The Time We Have Taken (9 page)

T
hat evening, after having knocked on Mulligan’s door and entered the welcoming mess of his room to tell Mulligan he had a job for him, Michael is sitting with Madeleine in the lounge room of her flat. There is a guitar on the floor. Everywhere, Michael imagines, in all the houses, on all the floors, there are guitars. The guitar and the decade go together. Once, it was the Age of the Piano. Pianos, he imagines, marked the leisurely passing of time in a more leisurely age than this. Pianos spoke of ease and calm in that recently vanished world of their grandparents, the time signature of which was forever
adagio
. In that once-upon-a-time world where the piano ruled, the hours passed unhurried, and days were long.
And the music that came from pianos was as ordered as the lives of the people who played them, and as long as the days through which they lived and played. At least, this is the way Michael, currently lounging on the floor in front of Madeleine, thinks of the piano.

This, by contrast, is the Age of the Guitar. Wherever you may be, a guitar is never far away. But this is not an instrument that is content to mark the slow passage of time as music did in that once-upon-a-time world that resisted the ruffian of change. The guitar is an instrument that shakes things up. The piano is made for living rooms and quiet houses. As much a resident of the house as the family in it. The guitar is like something blown in off the street. It has the look of trouble about it. Like a stranger on the doorstep, who slips into the house, unwanted and uninvited, by dint of sheer front. Unpredictable, with an attitude suggestive of it being permanently up to no good.

He could share these thoughts with Madeleine, and he would, if he knew her just a little more. If he was at ease with her as his lounging attitude would suggest, if he knew her just a little more he could relax, deliver his thoughts on the contrasting characteristics of the Age of the Piano and that of the guitar in such a way as to amuse her. He may even make her laugh (and he is convinced he doesn’t make
her laugh enough). But in the end he keeps these thoughts to himself, convinced that thoughts sound best inside the head and silly in the open air, like quotes remembered, stored up and trotted out to impress some girl if the occasion should arise.

There is a guitar on the floor in front of them, and it also possesses, it occurs to Michael, when looked at from a different angle (he’s tilting his head to one side), a certain air of wantonness. This guitar is no longer a ruffian, but a vamp. Lounging there on the floor, all curves and trouble, lying on the floor like a challenge, not so much waiting to be picked up but daring anybody to do so.

Madeleine sits on the sofa, the communal garden outside lit up by a line of full moons suspended on dark staffs, the foliage silver and white, not quite vegetable. Her knees together, she wears a short skirt — as is the fashion — and knee-high leather boots. She’s talking of travel, of the journey home, the one she’s been planning ever since the day she arrived here with her family on a ten-pound ticket (did she only ever agree to come for the boat trip, she’s not sure).

‘You know,’ she says, laughing, in that northern English, sing-song voice, ‘I’ve been talking about this for so long there are some people who think I’ve already gone and come back.’

He too laughs, but his is a different kind of laughter, a laughter that, in part, wishes it were true
— that she had gone, and that she was back. His is, in short, glum laughter. And, implied in what she says is the fact that he knew from the start that she was going. That he would only have her for a short time. She’s never withheld this from him. In the brief time they’ve been together, it’s been out there, in the open. You knew this, you always knew, Michael, so don’t go glum on me. This is what she may as well be saying.

It is while he is contemplating this (thoughts of the committee meeting that afternoon banished to the back of his mind) that she reaches out for the guitar and places it on her knees, ready to play. Madeleine is learning the thing, but not seriously. As an amusement, for company almost, in much the same way that his father’s generation took up the harmonica. She holds the guitar like a non-smoker holding a cigarette for someone else, then assembles her fingers into the familiar triangle of the D Major chord. She then strums the strings and grimaces as a muffled sound emerges. She has strangled the chord. Possibly killed it forever. He returns the grimace, then suggests she try again, but to hold the strings down properly this time and at just the right distance from the metal fret. She complies, only to replicate the crime. And he is not quite sure how many lives the D Major chord has, so he is quite relieved when she gives up.

‘I’ll never get it,’ she says, handing the thing over to him.

He rises from the floor and, while resting on his knees in front of her, takes the guitar. His fingers assemble unbidden (he has played the instrument for years, ever since fast bowling left his world and the guitar walked in), and without really being conscious of the relative complexity of the process, he strums the same chord. And from the moment he strikes the chord, one single chord, he realises he has never struck a chord in anything like the same way before. It is as though he has unwittingly brought this thing, this instrument of the Age, to life (and the devil that lurks in its woodwork), for the sound seems to expand and grow in the room like vegetable matter. The whole room, all four corners, is filled with sound, and he looks down at the instrument as if he were holding an entire orchestra in his hands, not a familiar, cheap classical copy from a city store. And, with the sound still swelling, he looks up to Madeleine as if for an explanation, and sees only bewilderment in her eyes. For this sound has transformed the room, and has now transformed them. They not only hear the sound, they feel it. The sound enters them, enters the vast network of their nervous systems and is registered throughout their bodies in the same way that touch might be registered. And as much as she might now look upon Michael as the magician who
produced this effect, Michael looks back at Madeleine in such a way as to suggest that the whole thing is a complete mystery to him. And, after sharing this moment of mystification, their eyes drift down to the guitar and now gaze at it in mutual wonder.

And it is then that she leans forward, her eyes now firmly on his, takes the guitar from him and slides it onto the carpeted floor. He has never seen her like this, her eyes open and direct. Foreign, a Madeleine he has never known. Although she says nothing, she is willing him, asking him, inviting him to kiss her. She will not move, the look says. He will now come to her and she will receive him. And, with the sound of that single chord still in their ears, he pauses so that he might return the extraordinary directness of her stare, delve into the depths of her eyes (which still might be blue or green), because he knows they have never shared an experience such as this before. This, he is saying to himself, this is Madeleine. This is
her
. The Madeleine that neither he nor quite possibly anybody else has ever witnessed before. And then he is kissing her.

He knows little of kissing (he assumes that neither of them really do), but he knows instantly that they have never kissed in this manner before. For not only is he kissing her, she is kissing him, the faint residue of wine still on her lips from the evening mass. She is both receiving him and seeking
him out, at once playing him and being played, and all through the lips. No other parts of their bodies are touching; not hands, arms, thighs, bodies — only the lips. And everything about this moment that has overtaken them is being poured from one to the other through the margins of their mouths, these organs of speech that seem to have acquired a life of their own and no longer feel the need of speech; that have, in fact, shed the need, and, in this delirious exchange, have discovered a higher order of communication altogether. And so deep is the craving there seems to be no end to it. And just when he imagines that this might very well go on forever — and he is content to let it — he feels her arms encircle his neck and draw him back onto the sofa with her. And not once do her lips leave his, or his hers. It is almost as though they have melded, become one, a pose set in marble that will leave them kissing forever, a spectacle frozen in time and destined for museum gardens, one that will outlive both time itself and the elements.

At first this other sound enters their ears like a door opening and closing in a distant universe. A door of no consequence in a faraway world — where two people (recognisable as Madeleine and Michael) lie on an identical sofa in a flat indistinguishable from the one they are in. But it is not a door of no consequence. It is theirs, and they spring from the
sofa, their lips finally parting, and are almost sitting upright as Madeleine’s sister enters the lounge room, which, throughout the whole exchange, has been left in full light — the curtains not drawn, the room open to the casual or inquiring eyes of the flats opposite them.

Her sister excuses herself, is about to retreat from the room, but they implore her to stay. But, as if having trespassed, as if in the company of two people who ought to be familiar but who seem disconcertingly foreign, she begins her retreat. They stop her. She sits. She sits, she knows, because if normality is to be returned she must sit and chat as if nothing has happened. And at some stage during the talk that follows, while uncertain conversation floats back and forth between them, Madeleine rises slowly from the sofa, picks the guitar up from the floor where it has been left to languish, and places it upright in the corner of the room. And, for a second, she fancies that it is staring back at her, satisfied with itself, its work done. She can still feel his lips, and he still feels hers as he watches her deposit the thing in the corner, both of them wondering what came over them, while staring at the guitar in the corner of the room as if the answer might be found in the infinity of chords contained within it, each just waiting for the right moment to be struck.

I
t could be any of the mornings of his life in the town. Vic has just come from the greengrocer’s and has left carrying a small bag of potatoes and beans. After the greengrocer’s, his walk takes him to the post office, where he checks his mail.

And, on this morning, before he even opens his post box, he senses there is a letter from Rita. He turns the key, draws the tiny door back, and there is one of those fancy Florentine envelopes that she sends her letters in, this one written a few days before at the small desk in her bedroom. It’s either that or a fancy French envelope. He doesn’t know where she finds these things. What takes him by surprise, though, is the anticipation he feels. Of looking forward to the letter, and knowing that he
will be disappointed if his intuitions are false and the letter is not there.

He sits on a bench in the sun. The light is always good, and it’s the perfect place to read these communications from a previous life. He unfolds the crisp, decorated paper and the old street, its houses and gardens, the entire suburb, open out with the letter. He holds the Old World in his hands, and it is both near and distant, something for which he feels both a curious affection and cold curiosity. You don’t walk away from twenty years just like that. You always leave something behind, and you always bring part of that Old World with you, no matter how much you might imagine you haven’t.

Not that Vic is someone who spends too much time dwelling on the past, because, as he tells himself, there’s not too much time left in which to dwell. There’s a lot more of the past now than there is of the future, and, besides, the past is gone, isn’t it? All the same, something Rita says (a reference to the Tivoli Road hill and that big old house where Rita grew up), drags him back, as much as he doesn’t want to be dragged but there is an emotional tide drawing him back into the former life, and soon he’s not even reading the letter. He’s back there. He’s young, she’s young. Impossibly so. Her eyes bright and brown, the adventure, that glorious shot at Life about to begin. The look, the eyes bright and blind to everyone
around, they both had it. The look the young always have, for it’s so easy to forget you had it too. And it is then, with a shock that moves him physically as if having been rocked by invisible hands (or the convulsion that his doctor tells him could come any day), it is then he remembers that they were once in love. He was once in love, she was once in love, they loved each other and together they spoke words of love. That this thing picked them both up and swept them along, and that they were happy to be swept along by a force so deliriously incomprehensible that it didn’t bear thinking about. They only knew that this was a time of ‘befores’ and ‘afters’, that the power of the thing had to be trusted, and all that was left for them to do was go with it. Let it take them wherever it would. And so they gave themselves up to it. And such was the power of the thing that it gave them days and days delirious with happiness (all too easily forgotten), that it gave them their son, and that, to give their son room for his long legs (which he got from Vic) to run, it took them out to the fringes of the city where a frontier community was hovering between town and suburb, a suburb in the process of being born, and where, in time, between one weekday walk to the station and another trek home, they eventually forgot that they were ever in love in the first place and could remember little of the force that had swept them all the way out there.

Vic finishes reading Rita’s letter and there are tears in his eyes. Where did they come from? He has no memory of the first tear or those that followed. A man, just doing the shopping, sits down in a public place to read a letter from his wife (from whom he is separated, but not divorced) and cries. Such a man is an event. And Vic is that man. People passing stare openly at the event of a man crying in a public place. And, as much as he is not a man given to crying in public places, he is not concerned. Vic is no stranger to crying, or ignorant of the wisdom of tears. He told Michael, often enough in those last few years in the old house and would tell him again any time, that crying is as natural as sweating. And Vic is a big sweater. And as the tears flow, Vic happy to let them, he contemplates how it is that we can forget such things. Such things should be unforgettable, and yet all too often they aren’t. How was it that, until just then, he was able to forget the hour before meeting Rita? And how was it that he was able to forget the Vic that pedalled her back from the late-night dances, all the way up that Tivoli Road hill (an eighteen-year-old Rita balancing on the handle bars)? And how was it that he was able to forget cycling back home from Rita’s in the early hours of morning, looking up to the stars and kissing the old life goodbye? How is it we so easily forget that something momentous once happened to us? Something so momentous we know
intuitively that whatever we were up to until then was the ‘before’ of our lives, and whatever was about to follow, the ‘after’.

Vic rises from his bench, wipes his eyes and looks about the town, which is suddenly alien to him. He places Rita’s letter in his pocket. Somebody nods and wishes him a good morning, with a funny look in his eye. Vic nods back. Calls the man ‘brother’ in that familiar way of his, and returns the greeting, but is not really sure who he has just greeted.