Free The Innocent by Ian McEwan Page B

decant the milk into a jug.
    She sat across from him and they warmed their hands around the big mugs. He knew from experience that unless he made a formidable effort, a pattern was waiting to impose itself: a polite inquiry would elicit a polite response and another question. Have you lived here long? Do you travel far to your work? Is it your afternoon off? The catechism would havebegun. Only silences would interrupt the relentless tread of question and answer. They would be calling to each other over immense distances, from adjacent mountain peaks. Finally he would be desperate for the relief of heading away with his own thoughts, after the awkward goodbyes. Even now, they had already retreated from the intensity of their greeting. He had asked her about tea making. One more like that, and there would be nothing he could do.
    She had set down her mug and had put her hands deep in the pockets of her skirt. She was tapping her slippered feet on the rug. Her head was cocked, with expectation perhaps, or was she marking time to the tune in her head? Was it still the song she had teased him with? He had never known a woman tap her feet, but he knew he must not panic.
    It was an assumption, lodged deep, beyond examination or even awareness, that the responsibility for the event was entirely his. If he could not find the easy words to bring them closer, the defeat would be his alone. What could he say that was neither trivial nor intrusive? She had taken up her mug again and was looking at him now with a half-smile that did not quite part her lips. “Aren’t you lonely living here by yourself?” sounded too wheedlingly suggestive. She might think he was offering to move in.
    Rather than tolerate more silence, he settled after all for small talk and began to ask, “Have you lived here long?”
    But all in a rush she spoke over him, saying, “How do you look without your glasses? Show me, please.” This last word she elongated beyond what any native speaker would have considered reasonable, unfurling a delicate, papery thrill through Leonard’s stomach. He snatched the glasses from his face and blinked at her. He could see quite well up to three feet, and her features had only partially dissolved. “And so,” she said quietly. “It is how I thought. Your eyes are beautiful, and all the time they are hidden. Has no one told you how they are beautiful?”
    Leonard’s mother used to say something of the sort when hewas fifteen and he had his first pair, but that was hardly relevant. He had the sensation of rising gently through the room.
    She took the glasses and folded down the sides and put them by the cactus.
    His voice sounded strangled in his ears. “No, no one has said that”
    “Not other girls?”
    He shook his head.
    “Then I am the first to discover you?” There was humor, but no mockery, in her look.
    It made him feel foolish, immature, to be grinning so openly at her compliment, but he could do nothing about it.
    She said, “And your smile.”
    She smoothed away a wisp of hair from her eyes. Her forehead, so high and oval, reminded him of how Shakespeare was supposed to look. He was not certain how to put this to her. Instead he took her hand as it completed its movement and they sat in silence for a minute or two, as they had at their first meeting. She interlocked her fingers with his, and it was at this moment, rather than later in the bedroom, or later still when they talked of themselves with greater freedom, that Leonard felt irrevocably bound to her. Their hands fitted well, the grip was intricate, unbreakable, there were so many points of contact. In this poor light, and without his glasses, he could not see which fingers were his own. Sitting in the darkening, chilly room in his raincoat, holding on to her hand, he felt he was throwing away his life. The abandonment was delicious. Something was pouring out of him, through his palm and into hers; something was spreading back up his arm, across his