by Ian Mcewan
What else, beyond the dying? Theo will make his first move from home—there'll be no postcards or letters or e-mails, only phone calls. There'll be trips to New York to listen to him and his band bring their blues to the Americans—they might not like it—and a chance to see old friends from Bellevue Hospital days. And Daisy will publish her poems, and produce a baby and bring Giulio—Henry still sees the dark-skinned, bare-chested lover from the poem he misheard. A baby and its huge array of matériel to enliven the household, and someone else, not him, not Rosalind, getting up in the night. And not Giulio, unless he's an unusual Italian. All this is rich. And then, he, Henry, will turn fifty and give up squash and marathons, the house will empty when Daisy and Giulio find a place, and Theo gets one too, and Henry and Rosalind will collapse in on each other, cling tighter, their business of raising children, launching young adults, over. That restlessness, that hunger he's had lately for another kind of life, will fade. The time will come when he does less operating, and more administration—there's another kind of life—and Rosalind will leave the paper to write her book, and a time will come when they find they no longer have the strength for the square, the junkies and the traffic din and dust. Perhaps a bomb in the cause of jihad will drive them out with all the other faint-hearts into the suburbs, or deeper into the country, or to the chateau—their Saturday will become a Sunday.
Behind him, as though agitated by his thoughts, Rosalind flinches, moans, and moves again before she falls silent and he turns back to the window. London, his small part of it, lies wide open, impossible to defend, waiting for its bomb, like a hundred other cities. Rush hour will be a convenient time. It might resemble the Paddington crash—twisted rails, buckled, upraised commuter coaches, stretchers handed out through broken windows, the hospital's Emergency Plan in action. Berlin, Paris, Lisbon. The authorities agree, an attack's inevitable. He lives in different times—because the newspapers say so doesn't mean it isn't true. But from the top of his day, this is a future that's harder to read, a horizon indistinct with possibilities. A hundred years ago, a middle-aged doctor standing at this window in his silk dressing gown, less than two hours before a winter's dawn, might have pondered the new century's future. February 1903. You might envy this Edwardian gent all he didn't yet know. If he had young boys, he could lose them within a dozen years, at the Somme. And what was their body count, Hitler, Stalin, Mao? Fifty million, a hundred? If you described the hell that lay ahead, if you warned him, the good doctor—an affable product of prosperity and decades of peace—would not believe you. Beware the utopianists, zealous men certain of the path to the ideal social order. Here they are again, totalitarians in different form, still scattered and weak, but growing, and angry, and thirsty for another mass killing. A hundred years to resolve. But this may be an indulgence, an idle, overblown fantasy, a night-thought about a passing disturbance that time and good sense will settle and rearrange.
The nearer ground, the nearest promontory, is easier to read—as sure as his mother's death, he'll be dining with Professor Taleb in an Iraqi restaurant near Hoxton. The war will start next month—the precise date must already have been fixed, as though for any big outdoor sporting event. Any later in the season will be too hot for killing or liberation. Baghdad is waiting for its bombs. Where's Henry's appetite for removing a tyrant now? At the end of this day, this particular evening, he's timid, vulnerable, he keeps drawing his dressing gown more tightly around him. Another plane moves left to right across his view, descending in its humdrum way along the line of the Thames towards Heathrow. Harder now to recall, or to inhabit, the vigour of his row with Daisy—the certainties have dissolved into debating points; that the world the professor described is intolerable, that however murky American motives, some lasting good and fewer deaths might come from dismantling it. Might, he hears Daisy tell him, is not good enough, and you've let one man's story turn your head. A woman bearing a child has her own authority. Will he revive his hopes for firm action in the morning? All he feels now is fear. He's weak and ignorant, scared of the way consequences of an action leap away from your control and breed new events, new consequences, until you're led to a place you never dreamed of and would never choose—a knife at the throat. One floor down from where Andrea Chapman dreams of being carried away by the improbable love of a young doctor, and of becoming one herself, lies Baxter in his private darkness, watched over by the constables. But one small fixed point of conviction holds Henry steady. It began to take form at dinner, before Jay rang, and was finally settled when he sat in intensive care, feeling Baxter's pulse. He must persuade Rosalind, then the rest of the family, then the police, not to pursue charges. The matter must be dropped. Let them go after the other man. Baxter has a diminishing slice of life worth living, before his descent into nightmare hallucination begins. Henry can get a colleague or two, specialists in the field, to convince the Crown Prosecution Service that by the time it comes round, Baxter will not be fit to stand trial. This may or may not be true. Then the system, the right hospital, must draw him in securely before he does more harm. Henry can make these arrangements, do what he can to make the patient comfortable, somehow. Is this forgiveness? Probably not, he doesn't know, and he's not the one to be granting it anyway. Or is he the one seeking forgiveness? He's responsible, after all; twenty hours ago he drove across a road officially closed to traffic, and set in train a sequence of events. Or it could be weakness—after a certain age, when the remaining years first take on their finite aspect, and you begin to feel for yourself the first chill, you watch a dying man with a closer, more brotherly interest. But he prefers to believe that it's realism: they'll all be diminished by whipping a man on his way to hell. By saving his life in the operating theatre, Henry also committed Baxter to his torture. Revenge enough. And here is one area where Henry can exercise authority and shape events. He knows how the system works—the difference between good and bad care is near-infinite.
Daisy recited a poem that cast a spell on one man. Perhaps any poem would have done the trick, and thrown the switch on a sudden mood change. Still, Baxter fell for the magic, he was transfixed by it, and he was reminded how much he wanted to live. No one can forgive him the use of the knife. But Baxter heard what Henry never has, and probably never will, despite all Daisy's attempts to educate him. Some nineteenth-century poet—Henry has yet to find out whether this Arnold is famous or obscure—touched off in Baxter a yearning he could barely begin to define. That hunger is his claim on life, on a mental existence, and because it won't last much longer, because the door of his consciousness is beginning to close, he shouldn't pursue his claim from a cell, waiting for the absurdity of his trial to begin. This is his dim, fixed fate, to have one tiny slip, an error of repetition in the codes of his being, in his genotype, the modern variant of a soul, and he must unravel—another certainty Henry sees before him.
Quietly, he lowers the window. The morning is still dark, and it's the coldest time now. The dawn won't come until after seven. Three nurses are walking across the square, talking cheerfully, heading in the direction of his hospital to start their morning shift. He closes the shutters on them, then goes towards the bed and lets the dressing gown fall to his feet as he gets in. Rosalind lies facing away from him with her knees crooked. He closes his eyes. This time there'll be no trouble falling towards oblivion, there's nothing can stop him now. Sleep's no longer a concept, it's a material thing, an ancient means of transport, a softly moving belt, conveying him into Sunday. He fits himself around her, her silk pyjamas, her scent, her warmth, her beloved form, and draws closer to her. Blindly, he kisses her nape. There's always this, is one of his remaining thoughts. And then: there's only this. And at last, faintly, falling: this day's over.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am enormously grateful to Neil Kitchen, MD, FRCS (SN), Consultant Neurosurgeon and Associate Clinical Director, The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queens Square, London. It was a privilege to watch this gifted surgeon a
t work in the theatre over a period of two years, and I thank him for his kindness and patience in taking time out of a demanding schedule to explain to me the intricacies of his profession, and the brain, with its countless pathologies. I am also grateful to Sally Wilson, FRCA, Consultant Neuro-anaesthetist at the same hospital, and to Anne McGuinness, Consultant, Accident and Emergency, University College Hospital, and to Chief Inspector Amon McAfee. For an account of a transsphenoidal hypophysectomy, I am indebted to Frank T. Vertosick, Jr., MD, and his excellent book, When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales of Neurosurgery, Norton, New York, 1996. Ray Dolan, that most literary of scientists, read the typescript of Saturday and made incisive neurological suggestions. Tim Garton Ash and Craig Raine also read this novel at an early stage and were very helpful in their comments. I am grateful to Craig Raine for generously allowing me to attribute to Daisy Perowne the words “excited watering can” and “peculiar rose” from his poem “Sexual Couplets,” and “how each/rose grows on a shark infested stem” from “Reading Her Old Letter about a Wedding,” Collected Poems 1978–1999, Picador, London, 2000. My wife, Annalena McAfee, read numerous stages of draft, and I am the lucky beneficiary of her wise editorial comments and loving encouragement.
I.M.
London, 2004
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ian McEwan is the author of the bestselling Atonement. He has written eight other novels, including The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, Enduring Love and the Booker Award–winning Amsterdam, and two collections of stories, First Love, Last Rites and In Between the Sheets. He has also written several film scripts, including The Imitation Game, The Ploughman's Lunch, Sour Sweet, The Good Son and The Innocent.
ALSO BY IAN MCEWAN
First Love, Last Rites
In Between the Sheets
The Cement Garden
The Comfort of Strangers
The Child in Time
The Innocent
Black Dogs
The Daydreamer
Enduring Love
Amsterdam
Atonement
The Imitation Game
(plays for television)
Or Shall We Die?
(libretto for oratorio by Michael Berkeley)
The Ploughman's Lunch
(film script)
Sour Sweet
(film script)
PUBLISHED BY NAN A. TALESE
AN IMPRINT OF DOUBLEDAY
a division of Random House, Inc.
DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Illustration on title page by Louis Jones
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McEwan, Ian.
Saturday / Ian McEwan.— 1st ed. in the United States of America
p. cm.
1. Neurosurgeons—Fiction. 2. Iraq War, 2003—Protest movements—Fiction. 3. Traffic accidents—Fiction. 4. London (England)—Fiction. 5. Middle-aged men—Fiction. 6. Family reunions—Fiction. 7. World politics—Fiction. 8. Criminals—Fiction. 9. Road rage—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6063.C4S27 2005
823'.914—dc22 2004062127
Grateful acknowledgment is given to J.J. Music and Promopub B.V. for permission to reprint lyrics from the song “Tanqueray” by Keith Richards and Johnnie Johnson.
Copyright © 2005 by Ian McEwan
All Rights Reserved
First published in Great Britain in 2005 by Jonathan Cape
eISBN: 978-0-307-27701-5
v3.0
