The Child in Time (20 page)

He took the box from a pile of fifty or so. There was no room for it in the basket. As he crossed to the checkout, he was suddenly impatient to be home with his choices, to set them out and rehearse once more the reason for each one. Even better if Julie could have gone through them with him,
she would have had ideas of her own, producing a richer set of possibilities, a greater offering to fate … But he knew what was real, he thought, as he handed over a surprisingly large sum of money. He knew that Julie was in her damp cottage with her partitas, with her notebooks and sharpened pencils, writing him painstakingly out of her existence. In his haste he forgot his umbrella by the entrance, but he was confirmed in his bold impulses when it stopped raining as he crossed the empty car-park outside the store.

At home he unpacked the walkie-talkie last. As he inserted the batteries, a rectangle of paper fell into his hand. The maximum range of this device, it announced, is in accordance with Government legislation. He placed one set on the floor at the end of his long hallway, near the front door. He took several paces backwards, lifted the other set to his mouth and pressed the transmitting button. He had intended to say one, two, three, but because there was no one there to judge him, because he knew exactly what he was doing, and that he was not mad, he began to sing Happy Birthday in a croaky baritone, all the while retreating up the hall. It was a crude representation of a voice he heard from the other end, tinny, crackling, with rustling consonants and muffled vowels. It could indeed have been a broadcast from the moon. But it worked, it would be fun. When he was a little more than a dozen paces away and on the penultimate line of his song, the transmission ceased. He took a step forward and it resumed, so he stood there, just within range, to finish the last line. This was a machine to encourage proximity. It belonged in the plan.

It was early in the afternoon, while he was wrapping the presents, that his jauntiness began to fade and he felt the first ache of pointlessness. He had been whistling and he stopped abruptly, a long nail smeared with fake blood in his hand. Meaning was draining fast. He did not wish to leave half the presents unwrapped. He pressed on with less care. The black cat’s tail protruded from the paper and gave
itself away. He went to the kitchen for a fresh bottle of Scotch and returned to the sitting room. More than fifteen misshapen packages in red paper were spread about the floor. What dismayed him was the quantity. He had intended one gift, one purely symbolic item with which to protest her absence, assert his playfulness, blackmail fate. Now this pile mocked him for weak-headedness. It was a pathetic abundance. He heaped the parcels on to the table, packing them close to make them seem fewer.

He found himself at his usual place by the open window. The logical thing to do on Kate’s birthday was to visit Julie. He could stop by The Bell at the same time, see if anything happened. In order to keep busy, he spent a quarter of an hour on the phone checking train times, changing his shoes, bolting the door on to the fire escape. He put a notebook and pen into his coat pocket. Then he returned to the window. Traffic, steady drizzle, shoppers waiting patiently at the zebra crossing, it was a wonder that there could be so much movement, so much purpose, all the time. He himself had none at all. He knew he wasn’t going. He felt the air leaving him slowly, without a sound, and his chest and spine shrink. Almost three years on and still stuck, still trapped in the dark, enfolded with his loss, shaped by it, lost to the ordinary currents of feeling that moved far above him and belonged exclusively to other people. He brought to mind the three-year-old, the springy touch of her, how she fitted herself so comfortably round his body, the solemn purity of her voice, the wet red and white of tongue and lips and teeth, the unconditional trust. It was getting harder to recall. She was fading, and all the time his useless love was swelling, encumbering and disfiguring him like a goitre. He thought, I want you. I want you back. I want you brought back now. I don’t want anything else. All I want to do is to want you to come back. It became an incantation whose rhythm narrowed to a throb, a physical pain, until all that went before was held in the words, It hurts.
Hunched by the window with his empty glass, Stephen let his thoughts wither to those two words.

He remained immobile, unaware of the passage of time. For a while it stopped raining, then it resumed, a heavier downpour. At last he heard from another flat the remote chime of a clock striking two, reminding him of something he did not want to miss. He came away from the window, averting his gaze from the pile on the table, and turned on the television. Fractionally before the vision came the sound, the energetic drone of a familiar host’s voice. He settled back and reached for the bottle.

During this inert time, friends returning home from summer trips abroad phoned to find out how Stephen was and whether he would like to join them for lunch or dinner. He would stand by the phone in his pyjamas and make himself sound wide-awake and friendly, but firm. He had started a book, something of a departure from the usual thing, he was working night and day and determined not to break his stride. He told the lie half a dozen times in a fortnight and worked it up so convincingly that he began to long for it to be true. To be lost to a daily quota of typewritten words, to pass the evenings under his lamp scrawling over them in black ink, to retype and, next day, press on into the unravelling of something only half known – he could almost believe himself as he made his apologies down the phone. But he knew he did not have the stamina, the essential optimism that made the effort of writing possible. As for ideas, the very word made him weary. His friends were understanding and, touchingly, excited on his behalf, and it was at this point that he would become a little ashamed of his fiction and try to wind up the conversation as rapidly as he could. This in itself was interpreted as an eagerness to be back at work. When he returned to his couch, his drink and the TV he would be distracted for an hour or so, unable to concentrate.

One call, however, was different. A cautiously enunciating voice asked if it was talking to Stephen Lewis, and then introduced itself by a lengthy title whose key words alone he managed to grasp – Assistant Secretary, Cabinet, Department, Protocol. Every three months, the Assistant Secretary explained, the Prime Minister gave a lunch at Downing Street for a few people, not politicians, who were distinguished in their fields. Such occasions were informal and intimate, and not widely publicised. What was said at them was considered off the record. Journalists were not often invited. Dress for men was lounge suit and tie, nothing flamboyant. Steel-tipped shoes were not acceptable. Smoking would be permitted after lunch, but not before. Guests, of whom there were only four on each occasion, were to present themselves a full hour before the lunch began to the Cabinet Office in Whitehall and make themselves known to the reception there. They should be understanding and patient while they allowed themselves to be thoroughly searched by two members of their own sex. Recording and photographic equipment would be confiscated and destroyed. Personal objects such as nail scissors and files, steel combs, metal pens, spectacle cases and loose change would be confiscated and returned later. Guests should present to reception two recent, passport-sized colour photographs of themselves signed on the back. One of these would be used in the laminated security clearance card which was to be worn on the left lapel at all times. The second photograph was for office purposes and would not be returned. The lunches were relaxed affairs at which there was no set agenda for conversation which was usually free-ranging and of mutual interest. The following topics, however, were not expected to be raised since they were covered quite adequately by the Prime Minister in the House and in various speeches and broadcasts: defence, unemployment, religion, the private conduct of any Cabinet Minister or the date of the next general election. The lunch
would begin at one and end ten minutes after the serving of coffee.

The Assistant Secretary paused. Stephen had been preparing his excuse, the work he had started, the new ground he thought he was breaking and so on. But as the limitations to the event proliferated, so, perversely, did his interest grow.

‘I take it you’re inviting me,’ he said at last.

‘Well, not quite. I am phoning to discover what your attitude would be if, and I only say if, you were to receive an invitation.’

Stephen sighed. From the living room came laughter and a sharp round of applause. A particularly helpless young couple were in separate sound-proofed booths exposing each other’s sexual quirks. He stretched the telephone lead into the room, but he had moved the set only the day before and it was just out of his sight.

The Assistant Secretary was not moved by Stephen’s diffidence. He explained, as though to a child, ‘The Prime Minister does not like to be refused and it is part of my job to make sure this never happens. Invitations are issued only to those likely to accept them. This conversation now, however, should not be treated as an invitation. I would simply like to know your attitude in the event of your receiving one.’

‘I’ll come,’ Stephen said as he squinted past the door jamb at a portion of the television screen. The couple were out of the booths. The man was sobbing into his hands and was trying to leave the stage. The host had him firmly by the elbow though.

‘You mean you’d come if you were invited.’

‘Right.’

‘Then an invitation may or may not be on its way to you,’ the Assistant Secretary said, and rang off. Stephen hurried into the living room.

It was a pleasure when mid-October came at last and it was time to walk the noisy route to Whitehall once more, collar turned up, umbrella held high. The air was keen and dust-free, the rush-hour crowd pushed forward quickly, purposefully; the year was hurrying to its end faster than ever before, having skipped a season, and there was an anticipatory sense of fresh beginnings. Stephen strode out, stepping in the gutter where necessary to overtake. To have a destination, a place where you were expected, a shred of identity, was such a relief after a month of game shows and Scotch. To show his pass to the familiar, taciturn guard, to saunter across the marble hall among well-dressed, self-important people, to penetrate deep into the building, knowing without giving the matter a thought which staircases and corridors to take, to arrive at just the room and make small talk with colleagues, to sip coffee from the plastic cups bearing the Ministry’s stamp, bought from a machine in the corridor which dispensed onion soup down the same nozzle – it was for little repetitions like these that people kept their jobs, however dull, and it was all Stephen could do to refrain from bursting into song.

Instead, he jingled his house keys in his pockets. Here was Emma Carew who laughed at everything he said and whose neck tendons were ready to snap in merriment, and Colonel Tackle who gave Stephen’s hand a manly squeeze and talked about tomato growing in a rainless summer. Hermione Sleep, who wore a silk scarf wound round her head and who still remembered his audience with the Prime Minister, sounded him out about dinner. He met a questioning glance from Rachael Murray who kept to the far side of the room, well away from the chatter. They had exchanged phone numbers at the end of the last session before the break and neither one had called. In his happiness Stephen regretted this and resolved to see her. By the tall windows the three academics and several others were starting up a loud seminar of their own. Then Lord
Parmenter arrived in a grey pinstripe on whose lapel was a miniature red rose. As though snatching a moment of private prayer, he stood by the door and lowered his head, which was resplendently bronzed. Then he gargled the room to order.

There were opening formalities. Eventually Canham cleared his throat loudly and stood to read out some draft proposals for their final report. There followed twenty minutes of rambling, muted dissent, until Parmenter intervened. These matters could be discussed later for it was time to take further evidence, and visitors should not be kept waiting. So the committee took evidence, dull depositions from two experts, and Stephen gave himself over once more to the luxury of structured daydreaming.