It is a slow haul back into central London - more than an hour to reach Westbourne Grove from Perivale. Dense traffic is heading into the city for Saturday night pleasures just as the first wave of coaches is bringing the marchers out. During
167
Ian McEwan
the long crawl towards the lights at Gypsy Corner, he lowers his window to taste the scene in full - the bovine patience of a jam, the abrasive tang of icy fumes, the thunderous idling machinery in six lanes east and west, the yellow street light bleaching colour from the bodywork, the jaunty thud of entertainment systems, and red tail lights stretching way ahead into the city, white headlights pouring out of it. He tries to see it, or feel it, in historical terms, this moment in the last decades of the petroleum age, when a nineteenth-century device is brought to final perfection in the early years of the twenty-first; when the unprecedented wealth of masses at serious play in the unforgiving modern city makes for a sight that no previous age can have imagined. Ordinary people! Rivers of light! He wants to make himself see it as Newton might, or his contemporaries, Boyle, Hooke, Wren, Willis those clever, curious men of the English Enlightenment who for a few years held in their minds nearly all the world's science. Surely, they would be awed. Mentally, he shows it off to them: this is what we've done, this is commonplace in our time. All this teeming illumination would be wondrous if he could only see it through their eyes. But he can't quite trick himself into it. He can't feel his way past the iron weight of the actual to see beyond the boredom of a traffic tailback, or the delay to which he himself is contributing, or the drab commercial hopes of a parade of shops he's been stuck beside for fifteen minutes. He doesn't have the lyric gift to see beyond it - he's a realist, and can never escape. But then, perhaps two poets in the family are enough.
Beyond Acton the traffic eases. In the late-afternoon dusk a single slab of red in the western sky, almost rectangular, an emblem of the natural world, of wilderness somewhere out of sight, fades slowly as it pursues him in his rearview mirror. Even if the westbound lanes out of the city were free, he's glad not to be heading that way. He wants to get home and collect himself before he starts cooking. He needs to check that there's champagne in the fridge, and bring some red
168
Saturday
wine into the kitchen to warm. The cheese too needs to be softened in the centrally-heated air. He needs to lie down for ten minutes. He's certainly in no mood for Theo's amplified blues.
But this is parenthood, as fixed as destiny, and at last he's parking in a street off Westbourne Grove, a couple of hundred yards from the old music hall theatre. He's forty-five minutes late. When he reaches it, the building is silent and in darkness and the doors are closed. But they open easily when he pushes against them, so that he stumbles as he mters the foyer. He waits to let his eyes adjust to the low light, straining to hear sounds, aware of the familiar smell of dusty carpeting. Is he too late? It would almost be a relief. He moves deeper into the lobby, past what he thinks must be the ticket office, until he comes to another set of double doors. He gropes for a metal bar, pushes down and enters.
A hundred feet away, the stage is in soft bluish light, broken by pinpricks of red on the amplifier racks. By the drums, the high hat catches the light and projects an elongated purple disc across the floor of the theatre which is without seats. There's no other light apart from an orange exit sign beyond the stage. People are moving and crouching by the equipment, and stirring beside the gleam of a keyboard. Just discernible above the low fuzzy hum of the speaker banks is a murmur of voices. A silhouetted figure stands at the front of the stage adjusting the heights of two microphones.
Perowne moves to his right, and in total darkness follows the wall with his hand until he's facing the centre of the stage. A second person appears by the microphones carrying a saxophone whose intricate outline is sharply defined against the blue. In response to a call, the keyboard sounds a single note, and a bass guitar tunes its top string to it. Another guitar plays a broken open chord - all in tune, then a third does the same. The drummer sits in and moves his cymbals closer and fiddles with the pedal on a bass drum. The murmur of voices ceases, and the roadies disappear into the wings.
169
r
Ian McEivan
Theo and Chas are at the front of the stage by the microphones looking out across the auditorium.
It's only at this point that Perowne realises they've seen him come in and that they've been waiting. Theo's guitar starts out alone with a languorous two-bar turnaround, a simple descending line from the fifth fret, tumbling into a thick chord which oozes into a second and remains hanging there, an unresolved fading seventh; then, with a sharp kick and roll on the torn, and five stealthy, rising notes from the bass, the blues begins. It's a downbeat 'Stormy Monday' kind of song, but the chords are dense and owe more to ja/z. The stage light is shifting to white. Theo, motionless in his usual trance, goes three times round the twelve bars. It's a smooth, rounded tone, plenty of feedback to mould the notes into their wailing lament, with a little sting in the attack on the shorter runs. The piano and rhythm guitar lay down their thick jazzy chords. Henry feels the bassline thump into his sternum and puts his hand to the sore spot there. It's building into a big sound, and he's uncomfortable, and resists it. In his present state, he'd prefer to be at home with a Mozart trio on the hi-fi, and a glass of icy white wine.
But he doesn't hold out for long. Something is swelling, or lightening in him as Theo's notes rise, and on the second turnaround lift into a higher register and begin to soar. This is what the boys have been working on, and they want him to hear it, and he's touched. He's catching on to the idea, to the momentum of their exuberance and expertise. At the same time he discovers that the song is not in the usual pattern of a twelve-bar blues. There's a middle section with an unworldly melody that rises and falls in semitones. Chas leans into his microphone to sing with Theo in a close, strange harmony.
Baby, you can choose despair, Or you can be happy if you dare. So let me take you there, My city square, city square.
170
Saturday
Then Chas, with all his fresh tricks from New York, turns aside, lifts his sax and comes in on a wild and ragged high note, like a voice cracking with joy that holds and holds, then tapers and drops away in a downward spiral, echoing Theo's intro, and delivers the band back into the twelve-bar round. Chas too goes three times round. The sax is edgy, with choppy rhythms and notes held against the chord changes, then released in savage runs. Theo and the bass guitarist are playing in octaves a tricksy repeated figure that shifts in unex J ways and never quite returns to its starting point. This
pcctec
i^ a blues at walking speed, but a driving rhythm is building up. On Chas's third turnaround, the two boys come back to the mikes, back to the lilting refrain whose harmonies are so close they're discords. Is Theo paying tribute to his teacher, to Jack Bruce of Cream?
So let me take you there City square, city square.
Then it's the keyboard's break, and the others join in the difficult, circular riff.
No longer tired, Henry comes away from the wall where he's been leaning, and walks into the middle of the dark auditorium, towards the great engine of sound. He lets it engulf him. There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything you have to others, but lose nothing of yourself. Out in the real world there exist detailed plans, visionary projects for peaceable realms, all conflicts resolved, happiness for everyone, for ever - mirages for which people are
171
I
Ian McEzvan
prepared to die and kill. Christ's kingdom on earth, the *
workers' paradise, the ideal Islamic state. But only in music, 4
and only on rare occasions, does the curtain actually lift on
this dream of community, and it's tantalisingly conjured,
before fading away with the last notes. ; 7.7/")-/ / !/
Naturally, no one can ever agree when it's happening. ' L \J l/L-1
Henry last heard it for himself at the Wigmore Hall, a Utopian community briefly realised in the Schubert Octet, when the 7"
wind players with little leaning, shrugging movements of their bodies, wafted their notes across the stage at the string section who sent them back sweetened. He also heard it long ago at Daisy and Theo's school, when a discordantly wailing school orchestra, with a staff and pupil choir, attempted Purcell, and made with cracked notes an innocent and blissful concord of adults and children. And here it is now, a coherent world, everything fitting at last. He stands swaying in the dark, staring up at the stage, his right hand in his pocket gripping his keys. Theo and Chas drift back to centre stage to sing their unearthly chorus. Or you can be happy if you dare. He knows what his mother meant. He can go for miles, he feels lifted up, right high across the counter. He doesn't want the song to end.
172 ^
*
m
I
He doesn't bother to park in the mews. Instead, he pulls up right outside his front door - it's legal at this time of evening to be on a yellow line and he's impatient to be indoors. But he takes a few seconds to examine the damage to the passenger door - barely a mark. As he looks up from the car, he notices that the house is in darkness. Naturally, Theo is still at rehearsal, Rosalind will be picking her way through the last fine points of her court application. A few widely separated flakes of snow picked out by street light show up vividly against the windows' glossy black. His father-in-law and daughter are due and he's pressed for time. As he opens the door he's trying to remember the exact phrasing of a remark Theo made earlier in the day that didn't trouble him at the time. It nags at him briefly now, but the half-hearted effort of recall itself fades as he steps into the warmth of the hall and turns on the lights; a mere light bulb can explode a thought. He goes straight down to the wine racks and takes out four bottles. His kind of fish stew needs a robust country wine - red, not white. Grammaticus introduced him to a Tautavel, Cotes de Roussillon Villages and Henry has made it his house wine - delicious, and less than fifty pounds a case. Uncorking wines hours before they're drunk is a form of magical
175
I
qg$
Ian McEwan *
t 5
thinking; the surface area exposed to the air is minute and *
can't possibly make a detectable difference. However, he r
does want the bottles warmer, and he carries them into the kitchen and puts them by the stove.
Three bottles of champagne are already in the fridge. He takes a step towards the CD player, then changes his mind for he's feeling the pull, like gravity, of the approaching TV news. It's a condition of the times, this compulsion to hear ~
how it stands with the world, and be joined to the gener ality, to a community of anxiety. The habit's grown stronger these past two years; a different scale of news value has been set by monstrous and spectacular scenes. The possibility of their recurrence is one thread that binds the days. The government's counsel - that an attack in a European or American t city is an inevitability - isn't only a disclaimer of responsi bility, it's a heady promise. Everyone fears it, but there's also a darker longing in the collective mind, a sickening for self punishment and a blasphemous curiosity. Just as the hospitals have their crisis plans, so the television networks stand ready to deliver, and their audiences wait. Bigger, grosser next time. Please don't let it happen. But let me see it all the same, as it's happening and from every angle, and let me be among the first to know. Also, Henry needs to hear about the pilots in custody.
With the idea of the news, inseparable from it, at least at weekends, is the lustrous prospect of a glass of red wine. He empties the last of a Cotes du Rhone into a glass, puts the TV on mute and sets about stripping and chopping three onions. Impatient of the papery outer layers, he makes a deep incision, forcing his thumb in four layers deep and ripping them away, wasting a third of the flesh. He chops the remainder rapidly and tips it into a casserole with a lot of olive oil. What he likes about cooking is its relative imprecision and lack of discipline - a release from the demands of the theatre. In the kitchen, the consequences of failure are mild: disappointment, a wisp of disgrace, rarely voiced. No
176 Saturday
one actually dies. He strips and chops eight fat cloves of garlic and adds them to the onions. From recipes he draws only the broadest principles. The cookery writers he admires speak of 'handfuls' and 'a sprinkling', of 'chucking in' this or that. They list alternative ingredients and encourage experimentation. Henry accepts that he'll never make a decent cook, that he belongs to what Rosalind calls the hearty school. Into his palm he empties several dried red chillies from a pot and crushes them between his hands and lets the flakes fall with their seeds into the onions and garlic. The TV news comes up but he doesn't touch the mute. It's the same helicopter shot from before it got dark, the same crowds still filing into the park, the same general celebration. Onto the softened onions and garlic - pinches of saffron, some bay leaves, orange-peel gratings, oregano, five anchovy fillets, two tins of peeled tomatoes. On the big Hyde Park stage, sound-bite extracts of speeches by a venerable politician of the left, a pop star, a playwright, a trade unionist. Into a stockpot he eases the skeletons of three skates. Their heads are intact, their lips girlishly full. Their eyes go cloudy on contact with the boiling water. A senior police officer is answering questions about the march. By his tight smile and the tilt of his head he appears satisfied with the day. From the green string bag of mussels Henry takes a dozen or so and drops them in with the skate. If they're alive and in pain, he isn't to know. Now that same earnest reporter, silently mouthing all there is to know about the unprecedented gathering. The juice of the tomatoes is simmering with the onions and the rest, and turning reddish-orange with the saffron.