The Child in Time

by Ian Mcewan

  She wanted him to share her excitement as she anticipated that in a hundred or fifty years’ time, or even less, there might evolve a theory, or a set of theories, of which relativity and quantum theories would be special, limiting cases. The new theory would refer to a higher order of reality, a higher ground, the ground of all that is, an undivided whole of which matter, space, time, even consciousness itself, would be complicatedly related embodiments, intrusions which made up the reality we understood. It was not entirely fanciful to imagine that one day there could be mathematical and physical descriptions of the type of experience Stephen had recounted. Different kinds of time, not simply the linear, sequential time of common sense, could be projected through consciousness from the higher common ground, from which consciousness itself would be a function, a limiting case which in turn would be inseparable from the matter which was its subject, or the space within which it occurred …

  Thelma was pouring the last of the wine into Stephen’s glass. When science could begin to abandon the illusions of objectivity by taking seriously, and finding a mathematical language for, the indivisibility of the entire universe, and when it could begin to take subjective experience into account, then the clever boy was on his way to becoming the wise woman.

  ‘Think how humanised and approachable scientists would be if they could join in the really important conversations about time, and without thinking they had the final word – the mystic’s experience of timelessness, the chaotic unfolding of time in dreams, the Christian moment of fulfilment and redemption, the annihilated time of deep sleep, the elaborate time schemes of novelists, poets, daydreamers, the infinite, unchanging time of childhood.’

  He knew he was hearing part of her book. ‘The slow time of panic,’ he added to her list, and told the story of his near collision with the lorry and how he had freed the driver. From there on the conversation meandered tiredly, and it was not until the evening was almost at an end that Thelma returned to Stephen’s hallucination, as they had now agreed to call it.

  ‘You have to forgive my ranting. It’s what comes of living alone in the country with only ideas for company. You don’t need physics to explain what happened to you. Niels Bohr was probably right all along when he said that scientists should have nothing to do with reality. Their business is to construct models which account for their observations.’

  She was going round the room turning out lamps, pulling the windows to. Stephen watched her closely. The word ‘alone’ took a long time to subside. The harsher overhead lights came on. She seemed tired and a little stooped.

  ‘But don’t we all do that?’ Stephen said as they went up the stairs. ‘Isn’t that what reality is anyway?’

  She kissed him lightly. Her lips were dry against his cheek. He felt the heat from her face. She turned her back and went along the creaky corridor to her room which, Stephen noted as he remained by his door, was separate from her husband’s.

  The next morning he slept in late and woke to the unusual din of birdsong. He lay on his back for half an hour and decided to return to London. Two and a half years on, it still made him uneasy to be away when Kate, or someone who knew where she was, might come to the flat. Nor was he looking forward to spending a day in the woods with Charles. Enough had happened for one day. Now he wanted to be on the couch in front of the TV surrounded by familiar mess.

  He went downstairs and out into the glare of the garden. Thelma was sitting in the shade reading a book. Charles had left early for the woods and would see him there, near the tree-house. When he explained his plans, she did not try to press him to stay. They drank a cup of coffee together and afterwards Thelma led the way through the green tunnel and spent a minute admiring the shorn off door handle and wing mirror. Stephen opened the passenger door, but did not get in. Around them in the nettles was an angry buzz of insects.

  Thelma had gone round to the driver’s side. She smiled across the dazzling roof. ‘It’s all right, you can say it. He’s completely mad.’

  ‘Well, you tell me.’

  ‘It would have been worse if we had stayed, you know. This isn’t exactly a sudden thing. It’s been coming for years. Why do you think he was so crazy about your first book?’

  Stephen shrugged. He was wearing a recently cleaned linen suit and a fresh white shirt. The car keys were in his hand, his wallet was snug in his inside pocket – the equipment of adulthood. The prospect of a solitary drive pleased him. What had seemed wild and liberating about Charles’s fantasies the night before now seemed merely silly, something he should snap out of. The metal strap of Stephen’s wristwatch was snagging the hairs of his wrist. He made an adjustment, and began to climb into the car.

  She raised a forefinger in warning. ‘Now don’t you get all urbane with me.’

  He slid across the passenger seat and put the key in the ignition.

  She spoke through the open window. ‘He’s happy.’

  ‘I can see that. And you?’

  ‘I’m working.’

  ‘And all alone.’ Thelma pursed her lips and glanced away. Stephen was annoyed with his friends. They had always managed to be both exciting and firmly rooted. Now they seemed to be making rather a hash of things. Thelma put her hand into the car and touched his arm. ‘Stephen, be soft …’

  He nodded briskly and started the car.

  Six

  Those who find it naturally hard to wield authority over their children should seriously consider the systematic use of treats and rewards. The promise of chocolate in return for, say, good bedtime behaviour is, on balance, worth the minor damage to teeth which will in any case soon replace themselves. In the past, too much has been demanded of parents who have been exhorted to inculcate altruism in their children at all costs. Incentives, after all, form the basis of our economic structure and necessarily shape our morality; there is no reason on earth why a well-behaved child should not have an ulterior motive.

  The Authorised Childcare Handbook, HMSO

  The rains came at last in late September, delivered by gales which stripped most trees bare in less than a week. Leaves clogged the drains, certain streets became navigable rivers, old couples were helped out of basement flats by policemen in waders, and there was a general feeling of crisis and excitement, at least on television. Weather experts were in demand to explain why there was no autumn, why it had been summer last week, winter this. There was no shortage of comforting theories – the encroaching ice age, the melting ice caps, the ozone layer depleted by fluorocarbons, the sun in its death throes. From urban barracks no one knew existed soldiers appeared with heavy-duty pumps. A military helicopter was televised lifting a stranded boy from a tree and on news programmes chief police constables or Army commanders pointed at maps with sticks. The Home Secretary, Charles’s old boss, was seen visiting the worst hit areas. The Prime Minister was said by the Cabinet press office to be personally concerned. Responsible opinion agreed that the weather was serving the Government well, for while no one yet knew how to stop the rain, things were seen to be done. It rained every day for fifty days. Then it stopped, normal life resumed and it was not long until Christmas.

  The weather had little effect on Stephen’s torpor. The Olympic games had given him a taste for morning and afternoon television. A new all-day channel had opened, sponsored by the Government and specialising in game and chat shows, commercials and phone-ins. Stephen, sprawled out with his Scotch on the couch in pyjamas and thick cardigan, watched the game shows with an addict’s glazed patience. In the corner of the room an ice bucket caught drips from the ceiling. The hosts on various programmes resembled each other to such an extent that he had warmed to them. They were professionals, dedicated men, clearly working to order, within a convention whose formal limitations they occasionally pointed up with cynical asides. And he liked the sweetly vulnerable couples who were welcomed on stage and never let go of each other’s hand, the extravagant trumpet fanfares which might greet the unveiling of a deep-freeze, the almost naked ass
istants with the fixed, brave smiles.

  The audiences, however, brought him to bouts of delirious misanthropy. It was the doggish eagerness to please the host and to be pleased by him, their readiness to applaud and cheer on command and wave plastic pennants bearing the show’s slogan; it was the ease with which their moods were regulated, whipped into uproar one moment, then calmed and made serious the next; naughty, then a little bit sentimental and nostalgic; embarrassed, shamed by their haranguing host, then cheerful again. The faces tilted into the studio lights were those of adults, parents, workers, but the wide open expressions were those of children watching a teatime party conjurer. They were held by what looked like religious awe when the host descended to walk among them, first-naming, chiding, flattering. Is she giving you enough, Henry? To eat, I mean. Is she? Is she? Come on now. Are you getting enough? And here was Henry, a white-haired man with bifocals, who in a better cut of suit could have passed for a head of state, giggling and looking meaningfully at his wife, then sinking his face into his hands while all around him roared and clapped. Was it any surprise the world was led by morons with these enfeebled souls at the ballot box, these ordinary ‘folk’ – a word much used by the hosts – these infants who longed for nothing more than to be told when to laugh? Stephen tilted his bottle and sucked and was ready to disenfranchise them all. More than that, he wanted them punished, soundly beaten, no, tortured. How dare they be children! He was prepared to listen, tolerant, reasonable man that he was, while it was explained just what purpose these people served, and why they should be permitted to go on living.

  For Stephen, these bouts – a democrat’s pornography – were as pleasurably degrading as anything he could remember. They peaked just before he chose to recall that his parents, along with his mother’s sister, Phyllida, and her husband, Frank, and their grown-up daughter, Tracy, had once been a part of just such a studio audience and had had the time of their lives. Each of them brought away a medallion showing a profile of their host, wreathed in laurel like an emperor, and, on the obverse, a pair of hands firmly clasped in friendship.

  This might be the time to rise to empty the water from the ice bucket, fix a sandwich or another drink in the kitchen, or spend time gazing out of the open window at the flooded street below. He had a short-list of preoccupations to keep him there, and the television to return to when he was tired of running through it. The Parmenter Committee’s long recess still had almost a month to run and he was annoyed to find that he missed the weekly meetings and the structure they allowed his thoughts. It bothered him that he had not heard from Julie, and that he could not bring himself to write to her without resentment. Although he fully intended to, he had not visited his parents again. He thought about Charles with nothing but irritation. More absorbing than any of these was Kate’s birthday. Next week, wherever she was, she was going to be six.

  For days now he had been wanting to visit a toy shop ten minutes’ walk from the flat. The thought was laughable. It presented a parody of bereavement. The wilful pathos of it made him groan out loud. It would be play-acting, a pretence to a madness he did not really feel. But the thought grew. He might stroll in that direction, imagine the sort of thing he would have bought. It was folly, it was weakness, it would cause him needless pain. But the thought went on growing, and one morning in the newsagent’s he picked up a roll of coloured wrapping paper and thrust it at the assistant before he had time to change his mind. To buy a toy would undo two years of adjustment, it would be irrational, indulgent, self-destructive; and weak, above all, weak. It was the weak who failed to maintain the line between the world as it was and the world as they wanted it to be. Don’t be weak, he told himself, try to survive. Throw away the paper, don’t cave in to fantasy, don’t go down that way. You might never come back. He did not go, but he could not stop himself wanting to go.

  Solitude had encouraged in him small superstitions, a tendency to magical thought. The superstitions had attached themselves to daily rituals, and in the constant silence of his own company his adherence had become rigorous. He always shaved the left side of his face first, he never began brushing his teeth until he had replaced the top of the toothpaste tube, he flushed the lavatory with his left hand although it was inconvenient, and these days he was scrupulous in placing both feet at once on the floor when he got out of bed. Magical thinking found ways of rationalising a trip to the toy shop.

  Before all else, it would be an act of faith in his daughter’s continued existence. Since she certainly would not be celebrating this day, it would be an assertion of her previous life and proper inheritance, of the truth about her birth – he had imagined the lies she would have been told about that. The observance of a mystery would release unknowable configurations of time and chance, the number magic of birth dates would be activated, events would be set in train which otherwise would not occur. To buy a present would demonstrate that he was not yet beaten, that he could do the surprising, lively thing. He would purchase his gift in joy rather than sorrow, in the spirit of loving extravagance, and in bringing it home and wrapping it up he would be making an offering to fate, or a challenge – Look, I’ve brought the present, now you bring back the girl. If the purchase cost him pain, then the pain would constitute a necessary sacrifice. Since he had exhausted all possibilities on the material plane by searching the streets, by placing ads in local newspapers offering a generous reward for information, by pasting enlarged photographs on bus shelters and walls, then it only made sense to deal on the level of the symbolic and the numinous, to conjoin with those unknowable forces which dealt in probability, which both distributed atoms to make solid objects solid, and unfolded all physical events, ultimately all personal destinies. And what had he to lose?

  The toy shop occupied a section of a converted warehouse and was in the style of a supermarket. Three spacious aisles under high fluorescent lights ran its length, and by the door was a row of checkout counters with trolleys and wire baskets heaped up nearby. The floor was in black springy rubber which gave off a sporty, efficient smell. On the wall was a sign in day-glo paint in imitation of a childish scrawl which warned that breakages would have to be paid for. From speakers hung high above the hooded lights came music suitable for children – a bouncy clarinet, a glockenspiel, a snare drum. It was Kate’s birthday. Because it was early on a Monday morning and raining steadily when Stephen arrived, the shop was empty of customers. By the only till open sat a young man with severely cropped hair and a black ear-stud writing in a notebook. Before entering by the rubber-laminated turnstile, Stephen paused to take off his coat and shake out his umbrella.

  The layout was simple. One end of the store was dominated by the khaki of combat drill and vehicle camouflage, and the riveted silver of heavily armed spaceships, the other by the pale pastels of baby wear and the shining white of miniature household appliances. With his wet coat folded over his arm, Stephen paced the length of the shop, from slaughter to drudgery, and discovered that the more interesting toys lay in between, where imitation of adults gave way to purer fun – a clockwork gorilla who climbed the side of a skyscraper to deliver a coin, a machine for squirting paint, a farting cushion, putty that glowed and squeaked when moulded, a ball that bounced unpredictably. Each of these he put tentatively into the hands of a six-year-old he knew as well as himself. He needed to test her reactions. She was a reticent girl, in company at least, with a straight back and dark fringe. She was a fantasist, a day-dreamer, a lover of strange-sounding words, a keeper of secret diaries, a hoarder of inexplicable objects. His first choices were safe: a set of coloured pens and a wooden box filled with minute farm animals. She preferred soft toys to dolls and he dropped into his wire basket a life-like grey cat. She was a giggler with a taste for practical jokes. He took the cushion and a flower which squirted water. She could torment her mother with these. He paused in front of a display of puzzles. He was not mad, he knew what was real. He knew what he was doing, he knew she was gone. He had thought all this ou
t quite carefully, and he was not deceived. He was doing this for himself, without illusions. Then he continued. She had no great taste for the abstract, enclosed world of puzzles. Her intelligence thrived on human contact, on the warmer complexities of fantasy and pretence. She liked to dress up. He reached for a witch’s hat, then he went back and changed the grey cat for a black one. Now he thought he had his theme. He was pulling stuff off the shelves at speed. He took magic pellets which turned into flowers on contact with water, a book of rhyming spells and cauldron recipes, a bottle of invisible ink, a cup which caused water poured into it to disappear, a nail which looked as though it had been driven through its wearer’s head.

  He was straying into the boys’ section. Beyond all question, she was a graceful child, but she was hopeless with a ball and it was time she knew how to throw. He took from the shelves a plastic sock of tennis balls. He fingered a cricket bat, well made in a child’s size, real willow. Was it too strenuously against the roles? He took it anyway, useful for the beach. Now he was deep into boys’ territory, passing guns, knives, flame-throwers, death rays and toy handcuffs, until he came to it at last, a matter of instant recognition, Kate’s present. It was a battery-operated, two-station, short-wave and frequency-modulated walkie-talkie set. On the packet a boy and a girl communicated delightedly across a small mountain range on what looked like the surface of the moon. From the antennae of their hand sets sprang white arcs of lightning, a representation of radio waves and excitement.