Saturday (6 page)

'Sort of. In spirit. I've got to get this song ready.'

'Sleep well then/ Henry says.

'Yeah. And you.'

On his way out the door Theo says, 'Night then,' and seconds later, when he's a little way up the stairs he calls back, 'See you in the morning,' and from the top of the stairs, tentatively, on a rising question note, 'Night?' To each call Henry responds, and waits for the next. These are Theo's characteristic slow fades, the three or four or even five goes he has at making his farewells, the superstition that he should have the last word. The held hand slowly slipping away.

Perowne has a theory that coffee can have a paradoxical effect, and it seems so now as he moves heavily about the kitchen turning off the lights; not only his broken night, but the whole week, and the weeks before bearing down on him. He feels feeble in his knees, in the quadriceps, as he goes up the stairs, making use of the handrail. This is how it will be in his seventies. He crosses the hallway, soothed by the cool touch of the smooth stone flags under his bare feet. On his way to the main stairs, he pauses by the double front doors. They give straight on to the pavement, on to the street that leads into the square, and in his exhaustion they suddenly loom before him strangely with their accretions - three stout Banham locks, two black iron bolts as old as the house, two tempered steel security chains, a spyhole with a brass cover, the box of electronics that works the Entryphone system, the red panic

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button, the alarm pad with its softly gleaming digits. Such defences, such mundane embattlement: beware of the city's poor, the drug-addicted, the downright bad.

In darkness again, standing by his side of the bed, he lets the dressing gown drop around his feet and blindly feels his way between the cold covers towards his wife. She's lying on her left side, facing away from him, with her knees still drawn up. He settles himself around her familiar shape, puts his arm about her waist and draws closer to her. As he kisses the nape of her neck she speaks from the recesses of sleep the tone is welcoming, gratified, but her single indistinct word, like a weight too heavy to lift, doesn't move from her tongue. He feels her body warmth through the silk of her pyjamas spread across his chest and groin. Walking up three flights of stairs has revived him, his eyes are wide open in the dark; the exertion, his minimally raised blood pressure, is causing local excitement on his retina, so that ghostly swarms of purple and iridescent green are migrating across his view of a boundless steppe, then rolling in on themselves to become bolts of cloth, swathes of swagged velvet, drawing back like theatre curtains on new scenes, new thoughts. He doesn't want any thoughts at all, but now he's alert. His workless day lies ahead of him, a track across the steppe; after his squash game, which insomnia is already losing for him, he must visit his mother. Her face as it is now eludes him. He sees instead the county champion swimmer of forty years ago - he's remembering from photographs - that floral rubber cap that gave her the appearance of an eager seal. He was proud of her even as she tormented his childhood, dragging him on winter evenings to loud municipal pools on whose concrete changing-room floors discarded sticking plasters with their pink and purplish stains stewed in lukewarm puddles. She made him follow her into sinister green lakes and the grey North Sea before season. It was another element, she used to say, as if it were an explanation or an enticement. Another element was precisely what he objected to lowering

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his skinny freckled frame into. It was the division between the elements that hurt most, the unfriendly surface, rising in a bitter cutting edge up his sunken goosefleshed belly as he advanced on tiptoe, to please her, into the unclear waters of the Essex coast in early June. He could never throw himself in, the way she did, the way she wanted him to. Submersion in another element, every day, making every day special, was what she wanted and thought he should have. Well, he was fine with that now, as long as the other element wasn't cold water.

The bedroom air is fresh in his nostrils, he's half-aroused sexually as he moves closer to Rosalind. He can hear the first stirring of steady traffic on the Huston Road, like a breeze moving through a forest of firs. People who have to be at work by six on a Saturday. The thought of them doesn't make him feel sleepy, as it often does. He thinks of sex. If the world was configured precisely to his needs, he would be making love to Rosalind now, without preliminaries, to a very willing Rosalind, and afterwards falling in a clear-headed swoon towards sleep. But even despotic kings, even the ancient gods, couldn't always dream the world to their convenience. It's only children, in fact, only infants who feel a wish and its fulfilment as one; perhaps this is what gives tyrants their childish air. They reach back for what they can't have. When they meet frustration, the man-slaying tantrum is never far away. Saddam, for example, doesn't simply look like a heavy jowled brute. He gives the impression of an overgrown, disappointed boy with a pudgy hangdog look, and dark eyes a little baffled by all that he still can't ordain. Absolute power and its pleasures are just beyond reach and keep receding. He knows that another fawning general dispatched to the torture rooms, another bullet in the head of a relative won't deliver the satisfaction it once did.

Perowne shifts position and nuzzles the back of Rosalind's head, inhaling the faint tang of perfumed soap mingled with the scent of warm skin and shampooed hair. What a stroke

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of luck, that the woman he loves is also his wife. But how quickly he's drifted from the erotic to Saddam - who belongs in a mess, a stew of many ingredients, of foreboding and preoccupation. Sleepless in the early hours, you make a nest out of your own fears - there must have been survival advantage in dreaming up bad outcomes and scheming to avoid them. This trick of dark imagining is one legacy of natural selection in a dangerous world. This past hour he's been in a state of wild unreason, in a folly of overinterpretation. It doesn't console him that anyone in these times, standing at the window in his place, might have leaped to the same conclusions. Misunderstanding is general all over the world. How can we trust ourselves? He sees now the details he half ignored in order to nourish his fears: that the plane was not being driven into a public building, that it was making a regular, controlled descent, that it was on a well-used flight path - none of this fitted the general unease. He told himself there were two possible outcomes - the cat dead or alive. But he'd already voted for the dead, when he should have sensed it straight away - a simple accident in the making. Not an attack on our whole way of life then.

Half aware of him, Rosalind shifts position, fidgeting with a feeble turn of her shoulders so that her back is snug against his chest. She slides her foot along his shin and rests the arch of her foot on his toes. Aroused further, he feels his erection trapped against the small of her back and reaches down to free himself. Her breathing resumes its steady rhythm. Henry lies still, waiting for sleep. By contemporary standards, by any standards, it's perverse that he's never tired of making love to Rosalind, never been seriously tempted by the opportunities that have drifted his way through the generous logic of medical hierarchy. When he thinks of sex, he thinks of her. These eyes, these breasts, this tongue, this welcome. Who else could love him so knowingly, with such warmth and teasing humour, or accumulate so rich a past with him? In one lifetime it wouldn't be

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possible to find another woman with whom he can learn to be so free, whom he can please with such abandon and expertise. By some accident of character, it's familiarity that excites him more than sexual novelty. He suspects there's something numbed or deficient or timid in himself. Plenty of male friends sidle into adventures with younger women; now and then a solid marriage explodes in a fire fight of recrimination. Perowne watches on with unease, fearing he lacks an element of the masculine life force, and a bold and healthy appetite for experience. Where's his curiosity? What's wrong with him? But there's nothing he can do about himself. He meets the occasional questioning glance of an attractive woman with a bland and level smile. This fidelity might look like virtue or doggedness, but it's neither of these because he exercises no real choice. This is what he has to have: possession, belonging, repetition.

It was a calamity - certainly an attack on her whole way of life - that brought Rosalind into his life. His first sight of her was from behind as he walked down the women's neurology ward one late afternoon in August. It was striking, this abundance of reddish-brown hair - almost to the waist - on such a small frame. For a moment he thought she was a large child. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, still fully dressed, talking to the registrar in a voice that strained to contain her terror. Perowne caught some of the history as he stopped by, and learned the rest later from her notes. Her health was generally fine, but she'd suffered headaches on and off during the past year. She touched her head to show them where. Her hands, he noticed, were very small. The face was a perfect oval, with large eyes of pale green. She had missed periods now and then, and sometimes a substance oozed from her breasts. Early that afternoon, while she was working in the law department library at University College, reading up on torts - she was specific on this point - her vision had started, as she said, to go wonky. Within minutes she could no longer see the numbers on her wristwatch. She left her books,

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grabbed her bag and went downstairs holding the banisters tightly. She was groping her way along the street to the casualty department when the day started to darken. She thought that there was an eclipse, and was surprised that no one was looking at the sky. Casualty had sent her straight here, and now she could barely see the stripes on the registrar's shirt. When he held up his fingers she could not count them.

'I don't want to go blind/ she said in a small, shocked voice. 'Please don't let me go blind.'

How was it possible that such large clear eyes could lose their sight? When Henry was sent off to find the consultant, who couldn't be raised on his pager, he felt an unprofessional pang of exclusion, a feeling that he could not afford to leave the registrar - a smooth predatory type - alone with such a rare creature. He, Perowne, wanted to do everything himself to save her, even though he had only a rudimentary sense of what her problem might be.

The consultant, Mr Whaley, was in an important meeting. He was a grand, shambling figure in three-piece pinstripe suit with a fob watch and a purple silk handkerchief poking from his top pocket. Perowne had often seen from a distance the distinctive pate gleaming in the sombre corridors. Whaley's booming theatrical voice was much parodied by the juniors. Perowne asked the secretary to go in and interrupt him. While he waited, he mentally rehearsed, keen to impress the great man with a succinct presentation. Whaley came out and listened with a scowl as Perowne started to tell him of a nineteen-year-old female's headache, her sudden onset of acute visual field impairment, and a history of amenorrhea and galactorrhea.

'For God's sake, lad. Irregular menstruation, nipple discharge!' He proclaimed this in his clipped, wartime news announcer's voice, but he was also moving down the corridor at speed with his jacket under his arm.

A chair was brought so that he could sit facing his patient. As he examined her eyes, his breathing appeared to slow.

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Perowne watched the beautiful pale intelligent face tilted up ^

at the consultant. He would have given much for her to be Jj

listening that way to him. Deprived of visual clues, she had �

to rely on every shifting nuance in Whaley's voice. The diagnosis was swift.

'Well, well, young lady. It seems you have a tumour on your pituitary gland, which is an organ the size of a pea in the centre of your brain. There's a haemorrhage around the *

tumour pressing on your optic nerves.' f

There was a tall window behind the consultant's head, and �

Rosalind must have been able to discern his outline, for her eyes seemed to scan his face. She was silent for several seconds. Then she said wonderingly, The really could go blind.'

'Not if we get to work on you straight away.'

She nodded her assent. Whaley told the registrar to order a confirmatory CT scan for Rosalind on her way to the theatre. Then leaning forward and speaking to her softly, almost tenderly, he explained how the tumour was making prolactin, a hormone associated with pregnancy that caused periods to stop and breasts to make milk. He reassured her that her tumour would be benign and that he expected her to make a complete recovery. Everything depended on speed. After a cursory look at her breasts to confirm the diagnosis Henry's view was obstructed - Mr Whaley stood and assumed a loud, public voice as he issued instructions. Then he strode away to reschedule his afternoon.

Henry escorted her from the radiology department to the operating suite. She lay on the trolley in anguish. He was a Senior House Officer of four months who couldn't even pretend to know much about the procedure that lay ahead. He waited with her in the corridor for the anaesthetist to arrive. Making small talk, he discovered she was a law student and had no immediate family nearby. Her father was in France, and her mother was dead. An adored aunt lived in Scotland, in the Western Isles. Rosalind was tearful, struggling against powerful emotions. She got control of her

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voice and, gesturing towards a fire extinguisher, told him that since this might be her last experience of the colour red, she wanted to remember it. Would he move her closer? Even now she could barely see. He said there was no question, the operation would be a success. But of course, he knew nothing, and his mouth was dry and his knees weak as he moved the trolley nearer to the wall. He had yet to learn clinical detachment. This may have been the time, rather than later in the ward, when he began to fall in love. The swing doors opened and they entered the theatre together, he walking at the side of the trolley while the porter pushed, and she worrying the tissue in her hand, gazing at the ceiling, as though hungry for last details.