The Cement Garden

Ian McEwan

• Publisher: RosettaBooks
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780795302596
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Orphaned siblings create a macabre secret world for themselves in this "irresistibly readable" novel by the New York Times -bestselling author ( The New York Review of Books ). This "powerful and disconcerting" novel by the Booker Prize-winning author of The Children Act and Atonement ( The Daily Telegraph ) tells the story of a dying family who live in a dying part of the city. A father of four children decides, in an effort to make his garden easier to control, to pave it over. In the process, he has a heart attack and dies, leaving the cement garden unfinished and the children to the care of their mother. Soon after, the mother too dies and the children, fearful of being separated by social services, decide to cover up their parents' deaths: they bury their mother in the cement garden. The story is told from the point of view of Jack, one of the sons, who is entering adolescence with all of its attendant curiosity and appetites. Julie, the eldest, is almost a grown woman. Sue is rather bookish and observes all that goes on around her. And Tom is the youngest and the baby of the lot. The children seem to manage in this perverse setting rather well—until Julie brings home a boyfriend who threatens their secret by asking too many questions. "[A] beautiful but disturbing novel."— The AV Club "McEwan's evocative detail and perfect British prose lend a genteel decorum to the death and decay that surround the family."— The New Yorker

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

I did not kill my father, but I sometimes felt I had helped him on his way. And but for the fact that it coincided with a landmark in my own physical growth, his death seemed insignificant compared to what followed. My sisters and I talked about him the week after he died, and Sue certainly cried when the ambulance men tucked him up in a bright red blanket and carried him away. He was a frail, irascible, obsessive man with yellowish hands and face. I am only including the little story of his death to explain how my sisters and I came to have such a large quantity of cement at our disposal.

In the early summer of my fourteenth year a lorry pulled up outside our house. I was sitting on the front step rereading a comic. The driver and another man came toward me. They were covered in a fine, pale dust which gave their faces a ghostly look. They were both whistling shrilly completely different tunes. I stood up and held the comic out of sight. I wished I had been reading the racing page of my father’s paper or the football results.

“Cement?” one of them said.

I hooked my thumbs into my pockets, moved my weight onto one foot and narrowed my eyes a little. I wanted to say something terse and appropriate, but I was not sure I had heard them right. I left it too long, for the one who had spoken rolled his eyes toward the sky and with his hands on his hips stared past me at the front door. It opened and my father stepped out, biting on his pipe and holding a clipboard against his hip.

“Cement,” the man said again, this time with a downward inflection. My father nodded. I folded the comic into my back pocket and followed the three men up the path to the lorry. My father stood on tiptoe to look over the side, took his pipe from his mouth and nodded again. The man who had not yet spoken made a savage chop with his hand. A steel pin flew free and one side of the lorry fell away with a great noise. The tightly packed paper sacks of cement were arranged two deep along the floor of the lorry.

My father counted them, looked at his clipboard and said, “Fifteen.” The two men grunted. I liked this kind of talk. I too said to myself, “Fifteen.” The men took a sack each on their shoulders and we went back down the path, this time with me in front followed by my father. Round to one side of the house he pointed with the wet stem of his pipe at the coal hole. The men heaved their sacks into the cellar and returned to their lorry for more. My father made a mark on the clipboard with a pencil which dangled from it by a piece of string. He rocked back on his heels, waiting. I leaned against the fence. I did not know what the cement was for, and I did not wish to be placed outside this intense community of work by showing ignorance. I counted the sacks too, and when they were all done I stood at my father’s elbow while he signed the delivery note. Then without a word he returned indoors.

That night my parents argued over the bags of cement. My mother, who was a quiet sort of person, was furious. She wanted my father to send the whole lot back. We had just finished supper. While my mother talked my father used a penknife to scrape black shards from the bowl of his pipe onto the food he had barely touched. He knew how to use his pipe against her. She was telling him how little money we had and that Tom would soon be needing new clothes for starting at school. He replaced the pipe between his teeth like a missing section of his own anatomy and interrupted to say it was “out of the question” sending the bags back and “that is the end of it.” Having seen for myself the lorry and the heavy sacks and the men who had brought them, I sensed he was right. But how self-important and foolish he looked as he took the thing out of his mouth, held it by its bowl and pointed the black stem at my mother. She became angrier, her voice choked with exasperation. Julie, Sue and I slipped away upstairs to Julie’s bedroom and closed the door. The rise and fall of our mother’s voice reached us through the floor, but the words themselves were lost.

Sue lay on the bed giggling with her knuckles in her mouth while Julie pushed a chair against the door. Together we rapidly stripped Sue of her clothes and when we were pulling down her pants our hands touched. Sue was rather thin. Her skin clung tightly to her rib cage and the hard muscular ridge of her buttocks strangely resembled her shoulder blades. Faint gingerish down grew between her legs. The game was that Julie and I were scientists examining a specimen from outer space. We spoke in clipped Germanic voices as we faced each other across the naked body. From downstairs came the tired, insistent drone of our mother’s voice. Julie had a high ridge of cheekbone beneath her eyes which gave her the deep look of some rare wild animal. In the electric light her eyes were black and big. The soft line of her mouth was just broken by two front teeth, and she had to pout a little to conceal her smile. I longed to examine my older sister but the game did not allow for that.

“Vell?” We rolled Sue onto her side and then onto her belly. We stroked her back and thighs with our fingernails. We looked into her mouth and between her legs with a torch and found the little flower made of flesh.

“Vot do you think of zis, Herr Doctor?” Julie stroked it with a moistened finger and a small tremor ran along Sue’s bony spine. I watched closely. I moistened my finger and slid it over Julie’s.

“Nothing serious,” she said at last, and closed the slit with her finger and thumb. “But ve vill votch for further developments, ja?” Sue begged us to go on. Julie and I looked at each other knowingly, knowing nothing.

“It’s Julie’s turn,” I said.

“No,” she said as always. “It’s your turn.”

Still on her back, Sue pleaded with us. I crossed the room, picked up Sue’s skirt and threw it at her.

“Out of the question,” I said through an imaginary pipe. “That’s the end of it.”

I locked myself in the bathroom and sat on the edge of the bath with my pants round my ankles. I thought of Julie’s pale brown fingers between Sue’s legs as I brought myself to my quick, dry stab of pleasure. I remained doubled up after the spasm passed and became aware that downstairs the voices had long ago ceased.

***

The next morning I went down into the cellar with Tom, my younger brother. It was large and divided into a number of meaningless rooms. Tom clung to my side as we descended the stone stairs. He had heard about the cement bags and now he wanted to look at them. The coal hole gave onto the largest of the rooms and the bags were strewn as they had fallen over what remained of last year’s coal. Along one wall was a massive tin chest, something to do with my father’s brief time in the Army, and used for a while to hold the coke separate from the coal. Tom wanted to look inside, so I lifted the lid for him. It was empty and blackened, so black that in this dusty light we could not see the bottom. Believing he was staring into a deep hole, Tom gripped the edge and shouted into the trunk and waited for his echo. When nothing happened he demanded to be shown the other rooms. I took him to one nearer the stairs. The door was almost off its hinges and when I pushed it, it came away completely. Tom laughed and had his echo at last returned to him from the room we had just left. In this room there were cardboard boxes of mildewed clothes, none of them familiar to me. Tom found some of his old toys. He turned them over contemptuously with his foot and told me they were for babies. Heaped up behind the door was an old brass cot that all of us had slept in at one time or another. Tom wanted me to reassemble it for him and I told him that cots were for babies too.

At the foot of the stairs we met our father coming down. He wanted me, he said, to give him a hand with the sacks. We followed him back into the large room. Tom was scared of Father and kept well behind me. Julie had told me recently that now Father was a semi-invalid he would have to compete with Tom for Mother’s attention. It was an extraordinary idea and I thought about it for a long time. So simple, so bizarre, a small boy and a grown man competing. Later I asked Julie who would win and without hesitation she said, “Tom of course, and Dad’ll take it out on him.”

And he was strict with Tom, always going on at him in a needling sort of way. He used Mother against Tom much as he used his pipe against her. “Don’t talk to your mother like that” or “Sit up straight when your mother is talking to you.” She took all this in silence. If Father then left the room, she would smile briefly at Tom or tidy his hair with her fingers. Now Tom stood back from the doorway watching us drag each sack between us across the floor, arranging them in two neat lines along the wall. Because of his heart attack my father was forbidden this sort of work, but I made sure he took as much weight as I did.

When we bent down and each took hold of a corner of a sack, I felt him delay, waiting for me to take up the strain. But I said, “One two three…” and pulled only when I saw his arm stiffen. If I were to do more then I wanted him to acknowledge it out loud. When we were done, we stood back like workers do, looking at the job. My father leaned with one hand against the wall breathing heavily. I deliberately breathed as lightly as I could, through my nose, even though it made me feel faint. I kept my hands casually on my hips.

“What do you want all this for?” I felt I now had a right to ask.

He snatched at words between breaths. “For… the garden.” I waited for more but after a pause he turned to leave. In the doorway he caught hold of Tom’s arm.

“Look at the state of your hands,” he complained, unaware of the mess his own hand was making on Tom’s shirt. “Go on, up you go.”

I remained behind a moment and then began turning off the lights. Hearing the clicks, so it seemed to me, my father stopped at the foot of the stairs and reminded me sternly to turn off all the lights before I came up.

“I already was,” I said irritably. But he was coughing loudly on his way up the stairs.

He had constructed rather than cultivated his garden according to plans he sometimes spread out on the kitchen table in the evenings while we peered over his shoulder. There were narrow flagstone paths which made elaborate curves to visit flower beds that were only a few feet away. One path spiraled up round a rockery as though it were a mountain pass. It annoyed him once to see Tom walking straight up the side of the rockery, using the path like a short flight of stairs.

“Walk up it properly,” he shouted out the kitchen window. There was a lawn the size of a card table raised a couple of feet on a pile of rocks. Round the edge of the lawn there was just space for a single row of marigolds. He alone called it the hanging garden. In the very center of the hanging garden was a plaster statue of a dancing Pan. Here and there were sudden flights of steps, down, then up. There was a pond with a blue plastic bottom. Once he brought home two goldfish in a plastic bag. The birds ate them the same day. The paths were so narrow it was possible to lose your balance and fall into the flower beds. He chose flowers for their neatness and symmetry. He liked tulips best of all and planted them well apart. He did not like bushes or ivy or roses. He would have nothing that tangled. On either side of us the houses had been cleared and in summer the vacant sites grew lush with weeds and their flowers. Before his first heart attack he had intended to build a high wall round his special world.

There were a few running jokes in the family, initiated and maintained by my father. Against Sue for having almost invisible eyebrows and lashes, against Julie for her ambitions to be a famous athlete, against Tom for pissing in his bed sometimes, against Mother for being poor at arithmetic and against me for my pimples which were just starting up at that time. One suppertime I passed him a plate of food and he remarked that he did not want his food to get too close to my face. The laughter was instant and ritual. Because little jokes like this one were stage-managed by Father, none of them ever worked against him.

That night Julie and I locked ourselves in her bedroom and set to work filling pages with crude overworked jokes. Everything we thought of seemed funny. We fell from the bed to the floor, clutching at our chests, screeching with delight. Outside Tom and Sue were banging on the door demanding to be let in. Our best jokes were, we thought, the question and answer ones. Several of them made references to Father’s constipation. But we knew the real target. We selected our best, polished it and practiced it. Then we waited a day or two. It was supper, and as it happened he came out with another crack about my spots. We waited for Tom and Sue to stop laughing. My heart was beating so hard it was difficult to sound casual, conversational, the way we had rehearsed it. I said, “I saw something out in the garden today that gave me a shock.”

“Oh,” said Julie, “what was that?”

“A flower.”

No one seemed to hear us. Tom was talking to himself, Mother poured a little milk into her cup and Father continued to butter with extreme care the slice of bread before him. Where butter strayed over the edge of his bread he folded it back with a quick sliding movement of his knife. I thought perhaps we should say it again louder and I looked across at Julie. She would not meet my eye. Father finished his bread and left the room.

Mother said, “That was quite unnecessary.”

“What was?”

But she said nothing more to me. Jokes were not made against Father because they were not funny. He sulked. I felt guilt when I desperately wanted to feel elation. I tried to convince Julie of our victory so that she in turn would convince me. We had Sue up that night lying between us, but the game was giving us no pleasure. Sue got bored and went away. Julie was for apologizing, making it up to him in some way. I could not face that, but when, two days later, he spoke to me for the first time, I was greatly relieved. Then the garden was not mentioned for a long time, and when he covered the kitchen table with his plans he looked at them alone. After his first heart attack he stopped work on the garden altogether. Weeds pushed up through the cracks in the paving stones. Part of the rockery collapsed and the little pond dried up. The dancing Pan fell on its side and broke in two, and nothing was said. The possibility that Julie and I were responsible for the disintegration filled me with horror and delight.

Shortly after the cement came the sand. A pale yellow pile filled one corner of the front garden. It became apparent, probably through my mother, that the plan was to surround the house, front and back, with an even plane of concrete. My father confirmed this one evening.

“It will be tidier,” he said. “I won’t be able to keep up the garden now”—he tapped his left breast with his pipe—“and it will keep the muck off your mother’s clean f...