Across the square, the wail of an ambulance racing southwards down Charlotte Street rouses him a little. He pulls himself onto an elbow, and moves closer so that his face is over hers.
'We should sleep/
'Yes. The police say they're coming at ten.'
But when they've finished kissing he says, Touch me.'
As the sweet sensation spreads through him he hears her say, Tell me that you're mine.'
T'm yours. Entirely yours.'
Touch my breasts. With your tongue.'
'Rosalind. I want you.'
This is where he marks the end of his day. The moment is sharper, more piercing than Saturday's lazy, affectionate beginning - their movements are quick and greedy, urgent rather than joyous - it's as if they've returned from exile, emerged from a hard prison spell to gorge at a feast. Their appetites are noisy, their manners are rough. They can't quite trust their luck, they want all they can get in a short time. They also know that at the end, after they've reclaimed each other, is the promise of oblivion.
At one point she whispers to him, 'My darling one. We could have been killed and we're alive.'
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They are alive for love, but only briefly. The end comes in a sudden fall, so concentrated in its pleasure that it's excruciating to endure, unbearably intrusive, like nerve ends being peeled and stripped clean. Afterwards they don't immediately move apart. They lie still in the dark, feeling their heartbeats slow. Henry experiences his exhaustion and the sudden clarity of sexual release merge into a single fact, dry and flat as a desert. He must begin to cross it now, alone, and he doesn't mind. At last they say goodnight by means of a single squeeze of hands - they feel too raw for kisses - then Rosalind turns on her side, and within seconds is breathing deeply.
Oblivion doesn't come to Henry Perowne quite yet - he may have reached the point at which tiredness itself prevents sleep. He lies on his back, patiently waiting, head turned towards the bar of white light on the wall, aware of an inconvenient pressure growing in his bladder. After several minutes he takes one of the dressing gowns from the floor and goes into the bathroom. The marble floor is icy underfoot, the open curtains on the tall north-facing windows show a few stars in a sky of broken, orange-tinted cloud. It's five fifteen, and already there's a rustle of traffic on the Euston Road. When he's relieved himself, he bends over the washbasin to drink deeply from the cold-water tap. Back in the bedroom he hears a distant rumble of an airplane, the first of the morning rush hour into Heathrow, he supposes and, drawn by the sound, goes to the window he stood at before and opens the shutters. He prefers to stand here a few minutes looking out than to lie still in bed, forcing sleep. Quietly he raises the window. The air is warmer than last time, but still he shivers. The light is softer too, the features of the square, especially the branches of the plane trees in the garden, are not so etched, and seem to merge with each other. What can it be about low temperatures that sharpens the edges of objects?
The benches have lost their expectant air, the litter bins have been emptied, the paving has been swept clean. The
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energetic team in yellow jackets must have been through during the evening. Henry tries to find reassurance in this orderliness, and in remembering the square at its best weekday lunchtimes, in warm weather, when the office crowds from the local production, advertising and design companies bring their sandwiches and boxed salads, and the gates of the gardens are opened up. They loll on the grass in quiet groups, men and women of various races, mostly in their twenties and thirties, confident, cheerful, unoppressed, fit from private gym workouts, at home in their city. So much divides them from the various broken figures That haunt the benches. Work is one outward sign. It can't just be class or opportunities - the drunks and junkies come from all kinds of backgrounds, as do the office people. Some of the worst wrecks have been privately educated. Perowne, the professional reductionist, can't help thinking it's down to invisible folds and kinks of character, written in code, at the level of molecules. It's a dim fate, to be the sort of person who can't earn a living, or resist another drink, or remember today what he resolved to do yesterday. No amount of social justice will cure or disperse this enfeebled army haunting the public places of every town. So, what then? Henry draws his dressing gown more closely around him. You have to recognise bad luck when you see it, you have to look out for these people. Some you can prise from their addictions, others all you can do is make them comfortable somehow, minimise their miseries.
Somehow! He's no social theorist and, of course, he's thinking of Baxter, that unpickable knot of affliction. It may be the thought of him that makes Henry feel shaky, or the physical effects of tiredness - he has to put his hand on the sill to steady himself. He feels himself turning on a giant wheel, like the Eye on the south bank of the Thames, just about to arrive at the highest point - he's poised on a hinge of perception, before the drop, and he can see ahead calmly. Or it's the eastward turn of the earth he imagines, delivering
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him towards the dawn at a stately one thousand miles an hour. If he counts on sleep rather than the clock to divide the days, then this is still his Saturday, dropping far below him, as deep as a lifetime. And from here, from the top of his day, he can see far ahead, before the descent begins. Sunday doesn't ring with the same promise and vigour as the day before. The square below him, deserted and still, gives no clues to the future. But from where he stands up here there are things he can see that he knows must happen. Soon it will be his mother's time, the message will come from the home, or they'll send for him, and he and his family will be sitting by her bed, in her tiny room, with her ornaments, drinking the thick brown tea, watching the last of her, the husk of the old swimmer, shrink into the pillows. At the thought, he feels nothing now, but he knows the sorrow will surprise him, because it's happened once before.
There came a time in her decline when at last he had to move her out of her house, the old family home where he grew up, and into care. The disease was obliterating the housewifely routines she had once kept faith with. She left the oven on all night with the butter dish inside, she hid the front-door key from herself down cracks in the floorboards, she confused shampoo and bleach. All these, and moments of existential bewilderment at finding herself in a street, or in a shop, or someone's house, with no knowledge of where she had come from, who these people were, where she lived, and what she was supposed to do next. A year later she had forgotten her life as well as her old house. But arranging to sell it felt like a betrayal, and Henry made no move. He and Rosalind checked on it, his childhood home, from time to time and he mowed the lawn in summer. Everything remained in its place, waiting - the yellow rubber gloves hanging from their wooden clothes peg, the drawer of ironed dusters and tea towels, the glazed pottery donkey bearing a pannier of toothpicks. A vegetable odour of neglect began to gather, a shabbiness invaded her possessions that had nothing
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to do with dust. Even from the road the house had a defeated look, and when kids put a stone through the living-room window one afternoon in November, he knew he must act.
Rosalind and the children came with him to clear the place one weekend. They all chose a memento - it seemed disrespectful not to. Daisy had a brass plate from Egypt, Theo a carriage clock, Rosalind, a plain china fruit bowl. Henry took a shoebox of photographs. Other pieces went to nephews and nieces. Lily's bed, her sideboard, two wardrobes and the carpets and the chests of drawers were waiting for a house clearing firm. The familv packed up clothes and kitchenware and unwanted ornaments for the charity shops - Henry never realised before how these places lived off the dead. Everything else they stuffed into bin liners and put out for the rubbish collection. They worked in silence, like looters - having the radio on wasn't appropriate. It took a day to dismantle Lily's existence.
They were striking the set of a play, a humble, one-handed domestic drama, without permission from the cast. They started in what she called her sewing room - his old room. She was never coming back, she no longer knew what knitting was, but wrapping up her scores of needles, her thousand patterns, a baby's half-finished yellow shawl, to give them all away to strangers was to banish her from the living. They worked quickly, almost in a frenzy. She's not dead, Henry kept telling himself. But her life, all lives, seemed tenuous when he saw how quickly, with what ease, all the trappings, all the fine details of a lifetime could be packed and scattered, or junked. Objects became junk as soon as they were separated from their owner and their pasts - without her, her old tea cosy was repellent, with its faded farmhouse motif and pale brown stains on cheap fabric, and stuffing that was pathetically thin. As the shelves and drawers emptied, and the boxes and bags filled, he saw that no one owned anything really. It's all rented, or borrowed. Our possessions will outlast us, we'll desert them in the end. They worked
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all day, and put out twenty-three bags for the dustmen.
He feels skinny and frail in his dressing gown, facing the morning that's still dark, still part of yesterday. Yes, that will happen, and he'll make the arrangements. She walked him once to a cemetery near her house to show him the rows of small metal lockers set into a wall where she wanted her ashes put. All that's bound to happen, and they'll stand with bowed heads, listening to the Burial of the Dead. Or will they have it for cremations? Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live . . . He's heard it often over the years, but remembers only fragments. He fleeth as it were a shadow
j O
. . . cut down like a flower. Yes, and then it will be the turn of John Grammaticus, one of those transfiguring illnesses that come to a drinking man, or a terminal stab to heart or brain. They'll all take that hard in their different ways, though Henry less than the others. The old poet was brave tonight, pretending not to suffer with his nose, giving Daisy just the right prompt. And when it comes, then there'll be the crisis of the chateau if Teresa marries John and stakes her claim, and Rosalind, formidable in law, pursues her rights to the place her mother made, the place where Daisy, Theo and Rosalind herself spent their childhood summers. And Henry's role? Wise and implacable loyalty.
What else, beyond the dying? Theo will make his first move from home - there'll be no postcards or letters or emails, only phone calls. There'll be trips to New York to listen to him and his band bring their blues to the Americans - they might not like it - and a chance to see old friends from Bellevue Hospital days. And Daisy will publish her poems, and produce a baby and bring Giulio - Henry still sees the dark-skinned, bare-chested lover from the poem he misheard. A baby and its huge array of materiel to enliven the household, and someone else, not him, not Rosalind, getting up in the night. And not Giulio, unless he's an unusual Italian. All this is rich. And then, he, Henry, will turn fifty and give up squash and marathons, the house will empty when Daisy
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and Giulio find a place, and Theo gets one too, and Henry and Rosalind will collapse in on each other, cling tighter, their business of raising children, launching young adults, over. That restlessness, that hunger he's had lately for another kind of life will fade. The time will come when he does less operating, and more administration - there's another kind of life - and Rosalind will leave the paper to write her book, and a time will come when they find they no longer have the strength for the square, the junkies and the traffic din and dust. Perhaps a bomb in the cause of jihad will drive them out with all the other faint-hearts into the suburbs, or deeper into therountrv, or to the chateau -their Saturday will become a Sunday.
Behind him, as though agitated by his thoughts, Rosalind flinches, moans, and moves again before she falls silent and he turns back to the window. London, his small part of it, lies wide open, impossible to defend, waiting for its bomb, like a hundred other cities. Rush hour will be a convenient time. It might resemble the Paddington crash - twisted rails, buckled, upraised commuter coaches, stretchers handed out through broken windows, the hospital's Emergency Plan in action. Berlin, Paris, Lisbon. The authorities agree, an attack's inevitable. He lives in different times - because the newspapers say so doesn't mean it isn't true. But from the top of his day, this is a future that's harder to read, a horizon indistinct with possibilities. A hundred years ago, a middle-aged doctor standing at this window in his silk dressing gown, less than two hours before a winter's dawn, might have pondered the new century's future. February 1903. You might envy this Edwardian gent all he didn't yet know. If he had young boys, he could lose them within a dozen years, at the Somme. And what was their body count, Hitler, Stalin, Mao? Fifty million, a hundred? If you described the hell that lay ahead, if you warned him, the good doctor - an affable product of prosperity and decades of peace - would not believe you. Beware the utopianists, zealous men certain of
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the path to the ideal social order. Here they are again, totalitarians in different form, still scattered and weak, but growing, and angry, and thirsty for another mass killing. A hundred years to resolve. But this may be an indulgence, an idle, overblown fantasy, a night-thought about a passing disturbance that time and good sense will settle and rearrange. The nearer ground, the nearest promontory, is easier to read - as sure as his mother's death, he'll be dining with Professor Taleb in an Iraqi restaurant near Hoxton. The war will start next month - the precise date must already have been fixed, as though for any big outdoor sporting event. Any later in the season will be too hot for killing or liberation. Baghdad is waiting for its bombs. Where's Henry's appetite for removing a tyrant now? At the end of this day, this particular evening, he's timid, vulnerable, he keeps drawing his dressing gown more tightly around him. Another plane moves left to right across his view, descending in its humdrum way along the line of the Thames towards Heathrow. Harder now to recall, or to inhabit, the vigour of his row with Daisy - the certainties have dissolved into debating points; that the world the professor described is intolerable, that however murky American motives, some lasting good and fewer deaths might come from dismantling it. Might, he hears Daisy tell him, is not good enough, and you've let one man's story turn your head. A woman bearing a child has her own authority. Will he revive his hopes for firm action in the morning? All he feels now is fear. He's weak and ignorant, scared of the way consequences of an action leap away from your control and breed new events, new consequences, until you're led to a place you never dreamed of and would never choose - a knife at the throat. One floor down from where Andrea Chapman dreams of being carried away by the improbable love of a young doctor, and of becoming one herself, lies Baxter in his private darkness, watched over by the constables. But one small fixed point of conviction holds