The Child in Time

by Ian Mcewan

  After Morley had left, he went into his daughter’s bare room and turned on the light. There was still a dustbin liner full of her stuff lying on the mattress of the single wooden bed. The room smelled damp. He knelt down and turned the valve on the radiator. He remained crouched for a moment on the floor, testing his feelings; it was not loss he confronted now, it was a fact, like a high wall. But inanimate, neutral. A fact. He said the word out loud, like a curse. Returning to the study, he took Morley’s chair by the fire and thought about his story. He saw them, man and wife, side by side on their backs like stone figures on a Medieval tomb. Nuclear war. He was suddenly, childishly, afraid to undress and go to bed. The world outside the room, outside his clothes even, seemed bitter, harsh beyond reason. The frail sanity he had established was under threat. He had been still for twenty minutes, and he was sinking. The silence was gaining in volume. He made a great effort and leaned forwards to build up the fire. He cleared his throat noisily to hear his own voice. As the flames took hold of the new coal, he settled back, and before he fell asleep he promised himself he would not let go. His tutorial was at ten the next morning, and he was due on court at three.

  Stephen’s mother had begun her convalescence in February. She was allowed out of bed for the afternoons and early evenings. As soon as it was warmer, she would be permitted to walk the four hundred yards to the Post Office. She had lost fifteen pounds during her illness, and most of the sight in one eye. Knitting, reading or watching television gave her pains in her good eye, so the radio and conversation were her main pleasures now. Like many women of her generation, she did not like to mention any discomfort. When his father had to spend half a day away from home visiting his sister, who was also ill, Stephen was asked if he would come and keep his mother company. He was happy to oblige. He liked seeing his parents singly; it was easier to break the habitual patterns, he felt less limited in his role as son. And there was the possibility of resuming the conversation they had begun in the kitchen half a year ago.

  He was surprised to be met at the front door by her, to see her once more in everyday clothes instead of the bed-jacket in shocking pink. Losing weight had tightened her facial skin, giving her a superficially youthful appearance which was heightened by a rakish eye patch. After they had embraced fleetingly, and while he was complimenting her on her progress and making a cumbersome pirate joke, she led the way into the living room.

  She apologised for the chaos there visible only to herself. One reason why she was keen to regain her strength, she said, was because she wanted to start putting the house to rights. Though not a single object seemed out of place, Stephen said it was surely a good sign she felt that way. It was also an indication of just how enfeebled she was that, after only ritual protest, she permitted him to make them a pot of tea in her own kitchen. But she called out instructions through the open hatch and, while he was not looking, pulled out the nest of coffee tables and arranged them to receive the tray and their cups. In the kitchen Stephen waited for the kettle to boil and examined the contents of an array of pill bottles. The iridescent intensity of the reds and yellows suggested powerful technology, deep intervention in the system. Elsewhere, an innovation was the large sign in his father’s hand by the wall phone listing the doctor’s emergency numbers and those of a few private ambulance companies.

  Mrs Lewis presided over the pouring, though her hand shook with the weight of the teapot. They pretended not to see the splashes which drenched the tray. They talked about the weather; it was forecast that before the first signs of spring they would have to endure heavy snowfalls. Mrs Lewis skilfully evaded her son’s questions about the doctor’s most recent visit. Instead they discussed Stephen’s aunt’s illness and whether Mr Lewis would be safe crossing West London by public transport. They debated the suitability of large-print books. Twenty minutes passed and Stephen began to worry that his mother would tire before he could move the conversation in the direction he wanted. So after the next short break in the talk he said, ‘Do you remember you were telling me about those new bikes?’

  She seemed to have been waiting for this. She smiled immediately. ‘Your father has his own reasons for wanting to forget about those.’

  ‘You mean he’s pretending to forget?’

  ‘It’s the Air Force training. If it’s untidy or it doesn’t fit, throw it out.’ She was speaking affectionately. She continued, ‘The day we bought those bikes was a difficult one, for both of us. He likes to think that everything that’s happened since then was bound to happen, that there was never any choice. He says he doesn’t remember, so we never talk about it.’ Though her tone was still reflective and unaccusing, a firmness in these last words seemed to be establishing a pretext for indiscretion. She was also being wilfully obscure and a little self-dramatising. She sat back in her chair with her teacup suspended an inch above its saucer, waiting to be prompted.

  Stephen took care not to appear too interested; he knew her guilty loyalties could be easily aroused. He let a few seconds pass before saying, ‘I suppose forty years is a long time, after all.’

  She was shaking her head emphatically. ‘Memory’s got nothing to do with years. You remember what you remember. The moment I first set eyes on your father is as clear to me now as it ever was.’ Stephen half knew the account of his parents’ first meeting. But he was aware that what was being offered as evidence of the timelessness of memory was her way into the story she wanted to tell.

  During the first three years after the war Stephen’s mother, Claire Temperly, worked in a small department store in a market town in Kent. The full social impact of the war, in particular the disappearance of a whole class of domestic servants, and with it the way of life of the less than wealthy middle classes, had yet to make itself fully felt, and the store – a kind of local Harrods on two floors – still managed to keep up some pre-war pretensions.

  ‘It wasn’t the sort of place my mum would feel happy doing her shopping in. She’d be made to feel out of place.’ Boys in dark blue uniforms with silver braid, and caps bearing the store’s insignia, waited by the revolving doors to conduct the lady shoppers across the plum-coloured carpet to the appropriate department. If the assistants there were busy, the ladies would be shown to comfortable chairs. The boys said Ma’am and touched their caps frequently, but they were never tipped.

  The assistants, who were all girls, wore uniforms too for which they were personally responsible. Each morning before the store opened they lined up for dress inspection in front of Miss Bart, the elderly head of personnel. She liked to pay special attention to the arrangement of the starched white bows ‘her girls’ tied behind their backs. Girls who were not born to it had to concentrate on saying ‘think’ not ‘fink’ and remembering their aitches and to tighten the muscles round their lips as they spoke. When they were not serving customers they had to remain behind the mahogany counters without slouching or talking to one another unnecessarily; they were required to look alert and friendly, but not ‘forward’ – ‘which meant not looking at a customer until the customer had looked at you. It took a month or two to learn how to do that.’

  Claire was twenty-five and still living at home when she began at the store. She was an odd mixture of shyness and independence. ‘I wriggled out of two offers of marriage, but I had to get my mum to do the talking for me.’ Still, family and friends were growing concerned about her age and telling her she only had a year or two left in her. She was pretty in a bright, bird-like way. It was not ambition but nervous energy and dread of criticism which made her work so diligently. Even Miss Bart, whom everyone feared, came to like her for her punctuality, and said her bows were the cleanest and the most neatly tied. She learned to speak the shop girls’ posh – ‘If modom would care to step this way …’ – and was one of the few assistants to be transferred to a new department every six months, ‘probably because the powers that be were thinking of promoting me’.

  It was for this reason she found herself starting in t
he clock department, having come from haberdashery where the supervisor had been a second mother to her and had made her feel less anxious about not being married. Now her boss was Mr Middlebrook, a tall, thin man who intimidated both underlings and customers with his clipped, sarcastic manner. He had a striking purple birthmark on his forehead and the story among the girls was that ‘if you let your eyes rest on it even for a second you’d be fired on the spot’. Mr Middlebrook was not unreasonable, but he was cool towards the girls and had a knack of making them feel stupid.

  Men were not often seen among the customers in the department store. It was a quiet, scented, womanly place. Occasionally, an elderly gent might come, looking well out of his depth as he bought an anniversary present for his wife, and loving it when a girl took him in hand and made respectful suggestions. And there were young couples, married or engaged, ‘furnishing their nests’, and much gossiped about by the assistants during their half-hour lunch break. But a young man alone in the shop, and a handsome man with a black moustache, a man in the cool blue-grey of an RAF uniform, was bound to cause a stir. News of his approach was telegraphed through the ground floor. Girls looked up from their counters, alert and friendly. Followed, not preceded, by a page boy, he strode across the tranquil expanse of plum carpet towards Claire’s department, a cap under one arm, under the other a clock, and demanded to see Mr Middlebrook. While someone went to fetch him from his office, the man set down the clock and his cap side by side on the glass counter, stood himself at ease, hands behind back, and stared fixedly ahead. He was a strong-looking man with an impressively straight back. He had the bony, flinty handsomeness much in fashion at the time. His wavy black hair was thickly Brylcreemed and his miniature black moustache was waxed right to its tiny tips. The clock was a mantelpiece chimer in a rosewood case. Claire was twelve feet away, dusting, which was the nearest Mr Middlebrook would allow his girls to doing nothing. Trained up to the impropriety of initiating an insubordinate eye-contact, she kept herself busy with the glass faces of the grandfather clocks, every one of which showed a waiting man in uniform. ‘But you know, without turning, I could feel something like a warmth coming off him. A sort of glow.’

  It did not help matters off to a good start that Mr Middlebrook was slow in coming, and that even when he did at last appear behind the counter and, presumably, register the presence of a man with a complaint, he first took down a brown envelope, removed a sheet of paper and unfolded it, wrote out a list of numbers, then refolded the sheet and returned it to the envelope and the envelope to its proper position on its shelf. Only then did he mount the barely credible drama of becoming aware of a customer in need of attention. Drawing up to his full height and inclining forwards, with his weight supported by splayed fingers against the glass counter, he said, ‘What seems to be the problem?’

  Throughout this the man in uniform had not stirred from his position, nor did his gaze wander until he was spoken to. Then he took half a pace forward, picked up his cap and used it to point to the clock. He said simply, ‘It’s broken. Again.’ Claire’s dusting was taking her nearer the scene.

  Mr Middlebrook was brisk. ‘Then there’s no problem at all, sir. The guarantee still has seven months to run.’ His hand was resting on the clock, and he was about to gather it up for processing. But the man put out his own hand and set it firmly on top of Mr Middlebrook’s, trapping it there while he spoke. Claire noticed the stubby fingers of this second hand, and the black, matted hair along the knuckles. The physical contact violated all the unspoken rules governing confrontations with customers. Mr Middlebrook had gone rigid. To struggle would have intensified the contact, so he had no choice but to listen to the man’s short speech. ‘I loved his way of talking. Straight to the point. Not rough, or rude, but not lah-di-dah either.’

  The man said, ‘You told me it was a reliable clock. Worth paying the extra money for. Either you were lying, or you were mistaken. That’s not for me to judge. I want my money back now.’

  Here, at least, Mr Middlebrook knew himself to be on familiar ground. ‘I’m afraid we cannot authorise refunds on goods purchased five months ago.’

  Reassured by a statement of company policy, Mr Middlebrook attempted to pull his hand clear. But the man’s larger hand encircled his wrist and the grip was tightening.

  He spoke again as if for the first time. ‘I want my money back now.’ And then came the surprise. The man turned to Claire. ‘And what’s your opinion? This is the third time it’s broken down.’

  ‘Until he asked me, I didn’t have an opinion. I was just watching to see what was going to happen. But before I could stop myself, I was saying, bold as you like, “I think you should have your money back, sir.”’

  The man nodded at the till and kept a good hold of Mr Middlebrook. ‘Come on then, girl. Seven pounds thirteen and six.’ Claire opened the till, thus initiating a lifetime of domestic obedience. Mr Middlebrook made no attempt to prevent her. He was, after all, being extricated from a most unpleasant situation without having to back down. Douglas Lewis took the money, turned on his heel and walked smartly away, leaving the broken clock behind him on the counter.

  ‘I’ll always remember the hands stood at a quarter to three.’

  Claire was sacked at lunchtime, not by Mr Middlebrook, who was at the doctor’s having his wrist bandaged, but by the disapproving Miss Bart. The girl was surprised to find her man waiting for her as she stepped out on to the pavement. He bought her a slap-up lunch at the George Hotel.

  ‘There was no question,’ said Mrs Lewis as she extended her cup and saucer for a refill. ‘He was a catch. When he came to tea he did all the right things. Arrived in his best uniform, and brought flowers, said nice things about the garden to my dad, thrilled my mum by eating three helpings of cake. After that, everyone started treating me with respect.’

  Three months later, when news came through of Douglas’s posting to North Germany, the couple were engaged. Claire had been just a little disappointed when she discovered during their lunch at the George that he was not a fighter pilot. He had never even been in an airplane. He was on the admin side, a filing clerk in charge of all the other filing clerks. Now she was greatly relieved that he would be doing nothing more dangerous in Germany than collecting the squadron’s wages from the bank each week. She went to Harwich to wave his ship goodbye, and sobbed in the train on the way home. They wrote regularly, sometimes every day for weeks on end. Though Douglas found it easier to describe bomb craters in ruined towns and food queues than his tenderest feelings, he was able to take a lead from his fiancée, and between them they managed a growing intimacy by post. When he came home on leave at Christmas, they were a little shame-faced, shy of holding hands even, for the postal affair with its extravagant declarations had run on ahead of them. But by Boxing Day they had caught up, and travelling in the train to Worthing to his parents, Douglas made a short murmured speech, almost lost to the iron clatter of wheels, in which he told Claire how in love he was with her.

  Conditions in Germany were still far too unsettled for wives to be permitted to accompany serving men, so they agreed not to get married until Douglas was posted back to the UK. He was not home again on leave until spring, and then only for a long weekend. The weather was warm and since there was nowhere they could be alone indoors they passed the days walking on the North Downs, making their plans. They strolled carefree along the very path used by Chaucer’s pilgrims. The tranquil Weald was spread out before them, there were wildflowers, larks, and abundant solitude. They were deliriously happy, it was a delirious weekend, and by the repetition of the word Stephen took his mother to be absolving them of a degree of carelessness. Sure enough, when Douglas returned on more extended leave in July, Claire had momentous news for him. She decided to choose her moment, to wait until they were back up on the hills among the wildflowers with the easy, joyful intimacy re-established.

  When she anticipated that moment she could almost hear a film score and see the midsummer sun
illuminate the scene – Douglas struck dumb with pride, his features softened by reverence, and admiration, and a new kind of tenderness. ‘But it didn’t occur to me that it would be cold and windy.’ Even worse, Douglas seemed different. He was edgy, abstracted, difficult to get close to. Sometimes he seemed bored. Whenever Claire asked him if there was anything the matter he would take her hand and squeeze ferociously. If she asked him too frequently he became irritable.

  At the end of his previous visit, they had decided to buy bicycles in order to free themselves from the erratic local buses, and since this was to be their first joint purchase, the first acquisitions for the little empire they were about to build, it seemed appropriate to buy new ones. They had already made their choice and a down payment and now, on the third day of Douglas’s July leave, they set out with a picnic already packed to collect their bikes and brave the weather. Claire had made up her mind to tell her news that day, even though it was raining and Douglas was more silent than ever. He cheered up once they were on their bikes, however, and began to sing, which was something he had never done in her presence before. So Claire seized her opportunity and blurted out her secret as they wobbled down the busy High Street.