by Ian Mcewan
Four
He doesn't bother to park in the mews. Instead, he pulls up right outside his front door—it's legal at this time of evening to be on a yellow line and he's impatient to be indoors. But he takes a few seconds to examine the damage to the passenger door—barely a mark. As he looks up from the car, he notices that the house is in darkness. Naturally, Theo is still at rehearsal, Rosalind will be picking her way through the last fine points of her court application. A few widely separated flakes of snow picked out by street light show up vividly against the windows' glossy black. His father-in-law and daughter are due and he's pressed for time. As he opens the door he's trying to remember the exact phrasing of a remark Theo made earlier in the day that didn't trouble him at the time. It nags at him briefly now, but the half-hearted effort of recall itself fades as he steps into the warmth of the hall and turns on the lights; a mere light bulb can explode a thought. He goes straight down to the wine racks and takes out four bottles. His kind of fish stew needs a robust country wine—red, not white. Grammaticus introduced him to a Tautavel, Côtes du Roussillon Villages, and Henry has made it his house wine—delicious, and less than fifty pounds a case. Uncorking wines hours before they're drunk is a form of magical thinking; the surface area exposed to the air is minute and can't possibly make a detectable difference. However, he does want the bottles warmer, and he carries them into the kitchen and puts them by the stove.
Three bottles of champagne are already in the fridge. He takes a step towards the CD player, then changes his mind for he's feeling the pull, like gravity, of the approaching TV news. It's a condition of the times, this compulsion to hear how it stands with the world, and be joined to the generality, to a community of anxiety. The habit's grown stronger these past two years; a different scale of news value has been set by monstrous and spectacular scenes. The possibility of their recurrence is one thread that binds the days. The government's counsel—that an attack in a European or American city is an inevitability—isn't only a disclaimer of responsibility, it's a heady promise. Everyone fears it, but there's also a darker longing in the collective mind, a sickening for self-punishment and a blasphemous curiosity. Just as the hospitals have their crisis plans, so the television networks stand ready to deliver, and their audiences wait. Bigger, grosser next time. Please don't let it happen. But let me see it all the same, as it's happening and from every angle, and let me be among the first to know. Also, Henry needs to hear about the pilots in custody.
With the idea of the news, inseparable from it, at least at weekends, is the lustrous prospect of a glass of red wine. He empties the last of a Côtes du Rhône into a glass, puts the TV on mute and sets about stripping and chopping three onions. Impatient of the papery outer layers, he makes a deep incision, forcing his thumb in four layers deep and ripping them away, wasting a third of the flesh. He chops the remainder rapidly and tips it into a casserole with a lot of olive oil. What he likes about cooking is its relative imprecision and lack of discipline—a release from the demands of the theatre. In the kitchen, the consequences of failure are mild: disappointment, a wisp of disgrace, rarely voiced. No one actually dies. He strips and chops eight fat cloves of garlic and adds them to the onions. From recipes he draws only the broadest principles. The cookery writers he admires speak of “handfuls” and “a sprinkling,” of “chucking in” this or that. They list alternative ingredients and encourage experimentation. Henry accepts that he'll never make a decent cook, that he belongs to what Rosalind calls the hearty school. Into his palm he empties several dried red chillies from a pot and crushes them between his hands and lets the flakes fall with their seeds into the onions and garlic. The TV news comes up but he doesn't touch the mute. It's the same helicopter shot from before it got dark, the same crowds still filing into the park, the same general celebration. Onto the softened onions and garlic—pinches of saffron, some bay leaves, orange-peel gratings, oregano, five anchovy fillets, two tins of peeled tomatoes. On the big Hyde Park stage, sound-bite extracts of speeches by a venerable politician of the left, a pop star, a playwright, a trade unionist. Into a stockpot he eases the skeletons of three skates. Their heads are intact, their lips girlishly full. Their eyes go cloudy on contact with the boiling water. A senior police officer is answering questions about the march. By his tight smile and the tilt of his head he appears satisfied with the day. From the green string bag of mussels Henry takes a dozen or so and drops them in with the skate. If they're alive and in pain, he isn't to know. Now that same earnest reporter, silently mouthing all there is to know about the unprecedented gathering. The juice of the tomatoes is simmering with the onions and the rest, and turning reddish-orange with the saffron.
Perowne, his hearing not yet fully recovered from the rehearsal, his feelings dimmed, even numbed, by his visit to his mother, decides he needs to be listening to something punchy, to Steve Earle, the thinking man's Bruce Springsteen, according to Theo. But the record he wants, El Corazón, is upstairs, so he drinks the wine instead, and keeps glancing towards the set, waiting for his story. The Prime Minister is giving his Glasgow speech. Perowne touches the control in time to hear him say that the number of marchers today has been exceeded by the number of deaths caused by Saddam. A clever point, the only case to make, but it should have been made from the start. Too late now. After Blix it looks tactical. Henry turns the sound off. It occurs to him how content he is to be cooking—even self-consciousness doesn't diminish the feeling. Into the biggest colander he pours the rest of the mussels and scrubs them with a vegetable brush at the sink under running water. The pale greenish clams on the other hand look dainty and pure, and he merely rinses them. One of the skates has arched its spine, as if to escape the boiling. As he pushes it back down with a wooden spatula, the vertebral column breaks, right below T3. Last summer he operated on a teenage girl who broke her back at C5 and T2 falling out of a tree at a pop festival, trying to get a better view of Radiohead. She'd just finished school and wanted to study Russian at Leeds. Now, after eight months' rehab she's doing fine. But he dismisses the memory. He isn't thinking about work, he wants to cook. From the fridge he takes a quarter-full bottle of white wine, a Sancerre, and tips it over the tomato mix.
On a broader, thicker chopping block, Perowne arranges the monkfish tails and cuts them into chunks and tips them into a big white bowl. Then he washes the ice off the tiger prawns and puts them in too. In a second bowl, he puts the clams and mussels. Both bowls go into the fridge, with dinner plates as lids. An establishing shot shows the United Nations building in New York, and next, Colin Powell getting into a black limousine. It's demotion for Henry's story, but he doesn't mind. He's cleaning up the kitchen, wiping his mess from the central island into a large bin, and scrubbing the chopping boards under running water. Then it's time to tip the boiling juice off the skates and mussels into the casserole. When that's done he has now, he reckons, about two and a half litres of bright orange stock which he'll cook for another five minutes. Just before dinner, he'll reheat it, and simmer the clams, monkfish, mussels and prawns in it for ten minutes. They'll eat the stew with brown bread, salad and red wine. After New York, there's the Kuwait–Iraq border, and military trucks moving in convoy along a desert road, and our lads kipping down by the tracks of their tanks, then eating bangers next morning from their mess-tins. He takes two bags of mâche from the bottom of the fridge and empties them into a salad tosser. He runs the cold tap over the leaves. An officer, barely in his twenties, is standing outside his tent pointing with a stick at a map on an easel. Perowne isn't tempted to disable the mute—these items from the front have a cheerful, censored air that lowers his spirits. He spins the salad and tips it into a bowl. Oil, lemon, pepper and salt he'll throw on later. There's cheese and fruit for pudding. Theo and Daisy can set the table.
His preparations are done, just as the burning plane story comes up, fourth item. With a confused sense that he's about to learn something significant about himself, he turns on the sound and stands
facing the tiny set, drying his hands on a towel. Placed fourth could mean no developments, or sinister silence from the authorities; but in fact the story has collapsed—you can almost hear in the introduction the presenter's regretful tone. There they are, the pilot, the wizened fellow with slicked-back hair and his tubby co-pilot standing outside a hotel near Heathrow. They are not, the pilot explains through a translator, Chechens or Algerians, they are not Muslims, they are Christians, though only in name, for they never attend church and own neither a Koran nor a Bible. Above all, they are Russians and proud of the fact. They are certainly not responsible for the American child pornography found half-destroyed in the burned-out cargo. They work for a good company, registered in Holland, and their only responsibilities are to their plane. And yes, of course, child pornography is an abomination, but it's not part of their duties to inspect every package listed on the manifest. They've been released without charge, and when the Civil Aviation Authority tells them it's appropriate, they'll return to Riga. Also dead is the controversy about the plane's route into the airport; the correct procedures were followed. Both men insist they've been treated with courtesy by the Metropolitan Police. The plump co-pilot says he wants a bath and a long drink.
Good news, but as he walks out of the kitchen in the direction of the larder, Henry feels no particular pleasure, not even relief. Have his anxieties been making a fool of him? It's part of the new order, this narrowing of mental freedom, of his right to roam. Not so long ago his thoughts ranged more unpredictably, over a longer list of subjects. He suspects he's becoming a dupe, the willing, febrile consumer of news fodder, opinion, speculation and of all the crumbs the authorities let fall. He's a docile citizen, watching Leviathan grow stronger while he creeps under its shadow for protection. This Russian plane flew right into his insomnia, and he's been only too happy to let the story and every little nervous shift of the daily news process colour his emotional state. It's an illusion, to believe himself active in the story. Does he think he's contributing something, watching news programmes, or lying on his back on the sofa on Sunday afternoons, reading more opinion columns of ungrounded certainties, more long articles about what really lies behind this or that development, or about what is most surely going to happen next, predictions forgotten as soon as they are read, well before events disprove them? For or against the war on terror, or the war in Iraq; for the termination of an odious tyrant and his crime family, for the ultimate weapons inspection, the opening of the torture prisons, locating the mass graves, the chance of liberty and prosperity, and a warning to other despots; or against the bombing of civilians, the inevitable refugees and famine, illegal international action, the wrath of Arab nations and the swelling of Al-Qaeda's ranks. Either way, it amounts to a consensus of a kind, an orthodoxy of attention, a mild subjugation in itself. Does he think that his ambivalence—if that's what it really is—excuses him from the general conformity? He's deeper in than most. His nerves, like tautened strings, vibrate obediently with each news “release.” He's lost the habits of scepticism, he's becoming dim with contradictory opinion, he isn't thinking clearly, and just as bad, he senses he isn't thinking independently.
The Russian pilots are shown walking into the hotel, and that's the last he'll ever see of them. He fetches a few bottles of tonic from the larder, checks on the ice-cube maker and the gin—three quarters of a litre is surely enough for one man—and turns off the heat under his stock. Upstairs, on the ground floor, he draws the curtains in the L-shaped living room, and turns on the lamps, and lights the gas in the mock-coal fires. These heavy curtains, closed by pulling on a cord weighted with a fat brass knob, have a way of cleanly eliminating the square and the wintry world beyond it. The tall-ceilinged room in creams and browns is silent, soothing, its only bright colour is in the blues and rubies of the rugs and an abstract slash of orange and yellow against green in a Howard Hodgkin on one of the chimney breasts. The three people in the world he, Henry Perowne, most loves, and who most love him, are about to come home. So what's wrong with him? Nothing, nothing at all. He's fine, everything is fine. He pauses at the foot of the stairs, wondering what it is he was intending to do next. He goes up to his study on the first floor, and remains standing as he looks at his screen to remind himself of the week ahead. There are four names on Monday's list, five for Tuesday's. Each name conjures a history he knows well from the past weeks or months. In each case he knows exactly what he intends to do, and he feels pleasure in the prospect of the work. How different for the nine individuals, some already on the wards, some at home, others travelling into London tomorrow or Monday, with their dread of the approaching moment, the anaesthetic oblivion, and their reasonable suspicion that when they come round they will never be quite the same.
From downstairs he hears the front-door lock turning, and by the sound of the door opening and closing—a style of entering a place with economy, and of easing the door shut behind her—he knows it's Daisy. What luck, that she should arrive before her grandfather. As he hurries down the stairs towards her, she does a little jig of delight.
“You're in!”
As they embrace, he makes a low, sighing, growling noise, the way he used to greet her when she was five. And it is the child's body he feels as he almost lifts her clear off the floor, the smoothness of muscle under the clothes, the springiness he can feel in her joints, the sexless kisses. Even her breath is like a child's. She doesn't smoke, she rarely drinks, and she's about to become a published poet. His own breath smells richly of red wine. What abstemious children he's fathered.
“So. Let me have a look at you.”
Six months is the longest she's ever been away from her family. The Perownes, though permissive to a high degree, are also possessive parents. Holding her at arm's length, he hopes she doesn't notice the glistening in his eyes or the little struggle in his throat. His moment of pathos rises and falls in a single smooth wave, and is gone. He's still only in rehearsal as an old fool, a mere beginner. Despite his fantasies, this is no child. She's an independent young woman, gazing back at him with head cocked—so like her grandmother in that tilted look—lips smiling but unparted, her intelligence like warmth in her face. This is the pain-pleasure of having newly adult children; they're innocent and ruthless in forgetting their sweet old dependence. But perhaps she's been reminding him—during their embrace she half rubbed, half patted his back, a familiar maternal gesture of hers. Even when she was five she liked to mother him, and admonish him whenever he worked too late or drank wine or failed to win the London Marathon. She was one of those finger-wagging, imperious little girls. Her daddy belonged to her. Now she rubs and pats other men, at least half a dozen in the past year, if My Saucy Bark and its “Six Short Songs” are a guide. It's the bracing existence of these fellows that helps him control his single tear.
She wears an unbuttoned scuffed leather trenchcoat of dark green. A Russian fur hat dangles from her right hand. Beneath the coat, grey leather boots at knee height, a dark grey woollen skirt, a thick, loose sweater and a grey and white silk scarf. The stab at Parisian chic doesn't extend to her luggage—her old student backpack is on its side at her feet. He's still holding her by the shoulders, trying to place what's changed in six months. An unfamiliar scent, a little heavier perhaps, a little wiser around the eyes, the delicate face set a little more firmly. Most of her life is a mystery to him now. He sometimes wonders if Rosalind knows things about their daughter that he does not.
Under his scrutiny, the pressure of her smile is growing, until she laughs and says, “Come on, doctor. You can be straight with me. I've become an old hag.”
“You're looking gorgeous, and way too grown up for my taste.”
“I'm bound to regress while I'm here.” She points behind her at the sitting room and mouths, “Is Granddad here?”
“Not yet.”
She wriggles clear of his hold, loops her arms around his shoulders and kisses him on the nose. “I love you and I'm so happy to be back.”
“I love you too.”
Something else is different. She's no longer merely pretty, she's beautiful, and perhaps also, so her eyes tell him, a little preoccupied. She's in love and can't bear to be parted. He pushes the thought away. Whatever it is, she's likely to tell Rosalind first.
For a few seconds they enter one of those mute, vacuous moments that follow an enthusiastic reunion—too much to be said, and a gentle resettling needed, a resumption of ordinary business. Daisy is gazing about her as she takes off her coat. The movement releases more of her unfamiliar perfume. A gift from her lover. He'll have to try harder to rid himself of this gloomy fixation. She's bound to love a man other than himself. It would be easier for him if her poems weren't so wanton—it isn't only wild sex they celebrate, but restless novelty, the rooms and beds visited once and left at dawn, the walk home down wet Parisian streets whose efficient cleansing by the city authorities is the occasion for various metaphors. The same fresh-start purification was in her Newdigate launderette poem. Perowne knows the old arguments about double standards, but don't some liberal-minded women now argue for the power and value of reticence? Is it only fatherly soft-headedness that makes him suspect that a girl who sleeps around too earnestly has an improved chance of ending up with a lower-grade male, an inadequate, a loser? Or is his own peculiarity in this field, his own lack of exploratory vigour, making for another problem of reference?
“My God, this place is even larger than I remember.” She's peering up through the banisters at the chandelier hanging from the remote second-floor ceiling. Without thinking, he takes her coat, laughs and hands it back.