Baxter makes a short run in their direction and shouts, 'Oi!'
They glance back, and Nark, uncharacteristically energetic, gives him the finger. As they walk on, Nigel makes a limp wristed dismissive gesture. The general has been indecisive,
98 Saturday
the troops are deserting, the humiliation is complete. Perowne too sees his opportunity to withdraw. He crosses the pavement, steps into the road and around his car. His keys are in the ignition. As he starts the engine he sees Baxter in his rearview mirror, dithering between the departing factions, shouting at both. Perowne eases forwards - for pride's sake, he does not want to appear hurried. The insurance is an irrelevance, and it amazes him now that he ever thought it important. He sees his racket on the front seat beside him. This is surely the moment to slip away, while the possibility remains that he can still rescue his game.
After he's parked, and before getting out of the car, he phones Rosalind at work - his long fingers still trembling, fumbling with the miniature keys. On this important day for her he doesn't intend to distract her with the story of his near thrashing. And he doesn't need sympathy. What he wants is more fundamental - the sound of her voice in an everyday exchange, the resumption of normal existence. What can be more reassuringly plain than husband and wife discussing the details of tonight's dinner? He speaks to a temp, what they call in Rosalind's office a hot-desker, and learns that her meeting with the editor has started late and is running on. He leaves no message, and says he'll try later.
It's unusual to see the glass-fronted squash courts deserted on a Saturday. He walks along the row, on stained blue carpet, past the giant Coke and energy bar dispensers, and finds the consultant anaesthetist at the far end, in number five, smacking the ball in fast repeated strokes low along the backhand wall, giving the appearance of a man working off a bad temper. But, it turns out, he's been waiting only ten minutes. He lives across the river in Wandsworth; the march forced him to abandon his car by the Festival Hall. Furious with himself for being late, he jogged across Waterloo Bridge and saw below him tens of thousands pouring along the Embankment towards Parliament Square. Too young for the
99 I
Ian McEiuan 5
Vietnam war protests, he's never in his life seen so many �
people in one place. Despite his own views, he was some ,
what moved. This, he told himself, is the democratic process, however inconvenient. He watched for five minutes, then jogged up Kingsway, against the flow of bodies. He describes all this while Perowne sits on the bench removing his sweater and tracksuit bottom, and making a heap of his wallet, keys j
and phone to store at one of the corners by the front wall �
he and Strauss are never serious enough to insist on a completely cleared court.
They dislike your Prime Minister, but boy do they fucking loathe my President.'
Jay is the only American medic Perowne knows to have taken a huge cut in salary and amenities to work in England. He says he loves the health system. He also loved an Englishwoman, had three children by her, divorced her, married another similar-looking English rose twelve years younger and had another two children - still toddlers, and a third is on its way. But his respect for socialised medicine or his love of children do not make him an ally of the peace cause. The proposed war, Perowne finds, generally doesn't divide people predictably; a known package of opinions is not a reliable guide. According to Jay, the matter is stark: how open societies deal with the new world situation will determine how open they remain. He's a man of untroubled certainties, impatient of talk of diplomacy, weapons of mass destruction, inspection teams, proofs of links with Al-Qaeda and so on. Iraq is a rotten state, a natural ally of terrorists, bound to cause mischief at some point and may as well be taken out now while the US military is feeling perky after Afghanistan. And by taken out, he insists he means liberated and democratised. The USA has to atone for its previous disastrous policies - at the very least it owes this to the Iraqi people. Whenever he talks to Jay, Henry finds himself tending towards the anti-war camp.
Strauss is a powerful, earthbound, stocky man, physically
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I Saturday
affectionate, energetic, direct in manner - to some of his English colleagues, tiresomely so. He's been completely bald since he was thirty. He works out for more than an hour each day, and looks like a wrestler. When he busies himself around his patients in the anaesthetic room, readying them for oblivion, they are reassured by the sight of the sculpted muscles on his forearms, the dense bulk of his neck and shoulders, and by the way he speaks to them - matter-of-fact, cheerful, without condescension. Anxious patients can believe this squat American will lay down his life to spare them pain.
They have worked together six years. As far as Henry is concerned, Jay is the key to the success of his firm. When things go wrong, Strauss becomes calm. If, for example, Perowne is obliged to cut off a major blood vessel to make a repair, Jay keeps time in a soothing way, ending with a murmured, 'You've got one minute, Boss, then you're out of there.' On the rare occasions when things go really badly, when there's no way back, Strauss will find him out afterwards, alone in a quiet stretch of corridor, and put his hands on his shoulders, squeeze tightly and say, 'OK Henry. Let's talk it through now. Before you start crucifying yourself.' This isn't the way an anaesthetist, even a consultant, usually speaks to a surgeon. Consequently, Strauss has an above average array of enemies. On certain committees, Perowne has protected his friend's broad back from various collegiate daggers. Now and then he finds himself saying to Jay something like, 'I don't care what you think. Be nice to him. Remember our funding next year.'
While Henry does his stretching exercises, Jay goes back on court to keep the ball warm, driving it down the right hand wall. There appears to be an extra punch today in his low shots, and the sequence of fast volleys is surely planned to intimidate an opponent. It works. Perowne feels the echoing rifle-shot crack of the ball as an oppression; there's an unusual stiffness in his neck as he goes through his routine, pushing with his left hand against his right elbow.
101
i
Ian McEwcin
Through the open glass door, he raises his voice to explain
why he's late, but it's a truncated account, centred mostly on
the scrape itself, the way the red car pulled out, and how he
swerved, how the damage to the paintwork was surprisingly
light. He skips the rest, saying only that it took a while to
sort out. He doesn't want to hear himself describe Baxter and
his friends. They'll interest Strauss too much, and prompt
questions he doesn't feel like answering yet. He's already �
feeling a rising unease about the encounter, a disquiet he <�
can't yet define, though guilt is certainly an element. m
He feels his left knee creak as he stretches his hamstrings. When will it be time to give up this game? His fiftieth birthday? Or sooner. Get out before he rips an anterior cruciate ligament, or crashes to the parquet with his first coronary. He's working on the tendons of his other leg, Strauss is still performing his rapid-fire volleys. Perowne suddenly feels his own life as fragile and precious. His limbs appear to him as neglected old friends, absurdly long and breakable. Is he in mild shock? His heart will be all the more vulnerable after that punch. His chest still aches. He has a duty to others to survive, and he mustn't endanger his own life for a mere game, smacking a ball against a wall. And there's no such thing as a gentle game of squash, especially with Jay. Especially with himself. They both hate to lose. Once they get going, they fight points like madmen. He should make excuses and pull out now, and risk irritating his friend. A negligible price. As he straightens up, it occurs to Perowne that what he really wants is to go home and lie down in the bedroom and think it through, the dispute in University Street, and decide how he should have handled it, and what it was he got wrong.
But even as he's thinking this, he's pulling on his goggles and stepping onto the court and closing the door behind him. He kneels to settle his valuables in a front- wall corner. There's a momentum to the everyday, a Saturday morning game of squash with a good friend and colleague, that he doesn't
102 Saturday
have the strength of will to interrupt. He stands on the backhand side of the court, Strauss sends a brisk, friendly ball down the centre, automatically Perowne returns it, back along its path. And so they are launched into the familiar routines of a warm-up. The third ball he mishits, slapping it loudly into the tin. A couple of strokes later he stops to retie his laces. He can't settle. He feels slow and encumbered and his grip feels misaligned, too open, too closed, he doesn't know. He fiddles with his racket between strokes. Four minutes pass and they've yet to have a decent exchange. There's none df that easy rhythm that usually works them into their game. He notices that Jay is slowing his pace, offering easier angles to keep the ball in play. At last, Perowne feels obliged to say he's ready. Since he lost last week's game - this is their arrangement - he is to serve.
He takes up his position in the right-hand service box. From behind him on the other side of the court, he hears Jay mutter, 'OK.' The silence is complete, of that hissing variety rarely heard in a city; no other players, no street sounds, not even from the march. For two or three seconds Perowne stares at the dense black ball in his left hand, willing himself to narrow the range of his thoughts. He serves a high lob, well placed in so far as it arcs too high for a volley, and slides off the side wall onto the back. But even as it leaves him, he knows he's hit it too hard. It comes off the back wall with some residual speed, leaving Jay plenty of space to drive a straight return down the side wall to a good length. The ball dies in the corner, dribbling off the back wall as Perowne reaches it.
With barely a pause, Jay snatches up the ball to serve from the right box. Perowne, gauging his opponent's mood, is expecting an overarm smash and is crouched forwards, prepared to take a volley before the ball nicks the side wall. But Strauss has made his own calculations about mood. He serves a softbodyline, angled straight into Perowne's right shoulder. It's the perfect shot to play at an indecisive opponent. He
103 1
Ian McEwan �
I
steps back, but too late and not far enough and, at some point
in his confusion, loses sight of the ball. His return drops into A
the front of the court and Strauss drives it hard into the right- *
hand corner. They've been playing less than a minute,
Perowne has lost his serve, is one point down and knows
already that he's lost control. And so it goes on, relentlessly
for the next five points, with Jay in possession of the centre 9
of the court, and Perowne, dazed and defensive, initiating
nothing. � At six-love, Strauss finally makes an unforced error. Perowne serves the same high lob, but this time it falls nicely off the back wall. Strauss does well to hook it out, but the ball sits up on the short line and Perowne amazes himself with a perfect dying-length drive. With that little swoon of euphoria comes the ability to concentrate. He takes the next three points without trouble, and on the last of these, clinched by a volley drop, he hears Jay swearing at himself as he walks to the back of the court. Now, the magical authority, and all the initiatives are Henry's. He has possession of the centre of the court and is sending his opponent running from front to back. Soon he's ahead at seven-six and is certain he'll take the next two points. Even as he thinks this, he makes a careless cross-court shot which Strauss pounces on and, with a neat slice, drops into the corner. Perowne manages to resist the lure of self-hatred as he walks to the left-hand court to receive the serve. But as the ball floats off the front wall towards him, unwanted thoughts are shaking at his concentration. He sees the pathetic figure of Baxter in the rearview mirror. This is precisely the moment he should have stepped forwards for a backhand volley - he could reach it at a stretch - but he hesitates. The ball hits the nick - the join between the wall and the floor - and rolls insultingly over his foot. It's a lucky shot, and in his irritation he longs to say so. Seven all. But there's no fight to the end. Perowne feels himself moving through a mental fog, and Jay takes the last two points in quick succession.
104 Saturday
Neither man has any illusions about his game. They are halfway decent club players, both approaching fifty. Their arrangement is that between games - they play the best of five - they pause to let their pulse rates settle. Sometimes they even sit on the floor. Today, the first game hasn't been strenuous, so they walk slowly up and down the court. The anaesthetist wants to know about the Chapman girl. He's gone out of his way to make friends with her. The girl's street manner didn't withstand the pep talk that Perowne, passing in the corridor, overheard Strauss deliver. The anaesthetist had gone up to the ward to introduce himself. He found a Filipino nurse in tears over some abuse she'd received. Strauss sat on the bed and put his face close to the girl's.
'Listen honey. You want us to fix that sorry head of yours, you've got to help us. You hear? You don't want us to fix it, take your attitude home. We got plenty of other patients waiting to get in your bed. Look, here's your stuff in the locker. You want me to start putting it in your bag? OK. Here we go. Toothbrush. Discman. Hairbrush . . . No? So which is it to be? Fine. OK, look, I'm taking them out again. No, look, I really am. You help us, we help you. We got a deal? Let's shake hands.'
Perowne reports on her good progress this morning.
The like that kid,' Jay says. 'She reminds me of myself at that age. A pain in the ass in every direction. She might go down in flames, she might do something with herself.'