Saturday (10 page)

No one's been in the kitchen since he left it. On the table are his cup, Theo's empty mineral water bottle and, beside it the remote control. It's still family surprising, this ritrid

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fidelity of objects, sometimes reassuring, sometimes sinister. He takes the remote, turns the set on and pushes the mute button - the nine o'clock bulletin is several minutes away yet - and fills the kettle. What simple accretions have brought the humble kettle to this peak of refinement: jug shaped for efficiency, plastic for safety, wide spout for ease of filling, and clunky little platform to pick up the power. He never complained about the old style - the sticking tin lid, the thick black feminine socket waiting to electrocute wet hands seemed in the nature of things. But someone had thought about this carefully, and now there's no going back. The world should take note: not everything is getting worse.

The news comes on while he's grinding the beans. The new anchor is an attractive dark-skinned woman whose plucked, widely arched eyebrows express surprise at the challenge of yet another new morning. First, pictures from a motorway bridge of scores of coaches bringing marchers into the city for what is expected to be the biggest display of public protest ever seen. Then a reporter down among an early gathering of demonstrators by the Embankment. All this happiness on display is suspect. Everyone is thrilled to be together out on the streets - people are hugging themselves, it seems, as well as each other. If they think - and they could be right - that continued torture and summary

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executions, ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide are preferable to an invasion, they should be sombre in their view. The airplane, Henry's airplane, is now second item. The same pictures, and only a few more details: an electrical fault is suspected to be the cause of the fire. Standing with some policemen, the two Russians - the pilot, a shrivelled fellow with oily hair, and his co-pilot, plump and oddly merry. They look suntanned, or perhaps they're from one of the southern republics. The fading life-chances of a disappointing news story - no villains, no deaths, no suspended outcome - are revived by a dose of manufactured i_ontro\ ersy: an aviation expert, has been found who's prepared to say that it was reckless to bring a burning plane in over a densely populated area when there were other options. A representative of the airport authority says there was no threat to Londoners. The government is yet to comment.

He turns the TV off, pulls up a stool and sets himself up with his coffee and the phone. Before his Saturday can begin, there's a follow-up call to make to the hospital. He's put through to intensive care and asks to speak to the nurse in charge. While someone fetches her he listens to the familiar background murmur, a porter's voice he recognises, a book or folder slapped down on a table.

Then he hears the expressionless tone of a busy woman say, TCU.'

'Deirdre? I thought Charles was on this weekend.'

'He's away with the flu, Mr Perowne.'

'How's Andrea?'

'GCS is fifteen, good oxygenation, not confused.'

'EVD?'

'Still draining at around five centimetres. I'm thinking of sending her back to the ward.'

That's fine then,' Perowne said. 'Can you let the anaesthetist know that I'm happy for her to go.' He's about to hang up when he acids, Ts she giving you any trouble?'

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Too overwhelmed by it all, Mr Perowne. We love her like this.'

He takes his keys and phone and garage remote control from a silver dish by the recipe books. His wallet is in an overcoat hanging in a room behind the kitchen, outside the wine vaults. His squash racket is upstairs on the ground floor, in a cupboard in the laundry. He puts on an old hiking fleece, and is about to set the burglar alarm when he remembers Theo inside. As he steps outside and turns from closing the door, he hears the squeal of seagulls come inland for the city's good pickings. The sun is low and only one half of the square

- his half - is in full sunlight. He walks away from the square along blinding moist pavement, surprised by the freshness of the day. The air tastes almost clean. He has an impression of striding along a natural surface, along some coastal wilderness, on a smooth slab of basalt causeway he vaguely recalls from a childhood holiday. It must be the cry of the gulls bringing it back. He can remember the taste of spray off a turbulent blue-green sea, and as he reaches Warren Street he reminds himself that he mustn't forget the fishmonger's. Lifted by the coffee, and by movement at last, as well as the prospect of the game and the comfortable fit of the sheathed racket in his hand, he increases his pace.

The streets round here are usually empty at weekends, but up ahead, along the Huston Road, a big crowd is making its way east towards Gower Street, and in the road itself, crawling in the eastbound lanes, are the same nose-to-tail coaches he saw on the news. The passengers are pressed against the glass, longing to be out there with the rest. They've hung their banners from the windows, along with football scarves and the names of towns from the heart of England

- Stratford, Gloucester, Evesham. From the impatient pavement crowds, some dry runs with the noisemakers - a trombone, a squeeze-ball car horn, a lambeg drum. There are ragged practice chants which at first he can't make out. Tumty

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tumty turn. Don't attack Iraq. Placards not yet on duty are held at a slope, at rakish angles over shoulders. Not in My Name goes past a dozen times. Its cloying self-regard suggests a bright new world of protest, with the fussy consumers of shampoos and soft drinks demanding to feel good, or nice. Henry prefers the languid, Down With this Sort of Thing. A placard of one of the organising groups goes by - the British Association of Muslims. Henry remembers that outfit well. It explained recently in its newspaper that apostasy from Islam was an offence punishable by death. Behind comes a banner proclaiming the Swaffham Women's Choir, and then, Jews Against the War.

On Warren Street he turns right. Now his view is east, towards the Tottenham Court Road. Here's an even bigger crowd, swelled by hundreds disgorging from the tube station. Backlit by the low sun, silhouetted figures break away and merge into a darker mass, but it's still possible to see a makeshift bookstall and a hot-dog stand, cheekily set up right outside McDonald's on the corner. It's a surprise, the number of children there are, and babies in pushchairs. Despite his scepticism, Perowne in white-soled trainers, gripping his racket tighter, feels the seduction and excitement peculiar to such events; a crowd possessing the streets, tens of thousands of strangers converging with a single purpose conveying an intimation of revolutionary joy.

He might have been with them, in spirit at least, for nothing now will keep him from his game, if Professor Taleb hadn't needed an aneurysm clipped on his middle cerebral artery. In the months after those conversations, Perowne drifted into some compulsive reading up on the regime. He read about the inspirational example of Stalin, and the network of family and tribal loyalties that sustained Saddam, and the palaces handed out as rewards. Henry became acquainted with the sickly details of genocides in the north and south of the country, the ethnic cleansing, the vast system of informers, the bizarre tortures, and Saddam's taste for getting person72 Saturday

ally involved, and the strange punishments passed into law - the brandings and amputations. Naturally, Henry followed closely the accounts of measures taken against surgeons who refused to carry out these mutilations. He concluded that viciousness had rarely been more inventive or systematic or widespread. Miri was right, it really was a republic of fear. Henry read Makiya's famous book too. It seemed clear, Saddam's organising principle was terror.

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 Shi'ite 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 trniteur, 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

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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

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revealed in mechanical jerks, the long nose and shining eyes at the stable door, chafing to be free. A silver Mercedes S500 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 Hie front passenger seat is an old copv of the Jouni^! of Ndirnsiirgcnt 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

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first time a gentle, swooning joy of possession. Tt 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 string 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