Ian McEwan - In Between the Sheets

That night he had the wet dream. The dream itself concerned the café, the girl and the coffee machine. It ended in sudden and intense pleasure, but for the moment the details were beyond recall. He got out of the bath hot and dizzy, on the edge, he thought, of an hallucination. Balanced on the side of the bath, he waited for it to wear off, a certain warping of the space between objects. He dressed and went outside, into the small garden of dying trees he shared with other residents in the square. It was seven o’clock. Already Drake, self-appointed custodian of the garden, was down on his knees by one of the benches. Paint scraper in one hand, a bottle of colorless liquid in the other.

“Pigeon crap,” Drake barked at Stephen. “Pigeons crap and no one can sit down. No one.” Stephen stood behind the old man, his hands deep in his pockets, and watched him work at the gray-and-white stains. He felt comforted. Around the edge of the garden ran a narrow path worn to a trough by the daily traffic of dog walkers, writers with blocks and married couples in crisis.

Walking there now Stephen thought, as he often did, of Miranda his daughter. On Sunday she would be fourteen, today he should find her a present. Two months ago she had sent him a letter. “Dear Daddy, are you looking after yourself? Can I have twenty-five pounds please to buy a record-player? With all my love, Miranda.” He replied by return post and regretted it the instant the letter left his hands. “Dear Miranda, I am looking after myself, but not sufficiently to comply with… etc.” In effect it was his wife he had addressed. At the sorting office he had spoken to a sympathetic official who led him away by the elbow. You wish to retrieve a letter? This way please. They passed through a glass door and stepped out on to a small balcony. The kindly official indicated with a sweep of his hand the spectacular view, two acres of men, women, machinery and moving conveyor belts. Now where would you like us to start?

Returning to his point of departure for the third time he noticed that Drake was gone. The bench was spotless and smelling of spirit. He sat down. He had sent Miranda thirty pounds, three new ten-pound notes in a registered letter. He regretted that too. The extra five so clearly spelled out his guilt. He spent two days over a letter to her, fumbling, with reference to nothing in particular, maudlin. “Dear Miranda, I heard some pop music on the radio the other day and I couldn’t help wondering at the words which…” To such a letter he could conceive of no reply. But it came about ten days later. “Dear Daddy, Thanks for the money. I bought a Musivox Junior the same as my friend Charmian. With all my love, Miranda. P.S. It’s got two speakers.”

Back indoors he made coffee, took it into his study and fell into the mild trance which allowed him to work three and a half hours without a break. He reviewed a pamphlet on Victorian attitudes towards menstruation, he completed another three pages of a short story he was writing, he wrote a little in his random journal. He typed, “nocturnal emission like an old man’s last gasp” and crossed it out. From a drawer he took a thick ledger and entered in the credit column “Review… 1500 words. Short story… 1020 words. Journal… 60 words.” Taking a red biro from a box marked “pens” he ruled off the day, closed the book and returned it to its drawer. He replaced the dust cover on his typewriter, returned the telephone to its cradle, gathered up the coffee things onto a tray and carried them out, locking the study door behind him, thus terminating the morning’s rite, unchanged for twenty-three years.

He moved quickly up Oxfort Street gathering presents for his daughter’s birthday. He bought a pair of jeans, a pair of colored canvas running shoes suggestive of the Stars and Stripes. He bought three colored T-shirts with funny slogans… It’s Raining in My Heart, Still a Virgin, and Ohio State University. He bought a pomander and a game of dice from a woman in the street and a necklace of plastic beads. He bought a book about women heroes, a game with mirrors, a record gift certificate for £5, a silk scarf and a glass pony. The silk scarf putting him in mind of underwear, he returned to the shop determined.

The erotic, pastel hush of the lingerie floor aroused in him a sense of taboo, he longed to lie down somewhere. He hesitated at the entrance to the department then turned back. He bought a bottle of cologne on another floor and came home in a mood of gloomy excitement. He arranged his presents on the kitchen table and surveyed them with loathing, their sickly excess and condescension. For several minutes he stood in front of the kitchen table staring at each object in turn, trying to relive the certainty with which he had bought it. The gift certificate he put to one side, the rest he swept into a carrier bag and threw it into the cupboard in the hallway. Then he took off his shoes and socks, lay down on his unmade bed, examined with his finger the colorless stain that had hardened on the sheet, and then slept till it was dark.

Naked from the waist Miranda Cooke lay across her bed, arms spread, face buried deep in the pillow, and the pillow buried deep under her yellow hair. From a chair by the bed a pink transistor radio played methodically through the top twenty. The late-afternoon sun shone through closed curtains and cast the room in the cerulean green of a tropical aquarium. Little Charmian sat astride Miranda’s buttocks, tiny Charmian, Miranda’s friend, plied her fingernails backwards and forwards across Miranda’s pale unblemished back.

Charmian too was naked, and time seemed to stand still. Ranged along the mirror of the dressing table, their feet concealed by cosmetic jars and tubes, their hands raised in perpetual surprise, sat the discarded dolls of Miranda’s childhood.

Charmian’s caresses slowed to nothing, her hands came to rest in the small of her friend’s back. She stared at the wall in front of her, swaying abstractedly. Listening.

“I didn’t know that was in,” she said. Miranda twisted her head and spoke from under her hair.

“It’s come back,” she explained. “The Rolling Stones used to sing it.”

When it was over Miranda spoke peevishly over the D.J.’s hysterical routine. “You’ve stopped. Why have you stopped?”

“I’ve been doing it for ages.”

“You said half an hour for my birthday. You promised.” Charmian began again. Miranda, sighing as one who only receives her due, sank her mouth into the pillow. Outside the room the traffic droned soothingly, the pitch of an ambulance siren rose and fell, a bird began to sing, broke off, started again, a bell rang somewhere downstairs and later a voice called out, over and over again, another siren passed, this time more distant… it was all so remote from the aquatic gloom where time had stopped, where Charmian gently drew her nails across her friend’s back for her birthday. The voice reached them again. Miranda stirred and said, “I think that’s my mum calling me. My dad must’ve come.”

When he rang the front doorbell of this house where he had lived sixteen years, Stephen assumed his daughter would answer. She usually did. But it was his wife. She had the advantage of three concrete steps and she glared down at him, waiting for him to speak. He had nothing ready for her.

“Is… is Miranda there?” he said finally. “I’m a little late,” he added, and taking his chance, advanced up the steps. At the very last moment she stepped aside and opened the door wider.