Saturday (19 page)

In the basement kitchen Theo has already taken the fish and stowed it in the fridge. The tiny TV is on with muted sound, and shows a helicopter's view of Hyde Park. The massed crowds appear as a smear of brown, like lichen on a rock. Theo has constructed his breakfast in a large salad bowl which contains close to a kilo of oatmeal, bran, nuts, blueberries, loganberries, raisins, milk, yoghurt, chopped dates, apple and bananas.

Theo nods at it. ‘Want some?'

‘I'll eat leftovers.'

Henry takes a plate of chicken and boiled potatoes from the fridge and eats standing up. His son sits on a high stool at the centre island, hunched over his giant bowl. Beyond the debris of crumbs, wrappers and fruit skins are pages of music manuscript with chords written out in pencil. His shoulders
are broad, and the bunched muscle stretches the fabric of his clean white T-shirt. The hair, the skin of his bare arms, the thick dark brown eyebrows still have the same rich, smooth new-made quality Perowne used to admire when Theo was four.

Perowne gestures towards the TV. ‘Still not tempted?'

‘I've been watching. Two million people. Truly amazing.'

Naturally, Theo is against the war in Iraq. His attitude is as strong and pure as his bones and skin. So strong he doesn't feel much need to go tramping through the streets to make his point.

‘What's the latest on that plane? I heard about the arrests.'

‘No one's saying anything.' Theo tips more milk into his salad bowl. ‘But there are rumours on the Internet.'

‘About the Koran.'

‘The pilots are radical Islamists. One's a Chechen, the other's Algerian.'

Perowne pulls up a stool and as he sits feels his appetite fading. He pushes his plate aside.

‘So how does it work? They set fire to their own plane in the cause of jihad, then land safely at Heathrow.'

‘They bottled out.'

‘So their idea was to sort of join in today's demonstration.'

‘Yeah. They'd be making a point. Make war on an Arab nation and this is the kind of thing that's going to happen.'

It doesn't sound plausible. But in general, the human disposition is to believe. And when proved wrong, shift ground. Or have faith, and go on believing. Over time, down through the generations, this may have been the most efficient: just in case, believe. All day, Perowne himself has suspected the story was not all it seemed, and now Theo is feeding this longing his father has to hear the worst. On the other hand, if the rumours about the plane come from the Internet, the chances of their inaccuracy are increased.

Henry gives a condensed account of his scrape with Baxter and his friends and of the symptoms of Huntington's and the lucky escape.

Theo says, ‘You humiliated him. You should watch that.'

‘Meaning what?'

‘These street guys can be proud. Also, Dad, I can't believe we've lived here all this time and you and Mum have never been mugged.'

Perowne looks at his watch and stands. ‘Mum and I just don't have the time. I'll see you in Notting Hill around five.'

‘You're coming. Excellent!'

It is part of Theo's charm, not to have pressed him. And if his father hadn't shown up, he wouldn't have mentioned it.

‘Start without me. You know what it's like, getting from Granny's.'

‘We'll be doing the new song. Chas'll be there. We'll keep it till you arrive.'

Chas is his favourite among Theo's friends, and the most educated too, dropping out of an English degree in his third year at Leeds to play in a band. A wonder that life so far – suicidal mother, absent father, two brothers, members of a strict Baptist sect – hasn't crushed all that relaxed good nature out of him. Something about the name of St Kitts – saints, kids, kittens – has produced a profusion of kindness in one giant lad. Since meeting him, Perowne has developed a vague ambition to visit the island.

From a corner of the room he picks up a potted plant wrapped in tissue, an expensive orchid he bought a few days ago in the florist's by Heal's. He stops at the doorway and raises a hand in farewell. ‘I'm cooking tonight. Don't forget to straighten out the kitchen.'

‘Yeah.' Then Theo adds without irony, ‘Remember me to Granny. Give her my love.'

 

Clean and scented, with a dull, near-pleasurable ache in his limbs, driving west in light traffic, Perowne finds he's feeling better about seeing his mother. He knows the routine well enough. Once they're established together, face to face, with
their cups of dark brown tea, the tragedy of her situation will be obscured behind the banality of detail, of managing the suffocating minutes, of inattentive listening. Being with her isn't so difficult. The hard part is when he comes away, before this visit merges in memory with all the rest, when the woman she once was haunts him as he stands by the front door and leans down to kiss her goodbye. That's when he feels he's betraying her, leaving her behind in her shrunken life, sneaking away to the riches, the secret hoard of his own existence. Despite the guilt, he can't deny the little lift he feels, the lightness in his step when he turns his back and walks away from the old people's place and takes his car keys from his pocket and embraces the freedoms that can't be hers. Everything she has now fits into her tiny room. And she hardly possesses the room because she's incapable of finding it unaided, or even of knowing that she has one. And when she is in it, she doesn't recognise her things. It's no longer possible to bring her to the Square to stay, or take her on excursions; a small journey disorients or even terrifies her. She has to remain behind, and naturally she doesn't understand that either.

But the thought of the leave-taking ahead doesn't trouble him now. He's at last suffused by the mild euphoria that follows exercise. That blessed self-made opiate, beta-endorphin, smothering every kind of pain. There's a merry Scarlatti harpsichord on the radio tinkling through a progression of chords that never quite resolves, and seems to lead him on towards a playfully receding destination. In the rear-view mirror, no red BMW. Along this stretch, where the Euston becomes the Marylebone Road, the traffic signals are phased, Manhattan-style, and he's wafted forwards on a leading edge of green lights, a surfer on a perfect wave of simple information:
go!
Or even,
yes!
The long line of tourists – teenagers mostly – outside Madame Tussaud's seems less futile than usual; a generation raised on thunderous Hollywood effects still longs to stand and gawp at
waxworks, like eighteenth-century peasants at a country fair. The reviled Westway, rearing on stained concrete piles and on which he rises swiftly to second-floor level, offers up a sudden horizon of tumbling cloud above a tumult of rooftops. It's one of those moments when to be a car owner in a city, the owner of this car, is sweet. The seven-speed automatic shifts smoothly up. A sign on a gantry above the traffic lanes proclaims The West, The North, as though there lies, spread beyond the suburbs, a whole continent, and the promise of a six-day journey.

The traffic must be stalled somewhere else by the march. For almost half a mile he alone possesses this stretch of elevated road. For seconds on end he thinks he grasps the vision of its creators – a purer world that favours machines rather than people. A rectilinear curve sweeps him past recent office buildings of glass and steel where the lights are already on in the February early afternoon. He glimpses people as neat as architectural models, at their desks, before their screens, even on a Saturday. This is the tidy future of his childhood science fiction comics, of men and women with tight-fitting collarless jumpsuits – no pockets, trailing laces or untucked shirts – living a life beyond litter and confusion, free of clutter to fight evil.

But from a vantage point on the White City flyover, just before the road comes down to earth among rows of red-brick housing, he sees the tail lights massing ahead and begins to brake. His mother never minded traffic lights and long delays. Only a year ago she was still well enough – forgetful, vague, but not terrified – to enjoy being driven around the streets of west London. The lights gave her an opportunity to examine other drivers and their passengers. ‘Look at him. He's got a spotty face.' Or simply to say companionably, ‘Red again!'

She was a woman who gave her life to housework, to the kind of daily routines of polishing, dusting, vacuuming and tidying that were once common, and these days are only
undertaken by patients with obsessive compulsive disorders. Every day, while Henry was at school, she spring-cleaned her house. She drew her deepest satisfactions from a tray of well-roasted beef, the sheen on a nest of tables, a pile of ironed candy-striped sheets folded in smooth slabs, a larder of neat provisions; or from one more knitted matineé jacket for one more baby in the remoter reaches of the family. The invisible sides, the obverse, the underneath and the insides of everything were clean. The oven and its racks were scrubbed after every use. Order and cleanliness were the outward expression of an unspoken ideal of love. A book he was reading would be back on the hallway shelf upstairs as soon as he put it aside. The morning paper could be in the dustbin by lunchtime. The empty milk bottles she put out for collection were as clean as her cutlery. To every item its drawer or shelf or hook, including her various aprons, and her yellow rubber gloves held by a clothes peg, hanging near the egg-shaped egg-timer.

Surely it was because of her that Henry feels at home in an operating theatre. She too would have liked the waxed black floor, the instruments of surgical steel arrayed in parallel rows on a sterile tray, and the scrub room with its devotional routines – she would have admired the niceties, the clean headwear, the short fingernails. He should have had her in while she was still capable. It never crossed his mind. It never occurred to him that his work, his fifteen years' training, had anything to do with what she did.

Nor did it occur to her. He barely knew it at the time, but he grew up thinking her intelligence was limited. He used to think she was without curiosity. But that wasn't right. She liked a good exploratory heart-to-heart with her neighbours. The eight-year-old Henry liked to flop on the floor behind the furniture and listen in. Illness and operations were important subjects, especially those associated with childbirth. That was when he first heard the phrase ‘under the knife' as well as ‘under the doctor'. ‘What the doctor said' was a powerful
invocation. This eavesdropping may have set Henry on his career. Then there were running accounts of infidelities, or rumours of them, and ungrateful children, and the unreasonableness of the old, and what someone's parent left in a will, and how a certain nice girl couldn't find a decent husband. Good people had to be sifted from the bad, and it wasn't always easy to tell at first which was which. Indifferently, illness struck the good as well as the bad. Later, when he made his dutiful attempts on Daisy's undergraduate course in the nineteenth-century novel, he recognised all his mother's themes. There was nothing small-minded about her interests. Jane Austen and George Eliot shared them too. Lilian Perowne wasn't stupid or trivial, her life wasn't unfortunate, and he had no business as a young man being condescending towards her. But it's too late for apologies now. Unlike in Daisy's novels, moments of precise reckoning are rare in real life; questions of misinterpretation are not often resolved. Nor do they remain pressingly unresolved. They simply fade. People don't remember clearly, or they die, or the questions die and new ones take their place.

Besides, Lily had another life that no one could have predicted, or could remotely guess at now. She was a swimmer. On Sunday morning, September the third 1939, while Chamberlain was announcing in his radio broadcast from Downing Street that the country was at war with Germany, the fourteen-year-old Lily was at a municipal pool near Wembley, having her first lesson with a sixty-year-old international athlete who had swum for Britain in the Stockholm Olympics in 1912 – the first ever women's swimming event. She had spotted Lily in the pool and offered to give her lessons for free, and coached her in the crawl, a most unladylike stroke. Lily went in for local matches in the late forties. In 1954 she swam for Middlesex in the county championships. She came second, and her tiny silver medal, set on a wooden shield made of oak, always stood on the mantelpiece while Henry was growing up. It's on a shelf in her room now. That
silver was as far, or as high, as she got, but she always swam beautifully, fast enough to push out in front of her a deep and sinuous bow wave.

She taught Henry, of course, but his treasured memory of her swimming was of when he was ten, on a school visit one morning to the local pool. He and his friends were changed and ready, had been through the shower and footbath, and had to wait on the tiles for the adult session to end. Two teachers stood by, shushing and fussing, trying to contain the children's excitement. Soon there was only one figure remaining in the pool, one in a white rubber cap with a frieze of petals he should have recognised earlier. His whole class was admiring her speed as she surged up the lane, the furrow in the water she left behind, just at the small of her back, and the way she turned her head to breathe without breaking her line in the water. When he knew it was her, he convinced himself he'd known from the beginning. To add to his exultation, he didn't even have to claim her out loud. Someone called out, ‘That's Mrs Perowne!' In silence they watched as she reached the end of her lane right at their feet and performed a flashy underwater turn that was novel at the time. This was no mere duster of sideboards. He'd seen her swim often enough, but this was entirely different; all his friends were there to witness her superhuman nature, in which he shared. Surely she knew, and put on in the last half-length a show of demonic speed just for him. Her feet churned, her slender white arms rose and chopped at the water, her bow wave swelled, the furrow deepened. Her body shaped itself round her own wave in a shallow undulating S. You would have had to sprint along the pool to keep up with her. She stopped at the far end and stood, and put her hands on the edge and flipped herself out of the water. She would have been about forty then. She sat there, feet still immersed, pulled off her cap and, tilting her head, smiled shyly in their direction. One of the teachers led the kids into solemn applause. Though it was 1966 – the boys' hair was growing thickly over
their ears, the girls wore jeans to class – a degree of fifties formality still prevailed. Henry clapped with the rest, but when his friends gathered round, he was too choked with pride, too exhilarated to answer their questions, and was relieved to get in the pool where he could conceal his feelings.