The Child in Time (14 page)

He was unimpressed by Stephen’s interview with the Prime Minister. ‘They’re all out for what they can get, son. I’ve told you before, you’re wasting your time there. This report’s already been written in secret and the whole thing’s a load of rubbish anyway. These committees are a lot of flannel as far as I can see. Professor So-and-So and Lord So-and-So! It’s to make people believe the report when they read it, and most people are such bloody fools, they will believe it. Lord So-and-So put his name to this so it must be true! And who is this Lord? Some Joe who’s said the right things all his life, offended no one and made himself some money. The right word in the right ear and he’s on the honours list, then suddenly he’s a god, his word is law. He’s a god. Lord So-and-So said this, Lord So-and-So thinks that. That’s the trouble with this country, too much bowing and scraping, everyone kow-towing to Lords and Sirs, no one thinking for themselves! No, I’d jack it in if I were you, son. You’re wasting your time there. Get on and write a book. It’s time you did. Kate’s not coming back, Julie’s gone. You might as well get on with it.’

The speech was not planned, and it surprised both of them. Stephen shook his head, but he could think of nothing to say. Mr Lewis settled back in his chair. The two men raised their glasses and drank deeply.

There was a minute or two, just before dinner, when Stephen was alone indoors. His father had gone into the kitchen to help out. The room extended from the back to the front of the house, with the dining table at one end and the three-piece suite at the other. This was his parents’ last house, and the first they had been able to furnish to their own taste. All about were objects collected from many postings, things put away in boxes and stored for years ‘till we have our own house’ – a phrase he remembered from his
earliest childhood. The ashtray with the leather thongs was in place, and the silhouetted palm trees and the North African brass pots. On the sideboard was his mother’s collection of crystal and cut-glass animals, cutely represented, spiky and heavy to hold. He balanced on his palm a mouse with bead eyes and nylon whiskers.

On the dining table were wine glasses with long, green-tinted stems. He used to think of them as ladies with long-sleeved gloves. The place mats bore the RAF insignia, the coffee spoons the crests of towns Stephen had visited – Vancouver, Ankara, Warsaw. It was odd, the ease with which a whole past could be fitted into one room, placed out of time and bound by a blend of familiar smells which had no date – lavender polish, cigarettes, scented soap, roasting meat. These objects, this particular perfume – already his resolutions, the precise importance of his enquiries, were beginning to elude him. He had some questions, some topics he wanted to raise, but he was comfortably vague from three cans of beer, and hungry too, and now his mother was passing the covered bowls of vegetables through the serving hatch and they were to be placed on the hotplates; his father had brought in a bottle of his wine, home-made in four weeks from a special kit, and was filling the glasses, topping the meniscus as was his habit; the first course was in place, each melon slice with its lurid cherry. He sat down gratefully, and when his parents had settled too, the three raised their glasses and his mother said, ‘Welcome home, son!’

When Stephen looked at his parents’ faces it was not the effects of age he saw so much as the devastation of Kate’s disappearance. She was rarely mentioned now, which was why he had been surprised twenty minutes before. The loss of their only grandchild had whitened his father’s hair in two months, and made his mother’s eyes sink into wrinkled pits. They had built their retirement years around their granddaughter for whom this room had been a paradise of
forbidden objects. She could pass half an hour alone, her chin propped on the sideboard, meandering through obscure dialogues in which she did the voices of the glass menagerie in high squeaks. Beyond the physical signs, Stephen had seen nothing of his parents’ sorrow. They had not wanted to add to his burden. It was typical of what bound the three of them that they had never been able to grieve Kate together, and that to say her name, as his father had done, was to break an unspoken rule.

It was not until the end of the meal that Stephen made the effort and raised the subject of the bicycles. He had this memory, he told them, which he could not quite place. He described the child seat, the track towards the sea, the shingle bank and the thunderous noise behind it. His father was shaking his head defiantly, as he often did when faced with the irretrievable past. But Mrs Lewis was quick.

‘That was Old Romney, in Kent. We had a week there once.’ She touched her husband’s forearm. ‘Don’t you remember, we borrowed the bikes back off Stan. Those old things. We stayed a week, and not a day it didn’t rain.’

‘Never been to Old Romney in my life,’ Stephen’s father said, but he was hesitant now, waiting to be convinced.

‘Something to do with a course you were on and you had a week’s leave. We stayed in a bed and breakfast, I can’t remember her name now, but quite nice, very clean.’

‘You borrowed the bikes back,’ Stephen said.

‘That’s right. We had them years, bought them new and gave them to your Uncle Stan when we got posted overseas.’

This time his father was unequivocal. ‘We had all sorts of bikes but we never had new ones. Couldn’t have afforded it. Not then.’

‘Well, I tell you, we did, on the never-never, and we gave them to Stan and borrowed them back to go to Old Romney.’

His certainty about the bikes had fortified his resistance to Old Romney. ‘Never been near the place. Not even near it.’

To conceal her annoyance, Stephen’s mother had stood
to gather in the plates. She lowered her voice in anger. ‘You forget what suits you.’

Mr Lewis was filling the glasses and giving Stephen a comical look which said, Look what I’ve got myself into now.

Good humour returned easily enough over coffee when the conversation turned to the funeral of an elderly relative who had been buried in Wimbledon cemetery the week before. Stephen’s mother told the story, breaking off to wipe the tears from her eyes. A little boy, a great grandchild of the deceased, had thrown a teddy bear into the grave during the service, and there it lay, on its back on the coffin, gazing up at the mourners with one eye missing. The kid set up a terrible commotion above the vicar’s drone. There were snorts of laughter, and angry stares from the family’s side. Nobody wanted to climb down and retrieve the thing and so it was buried with the dead.

‘And more grieved for,’ added Stephen’s father who had heard the story through again with a huge grin.

When the three set about the washing up, they followed the old routine. His mother made a start at the kitchen sink while Stephen and his father cleared away. When there were enough plates and dishes to be dried, Stephen went into the kitchen to make a start. When his father had finished clearing the table, he wiped it down. Then he joined the other two where he dried and put away. Mrs Lewis always dismissed the men from her kitchen in order to wash and dry the baking and roasting tins herself. This operation had about it elements of dance, ritual and military manoeuvre. Now that his own arrangements were so chaotic, Stephen found the process soothing where once it had filled him with despair. During the second stage, when his father was energetically buffing the dining-room table, and Stephen was alone in the kitchen with his mother, he asked about the bicycles again. When were they bought?

She was not curious why he wanted to know. Holding
her gloved hands under the suds, she tilted her head and considered. ‘Before you were born. Before we were married, because we used to go courting on them. They were beauties, black with gold writing, weighed a ton.’

‘Do you know a pub called The Bell near Otford in Kent?’

She shook her head. ‘Is that near Old Romney?’ she asked as Mr Lewis entered the kitchen. With precisely the impulse he had intended to resist – the impulse to make the evening pass smoothly, not to provoke dissent, however minor – Stephen refrained from further questions.

When everything was washed and put away in its proper place, they sat and chatted until it was time for him to set off for the last train. They gathered on the front doorstep in the warm air for farewells. A familiar sadness came over his parents, their voices were muted, though their words were cheerful enough. It was partly, he supposed, because he was leaving home again, as he had so many times in thirty years, each occasion an unrecognised enactment of the first; and partly because he was leaving alone, without wife or daughter, daughter-in-law or granddaughter. Whatever the cause, it would remain unspoken. As always, they stayed out on the front path waving at their son as he receded in the sodium dusk, waving, resting their hands, then waving again as they had on the desert airstrip, until a slight bend in the street lost him to their view. It was as if they wanted to see for themselves that he was not going to change his mind, turn round and come back home.

Stephen was driving a hired car along a deserted minor road, eastwards towards central Suffolk. The sunroof was open wide. He had tired of searching for tolerable music on the radio and was content with the rush of warm air and the novelty of driving for the first time in over a year. A postcard he had written to Julie was in his back pocket. She seemed to want to be left alone. He was uncertain whether to post it. The sun was high behind him, giving a visibility of luminous clarity. The road was flanked by concrete irrigation ditches and made wide curves through miles of conifer plantation set well back beyond a wide swathe of tree stumps and dried out bracken. He had slept well the night before, he remembered later. He was relaxed but reasonably alert. His speed was somewhere between
seventy and seventy-five, which dropped only a little as he came up behind a large pink lorry.

In what followed, the rapidity of events was accommodated by the slowing of time. He was preparing to overtake when something happened – he did not quite see what – in the region of the lorry’s wheels, a hiatus, a cloud of dust, and then something black and long snaked through a hundred feet towards him. It slapped the windscreen, clung there a moment and was whisked away before he had time to understand what it was. And then – or did this happen in the same moment? – the rear of the lorry made a complicated set of movements, a bouncing and swaying, and slewed in a wide spray of sparks, bright even in sunshine. Something curved and metallic flew off to one side. So far Stephen had had time to move his foot towards the brake, time to notice a padlock swinging on a loose flange, and ‘Wash me please’ scrawled in grime. There was a whinnying of scraped metal and new sparks, dense enough to form a white flame which seemed to propel the rear of the lorry into the air. He was applying first pressure to the brake as he saw the dusty, spinning wheels, the oily bulge of the differential, the camshaft, and now, at eye level, the base of the gear box. The upended lorry bounced on its nose once, perhaps twice, then lazily, tentatively, began to complete the somersault, bringing Stephen the inverted radiator grill, the downward flash of windscreen and a deep boom as the roof hit the road, rose again several feet, fell back, and surged along before him on a bed of flame. Then it swung its length round to block the road, fell on to its side and stopped abruptly as Stephen headed into it from a distance of less than a hundred feet and at a speed which he estimated, in a detached kind of way, to be forty-five miles an hour.

Now, in this slowing of time, there was a sense of a fresh beginning. He had entered a much later period in which all the terms and conditions had changed. So these were
the new rules, and he experienced something like awe, as though he were walking alone into a great city on a newly discovered planet. There was space too for a little touch of regret, genuine nostalgia for the old days of spectacle, back then when a lorry used to caterpult so impressively before the impassive witness. Now was a more demanding time of effort and concentration. He was pointing the car towards a six-foot gap formed between a road sign and the front bumper of the motionless lorry. He had removed his foot from the brakes, reasoning – and it was as if he had just completed a monograph on the subject – that they were pulling the car to one side, interfering with his aim. Instead he was changing down through the gears and steering with both hands firmly, but not too tightly, on the wheel, ready to bring them up to cover his head if he missed. He beamed messages, or rather messages sprang from him, to Julie and Kate, nothing more distinct than pulses of alarm and love. There were others he should send to, he knew, but time was short, less than half a second, and fortunately they did not come to mind to confuse him. As he shifted to second and the small car gave out a protesting roar, it was clear that he must not think too hard, that he had to trust to a relaxed and dissociated thinking, that he must imagine himself into the gap. On the sound of this very word, which he must have spoken aloud, there was a brisk crunch of metal and glass and he was through and coming to a halt, with his door handle and wing mirror scattered across the road fifty feet behind.

Before the relief, before the shock, came an intense hope that the driver of the lorry had witnessed this feat of driving. Stephen sat motionless, still holding the steering wheel, watching himself through the eyes of the man in the vehicle behind. If not the driver, then a passer-by would do, some farmer perhaps, someone who understood driving and would have the full measure of his accomplishment. He wanted applause, he wanted a passenger in
the front seat turning to him now with shining eyes. In fact, he wanted Julie. He began to laugh and shout, ‘Did you see that? Did you see that?’ And then, ‘You did it! You did it!’ The whole experience had lasted no longer than five seconds. Julie would have appreciated what had happened to time, how duration shaped itself round the intensity of the event. They would be talking about it now, thrilled to be alive, curious to understand what it must mean, what significance it had for their future. He laughed again, louder, and whooped. They would be kissing, taking one of the bottles of champagne from the back seat, beginning to undress each other, celebrating their survival in the settling dust. What a time they were having! He put his hands over his face and cried briefly and messily. He blew his nose hard on a yellow duster supplied by the hire firm, and got out of the car.