The Time We Have Taken (5 page)

T
he college lawns, the moat, the brilliant blue sky itself, all sparkle just that bit more in this second week of term because there is someone out there after all. Somebody had come along. Instead of moving through the world as if it were someone else’s property and he a mere visitor, and all the things that mattered happening to other people; instead of being a perpetual spectator, Michael is now
in
the world. As Vic’s daily round of shops and pub and golf and club begins a thousand miles to the sub-tropical north where he has just finished his customary simple breakfast, Michael enters the deeply thrilling world of grown-up love.

There he is drifting across the green lawns while a popular love song floats out from an open college
window. Love songs are everywhere now, and this one follows him over the moat and up the entire length of the gravel path that leads to the lecture theatres. And, in some ways, it is not so much the world that he is strolling through on this dazzling late-February morning, but an idealised view of it. A latter-day pastoral. He has known Madeleine for almost a month now and is still thrilling to the unfamiliar sensation that there really is someone out there for him. A way of feeling that had lain dormant inside him, unsummoned since adolescence, had come alive again, and this emotional renaissance, in transforming him, has also transformed the world he walks through.

But, above all, the word that occurs to him on this dazzling morning is the same one that will return to him years from now when he recalls it all and the rush of released emotions that came with it: ordinary. The wonder of the whole business is that he has discovered ordinariness. This is the way the rest of the world lives. A world of falling in love, making plans in plural and talking in terms of ‘us’ and ‘we’ beckoned. Someone had come along. And all the little ordinary things that everybody else took for granted had come along too. The ‘us’ and the ‘we’ still fell awkwardly from his lips, and, while part of him wanted the awkwardness to go away, part of him never wanted to lose it.

In front of the library, in the main square of the university, the various clubs and societies — Marxists, socialists, Christians, philosophical and sporting — have set up their stalls and are recruiting members, the colours of their flags and banners, the sounds and the milling crowds transforming the square into a kind of medieval market place. But, instead of selling goods, they’re selling ideas. There is a large banner on a wall informing everyone that an anti-imperialist, anti-war march will leave from the university in two weeks from now. Prominent student political figures — most of whom Michael knows, as this is a new, small university — are standing out front of their stalls, like spruikers in a side-show, drumming up trade with a sort of melodramatic urgency, the words ‘Vietnam’, ‘imperialist’ and ‘America’ mingling with the popular music issuing from the public address system and the catch-cries of the stalls around them. One of these figures, in fact, nods knowingly at Michael. You, he seems to say, you uppity English students. Don’t think those red socks you’re wearing fool me.

The wordless exchange takes only a second, and Michael acknowledges some truth in the look, for he is only vaguely mindful of the activity around him (and, even then, it is the colour and movement that draws his eye). It is the personal world that absorbs him. There is an uplifting, unmistakable feeling of setting out this morning — and not just upon the
year, but ‘Life’ itself. Since Madeleine had come along, Life had acquired a capital ‘L’, just as it did in the critical texts he studied. And now it is Life that is all around him, touching everything he looks upon and propelling every step he takes along the gravel path that will lead him to an appointment with his English tutor so that he can finish this broken degree of his (the teacher in charge of the school timetable having arranged Michael’s classes to allow for it).

Days in which a completely ordinary gesture, denoting care or affection, a corny love song and a casual sentence become synonymous with a moment and are forever after the key that opens it up for recall. Nothing happens, and everything happens. An ordinary act transforms the familiar into the unfamiliar, and memories are born.

And this is what Madeleine will become. Not a story, but a string of memories and scenes. Not even a picture, but parts of a picture. Details of days that may have passed barely noticed at the time, but which lodge and stick and stay clear in Michael’s mind through the years that come after when she is no longer there.

Later, that evening, he is walking beside her. She is carrying in her handbag his favourite book. A favourite book, Michael muses quietly, as if he were addressing Madeleine (which he is not, for he speaks
better in his mind than he does in fact), is a very private object. Others may read this book, he continues in silent address, but not the way you do. A favourite book becomes yours when it enters your life. You are the one for whom it was written and, in being read by you, the book meets its other half and becomes effectively whole. It is, therefore, difficult to share a favourite book. There is risk. The act of sharing comes with an implied question. So, when the book passes from one hand to another, this act of sharing can be as fraught as a declaration of love. Sometimes they amount to the same thing.

Madeleine says she is famous for her long strides. She walks like a young woman going places, in the kind of short skirt that is the fashion of the day. Michael doesn’t know how young women walked a hundred years ago, but he finds it difficult to imagine that they walked like Madeleine. Or Maddy. Her sister calls her Maddy. Her parents. Her friends. Everybody does. Except Michael. So far, the abbreviated form of her name does not come naturally. Not as naturally as those long strides for which she maintains she is famous and which take her across an unattended service station and down into the student streets of an inner-city student suburb. The book is in her handbag, the strap of which hangs across her shoulder and swings back and forth as she walks. It is not a great book, not one that is even looked upon as being serious enough to
belong to anybody’s list of great books. Not anybody with judgment, that is. And, as a student, now teacher of literature, Michael is meant to have judgment. But he suspends it for this book. From the first to the subsequent readings of it (and they have been many), Michael has never asked himself if this is a good or even a great book. It is simply
his
book, and questions of its goodness or greatness do not arise. And the author, Mr W Somerset Maugham, is not one of those authors who is even studied, not the way authors of great renown are read and studied by students of literature such as Michael. The word ‘entertainment’ occurs to him as he follows Madeleine’s long strides over the watery asphalt of the late-night petrol station, past the solid nineteenth-century building that houses the bank, to the lights and the crossing that will lead them to the shops and cafés and pizza houses of the main street. Mr Maugham, as his lecturers would call him, writes amusements and entertainments of a certain kind, ‘gentleman’s literature’, and Michael is almost on the point of apologising for the book — as he always seems to do whenever he mentions it to anybody — when she speaks. She likes it, she says. It is not a great book, he quickly adds, and she shakes her head saying that it does not matter. She reads more than the students he knows and already he trusts her judgment more than theirs. What does it matter that no one thinks it a serious book? And she slows those
long strides and stares at him candidly. An acknowledgment that the book was not really the point. And they both know what the point is, don’t they? In giving her a favourite book, a question had been asked. She reaches into her bag, passes it back to him, and he places it in his coat pocket. She does it carefully, to show that she cares for the book. And, with this demonstration of care, the question he asked in giving it to her has been answered.

‘Tell me about where you come from.’

‘Liverpool. Well,’ she corrects herself, ‘a small town just out of Liverpool.’

She stops there. He waits.

‘And?’

‘There’s nothing to tell. You wouldn’t know it.’

‘There’s always something to tell.’

‘The Beatles played at our local hall. My friends went. I missed it.’

‘I wish I could say that.’

‘It’s got a nice park, and a lovely little station. But I don’t miss it. Not much.’

‘I’d like to see it.’

‘Aren’t you funny,’ she says. It is one of her favourite expressions.

They stop outside a small café and contemplate the list of pizzas pasted to the inside of the window. Over the next few weeks, she and her sister will talk more to Michael about this place from which they come. And
it will become apparent that although they say they don’t miss it, they do. And the idea of this place from which Madeleine has come will enter his mind. It will enter, and it will stay there and a deeply private mythology will be born. The place from which she comes is being written in his mind, and over the following months he will unconsciously construct all the other moving and non-moving parts that constitute this place he has never seen but which one day he will, many years later, when the Liverpool of his mind and the real thing meet.

But, for now, a favourite book has been exchanged. A question has been asked, and an answer received. They stare into the pizza shop window, contemplating a cheap dinner for two. For Michael, part of that deeply thrilling world of the ordinary.

R
ita returns home from the Webster house mid-afternoon, her transformation of Mrs Webster’s dining room (new curtains, new carpet) now complete. It is too late to start something new and too early to put her feet up. It’s a dead part of the afternoon; she can neither sit nor stand, and because of this oddly unsettling effect she finds herself pacing from room to room until she finishes up in the bedroom at the front of the house.

As she turns her head from side to side, looking about the room and wondering what on earth she’s doing here, the wardrobe speaks. The wardrobe says, ‘Open me.’ So she does. And there they are. Her dresses. A lifetime of dresses. And, as she runs her
fingers across them, they sway on their hangers as if dancing to the sweetness of long-silent melodies.

Then, one by one, she takes them from the wardrobe, these dresses of hers that were always just a bit too good for the street, and which she wore in spite of it. These European dresses, like the fancy French windows at the front of the house, always spoke of other places, of the great world beyond the suburb, and so the street always took them as an insult. Well, stuff the street! Rita is not a woman who uses rough language, but she is not above telling the street to get stuffed when both sufficient cause and impulse come to her. Just as she is not above silently pronouncing the young girls of the suburb, with their mini-skirts and their tight blouses, tarts. As she takes the dresses from the wardrobe, those long-silent melodies, the songs that are forever attached to each of them, begin to echo in her ears and songs she thought she’d forgotten are retrieved by the dresses.

Somehow, and she can’t remember doing this (not consciously), the dresses are arranged in order, consistent with the years in which they were worn. They are a story, chapters leading into each other. And it’s a story that begins with the yellow-and-black summer affair, with the bright flowers and the one dark, bold strap, that she wore for the first time a thousand years ago to an engagement party at Bedser’s at the bottom of the street. And suddenly, she’s hearing
one of those finger-clicking, jazzy numbers that always annoyed the hell out of Vic, about, what? Love, of course. They were all about love, which is probably why they annoyed the hell out of him. Only, in this song (which is now full and rich in her ears), love is a sort of figure. Not a person, not a man or woman — but a thing, all the same. And it’s waiting, just around the corner. And Rita can’t decide whether to be excited by it, or frightened, or sad. It’s unsettling, that’s what it is. Because she can’t decide if this love thing waiting just around the corner is going to embrace her and caress her the way love should, or mug her. And the smooth-shaven, finger-snapping singer has a glint in his eyes like he knows something that only he and the song know, but his glinting pair of eyes are also telling her she’s welcome to come and find out all the same. It could be fun and it could be scary. Then the orchestra takes over. And she remembers what it was to be mugged by love and Vic’s that thing around the corner. Her mother is saying don’t marry him, her sisters are saying don’t marry him, everybody is saying don’t marry him — and, of course, she marries him.

And as the song plays, round and round in her head, she’s seized by the impulse to step back into that time when love mugged her and she took a chance. To step back into that time when love was a bit rough with the broad, because love knew no other way. And the dress says, yes, yes, you can. And she
says, no, no, I can’t. And she says it again and again. But the dress doesn’t give up, and — in this dead patch of the afternoon while the suburb is dozing — she’s peeling off the comfortable, loose summer frock she’s wearing and taking a chance.

There’s the faint whiff of moth balls and old times as she raises the thing above her head and begins to lower it. And her heart’s going like mad and she doesn’t know why because she’s just trying on an old dress, but it is anyway, because there seems to be something urgent in the act that she wasn’t aware of before she started. Something at stake, and she doesn’t know what. But, somehow, having started, she can’t bear to fail. And so, as she lowers it over her head (as she would have effortlessly and unselfconsciously fifteen years before), she is aware of every part of the process, the awkwardness of trying on an old dress. And although it takes a bit more time than it would once have done, soon enough she’s in it. And she’s not too sure about sitting down and standing up too fast, but she’s back inside the skin of the young wife. And she pauses, examining the sensations that come with it. And with this skin come all the nights and the parties that she once wore it to and she’s suddenly stepping into neighbours’ houses long gone, with plates and beers. Then they all come back in a rush and a blur, a night or two in particular, such as Bedser’s. Especially Bedser’s. The engagement of that daughter of his, what was her
name? And for a moment she’s carefree and happy as she walks down their street in this new dress of hers under a summer sky glowing with a touch of eternity, as though the night itself would go on forever, and everybody standing under it. And she passes from happy to sad to just plain flat (as if she’s just been run over by one of those great, snorting engines Vic drove) as she remembers that the night did end, and, like they all seemed to then, it ended badly. But did it always happen like that? Did they all start good and end badly? There must have been good ones in there. Must have been, only she’s pressed to remember them just now. Or maybe it’s just that the bad were so many, the shadow they cast so tall and wide, that they blot out the good. And the image that now prevails is that of a winter night, the table set, Rita and the boy that Michael was, waiting. And Vic not home. Not yet fallen in the back door in that way of his that always sounded like the briquettes had just been delivered.

And she’s no sooner back in the skin of the young wife than she wants to be out of it again. She eyes herself in the wardrobe mirror, and, although she’d never let the street see her like this, she’s happy enough with what her eyes tell her. Or is it what she tells them to tell her? Then she’s pulling the dress off and happily reclaiming the garments of middle age.

There they are, from one end of the bed to the other, her dresses from all the years. And as she steps
back, taking in the spectacle (which is also something of a history of recent fashion), she reads her story in the neatly arranged chapters of her dresses. And while it was good to know that she could slip back into the skin of the young wife, it wasn’t really that good to be under old skin again. Even the skin of youth.

And as she’s staring at them, reading chapter by chapter the story of her life, and the house and the whole suburb for that matter, she knows that the material of each dress is skin she has long since shed.

Slowly, she removes them from the hangers, her dresses, and folds them one on top of the other, year upon year upon year. And when she’s arrived at the present she closes the wardrobe. The dresses fit neatly into a suitcase. Outside, the afternoon is quietly slipping towards twilight, and the sounds of children playing the last of the day’s games and young families (the names of many she’s not yet familiar with) rise from the street. In the morning she’ll drop the suitcase off at the local opportunity shop in the Old Wheat Road. And perhaps, in time, a young wife will come along and slip into the skin that Rita once wore.