Enduring Love by Ian McEwan Read Free Book Online

fool for this kind of encirclement. It made me feel that I belonged, that I was rooted and blessed. I knew that she loved to close her eyes and let me kiss them, and then her nose and cheeks, as though she were a child at bedtime, and only at last find her lips.
    We often told ourselves off for wasting time in chairs, fully dressed, talking, when we could be doing the same lying down in bed, face to face and naked. That precious time before lovemaking is ill served by the pseudo-clinical term
foreplay
. The world would narrow and deepen, our voices would sink into the warmth of our bodies, the conversation would become associative and unpredictable. Everything was touch and breath. Certain simple phrases came to me, which I didn’t say out loud because they sounded so banal—
Here we are
, or
This again
, or
Yes, this
. Like a moment in a recurring dream, these spacious, innocent minutes were forgotten until we were back inside them. When we were, our lives returned to the essentials and began again. When we fell silent, we would lie so close we were mouth to mouth, delaying the union that bound us all the more because of this prelude.
    So there we were, this again, and it was deliverance. The darkness beyond the gloom of the bedroom was infinite and cold as death. We were a pinprick of warmth in the vastness. The events of the afternoon filled us, but we banished them from conversation. I said, “How do you feel?”
    “Scared,” she said. “Really scared.”
    “But you don’t look it.”
    “I feel I’m shivering inside.”
    Rather than follow the path that must lead us back to Logan, we told shivering and shaking stories, and as often happened in these talks, childhood was central. When Clarissa was seven, she went to Wales on a family holiday. One of her cousins, a girl of five, had gone missing on a rainy morning and six hours later had still not been found. The police came, bringing with them two tracker dogs. Villagers were out combing the bracken, and for a while a helicopter hovered above the higher ground. Just before nightfall the girl was found in a barn, asleep under some sacking. Clarissa remembered a general celebration in the rented farmhouse that evening. Her uncle, the girl’s father, had just shown the last of the policemen to the door. As he came back into the room, his step faltered and he sat back heavily in an armchair. His legs were shaking violently, and the children watched in fascination as Clarissa’s aunt knelt by him and pressed her palms soothingly along his thighs. “At the time I didn’t connect it with the search for my cousin. It was just one of those odd things you observe neutrally as a child. I thought this might be what they meant by drunkenness, those two knees dancing up and down inside his trousers.”
    I told the story of my first public performance on the trumpet, when I was eleven. I was so nervous and my hands were shaking so badly that I could not keep the mouthpiece against my lips, nor could I stretch my lips in the proper way to make a note. So I put the whole mouthpiece between my teeth and bit hard to hold it in place, and half sang, half tooted my part. In the general cacophony of a children’s Christmas orchestra, nobody noticed. Clarissa said, “Even now you do a good imitation of a trumpet in the bath.”
    From shaking we came to dancing (I hate it, she loves it) and from there we came to love. We told each other what lovers never tire of hearing and needing to say. “I love you more now I’ve seen you go completely mad,” she said. “The rationalist cracks at last!”
    “It’s just the beginning,” I promised. “Stick around.”
    This reference to my behavior after Logan hit the ground broke the spell, but only for half a minute or so. We drew closer and kissed. What eventually followed was heightened by all the emotional rawness of a reconciliation, as though a calamitous week-long row with threats and insults were sweetly resolved in mutual