Ian McEwan - In Between the Sheets

Mary arrived in the early evening and before driving to pick up Terence we sat around on my balcony watching the sun and smoked a small joint. It had been on my mind before she came that we might be going to bed for one last time. But now that she was here and we were dressed for an evening elsewhere, it seemed more appropriate to talk. Mary asked me what I had been doing and I told her about the nightclub act. I was not sure whether to present the man as a performer with an act so clever it was not funny, or as someone who had come in off the street and taken over the stage.

“I’ve seen acts like that here,” said Mary. “The idea, when it works, is to make your laughter stick in your throat. What was funny suddenly gets nasty.” I asked Mary if she thought there was any truth in my man’s story. She shook her head.

“Everyone here,” she said, gesturing toward the setting sun, “has got some kind of act going like that.”

“You seem to say that with some pride,” I said as we stood up. She smiled and we held hands for an empty moment in which there came to me from nowhere a vivid image of the parallel bars on the beach; then we turned and went inside.

Terence was waiting for us on the pavement outside the house where he was staying. He wore a white suit and as we pulled up he was fixing a pink carnation to his lapel. Mary’s car had only two doors. I had to get out to let Terence in, but through a combination of sly maneuvering on his part and obtuse politeness on my own, I found myself introducing my two friends from the back seat. As we turned onto the freeway Terence began to ask Mary a series of polite, insistent questions and it was clear from where I sat directly behind Mary, that as she was answering one question he was formulating the next or falling over himself to agree with everything she said.

“Yes, yes,” he was saying, leaning forward eagerly, clasping together his long, pale fingers, “That’s a really good way of putting it.” Such condescension, I thought, such ingratiation. Why does Mary put up with it? Mary said that she thought Los Angeles was the most exciting city in the United States. Before she had even finished Terence was outdoing her with extravagant praise.

“I thought you hated it.” I interjected sourly. But Terence was adjusting his seat belt and asking Mary another question. I sat back and stared out the window, attempting to control my irritation.

A little later Mary was craning her neck trying to find me in her mirror. “You’re very quiet back there,” she said gaily.

I fell into sudden, furious mimicry. “That’s a really good way of putting it, yes, yes.” Neither Terence nor Mary made any reply. My words hung over us as though they were being uttered over and over again. I opened my window. We arrived at George’s house with twenty-five minutes of unbroken silence behind us.

The introductions over, the three of us held the center of George’s huge living room while he fixed our drinks at the bar. I held my flute case and music stand under my arm like weapons. Apart from the bar the only other furniture was two yellow plastic sag chairs, very bright against the desert expanse of brown carpet. Sliding doors took up the length of one wall and gave onto a small backyard of sand and stones in the center of which, set in concrete, stood one of those tree-like contraptions for drying clothes on. In the corner of the yard was a scrappy sagebrush plant, survivor of the real desert that had been here a year ago. Terence, Mary and I addressed remarks to George and said nothing to each other.

“Well,” said George when the four of us stood looking at each other with drinks in our hands, “Follow me and I’ll show you the kids.” Obediently we padded behind George in single file along a narrow, thickly carpeted corridor. We peered through a bedroom doorway at two small boys in a bunk bed reading comics. They glanced at us without interest and went on reading.

Back in the living room, I said, “They’re very subdued, George. What do you do, beat them up?” George took my question seriously and there followed a conversation about corporal punishment. George said he occasionally gave the boys a slap on the back of the legs if things got really out of hand. But it was not to hurt them, he said, so much as to show them he meant business. Mary said she was dead against striking children at all, and Terence, largely to cut a figure I thought, or perhaps to demonstrate to me that he could disagree with Mary, said that he thought a sound thrashing never did anyone any harm. Mary laughed, but George, who obviously was not taking to this faintly foppish, languid guest sprawled across his carpet, seemed ready to move onto the attack. George worked hard. He kept his back straight even when he sat in the sag chair.

“You were thrashed when you were a kid?” he asked as he handed around the Scotch.

Terence hesitated and said, “Yes.” This surprised me. Terence’s father had died before he was born and he had grown up with his mother in Vermont.

“Your mother beat you?” I said before he had time to invent a swaggering bully of a father.

“Yes.”

“And you don’t think it did you any harm?” said George. “I don’t believe it.”

Terence stretched his legs. “No harm done at all.” He spoke through a yawn that might have been a fake. He gestured towards his pink carnation. “After all, here I am.”

There was a moment’s pause then George said, “For example, you never had any problem making out with women?” I could not help smiling.

Terence sat up. “Oh yes,” he said. “Our English friend here will verify that.” By this Terence referred to my outburst in the car.

But I said to George, “Terence likes to tell funny stories about his own sexual failures.”

George leaned forwards to catch Terence’s full attention. “How can you be sure they’re not caused by being thrashed by your mother?”

Terence spoke very quickly. I was not sure whether he was very excited or very angry. “There will always be problems between men and women and everyone suffers in some way. I conceal less about myself than other people do. I guess you never had your backside tanned by your mother when you were a kid, but does that mean you never have any hang-ups with women? I mean, where’s your wife…?”

Mary’s interruption had the precision of a surgeon’s knife.

“I was only ever hit once as a kid, by my father, and do you know why that was? I was twelve. We were all sitting around the table at suppertime, all the family, and I told everyone I was bleeding from between my legs. I put some blood on the end of my finger and held it up for them all to see. My father leaned across the table and slapped my face. He told me not to be dirty and sent me up to my room.”

George got up to fetch more ice for our glasses and muttered “Simply grotesque” as he went. Terence stretched out on the floor, his eyes fixed on the ceiling like a dead man’s. From the bedroom came the sound of the boys singing, or rather chanting, for the song was all on one note. I said to Mary something to the effect that between people who had just met, such a conversation could not have taken place in England.

“Is that a good thing, do you think?” Mary asked.

Terence said, “The English tell each other nothing.”

I said, “Between telling nothing and telling everything there is very little to choose.”

“Did you hear the boys?” George said as he came back.

“We heard some kind of singing,” Mary told him. George was pouring more Scotch and spooning ice into the glasses.

“That wasn’t singing. That was praying. I’ve been teaching them the Lord’s Prayer.” On the floor Terence groaned and George looked around sharply.