The Child in Time

by Ian Mcewan

  There was a murmur of approbation. The academic who had proposed the phonetic alphabet began to talk of dyslexia, the sale of State schools, the housing shortage. There were spontaneous groans. The mild-mannered fellow pressed on. Two-thirds of eleven-year-olds in inner city schools, he said, were illiterate. Parmenter intervened with lizard-like alacrity. The needs of special groups were beyond the committee’s terms of reference. At his side, Canham was nodding. Means and ends, not pathologies, were the committee’s concerns. The discussion became fragmentary. For some reason a vote was proposed.

  Stephen raised his hand for what he knew to be a useless alphabet. It hardly mattered for he was crossing a broad strip of cracked and pot-holed asphalt which separated two tower blocks. He carried with him a folder of photographs and lists of names and addresses, neatly typed and alphabetically ordered. The photographs – enlarged holiday snaps – he showed to anyone he could interest. The lists, compiled in the library from back numbers of local newspapers, were of parents whose children had died in the preceding six months. His theory, one of many, was that Kate had been stolen to replace a lost child. He knocked on doors and spoke to mothers who were first puzzled, then hostile. He visited child minders. He walked up and down the shopping streets with his photographs displayed. He loitered by the supermarket, and by the entrance to the chemist’s next door. He went further afield until his search area was three miles across. He anaesthetised himself with activity.

  He went everywhere alone, setting out each day shortly after the late winter dawn. The police had lost interest in the case after a week. Riots in a northern suburb, they said, were stretching their resources. And Julie stayed at home. She had special leave from the college. When he left in the morning she was sitting in the armchair in the bedroom, facing the cold fireplace. That was where he found her when he came back at night and turned on the lights.

  Initially there had been bustle of the bleakest kind: interviews with senior policemen, teams of constables, tracker dogs, some newspaper interest, more explanations, panicky grief. During that time Stephen and Julie had clung to one another, sharing dazed rhetorical questions, awake in bed all night, theorising hopefully one moment, despairing the next. But that was before time, the heartless accumulation of days, had clarified the absolute, bitter truth. Silence drifted in and thickened. Kate’s clothes and toys still lay about the flat, her bed was still unmade. Then, one afternoon, the clutter was gone. Stephen found the bed stripped and three bulging plastic sacks by the door in her bedroom. He was angry with Julie, disgusted by what he took to be a feminine self-destructiveness, a wilful defeatism. But he could not speak to her about it. There was no room for anger, no openings. They moved like figures in a quagmire, with no strength for confrontation. Suddenly their sorrows were separate, insular, incommunicable. They went their different ways, he with his lists and daily trudging, she in her armchair, lost to deep, private grief. Now there was no mutual consolation, no touching, no love. Their old intimacy, their habitual assumption that they were on the same side, was dead. They remained huddled over their separate losses, and unspoken resentments began to grow.

  At the end of a day on the streets, when he turned for home, nothing pained Stephen more than the knowledge of his wife sitting in the dark, of how she would barely stir to acknowledge his return, and how he would have neither the good will nor the ingenuity to break through the silence. He suspected – and it turned out later he was correct – that she took his efforts to be a typically masculine evasion, an attempt to mask feelings behind displays of competence and organisation and physical effort. The loss had driven them to the extremes of their personalities. They had discovered a degree of mutual intolerance which sadness and shock made insurmountable. They could no longer bear to eat together. He ate standing up in sandwich bars, anxious not to lose time, reluctant to sit down and listen to his thoughts. As far as he knew she ate nothing at all. Early on he brought home bread and cheese which over the days quietly grew their separate moulds in the unvisited kitchen. A meal together would have implied a recognition and acceptance of their diminished family.

  It came to the point where Stephen could not bring himself to look at Julie. It was not only that he saw haggard traces of Kate or himself mirrored in her face. It was the inertia, the collapse of will, the near ecstatic suffering which disgusted him and threatened to undermine his efforts. He was going to find his daughter and murder her abductor. He had only to act on the correct impulse and show the photograph to the right person and he would be led to her. If there were more daylight hours, if he could resist the temptation which was growing each morning to keep his head under the blankets, if he could walk faster, maintain his concentration, remember to glance behind now and then, waste less time eating sandwiches, trust his intuition, go up side streets, and move faster, cover more ground, run even, run …

  Parmenter was standing, faltering as he clipped his silver pen into the inside pocket of his jacket. As he made towards the door which Canham was holding open for him, the old man smiled a general farewell. The committee members shuffled their papers and began the customary, measured conversations which would see them out of the building. Stephen walked down the hot corridor with the academic who had been so convincingly voted down. His name was Morley. In his civilised, tentative manner he was explaining how the discredited alphabet systems of the past made his work all the harder. Stephen knew that soon he would be alone again. But even now he could not help drifting off, could not prevent himself reflecting that the situation had deteriorated to such an extent that he felt no particular emotion when he returned from his searching one late February afternoon and found Julie’s armchair empty. A note on the floor gave the name and phone number of a retreat in the Chilterns. There was no other message. He wandered about the flat, turning on lights, staring in at neglected rooms, little stage sets about to be struck.

  Finally he arrived back at Julie’s chair, loitered by it a moment, his hand resting lightly on its back as if calculating the odds of some dangerous act. At last he stirred himself, took two paces round the chair and sat down. He stared into the dark grate where spent matches lay at odd angles by a piece of tin foil; minutes went by, time in which to feel the chair’s bunched material yield Julie’s contours for his own, empty minutes like all the others. Then he slumped, he was still for the first time in weeks. He remained that way for hours, all through the night, sometimes dozing briefly, when awake never stirring or shifting his gaze from the grate. All the while, it seemed, there was something gathering in the silence about him, a slow surge of realisation mounting with a sleek, tidal force which did not break or explode dramatically but which bore him in the small hours to the first full flood of understanding of the true nature of his loss. Everything before had been fantasy, a routine and frenetic mimicry of sorrow. Just before dawn he began to cry, and it was from this moment in the semi-darkness that he was to date his time of mourning.

  Two

  Make it clear to him that the clock cannot be argued with and that when it is time to leave for school, for Daddy to go to work, for Mummy to attend to her duties, then these changes are as incontestable as the tides.

  The Authorised Childcare Handbook, HMSO

  That Stephen Lewis had a lot of money and was famous among school children was the consequence of a clerical error, a moment’s inattention in the operation of the internal post at Gott’s which had brought a parcel of typescript on to the wrong desk. That Stephen no longer mentioned this error – it was many years old now – was partly due to the royalty cheques and advances which had flowed from Gott’s and his many foreign publishers ever since, and partly to the acceptance of fate which comes with one’s first ageing; in his mid-twenties it had seemed arbitrarily humorous that he should be a successful writer of children’s books for there were still many other things he might yet have become. These days he could not imagine being anything else.

  What else could he be? The old friends of his student days, th
e aesthetic and political experimenters, the visionary drug-takers, had all settled for even less. A couple of acquaintances, once truly free men, were resigned to a lifetime teaching English to foreigners. Some were facing middle age exhaustedly teaching remedial English or ‘lifeskills’ to reluctant adolescents in far-flung secondary schools. These were the luckier ones who had found jobs. Others cleaned hospital floors or drove taxis. One had qualified for a begging badge. Stephen dreaded ever meeting her in the street. All these promising spirits, nurtured, brought to excited life by the study of English Literature from which they culled their quick slogans – Energy is perpetual delight, Damn braces, bless relaxes – had disgorged from libraries in the late sixties and early seventies intent on inward journeys, or eastward ones in painted buses. They had returned home when the world grew smaller and more serious to service Education, now a dingy, shrunken profession; schools were up for sale to private investors, the leaving age was soon to be lowered.

  The idea that the more educated the population the more readily could its problems be solved had quietly faded away. It belonged with the demise of a more general principle that on the whole life would get better for more and more people and that it was the responsibility of governments to stage-manage this drama of realised potential, widening possibilities. The cast of improvers had once been immense and there had always been jobs for types like Stephen and his friends. Teachers, museum keepers, mummers, actors, itinerant story-tellers – a huge company and all bankrolled by the State. Now governmental responsibilities had been redefined in simpler, purer terms: to keep order, and to defend the State against its enemies. For a while, Stephen had kept alive a vague ambition to be a teacher in a State school. He saw himself, tall and craggy by the blackboard, before him a silent, respectful class intimidated by his tendency to sudden sarcasm, leaning forwards to catch his every word. Now he knew how lucky he had been. He remained the author of children’s books, and half forgot that it was all a mistake.

  One year after leaving University College Stephen had returned to London with amoebic dysentery after a hashish-befuddled tour of Turkey, Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier Province to discover that the work ethic he and his generation had worked so hard to destroy was still strong within him. He craved order and purpose. He took a cheap bedsit, found a job as a filing clerk in a news-cutting agency and set about writing a novel. Each evening he worked four or five hours, delighted by the romance, the nobility of the undertaking. He was impregnable against the dullness of his job; he had a secret which was growing at one thousand words a day. And he had all the usual fantasies. He was Thomas Mann, he was James Joyce, perhaps he was William Shakespeare. He added to the excitement of his endeavour by working by the light of two candles.

  It was his intention to write of his travels, in a novel called Hashish, about hippies stabbed to death in their sleeping bags, a nicely brought-up girl sentenced to a lifetime in a Turkish jail, mystic pretentiousness, drug-enhanced sex, amoebic dysentery. First of all he needed to get down the background of his main character, something about his childhood to show the physical and moral distance he had to travel. But the opening chapter stubbornly refused to end. It took on a life of its own, and this was how Stephen came to write a novel based on a summer holiday he had spent in his eleventh year with two girl cousins, a novel of short trousers and short hair for the boys, and Alice bands and frocks tucked into knickers for the girls, with unspoken yearnings, coyly interlacing fingers in place of crazed sex, bicycles with wicker hampers instead of day-glo Volkswagen buses, and set not in Jalalabad but just outside Reading. It was all done in three months and he called it Lemonade.

  For a week he fingered and shuffled his typescript, worrying that it was too short. Then, one Monday morning, he pleaded ill, made a photocopy and delivered it personally to the Bloomsbury offices of Gott, the famous literary publisher. As is usual, he heard nothing for a very long time. When the letter finally arrived it was not from Charles Darke, the young senior editor profiled in the Sunday newspapers, rescuer of Gott’s faltering reputation. It was from a Miss Amanda Rien, pronounced, she said with a squeaky laugh when she ushered him into her office, not as a French word, but to rhyme with ‘mean’.

  Stephen sat with his shins pressed tight against Miss Rien’s desk, for the room had once been a broom cupboard. There were no windows. On the walls, instead of framed black and white photographs of the early twentieth-century giants who had made great the name of Gott, was a portrait not of Evelyn Waugh, surely, but a frog in a three-piece suit leaning on a cane by the balustrade of a country house. Elsewhere, tacked to the few feet of wall space, there were pictures of teddy bears, half a dozen of them at least, attempting to jump-start a fire engine, a mouse in a bikini holding a gun to its head, and a grim-faced crow with a stethoscope round its neck taking the pulse of a pale young boy who appeared to have fallen out of a tree.

  Miss Rien sat less than four feet away gazing at Stephen with proprietorial wonder. He smiled back uncomfortably, and lowered his gaze. Was this really his first? she wanted to know. Everyone at Gott’s was thrilled, absolutely thrilled. He nodded, suspecting a terrible mistake. He did not know enough about publishers to speak out, and the last thing he wanted was to appear foolish. He was reassured when Miss Rien said that Charles knew he was here and was dying to meet him. Minutes later the door snapped open and Darke, without leaving the corridor, leaned in and shook Stephen’s hand. He spoke rapidly, and without introduction. It was a brilliant book, and of course he wanted to do it. Of course he did. But he had to dash. New York and Frankfurt were on the line. But they would have lunch. And soon. And congratulations. The door snapped shut and Stephen turned to find Miss Rien studying his face for the first signs of adulation. She spoke solemnly and with lowered voice. A great man. A great man and a great publisher. There was nothing to do but agree.

  He returned to his bedsit excited and insulted. As a potential Joyce, Mann or Shakespeare he belonged without question to the European cultural tradition, the grown-up one. It was true that from the start he had been anxious to be understood. He had written in a simple, precise English. He had wanted to be accessible, but not to everyone. After much thought he decided to do nothing until he had met Darke again. In the meantime, to complicate his feelings further, there arrived in the post a contract and the offer of an advance for £2000, the equivalent of two years’ wages. He made enquiries and discovered this to be an exceptional sum for a first novel. The press cutting agency was unbearably tedious now that he had finished writing. For eight hours a day he cut articles out of newspapers, stamped them with the date and filed them. The people in the office were stupefied by the work they did. He was longing to give his notice. Several times he took out his pen, preparing to sign and take the money, but out of the corner of his eye he saw a jeering, ironic crowd of teddy bears, mice and crows, welcoming him to their ranks.

  And when at last the time came for him to put on the tie he had bought for the occasion, the first he had worn since leaving school, and voice his confusion to Darke in the discreet quiet of a restaurant, over the most expensive meal Stephen had ever eaten, nothing was clarified at all. Darke listened, nodding impatiently whenever Stephen neared the end of a sentence. Before Stephen had finished, Darke set down his soup spoon, placed his small, smooth hand on the younger man’s wrist and explained in a kindly manner, as though to a child, that the distinction between adult and children’s fiction was indeed a fiction itself. It was entirely false, a mere convenience. It was bound to be when the greatest of writers all possessed a child-like vision, a simplicity of approach – however complicatedly stated – that made adult genius at one with infancy. And conversely – Stephen was pulling his hand free – the greatest so-called children’s books were precisely those that spoke to both children and adults, to the incipient adult within the child, to the forgotten child within the adult.

  Darke was enjoying his speech. To be in a famous restaurant making expansive remarks to a
young writer was one of the more desirable perquisites of his profession. Stephen finished his potted shrimps and sat back to watch and listen. Darke had sandy hair with an ungovernable plume which rose from the back of the crown. It was a habit with him to feel for this tuft and press it flat with his palm while he spoke. It sprang up when he let it alone.

  For all his worldly confidence, dark suit and handmade shirt, Darke was only six years older than Stephen. It was a crucial six years, however, dividing, on Darke’s part, a reverence for maturity that made it a teenage ambition to appear twice one’s age, from Stephen’s conviction that maturity was treachery, timidity, fatigue, and that youth was a blessed state to be embraced for as long as was socially and biologically feasible. At the time of their first lunch together Darke had been married to Thelma seven years. The big house in Eaton Square was solidly established. The then almost valuable oil paintings of sea battles and hunting scenes were already in place. So too were the thick clean towels in the guest bedroom, the cleaning lady who came four hours every day and spoke no English. While Stephen and his friends were in Goa and Kabul with their frisbees and their hashish pipes, Charles and Thelma had a man who parked their car, a telephone answering service, dinner parties, hardback books. They were grownups. Stephen lived in a bedsit and could get all his stuff into two suitcases. His novel was suitable for children.