by Ian Mcewan
“I'm having this,” he cries. “You said I could take anything I want. So I'm taking this. OK?” He's addressing himself to the nape of Daisy's neck.
“Shit,” Nigel hisses.
It's of the essence of a degenerating mind, periodically to lose all sense of a continuous self, and therefore any regard for what others think of your lack of continuity. Baxter has forgotten that he forced Daisy to undress, or threatened Rosalind. Powerful feelings have obliterated the memory. In the sudden emotional rush of his mood swing, he inhabits the confining bright spotlight of the present. This is the moment to rush him. Henry looks across at Theo who makes a slow-motion nod of agreement. On the sofa, Grammaticus is sitting up, with his hands on his daughter's and granddaughter's shoulders. Rosalind and Daisy remain in their embrace—hard to believe they think they're out of danger, or that by ignoring Baxter they're making themselves more secure. It's the pregnancy, Henry decides, the overwhelming fact of it. It's time to act.
Baxter is almost shouting again. “I'm not taking anything else. You hear? Only this. It's all I want.” He clutches the book like a greedy child fearing the withdrawal of a treat.
Henry glances across at Theo again. He's edged nearer, and he looks tensed, ready to leap. Nigel stands between them, watching—but he's disaffected and there's a chance he'll do nothing. And besides, he, Perowne, is closer to Baxter and will certainly reach him before Nigel can intervene. Again, Perowne feels his pulse knocking in his ears, and sees a dozen ways in which it can go wrong. Henry glances once more at Theo, and decides to count in his mind to three, and then go, no matter what. One . . .
Suddenly Baxter turns. He's licking his lips, his smile is wet and beatific, his eyes are bright. The voice is warm, and trembles with exalted feeling.
“I'm going on that trial. I know all about it. They're trying to keep it quiet, but I see all the stuff. I know what's going on.”
“Fuck this,” Nigel says.
Perowne keeps his tone flat. “Yes.”
“You're going to show me this stuff.”
“Yes, the American trial. It's upstairs, in my office.”
He had almost forgotten his lie. He looks again at Theo who now seems to be prompting him with his eyes to go along with this. But he doesn't know that there's no trial. And the price of disappointing Baxter will be high.
He's put the book in his pocket and has taken the knife out and waves it in front of Perowne's face.
“Go on, go on! I'll be right behind you.”
He's so high now, he could stab someone in his joy. He's babbling his words.
“The trial. You show me everything. All of it, all of it . . .”
Henry wants to go to Rosalind, touch her hand, speak to her, kiss her—the smallest exchange would be enough, but Baxter is right in front of him now, with that peculiar metallic odour on his breath. The original idea was to draw him away from the others, and to separate him from Nigel. There's no reason not to carry this through. So, with a final despairing look in Rosalind's direction, Henry turns and walks slowly towards the door.
“You watch them,” Baxter says to Nigel. “They're all dangerous.”
He follows Perowne across the hall, and they start up the stairs, their steps ringing out in time on the stone. Henry is trying to recall which papers lying around on his desk he can plausibly pass off. He can't remember, and his thoughts are confused by the need to make a plan. There's a paperweight he can throw, and a bulky old stapler. The high-backed orthopaedic office chair will be too heavy to lift. He doesn't even own a paper knife. Baxter is one step behind him, right on his heels. Perhaps a backward kick is the thing.
“I know they're keeping it quiet,” Baxter is saying again. “They look after their own, don't they?”
They're already halfway up. Even if the trial existed, why would Baxter believe that this doctor would keep his word rather than call in the police? Because he's elated as well as desperate. Because his emotions are wild and his judgment is going. Because of the wasting in his caudate nucleus and putamen, and in his frontal and temporal regions. But none of this is relevant. Perowne needs a plan, and his thoughts are too quick, too profuse—and now he and Baxter are on the broad landing outside the study, dominated by the tall window that looks onto the street, just where it runs into the square.
Henry hesitates for a moment on the threshold, hoping to see something he might use. The desk lamps have heavy bases, but their tangled wires will restrict him. On a bookshelf is a stone figurine he would have to go on tiptoe to reach. Otherwise, the room is like a museum, a shrine, dedicated to another, carefree age—on the couch covered with a Bukhara rug his squash racket lies where he tossed it when he came up to look at Monday's list. On the big table by the wall, the screen saver—those pictures from the Hubble telescope of remote outer space, gas clouds light years across, dying stars and red giants fail to diminish earthly cares. On the old desk by the window, piles of papers, perhaps the only hope.
“Go on then.” Baxter pushes him in the small of his back and they enter the room together. It's a dreamy sensation, of going quietly, numbly, without protest towards destruction. Henry doesn't doubt that Baxter is feeling free enough to kill him.
“Where is it? Show me.”
His eagerness and trust is childlike, but he's waving his knife. For their different reasons, they both long for evidence of a medical trial and an invitation for Baxter to join the privileged cohort. Henry goes towards the desk by the window where two piles of journals and offprints lean side by side. Looking down, he sees an account of a new spinal fusion procedure, and a new technique for opening blocked carotid arteries, and a sceptical piece casting doubt on the surgical lesioning of the globus pallidus in the treatment of Parkinson's Disease. He chooses the last and holds it up. He has no idea what he's doing beyond delaying the moment. His family is downstairs, and he's feeling very lonely.
“This describes the structure,” he starts to say. His voice quavers, as a liar's might, but there's nothing he can do but keep talking. “The thing is this. The globus pallidus, the pale globe, is a rather beautiful thing, deep in the basal ganglia, one of the oldest parts of the corpus striatum, and uh divided in two segments which . . .”
But Baxter is no longer paying attention—he's turned his head to listen. From downstairs they hear rapid heavy footsteps crossing the hall, then the sound of the front door opening and slamming shut. Has he been deserted for the second time today? He hurries across the study and steps out onto the landing. Henry drops the article and follows. What they see is Theo coming towards them at a run, leaping up the stairs three at a time, his arms pumping, his teeth bared savagely with the effort. He makes an inarticulate shout, which sounds like a command. Henry is already moving. Baxter draws back the knife. Henry seizes his wrist with both hands, pinning the arm in place. Contact at last. A moment later, Theo lunges forwards from two steps down and takes Baxter by the lapels of his leather jacket, and with a twisting, whip-like movement of his body pulls him off balance. At the same time, Perowne, still gripping the arm, heaves with his shoulder, and together they fling him down the stairs.
He falls backwards, with arms outstretched, still holding the knife in his right hand. There's a moment, which seems to unfold and luxuriously expand, when all goes silent and still, when Baxter is entirely airborne, suspended in time, looking directly at Henry with an expression, not so much of terror, as dismay. And Henry thinks he sees in the wide brown eyes a sorrowful accusation of betrayal. He, Henry Perowne, possesses so much—the work, money, status, the home, above all, the family—the handsome healthy son with the strong guitarist's hands come to rescue him, the beautiful poet for a daughter, unattainable even in her nakedness, the famous father-in-law, the gifted, loving wife; and he has done nothing, given nothing to Baxter who has so little that is not wrecked by his defective gene, and who is soon to have even less.
The run of stairs before the turn is long, the steps are hard stone. With a rippling, bell-li
ke sound, Baxter's left foot glances along a row of iron banister posts, just before his head hits the floor of the half-landing and collides with the wall, inches above the skirting board.
They are in various forms of shock, and remain so for hours after the police have left and the paramedics have taken Baxter away in their ambulance. Sudden bursts of urgent, sometimes tearful recall are broken by numb silences. No one wants to be alone, so they remain in the sitting room together, trapped in a waiting room, a no man's land separating their ordeal from the resumption of their lives. With the resilience of the young, Theo and Daisy go downstairs to the kitchen and return with bottles of red wine, mineral water and a bowl of salted cashews, as well as ice and a cloth to make a compress for their grandfather's nose.
But alcohol, tasty as it is, barely penetrates. And Henry finds that he prefers to drink water. What meets their needs is touch—they sit close, hold hands, embrace. The parting words of the night-duty CID officer were that his colleagues would be coming in the morning to take formal statements from them individually. They were therefore not to discuss or compare their evidence. It's a hopeless prescription, and it doesn't even occur to them to follow it. There's nothing to do but talk, fall silent, then talk again. They have the impression of conducting a careful analysis of the evening's horrible events. But it's a simpler, more vital re-enactment. All they do is describe: when they came in the room, when he turned, when the tall horsy one just walked out of the house . . . They want to have it all again, from another's point of view, and know that it's all true what they've been through, and feel in these precise comparisons of feeling and observation that they're being delivered from private nightmare, and returned to the web of kindly social and familial relations, without which they're nothing. They were overrun and dominated by intruders because they weren't able to communicate and act together; now at last they can.
Perowne attends to his father-in-law's nose. John refuses to go to casualty that night, and no one tries to persuade him. The swelling already makes a diagnosis difficult, but his nose hasn't shifted from the midline position, and Perowne's guess is a hairline fracture to the maxillary processes—better that than ruptured cartilage. For much of this stretch of the evening Henry sits close to Rosalind. She shows them a red patch and a small cut on her neck, and describes a moment when she ceased to be terrified and became indifferent to her fate.
“I felt myself floating away,” she says. “It was as if I was watching all of us, myself included, from a corner of the room right up by the ceiling. And I thought, if it's going to happen, I won't feel a thing, I won't care.”
“Well, we might have,” Theo says, and they laugh loudly, too loudly.
Daisy talks with brittle gaiety about undressing in front of Baxter. “I tried to pretend that I was ten years old, at school, getting changed for hockey. I disliked the games mistress and hated taking my clothes off when she was there. But remembering her helped me. Then I tried to imagine that I was in the garden at the chateau, reciting to Granddad.”
The unspoken matter is Daisy's pregnancy. But it's too soon, Henry supposes, because she doesn't refer to it, and nor does Rosalind.
Grammaticus says from behind his compress, “You know, it sounds completely mad, but there came a point after Daisy recited Arnold for the second time when I actually began to feel sorry for that fellow. I think, my dear, you made him fall in love with you.”
“Arnold who?” Henry says, and makes Daisy and her grandfather laugh. Henry adds, but she doesn't seem to hear, “You know, I didn't think it was one of your best.”
He knows what Grammaticus means, and he could begin to tell them all about Baxter's condition, but Henry himself is undergoing a shift in sympathies; the sight of the abrasion on Rosalind's neck hardens him. What weakness, what delusional folly, to permit yourself sympathy towards a man, sick or not, who invades your house like this. As he sits listening to the others, his anger grows, until he almost begins to regret the care he routinely gave Baxter after his fall. He could have left him to die of hypoxia, pleading incapacity through shock. Instead, he went straight down with Theo and, finding Baxter semi-conscious, opened his airway with a jaw thrust; assuming spinal damage, he showed Theo how to hold Baxter's head while he improvised a collar out of towels from the half-landing bathroom. Downstairs, Rosalind was calling an ambulance—the landlines were not cut. With Theo still holding Baxter's head, Perowne rolled him into a recovery position, and looked at the other vital signs. They weren't too good. The breathing was noisy, the pulse slow and weak, the pupils slightly unequal. By this time, Baxter was murmuring to himself as he lay there with eyes closed. He was able to respond to his name and to a command to clench his fist—Perowne put his Glasgow Coma Score at thirteen. He went to his study and phoned ahead to casualty, spoke to the registrar and told him what to expect, and to be ready to order a CT scan and alert the neurosurgeon on duty. Then there was nothing to do but wait out the last minutes. During that time they managed to ease Daisy's book from Baxter's pocket. Theo continued to support his head until two lads from the hospital in green jump suits arrived, put in a line and under Perowne's instruction administered colloid fluid intravenously.
Two police constables arrived in support of the ambulance, and a few minutes later, the CID man turned up. After he'd met the family, and heard Perowne's account, he told them it was too late, and everyone was too upset now to be giving statements. He took from Henry the licence plate number of the red BMW and made a note of the Spearmint Rhino. He examined the gash in the sofa, then he went back upstairs, knelt by Baxter, prised the knife out of his hand and dropped it in a sterile plastic bag. He took a swab of dried blood from the knuckles of Baxter's left hand—it was likely to be blood from Grammaticus's nose.
The detective laughed out loud when Theo asked him whether he and his father had committed any crime in throwing Baxter down the stairs.
He touched Baxter with the tip of his shoe. “I doubt if he'll be making a complaint. And we certainly won't be.”
The detective phoned his station to arrange for two constables to be sent to the hospital to stand guard over Baxter through the night. When he was conscious, he'd be arrested. Formal charges would follow later. After the warning about sharing evidence, the three policemen left. The paramedics chocked and blocked Baxter on a spinal board and carried him away.
Rosalind appears to make an impressive recovery. Perhaps it's only half an hour after the police and ambulance men have left, when she suggests that it might do everybody good to come and eat. No one has an appetite, but they follow her down to the kitchen. While Perowne reheats his stock and takes from the fridge the clams, mussels, prawns and monkfish, the children lay the table, Rosalind slices a loaf of bread and makes a dressing for the salad, and Grammaticus puts down his icepack to open another bottle of wine. This communal activity is pleasurable, and twenty minutes later the meal is ready, and they are hungry at last. It's even faintly reassuring that Grammaticus is on his way to getting drunk, though he remains at a benign stage. It's about this time, as they're sitting down, that Henry learns the name of the poet, Matthew Arnold, and that his poem that Daisy recited, “Dover Beach,” is in all the anthologies and used to be taught in every school.
“Like your ‘Mount Fuji,'” Henry says, a remark that pleases Grammaticus immensely and prompts him to stand to propose a toast. John's in his twinkly mode, an effect heightened by his clownishly swollen nose. The evening has the appearance of being back on course, for in his hand is the proof copy of My Saucy Bark.
“Forget everything else that's happened. We're raising our glasses to Daisy,” he says. “Her poems mark a brilliant beginning to a career and I'm a very proud grandfather and dedicatee. Who would have thought that learning poems by heart for pocket money would turn out to be so useful. After tonight I think I must owe her another five pounds. To Daisy.”
“To Daisy,” they reply, and as they lift their glasses she kisses him, and he hugs her in return—the
reconciliation is made, the Newdigate Rebuff is forgotten.
Henry touches the wine to his lips, but finds he's lost his taste for alcohol. Just as Daisy and her grandfather sit down, the phone rings and since he's nearest, Henry goes across the kitchen to take the call. In his unusual state, he doesn't immediately recognise the American voice.
“Henry? Is that you, Henry?”
“Oh, Jay. Yes.”
“Listen. We got an extradural, male, mid-twenties, fell down the stairs. Sally Madden went home with the flu an hour ago, so I've got Rodney. The kid's keen and he's good and he doesn't want you in here. But Henry, we have a depressed fracture right over the sinus.”
Perowne clears his throat. “Boggy swelling?”
“Right on the spot. That's why I'm stepping in. I've seen inexperienced surgeons tear the sinus lifting the bone, and four litres of blood on the floor. I want someone senior in here and you're the nearest. Plus you're the best.”
From across the kitchen comes loud, unnatural laughter, exaggerated like before, almost harsh; they're not really pretending to have forgotten their fear—they're simply wanting to survive it. There are other surgeons Jay can call on, and as a general rule, Perowne avoids operating on people he knows. But this is different. And despite various shifts in his attitude to Baxter, some clarity, even some resolve, is beginning to form. He thinks he knows what it is he wants to do.