The Child in Time (24 page)

When, the following morning, the phone rang and the Assistant Secretary came on the line, Stephen listened patiently, but he had already made up his mind. The man began by expressing regret that Stephen had jumped out of the car that had been sent for him. Stephen explained that he had gone off in pursuit of what he thought was his long-lost daughter.

‘Did the chauffeur hand in my overcoat, by the way?’

‘No. If you left it, he would have reported it, I’m certain.’ No one, it seemed, had ever failed to turn up at the lunch without giving a good reason. It was an unpardonable rudeness, but for some extraordinary reason, and the Assistant
Secretary made it clear he disapproved, Stephen was being offered a second chance, another invitation was being offered.

‘Ah well,’ Stephen said, ‘that’s too bad. I don’t want another invitation.’

The Assistant Secretary was affable in his contempt. ‘What nonsense! Why ever not?’

‘In the first place I’m busy. I’ve started a piece of work, something of a departure for me …’

‘That doesn’t stop you eating lunch.’

‘In the second, and nothing personal in this, I resent what the Prime Minister’s been doing in this country all these years. It’s a mess, a disgrace.’

‘Then why did you accept first time?’

‘I was a mess too. Depressed. Now I’m not.’

There was a pause while the Assistant Secretary adjusted his approach.

He spoke in sorrow, as though lamenting an irrefutable physical law. ‘I’m afraid Mr Lewis there’s not much I can do. The PM absolutely insists on seeing you.’

‘Oh well,’ Stephen said, ‘you know where I live,’ and replaced the receiver.

He went to the kitchen to make coffee, and ten minutes later, as he was carrying his cup through the hallway, the phone rang again. It was a very peevish Assistant Secretary.

‘As it happens, we seem to have lost your address.’

Stephen gave it, then hung up and hurried with his coffee to his desk.

Throughout the early months of the following year, the Parmenter committee edged towards agreement on the final draft of its report. Attrition, weariness, vague wording where there were insurmountable differences, smoothed the way. Helpful reversals of position, or the sudden abandonment of eccentric views without too much loss of face, were made possible by Canham’s suggestion that they meet only twice monthly, and by pleasant lunches given for individual members by Lord Parmenter. It was also suggested to the committee that, while it might not be possible to be the first of the sub-committees to deliver a finished report to the Commission, however desirable that might be, it would not do at all to be last.

Stephen made his contribution. He put forward what he thought was a balanced case, arguing on the one hand for a degree of discipline and the instillation of certain ground rules – writing was a social act, a public medium – and on the other for the imagination – writing extended the private life, idiosyncrasies should not be discouraged at its expense. This harmless argument was easily assimilable, or the first half of it was, and he was not invited to eat lunch with the chairman. On the morning Stephen spoke the committee
was more interested in deleting all references to the learning alphabet and in preventing one of the academics reading a late paper, ‘Class Ascendancy and Prescriptive Grammar’. By mid-March the report of the Parmenter Sub-committee on Reading and Writing was submitted to the Commission on Childcare. Most members felt that they had fulfilled their mandate in producing a document that was judicious in tone and authoritarian in stance. The chairman was congratulated in the press on the absence of a minority report. A farewell sherry party was held in a remote and rarely-used annexe of the Ministerial building where the thirty-year-old floral carpet was still queasily vivid, still capable of delivering an invigorating electric shock to those who touched the door or window fittings.

Stephen came late to this gathering and left early. Since Christmas the committee meetings had ceased to represent a refuge of organised time in a chaos of wasted days. The sessions now bored him and threatened his fragile routine of work, study and physical exercise. He was learning classical Arabic from Mr Cromarty, a retired don who lived alone on the floor below. Four mornings a week he went downstairs for his tutorials in Mr Cromarty’s cold, sparse study where the only source of heat was an old gas fire whose weak yellow flames seemed to exhale the very narcotic fumes referred to in the poems the old man translated for him. Stephen was not interested in the language itself, or its literature. If Mr Cromarty had offered Greek or Tagalog Stephen would have been equally satisfied. The idea was to shake himself awake by learning something difficult; he wanted rules and their exceptions and the grim absorption of learning by heart.

As it turned out, he was immediately enchanted by the alphabet. He bought a bottle of ink and a special pen with which to practise his calligraphy. Within a month he was intrigued by the grammar, by its proud dissimilarity from English, the strange predominance of verbs, the forms of
which yielded with minimal strokes subtle gradations of meaning; regret (
nadam
) became a drinking partner (
nadim
); a pomegranate, a hand-grenade; old age, freedom.

His teacher was quiet and stern in manner, and gave the impression that he would be genuinely annoyed if his pupil were ever late or failed to fulfil the daily assignments. For the tutorials Mr Cromarty wore a dark suit from the waist-coat of which he would draw a silver pocket watch and address his closing remarks to its face. His apartment had an air of dour, old-fashioned poverty – bare boards, yellowing walls with oily patches of damp, doors and skirting boards caked in flaky brown paint, a smoky paraffin heater under a bare light bulb in the hall. There were no ornaments, pictures or soft chairs, no evidence of a past. His luxuries were all in the formal, sensuous verse he loved and from which he quoted at length, first in Arabic, then in Scots English, with his eyes closed and his head lifted as though recalling another life. ‘Slender-waisted she was, and tenderly plump her ankles, shapely taut her belly, not the least flabby.’ Mr Cromarty avoided Stephen in the street and discouraged small talk of any kind before or after the hour-long sessions. Stephen never learned his Christian name.

Stephen’s other new commitment was tennis three times a week on an indoor court. He had played a mediocre game for more than twenty years, a slow decline from his late teens when he had represented his school without distinction. For the first hour he took instruction from, and in the second he played a game with, his coach, a beefy, balding American who had given him a frank summary of the task ahead after the first session. His forehand and backhand strokes would have to be scrapped and rebuilt from the start. Similarly, the footwork needed fundamental rethinking. His service could be forgotten altogether for the moment. None of these items, however, was in such urgent need of attention as Stephen’s attitude. At the time they
were standing close together on either side of the net. He was uncertain what expression to adopt as he listened to this brisk slander from a man whose considerable fee he was paying.

‘You’re passive. You’re mentally enfeebled. You wait for things to happen, you stand there hoping they’re going to go your way. You take no responsibility for the ball, you’re making no active calculations about the next move. You’re inert, spineless, you’re half asleep, you don’t like yourself. Your racket has to be going back sooner, you’ve got to be moving into the stroke, going in low, enjoying the movement. You’re not all here. Even as I’m speaking to you now you’re not all here. You think you’re too good for this game? Wake up!’

As well as his Arabic and tennis, Stephen had his work, and when he was not doing that he read indiscriminately, brick-shaped novels, international best-sellers, the kind of book whose real purpose was to explain the workings of a submarine, an orchestra or a hotel. He was beginning to feel capable of a limited social life in the evenings, but he made a point of confining himself to his well-established, undemanding friendships with other men. Before Christmas his mother had succumbed to a long illness. He made frequent visits, first to the hospital then home, and though she was in no danger, she was too weak for any but the briefest conversation. If he was not exactly happy during these months, nor was he catatonic. He sometimes felt himself to be in training for an undisclosed event; he expected change – he had no clear idea of what kind – or perhaps even upheaval, and he was on the look-out for the first signs, the first small indication that his life was about to be transformed. The long books he was reading made him think in terms of useful formulae, of tides turning, fresh winds, shadows lifting. He had no doubt, though, that he was still in the shadows; after all, he paid for his most regular weekly human contacts.

The changes came, but there were no early warnings, no emerging details to prefigure a larger scheme. Instead there was a series of sudden and seemingly unrelated developments, the first of which began starkly one evening with two short rings at his front door. He had finished supper and was about to start copying in ink part of a poem which he would be reading out to Mr Cromarty the following morning. It had been snowing lightly all day and on returning from tennis Stephen had lit a fire, which was now well in. The thick velvet curtains were drawn, he had poured himself a small glass of Armagnac – he was down to a single shot of spirits a day – and stately orchestral music was processing quietly from the radio. He had already sketched out the characters in pencil and was enjoying the prospect of forming the first character, a curved line below a triangle of dots, by wiping the gold nib with a cotton rag. When the doorbell rang he clicked his tongue in irritation, and, as he stood, took time to replace the top of his ink bottle. As he did so he wondered whether he was beginning to resemble in his unhurried movements, his annoyance at disturbance, Mr Cromarty himself.

What he saw first was blood, almost black in the dim stairwell light, completely obscuring the face of a man who held a brown paper bag against his chest. The source of the blood was not evident. It seemed to have oozed through the pores, obliterating the features so entirely that only the ears showed white. Drips were forming at the point of the chin and falling on to the package.

Into his brief, shocked silence, the man spoke quickly with cultivated hesitancy. ‘I’m awfully sorry to be bothering you at this late hour. I … I should have phoned first …’ The voice, which was familiar to Stephen, expressed no pain. The man was extending a smeared hand. ‘Harold Morley, you know, from the committee.’

‘Ah yes,’ Stephen said, opening the door wider and stepping aside. ‘You’d better come in.’ It was only when he had
closed the door that he placed Morley as the man with the phonetic alphabet, the briefest reference to which had been deleted from the final report. Morley was staring at his hand, touching his chin gently and examining the end of his fingers. ‘I tripped on your stairs.’

Stephen was leading the way into the bathroom. ‘You’re not the first.’

Morley steadied himself in the doorway while Stephen filled the basin and rolled up his sleeves. ‘Do you know, I think I might have knocked myself out for a moment or two.’

‘You’re a mess,’ Stephen said. ‘You’d better let me take a look.’

Morley spoke wonderingly. ‘I remember going down, and I remember picking myself up, but there was some time in between, I’m sure of it.’

Stephen was emptying antiseptic fluid into the water. The smell heightened his awareness of his own efficiency. Morley removed his shirt. The cut was high on the forehead, barely an inch long and already beginning to congeal. As Stephen sponged down his head and face, Morley was talking disjointedly into the reddening water, repeating his account of the fall. By the time Stephen was finished, the man’s narrow, spotty back was beginning to tremble. When he straightened he immediately lost his balance. Stephen made him sit on the edge of the bath, gave him a towel and devised a make-shift compress. By now Morley was shaking badly. Stephen gave him a thick sweater, wrapped a blanket round him, led him into the study and sat him in an armchair close to the fire. He poured out a cup of strong coffee into which he heaped a half-dozen spoonfuls of sugar. But Morley was incapable of holding the cup himself. Stephen took it for him and heard his teeth chink against the rim. Ten minutes later Morley had calmed down and was beginning an elaborate apology. Stephen told him to rest. Five minutes after that his visitor had fallen asleep.

Stephen downed his Armagnac in one, refilled the glass, and was surprised to find that he was able to continue with his preparation for the next day’s tutorial. From time to time he glanced across at Morley. The ragged compress sat comically on his head, held in place by congealed blood alone. ‘She shows me a waist slender and slight as a camel’s nose rein, and a smooth shank like the reed of a watered, bent papyrus …’ Later he stared at his finished work and longed to know if anyone other than Mr Cromarty would be able to make sense of the miniature circles, dashes and curlicues which floated freely above the lines with their sudden cruel hooks. Could they possibly be a private code, an intricate game devised by the old man to pass the years?

After a quarter of an hour’s doze, Harold Morley began to stir. Suddenly he jerked to attention in his chair, his face taut with accusation. ‘Where is it?’ he demanded, then, in an unfaltering transformation, closed his eyes and struck his face with an open hand. ‘Oh God! The taxi. I left it on the seat.’

Stephen went to the bathroom and retrieved the brown paper bag from the floor. Then he went to the kitchen for the pot of coffee. By the time he returned to the study, Morley’s memory had been restored. He was standing by the fireplace examining the mess of bandages which he had pulled clear of the wound. ‘Quite a whack,’ he said, impressed.