Enduring Love by Ian McEwan

not want to provoke him.
    I said, “Where are you?”
    He hesitated. “I can come to you.”
    “No. Tell me where you are.”
    “I’m in the phone box at the end of your road?”
    He said it, he asked it, without shame. I was shocked, but determined to conceal it. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll be along.” I hung up, put on my coat, took my keys, and left the apartment. It was a comfort to discover that Clarissa’s scent, Diorissimo, still hung in the air on the stairs, all the way down.

Seven
    Outside our apartment building, running straight on rising ground, was an avenue of plane trees just coming into leaf. As soon as I stepped out onto the pavement I saw Parry standing under a tree at the corner, a hundred yards away. When he saw me he took his hands out of his pockets, folded his arms, then let them droop. He began to come toward me, changed his mind, and went back to his tree. I walked toward him slowly and felt my anxiety dropping away.
    As I went closer Parry retreated further under his tree, leaned back against its trunk, and tried to look nonchalant by hooking a thumb into his trouser pocket. In fact he looked abject. He appeared smaller, all knobs and bones, no longer the sleek Indian brave, despite the ponytail. He wouldn’t meet my eye as I came up, or rather his eyes made a nervous pass across my face and then turned down. As I put out my hand, I was feeling quite relieved. Clarissa was right: he was a harmless fellow with a strange notion, a nuisance at most, hardly the threat I had made him out to be. He looked a sorry sight now, cringing under the fresh plane leaves. It was the accident and theafterwaves of shock that had distorted my understanding. I had translated farce into indefinable menace. His hand, when it shook mine, exerted no pressure. I spoke to him firmly, but with a little kindness too. He was just about young enough to be my son. “You’d better tell me what this is all about.”
    He said, “There’s a coffee place …” and he nodded in the direction of the Edgware Road.
    “We’ll be fine right here,” I said. “I don’t have a lot of time.”
    The wind had got up again and seemed sharpened by the thin sunlight. I drew my coat around me and tightened its belt, and as I did so I glanced at Parry’s shoes. No trainers today. Soft brown leather shoes, handmade perhaps. I went and leaned against a nearby wall and folded my arms.
    Parry came away from the tree and stood in front of me, staring at his feet. “I’d rather we went inside,” he said, with a hint of a whine.
    I said nothing and waited. He sighed and looked down the street to where I lived, and then his gaze tracked a passing car. He looked up at the piles of towering cumulus, and he examined the nails of his right hand, but he could not look at me. When he spoke at last, I think his sight line was on a crack in the pavement.
    “Something’s happened,” he said.
    He wasn’t going to continue, so I said, “What’s happened?”
    He breathed in deeply through his nose. He still would not look at me. “You know what it is,” he said sulkily.
    I tried to help him. “Are we talking about the accident?”
    “You know what it is, but you want me to say it.”
    I said, “I think you’d better. I have to go soon.”
    “It’s all about control, isn’t it?” He had flashed a look of adolescent defiance at me and now his gaze was down again. “It’s so stupidto play games. Why don’t you just say it? There’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
    I looked at my watch. This was my best time of day for work, and I had yet to get into central London to collect a book. An empty taxi was coming toward us. Parry saw it too.
    “You think you’re being cool about this, but it’s ridiculous. You won’t be able to keep it up, and you know it. Everything’s changed now. Please don’t put on this act. Please …”
    We watched the taxi go past. I said, “You asked me to meet you because you had something to