by Ian Mcewan
There was a sound above him, but he did not look up. Charles had climbed down to find him. ‘Come on, Stephen,’ he called, ‘the view’s even better from the top.’
Stephen spoke with restraint in case the force of his words propelled him backwards out of the tree. ‘I’m stuck,’ he said through his teeth into the bark.
‘Oh Christ,’ Charles said as he appeared at his side. ‘You are wet.’
‘Don’t move about so quickly,’ Stephen whispered.
‘It’s perfectly safe, this tree. I’ve been up and down it dozens of times, carrying planks and things and even a couple of chairs.’
Stephen lurched and Charles caught his arm. The smell of liquorice was not reassuring.
‘Look, see this branch. Put your hand here and pull yourself up till you can move your foot out, then put your weight on your knee and get on to this bit here …’ The instructions continued. Stephen knew he had no choice but to obey to the letter. Useless to say he wanted to go down, for a dispute of any kind would be the end of him. He needed to trust. So he edged his way up, putting his hands and feet in exactly the places he was told, straining his attention to detect any dangerous ambiguities. A few times he interrupted. ‘Charles, do you mean my left hand or my right?’
‘Your right, stupid!’
He kept his vision reined in on hand and footholds. He was never sure where Charles was, and he did not want to look. There was always a disembodied voice somewhere above his head, issuing its scornful directions. ‘Oh God! Not your hand, your foot, you clot!’
There were times during the climb when Stephen thought to himself, I won’t always be doing this. One day I’ll be doing something else. But he was not entirely sure. He knew that for now all he had to do was climb and let circumstances look after themselves. One day he might, or might not, return to the old life. There was another thing, so appalling and large that he could not grasp it. The time came when at last he climbed up through a circular hole on to a ramshackle wooden platform. It was about twelve feet square and had no sides. At first he could only lie face down on it and suppress the sob rising in his throat.
‘Well, what do you think?’ Charles kept asking, and also, ‘Do you want some lemonade?’
When he had recovered, Stephen raised his head slowly so as not to jolt the platform out of the tree and looked about him. He kept his palms pressed flat against the boards. The whole wood was spread below them, and beyond it, five miles away across the fields, the town where he had stopped. To the west the sun was setting magnificently, the swirl of colour prettified by the dust of the Thames Valley seventy miles away. Charles was sprawled on a kitchen chair, watching proudly as Stephen took in the view. The bottle of lemonade which he swung between finger and thumb was nearly empty. At his side was an orange crate on which stood a pair of binoculars, a candle in a holder and a box of matches. Inside the case was a row of books, two on bird recognition, various boys’ adventures, some William books and, Stephen noted with no particular pleasure, his own first novel. Charles gestured towards a second chair, but Stephen did not wish to add to his height. Instead he made himself comfortable by edging away from the hole in the floor through which they had climbed.
Because his friend was looking at him expectantly, Stephen said at last, ‘It’s very good. Well done.’ Charles passed the bottle and Stephen, who was prepared to show himself a willing sort of guest, took a deep swig. His mouth filled with a salty, flat liquid, something like the taste of blood, only colder and thicker. Commonsense told him he should spit it out. He forced it down, however, careful not to retch, for he had noticed a loose plank by his foot.
Charles finished off the last two inches. ‘Made it myself,’ he said as he stowed the bottle among the books. ‘Do you want to know what’s in it?’
The thought which had intimidated Stephen on the climb up now returned. It was the climb down. ‘Tell me,’ he said quickly, his words pitched higher by nausea and fear, ‘why are you behaving like a kid? What are we doing up here?’
For a moment Charles remained bent over the orange case, straightening the books perhaps. Stephen could not quite see. Had he said exactly the wrong thing? He was dependent on Charles’s help and it was important he said nothing to offend him, at least, not until they were down. Charles came and knelt beside him. He was smiling.
‘Do you want to see what I’ve got in my pockets?’ The catapult came first. He pushed it into Stephen’s hands. ‘It’s walnut. The best.’ There followed a magnifying glass, a sheep’s vertebra and a penknife with a dozen or so attachments. As Charles opened each one out and explained its purpose, Stephen watched his friend closely for evidence of humour, self-consciousness, for traces of the adult. But the voice was level, the face intent on every detail. There were old-fashioned humbugs stuck to the bottom of a paper bag, a larger than usual snail shell, a dried newt, and marbles. The one Charles put into Stephen’s hand was big and milky.
To show interest, Stephen asked, ‘And where did you get it?’
The reply was defiant and quick – ‘I won it’ – and he did not like to ask where. There was a ball-bearing, a toy compass, a piece of rope and two empty cartridge cases, a fish-hook embedded in a cork, a feather, two oval pebbles.
Looking down at these items spread before him on the planks, uncertain what to say next, Stephen was impressed by what appeared to be very thorough research. It was as if his friend had combed libraries, diligently consulted the appropriate authorities to discover just what it was a certain kind of boy was likely to have in his pockets. It was too correct to be convincing, not quite sufficiently idiosyncratic, perhaps even fraudulent. Momentarily, embarrassment overcame vertigo.
Besides, what small boy ever offered to turn out his pockets? Stephen glanced away to the west. The brilliance was fading from the display and the light was thickening. The leaves in the few branches above their heads stirred. He was stuck for something to say. He could no longer bear to humour the forty-nine-year-old schoolboy, nor did he dare upset him. Finally he said, ‘Are you happy, Charles?’
Charles was stuffing his possessions back in his pocket in roughly the order in which they had been presented. He finished, stood up quickly and made a wide sweep with his arm. Stephen cowered on the boards, trying to steady them with his hands. ‘Look! It’s fantastic. You don’t understand it, it’s fantastic!’
‘You mean the view?’
‘No, stupid. Look …’ He had taken the catapult from his pocket and was fitting a pebble into the pouch. ‘Watch.’ He faced the sunset and drew the pouch back way behind his head, until the rubber thongs were stretched out over two arms’ lengths. He held this position for several seconds, possibly for effect. The air around them grew tight, and Stephen found it difficult to breathe. Then, with the whack of rubber against wood and a brief, high-pitched whine, the stone soared away from the platform, and rose high as it receded from them, for an instant a precise black shape against the red sky. Even before it began to drop, it had vanished from sight. Stephen guessed it had cleared the wood and landed in the first field, a quarter of a mile away.
‘Good shot,’ he said enthusiastically. He wondered if he should mention that it was getting dark.
Charles had his hands on his hips and was still gazing in the direction of the stone’s path when there rose towards them through the trees the faint sound of a handbell being rung. ‘Dinner,’ he said, and walked towards the hole and let himself down. When he spoke again only his head showed above the level of the platform. It was hard to tell whether the inarticulacy was laboriously faked or was now simply a habit. ‘It’s jus’ … well, it’s a matter of letting go …’
Stephen was so distracted, so sickened by fear as he crawled towards the hole that he assumed his friend was talking about catapult technique. He reached the edge and crouched there unhappily. His hands were shaking and the lemonade was rising in his throat. Charles lowered himself another couple of feet and stopped. He was almost out of control with laughter.
At last he steadied himself, wiped his eyes, peered up at Stephen and laughed again. ‘Now, do exactly as I tell you, or else you’ll die!’
At the end of a day in which he had come close to smashing a car, seeing a man crushed to death, being set upon by beggars and falling out of a tree, Stephen felt in need of a hot bath. Thelma said she had some reading to do and did not mind delaying the meal. He soaked in a long Victorian tub which was wedged in tight against the sloping roof of the guest bathroom. He was empty of speculation or memories. He thought only of the ripples pushed out across the water, the shock-waves of his heartbeat. His knee caps rose before him like promontories in a sea mist. The skin puckered on his fingertips. He closed his eyes and half dozed, rousing himself from time to time to turn the hot-water tap with his foot.
When at last he appeared downstairs, Thelma was reading a physics journal. Her elbows were propped on the dining table where only two places were set. The door and windows were still open, now to thick darkness and the sound of crickets. As she fetched their meal from the kitchen she explained that Charles had already eaten and gone to bed, and that he was usually asleep by nine. ‘He stayed up late for you.’
This should have been Stephen’s cue for a set of questions, and for a conversation about Charles’s regression. He was glad however that Thelma passed him the carving knife and asked him to slice the joint. They talked about the best ways of cooking lamb. Thelma was in good humour. Weeks of country air, long afternoons tending her garden, and the chance to work at what she wanted had made her euphoric. Her bare feet made a pleasant scuffing sound on the stone floor as she moved between the kitchen and the dining room with salad and potatoes and glass bottles of vinegar and olive oil. She was wearing a collarless man’s shirt tucked into a loose skirt. Round her neck was a set of painted wooden beads which might have come from a toy shop. She still kept the physicist’s tight bun above the nape of her neck. There was a hint of the old conspiratorial spirit between them. It was good to live in the remote country and be visited by a friend. More than that, they were touched, liberated by Charles’s behaviour. Thelma no longer had to live with the secret all by herself. She splashed Burgundy into the glasses. There was a wild generosity in the air, and as Stephen took a long pull of the wine, which was warm from standing out so long, he regretted his suspicious attitudes. If only he knew what he himself wanted, what he wanted to be, he could be free to carry it through.
Fifteen minutes into the meal Stephen fulfilled a resolution he had made many weeks before and described his experience in the Kent countryside. Towards the end of his account he had himself coming round in an armchair by the fire in Julie’s cottage. Thelma had been irritated by their separation, she wanted to bang their heads together, she said. He did not want to incite her with a description of a temporary, irresponsible intimacy. Otherwise, he remained faithful to the details, to the sense of another day intruding, the familiarity of the place, the bicycles leaning together outside the pub – and he went on at length about the kind of old-fashioned machines they were – his recognition of the young couple at their table, his father’s familiar gestures, the way his mother had looked towards and beyond him as though he were not there, and the falling sensation as he came back up the road, of tumbling through a kind of sluice.
Thelma ate steadily as she listened, and when he had finished went on to clear her plate before asking what had happened before and after the experience, what had been on his mind. He described the train journey, which he recalled with difficulty, and said he thought he had been thinking about the committee. And afterwards? But what had happened then was not Thelma’s business. He and Julie had talked desultorily, he said, and drunk two pots of tea and eaten the cake Julie had made. Then he had walked back to the station, caught the train home and had eaten supper with friends.
‘And what do you make of it?’ Thelma said as she poured the wine.
He shrugged, and told her that he had learned that his parents had once possessed new bikes.
‘Do they remember the pub?’
‘My mother doesn’t. My father doesn’t even remember the bikes.’
‘You didn’t describe this thing to them.’
‘No. I didn’t want to. It was as if I’d been spying on a very important conversation.’
‘Perhaps they were talking about you.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘But you still haven’t told me what you make of it,’ Thelma said.
‘I don’t know. It’s got something to do with time obviously, with seeing something out of time. And since you’ve got all these theories …’
She clapped her hands. ‘You go out in the countryside and have a vision, an hallucination or whatever, and what do you do? Consult an expert, of course! A scientist, no less. You come cap in hand to the oracle you quietly despise. Why don’t you go and ask a modernist?’
But Stephen was used to this. ‘Come off it, Thelma. Admit you’re bursting to lecture me. You miss your students, even the stupid ones. Let’s hear it. What’s the state of the art on time?’
Despite her good mood, Thelma did not seem eager to offer the usual tutorial. Perhaps she suspected him of mental laziness, perhaps she was saving her ideas for her book. Initially, at least, her tone was dismissive and she spoke rapidly. It was only later that she warmed up.
‘There’s a whole supermarket of theories these days. You can take your pick. They’re all written up for the layman in books of the “fancy that” variety. One offering has the world dividing every infinitesimal fraction of a second into an infinite number of possible versions, constantly branching and proliferating, with consciousness neatly picking its way through to create the illusion of a stable reality.’
‘You’ve told me that one before,’ Stephen said. ‘I think about it a lot.’
‘In my view you might just as well go for a bearded old man in the sky. Then there are physicists who find it convenient to describe time as a kind of substance, an efflorescence of undetectable particles. There are dozens of other theories, equally potty. They set out to smooth a few wrinkles in one corner of quantum theory. The mathematics are reasonable enough in a local sort of way, but the rest, the grand theorising, is whistling in the dark. What comes out is inelegant and perverse. But whatever time is, the common-sense, everyday version of it as linear, regular, absolute, marching from left to right, from the past through the present to the future, is either nonsense or a tiny fraction of the truth. We know this from our own experience. An hour can seem like five minutes or a week. Time is variable. We know it from Einstein who is still our bedrock here. In relativity theory time is dependent on the speed of the observer. What are simultaneous events to one person can appear in sequence to another. There’s no absolute, generally recognised “now” – but you know all this.’
‘It gets clearer each time round.’
‘In dense bodies with colossal gravitational fields, black holes, time can grind to a halt altogether. The brief appearance of certain particles in the cloud chamber can only be explained by the backward movement of time. In the Big Bang theory, time is thought to have been created in the same moment as matter, it’s inseparable from it. And that’s part of the problem – to consider time as an entity we have to wrench it apart from space and matter, we have to distort it to look at it. I’ve heard it argued that the very way our brains are wired up limits our understanding of time, just as it holds our perceptions to only three dimensions. That sounds like pretty dim materialism to me. And pessimistic too. But we do have to tie ourselves to models – time as liquid, time as a complex envelope with points of contact between all moments.’
Stephen remembered from his sixth form.
‘Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.’
‘There, you see, your modernists have their uses after all. I can’t help you with your hallucination, Stephen. Physics certainly can’t. It’s still
a divided subject. The twin pillars are relativity and quantum theories. One describes a causal and continuous world, the other a non-causal, discontinuous world. Is it possible to reconcile them? Einstein failed with his unified field theory. I side with the optimists like my colleague David Bohm, who anticipates a higher order of theory.’
It was at this point that Thelma livened up and Stephen began to understand less. The prospect was always so tantalising; a lucid account of what some of the best minds of the day were thinking about the elusive, everyday matter of time, what they were demonstrating in laboratories and giant accelerators. It was the promise of teasing paradox, and of personal intuitions confirmed, made official. What betrayed the promise was sheer difficulty, the indignity of coming up against the limitations of one’s intellectual reach.
At first she was patient with him, and he struggled hard. Then, slowly, she began to leave him behind and speak of Green’s function, clifford and fermionic algebrae, matrices and quaternions. Soon she abandoned all pretence of communication. She was addressing a fellow physicist, a soul mate who did not exist. Her eyes moved away from his and fixed on a point a few feet to his left, and her words became an uninterruptable torrent. She was talking for her own benefit, she was possessed. She spoke of eigenfunctions and Hermitian operators, Brownian motion, quantum potential, the Poisson bracket and the Schwarz inequality. Had she gone the same way as Charles? He watched her with alarm, uncertain whether he should reach across and touch her, try to bring her back. But he reasoned that she needed to get it out, tell her story of fermions, disorder and flux. In fact, she returned within fifteen minutes and seemed to become aware of him again. Her voice lost its monotonous intensity, and soon she was dealing once more in generalities he could understand.