The Child in Time (3 page)

This was a theoretical, precautionary anxiety. As he shouldered past shoppers and emerged on to the broad pavement he knew he would not see her there. Kate was
not adventurous in this way. She was not a strayer. She was too sociable, she preferred the company of the one she was with. She was also terrified of the road. He turned back and relaxed. She had to be in the shop, and she could come to no real harm there. He expected to see her emerging from behind the lines of shoppers at the checkouts. It was easy enough to overlook a child in the first flash of concern, to look too hard, too quickly. Still, a sickness and a tightening at the base of the throat, an unpleasant lightness in the feet, were with him as he went back. When he walked past all the tills, ignoring the girl at his who was irritably trying to attract his attention, a chill rose to the top of his stomach. At a controlled run – he was not yet past caring how foolish he looked – he went down all the aisles, past mountains of oranges, toilet rolls, soup. It was not until he was back at his starting point that he abandoned all propriety, filled his constricted lungs and shouted Kate’s name.

Now he was taking long strides, bawling her name as he pounded the length of an aisle and headed once more for the door. Faces were turning towards him. There was no mistaking him for one of the drunks who blundered in to buy cider. His fear was too evident, too forceful, it filled the impersonal, fluorescent space with unignorable human warmth. Within moments all shopping around him had ceased. Baskets and trolleys were set aside, people were converging and saying Kate’s name and somehow, in no time at all, it was generally known that she was three, that she was last seen at the checkout, that she wore green dungarees and carried a toy donkey. The faces of mothers were strained, alert. Several people had seen the little girl riding in the trolley. Someone knew the colour of her sweater. The anonymity of the city store turned out to be frail, a thin crust beneath which people observed, judged, remembered. A group of shoppers surrounding Stephen moved towards the door. At his side was the girl from the checkout, her face rigid with intent. There were other
members of the supermarket hierarchy in brown coats, white coats, blue suits, who suddenly were no longer ware-housemen or sub-managers or company representatives, but fathers, potential or real. They were all out on the pavement now, some crowding round Stephen asking questions or offering consolation while others, more usefully, set off in different directions to look in the doorways of nearby shops.

The lost child was everyone’s property. But Stephen was alone. He looked through and beyond the kindly faces pressing in. They were irrelevant. Their voices did not reach him, they were impediments to his field of vision. They were blocking his view of Kate. He had to swim through them, push them aside to get to her. He had no air, he could not think. He heard himself pronounce the word ‘stolen’ and the word was taken up and spread to the peripheries, to passers-by who were drawn to the commotion. The tall girl with the fast fingers who had looked so strong was crying. Stephen had time to feel momentary disappointment in her. As if summoned by the word he had spoken, a white police car spattered with mud cruised to a halt at the kerb. Official confirmation of disaster made him nauseous. Something was rising in his throat and he bent double. Perhaps he was sick, but he had no memory of it. The next thing was the supermarket again, and this time rules of appropriateness, of social order had selected the people at his side – a manager, a young woman who might have been a personal assistant, a sub-manager and two policemen. It was suddenly quiet.

They were heading briskly towards the rear of the vast floor space. It was some moments before Stephen realised that he was being led rather than followed. The shop had been cleared of customers. Through the plate-glass window on his right he saw another policeman outside surrounded by shoppers, taking notes. The manager was talking quickly into the silence, partly hypothesising, partly
complaining. The child – he knows her name, Stephen thought, but his status prevents him from using it – the child might have wandered into the loading-bay area. They should have thought of that first. The cold-store door was sometimes left open, however often he remonstrated with his subordinates.

They quickened their pace. An unintelligible voice spoke in short bursts over a policeman’s radio. By the cheese section they passed through a door into an area where all pretences were dropped, where the plastic tiled floor gave way to one of concrete in which mica sparkled coldly, and where light came from high, bare bulbs hung from an invisible ceiling. There was a forklift truck parked by a mountain of flattened cardboard boxes. Stepping over a dirty puddle of milk, the manager was hurrying towards the cold-store door which stood ajar.

They followed him into a low, cramped room in which two aisles stretched away into semi-darkness. Tins and boxes were piled untidily into racks along the sides, and down the centre, suspended from meat-hooks, were giant carcasses. The group divided into two and set off down the aisles. Stephen went with the policemen. The cold air penetrated drily to the back of the nose and tasted of chilled tin. They walked slowly, looking into the spaces behind the boxes in the racks. One of the policemen wanted to know how long someone could last in here. Through the chinks in the meat curtain which divided them, Stephen saw the manager glance at his subordinate. The young man cleared his throat and answered tactfully that as long as you kept moving you had nothing to worry about. The vapour billowed from his mouth. Stephen knew that if they found Kate in here she would be dead. But the relief he felt when the two groups met at the far end was abstract. He had become detached in an energetic, calculating way. If she was to be found, then they would find her because he was prepared to do nothing else but search; if she was not to
be found, then, in time, that would have to be faced in a sensible, rational manner. But not now.

They stepped out into an illusory, tropical warmth and made for the manager’s office. The policemen took out their notebooks and Stephen told his story, which was energetic both in delivery and in attention to detail. He was sufficiently removed from his own feelings to take pleasure in succinctness of expression, the skilful marshalling of relevant facts. He was watching himself, and saw a man under stress behaving with admirable self-control. He could forget Kate in the meticulous detailing of her clothing, the accurate portrayal of her features. He admired also the dogged, routine questioning of the policemen, the oil and leather smell of their polished gun holsters. They and he were men united in the face of unspeakable difficulty. One of the policemen spoke his description of Kate into the radio and they heard a distorted answer from a patrol car in the neighbourhood. That was all very reassuring. Stephen was entering a state close to elation. The manager’s personal assistant was speaking to him with a concern he felt was quite misplaced. She was pressing her hand against his forearm, and urging him to drink the tea she had brought. The manager was standing just outside his office complaining to an underling that supermarkets were the favoured territory of child snatchers. The personal assistant pushed the door shut briskly with her foot. The sudden movement released perfume from the folds of her sober clothes and caused Stephen to think of Julie. He confronted a blackness which emanated from inside the front of his head. He took hold of the side of his chair and waited, let his mind empty and then, when he felt he had gained control, stood. The questioning was over. The policemen were folding away their notebooks and standing too. The personal assistant offered to escort him home, but Stephen shook his head vigorously.

Then, without any apparent interval, any connecting events, he was outside the supermarket, waiting at the zebra
crossing with half a dozen other people. In his hand was a full shopping bag. He remembered that he had not paid. The salmon and tin foil were free gifts, compensation. The traffic slowed reluctantly and stopped. He crossed with the other shoppers and tried to absorb the insult of the world’s normality. He saw how rigorously simple it was – he had gone shopping with his daughter, lost her, and was now returning without her to tell his wife. The bikers were still there, and so too, further on, was the Coca-Cola can and its straw. Even the dog was under the same tree. On his way up the stairs he paused by a broken step. There was loud crashing music in his head, a great, orchestral tinnitus whose dissonance faded as he stood there holding the banister and started up again the moment he continued.

He opened the front door and listened. The air and light in the flat told him that Julie was still asleep. He took off his coat. When he lifted it to hang it up, his stomach contracted and a bolt – he thought of it as a black bolt – of morning coffee shot into his mouth. He spat into his cupped hands and went into the kitchen to wash. He had to step over Kate’s discarded pyjamas. That seemed relatively easy. He entered the bedroom with no thought for what he was about to do or say there. He lowered himself on to the edge of the bed. Julie rolled over to face him but she did not open her eyes. She found his hand. Hers was hot, unbearably so. She said something sleepily about how cold his hand was. She drew it towards her and tucked it under her chin. Still she did not open her eyes. She luxuriated in the security of his presence.

Stephen gazed down on his wife and certain stock phrases – a devoted mother, passionately attached to her child, a loving parent – seemed to swell with fresh meaning; these were useful, decent phrases, he thought, tested by time. A neat curl of black hair lay on her cheekbone, just below her eye. She was a calm, watchful woman, she had a lovely smile, she loved him fiercely and liked to tell him.
He had built his life round their intimacy and come to depend on it. She was a violinist, she taught at the Guildhall. With three friends she had formed a string quartet. They were getting bookings and they had had one small, favourable notice in a national newspaper. The future was, had been, rich. The fingers of her left hand with their pads of toughened skin were stroking his wrist. He was looking down at her from an immense distance now, from several hundred feet. He could see the bedroom, the Edwardian apartment block, the tarred roofs of its back additions with their lop-sided, crusty cisterns, the mess of South London, the hazy curvature of the earth. Julie was barely more than a speck among the tangle of sheets. He was rising still higher, and faster. At least, he thought, from up here where the air was thin and the city below was taking on geometric design, his feelings would not show, he could retain some composure.

It was then that she opened her eyes and found his face. It took her some seconds to read what was there before she scrambled upright in the bed and made a noise of incredulity, a little yelp on a harsh intake of breath. For a moment explanations were neither possible nor necessary.

In general, the committee was not well disposed towards a phonetic alphabet. Colonel Jack Tackle of the End Domestic Violence Campaign had said it sounded like a bloody nonsense. A young woman called Rachael Murray had delivered a tense rebuttal whose reliance on the language of professional linguistics could not disguise her quivering contempt. Now Tessa Spankey beamed about her. She was a publisher of children’s books, a large woman with dimples at the base of each finger. Her face was double-chinned and friendly, all freckles and crow’s-feet. She took care to include each of them in her tender gaze. She spoke slowly and reassuringly, as though to a group of nervous
infants. There was no language in the world, she said, which was not arduous to learn to read and write. If learning could be fun, that was all very well. But fun was peripheral. Teachers and parents should embrace the fact that at the heart of language learning was difficulty. Triumph over difficulty was what gave children their dignity and a sense of mental discipline. The English language, she said, was a minefield of irregularity, of exceptions outnumbering rules. But it had to be crossed, and crossing it was work. Teachers were too afraid of unpopularity, too fond of sugaring pills. They should accept difficulty, celebrate it, and make their pupils do likewise. There was only one way to learn to spell and that was through exposure, immersion in the written word. How else – and she rattled off a well-rehearsed list – do we learn the spellings of through, tough, plough, cough and though? Mrs Spankey’s maternal gaze raked the attentive faces. Diligence, she said, application, discipline and jolly hard work.

There was a murmur of approbation. The academic who had proposed the phonetic alphabet began to talk of dyslexia, the sale of State schools, the housing shortage. There were spontaneous groans. The mild-mannered fellow pressed on. Two-thirds of eleven-year-olds in inner city schools, he said, were illiterate. Parmenter intervened with lizard-like alacrity. The needs of special groups were beyond the committee’s terms of reference. At his side, Canham was nodding. Means and ends, not pathologies, were the committee’s concerns. The discussion became fragmentary. For some reason a vote was proposed.