The Child in Time (2 page)

Lord Parmenter presided with dignified and artful banality, indicating chosen speakers with a flickering swivel of his hooded, lashless eyes, raising a feathery limb to subdue passions, making his rare, slow-loris pronouncements with dry, speckled tongue. Only the dark, double-breasted suit betrayed a humanoid provenance. He had an aristocratic way with a commonplace. A long and fractious discussion concerning child development theory had been brought to a useful standstill by his weighty intervention – ‘Boys will be boys.’ That children were averse to soap and water, quick to learn and grew up all too fast were offered up similarly as difficult axioms. Parmenter’s banality was disdainful, fearless in proclaiming a man too important, too intact, to care how stupid he sounded. There was no one
he needed to impress. He would not stoop to being merely interesting. Stephen did not doubt that he was a very clever man.

The committee members did not find it necessary to get to know one another too well. When the long sessions were over, and while papers and books were shuffled into briefcases, polite conversations began which were sustained along the two-tone corridors and faded into echoes as the committee descended the spiral concrete staircase and dispersed on to many levels of the Ministry’s subterranean car-park.

Through the stifling summer months and beyond, Stephen made the weekly journey to Whitehall. This was his one commitment in a life otherwise free of obligations. Much of this freedom he spent in his underwear, stretched out on the sofa in front of the TV, moodily sipping neat Scotch, reading magazines back to front or watching the Olympic games. At nights the drinking increased. He ate in a local restaurant, alone. He made no attempt to contact friends. He never returned the calls monitored on his answering machine. Mostly he was indifferent to the squalor of his flat, the meaty black flies and their leisurely patrols. When he was out he dreaded returning to the deadly alignments of familiar possessions, the way the empty armchairs squatted, the smeared plates and old newspapers at their feet. It was the stubborn conspiracy of objects – lavatory seat, bed sheets, floor dirt – to remain exactly as they had been left. At home too he was never far from his subjects, his daughter, his wife, what to do. But here he lacked the concentration for sustained thought. He daydreamed in fragments, without control, almost without consciousness.

The members made a point of being punctual. Lord Parmenter was always the last to arrive. As he lowered
himself into his seat he called the room to order with a soft gargling sound which cleverly transformed itself into his opening words. The clerk to the committee, Peter Canham, sat on his right, with his chair set back from the table to symbolise his detachment. All that was required of Stephen was that he should appear plausibly alert for two and a half hours. This useful framework was familiar from his schooldays, from the hundreds or thousands of classroom hours dedicated to mental wandering. The room itself was familiar. He was at home with the light switches in brown bakelite, the electric wires in dusty piping tacked inelegantly to the wall. Where he went to school, the history room had looked much like this: the same worn-out, generous comfort, the same long battered table which someone still bothered to polish, the vestigial stateliness and dozy bureaucracy mingling soporifically. When Parmenter outlined, with reptilian affability, the morning’s work ahead Stephen heard his teacher’s soothing Welsh lilt croon the glories of Charlemagne’s court or the cycles of depravity and reform in the Medieval papacy. Through the window he saw not an enclosed car-park and baking limousines but, as from two floors up, a rose garden, playing fields, a speckled grey balustrade, then rough, uncultivated land which fell away to oaks and beeches, and beyond them the great stretch of foreshore and the blue tidal river, a mile from bank to bank. This was a lost time and a lost landscape – he had returned once to discover the trees efficiently felled, the land ploughed and the estuary spanned by a motorway bridge. And since loss was his subject, it was an easy move to a frozen, sunny day outside a supermarket in South London. He was holding his daughter’s hand. She wore a red woollen scarf knitted by his mother and carried a frayed donkey against her chest. They were moving towards the entrance. It was a Saturday, there were crowds. He held her hand tightly.

Parmenter had finished, and now one of the academics
was hesitantly arguing the merits of a newly devised phonetic alphabet. Children would learn to read and write at an earlier age and with greater enjoyment, the transition to the conventional alphabet promised to be effortless. Stephen held a pencil in his hand and looked poised to take notes. He was frowning and moving his head slightly, though whether in agreement or disbelief it was hard to tell.

Kate was at an age when her burgeoning language and the ideas it unravelled gave her nightmares. She could not describe them to her parents but it was clear they contained elements familiar from her story books – a talking fish, a big rock with a town inside, a lonely monster who longed to be loved. There had been nightmares through this night. Several times Julie had got out of bed to her, and then found herself wakeful until well after dawn. Now she was sleeping in. Stephen made breakfast and dressed Kate. She was energetic, despite her ordeal, keen to go shopping and ride in the supermarket trolley. The oddity of sunshine on a freezing day intrigued her. For once she co-operated in being dressed. She stood between his knees while he guided her limbs into her winter underwear. Her body was so compact, so unblemished. He picked her up and buried his face in her belly, pretending to bite her. The little body smelled of bed warmth and milk. She squealed and writhed, and when he put her down she begged him to do it again.

He buttoned her woollen shirt, helped her into a thick sweater and fastened her dungarees. She began a vague, abstracted chant which meandered between improvisation, nursery rhymes and snatches of Christmas carols. He sat her in his chair, put her socks on and laced her boots. When he knelt in front of her she stroked his hair. Like many little girls she was quaintly protective towards her father. Before they left the flat she would make certain he buttoned his coat to the top.

He took Julie some tea. She was half asleep, with her
knees drawn up to her chest. She said something which was lost to the pillows. He put his hand under the bedclothes and massaged the small of her back. She rolled over and pulled his face towards her breasts. When they kissed he tasted in her mouth the thick, metallic flavour of deep sleep. From beyond the bedroom gloom Kate was still intoning her medley. For a moment Stephen was tempted to abandon the shopping and set Kate up with some books in front of the television. He could slip between the heavy covers beside his wife. They had made love just after dawn, but sleepily, inconclusively. She was fondling him now, enjoying his dilemma. He kissed her again.

They had been married six years, a time of slow, fine adjustments to the jostling principles of physical pleasure, domestic duty and the necessity of solitude. Neglect of one led to diminishment or chaos in the others. Even as he gently pinched Julie’s nipple between his finger and thumb he was making his calculations. Following her broken night and a shopping expedition, Kate would be needing sleep by midday. Then they could be sure of uninterrupted time. Later, in the sorry months and years, Stephen was to make efforts to re-enter this moment, to burrow his way back through the folds between events, crawl between the covers, and reverse his decision. But time – not necessarily as it is, for who knows that, but as thought has constituted it – monomaniacally forbids second chances. There is no absolute time, his friend Thelma had told him on occasions, no independent entity. Only our particular and weak understanding. He deferred pleasure, he caved in to duty. He squeezed Julie’s hand and stood. In the hall Kate came towards him talking loudly, holding up the scuffed toy donkey. He bent to loop the red scarf twice around her neck. She was on tiptoe to check his coat buttons. They were holding hands even before they were through the front door.

They stepped outdoors as though into a storm. The main road was an arterial route south, its traffic rushed with
adrenal ferocity. The bitter, anti-cyclonic day was to serve an obsessive memory well with a light of brilliant explicitness, a cynical eye for detail. Lying in the sun by the steps was a flattened Coca-Cola can whose straw remained in place, still three-dimensional. Kate was for rescuing the straw, Stephen forbad it. And there, by a tree, as though illuminated from within, a dog was shitting with quivering haunches and uplifted, dreamy expression. The tree was a tired oak whose bark looked freshly carved, its ridges ingenious, sparkling, the ruts in blackest shadow.

It was a two-minute walk to the supermarket, over the four-lane road by a zebra crossing. Near where they waited to cross was a motor-bike salesroom, an international meeting place for bikers. Melon-bellied men in worn leathers leaned against or sat astride their stationary machines. When Kate withdrew the knuckle she had been sucking and pointed, the low sun illuminated a smoking finger. However, she found no word to frame what she saw. They crossed at last, in front of an impatient pack of cars which snarled forwards the moment they reached the centre island. Kate looked out for the lollipop lady, the one who always recognised her. Stephen explained it was Saturday. There were crowds, he held her hand tightly as they moved towards the entrance. Amid voices, shouts, the electro-mechanical rattle at the checkout counters, they found a trolley. Kate was smiling hugely to herself as she made herself comfortable in her seat.

The people who used the supermarket divided into two groups, as distinct as tribes or nations. The first lived locally in modernised Victorian terraced houses which they owned. The second lived locally in tower blocks and council estates. Those in the first group tended to buy fresh fruit and vegetables, brown bread, coffee beans, fresh fish from a special counter, wine and spirits, while those in the second group bought tinned or frozen vegetables, baked beans, instant soup, white sugar, cupcakes, beer, spirits and cigarettes. In
the second group were pensioners buying meat for their cats, biscuits for themselves. And there were young mothers, gaunt with fatigue, their mouths set hard round cigarettes, who sometimes cracked at the checkout and gave a child a spanking. In the first group were young, childless couples, flamboyantly dressed, who at worst were a little pressed for time. There were also mothers shopping with their au pairs, and fathers like Stephen, buying fresh salmon, doing their bit.

What else did he buy? Toothpaste, tissues, washing-up liquid, and best bacon, a leg of lamb, steak, green and red peppers, radice, potatoes, tin foil, a litre of Scotch. And who was there when his hand reached for these items? Someone who followed him as he pushed Kate along the stacked aisles, who stood a few paces off when he stopped, who pretended to be interested in a label and then continued when he did? He had been back a thousand times, seen his own hand, a shelf, the goods accumulate, heard Kate chattering on, and tried to move his eyes, lift them against the weight of time, to find that shrouded figure at the periphery of vision, the one who was always to the side and slightly behind, who, filled with a strange desire, was calculating odds, or simply waiting. But time held his sight for ever on his mundane errands, and all about him shapes without definition drifted and dissolved, lost to categories.

Fifteen minutes later they were at the checkout. There were eight parallel counters. He joined a small queue nearest the door because he knew the girl at the till worked fast. There were three people ahead of him when he stopped the trolley and there was no one behind him when he turned to lift Kate from her seat. She was enjoying herself and was reluctant to be disturbed. She whined and hooked her foot into her seat. He had to lift her high to get her clear. He noted her irritability with absent-minded satisfaction – it was a sure sign of her tiredness. By the time this little struggle was over, there were two people
ahead of them, one of whom was about to leave. He came round to the front of the trolley to unload it on to the conveyor belt. Kate was holding on to the wide bar at the other end of the trolley, pretending to push. There was no one behind her. Now the person immediately ahead of Stephen, a man with a curved back, was about to pay for several tins of dog food. Stephen lifted the first items on to the belt. When he straightened he might have been conscious of a figure in a dark coat behind Kate. But it was hardly an awareness at all, it was the weakest suspicion brought to life by a desperate memory. The coat could have been a dress or a shopping bag or his own invention. He was intent on ordinary tasks, keen to finish them. He was barely a conscious being at all.

The man with the dog food was leaving. The checkout girl was already at work, the fingers of one hand flickering over the keypad while the other drew Stephen’s items towards her. As he took the salmon from the trolley he glanced down at Kate and winked. She copied him, but clumsily, wrinkling her nose and closing both eyes. He set the fish down and asked the girl for a carrier bag. She reached under a shelf and pulled one out. He took it and turned. Kate was gone. There was no one in the queue behind him. Unhurriedly he pushed the trolley clear, thinking she had ducked down behind the end of the counter. Then he took a few paces and glanced down the only aisle she would have had time to reach. He stepped back and looked to his left and right. On one side there were lines of shoppers, on the other a clear space, then the chrome turnstile, then the automatic doors on to the pavement. There may have been a figure in a coat hurrying away from him, but at that time Stephen was looking for a three-year-old child, and his immediate worry was the traffic.