The deterioration in her vision had come on suddenly, in the library, and now she was alone, facing momentous change. She steadied herself with deep, slow breaths. She was intent on the anaesthetist's face as he slipped a cannula into the back of her hand, and administered thiopentone. Then she was gone, and Perowne was hurrying away to the scrub room. He had been told to observe closely this radical procedure. Transsphenoidal hypophysectomy. One day he would perform it himself. Yes, even now, so many years later, it calmed him to think how brave she had been. And how benignly their lives had been shaped by this catastrophe.
What else did the young Henry Perowne do to help this beautiful woman suffering a pituitary apoplexy regain her sight? He helped slide her anaesthetised body from the trolley onto the operating table. Obeying the instructions of the registrar, he slipped the sterile covers into place on the handles of the operating lights. He watched as the three steel points of the head-clamp were fixed tightly onto her head. Again guided by the registrar, while Whaley was briefly out of the room, Henry scrubbed Rosalind's mouth with antiseptic soap, and noted the perfection of her teeth. Later, after Mr Whaley had made an incision in her upper gum, rolled her face away from the opening of the nasal passages, stripping the nasal
43 Ian McEwan
mucosa from the septum, Henry helped manoeuvre into position the massive operating microscope. There was no screen to watch - video technology was new in those days, and had yet to be installed in this theatre. But throughout the operation he was allowed frequent glimpses through the registrar's eyepiece. Henry watched as Whaley moved in on the sphenoid sinus, passing through it after removing its front wall. Then he skilfully chipped and drilled away at the bony base of the pituitary fossa and revealed, in less than forty five minutes, the tightly swollen purplish gland within.
Perowne studied closely the decisive jab of the surgical blade and saw the surge of dark clot and ochre tumour the consistency of porridge disappearing into the tip of Whaley's sucker. At the sudden appearance of clear liquid - cerebral spinal fluid - the surgeon decided to take an abdominal fat graft to seal the leak. He made a small transverse incision in Rosalind's lower abdomen, and with a pair of surgical scissors removed a piece of subcutaneous fat which he dropped into a kidney dish. With great delicacy, the graft was passed through the nose and set into the remains of the sphenoid sinus, and held in place with nasal packs.
The elegance of the whole procedure seemed to embody a brilliant contradiction: the remedy was as simple as plumbing, as elemental as a blocked drain - the optic nerves were decompressed and the threat to Rosalind's vision vanished. And yet the making of a safe route into this remote and buried place in the head was a feat of technical mastery and concentration. To go in right through the face, remove the tumour through the nose, to deliver the patient back into her life, without pain or infection, with her vision restored was a miracle of human ingenuity. Almost a century of failure and partial success lay behind this one procedure, of other routes tried and rejected, and decades of fresh invention to make it possible, including this microscope and the fibre optic lighting. The procedure was humane and daring - the spirit of benevolence enlivened
44 Saturday
by the boldness of a high-wire circus act. Until then, Perowne's intention to become a neurosurgeon had always been a little theoretical. He'd chosen brains because they were more interesting than bladders or knee joints. Now his ambition became a matter of deep desire. As the closing up began and the face, this particular, beautiful face, was reassembled without a single disfiguring mark, he felt excitement tibout the future and impatient to acquire the skills. He was falling in love with a life. He was also, of course, falling in love. The two were inseparable. In his elation he even had some love left over for the maestro himself, Mr Whaley, as he bent his massive form over his minute and exacting tasks, breathing noisily through his nostrils behind his mask. When he was sure that he had removed all the tumour and clot he strode off to see another patient. It was left to the predatory registrar to put together again Rosalind's beautiful features.
Was it improper of Henry, to try and position himself in the recovery room so that he would be the first person she saw as she came round? Did he really think that with her perceptions and mood cradled in a gentle swell of morphine, she would notice him and become enraptured? As it turned out, the busy anaesthetist and his team swept Perowne aside. He was told to go and make himself useful elsewhere. But he lingered, and was standing several feet behind her head as she began to stir. At least he saw her eyes open, and her face remain immobile as she struggled to remember her place in the story of her existence, and her wary, painful smile as she began to understand that her sight was returning. Not yet perfect, but in a matter of hours it would be.
Some days later he was genuinely useful, removing the stitches from inside her upper lip, and helping in the removal of the nasal packing. He stayed on after shifts to talk to her. She appeared an isolated figure, pale from the ordeal, propped up on her pillows, surrounded by fat law manuals, her hair in two heavy schoolgirlish braids. Her only visitors
45 Ian McEivan
were the two studious girls she shared a flat with. Because it hurt to talk, she sipped water between sentences. She told him that three years ago, when she was sixteen, her mother died in a car accident, and that her father was the famous poet John Grammaticus, who lived in seclusion in a chateau near the Pyrenees. To jog Henry's memory, Rosalind helpfully mentioned 'Mount Fuji', the poem anthologised in all the school editions. But she didn't seem to mind so much that he'd never heard of it or the author. Nor did she care that Henry's background was less exotic - an unchanging suburban street in Perivale, an only child, with a father he didn't remember.
After their love affair finally began months later, past midnight, in the cabin of a ferry on a wintry crossing to Bilbao, she teased him about his 'long and brilliant campaign of seduction'. A masterpiece of stealth, she also called it. But pace and manner were set by her. Early on, he sensed how easy it would be to scare her away. Her isolation was not confined to the neurology ward. It was always there, a wariness curbing spontaneity, lowering the excitement levels. She kept the lid on her youth. She could be unsettled by a sudden proposal of a picnic in the country, the unannounced arrival of an old friend, some free tickets for the theatre that night. She might end up saying yes to all three, but the first response was always a turning away, a hidden frown. She felt safer in those days with her law books, in the knowable long-closed matter of Donoghue versus Stevenson. Such distrust of life was bound to extend to himself if he made an unusual move. There were two women to consider, and to earn the trust of the daughter he would have to know and like everything about the mother. This ghost would have to be courted too.
Marianne Grammaticus was not so much grieved for as continually addressed. She was a constant restraining presence, watching over her daughter, and watching with her. This was the secret of Rosalind's inwardness and caution.
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The death was too senseless to be believed - a late-night drunk jumping traffic lights near Victoria Station - and three years on, at some level, Rosalind didn't accept it. She remained in silent contact with an imaginary intimate. She referred everything back to her mother whom she'd always first-named, even as a little girl. She also talked about her freely to Henry, mentioning her often in passing and fantasising about her reactions. Marianne would have loved that, Rosalind might say of a movie they had just seen and liked. Or: Marianne showed me how to make this onion soup, but I can never get it to taste as good as hers. Or referring to the Falklands invasion: the funny thing is, she wouldn't have been against this war. She simply hated Galtieri. Many weeks into their friendship - affectionate, physically restrained, it was really no more than that - Henry dared ask Rosalind what her mother would have made of him. She answered without hesitation, 'She would have adored you.' He took this to be significant, and later that night kissed her with unusual freedom. She was responsive enough, though hardly abandoned, and for almost a week found herself too busy in the evenings to see him. Solitude and work were less threatening to her inner world than kisses. He began to understand that he was in a competition. In the nature of things he was bound to win, but only if he moved at the old-fashioned pace of a slow loris.
In the ferry's swaying cabin, on a narrow bunk, the matter was finally settled. It was not easy for Rosalind. To love him she had to begin to relinquish her constant friend, her mother. In the morning, when she woke and remembered the line she had crossed, she cried - for joy as much as for sorrow, she kept trying unconvincingly to tell him. Happiness seemed like a betrayal of principle, but happiness was unavoidable.
They went on deck to watch the dawn over the port. It was a harsh and alien world. Squalls of rain came flying over low concrete customs buildings and were driven against the grey derricks by a bitter wind which moaned among the steel
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Ian McEwan \
cables. On the dock, where vast puddles had formed, was the solitary figure of an elderly man maneuvering a heavy rope onto a bollard. He wore a leather jacket over an open necked shirt. In his mouth was an extinguished cigar. When he was finished, he walked slowly towards the customs shed, immune to the weather. They retreated from the cold and went back down the many stairways into the clammy depths |
of the ship and made love again in their narrow space, and *
afterwards lay still, listening to the ship's PA announce that *
foot passengers were to disembark immediately. Again, she was tearful, and told him that lately she could no longer quite hear the special quality of her mother's voice. It was to be a long goodbye. Many fine moments like this were to have their shadow. Even then, as they lay entwined, listening to the thumps and muffled calls of passengers filing by in the corridors, he understood the seriousness of what was beginning. Coming between Rosalind and her ghost he must assume responsibilities. They had entered into an unspoken contract. Starkly put, to make love to Rosalind was to marry her. In his place a reasonable man might have panicked with dignity, but the simplicity of the arrangement gave Henry Perowne nothing but delight.
Here she is, almost a quarter of a century later, beginning to stir in his arms, in sleep somehow aware that her alarm is about to sound. Sunrise - generally a rural event, in cities a mere abstraction - is still an hour and a half away. The city's appetite for Saturday work is robust. At six o'clock, the Euston Road is in full throat. Now occasional motorbikes soar above the ensemble, whining like busy wood saws. Also about this time come the first chorus of police sirens, rising and falling in Doppler shifts: it's no longer too early for bad deeds. Finally she rolls over to face him. This side of the human form exhales a communicative warmth. As they kiss he imagines the green eyes seeking out his own. This commonplace cycle of falling asleep and waking, in darkness, under private cover,
48 Saturday
with another creature, a pale soft tender mammal, putting faces together in a ritual of affection, briefly settled in the eternal necessities of warmth, comfort, safety, crossing limbs to draw nearer - a simple daily consolation, almost too obvious, easy to forget by daylight. Has a poet ever written it up? Not the single occasion, but its repetition through the years. He'll ask his daughter.
Rosalind says, "I had the feeling you were up all night. In and out of bed.'
'I went downstairs at four and sat around with Theo.'
'Is he all right?'
'Hmm.'
This is not the time to tell her about the plane, especially now that its significance has faded. As for his episode of euphoria, he doesn't possess at this moment the inventiveness to portray it. Later. He'll do it later. She's waking just as he's sinking. And still his erection proceeds, as though by a series of inhalations, endlessly tightening. No breathing out. It may be exhaustion that's sensitising him. Or five days' neglect. All the same, there's something familiarly taut in the way she shrugs herself closer, toasting him with an excess of body heat. He himself is in no shape to take initiatives, preferring to count on his luck, on her needs. If it doesn't happen, so be it. Nothing will stop him from falling asleep.
She kisses his nose. I'll try and pick up my dad straight from work. Daisy's getting in from Paris at seven. Will you be here?'
'Mm.'
Sensuous, intellectual Daisy, small-boned, pale and correct. What other postgraduate aspiring poet wears short skirted business suits and fresh white blouses, and rarely drinks and does her best work before 9 a.m.? His little girl, slipping away from him into efficient Parisian womanhood, is expecting her first volume of poems to be published in May. And not by some hand-cranked press, but a venerable
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institution in Queen Square, right across from the hospital where he clipped his first aneurysm. Even her cantankerous grandfather, grandly intolerant of contemporary writing, sent from his chateau a barely legible letter that on deciphering turned out to be rapturous. Perowne, no judge of such things, and pleased for her, of course, has been pained by the love lyrics, by her knowing so much, or dreaming so vividly about the bodies of men he's never met. Who is this creep whose tumescence resembles an 'excited watering can' approaching a 'peculiar rose'? Or the other one who sings in the shower 'like Caruso' as he shampoos 'both beards'? He has to check Lhis indignation - hardly a literary response. He's been trying to shrug oft the fatherly possessiveness and see the poems in their own terms. He already likes the less charged, but still sinister line in another poem that notes 'how each/ rose grew on a shark-infested stem'. The pale young girl with the roses hasn't been home for a long while. Her arrival is an oasis at the far end of the day.