Free Saturday by Ian McEwan

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,
    48 Saturday
    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.'
    'I went downstairs at four and sat around with Theo.'
    'Is he all right?'
    '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?'
    '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 venerable
    49 Ian McEwan
    institution 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. Perowne, no judge of such things, and pleased for her, of course, has been pained by the love lyrics, by her knowing so much, or dreaming so vividly about the bodies of men he's never met. Who is this creep whose tumescence resembles an 'excited watering can' approaching a 'peculiar rose'? Or the other one who sings in the shower 'like Caruso' as he shampoos 'both beards'? He has to check Lhis indignation - hardly a literary response. He's been trying to shrug oft the fatherly possessiveness and see the poems in their own terms. He already likes the less charged, but still sinister line in another poem that notes 'how each/ rose grew on a shark-infested stem'. The pale young girl with the roses hasn't been home for a long while. Her arrival is an oasis at the far end of the day.
    'I love you.'
    This isn't merely an affectionate token, for Rosalind reaches down and takes firm hold of him, and without letting go, turns and reaches behind her to disable the alarm clock, an awkward stretch that sends muscle tremors through the mattress.
    'I'm glad you do.'
    They kiss and she says, 'I've been half awake for a while, feeling you getting harder against my back.'
    'And how was that?'
    She whispers, 'It made me want you. But I don't have much time. I daren't be late.'
    Such effortless seduction! His