Humoring him, I accompanied him as he went up to the box and fished out an issue. He opened it up and promptly found what he was looking for. He drew my attention to this passage, in the page 32 story about McEwan:

[Dr. Perowne] encounters a menacing thug named Baxter and inwardly diagnoses him with Huntingdon's disease, a neurodegenerative disorder like the one Perowne's mother suffers from. As it turns out, McEwan's own mother died of Huntingdon's, and vascular dementia appears to be a preoccupation of his — it afflicts characters in his two previous novels as well. "It's a savage thing," McEwan says. "It has the nature of fate about it. There's nothing you can do; it was always going to happen. It's fixed somewhere in your genome. It has something of the quality of an abstract curse, such as a character in a Greek play might see."

[The longest day, Eye, March 31, 2005.]

The words were crystal clear: "McEwan's own mother died of Huntingdon's."

I felt a momentary trill of empathy for the fathead.

Back home I searched the web. (I didn't drag the fellow home with me.) No one else speaks of McEwan's mother having had Huntington's. (Incidentally, both spellings seem widespread.)

But the passage is still there at Eye's website.

On the matter raised in my question to McEwan, consider a couple of undeniable facts: #1 — the Eye story, which I didn't even know about when I posed the question; #2 — one of the most influential news purveyors of all — I refer of course to The New York Times -- whose front page headline on Sunday, the day before McEwan's talk, declared the pope "gravely ill."

The pope's death had in fact been announced by 3:00 PM EDT on Saturday.

McEwan's response to me was necessarily discreet. The media was presumably covering the event.

But I know. He and I see eye to eye on this one too.