Free Saturday by Ian McEwan Page A

message, he also summoned up a Creator in later editions, but his heart was never really in it. Those five hundred pages deserved only one conclusion: endless and beautiful forms of life, such as you see in a common hedgerow, including exalted beings like ourselves, arose from physical laws, from war of nature, famine and death. This is the grandeur. And a bracing kind of consolation in the brief privilege of consciousness.
    Once, on a walk by a river – Eskdale in low reddish sunlight, with a dusting of snow – his daughter quoted to him an opening verse by her favourite poet. Apparently, not many young women loved Philip Larkin the way she did. ‘If I were called in/To construct a religion/I should make use of water.’ She said she liked that laconic ‘called in’ – as if he would be, as if anyone ever is. They stopped to drink coffee from a flask, and Perowne, tracing a line of lichen with a finger, said that if he ever got the call, he’d make use of evolution. What better creation myth? An unimaginable sweep of time, numberless generations spawning by infinitesimal steps complex living beauty out of inert matter, driven on by the blind furies of random mutation, natural selection and environmental change, with the tragedy of forms continually dying, and lately the wonder of minds emerging and with them morality, love, art, cities – and the unprecedented bonus of this story happening to be demonstrably true.
    At the end of this 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 aroundthis 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