Sat.u.r.day.

Ian McEwan.

To Will and Greg McEwan For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a ma.s.s. Transformed by science. Under organised power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the late failure of radical hope-,. In a society that was no community and devalued the person. Owing to the multiplied power of numbers which made ?V v.-lf nodi.dbk'. Which srenf rnllirnrv billions .i^imv.! foreign enemies but would not nay for order at home. Which permitted savagery and barbarism in its own great cities. At the same time, the pressure of human millions who have discovered what concerted efforts and thoughts can do. As megatons of water shape organisms on the ocean floor. As tides polish stones. As winds hollow cliffs. The beautiful supermachinery opening a new life for innumerable mankind. Would you deny them the right to exist? Would you ask them to labor and go hungry while you yourself enjoyed old-fashioned Values? You - you yourself are a child of this ma.s.s and a brother to all the rest. Or else an ingrate, dilettante, idiot. There, Herzog, thought Herzog, since you ask for the instance, is the way it runs.

Saul Bellow, Herzog, 1964 One Some hours before dawn Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon, wakes to find himself already in motion, pushing back the covers from a sitting position, and then rising to his feet. It's not clear to him when exactly he became conscious, nor does it seem relevant. He's never done such a thing before, but he isn't alarmed or even faintly surprised, for the movement is easy, and pleasurable in his limbs, and his back and legs feel unusually strong. He stands there, naked by the bed - he always sleeps naked - feeling his full height, aware of his wife's patient breathing and of the wintry bedroom air on his skin. That too is a pleasurable sensation. His bedside clock shows three forty. He has no idea what he's doing out of bed: he has no need to relieve himself, nor is he disturbed by a dream or some element of the day before, or even by the state of the world. It's as if, standing there in the darkness, he's materialised out of nothing, fully formed, unenc.u.mbered. He doesn't feel tired, despite the hour or his recent labours, nor is his conscience troubled by any recent case. In fact, he's alert and empty-headed and inexplicably elated. With no decision made, no motivation at all, he begins to move towards the nearest of the three bedroom windows and experiences such ease and lightness in his tread that he suspects at once he's dreaming or sleepwalking. If it is the case, he'll be disappointed. Dreams don't interest him; that this should be real is a richer possibility. And he's entirely himself, he is certain of it, and he knows that sleep is behind him: to know the difference between it and waking, to know the boundaries, is the essence of sanity.

The bedroom is large and uncluttered. As he glides across

it with almost comic facility, the prospect of the experience ending saddens him briefly, then the thought is gone. He is by the centre window, pulling back the tall folding wooden j shutters with care so as not to wake Rosalind. In this he's selfish as well as solicitous. He doesn't wish to be asked what he's about - what answer could he give, and why relinquish this moment in the attempt? He opens the second shutter, letting it concertina into the cas.e.m.e.nt, and quietly raises the sash window. It is many feet taller than him, but it slides easily upwards, hoisted by its concealed lead counterweight. His skin tightens as the February air pours in around him, but he isn't troubled by the cold. From the second floor he faces the night, the city in its icy white light, the skeletal trees in the square, and thirty feet below, the black arrowhead railings like a row of spears. There's a degree or two of frost and the air is clear. The street lamp glare hasn't quite obliterated all the stars; above the Regency facade on the other side of the square hang remnants of constellations in the southern sky. That particular facade is a reconstruction, a pastiche - wartime Fitzrovia took some hits from the Luftwaffe - and right behind is the Post Office Tower, munic.i.p.al and seedy by day, but at night, half-concealed and decently illuminated, a valiant memorial to more optimistic days.

And now, what days are these? Baffled and fearful, he mostly thinks when he takes time from his weekly round to consider. But he doesn't feel that now. He leans forwards, pressing his weight onto his palms against the sill, exulting in the emptiness and clarity of the scene. His vision - always good - seems to have sharpened. He sees the paving stone mica glistening in the pedestrianised square, pigeon excre ment hardened by distance and cold into something almost beautiful, like a scattering of snow. He likes the symmetry of black cast-iron posts and their even darker shadows, and the lattice of cobbled gutters. The overfull litter baskets suggest abundance rather than squalor; the vacant benches set around the circular gardens look benignly expectant of their daily traffic - cheerful lunchtime office crowds, the solemn, studious boys from the Indian hostel, lovers in quiet raptures or crisis, the crepuscular drug dealers, the ruined old lady with her wild, haunting calls. Go away! she'll shout for hours .it r time, and squawk harshly, sounding like some marsh bird or zoo creature.

Standing here, as immune to the cold as a marble statue, gazing towards Charlotte Street, towards a foreshortened jumble of facades, scaffolding and pitched roofs, Henry thinks the city is a success, a brilliant invention, a biological masterpiece - millions teeming around the acc.u.mulated and layered achievements of the centuries, as though around a coral reef, sleeping, working, entertaining themselves, harmonious for the most part, nearly everyone wanting it to work. And the Perownes' own corner, a triumph of congruent proportion; the perfect square laid out by Robert Adam enclosing a perfect circle of garden - an eighteenth-century dream bathed and embraced by modernity, by street light from above, and from below by fibre-optic cables, and cool fresh water coursing down pipes, and sewage borne away in an instant of forgetting.

An habitual observer of his own moods, he wonders about this sustained, distorting euphoria. Perhaps down at the molecular level there's been a chemical accident while he slept - something like a spilled tray of drinks, prompting dopamine-like receptors to initiate a kindly cascade of intracellular events; or it's the prospect of a Sat.u.r.day, or the paradoxical consequence of extreme tiredness. It's true, he finished the week in a state of unusual depletion. He came home to an empty house, and lay in the bath with a book, content to be talking to no one. It was his literate, too literate daughter Daisy who sent the biography of Darwin which in turn has something to do with a Conrad novel she wants him to read and which he has yet to start - seafaring, however morally fraught, doesn't much interest him. For some years now she's been addressing what she believes is his astounding ignorance, guiding his literary education, scolding him for poor taste and insensitivity. She has a point - straight from school to medical school to the slavish hours of a junior doctor, then the total absorption of neurosurgery training spliced with committed fatherhood - for fifteen years he barely touched a non-medical book at all. On the other hand, he thinks he's seen enough death, fear, courage and suffering to supply half a dozen literatures. Still, he submits to her reading lists - they're his means of remaining in touch as she grows away from her family into unknowable womanhood in a suburb of Paris; tonight she'll be home for the first time in six months - another cause for euphoria.

He was behind with his a.s.signments from Daisy With one toe occasionally controlling a fresh input of hot water, he blearily read an account of Darwin's dash to complete The Origin of Species, and a summary of the concluding pages, amended in later editions. At the same time he was listening to the radio news. The stolid Mr Blix has been addressing the UN again - there's a general impression that he's rather undermined the case for war. Then, certain he'd taken in nothing at all, Perowne switched the radio off, turned back the pages and read again. At times this biography made him comfortably nostalgic for a verdant, horse-drawn, affectionate England; at others he was faintly depressed by the way a whole life could be contained by a few hundred pages - bottled, like homemade chutney. And by how easily an existence, its ambitions, networks of family and friends, all its cherished stuff, solidly possessed, could so entirely vanish. Afterwards, he stretched out on the bed to consider his supper, and remembered nothing more. Rosalind must have drawn the covers over him when she came in from work. She would have kissed him. Forty-eight years old, profoundly asleep at nine thirty on a Friday night - this is modern professional life. He works hard, everyone around him works hard, and this week he's been pushed harder by a flu outbreak among the hospital staff - his operating list has been twice the usual length.

By means of balancing and doubling, he was able to perform major surgery in one theatre, supervise a senior registrar in another, and perform minor procedures in a third. He has two neurosurgical registrars in his firm at present - Sally Madden who is almost qualified and entirely reliable, and a year-two registrar, Rodney Browne from Guyana, gifted, hardworking, but still unsure of himself. Perowne's consultant anaesthetist, Jay Strauss, has his own registrar, Gita Syal. For three days, keeping Rodney at his side, Perowne moved between the three suites - the sound of his own clogs on the corridor's polished floors and the various squeaks and groans of the theatre swing doors sounded like orchestral accompaniments. Friday's list was typical. While Sally closed up a patient Perowne went next door to relieve an elderly lady of her trigeminal neuralgia, her tic douloureux. These minor operations can still give him pleasure - he likes to be fast and accurate. He slipped a gloved forefinger into the back of her mouth to feel the route, then, with barely a glance at the image intensifier, slid a long needle through the outside of her cheek, all the way up to the trigeminal ganglion. Jay came in from next door to watch Gita bringing the lady to brief consciousness. Electrical stimulation of the needle's tip caused a tingling in her face, and once she'd drowsily confirmed the position was correct - Perowne had it right first time - she was put down again while the nerve was 'cooked' by radiofrequency thermocoagulation. The delicate trick was to eliminate her pain while leaving her an awareness of light touch - all done in fifteen minutes; three years' misery, of sharp, stabbing pain, ended. He clipped the neck of a middle cerebral artery aneurysm - he's something of a master in the art - and performed a biopsy for a tumour in the thalamus, a region where it's not possible to operate. The patient was a 28-year-old professional tennis player, already suffering acute memory loss. As Perowne drew the needle clear from the depths of the brain he could see at a glance that the tissue was abnormal. He held out little hope for radio- or chemotherapy. Confirmation came in a verbal report from the lab, and that afternoon he broke the news to the young man's elderly parents.

The next case was a craniotomy for a meningioma in a 53 year-old woman, a primary school headmistress. The tumour sat above the motor strip and was sharply defined, rolling away neatly before the probing of his Rhoton dissector - an entirely curative process. Sally closed that one up while Perowne went next door to carry out a multi-level lumbar laminectomy on an obese 44-year-old man, a gardener who worked in Hyde Park. He cut through four inches of subcutaneous fat before the vertebrae were exposed, and the man wobbled unhelpfully on the table whenever Perowne exerted downwards pressure to clip away at the bone.

For an old friend, a specialist in Ear, Nose and Throat, Perowne opened up an acoustic in a seventeen-year-old boy - it's odd how these ENT people shy away from making their own difficult routes in. Perowne made a large, rectangular bone flap behind the ear, which took well over an hour, irritating Jay Strauss who was wanting to get on with the firm's own list. Finally the tumour lay exposed to the operating microscope - a small vestibular schwannoma lying barely three millimetres from the cochlea. Leaving his specialist friend to perform the excision, Perowne hurried out to a second minor procedure which in turn caused him some irritation - a loud young woman with an habitually aggrieved manner wanted her spinal stimulator moved from back to front. Only the month before he had shifted it round after she complained that it was uncomfortable to sit down. Now she was saying the stimulator made it impossible to lie in bed. He made a long incision across her abdomen and wasted valuable time, up to his elbows inside her, searching for the battery wire. He was sure she'd be back before long.

For lunch he had a factory-wrapped tuna and cuc.u.mber sandwich with a bottle of mineral water. In the cramped coffee room whose toast and microwaved pasta always remind him of the odours of major surgery, he sat next to Heather, the much-loved c.o.c.kney lady who helps clean the theatres between procedures. She gave him an account of her son-in law's arrest for armed robbery after being mistakenly picked out of a police line-up. But his alibi was perfect - at the time of the crime he was at the dentist's having a wisdom tooth removed. Elsewhere in the room, the talk was of the flu epidemic - one of the scrub nurses and a trainee Operating Department Pract.i.tioner working for Jay Strauss were sent home that morning. After fifteen minutes Perowne took his firm back to work. While Sally was next door drilling a hole in the skull of an old man, a retired traffic warden, to relieve the pressure of his internal bleeding - a chronic subdural haematoma - Perowne used the theatre's latest piece of equipment, a computerised image-guidance system, to help him with a craniotomy for a resection of a right posterior frontal glioma. Then he let Rodney take the lead in another burr hole for a chronic subdural.

The culmination of today's list was the removal of a pilocytic astrocytoma from a fourteen-year-old Nigerian girl who lives in Brixton with her aunt and uncle, a Church of England vicar. The tumour was best reached through the back of the head, by an infratentorial supracerebellar route, with the anaesthetised patient in a sitting position. This in turn created special problems for Jay Strauss, for there was a possibility of air entering a vein and causing an embolism. Andrea Chapman was a problem patient, a problem niece. She arrived in England at the age of twelve - the dismayed vicar and his wife showed Perowne the photograph - a scrubbed girl in a frock and tight ribbons with a shy smile. Something in her that village life in rural north Nigeria kept b.u.t.toned down was released once she started at her local Brixton comprehensive. She took to the music, the clothes, the talk, the values - the street. She had att.i.tude, the vicar confided while his wife was trying to settle Andrea on the ward. His niece took drugs, got drunk, shoplifted, bunked off school, hated authority, and 'swore like a merchant seaman'. Could it be the tumour was pressing down on some part of her brain?

Perowne could offer no such comfort. The tumour was remote from the frontal lobes. It was deep in the superior cerebellar vermis. She'd already suffered early-morning headaches, blind spots and ataxia - unsteadiness. These symptoms failed to dispel her suspicion that her condition was part of a plot - the hospital, in league with her guardians, the school, the police - to curb her nights in the clubs. Within hours of being admitted she was in conflict with the nurses, the ward sister and an elderly patient who said she wouldn't tolerate the obscene language. Perowne had his own difficulties talking her through the ordeals that lay ahead. Even when Andrea wasn't aroused, she affected to talk like a rapper on MTV, swaying her upper body as she sat up in bed, making circular movements with her palms downwards, soothing the air in front of her, in preparation for one of her own storms. But he admired her spirit, and the fierce dark eyes, the perfect teeth, and the clean pink tongue lashing itself round the words it formed. She smiled joyously, even when she was shouting in apparent fury, as though she was tickled by just how much she could get away with. It took Jay Strauss, an American with the warmth and directness that no one else in this English hospital could muster, to bring her into line.

Andrea's operation lasted five hours and went well. She was placed in a sitting position, with her head-clamp bolted to a frame in front of her. Opening up the back of the head 10 needed great care because of the vessels running close under the bone. Rodney leaned in at Perowne's side to irrigate the drilling and cauterise the bleeding with the bipolar. Finally it lay exposed, the tentorium - the tent - a pale delicate structure of beauty, like the little whirl of a veiled dancer, where the dura is gathered and parted again. Below it lay the cerebellum. By cutting away carefully, Perowne allowed gravity itself to draw the cerebellum down - no need for retractors - and it was possible to see deep into the region where the pineal lay, with the tumour extending in a vast red ma.s.s right in front of it. The astrocytoma was well defined and had only partially infiltrated surrounding tissue. Perowne was able to excise almost all of it without damaging any eloquent region.

He allowed Rodney several minutes with the microscope and the sucker, and let him do the closing up. Perowne did the head dressing himself, and when he finally came away from the theatres, he wasn't feeling tired at all. Operating never wearies him - once busy within the enclosed world of his firm, the theatre and its ordered procedures, and absorbed by the vivid foreshortening of the operating microscope as he follows a corridor to a desired site, he experiences a superhuman capacity, more like a craving, for work.

As for the rest of the week, the two morning clinics made no more demand than usual. He's too experienced to be touched by the varieties of distress he encounters - his obligation is to be useful. Nor did the ward rounds or the various weekly committees tire him. It was the paperwork on Friday afternoon that brought him down, the backlog of referrals, and responses to referrals, abstracts for two conferences, letters to colleagues and editors, an unfinished peer review, contributions to management initiatives, and government changes to the structure of the Trust, and yet more revisions to teaching practices. There's to be a new look - there's always a new look - at the hospital's Emergency Plan. Simple train crashes are no longer all that are envisaged, and 11 words like 'catastrophe' and 'ma.s.s fatalities', 'chemical and biological warfare' and 'major attack' have recently become bland through repet.i.tion. In the past year he's become aware of new committees and subcommittees sp.a.w.ning, and lines of command that stretch up and out of the hospital, beyond the medical hierarchies, up through the distant reaches of the Civil Service to the Home Secretary's office.

Perowne dictated monotonously, and long after his secretary went home he typed in his overheated box of an office on the hospital's third floor. What dragged him back was an unfamiliar lack of fluency. He prides himself on speed and a sleek, wry style. It never needs much forethought - typing and composing are one. Now he was stumbling. And though the professional jargon didn't desert him - it's second nature - his prose acc.u.mulated awkwardly. Individual words brought to mind unwieldy objects - bicycles, deckchairs, coat hangers - strewn across his path. He composed a sentence in his head, then lost it on the page, or typed himself into a grammatical cul-de-sac and had to sweat his way out. Whether this debility was the cause or the consequence of fatigue he didn't pause to consider. He was stubborn and he pushed himself to the end. At eight in the evening he concluded the last in a series of e-mails, and stood up from his desk where he had been hunched since four. On his way out he looked in at his patients in the ICU. There were no problems, and Andrea was doing fine - she was sleeping and all her signs were good. Less than half an hour later he was back home, in his bath, and soon after, he too was asleep.

Two figures in dark overcoats are crossing the square diagonally, walking away from him towards Cleveland Street, their high heels ticking in awkward counterpoint - nurses surely, heading home, though this is a strange time to be coming off shift. They aren't speaking, and though their steps don't match, they walk close, shoulders almost touching in an intimate, sisterly way. They pa.s.s right beneath him, and 12 make a quarter-circular route around the gardens before striking off. There's something touching about the way their breath rises behind them in single clouds of vapour as they go, as though they're playing a children's game, imitating steam trains. They cross towards the far corner of the square, and with his advantage of height and in his curious mood, he not only watches them, but watches over them, supervising their progress with the remote possessiveness of a G.o.d. In the lifeless cold, they pa.s.s through the night, hot little biological engines with bipedal skills suited to any terrain, endowed with innumerable branching neural networks sunk deep in a k.n.o.b of bone casing, buried fibres, warm filaments with their invisible glow of consciousness - these engines devise their own tracks.

He's been at the window several minutes, the elation is pa.s.sing, and he's beginning to shiver. In the gardens, which are enclosed within a circle of high railings, a light frost lies on the landscaped hollows and rises of the lawn beyond the border of plane trees. He watches an ambulance, siren off, blue lights flashing, turn into Charlotte Street and accelerate hard southwards, heading perhaps for Soho. He turns from the window to reach behind him for a thick woollen dressing gown where it lies draped over a chair. Even as he turns, he's aware of some new element outside, in the square or in the trees, bright but colourless, smeared across his peripheral vision by the movement of his head. But he doesn't look back immediately. He's cold and he wants the dressing gown. He picks it up, threads one arm through a sleeve, and only steps back towards the window as he's finding the second sleeve and looping the belt around his waist.

He doesn't immediately understand what he sees, though he thinks he does. In this first moment, in his eagerness and curiosity, he a.s.sumes proportions on a planetary scale: it's a meteor burning out in the London sky, traversing left to right, low on the horizon, though well clear of the taller buildings. But surely meteors have a darting, needle-like quality. You 13 see them in a flash before their heat consumes them. This is moving slowly, majestically even. In an instant, he revises his perspective outward to the scale of the solar system: this object is not hundreds but millions of miles distant, far out in s.p.a.ce swinging in timeless...o...b..t around the sun. It's a comet, tinged with yellow, with the familiar bright core trailing its fiery envelope. He watched Hale-Bopp with Rosalind and the children from a gra.s.sy hillock in the Lake District and he feels again the same leap of grat.i.tude for a glimpse, beyond the earthly frame, of the truly impersonal. And this is better, brighter, faster, all the more impressive for being unexpected. They must have missed the media coverage. Working too hard. He's about to wake Rosalind - he knows she'll be thrilled by the sight - but he wonders if she'd get to the window before the comet disappears. Then he'll miss it too. But it's too extraordinary not to share.

He's moving towards the bed when he hears a low rumbling sound, gentle thunder gathering in volume, and stops to listen. It tells him everything. He looks back over his shoulder to the window for confirmation. Of course, a comet is so distant it's bound to appear stationary. Horrified, he returns to his position by the window. The sound holds at a steady volume while he revises the scale again, zooming inwards this time, from solar dust and ice back to the local. Only three or four seconds have pa.s.sed since he saw this fire in the sky and changed his mind about it twice. It's travelling along a route that he himself has taken many times in his life, and along which he's gone through the routines, adjusting his seat-back and his watch, putting away his papers, always curious to see if he can locate his own house down among the immense almost beautiful orange-grey sprawl; east to west, along the southern banks of the Thames, two thousand feet up, in the final approaches to Heathrow, It's directly south of him now, barely a mile away, soon to pa.s.s into the topmost lattice of the bare plane trees, and then behind the Post Office Tower, at the level of the lowest 14 microwave dishes. Despite the city lights, the contours of the plane aren't visible in the early-morning darkness. The fire must be on the nearside wing where it joins the fuselage, or perhaps in one of the engines slung below. The leading edge of the fire is a flattened white sphere which trails away in a cone of yellow and red, less like a meteor or comet than an artist's lurid impression of one. As though in a pretence of normality, the landing lights are flashing. But the engine note gives it all away. Above the usual deep and airy roar, is a straining, choking, banshee sound growing in volume - both a scream and a sustained shout, an impure, dirty noise that suggests unsustainable mechanical effort bevond the capacitv of hardened steel, spiralling upwards to an end point, irresponsibly rising and rising like the accompaniment to a terrible fairground ride. Something is about to give.

He no longer thinks of waking Rosalind. Why wake her into this nightmare? In fact, the spectacle has the familiarity of a recurrent dream. Like most pa.s.sengers, outwardly subdued by the monotony of air travel, he often lets his thoughts range across the possibilities while sitting, strapped down and docile, in front of a packaged meal. Outside, beyond a wall of thin steel and cheerful creaking plastic, it's minus sixty degrees and forty thousand feet to the ground. Flung across the Atlantic at five hundred feet a second, you submit to the folly because everyone else does. Your fellow pa.s.sengers are rea.s.sured because you and the others around you appear calm. Looked at a certain way - deaths per pa.s.senger mile - the statistics are consoling. And how else attend a conference in southern California? Air travel is a stock market, a trick of mirrored perceptions, a fragile alliance of pooled belief; so long as nerves hold steady and no bombs or wreckers are on board, everybody prospers. When there's failure, there will be no half measures. Seen another way deaths per journey - the figures aren't so good. The market could plunge.

Plastic fork in hand, he often wonders how it might go 15 Ian McEwcm the screaming in the cabin partly m.u.f.fled by that deadening acoustic, the fumbling in bags for phones and last words, the airline staff in their terror clinging to remembered fragments of procedure, the levelling smell of s.h.i.t. But the scene construed from the outside, from afar like this, is also familiar. It's already almost eighteen months since half the planet watched, and watched again the unseen captives driven through the sky to the slaughter, at which time there gathered round the innocent silhouette of any jet plane a novel a.s.sociation. Everyone agrees, airliners look different in the sky these days, predatory or doomed.

Henry knows it's a trick of vision that makes him think he can see an outline now, a deeper black shape against the dark. The howl of the burning engine continues to rise in pitch. It wouldn't surprise him to see lights coming on across the city, or the square fill with residents in dressing gowns. Behind him Rosalind, well practised at excluding the city's night troubles from her sleep, turns on her side. The noise is probably no more intrusive than a pa.s.sing siren on the Euston Road. The fiery white core and its coloured tail have grown larger - no pa.s.sengers sitting in that central section of the plane could survive. That is the other familiar element - the horror of what he can't see. Catastrophe observed from a safe distance. Watching death on a large scale, but seeing no one die. No blood, no screams, no human figures at all, and into this emptiness, the obliging imagination set free. The fight to the death in the c.o.c.kpit, a posse of brave pa.s.sengers a.s.sembling before a last-hope charge against the fanatics. To escape the heat of that fire which part of the plane might you run to? The pilot's end might seem less lonely somehow. Is it pathetic folly to reach into the overhead locker for your bag, or necessary optimism? Will the thickly made-up lady who politely served you croissant and jam now be trying to stop you?

The plane is pa.s.sing behind the tops of the trees. Briefly, the fire twinkles festively among the branches and twigs. It 16 occurs to Perowne that there's something he should be doing. By the time the emergency services have noted and pa.s.sed on his call, whatever is to happen will be in the past. If he's alive, the pilot will have radioed ahead. Perhaps they're already covering the runway in foam. Pointless at this stage to go down and make himself available to the hospital. Heathrow isn't in its area under the Emergency Plan. Elsewhere, further west, in darkened bedrooms, medics will be pulling on their clothes with no idea of what they face. Still fifteen miles of descent. If the fuel tanks explode there will be nothing for them to do.

The plane emerges from the trees, crosses a gap and disappears behind the Post Office Tower. If Perowne were inclined to religious feeling, to supernatural explanations, he could play with the idea that he's been summoned; that having woken in an unusual state of mind, and gone to the window for no reason, he should acknowledge a hidden order, an external intelligence which wants to show or tell him something of significance. But a city of its nature cultivates insomniacs; it is itself a sleepless ent.i.ty whose wires never stop singing; among so many millions there are bound to be people staring out of windows when normally they would be asleep. And not the same people every night. That it should be him and not someone else is an arbitrary matter. A simple anthropic principle is involved. The primitive thinking of the supernaturally inclined amounts to what his psychiatric colleagues call a problem, or an idea, of reference. An excess of the subjective, the ordering of the world in line with your needs, an inability to contemplate your own unimportance. In Henry's view such reasoning belongs on a spectrum at whose far end, rearing like an abandoned temple, lies psychosis.

And such reasoning may have caused the fire on the plane. A man of sound faith with a bomb in the heel of his shoe. Among the terrified pa.s.sengers many might be praying - another problem of reference - to their own G.o.d 17 for intercession. And if there are to be deaths, the very G.o.d who ordained them will soon be funereally pet.i.tioned for comfort. Perowne regards this as a matter for wonder, a human complication beyond the reach of morals. From it there spring, alongside the unreason and slaughter, decent people and good deeds, beautiful cathedrals, mosques, cantatas, poetry. Even the denial of G.o.d, he was once amazed and indignant to hear a priest argue, is a spiritual exercise, a form of prayer: it's not easy to escape from the clutches of the believers. The best hope for the plane is that it's suffered simple, secular mechanical failure.

It pa.s.ses beyond the Tower rind begins to recede across an open patch of western sky, angling a little towards the north. The fire appears to diminish with the slowly changing perspective. His view now is mostly of the tail and. its flashing light. The noise of the engine's distress is fading. Is the undercarriage down? As he wonders, he also wishes it, or wills it. A kind of praying? He's asking no one any favours. Even when the landing lights have shrunk to nothing, he continues to watch the sky in the west, fearing the sight of an explosion, unable to look away. Still cold, despite the dressing gown, he wipes the pane clear of the condensation from his breath, and thinks how remote it now seems, that unprompted, exalted mood that brought him from his bed. Finally he straightens and quietly unfolds the shutters to mask the sky.

As he comes away, he remembers the famous thought experiment he learned about long ago on a physics course. A cat, Schrodinger's Cat, hidden from view in a covered box, is either still alive, or has just been killed by a randomly activated hammer hitting a vial of poison. Until the observer lifts the cover from the box, both possibilities, alive cat and dead cat, exist side by side, in parallel universes, equally real. At the point at which the lid is lifted from the box and the cat is examined, a quantum wave of probability collapses. None of this has ever made any sense to him at all. No human sense. Surely another example of a problem of reference. He's 18 heard that even the physicists are abandoning it. To Henry it seems beyond the requirements of proof: a result, a consequence, exists separately in the world, independent of himself, known to others, awaiting his discovery. What then collapses will be his own ignorance. Whatever the score, it is already chalked up. And whatever the pa.s.sengers' destination, whether they are frightened and safe, or dead, they will have arrived by now.

Most people at their first consultation take a furtive look at frit- surgeon's hands in the hope of rea.s.surance. Prospective patients look for delicacy, sensitivity, steadiness, perhaps unblemished pallor. On this basis, Henry Perowne loses a number of cases each year. Generally, he knows it's about to happen before the patient does: the downward glance repeated, the prepared questions beginning to falter, the overemphatic thanks during the retreat to the door. Other patients don't like what they see but are ignorant of their right to go elsewhere; some note the hands, but are placated by the reputation, or don't give a d.a.m.n; and there are still others who notice nothing, or feel nothing, or are unable to communicate due to the cognitive impairment that has brought them in the first place.

Perowne himself is not concerned. Let the defectors go along the corridor or across town. Others will take their place. The sea of neural misery is wide and deep. These hands are steady enough, but they are large. Had he been a proper pianist - he's dabbled inexpertly - his ten-note span might be of use. They are k.n.o.bbly hands, bulging with bone and sinew at the knuckles, with a thatch of gingerish hair at the base of each finger - the tips of which are flat and broad, like the suckers on a salamander. There's an immodest length to the thumbs which curve back, banana-style, and even at rest have a double-jointed look, more suited to the circus ring, among the clowns and trapezists. And the hands, like much of the rest of Perowne, are gaily freckled in a motley 19 of orange and brown melanin extending right up to his highest knuckles. To a certain kind of patient this looks alien, even unwholesome: you might not want such hands, even gloved, tinkering with your brain.

They are the hands of a tall, sinewy man on whom recent years have added a little weight and poise. In his twenties, his tweed jacket hung on him as though on narrow poles. When he exerts himself to straighten his back, he stands at six feet two. His slight stoop gives him an apologetic look which many patients take as part of his charm. They're also put at their ease by the una.s.sertive manner and the mild green eyes with deep smile-wrinkles at their corners. Until his early forties, the boyish freckles on his face and forehead had the same unintimidating effect, but recently they've begun to fade, as though a senior position has at last obliged him to abandon a frivolous display. Patients would be less happy to know that he's not always listening to them. He's a dreamer sometimes. Like a car-radio traffic alert, a shadowy mental narrative can break in, urgent and unbidden, even during a consultation. He's adept at covering his tracks, continuing to nod or frown or firmly close his mouth around a half-smile. When he comes to, seconds later, he never seems to have missed much.

To a degree, the stoop is deceptive. Perowne has always had physical ambitions and he's reluctant to let them go. On his rounds he hits the corridors with an impatient stride his retinue struggles to match. He's healthy, more or less. If he takes time after a shower to scrutinise himself in the full length bathroom mirror, he notes around his waist a first thickening, an almost sensual swelling below the ribs. It vanishes when he holds himself erect or raises his arms. Otherwise, the muscles - the pecs, the abs - though modest, keep a reasonable definition, especially when the overhead lamp is off and light falls from the side. He is not done yet. His head hair, though thinning, is still reddish brown. Only on his p.u.b.es are the first scattered coils of silver.

20 Most weeks he still runs in Regent's Park, through William Nesfield's restored gardens, past the Lion Tazza to Primrose Hill and back. And he still beats some of the younger medics at squash, centring his long reach on the The' at the centre of the court, from where he flaunts the lob shots which are his special pride. Almost half the time he beats the consultant anaesthetist in their Sat.u.r.day games. But if an opponent is good enough to know how to shift him from the centre of the court and make him run, then Henry is done for in twenty minutes. Leaning against the back wall, he might un.o.btrusively check his own pulse and ask himself whether his 48 year-old frame can really sustain a rate of one hundred and ninety? On a rare day off he was two games up against Jay Strauss when they were called - it was the Paddington rail crash, everyone was called - and they worked twelve hours at a stretch in their trainers and shorts under their greens. Perowne runs a half-marathon for charity every year, and it's said, wrongly, that all those under him wanting advancement must run it too. His time last year - one hour forty-one was eleven minutes slower than his best.

The una.s.sertiveness is misleading, more style than character - it's not possible to be an una.s.sertive brain surgeon. Naturally, students and junior staff see less of his charm than the patients. The student who, referring to a CT scan in Perowne's presence, used the wTords 'low down on the left side', provoked a moment's rage and was banished in shame to relearn his directional terms. In the operating theatre Perowne is said by his firm to be at the inexpressive end of the scale: no stream of obscenities ascending as the difficulties and risks increase, no hissed threats to throw an incompetent front the room, none of those tough guy asides - Uhuh, there go the violin lessons - that are supposed to relieve tension. On the contrary, in Perowne's view, when things are difficult, tension is best maintained. His taste then is for terse murmurs or silence. If a registrar fumbles with the positioning of a retractor, or the scrub nurse places a pituitary forceps in 21 his hand at an awkward angle, Perowne might on a bad day utter a single staccato 'f.u.c.k', more troubling for its rarity and lack of emphasis, and the silence in the room will tighten. Otherwise, he likes music in the theatre when he's working, mostly piano works by Bach - the 'Goldberg' Variations, the Well-Tempered Klavier, the Part.i.tas. He favours Angela Hewitt, Martha Argerich, sometimes Gustav Leonhardt. In a really good mood he'll go for the looser interpretations of Glenn Gould. In committee he likes precision, all items addressed and disposed of within the set time, and to this end he's an effective chairman. Exploratory musings and anecdotes by senior colleagues, tolerated by most as an occupational hazard, make him impatient; fantasising should be a solitary pursuit. Decisions are all.

So despite the apologetic posture, the mild manner and an inclination to occasional daydreaming, it's unlike Perowne to dither as he does now - he's standing at the foot of the bed - unable to decide whether to wake Rosalind. It makes no sense at all. There's nothing to see. It's an entirely selfish impulse. Her alarm is due to go off at six thirty, and once he's told her the story, she'll have no hope of going back to sleep. She'll hear it all anyway. She has a difficult day ahead. Now that the shutters are closed and he's in darkness again, he understands the extent of his turmoil. His thoughts have a reeling, tenuous quality - he can't hold an idea long enough to force sense out of it. He feels culpable somehow, but helpless too. These are contradictory terms, but not quite, and it's the degree of their overlap, their manner of expressing the same thing from different angles, which he needs to comprehend. Culpable in his helplessness. Helplessly culpable. He loses his way, and thinks again of the phone. By daylight, will it seem negligent not to have called the emergency services? Will it be obvious that there was nothing to be done, that there wasn't time? His crime was to stand in the safety of his bedroom, wrapped in a woollen dressing gown, without moving or making a sound, half dreaming as he watched 22 people die. Yes, he should have phoned, if only to talk, to measure his voice and feelings against a stranger's.

And that is why he wants to wake her, not simply to give her the news, but because he's somewhat deranged, he keeps floating away from the line of his thoughts. He wants to tether himself to the precise details of what he's seen, arrange them before her worldly, legal mind and steady gaze. He'd like the touch of her hands - they are small and smooth, always cooler than his own. It's five days since they made love, Monday morning, before the six o'clock news, during a rainstorm, with only the dimmed light from the bathroom, twenty minutes s.n.a.t.c.hed - so they often joke - from the jaws of work. Well, in ambitious middle life it sometimes seems there is only work. He can be at the hospital until ten, then it can pull him from his bed at 3 a.m., and he can be back there again at eight. Rosalind's work proceeds by a series of slow crescendos and abrupt terminations as she tries to steer her newspaper away from the courts. For certain days, even weeks on end, work can shape every hour; it's the tide, the lunar cycle they set their lives by, and without it, it can seem, there's nothing, Henry and Rosalind Perowne are nothing.

Henry can't resist the urgency of his cases, or deny the egotistical joy in his own skills, or the pleasure he still takes in the relief of the relatives when he comes down from the operating room like a G.o.d, an angel with the glad tidings life, not death. Rosalind's best moments are outside court, when a powerful litigant backs down in the face of superior argument; or, rarer, when a judgment goes her way and establishes a point of principle in law. Once a week, usually on a Sunday evening, they line up their personal organisers side by side, like little mating creatures, so that their appointments can be transferred into each other's diary along an infrared beam. When they steal time for love they always leave the phone connected. By some perverse synchronism, it often rings just as they're getting started. It'll be for Rosalind as often as for him. If he's the one who is obliged to get 23 dressed and hurry from the room - perhaps returning with a curse for keys or loose change - he does so with a longing backward glance, and sets off from his house to the hospital - ten minutes at a brisk pace - with his burden, his fading thoughts of love. But once he's through the double swing doors, and crossing the worn chessboard linoleum tiles by Accident and Emergency, once he's ridden the lift to the third-floor operating suite and is in the scrub room, soap in hand, listening to his registrar's difficulties, the last touches of desire leave him and he doesn't even notice them go. No regrets. He's renowned for his speed, his success rate and his list - he takes over three hundred cases a year. Some fail, a handful endure with their lights a little fogged, but most thrive, and many return to work in some form; work - the ultimate badge of health.

And work is why he cannot wake her. She's due in the High Court at ten for an emergency hearing. Her paper has been prevented from reporting the details of a gagging order on another newspaper. The powerful party who obtained the original order successfully argued before a duty judge that 1 even the fact of the gagging cannot be divulged. A point of press freedom is at issue, and it's Rosalind's quest to have f the second order overturned by the end of the day. Before 4 the hearing, briefings in chambers, then - so she hopes - an exploratory chat in the corridors with the other side. Later she'll lay out the options to the editor and management. She'd have come in late last night from meetings, long after Henry dozed off without his supper. Probably she drank tea at the kitchen table and read through her papers. She may have had difficulty falling asleep.

Feeling unhinged and unreasonable and still in need of talking to her, he remains at the foot of the bed, staring towards her shape under the duvet. She sleeps like a child, with her knees drawn up. In the near-total darkness, how small she seems in the hugeness of the bed. He listens to her breathing, which is almost inaudible on the intake, quietly 24 emphatic on the exhalation. She makes a sound with her tongue, a wet click against the roof of her mouth. Many years ago he fell in love with her in a hospital ward, at a time of terror. She was barely aware of him. A white coat coming to her bedside to remove the st.i.tches from the inside of her upper lip. Then it was another three months before he kissed those lips. But he knew more of her, or at least had seen more of her, than any prospective lover could expect.

He approaches now and leans over her and kisses the warm back of her head. Then he comes away, closing the bedroom door quietly, and goes down to the kitchen to turn on the radio.

It's a commonplace of parenting and modern genetics that parents have little or no influence on the characters of their children. You never know who you are going to get. Opportunities, health, prospects, accent, table manners these might lie within your power to shape. But what really determines the sort of person who's coming to live with you is which sperm finds which egg, how the cards in two packs are chosen, then how they are shuffled, halved and spliced at the moment of recombination. Cheerful or neurotic, kind or greedy, curious or dull, expansive or shy and anywhere in between; it can be quite an affront to parental self-regard, just how much of the work has already been done. On the other hand, it can let you off the hook. The point is made for you as soon as you have more than one child; two entirely different people emerge from their roughly similar chances in life. Here in the cavernous bas.e.m.e.nt kitchen at 3.55 a.m., in a single pool of light, as though on stage, is Theo Perowne, eighteen years old, his formal education already long behind him, reclining on a tilted back kitchen chair, his legs in tight black jeans, his feet in boots of soft black leather (paid for with his own money) crossed on the edge of the table. As unlike his sister Daisy as randomness will allow. He's drinking from a large 25 tumbler of water. In the other hand he holds the folded back music magazine he's reading. A studded leather jacket lies in a heap on the floor. Propped against a cupboard is his guitar in its case. It's already acquired a few steamer trunk labels - Trieste, Oakland, Hamburg, Val d'Isere. There's s.p.a.ce for more. From a compact stereo player on a shelf above a library of cookery books comes the sound, like soft drizzle, of an all-night pop station.

Perowne sometimes wonders if, in his youth, he could ever have guessed that he would one day father a blues musician. He himself was simply processed, without question or complaint, in a polished continuum from school, through medical school, to the dogged acquisition of clinical experience, in London, Southend-on-Sea, Newcastle, Bellevue Emergency Department in New York and London again. How have he and Rosalind, such dutiful, conventional types, given rise to such a free spirit? One who dresses, with a certain irony, in the style of the bohemian fifties, who won't read books or let himself be persuaded to stay on at school, who's rarely out of bed before lunchtime, whose pa.s.sion is for mastery in all the nuances of the tradition, Delta, Chicago, Mississippi, for certain licks that contain for him the key to all mysteries, and for the success of his band, New Blue Rider. He has an enlarged version of his mother's face and soft eyes, not green though, but dark brown - the proverbial almonds, with a faint and exotic slant. He has his mother's wide open good willed look - and a stronger more compact variant on his father's big-boned lankiness. Usefully for his line of work, he's also got the hands. In the compact, gossipy world of British blues, Theo is spoken of as a man of promise, already mature in his grasp of the idiom, who might even one day walk with the G.o.ds, the British G.o.ds that is - Alexis Korner, John Mayall, Eric Clapton. Someone has written somewhere that Theo Perowne plays like an angel.

Naturally, his father agrees, despite his doubts about the limits of the form. He likes the blues well enough - in fact, 26 he was the one who showed the nine-year-old Theo how it worked. After that, grandfather took over. But is there a lifetime's satisfaction in twelve bars of three obvious chords? Perhaps it's one of those cases of a microcosm giving you the whole world. Like a Spode dinner plate. Or a single cell. Or, as Daisy says, like a Jane Austen novel. When player and listener together know the route so well, the pleasure is in the deviation, the unexpected turn against the grain. To see a world in a grain of sand. So it is, Perowne tries to convince himself, with clipping an aneurysm: absorbing variation on an unchanging theme.

And there's something in the loping authority of Theo's playing that revives for Henry the inexplicable lure of that simple progression. Theo is the sort of guitarist who plays in an open-eyed trance, without moving his body or ever glancing down at his hands. He concedes only an occasional thoughtful nod. Once in a set he might tilt back his head to indicate to the others that he is 'going round' again. He carries himself on stage as he does in conversation, quietly, formally, protecting his privacy within a sh.e.l.l of friendly politeness. If he happens to spot his parents at the back of a crowd, he'll lift his left hand from the fret in a shy and private salute. Henry and Rosalind remember then the card J.

board crib in the school gymnasium, the solemn five-year-old Joseph, tea towel bound to his head by a crown of rubber bands, holding the hand of a stricken Mary, making the same furtive, affectionate gesture as he located at last his parents in the second row.

This restraint, this cool, suits the blues, or Theo's version of it. When he breaks on a medium-paced standard like 'Sweet Home Chicago', with its slouching dotted rhythm - he's said he's beginning to tire of these evergreen blues he'll set off in the lower register with an easy muscular stride, like some sleek predatory creature, shuffling off tiredness, devouring miles of open savannah. Then he moves on up the fret and the diffidence begins to carry a hint of danger.

27 A little syncopated stab on the turnaround, the sudden chop of an augmented chord, a note held against the tide of harmony, a judiciously flattened fifth, a seventh bent in sensuous microtones. Then a pa.s.sing soulful dissonance. He has the rhythmic gift of upending expectation, a way of playing off triplets against two- or four-note cl.u.s.ters. His runs have the tilt and accent of bebop. It's a form of hypnosis, of effortless seduction. Henry has told no one, not even Rosalind, that there are moments, listening from the back of a West End bar, when the music thrills him, and in a state of exaltation he feels his pride in his son - inseparable from his pleasure in the music - as a constricting sensation in his chest, close to pain. It's difficult to breathe. At the heart of the blues is not melancholy, but a strange and worldly joy.

Theo's guitar pierces him because it also carries a reprimand, a reminder of buried dissatisfaction in his own life, of the missing element. This feeling can grow when a set is over, when the consultant neurosurgeon makes his affectionate farewells to Theo and his friends and, emerging onto the pavement, decides to go home on foot and reflect. There's nothing in his own life that contains this inventiveness, this style of being free. The music speaks to unexpressed longing or frustration, a sense that he's denied himself an open road, the life of the heart celebrated in the songs. There has to be more to life than merely saving lives. The discipline and responsibility of a medical career, compounded by starting a family in his mid-twenties - and over much of it, a veil of fatigue; he's still young enough to yearn for the unpredictable and unrestrained, and old enough to know the chances are narrowing. Is he about to become that man, that modern fool of a certain age, who finds himself pausing by shop windows to stare in at the saxophones or the motorbikes, or driven to find himself a mistress of his daughter's age? He's already bought himself an expensive car. Theo's playing carries this burden of regret into his father's heart. It is, after all, the blues.

28 By way of greeting, Theo lets his chair tip forward onto four legs and raises a hand. It's not his style to show surprise.

'Early start?'

'I've just seen a plane on fire, heading into Heathrow.'

'You're kidding.'

Henry is going towards the hi-fi, intending to retune it, but Theo picks up the remote from the kitchen table and turns on the small TV they keep near the stove for moments like this, breaking stories. They wait for the grandiose preamble to the four o' clock news to finish - pulsing synthetic music, spiralling, radiating computer graphics, combined in a son et lumiere of Wagnerian scale to suggest urgency, technology, global coverage. Then the usual square-jawed anchor of about Perowne's age begins to list the main stories of the hour. Straight away it's obvious that the burning plane has yet to enter the planetary matrix. It remains an unreliable subjective event. Still, they listen to some of the list.

'Hans Blix - a case for war?' the anchor intones over the sound of tom-toms, and pictures of the French Foreign Minister, M. de Villepin, being applauded in the UN debating chamber, 'Yes, say US and Britain. No say the majority.' Then, preparations for anti-war demonstrations later today in London and countless cities around the world; a tennis championship in Florida disrupted by woman with a bread knife . . .

He turns the set off and says, 'How about some coffee?' and while Theo gets up to oblige, Henry gives him the story, his main story of the hour. It shouldn't surprise him how little there is to tell - the plane and its point of light traversing his field of view, left to right, behind the trees, behind the Post Office Tower, then receding to the west. But he feels he's been through so much more.

'But uh, so what were you doing at the window?'

The told you. I couldn't sleep.'

29 'Some coincidence.'

'Exactly that.'

Their eyes meet - a moment of potential challenge - then Theo looks away and shrugs. His sister, on the other hand, likes adversarial argument - Daisy and Henry share an inspired love - a pathetic addiction, Rosalind and Theo would say - for a furious set-to. In the ripe teenage mulch of his bedroom, among the guitar magazines, discarded shirts and socks and smoothie bottles, are barely touched books on UFOs, a term these days interchangeable with s.p.a.cecraft, alien-owned and driven. As Henry understands it, Theo's world-view accommodates a hunch that somehow everything is connected, interestingly connected, and that certain authorities, notably the US government, with privileged access to extra-terrestrial intelligence, is excluding the rest of the world from such wondrous knowledge as contemporary science, dull and strait-laced, cannot begin to comprehend. This knowledge is divulged in other paperbacks, also barely touched by Theo. His curiosity, mild as it is, has been hijacked by peddlers of fakery. But does it matter, when he can play the guitar like an angel ringing a bell, when he's at least keeping faith with forms of wondrous knowledge, when there's so much time ahead to change his mind, if indeed he has made it up?

He's a gentle boy - those big lashes, those dark velvety eyes with their faint oriental pitch; he isn't the sort to enter easily into disputes. Their eyes meet, and he looks away with his own thoughts intact. The universe might be showing his father a connection, a sign which he chooses not to read. What can anyone do about that?

a.s.suming a daydreaming episode like one of his own, Henry says, to bring him down to ground, 'So it crashes minutes after I saw it disappear. How long do you think it would take to feed through the news channels?'

Theo, who's at the counter filtering the coffee, looks back over his shoulder and fingers his lower lip, a full dark red 30 lip, presumably not much kissed of late. He dismissed his last girlfriend in that way he has with girls, of saying nothing much and letting them fade, without drama. Saying little, minimalism in the matter of salutations, introductions, farewells, even thanks, is contemporary etiquette. On the phone, however, the young unb.u.t.ton. Theo often hunkers down for three hours at a stretch.

He speaks soothingly, as to a fussing child, with the authority of a citizen, an official even, of the electronic age. 'It'll be on the next news, Dad. Half four.'

Fair enough. Naked under his dressing gown - itself a uniform of the old and sick - with thinning hair tousled from lack of sleep, his voice, the consultant's even baritone, now lightened by turmoil - Henry's a candidate for soothing. Here's how it starts, the long process by which you become your children's child. Until one day you might hear them say, Dad, if you start crying again we're taking you home.

Theo sits down and slides the coffee cup across the table, within his father's reach. He has made none for himself. Instead, he snaps the lid off another half-litre bottle of mineral water. The purity of the young. Or he is warding off a hangover? The point has long been pa.s.sed when Henry feels he can ask, or express a view.

Theo says, 'You reckon it's terrorists?'

'It's a possibility.'

The September attacks were Theo's induction into international affairs, the moment he accepted that events beyond friends, home and the music scene had bearing on his existence. At sixteen, which was what he was at the time, this seemed rather late. Perowne, born the year before the Suez Crisis, too young for the Cuban missiles, or the construction of the Berlin Wall, or Kennedy's a.s.sa.s.sination, remembers being tearful over Aberfan in 'sixty-six - one hundred and sixteen schoolchildren just like himself, fresh from prayers in school a.s.sembly, the day before half-term, buried under a river of mud. This was when he first suspected that the kindly child-loving G.o.d extolled by his headmistress might riot exist. As it turned out, most major world events suggested the same. But for Theo's sincerely G.o.dless generation, the question hasn't come up. No one in his bright, plate-gla.s.s, forward-looking school ever asked him to pray, or sing an impenetrable cheery hymn. There's no ent.i.ty for i him to doubt. His initiation, in front of the TV, before the *

dissolving towers, was intense but he adapted quickly. These days he scans the papers for fresh developments the way he might a listings magazine. As long as there's nothing new, his mind is free. International terror, security cordons, preparations for war - these represent the steady state, the weather. Emerging into adult consciousness, this is the world he finds.

It can't trouble him the way it does his father, who reads the same papers with morbid fixation. Despite the troops mustering in the Gulf, or the tanks out at Heathrow on Thursday, the storming of the Finsbury Park mosque, the reports of terror cells around the country, and Bin Laden's promise on tape of 'martyrdom attacks' on London, Perowne held for a while to the idea that it was all an aberration, that the world would surely calm down and soon be otherwise, that solutions were possible, that reason, being a powerful tool, was irresistible, the only way out; or that like any other crisis, this one would fade soon, and make way for the next, going the way of the Falklands and Bosnia, Biafra and Chern.o.byl. But lately, this is looking optimistic. Against his own inclination, he's adapting, the way patients eventually do to their sudden loss of sight or use of their limbs. No going back. The nineties are looking like an innocent decade, and who would have thought that at the time? Now we breathe a different air. He bought Fred Halliday's book and read in the opening pages what looked like a conclusion and a curse: the New York attacks precipitated a global crisis that would, if we were lucky, take a hundred 32 years to resolve. // we were lucky. Henry's lifetime, and all of Theo's and Daisy's. And their children's lifetime too. A Hundred Years' War.

Inexpertly, Theo has made the coffee at triple strength. But fatherly to the last, Henry drinks it down. Now he is surely committed to the day.

Theo says, 'You didn't see what airline it was?'

'No. Too far away, too dark.'

'Just that Chas is due in from New York this morning.'

He is New Blue Rider's sax player, a gleaming giant of a lad from St Kitts, in New York for a week's master cla.s.s, nominally supervised by Branford Marsalis. These kids have the instincts, the sense of ent.i.tlement proper to an elite. Ry Cooder heard Theo play slide guitar in Oakland. Taped to a mirror in Theo's bedroom is a beer coaster with a friendly salute from the maestro. If you put your face up close you can make out in loopy blue biro, under a beer stain, a signature and, Keep it going Kid!

The wouldn't worry. The red-eyes don't start coming in until half five.'

'Yeah, I suppose.' He swigs on the water bottle. 'You think it's jihadists . . . ?'

Perowne is feeling dizzy, pleasantly so. Everything he looks at, including his son's face, is receding from him without growing smaller. He hasn't heard Theo use this word before. Is it the right word? It sounds harmless, even quaint, rendered in his light tenor. This deepening of the boyish treble is an advance Henry still can't entirely take for granted, even though it's five years old. On Theo's lips - he takes the trouble to do something fancy with the '}' - the Arabic word sounds as innocuous as some stringed Moroccan instrument the band might take up and electrify. In the ideal Islamic state, under strict Shari'a law, there'll be room for surgeons. Blues guitarists will be found other employment. But perhaps no one is demanding such a state. Nothing is demanded. Only hatred is registered, the purity of nihilism. As a 33 Londoner, you could grow nostalgic for the IRA. Even as your legs left your body, you might care to remember the cause was a united Ireland. Now that's coming anyway, according to the Reverend Ian Paisley, through the power of the perambulator. Another crisis fading into the sc.r.a.pbooks, after a mere thirty years. But that's not quite right. Radical Islamists aren't really nihilists - they want t