to the kitchen to mix a second drink and sat with it at the kitchen table. If Parry had been trailing me all day, then he knew where I lived. If he hadn’t, then my mental state was very frail. But it wasn’t, fundamentally, and he had, and I had to think this through. I could put down his late-night call to stress and solitary drinking, but not if he had been following me about today. And I knew he had, because I had seen the white of his trainer and its red lace. Unless—and the habit of skepticism was proof of my sanity—unless the redness was imagined, or visually conflated. The library carpet, after all, was red. But I had seen the color woven into the glimpse of shoe. I had sensed him behind me even before I saw him. The unreliability of such intuition I was prepared to concede. But it was him. Like many people living a safe life, I immediately imagined the worst. What reason had I given him for murdering me? Did he think I had mocked his faith? Perhaps he had phoned again …

I picked up the cordless and dialed last number recall. The computerized female voice intoned an unfamiliar London number. I called it and listened and shook my head. However reasonable my suspicions, confirmation was still a surprise. Parry’s machine said, “Please leave your message after the tone. And may the Lord be with you.” It was him, and it was two sentences. That his faith should have such reach, into the shallows of his answering machine, into the angles of his prose. What had he meant when he said he felt it too? What did he want?

I looked toward the gin and decided against. A more immediate problem was how to spend the evening until Clarissa’s return. If I
didn’t make conscious choices now, I knew I would brood and drink. I didn’t want to see friends, I had no need of entertainment, I wasn’t even hungry. Voids like these were familiar, and the only way across them was work. I went into my study, turned on the lights and the computer, and spread out my library notes. It was eight-fifteen. In three hours I could break the back of my piece on narrative in science. I already had the outlines of a theory—not one that I believed in, necessarily, but I could hang my piece around it. Propose it, evince the evidence, consider the objections, reassert it in conclusion. A narrative in itself—a little tired, perhaps, but it had served a thousand journalists before me.

Working was an evasion; I didn’t even doubt it at the time. I had no answers to my questions, and thinking would get me no further. My guess was that Clarissa would not be back before midnight, so I abandoned myself to my serious, flimsy argument. Within twenty minutes I had drifted into the desired state, the high-walled infinite prison of directed thought. It doesn’t always happen to me, and I was grateful that night. I didn’t have to defend myself against the usual flotsam—the scraps of recent memory, the tokens of things not done or ghostly wrecks of sexual longing. My beach was clean. I didn’t trick myself from my chair with promises of coffee, and despite the tonic I had no need to urinate.

It was the nineteenth-century culture of the amateur that nourished the anecdotal scientist. All those gentlemen without careers, those parsons with time to burn. Darwin himself, in pre-
Beagle
days, dreamed of a country living where he could pursue in peace his collector’s passion, and even in the life that genius and chance got him, Downe House was more parsonage than laboratory. The dominant artistic form was the novel, great sprawling narratives that not only charted private fates but made whole societies in mirror image and addressed the public issues of the day. Most educated people read
contemporary novels. Storytelling was deep in the nineteenth-century soul.

Then two things happened. Science became more difficult, and it became professionalized. It moved into the universities; parsonical narratives gave way to hard-edged theories that could survive intact without experimental support and that had their own formal aesthetic. At the same time, in literature and in other arts, a newfangled modernism celebrated formal, structural qualities, inner coherence, and self-reference. A priesthood guarded the temples of this difficult art against the trespasses of the common man.

Likewise in science. In physics, say, a small elite of European and American initiates accepted and acclaimed Einstein’s General Theory long before the confirming observational data were in. The Theory, which Einstein presented to the world in 1915 and ’16, made the proposition, offensive to common sense, that gravitation was simply an effect caused by the curvature of space-time wrought by matter and energy. It was predicted that light would be deflected by the gravitational field of the sun. An expedition had already been mounted to the Crimea to observe an eclipse in 1914 to test this out, but the war intervened. Another expedition set out in 1919 to two remote islands in the Atlantic. Confirmation was flashed around the world, but inaccurate or inconvenient data were overlooked in the desire to embrace the theory. More expeditions set out to observe eclipses and check Einstein’s predictions, in 1922 in Australia, in ’29 in Sumatra, in ’36 in the USSR, and in ’47 in Brazil. Not until the development of radio astronomy in the fifties was there incontrovertible experimental verification, but essentially these years of practical striving were irrelevant. The theory was already in the textbooks, from the twenties onward. Its integral power was so great, it was too beautiful to resist.

So the meanderings of narrative had given way to an aesthetics of
form; as in art, so in science. I typed on into the evening. I had spent too much time on Einstein, and I was casting about for another example of a theory accepted for reasons of its elegance. The less confident I became about this argument, the faster I typed. I found a kind of inverted argument from my own past: quantum electrodynamics. This time round there was a mass of experimental verification on hand for this set of ideas about electrons and light, but the theory, especially as propounded by Dirac in its original form, was slow to gain general acceptance. There were inconsistencies, there was lopsidedness. In short, the theory was unattractive, inelegant, it was a song sung out of tune. Acceptance withheld on grounds of ugliness.

I had been working for three hours and I had written two thousand words. I could have done with a third example, but my energy was beginning to fail. I printed out the pages and stared at them in my lap, astonished that such puny reasoning, such forced examples, could have held my attention for so long. Counterarguments welled from between the neat lines of text. What possible evidence could I produce to suggest that the novels of Dickens, Scott, Trollope, Thackeray, etc., had ever influenced by a comma the presentation of a scientific idea? Moreover, my examples were fabulously skewed. I had compared life sciences in the nineteenth century (the scheming dog in the library) to hard sciences in the twentieth. In the annals of Victorian physics and chemistry alone there was no end of brilliant theory that displayed not a shred of narrative inclination. And what, in fact, were the typical products of the twentieth-century scientific or pseudo-scientific mind? Anthropology, psychoanalysis—fabulation run riot. Using the highest methods of storytelling and all the arts of priesthood, Freud had staked his claim on the veracity, though not the falsifiability, of science. And what of those behaviorists and sociologists of the 1920s? It was as though an army of white-coated Balzacs had stormed the university departments and labs.

I fixed my twelve pages with a paper clip and balanced their weight in my hand. What I had written wasn’t true. It wasn’t written in pursuit of truth, it wasn’t science. It was journalism, magazine journalism, whose ultimate standard was readability. I wagged the pages in my hand, trying to devise further consolations. I had usefully distracted myself, I could make a separate coherent piece out of the counterarguments (the twentieth century saw the summation of narrative in science, etc.), and anyway, it was a first draft, which I would rewrite in a week or so. I tossed the pages onto the desk, and as they landed I heard, for the second time that day, the creak of a floorboard behind me. There was someone at my back.

The primitive, so-called sympathetic nervous system is a wondrous thing we share with all other species that owe their continued existence to being quick on the turn, fast and hard into battle, or fiery in flight. Evolution has culled us all into this efficiency. Nerve terminals buried deep in the tissue of the heart secrete their noradrenaline, and the heart lurches into accelerated pumping. More oxygen, more glucose, more energy, quicker thinking, stronger limbs. It’s a system so ancient, developed so far back along the branchings of our mammalian and premammalian past, that its operations never penetrate into higher consciousness. There wouldn’t be time anyway, and it wouldn’t be efficient. We only get the effects. That shot to the heart appears to occur simultaneously with the perception of threat: even as the visual or auditory cortex is sorting and resolving into awareness what fell upon eye or ear, those potent droplets are falling.

My heart had made its first terrifying cold pop even before I started to turn and rise from my chair and raise my hands, ready to defend myself, or even to attack. I would guess that modern humans, with no natural predators but themselves and with all their toys and mental constructs and cosy rooms, are relatively easy to creep up on. Squirrels and thrushes can only look down on us and smile.

What I saw coming toward me rapidly across the room, with arms outstretched like a cartoon sleepwalker, was Clarissa, and who knows by what complex intervention of higher centers I was able to convert plausibly my motions of primitive terror into a tenderly given and received embrace and to feel, as her arms locked round my neck, a pang of love that was in truth inseparable from relief.

“Oh Joe,” she said, “I’ve missed you all day, and I love you, and I’ve had such a terrible evening with Luke. And oh God, I love you.”

And oh God, I loved her. However much I thought about Clarissa, in memory or in anticipation, experiencing her again—the feel and sound of her, the precise quality of love that ran between us, the very animal presence—always brought, along with the familiarity, a jolt of surprise. Perhaps such amnesia is functional—those who could not wrench their hearts and minds from their loved ones were doomed to fail in life’s struggles and left no genetic footprints. We stood in the center of my study, Clarissa and I, on the yellow diamond at the middle of the Bokhara rug, kissing and embracing, and I heard through and between kisses the first fragments of her brother’s folly. Luke was leaving his kindly, beautiful wife and bonny twin daughters and Queen Anne house in Islington to live with an actress he had met three months before. Here was amnesia on a grander scale. He was considering, he had said over the seared scallops, quitting his job and writing a play, a monologue in fact, a one-woman show, which stood a chance of being put on in a room over a hairdresser’s in Kensal Green.

“Before we go to Paradise,” I began, and Clarissa finished, “By way of Kensal Green.”

“Reckless courage,” I said. “He must be living inside a hard-on.”

“Courage to shite!” She drew her breath sharply and shot me a beam of angry green. “An actress! He’s living inside a cliché!”

For a second I had become her brother. In recognition of that she
drew me close again and kissed me. “Joe. I’ve wanted you all day. After yesterday, and last night …”

Still hanging on to each other, we walked from study to bedroom. While Clarissa continued to tell me more tales from the ruined household and I described the piece I had written, we made preparations for our night journey into sex and sleep. I had already traveled some distance that evening from the time I had come in and had wanted only to talk to Clarissa about Parry. Work had settled on me a veil of abstracted contentment, and her arrival home, for all the sad story, had restored me completely. I felt frightened of nothing. Would it have been right, then, as we lay down face to face as we had the night before, to intrude on our happiness with an account of Parry’s phone call? Given what we had witnessed the day before, could I have destroyed our tenderness with fretful suspicions of being followed? The lights were dimmed; soon they would be out. John Logan’s ghost was still in the room, but it no longer threatened us. Parry was for tomorrow. All urgency had gone. With closed eyes I traced in double darkness Clarissa’s beautiful lips. She bit down on my knuckle, playfully hard. There are times when fatigue is the great aphrodisiac, annihilating all other thoughts, granting sensuous slow motion to heavy limbs, urging generosity, acceptance, infinite abandonment. We tumbled out of our respective days like creatures shaken from a net.