Enduring Love by Ian McEwan Read Free Book Online Page B

thought I might succumb to the freelancer’s temptations—newspapers, phone calls, daydreams. I had plenty of subject matter for wall gazing. But I pulled myself together and made myself finish a piece about the Hubble telescope for an American magazine.
    This project had interested me for years. It embodied an unfashionableheroism and grandeur, served no military or immediate commercial purpose, and was driven by a simple and noble urge: to know and understand more. When it was discovered that the eight-foot primary mirror was ten thousandths of an inch too flat, the general reaction down on Earth was not disappointment. It was glee and gloating, rejoicing and falling-about hilarity on a planetary scale. Ever since the
Titanic
sank we’ve been hard on our technicians, cynical about their extravagant ambitions. Here was our biggest toy in space so far, as tall, they said, as a four-story building, set to bring marvels to our retinas—images of the origins of the universe, our very own beginnings at the beginning of time. It had failed, not through some algorithmic arcana in the software but because of an error everybody could understand: short sight, the stuff of old-fashioned grind and polish. Hubble became the staple of TV stand-up routines, it rhymed with trouble and rubble, it proved America’s terminal industrial decline.
    Hubble was grand in conception, but the rescue operation was technologically sublime. Hundreds of space-walking hours, ten correcting mirrors placed around the rim of the faulty lens with inhuman precision, and down at control a Wagnerian-scale orchestra of scientists and computer power. Technically, it was more difficult than putting a man on the moon. The mistake was put right, the twelve-billion-year-old pictures came in true and sharp, the world forgot its scorn and marveled—for a day—then went about its business.
    I worked without a break for two and a half hours. What bothered me that morning as I typed up my piece was a disquiet, a physical sensation I could not quite identify. There are certain mistakes that no quantity of astronauts can right. Like mine, yesterday. But what had I done, or not done? If it was guilt, where exactly did it begin? At the ropes under the balloon, letting go, afterward by the body, on the phone last night? The unease was on my skin andbeyond. It was like the sensation of not having washed. But when I paused from my typing and thought the events through, guilt wasn’t it at all. I shook my head and typed faster. I don’t know how I was able to push back all thought of that late-night phone call. I managed to merge it with all the trouble of the day before. I suppose I was still in shock, I was trying to soothe myself by remaining busy.
    I finished the piece, corrected it, printed it up, and faxed it to New York, five hours short of my deadline. I phoned the police station in Oxford, and after being transferred through three departments, I learned that there was to be an inquest into John Logan’s death, that the coroner’s court was likely to sit in six weeks’ time, and that we were all expected to attend.
    I took a taxi to Soho to meet a radio producer who showed me into his office and told me he wanted me to do a program on supermarket vegetables. I said they weren’t my thing. Then the producer, whose name was Eric, surprised me by getting to his feet and making a passionate speech. He said that the demand for year-round snow peas, strawberries, and the like was wrecking the environments and local economies in various African countries. I said it was not my field, and I gave the names of some people he might try. And then, even though I barely knew him, or perhaps because of that, I returned the passion and gave him the full story. I couldn’t help myself. I had to be saying it to someone. Eric listened patiently, making appropriate sounds and shakes of his head but looking at me as though I were contaminated, the bearer into his office of a freshly