Saturday (15 page)

Neither man has spoken for half a minute. Perowne spreads his hands and says, in a tone as artificial as Strauss's smile, ‘I don't know what to do, Jay. I just know I hit a winner.'

But Strauss knows exactly what to do. He raises the stakes. ‘Henry, you were facing the front. You didn't see the ball come off the back wall. I did because I was going towards it. So the question is this. Are you calling me a liar?'

This is how it ends.

‘Fuck you, Strauss,' Perowne says and picks up his racket and goes to the service box.

And so they play the let, and Perowne serves the point again, and as he suspected might happen, he loses it, then he loses the next three points and before he knows it, it's all over, he's lost, and he's back in the corner picking up his wallet, phone, keys and watch. Outside the court, he pulls on his trousers and ties them with the chandler's cord, straps on his watch and puts on his sweater and fleece. He minds, but less than he did two minutes ago. He turns to Strauss who is just coming off the court.

‘You were bloody good. I'm sorry about the dispute.'

‘Fuck that. It could've been anyone's game. One of our best.'

They zip their rackets into their cases and sling them over their shoulders. Freed from red lines and the glaring white walls and the rules of the game, they walk along the courts to the Coke machine. Strauss buys a can for himself. Perowne doesn't want one. You have to be an American to want, as an adult, anything quite so sweet.

As they leave the building Strauss, pausing to drink deep, says, ‘They're all going down with the flu and I'm on call tonight.'

Perowne says, ‘Have you seen next week's list? Another heavy one.'

‘Yeah. That old lady and her astrocytoma. She's not going to make it, is she?'

They are standing on the steps above the pavement on Huntley Street. There's more cloud now, and the air is cold and damp. It could well rain on the demonstration. The lady's name is Viola, her tumour is in the pineal region. She's seventy-eight, and it turns out that in her working life she was an astronomer, something of a force at Jodrell Bank in the sixties. On the ward, while the other patients watch TV, she reads books on mathematics and string theory. Aware of
the lowering light, a winter's late-morning dusk, and not wanting to part on a bad note, a malediction, Perowne says, ‘I think we can help her.'

Understanding him, Strauss grimaces, raises a hand in farewell, and the two men go their separate ways.

 

Three

 

B
ack in the padded privacy of his damaged car, its engine idling inaudibly in deserted Huntley Street, he tries Rosalind again. Her meeting has ended, and she's gone straight in to see the managing director and is still with him, after forty-five minutes. The temporary secretary asks him to hold while she goes to find out more. While he waits, Perowne leans against the headrest and closes his eyes. He feels the itch of dried sweat on his face where he shaved. His toes, which he wiggles experimentally, seem encased in liquid, rapidly cooling. The importance of the game has faded to nothing, and in its place is a craving for sleep. Just ten minutes. It's been a tough week, a disturbed night, a hard game. Without looking, he finds the button that secures the car. The door locks are activated in rapid sequence, little resonating clunks, four semiquavers that lull him further. An ancient evolutionary dilemma: the need to sleep, the fear of being eaten. Resolved at last, by central locking.

Through the tiny receiver he holds to his left ear he hears the murmur of the open-plan office, the soft rattle of computer keys, and nearby a man's plaintive voice saying to someone out of earshot, ‘He's not denying it…but he doesn't deny it…Yes, I know. Yes, that's our problem. He won't deny a thing.'

With eyes closed he sees the newspaper offices, the curled-edged coffee-stained carpet tiles, the ferocious heating system that bleeds boiling rusty water, the receding phalanxes of fluorescent lights illuminating the chaotic corners, the piles of paper that no one touches, for no one cares to know what they contain, what they are for, and the overinhabited desks pushed too close together. It's the spirit of the school art room. Everyone too hard-pressed to start sorting through the old dust heaps. The hospital is the same. Rooms full of junk, cupboards and filing cabinets that no one dares open. Ancient equipment in cream tin-plate housing, too heavy, too mysterious to eject. Sick buildings, in use for too long, that only demolition can cure. Cities and states beyond repair. The whole world resembling Theo's bedroom. A race of extraterrestrial grown-ups is needed to set right the general disorder, then put everyone to bed for an early night. God was once supposed to be a grown-up, but in disputes He childishly took sides. Then sending us an actual child, one of His own – the last thing we needed. A spinning rock already swarming with orphans…

‘Mr Perowne?'

‘What? Yes?'

‘Your wife will phone you as soon as she's free, in about half an hour.'

Revived, he puts on his seatbelt, makes a three-point turn and heads towards Marylebone. The marchers are still in packed ranks on Gower Street, but the Tottenham Court Road is now open, with attack-waves of traffic surging northwards. He joins one briefly, then turns west and then north again and soon he's where Goodge and Charlotte Streets meet – a spot he's always liked, where the affairs of utility and pleasure condense to make colour and space brighter: mirrors, flowers, soaps, newspapers, electrical plugs, house paints, key cutting urbanely interleaved with expensive restaurants, wine and tapas bars, hotels. Who was the American novelist who said a man could be happy living on
Charlotte Street? Daisy will have to remind him again. So much commerce in a narrow space makes regular hillocks of bagged garbage on the pavements. A stray dog is worrying the sacks – gnawing filth whitens the teeth. Before turning west again, he sees way down the end of the street, his square, and on its far side, his house framed by bare trees. The blinds on the third floor are drawn – Theo is still asleep. Henry can still remember it, the exquisite tumbling late-morning doze of adolescence, and he never questions his son's claim to those hours. They won't last.

He crosses sombre Great Portland Street – it's the stone façades that make it seem always dusk here – and on Portland Place passes a Falun Gong couple keeping vigil across the road from the Chinese embassy. Belief in a miniaturised universe ceaselessly rotating nine times forwards, nine times backwards in the practitioner's lower abdomen is threatening the totalitarian order. Certainly, it's a non-material view. The state's response is beatings, torture, disappearances and murder, but the followers now outnumber the Chinese Communist Party. China is simply too populous, Perowne often thinks whenever he comes this way and sees the protest, to maintain itself in paranoia for much longer. Its economy's growing too fast, the modern world's too connected for the Party to keep control. Now you see mainland Chinese in Harrods, soaking up the luxury goods. Soon it will be ideas, and something will have to give. And here's the Chinese state meanwhile, giving philosophical materialism a bad name.

Then the embassy with its sinister array of roof aerials is behind him and he's passing through the orderly grid of medical streets west of Portland Place – private clinics and chintzy waiting rooms with bow-legged reproduction furniture and
Country Life
magazines. It is faith, as powerful as any religion, that brings people to Harley Street. Over the years his hospital has taken in and treated – free of charge, of course – scores of cases botched by some of the elderly overpaid incompetents around here. Waiting at red lights he
watches three figures in black burkhas emerge from a taxi on Devonshire Place. They huddle together on the pavement comparing the number on a door with a card one of them holds. The one in the middle, the likely invalid, whose form is somewhat bent, totters as she clings to the forearms of her companions. The three black columns, stark against the canyon of creamy stucco and brick, heads bobbing, clearly arguing about the address, have a farcical appearance, like kids larking about at Halloween. Or like Theo's school production of
Macbeth
when the hollowed trees of Birnam Wood waited in the wings to clump across the stage to Dunsinane. They are sisters perhaps, bringing their mother to her last chance. The lights remain stubbornly red. Perowne pushes the gear shift into ‘park'. What's he doing, pushing down so hard on the brake, tensing up his tender quadriceps? He can't help his distaste, it's visceral. How dismal, that anyone should be obliged to walk around so entirely obliterated. At least these ladies don't have the leather beaks. They really turn his stomach. And what would the relativists say, the cheerful pessimists from Daisy's college? That it's sacred, traditional, a stand against the fripperies of Western consumerism? But the men, the husbands – Perowne has had dealings with various Saudis in his office – wear suits, or trainers and tracksuits, or baggy shorts and Rolexes, and are entirely charming and worldly and thoroughly educated in both traditions. Would they care to carry the folkloric torch, and stumble about in the dark at midday?

The changed lights at last, the shift of scene – new porticoes, different waiting rooms – and the mild demands of traffic on his concentration edge him out of these constricting thoughts. He's caught himself in a nascent rant. Let Islamic dress codes be! What should he care about burkhas? Veils for his irritation. No, irritation is too narrow a word. They and the Chinese Republic serve the gently tilting negative pitch of his mood. Saturdays he's accustomed to being thoughtlessly content, and here he is for the second time this
morning sifting the elements of a darker mood. What's giving him the shivers? Not the lost game, or the scrape with Baxter, or even the broken night, though they all must have some effect. Perhaps it's merely the prospect of the afternoon when he'll head out towards the immensity of suburbs around Perivale. While there was a squash game posed between himself and his visit, he felt protected. Now there's only the purchase of fish. His mother no longer possesses the faculties to anticipate his arrival, recognise him when he's with her, or remember him after he's left. An empty visit. She doesn't expect him and she wouldn't be disappointed if he failed to show up. It's like taking flowers to a graveside – the true business is with the past. But she can raise a cup of tea to her mouth, and though she can't put a name to his face, or conjure any association, she's content with him sitting there, listening to her ramble. She's content with anyone. He hates going to see her, he despises himself if he stays away too long.

It's only while he's parking off Marylebone High Street that he remembers to turn on the midday news. The police are saying that two hundred and fifty thousand have gathered in central London. Someone for the rally is insisting on two million by the middle of the afternoon. Both sources agree that people are still pouring in. An elated marcher, who turns out to be a famous actress, raises her voice above the din of chanting and cheers to say that never in the history of the British Isles has there been such a huge assembly. Those who stay in their beds this Saturday morning will curse themselves they are not here. The earnest reporter reminds listeners that this is a reference to Shakespeare's St Crispin's Day speech, Henry the Fifth before the battle of Agincourt. The allusion is lost on Perowne as he reverses into a tight space between two four-wheel-drive jeeps. He doubts that Theo will be cursing himself. And why should a peace demonstrator want to quote a warrior king? The bulletin continues while Perowne sits with engine stilled, staring at a point of
blue-green light among the radio buttons. Across Europe, and all around the world, people are gathering to express their preference for peace and torture. That's what the professor would say – Henry can hear his insistent, high-tenor voice. The story Henry regards as his own comes next. Pilot and co-pilot are being held for questioning at separate locations in west London. The police are saying nothing else. Why's that? Through the windscreen the prosperous street of red brick, the receding geometry of pavement cracks and small bare trees, look provisional, like an image projected onto a sheet of thin ice. Now an airport official is conceding that one of the men is of Chechen origin, but denying a rumour about a Koran found in the cockpit. And even if it were true, he adds, it would mean nothing. It is, after all, hardly an offence.

Quite so. Henry snaps open his door. The secular authority, indifferent to the babel of various gods, will guarantee religious freedoms. They should flourish. It's time to go shopping. Despite the muscle pain in his thighs, he strides briskly away from his car, locking it with the remote without looking back. Sudden winter sunlight clarifies his path along the High Street. The largest gathering of humanity in the history of the islands, less than two miles away, is not disturbing Marylebone's contentment, and Perowne himself is soothed as he dodges around the oncoming crowds and all the pushchairs with their serenely bundled infants. Such prosperity, whole emporia dedicated to cheeses, ribbons, Shaker furniture, is protection of a sort. This commercial wellbeing is robust and will defend itself to the last. It isn't rationalism that will overcome the religious zealots, but ordinary shopping and all that it entails – jobs for a start, and peace, and some commitment to realisable pleasures, the promise of appetites sated in this world, not the next. Rather shop than pray.

He turns the corner into Paddington Street and stoops in front of the open-air display of fish on a steeply raked slab
of white marble. He sees at a glance that everything he needs is here. Such abundance from the emptying seas. On the tiled floor by the open doorway, piled in two wooden crates like rusting industrial rejects, are the crabs and lobsters, and in the tangle of warlike body parts there is discernible movement. On their pincers they're wearing funereal black bands. It's fortunate for the fishmonger and his customers that sea creatures are not adapted to make use of sound waves and have no voice. Otherwise there'd be howling from those crates. Even the silence among the softly stirring crowd is troubling. He turns his gaze away, towards the bloodless white flesh, and eviscerated silver forms with their unaccusing stare, and the deep-sea fish arranged in handy overlapping steaks of innocent pink, like cardboard pages of a baby's first book. Naturally, Perowne the fly-fisherman has seen the recent literature: scores of polymodal nociceptor sites just like ours in the head and neck of rainbow trout. It was once convenient to think biblically, to believe we're surrounded for our benefit by edible automata on land and sea. Now it turns out that even fish feel pain. This is the growing complication of the modern condition, the expanding circle of moral sympathy. Not only distant peoples are our brothers and sisters, but foxes too, and laboratory mice, and now the fish. Perowne goes on catching and eating them, and though he'd never drop a live lobster into boiling water, he's prepared to order one in a restaurant. The trick, as always, the key to human success and domination, is to be selective in your mercies. For all the discerning talk, it's the close at hand, the visible that exerts the overpowering force. And what you don't see…That's why in gentle Marylebone the world seems so entirely at peace.

Crab and lobsters are not on tonight's menu. If the clams and mussels he buys are alive, they are inert and decently closed up. He buys prawns already cooked in their shells, and three monkfish tails that cost a little more than his first car. Admittedly, a pile of junk. He asks for the bones and
heads of two skates to boil up for stock. The fishmonger is a polite, studious man who treats his customers as members of an exclusive branch of the landed gentry. He wraps each species of fish in several pages of a newspaper. This is the kind of question Henry liked to put to himself when he was a schoolboy: what are the chances of this particular fish, from that shoal, off that continental shelf ending up in the pages, no, on this page of this copy of the
Daily Mirror
? Something just short of infinity to one. Similarly, the grains of sand on a beach, arranged just so. The random ordering of the world, the unimaginable odds against any particular condition, still please him. Even as a child, and especially after Aberfan, he never believed in fate or providence, or the future being made by someone in the sky. Instead, at every instant, a trillion trillion possible futures; the pickiness of pure chance and physical laws seemed like freedom from the scheming of a gloomy god.