Amsterdam by Ian McEwan Read Free Book Online Page B

George was working his way around to the photographs.
    Vernon tried to speed him up. “We’ve got a good story on Friday about a pair of Siamese twins in local government …”
    “Pah!”
    It worked. George was suddenly on his feet.
    “That’s not a story, Vernon. That’s tittle-tattle. I’ll show you a story. I’ll show you why Julian Garmony is running round the Inns of Court with his thumb up his arse! Come with me.”
    They went back down the hall, past the kitchen, and along a narrower corridor that ended in a door, which George opened with a Yale key. Part of the complicated arrangement of his marriage had been that Molly kept herself, her guests, and her stuff separate in a wing of the house. She was spared the sight of her old friends stifling their amusement at George’s pomposity, and he escaped the tidal waves of Molly’s disorder engulfing the rooms of the house used for entertaining. Vernon had visited Molly’s apartment many times, but he had always used the external entrance. Now, as George pushed the door open, Vernon tensed. He feltunprepared. He would have preferred to look at the photographs in George’s part of the house.
    In the semidarkness, during the seconds it took George to fumble for the light switch, Vernon experienced for the first time the proper impact of Molly’s death—the plain fact of her absence. The recognition was brought on by familiar smells that he had already started to forget—her perfume, her cigarettes, the dried flowers she kept in the bedroom, coffee beans, the bakery warmth of laundered clothes. He had talked about her at length, and he had thought of her too, but only in snatches during his crowded working days, or while drifting into sleep, and until now he had never really missed her in his heart, or felt the insult of knowing he would never see or hear her again. She was his friend, perhaps the best he had ever had, and she had gone. He could easily have made a fool of himself in front of George, whose outline was blurring even now. This particular kind of desolation, a painful constriction right behind his face, above the roof of his mouth, he hadn’t known since childhood, since prep school. Homesick for Molly. He concealed a gasp of self-pity behind a loud adult cough.
    The place was exactly as she had left it the day she finally consented to move to a bedroom in the main house, to be imprisoned and nursed by George. As they passed the bathroom, Vernon glimpsed a skirt of hers he remembered, draped over the towel rail, and atowel and a bra lying on the floor. Over a quarter of a century ago she and Vernon had made a household for almost a year, in a tiny rooftop flat on the rue de Seine. There were always damp towels on the floor then, and cataracts of her underwear tumbling from the drawers she never closed, a big ironing board that was never folded away, and in the one overfilled wardrobe dresses, crushed and shouldering sideways like commuters on the mÉtro. Magazines, makeup, bank statements, bead necklaces, flowers, knickers, ashtrays, invitations, tampons, LPs, airplane tickets, high-heeled shoes—not a single surface was left uncovered by something of Molly’s, so that when Vernon was meant to be working at home, he took to writing in a cafÉ along the street. And yet each morning she arose fresh from the shell of this girly squalor, like a Botticelli Venus, to present herself, not naked, of course, but sleekly groomed, at the offices of Paris
Vogue
.
    “In here,” George said, and led the way into the living room. There was a large brown envelope on a chair. As George was reaching for it, Vernon had time to glance around. She could walk in at any moment. There was a book on Italian gardens lying face-down on the floor and, on a low table, three wineglasses, each with a lining of grayish green mold. Perhaps he himself had been drinking from one. He tried to remember his last visit here, but the occasions blurred. There were long conversations