The Child in Time (18 page)

At the end of a day in which he had come close to smashing a car, seeing a man crushed to death, being set upon by beggars and falling out of a tree, Stephen felt in need of a hot bath. Thelma said she had some reading to do and did not mind delaying the meal. He soaked in a long Victorian tub which was wedged in tight against the sloping roof of the guest bathroom. He was empty of speculation or memories. He thought only of the ripples pushed out across the water, the shock-waves of his heartbeat. His knee caps rose before him like promontories in a sea mist. The skin puckered on his fingertips. He closed his eyes and half dozed, rousing himself from time to time to turn the hot-water tap with his foot.

When at last he appeared downstairs, Thelma was reading a physics journal. Her elbows were propped on the dining table where only two places were set. The door and windows were still open, now to thick darkness and the sound of crickets. As she fetched their meal from the kitchen she explained that Charles had already eaten and gone to
bed, and that he was usually asleep by nine. ‘He stayed up late for you.’

This should have been Stephen’s cue for a set of questions, and for a conversation about Charles’s regression. He was glad however that Thelma passed him the carving knife and asked him to slice the joint. They talked about the best ways of cooking lamb. Thelma was in good humour. Weeks of country air, long afternoons tending her garden, and the chance to work at what she wanted had made her euphoric. Her bare feet made a pleasant scuffing sound on the stone floor as she moved between the kitchen and the dining room with salad and potatoes and glass bottles of vinegar and olive oil. She was wearing a collarless man’s shirt tucked into a loose skirt. Round her neck was a set of painted wooden beads which might have come from a toy shop. She still kept the physicist’s tight bun above the nape of her neck. There was a hint of the old conspiratorial spirit between them. It was good to live in the remote country and be visited by a friend. More than that, they were touched, liberated by Charles’s behaviour. Thelma no longer had to live with the secret all by herself. She splashed Burgundy into the glasses. There was a wild generosity in the air, and as Stephen took a long pull of the wine, which was warm from standing out so long, he regretted his suspicious attitudes. If only he knew what he himself wanted, what he wanted to be, he could be free to carry it through.

Fifteen minutes into the meal Stephen fulfilled a resolution he had made many weeks before and described his experience in the Kent countryside. Towards the end of his account he had himself coming round in an armchair by the fire in Julie’s cottage. Thelma had been irritated by their separation, she wanted to bang their heads together, she said. He did not want to incite her with a description of a temporary, irresponsible intimacy. Otherwise, he remained faithful to the details, to the sense of another day intruding, the familiarity of the place, the bicycles leaning together
outside the pub – and he went on at length about the kind of old-fashioned machines they were – his recognition of the young couple at their table, his father’s familiar gestures, the way his mother had looked towards and beyond him as though he were not there, and the falling sensation as he came back up the road, of tumbling through a kind of sluice.

Thelma ate steadily as she listened, and when he had finished went on to clear her plate before asking what had happened before and after the experience, what had been on his mind. He described the train journey, which he recalled with difficulty, and said he thought he had been thinking about the committee. And afterwards? But what had happened then was not Thelma’s business. He and Julie had talked desultorily, he said, and drunk two pots of tea and eaten the cake Julie had made. Then he had walked back to the station, caught the train home and had eaten supper with friends.

‘And what do you make of it?’ Thelma said as she poured the wine.

He shrugged, and told her that he had learned that his parents had once possessed new bikes.

‘Do they remember the pub?’

‘My mother doesn’t. My father doesn’t even remember the bikes.’

‘You didn’t describe this thing to them.’

‘No. I didn’t want to. It was as if I’d been spying on a very important conversation.’

‘Perhaps they were talking about you.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘But you still haven’t told me what you make of it,’ Thelma said.

‘I don’t know. It’s got something to do with time obviously, with seeing something out of time. And since you’ve got all these theories …’

She clapped her hands. ‘You go out in the countryside
and have a vision, an hallucination or whatever, and what do you do? Consult an expert, of course! A scientist, no less. You come cap in hand to the oracle you quietly despise. Why don’t you go and ask a modernist?’

But Stephen was used to this. ‘Come off it, Thelma. Admit you’re bursting to lecture me. You miss your students, even the stupid ones. Let’s hear it. What’s the state of the art on time?’

Despite her good mood, Thelma did not seem eager to offer the usual tutorial. Perhaps she suspected him of mental laziness, perhaps she was saving her ideas for her book. Initially, at least, her tone was dismissive and she spoke rapidly. It was only later that she warmed up.

‘There’s a whole supermarket of theories these days. You can take your pick. They’re all written up for the layman in books of the “fancy that” variety. One offering has the world dividing every infinitesimal fraction of a second into an infinite number of possible versions, constantly branching and proliferating, with consciousness neatly picking its way through to create the illusion of a stable reality.’

‘You’ve told me that one before,’ Stephen said. ‘I think about it a lot.’

‘In my view you might just as well go for a bearded old man in the sky. Then there are physicists who find it convenient to describe time as a kind of substance, an efflorescence of undetectable particles. There are dozens of other theories, equally potty. They set out to smooth a few wrinkles in one corner of quantum theory. The mathematics are reasonable enough in a local sort of way, but the rest, the grand theorising, is whistling in the dark. What comes out is inelegant and perverse. But whatever time is, the common-sense, everyday version of it as linear, regular, absolute, marching from left to right, from the past through the present to the future, is either nonsense or a tiny fraction of the truth. We know this from our own experience.
An hour can seem like five minutes or a week. Time is variable. We know it from Einstein who is still our bedrock here. In relativity theory time is dependent on the speed of the observer. What are simultaneous events to one person can appear in sequence to another. There’s no absolute, generally recognised “now” – but you know all this.’

‘It gets clearer each time round.’

‘In dense bodies with colossal gravitational fields, black holes, time can grind to a halt altogether. The brief appearance of certain particles in the cloud chamber can only be explained by the backward movement of time. In the Big Bang theory, time is thought to have been created in the same moment as matter, it’s inseparable from it. And that’s part of the problem – to consider time as an entity we have to wrench it apart from space and matter, we have to distort it to look at it. I’ve heard it argued that the very way our brains are wired up limits our understanding of time, just as it holds our perceptions to only three dimensions. That sounds like pretty dim materialism to me. And pessimistic too. But we do have to tie ourselves to models – time as liquid, time as a complex envelope with points of contact between all moments.’

Stephen remembered from his sixth form.

‘There, you see, your modernists have their uses after all. I can’t help you with your hallucination, Stephen. Physics certainly can’t. It’s still a divided subject. The twin pillars are relativity and quantum theories. One describes a causal and continuous world, the other a non-causal, discontinuous world. Is it possible to reconcile them? Einstein failed with his unified field theory. I side with the optimists like my colleague David Bohm, who anticipates a higher order of theory.’

It was at this point that Thelma livened up and Stephen began to understand less. The prospect was always so tantalising; a lucid account of what some of the best minds of the day were thinking about the elusive, everyday matter of time, what they were demonstrating in laboratories and giant accelerators. It was the promise of teasing paradox, and of personal intuitions confirmed, made official. What betrayed the promise was sheer difficulty, the indignity of coming up against the limitations of one’s intellectual reach.

At first she was patient with him, and he struggled hard. Then, slowly, she began to leave him behind and speak of Green’s function, clifford and fermionic algebrae, matrices and quaternions. Soon she abandoned all pretence of communication. She was addressing a fellow physicist, a soul mate who did not exist. Her eyes moved away from his and fixed on a point a few feet to his left, and her words became an uninterruptable torrent. She was talking for her own benefit, she was possessed. She spoke of eigenfunctions and Hermitian operators, Brownian motion, quantum potential, the Poisson bracket and the Schwarz inequality. Had she gone the same way as Charles? He watched her with alarm, uncertain whether he should reach across and touch her, try to bring her back. But he reasoned that she needed to get it out, tell her story of fermions, disorder and flux. In fact, she returned within fifteen minutes and seemed to become aware of him again. Her voice lost its monotonous intensity, and soon she was dealing once more in generalities he could understand.

She wanted him to share her excitement as she anticipated that in a hundred or fifty years’ time, or even less, there might evolve a theory, or a set of theories, of which relativity and quantum theories would be special, limiting cases. The new theory would refer to a higher order of reality, a higher ground, the ground of all that is, an undivided whole of which matter, space, time, even consciousness itself, would be complicatedly related embodiments,
intrusions which made up the reality we understood. It was not entirely fanciful to imagine that one day there could be mathematical and physical descriptions of the type of experience Stephen had recounted. Different kinds of time, not simply the linear, sequential time of common sense, could be projected through consciousness from the higher common ground, from which consciousness itself would be a function, a limiting case which in turn would be inseparable from the matter which was its subject, or the space within which it occurred …

Thelma was pouring the last of the wine into Stephen’s glass. When science could begin to abandon the illusions of objectivity by taking seriously, and finding a mathematical language for, the indivisibility of the entire universe, and when it could begin to take subjective experience into account, then the clever boy was on his way to becoming the wise woman.

‘Think how humanised and approachable scientists would be if they could join in the really important conversations about time, and without thinking they had the final word – the mystic’s experience of timelessness, the chaotic unfolding of time in dreams, the Christian moment of fulfilment and redemption, the annihilated time of deep sleep, the elaborate time schemes of novelists, poets, daydreamers, the infinite, unchanging time of childhood.’

He knew he was hearing part of her book. ‘The slow time of panic,’ he added to her list, and told the story of his near collision with the lorry and how he had freed the driver. From there on the conversation meandered tiredly, and it was not until the evening was almost at an end that Thelma returned to Stephen’s hallucination, as they had now agreed to call it.

‘You have to forgive my ranting. It’s what comes of living alone in the country with only ideas for company. You don’t need physics to explain what happened to you. Niels Bohr was probably right all along when he said that scientists
should have nothing to do with reality. Their business is to construct models which account for their observations.’

She was going round the room turning out lamps, pulling the windows to. Stephen watched her closely. The word ‘alone’ took a long time to subside. The harsher overhead lights came on. She seemed tired and a little stooped.

‘But don’t we all do that?’ Stephen said as they went up the stairs. ‘Isn’t that what reality is anyway?’

She kissed him lightly. Her lips were dry against his cheek. He felt the heat from her face. She turned her back and went along the creaky corridor to her room which, Stephen noted as he remained by his door, was separate from her husband’s.

The next morning he slept in late and woke to the unusual din of birdsong. He lay on his back for half an hour and decided to return to London. Two and a half years on, it still made him uneasy to be away when Kate, or someone who knew where she was, might come to the flat. Nor was he looking forward to spending a day in the woods with Charles. Enough had happened for one day. Now he wanted to be on the couch in front of the TV surrounded by familiar mess.