The Child in Time (9 page)

To women this thought was a premise. It was a constant torment or comfort, no matter how successful they were in their own or other people’s eyes. It was also a weakness and a strength. Committed motherhood denied professional fulfilment. A professional life on men’s terms eroded maternal care. Attempting both was to risk annihilation through fatigue. It was not so easy to persist when you could not believe that you were entirely the thing that you did, when you thought you could find yourself, or find another part of yourself, expressed through some other endeavour. Consequently, they were not taken in so easily by jobs and hierarchies, uniforms and medals. Against the faith men had in the institutions they and not women had shaped, women upheld some other principle of selfhood in which being surpassed doing. Long ago men had noted something unruly in this. Women simply enclosed the space which men longed to penetrate. The men’s hostility was aroused.

At last he reached the pines on the other side. He climbed a second aluminium gate which brought him, as his map had promised, on to a narrower concrete track bounded by barbed-wire fences curving through the green gloom. Afterwards, Stephen tried to recall what was on his mind as he walked the three hundred yards between the gate and a well-used minor road. But it was to remain inaccessible, a time of mental white noise. He was aware perhaps of his wet clothes. He might have considered how he would set about drying them when he arrived.

He was all the more vulnerable then to what happened when he emerged from the plantation and took in his new surroundings. He stood still, transfixed. A quick, breathy sigh escaped him. The road made a right-angled bend, and stretched away from him roughly along the line of the path. A small convoy of cars passed and seemed to make no sound. He knew this spot, knew it intimately, as if over a long period of time. The trees around him were unfolding, broadening, blossoming. One visit in the remote past would not account for this sense, almost a kind of ache, of familiarity, of coming to a place that knew him too, and seemed, in the silence that engulfed the passing cars, to expect him. What came to him was a particular day, a day he could taste. Here it was, just as it should be, the heavy, greenish air of a wet day in early summer, the misty, tranquil rain, the heavy drops which formed on and fell from the unblemished horse chestnut leaves, the sense of the trees being magnified, and purified by a rain so fine it displaced the air. It was on just such a day, he knew, that this place gained its importance.

He stood still, afraid that movement would destroy the spaciousness, the towering calm he felt about him, the vague longing in him. He had never been here before, not as a child, not as an adult. But this certainty was confused by the knowledge that he had imagined it just like this. And he had no memory of imagining it at all. With this, he knew that if he stepped from the grass verge and looked to his left he would see a phone box and, opposite, a pub set back in a gravel car-park. He went forward quickly.

He had to step out into the middle of the road before he could see round its curve. It was the way the compact, red-brick building fulfilled his expectations that gave him the first touch of fear. It was happening too quickly. How could he have expectations without memory? He was a hundred yards away with a three-quarters view of the façade. The well-kept building looked as it should. It was
a simple late-Victorian rectangular structure with a sloping red-tiled roof, and a back-addition which gave the whole the shape of the letter T. Out the back there was a derelict, once white caravan, now a potting shed. Some dishcloths were out to dry on a sagging line. At the front of the pub, to one side of the front porch, was a broken but usable wooden bench.

It all conformed. Its familiarity mocked him. A high, free-standing white post supported a sign which announced with picture and words, The Bell. The name meant nothing to him. He stood for many minutes looking, tempted to turn back, come another time and explore more closely. But it was not just a place he was being offered, it was a particular day,
this
day. He could taste the gravel’s dustiness released by rain. He was aware that the gentle, soaking spray had produced around him another countryside of once common trees – elms, chestnuts, oaks, beeches – old giants lost to the cash-crop plantations, magnificent trees whose ascendancy over the landscape was restored, settled cumuli of foliage rolling unhindered towards the North Downs.

Stephen stood on the edge of a minor road in Kent on a wet day in mid-June, attempting to connect the place and its day with a memory, a dream, a film, a forgotten childhood visit. He wanted a connection which might begin a process of explanation and allay his fear. But the call of the place, its knowingness, the longing it evinced, the rootless significance, all this made it seem quite certain, even before he could tell himself why, that the loudness – this was the word he fixed on – of this particular location had its origins outside his own existence.

He waited for fifteen minutes, then he began to walk slowly in the direction of The Bell. A sudden movement could dispel this delicate reconstruction of another time. He held himself in. It was difficult to take in the tumbling chaos of so many deciduous trees in full leaf, and the way the
misty rain magnified the bright ferns at their base to equatorial size, making rare species out of cow parsley and nettles. If he shook his head hard, he would be back among the orderly pines. He kept his gaze fixed on the building ahead. It was just past midday. The Bell would be open for its first lunchtime customers, and yet there were no cars parked on the gravel outside to diminish the impression of everything being correct, accurate in relation to a master copy.

There were no cars, but leaning by the wooden bench out the front were two old-fashioned black bicycles. One was a lady’s, both had wicker baskets. Fear was lightening his step, making his breathing shallow. He could have turned back. Julie was expecting him, he needed to do something about his wet clothes. He had to get home soon and work on the reading list for the committee. He slowed, but he did not stop. Cars passed close by. If he stepped in their path he could not be touched. The day he now inhabited was not the day he had woken into. He was lucid, determined to advance. He was in another time but he was not overwhelmed. He was a dreamer who knows his dream for what it is and, though fearful, lets it unfold out of curiosity.

He came closer to the silent building. He was an intruder. This place both concerned and excluded him, there was a delicate negotiation whose outcome he might affect adversely. He was crossing the gravel now, placing each step carefully. From a corner of the pub came the clipped sound of rain trickling into a water butt. At a distance of thirty feet the windows of the pub showed black. The building looked deserted until he shifted his position and made out dim lights inside. He had stopped in front of the small porch. The bicycles were propped against the wall, sheltered by the eaves from the rain. Their back wheels just touched the arm of the broken bench. The man’s bike was against the wall of the pub. The lady’s leaned into an awkward intimacy. The front wheels were splayed, the
pedals clumsily engaged. The machines were black and new, the maker’s name was on the upright in unblemished gold Gothic. The front baskets were clean wicker. The saddles were wide and well-sprung and gave off the delicate fecal odour of quality leather. The handlebars had off-white rubber grips with black beads of rain gathering on the chrome. He did not touch the bicycles. There was a movement inside, a figure passed in front of a light. He stepped to one side of the window, aware that he was visible to people he could not see.

It had stopped raining, but the sound of water was louder. It spilled from the cracked, mossy guttering and sounded in the rain butt, it ticked away among the leaves. He was close to the pub’s wall with an oblique view through the window into the saloon. A man was carrying two glasses of beer from the bar towards a small table where a young woman sat waiting. The table was set into a bay, and light from its windows silhouetted the couple. The man was settling himself, sedately lifting the creases of his loose, grey flannel trousers before sitting in close to the woman. They were on a bench seat built into three sides of the bay. Not recognition so much as its shadow, not its familiar sound but a brief resonance, caused Stephen to steady himself against the dry wall. His vision pulsed with the beating of his heart. Had the couple glanced up and to their left, towards the window by the door, they might have seen a phantom beyond the spotted glass, immobile with the tension of inarticulated recognition. It was a face taut with expectation, as though a spirit, suspended between existence and nothingness, attended a decision, a beckoning or a dismissal.

But the young man and woman were engrossed. He gulped his beer, a pint to her half, and talked earnestly, while her drink remained untouched. She was listening solemnly, plucking at the sleeve of her print dress, adjusting with unconscious precision the pretty clasp which kept her
trim, straight hair clear of her face. They touched hands and made determined, weak smiles; then the hands came apart and they spoke at once. The matter – for it was clearly one single subject – was not yet resolved.

As far as Stephen could see, there were no other customers. The barman, a broad, slow man, had his back turned and was fiddling with something on a shelf. The obvious thing was to enter, buy a drink and take a closer look. The idea was unattractive. Stephen kept his hand on to the wall, which was warm and reassuring to the touch. Quite suddenly, with the transforming rapidity of a catastrophe, everything was changed. His legs weakened, a chill spread downwards through his stomach. He was looking into the eyes of the woman, and he knew who she was. She had glanced up in his direction. The man was talking, making an insistent point, while the woman continued to stare. Her face showed no curiosity or shock; she simply returned Stephen’s gaze as she listened to her partner. She nodded vaguely, glanced away to reply, and then looked again towards Stephen. But she could not see him. There was nothing to suggest she had registered him in any way at all. She was not ignoring him, she was looking through him at the trees across the road. She was not looking at all, she was listening. Absurdly, he raised his hand and made an awkward gesture, something between a wave and a salute. There was no response from the young woman who he knew, beyond question, was his mother. She could not see him. She was listening to his father speak – how he recognised that way his father had of making a point with an open hand – and could not see her son. A cold, infant despondency sank through him, a bitter sense of exclusion and longing.

Perhaps he was crying as he backed away from the window, perhaps he was wailing like a baby waking in the night; to an observer he may have appeared silent and resigned. The air he moved through was dark and wet, he
was light, made of nothing. He did not see himself walk back along the road. He fell back down, dropped helplessly through a void, was swept dumbly through invisible curves and rose above the trees, saw the horizon below him even as he was hurled through sinuous tunnels of undergrowth, dank, muscular sluices. His eyes grew large and round and lidless with desperate, protesting innocence, his knees rose under him and touched his chin, his fingers were scaly flippers, gills beat time, urgent, hopeless strokes through the salty ocean that engulfed the treetops and surged between their roots; and for all the crying, calling sounds he thought were his own, he formed a single thought: he had nowhere to go, no moment which could embody him, he was not expected, no destination or time could be named; for while he moved forward violently, he was immobile, he was hurtling round a fixed point. And this thought unwrapped a sadness which was not his own. It was centuries, millennia old. It swept through him and countless others like the wind through a field of grass. Nothing was his own, not his strokes or his movement, not the calling sounds, not even the sadness, nothing was nothing’s own.

When Stephen opened his eyes he was lying on a bed, Julie’s bed, under an eiderdown, clasping against his chest a tepid hot-water bottle. Across the little room, most of whose space was taken by the bed, was an open door to the bathroom from which rolled a cloud of steam, yellowish in the electric light, and the thunder of running water. He closed his eyes. This bed was a wedding gift from friends he had not seen in years. He tried to remember their names, but they were gone. In it, or on it, his marriage had begun and, six years later, ended. He recognised a musical creak when he moved his legs, he smelled Julie on the sheets and banked-up pillows, her perfume and the close, soapy essence which characterised her newly washed linen. Here
he had taken part in the longest, most revealing and, later, most desolate conversations of his life. He had had the best sex ever here, and the worst wakeful nights. He had done more reading here than in any other single place – he remembered
Anna Karenina
and
Daniel Deronda
in one week of illness. He had never lost his temper so thoroughly anywhere else, nor been so tender, protective, comforting, nor, since early childhood, been so cared for himself. Here his daughter had been conceived and born. On this side of the bed. Deep in the mattress were the traces of pee from her early morning visits. She used to climb between them, sleep a little then wake them with her chatter, her insistence on the day beginning. As they clung to their last fragments of dreams, she demanded the impossible: stories, poems, songs, invented catechisms, physical combat, tickling. Nearly all evidence of her existence, apart from photographs, they had destroyed or given away. All the worst and the best things that had ever happened to him had happened here. This was where he belonged. Beyond all immediate considerations, like the fact that his marriage was more or less finished, there was his right to lie here now in the marriage bed.