Free Saturday by Ian McEwan Page B

not entirely facetious recitation - they were standing on a stone bridge at the junction of two streams - Daisy laughed and put down her cup to applaud. 'Now that's genuine old-time religion, when you say it happens to be demonstrably true.'
    He's missed her these past months and soon she'll be here. Amazingly for a Saturday, Theo has promised to stick around
    56 Saturday
    this evening, at least until eleven. Perowne's plan is to cook a fish stew. A visit to the fishmonger's is one of the simpler tasks ahead: monkfish, clams, mussels, unpeeled prawns. It's this practical daylight list, these salty items, that make him leave the bed at last and walk into the bathroom. There's a view that it's shameful for a man to sit to urinate because that's what women do. Relax! He sits, feeling the last scraps of sleep dissolve as his stream plays against the bowl. He's trying to locate a quite different source of shame, or guilt, or of something far milder, like the memory of some embarrassment or foolishness. It passed through his thoughts only minutes ago, and now what remains is the feeling without its rationale. A sense of having behaved or spoken laughably. Of having been a fool. Without the memory of it, he can't talk himself out of it. But who cares? These diaphanous films of sleep are still slowing him down - he imagines them resembling the arachnoid, that gossamer covering of the brain through which he routinely cuts. The grandeur. He must have hallucinated the phrase out of the hairdryer's drone, and confused it with the radio news. The luxury of being half asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety. But when he trod the air to the window last night he was fully awake. He's even more certain of that now.
    He rises and flushes his waste. At least one molecule of it will fall on him one day as rain, according to a ridiculous article in a magazine lying around in the operating suite coffee room. The numbers say so, but statistical probabilities aren't the same as truths. We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when. Humming this wartime tune, he crosses the wide green-and-white marble floor to his basin to shave. He feels incomplete without this morning rite, even on a day off. He ought to learn from Theo how to let go. But Henry likes the wooden bowl, the badger brush, the extravagantly disposable triple-bladed razor, with cleverly arched and ridged jungle-green handle - drawing this industrial gem over familiar flesh sharpens his thoughts. He should look out
    57 Ian McEwnn
    what William James wrote on forgetting a word or name; a tantalising, empty shape remains, almost but not quite defining the idea it once contained. Even as you struggle against the numbness of poor recall, you know precisely what the forgotten thing is not. James had the knack of fixing on the surprising commonplace - and in Perowne's humble view, wrote a better-honed prose than the fussy brother who would rather run round a thing a dozen different ways than call it by its name. Daisy, the arbiter of his literary education, would never agree. She wrote a long undergraduate essay on Henry James's late novels and can quote a passage from 'Ike Golden Bowl. She also knows dozens of poems by heart which she learned in her early teens, a means of earning pocket money from her grandfather. Her training was so different from her father's. No wonder they like their disputes. What Daisy knows! At her prompting, he tried the one about the little girl suffering from her parents' vile divorce. A promising subject, but poor Maisie soon vanished behind a cloud of words, and at page forty-eight Perowne, who can be on his feet seven hours for a difficult procedure, who has his name down for the London Marathon, fell away, exhausted. Even the tale of his daughter's namesake baffled him. What's an adult to conclude or feel about Daisy Miller's predictable decline? That the world can be unkind? It's not enough. He stoops to the tap to rinse his face. Perhaps he's