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Perowne’s view, when things are difficult, tension is best maintained. His taste then is for terse murmurs or silence. If a registrar fumbles with the positioning of a retractor, or the scrub nurse places a pituitary forceps inhis hand at an awkward angle, Perowne might on a bad day utter a single staccato ‘fuck’, more troubling for its rarity and lack of emphasis, and the silence in the room will tighten. Otherwise, he likes music in the theatre when he’s working, mostly piano works by Bach – the ‘Goldberg’ Variations, the Well-Tempered Klavier , the Partitas. He favours Angela Hewitt, Martha Argerich, sometimes Gustav Leonhardt. In a really good mood he’ll go for the looser interpretations of Glenn Gould. In committee he likes precision, all items addressed and disposed of within the set time, and to this end he’s an effective chairman. Exploratory musings and anecdotes by senior colleagues, tolerated by most as an occupational hazard, make him impatient; fantasising should be a solitary pursuit. Decisions are all.
    So despite the apologetic posture, the mild manner and an inclination to occasional daydreaming, it’s unlike Perowne to dither as he does now – he’s standing at the foot of the bed – unable to decide whether to wake Rosalind. It makes no sense at all. There’s nothing to see. It’s an entirely selfish impulse. Her alarm is due to go off at six thirty, and once he’s told her the story, she’ll have no hope of going back to sleep. She’ll hear it all anyway. She has a difficult day ahead. Now that the shutters are closed and he’s in darkness again, he understands the extent of his turmoil. His thoughts have a reeling, tenuous quality – he can’t hold an idea long enough to force sense out of it. He feels culpable somehow, but helpless too. These are contradictory terms, but not quite, and it’s the degree of their overlap, their manner of expressing the same thing from different angles, which he needs to comprehend. Culpable in his helplessness. Helplessly culpable. He loses his way, and thinks again of the phone. By daylight, will it seem negligent not to have called the emergency services? Will it be obvious that there was nothing to be done, that there wasn’t time? His crime was to stand in the safety of his bedroom, wrapped in a woollen dressing gown, without moving or making a sound, half dreaming as he watchedpeople die. Yes, he should have phoned, if only to talk, to measure his voice and feelings against a stranger’s.
    And that is why he wants to wake her, not simply to give her the news, but because he’s somewhat deranged, he keeps floating away from the line of his thoughts. He wants to tether himself to the precise details of what he’s seen, arrange them before her worldly, legal mind and steady gaze. He’d like the touch of her hands – they are small and smooth, always cooler than his own. It’s five days since they made love, Monday morning, before the six o’clock news, during a rainstorm, with only the dimmed light from the bathroom, twenty minutes snatched – so they often joke – from the jaws of work. Well, in ambitious middle life it sometimes seems there is only work. He can be at the hospital until ten, then it can pull him from his bed at 3 a.m., and he can be back there again at eight. Rosalind’s work proceeds by a series of slow crescendos and abrupt terminations as she tries to steer her newspaper away from the courts. For certain days, even weeks on end, work can shape every hour; it’s the tide, the lunar cycle they set their lives by, and without it, it can seem, there’s nothing, Henry and Rosalind Perowne are nothing.
    Henry can’t resist the urgency of his cases, or deny the egotistical joy in his own skills, or the pleasure he still takes in the relief of the relatives when he comes down from the operating room like a