Free Black Dogs by Ian McEwan

joined the Garrick Club. Such, Jenny maintained, was the distance travelled since ‘comrade’.
    ‘Dear boy. I want to get over to Berlin as soon as possible.’
    ‘Good idea,’ I said straight away. ‘You should go.’
    ‘Seats are gold dust. Everyone wants to go. I’ve put a hold on two places on a flight this afternoon. I have to let them know in an hour.’
    ‘Bernard, I’m just off to France.’
    ‘Make a diversion. It’s a historic moment.’
    ‘I’ll phone you back.’
    Jenny was scathing. ‘He has to go and see his Big Mistake put right. He’ll need someone to carry his bags.’
    When it was put like that, I was ready to say no. But during breakfast, roused by the tinny triumphalism of the black and white portable we had balanced by the kitchen sink, I began to feel an impatient excitement, a need for adventure after days of domestic duties. Again the set gave out a miniature roar, and I was feeling like a boy locked out of the stadium on Cup Final day. History was happening, without me.
    After the children had been delivered to their playgroup and schools, I raised the matter with Jenny again. She was pleased to be back home. She moved from room to room, cordless phone always within reach, tending the house plants that had wilted under my care.
    ‘Go,’ was her recommendation. ‘Don’t listen to me,I’m jealous. But before you go, you’d better finish what you started.’
    The best of all possible arrangements. I rerouted my flight to Montpellier through Berlin and Paris, and confirmed Bernard’s booking. I phoned Berlin to ask my friend Günter if we could borrow his apartment. I called Bernard to tell him that I would collect him in a taxi at two o’clock. I cancelled engagements, left instructions and packed my bag. On the TV was a half-mile queue of East Berliners outside a bank, waiting for their hundred Deutschmarks. Jenny and I returned to the bedroom for an hour, then she left in a hurry to an appointment. I sat in the kitchen in my dressing-gown and ate an early lunch of warmed-up left-overs. On the portable, other parts of the Wall had been breached. People were converging on Berlin from all over the planet. A huge party was in the making. Journalists and TV crews could not find hotel rooms. Back upstairs, standing under the shower, invigorated and clarified by lovemaking, bellowing the snatches of Verdi I could remember in Italian, I congratulated myself on my rich and interesting life.
    An hour and a half later I left the taxi waiting in Addison Road and sprinted up the flight of steps to Bernard’s flat. He was actually standing just inside the open doorway, holding his hat and coat, and with his bags at his feet. He had only lately acquired the fussy exactitude of old age, the necessary caution to accommodate a reliably useless memory. I picked up his bags (Jenny was right) and he was about to pull the door to, but already he was frowning and raising a forefinger.
    ‘One last look round.’
    I put the bags down and followed him in, in time to see him scoop up his housekeys and passport from thekitchen table. He held them up for me with a told-you-so look, as though I were the one who had forgotten them, and he were to be congratulated.
    I had shared London cabs with Bernard before. His legs almost reached the partition. We were still in first gear, still pulling away, and Bernard was making a steeple of his fingers under his chin and beginning, ‘The point is ...’ His voice did not have June’s clipped, wartime mandarin quality; instead, it was pitched slightly high and was over-precise in its enunciation, the way Lytton Strachey’s might have been, or Malcolm Muggeridge’s was, the way certain educated Welshmen used to talk. If you didn’t already know and like Bernard, it could sound affected. ‘The point is that German unity is an inevitability. The Russians will rattle their sabres, the French will wave their arms, the British will um and ah. Who knows what the