Free Saturday by Ian McEwan Page B

jungle-green handle – drawing this industrial gem over familiar flesh sharpens his thoughts. He should look outwhat 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 The 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 becoming, in this one respect at least, like Darwin in later years who found Shakespeare dull to the point of nausea. Perowne is counting on Daisy to refine his sensibilities.
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    Fully awake at last, he returns to the bedroom, suddenly impatient to be dressed and free of the various entanglements of the room, of sleep and insomnia and overheated thinking, and even of sex. The rumpled bed with its ruined, pornographic look embodies all these elements. It’s clarifying to be without desire. Still naked, he makes a quick pass at smoothing out the covers, picks up some pillows from thefloor and tosses them towards the headboard, and goes to the dressing room, to the corner where he stores his sports gear. These are the small pleasures at the start of a Saturday morning – the promise of coffee, and this faded squash kit. Daisy, a neat dresser, fondly calls it his scarecrow outfit. The blue shorts are bleached by patches of sweat that won’t wash out. Over a grey T-shirt he puts on an old cashmere jumper with moth-holes across the chest. Over the shorts, a tracksuit bottom, fastened with chandler’s cord at the waist. The white socks of prickly stretch towelling with yellow and pink bands at the top have something of the nursery about them. Unboxing them releases a homely aroma of the laundry. The squash shoes have a sharp smell, blending the synthetic with the animal, that reminds him of the court, the clean white walls and red lines, the unarguable rules of gladiatorial combat, and the score.
    It’s pointless pretending not to care about the score. He lost last week’s game against Jay Strauss, but as he crosses the room with cushioned, springy stride Henry feels he’ll win today. He’s reminded of how he glided across this same stretch of floor in the night, and as he opens the same shutters the half-remembered foolishness almost comes back to him. But it’s instantly dispersed by the flood of low winter sunlight, and by the sudden interest of what’s happening in the square.
    At first sight they look like two girls in their late teens, slight and with pale delicate faces, and underdressed for February. They could be sisters, standing by the railings of the central gardens, oblivious to passers-by, lost to a family drama of their own. Then Perowne decides that the figure facing him