lege? That it's sacred, traditional, a stand against the frip '
peries of Western consumerism? But the men, the husbands $
- Perowne has had dealings with various Saudis in his office Jr
- wear suits, or trainers and tracksuits, or baggy shorts and I Rolexes, and are entirely charming and worldly and thor *' oughly 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 *
124 I
3* Saturday
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
125 Ian McEwan
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
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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 awav, 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
127 Ian McEwan
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.
The white plastic bag that holds the family dinner is heavy, dense with flesh and sodden paper, and the handles bite into his palm as he walks back to his car. Because of the pain in his chest, he isn't able to transfer the load to his left hand. Coming away from the dank seaweed odours of the fishmonger's, he thinks he can taste sweetness in the air, like warm hay drying in the fields in August. The smell - surely an illusion generated by contrast - persists, even with the traffic and the February chill. All those family summers at his father-in-law's place in the Ariege, in a south-west corner of France where the land begins to ripple and swell before the Pyrenees. The Chateau St Felix of warm, faintly pink stone, and two rounded towers and the fragment of a moat was where John Grammaticus retreated when his wife died, and where he mourned her with the famous sad-sweet love songs collected up in the volume called No Exequies. Not famous to Henry Perowne, who read no poetry in adult life even after he acquired a poet father-in-law. Of course, he
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began as soon as he discovered he'd fathered a poet himself. But it cost him an effort of an unaccustomed sort. Even a first line can produce a tightness behind his eyes. Novels and movies, being restlessly modern, propel you forwards or backwards through time, through days, years or even generations. But to do its noticing and judging, poetry balances itself on the pinprick of the moment. Slowing down, stopping yourself completely, to read and understand a poem is like trying to acquire an old-fashioned skill like drystone walling or trout tickling.
When Grammaticus came out of mourning, more than twenty years ago, he began a series of love affairs that still continues. The pattern is well established. A younger woman, usually English, sometimes French, is taken on as secretary and housekeeper, and by degrees becomes a kind of wife. After two or three years she'll walk out, unable to bear any more, and it will be her replacement who greets the Perowne family in late July. Rosalind is scathing at each turnaround, always preferring the last to the next, then, over time, developing a fondness. After all, it's hardly the new arrival's fault. The children, entirely without judgment, even as teenagers, are immediately kind to her. Perowne, constitutionally bound to love one woman all his life, has been quietly impressed, especially as the old man advances into his seventies. Perhaps he's slowing down at last, for Teresa, a jolly forty-year-old librarian from Brighton, has been with him almost four years.
The dinners outside in the interminable dusk, the scented wheels of hay in the small steep fields that surround the gardens, and the fainter smell of swimming-pool chlorine on the children's skin, and warm red wine from Cahors or Cabrieres, - it should be paradise. It almost is, which is why they continue to visit. But John can be a childish, domineering man, the sort of artist who grants himself the licence of a full spectrum mood swing. He can migrate in the space of a bottle of red wine from twinkly anecdotes to sudden eruption, then a huffy retreat to his study - that tall stooping back retreating
129 Ian McEivan
across the lawn in the gloom towards the lighted house, with Betty or Jane or Francine, and now Teresa following him in to smooth things out. He's never quite got the trick of conversation, tending to hear in dissenting views, however mild, a kind of affront, an invitation to mortal combat. The years and the drink are not softening him. And naturally, as he ages and writes less, he's become unhappier. His exile in France has been a prolonged sulk, darkened over two decades by various slights from the home country. There was a bad four-year patch when his Collected Poems was out of print and another publisher had to be found. John minded when Spender and not he was knighted, when Raine not Grammaticus got the editorship at Faber, when he lost the Oxford Professorship of Poetry to Fenton, when Hughes and later Motion were preferred as Poets Laureate, and above all when it was Heaney who got the Nobel. These names mean nothing to Perowne. But he understands how eminent poets, like senior consultants, live in a watchful, jealous world in which reputations are edgily tended and a man can be brought low by status anxiety. Poets, or at least this poet, are as earthbound as the rest.
For a couple of summers when the children were babies the Perownes went elsewhere, but they found nothing in southern Europe as beautiful as St Felix. It was where Rosalind spent her childhood holidays. The chateau was enormous and it was easy to keep out of John's way - he liked to spend several hours a day alone. There were rarely more than two or three bad moments in a week, and with time they've mattered less. And as the pattern of his love life became established, Rosalind has had her own delicate reasons to keep close contact with her father. The chateau belonged to her maternal grandparents and was the love of her mother's life. She was the one who modernised and restored the place. The worry is that if age and illness wear John down into finally marrying one of his secretaries, the chateau could pass out of the family into the hands of a newcomer. French inheritance
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laws might have prevented that, but there's a document, an old tontine, to show that St Felix has been exempted and that English law prevails. In his irritable way, John has assured his daughter he'll never remarry and that the chateau will be hers, but he refuses to put anything in writing.
That background anxiety will probably be resolved. Another more forceful reason why they've kept up their summer visits to the chateau is because Daisy and Theo used to insist - those were the old days, before John and Daisy fell out. They loved their grandfather and considered his silly moods proof of his difference, his greatness - a view he rather shared himself. He doted on them, never raised his voice against them, and hid from them his worst outbursts. From the beginning, he considered himself - rightly as it's turned out - a figure in their intellectual development. Once it became clear that Theo was never going to take more than a polite interest in books, John encouraged him at the piano and taught him a simple boogie in C. Then he bought him an acoustic guitar and lugged up from the cellars cardboard boxes of blues recordings on heavy old 78s as well as LPs, and made tapes which arrived in London in regular packages. On Theo's fourteenth birthday, his grandfather drove him to Toulouse to hear John Lee Hooker in one of his last appearances. One summer evening after dinner, Grammaticus and Theo performed 'St James' Infirmary' under a brilliant sky of stars, the old man tipping back his head and warbling in a husky American accent that made Rosalind tearful. Theo, still only fourteen, improvised a sweet and melancholy solo. Perowne, sitting apart with his wine by the pool, bare feet in the water, was touched too and blamed himself for not taking his son's talent seriously enough.