The Child in Time (8 page)

He owed it to his love for them, not to let them slip away with their lives forgotten. He was ready to get up from the bed, tiptoe from the Darkes’ house and take a long taxi ride through the night to their place, arrive clutching his questions, his brief to prosecute the vandalising erasures of time. Certainly he was ready, he was reaching for a pen, he would leave a note for Thelma and set out this minute, he was reaching for his socks and shoes. All that was holding him back was the need to close his eyes and take time for further thought.

Following an exchange of neutrally worded postcards with his wife, Stephen set out one morning in mid-June to visit her. He had not seen her in several months. She had come back from her retreat – a monastery which rented rooms to troubled outsiders – and within weeks had moved out of the flat and bought a place of her own. For the first time since April the day was overcast. It was something of a novelty, a re-assertion of good taste, to walk everywhere in cool shade. He carried with him a set of scrawled directions. Because he did not wish to contemplate his motives too closely, he concentrated instead on the journey itself which turned out to have a pleasing shape, tapering purposefully and consistently from the din of Central London to a cottage in a pine plantation less than thirty miles away. At each stage of the journey he encountered fewer people. A ride on the crowded underground brought him to Victoria. From here the train rumbled out across the river’s broad white sky. He walked the length of every
carriage looking for the most secluded seat. A disruptive minority of humankind regarded journeys, even short ones, as the occasion for pleasant encounters. There were people ready to inflict intimacies on strangers. Such travellers were to be avoided if you belonged to the majority for whom a journey was the occasion for silence, reflection, daydream. The requirements were simple: an unobstructed view of a changing landscape, however dull, and freedom from the breath of other passengers, their body warmth, sandwiches and limbs.

He found an empty first-class compartment and closed the door firmly. They were travelling from the past into the present. They ran along the rear gardens of Victorian terraces whose back additions offered glimpses through open doors into kitchens, past Edwardian and pre-war semis, and then they were threading through suburbs, southwards then eastwards, past encampments of minute, new houses with dirty, well-thumbed scraps of country in between. The train slowed over a tangle of junctions and shuddered to a halt. In the abrupt, expectant silence exuded by railway lines he realised how impatient he was to arrive. They had stopped by a new housing estate of raw, undersized semi-detached houses, starter homes for first-time buyers. There were dumper trucks still at work. The front gardens were still rutted earth; out the back, fluttering white nappies proclaimed from diagrammatic, metal trees a surrender to a new life. Two infants, hand in hand, staggered beneath the washing and waved at the train.

Shortly before his stop it began to rain. His station, barely more than a halt for commuters, was at the end of a long tunnel of nettles. Despite the rain, he took his time on the footbridge watching the black-buttoned roof of his train slip through a frail proscenium of signals and, foreshortened, click slowly out of sight round a curve. With that there settled a velvety, country silence against which other small sounds seemed precision-cut and polished: the brisk,
departing steps of another passenger, complex birdsong and simpler human whistling. He remained on the footbridge, taking childish – or boyish – pleasure in the polished rails pointing away in both directions into the silence. As a child he had once stood on a larger bridge with his father waiting for a train to come through. Stephen had stared at the receding lines and had asked why they grew together as they got further away. His father looked down at him, eyes narrowed, mock-serious, and then squinted into the distance where question and answer converged. He always seemed to be standing to attention. He was holding Stephen’s hand, their fingers were interlaced. His father’s were stubby, with matted black hair across the knuckles. In games he used to move his fingers scissor-like, clamping Stephen’s until he danced with agony and delight at such irresponsible power. His father looked from the horizon to explain that trains got smaller and smaller as they moved away, and that to accommodate them the rails did the same. Otherwise there would be derailments. Shortly after that an express shook the bridge as it shot beneath their feet. Stephen marvelled then at the intricate relation of things, the knowingness of the inanimate, the deep symmetry which conspired to narrow the rail’s gauge precisely in keeping with the train’s diminishment; no matter how fast it rushed, the rails were always ready.

He stood outside the station reading Julie’s instructions. The rain had broken into a fine mist and the handwriting was smudged, almost illegible. He followed the road out of the village along what she described as the old bus route. He passed a hypermarket with a crowded ten-acre car-park, and crossed a motorway by an elegantly curving concrete bridge. After half a mile he turned down a paved track which cut a straight line through forestry land. Now that he was in real, open country he was light-hearted. On both sides there were planted lines of conifers with their flashing parallax as one row ceded to the next, a pleasing effect
which conveyed a false sense of speed. It was a geometrical forest uncomplicated by undergrowth or birdsong. The road gleamed white in the rain. Its single-mindedness pleased him, he wanted to run. Half a mile in there was a clearing in the plantation where a high barbed-wire fence ran round a nodding donkey. It was a grey beast languidly lifting its blunt, heavy head with a steady purr. There were others, spaced at regular intervals along the road. Outside one was an oil tanker making its collection from the reservoir tank. The driver was up in his cab with his feet on the dashboard, drinking beer from a tin can and reading a newspaper. He smiled and lifted his hand as Stephen passed and this cheered him further. He had forgotten how friendly people were in the country.

As Julie had promised, the road came to an end after half an hour’s walking. The pine forest gave way abruptly to an unbounded prairie of wheat. Stephen rested against an aluminium five-barred gate. The only indication that the yellow field, which resembled a desert, was finite was a line on the horizon where the plantation resumed. Perhaps it was a mirage. The plain was cut neatly in two by an access track, a continuation of the paved road and equally straight. He set off, and within minutes found satisfaction in this new landscape. He was marching across a void. All sense of progress, and therefore all sense of time, disappeared. The trees on the far side did not come closer. This was an obsessive landscape – it thought only about wheat. The lack of hurry, the disappearance of any real sense of a destination, suited him.

Julie had returned from her monastery in the Chilterns after six weeks. Stephen left Eaton Square, timing his arrival at the flat to coincide with hers. They greeted one another cautiously. There was a touch of the old, easy affection. They stood side by side in the centre of their living room, fingers
loosely linked. How rapidly a home perishes through neglect, and how indefinably; it wasn’t the dust, or the dead air, or the newspapers turned yellow so soon, or the withered pot plants. They said all these things as they dusted, opened windows and carried things to the dustbins. Stephen assumed that they were really talking about their marriage. For the next week or two they circled warily, sometimes polite, at others genuinely, sweetly affectionate, and once even making love. For a while it seemed they would soon begin to touch on the subjects they were at such pains to avoid.

But it could go the other way too, and it did. As Stephen saw it, the problem was desire. They had no need of comfort from one another, or advice. Their loss had set them on separate paths. There was nothing to be shared. Julie had lost weight and cut her hair short. She was reading mystical or sacred texts – St John of the Cross, Blake’s longer poems, Lao-tzu. Her pencilled annotations crowded the margins. She worked hours each day at a Bach partita. The rasp of double-stopped notes, the spiralling frenzy of semiquavers warned him away. For his part he made the first approaches to a serious drinking habit and indulged the books of his adolescence, reading of unencumbered, solitary men whose troubles were the world’s. Hemingway, Chandler, Kerouac. He toyed with the idea of packing a light suitcase, taking a taxi out to the airport and choosing a destination, drifting about with his melancholy for a few months.

Being together heightened their sense of loss. When they sat down to a meal, Kate’s absence was a fact they could neither mention nor ignore. They could not give or receive comfort, therefore there was no desire. Their one attempt was routine, false, depressing for them both. Afterwards Julie put on her dressing gown and went to the kitchen. He heard her crying and knew he could not go to her. She would not welcome him anyway. They managed five weeks. The only serious conversations they had during that time
were towards the end when they began to play with the idea of parting; it was not a divorce, of course, nor a separation, but ‘a time apart’. And so a representative from an estate agent came to value the flat. He was a big man with a kind, authoritative manner who commented intelligently as he measured rooms and recorded original features.

They asked, implored the man to stay to tea. While he took his second cup they told him about Kate, the supermarket, the police, the monastery, the difficulty of being back. He propped his elbows on the kitchen table and rested his head on his hands. He nodded solemnly throughout. What he heard confirmed what he had always feared. When they had finished he dabbed at his lips with a handkerchief. Then he pushed his arms out across the table and took their hands. The grip was powerful, his hands were hot and dry. After a silence he told them they were not to blame each other. For a moment they felt elated, released.

But that moment passed. An estate agent could do more than they could for each other. What did that mean? They learned later that the man had once been a priest and had lost his faith. The flat was valued and Stephen gave Julie a cheque for two-thirds the amount. She found her cottage and moved out, taking her violins, their bed and a handful of possessions. She refused to install a telephone. They kept in touch with occasional postcards and met once or twice in restaurants in central London where nothing much was said. If there was love it was buried beyond their reach.

The rain moved across the great space in fine columns of mist towards him. For twenty minutes the ground had sloped away imperceptibly until the distant trees were sunk and his horizon was entirely wheat. It was curiosity and unease which brought him across this drenched plain when he could have been watching the men’s ten thousand metres. Julie could set about transforming herself, purposefully evolve some different understanding of life and her place within it. She would have been on long walks through
the symmetrical pines, reassessing her past, their past, shuffling priorities, making arrangements for a new future; the walking boots he had given her one birthday would have been pounding the straight concrete road. Before he could unearth his own feelings, and without his being a witness to the process, she could metamorphose into a complete stranger, someone he would not know how to talk to. He did not want to get left behind, he did not want to lose his place in her story. She was not beyond confusion or irrationality, but she had an inviolably useful way of understanding and presenting her own morasses within the terms of a sentimental or spiritual education. With her, previous certainties were not jettisoned so much as encompassed, rather in the way, according to Thelma, scientific revolutions were said to redefine rather than discard all previous knowledge. What he frequently regarded in her as contradictory – But that’s not what you said last year! – she maintained was development – Because last year I hadn’t yet understood! She did not simply inhabit her inner life, she ran it, directed it, the terrain ahead was mapped out. The course of study was not to be left to blind chance, to what might simply come her way. The role of fate, on the other hand, she would not deny. The work, the responsibility, was to fulfil one’s destiny.

Such faith in endless mutability, in re-making yourself as you came to understand more, or changed your version, he had come to see as an aspect of her femininity. Where once he had believed, or thought he ought to believe, that men and women were, beyond all the obvious physical differences, essentially the same, he now suspected that one of their many distinguishing features was precisely their attitudes to change. Past a certain age, men froze into place, they tended to believe that, even in adversity, they were somehow at one with their fates. They were who they thought they were. Despite what they said, men believed in what they did and they stuck at it. This was a weakness
and a strength. Whether they were scrambling out of trenches to be killed in their thousands, or doing the firing themselves, or putting the final touches to a cycle of symphonies, it only rarely occurred to them, or occurred only to the rare ones among them, that they might just as well be doing something else.