Black Dogs by Ian McEwan Page A

punitive, so harsh. There was no financial support, of course. An unmarried mother was an outcast, a disgrace, dependent on vengeful charities, church groups or whatever. We all knew a half-dozen terrible, cautionary tales to keep us on the straight and narrow. They weren’t enough that afternoon, but I certainly thought I was fixing my doom as we went up the stairs to this tiny room at the top of the house where the wind and the rain were beating at the window, just like today. We had no precautions, of course, and in my ignorance I thought pregnancy was inevitable. And I knew that I was not able to turn back. I was miserable about it but I was also tasting freedom. It was the freedom I imagine a criminal must experience, even if only for a moment, as he sets about his crime. I’d always done more or less what people expected of me, but now I knew myself for the first time. And I simply had to, had to Jeremy, get close up to this man ...’
    I cleared my throat softly. ‘And, um, how was it?’ I could not credit that I was asking June Tremaine this question. Jenny would never believe me.
    June gave another of her hoots. I had never seen her so animated. ‘It was a surprise! Bernard was the clumsiest of creatures, always spilling his drink or banging his headon a beam. Lighting someone’s cigarette was an ordeal for him. I was sure I was the first girl he’d been with. He hinted otherwise, but that was just the form, that was what he was supposed to say. So I rather thought we’d be babes in the wood together, and I honestly didn’t mind. I wanted him on any terms. We climbed into this narrow bed, me giggling with terror and excitement and would you believe it – Bernard was a genius! All the words you’d find in a romantic novel – gentle, strong, skilful – and, well, inventive . When we’d finished he did this ridiculous thing. He suddenly leaped up and ran to the window, threw it open to the storm and stood there naked, long and thin and white, beating his chest and yodelling like Tarzan while leaves came swirling in. It was so stupid! D’you know, he made me laugh so hard that I widdled on the bed. We had to turn the mattress over. Then we picked hundreds of leaves off the carpet. I took the sheets home in a shopping bag and washed them and got them back on the bed with my friend’s help. She was a year older than me and so disgusted she didn’t speak to me for months!’
    Experiencing in myself something of June’s criminal freedom of forty-five years ago, I was close to bringing up the matter of the size Bernard ‘took’. Was it merely, as now seemed the case, June’s occasional slander? Or the paradoxical secret of his success? Or again, when he was so long in the body, wasn’t this simply an error of relative judgment? But there are things one may not ask one’s mother-in-law, and besides, she was frowning, trying to formulate.
    ‘It might have been a week later Bernard came home and met my parents, and I’m almost certain that was the time he knocked a full teapot over the Wilton. Apart from that he was a success, perfectly appropriate – public school, Cambridge, a nice shy way of talking tohis elders. So we began a double life. We were the darling young couple who gladdened all hearts by engaging to be married as soon as the war was over. At the same time, we continued what we had started. There were unused rooms in Senate House and other government buildings. Bernard was clever at getting hold of keys. In summer, there were the beech woods around Amersham. It was an addiction, a madness, a secret life. We were taking precautions, by then, but quite honestly by that time I couldn’t have cared less.
    ‘Whenever we talked about the world beyond ourselves, we talked about communism. It was our other obsession. We decided to forgive the Party its stupidity at the beginning of the war, and to join as soon as there was peace and we had left our jobs. Marx, Lenin, Stalin, the way forward, we