Saturday (34 page)

Rosalind and the children came with him to clear the place one weekend. They all chose a memento – it seemed disrespectful not to. Daisy had a brass plate from Egypt, Theo a carriage clock, Rosalind, a plain china fruit bowl. Henry took a shoebox of photographs. Other pieces went to nephews and nieces. Lily's bed, her sideboard, two wardrobes and the carpets and the chests of drawers were waiting for a house-clearing firm. The family packed up clothes and kitchenware and unwanted ornaments for the charity shops – Henry never realised before how these places lived off the dead. Everything else they stuffed into bin liners and put out for the rubbish collection. They worked in silence, like looters – having the radio on wasn't appropriate. It took a day to dismantle Lily's existence.

They were striking the set of a play, a humble, one-handed domestic drama, without permission from the cast. They started in what she called her sewing room – his old room. She was never coming back, she no longer knew what knitting was, but wrapping up her scores of needles, her thousand patterns, a baby's half-finished yellow shawl, to give them all away to strangers was to banish her from the living. They worked quickly, almost in a frenzy. She's not dead, Henry kept telling himself. But her life, all lives, seemed tenuous when he saw how quickly, with what ease, all the trappings, all the fine details of a lifetime could be packed and scattered, or junked. Objects became junk as soon as they were separated from their owner and their pasts – without her, her old tea cosy was repellent, with its faded farmhouse motif and pale brown stains on cheap fabric, and stuffing that was pathetically thin. As the shelves and drawers emptied, and the boxes and bags filled, he saw that no one owned anything really. It's all rented, or borrowed. Our possessions
will outlast us, we'll desert them in the end. They worked all day, and put out twenty-three bags for the dustmen.

He feels skinny and frail in his dressing gown, facing the morning that's still dark, still part of yesterday. Yes, that will happen, and he'll make the arrangements. She walked him once to a cemetery near her house to show him the rows of small metal lockers set into a wall where she wanted her ashes put. All that's bound to happen, and they'll stand with bowed heads, listening to the Burial of the Dead. Or will they have it for cremations? Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live…He's heard it often over the years, but remembers only fragments. He fleeth as it were a shadow…cut down like a flower. Yes, and then it will be the turn of John Grammaticus, one of those transfiguring illnesses that come to a drinking man, or a terminal stab to heart or brain. They'll all take that hard in their different ways, though Henry less than the others. The old poet was brave tonight, pretending not to suffer with his nose, giving Daisy just the right prompt. And when it comes, then there'll be the crisis of the chateau if Teresa marries John and stakes her claim, and Rosalind, formidable in law, pursues her rights to the place her mother made, the place where Daisy, Theo and Rosalind herself spent their childhood summers. And Henry's role? Wise and implacable loyalty.

What else, beyond the dying? Theo will make his first move from home – there'll be no postcards or letters or e-mails, only phone calls. There'll be trips to New York to listen to him and his band bring their blues to the Americans – they might not like it – and a chance to see old friends from Bellevue Hospital days. And Daisy will publish her poems, and produce a baby and bring Giulio – Henry still sees the dark-skinned, bare-chested lover from the poem he misheard. A baby and its huge array of
matériel
to enliven the household, and someone else, not him, not Rosalind, getting up in the night. And not Giulio, unless he's an unusual Italian. All this is rich. And then, he, Henry, will turn fifty and give up squash and marathons, the
house will empty when Daisy and Giulio find a place, and Theo gets one too, and Henry and Rosalind will collapse in on each other, cling tighter, their business of raising children, launching young adults, over. That restlessness, that hunger he's had lately for another kind of life will fade. The time will come when he does less operating, and more administration – there's another kind of life – and Rosalind will leave the paper to write her book, and a time will come when they find they no longer have the strength for the square, the junkies and the traffic din and dust. Perhaps a bomb in the cause of jihad will drive them out with all the other faint-hearts into the suburbs, or deeper into the country, or to the chateau – their Saturday will become a Sunday.

Behind him, as though agitated by his thoughts, Rosalind flinches, moans, and moves again before she falls silent and he turns back to the window. London, his small part of it, lies wide open, impossible to defend, waiting for its bomb, like a hundred other cities. Rush hour will be a convenient time. It might resemble the Paddington crash – twisted rails, buckled, upraised commuter coaches, stretchers handed out through broken windows, the hospital's Emergency Plan in action. Berlin, Paris, Lisbon. The authorities agree, an attack's inevitable. He lives in different times – because the newspapers say so doesn't mean it isn't true. But from the top of his day, this is a future that's harder to read, a horizon indistinct with possibilities. A hundred years ago, a middle-aged doctor standing at this window in his silk dressing gown, less than two hours before a winter's dawn, might have pondered the new century's future. February 1903. You might envy this Edwardian gent all he didn't yet know. If he had young boys, he could lose them within a dozen years, at the Somme. And what was their body count, Hitler, Stalin, Mao? Fifty million, a hundred? If you described the hell that lay ahead, if you warned him, the good doctor – an affable product of prosperity and decades of peace – would not believe you. Beware the utopianists, zealous men certain of
the path to the ideal social order. Here they are again, totalitarians in different form, still scattered and weak, but growing, and angry, and thirsty for another mass killing. A hundred years to resolve. But this may be an indulgence, an idle, overblown fantasy, a night-thought about a passing disturbance that time and good sense will settle and rearrange.

The nearer ground, the nearest promontory, is easier to read – as sure as his mother's death, he'll be dining with Professor Taleb in an Iraqi restaurant near Hoxton. The war will start next month – the precise date must already have been fixed, as though for any big outdoor sporting event. Any later in the season will be too hot for killing or liberation. Baghdad is waiting for its bombs. Where's Henry's appetite for removing a tyrant now? At the end of this day, this particular evening, he's timid, vulnerable, he keeps drawing his dressing gown more tightly around him. Another plane moves left to right across his view, descending in its humdrum way along the line of the Thames towards Heathrow. Harder now to recall, or to inhabit, the vigour of his row with Daisy – the certainties have dissolved into debating points; that the world the professor described is intolerable, that however murky American motives, some lasting good and fewer deaths might come from dismantling it. Might, he hears Daisy tell him, is not good enough, and you've let one man's story turn your head. A woman bearing a child has her own authority. Will he revive his hopes for firm action in the morning? All he feels now is fear. He's weak and ignorant, scared of the way consequences of an action leap away from your control and breed new events, new consequences, until you're led to a place you never dreamed of and would never choose – a knife at the throat. One floor down from where Andrea Chapman dreams of being carried away by the improbable love of a young doctor, and of becoming one herself, lies Baxter in his private darkness, watched over by the constables. But one small fixed point of conviction holds Henry steady. It
began to take form at dinner, before Jay rang, and was finally settled when he sat in intensive care, feeling Baxter's pulse. He must persuade Rosalind, then the rest of the family, then the police, not to pursue charges. The matter must be dropped. Let them go after the other man. Baxter has a diminishing slice of life worth living, before his descent into nightmare hallucination begins. Henry can get a colleague or two, specialists in the field, to convince the Crown Prosecution Service that by the time it comes round, Baxter will not be fit to stand trial. This may or may not be true. Then the system, the right hospital, must draw him in securely before he does more harm. Henry can make these arrangements, do what he can to make the patient comfortable, somehow. Is this forgiveness? Probably not, he doesn't know, and he's not the one to be granting it anyway. Or is he the one seeking forgiveness? He's responsible, after all; twenty hours ago he drove across a road officially closed to traffic, and set in train a sequence of events. Or it could be weakness – after a certain age, when the remaining years first take on their finite aspect, and you begin to feel for yourself the first chill, you watch a dying man with a closer, more brotherly interest. But he prefers to believe that it's realism: they'll all be diminished by whipping a man on his way to hell. By saving his life in the operating theatre, Henry also committed Baxter to his torture. Revenge enough. And here is one area where Henry can exercise authority and shape events. He knows how the system works – the difference between good and bad care is near-infinite.

Daisy recited a poem that cast a spell on one man. Perhaps any poem would have done the trick, and thrown the switch on a sudden mood change. Still, Baxter fell for the magic, he was transfixed by it, and he was reminded how much he wanted to live. No one can forgive him the use of the knife. But Baxter heard what Henry never has, and probably never will, despite all Daisy's attempts to educate him. Some
nineteenth-century poet – Henry has yet to find out whether this Arnold is famous or obscure – touched off in Baxter a yearning he could barely begin to define. That hunger is his claim on life, on a mental existence, and because it won't last much longer, because the door of his consciousness is beginning to close, he shouldn't pursue his claim from a cell, waiting for the absurdity of his trial to begin. This is his dim, fixed fate, to have one tiny slip, an error of repetition in the codes of his being, in his genotype, the modern variant of a soul, and he must unravel – another certainty Henry sees before him.

Quietly, he lowers the window. The morning is still dark, and it's the coldest time now. The dawn won't come until after seven. Three nurses are walking across the square, talking cheerfully, heading in the direction of his hospital to start their morning shift. He closes the shutters on them, then goes towards the bed and lets the dressing gown fall to his feet as he gets in. Rosalind lies facing away from him with her knees crooked. He closes his eyes. This time there'll be no trouble falling towards oblivion, there's nothing can stop him now. Sleep's no longer a concept, it's a material thing, an ancient means of transport, a softly moving belt, conveying him into Sunday. He fits himself around her, her silk pyjamas, her scent, her warmth, her beloved form, and draws closer to her. Blindly, he kisses her nape. There's always this, is one of his remaining thoughts. And then: there's only this. And at last, faintly, falling: this day's over.

 

Dover Beach

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

 

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

 

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold

 

Acknowledgements

I am enormously grateful to Neil Kitchen MD FRCS (SN), Consultant Neurosurgeon and Associate Clinical Director, The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square, London. It was a privilege to watch this gifted surgeon at work in the theatre over a period of two years, and I thank him for his kindness and patience in taking time out of a demanding schedule to explain to me the intricacies of his profession, and the brain, with its countless pathologies. I am also grateful to Sally Wilson, FRCA, Consultant Neuro-anaesthetist at the same hospital, and to Anne McGuinness, Consultant, Accident and Emergency, University College Hospital, and to Chief Inspector Amon McAfee. For an account of a transsphenoidal hypophysectomy, I am indebted to Frank T. Vertosick, Jr., MD and his excellent book,
When the Air Hits your Brain: Tales of Neurosurgery
, Norton, New York, 1996. Ray Dolan, that most literary of scientists, read the typescript of
Saturday
and made incisive neurological suggestions. Tim Garton Ash and Craig Raine also read this novel at an early stage and were very helpful in their comments. I am grateful to Craig Raine for generously allowing me to attribute to Daisy Perowne the words, ‘excited watering can' and ‘peculiar rose' from his poem, ‘Sexual Couplets', and ‘how each\rose grows on a shark infested stem' from ‘Reading Her Old Letter about a Wedding',
Collected Poems 1978-1999
, Picador, London 2000. My wife, Annalena McAfee, read numerous stages of draft, and I am the lucky beneficiary of her wise editorial comments and loving encouragement.

IM
London 2004