Amsterdam by Ian McEwan Page B

beauty, or the memory of it, until seconds later it dissolved into a river straightened to a concreted sluice or a sudden agricultural wilderness without hedges or trees, and roads, new roads probing endlessly, shamelessly, as though all that mattered was to be elsewhere. As far as the welfare of every other living form onearth was concerned, the human project was not just a failure, it was a mistake from the very beginning.
    If anyone was to blame, it was Vernon. Clive had traveled this line often in the past and had never felt bleak about the view. He couldn’t put it down to chewing gum or a mislaid pen. Their row of the evening before was still sounding in his ears, and he worried that the echoes would pursue him into the mountains and destroy his peace. And it was hardly just a clash of voices he still carried with him, it was growing dismay at his friend’s behavior, and a gathering sense that he had never really known Vernon at all. He turned away from the window. To think, only the week before he had made a most unusual and intimate request of his friend. What a mistake that had been, especially now that the sensation in his left hand had vanished completely. Just a foolish anxiety brought on by Molly’s funeral. One of those occasional bouts of fearing death. But how vulnerable he had made himself that night. It was no comfort that Vernon had asked the same for himself; all it had cost him was a scribbled note pushed through the door. And perhaps that was typical of a certain … imbalance in their friendship that had always been there and that Clive had been aware of somewhere in his heart and had always pushed away, disliking himself for unworthy thoughts. Until now. Yes, a certain lopsidedness in their friendship, which, ifhe cared to consider, made last night’s confrontation less surprising.
    There was the time, for example, way back, when Vernon stayed for a year and never once offered to pay rent. And was it not generally true that over the years it had been Clive rather than Vernon who had provided the music—in every sense? The wine, the food, the house, the musicians and other interesting company, the initiatives that took Vernon to rented houses with lively friends in Scotland, the mountains of northern Greece, and the shores of Long Island. When had Vernon ever proposed and arranged some fascinating pleasure? When had Clive last been a guest in Vernon’s house? Three or four years ago, perhaps. Why had he never properly acknowledged the act of friendship that lay behind his borrowing a large sum to see Vernon through a difficult time? When Vernon had had an infection of the spine, Clive had visited almost every day; when Clive had slipped on the pavement outside his house and broken his ankle, Vernon had sent his secretary round with a bag of books from the
Judge’s
books page slush pile.
    Put most crudely, what did he, Clive, really derive from this friendship? He had given, but what had he ever received? What bound them? They had Molly in common, there were the accumulated years and the habits of friendship, but there was really nothing at its center, nothing for Clive. A generous explanation forthe imbalance might have evoked Vernon’s passivity and self-absorption. Now, after last night, Clive was inclined to see these as merely elements of a larger fact—Vernon’s lack of principle.
    Outside the compartment window, unseen by Clive, a deciduous woodland slid by, its winter geometry silvered by unmelted frost. Farther on, a slow river eased through brown fringes of sedge, and beyond the floodplain, icy pastures were laced with dry-stone walls. On the edges of a rusty-looking town, an expanse of industrial wasteland was being returned to forest; saplings in plastic tubes stretched almost to the horizon, where bulldozers were spreading topsoil. But Clive stared ahead at the empty seat opposite, lost to the self-punishing convolutions of his fervent social accounting, unknowingly bending and