Read Online Amsterdam by Ian McEwan - Free Book Online Page A

I’d like your view on this, not just because you’ve got a personal connection and you already know a little about it. It’s because you’re not in the business and I need an outsider’s view. I think I’m going mad …”
    This last he was murmuring to himself as he delved into the case and produced a large cardboard-backed envelope, from which he pulled three black-and-white photographs. Clive turned the heat off under the saucepans and sat down. The first photograph Vernon put in his hands showed Julian Garmony in a plain three-quarter-length dress, posing catwalk style, with arms pushing away a little from his body and one foot set in front of the other, knees slightly crooked. The false breasts under the dress were small, and the edge of one bra strap was visible. The face was made up, but not overly so, for his natural pallor served him well, and lipstick had bestowed a bow of sensuality on the unkind, narrow lips. The hair was distinctively Garmony’s, short, wavy, and side-parted, so that his appearance was both manicured and dissolute, and faintly bovine. This was not something that could ever be passed off as fancy dress, or a lark in front of the camera. The strained, self-absorbed expression was that of a man revealed in a sexual state. The strong gaze into the lens was consciously seductive. The lighting was soft, and cleverly done.
    “Molly,” Clive said, more to himself.
    “You got it in one,” Vernon said. He was watching hungrily, waiting for a reaction, and it was partly to conceal his thoughts that Clive continued to gaze into the picture. What he felt first was simple relief, for Molly. A puzzle had been solved. This was what had drawn her to Garmony—the secret life, his vulnerability, the trust that must have bound them closer. Good old Molly. She would have been creative and playful,urging him on, taking him further into the dreams that the House of Commons could not fulfill, and he would have known that he could rely on her. If she had been ill in some other kind of way, she would have taken care to destroy these pictures. Had it ever moved beyond the bedroom? To restaurants in foreign cities? Two girls on the town. Molly would have known how. She knew the clothes and the places, and she would have adored the conspiracy and fun, the silliness and sexiness of it. Clive thought again how he loved her. “Well?” Vernon said.
    To forestall him. Clive put out a hand for another picture. In this, a head-and-shoulders shot, Garmony’s dress was more silkily feminine. There was a simple line of lace around the high sleeves and neckline. Perhaps it was lingerie he was wearing. The effect was less successful, unmasking completely the lurking masculinity and revealing the pathos, the impossible hopes of his confounded identity. Molly’s artful lighting could not dissolve the jawbones of a huge head or the swell of an Adam’s apple. How he looked and how he felt he looked were probably very far apart. They should have been ridiculous, these photographs, they
were
ridiculous, but Clive was somewhat awed. We knew so little about each other. We lay mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white. Here was a rare sight below the waves, of a man’s privacy and turmoil, of his dignity upended bythe overpowering necessity of pure fantasy, pure thought, by the irreducible human element—mind.
    For the first time Clive considered what it might be like to feel kindly toward Garmony. It was Molly who had made it possible. In the third of the pictures he wore a boxy Chanel jacket and his gaze was turned downward; on some mental screen of selfhood he was a demure and feasible woman, but to an outsider what showed was evasion. Face it, you’re a man. He was better off looking to camera, confronting us with his pretense.
    “So?” Vernon was becoming impatient.
    “Extraordinary.”
    Clive handed the photographs back. He could not think clearly with the images