The Children Act by Ian McEwan

Author:Ian McEwan [McEwan, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 978-0-385-53971-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-09-08T16:00:00+00:00

But Satan made a cloth of beaten gold

That shone God’s love upon the fold.

The way with golden light is paved

And I am saved.

She waited in case there was more but he put the page down, leaned back and looked at the ceiling as he spoke.

“I wrote it after one of the elders, Mr. Crosby, told me that if the worst was to happen, it would have a fantastic effect on everyone.”

Fiona murmured, “He said that?”

“It would fill our church with love.”

She summed up for him. “So Satan comes to beat you with his hammer, and without meaning to he flattens your soul into a sheet of gold that reflects God’s love on everyone and for this you’re saved and it doesn’t matter so much that you’re dead.”

“My Lady, you’ve got it exactly,” the boy almost shouted in his excitement. Then he had to stop to recover his breath again. “I don’t think the nurses understood it, except for Donna, the one who was in here just now. Mr. Crosby’s going to try and get it published in The Watchtower.”

“That would be marvelous. You may have a future as a poet.”

He saw through this and smiled.

“What do your parents think of your poems?”

“My mum loves them, my dad thinks they’re okay but they use up the strength I need to get better.” He rolled onto his side again to face her. “But what does My Lady think? It’s called ‘The Hammer.’ ”

He had such a hunger in his look, such longing for her approval, that she hesitated. Then she said, “I think it shows a touch, a very small touch, mind, of real poetic genius.”

He continued to gaze at her, expression unchanged, wanting more. She had thought she knew what she was doing, but just then her mind emptied. She didn’t want to disappoint him and she was not used to talking about poetry.

He said, “What makes you say that?”

She didn’t know, not immediately. She would have appreciated Donna returning to bustle around the machines and her patient, while she herself went to the unopenable window and looked out across Wandsworth Common and decided what to say. But the nurse was not due for another fifteen minutes. Fiona hoped that by starting to speak she would discover what she thought. It was like being at school. Back then she had mostly got away with it.

“The shape, the form of it, and those two short lines balancing things out, you’re low, then you’re saved, the second overcoming the first, I liked that. And I liked the blacksmith’s strokes …”

“Long and slow.”

“Mm. Long and slow is good. And it’s very condensed, the way some of the best short poems are.” She felt some confidence returning. “I suppose it’s telling us that out of adversity, out of a terrible time, something good can come. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“And I don’t think you have to believe in God to understand or like this poem.”

He thought for a moment and said, “I think you do.”

She said, “Do you think you have to suffer to be a good poet?”

“I think all great poets must suffer.

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