170.

Then Chas, with all his fresh tricks from New York, turns aside, lifts his sax and comes in on a wild and ragged high note, like a voice cracking with joy that holds and holds, then tapers and drops away in a downward spiral, echoing Theo's intro, and delivers the band back into the twelve-bar round. Chas too goes three times round. The sax is edgy, with choppy rhythms and notes held against the chord changes, then released in savage runs. Theo and the ba.s.s guitarist are playing in octaves a tricksy repeated figure that shifts in unex J ways and never quite returns to its starting point. This pcctec i^ a blues at walking speed, but a driving rhythm is building up. On Chas's third turnaround, the two boys come back to the mikes, back to the lilting refrain whose harmonies are so close they're discords. Is Theo paying tribute to his teacher, to Jack Bruce of Cream?

So let me take you there City square, city square.

Then it's the keyboard's break, and the others join in the difficult, circular riff.

No longer tired, Henry comes away from the wall where he's been leaning, and walks into the middle of the dark auditorium, towards the great engine of sound. He lets it engulf him. There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything you have to others, but lose nothing of yourself. Out in the real world there exist detailed plans, visionary projects for peaceable realms, all conflicts resolved, happiness for everyone, for ever - mirages for which people are 171.

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Ian McEzvan prepared to die and kill. Christ's kingdom on earth, the *

workers' paradise, the ideal Islamic state. But only in music, 4 and only on rare occasions, does the curtain actually lift on this dream of community, and it's tantalisingly conjured, before fading away with the last notes. ; 7.7/")-/ / !/ Naturally, no one can ever agree when it's happening. ' L J l/L-1 Henry last heard it for himself at the Wigmore Hall, a Utopian community briefly realised in the Schubert Octet, when the 7"

wind players with little leaning, shrugging movements of their bodies, wafted their notes across the stage at the string section who sent them back sweetened. He also heard it long ago at Daisy and Theo's school, when a discordantly wailing school orchestra, with a staff and pupil choir, attempted Purcell, and made with cracked notes an innocent and blissful concord of adults and children. And here it is now, a coherent world, everything fitting at last. He stands swaying in the dark, staring up at the stage, his right hand in his pocket gripping his keys. Theo and Chas drift back to centre stage to sing their unearthly chorus. Or you can be happy if you dare. He knows what his mother meant. He can go for miles, he feels lifted up, right high across the counter. He doesn't want the song to end.

172 ^.

m I.

He doesn't bother to park in the mews. Instead, he pulls up right outside his front door - it's legal at this time of evening to be on a yellow line and he's impatient to be indoors. But he takes a few seconds to examine the damage to the pa.s.senger door - barely a mark. As he looks up from the car, he notices that the house is in darkness. Naturally, Theo is still at rehearsal, Rosalind will be picking her way through the last fine points of her court application. A few widely separated flakes of snow picked out by street light show up vividly against the windows' glossy black. His father-in-law and daughter are due and he's pressed for time. As he opens the door he's trying to remember the exact phrasing of a remark Theo made earlier in the day that didn't trouble him at the time. It nags at him briefly now, but the half-hearted effort of recall itself fades as he steps into the warmth of the hall and turns on the lights; a mere light bulb can explode a thought. He goes straight down to the wine racks and takes out four bottles. His kind of fish stew needs a robust country wine - red, not white. Grammaticus introduced him to a Tautavel, Cotes de Roussillon Villages and Henry has made it his house wine - delicious, and less than fifty pounds a case. Uncorking wines hours before they're drunk is a form of magical 175.

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qg$ Ian McEwan *

t 5 thinking; the surface area exposed to the air is minute and *

can't possibly make a detectable difference. However, he r does want the bottles warmer, and he carries them into the kitchen and puts them by the stove.

Three bottles of champagne are already in the fridge. He takes a step towards the CD player, then changes his mind for he's feeling the pull, like gravity, of the approaching TV news. It's a condition of the times, this compulsion to hear ~ how it stands with the world, and be joined to the gener ality, to a community of anxiety. The habit's grown stronger these past two years; a different scale of news value has been set by monstrous and spectacular scenes. The possibility of their recurrence is one thread that binds the days. The government's counsel - that an attack in a European or American t city is an inevitability - isn't only a disclaimer of responsi bility, it's a heady promise. Everyone fears it, but there's also a darker longing in the collective mind, a sickening for self punishment and a blasphemous curiosity. Just as the hospitals have their crisis plans, so the television networks stand ready to deliver, and their audiences wait. Bigger, grosser next time. Please don't let it happen. But let me see it all the same, as it's happening and from every angle, and let me be among the first to know. Also, Henry needs to hear about the pilots in custody.

With the idea of the news, inseparable from it, at least at weekends, is the l.u.s.trous prospect of a gla.s.s of red wine. He empties the last of a Cotes du Rhone into a gla.s.s, puts the TV on mute and sets about stripping and chopping three onions. Impatient of the papery outer layers, he makes a deep incision, forcing his thumb in four layers deep and ripping them away, wasting a third of the flesh. He chops the remainder rapidly and tips it into a ca.s.serole with a lot of olive oil. What he likes about cooking is its relative imprecision and lack of discipline - a release from the demands of the theatre. In the kitchen, the consequences of failure are mild: disappointment, a wisp of disgrace, rarely voiced. No 176 one actually dies. He strips and chops eight fat cloves of garlic and adds them to the onions. From recipes he draws only the broadest principles. The cookery writers he admires speak of 'handfuls' and 'a sprinkling', of 'chucking in' this or that. They list alternative ingredients and encourage experimentation. Henry accepts that he'll never make a decent cook, that he belongs to what Rosalind calls the hearty school. Into his palm he empties several dried red chillies from a pot and crushes them between his hands and lets the flakes fall with their seeds into the onions and garlic. The TV news comes up but he doesn't touch the mute. It's the same helicopter shot from before it got dark, the same crowds still filing into the park, the same general celebration. Onto the softened onions and garlic - pinches of saffron, some bay leaves, orange-peel gratings, oregano, five anchovy fillets, two tins of peeled tomatoes. On the big Hyde Park stage, sound-bite extracts of speeches by a venerable politician of the left, a pop star, a playwright, a trade unionist. Into a stockpot he eases the skeletons of three skates. Their heads are intact, their lips girlishly full. Their eyes go cloudy on contact with the boiling water. A senior police officer is answering questions about the march. By his tight smile and the tilt of his head he appears satisfied with the day. From the green string bag of mussels Henry takes a dozen or so and drops them in with the skate. If they're alive and in pain, he isn't to know. Now that same earnest reporter, silently mouthing all there is to know about the unprecedented gathering. The juice of the tomatoes is simmering with the onions and the rest, and turning reddish-orange with the saffron.

Perowne, his hearing not yet fully recovered from the rehearsal, his feelings dimmed, even numbed, by his visit to his mother, decides he needs to be listening to something punchy, to Steve Earle, the thinking man's Bruce Springsteen, according to Theo. But the record he wants, El Corazon, is upstairs, so he drinks the wine instead, and keeps glancing 177.

i Ian McEwan *

1 towards the set, waiting for his story. The Prime Minister is *

giving his Glasgow speech. Perowne touches the control in ar time to hear him say that the number of marchers today has been exceeded by the number of deaths caused by Saddam. A clever point, the only case to make, but it should have been made from the start. Too late now. After Blix it looks tactical. Henry turns the sound off. It occurs to him how content he is to be cooking - even self-consciousness doesn't diminish ~~ the feeling. Into the biggest colander he pours the rest of the mussels and scrubs them with a vegetable brush at the sink ; under running water. The pale greenish clams on the other hand look dainty and pure, and he merely rinses them. One of the skates has arched its spine, as if to escape the boiling. As he pushes it back down with a wooden spatula, the ver t tebral column breaks, right below T3. Last summer he oper '?

ated on a teenage girl who broke her back at C5 and T2 falling out of a tree at a pop festival, trying to get a better view of Radiohead. She'd just finished school and wanted to study Russian at Leeds. Now, after eight months' rehab she's doing - fine. But he dismisses the memory. He isn't thinking about work, he wants to cook. From the fridge he takes a quarter full bottle of white wine, a Sancerre, and tips it over the tomato mix.

On a broader, thicker chopping block, Perowne arranges the monkfish tails and cuts them into chunks and tips them into a big white bowl. Then he washes the ice off the tiger prawns and puts them in too. In a second bowl, he puts the clams and mussels. Both bowls go into the fridge, with dinner plates as lids. An establishing shot shows the United Nations building in New York, and next, Colin Powell getting into a black limousine. It's demotion for Henry's story, but he doesn't mind. He's cleaning up the kitchen, wiping his mess from the central island into a large bin, and scrubbing the chopping boards under running water. Then it's time to tip the boiling juice off the skates and mussels into the ca.s.serole. When that's done he has now, he reckons, 178.

about two and a half litres of bright orange stock which he'll cook for another five minutes. Just before dinner, he'll reheat it, and simmer the clams, monkfish, mussels and prawns in it for ten minutes. They'll eat the stew with brown bread, salad and red wine. After New York, there's the Kuwait-Iraq border, and military trucks moving in convoy along a desert road, and our lads kipping down by the tracks of their tanks, then eating bangers next morning from their mess-tins. He takes two bags of mache from the bottom of the fridge and empties them into a salad t.o.s.s.e.r. He runs the cold tap over the leaves. An officer, barely in his twenties, is standing outside his tent pointing with a stick at a map on an easel. Perowne isn't tempted to disable the mute - these items from the front have a cheerful, censored air that lowers his spirits. He spins the salad and tips it into a bowl. Oil, lemon, pepper and salt he'll throw on later. There's cheese and fruit for pudding. Theo and Daisy can set the table.

His preparations are done, just as the burning plane story comes up, fourth item. With a confused sense that he's about to learn something significant about himself, he turns on the sound and stands facing the tiny set, drying his hands on a towel. Placed fourth could mean no developments, or sinister silence from the authorities; but in fact the story has collapsed - you can almost hear in the introduction the presenter's regretful tone. There they are, the pilot, the wizened fellow with slicked-back hair and his tubby copilot standing outside a hotel near Heathrow. They are not, the pilot explains through a translator, Chechens or Algerians, they are not Muslims, they are Christians, though only in name, for they never attend church and own neither a Koran nor a Bible. Above all, they are Russians and proud of the fact. They are certainly not responsible for the American child p.o.r.nography found half-destroyed in the burned-out cargo. They work for a good company, registered in Holland, and their only responsibilities are to their plane. And yes, of 179.

* Ian McEwan ,'?

course, child p.o.r.nography is an abomination, but it's not part of their duties to inspect every package listed on the manifest. They've been released without charge, and when the Civil Aviation Authority tells them it's appropriate, they'll return to Riga. Also dead is the controversy about the plane's route into the airport; the correct procedures were followed. Both men insist they've been treated with courtesy by the Metropolitan Police. The plump co-pilot says he wants a bath and a long drink.

Good news, but as he walks out of the kitchen in the direction of the larder, Henry feels no particular pleasure, not even relief. Have his anxieties been making a fool of him? It's part of the new order, this narrowing of mental freedom, of his right to roam. Not so long ago his thoughts ranged more unpredictably, over a longer list of subjects. He suspects he's becoming a dupe, the willing, febrile consumer of news fodder, opinion, speculation and of all the crumbs the authorities let fall. He's a docile citizen, watching Leviathan grow stronger while he creeps under its shadow for protection. This Russian plane flew right into his insomnia, and he's been only too happy to let the story and every little nervous shift of the daily news process colour his emotional state. It's an illusion, to believe himself active in the story. Does he think he's contributing something, watching news programmes, or lying on his back on the sofa on Sunday afternoons, reading more opinion columns of ungrounded certainties, more long articles about what really lies behind this or that development, or about what is most surely going to happen next, predictions forgotten as soon as they are read, well before events disprove them? For or against the war on terror, or the war in Iraq; for the termination of an odious tyrant and his crime family, for the ultimate weapons inspection, the opening of the torture prisons, locating the ma.s.s graves, the chance of liberty and prosperity, and a warning to other despots; or against the bombing of civilians, the 180.

inevitable refugees and famine, illegal international action, the wrath of Arab nations and the swelling of Al-Qaeda's ranks. Either way, it amounts to a consensus of a kind, an orthodoxy of attention, a mild subjugation in itself. Does he think that his ambivalence - if that's what it really is excuses him from the general conformity? He's deeper in than most. His nerves, like tautened strings, vibrate obediently with each news 'release'. He's lost the habits of scepticism, he's becoming dim with contradictory opinion, he isn't thinking clearly, and just as bad, he senses he isn't thinking independently.

The Russian pilots are shown walking into the hotel, and that's the last he'll ever see of them. He fetches a few bottles of tonic from the larder, checks on the ice-cube maker and the gin - three quarters of a litre is surely enough for one man - and turns off the heat under his stock. Upstairs, on the ground floor, he draws the curtains in the L-shaped living room, and turns on the lamps, and lights the gas in the mock-coal fires. These heavy curtains, closed by pulling on a cord weighted with a fat bra.s.s k.n.o.b, have a way of cleanly eliminating the square and the wintry world beyond it. The tall-ceilinged room in creams and browns is silent, soothing, its only bright colour is in the blues and rubies of the rugs and an abstract slash of orange and yellow against green in a Howard Hodgkin on one of the chimney b.r.e.a.s.t.s. The three people in the world he, Henry Perowne, most loves, and who most love him, are about to come home. So what's wrong with him? Nothing, nothing at all. He's fine, everything is fine. He pauses at the foot of the stairs, wondering what it is he was intending to do next. He goes up to his study on the first floor, and remains standing as he looks at his screen to remind himself of the week ahead. There are four names on Monday's list, five for Tuesday's. The old astronomer, Viola, will be first, at eight thirty. Jay is right, she may not make it. All the names conjure a history he knows well from the past weeks or months. In each case 181.

r he knows exactly what he intends to do, and he feels pleasure in the prospect of the work. How different for the nine individuals, some already on the wards, some at home, others travelling into London tomorrow or Monday, with their dread of the approaching moment, the anaesthetic oblivion, and their reasonable suspicion that when they come round they will never be quite the same.

From downstairs he hears the front-door lock turning, and by the sound of the door opening and closing - a style of entering a place with economy, and of easing the door shut behind her - he knows it's Daisy. What luck, that she should arrive before her grandfather. As he hurries down the stairs towards her, she does a little jig of delight.

'You're in!'

As they embrace, he makes a low, sighing, growling noise, the way he used to greet her when she was five. And it is the child's body he feels as he almost lifts her clear off the floor, the smoothness of muscle under the clothes, the springiness he can feel in her joints, the s.e.xless kisses. Even her breath is like a child's. She doesn't smoke, she rarely drinks, and she's about to become a published poet. His own breath smells richly of red wine. What abstemious children he's fathered.

'So. Let me have a look at you.'

Six months is the longest she's ever been away from her family. The Perownes, though permissive to a high degree, are also possessive parents. Holding her at arm's length, he hopes she doesn't notice the glistening in his eyes or the little struggle in his throat. His moment of pathos rises and falls in a single smooth wave, and is gone. He's still only in rehearsal as an old fool, a mere beginner. Despite his fantasies, this is no child. She's an independent young woman, gazing back at him with head c.o.c.ked - so like her grandmother in that tilted look - lips smiling but unparted, her intelligence like warmth in her face. This is the pain-pleasure of having newly adult children; they're innocent and ruth 182.

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less in forgetting their sweet old dependence. But perhaps she's been reminding him - during their embrace she half rubbed, half patted his back, a familiar maternal gesture of hers. Even when she was five she liked to mother him, and admonish him whenever he worked too late or drank wine or failed to win the London Marathon. She was one of those finger-wagging, imperious little girls. Her daddy belonged to her. Now she rubs and pats other men, at least half a dozen in the past year, if My Saucy Bark and its 'Six Short Songs' are a guide. It's the bracing existence of these fellows that helps him control his single tear.

She wears an unb.u.t.toned scuffed leather trerichcoat of dark green. A Russian fur hat dangles from her right hand. Beneath the coat, grey leather boots at knee height, a dark grey woollen skirt, a thick, loose sweater and a grey and white silk scarf. The stab at Parisian chic doesn't extend to her luggage - her old student backpack is on its side at her feet. He's still holding her by the shoulders, trying to place what's changed in six months. An unfamiliar scent, a little heavier perhaps, a little wiser around the eyes, the delicate face set a little more firmly. Most of her life is a mystery to him now. He sometimes wonders if Rosalind knows things about their daughter that he does not.

Under his scrutiny, the pressure of her smile is growing, until she laughs and says, 'Come on, Doctor. You can be straight with me. I've become an old hag.'

'You're looking gorgeous, and way too grown up for my taste.'

'I'm bound to regress while I'm here.' She points behind her at the sitting room and mouths, 'Is Granddad here?'

'Not yet.'

She wriggles clear of his hold, loops her arms around his shoulders and kisses him on the nose. 'I love you and I'm so happy to be back.'

'I love you too.'

Something else is different. She's no longer merely pretty, 183.

she's beautiful, and perhaps also, so her eyes tell him, a little preoccupied. She's in love and can't bear to be parted. He pushes the thought away. Whatever it is, she's likely to tell Rosalind first.

For a few seconds they enter one of those mute, vacuous moments that follow an enthusiastic reunion - too much to be said, and a gentle resettling needed, a resumption of ordinary business. Daisy is gazing about her as she takes off her coat. The movement releases more of her unfamiliar perfume. A gift from her lover. He'll have to try harder to rid himself of this gloomy fixation. She's bound to love a man other than himself. It would be easier for him if her poems weren't so wanton - it isn't only wild s.e.x they celebrate, but restless novelty, the rooms and beds visited once and left at dawn, the walk home down wet Parisian streets whose efficient cleansing by the city authorities is the occasion for various metaphors. The same fresh start purification was in her Newdigate launderette poem. Perowne knows the old arguments about double standards, but don't some liberal minded women now argue for the power and value of reticence? Is it only fatherly soft-headedness that makes him suspect that a girl who sleeps around too earnestly has an improved chance of ending up with a lower-grade male, an inadequate, a loser? Or is his own peculiarity in this field, his own lack of exploratory vigour, making for another problem of reference?

'My G.o.d, this place is even larger than I remember.' She's peering up through the banisters at the chandelier hanging from the remote second-floor ceiling. Without thinking, he takes her coat, laughs and hands it back.

'What am I doing?' he says. 'You live here. You can hang it up yourself.'

She follows him down to the kitchen, and when he turns to offer her a drink, she hugs him again, then strides away with a little stagey skip into the dining room, and beyond, into the conservatory.

184.

Srtf/m/rti/ 'I love it here/ she calls to him. 'Look at this tropical tree! I love this tree. What have 1 been thinking of, staying away so long?' 'Exactly my question/ The tree has been there nine years. He's never seen her in this mood. She's walking back towards him, arms outstretched as though on a tightrope, pretending to wobble it's the sort of thing a character in an American soap might do when she wants important good news wrung from her. Next thing, she'll be turning pirouettes around him and humming show tunes, 1 feel prettv. He takes two glosses from a cupboard and a bottle of champagne from the fridge and twists the cork off.

'Here/ he says. There's no reason to wait for the others/ 'I love you/ she says again, raising her gla.s.s.

'Welcome home my darling.'

She drinks and he notices, with some relief, that it isn't deeply. Barely a sip - no change there. He's in watchful mode, trying to figure her out. She can't keep still. She wanders with her gla.s.s around the central island.

'Guess where I went on my way from the station/ she says as she comes back towards him.

'Urn. Hyde Park?'

'You knew! Daddy, why weren't you there? It was simply amazing/ 'I don't know. Playing squash, visiting Granny, cooking the dinner, lack of certainty. That sort of thing.'

'But it's completely barbaric, what they're about to do. Everyone knows that/ Tt might be. So might doing nothing. 1 honestly don't know. Tell me how it was in the park.'

The know that if you'd been there you wouldn't have any doubts/ He says, wanting to be helpful, '[ watched them set off this morning. All very good natured.'

She grimaces, as though in pain. She's home at last, they 185.

have their champagne, and she can't bear it that he doesn't see it her way. She puts a hand on his arm. Unlike her father's or brother's, it's a tiny hand with tapering fingers, each with a remnant of a childish dimple at the base. While she speaks he's looking at her fingernails, gratified to see them in good condition. Longish, smooth, clean, glazed, not painted. You can tell a lot from a person's nails. When a life starts to unravel, they're among the first to go. He takes her hand and squeezes it.

She's beseeching him. Her head is as crammed with this stuff as his own. The speech she gives is a collation of everything she heard in the park, of everything they've both heard and read a hundred times, the worst-case guesses that become facts through repet.i.tion, the sweet raptures of pessimism. He hears again the UN's half-million Iraqi dead through famine and bombing, the three million refugees, the death of the UN, the collapse of the world order if America goes it alone, Baghdad entirely destroyed as it's taken street by street from the Republican Guard, Turks invading from the north, Iranians from the east, Israelis making excursions from the west, the whole region in flames, Saddam backed into a corner unleashing his chemical and biological weapons - if he has them, because no one's really proved it convincingly, and nor have they shown the connection to Al-Qaeda - and when the Americans have invaded, they won't be interested in democracy, they won't spend any money on Iraq, they'll take the oil and build their military bases and run the place like a colony.

While she speaks he gazes at her with warmth and some surprise. They're about to have one of their set-pieces - and so soon. She doesn't usually talk politics, it's not one of her subjects. Is this the source of her agitated happiness? The colour rises from her neck, and every extra reason she gives for not going to war gathers weight from the one before and lifts her towards her triumph. The dark outcomes she believes in are making her euphoric, she's slaying a dragon with every 186.

stroke. When she's done she gives a little affectionate push on his forearm, as though to shake him awake. Then she makes a face of mock sorrow. She longs for him to see what's true.

Conscious of taking up a position, girding himself for combat, he says, 'But this is all speculation about the future. Why should I feel any certainty about it? How about a short war, the UN doesn't fall apart, no famine, no refugees or invasions by neighbours, no flattened Baghdad and fewer deaths than Saddam causes his own people in an average year? What if the Americans try to organise a democracy, pump in the billions and leave because the President wants to get himself re-elected next year? I think you'd still be against it, and you haven't told me why.'

She pulls away from him and faces him with a look of anxious surprise. 'Daddy, you're not for the war, are you?'

He shrugs. 'No rational person is for war. But in five years we might not regret it. I'd love to see the end of Saddam. You're right, it could be a disaster. But it could be the end of a disaster and the beginning of something better. It's all about outcomes, and no one knows what they'll be. That's why I can't imagine marching in the streets.'

Her surprise has turned to distaste. He raises the bottle and offers to top up her gla.s.s but she shakes her head and sets her champagne down and moves further away. She isn't drinking with the enemy.

'You hate Saddam, but he's a creation of the Americans. They backed him, and armed him.'

'Yes, and the French, and Russians and British did too. A big mistake. The Iraqis were betrayed, especially in 1991 when they were encouraged to rise against the Ba'athists who cut them down. This could be a chance to put that right.'

'So you're for the war?'

'Like I said, I'm not for any war. But this one could be the lesser evil. In five years we'll know.'

That's so typical.'

187.

He smiles uneasily. 'Of what?'

'Of you.'

This isn't quite the reunion he imagined, and as sometimes happens, their dispute is getting personal. He's not used to it, he's lost his touch. He feels a tightness above his heart. Or is it the bruise on his sternum? He's well into his second gla.s.s of champagne, she's hardly touched her first. Her dancing impulses have vanished. She leans by the doorway, arms folded squarely, the little elfin face tight with anger. She responds to his raised eyebrows.

'You're saying let the war go ahead, and in five years if it works out you're for it, and if doesn't, you're not responsible. You're an educated person living in what we like to call a mature democracy, and our government's taking us to war. If you think that's a good idea, fine, say so, make the argument, but don't hedge your bets. Are we sending the troops in or not? It's happening now. And making guesses about the future is what you do sometimes when you make a moral choice. It's called thinking through the consequences. I'm against this war because I think terrible things are going to happen. You seem to think good will come of it, but you won't stand by what you believe.'

He considers, and says, 'It's true. I honestly think I could be wrong.'

This admission, and his pliant manner, make her angrier. Then why take the risk? Where's the cautionary principle you're always going on about? If you're sending hundreds of thousands of soldiers to the Middle East, you better know what you're doing. And these bullying greedy fools in the White House don't know what they're doing, they've no idea where they're leading us, and I can't believe you're on their side.'

Perowne wonders if they're really talking about something else. Her 'so typical' still bothers him. Perhaps her months in Paris have given her time to discover fresh perspectives on her father, and she doesn't like them. He turns 188.

the thought away. It's good, it's healthy to have one of their old head-to-head arguments, it's family life resumed. And the world matters. He eases himself onto one of the high stools by the centre island, and gestures for her to do the same. She ignores him and remains by the door, arms still crossed, face still closed. It doesn't help that he becomes calmer as she grows more agitated, but that's his habit, professionally ingrained.

'Look Daisy, if it wras down to me, those troops wouldn't be on the Iraq border. This is hardly the best time for the West to be going to war with an Arab nation And no plan in sight for the Palestinians. But the war's going to happen, with or without the UN, whatever any government says or any ma.s.s demonstrations. The hidden weapons, whether they exist or not, they're irrelevant. The invasion's going to happen, and militarily it's bound to succeed. It'll be the end of Saddam and one of the most odious regimes ever known, and I'll be glad.'

'So ordinary Iraqis get it from Saddam, and now they have to take it from American missiles, but it's all fine because you'll be glad.'

He doesn't recognise the rhetorical sourness, the harshness in her throat. He says, 'Hang on,' but she doesn't hear him.

'Do you think we're going to be any safer at the end of all this? We'll be hated right across the Arab world. All those bored young guys will be queuing up to become terrorists 'Too late to worry about that,' he says over her. 'A hundred thousand have already pa.s.sed through the Afghan training camps. At least you must be happy that's come to an end.'

As he says this, he remembers that in fact she was, that she loathed the joyless Taliban, and he wonders why he's interrupting her, arguing with her, rather than eliciting her views and affectionately catching up with her. Why be adversarial? Because he himself is stoked up, there's poison in his 189.

blood, despite his soft tone; and fear and anger, constricting his thoughts, making him long to have a row. Let's have this out! They are fighting over armies they will never see, about which they know almost nothing.

There'll be more fighters,' Daisy says. 'And when the first explosion hits London your pro-war views . . .'

'If you're describing my position as pro-war, then you'd have to accept That yours is effectively pro-Saddam.'

'What f.u.c.king nonsense.'

As she swears he feels a sudden surge in his being, driven narHv by asionKhmi'nt ""h.if fhoir conversation is moving out of control, and also by a reckless enlivening joy, n release from the brooding that has afflicted him all day. The colour has gone from Daisy's face and the few freckles she has along her cheekbone are suddenly vivid in her share of the bas.e.m.e.nt kitchen's pools of downlighting. Her face, which typically in conversations is at a quizzical angle, confronts him with a level glare of outrage.

Despite his leap of feeling, he looks calm as he takes a drink of champagne and says, 'What I meant is this. The price of removing Saddam is war, the price of no war is leaving him in place.'

It was meant as a conciliatory point, but Daisy doesn't hear it that way. 'It's crude and ugly,' she says, 'when the war lobby calls us pro-Saddam.'

'Well, you're prepared to do the one thing he'd most like you to do, which is to leave him in power. But you'll only postpone the confrontation. He or his horrible sons are going to have to be dealt with one day. Even Clinton knew that.'

'You're saying we're invading Iraq because we haven't got a choice. I'm amazed at the c.r.a.p you talk, Dad. You know very well these extremists, the Neo-cons, have taken over America. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfovitz. Iraq was always their pet project. Nine eleven was their big chance to talk Bush round. Look at his foreign policy up until then. He was a 190.