Saturday. Part 5

Perowne looks at his watch and stands. 'Mum and 1 just don't have the time. I'll see you in Netting Hill around five.'

'You're coming. Excellent!'

It is part of Theo's charm, not to have pressed him. And if his father hadn't shown up, he wouldn't have mentioned it.

'Start without me. You know what it's like, getting from Granny's.'

'We'll be doing the new song. Chas'll be there. We'll keep it till you arrive.'

Chas is his favourite among Theo's friends, and the most educated too, dropping out of an English degree in his third year at Leeds to play in a band. A wonder that life so far suicidal mother, absent father, two brothers, members of a strict Baptist sect - hasn't crushed all that relaxed good nature out of him. Something about the name of St Kitts - saints, kids, kittens - has produced a profusion of kindness in one giant lad. Since meeting him, Perowne has developed a vague ambition to visit the island.

From a corner of the room he picks up a potted plant wrapped in tissue, an expensive orchid he bought a few days ago in the florist's by Heal's. He stops at the doorway and raises a hand in farewell. T'm cooking tonight. Don't forget to straighten out the kitchen.'

'Yeah.' Then Theo adds without irony, 'Remember me to Granny. Give her my love.'

Clean and scented, with a dull, near-pleasurable ache in his limbs, driving west in light traffic, Perowne finds he's feeling better about seeing his mother. He knows the routine well enough. Once they're established together, face to face, with 152.

their cups of dark brown tea, the tragedy of her situation will be obscured behind the ba.n.a.lity of detail, of managing the suffocating minutes, of inattentive listening. Being with her isn't so difficult. The hard part is when he comes away, before this visit merges in memory with all the rest, when the woman she once was haunts him as he stands by the front door and leans down to kiss her goodbye. That's when he feels he's betraying her, leaving her behind in her shrunken life, sneaking away to the riches, the secret h.o.a.rd of his own existence. Despite the guilt, he can't deny the little lift he feels, the lightness in his step when he turns his back and walks away from the old people's place and takes his car keys from his pocket and embraces the freedoms that can't be hers. Everything she has now fits into her tiny room. And she hardly possesses the room because she's incapable of finding it unaided, or even of knowing that she has one. And when she is in it, she doesn't recognise her things. It's no longer possible to bring her to the Square to stay, or take her on excursions; a small journey disorients or even terrifies her. She has to remain behind, and naturally she doesn't understand that either.

But the thought of the leave-taking ahead doesn't trouble him now. He's at last suffused by the mild euphoria that follows exercise. That blessed self-made opiate, beta-endorphin, smothering every kind of pain. There's a merry Scarlatti harpsichord on the radio tinkling through a progression of chords that never quite resolves, and seems to lead him on towards a playfully receding destination. In the rear-view mirror, no red BMW. Along this stretch, where the Euston becomes the Marylebone Road, the traffic signals are phased, Manhattan-style, and he's wafted forwards on a leading edge of green lights, a surfer on a perfect wave of simple information: go! Or even, yes! The long line of tourists - teenagers mostly - outside Madame Tussaud's seems less futile than usual; a generation raised on thunderous Hollywood effects still longs to stand and gawp at 153.

waxworks, like eighteenth-century peasants at a country fair. The reviled Westway, rearing on stained concrete piles and on which he rises swiftly to second-floor level, offers up a sudden horizon of tumbling cloud above a tumult of rooftops. It's one of those moments when to be a car owner in a city, the owner of this car, is sweet. For the first time in weeks, he's in fourth gear. Perhaps he'll make fifth. A sign on a gantry above the traffic lanes proclaims The West, The North, as though there lies, spread beyond the suburbs, a whole continent, and the promise of a six-day journey.

The traffic must be stalled somewhere else by the march. For almost half a mile he alone possesses this stretch of elevated road. For seconds on end he thinks he grasps the vision of its creators - a purer world that favours machines rather than people. A rectilinear curve sweeps him past recent office buildings of gla.s.s and steel where the lights are already on in the February early afternoon. He glimpses people as neat as architectural models, at their desks, before their screens, even on a Sat.u.r.day. This is the tidy future of his childhood science fiction comics, of men and women with tight-fitting collarless jumpsuits - no pockets, trailing laces or untucked shirts - living a life beyond litter and confusion, free of clutter to fight evil.

But from a vantage point on the White City flyover, just before the road comes down to earth among rows of redbrick housing, he sees the tail lights ma.s.sing ahead and begins to brake. His mother never minded traffic lights and long delays. Only a year ago she was still well enough - forgetful, vague, but not terrified - to enjoy being driven around the streets of west London. The lights gave her an opportunity to examine other drivers and their pa.s.sengers. 'Look at him. He's got a spotty face.' Or simply to say companionably, 'Red again!'

She was a woman who gave her life to housework, to the kind of daily routines of polishing, dusting, vacuuming and tidying that were once common, and these days are only 154.

undertaken by patients with obsessive compulsive disorders. Every day, while Henry was at school, she spring-cleaned her house. She drew her deepest satisfactions from a tray of well-roasted beef, the sheen on a nest of tables, a pile of ironed candy-striped sheets folded in smooth slabs, a larder of neat provisions; or from one more knitted matinee jacket for one more baby in the remoter reaches of the family. The invisible sides, the obverse, the underneath and the insides of everything were clean. -The oven and its racks were scrubbed after every use. Order and cleanliness were the outward expression of an unspoken ideal of love. A book he was reading would be back on the hallway shelf upstairs as soon as he put it aside. The morning paper could be in the dustbin by lunchtime. The empty milk bottles she put out for collection were as clean as her cutlery. To every item its drawer or shelf or hook, including her various ap.r.o.ns, and her yellow rubber gloves held by a clothes peg, hanging near the egg shaped egg-timer.

Surely it was because of her that Henry feels at home in an operating theatre. She too would have liked the waxed black floor, the instruments of surgical steel arrayed in parallel rows on a sterile tray, and the scrub room with its devotional routines - she would have admired the niceties, the clean headwear, the short fingernails. He should have had her in while she was still capable. It never crossed his mind. It never occurred to him that his work, his fifteen years' training, had anything to do with what she did.

Nor did it occur to her. He barely knew it at the time, but he grew up thinking her intelligence was limited. He used to think she was without curiosity. But that wasn't right. She liked a good exploratory heart-to-heart with her neighbours. The eight-year-old Henry liked to flop on the floor behind the furniture and listen in. Illness and operations were important subjects, especially those a.s.sociated with childbirth. That was when he first heard the phrase 'under the knife' as well as 'under the doctor'. 'What the doctor said' was a powerful 155.

Ian McEzvan invocation. This eavesdropping may have set Henry on his career. Then there were running accounts of infidelities, or rumours of them, and ungrateful children, and the unreasonableness of the old, and what someone's parent left in a will, and how a certain nice girl couldn't find a decent husband. Good people had to be sifted from the bad, and it wasn't always easy to tell at first which was which. Indifferently, illness struck the good as well as the bad. Later, when he made his dutiful attempts on Daisy's undergraduate course in the nineteenth-century novel, he recognised all his mother's themes. There was nothing small-minded about her interests. Jane Austen and George Eliot shared them too. Lilian Perowne wasn't stupid or trivial, her life wasn't unfortunate, and he had no business as a young man being condescending towards her. But it's too late for apologies now. Unlike in Daisy's novels, moments of precise reckoning are rare in real life; questions of misinterpretation are not often resolved. Nor do they remain pressingly unresolved. They simply fade. People don't remember clearly, or they die, or the questions die and new ones take their place.

Besides, Lily had another life that no one could have predicted, or could remotely guess at now. She was a swimmer. On Sunday morning, September the third 1939, while Chamberlain was announcing in his radio broadcast from Downing Street that the country was at war with Germany, the fourteen-year-old Lily was at a munic.i.p.al pool near Wembley, having her first lesson with a sixty-year-old international athlete who had swum for Britain in the Stockholm Olympics in 1912 - the first ever women's swimming event. She had spotted Lily in the pool and offered to give her lessons for free, and coached her in the crawl, a most unladylike stroke. Lily went in for local matches in the late forties. In 1954 she swam for Middles.e.x in the county championships. She came second, and her tiny silver medal, set on a wooden shield made of oak, always stood on the mantelpiece while Henry was growing up. It's on a shelf in 156.

her room now. That silver was as far, or as high, as she got, but she always swam beautifully, fast enough to push out in front of her a deep and sinuous bow wave.

She taught Henry, of course, but his treasured memory of her swimming was of when he was ten, on a school visit one morning to the local pool. He and his friends were changed and ready, had been through the shower and footbath, and had to wait on the tiles for the adult session to end. Two teachers stood by, shushing and fussing, trying to contain the children's excitement. Soon there was only one figure remaining in the pool, one in a white rubber cap with a frieze of petals he should have recognised earlier. His whole cla.s.s was admiring her speed as she surged up the lane, the furrow in the water she left behind, just at the small of her back, and the way she turned her head to breathe without breaking her line in the water. When he knew it was her, he convinced himself he'd known from the beginning. To add to his exultation, he didn't even have to claim her out loud. Someone called out, That's Mrs Perowne!' In silence they watched as she reached the end of her lane right at their feet and performed a flashy underwater turn that was novel at the time. This was no mere duster of sideboards. He'd seen her swim often enough, but this was entirely different; all his friends were there to witness her superhuman nature, in which he shared. Surely she knew, and put on in the last half-length a show of demonic speed just for him. Her feet churned, her slender white arms rose and chopped at the water, her bow wave swelled, the furrow deepened. Her body shaped itself round her own wave in a shallow undulating S. You would have had to sprint along the pool to keep up with her. She stopped at the far end and stood, and put her hands on the edge and flipped herself out of the water. She would have been about forty then. She sat there, feet still immersed, pulled off her cap and, tilting her head, smiled shyly in their direction. One of the teachers led the kids into solemn applause. Though it was 1%6 - the boys' hair was growing thickly over 157.

Ian McEivnn their ears, the girls wore jeans to cla.s.s - a degree of fifties formality still prevailed. Henry clapped with the rest, but when his friends gathered round, he was too choked with pride, too exhilarated to answer their questions, and was relieved to get in the pool where he could conceal his feelings.

In the twenties and thirties, great tracts of agricultural land to the west of London disappeared before an onslaught of highspeed housing development, and even now the streets of frowning, respectable two-storey houses haven't quite shaken off their air of suddenness. Each near-identical house has an uneasy, provisional look, as if it knows howr readily the land would revert to cereal crops and grazing. Lily now lives only a few minutes away from the old Perivale family home. Henry likes to think that in the misty landscape of her dementia, a sense of familiarity breaks through occasionally and rea.s.sures her. By the standards of old people's homes, Suffolk Place is minute - three houses have been knocked through to make one, and an annexe has been added. Out front, privet hedges still mark the old garden boundaries and two laburnum trees survive. One of the three front gardens has been cemented over to make parking s.p.a.ce for two cars. The oversized dustbins behind a lattice fence are the only inst.i.tutional clues.

Perowne parks and takes the potted plant from the back seat. He pauses a moment before ringing the bell - there's a taste in the air, sweet and vaguely antiseptic, that reminds him of his teenage years in these streets, and of a general state of longing, a hunger for life to begin that from this distance seems like happiness. As usual, Jenny opens the door. She's a large, cheerful Irish girl in a blue gingham tabard who's due to start nurse's training in September. Henry receives special consideration on account of his medical connection - an extra three tea bags in the brew she'll bring soon to his mother's room, and perhaps a plate of chocolate fingers. Without knowing much at all about each other, they've settled on teasing forms of address.

158.

'If it isn't the good doctor!'

'How's my fair colleen?'

Off the narrow s.p.a.ce of the suburban hallway, tinted yellow by the front door's leaded gla.s.s, is a kitchen of fluorescent light and stainless steel. From there comes a clammy aroma of the lunch the residents ate two hours earlier. After a lifetime's exposure, Perowne has a mild fondness, or at least a complete lack of disgust, for inst.i.tutional food. On the other side of the entrance hall is a narrower door that leads through into the three interconnecting sitting rooms of three houses. He can hear the bottled sound of televisions in other rooms.

'She's waiting for you/ Jenny says. They both know this to be a neurological impossibility. Even boredom is beyond his mother's reach.

He pushes the door open and goes through. She is right in front of him, sitting on a wooden chair at a round table covered with a chenille cloth. There's a window at her back, and beyond it, a window of the house next door, ten feet away. There are other women ranged around the edges of the room sitting in high-backed chairs with curved wooden arms. Some are watching, or looking in the direction of, the television mounted on the wall, out of reach. Others are staring at the floor. They stir or seem to sway as he enters, as if gently buffeted by the air the door displaces. There's a general, cheery response to his 'Good afternoon, ladies' and they watch him with interest. At this stage they can't be sure he isn't one of their own close relatives. To his right, in the farthest of the connecting sitting rooms, is Annie, a woman with wild grey hair which radiates from her head in fluffy spokes. She's shuffling unsupported towards him at speed. When she reaches the end of the third sitting room she'll turn back, and keep moving back and forwards all day until she's gviided towards a meal, or bed.

His mother is watching him closely, pleased and anxious all at once. She thinks she knows his face - he might be the doctor, or the odd-job man. She's waiting for a cue. He kneels 159.by her chair and takes her hand, which is smooth and dry and very light.

'h.e.l.lo Mum, Lily. It's Henry, your son Henry/ 'h.e.l.lo darling. Where are you going?'

'I've come to see you. We'll go and sit in your room.'

'I'm sorry dear. I don't have a room. I'm waiting to go home. I'm getting the bus.'

It pains him whenever she says that, even though he knows she's referring to her childhood home where she thinks her mother is waiting for her. He kisses her cheek and helps her out of her chair, feeling the tremors of effort or nervousness in her arms. As always, in the first dismaying moments of seeing her again, his eyes p.r.i.c.k.

She protests feebly. 'I don't know where we can go.'

He dislikes speaking with the forced cheerfulness nurses use on the wards, even on adult patients with no mental impairment. Just pop this in your mouth for me. But he does it anyway, partly to disguise his feelings. 'You've got a lovely little room. As soon as you see it, you'll remember. This way now.'

Arm in arm, they walk slowly through the other sitting rooms, standing aside to let Annie pa.s.s. It's rea.s.suring that Lily is decently dressed. The helpers knew he was coming. She wears a deep red skirt with a matching brushed-cotton blouse, black tights and black leather shoes. She always dressed well. Hers must have been the last generation to care as a matter of course about hats. There used to be dark rows of them, almost identical, on the top shelf of her wardrobe, coc.o.o.ned in a whiff of mothball.

When they step out into a corridor, she turns away to her left and he has to put his hand on her narrow shoulder to guide her back. 'Here it is. Do you recognise your door?'

'I've never been out this way before.'

He opens her door and hands her in. The room is about eight feet by ten, with a glazed door giving on to a small back garden. The single bed is covered by a floral eiderdown 160.

and various soft toys that were part of her life long before her illness. Some of her remaining ornaments - a robin on a log, two comically exaggerated gla.s.s squirrels - are in a glazed corner cupboard. Others are ranged about a sideboard close to the door. On the wall near the handbasin is a framed photograph of Lily and Jack, Henry's father, standing on a lawn. Just in shot is the handle of a pram, presumably in which lies the oblivious Henry. She's pretty in a white summer dress and has her head c.o.c.ked in that shy, quizzical way he remembers well. The young man is smoking a cigarette and wears a blazer and open-necked white shirt. He's tall, with a stoop, and has big hands like his son. His grin is wide and untroubled. It's always useful to have solid proof that the old have had their go at being young. But there is also an element of derision in photography. The couple appear vulnerable, easily mocked for appearing not to know that their youth is merely an episode, or that the tasty smouldering item in Jack's right hand will contribute - Henry's theory later that same year to his sudden death.

Having failed to remember its existence, Lily isn't surprised to find herself in her room. She instantly forgets that she didn't know about it. However, she dithers, uncertain of where she should sit. Henry shows her into her high backed chair by the French window, and sits facing her on the edge of the bed. It's ferociously hot, even hotter than his own bedroom. Perhaps his blood is still stirred by the game, and the hot shower and the warmth of the car. He'd be content to stretch out on the oversprung bed and start to think about the day, and perhaps doze a little. How interesting his life suddenly appears from the confines of this room. At that moment, with the eiderdown beneath him, and the heat, he feels a heaviness in his eyes and can't stop them closing. And his visit has hardly begun. To revive himself, he pulls off his sweater, then he shows Lily the plant he has brought.

'Look,' he says. 'It's an orchid for your room.'

161.

As he holds it out towards her, and the frail white flower bobs between them, she recoils.

'Why have you got that?'

'It's yours. It'll keep flowering through the winter. Isn't it pretty? It's for you.'

'It's not mine,' Lily says firmly. 'I've never seen it before.'

He had the same baffling conversation last time. The disease proceeds by tiny unnoticed strokes in small blood vessels in the brain. c.u.mulatively, the infarcts cause cognitive decline by disrupting the neural nets. She unravels in little steps. Now she's lost her grasp of the concept of a gift, and with it, the pleasure. Adopting again the tone of the cheerful nurse, he says, 'I'll put it up here where you can see it.'

She's about to protest, but her attention wanders. She has seen some decorative china pieces on a display shelf above her bed, right behind her son. Her mood is suddenly conciliatory.

'I've got plenty of them cups and saucers. So I can always go out with one of them. But the thing is, the s.p.a.ce between people is so tiny' - she brings up two wavering hands to show him a gap - 'that there's hardly enough s.p.a.ce to squeeze through. There's too much binding.'

The agree/ Henry says as he settles back on the bed. 'There's far too much binding.'

Damage from the small-vessel clotting tends to acc.u.mulate in the white matter and destroy the mind's connectivity. Along the way, well before the process is complete, Lily is able to deliver her rambling treatises, her nonsense monologues with touching seriousness. She doesn't doubt herself at all. Nor does she think that he's unable to follow her. The structure of her sentences is intact, and the moods which inflect her various descriptions make sense. It pleases her if he nods and smiles, and chimes in from time to time.

She isn't looking at him as she gathers her thoughts, but past him, concentrating on an elusive matter, staring as though through a window at an unbounded view. She goes 162.

to speak, but remains silent. Her pale green eyes, sunk deep in bowls of finely folded light brown skin, have a flat, dulled quality, like dusty stones under gla.s.s. They give an accurate impression of understanding nothing. He can't bring her news of the family - the mention of strange names, any names, can alarm her. So although she won't understand, he often talks to her about work. What she warms to is the sound, the emotional tone of a friendly conversation.

He is about to describe to her the Chapman girl, and how well she's come through, when Lily suddenly speaks up. Her mood is anxious, even a little querulous. 'And you know that this . . . you know, Aunty, what people put on their shoes to make them . . . you know?'

'Shoe polish?' He never understands why she calls him Aunty, or which of her many aunts is haunting her.

'No, no. They put it all over their shoes and rub it with a cloth. Well, anyway, it's a bit like shoe polish. It's that sort of thing. We had side plates and G.o.d knows what, all along the street. We had everything but the right thing because we were in the wrong place.'

Then she suddenly laughs. It's become clearer to her.

'If you turn the picture round and take the back off like I did you get such a lot of pleasure out of it. It's all what it meant. And the laugh we had out of it!'

And she laughs gaily, just like she used to, and he laughs too. It's all what it meant. Now she's away, describing what might be a disintegrated memory of a street party, and a little watercolour she once bought in a jumble sale.

Some time later, when Jenny arrives with the refreshments, Lily stares at her without recognition. Perowne stands and clears s.p.a.ce on a low table. He notices the suspicion Lily is showing towards what she takes to be a complete stranger, and so, as soon as Jenny leaves, and before Lily can speak, he says, 'What a lovely girl she is. Always helpful.'

'She's marvellous,' Lily agrees.

The memory of whoever was in the room is already fading.

163.

His emotional cue is irresistible and she immediately smiles and begins to elaborate while he spoons all six tea bags out of the metal pot.

'She always comes running, even if it's narrow all the way down. She wants to come on one of them long things but she doesn't have the fare. I sent her the money, but she doesn't have it in her hand. She wants some music, and I said you might as well make up a little band and play it yourself. I worry about her though. I said to her, why do you put all the slices in one bowl when no one's standing up? You can't do it yourself.'

He knows who she's talking about, and waits for more. Then he says, 'You should go and see her.'

It's a long time since he last tried to explain to her that her mother died in 1970. It is easier now to support the delusion and keep the conversation moving along. Everything belongs in the present. His immediate concern is to prevent her eating a tea bag, the way she almost did last time. He piles them onto a saucer which he places on the floor by his foot. He puts a half-filled cup within her reach and offers her a biscuit and a napkin. She spreads it over her lap and carefully places the biscuit in its centre. She raises the cup to her lips and drinks. At moments like these, when she's skilful in the long-established routines, and looks demure in her colour-matched clothes, a perfectly well-looking 77year old with amazing legs for her age, athlete's legs, he can imagine that it's all been a mistake, a bad dream, and that she'll leave her tiny room and come away with him into the heart of the city and eat fish stew with her daughter-in-law and grandchildren and stay a while.

Lily says, 'I was there last week, Aunty, on the bus and my mum was in the garden. I said to her, You can walk down there, see what you're going to get, and the next thing is the balancing of everything you've got. She's not well. Her feet. I'll go there in a minute and I can't help losing her a jersey.'

How strange it would have been for Lily's mother, an 164.

aloof, unmaternal woman, to have known that the little girl at her skirts would one day, in a remote future, a science fiction date in the next century, talk of her all the time and long to be home with her. Would that have softened her?

Now Lily is set, she'll talk on for as long as he sits there. It's hard to tell if she's actually happy. Sometimes she laughs, at others she describes shadowy disputes and grievances, and her voice becomes indignant. In many of the situations she conjures, she's remonstrating with a man who won't see sense.

'} fold him anything that's going for a liberty and he said, I don't care. You can give it away, and I said don't let it waste in the fire. And all the new stuff that's going to be picked up.'

If she becomes too agitated by the story she's telling, Henry will cut in and laugh loudly and say, 'Mum, that's really very funny!' Being suggestible, she'll laugh too and her mood will shift, and the story she tells then will be happier. For now, she's in neutral mode - there's a clock, and a jersey again, and again, a s.p.a.ce too narrow to pa.s.s through - and Henry, sipping the thick brown tea, half listening, half asleep in the small room's airless warmth, thinks how in thirty-five years or less it could be him, stripped of everything he does and owns, a shrivelled figure meandering in front of Theo or Daisy, while they wait to leave and return to a life of which he'll have no comprehension. High blood pressure is one good predictor of strokes. A hundred and twenty-two over sixty-five last time. The systolic could be lower. Total cholesterol, five point two. Not good enough. Elevated levels of lipoprotein-a are said to have a robust a.s.sociation with multi infarct dementia. He'll eat no more eggs, and have only semi skimmed milk in his coffee, and coffee too will have to go one day. He isn't ready to die, and nor is he ready to half die. He wants his prodigiously connected myelin-rich white matter intact, like an unsullied snowfield. No cheese then. He'll be ruthless with himself in his pursuit of boundless health to avoid his mother's fate. Mental death.

165.

'I put sap in the clock/ she's telling him, 'to make it moist.'

An hour pa.s.ses, and then he forces himself fully awake and stands up, too quickly perhaps, because he feels a sudden dizziness. Not a good sign. He extends both hands towards her, feeling immense and unstable as he looms over her tiny form.

'Come on now, Mum/ he says gently, 'it's time for me to go. And I'd like you to see me to the door/ Childlike in her obedience, she takes his hands and he helps her from her chair. He piles up the tray and puts it outside the room, then remembers the tea bags, half concealed ^ under the bed, and puts them out too. She might have feasted on them. He guides her into the corridor, rea.s.suring her all the while, aware that she's stepping into an alien world. She has no idea which way to turn as they leave her room. She doesn't comment on the unfamiliar surroundings, but she grips his hand tighter. In the first of the sitting rooms two women, one with snowy hair in braids, the other completely bald, are watching television with the sound off. Approaching from the middle room is Cyril, as always in cravat and sports jacket, and today carrying a cane and wearing a deerstalker. He's the home's resident gent, sweet-mannered, marooned in one particular, well-defined fantasy: he believes he owns a large estate and is obliged to go around visiting his tenants and be scrupulously polite. Perowne has never seen him unhappy.

Cyril raises his hat at Lily and calls, 'Good morning, my dear. Everything well? Any complaints?'

Her face tightens and she looks away. On the screen above her head Perowne sees the march - Hyde Park still, a vast crowd before a temporary stage, and in the far distance a tiny figure at a microphone, then the aerial shot of the same, and then the marchers in columns with their banners, still arriving through the park gates. He and Lily stop to let Cyril pa.s.s. There's a shot of the newsreader at her s.p.a.ce-age desk, then the plane as he saw it in the early hours, the blackened 166.

fuselage vivid in a lake of foam, like a tasteless ornament on an iced cake. Now, Paddington police station - said to be secure against terrorist attack. A reporter is standing outside, speaking into a microphone. There's a development. Are the Russian pilots really radical Muslims? Perowne is reaching up for the volume control, but Lily is suddenly agitated and trying to tell him something important.

'If it gets too dry it will curl up again. I told him, and 1 told him you have to water it, but he wouldn't put it down.'

'It's all right,' he tells her. 'He will put it down. I'll tell him to. i promise you.'

He decides against the television and they come away. He needs to concentrate on his leavetaking, for he knows that she'll think she's coming with him. He'll be standing once more at the front door, with his meaningless explanation that he'll return soon. Jenny or one of the other girls will have to distract her as he steps outside.

Together they walk back through the first sitting room. Tea and crustless sandwiches are being served to the ladies at the round table with the chenille cloth. He calls a greeting to them, but they seem too distracted to reply. Lily is happier now, and leans her head against his arm. As they come into the hall they see Jenny Lavin by the door, already raising her hand to the high double security lock and smiling in their direction. Just then his mother pats his hand with a feathery touch and says, 'Out here it only looks like a garden, Aunty, but it's the countryside really and you can go for miles. When you walk here you feel lifted up, right high across the counter. I can't manage all them plates without a brush, but G.o.d will take care of you and see what you're going to get because it's a swimming race. You'll squeeze through somehow.'

It is a slow haul back into central London - more than an hour to reach Westbourne Grove from Perivale. Dense traffic is heading into the city for Sat.u.r.day night pleasures just as the first wave of coaches is bringing the marchers out. During 167.

the long crawl towards the lights at Gypsy Corner, he lowers his window to taste the scene in full - the bovine patience of a jam, the abrasive tang of icy fumes, the thunderous idling machinery in six lanes east and west, the yellow street light bleaching colour from the bodywork, the jaunty thud of entertainment systems, and red tail lights stretching way ahead into the city, white headlights pouring out of it. He tries to see it, or feel it, in historical terms, this moment in the last decades of the petroleum age, when a nineteenth-century device is brought to final perfection in the early years of the twenty-first; when the unprecedented wealth of ma.s.ses at serious play in the unforgiving modern city makes for a sight that no previous age can have imagined. Ordinary people! Rivers of light! He wants to make himself see it as Newton might, or his contemporaries, Boyle, Hooke, Wren, Willis those clever, curious men of the English Enlightenment who for a few years held in their minds nearly all the world's science. Surely, they would be awed. Mentally, he shows it off to them: this is what we've done, this is commonplace in our time. All this teeming illumination would be wondrous if he could only see it through their eyes. But he can't quite trick himself into it. He can't feel his way past the iron weight of the actual to see beyond the boredom of a traffic tailback, or the delay to which he himself is contributing, or the drab commercial hopes of a parade of shops he's been stuck beside for fifteen minutes. He doesn't have the lyric gift to see beyond it - he's a realist, and can never escape. But then, perhaps two poets in the family are enough.

Beyond Acton the traffic eases. In the late-afternoon dusk a single slab of red in the western sky, almost rectangular, an emblem of the natural world, of wilderness somewhere out of sight, fades slowly as it pursues him in his rearview mirror. Even if the westbound lanes out of the city were free, he's glad not to be heading that way. He wants to get home and collect himself before he starts cooking. He needs to check that there's champagne in the fridge, and bring some red 168.

wine into the kitchen to warm. The cheese too needs to be softened in the centrally-heated air. He needs to lie down for ten minutes. He's certainly in no mood for Theo's amplified blues.

But this is parenthood, as fixed as destiny, and at last he's parking in a street off Westbourne Grove, a couple of hundred yards from the old music hall theatre. He's forty-five minutes late. When he reaches it, the building is silent and in darkness and the doors are closed. But they open easily when he pushes against them, so that he stumbles as he mters the foyer. He waits to let his eyes adjust to the low light, straining to hear sounds, aware of the familiar smell of dusty carpeting. Is he too late? It would almost be a relief. He moves deeper into the lobby, past what he thinks must be the ticket office, until he comes to another set of double doors. He gropes for a metal bar, pushes down and enters.

A hundred feet away, the stage is in soft bluish light, broken by pinp.r.i.c.ks of red on the amplifier racks. By the drums, the high hat catches the light and projects an elongated purple disc across the floor of the theatre which is without seats. There's no other light apart from an orange exit sign beyond the stage. People are moving and crouching by the equipment, and stirring beside the gleam of a keyboard. Just discernible above the low fuzzy hum of the speaker banks is a murmur of voices. A silhouetted figure stands at the front of the stage adjusting the heights of two microphones.

Perowne moves to his right, and in total darkness follows the wall with his hand until he's facing the centre of the stage. A second person appears by the microphones carrying a saxophone whose intricate outline is sharply defined against the blue. In response to a call, the keyboard sounds a single note, and a ba.s.s guitar tunes its top string to it. Another guitar plays a broken open chord - all in tune, then a third does the same. The drummer sits in and moves his cymbals closer and fiddles with the pedal on a ba.s.s drum. The murmur of voices ceases, and the roadies disappear into the wings.

169.

r Theo and Chas are at the front of the stage by the microphones looking out across the auditorium.

It's only at this point that Perowne realises they've seen him come in and that they've been waiting. Theo's guitar starts out alone with a languorous two-bar turnaround, a simple descending line from the fifth fret, tumbling into a thick chord which oozes into a second and remains hanging there, an unresolved fading seventh; then, with a sharp kick and roll on the torn, and five stealthy, rising notes from the ba.s.s, the blues begins. It's a downbeat 'Stormy Monday' kind of song, but the chords are dense and owe more to ja/z. The stage light is shifting to white. Theo, motionless in his usual trance, goes three times round the twelve bars. It's a smooth, rounded tone, plenty of feedback to mould the notes into their wailing lament, with a little sting in the attack on the shorter runs. The piano and rhythm guitar lay down their thick jazzy chords. Henry feels the ba.s.sline thump into his sternum and puts his hand to the sore spot there. It's building into a big sound, and he's uncomfortable, and resists it. In his present state, he'd prefer to be at home with a Mozart trio on the hi-fi, and a gla.s.s of icy white wine.

But he doesn't hold out for long. Something is swelling, or lightening in him as Theo's notes rise, and on the second turnaround lift into a higher register and begin to soar. This is what the boys have been working on, and they want him to hear it, and he's touched. He's catching on to the idea, to the momentum of their exuberance and expertise. At the same time he discovers that the song is not in the usual pattern of a twelve-bar blues. There's a middle section with an unworldly melody that rises and falls in semitones. Chas leans into his microphone to sing with Theo in a close, strange harmony.

Baby, you can choose despair, Or you can be happy if you dare. So let me take you there, My city square, city square.