The Child in Time (10 page)

When next he opened his eyes Julie was sitting on the edge of the bed looking down at him. The room was silent but for the heavily accented, echoing drip of a bathroom tap. There was restrained amusement in the tension around her lips which she held pressed together against the temptation to say something wryly unsympathetic. Her clear, grey eyes moved in steady, unpredictable triangles, from his left to his right eye and back, comparing them, measuring truth by the faint differences she detected, then down to his mouth to gauge the expression there and make further comparisons. He pushed himself into a sitting position and took her hand. It was responsive, yet cool to touch.

He said: ‘I’m sorry to be a nuisance.’

She smiled instantly. ‘It’s all right.’ Her lips closed up
again, and bulged once more with the effort of retaining a humorous observation. It was not her way to ask him directly why he had arrived at her house in a state of shock. Questions, ordinary inquisitiveness, did not suit her at all. She never insisted on the answer to a question. She might ask once, and if there was no reply, then she would match the silence. There was a pleasing depth to her silence. It was difficult not to tell her things in order to draw her from her steady self-communion, to bring her closer.

He said: ‘It’s wonderful to lie in this bed again.’

‘It drives me mad,’ Julie said promptly. ‘It sags in the middle and squeaks every time you move.’

Without meaning to, he said lightly, ‘I’ll have it then,’ and Julie shrugged.

‘If you like. Take it.’

This was too bleak. Their hands disengaged and there was a silence. Stephen wanted to return to the intimacy he had woken up to, and he was tempted to explain everything as well as he could. But he could not trust himself with a long account, it could just as easily push them further apart. He kicked the bed clothes clear, leaned forwards and placed his hands on her shoulders, pressing firmly, as if to make sure she was there. She was frail to touch, the body heat through her cotton blouse was fierce and endearing. She was watchful, but the suppressed smile was there.

‘I’ll explain what happened,’ he said, still pressing.

He released her and was about to rise from the bed when she put her hand on his arm. She spoke firmly. ‘You’re not to get up. I’ve brought some tea. And I’ve made a cake.’ She pulled the covers back over his legs, up to his waist, and stood to tuck him in. She did not want him to leave the marriage bed. From the floor she picked up a tray and set it before him. ‘For once,’ she said, ‘you can stop pretending everything’s all right. You’re my patient.’

She cut the cake and poured the tea. The cups were fine, bone china. She had gone to the trouble of finding saucers
which matched the side plates. Undeniably, it was an occasion. They chinked cups and said ‘Cheers.’ When he asked what time it was she said, ‘Bathtime.’ She pointed at the streaks of dried mud along his arm. In the bedroom’s half light the whites of her eyes flashed repeatedly as she glanced up from her plate to his face, as though checking it against a memory. She would not hold his gaze now. When he smiled at her she looked down. She was wearing long earrings of coloured crystal. Untypically, her hands would not keep still.

Small talk was not easy. After some time Stephen said: ‘You’re looking very beautiful.’

The reply came back immediately in an even tone. ‘So do you.’ She smiled at him and said, ‘Now …’ through an efficient sigh, and cleared away the tea things. She stood at the head of the bed, stroking his hair. He was holding his breath, the moment was holding its breath. They confronted two possibilities, equally weighted, balanced on a honed fulcrum. The moment they inclined towards one, the other, while never ceasing to exist, would disappear irrevocably. He could rise from the bed now, giving her an affectionate smile as he moved past her on his way to his bath. He would lock the door behind him, securing his independence and pride. She would wait downstairs, and they would resume their careful exchanges until it was time for him to walk across the field to catch his train. Or something could be risked, a different life unfolded in which his own unhappiness could be redoubled or eliminated.

Their hesitation was brief, delicious before the forking paths. Had he not seen two ghosts already that day and brushed against the mutually enclosing envelopes of events and the times and places in which they occurred, then he would not have been able to choose, as he did now, without deliberation and with an immediacy which felt both wise and abandoned. A ghostly, fading Stephen rose, smiled, crossed the room and closed the bathroom door behind him,
and innumerable invisible events were set in train. As Stephen took Julie’s hand and felt the sinuous compliance of her body communicated along the length of her arm, and as he drew her across his lap and kissed her, he did not doubt that what was happening now, and what would happen as a consequence of now, was not separate from what he had experienced earlier that day. Obscurely, he sensed a line of argument was being continued. Here, however, there was nothing but delight as he held Julie’s head, the dear head, between his hands and kissed her eyes, where earlier, outside The Bell, he had felt terror; but the two moments were undeniably bound, they held in common the innocent longing they provoked, the desire to belong.

The homely and erotic patterns of marriage are not easily discarded. They knelt face to face in the centre of the bed undressing each other slowly.

‘You’re so thin,’ said Julie. ‘You’re going to waste away.’ She ran her hands along the pole of his collar bone, down the bars of his rib cage, and then, gratified by his excitement, held him tight in both hands and bent down to reclaim him with a long kiss.

He too felt proprietorial tenderness once she was naked. He registered the changes, the slight thickening at the waist, the large breasts a little smaller. From living alone, he thought, as he closed his mouth around the nipple of one and pressed the other against his cheek. The novelty of seeing and feeling a familiar naked body was such that for some minutes they could do little more than hold each other at arm’s length and say, ‘Well …’ and ‘Here we are again …’ A wild jokiness hung in the air, a suppressed hilarity that threatened to obliterate desire. All the coolness between them now seemed an elaborate hoax, and they wondered how they had kept it going for so long. It was amusingly simple: they had to do no more than remove their clothes and look at one another to be set free and
assume the uncomplicated roles in which they could not deny their mutual understanding. Now they were their old, wise selves, and they could not stop grinning.

Later, one word seemed to repeat itself as the long-lipped opening parted and closed around him, as he filled the known dip and curve and arrived at a deep, familiar place, a smooth, resonating word generated by slippery flesh on flesh, a warm, humming, softly consonanted, roundly vowelled word … home, he was home, enclosed, safe and therefore able to provide, home where he owned and was owned. Home, why be anywhere else? Wasn’t it wasteful to be doing anything other than this? Time was redeemed, time assumed purpose all over again because it was the medium for the fulfilment of desire. The trees outside edged in closer, needles stroked the small panes, darkening the room which rippled with the movement of filtered light. Heavier rain sounded on the roof, and later receded. Julie was crying. He wondered, as he had many times before, how anything so good and simple could be permitted, how they were allowed to get away with it, how the world could have taken this experience into account for so long and still be the way it was. Not governments, or publicity firms or research departments, but biology, existence, matter itself had dreamed this up for its own pleasure and perpetuity, and this was exactly what you were meant to do, it wanted you to like it. His arms and legs were drifting away. High, in clean air, he hung by his fingers from a mountain ledge; fifty feet below was the long smooth scree. His grip was loosening. Surely then, he thought as he fell backwards into the exquisite, dizzy emptiness and accelerated down the irresponsibly steep slope, surely at heart the place is benevolent, it likes us, it wants us to like it, it likes itself.

Then everything was different. They squeezed into the narrow, lukewarm bath, taking with them wine which they
drank from the bottle. Satiated desire brought on a speedy, reckless clarity. They talked and laughed loudly and were careless with one another. Julie told a lengthy anecdote about life in the nearby village. Stephen gave an exaggerated account of the committee members. They made harsh summaries of the recent lives of mutual friends. Even as the animated talk proceeded they were uneasy because they knew there was nothing underpinning this cordiality, no reason for bathing together. There was an indecisiveness which neither dared voice. They were talking freely, but their freedom was bleak, ungrounded. Soon their voices began to falter, the fast talk began to fade. The lost child was between them again. The daughter they did not have was waiting for them outside. Stephen knew he would be leaving soon. The awkwardness grew when they were back in their clothes. The habits of separation are not easily discarded. They were losing their voices, they were dismayed. The old, careful politeness was re-establishing itself, and they were helpless before it. They had exposed themselves too easily, too quickly, they had shown themselves to be vulnerable.

Downstairs, he watched as Julie knelt to spread a damp towel in front of a smoky log fire. There should have been something affectionate to say which would be neither flippant nor expose him further. But all there remained was small talk. He could think only of taking her hand, and yet he didn’t. They had used up the possibilities, the tension of touch, they had been to the limits. For now everything was neutralised. Had they been together still, they could have fallen back on other resources, ignored each other for a while, or undertaken some task, or faced the loss somehow. But here there was nothing. A sad pride pinned them to little exchanges over a final pot of tea. He had a glimpse of the kind of life she was leading. Pine trees grew right up to the house and the windows of the cottage were small, so all the rooms were gloomy, even on a sunny day. She
kept a fire in right through the summer to control the damp. In a corner of the room was a scrubbed kitchen table on which stood her various notebooks in neat piles, candles to read by at night and on cloudy days, and a jam-jar of weeds and what few wild flowers she could find on the edges of the plantations. Another jar contained sharpened pencils. Her violins were in a corner on the floor, fastened in their cases, and the music stand was not in sight. He imagined her wandering the rural concrete tracks, thinking, or trying not to think, about Kate, and coming back to practise in the hissing silence.

Any minute he would be setting off across the machine-efficient prairie to return to his own hermitage. Sitting across from her, watching as she hunched over her tea, warming her hands round the cup, he was emotionless. He could begin to learn how to detach himself from his wife. Her fingernails were bitten down, her hair was unwashed, her face had a pinched look. He could learn not to love her, just so long as he could see her from time to time and be reminded that she was mortal, a woman in her late thirties, intent on solitude, on making sense of her own troubled life. Later he might be taunted by the memory of her thin, bare arms protruding from the torn sweater, endearingly too large, which he recognised as his own, and the huskiness in the voice as she kept her feelings down.

It was inevitable that as he stood they should exchange the briefest of goodbyes. She opened the door for him, there was a little squeeze of hands and he was no more than three steps up the path before he heard the front door close behind him. By the wicket gate he turned to look back. It was a house such as a child might draw. It was box-shaped with its front door dead centre, four small windows near each corner, and constructed of the same red bricks as The Bell. A path made out of left-over bricks made a shallow S-shape between the gate and the front door. The cottage stood in a clearing barely fifty feet across. The plantation trees were pressing in on all
sides. For a moment he considered going back, but he had no idea what it was he wanted to say.

And so, by a perverse collusion in unhappiness, many months passed before they saw each other again. In his better moments, Stephen felt that what had taken place had happened too soon; they had been unprepared. In his worst, he was furious at himself for undoing what he saw as careful progress in separation. For years afterwards he would be baffled by his insistence on not returning to see her. At the time he argued it this way: Julie had never summoned him. He had initiated the visit himself. She was happy enough to see him, just as happy to see him go and to resume her solitude. If what had happened meant anything at all to her, then she would break the silence. If he heard nothing, then he could take it that she still wanted to be left alone.

The rain had long ceased. Stephen crossed the road near The Bell briskly, determined to resist further drama or significance. He hurried along the concrete path towards the big field. He had accepted a dinner invitation from a couple in London renowned for their elaborate meals and interesting friends, and he was going to be late.