Saturday (10 page)

In a spirit of aggressive celebration of the times, Perowne swings the Mercedes east into Maple Street. His wellbeing appears to need spectral entities to oppose it, figures of his own invention whom he can defeat. He's sometimes like this before a game. He doesn't particularly like himself in this frame, but the second-by-second wash of his thoughts is only partially his to control – the drift, the white noise of solitary thought is driven by his emotional state. Perhaps he isn't really happy at all, he's psyching himself up. He's passing by the building at the foot of the Post Office Tower – less ugly these days with its aluminium entrance, blue cladding and geometric masses of windows and ventilation grilles looking like a Mondrian. But further along, where Fitzroy becomes Charlotte Street, the neighbourhood is packed with penny-pinching office blocks and student accommodation – ill-fitting windows, low ambition, not lasting well. In the rain, and in the right temper, you can imagine yourself back in Communist Warsaw. Only when enough of them have been torn down, will it be possible to start loving them.

Henry is now parallel to and two blocks south of Warren
Street. He's still bothered by his peculiar state of mind, this happiness cut with aggression. As he approaches the Tottenham Court Road, he begins a familiar routine, listing the recent events that may have shaped his mood. That he and Rosalind made love, that it's Saturday morning, that this is his car, that no one died in the plane and there's a game ahead and the Chapman girl and his other patients from yesterday are stable, that Daisy is coming – all this is to the good. And on the other hand? On the other hand, he's touching the brake. There's a motorbike policeman in a yellow jacket, in the middle of the Tottenham Court Road with his machine on its stand, holding out an arm to stop him. Of course, the road is closed for the march. He should have known. But still Perowne keeps coming, slowing all the while, as if by pretending not to know, he can be exempted – after all, he only wants to cross this road, not drive down it; or at least, he'll receive his due: a little drama of exchange between a firm but apologetic policeman and the solemnly tolerant citizen.

He stops at the junction of the two roads. And indeed, the cop is coming towards him, with a glance up the street at the marchers and a pursed tolerant smile that suggests he himself would have bombed Iraq long ago, and many other countries besides. Perowne, relaxed at the wheel, would have responded with a collegiate closed-mouth smile of his own, but two things happen, almost at the same time. Behind the patrolman, on the far side of the road, three men, two tall, one thickset and short and wearing a black suit, are hurrying out of a lap-dancing club, the Spearmint Rhino, almost stumbling in their efforts not to run. When they turn the corner, into the street Perowne is wanting to enter, they're no longer so restrained. With the shorter man lagging behind, they run towards a car parked on the nearside.

The second thing to happen is that the cop meanwhile, unaware of the men, suddenly stops on his way to Perowne and raises a hand to his left ear. He nods and speaks into a
microphone fixed in front of his mouth and turns towards his bike. Then, remembering what he was about, he glances back. Perowne meets his eye, and with a self-deprecating, interrogative look, points across the road at University Street. The cop shrugs, and then nods, and makes a gesture with his hand to say, Do it quickly then. What the hell. The marchers are still mostly up the other end, and he's had fresh instructions.

Perowne isn't late for his game, nor is he impatient to be across the road. He likes his car, but he's never been interested in the details of its performance, its acceleration from a standing start. He assumes it's impressive, but he's never put it to the test. He's far too old to be leaving rubber at the traffic lights. As he rolls forward, he looks diligently in both directions, even though it's a one-way flow northwards; he knows that pedestrians could be coming from either direction. If he moves briskly across the four-lane width of the road, it's out of consideration for the policeman who's already starting up his bike. Perowne doesn't want the man in trouble with his superiors. And something about the hand gesture has communicated the need to be quick. By the time the Mercedes has travelled the sixty or seventy feet to the entrance of University Street, which is where he changes into second, he may be doing twenty miles an hour. Twenty-five perhaps. Thirty at a stretch. And almost immediately, he's easing off, looking out for the right turn before Gower Street, which is also closed off.

And the forward motion is a prompt, it instantly returns him to his list, the proximal and distal causes of his emotional state. A second can be a long time in introspection. Long enough for Henry to make a start on the negative features, certainly enough time for him to think, or sense, without unwrapping the thought into syntax and words, that it is in fact the state of the world that troubles him most, and the marchers are there to remind him of it. The world probably has changed fundamentally and the matter is being clumsily
handled, particularly by the Americans. There are people around the planet, well-connected and organised, who would like to kill him and his family and friends to make a point. The scale of death contemplated is no longer at issue; there'll be more deaths on a similar scale, probably in this city. Is he so frightened that he can't face the fact? The assertions and the questions don't spell themselves out. He experiences them more as a mental shrug followed by an interrogative pulse. This is the pre-verbal language that linguists call mentalese. Hardly a language, more a matrix of shifting patterns, consolidating and compressing meaning in fractions of a second, and blending it inseparably with its distinctive emotional hue, which itself is rather like a colour. A sickly yellow. Even with a poet's gift of compression, it could take hundreds of words and many minutes to describe. So that when a flash of red streaks in across his left peripheral vision, like a shape on his retina in a bout of insomnia, it already has the quality of an idea, a new idea, unexpected and dangerous, but entirely his, and not of the world beyond himself.

He's driving with unconscious expertise into the narrow column of space framed on the right by a kerb-flanked cycle path, and on the left by a line of parked cars. It's from this line that the thought springs, and with it, the snap of a wing mirror cleanly sheared and the whine of sheet-steel surfaces sliding under pressure as two cars pour into a gap wide enough for one. Perowne's instant decision at the moment of impact is to accelerate as he swerves right. There are other sounds – the staccato rattle of the red car on his left side raking a half-dozen stationary vehicles, and the thwack of concrete against rubber, like an amplified single handclap as the Mercedes mounts the cycle-path kerb. His back wheel hits the kerb too. Then he's ahead of the intruder and braking. The slewed cars stop thirty yards apart, engines cut, and for a moment there's silence, and no one gets out.

By the standards of contemporary road traffic accidents – Henry has done a total of five years in Accident and Emergency – this is a trivial matter. No one can possibly be hurt, and he won't be in the role of doctor at the scene. He's done it twice in the past five years, both for heart attacks, once on a flight to New York, another time in an airless London theatre during a June heatwave, both occasions unsatisfactory and complicated. He's not in shock, he's not weirdly calm or elated or numbed, his vision isn't unusually sharp, he isn't trembling. He listens to the click of hot metal contracting. What he feels is rising irritation struggling against worldly caution. He doesn't have to look – one side of his car is wrecked. He already sees ahead into the weeks, the months of paperwork, insurance claims and counterclaims, phone calls, delays at the garage. Something original and pristine has been stolen from his car, and can never be restored, however good the repair. There's also the impact on the front axle, on the bearings, on those mysterious parts which conjure the essence of prolonged torture –
rack and pinion
. His car will never be the same again. It's ruinously altered, and so is his Saturday. He'll never make his game.

Above all, there swells in him a peculiarly modern emotion – the motorist's rectitude, spot-welding a passion for justice to the thrill of hatred, in the service of which various worn phrases tumble through his thoughts, revitalised, cleansed of cliché: just pulled out, no signal, stupid bastard, didn't even look, what's his mirror for, fucking
bastard
. The only person in the world he hates is sitting in the car behind, and Henry is going to have to talk to him, confront him, exchange insurance details with him – all this when he could be playing squash. He feels he's been left behind. And he seems to see it: receding obliviously down a side street is the other, most likely version of himself, like a vanishing rich uncle, introspective and happy, motoring carefree through his Saturday, leaving him alone and wretched, in
his new, improbable, inescapable fate. This is real. Telling himself it is so betrays how little he believes it yet. He picks his racket off the car floor and puts it back on top of the
Journal
. His right hand is on the door catch. But he doesn't move yet. He's looking in the mirror. There are reasons to be cautious.

There are, as he expected, three heads in the car behind. He knows he's subject to unexamined assumptions, and he tries to examine them now. As far as he's aware, lap-dancing is a lawful pursuit. But if he'd seen the three men hurrying, even furtively, from the Wellcome Trust or the British Library he might already have stepped from his car. That they were running makes it possible they'll be even more irritated than him by delay. The car is a series five BMW, a vehicle he associates for no good reason with criminality, drug-dealing. And there are three men, not one. The shortest is in the front passenger's seat, and the door on that side is opening as he watches, followed immediately by the driver's, and then the rear offside door. Perowne, who does not intend to be trapped into talking from a sitting position, gets out of his car. The half-minute's pause has given the situation a game-like quality in which calculations have already been made. The three men have their own reasons for holding back and discussing their next move. It's important, Perowne thinks as he goes round to the front of his car, to remember that he's in the right, and that he's angry. He also has to be careful. But these contradictory notions aren't helpful, and he decides he'll be better off feeling his way into the confrontation, rather than troubling himself with ground rules. His impulse then is to ignore the men, walk away from them, round the front of the Mercedes to get a view of the damaged side. But even as he stands, with hands on hips, in a pose of proprietorial outrage, he keeps the men, now advancing as a group, on the edge of vision.

At a glance, there seems to be no damage at all. The wing mirror is intact, there are no dents in the panels; amazingly,
the metallic silver paintwork is clean. He leans forward to catch the light at a different angle. With fingers splayed, he runs a hand lightly over the bodywork, as if he really knew what he's about. There is nothing. Not a blemish. In immediate, tactical terms, this seems to leave him at a disadvantage. He has nothing to show for his anger. If there's any damage at all, it is out of sight, between the front wheels.

The men have stopped to look at something in the road. The short fellow in the black suit touches with the tip of his shoe the BMW's shorn-off wing mirror, turning it over the way one might a dead animal. One of the others, a tall young man with the long mournful face of a horse, picks it up, cradling it in both hands. They stare down at it together and then, at a remark from the short man, they turn their faces towards Perowne simultaneously, with abrupt curiosity, like deer disturbed in a forest. For the first time, it occurs to him that he might be in some kind of danger. Officially closed off at both ends, the street is completely deserted. Behind the men, on the Tottenham Court Road, a broken file of protesters is making its way south to join the main body. Perowne glances over his shoulder. There, behind him on Gower Street, the march proper has begun. Thousands packed in a single dense column are making for Piccadilly, their banners angled forwards heroically, as in a revolutionary poster. From their faces, hands and clothes they emanate the rich colour, almost like warmth, peculiar to compacted humanity. For dramatic effect, they're walking in silence to the funereal beat of marching drums.

The three men resume their approach. As before, the short man – five foot five or six perhaps – is out in front. His gait is distinctive, with a little jazzy twist and dip of his trunk, as though he's punting along a gentle stretch of river. The punter from the Spearmint Rhino. Perhaps he's listening to his personal stereo. Some people go nowhere, even into disputes, without a soundtrack. The other two have the manner of subordinates, sidekicks. They're wearing trainers, track-
suits and hooded tops – the currency of the street, so general as to be no style at all. Theo sometimes dresses this way in order, so he says, not to make decisions about how he looks. The horse-faced fellow is still holding the wing mirror in two hands, presumably to make a point. The unrelenting throb of drums is not helpful to the situation, and the fact that so many people are close by, unaware of him, makes Henry feel all the more isolated. It's best to go on looking busy. He drops down closer by the car, noting a squashed Coke can under his front tyre. There is, he sees now, with both relief and irritation, an irregular area on the rear door where the sheen is diminished, as though rubbed with a fine emery cloth. Surely the contact point, confined to a two-foot patch. How right he was, swerving away before he hit the brake. He feels steadier now, straightening up to face the men as they stop in front of him.