Amsterdam by Ian McEwan Read Free Book Online Page A

yourself on the wrong side of the law, assuming, of course, you were to say yes. But there are ways, and there are places, and if it came to it, I’d want you to get me thereon a plane. It’s a heavy responsibility, something I could only ask of a close friend like yourself. All I can say is that I’m not in a state of panic or anything. I have given it a lot of thought.”
    Then, because Vernon still sat in silence, staring, he added with some embarrassment, “Well, there it is.”
    Vernon set down his glass and scratched his head, and then stood.
    “You don’t want to talk about this scare you’ve had?”
    “Absolutely not.”
    Vernon glanced at his watch. He was late for George. He said, “Well, look, it’s quite a thing you’re asking me. It needs some thought.”
    Clive nodded. Vernon moved toward the door and led the way down the stairs. In the hallway they embraced again. Clive opened the door, and Vernon stepped out into the night.
    “I’ll need to think about it.”
    “Quite so. Thanks for coming.”
    Both men accepted that the nature of the request, its intimacy and self-conscious reflection on their friendship, had created, for the moment, an uncomfortable emotional proximity, which was best dealt with by their parting without another word, Vernon walking quickly up the street in search of a taxi and Clive going back up the stairs to his piano.

iv
    Lane himself opened the door of his Holland Park mansion.
    “You’re late.”
    Vernon, who assumed that George was trying on the part of press lord summoning his editor, declined to apologize or even reply and followed his host across a bright hallway into the living room. Fortunately, there was nothing here to remind Vernon of Molly. The room was furnished in what he had once heard her describe as the Buckingham Palace style: thick mustard-yellow carpets, big dusty-pink sofas and armchairs with raised patterns of vines and scrolls, brown oil paintings of racehorses at grass and reproduction Fragonards of bucolic ladies on swings in immense gilt frames, and the whole opulent emptiness overlit by lacquered brass lamps. George reached the massive brecciated marble surround of the coal-effect gas fire and turned.
    “You’ll take a glass of port?”
    Vernon realized that he had had nothing to eat since a cheese and lettuce sandwich at lunchtime. Why else would George’s pretentious construction have made him feel so irritable? And what was George doingwearing a silk dressing gown over his day clothes? The man was simply preposterous. “Thanks. I will.”
    They sat almost twenty feet apart, with the hissing fireplace between them. Had he been alone for half a minute, Vernon thought, he might have crawled over to the fender and knocked the right side of his head on it. Even in company now, he did not feel right.
    “I’ve seen the circulation figures,” George said gravely. “Not good.”
    “The rate of decline is slowing,” was Vernon’s automatic response, his mantra.
    “But it’s still a decline.”
    “These things take time to turn around.” Vernon tasted his port and protected himself with the recollection that George owned a mere one and a half percent of the
Judge
and knew nothing about the business. It was also useful to remember that his fortune, his publishing “empire,” was rooted in an energetic exploitation of the weak-headed: hidden numerical codes in the Bible foretold the future, the Incas hailed from outer space, the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant, the Second Coming, the Third Eye, the Seventh Seal, Hitler was alive and well in Peru. It was not easy to be lectured by George on the ways of the world.
    “It seems to me,” he was saying, “that what you need now is one big story, something that’ll catch fire,something your opponents will have to run with just to keep up.”
    What was needed for the circulation to stop going down was for the circulation to go up. But Vernon kept a neutral expression, for he knew that