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wrist and feels for his pulse. It's quite unnecessary because the monitor's showing a reading in bright blue numerals - sixty-five beats per minute. He does it because he wants to. It was one of the first things he learned to do as a student. Simple, a matter of primal contact, reassuring to the patient - so long as it's done with unfaltering authority. Count the beats, those soft footfalls, over fifteen seconds, then multiply by four. The nurse is still up at the far end of the ward. The constables in the corridor are just visible through a window in the unit's swing doors. Far more than a quarter of a minute passes. In effect, he's holding Baxter's hand while he attempts to sift and order his thoughts and decide precisely what should be done.
Rosalind has left a lamp on in the bedroom, by the sofa, under the mirror; the dimmer switch is turned low and the bulb gives less light than a candle. She's lying curled on her side, with the covers bunched against her stomach, and the pillows discarded on the floor - sure signs of troubled sleep. He watches her from the foot of the bed for a minute or so, waiting to see if he disturbed her as he came in. She looks young - her hair has fallen forwards across her face, giving her a carefree, dissolute air. He goes to the bathroom and undresses in semi-darkness because he doesn't want to see himself in the mirror - the sight of his haggard face could set him off on a meditation about ageing, which would poison his sleep. He takes a shower to wash away the sweat of concentration and all traces of the hospital - he imagines fine bone dust from Baxter's skull lodged in the pores of his forehead - and soaps himself vigorously. As he's drying he notices that even in poor light, the bruise on his chest is visible and appears to have spread, like a stain in a cloth. It hurts less though when he touches it. It feels like a distant memory now, months ago, when he took that blow and felt the sharp ridge of a shock wave run through his body. More insult than pain. Perhaps he should turn the light on after all and examine it.
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But he goes into the bedroom, still with his towel, and switches off the lamp. One shutter stands ajar by an inch, casting a blurred rod of soft white light across the floor and up the facing wall. He doesn't trouble himself with closing the shutter - total darkness, sense deprivation, might activate his thoughts. Better to stare at something, and hope to feel his eyelids grow heavy. Already, his tiredness seems fragile, or unreliable, like a pain that comes and goes. He needs to nurture it, and avoid thoughts at all costs. Standing on his side of the bed, he hesitates; there's enough light to see that Rosalind has taken all the covers, and has knotted them under her and against her chest. Pulling them free is bound to wake her, but it's too cold to sleep without them. He fetches from the bathroom two heavy towelling dressing gowns to use as blankets. She's sure to roll over soon, and then he'll take his share.
But as he's getting into bed, she puts her hand on his arm and whispers, 'I kept dreaming it was you. Now it really is.'
She lifts the covers and lets him enter the tent of her warmth. Her skin is hot, his is cool. They lie on their sides, face to face. He can barely see her, but her eyes show two points of light, gathered from the tip of the white bar rising on the wall behind him. He puts his arms around her and as she moves closer into him, he kisses her head.
She says, 'You smell good.'
He grunts, vaguely in gratitude. Then there's silence, as they try out the possibility that they can treat this like any other disturbed night and fall asleep in each other's arms. Or perhaps they're only waiting to begin.
After a little while Henry says quietly, Tell me what you're feeling.' As he says this, he puts his hand in the small of her back.
She breathes out sharply. He's asked her a difficult question. 'Angry,' she tells him at last. Because she says it in a whisper, it sounds unconvincing. She adds, 'And terrified snll, of them.'
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As he's starting to reassure her they'll never come back, she speaks over him. 'No, no. I mean, I feel they're in the room. They're still here. I'm still frightened.'
He feels her legs begin to shake and he draws her closer to him and kisses her face. 'Darling/ he murmurs.
'Sorry. I had this shaking earlier, when I came to bed. Then it calmed down. Oh God. I want it to stop.'
He reaches dowTn and places his hands on her legs - the shivering appears to emanate from her knees in tight, dry spasms, as though her bones were grating in their joints.
'You're in shock/ he says as he massages her legs.
'Oh God/ she keeps saying, but nothing else.
Several minutes pass before the trembling subsides, during which he holds her, and rocks her, and tells her he loves her.
When she's calm at last she says in her usual, level voice, T'm angry too. I can't help it, but I want him punished. I mean, I hate him, I want him to die. You asked me what I felt, not what I think. That vicious, loathsome man, what he did to John, and forcing Daisy like that, and holding the knife against me, and using it to make you go upstairs. I thought I might never see you again alive . . /
She stops, and he waits. When she speaks again her tone is more deliberate. They're lying face to face again, he's holding her hand, caressing her fingers with his thumb.
'When I talked to you at the front door, about revenge I mean, it was my own feelings I was afraid of, I thought that in your position I'd do something really terrible to him. I was worried that you were having the same ideas, that you'd get in serious trouble.'
There's so much he wants to tell her, discuss with her, but this is not the time. He knows he won't get from her the kind of response he wants. He'll do it tomorrow, when she's less upset, before the police come.
With her fingertips she finds his lips and kisses them. 'What happened in the operation?'
'It was fine. Pretty much routine. He lost a lot of blood,
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we patched him up. Rodney was good, but he might have had trouble dealing with it alone/
'So this person, Baxter, will live to face charges.'
Henry doesn't reply to this beyond an uncommitted nasal hum of near-assent. It's useful to consider the moment he'll broach the subject; Sunday morning, coffee in large white cups, the conservatory in brilliant winter sunshine, the newspapers they deplore but always read, and as he reaches forwards to touch her hand she looks up and he sees in her face that calm intelligence, focused, ready to forgive. He opens his eyes into darkness, and discovers he's been asleep, perhaps for only a few seconds.
Rosalind is saying, 'He got terribly drunk, maudlin, the usual stuff. It was hard to take after everything else. But the kids were fantastic. They took him back in a taxi and a hotel doctor came out and looked at his nose.'
Henry has a passing sensation of travelling through the night. He and Rosalind once took a sleeper train from Marseilles to Paris and squeezed into the top bunk together where they lay on their fronts to watch sleeping France go by and talk until dawn. Tonight, the conversation is the journey.
In his comfortable, drifting state he feels only warmth towards his father-in-law. He says, 'He was magnificent though. They couldn't intimidate him. And he told Daisy what to do.'
'He was brave all right,' she agrees. 'But you were amazing. Right from the beginning I could see you planning and calculating. I saw you look across at Theo.'
He takes her hand and kisses her fingers. 'None of us went through what you did. You were fantastic.'
'Daisy held me steady. She had such strength then . . .'
'And Theo too, when he came flying up those stairs . . .'
For some minutes the events of the evening are transformed into a colourful adventure, a drama of strong wills, inner resources, new qualities of character revealed under pressure.
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They used to talk this way after family ascents of mountains in the West Highlands of Scotland - things always went wrong, but interestingly, funnily. Now, suddenly animated, they exult in praise, and because it's familiar, and less absurd than eulogising each other, they celebrate the children. These past two decades Henry and Rosalind have spent many hours doing just this - alone together, they like to gossip about their children. These latest exploits shine in the dark - when Theo grabbed his lapels, when Daisy looked him right in the eye. What lovely children these are, such loving natures, what luck to be their parents. But the excited conversation can't last, their words begin to sound hollow and unreal in their ears, and they begin to subside. They can't avoid for much longer the figure of Baxter at the centre of their ordeal - cruel, weak, meaningless, demanding to be confronted. Also, they're talking about Daisy and not addressing the pregnancy. They're not quite ready, though they're close.
After a pause, Henry says, The thing is this, surely. His mind is going, and he thought he was coming to settle a score. Who knows what spooky uncontrollable emotions were driving him.' He then describes to her in detail the encounter in University Street, and includes everything he thinks might be relevant - the policeman waving him on, the demonstrators in Gower Street and the funereal drumbeats, his own competitive instincts before the confrontation. While he's talking, her hand is resting on his cheek. They could turn on the lights, but it comforts them, this intimate trusting darkness, the sexless, childlike huddling and talking into the night. Daisy and Theo used to do it, on the top floor with their sleepover friends - little voices still murmuring at 3.00 a.m., faltering against sleep and bravely picking up again. When Henry was ten, a cousin a year younger came to stay for a month while her mother was in hospital. Since he had a double bed in his room and there was nowhere else, his mother put her in with him. Henry and his cousin ignored each other during the day - Mona was plump, with thick
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lenses in her specs and a missing finger, and above all she was a girl - but on the first night, a disembodied whispering voice from a warm mound on the other side of the bed wove the epic of the school sweet factory visit, and the chocolates cascading down a chute, of the machinery that turned so fast it was invisible, then the swift, painless dismemberment, the spray of blood 'like a feather duster' that coloured the teacher's jacket, of the fainting friends, and the foreman on his hands and knees beneath the machine, hunting for the missing 'part'. Stirred, Henry could answer with no more than a lanced boil, but Mona was sportingly appreciative, and so they were launched in their time capsule, their short lives and some inventiveness sufficient to keep them in horrible anecdotes through the night until the summer dawn, and with different themes through other nights too.
When he's finished his account of the confrontation, Rosalind says, 'Of course it wasn't an abuse of authority. They could have killed you.'
This is not the conclusion he wanted her to reach - he arranged the details to prompt her in another direction. He's about to try again, but she starts a story of her own. This is the nature of these night journeys - the steps, the sequences are not logical.
'While I was waiting for you tonight, before I fell asleep, I was trying to work out just how long it was he held that knife to me. In my memory, it's no time at all - and I don't mean that it seems brief. It's no time, not in time, not a minute or an hour. Just a fact
As she recalls it, the tremors return, but fainter, then fade away. He holds her hand tightly.
'I wondered if it was because I felt only one thing - sheer terror, no changes, no sense of passing time. But that's not it. I did feel other things.'
Her pause is long. Unable to read her expression, he hesitates to prompt her.
Finally he says, 'What other things?'
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Her voice is reflective rather than distressed. 'You. There was you. The only other time I've felt so terrified and helpless was before my operation, when I still thought I was going to go blind. When you came down with me to wait. You were so gawky and earnest. The sleeves of your white coat hardly came past your elbows. I've always said that's when I fell for you. I suppose that's right. Sometimes I think I made that up, and it was later. Then tonight, an even greater terror, and there you were again, trying to talk to me with your eyes. Still there. After all the years. That's what I hung on to. You.'
He feels her fingers graze across his face, then she kisses him. No longer so childlike, their tongues touch.
'But it was Daisy who delivered you. She swung his mood with that poem. Arnold someone?'
'Matthew Arnold.'
He's remembering her body, its pallor, the compact bump containing his grandchild, already with a heart, a self organising nervous system, a swelling pinhead of a brain
- here's what unattended matter can get up to in the total darkness of a womb.
Reading the meaning of his silence, Rosalind says, The talked to her again. She's in love, she's excited, she's having this baby. Henry, we have to be on her side.'
The am,' he says. 'We are.'
His eyes are closed and he's listening intently to Rosalind. This baby's life is taking shape - a year in Paris with its enraptured parents, and then to London where its father has been offered a good position in an important dig - a Roman villa to the east of the City. They might all move in here for a while and live on the square. Henry murmurs his assent, he's glad
- the house is big, seven thousand square feet, and needs the sound of a child's voice again. He feels his body, the size of a continent, stretching away from him down the bed - he's a king, he's vast, accommodating, immune, he'll say yes to any plan that has kindness and warmth at its heart. Let the
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baby take its first steps and speak its first sentence here, in this palace. Daisy wants her baby, then let it happen in the best possible way. If she was ever going to be a poet, she'll make her poetry out of this - as good a subject as a string of lovers. He can't move his head, he can barely move his hand to stroke Rosalind's as she unfolds the future for him, the domestic arrangements - he's following closely, attending to the pleasure in her voice. The first shock is over. She's coming through. And Theo has been talking of his plans too, which will take him away for fifteen months to New York with New Blue Rider as resident band in an East Village club. It has to be, Theo's music needs it and they'll make it work, help him find a place, visit him there. The king rumbles his assent.