Saturday (24 page)

‘Too late to worry about that,' he says over her. ‘A hundred thousand have already passed through the Afghan training camps. At least you must be happy that's come to an end.'

As he says this, he remembers that in fact she was, that she loathed the joyless Taliban, and he wonders why he's interrupting her, arguing with her, rather than eliciting her views and affectionately catching up with her. Why be adversarial? Because he himself is stoked up, there's poison in his
blood, despite his soft tone; and fear and anger, constricting his thoughts, making him long to have a row. Let's have this out! They are fighting over armies they will never see, about which they know almost nothing.

‘There'll be more fighters,' Daisy says. ‘And when the first explosion hits London your pro-war views…'

‘If you're describing my position as pro-war, then you'd have to accept that yours is effectively pro-Saddam.'

‘What fucking nonsense.'

As she swears he feels a sudden surge in his being, driven partly by astonishment that their conversation is moving out of control, and also by a reckless enlivening joy, a release from the brooding that has afflicted him all day. The colour has gone from Daisy's face and the few freckles she has along her cheekbone are suddenly vivid in her share of the basement kitchen's pools of downlighting. Her face, which typically in conversations is at a quizzical angle, confronts him with a level glare of outrage.

Despite his leap of feeling, he looks calm as he takes a drink of champagne and says, ‘What I meant is this. The price of removing Saddam is war, the price of no war is leaving him in place.'

It was meant as a conciliatory point, but Daisy doesn't hear it that way. ‘It's crude and ugly,' she says, ‘when the war lobby calls us pro-Saddam.'

‘Well, you're prepared to do the one thing he'd most like you to do, which is to leave him in power. But you'll only postpone the confrontation. He or his horrible sons are going to have to be dealt with one day. Even Clinton knew that.'

‘You're saying we're invading Iraq because we haven't got a choice. I'm amazed at the crap you talk, Dad. You know very well these extremists, the Neo-cons, have taken over America. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfovitz. Iraq was always their pet project. Nine eleven was their big chance to talk Bush round. Look at his foreign policy up until then. He was a
know-nothing stay-at-home mouse. But there's nothing linking Iraq to nine eleven, or to Al-Qaeda generally, and no really scary evidence of WMD. Didn't you hear Blix yesterday? And doesn't it ever occur to you that in attacking Iraq we're doing the very thing the New York bombers wanted us to do – lash out, make more enemies in Arab countries and radicalise Islam. Not only that, we're getting rid of their old enemy for them, the godless Stalinist tyrant.'

‘And I suppose they wanted us to destroy their training camps and drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan, and force Bin Laden on the run, and have their financial networks disrupted and hundreds of their key guys locked up…'

She cuts in and her voice is loud. ‘Stop twisting my words. No one's against going after Al-Qaeda. We're talking about Iraq. Why is it that the few people I've met who aren't against this crappy war are all over forty? What is it about getting old? Can't get close to death soon enough?'

He feels a sudden sadness, and a longing for the dispute to come to an end. He preferred it ten minutes ago, when she told him she loved him. She's yet to show him the proofs of
My Saucy Bark
and the artwork for the cover.

But he can't stop himself. ‘Death's all around,' he agrees. ‘Ask Saddam's torturers at Abu Ghraib prison and the twenty thousand inmates. And let me ask you a question. Why is it among those two million idealists today I didn't see one banner, one fist or voice raised against Saddam?'

‘He's loathsome,' she says. ‘It's a given.'

‘No it's not. It's a forgotten. Why else are you all singing and dancing in the park? The genocide and torture, the mass graves, the security apparatus, the criminal totalitarian state – the iPod generation doesn't want to know. Let nothing come between them and their ecstasy clubbing and cheap flights and reality TV. But it will, if we do nothing. You think you're all lovely and gentle and blameless, but the religious nazis loathe you. What do you think the Bali bombing was about? The clubbers clubbed. Radical Islam hates your freedom.'

She mimes being taken aback. ‘Dad, I'm sorry you're so sensitive about your age. But Bali was Al-Qaeda, not Saddam. Nothing you've just said justifies invading Iraq.'

Perowne is well into his third glass of champagne. A big mistake. He's not a practised drinker. But he's viciously happy. ‘It's not just Iraq. I'm talking about Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, a great swathe of repression, corruption and misery. You're about to be a published writer. Why not let it bother you a little, the censorship, and your fellow writers in Arab jails, in the very region where writing was invented? Or is freedom and not being tortured a Western affectation we shouldn't impose on others?'

‘Oh for God's sake, not that relativist stuff again. And you keep drifting off the point. No one wants Arab writers in jail. But invading Iraq isn't going to get them out.'

‘It might. Here's a chance to turn one country around. Plant a seed. See if it flourishes and spreads.'

‘You don't plant seeds with cruise missiles. They're going to hate the invaders. The religious extremists will get stronger. There'll be less freedom, more writers in prison.'

‘My fifty pounds says three months after the invasion there'll be a free press in Iraq, and unmonitored Internet access too. The reformers in Iran will be encouraged, those Syrian and Saudi and Libyan potentates will be getting the jitters.'

Daisy says, ‘Fine. And my fifty says it'll be a mess and even you will wish it never happened.'

They had various bets after arguments during her teenage years, generally concluded with a mock-formal handshake. Perowne found a way of paying up, even when he won – a form of concealed subsidy. After an exam seemed to go badly for her, seventeen-year-old Daisy angrily put twenty pounds on never getting into Oxford. To cheer her up he raised his side of the deal to five hundred, and when her acceptance came through she spent the money on a trip to Florence with a friend. Is she in the mood for shaking hands now? She
comes away from the door, retrieves her champagne and moves to the far side of the kitchen and appears interested in Theo's CDs by the hi-fi. Her back is firmly turned on him. He remains on his stool at the centre island, playing with his glass, no longer drinking. He has a hollow feeling from arguing only a half of what he feels. He's a dove with Jay Strauss, and a hawk with his daughter. What sense is he making? And how luxurious, to work it all out at home in the kitchen, the geopolitical moves and military strategy, and not be held to account, by voters, newspapers, friends, history. When there are no consequences, being wrong is simply an interesting diversion.

She takes a CD from its box and posts it in the player. He waits, knowing he'll get a clue to her mood, or even a message. At the piano intro he smiles. It's a record Theo brought into the house years ago, Chuck Berry's old pianist, Johnnie Johnson, singing ‘Tanqueray', a slouching blues of reunion and friendship.

 

It was a long time comin',

But I knew I would see the day

When you and I could sit down,

And have a drink of Tanqueray.

 

She turns and comes towards him with a little dance shuffle. When she's at his side he takes her hand.

She says, ‘Smells like the old warmonger's made one of his fish stews. Can I be of use?'

‘The young appeaser can set the table. And make a salad dressing if you like.'

She's on her way to the plate cupboard when they hear the doorbell, two overlong unsteady rings. They look at each other: it's not promising, that kind of persistence.

He says, ‘Before you do that, slice a lemon. The gin's over there, tonic's in the fridge.'

He's amused by her theatrical eye-rolling and deep breath.

‘Here goes.'

‘Stay cool,' he advises, and goes upstairs to greet his father-in-law, the eminent poet.

 

Growing up in the suburbs in cosily shared solitude with his mother, Henry Perowne never felt the lack of a father. In the heavily mortgaged households around him, fathers were distant, work-worn figures of little obvious interest. To a child, a domestic existence in Perivale in the mid-sixties was regulated uniquely by a mother, a housewife; visiting a friend's house to play at weekends or holidays, it was her domain you entered, her rules you temporarily lived by. She was the one who gave or withheld permission, or handed out the small change. He had no good reason to envy his friends an extra parent – when fathers weren't absent, they loomed irascibly, preventing rather than enabling the better, riskier elements of life. In his teens, when he scrutinised the few existing photographs of his father, it was less out of longing than narcissism – he hoped to discover in those strong, acne-free features some promise for his own future chances with girls. He wanted the face, but he didn't want the advice, the refusals or the judgments. Perhaps he was bound to regard a father-in-law as an imposition, even if he'd acquired one far less imposing than John Grammaticus.

Right from their first meeting in 1982 when he arrived at the chateau hours after consummating his love for Rosalind on a lower bunk on the Bilbao ferry, Senior House Officer Perowne was determined not to be patronised, not to be treated like a prospective son. He was an adult with specialised skills that could stand alongside those of any poet. Through Rosalind, he knew of ‘Mount Fuji', the much anthologised Grammaticus poem, but Henry didn't read poetry and said so without shame at dinner that first night. At that time John was deep into his
No Exequies
– his last extended creative period as it turned out – and what some junior
doctor didn't read in his spare time failed to intrigue him. Nor did he seem to care or even notice, later when the Scotch was on the table, the same doctor disagreeing with him on politics – Grammaticus was an early fan of Mrs Thatcher – or music – bebop had betrayed jazz – or the true nature of the French – venal to a man.

Rosalind said the next morning that Henry had tried too hard to get the old man's attention – the opposite of what he intended, and a very irritating remark. But even though he ceased to be argumentative, nothing much changed between them after that first evening, even after marriage, children and the passing of more than two decades. Perowne keeps his distance, and Grammaticus is happy with the arrangement, and looks straight through his son-in-law to his daughter, to his grandchildren. The two men are superficially friendly and at bottom bored by each other. Perowne can't see how poetry – rather occasional work it appears, like grape picking – can occupy a whole working life, or how such an edifice of reputation and self-regard can rest on so little, or why one should believe a drunk poet is different from any other drunk; while Grammaticus – Perowne's guess – regards him as one more tradesman, an uncultured and tedious medic, a class of men and women he distrusts more as his dependency on it grows with age.

There's another matter, naturally never discussed. The house on the square, like the chateau, came to Rosalind's mother Marianne through her parents. When she married Grammaticus, the London house became the family home where Rosalind and her brother grew up. When Marianne died in the road accident, the terms of her will were clear – the London house passed to the children, and John was to have St Felix. Four years after they were married, Rosalind and Henry, living in a tiny flat in Archway, raised a mortgage to buy out her brother who wanted an apartment in New York. It was a joyful day when the Perownes and their two young children moved into the big house. These various
transactions were made without ill-will. But Grammaticus tends to behave on his occasional visits as if he's returning home, as if he were an absentee landlord greeting his tenants, asserting his rights. Or perhaps Henry is too sensitive, having no place in his constitution for a father figure. Either way, it irks him; he prefers to see his father-in-law, if at all, in France.

As he goes towards the front door, Perowne reminds himself, against the promptings of the champagne, to keep his feelings well disguised; the purpose of the evening is to reconcile Daisy to her grandfather, three years on from what Theo has named, in honour of various thrillers, ‘The Newdigate Rebuff'. She'll want to show him the proofs, and the old man should rightfully claim his part in her success. On that good thought he opens the door to see Grammaticus several feet away, standing in the road, with long belted woollen coat, fedora and cane, head tipped back, his features in profile caught in the cool white light from the lamps in the square. Most likely he was posing for Daisy.

‘Ah Henry,' he says – the disappointment is in the downward inflection – ‘I was looking at the tower…'

Grammaticus doesn't shift position, so Perowne obligingly steps out to join him.

‘I was trying to see it', he continues, ‘through the eyes of Robert Adam when he was setting out the square, wondering what he would have made of it. What do you think?'

It rises above the plane trees in the central gardens, behind the reconstructed façade on the southern side; set high on the glass-paned stalk, six stacked circular terraces bearing their giant dishes, and above them, a set of fat wheels or sleeves within which is bound the geometry of fluorescent lights. At night, the dancing Mercury is a playful touch. When he was small, Theo liked to ask whether the tower would hit the house if it fell their way, and was always gratified when his father told him it most certainly would. Since
Perowne and Grammaticus have not yet greeted each other or shaken hands, their conversation is disembodied, like a chat-room exchange.