76 Saturday
streets and the people on them are their own justification, their own insurance. The world has not fundamentally changed. Talk of a hundred-year crisis is indulgence. There are always crises, and Islamic terrorism will settle into place, alongside recent wars, climate change, the politics of international trade, land and fresh water shortages, hunger, poverty and the rest.
He listens to the Schubert, sweetly fade and swell. The street is fine, and the city, grand achievement of the living and all the dead who've ever lived here, is fine too, and robust. It \von't easilv allow itself to be deslroved. It's too good lo K-! go. Life in it has steadilv improved over the- rentu"iec for most people, despite the junkies and beggars now. The air is better, and salmon are leaping in the Thames, and otters are returning. At every level, material, medical, intellectual, sensual, for most people it has improved. The teachers who educated Daisy at university thought the idea of progress old-fashioned and ridiculous. In indignation, Perowne grips the wheel tighter in his right hand. He remembers some lines by Medawar, a man he admires: To deride the hopes of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of mind.' Yes, he's a fool to be taken in by that hundred-year claim. In Daisy's final term he went to an open day at her college. The young lecturers there like to dramatise modern life as a sequence of calamities. It's their style, their way of being clever. It wouldn't be cool or professional to count the eradication of smallpox as part of the modern condition. Or the recent spread of democracies. In the evening one of them gave a lecture on the prospects for our consumerist and technological civilisation: not good. But if the present dispensation is wiped out now, the future will look back on us as gods, certainly in this city, lucky gods blessed by supermarket cornucopias, torrents of accessible information, warm clothes that weigh nothing, extended life spans, wondrous machines. This is an age of wondrous machines. Portable telephones barely bigger than your ear.
77
1
Jan McEwan
Vast music libraries held in an object the size of a child's hand. Cameras that can beam their snapshots around the world. Effortlessly, he ordered up the contraption he's riding in now through a device on his desk via the Internet. The computer-guided stereotactic array he used yesterday has transformed the way he does biopsies. Digitalised entertainment binds that Chinese couple walking hand in hand, lis || tening through a Y-socket to their personal stereo. And she's n almost skipping, that stringy girl in a shell suit behind a three-wheel all-terrain pushchair. In fact, everyone he's passing now along this pleasantly down-at-heel street looks happy enough, at least as content as he is. But for the professors in the academy, for the humanities generally, misery is more amenable to analysis: happiness is a harder nut to crack.
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
78 Saturday
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 froui 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 ve!!o\, in the middle of the Tottenham Court Road with hi-~ machine on its stnnd, holding nut nn nnri to ctoii 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
79
1
Ian McEwan
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 I
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 slips into first, 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 rnay be doing twenty miles an hour. Twenty-five perhaps. Thirty at a stretch. And even as he changes up, 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
80 Saturday
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 mure 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, con solidaling 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.
81 Ian McEwan
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. Whnt he feels i= 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 cliche: 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
82 Saturday
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, pvrn furtively, from the Wellcome Trust or the British Librarv 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,
83