Saturday. Part 4

That autumn Theo began travelling to east London for lessons with various elderly figures of the British blues scene, contacted through a friend of Rosalind's at her paper. According to Theo, Jack Bruce was the most impressive because he had formal training in music, played several 131 1.

instruments, revolutionised ba.s.s playing, knew everything about theory and recorded with everyone during the heroic period of the British blues, in the early sixties, the long-ago days of Blues Incorporated. He was also, Theo said, more patient with him than the others, and very kind. Perowne was surprised how an elevated figure like Bruce could be troubled to spend time instructing a mere boy. Disarmingly, Theo saw nothing unusual in it at all.

Through Bruce, Theo met some of the legendary figures. J He was allowed to sit in on a Clapton mastercla.s.s. Long John Baldry came over from Canada for a reunion. Theo liked hearing about Cyril Davies and Alexis Korner, and the Graham Bond Organisation, and Cream's first concert. By some accident Theo jammed for several minutes with Ronnie Wood and met his older brother, Art. A year on, Art asked Theo to join a jamming session at the Eel Pie Club in the Cabbage Patch pub in Twickenham. In less than five years he seems to have possessed the whole tradition. Now, whenever he's at the chateau he plays for his grandfather and shows him his latest tricks. He seems to need John's approval, and the old man obliges. Perowne has to hand it to him, he opened up something in Theo that he, Perowne, might never have known about. It's true that on a body-surfing holiday in Pembrokes.h.i.+re when Theo was nine, Henry showed him three simple chords on someone's guitar and how the blues worked in E. That was just one thing along with the Frisbee throwing, gra.s.s skiing, quad biking, paintballing, stone skipping and in-line skating. He worked seriously on his children's fun back then. He even broke an arm keeping up on the skates. But he never could have guessed those three chords would become the basis of his son's professional life.

John Grammaticus has also been a force in Daisy's life, at least, until something went wrong between them. When she was thirteen, about the time he was teaching her brother the boogie in C, he asked her to tell him about the books she enjoyed. He heard her out and announced she was under132 stretched - he was contemptuous of the 'young adult' fiction she was reading. He persuaded her to try Jane Eyre, and read the first chapters aloud to her, and mapped out for her the pleasures to come. She persisted, but only to please him. The language was unfamiliar, the sentences long, the pictures in her head, she kept saying, wouldn't come clear. Perowne tried the book and had much the same experience. But John kept his granddaughter at it, and finally, a hundred pages in, she fell for Jane and would hardly stop for meals. When the family went for a walk across the fields one afternoon, they left her with forty-one pages to go. When they returned they found her under a tree by the dovecote weeping, not for the story but because she had reached the end and emerged from a dream to grasp that it was all the creation of a woman she would never meet. She cried, she said, out of admiration, out of joy that such things could be made up. What sort of things, Grammaticus wanted to know. Oh Grandad, when the orphanage children die and yet the weather is so beautiful, and that bit when Rochester pretends to be a gypsy, and when Jane meets Bertha for the first time and she's like a wild animal . . .

He gave her Kafka's 'Metamorphosis', which he said was ideal for a thirteen-year-old girl. She raced through this domestic fairy story and demanded her parents read it too. She came into their bedroom in the chateau far too early one morning and sat on the bed to lament: that poor Gregor Samsa, his family are so horrid to him. How lucky he was to have a sister to clean out his room and find him the foods he liked. Rosalind took it in at a gulp, as though it were a legal brief. Perowne, by nature ill-disposed towards a tale of impossible transformation, conceded that by the end he was intrigued - he wouldn't have put it higher than that. He liked the unthinking cruelty of that sister on the final page, riding the tram with her parents to the last stop, stretching her young limbs, ready to begin a sensual life. A transformation he could believe in. This was the first book Daisy recommended to him, and marked the beginning of his literary education at her hands. Though he's been diligent over the years and tries to read almost everything she puts his way, he knows she thinks he's a coa.r.s.e, unredeemable materialist. She thinks he lacks an imagination. Perhaps it's so, but she hasn't quite given up on him yet. The books are piled at his bedside, and she'll be arriving with more tonight. He hasn't even finished the Darwin biography, or started the Conrad.

From the summer of Bronte and Kafka onwards, Grammaticus took charge of Daisy's reading. He had firm, old-fas.h.i.+oned views of the fundamenials, not all of which he thought should be too pleasurable. He believed in children learning by rote, and he was prepared to pay up. Shakespeare, Milton and the King James Bible - five pounds for every twenty lines memorised from the pa.s.sages he marked. These three were the sources of all good English verse and prose; he instructed her to roll the syllables around her tongue and feel their rhythmic power. The summer of her sixteenth birthday, Daisy earned a teenage fortune at the chateau, chanting, even singing, parts of Paradise Lost, and Genesis and various gloomy musings of Hamlet. She recited Browning, Clough, Chesterton and Masefield. In one good week she earned forty-five pounds. I Even now, six years on, at the age of twenty-three, she claims to be able to spout - her word - non-stop for more than two hours. By the time she was eighteen and leaving school she'd read a decent fraction of what her grandfather called the obvious stuff. He wouldn't hear of her going anywhere to ?

study English Literature other than his own Oxford college. ! Though Henry and Rosalind begged him not to, he probably *.

put in a good word for her. Dismissively, he told them that these days the system was incorruptible and he couldn't help .]

even if he wanted to. Familiarity with their own professions & told them this could never be strictly true. But it soothed their f consciences, the handwritten note to Daisy's headmaster from ^ "TP.

a tutor which said she'd given a dazzling interview, backing 1 every insight with a quotation. *

134 H A year later she may have had a little too much success for her grandfather's taste. She arrived at St Felix two days after the rest of the family, and brought with her the poem that had won her that year's Newdigate Prize. Henry and Rosalind had never heard of the Newdigate, but were automatically pleased. But it meant more, perhaps too much, to Daisy's grandfather who had won it himself back in the late fifties. He took her pages into his study - her parents were only allowed to see them later. The poem described at length the tender meditations of a young woman at the end of another affair. Once more1 she has stripped the sheets from her bed and taken them to the launderette where she watches through the 'misted monocle' of the was.h.i.+ng machine, 'all stains of us turning to be purged'. These affairs also turned, like the seasons, too quickly, 'running green to brown' with 'windfalls sweetly rotting to oblivion'. The stains are not really sins but 'watermarks of ecstasy' or later 'milky palimpsests', and therefore not so easily removed after all. Vaguely religious, mellifluously erotic, the poem suggested to a troubled Perowne that his daughter's first year at university had been more crowded than he could ever have guessed. Not just a boyfriend, or a lover, but a whole succession, to the point of serenity. This may have been why Grammaticus took against the poem - his protegee had struck out and found other men. Or it may have been one more pitiful attack of status anxiety - in forming Daisy's literary education he hadn't intended to produce yet another rival poet. This Newdigate after all had also been won by Fenton and Motion.

Teresa made a simple supper of salade nicoise with fresh tuna from the market in Pamiers. The dining table was set right outside the kitchen, on the edge of a wide expanse of lawn. It was another unexceptionally beautiful evening, with purplish shadows of trees and shrubs advancing across the dried gra.s.s, and crickets beginning to take up where the afternoon cicadas left off. Grammaticus was last to appear, and Perowne's guess, as his father-in-law lowered himself into the chair next to Daisy's, was that he'd already sunk a bottle of wine or more on his own. This was confirmed when he laid his hand on his granddaughter's wrist, and with that hectoring frankness that drunks mistake for intimacy, told her that her poem was ill-advised and not the sort of thing that generally won the Newdigate. It wasn't good at all, he told her, as though she must know it already and was bound to agree. He was, as a psychiatrist might have said, disinhibited.

As early as her final year at school, just eighteen, head girl and academic star of the sixth form, Daisy had developed her precise and self-contained manner. She's a light-boned young woman, trim and compact, with a small elfin face, short black hair and straight back. Her composure looks impregnable. At dinner that night, only her parents and brother knew how fragile that controlled appearance was. But she was cool as she unhurriedly withdrew her hand and looked at her grandfather, waiting for him to say more. He took a long pull on his wine, as though it was a pint pot of lukewarm beer, and advanced into her silence. He said the rhythms were loose and clumsy, the stanzas were of irregular length. Henry looked at Rosalind, willing her to intervene. If she didn't, he would have to, and the matter would a.s.sume too much importance. To his shame, he was not absolutely certain what a stanza was until he looked in a dictionary later that night. Rosalind held back - breaking into her father's flow too early could cause an explosion. { Managing him was a delicate art. On her side of the table, f Teresa was already suffering. In her time, and on many occasions in the years before her time, there had been scenes like this, though never one that involved the children. She knew it could not end well. Theo rested his jaw in his palm and stared at his plate.

Encouraged by his granddaughter's silence, John went on a roll, warming to his own authority, stupidly affectionate in his manner. He was confusing the young woman in front of 136 him with the sixteen-year-old whom he had coached in the Elizabethan poets of the silver age. If he'd ever known, he had forgotten what one good year at a university could do. He could only imagine she felt as he did, and he was only telling her the obvious: the poem was too long, it tried too hard to shock, there was a simile they both knew was convoluted. He paused to drink deeply again, and still she said nothing.

Then he told her her poem was not original, and finally got a reaction. She c.o.c.ked her neat head and raised an eyebrow. Not original? Perowne, seeing a telltale tremble in the dainty chin, thought the cool manner wouldn't hold. Rosalind spoke up at last, but her father talked over her. Yes, a little known but gifted poet, Pat Jordan, a woman of the Liverpool school, had written up a similar idea in the sixties - the end of the affair, the spinning sheets at the launderette displayed before the thoughtful poet. Was it possible that Grammaticus knew how idiotic his behaviour was but could not pull back? In the old man's weak eyes there was a dog-like cringing look, as if he was scaring himself and was pleading for someone to restrain him. His voice cracked as he strained for affability, and he talked on and on, making himself more ridiculous. The silence around the table that had enabled him was now his punishment, his affliction. Theo was gazing at him in amazement, shaking his head. Of course, John was saying, he wasn't accusing Daisy of plagiarism, she may have read the poem and forgotten about it, or simply reinvented it for herself. After all, it wasn't such an exceptional or unusual idea, but either way . . .

At last he wound down, unable to make his situation worse. Perowne was pleased to see that his daughter wasn't crushed. She was furious. He could see the pulse in her neck throbbing beneath the skin. But she was not going to relieve her grandfather with any sort of outburst. Suddenly, unable to bear the silence, he started up again, talking hurriedly, trying to soften his judgment without actually altering it. Daisy cut in and said she thought they should talk about something else, at which Grammaticus muttered a simple 'Oh f.u.c.k!', J stood up and went indoors. They watched him go - a familiar sight, that receding form, but upsetting too, for it was the first time that summer.

Daisy stayed on another three days, long enough for her grandfather to have thought of ways of resuming relations. But the next day he was brisk and cheerfully self-absorbed and seemed to have forgotten. Or he was simply pretending - like many drinkers, he liked to think each new day drew a line under the day before. When Daisy left for Barcelona it was an arrangement that had long been in place - she brought herself to kiss him goodbye on both cheeks and he gripped her arm, and afterwards was able to persuade himself that a reconciliation had taken place. When Rosalind and then Henry tried to convince him that he still had work to do on Daisy, he told them they were making trouble. He must have wondered then why she didn't appear at St Felix the following two summers. She found good reasons to travel with friends in China and Brazil. He should have written to her when she got her first, but by then he had fallen into a sulk about the matter. So it was a risky move when Rosalind sent him a proof copy of Daisy's poems. Wasn't he bound to dislike them? Especially when her publisher was the one who let his Collected go out of print.

If his enthusiasm for My Saucy Bark was tactical, he concealed it brilliantly. His long letter to her opened by conceding he had been 'a disgraceful boor' about the launderette poem. It wasn't included in the book, and Henry wondered, though never aloud, whether she thought her grandfather was right about it all along. She had found a conversational tone, he told her in his letter, that was nevertheless rich with meaning and a.s.sociation. Every now and then that everyday, level voice was interrupted by lines of sudden emotional intensity and 'secular transcendence'. In this respect, he found everywhere in her poems the spirit of his beloved Larkin, 138.

1 but 'invigorated by a young woman's sensuality', and darker humour. In his near-illegible longhand he praised the 'intellectual muscle', the 'courage of hard and independent thinking' that informed the scheme of her poems. He loved the 'slatternly wit' of her 'Six Short Songs'. He said he 'laughed like an idiot' at The Ballad of the Brain on my Shoe' - a poem that resulted from Daisy's visit to the operating theatre one morning to watch her father at work. It's the one, of course, that Henry likes least. His daughter was present for a straightforward MCA aneurysm. No grey or white matter was lost. He thought he caught in the poem art's essential but - he had to suppose - forgivable dishonesty. Daisy sent her grandfather an affectionate postcard. She told him how much she missed him and how much she owed to him. She said his remarks thrilled her and she was reading them over and again and was giddy with his praise.

Now the old man and Daisy are converging from Toulouse and Paris. A TV company wanting to make a programme about his life is putting Grammaticus up in style at Claridge's. At dinner tonight the reconciliation will be sealed - this is the idea, but Perowne, lugging his bag of fish, moving with the crowds back down the High Street, has shared too many meals with his father-in-law to be optimistic; and matters have moved on in the past three years. These days Grammaticus starts his evenings or late afternoons the way he used to, with a few serious jolts of gin before the wine - a habit he managed to kick for a while in his sixties. Another development is the tumblers of Scotch to round out the day, before he visits the pre-bedtime 'cleansing' beer. If he appears on the doorstep in a cheerful or excited state, he'll feel that un cxamined compulsion of his to dominate in his daughter's house which makes him drink faster. Becoming drunk is a journey that generally elates him in the early stages - he's good company, expansive, mischievous and fun, the famous old poet, almost as happy listening as talking. But once the destination is met, once established up there on that unsunny 139 plateau, a fully qualified drunk, the nastier muses, the goblins of aggression, paranoia, self-pity take control. The expectation now is that an evening with John will go bad somehow, unless everyone around is prepared to toil at humouring and flattering and hours of frozen-faced listening. No one will be.

Perowne reaches his car and stows his odorous bag in the boot, in among the family's hiking boots and backpacks and last summer's tennis b.a.l.l.s. The unprofessional thought sometimes occurs to him that the kindest touch for everyone, including the old man himself, would be to slip him a minor tranquilliser while he's still on the cheerful rising track, some short-acting benzodiazepine derivative dissolved into a strong red wine like Rioja, and as his yawns multiply, guide him up the stairs to his room, or towards his taxi - the famous old poet in bed half an hour before midnight, tired and happy, and no harm done.

He's driven a couple of hundred yards through Marylebone in slow-moving traffic when he notices in his rear-view mirror, two cars back, a red BMW. All he can actually see is a corner of its offside wing and he can't tell whether the wing mirror is missing. A white van interposes itself at a junction, and he can barely see the red car at all. It's not impossible that it's Baxter, but he feels no particular anxiety about seeing him again. In fact, he wouldn't mind talking to him. His case is interesting, and the offer of help was sincere. What concerns him more is that the Sat.u.r.day-morning traffic is no longer moving - there's an obstruction ahead. When he looks again, the red car has gone. And then he forgets about it; his attention is caught by a television shop to his left.

In its window display are angled banks of identical images on various kinds of screen - cathode ray, plasma, handheld, home cinema. What's showing on every device is the Prime Minister giving a studio interview. The close-up of a face is steadily becoming a close-up of a mouth, until the 140 lips fill half the screen. He has suggested in the past that if we knew as much as he did, we too would want to go to war. Perhaps in this slow zoom the director is consciously responding to a calculation a watching population is bound to want to make: is this politician telling the truth? But can anyone really know the sign, the tell of an honest man? There's been some good work on this very question. Perowne has read Paul Ekman on the subject. In the smile of a self-conscious liar certain muscle groups in the face are not activated. They only come to life as the expression of genuine feeling. The smile of a deceiver is flawed, insufficient. But can we see these muscles resting there inert when there's so much local variation in faces, pads of fat, odd concavities, differences of bone structure? Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he's sincere. And once he's sincere, all deception vanishes.

For all the difficulties, the instinctive countermeasures, we go on watching closely, trying to read a face, trying to measure intentions. Friend or foe? It's an ancient preoccupation. And even if, down through the generations, we are only right slightly more than half the time, it's still worth doing. More than ever now, on the edge of war, when the country still imagines it can call back this deed before it's too late. Does this man sincerely believe that going to war will make us safer? Does Saddam possess weapons of terrifying potential? Simply, the Prime Minister might be sincere and wrong. Some of his bitterest opponents don't doubt his good faith. He could be on the verge of a monstrous miscalculation. Or perhaps it will work out - the dictator vanquished without hundreds of thousands of deaths, and after a year or two, a democracy at last, secular or Islamic, nestling among the weary tyrannies of the Middle East. Wedged in traffic alongside the multiple faces, Henry experiences his own ambivalence as a form of vertigo, of dizzy indecision. In neurosurgery he chose a safe and simple profession.

141 I.

Ian McEivan *

W.

He knows of patients who can't even recognise, let alone read, the faces of their closest family or friends. In most cases the right middle fusiform gyrus has been compromised, usually by a stroke. Nothing a neurosurgeon can do about that. And it must have been a moment of deficient face recognition - transient prosopagnosia - that was involved in his one meeting with Tony Blair. It was back in May 2000, a time now acquiring a polish, a fake gleam of innocence. Before the current preoccupations, there was a public project widely accounted a success. No one seemed to deny, something went right. A disused power station on the south bank of the Thames was discovered to be useful as a museum for contemporary art. The conversion was bold and brilliant. At the opening party for the Tate Modern there were four thousand guests - celebrities, politicians, the great and good - and hundreds of young men and women distributing champagne and canapes, and a general euphoria untainted by cynicism unusual at such events. Henry was there as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons. Rosalind was invited through her newspaper. Theo and Daisy came along too, and vanished into the crowd as soon as they arrived. Their parents didn't see them until the following morning. The guests gathered in the industrial vastness of the old turbine hall where the din of thousands of excited voices seemed to bear aloft a giant spider hovering below iron girders. After an hour, Henry and Rosalind broke away from their friends and wandered with their drinks among the exhibits through the relatively deserted galleries.

Such was their wellbeing that even the sullen orthodoxies of conceptual art seemed part of the fun, like earnest displays of pupils' work at a school open day. Perowne liked Cornelia Parker's 'Exploding Shed' - a humorous construction, like a brilliant idea bursting out of a mind. They came into a room of Rothkos and for several minutes remained pleasantly becalmed among the giant slabs of dusky purple and orange. Then they went through a wide portal into the 142.

gallery next door and came across what at first seemed like another installation. Part of it, a low pile of bricks, really was an exhibit. Standing beyond it, at the far end of the large room, was the Prime Minister and at his side the gallery director. Twenty feet away, on the nearside of the bricks, nominally restrained by a velvet rope, was the press corps -- thirty photographers or more, and reporters - and what looked like gallery officials and Downing Street staff. The Perownes had come in on an oddly silent moment. Blair and the director smiled and posed for the cameras, whose pic hiiV'S would also include fh<: famous="" bricks="" the="" flashes="" twin="" kled="" randomly,="" but="" none="" of="" 'die="" photographers="" was="" calling="" out="" in="" the="" usual="" way.="" the="" calmness="" of="" the="" scene="" seemed="" an="" extension="" of="" the="" rothko="" gallery="" next="">

Then the director, perhaps looking for an excuse to bring the session to an end, raised a hand in greeting to Rosalind. They knew each other through some legal matter that had ended amicably. The director guided Blair around the bricks and crossed the gallery towards the Perownes, and behind them wheeled the retinue, the photographers with their cameras up and ready, the diarists with their notebooks in case something interesting should happen at last. Helplessly, the Perownes watched them all approach. In a sudden press of bodies they were introduced to the Prime Minister. He took Rosalind's hand first, then Henry's. The grip was firm and manly, and to Perowne's surprise, Blair was looking at him with recognition and interest. The gaze was intelligent and intense, and unexpectedly youthful. So much had yet to happen.

He said, The really admire the work you're doing.' Perowne said automatically, 'Thank you.' But he was impressed. It was just conceivable, he supposed, that Blair with his good memory and reputation for absorbing the details of his ministers' briefs, would have heard of the hospital's excellent report last month - all targets met - and even of the special mention of the neurosurgery department's exceptional 143.

1.results. Procedures twenty-three per cent up on last year. Later Henry realised what an absurd notion that was.

The Prime Minister, who still had hold of his hand, added, 'In fact, we've got two of your paintings hanging in Downing j Street. Cherie and I adore them.' f 'No, no,' Perowne said.

'Yes, yes,' the Prime Minister insisted, pumping his hand. He was in no mood for artistic modesty.

'No, I think you - ' J 'Honestly. They're in the dining room.'

'You're making a mistake/ Perowne said, and on that word there pa.s.sed through the Prime Minister's features for the "*

briefest instant a look of sudden alarm, of fleeting self-doubt. No one else saw his expression freeze and his eyes bulge minimally. A hairline fracture had appeared in the a.s.surance of power. Then he continued as before, no doubt making the rapid calculation that given all the people pus.h.i.+ng in around them trying to listen, there could be no turning back. Not without a derisive press tomorrow.

'Anyway. They truly are marvellous. Congratulations.'

One of the aides, a woman in a black trouser suit, cut in and said, 'Prime Minister, we have three and a half minutes. We have to move.'

Blair let go of Perowne's hand and without a farewell beyond a nod and a curt pursing of the lips, turned and let himself be led away. And the crew, the press, the flunkeys, the bodyguards, the gallery underlings and their director surged behind him, and within seconds the Perownes were standing in the empty gallery with the bricks as if nothing had happened at all.

Watching from his car the multiple images cutting between interviewer and guest, Perowne wonders if such moments, stabs of cold panicky doubt, are an increasing part of the "

Prime Minister's days, or nights. There might not be a second UN resolution. The next weapons inspectors' report could C '

also be inconclusive. The Iraqis might use biological weapons f S 144 1.

1.against the invasion force. Or, as one former inspector keeps insisting, there might no longer be any weapons of ma.s.s destruction at all. There's talk of famine and three million refugees, and they're already preparing the reception camps in Syria and Iran. The UN is predicting hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths. There could be revenge attacks on London. And still the Americans remain vague about their post-war plans. Perhaps they have none. In all, Saddam could be overthrown at too high a cost. It's a future no one can read. Government ministers speak up loyally, various newspapers back the war, there's a fair degree of anxious support in the country along with the dissent, but no one really doubts that in Britain one man alone is driving the matter forward. Night sweats, hideous dreams, the wild, lurching fantasies of sleeplessness? Or simple loneliness? Whenever he sees him now on screen, Henry looks out for an awareness of the abyss, for that hairline crack, the moment of facial immobility, the brief faltering he privately witnessed. But all he sees is certainty, or at worst a straining earnestness.

He finds a vacant residents' parking s.p.a.ce across the road from his front door. As he takes the shopping from the boot of his car, he sees in the square, lounging by the bench nearest his house, the same young men who are often there in the early evening, and then again late at night. There are two West Indians and two, sometimes three Middle Easterners who might be Turks. All of them look genial and prosperous, and frequently lean on each other's shoulders and laugh loudly. At the kerb is a Mercedes, same model as Perowne's, but black, and a figure always at the wheel. Now and then a stranger will come by and stop to talk to the group. One of them will cross to the car, consult with the driver and return, there'll be another huddle, and then the stranger will walk on. They are entirely self-contained and unthreatening, and Perowne a.s.sumed for a long time they were dealers, running a pavement cafe in cocaine perhaps, or ecstasy and 145.

marijuana. Their customers do not look haunted or degenerate enough to be heroin or crack users. It was Theo who put his father right. The group sells tickets for various fringe rap gigs around the city. They also sell bootleg CDs and can 1 arrange cheap long-distance flights as well as fix up cut-rate 1 premises and DJs for parties, limos for weddings and airports and cut-rate health and travel insurance; for a commission they can introduce asylum seekers and illegal aliens to solicitors. The group pays no taxes or office overheads and is highly compet.i.tive. Whenever Perowne sees these people he vaguely feels, as he doe< now,="" crossing="" fh="">.' road io ]'<]-door, that="" he="" owe?="" them="" an="" apology.="" one="" day="" he'll="" bin'="" something="" from="">

Theo is down in the kitchen, probably preparing one of his fruit and yoghurt breakfasts. Henry leaves the fish at the top of the stairs, calls down a greeting and goes up to the second floor. The bedroom feels overheated and confined, and depleted by daylight. It looks and feels a better, kinder place lit by dimmed lamps, with the day's work done and the promise of sleep; being here in the early afternoon reminds him of a bad spell of flu. He pulls off his trainers, peels away his damp socks and drops them in the laundry basket, and goes to the central window to open it. And there it is again, or another one, directly below him, slowly rounding the corner of the house where the street meets the square. His view is mostly of its roof, and his sightline to the offside wing mirror is entirely obscured, even though he pushes the window up and leans right out. Nor can he see the driver, or any pa.s.sengers. He watches it cruise along the northern side of the square and turn right into Conway Street and disappear. This time he doesn't feel quite so detached. But what is he then? Interested, or even faintly troubled? It's a common enough make, and until two or three years ago, red was a common choice. On the other hand, why reason away the possibility of it being Baxter; his predicament is terrible and fascinating - the tough-guy street existence must have masked 146.

a longing for a better kind of life even before the degenerative disease showed its first signs. Perowne comes away from the window and goes towards the bathroom. Baxter would hardly need to tail him. The Mercedes is distinctive enough, and it's parked right outside the house. Yes, he'd like to see Baxter again, in office hours, and hear more and give him some useful contacts. But Henry doesn't want him hanging around the square.

As he finishes undressing, his mobile rings from within the heap of clothes he's let fall at his feet. He fumbles and finds it.

'Darling?' she says. Rosalind at last. What better moment? He takes the phone through to the bedroom and sprawls naked on his back on the half-made bed where hours before they made love. From the radiators he feels on his bare skin waves of heat like a desert breeze. The thermostat is set too high. He has a half, or perhaps really a quarter of an erection. If she hadn't been working today, if there were no weekend crisis on the paper, if her mild-mannered editor wasn't such a bruiser when it comes to the small print of press freedom, she and Henry might be here together now. It's how they sometimes pa.s.s an hour or two on a winter's Sat.u.r.day afternoon. The s.e.xiness of a four o'clock dusk.

The bathroom mirror, with the help of kindly illumination and a correct angle, allows Henry an occasional reminder of his youth. But Rosalind, by some trick of inner light or his own loving folly, still appears to resemble strongly, constantly, the woman he first knew all those years ago. The older sister of that young Rosalind, but not yet her mother. How long can this last? In their essentials, the individual elements remain unchanged: the near luminous pallor of her skin her mother, Marianne, was of Celtic descent; the scant, delicate eyebrows - almost non-existent; that level, soft green regard; and her teeth, white as ever, (his own are going grey) the upper set perfectly shaped, the lower, faintly awry - a 147.

girlish imperfection he's never wanted her to remedy; the way the unfeigned breadth of the smile proceeds from a shy ^ A start; on her lips, an orange-rose gleam that is all her own; the hair, cut short now, still reddish-brown. In repose she has an air of merry intelligence, an undiminished taste for fun. It remains a beautiful face. Like everyone in their forties, she has her moments of dismay, weary before the mirror at bedtime, and he's recognised in himself that look, almost a snarl, of savage appraisal. We're all travelling in the same direction. Reasonably, she's not entirely convinced when he tells her that the soft swelling at her hips is rather to his taste, as is the heaviness in her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. But it's true. Yes, he would be happy lying down with her now.

He guesses that her state of mind will be remote from his own - in her black office clothes, hurrying in and out of meetings - so he pulls himself up into a sitting position on the bed to talk sensibly.

'How's it going?'

'Our judge is stuck in a traffic jam south of Blackfriars Bridge. It's the demonstration. But I think he's going to give us what we want.'

'Lift the injunction?'

'Yup. Monday morning. ' She sounds speedy and pleased.

'You're a genius,' Henry says. 'What about your dad?'

'I can't collect him from his hotel. It's the demonstration. The traffic's h.e.l.l. He's going to make his own way in a taxi.' She pauses and says at a slightly slower pace, 'And how are you?' The downward inflection and extension of the final word is tender, a clear reference to this morning. He was wrong about her mood. He's about to tell her that he's naked on the bed, wanting her, then he changes his mind. This isn't the time for telephone foreplay, when he has to get out of the house and she has her own business to conclude. And there are more important things he's yet to tell her which will have to wait until after tonight's dinner, or tomorrow morning. pounds I 148 I.

ii r Ian McEzvan He says, 'I'm heading off to Perivale as soon as I've had a shower.' And because that isn't the answer to her question, he adds, 'I'm all right, but I'm looking forward to some time with you.' That isn't enough either, so he says, 'Various things've happened I need to talk to you about.'

'What sort of things?'

'Nothing terrible. I'd rather tell you when I see you/ 'OK. But give me a clue.'

'Last night when I couldn't sleep I was at the window. I saw that Russian cargo plane.'

'Darling. That must have been scary. What else?'

He hesitates, and his hand, by its own volition, caresses the area around the bruise on his chest. What would be the heading, as she sometimes puts it? Road-rage showdown. Attempted mugging. A neural disease. The wing mirror. The rear-view mirror.

'I lost at squash. I'm getting too old for this game.'

She laughs. The don't believe that's what it is.' But she sounds rea.s.sured. She says, 'There's something you may have forgotten. Theo's got a big rehearsal this afternoon. A few days ago I heard you promising to be there.'

'd.a.m.n. What time?' He has no memory of such a promise.

'At five in that place in Ladbroke Grove.'

The better move.'

He rises from the bed and takes the phone into the bathroom for the farewells.

The love you.'

The love you,' she answers, and rings off.

He steps under the shower, a forceful cascade pumped down from the third floor. When this civilisation falls, when the Romans, whoever they are this time round, have finally left and the new dark ages begin, this will be one of the first luxuries to go. The old folk crouching by their peat fires will tell their disbelieving grandchildren of standing naked midwinter under jet streams of hot clean water, of lozenges of scented soaps and of viscous amber and vermilion liquids 149.

1.they rubbed into their hair to make it glossy and more voluminous than it really was, and of thick white towels as big f as togas, waiting on warming racks.

He wears a suit and tie five days a week. Today he's wearing jeans, sweater and scuffed brown boots, and who's to know that he himself is not the great guitarist of his generation? As he bends to tie his laces, he feels a sharp pain in his knees. It's pointless holding out until he's fifty. He'll give himself six more months of squash and one last London Marathon. Will he be able to bear it, having these pastimes only in his past7 At the mirror he's lavish with his aftershave - in winter especially, there's sometimes a scent in the air at the old people's home that he prefers to counteract.

He steps out of the bedroom and then, sideways on, skips down the first run of stairs two at a time, without holding the banister for safety. It's a trick he learned in adolescence, and he can do it better than ever. But a skidding boot heel, a shattered coccyx, six months on his back in bed, a year rebuilding his wasted muscles - the premonitory fantasy fills less than half a second, and it works. He takes the next flight in the ordinary way.

In the bas.e.m.e.nt kitchen Theo has already taken the fish and stowed it in the fridge. The tiny TV is on with muted sound, and shows a helicopter's view of Hyde Park. The ma.s.sed crowds appear as a smear of brown, like lichen on a rock. Theo has constructed his breakfast in a large salad bowl which contains close to a kilo of oatmeal, bran, nuts, blueberries, loganberries, raisins, milk, yoghurt, chopped dates, apple and bananas.

Theo nods at it. 'Want some?'

Till eat leftovers.'

Henry takes a plate of chicken and boiled potatoes from the fridge and eats standing up. His son sits on a high stool at the centre island, hunched over his giant bowl. Beyond the debris of crumbs, wrappers and fruit skins are pages of music ma.n.u.script with chords written out in pencil. His shoulders 150 i ii ii are broad, and the bunched muscle stretches the fabric of his clean white T-s.h.i.+rt. The hair, the skin of his bare arms, the thick dark brown eyebrows still have the same rich, smooth new made quality Perowne used to admire when Theo was four.

Perowne gestures towards the TV. 'Still not tempted?'

'I've been watching. Two million people. Truly amazing.'

Naturally, Theo is against the war in Iraq. His att.i.tude is as strong and pure as his bones and skin. So strong he doesn't feel much need to go tramping through the streets to make his point.

'What's the latest on that plane? I heard about the arrests.'

'No one's saying anything.' Theo tips more milk into his salad bowl. 'But there are rumours on the Internet.'

'About the Koran.'

The pilots are radical Islamists. One's a Chechen, the other's Algerian.'

Perowne pulls up a stool and as he sits feels his appet.i.te fading. He pushes his plate aside.

'So how does it work? They set fire to their own plane in the cause of jihad, then land safely at Heathrow.'

'They bottled out.'

'So their idea was to sort of join in today's demonstration.'

'Yeah. They'd be making a point. Make war on an Arab nation and this is the kind of thing that's going to happen.'

It doesn't sound plausible. But in general, the human disposition is to believe. And when proved wrong, s.h.i.+ft ground. Or have faith, and go on believing. Over time, down through the generations, this may have been the most efficient: just in case, believe. All day, Perowne himself has suspected the story was not all it seemed, and now Theo is feeding this longing his father has to hear the worst. On the other hand, if the rumours about the plane come from the Internet, the chances of their inaccuracy are increased.

Henry gives a condensed account of his sc.r.a.pe with Baxter and his friends and of the symptoms of Huntington's and the lucky escape.

151.

Theo says, 'You humiliated him. You should watch that.'

'Meaning what?'

'These street guys can be proud. Also, Dad, I can't believe we've lived here all this time and you and Mum have never been mugged.'