CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Ian McEwan
Dedication
Title Page
Introduction
Solid Geometry
Homemade
Last Day of Summer
Cocker at the Theatre
Butterflies
Conversation With a Cupboard Man
First Love, Last Rites
Disguises
From the Archive
Copyright
Taut, brooding and densely atmospheric, these stories show us the ways in which murder can arise out of boredom, perversity can result from adolescent curiosity, and sheer evil might be the solution to unbearable loneliness.
The book jacket from the 1975 first edition
A handwritten page from the original manuscript
Early sales and marketing material
Early publicity material
In 1970, when I was twenty-two, I moved to Norwich and lodged in a small, pleasant room on the edge of the city. I had come to do an MA in English at the University of East Anglia, but my overriding purpose was to write fiction. At the end of my first week, with all arrangements made, I sat down at a card table by the end of my bed one evening and told myself that I would work continuously through the night until I had completed an entire short story. I had no notes, only a scrap, a dreamy notion of what sort of story this would be.
Within an hour, a strange voice was talking to me from the page. I let it speak. I worked on into the night, filled with a romantic sense of myself, the writer heroically driven by a compelling idea, pushing on towards dawn as the city slept. I finished around six o’clock.
The story was called ‘Conversation with a Cupboard Man’, one of a handful I wrote that year that went into my first book, First Love, Last Rites, published in 1975. Its narrator was a man who didn’t want to grow up – a strange choice for me because I considered myself that year to have finally reached adult independence. Being in Norwich was the first major decision I’d taken in my life without reference to or advice from anyone else. I wanted a fresh start after undergraduate life. I regarded myself as a full-time committed writer. An MA was what I could do in my spare time. An academic grant would support me.
Other strange voices, other weird or wretched characters, surfaced in that year to haunt or infest my fiction. Violent, sexually perverse, lonely, they were remote from the life I was living in Norwich at the time. I was meeting many new friends, falling in love, keenly reading contemporary American fiction, hiking the North Norfolk coast, had taken a hallucinogenic drug in the countryside and been amazed – and yet whenever I returned to my notebook or typewriter, a savage, dark impulse took hold of me. Sibling incest, cross-dressing, a rat that torments young lovers, actors making love mid-rehearsal, children roasting a cat, child abuse and murder, a man who keeps a penis in a jar and uses esoteric geometry to obliterate his wife – however dark the stories were, I also thought elements in them were hilarious. Sometimes I persuaded myself I was some kind of wild man, a fauviste, kicking against the bourgeois divorce novel that people complained about.
Forty years on from the publication of that little volume of stories, I’m bound to have a different view. Of course, English literary culture in 1970 was far more diverse than the so-called Hampstead divorce novel. The recent ‘missing Booker’ shortlist was powerful proof of that. Besides, divorce is a rich subject, Hampstead a legitimate place. Up until my arrival in Norwich I’d been an intense, somewhat shy or reserved child and teenager. I hadn’t caused much trouble, had uncomplainingly passed through the educational mill, and come to sex and drugs later than most – respectively, at eighteen and twenty-one. Fiction was part of a genial explosion in my life, of a sense that with my formal education more or less over, I could do whatever I wanted.
And as far as I was concerned, fiction was synonymous with freedom. The legal struggles to publish Joyce’s Ulysses, the Lady Chatterley trial, the wild transgressions of books like Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch persuaded me that to write fiction was to be obliged to take the reader by the hand to the edge – and jump. The business was to find a boundary, then cross it.
If they came to court today, those novels of Joyce and Lawrence would certainly be allowed into the public domain without much trouble. But I’m not so sure what would happen in the courtrooms of Twitter. For now we live uneasily with our sexual freedom. Revelations of horrific and widespread child abuse have shocked us into uncertainty. Adults, especially men, have to be careful about speaking to children in the street. Feminists were right to tell us how oppressive public expressions of male desire could be. (If you doubt it, have another look at the excruciating, unfunny and embarrassing 1955 Marilyn Monroe movie The Seven Year Itch). But desire, in women as in men, is a reality, a subject. Can’t we tell it from oppression? When Craig Raine published in May 2015 a wistful, clever poem about an ageing man’s hopeless erotic thoughts, it stirred rage, hatred and fantasies of violence, of vengeful genital mutilation across the social media. When a Jilly Cooper novel was reissued recently, the original cover of thirty years ago was altered to suit modern tastes – a man’s hand was politely raised from a woman’s buttocks to her waist. Meanwhile, in books and especially on screens, sexual explicitness continues to flourish. Culturally, we are neither puritanical nor ‘liberated’. Just profoundly confused.
The uses and abuses of freedom were the air we breathed in 1970. I feel neither nostalgic nor dismissive about those times now. There were gains and there were, plainly, excesses. When I showed my stories to Norwich friends, or to the two novelists who were keeping an avuncular eye on me, Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson, no one was shocked, no one thought my stories were outrageous or immoral. Bradbury would say something like, ‘Not bad. When can I see the next one?’
By the mid-seventies the ‘sixties’ were winding down. The culture was waking up with a headache, and beginning to take stock. When it appeared in hardback, First Love, Last Rites was considered a critical, though certainly not a commercial, success. But even the positive reviews were scandalized. What monster had come among us? In fact, it was sometimes hard to tell the good reviews from the bad, for both listed with relish the obscenities and baroque perversions. It was difficult for me then, and would be even more difficult now, to persuade readers that my intentions were actually moral. My amoral first-person narrators especially were supposed to be condemning themselves out of their own mouths. I thought it was more interesting for the author not to intervene.
Before writing down these thoughts I took a copy of First Love, Last Rites from my shelves in order to read the title story. This copy once belonged to my parents, and has my dedication, dated April 24 1975. (They were very proud, and a little horrified.) I don’t think I’d read the story since I corrected the proofs in late 1974. Once I was over my irritation with commas serving as full stops (a trick I must have learned from Beckett), I found myself looking across the span of my adult life – from twenty-two to almost sixty-seven.
A pregnant rat scrabbling behind a skirting-board was an invention, but the beautiful, self-contained teenage girl, her boisterous and charming younger brother, their family at a point of disintegration, the small fishing town and a doomed eel-catching business were all briefly part of my life. As I read, I could smell tidal river mud from that high summer of 1971. The forty-five years that had passed since I wrote the story shrank to nothing. It’s in the very nature of fiction that it lives suspended in a perpetual present tense. The past you think you’ve forgotten sits at your shoulder, waiting to remind you that life is indeed brief and you’d better make the best of what’s left.
Ian McEwan, 2015
IN MELTON MOWBRAY in 1875 at an auction of articles of ‘curiosity and worth’, my great-grandfather, in the company of M his friend, bid for the penis of Captain Nicholls who died in Horsemonger jail in 1873. It was bottled in a glass twelve inches long, and, noted my great-grandfather in his diary that night, ‘in a beautiful state of preservation’. Also for auction was ‘the unnamed portion of the late Lady Barrymore. It went to Sam Israels for fifty guineas.’ My great-grandfather was keen on the idea of having the two items as a pair, and M dissuaded him. This illustrates perfectly their friendship. My great-grandfather the excitable theorist, M the man of action who knew when to bid at auctions. My great-grandfather lived for sixty-nine years. For forty-five of them, at the end of every day, he sat down before going to bed and wrote his thoughts in a diary. These diaries are on my table now, forty-five volumes bound in calf leather, and to the left sits Capt. Nicholls in the glass jar. My great-grandfather lived on the income derived from the patent of an invention of his father, a handy fastener used by corset-makers right up till the outbreak of the First World War. My great-grandfather liked gossip, numbers and theories. He also liked tobacco, good port, jugged hare and, very occasionally, opium. He liked to think of himself as a mathematician, though he never had a job, and never published a book. Nor did he ever travel or get his name in The Times, even when he died. In 1869 he married Alice, only daughter of the Rev. Toby Shadwell, co-author of a not highly regarded book on English wild flowers. I believe my great-grandfather to have been a very fine diarist, and when I have finished editing the diaries and they are published I am certain he will receive the recognition due to him. When my work is over I will take a long holiday, travel somewhere cold and clean and treeless, Iceland or the Russian Steppes. I used to think that at the end of it all I would try, if it was possible, to divorce my wife Maisie, but now there is no need at all.
Often Maisie would shout in her sleep and I would have to wake her.
‘Put your arm around me,’ she would say. ‘It was a horrible dream. I had it once before. I was in a plane flying over a desert. But it wasn’t really a desert. I took the plane lower and I could see there were thousands of babies heaped up, stretching away into the horizon, all of them naked and climbing over each other. I was running out of fuel and I had to land the plane. I tried to find a space, I flew on and on looking for a space . . .’
‘Go to sleep now,’ I said through a yawn. ‘It was only a dream.’
‘No,’ she cried. ‘I mustn’t go to sleep, not just yet.’
‘Well, I have to sleep now,’ I told her. ‘I have to be up early in the morning.’
She shook my shoulder. ‘Please don’t go to sleep yet, don’t leave me here.’
‘I’m in the same bed,’ I said. ‘I won’t leave you.’
‘It makes no difference, don’t leave me awake . . .’ But my eyes were already closing.
Lately I have taken up my great-grandfather’s habit. Before going to bed I sit down for half an hour and think over the day. I have no mathematical whimsies or sexual theories to note down. Mostly I write out what Maisie has said to me and what I have said to Maisie. Sometimes, for complete privacy, I lock myself in the bathroom, sit on the toilet seat and balance the writing-pad on my knees. Apart from me there is occasionally a spider or two in the bathroom. They climb up the waste pipe and crouch perfectly still on the glaring white enamel. They must wonder where they have come to. After hours of crouching they turn back, puzzled, or perhaps disappointed they could not learn more. As far as I can tell, my great-grandfather made only one reference to spiders. On May 8th, 1906, he wrote, ‘Bismarck is a spider.’
In the afternoons Maisie used to bring me tea and tell me her nightmares. Usually I was going through old newspapers, compiling indexes, cataloguing items, putting down this volume, picking up another. Maisie said she was in a bad way. Recently she had been sitting around the house all day glancing at books on psychology and the occult, and almost every night she had bad dreams. Since the time we exchanged physical blows, lying in wait to hit each other with the same shoe outside the bathroom, I had had little sympathy for her. Part of her problem was jealousy. She was very jealous . . . of my great-grandfather’s forty-five-volume diary, and of my purpose and energy in editing it. She was doing nothing. I was putting down one volume and picking up another when Maisie came in with the tea.
‘Can I tell you my dream?’ she asked. ‘I was flying this plane over a kind of desert . . .’
‘Tell me later, Maisie,’ I said. ‘I’m in the middle of something here.’ After she had gone I stared at the wall in front of my desk and thought about M, who came to talk and dine with my great-grandfather regularly over a period of fifteen years up until his sudden and unexplained departure one evening in 1898. M, whoever he might have been, was something of an academic, as well as a man of action. For example, on the evening of August 9th, 1870, the two of them are talking about positions for lovemaking and M tells my great-grandfather that copulation a posteriori is the most natural way owing to the position of the clitoris and because other anthropoids favour this method. My great-grandfather, who copulated about half-a-dozen times in his entire life, and that with Alice during the first year of their marriage, wondered out loud what the Church’s view was and straight away M is able to tell him that the seventh-century theologian Theodore considered copulation a posteriori a sin ranking with masturbation and therefore worthy of forty penances. Later in the same evening my great-grandfather produced mathematical evidence that the maximum number of positions cannot exceed the prime number seventeen. M scoffed at this and told him he had seen a collection of drawings by Romano, a pupil of Raphael’s, in which twenty-four positions were shown. And, he said, he had heard of a Mr F. K. Forberg who had accounted for ninety. By the time I remembered the tea Maisie had left by my elbow it was cold.
An important stage in the deterioration of our marriage was reached as follows. I was sitting in the bathroom one evening writing out a conversation Maisie and I had had about the Tarot pack when suddenly she was outside, rapping on the door and rattling the door-handle.
‘Open the door,’ she called out. ‘I want to come in.’
I said to her, ‘You’ll have to wait a few minutes more. I’ve almost finished.’
‘Let me in now,’ she shouted. ‘You’re not using the toilet.’
‘Wait,’ I replied, and wrote another line or two. Now Maisie was kicking the door.
‘My period has started and I need to get something.’ I ignored her yells and finished my piece, which I considered to be particularly important. If I left it till later certain details would be lost. There was no sound from Maisie now and I assumed she was in the bedroom. But when I opened the door she was standing right in my way with a shoe in her hand. She brought the heel of it sharply down on my head, and I only had time to move slightly to one side. The heel caught the top of my ear and cut it badly.
‘There,’ said Maisie, stepping round me to get to the bathroom, ‘now we are both bleeding,’ and she banged the door shut. I picked up the shoe and stood quietly and patiently outside the bathroom holding a handkerchief to my bleeding ear. Maisie was in the bathroom about ten minutes and as she came out I caught her neatly and squarely on the top of her head. I did not give her time to move. She stood perfectly still for a moment looking straight into my eyes.
‘You worm,’ she breathed, and went down to the kitchen to nurse her head out of my sight.
During supper yesterday Maisie claimed that a man locked in a cell with only the Tarot cards would have access to all knowledge. She had been doing a reading that afternoon and the cards were still spread about the floor.
‘Could he work out the street plan of Valparaiso from the cards?’ I asked.
‘You’re being stupid,’ she replied.
‘Could it tell him the best way to start a laundry business, the best way to make an omelette or a kidney machine?’
‘Your mind is so narrow,’ she complained. ‘You’re so narrow, so predictable.’
‘Could he,’ I insisted, ‘tell me who M is, or why . . .’
‘Those things don’t matter,’ she cried. ‘They’re not necessary.’
‘They are still knowledge. Could he find them out?’
She hesitated. ‘Yes, he could.’
I smiled, and said nothing.
‘What’s so funny?’ she said. I shrugged, and she began to get angry. She wanted to be disproved. ‘Why did you ask all those pointless questions?’
I shrugged again. ‘I just wanted to know if you really meant everything.’
Maisie banged the table and screamed, ‘Damn you! Why are you always trying me out? Why don’t you say something real?’ And with that we both recognized we had reached the point where all our discussions led and we became bitterly silent.
Work on the diaries cannot proceed until I have cleared up the mystery surrounding M. After coming to dinner on and off for fifteen years and supplying my great-grandfather with a mass of material for his theories, M simply disappears from the pages of the diary. On Tuesday, December 6th, my great-grandfather invited M to dine on the following Saturday, and although M came, my great-grandfather in the entry for that day simply writes, ‘M to dinner.’ On any other day the conversation at these meals is recorded at great length. M had been to dinner on Monday, December 5th, and the conversation had been about geometry, and the entries for the rest of that week are entirely given over to the same subject. There is absolutely no hint of antagonism. Besides, my great-grandfather needed M. M provided his material, M knew what was going on, he was familiar with London and he had been on the Continent a number of times. He knew all about socialism and Darwin, he had an acquaintance in the free love movement, a friend of James Hinton. M was in the world in a way which my great-grandfather, who left Melton Mowbray only once in his lifetime, to visit Nottingham, was not. Even as a young man my great-grandfather preferred to theorize by the fireside; all he needed were the materials M supplied. For example, one evening in June 1884 M, who was just back from London, gave my great-grandfather an account of how the streets of the town were fouled and clogged by horse-dung. Now in that same week my great-grandfather had been reading the essay by Malthus called ‘On the Principle of Population’. That night he made an excited entry in the diary about a pamphlet he wanted to write and have published. It was to be called ‘De Stercore Equorum’. The pamphlet was never published and probably never written, but there are detailed notes in the diary entries for the two weeks following that evening. In ‘De Stercore Equorum’ (‘Concerning Horseshit’) he assumes geometric growth in the horse population, and working from detailed street plans he predicted that the metropolis would be impassable by 1935. By impassable he took to mean an average thickness of one foot (compressed) in every major street. He described involved experiments outside his own stables to determine the compressibility of horse-dung, which he managed to express mathematically. It was all pure theory, of course. His results rested on the assumption that no dung would be shovelled aside in the fifty years to come. Very likely it was M who talked my great-grandfather out of the project.
One morning, after a long dark night of Maisie’s nightmares, we were lying side by side in bed and I said,
‘What is it you really want? Why don’t you go back to your job? These long walks, all this analysis, sitting around the house, lying in bed all morning, the Tarot pack, the nightmares . . . what is it you want?’
And she said, ‘I want to get my head straight,’ which she had said many times before.
I said, ‘Your head, your mind, it’s not like a hotel kitchen, you know, you can’t throw stuff out like old tin cans. It’s more like a river than a place, moving and changing all the time. You can’t make rivers flow straight.’
‘Don’t go through all that again,’ she said. ‘I’m not trying to make rivers flow straight, I’m trying to get my head straight.’
‘You’ve got to do something,’ I told her. ‘You can’t do nothing. Why not go back to your job? You didn’t have nightmares when you were working. You were never so unhappy when you were working.’
‘I’ve got to stand back from all that,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure what any of it means.’
‘Fashion,’ I said, ‘it’s all fashion. Fashionable metaphors, fashionable reading, fashionable malaise. What do you care about Jung, for example? You’ve read twelve pages in a month.’
‘Don’t go on,’ she pleaded, ‘you know it leads nowhere.’
But I went on.
‘You’ve never been anywhere,’ I told her, ‘you’ve never done anything. You’re a nice girl without even the blessing of an unhappy childhood. Your sentimental Buddhism, this junk-shop mysticism, joss-stick therapy, magazine astrology . . . none of it is yours, you’ve worked none of it out for yourself. You fell into it, you fell into a swamp of respectable intuitions. You haven’t the originality or passion to intuit anything yourself beyond your own unhappiness. Why are you filling your mind with other people’s mystic banalities and giving yourself nightmares?’ I got out of bed, opened the curtains and began to get dressed.
‘You talk like this was a fiction seminar,’ Maisie said. ‘Why are you trying to make things worse for me?’ Self-pity began to well up from inside her, but she fought it down. ‘When you are talking,’ she went on, ‘I can feel myself, you know, being screwed up like a piece of paper.’
‘Perhaps we are in a fiction seminar,’ I said grimly. Maisie sat up in bed staring at her lap. Suddenly her tone changed. She patted the pillow beside her and said softly,
‘Come over here. Come and sit here. I want to touch you, I want you to touch me . . .’ But I was sighing, and already on my way to the kitchen.
In the kitchen I made myself some coffee and took it through to my study. It had occurred to me in my night of broken sleep that a possible clue to the disappearance of M might be found in the pages of geometry. I had always skipped through them before because mathematics does not interest me. On the Monday, December 5th, 1898, M and my great-grandfather discussed the vescia piscis, which apparently is the subject of Euclid’s first proposition and a profound influence on the ground plans of many ancient religious buildings. I read through the account of the conversation carefully, trying to understand as best I could the geometry of it. Then, turning the page, I found a lengthy anecdote which M told my great-grandfather that same evening when the coffee had been brought in and the cigars were lit. Just as I was beginning to read Maisie came in.
‘And what about you,’ she said, as if there had not been an hour break in our exchange, ‘all you have is books. Crawling over the past like a fly on a turd.’
I was angry, of course, but I smiled and said cheerfully, ‘Crawling? Well, at least I’m moving.’
‘You don’t speak to me any more,’ she said, ‘you play me like a pinball machine, for points.’
‘Good morning, Hamlet,’ I replied, and sat in my chair waiting patiently for what she had to say next. But she did not speak, she left, closing the study door softly behind her.
‘In September 1870,’ M began to tell my great-grandfather,
I came into the possession of certain documents which not only invalidate everything fundamental to our science of solid geometry but also undermine the whole canon of our physical laws and force one to redefine one’s place in Nature’s scheme. These papers outweigh in importance the combined work of Marx and Darwin. They were entrusted to me by a young American mathematician, and they are the work of David Hunter, a mathematician too and a Scotsman. The American’s name was Goodman. I had corresponded with his father over a number of years in connection with his work on the cyclical theory of menstruation which, incredibly enough, is still widely discredited in this country. I met the young Goodman in Vienna where, along with Hunter and mathematicians from a dozen countries, he had been attending an international conference on mathematics. Goodman was pale and greatly disturbed when I met him, and planned to return to America the following day even though the conference was not yet half complete. He gave the papers into my care with instructions that I was to deliver them to David Hunter if I was ever to learn of his whereabouts. And then, only after much persuasion and insistence on my part, he told me what he had witnessed on the third day of the conference. The conference met every morning at nine thirty when a paper was read and a general discussion ensued. At eleven o’clock refreshments were brought in and many of the mathematicians would get up from the long, highly polished table round which they were all gathered and stroll about the large, elegant room and engage in informal discussions with their colleagues. Now, the conference lasted two weeks, and by a long-standing arrangement the most eminent of the mathematicians read their papers first, followed by the slightly less eminent, and so on, in a descending hierarchy throughout the two weeks, which caused, as it is wont to do among highly intelligent men, occasional but intense jealousies. Hunter, though a brilliant mathematician, was young and virtually unknown outside his university, which was Edinburgh. He had applied to deliver what he described as a very important paper on solid geometry, and since he was of little account in this pantheon he was assigned to read to the conference on the last day but one, by which time many of the most important figures would have returned to their respective countries. And so on the third morning, as the servants were bringing in the refreshments, Hunter stood up suddenly and addressed his colleagues just as they were rising from their seats. He was a large, shaggy man and, though young, he had about him a certain presence which reduced the hum of conversation to a complete silence.
‘Gentlemen,’ said Hunter, ‘I must ask you to forgive this improper form of address, but I have something to tell you of the utmost importance. I have discovered the plane without a surface.’ Amid derisive smiles and gentle bemused laughter, Hunter picked up from the table a large white sheet of paper. With a pocket-knife he made an incision along its surface about three inches long and slightly to one side of its centre. Then he made some rapid, complicated folds and, holding the paper aloft so all could see, he appeared to draw one corner of it through the incision, and as he did so it disappeared.
‘Behold, gentlemen,’ said Hunter, holding out his empty hands towards the company, ‘the plane without a surface.’
Maisie came into my room, washed now and smelling faintly of perfumed soap. She came and stood behind my chair and placed her hands on my shoulders.
‘What are you reading?’ she said.
‘Just bits of the diary which I haven’t looked at before.’ She began to massage me gently at the base of my neck. I would have found it soothing if it had still been the first year of our marriage. But it was the sixth year and it generated a kind of tension which communicated itself the length of my spine. Maisie wanted something. To restrain her I placed my right hand on her left, and, mistaking this for affection, she leaned forward and kissed under my ear. Her breath smelled of toothpaste and toast. She tugged at my shoulder.
‘Let’s go in the bedroom,’ she whispered. ‘We haven’t made love for nearly two weeks now.’
‘I know,’ I replied. ‘You know how it is . . . with my work.’ I felt no desire for Maisie or any other woman. All I wanted to do was turn the next page of my great-grandfather’s diary. Maisie took her hands off my shoulders and stood by my side. There was such a sudden ferocity in her silence that I found myself tensing like a sprinter on the starting line. She stretched forward and picked up the sealed jar containing Capt. Nicholls. As she lifted it his penis drifted dreamily from one end of the glass to the other.
‘You’re so COMPLACENT