Innocent, The by McEwan Ian

Author:McEwan, Ian [McEwan, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Espionage, Thriller, Modern Classics, Fiction, Novel
ISBN: 9780307761026
Publisher: Anchor Books
Published: 1990-01-21T02:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

Leonard returned home for Christmas, having failed to persuade Maria to accompany him. She thought that a divorced older woman, a German, to whom Leonard was not even engaged would not be welcomed by Leonard’s mother. He thought she was being too scrupulous. He could not honestly say that his parents lived by such precise and limiting codes. Once he had been home twenty-four hours, he realized she had been right. It was difficult. His bedroom with its single bed and the framed certificate proclaiming him winner of the sixth-form maths prize was a child’s room. He was changed, he was transformed, but it was impossible to convey this to his parents. Twisted crepe paper crisscrossed the living room, the holly was in place, framing the mantelpiece mirror. They heard out his enthusiastic account on his first evening home. He told them about Maria and her work and what she was like, about her apartment and his, about the Resi, the Hotel am Zoo, the lakes, and the edginess and excitement of the half-ruined city.

There was a roast chicken in his honor, and more roast potatoes than he could eat these days. There were perfunctory questions, his mother asking how he did for laundry and his father referring to “this girl you’re seeing.” Maria’s name evinced a barely conscious hostility, as though, assuming they would never have to meet her, they could brush her aside. He avoided reference to her age or marital status. Otherwise, their remarks had the effect of grinding away at the difference between here and there. Nothing he said aroused curiosity or wonder or disgust, and soon Berlin was loosened from its strangeness and was nothing more than an outlying stretch of Tottenham, confined and known, interesting in itself, but not for long. His parents did not know he was in love.

And Tottenham, and all of London, was sunk in Sunday torpor. People were drowning in ordinariness. In his street the parallel walls of Victorian terraces were the end of all change. Nothing that mattered could ever happen here. There was no tension, no purpose. What interested the neighbors was the prospect of renting or owning a television. The H-shaped aerials were sprouting on the rooftops. On Friday evenings his parents popped into the house two doors down to watch, and they were saving hard, having sensibly set their hearts against hire-purchase. They had already seen the set they wanted, and his mother had shown him the corner of the living room where it would one day stand. The great struggle to keep Europe free was as remote as the canals of Mars. Down at his father’s pub, none of the regulars had even heard of the Warsaw Pact, the ratification of which had caused such a stir in Berlin. Leonard paid for a round and, prompted by one of his father’s friends, gave a slightly boastful account of the bomb damage, the fabulous money made by smugglers, the kidnappings—men dragged shouting and kicking into saloon cars and driven off into the Russian sector, never to be seen again.

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