by Ian Mcewan
Right from their first meeting in 1982 when he arrived at the chateau hours after consummating his love for Rosalind on a lower bunk on the Bilbao ferry, Senior House Officer Perowne was determined not to be patronised, not to be treated like a prospective son. He was an adult with specialised skills that could stand alongside those of any poet. Through Rosalind, he knew of “Mount Fuji,” the much anthologised Grammaticus poem, but Henry didn't read poetry and said so without shame at dinner that first night. At that time John was deep into his No Exequies—his last extended creative period as it turned out—and what some junior doctor didn't read in his spare time failed to intrigue him. Nor did he seem to care or even notice, later when the Scotch was on the table, the same doctor disagreeing with him on politics—Grammaticus was an early fan of Mrs. Thatcher—or music—bebop had betrayed jazz—or the true nature of the French—venal to a man.
Rosalind said the next morning that Henry had tried too hard to get the old man's attention—the opposite of what he intended, and a very irritating remark. But even though he ceased to be argumentative, nothing much changed between them after that first evening, even after marriage, children and the passing of more than two decades. Perowne keeps his distance, and Grammaticus is happy with the arrangement, and looks straight through his son-in-law to his daughter, to his grandchildren. The two men are superficially friendly and at bottom bored by each other. Perowne can't see how poetry—rather occasional work it appears, like grape picking—can occupy a whole working life, or how such an edifice of reputation and self-regard can rest on so little, or why one should believe a drunk poet is different from any other drunk; while Grammaticus—Perowne's guess—regards him as one more tradesman, an uncultured and tedious medic, a class of men and women he distrusts more as his dependency on it grows with age.
There's another matter, naturally never discussed. The house on the square, like the chateau, came to Rosalind's mother Marianne through her parents. When she married Grammaticus, the London house became the family home where Rosalind and her brother grew up. When Marianne died in the road accident, the terms of her will were clear—the London house passed to the children, and John was to have St. Félix. Four years after they were married, Rosalind and Henry, living in a tiny flat in Archway, raised a mortgage to buy out her brother who wanted an apartment in New York. It was a joyful day when the Perownes and their two young children moved into the big house. These various transactions were made without ill-will. But Grammaticus tends to behave on his occasional visits as if he's returning home, as if he were an absentee landlord greeting his tenants, asserting his rights. Or perhaps Henry is too sensitive, having no place in his constitution for a father figure. Either way, it irks him; he prefers to see his father-in-law, if at all, in France.
As he goes towards the front door, Perowne reminds himself, against the promptings of the champagne, to keep his feelings well disguised; the purpose of the evening is to reconcile Daisy to her grandfather, three years on from what Theo has named, in honour of various thrillers, “The Newdigate Rebuff.” She'll want to show him the proofs, and the old man should rightfully claim his part in her success. On that good thought he opens the door to see Grammaticus several feet away, standing in the road, with long belted woollen coat, fedora and cane, head tipped back, his features in profile caught in the cool white light from the lamps in the square. Most likely he was posing for Daisy.
“Ah Henry,” he says—the disappointment is in the downward inflection—“I was looking at the tower . . .”
Grammaticus doesn't shift position, so Perowne obligingly steps out to join him.
“I was trying to see it,” he continues, “through the eyes of Robert Adam when he was setting out the square, wondering what he would have made of it. What do you think?”
It rises above the plane trees in the central gardens, behind the reconstructed façade on the southern side; set high on the glass-paned stalk, six stacked circular terraces bearing their giant dishes, and above them, a set of fat wheels or sleeves within which is bound the geometry of fluorescent lights. At night, the dancing Mercury is a playful touch. When he was small, Theo liked to ask whether the tower would hit the house if it fell their way, and was always gratified when his father told him it most certainly would. Since Perowne and Grammaticus have not yet greeted each other or shaken hands, their conversation is disembodied, like a chat-room exchange.
Perowne, the courteous host, joins in the game. “Well, he might have taken an engineer's view. All that glass, and the unsupported height, would have amazed him. So would the electric light. He might have thought of it more as a machine than a building.”
Grammaticus indicates that this is not the answer at all. “The truth is, his only analogy at the end of the eighteenth century would have been a cathedral spire. He was bound to think of it as a religious building of some kind—why else build so high? He'd have to assume those dishes were ornamental, or used in rites. A religion of the future.”
“In which case, not far out.”
Grammaticus raises his voice to speak over him. “For God's sake, man. Look at the proportions of those pillars, the carving on those capitals!” Now he's jabbing his cane towards the façade on the square's east side. “There's beauty for you. There's self-knowledge. A different world, a different consciousness. Adam would have been stunned by the ugliness of that glass thing. No human scale. Top heavy. No grace, no warmth. It would have put fear in his heart. If that's going to be our religion, he'd've said to himself, then we're truly fucked.”
Their view of the Georgian pillars of the east façade includes in the foreground two figures on a bench about a hundred feet away wearing leather jackets and woollen watch caps. Their backs are turned and they're sitting close together, hunched forward, so that Perowne assumes that a deal is in progress. Why else sit out here so intently on a cold February night? Sudden impatience comes over him; before Grammaticus can continue to damn the civilisation they share, or exult in another well out of their reach, he says, “Daisy's waiting for you. She's making you a powerful drink.” He takes his father-in-law's elbow and shoves him gently in the direction of the wide, brightly lit open door. John is well into his expansive, relatively benign stage and Daisy shouldn't miss it. Reconciliation won't be a theme of the later phases.
He takes his father-in-law's coat, stick and hat, shows him into the sitting room and goes to call down to Daisy. She's already on her way up with a tray—a new bottle of champagne as well as the old, the gin, ice, lemon, extra glasses for Rosalind and Theo, and macadamia nuts in the painted bowl she brought back from a student trip to Chile. When she gives him a querying look he makes a cheerful face: it's going to be fine. Thinking she and her grandfather are bound to embrace, he takes the tray and follows her in. But Grammaticus, who's standing in the centre of the room, draws himself up rather formally, and Daisy holds back. It could be he's surprised by her beauty, just as Henry himself was; or struck by her familiarity. They go towards each other murmuring respectively, “Daisy . . . Granddad,” shake hands, and then, by a compact enforced by the movement of their bodies which they can't reverse once it's begun, they awkwardly kiss cheeks.
Henry sets down the tray and mixes a gin and tonic. “Here you are,” he says. “Let's raise a glass. To poetry.”
The old man's hand, he notices, is shaking as he takes his gin. Lifting their glasses, humming or grunting without quite repeating the words a mere bonesetter has no right to utter, Daisy and her grandfather drink.
Grammaticus says to him, “She's the image of Marianne when I first met her.”
His eyes, Perowne notes, are not moist like his own were; despite the passion and the mood reversals, there's something controlled and untouchable, even steely about Grammaticus. He has a way of sailing through encounters, of being lofty, even in close company. Long ago, according to Rosalind, in his thirties, he developed the manner of the old and grand, of not caring what anybody thinks.
Daisy says to him, �
�You look awfully well.”
He puts his hand on her arm. “I re-read them all in the hotel this afternoon. Bloody marvellous, Daisy. There's no one like you.” He drinks again, and quotes in a curious singsong:
My saucy bark, inferior far to his
On your broad main doth bravely appear.
He's twinkly, and teasing her the way he used to. “Now. Be honest. Who is the other poet with talent the size of a galleon?”
Grammaticus is fishing for the tribute he believes must be his by right. A little too soon in the evening. He's going too fast. It's quite possible that Daisy has dedicated her book to her grandfather, although Perowne has worries about that. Another reason why he wanted to see the proofs.
Daisy is confused. She goes to speak, changes her mind, and then says through a forced smile, “You'll just have to wait and see.”
“Of course, Shakespeare didn't really think he was a little sailing boat among the ocean-going competition. He was trying it on, being sardonic. So perhaps you are too, my dear girl.”
She's hesitant, embarrassed, struggling with a decision. She hides behind her raised glass. Then she puts it down on the table and seems to make up her mind.
“Granddad, it's not ‘doth bravely appear.'”
“Of course it is. I taught you that sonnet.”
“I know you did. But how can the line scan with ‘bravely'? It's ‘On your broad main doth wilfully appear.'”
The twinkle in Grammaticus simply vanishes. His rigid gaze rests on his granddaughter, and she glares back, just the way she did at her father in the kitchen. She's spoken up in a spirit of disloyalty, and she's standing her ground. For Henry, the word “scan” triggers an unwanted memory, a prick of work anxiety about a hundred-and-ninety-thousand-pound shortfall in the funds the Trust has set aside for the purchase of a more powerful MRI scanner. He's written the memo, he's been to all the meetings. Was there something else he should have done? An e-mail to be forwarded perhaps. Of scanning in poetry, he's in no position to say that “wilfully” is an improvement on “bravely.”
Grammaticus says, “Well, there you go. It doesn't scan. How about that? Henry, how are things at the hospital?”
In more than twenty years he's never asked about the hospital, and Henry can't permit his daughter to be brushed aside. At the same time, it's wondrous: three years apart, and these two are falling out within the minute.
He gives a plausible impression of being amused in saying lightly to Grammaticus, “My own memory plays far worse tricks than that.” Then he turns to Daisy. She's backed off a pace and looks like she might be searching for an excuse to leave the room. He's determined to keep her there.
“Clear this up for me. How is it ‘wilfully' scans and ‘bravely' doesn't?”
She's perfectly good-natured, explaining the facts of life to her father, and rubbing it in for Grammaticus.
“‘On your broad main doth wilfully appear' is five feet, five iambs. You know, ti-tum, weak strong. There are always five in this kind of line. ‘Bravely' would leave it a beat short and it wouldn't sound right.”
While she's speaking Grammaticus is lowering himself onto one of the leather sofas with a conspicuous groan that partly obliterates her final words.
He says, “Don't be too hard on an old man. ‘It was no dream; I lay broad waking.' Plenty of short lines in Shakespeare, dozens of them in the sonnets. If he'd written ‘bravely,' we'd make the bugger scan.”
“That's bloody Wyatt,” Daisy murmurs below the old man's hearing.
Perowne glances at her and raises a covert finger. She's won her point and surely knows she should let her grandfather have the last word. Unless she wants to fight on until dinner, and beyond.
“I suppose you're right. We would. More gin, Granddad?” There's no audible edge in her voice.
Grammaticus passes her his glass. “I'll do the tonic myself.”
When that's done, Daisy lets a few seconds pass for the silence to neutralise, then murmurs to her father, “I'll go and finish the table.”
Perhaps Henry's too preoccupied, or too impatient, to make a decent job of this reunion. Does it matter? If Daisy has outgrown one more tutor in her life, what's he supposed to do about that? There's a change in her he doesn't understand, a certain agitation that keeps fading into a smoothness of manner, a degree of combativeness that rises and retreats. And he doesn't wish to be left alone drinking with his father-in-law. He longs for Rosalind to arrive home with all her homely skills—the mother's, daughter's, wife's, lawyer's.
He says to Daisy, “I'd love to see this proof copy.”
“All right.”
Perowne sits on the other sofa, facing Grammaticus across the scarred, polished thakat table, and pushes the nuts towards him. They listen to her softly cursing as she rummages in her backpack in the hall. Neither man can be troubled with small talk. Even if they could agree on what's worthwhile talking about, neither would have any interest in the other's opinion. So they remain in contented silence. Sitting down comfortably for the first time since he entered the house, his feet delightfully relieved of his weight, his mood enhanced by wine and three glasses of champagne on an empty stomach, his hearing still faintly impaired by Theo's band, his thighs aching again from the squash, Perowne abandons himself to a gentle swell of dissociation. Nothing matters much. Whatever's been troubling him is benignly resolved. The pilots are harmless Russians, Lily is well cared for, Daisy is home with her book, those two million marchers are good-hearted souls, Theo and Chas have written a fine song, Rosalind will win her case on Monday and is on her way, it's statistically improbable that terrorists will murder his family tonight, his stew, he suspects, might be one of his best, all the patients on next week's list will come through, Grammaticus means well really, and tomorrow—Sunday—will deliver Henry and Rosalind into a morning of sleep and sensuality. Now is the moment to pour another glass.
He's reaching for the bottle and checking his father-in-law's drink when they hear a loud metallic jiggling from the hall, a scream from Daisy, a baritone shout of “Yo!” followed by the thunderous slam of the front door which sends concentric ripples through the poet's gin; then a soft thud and grunt of bodies colliding. Theo is home and embracing his sister. Seconds later, entering the sitting room hand in hand, the children present a tableau of their respective obsessions and careers, precious gifts, Henry unjealously concedes, from their grandfather: Daisy holds a copy of her bound proof, her brother grips his guitar in its case by the neck. Of all the family, Theo is by far the most relaxed with Grammaticus. They have their music in common, and there's no competition: Theo plays, his grandfather listens and tends his blues archive—now being transferred to hard disk with the boy's help.
“Granddad, don't get up,” he calls as he leans his guitar against the wall.
But the old man is getting to his feet as Theo comes over, and the two hug without inhibition. Daisy comes and sits beside her father and slides her book into his lap.
Grammaticus has hold of his grandson's arm and is enlivened, rejuvenated by his presence. “So. You've a new song for me.”
The proof is aquamarine with black lettering. As he stares at the title and its author's name, Perowne slips his arm around his daughter's shoulders and squeezes, and she moves closer to him to see her book through his eyes. He sees it through hers, and tries to imagine the thrill. At her age he was a swotting fifth-year medical student in a universe of Latin names and corporeal facts, far removed from such possibilities. With his free hand he turns to the title page and together they read the three words again, and this time they're bound within a double-edged rectangle, My Saucy Bark, Daisy Perowne, and at the foot of the page, the publisher's name followed by London, Boston. Her boat, of whatever size, is launched upon the transatlantic currents. Theo is saying something, and he looks up.
“Dad. Dad! The song. What did you think?”
When the children were tiny, one took care with the even distribution of praise. These high
-achieving kids. He should have been discussing the song earlier when he was alone with Grammaticus. But Henry needed his drifting half-minute of positive thinking.
He says, “I was swept away.” And to everyone's surprise, he tips his chin towards the ceiling and sings with tolerable accuracy, “Let me take you there / My city square, city square.”
Theo takes from his coat pocket a CD and gives it to his grandfather. “We made a recording this afternoon. It's not perfect, but you'll get the idea.”
Henry returns his attention to his daughter. “I like this London, Boston. Very classy.” He traces the tiny block capitals with his finger. Over the page he reads with relief the dedication. To John Grammaticus.
In sudden anguish, Daisy is whispering in his ear, “I don't know if it's right. It should have been to you and Mum. I just didn't know what to do.”
He squeezes her again and murmurs, “It's exactly right.”
“I don't know if it is. I can still change it.”
“He put you on the path, it makes perfect sense. He's going to be very happy. We all are. You did the right thing.” And then, in case there's any trace of regret in his voice, he adds, “There'll be other books too. You can work your way round the whole family.”
Only then is he aware, from tremors in her form huddled up against his own and a flush of body warmth, that she's crying. She pushes her face into his upper arm. Theo and his grandfather are in the other part of the room, by the CD shelves, discussing a boogie pianist.
“Hey, little one,” he says into her ear. “What is it, my darling?”
She cries harder, soundlessly, and shakes her head, unable to talk.
“Shall we go upstairs to the library?”
She shakes her head again, and he strokes her hair and waits.
Unhappy in love? He tries to resist speculation. There's no particular instance from her childhood he can remember, but it's a vaguely familiar experience from long ago, waiting for her to recover and tell him what's making her cry. She was always eloquent. All those novels she read as a child, especially after her grandfather took her in hand, schooled her in the accurate description of feelings. Henry leans back and patiently, lovingly holds his daughter. She's no longer tearful, but she continues to press her head into his shoulder and her eyes are closed. Her book lies open on his lap, still at the dedication page. Behind him, Theo and his grandfather are discussing recordings and personnel, and like true devotees, they speak in murmurs, making the room feel calm. Grammaticus has another gin in his hand, his third perhaps, but is eerily sober. Perowne feels pins and needles moving along his upper arm where Daisy's head is pressing. He looks down at her fondly, at what little he can see of her face. Not even the first traces of ageing or experience around the corner of her visible eye, only clean taut skin, faintly purple, like the peripheries of a bruise. The outward show, the new toys of sexual development obscure the fact that childhood tails away slowly. Daisy had breasts and periods when her bed was still so stuffed with teddy bears and other soft animals there was barely room for her. Then it was a first bank account, a university degree, a driving licence that concealed the lingering, fading child which only a parent can still recognise in the newly formed adult. But watching her now, he knows that however she cuddles against his side, this is no innocent. It's likely her mind is turning fast, faster than his can, perhaps around a broken mosaic of recent events—raised voices in rooms, flashes of Parisian streets, an open suitcase on an unmade bed, whatever is distressing her. You stare at a head, a lushness of hair, and can only guess.
