Enduring Love: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Joe and Clarissa wake the next morning and go about their normal routines. Clarissa returns to work at her university, while Joe finishes an essay about the Hubble telescope, briefly recalling both the “glee” felt by ordinary people upon its initial failure and the wonder with which its ultimate success was met. Throughout the morning, Joe feels a sense of “unease” that he can’t quite define. He doesn’t think about Parry’s late-night phone call; rather, he manages to merge the call “with all the trouble of the day before.”

After finishing the piece, Joe telephones the police and learns that he must attend an inquest concerning John Logan’s death in six weeks’ time. He takes a taxi across town to meet with a radio producer who wants a story on supermarket vegetables, and he surprises himself by telling the producer “the full story” of the balloon disaster. Leaving the radio station, he feels again the “unnamed sensation” from earlier in the morning, and he proceeds to the London Library, where he intends to spend the afternoon researching Charles Darwin’s contemporaries.

Joe has in mind a particular new essay: he wants to write about “the death of anecdote and narrative in science.” He believes that “Darwin’s generation was the last to permit itself the luxury of storytelling in published articles.” He recalls a published anecdote in which a dog appeared to engage in strategic thinking, and he reflects on the fact that “the attractions of narrative” had, in that particular case, “clouded judgment.”

As he works, Joe can hear outside the reading room the traffic in St. James’s Square, and he is further disturbed by the sound of creaking floorboards behind the chair in which he’s sitting. Giving in to the distractions, he glances up from his book in time to see “a flash of white shoe and something red,” as well as the “closing of the sighing swing doors that led out of the reading room onto the stairs.”

Turning his attention back to his research, Joe fails for a moment to grasp “the prompting of footwear and color,” not yet realizing that what he has seen matches the shoes worn by Jed Parry during the ballooning accident. Instead, he begins to “fret,” and is struck by a sense of “apprehension” whose source he can’t identify. He cannot “stop looking at the door” that closed a moment earlier, and, after a few seconds, he stands and moves into the stairwell then descends onto the street.

Standing in St. James’s Square, Joe looks around for anyone dressed in the footwear he believes he saw in the reading room: “a pair of white shoes, trainers with red laces.” He sees nothing, but, before returning to the reading room, he replaces a bunch of flowers in the jar from which they have been knocked. In doing so, Joe is righting a makeshift memorial to a policewoman who was murdered on that spot. Though he thinks that this act might bring him “luck,” he realizes simultaneously that he is engaging in a delusion on which “whole religions” have been founded.