The Child in Time (21 page)

The disintegration of a contemporary marriage had been the subject of dozens of novels he had read in the past twenty years, of films he could no longer remember, of easy gossip, or earnest debate among concerned friends; he had gone drinking with the protagonists, or held their hands and listened, or given them house room. On one occasion, when he was barely twenty, he had become involved to the extent of breaking into his lover’s husband’s house and stealing, or retrieving, the washing machine – a foolish act of devotion. He had half read long articles in magazines and newspapers; marriage was a dying institution because more people got divorced than ever before, or it was thriving because more people got married more often than ever before; they had higher expectations, they were trying to get it right. Now that Stephen had joined the throng he expected, with so much reading and talking and listening behind him, to be an expert, like everybody else. But it was as if he was trying to write afresh a book which had already been written. The ground was so well prepared, planted up with myth and cliché, and the tradition so firmly established, that he could no more think clearly about his own situation than a Medieval painter could, by taking thought, invent perspective.

For example, he made long and eloquent speeches in his mind to Julie, which he revised and extended over the months. These were founded upon the unhelpful idea of a final truth, an irrefutable overview amounting to a verdict, whose clarity and force – if only she could be exposed to it – would not fail to convince Julie that her understanding of their situation and her behaviour in response to it was deeply flawed. He must have picked up that habit of mind from spending so long listening to the protestations of injured parties. In any other matter he accepted, with resignation, the fact that the way people understood things had a lot to do with the way people were, how they had been shaped, what they wanted; tricks of rhetoric would not shift them.

Equally there were ready-made roles he could adopt for both of them, many of them contradictory, mutually exclusive. There were times, for example, when he thought that Julie’s problem was weakness – she simply did not have the force of character to see out a difficult time with him. In which case it was just as well she had gone. She had been tested, and had failed. But this was not quite enough; he wanted to tell her she was weak; more than that, he wanted her to know it, the way he did. Otherwise she would go on behaving as if she were strong. And there were other times, when his spirits were low, when he thought of himself as the innocent victim – he did not like to use the word weak here. Then he was displeased by the way his own life had shrivelled to nothing, while hers was so contentedly self-sufficient. This was because she had used him, stolen from him. He had gone out searching for their daughter while she sat at home. When he had failed to find her, Julie had blamed him and left, her head full of cant about the proper way to mourn. The proper way! Who was she to lay down rules about that? Had he found Kate, then his methods would never have been in doubt, though Julie would surely have found a
way to claim credit. By my inaction, he heard her announce, I moved you to strenuous efforts.

This was a short distance from another well-prepared channel, the argument from malice. Julie had been waiting for an excuse to leave the marriage, being too great a moral coward to do so on the basis of her own grievances. She had used Kate’s disappearance to effect her own. Or, more elaborately, she had wanted him out of her way, Kate was living with her in secret, the abduction in the supermarket had been carefully and cynically planned, probably with the help of some old lover. Or a new one. While he believed none of this, thinking it gave him a certain self-destructive and sentimental pleasure, it helped work up the rage to move him to unfold one of his set speeches, one of the final verdicts which, it would be suddenly apparent, needed adjustment, stronger words, harsher truths.

There was no succour to be had from the legends and symbology, the great, enveloping tradition of marital breakdown, for like many before him, he thought his own case was unique. His difficulties were not bred from within, like other people’s, they did not grow out of anything so banal as sexual boredom or financial pressure. There had been a malevolent intervention and – he kept coming back to this – Julie had left. He was still there, in the same old flat, and Julie had gone.

Much later he was to realise that he never really thought about his situation at all, for thought implied something active and controlled; instead images and arguments paraded in front of him, a mocking, malicious, paranoid, contradictory, self-pitying crowd. He had no clarity, no distance, he was never looking for a way through. There was no purpose to his brooding. He was the victim, not the progenitor, of his thoughts. They washed over him most effectively when he offered them a drink, or when he was tired, or waking from deep sleep. There were times when they left him in peace for days on end, and when they
resumed he was too immediately immersed to propose the simple question – what did this preoccupation amount to? Any drunk in a bar could have told Stephen that he was still in love with his wife, but Stephen was a little too clever for that, too in love with thought.

While a man with a trim black toothbrush moustache explained why children’s books should not be illustrated, Stephen gazed into his lap and drifted away. At some level desire powered his thoughts, but it was rarely a conscious element. When he remembered his last visit to Julie’s house, what came to mind was the stifling awkwardness towards the end, and the sense of everything having been played out. He did not dwell on the intimacy and pleasure because they did not match the self-protective mesh of his preoccupations. But because he was happier, however superficially, because there had been just a touch of tension, the briefest moment, in the glance he had exchanged with Rachael Murray, today he was disposed to gentler currents of vague longing and remorse. He heard Julie’s voice, not speaking words and sentences, but her voice in abstract – its pitch, which was low, its rhythms, the melody of her phrases. When she was insistent or excited, she broke register in a sweet way. He tried to make this voice say something to him, but none of the words sounded like hers. Then it was all the more intimate for being wordless, a purer expression of character. It murmured, he heard it as though through a thick wall. The tone was neither loving nor aggressive. It was Julie in her speculative mood, describing a course of action they might take, something they might achieve together. A holiday, a new set of colours for a room, or a more ambitious project?

He strained to hear her. He saw her in characteristic pose, in an armchair, one foot on the floor, her other knee raised to support her crossed arms which in turn supported her chin. She was proposing a difficult undertaking. She appeared excited as she made her proposals, but her voice
was level and certain. Now he had her with legs folded beneath her, hands folded across her belly. She stared at him, silent, contentedly secretive. She wore a patched-up pair of old corduroys and a loose shirt with billowing sleeves and many pleats. She was plump and comfortable. He was remembering her pregnant. He thought of her buttocks, the smoothness of their concavities. He saw his hand resting there, and then, unaccountably, his thoughts slid away and he was thinking of her two brothers, both doctors, obsessed with their work and their large families. There came to mind the small army of her nephews and nieces, the presents he and Julie bought for them every Christmas; now he saw her tough, grizzled mother who worked for a charity and kept a small flat crammed with photographs and mementoes – old toys, cracked dolls, rock, stamp, egg and feather collections, and in thick albums numbered by years, a picture of Julie with an Alice band, displaying a pet rabbit in a passionate grip, Julie with a foot on each brother’s shoulder. And Julie’s father, dead when his children were teenagers, kept alive in family mythology and still cried for occasionally by Julie and her mother.

An inventory proliferated outwards to remoter stretches of Julie’s family: an architect uncle who had been to prison, her women friends, her ex-lovers, one of whom he was fond of, her work, the French family that adopted her in her teens and still invited her over to their dismal château; and inwards, to the pomander she kept in her drawer full of sweaters, her taste for exotic underwear and brightly coloured woollen socks, the calloused skin on her heels and the pumice stone she used, the puckered disc on her hand from an old dog bite, no sugar in her coffee, honey in her tea, an aversion to beetroot, fish roe, cigarettes, radio drama … His sorrow was in the uselessness of all this knowledge. He had made himself an expert in a subject which no longer existed, his skills were outdated.

He looked across the table at Rachael Murray. With one
hand she pinched her forehead with forefinger and thumb, with the other she was taking notes. Now and then she pushed her hair clear of her eyes with an abrupt, irritable movement. He heard himself addressed in the kind of high style adopted by newspaper leaders when they pronounced on the subject of national decline – an airy harangue that had sounded all his adult life. A new role in the world had yet to be found, the challenge of the future would be the mastery of new forms of expertise, old skills must be replaced by new skills – the alternative was perpetual redundancy. Was he up to the task? Involuntarily he shook his head.

He saw his hand on Julie’s thigh just before she rose from the bed and, naked, crossed the room. The bare boards creaked. It was cold, her breath was visible as she opened a drawer and pulled on a shirt. She was standing at the foot of the bed, looking at him as she wiggled into her knickers. She dropped a thick, winter skirt over her head and as she fastened it at the waist she half smiled at him and spoke. It seemed important.

On a mild morning shortly before Christmas, Stephen stood in his underwear and examined the selection of suits in his wardrobe, and in a mood of political, or childish, defiance chose the most worn and least clean. On the jacket black threads hung where a button should have been, and there was a small burn, a precise, brown-fringed hole inches above the knee. He took out a white shirt with a faded, three-year-old, sickle-shaped bolognese stain down the front. His overcoat, which was expensive and relatively new, detracted from the effect, but that could be removed when he arrived. He sat in it in the kitchen drinking coffee and reading the paper until his doorbell rang. He went down and found a uniformed chauffeur, pallid and tubby, looking about him with distaste.

‘This your place?’ the man asked, incredulous. Stephen made no reply, and they set out across the mud and round the litter-crammed puddles to where the car was parked, four wheels up on the pavement and all indicators flashing. It was the same beaten-up model that used to call at Eaton Square for Charles.

In retaliation, Stephen called across the roof to the chauffeur who was fiddling with the door key, ‘This can’t be it, surely.’ He got in the front. With his heavy overcoat and the man’s girth it was a squeeze and their shoulders were rammed tight together.

The chauffeur breathed heavily as he fumbled for the ignition. Now his tone was almost apologetic. ‘It’s all allocated, see? Nothing to do with me. One day it’s a Rolls, the next it’s rubbish like this.’ The engine started and he added, ‘It all depends who you’re picking up, see?’

They lurched out into the stream of traffic which was moving a little faster than walking pace. A jet of very hot air was blowing against Stephen’s trouser leg, releasing a blend of odours. He reached forwards in the confined space and pushed and pulled at the ventilation controls which swung back and forth freely, attached to nothing. ‘Nah,’ said the chauffeur, shaking his head. He wound down his window. But by now the traffic had come to a halt and the temperature in the car was rising steadily. While Stephen grunted with the exertion of getting out of his coat, the chauffeur began an explanation involving split pins and wing nuts and dual connecting rods, and by the time Stephen, all irritable and hot, had thrown the coat over his shoulder on to the back seat, the account had widened to embrace deficiencies in the management of the car pool, the compulsory overtime, the victimisation of certain drivers like himself who did not falsify their petrol chits or make out fake job claims or sell whatever they happened to hear to the newspapers.

Stephen wound his window down and leaned out with both elbows on the sill.

The chauffeur was relaxing into his monologue. ‘Take the case of one Mr Symes,’ he said, and drummed on the steering wheel with extended forefingers. The traffic was starting up again. They moved slowly across the lights and then, where two streams of cars merged, they stopped again. They were taking Stephen’s morning route to Whitehall. He should have walked. They edged forwards a little further and began to draw level with the local primary and junior school. ‘Do you know when he last drove a car out? Can you make a guess?’ Because his head was half out the window Stephen’s negative was lost, but the fat chauffeur did not mind. It was late-morning break, the playground swarmed. They came alongside a football game, roughly twenty-five a side. Seven- and eight-year-olds were playing with violent competence. Passing movements swept one way and then the other across the asphalt; to the sound of first names and obscenities shouted in urgent falsetto, high balls were fought for in the air; midfield players fed the attackers and then hung back. ‘Nineteen eighty-five. That’s when. Hasn’t been out on a job since then. Nineteen eighty-five. And do you know who he took then, who he was driving, because this is the point?’