Saturday (29 page)

‘This describes the structure,' he starts to say. His voice quavers, as a liar's might, but there's nothing he can do but keep talking. ‘The thing is this. The globus pallidus, the pale globe, is a rather beautiful thing, deep in the basal ganglia, one of the oldest parts of the corpus striatum, and uh divided in two segments which…'

But Baxter is no longer paying attention – he's turned his head to listen. From downstairs they hear rapid heavy footsteps crossing the hall, then the sound of the front door opening and slamming shut. Has he been deserted for the second time today? He hurries across the study and steps out onto the landing. Henry drops the article and follows. What they see is Theo coming towards them at a run, leaping up the stairs three at a time, his arms pumping, his teeth bared savagely with the effort. He makes an inarticulate shout, which sounds like a command. Henry is already moving. Baxter draws back the knife. Henry seizes his wrist with both hands, pinning the arm in place. Contact at last. A moment later, Theo lunges forwards from two steps down and takes Baxter by the lapels of his leather jacket, and with a twisting, whip-like movement of his body pulls him off balance. At the same time, Perowne, still gripping the arm, heaves with his shoulder, and together they fling him down the stairs.

He falls backwards, with arms outstretched, still holding the knife in his right hand. There's a moment, which seems to unfold and luxuriously expand, when all goes silent and still, when Baxter is entirely airborne, suspended in time, looking directly at Henry with an expression, not so much of terror, as dismay. And Henry thinks he sees in the wide brown eyes a sorrowful accusation of betrayal. He, Henry Perowne, possesses so much – the work, money, status, the home, above all, the family – the handsome healthy son with the strong guitarist's hands come to rescue him, the beautiful poet for a daughter, unattainable even in her nakedness,
the famous father-in-law, the gifted, loving wife; and he has done nothing, given nothing to Baxter who has so little that is not wrecked by his defective gene, and who is soon to have even less.

The run of stairs before the turn is long, the steps are hard stone. With a rippling, bell-like sound, Baxter's left foot glances along a row of iron banister posts, just before his head hits the floor of the half-landing and collides with the wall, inches above the skirting board.

 

They are in various forms of shock, and remain so for hours after the police have left and the paramedics have taken Baxter away in their ambulance. Sudden bursts of urgent, sometimes tearful recall are broken by numb silences. No one wants to be alone, so they remain in the sitting room together, trapped in a waiting room, a no man's land separating their ordeal from the resumption of their lives. With the resilience of the young, Theo and Daisy go downstairs to the kitchen and return with bottles of red wine, mineral water and a bowl of salted cashews, as well as ice and a cloth to make a compress for their grandfather's nose.

But alcohol, tasty as it is, barely penetrates. And Henry finds that he prefers to drink water. What meets their needs is touch – they sit close, hold hands, embrace. The parting words of the night-duty CID officer were that his colleagues would be coming in the morning to take formal statements from them individually. They were therefore not to discuss or compare their evidence. It's a hopeless prescription, and it doesn't even occur to them to follow it. There's nothing to do but talk, fall silent, then talk again. They have the impression of conducting a careful analysis of the evening's horrible events. But it's a simpler, more vital re-enactment. All they do is describe: when they came in the room, when he turned, when the tall horsy one just walked out of the house…They want to have it all again, from another's point of view, and know that it's all true what they've been through,
and feel in these precise comparisons of feeling and observation that they're being delivered from private nightmare, and returned to the web of kindly social and familial relations, without which they're nothing. They were overrun and dominated by intruders because they weren't able to communicate and act together; now at last they can.

Perowne attends to his father-in-law's nose. John refuses to go to casualty that night, and no one tries to persuade him. The swelling already makes a diagnosis difficult, but his nose hasn't shifted from the midline position, and Perowne's guess is a hairline fracture to the maxillary processes – better that than ruptured cartilage. For much of this stretch of the evening Henry sits close to Rosalind. She shows them a red patch and a small cut on her neck, and describes a moment when she ceased to be terrified and became indifferent to her fate.

‘I felt myself floating away,' she says. ‘It was as if I was watching all of us, myself included, from a corner of the room right up by the ceiling. And I thought, if it's going to happen, I won't feel a thing, I won't care.'

‘Well,
we
might have,' Theo says, and they laugh loudly, too loudly.

Daisy talks with brittle gaiety about undressing in front of Baxter. ‘I tried to pretend that I was ten years old, at school, getting changed for hockey. I disliked the games mistress and hated taking my clothes off when she was there. But remembering her helped me. Then I tried to imagine that I was in the garden at the chateau, reciting to Granddad.'

The unspoken matter is Daisy's pregnancy. But it's too soon, Henry supposes, because she doesn't refer to it, and nor does Rosalind.

Grammaticus says from behind his compress, ‘You know, it sounds completely mad, but there came a point after Daisy recited Arnold for the second time when I actually began to feel sorry for that fellow. I think, my dear, you made him fall in love with you.'

‘Arnold who?' Henry says, and makes Daisy and her grandfather laugh. Henry adds, but she doesn't seem to hear, ‘You know, I didn't think it was one of your best.'

He knows what Grammaticus means, and he could begin to tell them all about Baxter's condition, but Henry himself is undergoing a shift in sympathies; the sight of the abrasion on Rosalind's neck hardens him. What weakness, what delusional folly, to permit yourself sympathy towards a man, sick or not, who invades your house like this. As he sits listening to the others, his anger grows, until he almost begins to regret the care he routinely gave Baxter after his fall. He could have left him to die of hypoxia, pleading incapacity through shock. Instead, he went straight down with Theo and, finding Baxter semi-conscious, opened his airway with a jaw thrust; assuming spinal damage, he showed Theo how to hold Baxter's head while he improvised a collar out of towels from the half-landing bathroom. Downstairs, Rosalind was calling an ambulance – the landlines were not cut. With Theo still holding Baxter's head, Perowne rolled him into a recovery position, and looked at the other vital signs. They weren't too good. The breathing was noisy, the pulse slow and weak, the pupils slightly unequal. By this time, Baxter was murmuring to himself as he lay there with eyes closed. He was able to respond to his name and to a command to clench his fist – Perowne put his Glasgow Coma Score at thirteen. He went to his study and phoned ahead to casualty, spoke to the registrar and told him what to expect, and to be ready to order a CT scan and alert the neurosurgeon on duty. Then there was nothing to do but wait out the last minutes. During that time they managed to ease Daisy's book from Baxter's pocket. Theo continued to support his head until two lads from the hospital in green jump suits arrived, put in a line and under Perowne's instruction administered colloid fluid intravenously.

Two police constables arrived in support of the ambulance, and a few minutes later, the CID man turned up. After he'd
met the family, and heard Perowne's account, he told them it was too late, and everyone was too upset now to be giving statements. He took from Henry the licence plate number of the red BMW and made a note of the Spearmint Rhino. He examined the gash in the sofa, then he went back upstairs, knelt by Baxter, prised the knife out of his hand and dropped it in a sterile plastic bag. He took a swab of dried blood from the knuckles of Baxter's left hand – it was likely to be blood from Grammaticus's nose.

The detective laughed out loud when Theo asked him whether he and his father had committed any crime in throwing Baxter down the stairs.

He touched Baxter with the tip of his shoe. ‘I doubt if he'll be making a complaint. And we certainly won't be.'

The detective phoned his station to arrange for two constables to be sent to the hospital to stand guard over Baxter through the night. When he was conscious, he'd be arrested. Formal charges would follow later. After the warning about sharing evidence, the three policemen left. The paramedics chocked and blocked Baxter on a spinal board and carried him away.

Rosalind appears to make an impressive recovery. Perhaps it's only half an hour after the police and ambulance men have left, when she suggests that it might do everybody good to come and eat. No one has an appetite, but they follow her down to the kitchen. While Perowne reheats his stock and takes from the fridge the clams, mussels, prawns and monkfish, the children lay the table, Rosalind slices a loaf of bread and makes a dressing for the salad, and Grammaticus puts down his icepack to open another bottle of wine. This communal activity is pleasurable, and twenty minutes later the meal is ready, and they are hungry at last. It's even faintly reassuring that Grammaticus is on his way to getting drunk, though he remains at a benign stage. It's about this time, as they're sitting down, that Henry learns the name of the poet, Matthew Arnold, and that his poem that Daisy recited, ‘Dover
Beach', is in all the anthologies and used to be taught in every school.

‘Like your “Mount Fuji”,' Henry says, a remark that pleases Grammaticus immensely and prompts him to stand to propose a toast. John's in his twinkly mode, an effect heightened by his clownishly swollen nose. The evening has the appearance of being back on course, for in his hand is the proof copy of
My Saucy Bark
.

‘Forget everything else that's happened. We're raising our glasses to Daisy,' he says. ‘Her poems mark a brilliant beginning to a career and I'm a very proud grandfather and dedicatee. Who would have thought that learning poems by heart for pocket money would turn out to be so useful. After tonight I think I must owe her another five pounds. To Daisy.'

‘To Daisy,' they reply, and as they lift their glasses she kisses him, and he hugs her in return – the reconciliation is made, the Newdigate Rebuff is forgotten.

Henry touches the wine to his lips, but finds he's lost his taste for alcohol. Just as Daisy and her grandfather sit down, the phone rings and since he's nearest, Henry goes across the kitchen to take the call. In his unusual state, he doesn't immediately recognise the American voice.

‘Henry? Is that you, Henry?'

‘Oh, Jay. Yes.'

‘Listen. We got an extradural, male, mid twenties, fell down the stairs. Sally Madden went home with the flu an hour ago, so I've got Rodney. The kid's keen and he's good and he doesn't want you in here. But Henry, we have a depressed fracture right over the sinus.'

Perowne clears his throat. ‘Boggy swelling?'

‘Right on the spot. That's why I'm stepping in. I've seen inexperienced surgeons tear the sinus lifting the bone, and four litres of blood on the floor. I want someone senior in here and you're the nearest. Plus you're the best.'

From across the kitchen comes loud, unnatural laughter, exaggerated like before, almost harsh; they're not really pre
tending to have forgotten their fear – they're simply wanting to survive it. There are other surgeons Jay can call on, and as a general rule, Perowne avoids operating on people he knows. But this is different. And despite various shifts in his attitude to Baxter, some clarity, even some resolve, is beginning to form. He thinks he knows what it is he wants to do.

‘Henry? Are you there?'

‘I'm on my way.'

 

Five

 

T
he family is used to Perowne's occasional departures from dinner – and in this case there may even be some reassurance, a suggestion of a world returning to the everyday, in his announcement that he's been called to the hospital.

He leans by Daisy's chair and says into her ear, ‘We've a lot to talk about.'

Without turning, she takes his hand and squeezes. He's about to say to Theo, perhaps for the third time that evening, You saved my life, but instead he half smiles at his son and mouths, ‘See you later.' Theo has never seemed so handsome, so beautiful as now. His bare lean arms lie across the table; the solemn, clear brown eyes and their curling lashes, the blind perfection of hair, skin, teeth, the unbent, untroubled spine – he gleams in the half-light of the kitchen. He raises his glass – mineral water – and says, ‘You sure you're up to this, Dad?'

Grammaticus says, ‘He's right, you know. It's been a long night. You could kill some poor bugger.' With his swept-back silver hair and nose compress he resembles a patched-up lion in a children's book.

‘I'm fine.'

There's been talk of Theo fetching down an acoustic guitar to accompany his grandfather in ‘St James Infirmary', for
Grammaticus is in the mood for a Doc Watson imitation. Rosalind and Daisy want to hear the recording of Theo's new song, ‘City Square'. There's an air of unnatural festivity around the table, of wild release which reminds Henry of a family outing to the theatre the previous year – an evening of bloody and startling atrocities at the Royal Court. At dinner afterwards they passed the evening in hilarious reminiscence of summer holidays, and drinking too much.

When he's said his farewells and is leaving, Grammaticus calls after him, ‘We'll still be here when you get back.'

Perowne knows this is unlikely, but he nods cheerfully. Only Rosalind senses the deeper alteration in his mood. She rises and follows him up the stairs and watches him as he puts on his overcoat and finds his wallet and keys.

‘Henry, why did you say yes?'

‘It's him.'

‘So why did you agree?'

They are standing by the front door with its triple locks and the keypad's comforting glow. He kisses her, then she draws him towards her by his lapels and they kiss again, longer and deeper. It's a reminder, a resumption of their morning lovemaking, and also a promise; this is surely how they must end such a day. She tastes salty, which arouses him. Far below his desire, lying like a granite block on the sea floor, is his exhaustion. But at times like this, on his way to the theatre, he's professionally adept at resisting all needs.

As they pull away he says, ‘I had a scrape in the car with him this morning.'

‘I gathered that.'

‘And a stupid showdown on the pavement.'

‘So? Why are you going in?' She licks her forefinger – he likes this glimpse of her tongue – and straightens his eyebrows for him. Thickening, with unruly tendrils of ginger, grey and unblemished white tending to the vertical, evidence of the clotted testosterone that can also cause ear and nostril hair to grow like winter sedge. More evidence of decline.

He says, ‘I have to see this through. I'm responsible.' In reply to her querying look he adds, ‘He's very sick. Probably Huntington's.'

‘He's obviously nuts as well as nasty. But Henry. Weren't you drinking earlier? Can you really operate?'

‘It was a while ago. I think the adrenaline's rather cleared my head.'

She's fingering the lapel of his coat, keeping him close. She doesn't want him to leave. He watches her tenderly, and with some amazement, for her ordeal is only two or three hours behind her and now here she is, pretending to be entirely herself again and, as always, keen to know the components of an unusual decision, and loving him in her precise, exacting way, a lawyer to the core. He forces his gaze from settling on the abrasion on her throat.

‘Are you going to be all right?'

She's lowered her eyes as she orders her thoughts. When she lifts them he sees himself, by some trick of light, suspended in miniature against the black arena of her pupils, embraced by a tiny field of mid-green iris.

She says, ‘I think so. Look, I'm worried about you going in.'

‘Meaning?'

‘You're not thinking about doing something, about some kind of revenge are you? I want you to tell me.'

‘Of course not.'

He pulls her towards him and they kiss again, and this time their tongues touch and slide by each other – in their private lexicon a kind of promise. Revenge. He suddenly doubts he's ever heard the word on her lips before. In Rosalind's slightly breathless utterance, it sounds erotic, the very word. And what is he doing, leaving the house? Even as he frames the question, he knows he's going; superficially, it's simple momentum – Jay Strauss and the team will already be in the anaesthetist's room, starting work on his patient. Henry has an image of his own right hand
pushing open the swing doors to the scrub room. In a sense, he's already left, though he's still kissing Rosalind. He ought to hurry.

He murmurs, ‘If I'd handled things better this morning, perhaps none of this would've happened. Now Jay's asked me in, I feel I ought to go. And I want to go.'

She looks at him wryly, still trying to gauge his intentions, his precise state of mind, the strength of the bond between them at this particular moment.

Because he's genuinely curious to know the story, but also to deflect her, he then says, ‘So we're going to be grandparents.'

There's sadness in her smile. ‘She's thirteen weeks and she says she's in love. Giulio is twenty-two, from Rome, studying archaeology in Paris. His parents have given them enough money to buy a little flat.'

Henry contends with fatherly thoughts, with nascent outrage at this unknown Italian's assault on the family's peace and cohesion, at his impertinently depositing his seed without first making himself available for inspection, evaluation – where was he now, for example? And irritation that this boy's own family should know before Daisy's, that arrangements are already in hand. A little flat. Thirteen weeks. Perowne leans his hand on the door lock's ancient brassy knob. At last Daisy's pregnancy – the evening's buried subject – rises before him in clear light, a calamity and an insult and a waste, a subject too huge to confront or lament now, when he is waited for up the road.

‘Oh God. What a mess. Why didn't she tell us? Did she think about a termination?'

‘Out of the question, apparently. Darling, don't start boiling over when you're about to operate.'

‘How are they going to live?'

‘The way we did.'

In a bliss of sex and graduate poverty, taking turns with baby Daisy as together they sleeplessly raced through a law
degree and first law job, and the early years of neurosurgery. He remembers himself after a thirty-hour shift, carrying his bicycle four floors up a cement stairwell towards the insomniac wail of a teething infant. And in that one-bedroom flat in Archway, folding the ironing board away in order to fuck late at night on the living-room floor by the gas fire. Rosalind may have intended such recollections to mollify him. He appreciates the attempt, but he's troubled. What's to become of Daisy Perowne, the poet? He and Rosalind meshed their timetables and worked hard at sharing the domestic load. Italian men, on the other hand, are
pueri aeterni
, who expect their wives to replace their mothers, and iron their shirts and fret about their underwear. This feckless Giulio could destroy his daughter's hopes.

Henry discovers he's clenching a fist. He relaxes it and says untruthfully, ‘I can't think about it now.'

‘That's right. None of us can.'

‘I better go.'

They kiss again, unerotically this time, with all the restraint of a farewell.

As he opens the door she says, ‘I'm still worried about you going in like this. I mean, in this mood. Promise me, nothing foolish.'

He touches her arm. ‘I promise.'

 

As the door closes behind him and he steps away from the house, he feels a clarifying pleasure in the cold, wet night air, in his purposeful stride and, he can admit it, in being briefly alone. If only the hospital were further away. Irresponsibly, he prolongs his walk by half a minute by going across the square, rather than down Warren Street. The few fine snowflakes he saw earlier have vanished, and during the evening it has rained; the square's paving stones and cobbled gutters shine cleanly in the white street light. Low smoky cloud grazes the top of the Post Office Tower. The square is deserted, which also pleases him. As he hurries along the
eastern side, near the high railings of the gardens, under the bare plane trees stirring and creaking, the empty square is reduced to its vastness and the simplicity of architectural lines and solemn white forms.

He's trying not to think about Giulio. He thinks instead about Rome, where he attended a neurosurgery symposium two years ago, in rooms overlooking the Campo dei Fiori. It was the mayor himself, Walter Veltroni, a quiet, civilised man with a passion for jazz, who opened the proceedings. The following day, in honour of the guests, Nero's palace, the Domus Aurea, much of it still closed to the public, was made available, and Veltroni along with various curators gave the surgeons a private tour. Perowne, knowing nothing about Roman antiquity, was disappointed that the site appeared to be underground, entered by a gated hole in a hillside. This was not what he understood by a palace. They were led down a tunnel smelling of earth and lit by bare bulbs. Off to the sides were dim chambers where restoration work was in progress on fragments of wall tiles. A curator explained – three hundred rooms of white marble, frescos, intricately patterned mosaic, pools, fountains and ivory finish, but no kitchens, bathrooms or lavatories. At last the surgeons entered a scene of wonders – painted corridors of birds and flowers and complicated repeating designs. They saw rooms where frescos were just appearing from under a sludge of grime and fungus. The palace lay undiscovered for five hundred years under rubble until the early Renaissance. For the past twenty years it had been closed for restoration, and its partial opening had been part of Rome's millennial celebration. A curator pointed out a jagged hole far above them in an immense domed ceiling. This was where fifteenth-century robbers dug through to steal gold leaf. Later Raphael and Michelangelo had themselves lowered down on ropes; marvelling, they copied the designs and paintings their smoking torches revealed. Their own work was profoundly influenced by these incursions. Through his translator, Signor Veltroni
offered an image he thought might appeal to his guests; the artists had drilled through this skull of brick to discover the mind of ancient Rome.

Perowne leaves the square and heads east, crosses the Tottenham Court Road and walks towards Gower Street. If only the mayor was right, that penetrating the skull brings into view not the brain but the mind. Then within the hour he, Perowne, might understand a lot more about Baxter; and after a lifetime's routine procedures would be among the wisest men on earth. Wise enough to understand Daisy? He's not able to avoid the subject. Henry refuses to accept that she might have chosen to be pregnant. But for her sake he needs to be positive and generous. This Roman Giulio may be just like the admirable boiler-suited types he saw in the gloomy chambers of the Domus Aurea, dabbing away at mosaic tiles with their toothbrushes – archaeology is an honourable profession. It's his duty, Henry supposes, to try to like the father of his grandchild. The despoiler of his daughter. When he condescends at last to visit, young Giulio will need to exert much native charm.

On Gower Street the sanitary teams are still at work, cleaning up after the demonstration. Perhaps they've only just begun. From noisy trucks, generator-powered arc lights illuminate mounds of food, plastic wrappings and discarded placards which men in yellow and orange jackets are pushing forward with wide brooms. Others are shovelling the piles onto the lorries. The state's embrace is ample, ready for war, ready to clean up behind the dissenters. And the debris has a certain archaeological interest – a Not in My Name with a broken stalk lies among polystyrene cups and abandoned hamburgers and pristine fliers for the British Association of Muslims. On a pile he steps round are a slab of pizza with pineapple slices, beer cans in a tartan motif, a denim jacket, empty milk cartons and three unopened tins of sweetcorn. The details are oppressive to him, objects look too bright-edged and tight, ready to burst from the packaging. He must
be in a lingering state of shock. He recognises one of the sweepers as the man he saw this morning cleaning the pavements in Warren Street: a whole day behind the broom, and now, courtesy of untidy world events, some serious overtime.

Around the hospital's front entrance there's the usual late-night Saturday gathering, and two security guards standing between the double sets of doors. Typically, people emerge, though not completely, from a drunken dream and remember they last saw a friend being lifted into the back of an ambulance. They find the hospital, often the wrong one, and emphatically demand to see this friend. The guards' job is to keep out the troublemakers, the abusive or incapable, the ones likely to throw up on the waiting-room floor, or take a swing at authority, at a light-boned Filipino nurse or some tired junior doctor in the final hours of her shift. They're also obliged to keep out the rough sleepers who want a bench or piece of floor in the institutional warmth. The sample of the public that makes it to a hospital late on a weekend night is not always polite, kind or appreciative. As Henry recalls, working in Accident and Emergency is a lesson in misanthropy. They used to be tolerated, the assaults as well as the dossers, who even had their own little corner in A and E. But these last few years what's now called the culture has changed. The medical staff have had enough. They want protection. The drunks and loudmouths are thrown out onto the pavement by men who've worked as bouncers and know their business. It's another American import, and not a bad one – zero tolerance. But there's always a danger of chucking out a genuine patient; head injuries, as well as cases of sepsis or hypoglycaemia can present as drunkenness.