Saturday. Part 12

She says, 'You smell good.'

He grunts, vaguely in grat.i.tude. Then there's silence, as they try out the possibility that they can treat this like any other disturbed night and fall asleep in each other's arms. Or perhaps they're only waiting to begin.

After a little while Henry says quietly, Tell me what you're feeling.' As he says this, he puts his hand in the small of her back.

She breathes out sharply. He's asked her a difficult question. 'Angry,' she tells him at last. Because she says it in a whisper, it sounds unconvincing. She adds, 'And terrified snll, of them.'

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As he's starting to rea.s.sure her they'll never come back, she speaks over him. 'No, no. I mean, I feel they're in the room. They're still here. I'm still frightened.'

He feels her legs begin to shake and he draws her closer to him and kisses her face. 'Darling/ he murmurs.

'Sorry. I had this shaking earlier, when I came to bed. Then it calmed down. Oh G.o.d. I want it to stop.'

He reaches dowTn and places his hands on her legs - the shivering appears to emanate from her knees in tight, dry spasms, as though her bones were grating in their joints.

'You're in shock/ he says as he ma.s.sages her legs.

'Oh G.o.d/ she keeps saying, but nothing else.

Several minutes pa.s.s before the trembling subsides, during which he holds her, and rocks her, and tells her he loves her.

When she's calm at last she says in her usual, level voice, T'm angry too. I can't help it, but I want him punished. I mean, I hate him, I want him to die. You asked me what I felt, not what I think. That vicious, loathsome man, what he did to John, and forcing Daisy like that, and holding the knife against me, and using it to make you go upstairs. I thought I might never see you again alive . . / She stops, and he waits. When she speaks again her tone is more deliberate. They're lying face to face again, he's holding her hand, caressing her fingers with his thumb.

'When I talked to you at the front door, about revenge I mean, it was my own feelings I was afraid of, I thought that in your position I'd do something really terrible to him. I was worried that you were having the same ideas, that you'd get in serious trouble.'

There's so much he wants to tell her, discuss with her, but this is not the time. He knows he won't get from her the kind of response he wants. He'll do it tomorrow, when she's less upset, before the police come.

With her fingertips she finds his lips and kisses them. 'What happened in the operation?'

'It was fine. Pretty much routine. He lost a lot of blood, 265.

we patched him up. Rodney was good, but he might have had trouble dealing with it alone/ 'So this person, Baxter, will live to face charges.'

Henry doesn't reply to this beyond an uncommitted nasal hum of near-a.s.sent. It's useful to consider the moment he'll broach the subject; Sunday morning, coffee in large white cups, the conservatory in brilliant winter sunshine, the newspapers they deplore but always read, and as he reaches forwards to touch her hand she looks up and he sees in her face that calm intelligence, focused, ready to forgive. He opens his eyes into darkness, and discovers he's been asleep, perhaps for only a few seconds.

Rosalind is saying, 'He got terribly drunk, maudlin, the usual stuff. It was hard to take after everything else. But the kids were fantastic. They took him back in a taxi and a hotel doctor came out and looked at his nose.'

Henry has a pa.s.sing sensation of travelling through the night. He and Rosalind once took a sleeper train from Ma.r.s.eilles to Paris and squeezed into the top bunk together where they lay on their fronts to watch sleeping France go by and talk until dawn. Tonight, the conversation is the journey.

In his comfortable, drifting state he feels only warmth towards his father-in-law. He says, 'He was magnificent though. They couldn't intimidate him. And he told Daisy what to do.'

'He was brave all right,' she agrees. 'But you were amazing. Right from the beginning I could see you planning and calculating. I saw you look across at Theo.'

He takes her hand and kisses her fingers. 'None of us went through what you did. You were fantastic.'

'Daisy held me steady. She had such strength then . . .'

'And Theo too, when he came flying up those stairs . . .'

For some minutes the events of the evening are transformed into a colourful adventure, a drama of strong wills, inner resources, new qualities of character revealed under pressure.

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They used to talk this way after family ascents of mountains in the West Highlands of Scotland - things always went wrong, but interestingly, funnily. Now, suddenly animated, they exult in praise, and because it's familiar, and less absurd than eulogising each other, they celebrate the children. These past two decades Henry and Rosalind have spent many hours doing just this - alone together, they like to gossip about their children. These latest exploits shine in the dark - when Theo grabbed his lapels, when Daisy looked him right in the eye. What lovely children these are, such loving natures, what luck to be their parents. But the excited conversation can't last, their words begin to sound hollow and unreal in their ears, and they begin to subside. They can't avoid for much longer the figure of Baxter at the centre of their ordeal - cruel, weak, meaningless, demanding to be confronted. Also, they're talking about Daisy and not addressing the pregnancy. They're not quite ready, though they're close.

After a pause, Henry says, The thing is this, surely. His mind is going, and he thought he was coming to settle a score. Who knows what spooky uncontrollable emotions were driving him.' He then describes to her in detail the encounter in University Street, and includes everything he thinks might be relevant - the policeman waving him on, the demonstrators in Gower Street and the funereal drumbeats, his own compet.i.tive instincts before the confrontation. While he's talking, her hand is resting on his cheek. They could turn on the lights, but it comforts them, this intimate trusting darkness, the s.e.xless, childlike huddling and talking into the night. Daisy and Theo used to do it, on the top floor with their sleepover friends - little voices still murmuring at 3.00 a.m., faltering against sleep and bravely picking up again. When Henry was ten, a cousin a year younger came to stay for a month while her mother was in hospital. Since he had a double bed in his room and there was nowhere else, his mother put her in with him. Henry and his cousin ignored each other during the day - Mona was plump, with thick 267.

lenses in her specs and a missing finger, and above all she was a girl - but on the first night, a disembodied whispering voice from a warm mound on the other side of the bed wove the epic of the school sweet factory visit, and the chocolates cascading down a chute, of the machinery that turned so fast it was invisible, then the swift, painless dismemberment, the spray of blood 'like a feather duster' that coloured the teacher's jacket, of the fainting friends, and the foreman on his hands and knees beneath the machine, hunting for the missing 'part'. Stirred, Henry could answer with no more than a lanced boil, but Mona was sportingly appreciative, and so they were launched in their time capsule, their short lives and some inventiveness sufficient to keep them in horrible anecdotes through the night until the summer dawn, and with different themes through other nights too.

When he's finished his account of the confrontation, Rosalind says, 'Of course it wasn't an abuse of authority. They could have killed you.'

This is not the conclusion he wanted her to reach - he arranged the details to prompt her in another direction. He's about to try again, but she starts a story of her own. This is the nature of these night journeys - the steps, the sequences are not logical.

'While I was waiting for you tonight, before I fell asleep, I was trying to work out just how long it was he held that knife to me. In my memory, it's no time at all - and I don't mean that it seems brief. It's no time, not in time, not a minute or an hour. Just a fact As she recalls it, the tremors return, but fainter, then fade away. He holds her hand tightly.

'I wondered if it was because I felt only one thing - sheer terror, no changes, no sense of pa.s.sing time. But that's not it. I did feel other things.'

Her pause is long. Unable to read her expression, he hesitates to prompt her.

Finally he says, 'What other things?'

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Her voice is reflective rather than distressed. 'You. There was you. The only other time I've felt so terrified and helpless was before my operation, when I still thought I was going to go blind. When you came down with me to wait. You were so gawky and earnest. The sleeves of your white coat hardly came past your elbows. I've always said that's when I fell for you. I suppose that's right. Sometimes I think I made that up, and it was later. Then tonight, an even greater terror, and there you were again, trying to talk to me with your eyes. Still there. After all the years. That's what I hung on to. You.'

He feels her fingers graze across his face, then she kisses him. No longer so childlike, their tongues touch.

'But it was Daisy who delivered you. She swung his mood with that poem. Arnold someone?'

'Matthew Arnold.'

He's remembering her body, its pallor, the compact b.u.mp containing his grandchild, already with a heart, a self organising nervous system, a swelling pinhead of a brain - here's what unattended matter can get up to in the total darkness of a womb.

Reading the meaning of his silence, Rosalind says, The talked to her again. She's in love, she's excited, she's having this baby. Henry, we have to be on her side.'

The am,' he says. 'We are.'

His eyes are closed and he's listening intently to Rosalind. This baby's life is taking shape - a year in Paris with its enraptured parents, and then to London where its father has been offered a good position in an important dig - a Roman villa to the east of the City. They might all move in here for a while and live on the square. Henry murmurs his a.s.sent, he's glad - the house is big, seven thousand square feet, and needs the sound of a child's voice again. He feels his body, the size of a continent, stretching away from him down the bed - he's a king, he's vast, accommodating, immune, he'll say yes to any plan that has kindness and warmth at its heart. Let the 269.

baby take its first steps and speak its first sentence here, in this palace. Daisy wants her baby, then let it happen in the best possible way. If she was ever going to be a poet, she'll make her poetry out of this - as good a subject as a string of lovers. He can't move his head, he can barely move his hand to stroke Rosalind's as she unfolds the future for him, the domestic arrangements - he's following closely, attending to the pleasure in her voice. The first shock is over. She's coming through. And Theo has been talking of his plans too, which will take him away for fifteen months to New York with New Blue Rider as resident band in an East Village club. It has to be, Theo's music needs it and they'll make it work, help him find a place, visit him there. The king rumbles his a.s.sent.

Across the square, the wail of an ambulance racing southwards down Charlotte Street rouses him a little. He pulls himself onto an elbow, and moves closer so that his face is over hers.

'We should sleep/ 'Yes. The police say they're coming at ten.'

But when they've finished kissing he says, Touch me.'

As the sweet sensation spreads through him he hears her say, Tell me that you're mine.'

T'm yours. Entirely yours.'

Touch my b.r.e.a.s.t.s. With your tongue.'

'Rosalind. I want you.'

This is where he marks the end of his day. The moment is sharper, more piercing than Sat.u.r.day's lazy, affectionate beginning - their movements are quick and greedy, urgent rather than joyous - it's as if they've returned from exile, emerged from a hard prison spell to gorge at a feast. Their appet.i.tes are noisy, their manners are rough. They can't quite trust their luck, they want all they can get in a short time. They also know that at the end, after they've reclaimed each other, is the promise of oblivion.

At one point she whispers to him, 'My darling one. We could have been killed and we're alive.'

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They are alive for love, but only briefly. The end comes in a sudden fall, so concentrated in its pleasure that it's excruciating to endure, unbearably intrusive, like nerve ends being peeled and stripped clean. Afterwards they don't immediately move apart. They lie still in the dark, feeling their heartbeats slow. Henry experiences his exhaustion and the sudden clarity of s.e.xual release merge into a single fact, dry and flat as a desert. He must begin to cross it now, alone, and he doesn't mind. At last they say goodnight by means of a single squeeze of hands - they feel too raw for kisses - then Rosalind turns on her side, and within seconds is breathing deeply.

Oblivion doesn't come to Henry Perowne quite yet - he may have reached the point at which tiredness itself prevents sleep. He lies on his back, patiently waiting, head turned towards the bar of white light on the wall, aware of an inconvenient pressure growing in his bladder. After several minutes he takes one of the dressing gowns from the floor and goes into the bathroom. The marble floor is icy underfoot, the open curtains on the tall north-facing windows show a few stars in a sky of broken, orange-tinted cloud. It's five fifteen, and already there's a rustle of traffic on the Euston Road. When he's relieved himself, he bends over the washbasin to drink deeply from the cold-water tap. Back in the bedroom he hears a distant rumble of an airplane, the first of the morning rush hour into Heathrow, he supposes and, drawn by the sound, goes to the window he stood at before and opens the shutters. He prefers to stand here a few minutes looking out than to lie still in bed, forcing sleep. Quietly he raises the window. The air is warmer than last time, but still he shivers. The light is softer too, the features of the square, especially the branches of the plane trees in the garden, are not so etched, and seem to merge with each other. What can it be about low temperatures that sharpens the edges of objects?

The benches have lost their expectant air, the litter bins have been emptied, the paving has been swept clean. The 271.

energetic team in yellow jackets must have been through during the evening. Henry tries to find rea.s.surance in this orderliness, and in remembering the square at its best weekday lunchtimes, in warm weather, when the office crowds from the local production, advertising and design companies bring their sandwiches and boxed salads, and the gates of the gardens are opened up. They loll on the gra.s.s in quiet groups, men and women of various races, mostly in their twenties and thirties, confident, cheerful, unoppressed, fit from private gym workouts, at home in their city. So much divides them from the various broken figures That haunt the benches. Work is one outward sign. It can't just be cla.s.s or opportunities - the drunks and junkies come from all kinds of backgrounds, as do the office people. Some of the worst wrecks have been privately educated. Perowne, the professional reductionist, can't help thinking it's down to invisible folds and kinks of character, written in code, at the level of molecules. It's a dim fate, to be the sort of person who can't earn a living, or resist another drink, or remember today what he resolved to do yesterday. No amount of social justice will cure or disperse this enfeebled army haunting the public places of every town. So, what then? Henry draws his dressing gown more closely around him. You have to recognise bad luck when you see it, you have to look out for these people. Some you can prise from their addictions, others all you can do is make them comfortable somehow, minimise their miseries.

Somehow! He's no social theorist and, of course, he's thinking of Baxter, that unpickable knot of affliction. It may be the thought of him that makes Henry feel shaky, or the physical effects of tiredness - he has to put his hand on the sill to steady himself. He feels himself turning on a giant wheel, like the Eye on the south bank of the Thames, just about to arrive at the highest point - he's poised on a hinge of perception, before the drop, and he can see ahead calmly. Or it's the eastward turn of the earth he imagines, delivering 272.

him towards the dawn at a stately one thousand miles an hour. If he counts on sleep rather than the clock to divide the days, then this is still his Sat.u.r.day, dropping far below him, as deep as a lifetime. And from here, from the top of his day, he can see far ahead, before the descent begins. Sunday doesn't ring with the same promise and vigour as the day before. The square below him, deserted and still, gives no clues to the future. But from where he stands up here there are things he can see that he knows must happen. Soon it will be his mother's time, the message will come from the home, or they'll send for him, and he and his family will be sitting by her bed, in her tiny room, with her ornaments, drinking the thick brown tea, watching the last of her, the husk of the old swimmer, shrink into the pillows. At the thought, he feels nothing now, but he knows the sorrow will surprise him, because it's happened once before.

There came a time in her decline when at last he had to move her out of her house, the old family home where he grew up, and into care. The disease was obliterating the housewifely routines she had once kept faith with. She left the oven on all night with the b.u.t.ter dish inside, she hid the front-door key from herself down cracks in the floorboards, she confused shampoo and bleach. All these, and moments of existential bewilderment at finding herself in a street, or in a shop, or someone's house, with no knowledge of where she had come from, who these people were, where she lived, and what she was supposed to do next. A year later she had forgotten her life as well as her old house. But arranging to sell it felt like a betrayal, and Henry made no move. He and Rosalind checked on it, his childhood home, from time to time and he mowed the lawn in summer. Everything remained in its place, waiting - the yellow rubber gloves hanging from their wooden clothes peg, the drawer of ironed dusters and tea towels, the glazed pottery donkey bearing a pannier of toothpicks. A vegetable odour of neglect began to gather, a shabbiness invaded her possessions that had nothing to do with dust. Even from the road the house had a defeated look, and when kids put a stone through the living-room window one afternoon in November, he knew he must act.

Rosalind and the children came with him to clear the place one weekend. They all chose a memento - it seemed disrespectful not to. Daisy had a bra.s.s plate from Egypt, Theo a carriage clock, Rosalind, a plain china fruit bowl. Henry took a s...o...b..x of photographs. Other pieces went to nephews and nieces. Lily's bed, her sideboard, two wardrobes and the carpets and the chests of drawers were waiting for a house clearing firm. The familv packed up clothes and kitchenware and unwanted ornaments for the charity shops - Henry never realised before how these places lived off the dead. Everything else they stuffed into bin liners and put out for the rubbish collection. They worked in silence, like looters - having the radio on wasn't appropriate. It took a day to dismantle Lily's existence.

They were striking the set of a play, a humble, one-handed domestic drama, without permission from the cast. They started in what she called her sewing room - his old room. She was never coming back, she no longer knew what knitting was, but wrapping up her scores of needles, her thousand patterns, a baby's half-finished yellow shawl, to give them all away to strangers was to banish her from the living. They worked quickly, almost in a frenzy. She's not dead, Henry kept telling himself. But her life, all lives, seemed tenuous when he saw how quickly, with what ease, all the trappings, all the fine details of a lifetime could be packed and scattered, or junked. Objects became junk as soon as they were separated from their owner and their pasts - without her, her old tea cosy was repellent, with its faded farmhouse motif and pale brown stains on cheap fabric, and stuffing that was pathetically thin. As the shelves and drawers emptied, and the boxes and bags filled, he saw that no one owned anything really. It's all rented, or borrowed. Our possessions will outlast us, we'll desert them in the end. They worked 274.

all day, and put out twenty-three bags for the dustmen.

He feels skinny and frail in his dressing gown, facing the morning that's still dark, still part of yesterday. Yes, that will happen, and he'll make the arrangements. She walked him once to a cemetery near her house to show him the rows of small metal lockers set into a wall where she wanted her ashes put. All that's bound to happen, and they'll stand with bowed heads, listening to the Burial of the Dead. Or will they have it for cremations? Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live . . . He's heard it often over the years, but remembers only fragments. He fleeth as it were a shadow . . . cut down like a flower. Yes, and then it will be the turn of John Grammaticus, one of those transfiguring illnesses that come to a drinking man, or a terminal stab to heart or brain. They'll all take that hard in their different ways, though Henry less than the others. The old poet was brave tonight, pretending not to suffer with his nose, giving Daisy just the right prompt. And when it comes, then there'll be the crisis of the chateau if Teresa marries John and stakes her claim, and Rosalind, formidable in law, pursues her rights to the place her mother made, the place where Daisy, Theo and Rosalind herself spent their childhood summers. And Henry's role? Wise and implacable loyalty.

What else, beyond the dying? Theo will make his first move from home - there'll be no postcards or letters or emails, only phone calls. There'll be trips to New York to listen to him and his band bring their blues to the Americans - they might not like it - and a chance to see old friends from Bellevue Hospital days. And Daisy will publish her poems, and produce a baby and bring Giulio - Henry still sees the dark-skinned, bare-chested lover from the poem he misheard. A baby and its huge array of materiel to enliven the household, and someone else, not him, not Rosalind, getting up in the night. And not Giulio, unless he's an unusual Italian. All this is rich. And then, he, Henry, will turn fifty and give up squash and marathons, the house will empty when Daisy 275.

and Giulio find a place, and Theo gets one too, and Henry and Rosalind will collapse in on each other, cling tighter, their business of raising children, launching young adults, over. That restlessness, that hunger he's had lately for another kind of life will fade. The time will come when he does less operating, and more administration - there's another kind of life - and Rosalind will leave the paper to write her book, and a time will come when they find they no longer have the strength for the square, the junkies and the traffic din and dust. Perhaps a bomb in the cause of jihad will drive them out with all the other faint-hearts into the suburbs, or deeper into therountrv, or to the chateau -their Sat.u.r.day will become a Sunday.

Behind him, as though agitated by his thoughts, Rosalind flinches, moans, and moves again before she falls silent and he turns back to the window. London, his small part of it, lies wide open, impossible to defend, waiting for its bomb, like a hundred other cities. Rush hour will be a convenient time. It might resemble the Paddington crash - twisted rails, buckled, upraised commuter coaches, stretchers handed out through broken windows, the hospital's Emergency Plan in action. Berlin, Paris, Lisbon. The authorities agree, an attack's inevitable. He lives in different times - because the newspapers say so doesn't mean it isn't true. But from the top of his day, this is a future that's harder to read, a horizon indistinct with possibilities. A hundred years ago, a middle-aged doctor standing at this window in his silk dressing gown, less than two hours before a winter's dawn, might have pondered the new century's future. February 1903. You might envy this Edwardian gent all he didn't yet know. If he had young boys, he could lose them within a dozen years, at the Somme. And what was their body count, Hitler, Stalin, Mao? Fifty million, a hundred? If you described the h.e.l.l that lay ahead, if you warned him, the good doctor - an affable product of prosperity and decades of peace - would not believe you. Beware the utopianists, zealous men certain of 276.

the path to the ideal social order. Here they are again, totalitarians in different form, still scattered and weak, but growing, and angry, and thirsty for another ma.s.s killing. A hundred years to resolve. But this may be an indulgence, an idle, overblown fantasy, a night-thought about a pa.s.sing disturbance that time and good sense will settle and rearrange. The nearer ground, the nearest promontory, is easier to read - as sure as his mother's death, he'll be dining with Professor Taleb in an Iraqi restaurant near Hoxton. The war will start next month - the precise date must already have been fixed, as though for any big outdoor sporting event. Any later in the season will be too hot for killing or liberation. Baghdad is waiting for its bombs. Where's Henry's appet.i.te for removing a tyrant now? At the end of this day, this particular evening, he's timid, vulnerable, he keeps drawing his dressing gown more tightly around him. Another plane moves left to right across his view, descending in its humdrum way along the line of the Thames towards Heathrow. Harder now to recall, or to inhabit, the vigour of his row with Daisy - the certainties have dissolved into debating points; that the world the professor described is intolerable, that however murky American motives, some lasting good and fewer deaths might come from dismantling it. Might, he hears Daisy tell him, is not good enough, and you've let one man's story turn your head. A woman bearing a child has her own authority. Will he revive his hopes for firm action in the morning? All he feels now is fear. He's weak and ignorant, scared of the way consequences of an action leap away from your control and breed new events, new consequences, until you're led to a place you never dreamed of and would never choose - a knife at the throat. One floor down from where Andrea Chapman dreams of being carried away by the improbable love of a young doctor, and of becoming one herself, lies Baxter in his private darkness, watched over by the constables. But one small fixed point of conviction holds 277.

Henry steady. It began to take form at dinner, before Jay rang, and was finally settled when he sat in intensive care, feeling Baxter's pulse. He must persuade Rosalind, then the rest of the family, then the police, not to pursue charges. The matter must be dropped. Let them go after the other man. Baxter has a diminishing slice of life worth living, before his descent into nightmare hallucination begins. Henry can get a colleague or two, specialists in the field, to convince the Crown Prosecution Service that by the time it comes round, Baxter will not be fit to stand trial. This may or may not be true. Then the system, the right hospital, must draw him in securely before he does more harm. Henry can make these arrangements, do what he can to make the patient comfortable, somehow. Is this forgiveness? Probably not, he doesn't know, and he's not the one to be granting it anyway. Or is he the one seeking forgiveness? He's responsible, after all; twenty hours ago he drove across a road officially closed to traffic, and set in train a sequence of events. Or it could be weakness - after a certain age, when the remaining years first take on their finite aspect, and you begin to feel for yourself the first chill, you watch a dying man with a closer, more brotherly interest. But he prefers to believe that it's realism: they'll all be diminished by whipping a man on his way to h.e.l.l. By saving his life in the operating theatre, Henry also committed Baxter to his torture. Revenge enough. And here is one area where Henry can exercise authority and shape events. He knows how the system works - the difference between good and bad care is near-infinite.

Daisy recited a poem that cast a spell on one man. Perhaps any poem would have done the trick, and thrown the switch on a sudden mood change. Still, Baxter fell for the magic, he was transfixed by it, and he was reminded how much he wanted to live. No one can forgive him the use of the knife. But Baxter heard what Henry never has, and probably never will, despite all Daisy's attempts to educate him. Some 278.

nineteenth-century poet - Henry has yet to find out whether this Arnold is famous or obscure - touched off in Baxter a yearning he could barely begin to define. That hunger is his claim on life, on a mental existence, and because it won't last much longer, because the door of his consciousness is beginning to close, he shouldn't pursue his claim from a cell, waiting for the absurdity of his trial to begin. This is his dim, fixed fate, to have one tiny slip, an error of repet.i.tion in the codes of his being, in his genotype, the modern variant of a soul, and he must unravel - another certainty Henry sees before him.

Quietly, he lowers the window. The morning is still dark, and it's the coldest time now. The dawn won't come until after seven. Three nurses are walking across the square, talking cheerfully, heading in the direction of his hospital to start their morning shift. He closes the shutters on them, then goes towards the bed and lets the dressing gown fall to his feet as he gets in. Rosalind lies facing away from him with her knees crooked. He closes his eyes. This time there'll be no trouble falling towards oblivion, there's nothing can stop him now. Sleep's no longer a concept, it's a material thing, an ancient means of transport, a softly moving belt, conveying him into Sunday. He fits himself around her, her silk pyjamas, her scent, her warmth, her beloved form, and draws closer to her. Blindly, he kisses her nape. There's always this, is one of his remaining thoughts. And then: there's only this. And at last, faintly, falling: this day's over.

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Acknowledgements

I am enormously grateful to Neil Kitchen MD FRCS (SN), Consultant Neurosurgeon and a.s.sociate Clinical Director, The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queens Square, London. It was a privilege to watch this gifted surgeon at work in the theatre over a period of two years, and 1 thank him for his kindness and patience in taking time out of a demanding schedule to explain to me the intricacies of his profession, and the brain, with its countless pathologies. I am also grateful to Sally Wilson, FRCA, Consultant Neuro anaesthetist at the same hospital, and to Anne McGuinness, Consultant, Accident and Emergency, University College Hospital, and to Chief Inspector Amon McAfee. For an account of a transsphenoidal hypophysectomy, I am indebted to Frank The . Vertosick, Jr., MD and his excellent book, When the Air Hits your Brain: Tales of Neurosurgery, Norton, New York, 1996. Ray Dolan, that most literary of scientists, read the typescript of Sat.u.r.day and made incisive neurological suggestions. Tim Carton Ash and Craig Raine also read this novel at an early stage and were very helpful in their comments. I am grateful to Craig Raine for generously allowing me to attribute to Daisy Perowne the words, 'excited watering can' and 'peculiar rose' from his poem, 's.e.xual Couplets', and 'how eachrose grows on a shark infested stem' from 'Reading Her Old Letter about a Wedding', Collected Poems 1978-1999, Picador, London 2000. My wife, Annalena McAfee read numerous stages of draft, and I am the lucky beneficiary of her wise editorial comments and loving encouragement.

IM London 2004