28 Saturday
By way of greeting, Theo lets his chair tip forward onto four legs and raises a hand. It's not his style to show surprise.
'Early start?'
'I've just seen a plane on fire, heading into Heathrow.'
'You're kidding.'
Henry is going towards the hi-fi, intending to retune it, but Theo picks up the remote from the kitchen table and turns on the small TV they keep near the stove for moments like this, breaking stories. They wait for the grandiose preamble to the four o' clock news to finish - pulsing synthetic music, spiralling, radiating computer graphics, combined in a son et lumiere of Wagnerian scale to suggest urgency, technology, global coverage. Then the usual square-jawed anchor of about Perowne's age begins to list the main stories of the hour. Straight away it's obvious that the burning plane has yet to enter the planetary matrix. It remains an unreliable subjective event. Still, they listen to some of the list.
'Hans Blix - a case for war?' the anchor intones over the sound of tom-toms, and pictures of the French Foreign Minister, M. de Villepin, being applauded in the UN debating chamber, 'Yes, say US and Britain. No say the majority.' Then, preparations for anti-war demonstrations later today in London and countless cities around the world; a tennis championship in Florida disrupted by woman with a bread knife . . .
He turns the set off and says, 'How about some coffee?' and while Theo gets up to oblige, Henry gives him the story, his main story of the hour. It shouldn't surprise him how little there is to tell - the plane and its point of light traversing his field of view, left to right, behind the trees, behind the Post Office Tower, then receding to the west. But he feels he's been through so much more.
'But uh, so what were you doing at the window?'
The told you. I couldn't sleep.'
29 Ian McEivan
'Some coincidence.'
'Exactly that.'
Their eyes meet - a moment of potential challenge - then Theo looks away and shrugs. His sister, on the other hand, likes adversarial argument - Daisy and Henry share an inspired love - a pathetic addiction, Rosalind and Theo would say - for a furious set-to. In the ripe teenage mulch of his bedroom, among the guitar magazines, discarded shirts and socks and smoothie bottles, are barely touched books on UFOs, a term these days interchangeable with spacecraft, alien-owned and driven. As Henry understands it, Theo's world-view accommodates a hunch that somehow everything is connected, interestingly connected, and that certain authorities, notably the US government, with privileged access to extra-terrestrial intelligence, is excluding the rest of the world from such wondrous knowledge as contemporary science, dull and strait-laced, cannot begin to comprehend. This knowledge is divulged in other paperbacks, also barely touched by Theo. His curiosity, mild as it is, has been hijacked by peddlers of fakery. But does it matter, when he can play the guitar like an angel ringing a bell, when he's at least keeping faith with forms of wondrous knowledge, when there's so much time ahead to change his mind, if indeed he has made it up?
He's a gentle boy - those big lashes, those dark velvety eyes with their faint oriental pitch; he isn't the sort to enter easily into disputes. Their eyes meet, and he looks away with his own thoughts intact. The universe might be showing his father a connection, a sign which he chooses not to read. What can anyone do about that?
Assuming a daydreaming episode like one of his own, Henry says, to bring him down to ground, 'So it crashes minutes after I saw it disappear. How long do you think it would take to feed through the news channels?'
Theo, who's at the counter filtering the coffee, looks back over his shoulder and fingers his lower lip, a full dark red
30 Saturday
lip, presumably not much kissed of late. He dismissed his last girlfriend in that way he has with girls, of saying nothing much and letting them fade, without drama. Saying little, minimalism in the matter of salutations, introductions, farewells, even thanks, is contemporary etiquette. On the phone, however, the young unbutton. Theo often hunkers down for three hours at a stretch.
He speaks soothingly, as to a fussing child, with the authority of a citizen, an official even, of the electronic age. 'It'll be on the next news, Dad. Half four.'
Fair enough. Naked under his dressing gown - itself a uniform of the old and sick - with thinning hair tousled from lack of sleep, his voice, the consultant's even baritone, now lightened by turmoil - Henry's a candidate for soothing. Here's how it starts, the long process by which you become your children's child. Until one day you might hear them say, Dad, if you start crying again we're taking you home.
Theo sits down and slides the coffee cup across the table, within his father's reach. He has made none for himself. Instead, he snaps the lid off another half-litre bottle of mineral water. The purity of the young. Or he is warding off a hangover? The point has long been passed when Henry feels he can ask, or express a view.
Theo says, 'You reckon it's terrorists?'
'It's a possibility.'
The September attacks were Theo's induction into international affairs, the moment he accepted that events beyond friends, home and the music scene had bearing on his existence. At sixteen, which was what he was at the time, this seemed rather late. Perowne, born the year before the Suez Crisis, too young for the Cuban missiles, or the construction of the Berlin Wall, or Kennedy's assassination, remembers being tearful over Aberfan in 'sixty-six - one hundred and sixteen schoolchildren just like himself, fresh from prayers in school assembly, the day before half-term, buried
31
I
Ian McEwan
under a river of mud. This was when he first suspected that the kindly child-loving God extolled by his headmistress might riot exist. As it turned out, most major world events suggested the same. But for Theo's sincerely godless generation, the question hasn't come up. No one in his bright, plate-glass, forward-looking school ever asked him to pray, or sing an impenetrable cheery hymn. There's no entity for i
him to doubt. His initiation, in front of the TV, before the *
dissolving towers, was intense but he adapted quickly. These days he scans the papers for fresh developments the way he might a listings magazine. As long as there's nothing new, his mind is free. International terror, security cordons, preparations for war - these represent the steady state, the weather. Emerging into adult consciousness, this is the world he finds.
It can't trouble him the way it does his father, who reads the same papers with morbid fixation. Despite the troops mustering in the Gulf, or the tanks out at Heathrow on Thursday, the storming of the Finsbury Park mosque, the reports of terror cells around the country, and Bin Laden's promise on tape of 'martyrdom attacks' on London, Perowne held for a while to the idea that it was all an aberration, that the world would surely calm down and soon be otherwise, that solutions were possible, that reason, being a powerful tool, was irresistible, the only way out; or that like any other crisis, this one would fade soon, and make way for the next, going the way of the Falklands and Bosnia, Biafra and Chernobyl. But lately, this is looking optimistic. Against his own inclination, he's adapting, the way patients eventually do to their sudden loss of sight or use of their limbs. No going back. The nineties are looking like an innocent decade, and who would have thought that at the time? Now we breathe a different air. He bought Fred Halliday's book and read in the opening pages what looked like a conclusion and a curse: the New York attacks precipitated a global crisis that would, if we were lucky, take a hundred
32 Saturday
years to resolve. // we were lucky. Henry's lifetime, and all of Theo's and Daisy's. And their children's lifetime too. A Hundred Years' War.
Inexpertly, Theo has made the coffee at triple strength. But fatherly to the last, Henry drinks it down. Now he is surely committed to the day.
Theo says, 'You didn't see what airline it was?'
'No. Too far away, too dark.'
'Just that Chas is due in from New York this morning.'
He is New Blue Rider's sax player, a gleaming giant of a lad from St Kitts, in New York for a week's master class, nominally supervised by Branford Marsalis. These kids have the instincts, the sense of entitlement proper to an elite. Ry Cooder heard Theo play slide guitar in Oakland. Taped to a mirror in Theo's bedroom is a beer coaster with a friendly salute from the maestro. If you put your face up close you can make out in loopy blue biro, under a beer stain, a signature and, Keep it going Kid!
The wouldn't worry. The red-eyes don't start coming in until half five.'
'Yeah, I suppose.' He swigs on the water bottle. 'You think it's jihadists . . . ?'
Perowne is feeling dizzy, pleasantly so. Everything he looks at, including his son's face, is receding from him without growing smaller. He hasn't heard Theo use this word before. Is it the right word? It sounds harmless, even quaint, rendered in his light tenor. This deepening of the boyish treble is an advance Henry still can't entirely take for granted, even though it's five years old. On Theo's lips - he takes the trouble to do something fancy with the '}' - the Arabic word sounds as innocuous as some stringed Moroccan instrument the band might take up and electrify. In the ideal Islamic state, under strict Shari'a law, there'll be room for surgeons. Blues guitarists will be found other employment. But perhaps no one is demanding such a state. Nothing is demanded. Only hatred is registered, the purity of nihilism. As a
33 Ian McEwan
Londoner, you could grow nostalgic for the IRA. Even as your legs left your body, you might care to remember the cause was a united Ireland. Now that's coming anyway, according to the Reverend Ian Paisley, through the power of the perambulator. Another crisis fading into the scrapbooks, after a mere thirty years. But that's not quite right. Radical Islamists aren't really nihilists - they want the perfect society on earth, which is Islam. They belong in a doomed tradition about which Perowne takes the conventional view - the pursuit of Utopia ends up licensing every form of excess, all ruthless means of its realisation. If everyone is sure to end up happy for ever, what crime can it be to slaughter a million or two now?
'I don't know what I think/ Henry says. 'It's too late to think. Let's wait for the news.'
Theo looks relieved. In his obliging way, he's prepared to debate the issues with his father, if that's what is required. But at four twenty in the morning he's happier saying little. So they wait in unstrained silence for several minutes. In the past months they have sat across this table and touched on all the issues. They've never talked so much before. Where's the adolescent rage, the door-slamming, the muted fury that's supposed to be Theo's rite of passage? Is all that feeling sunk in the blues? They discussed Iraq of course, America and power, European distrust, Islam - its suffering and self-pity, Israel and Palestine, dictators, democracy - and then the boys' stuff: weapons of mass destruction, nuclear fuel rods, satellite photography, lasers, nanotechnology. At the kitchen table, this is the early-twenty-first-century menu, the specials of the day. On a recent Sunday evening Theo came up with an aphorism: the bigger you think, the crappier it looks. Asked to explain he said, 'When we go on about the big things, the political situation, global warming, world poverty, it all looks really terrible, with nothing getting better, nothing to look forward to. But when I think small, closer in - you know, a girl I've just met, or this song we're going to do with Chas,
34 Saturday
or snowboarding next month, then it looks great. So this is going to be my motto - think small.'
Remembering this now, with still some minutes to go before the news, Henry says, 'How was the gig?'
'We did this set of really basic, headbanging stuff, nearly all Jimmy Reed numbers. You know, like this . . .' He sings with parodic emphasis a little boogie bass figure, his left hand clenching and unclenching, unconsciously shaping the chords. They went wild for it. Wouldn't let us do anything else. Bit depressing really, because it's not what we're about at nil.' But he's smiling broadly at the memory.
It's time for the news. Once again, the radio pulses, the synthesised bleeps, the sleepless anchor and his dependable jaw. And there it is, made real at last, the plane, askew on the runway, apparently intact, surrounded by firefighters still spraying foam, soldiers, police, flashing lights, and ambulances backed up and ready. Before the story, irrelevant praise for the rapid response times of the emergency services. Only then is it explained. It's a cargo plane, a Russian Tupolev on a run from Riga to Birmingham. As it passed well to the east of London a fire broke out in one of the engines. The crew radioed for permission to land, and tried to shut down the fuel supply to the burning engine. They turned west along the Thames and were guided into Heathrow and made a decent landing. Neither of the two-man crew is hurt. The cargo is not specified, but a part of it, thought to be mostly mail, is destroyed. Then, still in second place, the antiwar protests only hours away. Hans Blix, yesterday's man, is third.
Schrodinger's dead cat is alive after all.
Theo picks up his jacket from the floor and stands. His manner is wry.
'So, not an attack on our whole way of life then.'
'A good result,' Henry agrees.
He would like to embrace his son, not only out of relief, but because it occurs to him that Theo has become such a likeable adult. Leaving school did the trick after all - boldly
35 Ian McEwan
stepping where his parents didn't dare, out of formal education, taking charge of his life. But these days he and Theo have to be apart for at least a week before they allow themselves to embrace. He was always a physical child - even at thirteen he sometimes took his father's hand in the street. No way back to that. Only Daisy holds out the chance of a bedtime kiss when she's home.
As Theo crosses the kitchen, his father says, 'So you'll be on the march today?'