The Child in Time

by Ian Mcewan

  Any minute he would be setting off across the machine-efficient prairie to return to his own hermitage. Sitting across from her, watching as she hunched over her tea, warming her hands round the cup, he was emotionless. He could begin to learn how to detach himself from his wife. Her fingernails were bitten down, her hair was unwashed, her face had a pinched look. He could learn not to love her, just so long as he could see her from time to time and be reminded that she was mortal, a woman in her late thirties, intent on solitude, on making sense of her own troubled life. Later he might be taunted by the memory of her thin, bare arms protruding from the torn sweater, endearingly too large, which he recognised as his own, and the huskiness in the voice as she kept her feelings down.

  It was inevitable that as he stood they should exchange the briefest of goodbyes. She opened the door for him, there was a little squeeze of hands and he was no more than three steps up the path before he heard the front door close behind him. By the wicket gate he turned to look back. It was a house such as a child might draw. It was box-shaped with its front door dead centre, four small windows near each corner, and constructed of the same red bricks as The Bell. A path made out of left-over bricks made a shallow S-shape between the gate and the front door. The cottage stood in a clearing barely fifty feet across. The plantation trees were pressing in on all sides. For a moment he considered going back, but he had no idea what it was he wanted to say.

  And so, by a perverse collusion in unhappiness, many months passed before they saw each other again. In his better moments, Stephen felt that what had taken place had happened too soon; they had been unprepared. In his worst, he was furious at himself for undoing what he saw as careful progress in separation. For years afterwards he would be baffled by his insistence on not returning to see her. At the time he argued it this way: Julie had never summoned him. He had initiated the visit himself. She was happy enough to see him, just as happy to see him go and to resume her solitude. If what had happened meant anything at all to her, then she would break the silence. If he heard nothing, then he could take it that she still wanted to be left alone.

  The rain had long ceased. Stephen crossed the road near The Bell briskly, determined to resist further drama or significance. He hurried along the concrete path towards the big field. He had accepted a dinner invitation from a couple in London renowned for their elaborate meals and interesting friends, and he was going to be late.

  Four

  We could do worse than conclude, as have many before us, that from love and respect for home we derive our deepest loyalties to nation.

  The Authorised Childcare Handbook, HMSO

  It was late morning and impressively hot, and the committee was taking evidence. The day before, the temperature had passed the one hundred degree Fahrenheit mark, inspiring patriotic exultation in the popular press. Responsible opinion judged the weather to be serving the Government well, and today even higher temperatures were expected. Ten minutes into the morning session, at Canham’s instigation, a clerk had brought an electric fan and plugged it in close to the chairman, at whom it was deferentially pointed. Over the weekend workmen had prised free the sash windows which now stood wide open to the drone of sluggish traffic in Whitehall. A bluebottle, trapped between parallel panes of hot glass, buzzed intermittently. As the morning wore on the pauses became longer. On the surface of the enormous table, which was moist to the touch, loose papers stirred lazily in a faint stream of warm air.

  For more than an hour Stephen had been staring at his hands on his lap. Lately, the smell and feel of his own skin in this heat had brought back to him the taste of an only childhood in hot countries – of perspiration, and the pervasive, sweet scent of mangoes, English vegetables boiling in the kitchen and spices in painted tins of dragons and palm trees, kept in the outhouse by the amah girl. He had once lifted a lid and inhaled the essence of a brown flaky substance. When he went back indoors and stood in the deserted living room under the slow-moving ceiling fan, the bitter, putrid taste was a secret he had to keep from the lavender-polished, RAF-issue furniture.

  This was his East: the manly scent of cigarettes and Flit, the fly-killer; bulky armchairs in floral casings, his father’s with the brass ashtray held in place by leather-thonged straps; around his mother’s the scent of pink soap, the knitting she pressed on with in the sticky heat and Woman’s Realm; on the walls, clever silhouettes in black-painted tin of palm trees with sunsets; the pretty amah who, it was said, slept at the end of his bed at nights, though he never saw her; the water snakes who lived between his sheets, held at bay by prayers; his first classroom where the heat drew the fragrance of cedar from the pencil between his fingers, and the tiger under the palm tree, emblem of his school and of his father’s beer.

  One humid afternoon he followed his mother up the stairs and lay down beside her on the ribbed expanse of candlewick bedspread, on the ashtray side, by the ticking alarm. Her outlandish proposal was that they should fall asleep in broad daylight, hours before bedtime. He lay on his back, watching the fan.

  ‘Close your eyes, son,’ she instructed him. ‘Close your eyes.’ He did so, and when he woke it was a long time later. She was gone, he could hear her downstairs talking and drinking tea with women friends. He was impressed; sleep need not simply happen, it was something people controlled by closing their eyes. What else could they control?

  He liked to listen to his mother and her friends. The talk was of things going wrong, of people saying and doing the wrong things, and of illnesses and the wrong things doctors did. No one talked to children about things going wrong. The tea things were cleared away, and the women dispersed before his father came home. He wore baggy shorts and there were damp stains on his khaki shirt. As soon as he was home he sought Stephen out and pretended to be an ogre chasing him, growling, ‘Fee fi fo fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman!’ and tickled him and hurled him dangerously high in the air. When Flight-Sergeant Lewis had showered and had had a beer made of tiger’s blood, which Stephen was allowed to pour, they sat down to tea and more talk of interestingly wrong things: a young officer who knew too little; what another flight-sergeant had done wrong, or how the politicians were telling the RAF to do the wrong things. Then his mother would tell of the things she had heard that afternoon. Afterwards it was Stephen’s job to help clear the table while his mother washed, and his father dried.

  It occurred to Stephen that if he could control events in the way his mother controlled sleep, then he would make his parents King and Queen of the entire world, and they could set right all the wrongs they described so wisely. For was not his father stronger than any ogre? At the intersquadron games he pedalled his legs to a blur and came close to unpowered flight in the hop, skip and jump; he carried Stephen on his back down to the beach where, they later learned, there were sharks, and came churning out of the surf, head and shoulders draped with seaweed, a roaring sea monster; the young officers asked him what to do even though he had to call them sir, while the men under his command dreaded his disfavour, as did Stephen and his mother.

  And was she not more beautiful than the Queen of England, with the additional gifts of being able to remain twenty-one every birthday, of hitting bull’s-eyes with a .22 rifle at shooting matches, of hearing sounds at night which no one else could hear, of knowing when he was having a bad dream, for she was always there when he woke in the dark. They often went out to a special do at the Sergeants’ Mess. His mother wore long satin dresses which she sewed herself. His father wore his uniform and always had a beer before they set out. Sometimes they danced in the living room to the music of the Forces Broadcasting Service, a waltz, a foxtrot or a two-step, moving confidently in the space between the furniture with their backs held straight and their feet pivoting neatly. Then they were like the elegant dancing couple who revolved on his mother’s jewellery box to the tinkle of Für Elise, dream figures whose features dissolved into pink blobs when you put your face up close.

  Dreams were dangerous; wa
s it only a bad dream, when the plate of lunchtime mashed potato missed his father’s head and smashed against the wall, when later his mother cried as she collected the crockery pieces in her apron and wiped the wall with a wet cloth? Did he dream the raised voices downstairs at night, was it a nightmare when he saw through the open kitchen door his father with a carving knife, when he put his red and angry face close to Stephen’s and said he was a mother’s boy, or worse, picked him up in front of visitors to hold him like a babe-in-arms and rocked and shushed him?

  Perhaps he was a mother’s boy. A few years later he still slept in her bed whenever his father, now a Warrant-Officer, was away on training. This was when they had been posted to North Africa. When Stephen joined the cubs and had to earn his proficiency badge in handicraft, his mother helped him make a set of toy furniture. She ended up doing all the work herself. He carried the results – a blue three-piece suite, a matchbox sideboard, a standard lamp – in their shoebox living room to the weekly meeting in the Nissen hut confident that her work was his of right.

  She was a frail and beautiful insomniac who quietly worried about everyone except herself, and whose worrying was a subtle form of possessiveness, inseparable from love, it seemed, when it was directed against himself. She confronted him with a dangerous world of invisible germs and pneumonia-bearing draughts of air in certain rooms. She warned against the perils of wearing unaired clothes, of missing a meal, of not wearing a cardigan in the evening. While he was bound by loyalty to submit to her little strictures, he learned to scoff at them, like his father did.

  For Stephen was also a father’s boy. During the Suez Crisis all the families were moved into military camps for protection against the local Arabs. Mrs Lewis was in England visiting relatives, and there followed heady weeks of disruption from the routines of school and beach. There was the novelty of ceasing to be the immediate focus of parental attention, of living in large tents with his friends who all appeared in memory as freckly, short-haired, jugeared boys like himself. There was the smell of lorry oil on hot sand, the military vehicles, faithful reproductions of his Dinky toys, neat, white-washed stones lining every path, barbed wire and sand-bagged machine-gun nests. Above all, there was the officer with direct responsibility for the families, his father, a distant figure striding from one meeting to another, a service revolver strapped about his waist.

  When that was over, there were other jaunts. They left his mother at home and raced the black Morris Oxford across the semi-desert, along the empty roads, inland towards the airfield, to find out just how fast the new car would go. They went out with a jam jar to hunt for a scorpion. His father heaved aside a rock, and there it was, yellow and fat, lifting its pincers towards them in supplication. He used his foot to encourage it into the jar, and Stephen was ready with the perforated lid. They laughed – Stephen uneasily – when his mother said she could not sleep at night for fear that it would escape and roam the house in the dark. Later it was taken into the workshops and pickled in formaldehyde.

  Each morning before school his father took him into the bathroom, scooped two fingers full from the Brylcreem jar and worked it into Stephen’s short back and sides with fanatical vigour. Then he took his steel comb and, holding the boy’s jaw in a tight grip, combed the obedient hair flat and made a straight, grey parting of military precision. Within an hour this construction had melted in the sun. Most afternoons during the nine-month summer they spent on the beach where the officers and their families sat at one end, the airmen, sergeants and warrant-officers included, at the other. His father would stand chest deep in the water counting slowly while Stephen stood unsupported on his shoulders until laughter or the slippery haircream underfoot caused him to fall. The count was interrupted when a wave washed over his father’s head, but only momentarily. The record stood at forty-three when the game ceased, not long before Stephen left for boarding school.

  North Africa was a five-year idyll. Angry voices no longer broke into his dreams. His time was divided between school, which ended at lunch, and the beach where he met his friends, who were all sons of his father’s colleagues, men who had risen through the ranks. It was where his mother met her friends, who were the wives of the same men. Just as his little family enclosed him with its fierce, possessive love, so the RAF enclosed their family, choosing and defining friends, entertainment, doctors and dentists, schools and teachers, the house, its furniture, even the cutlery and bed linen. When Stephen spent a night at a friend’s house, he slept between familiar sheets. It was a secure and ordered world, hierarchical and caring. Children had to know their place and submit, as their parents did, to the demands and limitations of military life. Stephen and his friends – though not their sisters – were encouraged to call their fathers’ colleagues sir, like the American boys from the airbase. They were taught to let ladies precede them through doors. But they were generously indulged, encouraged, virtually ordered, to have fun. After all, their parents had grown up during the Depression, so now there was to be no shortage of lemonades, ice creams, cheese omelettes and chips. On the terrace of the Beach Club the parents sat round the tin tables laden with beer glasses marvelling at the difference between their lives then and their lives now, between their childhoods and their children’s.

  Stephen’s first term at boarding school was a blur of complex rites, brutalities and constant noise, but he was not particularly sad. He was too silent and watchful to be singled out for bullying. In fact he was hardly noticed at all. He remained at heart a member of his little family group, and ticked off the ninety-one days until the Christmas holidays, determined to survive. Back home at last with the brilliant light, the view from his bedroom window of date palms leaning into the pale blue winter sky, he resumed his place easily enough in the triangle. It was only when it was time to return to England, the day after his twelfth birthday, to start again at the foot of another mountain of days, that he began to feel keenly for what he was about to leave. A quick arithmetic demonstrated that from now on three-quarters of his life were to be spent away. He had, in fact, left home. His parents must have made the same calculations, for as they drove across the desert scrub to the airfield, the talk was unnaturally cheery with plans for the next holiday, and there were long silences which they could not break without repeating themselves.

  In the airplane an elderly lady kindly moved across to let him have the window seat so he could wave to his parents. He could see them more clearly than they could see him. They were a dozen yards from the tip of the wing, standing arm in arm just where the tarmac met the sand. They were smiling, and waving hard, then resting their arms, then waving again. The propellers on his side of the plane started up. He saw his mother turn and dab at her eyes. His father put his hands in his pockets and took them out again. Stephen was old enough to know that a period of his life, a time of unambiguous affinities, was over. He pressed his face against the window and began to cry. His Brylcreem was all over the glass. When he tried to wipe it clear his parents mistook the movement of his hand and waved again. The plane was edging forward, and they slipped quite suddenly from his view. Turning towards the cabin he was confirmed in his worst intimations when he saw that the old lady had been watching him and was crying too.

  The presence of a stranger in the room, a gaunt young man who appeared to have declined the offer of a chair, had aroused Stephen from uneasy daydreams. The man had been speaking for half an hour already. He stood hunched like a penitent with bluish pale fingers clasped in front of him. His jaws and upper lip were smudged with closely shaved stubble which gave him the saddened, honest appearance of a chimpanzee, an impression furthered by large brown eyes and the black tangle of chest pelt, as thick as pubic hair, visible through his thin white nylon shirt and sprouting irreverently between its buttons. It seemed to Stephen that he held his hands still while he spoke to avoid exposing the unnatural length of his arms, whose elbows occurred an inch or two before they should have. The voice was a strained tenor, the words enunci
ated with precision and caution as though language, a dangerous weapon, had only recently been acquired and might explode in its user’s face. Dazed from introspection, Stephen was so struck by the man’s appearance that he had yet to take in what he was saying. The rest of the committee sat in silence, apparently attentive, faces politely wiped of all expression. Rachael Murray and one of the academics were taking notes. To aid his concentration Lord Parmenter had closed his eyes and was breathing slowly and rhythmically through his nose.

  After he had registered the man’s appearance, Stephen became aware of a stirring among the committee members, a restlessness which could not be put down to boredom and the heat. Heads were turning in his direction. Eyes that met his slid away, and here and there – Rachael Murray, Tessa Spankey – was a suppressed smile. Even Lord Parmenter had shifted position and was inclining his leathery head in Stephen’s direction. Was he expected to speak? Had he already been asked? He forced his wheeling, unruly attention on the tensed monotone, its straining, pleading note of, But surely, surely you will agree that this is so. He found himself looking straight into the honest brown eyes. Was he expected to intervene? Now? He nodded faintly and gave a wry smile to indicate both total comprehension and a reasonable, knowing reticence.