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but 'invigorated by a young woman's sensuality', and darker humour. In his near-illegible longhand he praised the 'intellectual muscle', the 'courage of hard and independent thinking' that informed the scheme of her poems. He loved the 'slatternly wit' of her 'Six Short Songs'. He said he 'laughed like an idiot' at The Ballad of the Brain on my Shoe' - a poem that resulted from Daisy's visit to the operating theatre one morning to watch her father at work. It's the one, of course, that Henry likes least. His daughter was present for a straightforward MCA aneurysm. No grey or white matter was lost. He thought he caught in the poem art's essential but - he had to suppose - forgivable dishonesty. Daisy sent her grandfather an affectionate postcard. She told him how much she missed him and how much she owed to him. She said his remarks thrilled her and she was reading them over and again and was giddy with his praise.
Now the old man and Daisy are converging from Toulouse and Paris. A TV company wanting to make a programme about his life is putting Grammaticus up in style at Claridge's. At dinner tonight the reconciliation will be sealed - this is the idea, but Perowne, lugging his bag of fish, moving with the crowds back down the High Street, has shared too many meals with his father-in-law to be optimistic; and matters have moved on in the past three years. These days Grammaticus starts his evenings or late afternoons the way he used to, with a few serious jolts of gin before the wine - a habit he managed to kick for a while in his sixties. Another development is the tumblers of Scotch to round out the day, before he visits the pre-bedtime 'cleansing' beer. If he appears on the doorstep in a cheerful or excited state, he'll feel that un cxamined compulsion of his to dominate in his daughter's house which makes him drink faster. Becoming drunk is a journey that generally elates him in the early stages - he's good company, expansive, mischievous and fun, the famous old poet, almost as happy listening as talking. But once the destination is met, once established up there on that unsunny
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plateau, a fully qualified drunk, the nastier muses, the goblins of aggression, paranoia, self-pity take control. The expectation now is that an evening with John will go bad somehow, unless everyone around is prepared to toil at humouring and flattering and hours of frozen-faced listening. No one will be.
Perowne reaches his car and stows his odorous bag in the boot, in among the family's hiking boots and backpacks and last summer's tennis balls. The unprofessional thought sometimes occurs to him that the kindest touch for everyone, including the old man himself, would be to slip him a minor tranquilliser while he's still on the cheerful rising track, some short-acting benzodiazepine derivative dissolved into a strong red wine like Rioja, and as his yawns multiply, guide him up the stairs to his room, or towards his taxi - the famous old poet in bed half an hour before midnight, tired and happy, and no harm done.
He's driven a couple of hundred yards through Marylebone in slow-moving traffic when he notices in his rear-view mirror, two cars back, a red BMW. All he can actually see is a corner of its offside wing and he can't tell whether the wing mirror is missing. A white van interposes itself at a junction, and he can barely see the red car at all. It's not impossible that it's Baxter, but he feels no particular anxiety about seeing him again. In fact, he wouldn't mind talking to him. His case is interesting, and the offer of help was sincere. What concerns him more is that the Saturday-morning traffic is no longer moving - there's an obstruction ahead. When he looks again, the red car has gone. And then he forgets about it; his attention is caught by a television shop to his left.
In its window display are angled banks of identical images on various kinds of screen - cathode ray, plasma, handheld, home cinema. What's showing on every device is the Prime Minister giving a studio interview. The close-up of a face is steadily becoming a close-up of a mouth, until the
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lips fill half the screen. He has suggested in the past that if we knew as much as he did, we too would want to go to war. Perhaps in this slow zoom the director is consciously responding to a calculation a watching population is bound to want to make: is this politician telling the truth? But can anyone really know the sign, the tell of an honest man? There's been some good work on this very question. Perowne has read Paul Ekman on the subject. In the smile of a self-conscious liar certain muscle groups in the face are not activated. They only come to life as the expression of genuine feeling. The smile of a deceiver is flawed, insufficient. But can we see these muscles resting there inert when there's so much local variation in faces, pads of fat, odd concavities, differences of bone structure? Especially difficult when the first and best unconscious move of a dedicated liar is to persuade himself he's sincere. And once he's sincere, all deception vanishes.
For all the difficulties, the instinctive countermeasures, we go on watching closely, trying to read a face, trying to measure intentions. Friend or foe? It's an ancient preoccupation. And even if, down through the generations, we are only right slightly more than half the time, it's still worth doing. More than ever now, on the edge of war, when the country still imagines it can call back this deed before it's too late. Does this man sincerely believe that going to war will make us safer? Does Saddam possess weapons of terrifying potential? Simply, the Prime Minister might be sincere and wrong. Some of his bitterest opponents don't doubt his good faith. He could be on the verge of a monstrous miscalculation. Or perhaps it will work out - the dictator vanquished without hundreds of thousands of deaths, and after a year or two, a democracy at last, secular or Islamic, nestling among the weary tyrannies of the Middle East. Wedged in traffic alongside the multiple faces, Henry experiences his own ambivalence as a form of vertigo, of dizzy indecision. In neurosurgery he chose a safe and simple profession.
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He knows of patients who can't even recognise, let alone read, the faces of their closest family or friends. In most cases the right middle fusiform gyrus has been compromised, usually by a stroke. Nothing a neurosurgeon can do about that. And it must have been a moment of deficient face recognition - transient prosopagnosia - that was involved in his one meeting with Tony Blair. It was back in May 2000, a time now acquiring a polish, a fake gleam of innocence. Before the current preoccupations, there was a public project widely accounted a success. No one seemed to deny, something went right. A disused power station on the south bank of the Thames was discovered to be useful as a museum for contemporary art. The conversion was bold and brilliant. At the opening party for the Tate Modern there were four thousand guests - celebrities, politicians, the great and good - and hundreds of young men and women distributing champagne and canapes, and a general euphoria untainted by cynicism unusual at such events. Henry was there as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons. Rosalind was invited through her newspaper. Theo and Daisy came along too, and vanished into the crowd as soon as they arrived. Their parents didn't see them until the following morning. The guests gathered in the industrial vastness of the old turbine hall where the din of thousands of excited voices seemed to bear aloft a giant spider hovering below iron girders. After an hour, Henry and Rosalind broke away from their friends and wandered with their drinks among the exhibits through the relatively deserted galleries.
Such was their wellbeing that even the sullen orthodoxies of conceptual art seemed part of the fun, like earnest displays of pupils' work at a school open day. Perowne liked Cornelia Parker's 'Exploding Shed' - a humorous construction, like a brilliant idea bursting out of a mind. They came into a room of Rothkos and for several minutes remained pleasantly becalmed among the giant slabs of dusky purple and orange. Then they went through a wide portal into the
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gallery next door and came across what at first seemed like another installation. Part of it, a low pile of bricks, really was an exhibit. Standing beyond it, at the far end of the large room, was the Prime Minister and at his side the gallery director. Twenty feet away, on the nearside of the bricks, nominally restrained by a velvet rope, was the press corps -- thirty photographers or more, and reporters - and what looked like gallery officials and Downing Street staff. The Perownes had come in on an oddly silent moment. Blair and the director smiled and posed for the cameras, whose pic hiiV'S would also include fh<: famous bricks The flashes twin kled randomly, but none of 'die photographers was calling out in the usual way. The calmness of the scene seemed an extension of the Rothko gallery next door.
Then the director, perhaps looking for an excuse to bring the session to an end, raised a hand in greeting to Rosalind. They knew each other through some legal matter that had ended amicably. The director guided Blair around the bricks and crossed the gallery towards the Perownes, and behind them wheeled the retinue, the photographers with their cameras up and ready, the diarists with their notebooks in case something interesting should happen at last. Helplessly, the Perownes watched them all approach. In a sudden press of bodies they were introduced to the Prime Minister. He took Rosalind's hand first, then Henry's. The grip was firm and manly, and to Perowne's surprise, Blair was looking at him with recognition and interest. The gaze was intelligent and intense, and unexpectedly youthful. So much had yet to happen.
He said, The really admire the work you're doing.' Perowne said automatically, 'Thank you.' But he was impressed. It was just conceivable, he supposed, that Blair with his good memory and reputation for absorbing the details of his ministers' briefs, would have heard of the hospital's excellent report last month - all targets met - and even of the special mention of the neurosurgery department's exceptional
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results. Procedures twenty-three per cent up on last year. Later Henry realised what an absurd notion that was.
The Prime Minister, who still had hold of his hand, added, 'In fact, we've got two of your paintings hanging in Downing |j
Street. Cherie and I adore them.' f
'No, no,' Perowne said.
'Yes, yes,' the Prime Minister insisted, pumping his hand. He was in no mood for artistic modesty.
'No, I think you - ' J
'Honestly. They're in the dining room.' �
'You're making a mistake/ Perowne said, and on that word there passed through the Prime Minister's features for the "*
briefest instant a look of sudden alarm, of fleeting self-doubt. No one else saw his expression freeze and his eyes bulge minimally. A hairline fracture had appeared in the assurance of power. Then he continued as before, no doubt making the rapid calculation that given all the people pushing in around them trying to listen, there could be no turning back. Not without a derisive press tomorrow.
'Anyway. They truly are marvellous. Congratulations.'
One of the aides, a woman in a black trouser suit, cut in and said, 'Prime Minister, we have three and a half minutes. We have to move.'
Blair let go of Perowne's hand and without a farewell beyond a nod and a curt pursing of the lips, turned and let himself be led away. And the crew, the press, the flunkeys, the bodyguards, the gallery underlings and their director surged behind him, and within seconds the Perownes were standing in the empty gallery with the bricks as if nothing had happened at all.
Watching from his car the multiple images cutting between interviewer and guest, Perowne wonders if such moments, stabs of cold panicky doubt, are an increasing part of the "
Prime Minister's days, or nights. There might not be a second UN resolution. The next weapons inspectors' report could C '
also be inconclusive. The Iraqis might use biological weapons f
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against the invasion force. Or, as one former inspector keeps insisting, there might no longer be any weapons of mass destruction at all. There's talk of famine and three million refugees, and they're already preparing the reception camps in Syria and Iran. The UN is predicting hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths. There could be revenge attacks on London. And still the Americans remain vague about their post-war plans. Perhaps they have none. In all, Saddam could be overthrown at too high a cost. It's a future no one can read. Government ministers speak up loyally, various newspapers back the war, there's a fair degree of anxious support in the country along with the dissent, but no one really doubts that in Britain one man alone is driving the matter forward. Night sweats, hideous dreams, the wild, lurching fantasies of sleeplessness? Or simple loneliness? Whenever he sees him now on screen, Henry looks out for an awareness of the abyss, for that hairline crack, the moment of facial immobility, the brief faltering he privately witnessed. But all he sees is certainty, or at worst a straining earnestness.
He finds a vacant residents' parking space across the road from his front door. As he takes the shopping from the boot of his car, he sees in the square, lounging by the bench nearest his house, the same young men who are often there in the early evening, and then again late at night. There are two West Indians and two, sometimes three Middle Easterners who might be Turks. All of them look genial and prosperous, and frequently lean on each other's shoulders and laugh loudly. At the kerb is a Mercedes, same model as Perowne's, but black, and a figure always at the wheel. Now and then a stranger will come by and stop to talk to the group. One of them will cross to the car, consult with the driver and return, there'll be another huddle, and then the stranger will walk on. They are entirely self-contained and unthreatening, and Perowne assumed for a long time they were dealers, running a pavement cafe in cocaine perhaps, or ecstasy and
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marijuana. Their customers do not look haunted or degenerate enough to be heroin or crack users. It was Theo who put his father right. The group sells tickets for various fringe rap gigs around the city. They also sell bootleg CDs and can 1