by Ian Mcewan
Assuming a daydreaming episode like one of his own, Henry says, to bring him down to ground, “So it crashes minutes after I saw it disappear. How long do you think it would take to feed through the news channels?”
Theo, who's at the counter filtering the coffee, looks back over his shoulder and fingers his lower lip, a full dark red lip, presumably not much kissed of late. He dismissed his last girlfriend in that way he has with girls, of saying nothing much and letting them fade, without drama. Saying little, minimalism in the matter of salutations, introductions, farewells, even thanks, is contemporary etiquette. On the phone, however, the young unbutton. Theo often hunkers down for three hours at a stretch.
He speaks soothingly, as to a fussing child, with the authority of a citizen, an official even, of the electronic age. “It'll be on the next news, Dad. Half four.”
Fair enough. Naked under his dressing gown—itself a uniform of the old and sick—with thinning hair tousled from lack of sleep, his voice, the consultant's even baritone, now lightened by turmoil—Henry's a candidate for soothing. Here's how it starts, the long process by which you become your children's child. Until one day you might hear them say, Dad, if you start crying again we're taking you home.
Theo sits down and slides the coffee cup across the table, within his father's reach. He has made none for himself. Instead, he snaps the lid off another half-litre bottle of mineral water. The purity of the young. Or is he warding off a hangover? The point has long been passed when Henry feels he can ask, or express a view.
Theo says, “You reckon it's terrorists?”
“It's a possibility.”
The September attacks were Theo's induction into international affairs, the moment he accepted that events beyond friends, home and the music scene had bearing on his existence. At sixteen, which was what he was at the time, this seemed rather late. Perowne, born the year before the Suez Crisis, too young for the Cuban missiles, or the construction of the Berlin Wall, or Kennedy's assassination, remembers being tearful over Aberfan in 'sixty-six—one hundred and sixteen schoolchildren just like himself, fresh from prayers in school assembly, the day before half-term, buried under a river of mud. This was when he first suspected that the kindly child-loving God extolled by his headmistress might not exist. As it turned out, most major world events suggested the same. But for Theo's sincerely godless generation, the question hasn't come up. No one in his bright, plate-glass, forward-looking school ever asked him to pray, or sing an impenetrable cheery hymn. There's no entity for him to doubt. His initiation, in front of the TV, before the dissolving towers, was intense but he adapted quickly. These days he scans the papers for fresh developments the way he might a listings magazine. As long as there's nothing new, his mind is free. International terror, security cordons, preparations for war—these represent the steady state, the weather. Emerging into adult consciousness, this is the world he finds.
It can't trouble him the way it does his father, who reads the same papers with morbid fixation. Despite the troops mustering in the Gulf, or the tanks out at Heathrow on Thursday, the storming of the Finsbury Park mosque, the reports of terror cells around the country, and Bin Laden's promise on tape of “martyrdom attacks” on London, Perowne held for a while to the idea that it was all an aberration, that the world would surely calm down and soon be otherwise, that solutions were possible, that reason, being a powerful tool, was irresistible, the only way out; or that like any other crisis, this one would fade soon, and make way for the next, going the way of the Falklands and Bosnia, Biafra and Chernobyl. But lately, this is looking optimistic. Against his own inclination, he's adapting, the way patients eventually do to their sudden loss of sight or use of their limbs. No going back. The nineties are looking like an innocent decade, and who would have thought that at the time? Now we breathe a different air. He bought Fred Halliday's book and read in the opening pages what looked like a conclusion and a curse: the New York attacks precipitated a global crisis that would, if we were lucky, take a hundred years to resolve. If we were lucky. Henry's lifetime, and all of Theo's and Daisy's. And their children's lifetime too. A Hundred Years' War.
Inexpertly, Theo has made the coffee at triple strength. But fatherly to the last, Henry drinks it down. Now he is surely committed to the day.
Theo says, “You didn't see what airline it was?”
“No. Too far away, too dark.”
“Just that Chas is due in from New York this morning.”
He is New Blue Rider's sax player, a gleaming giant of a lad from St. Kitts, in New York for a week's master class, nominally supervised by Branford Marsalis. These kids have the instincts, the sense of entitlement proper to an elite. Ry Cooder heard Theo play slide guitar in Oakland. Taped to a mirror in Theo's bedroom is a beer coaster with a friendly salute from the maestro. If you put your face up close you can make out in loopy blue Biro, under a beer stain, a signature and, Keep it going Kid!
“I wouldn't worry. The red-eyes don't start coming in until half five.”
“Yeah, I suppose.” He swigs on the water bottle. “You think it's jihadists . . . ?”
Perowne is feeling dizzy, pleasantly so. Everything he looks at, including his son's face, is receding from him without growing smaller. He hasn't heard Theo use this word before. Is it the right word? It sounds harmless, even quaint, rendered in his light tenor. This deepening of the boyish treble is an advance Henry still can't entirely take for granted, even though it's five years old. On Theo's lips—he takes the trouble to do something fancy with the “j”—the Arabic word sounds as innocuous as some stringed Moroccan instrument the band might take up and electrify. In the ideal Islamic state, under strict Shari'a law, there'll be room for surgeons. Blues guitarists will be found other employment. But perhaps no one is demanding such a state. Nothing is demanded. Only hatred is registered, the purity of nihilism. As a Londoner, you could grow nostalgic for the IRA. Even as your legs left your body, you might care to remember the cause was a united Ireland. Now that's coming anyway, according to the Reverend Ian Paisley, through the power of the perambulator. Another crisis fading into the scrapbooks, after a mere thirty years. But that's not quite right. Radical Islamists aren't really nihilists—they want the perfect society on earth, which is Islam. They belong in a doomed tradition about which Perowne takes the conventional view—the pursuit of utopia ends up licensing every form of excess, all ruthless means of its realisation. If everyone is sure to end up happy for ever, what crime can it be to slaughter a million or two now?
“I don't know what I think,” Henry says. “It's too late to think. Let's wait for the news.”
Theo looks relieved. In his obliging way, he's prepared to debate the issues with his father, if that's what is required. But at four twenty in the morning he's happier saying little. So they wait in unstrained silence for several minutes. In the past months they have sat across this table and touched on all the issues. They've never talked so much before. Where's the adolescent rage, the door-slamming, the muted fury that's supposed to be Theo's rite of passage? Is all that feeling sunk in the blues? They discussed Iraq of course, America and power, European distrust, Islam—its suffering and self-pity, Israel and Palestine, dictators, democracy—and then the boys' stuff: weapons of mass destruction, nuclear fuel rods, satellite photography, lasers, nanotechnology. At the kitchen table, this is the early-twenty-first-century menu, the specials of the day. On a recent Sunday evening Theo came up with an aphorism: the bigger you think, the crappier it looks. Asked to explain he said, “When we go on about the big things, the political situation, global warming, world poverty, it all looks really terrible, with nothing getting better, nothing to look forward to. But when I think small, closer in—you know, a girl I've just met, or this song we're going to do with Chas, or snowboarding next month, then it looks great. So this is going to be my motto—think small.”
Remembering this now, with still some minutes to go before the news, Henry says, “How was the gig?�
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“We did this set of really basic, headbanging stuff, nearly all Jimmy Reed numbers. You know, like this . . .” He sings with parodic emphasis a little boogie bass figure, his left hand clenching and unclenching, unconsciously shaping the chords. “They went wild for it. Wouldn't let us do anything else. Bit depressing really, because it's not what we're about at all.” But he's smiling broadly at the memory.
It's time for the news. Once again, the radio pulses, the synthesised bleeps, the sleepless anchor and his dependable jaw. And there it is, made real at last, the plane, askew on the runway, apparently intact, surrounded by firefighters still spraying foam, soldiers, police, flashing lights, and ambulances backed up and ready. Before the story, irrelevant praise for the rapid response times of the emergency services. Only then is it explained. It's a cargo plane, a Russian Tupolev on a run from Riga to Birmingham. As it passed well to the east of London a fire broke out in one of the engines. The crew radioed for permission to land, and tried to shut down the fuel supply to the burning engine. They turned west along the Thames and were guided into Heathrow and made a decent landing. Neither of the two-man crew is hurt. The cargo is not specified, but a part of it, thought to be mostly mail, is destroyed. Then, still in second place, the anti-war protests only hours away. Hans Blix, yesterday's man, is third.
Schrödinger's dead cat is alive after all.
Theo picks up his jacket from the floor and stands. His manner is wry.
“So, not an attack on our whole way of life then.”
“A good result,” Henry agrees.
He would like to embrace his son, not only out of relief, but because it occurs to him that Theo has become such a likeable adult. Leaving school did the trick after all—boldly stepping where his parents didn't dare, out of formal education, taking charge of his life. But these days he and Theo have to be apart for at least a week before they allow themselves to embrace. He was always a physical child—even at thirteen he sometimes took his father's hand in the street. No way back to that. Only Daisy holds out the chance of a bedtime kiss when she's home.
As Theo crosses the kitchen, his father says, “So you'll be on the march today?”
“Sort of. In spirit. I've got to get this song ready.”
“Sleep well then,” Henry says.
“Yeah. And you.”
On his way out the door Theo says, “Night then,” and seconds later, when he's a little way up the stairs he calls back, “See you in the morning,” and from the top of the stairs, tentatively, on a rising question note, “Night?” To each call Henry responds, and waits for the next. These are Theo's characteristic slow fades, the three or four or even five goes he has at making his farewells, the superstition that he should have the last word. The held hand slowly slipping away.
Perowne has a theory that coffee can have a paradoxical effect, and it seems so now as he moves heavily about the kitchen turning off the lights; not only his broken night, but the whole week, and the weeks before bearing down on him. He feels feeble in his knees, in the quadriceps, as he goes up the stairs, making use of the handrail. This is how it will be in his seventies. He crosses the hallway, soothed by the cool touch of the smooth stone flags under his bare feet. On his way to the main stairs, he pauses by the double front doors. They give straight on to the pavement, on to the street that leads into the square, and in his exhaustion they suddenly loom before him strangely with their accretions—three stout Banham locks, two black iron bolts as old as the house, two tempered steel security chains, a spyhole with a brass cover, the box of electronics that works the Entryphone system, the red panic button, the alarm pad with its softly gleaming digits. Such defences, such mundane embattlement: beware of the city's poor, the drug-addicted, the downright bad.
In darkness again, standing by his side of the bed, he lets the dressing gown drop around his feet and blindly feels his way between the cold covers towards his wife. She's lying on her left side, facing away from him, with her knees still drawn up. He settles himself around her familiar shape, puts his arm about her waist and draws closer to her. As he kisses the nape of her neck she speaks from the recesses of sleep—the tone is welcoming, gratified, but her single indistinct word, like a weight too heavy to lift, doesn't move from her tongue. He feels her body warmth through the silk of her pyjamas spread across his chest and groin. Walking up three flights of stairs has revived him, his eyes are wide open in the dark; the exertion, his minimally raised blood pressure, is causing local excitement on his retina, so that ghostly swarms of purple and iridescent green are migrating across his view of a boundless steppe, then rolling in on themselves to become bolts of cloth, swathes of swagged velvet, drawing back like theatre curtains on new scenes, new thoughts. He doesn't want any thoughts at all, but now he's alert. His workless day lies ahead of him, a track across the steppe; after his squash game, which insomnia is already losing for him, he must visit his mother. Her face as it is now eludes him. He sees instead the county champion swimmer of forty years ago—he's remembering from photographs—that floral rubber cap that gave her the appearance of an eager seal. He was proud of her even as she tormented his childhood, dragging him on winter evenings to loud municipal pools on whose concrete changing-room floors discarded sticking plasters with their pink and purplish stains stewed in lukewarm puddles. She made him follow her into sinister green lakes and the grey North Sea before season. It was another element, she used to say, as if it were an explanation or an enticement. Another element was precisely what he objected to lowering his skinny freckled frame into. It was the division between the elements that hurt most, the unfriendly surface, rising in a bitter cutting edge up his sunken goosefleshed belly as he advanced on tiptoe, to please her, into the unclear waters of the Essex coast in early June. He could never throw himself in, the way she did, the way she wanted him to. Submersion in another element, every day, making every day special, was what she wanted and thought he should have. Well, he was fine with that now, as long as the other element wasn't cold water.
The bedroom air is fresh in his nostrils, he's half-aroused sexually as he moves closer to Rosalind. He can hear the first stirring of steady traffic on the Euston Road, like a breeze moving through a forest of firs. People who have to be at work by six on a Saturday. The thought of them doesn't make him feel sleepy, as it often does. He thinks of sex. If the world were configured precisely to his needs, he would be making love to Rosalind now, without preliminaries, to a very willing Rosalind, and afterwards falling in a clearheaded swoon towards sleep. But even despotic kings, even the ancient gods, couldn't always dream the world to their convenience. It's only children, in fact, only infants who feel a wish and its fulfilment as one; perhaps this is what gives tyrants their childish air. They reach back for what they can't have. When they meet frustration, the man-slaying tantrum is never far away. Saddam, for example, doesn't simply look like a heavy-jowled brute. He gives the impression of an overgrown, disappointed boy with a pudgy hangdog look, and dark eyes a little baffled by all that he still can't ordain. Absolute power and its pleasures are just beyond reach and keep receding. He knows that another fawning general dispatched to the torture rooms, another bullet in the head of a relative won't deliver the satisfaction it once did.
Perowne shifts position and nuzzles the back of Rosalind's head, inhaling the faint tang of perfumed soap mingled with the scent of warm skin and shampooed hair. What a stroke of luck, that the woman he loves is also his wife. But how quickly he's drifted from the erotic to Saddam—who belongs in a mess, a stew of many ingredients, of foreboding and preoccupation. Sleepless in the early hours, you make a nest out of your own fears—there must have been survival advantage in dreaming up bad outcomes and scheming to avoid them. This trick of dark imagining is one legacy of natural selection in a dangerous world. This past hour he's been in a state of wild unreason, in a folly of overinterpretation. It doesn't console him, that anyone in these times, standing at the window in his place, might have leaped t
o the same conclusions. Misunderstanding is general all over the world. How can we trust ourselves? He sees now the details he half-ignored in order to nourish his fears: that the plane was not being driven into a public building, that it was making a regular, controlled descent, that it was on a well-used flight path—none of this fitted the general unease. He told himself there were two possible outcomes—the cat dead or alive. But he'd already voted for the dead, when he should have sensed it straight away—a simple accident in the making. Not an attack on our whole way of life then.
Half aware of him, Rosalind shifts position, fidgeting with a feeble turn of her shoulders so that her back is snug against his chest. She slides her foot along his shin and rests the arch of her foot on his toes. Aroused further, he feels his erection trapped against the small of her back and reaches down to free himself. Her breathing resumes its steady rhythm. Henry lies still, waiting for sleep. By contemporary standards, by any standards, it's perverse that he's never tired of making love to Rosalind, never been seriously tempted by the opportunities that have drifted his way through the generous logic of medical hierarchy. When he thinks of sex, he thinks of her. These eyes, these breasts, this tongue, this welcome. Who else could love him so knowingly, with such warmth and teasing humour, or accumulate so rich a past with him? In one lifetime it wouldn't be possible to find another woman with whom he can learn to be so free, whom he can please with such abandon and expertise. By some accident of character, it's familiarity that excites him more than sexual novelty. He suspects there's something numbed or deficient or timid in himself. Plenty of male friends sidle into adventures with younger women; now and then a solid marriage explodes in a firefight of recrimination. Perowne watches on with unease, fearing he lacks an element of the masculine life force, and a bold and healthy appetite for experience. Where's his curiosity? What's wrong with him? But there's nothing he can do about himself. He meets the occasional questioning glance of an attractive woman with a bland and level smile. This fidelity might look like virtue or doggedness, but it's neither of these because he exercises no real choice. This is what he was to have: possession, belonging, repetition.
