by Ian Mcewan
The unassertiveness is misleading, more style than character—it's not possible to be an unassertive brain surgeon. Naturally, students and junior staff see less of his charm than the patients. The student who, referring to a CT scan in Perowne's presence, used the words “low down on the left side,” provoked a moment's rage and was banished in shame to relearn his directional terms. In the operating theatre Perowne is said by his firm to be at the inexpressive end of the scale: no stream of obscenities ascending as the difficulties and risks increase, no hissed threats to throw an incompetent from the room, none of those tough-guy asides—Uhuh, there go the music lessons—that are supposed to relieve tension. On the contrary, in Perowne's view, when things are difficult, tension is best maintained. His taste then is for terse murmurs or silence. If a registrar fumbles with the positioning of a retractor, or the scrub nurse places a pituitary forceps in his hand at an awkward angle, Perowne might on a bad day utter a single staccato “fuck,” more troubling for its rarity and lack of emphasis, and the silence in the room will tighten. Otherwise, he likes music in the theatre when he's working, mostly piano works by Bach—the “Goldberg” Variations, the Well-Tempered Klavier, the Partitas. He favours Angela Hewitt, Martha Argerich, sometimes Gustav Leonhardt. In a really good mood he'll go for the looser interpretations of Glenn Gould. In committee he likes precision, all items addressed and disposed of within the set time, and to this end he's an effective chairman. Exploratory musings and anecdotes by senior colleagues, tolerated by most as an occupational hazard, make him impatient; fantasising should be a solitary pursuit. Decisions are all.
So despite the apologetic posture, the mild manner and an inclination to occasional daydreaming, it's unlike Perowne to dither as he does now—he's standing at the foot of the bed—unable to decide whether to wake Rosalind. It makes no sense at all. There's nothing to see. It's an entirely selfish impulse. Her alarm is due to go off at six thirty, and once he's told her the story, she'll have no hope of going back to sleep. She'll hear it all anyway. She has a difficult day ahead. Now that the shutters are closed and he's in darkness again, he understands the extent of his turmoil. His thoughts have a reeling, tenuous quality—he can't hold an idea long enough to force sense out of it. He feels culpable somehow, but helpless too. These are contradictory terms, but not quite, and it's the degree of their overlap, their manner of expressing the same thing from different angles, which he needs to comprehend. Culpable in his helplessness. Helplessly culpable. He loses his way, and thinks again of the phone. By daylight, will it seem negligent not to have called the emergency services? Will it be obvious that there was nothing to be done, that there wasn't time? His crime was to stand in the safety of his bedroom, wrapped in a woollen dressing gown, without moving or making a sound, half dreaming as he watched people die. Yes, he should have phoned, if only to talk, to measure his voice and feelings against a stranger's.
And that is why he wants to wake her, not simply to give her the news, but because he's somewhat deranged, he keeps floating away from the line of his thoughts. He wants to tether himself to the precise details of what he's seen, arrange them before her worldly, legal mind and steady gaze. He'd like the touch of her hands—they are small and smooth, always cooler than his own. It's five days since they made love, Monday morning, before the six o'clock news, during a rainstorm, with only the dimmed light from the bathroom, twenty minutes snatched—so they often joke—from the jaws of work. Well, in ambitious middle life it sometimes seems there is only work. He can be at the hospital until ten, then it can pull him from his bed at 3 a.m., and he can be back there again at eight. Rosalind's work proceeds by a series of slow crescendos and abrupt terminations as she tries to steer her newspaper away from the courts. For certain days, even weeks on end, work can shape every hour; it's the tide, the lunar cycle they set their lives by, and without it, it can seem, there's nothing, Henry and Rosalind Perowne are nothing.
Henry can't resist the urgency of his cases, or deny the egotistical joy in his own skills, or the pleasure he still takes in the relief of the relatives when he comes down from the operating room like a god, an angel with the glad tidings—life, not death. Rosalind's best moments are outside court, when a powerful litigant backs down in the face of superior argument; or, rarer, when a judgment goes her way and establishes a point of principle in law. Once a week, usually on a Sunday evening, they line up their personal organisers side by side, like little mating creatures, so that their appointments can be transferred into each other's diary along an infrared beam. When they steal time for love they always leave the phone connected. By some perverse synchronism, it often rings just as they're getting started. It'll be for Rosalind as often as for him. If he's the one who is obliged to get dressed and hurry from the room—perhaps returning with a curse for keys or loose change—he does so with a longing backward glance, and sets off from his house to the hospital—ten minutes at a brisk pace—with his burden, his fading thoughts of love. But once he's through the double swing doors, and crossing the worn chessboard linoleum tiles by Accident and Emergency, once he's ridden the lift to the third-floor operating suite and is in the scrub room, soap in hand, listening to his registrar's difficulties, the last touches of desire leave him and he doesn't even notice them go. No regrets. He's renowned for his speed, his success rate and his list—he takes over three hundred cases a year. Some fail, a handful endure with their lights a little fogged, but most thrive, and many return to work in some form; work—the ultimate badge of health.
And work is why he cannot wake her. She's due in the High Court at ten for an emergency hearing. Her paper has been prevented from reporting the details of a gagging order on another newspaper. The powerful party who obtained the original order successfully argued before a duty judge that even the fact of the gagging cannot be divulged. A point of press freedom is at issue, and it's Rosalind's quest to have the second order overturned by the end of the day. Before the hearing, briefings in chambers, then—so she hopes—an exploratory chat in the corridors with the other side. Later she'll lay out the options to the editor and management. She'd have come in late last night from meetings, long after Henry dozed off without his supper. Probably she drank tea at the kitchen table and read through her papers. She may have had difficulty falling asleep.
Feeling unhinged and unreasonable and still in need of talking to her, he remains at the foot of the bed, staring towards her shape under the duvet. She sleeps like a child, with her knees drawn up. In the near-total darkness, how small she seems in the hugeness of the bed. He listens to her breathing, which is almost inaudible on the intake, quietly emphatic on the exhalation. She makes a sound with her tongue, a wet click against the roof of her mouth. Many years ago he fell in love with her in a hospital ward, at a time of terror. She was barely aware of him. A white coat coming to her bedside to remove the stitches from the inside of her upper lip. Then it was another three months before he kissed those lips. But he knew more of her, or at least had seen more of her, than any prospective lover could expect.
He approaches now and leans over her and kisses the warm back of her head. Then he comes away, closing the bedroom door quietly, and goes down to the kitchen to turn on the radio.
It's a commonplace of parenting and modern genetics that parents have little or no influence on the characters of their children. You never know who you are going to get. Opportunities, health, prospects, accent, table manners—these might lie within your power to shape. But what really determines the sort of person who's coming to live with you is which sperm finds which egg, how the cards in two packs are chosen, then how they are shuffled, halved and spliced at the moment of recombination. Cheerful or neurotic, kind or greedy, curious or dull, expansive or shy and anywhere in between; it can be quite an affront to parental self-regard, just how much of the work has already been done. On the other hand, it can let you off the hook. The point is made for you as soon as you have more than one child; two entirely different people emerg
e from their roughly similar chances in life. Here in the cavernous basement kitchen at 3:55 a.m., in a single pool of light, as though on stage, is Theo Perowne, eighteen years old, his formal education already long behind him, reclining on a tilted-back kitchen chair, his legs in tight black jeans, his feet in boots of soft black leather (paid for with his own money) crossed on the edge of the table. As unlike his sister Daisy as randomness will allow. He's drinking from a large tumbler of water. In the other hand he holds the folded back of the music magazine he's reading. A studded leather jacket lies in a heap on the floor. Propped against a cupboard is his guitar in its case. It's already acquired a few steamer trunk labels—Trieste, Oakland, Hamburg, Val d'Isère. There's space for more. From a compact stereo player on a shelf above a library of cookery books comes the sound, like soft drizzle, of an all-night pop station.
Perowne sometimes wonders if, in his youth, he could ever have guessed that he would one day father a blues musician. He himself was simply processed, without question or complaint, in a polished continuum from school, through medical school, to the dogged acquisition of clinical experience, in London, Southend-on-Sea, Newcastle, Bellevue Emergency Department in New York and London again. How have he and Rosalind, such dutiful, conventional types, given rise to such a free spirit? One who dresses, with a certain irony, in the style of the bohemian fifties, who won't read books or let himself be persuaded to stay on at school, who's rarely out of bed before lunchtime, whose passion is for mastery in all the nuances of the tradition, Delta, Chicago, Mississippi, for certain licks that contain for him the key to all mysteries, and for the success of his band, New Blue Rider. He has an enlarged version of his mother's face and soft eyes, not green though, but dark brown—the proverbial almonds, with a faint and exotic slant. He has his mother's wide open good-willed look—and a stronger more compact variant on his father's big-boned lankiness. Usefully for his line of work, he's also got the hands. In the confined, gossipy world of British blues, Theo is spoken of as a man of promise, already mature in his grasp of the idiom, who might even one day walk with the gods, the British gods that is—Alexis Korner, John Mayall, Eric Clapton. Someone has written somewhere that Theo Perowne plays like an angel.
Naturally, his father agrees, despite his doubts about the limits of the form. He likes the blues well enough—in fact, he was the one who showed the nine-year-old Theo how it worked. After that, grandfather took over. But is there a lifetime's satisfaction in twelve bars of three obvious chords? Perhaps it's one of those cases of a microcosm giving you the whole world. Like a Spode dinner plate. Or a single cell. Or, as Daisy says, like a Jane Austen novel. When player and listener together know the route so well, the pleasure is in the deviation, the unexpected turn against the grain. To see a world in a grain of sand. So it is, Perowne tries to convince himself, with clipping an aneurysm: absorbing variation on an unchanging theme.
And there's something in the loping authority of Theo's playing that revives for Henry the inexplicable lure of that simple progression. Theo is the sort of guitarist who plays in an open-eyed trance, without moving his body or ever glancing down at his hands. He concedes only an occasional thoughtful nod. Now and then, during a set, he might tilt back his head to indicate to the others that he is “going round” again. He carries himself on stage as he does in conversation, quietly, formally, protecting his privacy within a shell of friendly politeness. If he happens to spot his parents at the back of a crowd, he'll lift his left hand from the fret in a shy and private salute. Henry and Rosalind remember then the cardboard crib in the school gymnasium, the solemn five-year-old Joseph, tea towel bound to his head by a crown of rubber bands, holding the hand of a stricken Mary, making the same furtive, affectionate gesture as he located at last his parents in the second row.
This restraint, this cool, suits the blues, or Theo's version of it. When he breaks on a medium-paced standard like “Sweet Home Chicago,” with its slouching dotted rhythm—he's said he's beginning to tire of these evergreen blues—he'll set off in the lower register with an easy muscular stride, like some sleek predatory creature, shuffling off tiredness, devouring miles of open savannah. Then he moves on up the fret and the diffidence begins to carry a hint of danger. A little syncopated stab on the turnaround, the sudden chop of an augmented chord, a note held against the tide of harmony, a judiciously flattened fifth, a seventh bent in sensuous microtones. Then a passing soulful dissonance. He has the rhythmic gift of upending expectation, a way of playing off triplets against two- or four-note clusters. His runs have the tilt and accent of bebop. It's a form of hypnosis, of effortless seduction. Henry has told no one, not even Rosalind, that there are moments, listening from the back of a West End bar, when the music thrills him, and in a state of exaltation he feels his pride in his son—inseparable from his pleasure in the music—as a constricting sensation in his chest, close to pain. It's difficult to breathe. At the heart of the blues is not melancholy, but a strange and worldly joy.
Theo's guitar pierces him because it also carries a reprimand, a reminder of buried dissatisfaction in his own life, of the missing element. This feeling can grow when a set is over, when the consultant neurosurgeon makes his affectionate farewells to Theo and his friends and, emerging onto the pavement, decides to go home on foot and reflect. There's nothing in his own life that contains this inventiveness, this style of being free. The music speaks to unexpressed longing or frustration, a sense that he's denied himself an open road, the life of the heart celebrated in the songs. There has to be more to life than merely saving lives. The discipline and responsibility of a medical career, compounded by starting a family in his mid-twenties—and over much of it, a veil of fatigue; he's still young enough to yearn for the unpredictable and unrestrained, and old enough to know the chances are narrowing. Is he about to become that man, that modern fool of a certain age, who finds himself pausing by shop windows to stare in at the saxophones or the motorbikes, or driven to find himself a mistress of his daughter's age? He's already bought himself an expensive car. Theo's playing carries this burden of regret into his father's heart. It is, after all, the blues.
By way of greeting, Theo lets his chair tip forward onto four legs and raises a hand. It's not his style to show surprise.
“Early start?”
“I've just seen a plane on fire, heading into Heathrow.”
“You're kidding.”
Henry is going towards the hi-fi, intending to retune it, but Theo picks up the remote from the kitchen table and turns on the small TV they keep near the stove for moments like this, breaking stories. They wait for the grandiose preamble to the four o'clock news to finish—pulsing synthetic music, spiralling, radiating computer graphics, combined in a son et lumière of Wagnerian scale to suggest urgency, technology, global coverage. Then the usual square-jawed anchor of about Perowne's age begins to list the main stories of the hour. Straight away it's obvious that the burning plane has yet to enter the planetary matrix. It remains an unreliable subjective event. Still, they listen to some of the list.
“Hans Blix—a case for war?” the anchor intones over the sound of tom-toms, and pictures of the French Foreign Minister, M. de Villepin, being applauded in the UN debating chamber. “Yes, say US and Britain. No, say the majority.” Then, preparations for anti-war demonstrations later today in London and countless cities around the world; a tennis championship in Florida disrupted by a woman with a bread knife . . .
He turns the set off and says, “How about some coffee?” and while Theo gets up to oblige, Henry gives him the story, his main story of the hour. It shouldn't surprise him how little there is to tell—the plane and its point of light traversing his field of view, left to right, behind the trees, behind the Post Office Tower, then receding to the west. But he feels he's been through so much more.
“But uh, so what were you doing at the window?”
“I told you. I couldn't sleep.”
“Some coincidence.”
“Exa
ctly that.”
Their eyes meet—a moment of potential challenge—then Theo looks away and shrugs. His sister, on the other hand, likes adversarial argument. Daisy and Henry share an inspired love—a pathetic addiction, Rosalind and Theo would say—for a furious set-to. In the ripe teenage mulch of his bedroom, among the guitar magazines, discarded shirts and socks and smoothie bottles, are barely touched books on UFOs, a term these days interchangeable with spacecraft, alien-owned and driven. As Henry understands it, Theo's world-view accommodates a hunch that somehow everything is connected, interestingly connected, and that certain authorities, notably the U.S. government, with privileged access to extra-terrestrial intelligence, is excluding the rest of the world from such wondrous knowledge as contemporary science, dull and strait-laced, cannot begin to comprehend. This knowledge is divulged in other paperbacks, also barely touched by Theo. His curiosity, mild as it is, has been hijacked by peddlers of fakery. But does it matter, when he can play the guitar like an angel ringing a bell, when he's at least keeping faith with forms of wondrous knowledge, when there's so much time ahead to change his mind, if indeed he has made it up?
He's a gentle boy—those big lashes, those dark velvety eyes with their faint oriental pitch; he isn't the sort to enter easily into disputes. Their eyes meet, and he looks away with his own thoughts intact. The universe might be showing his father a connection, a sign which he chooses not to read. What can anyone do about that?
