The Child in Time (22 page)

‘No,’ Stephen said into the cooler air. By the entrance where they had stopped was a group of girls with a long skipping rope which swung to a rhythmic chant in powerful arcs above the heads of two girls who danced through it in quick sideways movements, lifting their feet as late and as little as possible to clear the rope as it cut down beneath them. The two were joined by a third, then a fourth, the chant became more insistent, then the rope snagged and there was a moan of good-natured disappointment. Between these two boisterous groups, the foot-ballers and the skippers, were solitary figures, a girl tracing a line with the tip of her shoe, and further off, a ginger boy with something moving inside a brown paper bag.

‘The Foreign Secretary,’ said the chauffeur. ‘That’s who.
Not even our department. Symes was lent out. And the FO with almost as many drivers as we got.’ They had stopped right by the school entrance. An argument had broken out among the children. It had something to do with which couple was to turn the rope, for one girl had it pulled from her hands. Eventually her partner at the other end left her station to console her. They had been replaced by bigger girls. ‘Do you know where he took him? It’s God’s truth.’ Stephen shook his head. ‘Out to a brothel near Northolt Airport. It’s a place they got out there for diplomats.’

‘Is that so?’ The rope was turning again, the chant was starting up. An impatient line had formed and now the girl at the front was pushed forward. She took up a position just a couple of feet from where the rope smacked the ground, nodding her head to the beat of the song, working the rhythm of it into her feet. The girls sang in unison, but a few were off pitch and the dense disharmonies jarred. The stresses were crudely emphatic on the down-beat. Daddy, Daddy, I feel sick, Send for the doctor, quick, quick, quick! ‘You can imagine it. Something happened. In return for a favour, something not mentioned perhaps, a word to the car-pool super, and Symes never does a day’s work again. On full pay. For life.’

Stephen watched the waiting girl. She fingered the hem of her skirt. She made a little feint, then she was in, bobbing like a Highland dancer, and the next girl was ready. Doctor, doctor, shall I die? Yes my dear, and so shall I. How many carriages shall I have? One, two, three, four … The two were face to face as they skipped. They clapped hands, left to right, right to right, both together, then left to right … The first girl was facing away from him. He was watching the blurred line of her moving shoulders, the tilt of her head, the pale crook of her knees. At the moment when the skipping song came full circle, the two leaped higher, turned in the air and landed back to back. The first girl’s face was obscured by the crowd of chanting girls who were pressing
in closer. He half lifted himself out of his seat, straining to see. Ahead, the traffic was moving. They slipped forwards ten feet or so before stopping, and suddenly he had a clearer view. There were five girls in the rope, a compacted line that rose and fell to the pulse of the chant. The first girl was closest to him. The thick fringe bobbed against her white forehead, her chin was raised, she had a dreamy appearance. He was looking at his daughter. He shook his head, he opened his mouth without making a sound. She was fifty feet away, unmistakable. The chauffeur roused himself from reveries of injustice and shoved the gear stick forwards.

They were moving again, picking up speed. Stephen twisted round in his seat to look out of the rear window. The rope had snagged again, there was a lot of milling about, it was difficult to see faces. He had lost sight of Kate, then saw her briefly as she bent to retrieve something from the ground.

‘Stop the car,’ he whispered, cleared his throat and said it again, louder. ‘Stop the car.’

They were going at a steady thirty miles an hour. Ahead the lights were green, and the rush of cooler air into the dry heat was refreshing the chauffeur, generating a breezy optimism. ‘It’s not all bad, though. You’re your own boss really. It’s up to you to make what you can of it.’ The school was already half a mile behind them.

‘Stop the car!’

‘What’s up?’

‘Just do as I say.’

‘With this lot behind?’

Stephen jerked the wheel, and as the car swerved to the left the chauffeur had no choice but to brake sharply. Moving at less than five miles an hour they scraped the length of a parked van. Behind them was a chorus of horns. ‘Now look,’ the chauffeur moaned, but Stephen was out on the pavement and starting to run.

By the time he was back, the playground was deserted. Its air of having been vacated of bodies and clamour only minutes before made its emptiness more complete, its walled boundaries more remote. A residual heat hung above the asphalt. The school buildings were of the late Victorian type, with high windows and steeply pitched roofs at many angles. From these buildings came not so much a sound as an emanation of children confined in classrooms. Stephen stood still by the entrance, all senses focused. Time itself had a closed-down, forbidden quality; he was experiencing the pleasurable transgression, the heightened significance that came with being out of school at the wrong moment. From across the playground a man with a zinc bucket was approaching, so Stephen strode purposefully towards a red door and opened it. He had no particular plan, though it was clear that if his daughter were here it would be easy enough to find her. He felt no excitement now, only peaceful resolve.

He was standing by a fire hose mounted on a red drum on the wall at the beginning of a corridor which ended some sixty feet away with a set of swing doors. It looked familiar to him from schooldays; the floor was red-tiled, the walls were a creamy gloss for easy cleaning. He set off down the corridor slowly. He would search the whole building methodically, regard it not as a school so much as a set of hiding places. The first door that gave on to the corridor was locked, the second opened a broom cupboard, the third a boiler room where tea things were set out on an upturned crate. Another two doors were locked and by this time he had reached the swing doors. As he pushed them open he glanced over his shoulder to see the man with the bucket enter the corridor and turn to lock the red door behind him. Stephen hurried on.

He had arrived at a well-lit reception area where two other corridors, wider and without connecting doors, converged. There were potted plants on shelves and child
art on the walls. A sign which announced ‘School Fees and Enquiries’ hung on a door which stood ajar. Beyond it someone was typing slowly. He smelled coffee and cigarettes, and as he passed, preferring not to be heard or seen, a male voice exclaimed, ‘But newts are not extinct!’ and a woman murmured reassuringly, ‘Well, almost.’

Stephen continued along one of the wider corridors, drawn by the sound of a rhythmic and resonant boom. At his feet the linoleum tiles had been worn through to the concrete beneath, making a fissure which ran ahead of him. He stopped at a door in which was set a semi-circular window with wired glass. Glancing in, and seeing nothing but an expanse of wooden floor, he pushed the door open and entered a gymnasium on the far side of which thirty children queued in silence to run at a springboard and launch themselves over a wooden horse. Standing on a rubber mat to steady them as they landed was a compact, elderly man with his glasses swinging from his neck by a silver chain. As each child bounced off the board he emitted a staccato ‘Hup!’ He glanced without interest at Stephen, who took up a position at the far end of the mat to watch the children come over.

Soon the bobbing faces had abstracted themselves into little moons, discs with a comic-book range of expressions – terrified, indifferent, determined. He had watched half the class before he became aware of the ideal form of the exercise. It was intended that the children should land on the mat with their feet together, perfectly still, at attention for a second or so before running off to re-join the queue. Since no one could achieve this, the master appeared to have settled for the next best thing – each child sprang to attention, military style, after stumbling across the mat. At no time did the teacher, who was a kind of circus ringmaster, offer encouragement or instruction. His ‘hup’s never varied in tone. It did not look as though he planned to do anything else, for there was no other apparatus in sight.
The children ran straight from the mat to the end of the queue without talking or touching. It was difficult to imagine the process being brought to a halt. Stephen left when he started seeing faces for the second time. In recollection, the entire period of his search through the school took place against the background of the thwack and boom of the springboard, and the regular, strangled cry of the games master.

Minutes later he was standing at the rear of a crowded classroom watching a matronly teacher at the blackboard put the finishing touches to her picture of a Medieval village. The roads converged to form the triangular green, around which were grouped primitive huts. There was a village pump out of proportion, and in the distance, drawn with some care, the manor house. With a low buzz, the children took their crayons and started out on their own versions. The teacher waved Stephen into a vacant seat halfway down the classroom, and it was from here, squeezed tight against his desk, that he surveyed the faces as they bent over their work.

The teacher appeared at his side and whispered exaggeratedly. ‘I’m so happy you can take part in the scheme. If you’re unsure what to do just raise your hand and ask.’ Solicitously, she spread paper before him and offered him a fistful of crayons. Stephen began to draw his village. He remembered this arrangement from thirty years ago. This was perhaps the fourth time he had represented a Medieval village in his life – and he was able to work quickly, imparting to his row of huts a degree of perspective they never had in previous attempts, and managing a life-like pump on the edge of the green no larger than half the size of the nearest hut. The manor house, which he imagined to be at least half a mile away, gave him more trouble and he began to slow down, and raise his eyes to the blackboard, finding there some useful architectural hints. To render these features, however, meant drawing out of scale, and
his picture began to acquire the primitivist qualities of all his previous attempts.

As he drew he looked about him. Fortunately, all the girls were on one side of the room, but only the faces of those behind him and immediately to his left were visible. As he shifted to improve his point of view, the tiny wooden seat beneath him squeaked loudly. The teacher called threateningly without looking up from her book, ‘Someone has the fidgets.’ He ducked down and resumed his drawing. The door opened and the man with the bucket popped his head round, smiled apologetically at the teacher, glanced round the class and disappeared. There were three dark-haired girls to Stephen’s left. It was difficult to see them because they held their faces so close to their work. He turned to watch them, careful not to move too quickly in his seat. The nearest girl became aware of him, tilted her head and smiled furtively and prettily through the pencil she was biting. There was a movement up front, the harsh scrape of a chair. The teacher spoke to the class as a whole.

‘There’s no need to copy your neighbour. It’s all up there on the blackboard.’

She strolled the aisles with leisurely authority, pausing to murmur criticism or encouragement. She was still twenty feet or so behind Stephen, but nevertheless the whole of the back of his head registered her approach. He straightened the sheet of paper on his desk and tried to see his picture through her eyes. Would she be impressed by the detail on his pump, the artful, irregular spacing between his huts, the innovative horse he had set by his manor house? He smelled her perfume moments before she was at his side. The painted fingernails of one hand rested momentarily on the village green, and then she had passed on, without comment. The brief disappointment was familiar to him. He took advantage of her retreating back to rise out of his seat and survey girls’ faces. Indeed, there was a general relaxation now, a stirring of confined young
limbs, a mutter which gained in volume. The teacher was on the far side of the class, engrossed in the work of one of the boys. Emboldened, Stephen darted out to the front. The girls were oblivious of his close scrutiny. The chatter was now almost a din, approaching cocktail party level, but no one else had stood up. So far the teacher had pretended not to hear.

Now she straightened, and sternly pronounced the old formula. ‘Did I give anyone permission to speak?’ The silence was immediate, resentful. No one had an answer. Stephen remained out the front, by the teacher’s desk, checking all the faces one last time.

The teacher met his eye and spoke without a hint of humour. ‘And did I say you could leave your seat?’

There were titters from the back. These were moments of intense pleasure, the time it took Stephen to walk to the classroom door; to step out of the fantasy, to cease colluding in the teacher’s authority, simply to turn his back and come away at his own pace, confident of immunity – this was his schoolboy daydream, nurtured through many dull hours, enacted at last, thirty years late.

At the door he turned and said civilly, ‘I’m sorry to have troubled you,’ and went out into the corridor.

Approaching him, with a thunderous drumming of shoes on a hard surface, and with the pent energy of a tidal-bore wave, was a classful, or perhaps two, of children who dared not run but could not quite restrain themselves to walk. They half skipped, half sprinted, pulling each other back as they pushed forwards. Faces strained ahead in the anticipation of some pleasure. From out of sight a man called furiously, ‘Walk, I said walk!’ They came on in a surge, stumbling, rolling, elbowing, and when they reached Stephen, who for his own reasons held his ground in the centre of the corridor, they parted and converged around him as though he were a mere physical obstacle, a rock, a tree, a grown-up. His view was of bobbing heads, mostly
dark brown to mousy, whorls of hair, and glimpses of features, and of couples barely conscious as they let go of each other’s hands to pass on either side of him. They gave off a not unpleasant baked smell from their exertions. Every single child was a fluting monologuist, for there seemed to be no listeners here. However close they passed by him, he could not discern in the babble one intelligible phrase. There were the children who glanced up, as one might while passing under an arch of little architectural interest, and then there flashed upwards, all the more vivid amidst the dullness of the hair, a clear green, a speckled brown, a milky blue. The colours of the marbles they roll, he thought. Had he included marbles in the presents he had bought? And it was in clear vindication of those mad and trusting impulses that, as the question shaped itself, he found he was staring into familiar dark eyes below a heavy fringe, and he was dropping down to her level, on both knees, placing his hands gently on her shoulders, repeating her name while the children wheeled about them to form a tight and curious wall that was never quite still or silent.