Free Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

Then Clive added, “Perhaps he has. Did she take any of you? In the frogman’s suit? Or was it the tutu? The people must be told.”
    Vernon stood up and put the envelope back in his case. “I came round hoping for your support. Or at the least, a sympathetic hearing. I didn’t expect your fucking abuse.”
    He went out into the hall. Clive followed him, but he did not feel apologetic.
    Vernon opened the door and turned. He looked unwashed, wrecked. “I don’t get it,” he said quietly. “I don’t think you’re being straight with me. What is it you really object to about this?”
    Possibly the question was rhetorical. Clive took a couple of steps toward his friend and answered it. “Because of Molly. We don’t like Garmony, but she did. He trusted her, and she respected his trust. It was something private between them. These are her pictures, nothing to do with me or you or your readers. She would have hated what you’re doing. Frankly, you’re betraying her.”
    Then, rather than let Vernon have the satisfaction of closing the door on him, Clive turned and walked away, toward the kitchen, to eat his supper alone.

iii
    Outside the hotel, set against a rough stone wall, was a long wooden bench. In the morning, after breakfast, Clive sat here to lace his boots. Although he was missing the key element of his finale, he had two important advantages in his search. The first was general: he felt optimistic. He had done the background work in his studio, and though he hadn’t slept well, he was cheerful about being back in his favorite landscape. The second was specific: he knew exactly what he wanted. He was working backward really, sensing that the theme lay infragments and hints in what he had already written. He would recognize the right thing as
soon
as it occurred to him. In the finished piece the melody would sound to the innocent ear as though it had been anticipated or developed elsewhere in the score. Finding the notes would be an act of inspired synthesis. It was as if he knew them but could not yet hear them. He knew their enticing sweetness and melancholy. He knew their simplicity, and the model, surely, was Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. Consider the first line—a few steps up, a few steps down. It could be a nursery tune. It was completely without pretension and yet carried such spiritual weight. Clive stood to receive his packed lunch from the waitress who had brought it out to him. Such was the exalted nature of his mission, and of his ambition. Beethoven. He knelt on the car-park gravel to stow in his daypack the grated cheese sandwiches.
    He slung the pack across his shoulder and set off along the track into the valley. During the night a warm front had moved across the Lakes, and already the frost had gone from the trees and from the meadow by the beck. The cloud cover was high and uniformly gray, the light was clear and flat, the path dry. Conditions did not come much better in late winter. He reckoned he had eight hours of daylight, though he knew that as long as he was off the fells and back down in the valley by dusk, he could find his way home with atorch. He had time then to climb Scafell Pike, but he could delay the decision until he was on Esk Hause.
    During the first hour or so, after he had turned south into the Langstrath, he felt, despite his optimism, the unease of outdoor solitude wrap itself around him. He drifted helplessly into a daydream, an elaborate story about someone hiding behind a rock, waiting to kill him. Now and then he glanced over his shoulder. He knew this feeling well because he often hiked alone. There was always a reluctance to be overcome. It was an act of will, a tussle with instinct, to keep walking away from the nearest people, from shelter, warmth, and help. A sense of scale habituated to the daily perspectives of rooms and streets was suddenly affronted by a colossal emptiness. The mass of rock rising above the valley was one long frown set in stone. The hiss and