The Time We Have Taken (18 page)

Then the first glimmer of light is there, visible at the venetians. There’s a bird out there somewhere. She could almost laugh. Nights do end, after all. There’s a bird out there somewhere and a finger of light touches the blinds.

W
hen the cinema is shut and Michael returns to his room (while Rita is discovering the public and private faces of Mrs Webster), he sees the note that has been slipped under the door in his absence. He takes his coat off, drops the newspaper onto his desk and opens the envelope. She is desperately sorry. Work. Last-minute stuff. Had to fill in for someone. Impossibility of letting him know (no phone). Feels awful. Misses him dreadfully. Dropped by hoping to catch him. Call her in the morning. Madeleine.

He folds the note and places it in the drawer where he keeps her letters (the same letters that he will, when she is gone from his life, drop into a battered metal bin one inevitably rainy rubbish day). Something
not right, he muses. It’s crisp, plausible, says all the right things — but something’s not right. And he can’t put his finger on it. But it’s there all the same. Nicely written, though. And perhaps that’s it. It is ‘written’. Crafted in shorthand. As apart from being thrown on the page, as you do when you’re in a state. Perhaps it’s the ‘dreadfully’. Writers use words such as ‘dreadfully’. Certain writers use words such as that in their diaries and their memoirs, and that’s why diaries and memoirs always sound fake to Michael. Writers putting on airs use words such as that, not people who have had their nights thrown out. Something not right. Definitely. He shuts the drawer.

When he has finished mulling over the note, he slips back into his coat (brown corduroy, which he bought with Madeleine, who insisted he buy it when she discovered he didn’t own one). Even though the evening is really getting on, he strolls downstairs and into the street, past the pub opposite, where the Italian drinkers sing like a heavenly choir in the evenings. But tonight there are no angelic notes to warm the cold winter air. The pub is shut. The night is still, and his footsteps (that will eventually lead to Madeleine’s place, and which are as soft as a burglar’s) blend with the mid-week quiet. Tomorrow is the last day of winter, and if he was to drag himself away from his thoughts he just might notice the scents in the air that herald the coming spring.

Not long after, he is pacing up and down the footpath at the front of Madeleine’s. He’s been there for five, ten, even fifteen minutes for all he knows. From below he can see that Madeleine’s light is on. She’s in. Doing something. It is, he has been telling himself over and over again, a perfectly reasonable thing to do. To drop in. He got her note, and here he is. He is, he tells himself, passing by, but he has walked well out of his way to be here and at such a late hour. If he admits it, it is a contrived situation. And it is this contrivance that is troubling him and making him march up and down the footpath when he should just march on in. If he had just come from visiting a friend, become lost to the world contemplating all the things they’d talked about, wandered off into the night afterwards not noticing where he was and looked up to find himself in Madeleine’s street (she has recently moved into the upper floor of a house with her sister), he would simply have rung her bell without thinking. A surprise visit. But he has knowingly walked out of his way, not aimlessly strolled, and there is that undeniable element of calculation to his visit. Besides, she said call, not drop in. Without ever saying as much, Michael had concluded very early on, and has always assumed since, that Madeleine is not to be ‘dropped in’ on. Consequently, he never has. And, although it should feel perfectly natural, he is conscious of stepping
outside the bounds — however tacitly agreed, or, indeed, imagined — of their ‘going out’.

Two thoughts prevent him from ringing her bell: that this element of contrivance might show on his face and that he is not entirely sure of what he might find inside. The look of contrivance on his face will tell her that he is prying — that this is not a surprise visit, but simple snooping. And this simple snooping (to which he now feels himself reduced) will, he fears, from the moment he steps in the house, become a self-fulfilling exercise, conjuring up the very thing he dreads. It is, of course, ridiculous. But he is increasingly drawn to the ridiculous these days, and, even as he pronounces the thought ridiculous, he is aware of being in its thrall.

It is then that the voice of his all-too-patient, all-too-indulgent common sense, its tolerance finally run out, snaps him to attention and he strides through the gate, raps on the front door, his knocks seeming to reverberate around the neighbourhood houses and the park opposite. He is, he rehearses once more, just passing.

Inside he hears footfalls on the stairs. As her steps near, he feels the skin on his face tighten and his eyes widen and knows that his face will betray him when he casually lets her know that he was just passing.

The door suddenly opens on the night and she is standing there, at first not recognising him in the dull light, then smiling.

‘Hi,’ he says quickly. ‘Do you mind?’

With a quick shake of her head, still smiling, she takes his hand and draws him into the house, closing the door behind them.

‘I’m so sorry about tonight.’

‘It’s all right.’

‘No, it’s not. I felt awful, but I couldn’t get away. And I wanted so dreadfully to be there.’

She says the word with such conviction, such unaffected poetry, that he believes her utterly. It is not the giveaway word of the fancy writer trading in fake feelings, but her word. And, being her word, it is his too. It is all right. All is well, he tells himself, and he was a fool to be standing out there in the dark all that time. She is, after all, his Madeleine, and he is just dropping in. She doesn’t mind and he asks himself why he has never done this before. His face did not betray him, ridiculous words did not spring from his lips. He is inside and the only cause for wonder is that it took him so long. And, as she slips her hand from his, he resolves that that will never happen again.

She leads him up the stairs, and he can now unselfconsciously observe her. He notices for the first time that she is casually dressed. And then, and he wishes he hadn’t but it is done before he knows it, he mentally substitutes the word ‘hastily’ for ‘casually’. It is noteworthy, unusual even, because —
unlike the female students he knows — Madeleine always dresses with care. Rarely in jeans and rarely in loose jumpers. But tonight she is wearing jeans and a sloppy pullover. The pullover — which he has never seen before, and which looks to be more a man’s pullover than a woman’s — has slid down one shoulder and he can see quite clearly the line of her collarbone, and her neck, and he notes also that she is not wearing a bra. Nor is she wearing a shirt. Beneath the pullover, she is naked. She is, in six months of them being together, as naked as she has ever been with him. And he concludes that he is right. She is hastily dressed.

On the landing she turns, kisses him briefly, then opens the door of the lounge room and pushes him in with a laugh, saying that she was just about to go to bed, that she needs to brush her hair at least, that she is not quite ready to be received. And when she murmurs the word ‘received’ it is with the italics of her raised eyebrows.

Then he is sitting on the sofa in the lounge room, the gas heater low, the moon casting a shifting, milky shaft of light through the curtains. He rises, walks to the window and stares down upon the footpath, calculating that no more than a minute has elapsed since ringing the bell. And this, this is the lighted room he gazed up at. The room is neat and ordered. It relaxes him. He is, once again,
in her sphere. And as he is looking down on the footpath, he substitutes the word ‘casually’ for ‘hastily’ — which he now realises he was too quick in applying. She was, after all, about to go to bed. He never wears a watch but he can guess the hour. The lack of traffic, the deserted street and the high moon outside all tell him that the night is getting on. He relaxes, but resolves not to stay long for she must surely be working early in the morning. All is well again.

When Madeleine re-enters the room moments later, closing the door firmly behind her, her hair is up, pinned with a black velvet clip. She could almost be stepping out for the night instead of turning in. As they both lean back on the sofa, he sees that the pullover has been straightened and that she is now wearing a bra.

‘You don’t mind…me dropping in?’ he asks again.

‘No.’

‘Sure?’

‘Of course. But I haven’t got my face on. You’re seeing the real me.’

Once again, the word ‘real’ is delivered with the italics of her raised eyebrows. He hadn’t even noticed or cared, but he now asks himself if he has ever seen her without make-up before and he concludes that he hasn’t. And it is oddly thrilling, a kind of nakedness in
itself. She thinks she looks plain, he hums inwardly. If only she knew. This, he tells himself, this is how she would look if… This is how she would look if he were to wake with her in the mornings, the Madeleine he would see that nobody else would.

‘I was just passing.’

‘Good.’

‘Are you pleased?’

‘Can’t you tell?’

And it is then that she rises, almost, it seems to Michael, on cue, and plays the record already there on the stereo. Music, the kind of music couples play late at night, romantic music — not the kind he associates with Madeleine. This music (which is beneath her in the same way that words such as ‘hunk’ are beneath her) swells and fills the room, like music at the end of a party rather than the end of an evening. And, when she sits back on the sofa, she places her arms round his neck without speaking and kisses him. It is a long, luxuriant kiss, and she is kissing him more than he is kissing her. And, when he inquires if he ought to leave because she must, after all, be working early the next morning (he feels guilty for detaining her), she pushes him firmly against the back of the sofa so that rising now would be difficult even if he wanted to, and resumes what feels like the same luxuriant kiss. But as he is about to lose himself in the oblivion of it all, he is suddenly
disturbed by something out there. Footsteps. He swears he could hear, for all the world, somewhere out there beyond the music and their breathing and kissing, footfalls on the stairs. Then footfalls descending the stairs, out the front and fading into the street. And was that the distant thump of the front door or car door in the night?

He is tense, his ears alert for any sound. As he lifts his face, and for a moment extricates himself from the embrace, he looks intently at the window, the milky shaft of shifting moonlight still playing with the lace.

‘What is it?’ she asks, eyeing him with sudden alarm and concern.

His eyes are wide, asking, almost pleading, can I trust you?

‘What is it?’ she whispers.

She is troubled. Her face is now so close, her skin so warm, her eyes so alight with…with what he can only call care.

‘Nothing,’ he says, staring at the window, the moonlight, the room, then back to the nakedness of her face and this enthralling creature she calls the ‘real’ her.

When the music stops shortly afterwards, she reminds him that she is indeed working early the next morning, that it has been a lovely surprise, but that he perhaps ought to go now.

Downstairs, she stands framed in the doorway. The concern is still in his eyes, the phantom footfalls still in his ears. And it is then, her eyes gazing knowingly into his as if, indeed, reading his thoughts and drawing him back to her, that with a playful smile she pulls back the neck of the sweater (which he has never seen until tonight) to reveal the full length of her neck and the crest of her bared shoulder.

The effect is instantaneous. So much so that, at first, he does not see the invitation in the gesture.

There is no one out on the street. But there could be. At any moment. As his feet finally reach the doorway, his lips come to rest on her open neck (his eyes closed).

She does this. When he thinks he knows her, he realises he doesn’t. And it is a puzzle, a constantly shifting puzzle. How she can be his Madeleine in private — the private, controlled Madeleine who goes so far and so far only when they are alone and nobody is looking — and then, as it were, fornicate with him in public. Fornicate with her shoulder and eyes and the line of her perfect neck.

Eyes still closed, his lips finally leave her neck and, as she draws the band of the sweater back into place, it is as though their accustomed places have been thrown into the air, and it is love that lights her eyes, and gratitude that opens his.

She smiles and takes one pace back into the hallway. She smiles playfully, both familiar and strange. The young woman he takes to be
his
Madeleine, always slipping from him. And, as he loses himself in her eyes, he is convinced he will never know her enough to keep her. She will always be leaving, even as she is drawing him back.

Then he is on the footpath and the honeyed wedge of light in her doorway disappears. The road curves up the hill to the university grounds, and, as he walks up the footpath, he occasionally glances back, half expecting to see something or someone, but not sure who or what.

In the years to come, he will know what it is to receive love and feel only gratitude in return. He will, in short, know what it is to be Madeleine. But on this night, on this street, Michael is experiencing the most important moments of his life until now and he knows it. Perhaps it is true, he is wondering. Perhaps it’s true what the love-sick poems and books that he reads tell him — that we only ever fall in love once, and after that we may as well die. That the mind and the body can only ever deal with the earthquake of love once. By the time he reaches the top of the street and looks back down along the incline leading to the hospital and to Madeleine’s door, one part of him is convinced it is true. The other is already rearranging the scene — and all their scenes — more satisfactorily.

When he returns to his room, he finds a pamphlet pinned to his door. It is from Bunny Rabbit, who must have slipped in when Pussy Cat was sleeping. There is a rally, it seems, at the university the next day. Be there or be square! But there is no room for meetings or rallies or marches in Michael’s mind. It is a private Michael with a private mind that goes to bed and that wakes in the morning, indifferent to the public march of History out there on the streets around him.