Read Online Saturday by Ian McEwan - Free Book Online Page B

the cold and went back down the many stairways into the clammy depths of the ship and made love again in their narrow space, and afterwards lay still, listening to the ship’s PA announce that foot passengers were to disembark immediately. Again, she was tearful, and told him that lately she could no longer quite hear the special quality of her mother’s voice. It was to be a long goodbye. Many fine moments like this were to have their shadow. Even then, as they lay entwined, listening to the thumps and muffled calls of passengers filing by in the corridors, he understood the seriousness of what was beginning. Coming between Rosalind and her ghost he must assume responsibilities. They had entered into an unspoken contract. Starkly put, to make love to Rosalind was to marry her. In his place a reasonable man might have panicked with dignity, but the simplicity of the arrangement gave Henry Perowne nothing but delight.
    Â 
    Here she is, almost a quarter of a century later, beginning to stir in his arms, in sleep somehow aware that her alarm is about to sound. Sunrise – generally a rural event, in cities a mere abstraction – is still an hour and a half away. The city’s appetite for Saturday work is robust. At six o’clock, the Euston Road is in full throat. Now occasional motorbikes soar above the ensemble, whining like busy wood saws. Also about this time come the first chorus of police sirens, rising and falling in Doppler shifts: it’s no longer too early for bad deeds. Finally she rolls over to face him. This side of the human form exhales a communicative warmth. As they kiss he imagines the green eyes seeking out his own. This commonplace cycle of falling asleep and waking, in darkness, under private cover,with another creature, a pale soft tender mammal, putting faces together in a ritual of affection, briefly settled in the eternal necessities of warmth, comfort, safety, crossing limbs to draw nearer – a simple daily consolation, almost too obvious, easy to forget by daylight. Has a poet ever written it up? Not the single occasion, but its repetition through the years. He’ll ask his daughter.
    Rosalind says, ‘I had the feeling you were up all night. In and out of bed.’
    â€˜I went downstairs at four and sat around with Theo.’
    â€˜Is he all right?’
    â€˜Hmm.’
    This is not the time to tell her about the plane, especially now that its significance has faded. As for his episode of euphoria, he doesn’t possess at this moment the inventiveness to portray it. Later. He’ll do it later. She’s waking just as he’s sinking. And still his erection proceeds, as though by a series of inhalations, endlessly tightening. No breathing out. It may be exhaustion that’s sensitising him. Or five days’ neglect. All the same, there’s something familiarly taut in the way she shrugs herself closer, toasting him with an excess of body heat. He himself is in no shape to take initiatives, preferring to count on his luck, on her needs. If it doesn’t happen, so be it. Nothing will stop him from falling asleep.
    She kisses his nose. ‘I’ll try and pick up my dad straight from work. Daisy’s getting in from Paris at seven. Will you be here?’
    â€˜Mm.’
    Sensuous, intellectual Daisy, small-boned, pale and correct. What other postgraduate aspiring poet wears short-skirted business suits and fresh white blouses, and rarely drinks and does her best work before 9 a.m.? His little girl, slipping away from him into efficient Parisian womanhood, is expecting her first volume of poems to be published in May. And not by some hand-cranked press, but a venerableinstitution in Queen Square, right across from the hospital where he clipped his first aneurysm. Even her cantankerous grandfather, grandly intolerant of contemporary writing, sent from his chateau a barely legible letter that on deciphering turned out to be rapturous.