Free Saturday by Ian McEwan

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 this indignation – hardly a literary response. He’s been trying to shrug off 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.
    â€˜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.
    â€˜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.’
    â€˜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 wish come true, not a finger lifted, the envy of gods and despots, Henry is raised from his stupor to take her in his arms and kiss her deeply. Yes, she’s ready. And so his night ends, and this is where he begins his day, at 6 a.m., wondering whether all the essences of marital compromise have been flung carelessly into onemoment: in darkness, in the missionary position, in a hurry, without preamble. But these are the externals. Now he is freed from thought, from memory, from the passing seconds and from the state of the world. Sex is a different medium, refracting time and sense, a biological hyperspace as remote from conscious existence as dreams, or as water is from air. As his mother used to say, another element; the day is changed, Henry, when you take a swim. And that day is bound to be marked out from all the rest.

 
    Two
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    T here is grandeur in this view of life. He wakes, or he thinks he does, to the sound of her hairdryer and a murmuring voice repeating a phrase, and later, after he’s sunk again, he hears the solid clunk of her wardrobe door opening, the vast built-in wardrobe, one of a pair, with automatic lights and intricate interior of lacquered veneer and deep, scented recesses; later still, as she crosses and re-crosses the bedroom in her bare feet, the silky whisper of her petticoat, surely the black one with the raised tulip pattern he bought in Milan; then the business-like tap of her boot heels on the bathroom’s marble floor as she goes about her final preparations in front of the mirror, applying perfume, brushing out her hair; and all the while, the plastic radio in the form of a leaping blue dolphin, attached by suckers to the mosaic wall in the shower, plays that same phrase, until he begins to sense a religious content as its significance swells – there is grandeur in this view of life , it says, over and again.
    There is grandeur in this view of life. When he wakes properly two hours later she’s gone and the room is silent. There’s a narrow column of light where a shutter stands ajar. The day looks fiercely white. He pushes the covers aside and lies on his back in her part of the bed, naked in the warmth of the central heating, waiting to place the phrase. Darwin ofcourse, from last night’s read in the bath, in the final paragraph of his great work Perowne has never actually read. Kindly, driven, infirm Charles in all his humility, bringing on the earthworms and planetary cycles to assist him with a farewell bow. To soften the