by Ian Mcewan
With her fingertips she finds his lips and kisses them. “What happened in the operation?”
“It was fine. Pretty much routine. He lost a lot of blood, we patched him up. Rodney was good, but he might have had trouble dealing with it alone.”
“So this person, Baxter, will live to face charges.”
Henry doesn't reply to this beyond an uncommitted nasal hum of near-assent. It's useful to consider the moment he'll broach the subject; Sunday morning, coffee in large white cups, the conservatory in brilliant winter sunshine, the newspapers they deplore but always read, and as he reaches forwards to touch her hand she looks up and he sees in her face that calm intelligence, focused, ready to forgive. He opens his eyes into darkness, and discovers he's been asleep, perhaps for only a few seconds.
Rosalind is saying, “He got terribly drunk, maudlin, the usual stuff. It was hard to take after everything else. But the kids were fantastic. They took him back in a taxi and a hotel doctor came out and looked at his nose.”
Henry has a passing sensation of travelling through the night. He and Rosalind once took a sleeper train from Marseilles to Paris and squeezed into the top bunk together where they lay on their fronts to watch sleeping France go by and talk until dawn. Tonight, the conversation is the journey.
In his comfortable, drifting state he feels only warmth towards his father-in-law. He says, “He was magnificent though. They couldn't intimidate him. And he told Daisy what to do.”
“He was brave all right,” she agrees. “But you were amazing. Right from the beginning I could see you planning and calculating. I saw you look across at Theo.”
He takes her hand and kisses her fingers. “None of us went through what you did. You were fantastic.”
“Daisy held me steady. She had such strength then . . .”
“And Theo too, when he came flying up those stairs . . .”
For some minutes the events of the evening are transformed into a colourful adventure, a drama of strong wills, inner resources, new qualities of character revealed under pressure. They used to talk this way after family ascents of mountains in the West Highlands of Scotland—things always went wrong, but interestingly, funnily. Now, suddenly animated, they exult in praise, and because it's familiar, and less absurd than eulogising each other, they celebrate the children. These past two decades Henry and Rosalind have spent many hours doing just this—alone together, they like to gossip about their children. These latest exploits shine in the dark—when Theo grabbed his lapels, when Daisy looked him right in the eye. What lovely children these are, such loving natures, what luck to be their parents. But the excited conversation can't last, their words begin to sound hollow and unreal in their ears, and they begin to subside. They can't avoid for much longer the figure of Baxter at the centre of their ordeal—cruel, weak, meaningless, demanding to be confronted. Also, they're talking about Daisy and not addressing the pregnancy. They're not quite ready, though they're close.
After a pause, Henry says, “The thing is this, surely. His mind is going, and he thought he was coming to settle a score. Who knows what spooky uncontrollable emotions were driving him.” He then describes to her in detail the encounter in University Street, and includes everything he thinks might be relevant—the policeman waving him on, the demonstrators in Gower Street and the funereal drumbeats, his own competitive instincts before the confrontation. While he's talking, her hand is resting on his cheek. They could turn on the lights, but it comforts them, this intimate trusting darkness, the sexless, childlike huddling and talking into the night. Daisy and Theo used to do it, on the top floor with their sleepover friends—little voices still murmuring at 3:00 a.m., faltering against sleep and bravely picking up again. When Henry was ten, a cousin a year younger came to stay for a month while her mother was in hospital. Since he had a double bed in his room and there was nowhere else, his mother put her in with him. Henry and his cousin ignored each other during the day—Mona was plump, with thick lenses in her specs and a missing finger, and above all she was a girl—but on the first night, a disembodied whispering voice from a warm mound on the other side of the bed wove the epic of the school sweet factory visit, and the chocolates cascading down a chute, of the machinery that turned so fast it was invisible, then the swift, painless dismemberment, the spray of blood “like a feather duster” that coloured the teacher's jacket, of the fainting friends, and the foreman on his hands and knees beneath the machine, hunting for the missing “part.” Stirred, Henry could answer with no more than a lanced boil, but Mona was sportingly appreciative, and so they were launched in their time capsule, their short lives and some inventiveness sufficient to keep them in horrible anecdotes through the night until the summer dawn, and with different themes through other nights too.
When he's finished his account of the confrontation, Rosalind says, “Of course it wasn't an abuse of authority. They could have killed you.”
This is not the conclusion he wanted her to reach—he arranged the details to prompt her in another direction. He's about to try again, but she starts a story of her own. This is the nature of these night journeys—the steps, the sequences are not logical.
“While I was waiting for you tonight, before I fell asleep, I was trying to work out just how long it was he held that knife to me. In my memory, it's no time at all—and I don't mean that it seems brief. It's no time, not in time, not a minute or an hour. Just a fact . . .”
As she recalls it, the tremors return, but fainter, then fade away. He holds her hand tightly.
“I wondered if it was because I felt only one thing—sheer terror, no changes, no sense of passing time. But that's not it. I did feel other things.”
Her pause is long. Unable to read her expression, he hesitates to prompt her.
Finally he says, “What other things?”
Her voice is reflective rather than distressed. “You. There was you. The only other time I've felt so terrified and helpless was before my operation, when I still thought I was going to go blind. When you came down with me to wait. You were so gawky and earnest. The sleeves of your white coat hardly came past your elbows. I've always said that's when I fell for you. I suppose that's right. Sometimes I think I made that up, and it was later. Then tonight, an even greater terror, and there you were again, trying to talk to me with your eyes. Still there. After all the years. That's what I hung on to. You.”
He feels her fingers graze across his face, then she kisses him. No longer so childlike, their tongues touch.
“But it was Daisy who delivered you. She swung his mood with that poem. Arnold someone?”
“Matthew Arnold.”
He's remembering her body, its pallor, the compact bump containing his grandchild, already with a heart, a self-organising nervous system, a swelling pinhead of a brain—here's what unattended matter can get up to in the total darkness of a womb.
Reading the meaning of his silence, Rosalind says, “I talked to her again. She's in love, she's excited, she's having this baby. Henry, we have to be on her side.”
“I am,” he says. “We are.”
His eyes are closed and he's listening intently to Rosalind. This baby's life is taking shape—a year in Paris with its enraptured parents, and then to London where its father has been offered a good position in an important dig—a Roman villa to the east of the City. They might all move in here for a while and live on the square. Henry murmurs his assent, he's glad—the house is big, seven thousand square feet, and needs the sound of a child's voice again. He feels his body, the size of a continent, stretching away from him down the bed—he's a king, he's vast, accommodating, immune, he'll say yes to any plan that has kindness and warmth at its heart. Let the baby take its first steps and speak its first sentence here, in this palace. Daisy wants her baby, then let it happen in the best possible way. If she was ever going to be a poet, she'll make her poetry out of this—as good a subject as a string of lovers. He can't move his head, he can barely move his hand to stroke
Rosalind's as she unfolds the future for him, the domestic arrangements—he's following closely, attending to the pleasure in her voice. The first shock is over. She's coming through. And Theo has been talking of his plans too, which will take him away for fifteen months to New York with New Blue Rider as resident band in an East Village club. It has to be, Theo's music needs it and they'll make it work, help him find a place, visit him there. The king rumbles his assent.
Across the square, the wail of an ambulance racing southwards down Charlotte Street rouses him a little. He pulls himself onto an elbow, and moves closer so that his face is over hers.
“We should sleep.”
“Yes. The police say they're coming at ten.”
But when they've finished kissing he says, “Touch me.”
As the sweet sensation spreads through him he hears her say, “Tell me that you're mine.”
“I'm yours. Entirely yours.”
“Touch my breasts. With your tongue.”
“Rosalind. I want you.”
This is where he marks the end of his day. The moment is sharper, more piercing than Saturday's lazy, affectionate beginning—their movements are quick and greedy, urgent rather than joyous—it's as if they've returned from exile, emerged from a hard prison spell to gorge at a feast. Their appetites are noisy, their manners are rough. They can't quite trust their luck, they want all they can get in a short time. They also know that at the end, after they've reclaimed each other, is the promise of oblivion.
At one point she whispers to him, “My darling one. We could have been killed and we're alive.”
They are alive for love, but only briefly. The end comes in a sudden fall, so concentrated in its pleasure that it's excruciating to endure, unbearably intrusive, like nerve ends being peeled and stripped clean. Afterwards they don't immediately move apart. They lie still in the dark, feeling their heartbeats slow. Henry experiences his exhaustion and the sudden clarity of sexual release merge into a single fact, dry and flat as a desert. He must begin to cross it now, alone, and he doesn't mind. At last they say goodnight by means of a single squeeze of hands—they feel too raw for kisses—then Rosalind turns on her side, and within seconds is breathing deeply.
Oblivion doesn't come to Henry Perowne quite yet—he may have reached the point at which tiredness itself prevents sleep. He lies on his back, patiently waiting, head turned towards the bar of white light on the wall, aware of an inconvenient pressure growing in his bladder. After several minutes he takes one of the dressing gowns from the floor and goes into the bathroom. The marble floor is icy underfoot, the open curtains on the tall north-facing windows show a few stars in a sky of broken, orange-tinted cloud. It's five fifteen, and already there's a rustle of traffic on the Euston Road. When he's relieved himself, he bends over the washbasin to drink deeply from the cold-water tap. Back in the bedroom he hears a distant rumble of an airplane, the first of the morning rush hour into Heathrow, he supposes and, drawn by the sound, goes to the window he stood at before and opens the shutters. He prefers to stand here a few minutes looking out than to lie still in bed, forcing sleep. Quietly he raises the window. The air is warmer than last time, but still he shivers. The light is softer too, the features of the square, especially the branches of the plane trees in the garden, are not so etched, and seem to merge with each other. What can it be about low temperatures that sharpens the edges of objects?
The benches have lost their expectant air, the litter bins have been emptied, the paving has been swept clean. The energetic team in yellow jackets must have been through during the evening. Henry tries to find reassurance in this orderliness, and in remembering the square at its best—weekday lunchtimes, in warm weather, when the office crowds from the local production, advertising and design companies bring their sandwiches and boxed salads, and the gates of the gardens are opened up. They loll on the grass in quiet groups, men and women of various races, mostly in their twenties and thirties, confident, cheerful, unoppressed, fit from private gym workouts, at home in their city. So much divides them from the various broken figures that haunt the benches. Work is one outward sign. It can't just be class or opportunities—the drunks and junkies come from all kinds of backgrounds, as do the office people. Some of the worst wrecks have been privately educated. Perowne, the professional reductionist, can't help thinking it's down to invisible folds and kinks of character, written in code, at the level of molecules. It's a dim fate, to be the sort of person who can't earn a living, or resist another drink, or remember today what he resolved to do yesterday. No amount of social justice will cure or disperse this enfeebled army haunting the public places of every town. So, what then? Henry draws his dressing gown more closely around him. You have to recognise bad luck when you see it, you have to look out for these people. Some you can prise from their addictions, others—all you can do is make them comfortable somehow, minimise their miseries.
Somehow! He's no social theorist and, of course, he's thinking of Baxter, that unpickable knot of affliction. It may be the thought of him that makes Henry feel shaky, or the physical effects of tiredness—he has to put his hand on the sill to steady himself. He feels himself turning on a giant wheel, like the Eye on the south bank of the Thames, just about to arrive at the highest point—he's poised on a hinge of perception, before the drop, and he can see ahead calmly. Or it's the eastward turn of the earth he imagines, delivering him towards the dawn at a stately one thousand miles an hour. If he counts on sleep rather than the clock to divide the days, then this is still his Saturday, dropping far below him, as deep as a lifetime. And from here, from the top of his day, he can see far ahead, before the descent begins. Sunday doesn't ring with the same promise and vigour as the day before. The square below him, deserted and still, gives no clues to the future. But from where he stands up here there are things he can see that he knows must happen. Soon it will be his mother's time, the message will come from the home, or they'll send for him, and he and his family will be sitting by her bed, in her tiny room, with her ornaments, drinking the thick brown tea, watching the last of her, the husk of the old swimmer, shrink into the pillows. At the thought, he feels nothing now, but he knows the sorrow will surprise him, because it's happened once before.
There came a time in her decline when at last he had to move her out of her house, the old family home where he grew up, and into care. The disease was obliterating the housewifely routines she had once kept faith with. She left the oven on all night with the butter dish inside, she hid the front-door key from herself down cracks in the floorboards, she confused shampoo and bleach. All these, and moments of existential bewilderment at finding herself in a street, or in a shop, or someone's house, with no knowledge of where she had come from, who these people were, where she lived, and what she was supposed to do next. A year later she had forgotten her life as well as her old house. But arranging to sell it felt like a betrayal, and Henry made no move. He and Rosalind checked on it, his childhood home, from time to time and he mowed the lawn in summer. Everything remained in its place, waiting—the yellow rubber gloves hanging from their wooden clothes peg, the drawer of ironed dusters and tea towels, the glazed pottery donkey bearing a pannier of toothpicks. A vegetable odour of neglect began to gather, a shabbiness invaded her possessions that had nothing to do with dust. Even from the road the house had a defeated look, and when kids put a stone through the living-room window one afternoon in November, he knew he must act.
Rosalind and the children came with him to clear the place one weekend. They all chose a memento—it seemed disrespectful not to. Daisy had a brass plate from Egypt, Theo a carriage clock, Rosalind, a plain china fruit bowl. Henry took a shoebox of photographs. Other pieces went to nephews and nieces. Lily's bed, her sideboard, two wardrobes and the carpets and the chests of drawers were waiting for a house-clearing firm. The family packed up clothes and kitchenware and unwanted ornaments for the charity shops—Henry never realised before how these places lived off the dead. Everything e
lse they stuffed into bin liners and put out for the rubbish collection. They worked in silence, like looters—having the radio on wasn't appropriate. It took a day to dismantle Lily's existence.
They were striking the set of a play, humble, one-handed domestic drama, without permission from the cast. They started in what she called her sewing room—his old room. She was never coming back, she no longer knew what knitting was, but wrapping up her scores of needles, her thousand patterns, a baby's half-finished yellow shawl, to give them all away to strangers was to banish her from the living. They worked quickly, almost in a frenzy. She's not dead, Henry kept telling himself. But her life, all lives, seemed tenuous when he saw how quickly, with what ease, all the trappings, all the fine details of a lifetime could be packed and scattered, or junked. Objects became junk as soon as they were separated from their owner and their pasts—without her, her old tea cosy was repellent, with its faded farmhouse motif and pale brown stains on cheap fabric, and stuffing that was pathetically thin. As the shelves and drawers emptied, and the boxes and bags filled, he saw that no one owned anything really. It's all rented, or borrowed. Our possessions will outlast us, we'll desert them in the end. They worked all day, and put out twenty-three bags for the dustmen.
He feels skinny and frail in his dressing gown, facing the morning that's still dark, still part of yesterday. Yes, that will happen, and he'll make the arrangements. She walked him once to a cemetery near her house to show him the rows of small metal lockers set into a wall where she wanted her ashes put. All that's bound to happen, and they'll stand with bowed heads, listening to the Burial of the Dead. Or will they have it for cremations? Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live . . . He's heard it often over the years, but remembers only fragments. He fleeth as it were a shadow . . . cut down like a flower. Yes, and then it will be the turn of John Grammaticus, one of those transfiguring illnesses that come to a drinking man, or a terminal stab to heart or brain. They'll all take that hard in their different ways, though Henry less than the others. The old poet was brave tonight, pretending not to suffer with his nose, giving Daisy just the right prompt. And when it comes, then there'll be the crisis of the chateau if Teresa marries John and stakes her claim, and Rosalind, formidable in law, pursues her rights to the place her mother made, the place where Daisy, Theo and Rosalind herself spent their childhood summers. And Henry's role? Wise and implacable loyalty.
