The Child in Time

by Ian Mcewan

  It was Thelma who answered the door to Stephen.

  ‘We’re in the kitchen,’ she said and led him across the hall. Then she changed her mind and turned.

  He gestured at the bare walls where smudged, grey rectangles hung in place of paintings.

  ‘Yes, the removal people started work this afternoon.’ She had steered him into the drawing room and spoke quickly and softly. ‘Charles is in a fragile state. Don’t ask him any questions, and don’t make him feel guilty about leaving you with that committee.’

  Since Darke’s rise in politics, Stephen had seen a great deal more of Thelma. He had kept her company in the evenings and tried to learn a little about theoretical physics. She liked to pretend that he was closer to her than her husband was, that they had a special, conspiratorial understanding. It was not treachery so much as flattery. It was embarrassing and irresistible. He nodded now, as always happy to please her. Charles was her difficult child, and she had enlisted Stephen’s help many times; on one occasion, to help curb the Minister’s drinking on the eve of a parliamentary debate, on another, to distract him at the dinner table from needling a young physicist friend of hers who was a socialist.

  ‘Tell me what’s happened,’ Stephen asked, but she was moving back in the echoing hall and putting on a mock-stern voice.

  ‘Have you just got out of bed? You look awfully pale.’ She nodded briskly as he protested, implying that she would get the truth out of him later. They set off again across the hallway, down some steps and through a green baize door, an item Charles had installed not long after he was offered his job in government.

  The ex-Minister was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a glass of milk. He stood and came towards Stephen, wiping away a milk moustache with the back of his hand. His voice was light, oddly melodious. ‘Stephen … Stephen, many changes. I hope you’ll be tolerant …’

  It had been a long time since Stephen had seen his friend without a dark suit, striped shirt and silk tie. Now he was in loose corduroy trousers and a white T-shirt. He looked suppler, younger; without the padding of a tailored jacket, his shoulders appeared to be delicately constructed. Thelma was pouring Stephen a glass of wine, Charles was guiding him towards a wooden chair. They all sat with their elbows on the table. There was quiet excitement, news in the air that was difficult to break. Thelma said, ‘We’ve decided that we can’t tell you it all at once. In fact, we think we’d rather show you than tell you. So be patient, you’ll know it all sooner or later. You’re the only one we’ll be taking into our confidence, so …’

  Stephen nodded.

  Charles said, ‘Did you see the television news?’

  ‘I saw the evening paper.’

  ‘The story is I’m having a breakdown.’

  ‘Well?’

  Charles looked at Thelma, who said, ‘We’ve made some well-considered decisions. Charles is giving up his career, and I’m resigning. We’re selling the house and moving into the cottage.’

  Charles went to the fridge and refilled his glass with milk. He did not return to his chair, but stood behind Thelma’s, with one hand resting lightly on her shoulder. For as long as Stephen had known her, Thelma had wanted to give up university teaching, move out to the country somewhere and write her book. How had she got round Charles? She was looking at Stephen, waiting for a reaction. It was difficult not to read triumph into the slight smile, and difficult to follow her instructions and not ask questions.

  Stephen spoke past Thelma to Charles. ‘What are you going to do in Suffolk? Breed pigs?’

  He smiled wryly.

  There was a silence. Thelma patted her husband’s hand and spoke without turning to face him. ‘You promised yourself an early night …’ He was already straightening. It was barely eight-thirty. Stephen watched his friend closely, marvelling at how much smaller he appeared, how slight in build. Had high office really made him larger?

  ‘Yes,’ he was saying, ‘I’ll go up.’ He kissed his wife on the cheek and said to Stephen from the doorway, ‘We really would like you to come and see us in Suffolk. It will be easier than explaining.’ He raised his hand in ironic salute and left.

  Thelma refilled Stephen’s glass and pursed her lips into an efficient smile. She was about to speak, but she changed her mind and stood. ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ she said as she crossed the kitchen. Moments later he heard her on the stairs calling after Charles and the sound of a door opening and closing. Then the house was quiet but for the baritone hum of kitchen equipment.

  The day after Julie left for her retreat in the Chilterns, Thelma had arrived in a snow storm to collect Stephen. While he fumbled about the bedroom for clothes and a bag to put them in, she cleaned up the kitchen, bagged the rubbish and carried it down to the dustbins. She gathered up handfuls of unopened bills and stuffed them into her handbag. In the bedroom she supervised Stephen’s packing. She worked with brisk, maternal thoroughness, speaking to him only when it was necessary. Did he have enough pairs of socks? pants? Was this sweater really thick enough? She took him into the bathroom and made him select items for a washbag. Where was his toothbrush? Was he going to grow a beard? If not, where was his shaving soap? There was no single action for which Stephen could generate a motive. He saw no point in being warm, or in having socks or teeth. He could carry out simple commands so long as he did not have to reflect on their rationale.

  He followed Thelma down to the car, waited while she opened the passenger door for him, and sat motionless on the scented leather seat while she returned to the flat to turn off the water and gas. He stared ahead at the large flakes melting on contact with the windscreen. There came to him images of a Dickensian melodrama in which his shivering three-year-old daughter beat a path through the snow to her home, only to find it locked, and deserted. Should they leave a note on the door? he asked Thelma when she came down. Rather than argue that Kate could not read and was never coming back, Thelma returned upstairs and pinned her address and phone number to his front door.

  Forgotten weeks passed in the carpeted, marble-and-mahogany tranquillity of the Darkes’ guest bedroom. He experienced a chaos of emotion amidst the impeccable order of monogrammed towels, pot pourri on waxed, dustless surfaces, laundered sheets which smelled of lavender. Later on, when he was steadier, Thelma spent evenings with him and told tales of Schroedinger’s cat, backward flowing time, the right-handedness of God and other quantum magic.

  She belonged to an honourable tradition of women theoretical physicists, though she claimed she had not made a single discovery, not even an insignificant one. Her task was to reflect and teach. Discoveries, she said, were now the ratrace end of science and, besides, they were for the young. There had been a scientific revolution this century and hardly anyone, even among the scientists themselves, was thinking it through. During the cold evenings of a disappointing spring she sat with him by the fire and told him how quantum mechanics would feminise physics, all science, make it softer, less arrogantly detached, more receptive to participating in the world it wanted to describe. She had pet topics, set pieces which she developed each time round. On the luxury and challenge of solitude, the ignorance of so-called artists, how informed wonder would have to become integral to the intellectual equipment of scientists. Science was Thelma’s child (Charles was another) for whom she held out great and passionate hopes and in whom she wished to instil gentler manners and a sweeter disposition. This child was on the point of growing up and learning to claim less for itself. The period of its frenetic, childish egotism – four hundred years! – was drawing to a close.

  She took him step by step, using metaphors in place of mathematics, through the fundamental paradoxes, the kinds of things, she said, her first-year students were expected to know: how it could be demonstrated in the laboratory that something could be a wave and a particle at the same time; how particles appeared to be ‘aware’ of each other and seemed – in theory at least – to communicate this awareness instantaneously over immense distances
; how space and time were not separable categories but aspects of one another, and likewise matter and energy, matter and the space it occupied, motion and time; how matter itself did not consist of tiny hard bits and was more like patterned movement; how the more you knew about something in detail, the less you knew about it in general. A lifetime’s teaching had instilled useful pedagogic habits. She paused regularly to find out if he was following her. As she spoke, her eyes scanned his face for total concentration. Inevitably she would discover that not only had he failed to understand, he had been daydreaming for fifteen minutes. This in turn could provoke another set piece. She would press forefinger and thumb to her forehead. A certain amount of play-acting was in order.

  ‘You ignorant pig!’ she might begin as Stephen set his face round contrition. Perhaps these were their moments of greatest intimacy. ‘A scientific revolution, no, an intellectual revolution, an emotional, sensual explosion, a fabulous story just beginning to unfold for us, and you and your kind won’t give it a serious minute of your time. People used to think the world was held up by elephants. That’s nothing! Reality, whatever that word means, turns out to be a thousand times stranger. Who do you want? Luther? Copernicus? Darwin? Marx? Freud? None of them has reinvented the world and our place in it as radically and bizarrely as the physicists of this century have. The measurers of the world can no longer detach themselves. They have to measure themselves too. Matter, time, space, forces – all beautiful and intricate illusions in which we must now collude. What a stupendous shake-up, Stephen. Shakespeare would have grasped wave functions, Donne would have understood complementarity and relative time. They would have been excited. What richness! They would have plundered this new science for their imagery. And they would have educated their audiences too. But you “arts” people, you’re not only ignorant of these magnificent things, you’re rather proud of knowing nothing. As far as I can make out, you think that some local, passing fashion like modernism – modernism! – is the intellectual achievement of our time. Pathetic! Now, stop smirking and get me a drink.’

  She appeared ten minutes later in the kitchen doorway and indicated he should follow her into the drawing room. Two giant Chesterfields faced each other across a low, pitted, marble-topped table. A sealed flask and coffee cups had been set out by Thelma or the housekeeper. The sea battles too had been replaced by rectangular grey smudges. She followed his gaze and said, ‘Pictures and ornaments go separately. Something to do with insurance.’

  They settled side by side as they always did when Charles was working late at the Ministry or in the Commons. She had never taken his political career seriously. She had tolerated from a benign distance the bustle around the house as he advanced and secured his position. The government post had revived in her talk of retirement, of her book, of making a proper home of the cottage. But how to remove Charles now that he was a minor fixture of national life, now that a Times diarist had parenthetically spoken of him as ‘Prime Minister material’? What feminine quantum magic had she worked?

  She was kicking her shoes off with the carelessness of a teenager, and tucking her slender legs beneath her. She was almost sixty-one. She kept her eyebrows plucked. The high cheekbones gave her a bright, pert look which made Stephen think of a highly intelligent squirrel. Intelligence shone from her face, and the severity of her manner was always playful, self-mocking. The salt and pepper hair was drawn back in a straggly bun – de rigueur, she claimed, for women physicists – and secured with an antique comb.

  She tucked some loose strands of hair behind her ear, no doubt arranging her methodical thoughts. The windows were wide open and through them came the distant, airy sound of heavy traffic and the warble and whine of patrol cars.

  ‘Put it this way,’ she said at last. ‘No one would guess it for a moment, but Charles has an inner life. In fact, more than an inner life, an inner obsession, a separate world. You’ll have to take that on trust. Mostly he denies it’s there, but it’s with him all the time, it consumes him, it makes him what he is. What Charles desires – if that’s the word – what he needs is quite at odds with what he does, what he’s been doing. It’s the contradictions that make him so frantic, so impatient about success. This move, at least as far as he is concerned, has to do with resolving these.’ She smiled hurriedly. ‘Then there are my needs, but that’s another matter, and you know all about that.’ She sat back, apparently satisfied that all had been made clear.

  Stephen let half a minute go by. ‘Well, what exactly is this inner life?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry if it sounds obscure. We’d rather you came and visited us. See for yourself. I don’t want to explain it ahead of time.’

  She described her own resignation from her job and her pleasure in the prospect of writing her book. It would consist of elaborations on her many set pieces. He saw them, Thelma in the upstairs study with the creaking floorboards, at her desk where sunlight brightened her scattered papers and from where, through the open latticed window, she would have a view of Charles in shirtsleeves idling with his wheelbarrow. Beyond the garden telephones were ringing, Ministers were crossing town in limousines to important lunches. Charles was on his knees, patiently firming up soil round the base of a sickly shrub.

  Later she brought in a tray of cold food. While they ate, he described the committee meeting, tried to make them more amusing than they were. The evening flagged, and dwindled into talk of mutual friends. Thelma’s manner was apologetic towards the end, as if she was worried that he thought he had made a wasted journey. She had little idea how most of his evenings were spent.

  Because he would not be visiting the house again before it was sold, he accepted her invitation to stay the night. Well before midnight, he was facing a familiar cornflower wallpaper while he sat on the edge of the bed removing his shoes. He regarded the things in this room as his own. He had spent so much time staring at them – the blue glazed bowl of crushed flowers on an oak and brass chest of drawers, a small bust of Dante in pewter, a lidded, glass pot for keeping cufflinks in. He had served three or four catatonic weeks in here. Now, as he removed his socks and crossed the room to open the window wider, he expected the worst kinds of memories. It had been a mistake to stay. The constant, urban rumble could not mitigate the burdensome silence which emanated from the carpet’s deep pile, the fleecy towels on the wooden stand, the granite folds of velvet curtain. Still dressed, he lay on his back on the bed. He was waiting for the pictures, the ones he could only dispel by jerking his head.

  What came was not his daughter showing him her head-over-heels, but his parents, in a random moment from his last visit. His mother stood by the kitchen sink, her hands encased in rubber gloves. His father was at her side with a clean beer glass in one hand and a dishcloth in the other. They were turning to look where he stood in the doorway. She held herself awkwardly, keeping her hands in the sink. She did not want suds on the floor. Nothing important happened. He thought that his father had been about to speak. In her uncomfortable position, his mother cocked her head on one side as she prepared to listen. It was a habit Stephen himself had adopted. He could see their faces, the lined expressions of tenderness and anxiety. It was the ageing, the essential selves enduring while the bodies withered away. He felt the urgency of contracting time, of unfinished business. There were conversations he had not yet had with them and for which he always thought there would be time.

  He had an unplaced memory, for example, a small thing which only they could explain. He was in the child’s seat of a bicycle. In front of him was his father’s massive back, the creases and folds of his white shirt switching with the rise and fall of the pedals. To the left was his mother on her bicycle. They were travelling along a concreted road. At intervals they bumped over the fine tar strips which joined the sections. By a great shingle bank they dismounted. The sea was on the other side, he could hear its roar and rattle as they began the steep climb. He remembered nothing of the sea itself, only the fearful anticipatio
n as his father dragged him by the arm towards the top. But when was this, and where? They had never lived near the sea or taken holidays on beaches like this. His parents never had bicycles.

  When he visited them now, conversation moved in familiar ways. It was hard to break out to pursue the useless, important details. His mother had trouble with her eyes, and pains at night. His father’s heart murmured and beat irregularly. Lesser illnesses were crowding in. There were bouts of ’flu he heard of only when they were over. There was a harsh undoing in progress. The telegram could arrive for him, the leaden phone call, and he would confront the frustration and guilt of a conversation never begun.

  Only when you are grown up, perhaps only when you have children yourself, do you fully understand that your own parents had a full and intricate existence before you were born. He knew only outlines and details from stories – his mother in a department store, praised for the neatness of the bow she could tie behind her back; his father walking through a ruined town in Germany, or crossing the tarmac of an airfield to give the official news of victory to the squadron leader. Even when their stories began to concern himself, Stephen knew next to nothing of how his parents met, what attracted them, how they decided to get married, or how he had come about. It is difficult to step outside the moment on any given day and ask the unnecessary, essential question, or to realise that, however familiar, parents are also strangers to their children.

  He owed it to his love for them, not to let them slip away with their lives forgotten. He was ready to get up from the bed, tiptoe from the Darkes’ house and take a long taxi ride through the night to their place, arrive clutching his questions, his brief to prosecute the vandalising erasures of time. Certainly he was ready, he was reaching for a pen, he would leave a note for Thelma and set out this minute, he was reaching for his socks and shoes. All that was holding him back was the need to close his eyes and take time for further thought.