'Oh for God's sake, not that relativist stuff again. And you keep drifting off the point. No one wants Arab writers in jail. But invading Iraq isn't going to get them out.'
'It might. Here's a chance to turn one country around. Plant a seed. See if it flourishes and spreads.'
'You don't plant seeds with cruise missiles. They're going to hate the invaders. The religious extremists will get stronger. There'll be less freedom, more writers in prison.'
'My fifty pounds says three months after the invasion there'll be a free press in Iraq, and unmonitored Internet access too. The reformers in Iran will be encouraged, those Syrian and Saudi and Libyan potentates will be getting the jitters.'
Daisy says, 'Fine. And my fifty says it'll be a mess and even you will wish it never happened.'
They had various bets after arguments during her teenage years, generally concluded with a mock-formal handshake. Perowne found a way of paying up, even when he won - a form of concealed subsidy. After an exam seemed to go badly for her, seventeen-year-old Daisy angrily put twenty pounds on never getting into Oxford. To cheer her up he raised his side of the deal to five hundred, and when her acceptance came through she spent the money on a trip to Florence with a friend. Is she in the mood for shaking hands now? She
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comes away from the door, retrieves her champagne and moves to the far side of the kitchen and appears interested in Theo's CDs by the hi-fi. Her back is firmly turned on him. He remains on his stool at the centre island, playing with his glass, no longer drinking. He has a hollow feeling from arguing only a half of what he feels. He's a dove with Jay Strauss, and a hawk with his daughter. What sense is he making? And how luxurious, to work it all out at home in the kitchen, the geopolitical moves and military strategy, and not be held to account, by voters, newspapers, friends, historv. When there are no consequences, being wrong is simply an interesting diversion.
She takes a CD from its box and posts it in the player. He waits, knowing he'll get a clue to her mood, or even a message. At the piano intro he smiles. It's a record Theo brought into the house years ago, Chuck Berry's old pianist, Johnnie Johnson, singing Tanqueray', a slouching blues of reunion and friendship.
It was a long time comiri, But I knew I would see the day When you and I could sit down, And have a drink of Tanqueray.
She turns and comes towards him with a little dance shuffle. When she's at his side he takes her hand.
She says, 'Smells like the old warmonger's made one of his fish stews. Can I be of use?'
The young appeaser can set the table. And make a salad dressing if you like.'
She's on her way to the plate cupboard when they hear the doorbell, two overlong unsteady rings. They look at each other: it's not promising, that kind of persistence.
He says, 'Before you do that, slice a lemon. The gin's over there, tonic's in the fridge.'
He's amused by her theatrical eye-rolling and deep breath.
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'Here goes.'
'Stay cool/ he advises, and goes upstairs to greet his father in-law, the eminent poet.
Growing up in the suburbs in cosily shared solitude with his mother, Henry Perowne never felt the lack of a father. In the heavily mortgaged households around him, fathers were distant, work-worn figures of little obvious interest. To a child, a domestic existence in Perivale in the mid-sixties was regulated uniquely by a mother, a housewife; visiting n friend'^ house to pl.iv at weekends or holidavs, it was her domain you entered, her rules you temporarily lived by. She was the one who gave or withheld permission, or handed out the small change. He had no good reason to envy his friends an extra parent - when fathers weren't absent, they loomed irascibly, preventing rather than enabling the better, riskier elements of life. In his teens, when he scrutinised the few existing photographs of his father, it was less out of longing than narcissism - he hoped to discover in those strong, acne-free features some promise for his own future chances with girls. He wanted the face, but he didn't want the advice, the refusals or the judgments. Perhaps he was bound to regard a father-in-law as an imposition, even if he'd acquired one far less imposing than John Grammaticus.
Right from their first meeting in 1982 when he arrived at the chateau hours after consummating his love for Rosalind on a lower bunk on the Bilbao ferry, Senior House Officer Perowne was determined not to be patronised, not to be treated like a prospective son. He was an adult with specialised skills that could stand alongside those of any poet. Through Rosalind, he knew of 'Mount Fuji', the much anthologised Grammaticus poem, but Henry didn't read poetry and said so without shame at dinner that first night. At that time John was deep into his No Exequies - his last extended creative period as it turned out - and what some junior
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doctor didn't read in his spare time failed to intrigue him. Nor did he seem to care or even notice, later when the Scotch was on the table, the same doctor disagreeing with him on politics - Grammaticus was an early fan of Mrs Thatcher or music - bebop had betrayed jazz - or the true nature of the French - venal to a man.
Rosalind said the next morning that Henry had tried too hard to get the old man's attention - the opposite of what he intended, and a very irritating remark. But even though he ceased to be argumentative, nothing much changed between them after that first evening, even nfter rnornnKe, children and the passing of more than two decades. Perowne keeps his distance, and Grammaticus is happy with the arrangement, and looks straight through his son-in-law to his daughter, to his grandchildren. The two men are superficially friendly and at bottom bored by each other. Perowne can't see how poetry - rather occasional work it appears, like grape picking - can occupy a whole working life, or how such an edifice of reputation and self-regard can rest on so little, or why one should believe a drunk poet is different from any other drunk; while Grammaticus - Perowne's guess - regards him as one more tradesman, an uncultured and tedious medic, a class of men and women he distrusts more as his dependency on it grows with age.
There's another matter, naturally never discussed. The house on the square, like the chateau, came to Rosalind's mother Marianne through her parents. When she married Grammaticus, the London house became the family home where Rosalind and her brother grew up. When Marianne died in the road accident, the terms of her will were clear the London house passed to the children, and John was to have St Felix. Four years after they were married, Rosalind and Henry, living in a tiny flat in Archway, raised a mortgage to buy out her brother who wanted an apartment in New York. It was a joyful day when the Perownes and their two young children moved into the big house. These various
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transactions were made without ill-will. But Grammaticus tends to behave on his occasional visits as if he's returning home, as if he were an absentee landlord greeting his tenants, asserting his rights. Or perhaps Henry is too sensitive, having no place in his constitution for a father figure. Either way, it irks him; he prefers to see his father-in-law, if at all, in France.
As he goes towards the front door, Perowne reminds himself, against the promptings of the champagne, to keep his feelings well disguised; the purpose of the evening is to reconcile Daisy to her grandfather, three years on from what Then has named, in honour of various thrillers, 'The Newdigate Rebuff. She'll want to show7 him the proofs, and the old man should rightfully claim his part in her success. On that good thought he opens the door to see Grammaticus several feet away, standing in the road, with long belted woollen coat, fedora and cane, head tipped back, his features in profile caught in the cool white light from the lamps in the square. Most likely he was posing for Daisy.
'Ah Henry,' he says - the disappointment is in the downward inflection - 'I was looking at the tower . . .'
Grammaticus doesn't shift position, so Perowne obligingly steps out to join him.
'I was trying to see it', he continues, 'through the eyes of Robert Adam when he was setting out the square, wondering what he would have made of it. What do you think?'
It rises above the plane trees in the central gardens, behind the reconstructed facade on the southern side; set high on the glass-paned stalk, six stacked circular terraces bearing their giant dishes, and above them, a set of fat wheels or sleeves within which is bound the geometry of fluorescent lights. At night, the dancing Mercury is a playful touch. When he was small, Theo liked to ask whether the tower would hit the house if it fell their way, and was always gratified when his father told him it most certainly would. Since
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Perowne and Grammaticus have not yet greeted each other or shaken hands, their conversation is disembodied, like a chat-room exchange.
Perowne, the courteous host, joins in the game. 'Well, he might have taken an engineer's view. All that glass, and the unsupported height, would have amazed him. So would the electric light. He might have thought of it more as a machine than a building.'
Grammaticus indicates that this is not the answer at all. The truth is, his only analogy at the end of the eighteenth century would have been a cathedral spire. He was bound to think of it as a religious building of some kind - why else build so high? He'd have to assume those dishes were ornamental, or used in rites. A religion of the future.'
'In which case, not far out.'
Grammaticus raises his voice to speak over him. 'For God's sake, man. Look at the proportions of those pillars, the carving on those capitals!' Now he's jabbing his cane towards the facade on the square's east side. There's beauty for you. There's self-knowledge. A different world, a different consciousness. Adam would have been stunned by the ugliness of that glass thing. No human scale. Top heavy. No grace, no warmth. It would have put fear in his heart. If that's going to be our religion, he'd've said to himself, then we're truly fucked.'
Their view of the Georgian pillars of the east facade includes in the foreground two figures on a bench about a hundred feet away wearing leather jackets and woollen watch caps. Their backs are turned and they're sitting close together, hunched forward, so that Perowne assumes that a deal is in progress. Why else sit out here so intently on a cold February night? Sudden impatience comes over him; before Grammaticus can continue to damn the civilisation they share, or exult in another well out of their reach, he says, 'Daisy's waiting for you. She's making you a powerful drink.' He takes his father-in-law's elbow and shoves
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him gently in the direction of the wide, brightly lit open door. John is well into his expansive, relatively benign stage and Daisy shouldn't miss it. Reconciliation won't be a theme of the later phases.
He takes his father-in-law's coat, stick and hat, shows him into the sitting room and goes to call down to Daisy. She's already on her way up with a trav - a new bottle of cham
j j r j
pagrie as well as the old, the gin, ice, lemon, extra glasses for Rosalind and Theo, and macadamia nuts in the painted bowl she brought back from a student trip to Chile. When she gi\vs him a quorvmg look he makes a cheerful face: it's going to be fine. Thinking she and her grandfather are bound to embrace, he takes the tray and follows her in. But Grammaticus, who's standing in the centre of the room, draws himself up rather formally, and Daisy holds back. It could be he's surprised by her beauty, just as Henry himself was; or struck by her familiarity. They go towards each other murmuring respectively, 'Daisy . . . Grandad', shake hands, and then, by a compact enforced by the movement of their bodies which they can't reverse once it's begun, they awkwardly kiss cheeks.
Henry sets down the tray and mixes a gin and tonic. 'Here you are,' he says. 'Let's raise a glass. To poetry/
The old man's hand, he notices, is shaking as he takes his gin. Lifting their glasses, humming or grunting without quite repeating the words a mere bonesetter has no right to utter, Daisy and her grandfather drink.
Grammaticus says to him, 'She's the image of Marianne when I first met her.'
His eyes, Perowne notes, are not moist like his own were; despite the passion and the mood reversals, there's something controlled and untouchable, even steely about Grammaticus. He has a way of sailing through encounters, of being lofty, even in close company. Long ago, according to Rosalind, in his thirties, he developed the manner of the old and grand, of not caring what anybody thinks.
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Daisy says to him, 'You look awfully well.' He puts his hand on her arm. "I re-read them all in the hotel this afternoon. Bloody marvellous, Daisy. There's no one like you.' He drinks again, and quotes in a curious singsong.
My saucy bark, inferior far to his
On your broad main doth bravely appear.
He's twinkly, and teasing her the way he used to. 'Now. Be honest. Who is the other poet with talent the size of a galleon?'
Grammaticus is fishing for the tribute he believes must be his by right. A little too soon in the evening. He's going too fast. It's quite possible that Daisy has dedicated her book to her grandfather, although Perowne has worries about that. Another reason why he wanted to see the proofs.
Daisy is confused. She goes to speak, changes her mind, and then says through a forced smile, 'You'll just have to wait and see.'
'Of course, Shakespeare didn't really think he was a little sailing boat among the ocean-going competition. He was trying it on, being sardonic. So perhaps you are too, my dear girl.'
She's hesitant, embarrassed, struggling with a decision. She hides behind her raised glass. Then she puts it down on the table and seems to make up her mind.
'Granddad, it's not "doth bravely appear".'
'Of course it is. I taught you that sonnet.'
The know you did. But how can the line scan with "bravely"? It's "On your broad main doth wilfully appear".'