Saturday by Ian McEwan

is about to set the burglar alarm when he remembers Theo inside. As he steps outside and turns from closing the door, he hears the squeal of seagulls come inland for the city’s good pickings. The sun is low and only one half of the square – his half – is in full sunlight. He walks away from the square along blinding moist pavement, surprised by the freshness of the day. The air tastes almost clean. He has an impression of striding along a natural surface, along some coastal wilderness, on a smooth slab of basalt causeway he vaguely recalls from a childhood holiday. It must be the cry of the gulls bringing it back. He can remember the taste of spray off a turbulent blue-green sea, and as he reaches Warren Street he reminds himself that he mustn’t forget the fishmonger’s. Lifted by the coffee, and by movement at last, as well as the prospect of the game and the comfortable fit of the sheathed racket in his hand, he increases his pace.
    The streets round here are usually empty at weekends, but up ahead, along the Euston Road, a big crowd is making its way east towards Gower Street, and in the road itself, crawling in the eastbound lanes, are the same nose-to-tail coaches he saw on the news. The passengers are pressed against the glass, longing to be out there with the rest. They’ve hung their banners from the windows, along with football scarves and the names of towns from the heart of England – Stratford, Gloucester, Evesham. From the impatient pavement crowds, some dry runs with the noisemakers – a trombone, a squeeze-ball car horn, a lambeg drum. There are ragged practice chants which at first he can’t make out. Tumtytumty tum. Don’t attack Iraq. Placards not yet on duty are held at a slope, at rakish angles over shoulders. Not in My Name goes past a dozen times. Its cloying self-regard suggests a bright new world of protest, with the fussy consumers of shampoos and soft drinks demanding to feel good, or nice. Henry prefers the languid, Down With this Sort of Thing. A placard of one of the organising groups goes by – the British Association of Muslims. Henry remembers that outfit well. It explained recently in its newspaper that apostasy from Islam was an offence punishable by death. Behind comes a banner proclaiming the Swaffham Women’s Choir, and then, Jews Against the War.
    On Warren Street he turns right. Now his view is east, towards the Tottenham Court Road. Here’s an even bigger crowd, swelled by hundreds disgorging from the tube station. Backlit by the low sun, silhouetted figures break away and merge into a darker mass, but it’s still possible to see a makeshift bookstall and a hot-dog stand, cheekily set up right outside McDonald’s on the corner. It’s a surprise, the number of children there are, and babies in pushchairs. Despite his scepticism, Perowne in white-soled trainers, gripping his racket tighter, feels the seduction and excitement peculiar to such events; a crowd possessing the streets, tens of thousands of strangers converging with a single purpose conveying an intimation of revolutionary joy.
    He might have been with them, in spirit at least, for nothing now will keep him from his game, if Professor Taleb hadn’t needed an aneurysm clipped on his middle cerebral artery. In the months after those conversations, Perowne drifted into some compulsive reading up on the regime. He read about the inspirational example of Stalin, and the network of family and tribal loyalties that sustained Saddam, and the palaces handed out as rewards. Henry became acquainted with the sickly details of genocides in the north and south of the country, the ethnic cleansing, the vast system of informers, the bizarre tortures, and Saddam’s taste for getting personally involved, and the strange punishments passed into law – the brandings and amputations. Naturally, Henry followed closely the accounts of measures taken against surgeons who