The Time We Have Taken (3 page)

T
here they are. There they will always be. A formal gathering on the balcony. On the brink of the evening, in their gowns and hired suits. As Peter van Rijn is shutting his shop after a day of slow summer trade, and as Rita strolls home and Mrs Webster’s Bentley turns into her street (the cicadas now silent), a young woman named Madeleine, a nurse at the main hospital just a short walk away from this inner-city block of flats, leans over the iron railing of her balcony, stares down into the communal garden below and draws in its many scents. They have summoned a taxi, currently floating through the soft light towards them. At first
Michael is not told where they are going, or the nature of the occasion. Only that it is a ball. Madeleine then grins at her sister and her friends. The rest, she says, is a mystery. It is, it seems, a game they have all agreed to play. Then she buries her face once more into the summer scents below as the taxi horn sounds in the street.

But even when he learns the nature of the occasion, the evening will always remain a mystery because he forgets upon being told. It is an intoxicating evening (Michael has never been to anything so grandly named as a ball), and years from this night, when he tries to remember where they went, and why they all went there, he will not be able to. He will remember only a suburb somewhere he had never visited before (and quite possibly never seen since), the high white columns of the large public building to which the taxi took them, and open windows, music and wide lawns.

Perfume, what he will later identify as Madeleine’s perfume, mingles with less significant scents inside the taxi. She is beside him, talking to her sister in the front seat, to the driver, to the whole cab. He is free to watch her: the red, black and white Bavarian dress that should look all wrong but doesn’t, the light brown hair that falls across her shoulders, the fringe, the occasionally lifting eyebrow that tells you she is playing and doesn’t really mean what she says, the
small gold crucifix that hangs from her neck. This is only the second time they have seen each other, the second time they have ‘gone out’. The first time they met (blind date), a week before, he had seen only the traces of a childhood infatuation in her face, shades of a young woman from his old street, shades of the unreachable, nineteen-year-old Patsy Bedser. Patsy Bedser, who, one day in 1958, drove her Morris Minor out the old street and back to Liverpool where she, like Madeleine, came from; Patsy Bedser, whom he had fallen in love with at the age of twelve, whom he had never forgotten, but whom he could only ever hope to look at. And so that first meeting with Madeleine had awoken in him a nostalgia for someone else. He has not yet gathered much of this thing called ‘the past’, and nostalgia — he has been the nostalgic type for as long as he can remember — still comes easily, easier than it will when there is more of the past than there is of the future and looking back will cease to be pleasantly melancholic. And so, upon meeting Madeleine for the first time, he was — through the familiarity of her features, through the shades of resemblance she bore to someone else — able to go back and indulge emotions he never dared set free at the time. He could never, he told himself that first night, never love this Madeleine. She would only ever be a kind of gathering place for those legions of adolescent feelings that had
assembled themselves inside him years before, legions of feelings that had never been set free, and that had lain in wait all these years for their moment to surface and breathe. And Madeleine was that moment. What did it matter that she was not the actual cause of these feelings, but had simply summoned them? The feeling was good, and he had been content, that first night, to be carried along by it.

But in the breezy, perfumed air of the taxi going God only knows where for God only knows what reason, he sees only Madeleine. The features, the shades of that other, earlier infatuation, have been completely wiped from her face. And it is like seeing her for the first time. She is now that which she always was and that he was too blinded to see. It is a night of mysteries, but nothing will be more mysterious, now and after, than this revelation.

The river flows slowly down to the docks underneath them as they cross Princes Bridge. When they are over it, he looks back, as he always does when presented with a view of the city from the wrong side. It is a view that is always accompanied by the feeling that there has been a mistake. That he doesn’t really belong here. And with that, uncertainty at being out of his territory, of not being in his city but someone else’s.

Inside the taxi the talk is loud and constant, outside the parks have the quiet, officially clocked-off
look that parks do after a long day. Soon they disappear, the city recedes, and a lost feeling descends upon him. The taxi, over which he has no control (and he doesn’t like that feeling either), is speeding away from everything he knows into this other city, which he doesn’t know. And when they leave the main road and enter a succession of unfamiliar suburbs he is filled with a fierce, illogical longing for his old street and the children’s voices that he and his friends once had when they were young and the street was a world unto itself. He can hear them all clearly and distinguish the twilight voices of his old gang gathered together in summer shadow. Then it passes, and he is aware once more of being sped into the future. And as much as he once lived for speed (for the perfect ball and the kind of speed that would turn heads and be remembered forever after as the ball that Michael bowled), he is now wary, even a little frightened of it. It is a sufficiently distant Michael who bowled a worn cricket ball in the local nets, day after day, throughout his youth, to be a puzzle now. At the time it was all he needed to fill his days; now, as he sits in this speeding, noisy taxi, he is half wondering what he could possibly have been thinking back then, half entranced with this young woman he is, in essence, seeing for the first time.

Words are tossed back and forth about the cab, from the back seat to the front, and he watches
Madeleine and concentrates on her. She is his fixed point. That lost feeling evaporates as he dwells on the sing-song, Liverpool voice, the raised eyebrow and the playful look in her eyes that reveals she doesn’t really mean what she is saying, the playful look that also contains the promise that this night just might contain a few surprises and that at any second they might jolly well disappear down a rabbit hole in the road. And it is then that the playfulness leaves her eyes, and she stares at him with the kind of bold intimacy that Michael is not used to receiving, and he is both marvelling at the poise with which she delivers it and asking himself how she became so practised in the art of the intimate glance or if it just comes as naturally to her as her sing-song voice. And already the nagging question emerges: who else may have been the recipient of such glances? But, at this moment, the look, both innocent and experienced, is for him. Later in the year, and years later still, he will be able to read in it the affection of someone who has netted some rare species of innocent life, who is drawn to it, wants it, but, at the same time, doesn’t quite know what to do with it.

Then he is alone. He is standing on the street, his wallet in hand, and as the taxi driver slowly, painfully, extracts coins from his coin dispenser, Michael goes over the sequence of events that left him here. The taxi
pulled up at a fabulous white public building, all the more fabulous for being in a side street. A piece of antiquity dumped in the suburbs, its tall white columns gleaming under electric lamps. He was so enthralled by the sight of the building, its expansiveness, its many windows and wide lawns, that he didn’t notice the others leave the taxi, or, indeed, disappear. He only remembers calling out, saying he would pay the taxi (a ridiculous gesture considering that, although in a few days he will become a first-year teacher, he is currently drawing no pay except for his meagre scholarship and is the poorest of them all). Whether it was to impress this Madeleine whom he has only this night discovered, or simply because he was the last one left standing by the cab, he doesn’t know — but he pays. His eyes rarely leave the gleaming antique construction in front of him, and when the driver has finally extracted the coins, he doesn’t even look to see what’s there. The cab departs, and he stands, uncertainly eyeing the many rooms, the multi-coloured crowds that are at the mouth of the building or calling out from those many opened windows to their friends below. Already the place is bursting with life. Young life. Loud life. But, rather than relishing all that life and delighting in it as he usually would, he now sees it as an inconvenience, an impediment, for somewhere amongst all that loud, inconvenient life is Madeleine. And the task of finding her will be made all the more difficult by the crowd.

Inside it is worse. Everywhere, all around him, everyone is dressed in what seem to Michael to be the most fantastic costumes. Medieval figures, like strolling players from another age, all deep burgundy, daffodil yellow and sky blue, pour in through the wide double doors; a whole Edwardian cricket team in harlequin peaked caps and creams, held up not by belts but psychedelic ties, rush headlong up the stairs as if fleeing a film set; and, at the top of the stairs looking down on the foyer, a line of bowler-hatted, dark-suited commuters, black umbrellas opened, stand well prepared for the eventuality of indoor rain. And they are all in groups and they all know each other. As he looks around the foyer he has the distinct sense of being carried along by events — as he is by the crowd — and he notes for the second time this evening his uneasiness with that feeling. And the music — there seem to be two, possibly three bands playing — floats from the windows and doors, upstairs and downstairs, and merges into an odd, disjointed jigsaw of sound. Pop songs and mellow tunes from his parents’ youths mingling uncertainly in the all-accommodating summer air.

That is when he begins to push his way through it, all the inconvenient life that threatens to burst the building asunder. And, all of it, constantly migrating. He follows pop music into a vast ballroom. The floor is clogged. He has no sooner scanned one section of
the room than it has altered. The task of spotting a young woman in a red, black and white Bavarian dress is all the more remote for the constantly shifting nature of the dance floor and he resolves to return when the music stops.

Back in the foyer he follows the crowd up the stairway (the line of bowler-hatted commuters having moved on), but as much as he scans the crowd around, above and below, he is, in his habitually fatalistic way, quickly coming to the conclusion that he will not find them. He follows the upstairs corridor, peeking into a smaller reception room (a Commedia dell’Arte clown sharing a joint with a young WG Grace leaning casually on his bat) and even comes across a small, sedate secondary dance floor — with a crooner at a grand piano — and eyes the dancers and diners, but she’s not there. It is the same throughout the entire upper floor and, as he descends the stairway, he is convinced that he has lost her. Either they have found a small enclave in this vast, crazy place, and are enjoying themselves so much they have forgotten about him altogether (as indeed they had in the taxi), or they have gone outside to look for him while he is inside looking for them. It’s hopeless. And the very ordinariness of his clothes (plain white shirt and academic corduroy trousers) only intensifies this feeling of being a stranger in a strange land. He should have waited outside. Instead of this, conceivably
spending the whole night seeking each other out and never succeeding. He doesn’t know the people he came with. He doesn’t know Madeleine, for that matter. They could be having a grand old time somewhere in some back room without a thought for him, happy to pass the evening exactly where they are, oblivious of the fact that they now number one less than they did when they arrived.

With this gloomy speculation a settled certainty, Michael ambles out onto the wide lawns at the back of the building. Here, survivors of the dance floor are cooling themselves in the evening breeze and allowing the ringing in their ears to fade. It is quieter, less frantic on the lawns. He slows to a stroll, such is the effect of moonlight on lawn, half expecting some longed-for romantic scene when he will find Madeleine staring up at him. But no, there’s been a dreadful mix-up and he may as well go home and phone her in the morning. He is now utterly convinced that they have either gone, or are part of some private function that he could spend the whole evening trying to find.

And it is then that he remembers observing Madeleine in the taxi, seeing her and her alone, no trace of other older, useless infatuations (from an adolescence that seems now to have been taken up entirely with infatuations), and remembers the thrill of knowing that he was with her, she was with him,
and the glance that told him all this — the glance that invited him into the private life of Madeleine and that promised that the evening was theirs. But he’d let her slip from him. Now, it was just the way it had always been, Michael standing on some bare patch of lawn with the sound of parties old and new ringing in his ears and wondering why it is that things always turn out wrong. And it is at times such as these that curses seem real, and that he, Michael, has one placed upon him. That he was born into a house of fatalistic sensibilities and that’s why things always go rotten, just when they looked so right.

Inside again he pauses, giving the dance floor a goodbye glance. As the band stops, the crowd parts, and there she is. Simple. There all the time. And the last ten minutes — or was it twenty? — becomes a trifle. A misunderstanding. One of those things. And once again they have the whole night before them.

She is leaning against a pillar at the back of the dance floor with a small group, but talking to an older-looking man beside her. Michael has no sense of crossing the floor but suddenly he is in front of her. He is aware of something childish in his voice, an immature urgency when he addresses her. He is not so much speaking as blurting words. And when Madeleine turns from the man with whom she has been immersed in conversation, he is convinced that, before a smile lights her face, something else
— something disturbing — crosses her features. She begins to speak and he is still puzzling over what it might have been when he realises it was disappointment.