by Ian Mcewan
“Mm.”
Sensuous, intellectual Daisy, small-boned, pale and correct. What other postgraduate aspiring poet wears short-skirted business suits and fresh white blouses, and rarely drinks and does her best work before 9 a.m.? His little girl, slipping away from him into efficient Parisian womanhood, is expecting her first volume of poems to be published in May. And not by some hand-cranked press, but a venerable institution in Queen Square, right across from the hospital where he clipped his first aneurysm. Even her cantankerous grandfather, grandly intolerant of contemporary writing, sent from his chateau a barely legible letter that on deciphering turned out to be rapturous. Perowne, no judge of such things, and pleased for her, of course, has been pained by the love lyrics, by her knowing so much, or dreaming so vividly about the bodies of men he's never met. Who is this creep whose tumescence resembles an “excited watering can” approaching a “peculiar rose”? Or the other one who sings in the shower “like Caruso” as he shampoos “both beards”? He has to check this indignation—hardly a literary response. He's been trying to shrug off the fatherly possessiveness and see the poems in their own terms. He already likes the less charged, but still sinister line in another poem that notes “how each/rose grew on a shark-infested stem.” The pale young girl with the roses hasn't been home for a long while. Her arrival is an oasis at the far end of the day.
“I love you.”
This isn't merely an affectionate token, for Rosalind reaches down and takes firm hold of him, and without letting go, turns and reaches behind her to disable the alarm clock, an awkward stretch that sends muscle tremors through the mattress.
“I'm glad you do.”
They kiss and she says, “I've been half awake for a while, feeling you getting harder against my back.”
“And how was that?”
She whispers, “It made me want you. But I don't have much time. I daren't be late.”
Such effortless seduction! His wish come true, not a finger lifted, the envy of gods and despots, Henry is raised from his stupor to take her in his arms and kiss her deeply. Yes, she's ready. And so his night ends, and this is where he begins his day, at 6 a.m., wondering whether all the essences of marital compromise have been flung carelessly into one moment: in darkness, in the missionary position, in a hurry, without preamble. But these are the externals. Now he is freed from thought, from memory, from the passing seconds and from the state of the world. Sex is a different medium, refracting time and sense, a biological hyperspace as remote from conscious existence as dreams, or as water is from air. As his mother used to say, another element; the day is changed, Henry, when you take a swim. And that day is bound to be marked out from all the rest.
Two
There is grandeur in this view of life. He wakes, or he thinks he does, to the sound of her hairdryer and a murmuring voice repeating a phrase, and later, after he's sunk again, he hears the solid clunk of her wardrobe door opening, the vast built-in wardrobe, one of a pair, with automatic lights and intricate interior of lacquered veneer and deep, scented recesses; later still, as she crosses and re-crosses the bedroom in her bare feet, the silky whisper of her petticoat, surely the black one with the raised tulip pattern he bought in Milan; then the business-like tap of her boot heels on the bathroom's marble floor as she goes about her final preparations in front of the mirror, applying perfume, brushing out her hair; and all the while, the plastic radio in the form of a leaping blue dolphin, attached by suckers to the mosaic wall in the shower, plays that same phrase, until he begins to sense a religious content as its significance swells—there is grandeur in this view of life, it says, over and again.
There is grandeur in this view of life. When he wakes properly two hours later she's gone and the room is silent. There's a narrow column of light where a shutter stands ajar. The day looks fiercely white. He pushes the covers aside and lies on his back in her part of the bed, naked in the warmth of the central heating, waiting to place the phrase. Darwin of course, from last night's read in the bath, in the final paragraph of his great work Perowne has never actually read. Kindly, driven, infirm Charles in all his humility, bringing on the earthworms and planetary cycles to assist him with a farewell bow. To soften the message, he also summoned up the Creator, but his heart wasn't in it and he ditched Him in later editions. Those five hundred pages deserved only one conclusion: endless and beautiful forms of life, such as you see in a common hedgerow, including exalted beings like ourselves, arose from physical laws, from war of nature, famine and death. This is the grandeur. And a bracing kind of consolation in the brief privilege of consciousness.
Once, on a walk by a river—Eskdale in low reddish sunlight, with a dusting of snow—his daughter quoted to him an opening verse by her favourite poet. Apparently, not many young women loved Philip Larkin the way she did. “If I were called in/To construct a religion/I should make use of water.” She said she liked that laconic “called in”—as if he would be, as if anyone ever is. They stopped to drink coffee from a flask, and Perowne, tracing a line of lichen with a finger, said that if he ever got the call, he'd make use of evolution. What better creation myth? An unimaginable sweep of time, numberless generations spawning by infinitesimal steps complex living beauty out of inert matter, driven on by the blind furies of random mutation, natural selection and environmental change, with the tragedy of forms continually dying, and lately the wonder of minds emerging and with them morality, love, art, cities—and the unprecedented bonus of this story happening to be demonstrably true.
At the end of this not entirely facetious recitation—they were standing on a stone bridge at the junction of two streams—Daisy laughed and put down her cup to applaud. “Now that's genuine old-time religion, when you say it happens to be demonstrably true.”
He's missed her these past months and soon she'll be here. Amazingly for a Saturday, Theo has promised to stick around this evening, at least until eleven. Perowne's plan is to cook a fish stew. A visit to the fishmonger's is one of the simpler tasks ahead: monkfish, clams, mussels, unpeeled prawns. It's this practical daylight list, these salty items, that make him leave the bed at last and walk into the bathroom. There's a view that it's shameful for a man to sit to urinate because that's what women do. Relax! He sits, feeling the last scraps of sleep dissolve as his stream plays against the bowl. He's trying to locate a quite different source of shame, or guilt, or of something far milder, like the memory of some embarrassment or foolishness. It passed through his thoughts only minutes ago, and now what remains is the feeling without its rationale. A sense of having behaved or spoken laughably. Of having been a fool. Without the memory of it, he can't talk himself out of it. But who cares? These diaphanous films of sleep are still slowing him down—he imagines them resembling the arachnoid, that gossamer covering of the brain through which he routinely cuts. The grandeur. He must have hallucinated the phrase out of the hairdryer's drone, and confused it with the radio news. The luxury of being half asleep exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety. But when he trod the air to the window last night he was fully awake. He's even more certain of that now.
He rises and flushes his waste. At least one molecule of it will fall on him one day as rain, according to a ridiculous article in a magazine lying around in the operating suite coffee room. The numbers say so, but statistical probabilities aren't the same as truths. We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when. Humming this wartime tune, he crosses the wide green-and-white marble floor to his basin to shave. He feels incomplete without this morning rite, even on a day off. He ought to learn from Theo how to let go. But Henry likes the wooden bowl, the badger brush, the extravagantly disposable triple-bladed razor, with cleverly arched and ridged jungle-green handle—drawing this industrial gem over familiar flesh sharpens his thoughts. He should look out what William James wrote on forgetting a word or name; a tantalising, empty shape remains, almost but not quite defining the idea it once contained. Even as you struggle against the numbness of poor recall,
you know precisely what the forgotten thing is not. James had the knack of fixing on the surprising commonplace—and in Perowne's humble view, wrote a better-honed prose than the fussy brother who would rather run round a thing a dozen different ways than call it by its name. Daisy, the arbiter of his literary education, would never agree. She wrote a long undergraduate essay on Henry James's late novels and can quote a passage from The Golden Bowl. She also knows dozens of poems by heart which she learned in her early teens, a means of earning pocket money from her grandfather. Her training was so different from her father's. No wonder they like their disputes. What Daisy knows! At her prompting, he tried the one about the little girl suffering from her parents' vile divorce. A promising subject, but poor Maisie soon vanished behind a cloud of words, and at page forty-eight Perowne, who can be on his feet seven hours for a difficult procedure, who has his name down for the London Marathon, fell away, exhausted. Even the tale of his daughter's namesake baffled him. What's an adult to conclude or feel about Daisy Miller's predictable decline? That the world can be unkind? It's not enough. He stoops to the tap to rinse his face. Perhaps he's becoming, in this one respect at least, like Darwin in later years who found Shakespeare dull to the point of nausea. Perowne is counting on Daisy to refine his sensibilities.
Fully awake at last, he returns to the bedroom, suddenly impatient to be dressed and free of the various entanglements of the room, of sleep and insomnia and overheated thinking, and even of sex. The rumpled bed with its ruined, pornographic look embodies all these elements. It's clarifying to be without desire. Still naked, he makes a quick pass at smoothing out the covers, picks up some pillows from the floor and tosses them towards the headboard, and goes to the dressing room, to the corner where he stores his sports gear. These are the small pleasures at the start of a Saturday morning—the promise of coffee, and this faded squash kit. Daisy, a neat dresser, fondly calls it his scarecrow outfit. The blue shorts are bleached by patches of sweat that won't wash out. Over a grey T-shirt he puts on an old cashmere jumper with moth-holes across the chest. Over the shorts, a tracksuit bottom, fastened with chandler's cord at the waist. The white socks of prickly stretch towelling with yellow and pink bands at the top have something of the nursery about them. Unboxing them releases a homely aroma of the laundry. The squash shoes have a sharp smell, blending the synthetic with the animal, that reminds him of the court, the clean white walls and red lines, the unarguable rules of gladiatorial combat, and the score.
It's pointless pretending not to care about the score. He lost last week's game against Jay Strauss, but as he crosses the room with cushioned, springy stride Henry feels he'll win today. He's reminded of how he glided across this same stretch of floor in the night, and as he opens the same shutters the half-remembered foolishness almost comes back to him. But it's instantly dispersed by the flood of low winter sunlight, and by the sudden interest of what's happening in the square.
At first sight they look like two girls in their late teens, slight and with pale delicate faces, and underdressed for February. They could be sisters, standing by the railings of the central gardens, oblivious to passers-by, lost to a family drama of their own. Then Perowne decides that the figure facing him is a boy. It's difficult to tell because he wears a cycle helmet from under which thick brown hair curls. Perowne is persuaded by the posture, the way the feet are planted well apart, the thickness of the wrist as he places a hand on the girl's shoulder. She shrugs him off. She's agitated and crying, and undecided in her movements—she raises her hands to cover her face, but when the boy moves closer to draw her towards him, she lands ineffectual blows on his chest, like an old-fashioned Hollywood heroine. She turns from him, but doesn't walk away. Perowne thinks he sees in her face a reminder of his daughter's delicate oval, the little nose and elfin chin. That connection made, he watches more closely. She wants the boy, she hates him. His look is feral, sharpened by hunger. Is it for her? He's not letting her go and all the time he's talking, coaxing, wheedling, attempting to persuade or mollify her. Repeatedly, her left hand wanders behind her back, to dig under her T-shirt and scratch hard. She does this compulsively, even as she's crying and half-heartedly shoving the boy away. Amphetamine-driven formication—the phantom ants crawling through her arteries and veins, the itch that can never be reached. Or an exogenous opioid-induced histamine reaction, common among new users. The pallor and emotional extravagance are telling. These are addicts, surely. A missed score rather than a family matter is behind her distress and the boy's futile comforting.
People often drift into the square to act out their dramas. Clearly, a street won't do. Passions need room, the attentive spaciousness of a theatre. On another scale, Perowne considers, drawn now by sunlight and a fresh day into his usual preoccupation, this could be the attraction of the Iraqi desert—the flat and supposedly empty landscape approximating a strategist's map on which fury of industrial proportions can be let loose. A desert, it is said, is a military planner's dream. A city square is the private equivalent. Last Sunday there was a boy striding up and down the square for two hours, shouting into his phone, his voice fading each time he marched off south, and swelling in the afternoon gloom as he returned. Next morning, on his way to work, Perowne saw a woman snatch her husband's phone and shatter it on the pavement. In the same month there was a fellow in a dark suit on his knees, umbrella at his side, apparently with his head stuck between the garden railings. In fact he was clinging to the bars and sobbing. The old lady with the whisky would never get away with her shouts and squawks in the narrowness of a street, not for three hours at a stretch. The square's public aspect grants privacy to these intimate dramas. Couples come to talk or cry quietly on the benches. Emerging from small rooms in council flats or terraced houses, and from cramped side streets, into a wider view of generous sky and a tall stand of plane trees on the green, of space and growth, people remember their essential needs and how they're not being met.
But there's no shortage of happiness either. Perowne can see it now, on the far side, by the Indian hostel, as he goes to open the other shutters and the bedroom fills with light. There is real excitement in that part of the square. Two Asian lads in tracksuits—he recognises them from the newsagent's in Warren Street—are unloading a van onto a handcart on the pavement. Placards are already piled high, and folded banners and cards of lapel buttons and whistles, football rattles and trumpets, funny hats and rubber masks of politicians—Bush and Blair in wobbling stacks, the topmost faces gazing blankly skywards, ghastly white in the sunshine. Gower Street a few blocks away to the east is one of the starting points of the march, and some of the overspill has reached back here. A small crowd round the cart wants to buy stuff before the vendors are ready. The general cheerfulness Perowne finds baffling. There are whole families, one with four children in various sizes of bright red coats clearly under instruction to hold hands; and students, and a coachful of greying ladies in quilted anoraks and stout shoes. The Women's Institute perhaps. One of the tracksuited men holds up his hands in mock surrender, his friend standing on the back of the van makes his first sale. Displaced by the commotion, the square's pigeons take off and wheel and dip in formation. Waiting for them below on a bench by a litter bin is a trembling red-faced man wrapped in a grey blanket with a sliced loaf ready on his lap. Among the Perowne children, “pigeon feeder” is a term synonymous with mentally deficient. Behind the throng round the cart is a bunch of kids in leather jackets and cropped hair, looking on with tolerant smiles. They have already unfurled their banner which proclaims simply, Peace Not Slogans!!
The scene has an air of innocence and English dottiness. Perowne, dressed for combat on court, imagines himself as Saddam, surveying the crowd with satisfaction from some Baghdad ministry balcony: the good-hearted electorates of the Western democracies will never allow their governments to attack his country. But he's wrong. The one thing Perowne thinks he knows about this war is that it's going to happen. With or without the UN. The troops are
in place, they'll have to fight. Ever since he treated an Iraqi professor of ancient history for an aneurysm, saw his torture scars and listened to his stories, Perowne has had ambivalent or confused and shifting ideas about this coming invasion. Miri Taleb is in his late sixties, a man of slight, almost girlish build, with a nervous laugh, a whinnying giggle that could have something to do with his time in prison. He did his Ph.D. at University College London and speaks excellent English. His field is Sumerian civilisation, and for more than twenty years he taught at the university in Baghdad and was involved in various archaeological surveys in the Euphrates area. His arrest came one winter's afternoon in 1994, outside a lecture room where he was about to teach. His students were waiting for him inside and did not see what happened. Three men showed their security accreditation, and asked him to go with them to their car. There they handcuffed him, and it was at that point that his torture began. The cuffs were so tight that for sixteen hours, until they were removed, he could think of nothing else but the pain. Permanent damage was done to both shoulders. For the following ten months he was moved around central Iraq between various jails. He had no idea what these moves meant, and no means of letting his wife know he was still alive. Even on the day of his release, he didn't discover what the charges were against him.
Perowne listened in his office to the professor, and later talked to him in the ward after his operation—fortunately, a complete success. For a man approaching his seventieth birthday, Taleb has an unusual appearance—a childlike smooth skin and long eyelashes, and a carefully groomed black moustache—surely dyed. In Iraq he had no involvement or interest in politics, and declined to join the Ba'ath Party. That may have been the cause of his problems. Equally, it could have been the fact that one of his wife's cousins, long dead, was once a member of the Communist Party, or that another cousin had received a letter from Iran from a friend exiled because of his supposed Iranian descent; or that the husband of a niece had refused to return from a teaching job in Canada. Another possible reason was that the professor himself had travelled to Turkey to advise on archaeological digs. He was not particularly surprised by his arrest, and nor would his wife have been. They both knew, everyone knew, someone who'd been taken in, held for a while, tortured perhaps, and then released. People suddenly turned up at work again, and did not speak about their experiences, and no one dared ask—there were too many informers around, and inappropriate curiosity could get you arrested. Some came back in sealed coffins—it was strictly forbidden to open them. It was common to hear of friends and acquaintances making the rounds of the hospitals, police stations and government offices hoping for news of their relatives.
