Machines Like Me

But I liked the music’s muscular sentimentality, emptied of irony by these middle-aged performers, so confident and tuneful, liberated by useful ignorance of two and a half centuries of symphonic experimentation. Lennon’s rasping voice floated towards us from some faraway echoing place beyond the horizon, or the grave. I didn’t mind being told again about love. Here before me were all of its warm possibilities, barely three feet away, and it was all I needed. Here was her long, exquisitely shaped face (those angled cheekbones might break through the skin one day), the amused gaze, at this point still merry, and narrowed, locked on me, the lips parted, for she was about to speak against what I’d just said. Her perfect elongated nose flared faintly at the base of the nostrils’ arch to signal in advance her dissent. Her pallor set off her fine brown hair, tonight childishly parted dead centre. Against prevailing fashion, she kept out of the sun. Her bare white arms were also thin and unblemished – not a single freckle.

From my point of view we still holidayed in the foothills, among possibilities whose fulfilment rose like distant alps. I tried to ignore them in order to attend to details. From her perspective, on the other side of this frail table, we may have already reached our highest point. She may have thought she was as close as she ever wanted to be, or could be, to another person. Love stories like Jane Austen’s used to conclude chastely with preparations for a wedding. Now their climax lay on the far side of carnal knowledge, where all of complexity waited.

For now, my business was to conduct a political argument with her without feelings running high then turning sour, and at the same time stay true to myself and let her do the same. It was a feasible balancing act, as long as I drank less than half a bottle of the indifferent Médoc that stood between us. We’d had this conversation before and it should have been easier now, but repetition seemed like an indictment of us both. We didn’t really want to be talking about it. Impossible to avoid, even though we knew it would lead nowhere. But this was how it was for everyone. We were all still tending the wound. How could Miranda and I spend our lives together when we couldn’t agree on such a fundamental as war?

About the islands formerly known as the Falklands she had firm views. She insisted that the Argentine flag-planting on remote South Georgia had been a clear violation of international law. I said it was an inhospitable place and no one should be asked to fight to the death for it. She said that the taking of Port Stanley was the desperate act of an unpopular regime looking to whip up patriotic fervour. I said this was all the more reason not to get drawn in. She said the Task Force was a brave and brilliant conception, even in failure. I said, uneasily remembering my emotional state when the ships set off, that it was a ridiculous enactment of lost imperial grandeur. How could I not see, she said, that this was an anti-fascist war? No (I spoke over her) it was a row over property, fed on each side by nationalistic stupidity. I summoned the Borges observation: two bald men fighting over a comb. She replied that a bald man might hand down his comb to his children. I was struggling to understand this when she added that the generals had tortured, disappeared and killed their citizens by the thousands and were running the economy into the ground. If we’d taken back the islands, the humiliation would have finished the military regime and democracy would have returned to Argentina. I replied that she could not possibly know this. We had lost thousands of young men and women to the cause of Mrs Thatcher’s ambitions. My voice began to rise before I remembered. I resumed quietly but with a certain tremor: that she remained in office after such slaughter was the greatest political scandal of our time. I delivered this with a finality that deserved a moment’s respectful silence, but Miranda came straight back to tell me that the prime minister failed in a decent cause and was supported by almost all of Parliament and the country and she was right to remain in office.