Saturday (18 page)

Then the director, perhaps looking for an excuse to bring the session to an end, raised a hand in greeting to Rosalind. They knew each other through some legal matter that had ended amicably. The director guided Blair around the bricks and crossed the gallery towards the Perownes, and behind them wheeled the retinue, the photographers with their cameras up and ready, the diarists with their notebooks in case something interesting should happen at last. Helplessly, the Perownes watched them all approach. In a sudden press of bodies they were introduced to the Prime Minister. He took Rosalind's hand first, then Henry's. The grip was firm and manly, and to Perowne's surprise, Blair was looking at him with recognition and interest. The gaze was intelligent and intense, and unexpectedly youthful. So much had yet to happen.

He said, ‘I really admire the work you're doing.'

Perowne said automatically, ‘Thank you.' But he was impressed. It was just conceivable, he supposed, that Blair with his good memory and reputation for absorbing the details of his ministers' briefs, would have heard of the hospital's excellent report last month – all targets met – and even of the special mention of the neurosurgery department's exceptional
results. Procedures twenty-three per cent up on last year. Later Henry realised what an absurd notion that was.

The Prime Minister, who still had hold of his hand, added, ‘In fact, we've got two of your paintings hanging in Downing Street. Cherie and I adore them.'

‘No, no,' Perowne said.

‘Yes, yes,' the Prime Minister insisted, pumping his hand. He was in no mood for artistic modesty.

‘No, I think you – '

‘Honestly. They're in the dining room.'

‘You're making a mistake,' Perowne said, and on that word there passed through the Prime Minister's features for the briefest instant a look of sudden alarm, of fleeting self-doubt. No one else saw his expression freeze and his eyes bulge minimally. A hairline fracture had appeared in the assurance of power. Then he continued as before, no doubt making the rapid calculation that given all the people pushing in around them trying to listen, there could be no turning back. Not without a derisive press tomorrow.

‘Anyway. They truly are marvellous. Congratulations.'

One of the aides, a woman in a black trouser suit, cut in and said, ‘Prime Minister, we have three and a half minutes. We have to move.'

Blair let go of Perowne's hand and without a farewell beyond a nod and a curt pursing of the lips, turned and let himself be led away. And the crew, the press, the flunkeys, the bodyguards, the gallery underlings and their director surged behind him, and within seconds the Perownes were standing in the empty gallery with the bricks as if nothing had happened at all.

Watching from his car the multiple images cutting between interviewer and guest, Perowne wonders if such moments, stabs of cold panicky doubt, are an increasing part of the Prime Minister's days, or nights. There might not be a second UN resolution. The next weapons inspectors' report could also be inconclusive. The Iraqis might use biological weapons
against the invasion force. Or, as one former inspector keeps insisting, there might no longer be any weapons of mass destruction at all. There's talk of famine and three million refugees, and they're already preparing the reception camps in Syria and Iran. The UN is predicting hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths. There could be revenge attacks on London. And still the Americans remain vague about their post-war plans. Perhaps they have none. In all, Saddam could be overthrown at too high a cost. It's a future no one can read. Government ministers speak up loyally, various newspapers back the war, there's a fair degree of anxious support in the country along with the dissent, but no one really doubts that in Britain one man alone is driving the matter forward. Night sweats, hideous dreams, the wild, lurching fantasies of sleeplessness? Or simple loneliness? Whenever he sees him now on screen, Henry looks out for an awareness of the abyss, for that hairline crack, the moment of facial immobility, the brief faltering he privately witnessed. But all he sees is certainty, or at worst a straining earnestness.

 

He finds a vacant residents' parking space across the road from his front door. As he takes the shopping from the boot of his car, he sees in the square, lounging by the bench nearest his house, the same young men who are often there in the early evening, and then again late at night. There are two West Indians and two, sometimes three Middle Easterners who might be Turks. All of them look genial and prosperous, and frequently lean on each other's shoulders and laugh loudly. At the kerb is a Mercedes, same model as Perowne's, but black, and a figure always at the wheel. Now and then a stranger will come by and stop to talk to the group. One of them will cross to the car, consult with the driver and return, there'll be another huddle, and then the stranger will walk on. They are entirely self-contained and unthreatening, and Perowne assumed for a long time they were dealers, running a pavement café in cocaine perhaps, or ecstasy and
marijuana. Their customers do not look haunted or degenerate enough to be heroin or crack users. It was Theo who put his father right. The group sells tickets for various fringe rap gigs around the city. They also sell bootleg CDs and can arrange cheap long-distance flights as well as fix up cut-rate premises and DJs for parties, limos for weddings and airports and cut-rate health and travel insurance; for a commission they can introduce asylum seekers and illegal aliens to solicitors. The group pays no taxes or office overheads and is highly competitive. Whenever Perowne sees these people he vaguely feels, as he does now, crossing the road to his door, that he owes them an apology. One day he'll buy something from them.

Theo is down in the kitchen, probably preparing one of his fruit and yoghurt breakfasts. Henry leaves the fish at the top of the stairs, calls down a greeting and goes up to the second floor. The bedroom feels overheated and confined, and depleted by daylight. It looks and feels a better, kinder place lit by dimmed lamps, with the day's work done and the promise of sleep; being here in the early afternoon reminds him of a bad spell of flu. He pulls off his trainers, peels away his damp socks and drops them in the laundry basket, and goes to the central window to open it. And there it is again, or another one, directly below him, slowly rounding the corner of the house where the street meets the square. His view is mostly of its roof, and his sightline to the off-side wing mirror is entirely obscured, even though he pushes the window up and leans right out. Nor can he see the driver, or any passengers. He watches it cruise along the northern side of the square and turn right into Conway Street and disappear. This time he doesn't feel quite so detached. But what is he then? Interested, or even faintly troubled? It's a common enough make, and until two or three years ago, red was a common choice. On the other hand, why reason away the possibility of it being Baxter? His predicament is terrible and fascinating – the tough-guy street existence must have masked
a longing for a better kind of life even before the degenerative disease showed its first signs. Perowne comes away from the window and goes towards the bathroom. Baxter would hardly need to tail him. The Mercedes is distinctive enough, and it's parked right outside the house. Yes, he'd like to see Baxter again, in office hours, and hear more and give him some useful contacts. But Henry doesn't want him hanging around the square.

As he finishes undressing, his mobile rings from within the heap of clothes he's let fall at his feet. He fumbles and finds it.

‘Darling?' she says.

Rosalind at last. What better moment? He takes the phone through to the bedroom and sprawls naked on his back on the half-made bed where hours before they made love. From the radiators he feels on his bare skin waves of heat like a desert breeze. The thermostat is set too high. He has a half, or perhaps really a quarter of an erection. If she hadn't been working today, if there were no weekend crisis on the paper, if her mild-mannered editor wasn't such a bruiser when it comes to the small print of press freedom, she and Henry might be here together now. It's how they sometimes pass an hour or two on a winter's Saturday afternoon. The sexiness of a four o'clock dusk.

The bathroom mirror, with the help of kindly illumination and a correct angle, allows Henry an occasional reminder of his youth. But Rosalind, by some trick of inner light or his own loving folly, still appears to resemble strongly, constantly, the woman he first knew all those years ago. The older sister of that young Rosalind, but not yet her mother. How long can this last? In their essentials, the individual elements remain unchanged: the near luminous pallor of her skin – her mother, Marianne, was of Celtic descent; the scant, delicate eyebrows – almost non-existent; that level, soft green regard; and her teeth, white as ever, (his own are going grey) the upper set perfectly shaped, the lower, faintly awry – a
girlish imperfection he's never wanted her to remedy; the way the unfeigned breadth of the smile proceeds from a shy start; on her lips, an orange-rose gleam that is all her own; the hair, cut short now, still reddish-brown. In repose she has an air of merry intelligence, an undiminished taste for fun. It remains a beautiful face. Like everyone in their forties, she has her moments of dismay, weary before the mirror at bedtime, and he's recognised in himself that look, almost a snarl, of savage appraisal. We're all travelling in the same direction. Reasonably, she's not entirely convinced when he tells her that the soft swelling at her hips is rather to his taste, as is the heaviness in her breasts. But it's true. Yes, he would be happy lying down with her now.

He guesses that her state of mind will be remote from his own – in her black office clothes, hurrying in and out of meetings – so he pulls himself up into a sitting position on the bed to talk sensibly.

‘How's it going?'

‘Our judge is stuck in a traffic jam south of Blackfriars Bridge. It's the demonstration. But I think he's going to give us what we want.'

‘Lift the injunction?'

‘Yup. Monday morning. ‘ She sounds speedy and pleased.

‘You're a genius,' Henry says. ‘What about your dad?'

‘I can't collect him from his hotel. It's the demonstration. The traffic's hell. He's going to make his own way in a taxi.' She pauses and says at a slightly slower pace, ‘And how are you?' The downward inflection and extension of the final word is tender, a clear reference to this morning. He was wrong about her mood. He's about to tell her that he's naked on the bed, wanting her, then he changes his mind. This isn't the time for telephone foreplay, when he has to get out of the house and she has her own business to conclude. And there are more important things he's yet to tell her which will have to wait until after tonight's dinner, or tomorrow morning.

He says, ‘I'm heading off to Perivale as soon as I've had a shower.' And because that isn't the answer to her question, he adds, ‘I'm all right, but I'm looking forward to some time with you.' That isn't enough either, so he says, ‘Various things've happened I need to talk to you about.'

‘What sort of things?'

‘Nothing terrible. I'd rather tell you when I see you.'

‘OK. But give me a clue.'

‘Last night when I couldn't sleep I was at the window. I saw that Russian cargo plane.'

‘Darling. That must have been scary. What else?'

He hesitates, and his hand, by its own volition, caresses the area around the bruise on his chest. What would be the heading, as she sometimes puts it? Road-rage showdown. Attempted mugging. A neural disease. The wing mirror. The rear-view mirror.

‘I lost at squash. I'm getting too old for this game.'

She laughs. ‘I don't believe that's what it is.' But she sounds reassured. She says, ‘There's something you may have forgotten. Theo's got a big rehearsal this afternoon. A few days ago I heard you promising to be there.'

‘Damn. What time?' He has no memory of such a promise.

‘At five in that place in Ladbroke Grove.'

‘I better move.'

He rises from the bed and takes the phone into the bathroom for the farewells.

‘I love you.'

‘I love you,' she answers, and rings off.

He steps under the shower, a forceful cascade pumped down from the third floor. When this civilisation falls, when the Romans, whoever they are this time round, have finally left and the new dark ages begin, this will be one of the first luxuries to go. The old folk crouching by their peat fires will tell their disbelieving grandchildren of standing naked midwinter under jet streams of hot clean water, of lozenges of scented soaps and of viscous amber and vermilion liquids
they rubbed into their hair to make it glossy and more voluminous than it really was, and of thick white towels as big as togas, waiting on warming racks.

He wears a suit and tie five days a week. Today he's wearing jeans, sweater and scuffed brown boots, and who's to know that he himself is not the great guitarist of his generation? As he bends to tie his laces, he feels a sharp pain in his knees. It's pointless holding out until he's fifty. He'll give himself six more months of squash and one last London Marathon. Will he be able to bear it, having these pastimes only in his past? At the mirror he's lavish with his aftershave – in winter especially, there's sometimes a scent in the air at the old people's home that he prefers to counteract.

He steps out of the bedroom and then, sideways on, skips down the first run of stairs two at a time, without holding the banister for safety. It's a trick he learned in adolescence, and he can do it better than ever. But a skidding boot heel, a shattered coccyx, six months on his back in bed, a year rebuilding his wasted muscles – the premonitory fantasy fills less than half a second, and it works. He takes the next flight in the ordinary way.