by Ian Mcewan
A year later she may have had a little too much success for her grandfather's taste. She arrived at St. Félix 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 more she has stripped the sheets from her bed and taken them to the launderette where she watches, through the “misted monocle” of the washing 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 protégée 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 niçoise 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 grass, 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 were 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 assume 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, 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 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 cocked 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 fuck!” 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. Félix 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 association. 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, 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 unexamined 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 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 balls. 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 Saturday-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, hand-held, 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 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.
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 canapés, 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 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, were 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 pictures would also include the famous bricks. The flashes twinkled randomly, but none of the photographers was calling out in the usual way. The calmness of the scene seemed an extension of the Rothko gallery next door.
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 aro
und 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, “I 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 results. Procedures twenty-three per cent up on last year. Later Henry realised what an absurd notion that was.
