Enduring Love: Chapter 18 Summary & Analysis

It is Clarissa’s birthday, and, to Joe’s surprise, she kisses him when he gives her a card. Joe suspects that Clarissa is being “kind” because she knows that their relationship is over. He continues to feel, too, that Clarissa has “done neither the research nor the thinking” about Parry’s condition and is thus underestimating it. Parry’s love, Joe believes, “could not stand still”; it must soon turn “to either indifference or hatred.”

As Clarissa leaves for work, Joe goes to his study to wrap her present: an early edition of John Keats’s poems. While there, he gathers all of Parry’s letters and reads them again, looking for “significant passages.” Joe is “attempting to compile a dossier of threats,” and he has come to understand that Parry’s threats lie not in his “pathetic” expressions of love but in his recollections, for example, of how much he loved hunting as a child: enjoying the “power of life and death” that was in his hands when he was armed with a gun. So, too, do Parry’s threats lie in his assurance that he can hire others to do his bidding, which Joe reflects on once again as he works.

Joe notices, reading further, that Parry’s letters contain very few religious references; instead, “his religion [is] dreamily vague on the specifics of doctrine.” God, for Parry, is “undeniably ‘within’ rather than in his heaven”; thus, Parry has a license, Joe realizes, to “respond to the calls of feeling or intuition.”

Joe leaves his apartment carrying his notes about Parry’s letters. Parry is not outside waiting for him, and the change in Parry’s routine makes Joe “uneasy.” Arriving at a police station—his destination this morning—Joe has to wait for “over an hour” to be seen, and he speculates that the “exhausted air” that seems to fill the station is a result of “the human need for order meet[ing] the human tendency to mayhem.” At last, Duty Inspector Linley appears and leads Joe into an interview room. There, the two men sit beneath fluorescent lights to talk.

Joe reflects inwardly about the strategy that has finally brought him into a face-to-face conversation with a policeman: he has lodged a formal complaint about the way his case has “been handled so far,” and now that complaint must be dealt with. Sitting with Duty Inspector Linley, to whom he has already told his story by telephone, Joe tries to determine whether the man is “slightly clever or very stupid.” Duty Inspector Linley asks Joe a series of questions about Parry’s behavior, and, once again, Joe finds it difficult to describe Parry’s obsession in a way that clearly indicates its criminality. As Duty Inspector Linley asks Joe about Clarissa’s response to Parry, it quickly becomes clear that Linley suspects that Joe’s mental state may not be entirely healthy.

Frustrated, and “beginning to detest Linley,” Joe states that he has “good reasons to believe [Parry] will turn nasty” and that he has come “to the police for help.” Duty Inspector Linley suggests that he would have done “the same [him]self,” but, even after examining the threats that Joe has copied out from Parry’s letters, he declares that Parry is a “pussycat” as far as stalkers are concerned. When Joe insists that Parry is likely to hire someone to assault him, Linley responds that Joe’s case is “too weak” to pursue. Joe asks Linley to “send a couple of officers round to [Parry’s] place” and let him know he’s being monitored, but Linley answers that such an action is not possible “in the kind of society we have, or want to have.”

Late for Clarissa’s birthday lunch, Joe leaves the station in frustration and rushes to the restaurant where he is to meet Clarissa and her godfather, Jocelyn Kale. As he walks, he thinks about Clarissa’s last birthday, “when [they] had celebrated without a trace of complication in [their] lives.” Even now, Joe reflects, he can’t bring himself to believe that their relationship is really over, despite what Clarissa has declared. Instead, he tells himself that their love is “just the kind to endure.”

Reflecting further on Clarissa’s last birthday, Joe recalls the specifics of that day. He had worked on an essay about “the genetic basis to religious belief” and had speculated that religion gave believers “the brute strength of singlemindedness.” In bed that morning, Clarissa had attempted to make love to Joe, and he had made a playful show of resisting her, reading the newspaper while she “sat sleepily astride [him].” Even now, Joe recalls being simultaneously aroused by Clarissa and interested in a newspaper article that caught his eye. He ponders the marvels of the human brain, which is able to sustain such dual attention, even as he considers how much he misses his daily life with Clarissa. The task of reclaiming that life, he understands once again, will have to be his alone.