by Ian Mcewan
Perowne knows that when a powerful imperium—Assyrian, Roman, American—makes war and claims just cause, history will not be impressed. He also worries that the invasion or the occupation will be a mess. The marchers could be right. And he acknowledges the accidental nature of opinions; if he hadn't met and admired the professor, he might have thought differently, less ambivalently, about the coming war. Opinions are a roll of the dice; by definition, none of the people now milling around Warren Street tube station happens to have been tortured by the regime, or knows and loves people who have, or even knows much about the place at all. It's likely most of them barely registered the massacres in Kurdish Iraq, or in the Shi'ite south, and now they find they care with a passion for Iraqi lives. They have good reasons for their views, among which are concerns for their own safety. Al-Qaeda, it's said, which loathes both godless Saddam and the Shiite opposition, will be provoked by an attack on Iraq into revenge on the soft cities of the West. Self-interest is a decent enough cause, but Perowne can't feel, as the marchers themselves probably can, that they have an exclusive hold on moral discernment.
The sandwich bars along the street are closed up for the weekend. Only the flute shop and newsagent are open. Outside the Rive Gauche traiteur, the owner is using a zinc bucket to sluice down the pavement, Parisian-style. Coming towards Perowne, his back to the crowds, is a pink-faced man of about his own age, in a baseball cap and yellow Day-Glo jacket, with a handcart, sweeping the gutter for the council. He seems oddly intent on making a good job, jabbing the corner of his broom hard into the angles of the kerb, chasing out the scraps. His vigour and thoroughness are uncomfortable to watch, a quiet indictment on a Saturday morning. What could be more futile than this underpaid urban-scale housework when behind him, at the far end of the street, cartons and paper cups are spreading thickly under the feet of demonstrators gathered outside McDonald's on the corner? And beyond them, across the metropolis, a daily blizzard of litter. As the two men pass, their eyes meet briefly, neutrally. The whites of the sweeper's eyes are fringed with egg-yellow shading to red along the lids. For a vertiginous moment Henry feels himself bound to the other man, as though on a seesaw with him, pinned to an axis that could tip them into each other's life.
Perowne looks away and slows before turning into the mews where his car is garaged. How restful it must once have been, in another age, to be prosperous and believe that an all-knowing supernatural force had allotted people to their stations in life. And not see how the belief served your own prosperity—a form of anosognosia, a useful psychiatric term for a lack of awareness of one's own condition. Now we think we do see, how do things stand? After the ruinous experiments of the lately deceased century, after so much vile behaviour, so many deaths, a queasy agnosticism has settled around these matters of justice and redistributed wealth. No more big ideas. The world must improve, if at all, by tiny steps. People mostly take an existential view—having to sweep the streets for a living looks like simple bad luck. It's not a visionary age. The streets need to be clean. Let the unlucky enlist.
He walks down a faint incline of greasy cobbles to where the owners of houses like his own once kept their horses. Now, those who can afford it cosset their cars here with off-street parking. Attached to his key ring is an infrared button which he presses to raise a clattering steel shutter. It's revealed in mechanical jerks, the long nose and shining eyes at the stable door, chafing to be free. A silver Mercedes S 500 with cream upholstery—and he's no longer embarrassed by it. He doesn't even love it—it's simply a sensual part of what he regards as his overgenerous share of the world's goods. If he didn't own it, he tries to tell himself, someone else would. He hasn't driven it in a week, but in the gloom of the dry dustless garage the machine breathes an animal warmth of its own. He opens the door and sits in. He likes driving it wearing his threadbare sports clothes. On the front passenger seat is an old copy of the Journal of Neurosurgery which carries a report of his on a convention in Rome. He tosses his squash racket on top of it. It's Theo who disapproves most, saying it's a doctor's car, as if this were the final word in condemnation. Daisy, on the other hand, said she thought that Harold Pinter owned something like it, which made it all fine with her. Rosalind encouraged him to buy it. She thinks his life is too guiltily austere, and never buying clothes or good wine or a single painting is a touch pretentious. Still living like a postgraduate student. It was time for him to fill out.
For months he drove it apologetically, rarely in fourth gear, reluctant to overtake, waving on right-turning traffic, punctilious in permitting cheaper cars their road space. He was cured at last by a fishing trip to north-west Scotland with Jay Strauss. Seduced by the open road and Jay's exultant celebration of “Lutheran genius,” Henry finally accepted himself as the owner, the master, of his vehicle. In fact, he's always quietly considered himself a good driver: as in the theatre, firm, precise, defensive to the correct degree. He and Jay fished the streams and lochans around Torridon for brown trout. One wet afternoon, glancing over his shoulder while casting, Henry saw his car a hundred yards away, parked at an angle on a rise of the track, picked out in soft light against a backdrop of birch, flowering heather and thunderous black sky—the realisation of an ad man's vision—and felt for the first time a gentle, swooning joy of possession. It is, of course, possible, permissible, to love an inanimate object. But this moment was the peak of the affair; since then his feelings have settled into mild, occasional pleasure. The car gives him vague satisfaction when he's driving it; the rest of the time it rarely crosses his mind. As its makers intended and promised, it's become part of him.
But certain small things still stir him particularly, like the way the car idles without vibration; the rev counter alone confirms the engine is turning. He switches on the radio, which is playing sustained, respectful applause as he eases out of the garage, lets the steel shutter drop behind him, and goes slowly up the mews and turns left, back into Warren Street. His squash club is in Huntley Street in a converted nurses' home—no distance at all, but he's driving because he has errands to do afterwards. Shamelessly, he always enjoys the city from inside his car where the air is filtered and hi-fi music confers pathos on the humblest details—a Schubert trio is dignifying the narrow street he's slipping down now. He's heading a couple of blocks south in order to loop eastwards across the Tottenham Court Road. Cleveland Street used to be known for garment sweatshops and prostitutes. Now it has Greek, Turkish and Italian restaurants—the local sort that never get mentioned in the guides—with terraces where people eat out in summer. There's a man who repairs old computers, a fabric shop, a cobbler's, and further down, a wig emporium, much visited by transvestites. This is the fair embodiment of an inner city byway—diverse, self-confident, obscure. And it's at this point he remembers the source of his vague sense of shame or embarrassment: his readiness to be persuaded that the world has changed beyond recall, that harmless streets like this and the tolerant life they embody can be destroyed by the new enemy—well-organised, tentacular, full of hatred and focused zeal. How foolishly apocalyptic those apprehensions seem by daylight, when the self-evident fact of the streets and the people on them is their own justification, their own insurance. The world has not fundamentally changed. Talk of a hundred-year crisis is indulgence. There are always crises, and Islamic terrorism will settle into place, alongside recent wars, climate change, the politics of international trade, land and fresh water shortages, hunger, poverty and the rest.
He listens to the Schubert sweetly fade and swell. The street is fine, and the city, grand achievement of the living and all the dead who've ever lived here, is fine too, and robust. It won't easily allow itself to be destroyed. It's too good to let go. Life in it has steadily improved over the centuries for most people, despite the junkies and beggars now. The air is better, and salmon are leaping in the Thames, and otters are returning. At every level, material, medical, intellectual, sensual, for most people it has improved. The teachers who educated Daisy a
t university thought the idea of progress old-fashioned and ridiculous. In indignation, Perowne grips the wheel tighter in his right hand. He remembers some lines by Medawar, a man he admires: “To deride the hopes of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind.” Yes, he's a fool to be taken in by that hundred-year claim. In Daisy's final term he went to an open day at her college. The young lecturers there like to dramatise modern life as a sequence of calamities. It's their style, their way of being clever. It wouldn't be cool or professional to count the eradication of smallpox as part of the modern condition. Or the recent spread of democracies. In the evening one of them gave a lecture on the prospects for our consumerist and technological civilisation: not good. But if the present dispensation is wiped out now, the future will look back on us as gods, certainly in this city, lucky gods blessed by supermarket cornucopias, torrents of accessible information, warm clothes that weigh nothing, extended lifespans, wondrous machines. This is an age of wondrous machines. Portable telephones barely bigger than your ear. Vast music libraries held in an object the size of a child's hand. Cameras that can beam their snapshots around the world. Effortlessly, he ordered up the contraption he's riding in now through a device on his desk via the Internet. The computer-guided stereotactic array he used yesterday has transformed the way he does biopsies. Digitalised entertainment binds that Chinese couple walking hand in hand, listening through a Y-socket to their personal stereo. And she's almost skipping, that stringy girl in a shell suit behind a three-wheel all-terrain pushchair. In fact, everyone he's passing now along this pleasantly down-at-heel street looks happy enough, at least as content as he is. But for the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.
In a spirit of aggressive celebration of the times, Perowne swings the Mercedes east into Maple Street. His wellbeing appears to need spectral entities to oppose it, figures of his own invention whom he can defeat. He's sometimes like this before a game. He doesn't particularly like himself in this frame, but the second-by-second wash of his thoughts is only partially his to control—the drift, the white noise of solitary thought is driven by his emotional state. Perhaps he isn't really happy at all, he's psyching himself up. He's passing by the building at the foot of the Post Office Tower—less ugly these days with its aluminium entrance, blue cladding and geometric masses of windows and ventilation grilles looking like a Mondrian. But further along, where Fitzroy becomes Charlotte Street, the neighbourhood is packed with penny-pinching office blocks and student accommodation—ill-fitting windows, low ambition, not lasting well. In the rain, and in the right temper, you can imagine yourself back in Communist Warsaw. Only when enough of them have been torn down, will it be possible to start loving them.
Henry is now parallel to and two blocks south of Warren Street. He's still bothered by his peculiar state of mind, this happiness cut with aggression. As he approaches the Tottenham Court Road, he begins a familiar routine, listing the recent events that may have shaped his mood. That he and Rosalind made love, that it's Saturday morning, that this is his car, that no one died in the plane and there's a game ahead and the Chapman girl and his other patients from yesterday are stable, that Daisy is coming—all this is to the good. And on the other hand? On the other hand, he's touching the brake. There's a motorbike policeman in a yellow jacket, in the middle of the Tottenham Court Road with his machine on its stand, holding out an arm to stop him. Of course, the road is closed for the march. He should have known. But still Perowne keeps coming, slowing all the while, as if by pretending not to know, he can be exempted—after all, he only wants to cross this road, not drive down it; or at least, he'll receive his due: a little drama of exchange between a firm but apologetic policeman and the solemnly tolerant citizen.
He stops at the junction of the two roads. And indeed, the cop is coming towards him, with a glance up the street at the marchers and a pursed, tolerant smile that suggests he himself would have bombed Iraq long ago, and many other countries besides. Perowne, relaxed at the wheel, would have responded with a collegiate closed-mouth smile of his own, but two things happen, almost at the same time. Behind the patrolman, on the far side of the road, three men, two tall, one thickset and short and wearing a black suit, are hurrying out of a lap-dancing club, the Spearmint Rhino, almost stumbling in their efforts not to run. When they turn the corner, into the street Perowne is wanting to enter, they're no longer so restrained. With the shorter man lagging behind, they run towards a car parked on the nearside.
The second thing to happen is that the cop meanwhile, unaware of the men, suddenly stops on his way to Perowne and raises a hand to his left ear. He nods and speaks into a microphone fixed in front of his mouth and turns towards his bike. Then, remembering what he was about, he glances back. Perowne meets his eye, and with a self-deprecating, interrogative look, points across the road at University Street. The cop shrugs, and then nods, and makes a gesture with his hand to say, Do it quickly then. What the hell. The marchers are still mostly up the other end, and he's had fresh instructions.
Perowne isn't late for his game, nor is he impatient to be across the road. He likes his car, but he's never been interested in the details of its performance, its acceleration from a standing start. He assumes it's impressive, but he's never put it to the test. He's far too old to be leaving rubber at the traffic lights. As he slips into first, he looks diligently in both directions, even though it's a one-way flow northwards; he knows that pedestrians could be coming from either direction. If he moves briskly across the four-lane width of the road, it's out of consideration for the policeman who's already starting up his bike. Perowne doesn't want the man in trouble with his superiors. And something about the hand gesture has communicated the need to be quick. By the time the Mercedes has travelled the sixty or seventy feet to the entrance of University Street, which is where he changes into second, he may be doing twenty miles an hour. Twenty-five perhaps. Thirty at a stretch. And even as he changes up, he's easing off, looking out for the right turn before Gower Street, which is also closed off.
And the forward motion is a prompt, it instantly returns him to his list, the proximal and distal causes of his emotional state. A second can be a long time in introspection. Long enough for Henry to make a start on the negative features, certainly enough time for him to think, or sense, without unwrapping the thought into syntax and words, that it is in fact the state of the world that troubles him most, and the marchers are there to remind him of it. The world probably has changed fundamentally and the matter is being clumsily handled, particularly by the Americans. There are people around the planet, well-connected and organised, who would like to kill him and his family and friends to make a point. The scale of death contemplated is no longer at issue; there'll be more deaths on a similar scale, probably in this city. Is he so frightened that he can't face the fact? The assertions and the questions don't spell themselves out. He experiences them more as a mental shrug followed by an interrogative pulse. This is the pre-verbal language that linguists call mentalese. Hardly a language, more a matrix of shifting patterns, consolidating and compressing meaning in fractions of a second, and blending it inseparably with its distinctive emotional hue, which itself is rather like a colour. A sickly yellow. Even with a poet's gift of compression, it could take hundreds of words and many minutes to describe. So that when a flash of red streaks in across his left peripheral vision, like a shape on his retina in a bout of insomnia, it already has the quality of an idea, a new idea, unexpected and dangerous, but entirely his, and not of the world beyond himself.
He's driving with unconscious expertise into the narrow column of space framed on the right by a kerb-flanked cycle path, and on the left by a line of parked cars. It's from this line that the thought springs, and with it, the snap of a wing mirror cleanly sheared and the whine of sheet-steel surfaces sliding under pressure as two cars pour into a gap wide enough for o
ne. Perowne's instant decision at the moment of impact is to accelerate as he swerves right. There are other sounds—the staccato rattle of the red car on his left side raking a half-dozen stationary vehicles, and the thwack of concrete against rubber, like an amplified single handclap as the Mercedes mounts the cycle-path kerb. His back wheel hits the kerb too. Then he's ahead of the intruder and braking. The slewed cars stop thirty yards apart, engines cut, and for a moment there's silence, and no one gets out.
By the standards of contemporary road traffic accidents—Henry has done a total of five years in Accident and Emergency—this is a trivial matter. No one can possibly be hurt, and he won't be in the role of doctor at the scene. He's done it twice in the past five years, both for heart attacks, once on a flight to New York, another time in an airless London theatre during a June heatwave, both occasions unsatisfactory and complicated. He's not in shock, he's not weirdly calm or elated or numbed, his vision isn't unusually sharp, he isn't trembling. He listens to the click of hot metal contracting. What he feels is rising irritation struggling against worldly caution. He doesn't have to look—one side of his car is wrecked. He already sees ahead into the weeks, the months of paperwork, insurance claims and counterclaims, phone calls, delays at the garage. Something original and pristine has been stolen from his car, and can never be restored, however good the repair. There's also the impact on the front axle, on the bearings, on those mysterious parts which conjure the essence of prolonged torture—rack and pinion. His car will never be the same again. It's ruinously altered, and so is his Saturday. He'll never make his game.
