The Time We Have Taken (4 page)

It was there for a moment only — in her eyes, her lips and the minute crease of her forehead — but a moment is all it takes. Love can be won and lost, lives come and go, everything that may matter in someone’s life may be contained in a moment — just as whole worlds can turn or crumble in one. And, as he stands there staring at Madeleine, he is convinced that he has found her only to lose her. It is a conviction that is made all the more urgent by the equally sudden realisation that sometime between getting into the taxi, crossing the city, losing her and finally finding her again he fell in love.

What he has also realised, with absolute clarity (and time will not contradict the clarity of this realisation), is that he will be the only one of the two to fall in love. And it
will
be proved true, for, in the end, she will indeed return his love with the very best that she can offer — her gratitude. And she will not say this lightly when the time comes, towards the end of this year when spring arrives; she will say it with the sad sincerity of someone who, quite simply, cannot return another’s love. It will always be entwined with the regret of never really having discovered what on earth to do with him, having netted him. And so she
will set him free, offering her gratitude for the days they have had. She is Liverpool-born, Irish blood, and she will tell him as she sets him free that there is a saying that sailed across the Irish Sea with her ancestors:
We have known the days
. And when she gives him thanks for the days they have known, it will be with a strangely surprised look in her eyes, still deeply puzzled that they never found more. She will, in fact, not even say it. She will give him a poem to read one day, a poem that contains all of the things she longs to say, and which will do her talking for her — the way good poems should.

‘Did I not tell you which table? No?’

Madeleine says this with such concern in her eyes that it obliterates the flicker of disappointment that was there a second before. And those eyes, which could be blue or green, depending on how you looked at them, far from signalling her disappointment at being dragged away from her conversation are signalling her concern. And he is suddenly exhilarated by this, for behind all such concern is care. She cares! The losing her is all worth it for the finding of her.

‘No,’ he says, distracted by his unexpected exhilaration.

‘You poor thing. And you’ve been looking for us all this time?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you found us,’ she grins.

It’s infectious. He grins too. She takes his hand, and this man to whom she has been talking, this older man who has the relaxed look of someone used to the company of women (and who is, Michael notices, married), quietly slips away with the faintest of waves, which is acknowledged by Madeleine with the faintest of nods.

Michael wants to tell her how he looked everywhere for her, tell her how big the place is and how he’d pretty much given up on finding her. He wants to ask her who that man was, but he already knows it’s none of his business. He knows this not only because she did not introduce them but also because she offers no explanation as to who he was. He is left to conclude that he is either someone of no great consequence — a work companion she fell into chatting with — or someone of consequence significant enough not to be introduced. Whatever, the exhilaration he just felt at her sudden concern is now diminished. Then, in a flash, it is gone altogether. The sulks are there instead. Probably all over his face. He feels younger than his years, like a child in a school playground who has found his best friend playing with someone else. He also feels, keenly, the year that separates them. Madeleine is a year older, and it shouldn’t concern him (he hasn’t even given it a thought until now) but it does. It will
not be the first time that he will feel like a child in her presence. And, just as she will always be a year older, there is a part of him that already suspects he will always feel like a younger brother. It is as a child, a pathetically lost one, that he now speaks to her.

‘I thought you must have gone, and there’d been some crazy mix-up. And that I’d
never
find you.’

As he says it, he curses the child that he seems to drag around with him wherever he goes, and who always shoots his gob off at precisely the wrong moment, embarrassing the all-too-fragile construction of this grown-up Michael (watching). Surely she is wondering what on earth she is doing here with a baby face, on the verge of embarrassing tears.

‘You poor thing.’

He notes that she has already said this, and that she said it best the first time. The first time he was moved to the point of exhilaration, the second time he is unmoved. He is unmoved because, for all the concern in her eyes, her delivery is mechanical — a statement of concern delivered without concern. But it is not the feeling that this second use of the phrase is flat that bothers him — it is the possibility that she may have been just as flat and unmoved the first time and he didn’t notice.

Then, her eyes glittering blue or green (he still can’t decide), she brushes his cheek with her fingers, and kisses him on the temple. It is a
miraculous act. A blessing. She has kissed the sulks away, and she knows she has.

Michael is not someone who dances with ease or enthusiasm. Once the world of rhythm and speed was all he lived for, the acquisition of speed, the perfect ball, the ball that would become known across his old suburb as the ball that Michael bowled. And when cricket no longer filled his days, he bought a guitar and its rhythms filled his room in the days that followed. But the rhythms of dancing do not come naturally to him. He tells her this and she says that all he has to do is just stand there. He does, and she dances all around him as if he were a sort of human maypole. She dances, he stands transfixed now by her abandon, having completely forgotten that earlier in the evening he lost her, found her, and discerned only a flicker of disappointment in her eyes when he did. He only knows that sometime between getting into the taxi and getting out he had become part of her world. And as she dances all around him, the Bavarian dress that should look all wrong, but doesn’t, swirling as she spins, he is wondering if Madeleine will ever become Maddy (as her sister calls her) and if his part in her world will become a place.

They dance, they sit, they chat like — it would seem to an observer — two people who have known each other for years and who expect to know each other for years more. He relaxes, he expands, he
grows in confidence and years. Fun, he thinks, they are having fun. And he is pleased that he can make her laugh, for observations tell him that all love begins with laughter, and if he can make her laugh then he just might be able to make her love.

Nobody sleeps that night. Nobody goes to bed. And when the early summer sun returns, dusting the foliage of the communal garden orange and yellow, they are all once more standing on the same balcony upon which they had assembled on that distant shore of the previous evening.

This was the night — in between losing her and finding her — that Michael fell in love with Madeleine. The night that he also realised he would be the only one to fall and would receive, in return, the best that she could offer.

M
rs Webster is standing in the wide dining room (rarely used in Webster’s day) in this second week of February, a bright weekday morning sun igniting the trees outside and illuminating the whole room. She is reading a letter from the mayor’s office. It is a puzzling letter (posted almost four weeks to the day after Peter van Rijn took his momentous drive and gave birth to an idea). A committee is being formed that will direct events in this the centenary year of the suburb, and she is invited to be part of it. Is the suburb really a hundred years old? The age of the suburb is not something she has ever pondered. And how can anybody know such a thing anyway? Where do you start? But it is an official letter, an official document with the Office of the Mayor stamped upon it.
Somebody has apparently decided that the suburb is a hundred years old. The whole world moves in strange ways, why not the suburb? Ideas come and go, are casually thrown around official offices, and every now and then some of them are taken seriously enough to become fact. And this, it seems, is one. Although how this comes about, why some ideas stick and others don’t, is a mystery to her and probably everyone else involved. All the same, she is both intrigued and amused by the idea and at being invited to join the committee. She rubs the edge of the envelope on her chin, contemplating whether to accept the invitation or not. And, in the end, the best answer she can come up with is ‘Why not?’

She resolves to write back later that evening, but, for the moment, she is distracted by the house. New long flowing curtains have just been fitted and Rita is standing by the window closely examining the quality of the workman’s job. When Mrs Webster advertised in the local paper the year before for domestic help, she expected to get a young girl but found herself with Rita instead. And at first she simply let her do the domestic work she was hired for, until a few months before when she asked Rita for her advice on how best to paint the kitchen and discovered that this woman had the gift of a designer’s eye. Whereas Mrs Webster looks at a room (the house has never been changed) and sees
only the room as it is and cannot conceive of it any differently, this woman sees possibilities. And her judgments are impeccable. So much so that when Rita suggests a particular type of material, a piece of furniture in such and such a corner, a colour that might lift a room, Mrs Webster finds herself saying ‘Yes, yes’ before Rita has even finished describing the full sweep of what she has in mind.

The curtains are a small part, a detail of the vast picture Rita secretly imagines, yet her eyes dwell on every detail of the stitching and folds, for, having been trained as a milliner, Rita knows a few things about stitches and materials.

‘It’s a new room.’ Mrs Webster’s eyes travel the dining room in wonder as if seeing it for the first time, reflecting that, if it had looked like this in the past, it might well have been used more often.

‘Not yet.’ Rita looks up from her inspection.

Mrs Webster smiles. Rita’s confidence and sheer enthusiasm make her smile and she is not only glad this woman is in her house, but in her world. This woman cares for the house and the house responds.

Outside in the suburb, the schools are back and the streets possess a timeless quiet. As she drives through them to the factory, dreamy, she is aware that on days such as these she could, if she were not careful, spend the rest of her life being lulled by the leafy streets. It would, she reflects, be a kind of death,
a big sleep, and death (in one way or another — the death of Webster, the death of the factory) has been on her mind too much. And not just lately, but for a long time. The sheer contentment of these leafy streets works on her, not like a balm, but like an anaesthetic. Then she is at the factory car park. She has changed gears, stopped at intersections, turned corners, slowed, accelerated and finally arrived — and yet she can’t remember anything of the drive, only the deep, entrancing green of the leafy streets through which she has driven. And, as she walks to the factory, she is once again struck by the thought that, if she were not careful, she could well spend the rest of her life being lulled by these streets.

B
reakfast is a simple matter for Vic. Always has been. A pot of strong, black tea — strong enough to stain the inside of his mug. It is coated, this mug, with years of drinking, like all the railway mugs he has ever possessed. A good coating, they all agreed, all the drivers and firemen from those days that are now gone, transformed ordinary tea into that vintage brew you could only drink in the cabin of an engine or by the side of the tracks upon which it sat. And, even now, Vic sees the giant hand of Paddy Ryan wrapped around, dwarfing, the tin mug from which he drank all his working life. This mug had only ever been rinsed, never cleaned. And Paddy said often enough that if anybody ever dared scrub the thing he’d wring the life out of them. And one look at Paddy’s giant
mitts and his eyes when he spoke convinced you that he meant exactly what he said. To stand on the footplate with Paddy Ryan was to stand in the studio of a grand master. Paddy Ryan was the Michelangelo of engine driving and he taught Vic all he knew. Well, almost. He never passed on the secrets, those defining touches that made Paddy Ryan Paddy Ryan. Those signatures that the great drivers left behind on the rails and that could be read, by those who knew how, as easily as reading a painter’s signature on a canvas. It was up to Vic to find his own defining touches. Just as Paddy Ryan, the master of the smooth ride, had found his. It took a lifetime of labour to find those touches, and a lifetime of labour to keep them. Now, all gone: Paddy, the engines they drove, the defining touches that remain now only in the memories of others, or have long passed into railway mythology. All incomprehensibly gone. One minute you’re twenty and it’s all there before you, the next it’s gone. And, like country stations in the night, in the blink of an eye.

A thousand miles away, Michael will, in a few hours, be strolling across magical college lawns that have never glittered so brightly, that unmistakable sensation that life is just beginning,
real
life, touching everything he looks upon, excitement in every step, in the same way that the young Vic would have strode to the first engines of his working life. Vic, mindful
that his son will be doing something at this moment (and not that he worries about him, but Michael is always in his thoughts, as much for the things they did together as the things they didn’t), throws back his tea, contemplates what the boy might be up to, finishes the sandwich and completes this railway breakfast with a Champion Ruby, rolled and ready on the table for when the sandwich is gone and the second mug of tea is poured. And, as the tea ripples down his throat and the air is filled with the blue smoke of the first cigarette of the morning, Vic could almost be driving again. The world could almost be wide again, like it always was when he drove, and he could almost pick up his bag, filled with his billy, his dinner, his swabs and soap, and walk straight out the door to work. He had it, and lost it. They all had it, and lost it — the best of their living. But at least they’d known it and known what it was to possess such a thing. One single pure activity, that’s all it takes to turn a succession of days, months and years into a life. They may all be gone now, those days, but at least they had them. And with that he nods slowly to himself, drains the last of the tea and stands.

The flat is on a hill, and from his doorstep Vic has a full view of the town. From here, he can scan his world. The shimmering green of the banana trees in the garden below, the long, sweeping road that leads down into the town, the imposing white columns of the Twin
Towns Services Club (where all evenings end), the shops to which he will now go, the post office, the pub at which he will lunch, and beyond it all (just visible), the wide green fairways of the golf course. His world is compact and complete. A duchy unto itself.

With his hat on (the summer sun is already powerful) and his thin legs supporting a paunch he never had when he was driving, he strolls easily down the hill, leading with his belly, into the town. Already, he can see the place changing. Or, rather, having change imposed upon it, this little duchy. New flats going up, new clubs. Apartments for southerners. Fancy shops for tourists. It was a sleepy fishing town even when he came here just a few years ago. A proper town, but not a nosy one, a town that let you be if that’s what you wanted. But it’s not sleepy any more. And he knows that soon they’ll bugger up the place like they’ve buggered up everywhere else. But at least he can give thanks that he won’t be around to see that. Progress, they all call it. And he snorts into brief laughter. He once drove a train called Progress, and he knows where that leads and how it ends.

And Vic knows he won’t be around to witness the whole place being buggered up. These pills he takes, which are fighting a losing battle against the grog and the fags and all the damage of a lifetime, put things off. That’s all. Vic knows it. He tells his doctor that he’s not changing, as he’s always told all the
doctors of his life. And when his doctor, with detached simplicity, says it’ll kill him, Vic replies, as he has for them all, that he couldn’t care less. Neither of them ever attempts to kid the other, and they both know that Vic’s day is coming. That it could be any day from now. In the suburb he occasionally wondered what sort of day it would be. But here he knows. The sun will shine. Bathers will go down to the sea, and the surf will be good. The best thing is not to give it too much thought. It’ll all see itself through — these things always do — without Vic thinking too much about it.

Then he’s thinking onions. And as he comes to the first of his routine stops at the front of the greengrocers, he can almost smell the onions he is about to buy, sizzling, as they will be that evening, in a rich butter sauce, the aroma of which will float from the kitchen and fill the entire flat. The anticipated scent in his nostrils, he steps into the shop and greets the round, middle-aged Polish proprietor who looks like she knows (along with her greens) a few things about sausages.

This world unto itself, this duchy for which he has taken out citizenship (having ditched the old self, the they-self, the old city and the old ways) is where his story will end. That’s why he chose it. The sun will shine, the surf will be good and young bathers will go down to the sea.