Finally, after seventy-five minutes, a loud voice from somewhere declaimed, ‘Please give a big welcome to the next prime minister of Great Britain!’
To the sound of the Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’, the hero strode out. He raised both arms and there was uproar. Even from where I was, I could make out a thoughtful man in brown tweed jacket and tie, rather bemused by his elevation. He took his unlit pipe from his jacket pocket, probably out of habit, and there was another roar of delight from the crowd. I glanced across at Adam. He too was thoughtful, neither for nor against anything, but intent on recording it all.
It sounded to me as though Benn was reluctant to whip up such a vast crowd. He called out uncertainly, ‘Do we want the poll tax?’ ‘No!’ the crowd thundered. ‘Do we want a Labour government?’ ‘Yes!’ came the even louder reply. He sounded more comfortable once he started laying out his argument. The speech was simpler than the one I’d heard in Trafalgar Square and more effective. He proposed a fairer, racially harmonious, decentralised, technologically sophisticated Britain ‘fit for the late twentieth century’, a kind and decent place where private schools were merged with the state system, university education was opened up to the working class, housing and the best healthcare were available to all, where the energy sector was taken back into public ownership and the City was not deregulated, as proposed, and where workers sat on company boards, the rich paid their dues and the cycle of inherited privilege was broken.
All well and good, and no surprises. The speech was long, partly because each of Benn’s proposals was met with reverential applause. Since I’d never heard Adam express an interest in politics, I nudged him and asked him what he thought so far.
He said, ‘We should make your fortune before the top rate of tax goes back to eighty-three per cent.’
Was this comic cynicism? I looked at him and couldn’t tell. The speech went on and my attention began to wander. I’d often noticed in large crowds that, however rapt the audience, there were always people on the move, returning or wandering away, threading through in different directions, intent on some other business, a train, a lavatory, a fit of boredom or disapproval. Where we stood was on ground that rose slightly towards an oak tree behind us. We had a good view. Some people were moving nearer the front. The crowd in our immediate area had begun to thin out to reveal a quantity of litter trodden into the softened ground. I happened to glance at Adam and saw that his gaze was not directed at the stage but away to his left. A well-dressed woman, in her fifties, I guessed, rather gaunt, with hair severely drawn back, using a cane to steady herself on the muddy grass, was coming diagonally towards us. Then I noticed the young woman at her side, her daughter perhaps. They approached at a slow pace. The young woman’s hand hovered near her mother’s elbow to steady her. I glanced at Adam again and saw an expression, hard to identify at first – astonishment was my first thought. He was transfixed as the two came nearer.
The young woman saw Adam and stopped. They were staring hard at each other. The woman with the cane was irritated at being held up and plucked at her daughter’s sleeve. Adam made a sound, a smothered gasp. When I looked again at the couple, I understood. The younger one was pale and pretty in an unusual way, a clever variation on a theme. The woman with the cane hadn’t grasped what was happening. She wanted to get on her way and gave an irritable command to her young companion. In her, there was no mistaking the line of that nose, or the blue eyes flecked with tiny black rods. Not a daughter at all, but Eve, Adam’s sister, one of thirteen.
I thought it was my responsibility to make some kind of contact with her. The couple were no more than twenty feet away. I raised a hand and called out ridiculously, ‘I say…’ and started to go towards them. They might not have heard; my words could have been lost to Benn’s speech. I felt Adam’s hand on my shoulder.
He said softly, ‘Please don’t.’
I looked again at Eve. She was a beautiful unhappy girl. The face was pale, with an expression of pleading and misery as she continued to stare at her twin.
‘Go on,’ I whispered. ‘Talk to her.’
The woman lifted her cane and pointed in the direction she intended to go. At the same time, she dragged at Eve’s arm.
I said, ‘Adam. For God’s sake. Go on!’
He wouldn’t move. With her gaze still locked on him, Eve allowed herself to be led away. They moved off through the crowd. Just before they disappeared from view, she turned for one last look. She was too far away for me to read her expression. She was no more than a small pale face bobbing in the press of bodies. Then she was gone. We could have followed them but Adam had already turned in the other direction and had gone to stand by the oak tree.
We set off for home in silence. I should have done more to encourage him to approach his twin. We stood side by side on the crowded Tube heading south. I was haunted, and I knew he was too, by Eve’s abject look. I decided not to press him to explain why he had turned away. He would tell me when he was ready. I should have spoken to her, I kept thinking, but he didn’t want it. The way he had stood with his back to her, gazing into the tree trunk as she vanished into the crowd! I’d been neglecting him. I’d been lost to a love affair. In the daily round, it no longer amazed me that I could pass the time of day with a manufactured human, or that it could wash the dishes and converse like anyone else. I sometimes wearied of his earnest pursuit of ideas and facts, of his hunger for propositions that lay beyond my reach. Technological marvels like Adam, like the first steam engine, become commonplace. Likewise, the biological marvels we grow up among and don’t fully understand, like the brain of any creature, or the humble stinging nettle, whose photosynthesis had only just been described on a quantum scale. There is nothing so amazing that we can’t get used to it. As Adam blossomed and made me rich, I had ceased to think about him.
That evening I described the Hyde Park moment to Miranda. She wasn’t as impressed as I was that we had seen an Eve. I described the sad moment, as I saw it, when he turned his back on her. And then, my guilt about him.
‘I don’t know what you’re being so dramatic about,’ she said. ‘Talk to him. Spend more time with him.’
In the mid-morning of the following day, when the rain had stopped at last, I went into my bedroom and persuaded Adam to desert the currency markets and come for a walk. He was just back from escorting Miranda to the Tube and reluctantly got to his feet. But how confident his stride was as he weaved through the shoppers on Clapham High Street. Of course, our excursion was costing hundreds of pounds in lost revenue. Since we were passing the newsagent, we called in on Simon Syed. While I browsed the magazine shelves, I listened as Adam and Simon discussed the politics of Kashmir, then the India–Pakistan nuclear arms race and finally, to end on a celebratory note, the poetry of Tagore, whom both could quote in the original at length. I thought Adam was showing off, but Simon was delighted. He praised Adam’s accent – better than his own these days, he said – and promised to invite us all to dinner.
A quarter of an hour later, we were walking on the Common. Until this point, we had small-talked. Now I asked him about the visit of Sally, the engineer. When she had asked him to imagine an object of hatred, what had he brought to mind?
‘Obviously, I thought about what happened to Mariam. But it’s hard when someone asks you to think about something. The mind goes its own way. As John Milton said, the mind is its own place. I tried to stay focussed on Gorringe, but then I started thinking about the ideas that lay behind his actions. How he believed he was allowed to do what he did, or had some kind of entitlement to it, how he could be immune to her cries and her fear and the consequences for her, and how he thought there was no other way for him to get what he wanted than by force.’