The Child in Time (32 page)

He walked behind a clattering cart laden with bundles of semi-pornographic magazines. When it stopped he went forward to ask the driver if there was a mail train leaving for Dover. The man shrugged and re-phrased the question for the benefit of the porters who were preparing to unload the cart. Two-twenty, they murmured in ragged sequence, an hour and a half ago. Stephen was about to walk away when one of the porters, a boy in his teens, spoke out with a train spotter’s intensity.

‘’S’only maintenance going down there now.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘You won’t get on him.’ All the same, he pointed to where the platform ramp sloped down into the night.

Stephen thanked him and walked on, ignoring a sharp call of ‘Oi!’ at his back which was followed, encouragingly, by loud laughter.

The platform dropped away from under the station roof past a warning sign to passengers not to advance further, and out among the mess of rails along a narrow, cinder path. Two hundred yards ahead, in a siding lit by high arc-lights, was a diesel engine with a single carriage behind, both vivid yellow. Stephen approached without any particular plan. He arrived below the cab and found himself looking up at a man of about his own age who wore a beret balanced on thick black curls. Stephen took the beret to be a good sign, evidence of a sense of humour.

He had to shout above the throb of the engine. ‘Are you the driver?’

The man nodded.

‘I’d like a word.’

‘Come on then.’

He swung himself up awkwardly with his bag. In the warm, narrow space there were fewer dials than he expected and fewer controls. The floor vibrated pleasantly under his feet. He noticed two paperback thrillers, a thermos flask, a tin of tobacco, a pair of binoculars, a pair of thick woollen
socks folded into each other. It was dingy and intimate, like a bedsit. The driver had moved towards the other door to make room. Stephen resisted an impulse to lower himself into one of the driver’s seats. It would have been a presumption.

Instead he rested his hand on it and said, ‘I wondered if you could drop me off somewhere on the way to Dover.’ As he spoke he reached into his back pocket and brought out the fifty-pound notes. ‘I know it’s strictly against the rules, so …’

He had extended his hand with the money. The driver sat down, put his elbow on the control panel and propped his cheek against his knuckles. He looked past the money at Stephen’s face.

‘You on the run or something?’

Because he had not expected to explain himself, Stephen could think only of the truth. ‘I’ve had an urgent summons from my wife, my ex-wife.’ He sat down, feeling that he had earned the right.

‘When did you last see her then?’ The driver stressed the pronoun, as if he knew the woman in question.

‘Last June.’

The man grimaced and said, ‘That figures.’

Stephen waited for an explanation, or a decision, but the driver, still leaning on his elbow, with his free hand playing over the controls, said nothing. Stephen transferred the notes to the other hand. He was reluctant to put them away in case it seemed he was withdrawing his offer. He was considering a new approach when he saw through the windscreen lights sliding fractionally to one side. The train was easing forward at less than walking pace. On a gantry a quarter of a mile ahead, an arrangement of illuminated signals had shifted, though he could not remember which colours had been added or changed. The driver had straightened in his seat. They increased speed as they ground over a quick and complex set of points which swung them right across the belt of track to the far side.

Stephen waited until the noise of that had passed and said, ‘Thank you.’ The driver did not look in his direction, but the adjustment he made to his beret was a form of acknowledgement.

It was infinitely preferable to look forwards rather than sideways, to see not embankments or back gardens, but miles of metal ribbon spooling in, and railway furniture curving in on collision course to flip by with finely gauged accuracy. As they gathered pace through South London it began to snow, heightening for Stephen the pleasure of forward motion; they were hurtling into a vortex of snowflakes whose open end rotated about them, seeming to screw itself tighter round the train.

The driver clicked his tongue against his teeth and looked at his watch. ‘Where was it you wanted to go?’

Stephen named the stop.

‘She lives there does she?’

‘About three miles south.’

For the first time since they had started moving, the driver looked at Stephen. ‘We don’t have to stop at stations you know.’

Stephen tried to describe the plantation, the bend in the road, then he remembered The Bell.

‘I know it,’ the driver said. ‘I can set you down nicely.’

They travelled out from under the orange glow of the suburbs into the darkened remnants of countryside between dormitory towns. The snow eased off, and then stopped completely. Their speed increased. Stephen was still holding the money tight. He offered it again, but the driver kept his eyes on the track ahead and had one hand on a crescent-shaped brass handle, the other deep in his pocket.

‘Give it to your ex. She’ll be needing it, I should think.’

Stephen pocketed the money, and felt that the least he could do was offer his name.

‘Edward,’ the driver replied, and explained that he was taking a mobile workshop and canteen to where a gang
was due to start that morning. They would be working in a tunnel, re-setting the bed of the track which had been damaged by water. It was a fine old tunnel, one of the best in the south. The week before they had admired by spotlight the brickwork of the roof, and the buttresses at the mouth.

‘It’s a cathedral in there. You could call it fan vaulting what they got up at the top, and no one ever sees it.’ In two years’ time the line was due to be closed down. ‘They’ll never get it back,’ Edward said after a pause. ‘They’ll sell the land off and they’ll never get it back.’

‘It’s irrational,’ Stephen said.

Edward shook his head. ‘It’s too rational, my friend. That’s the problem. Here’s a cathedral in the dark. What’s the point of that? Close it down. Build a motorway. But there’s no heart in motorways. You won’t see kids on the bridges taking car numbers, will you.’

It took an hour to reach the little station. As soon as they were through it, Edward began to apply the brakes. ‘I’m going to put you down by a level crossing. You can’t get lost. Go up the hill, down the other side, through a wood till you come to a junction. Take a right turn there and you’ll see the pub on your right.’

They stopped on the far side of the automatic crossing. Stephen shook Edward’s hand. ‘You are very kind.’

‘Go on, off you go. I don’t want the sack, and you’ve got business to do.’

Stephen climbed on to the track and Edward threw the bag down. There followed the commotion of a celebration. The huge machine roared as it inched forward, and behind him the bells were ringing out and red lights flashing as the gates restored the right of way to the road. Then, within a minute, there was silence.

Beyond the crossing, the hill rose steeply. No cars had been through since the last fall of snow, and the way ahead was a band of unbroken white between the hedgerows. The
moon was in front of him, sinking at last. It was a haunted road. He walked silently on its edge, aware of the young couple at his side pushing their bikes into the wind and rain, lost to their unspoken, unharmonious thoughts. Where were those young people now? What separated them from him beyond the forty-three years? Their moment here was a tapering echo. He could hear the stern ticking of their back wheels, the different lengths of stride falling in and out of step. He reached the top with them, and paused as they had.

The brilliant road dropped and curved into the wood a mile away. He set his bag on the ground and fiddled with the straps, adjusting them to fit across his shoulder, and then he re-tied a shoelace with the nervous competence of a sprinter in the blocks. He straightened and took deep breaths. He felt the imperative of his summons as a tautness in his stomach wall, a cold thrill. For one last moment he savoured the pent energy of altitude before tilting forwards and letting the hill draw him down and fix his pace, a near effortless sprint across the snow. In two hundred yards he had settled his breathing to the thump of each footfall. It seemed he might rise through the air if he threw off his bag. He pounded the earth to aid its rotation, so that things raced towards him as he did to them. He was down among the first trees, and into the wood where road broke through the snow. He decided on the tree where his mother had schemed his own termination. He increased his speed though he was on level ground now and his breathing came harder. A quarter of a mile ahead was the junction, so he cut across open rough ground, stumbling on concealed hillocks.

The second road was wider, he remembered the look of it and the tall trees which crowded to its verge. Ahead was the telephone box, the rise and the sharp bend in the road where the footpath led off to the prairie field, and nearer, on the right, was The Bell, in this light a bold pencil sketch.
He drew level with the porch and glanced across. It was then that he understood that his experience there had not only been reciprocal with his parents’, it had been a continuation, a kind of repetition. He had a premonition followed instantly by a certainty, borne out by Thelma’s smile and Edward’s instant understanding of the months, that all the sorrow, all the empty waiting had been enclosed within meaningful time, within the richest unfolding conceivable. Breathless as he was, he gave out a whoop of recognition, and ran on up the rise, and along the path that led to Julie’s cottage.

The front door was not locked. It gave straight on to the living room whose warmth and faint aroma of bread and coffee suggested wakefulness. When he closed the door he smelled Julie’s perfume on a coat and scarf which hung behind it. Light from a coal fire spilled across the floor, the rest of the room was in semi-darkness. On the scrubbed work table, by the notebooks, was an earthenware vase with sprigs of holly and a violin resting on a yellow duster. On a chair was an orderly stack of ironed laundry. By it, on the floor, was a book about the night sky and a cup and saucer. He was halfway across the room when he heard from upstairs the familiar creak of the bed, then footsteps above his head.

He went to the foot of the stairs and called up, ‘It’s me.’ The shadows of the balusters bowed and thickened on the wall. She was standing at the head of the stairs. He thought he saw the white of a nightdress, but all he could see clearly was her face by the candle she held out before her. He wondered if she had been abroad. She looked tanned.

‘You were quick,’ she whispered. ‘Come up.’

She was back in bed by the time he entered the room. His breathing had yet to return to normal, and he tried to conceal this. He did not want her to know he had been
running. Besides the candle there was a lamp on the dresser and a fire in the grate. Surrounding her, all across the quilt, were books, newspapers, a magazine and loose sheets of music. There were flowers by the bed, and a carton of fruit juice. Behind her were half a dozen plumped out pillows. He stood at the foot of the bed and set down his bag. For the moment he did not want to go closer.

She drew the quilt towards her. Somewhere in the shadows something slid to the floor. ‘I think I had the beginning of a contraction as soon as I came back from talking to you. But don’t worry, they can go on for days. It’s not due for a week or so.’

Stephen said stupidly, ‘I didn’t know.’

She shook her head and smiled. The whites of her eyes were luminous in the soft light as she glanced up at him and away. She wore a cardigan draped across her shoulders, beneath that a cotton nightdress unbuttoned to the cleavage of her heavy breasts. Her skin was dark and looked hot. Her hands rested demurely where the swell of her belly began. Even the fingers, he thought, looked plumper. They parted and she patted the bed.

‘Come and sit down.’

But he still felt wild from his running. His drenched shirt clung to his spine. He needed time to adjust to the warm confines of the room before he could sit close in to her, to this potency. To soften his refusal he said the first thing that came to him. ‘I got here in a railway engine, I rode in the cab.’

‘Your boyhood dream.’

‘The driver dropped me off at the level crossing. He seemed to know his way around here.’ He was about to describe Edward to her, tell her how much she would have liked him, then he decided it was too difficult, irrelevant. He said, ‘Julie, why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Come and sit here.’

He hesitated, then he laid his jacket and sweater over a
chair and put his shoes and socks to dry by the fire. As he walked round the bed, the feel of the warm boards under his feet brought to mind again the idea of home, and of barely imaginable pleasures. He sat on the edge of the bed, not quite where she had patted. But she was determined to draw him closer. She took both his hands in hers. He was unable to speak, he was charged with more love than he thought he could bear. Light and warmth radiated from his stomach. He felt weightless and mad. She was smiling at him, she was close to laughter. It was the triumphant good humour of one who has her best hopes confirmed. He had never seen her so beautiful. Her skin had a finer grain, like a child’s. What had grown in her was not confined to the womb but was coiled in every cell. Her voice was melodious and grave as she answered his question.