The Child in Time

by Ian Mcewan

  He was shivering as he sweated. Ahead he could see through the trees the brightness of the larger clearing. Thelma was standing where he had left her. As he approached, he thought he would drop Charles at her feet. She could lift him into position when he had had a rest. But she turned as soon as he was close, and began to walk back the way they had come. She did not look round as she hurried on. He had no choice but to go after her.

  By the time they were among the coppiced trees and were climbing the slow incline of the hollow, the weight was causing Stephen severe pain, principally in his legs, across the neck and in his arms where they were clasped behind Charles’s knees. Thelma had paused only once to pull the torch out from Stephen’s pocket. So far they had not spoken.

  As the pain intensified, he resolved not to put Charles down until they reached the cottage. He would atone for his poor showing as a friend. He had dropped his friend before, he would not drop him now. It was with heroic thoughts such as these that Stephen tolerated the pain. But when at last Thelma had led the way through the cottage garden and into the scullery, and had indicated that this was where she wanted the body set down, he could not activate the right muscles, they had hardened beyond his control. He stood swaying in the confined, brightly lit space, unable to shed his burden. ‘Pull,’ he cried. ‘For God’s sake get him off me!’

  It was less in the interests of hygiene, more in the way of re-establishing the line between the living and the dead, that Stephen went immediately to the kitchen sink to wash his hands. The kitchen was too warm now, and closed in. He went through to the living room. Years ago, a wall had been knocked down to form a long gallery. The furnishings were sparse, the air cool and unused. Thelma was there already, resting against a window ledge, still in her coat. He headed for a chair but found he could not sit. Though his hands looked steady, his whole being seemed to be vibrating at a high frequency. There was a keening in his ears, or in the room, at the limits of the audible range. He walked from the chair along the polished boards to the far wall and turned. He would have liked to run. He thought he might be formidable on a tennis court now. She crossed the room, reached the adjacent window and walked back. He returned along the boards, making a loud noise with his heels. Thelma stood by the empty fireplace. He looked up when he thought he heard her whispering, but it was the sound of skin on skin as she rubbed her hands together. He fetched the Scotch and glasses from the kitchen. It was difficult to control the flow.

  The drink tasted salty. ‘Do they put salt in this?’ he asked. She looked puzzled and he did not repeat the question. All the same, after a pause she nodded. Holding the glass in two hands, she went up the room along Stephen’s route. She kept her back to him while she drank.

  ‘You ought to know,’ she said at last, still without turning, ‘this isn’t a surprise. He tried it in London, more than once. I thought coming here would be a reprieve. In fact it was a postponement.’

  ‘I thought I knew him well,’ Stephen said. ‘But obviously I was wrong.’

  ‘It’s how it usually is. The manic side, the energetic, successful side was public, and the rest, the mad lows, was all for me. Moving out here was supposed to reconcile the two …’ She had walked back to where Stephen stood.

  ‘Except,’ he said, ‘out here I was the only public.’

  She was looking at him, without accusation. ‘It’s true, he was upset when you went off without warning that day, when he was waiting for you. He wasn’t counting on your approval, although that would have been nice. What he wanted was for you not to mind.’

  Stephen felt winded, his arms were heavy. He glanced behind him and sat down. ‘I suppose I did mind,’ he said sadly.

  Thelma sat on the arm of the chair. ‘Don’t misunderstand me. It would have made no difference in the end. It certainly didn’t hang on your attitude. I didn’t mean to suggest that. I could have told you more, prepared you for what to expect. But Charles was against that. He didn’t want us talking about him in that way, he didn’t want to be a case.’ Then she added, ‘And at the time I thought he was right.’

  A clock at the end of the room set about striking eleven. The final reverberation had to fade into nothing before it was possible to resume.

  Thelma appeared to have entered a state of emotional neutrality. ‘He couldn’t square it,’ she said in a matter-of-fact way. ‘He wanted to be famous, and have people tell him that one day he would be Prime Minister, and he wanted to be the little boy without a care in the world, with no responsibility, no knowledge of the world outside. It wasn’t an eccentric whim. It was an overwhelming fantasy which dominated all his private moments. He thought about it, he wanted it in the way some people want sex. In fact, it had a sexual side. He wore his short trousers and had his bottom smacked by a prostitute pretending to be a governess. You might as well know that, it was one of the things he wanted to tell you about. It’s a pretty standard minority taste among public schoolboys.

  ‘But it had a more important emotional side which he found harder to understand in himself or talk about. He wanted the security of childhood, the powerlessness, the obedience, and also the freedom that goes with it, freedom from money, decisions, plans, demands. He used to say he wanted to escape from time, from appointments, schedules, deadlines. Childhood to him was timelessness, he talked about it as though it were a mystical state. He longed for all this, talked to me about it endlessly, got depressed, and meanwhile he was out there making money, becoming known, creating hundreds of obligations for himself in the adult world, running away from his thoughts. Your book Lemonade was very important to him. He said it was one part of himself addressing the other. He said it made him realise that he had a responsibility to his desires, that he had to do something about them before time removed the opportunity. It was a warning of mortality. He had to do something quick or regret it for ever.’

  She blew her nose. She maintained her detached, analytical style.

  ‘But he did nothing. Conventional ambition is hard to break with. There was a suicide attempt, pretty half-hearted actually. He changed jobs and went on being more successful, as you know. The years raced by, just as he had feared. The pressure was building up. He went into politics, got his job in government. He started reading your book again. It was because of the Childcare project. The Prime Minister invited him, which in that world means ordered him, to write a shadow Childcare manual, the one there’s been all this fuss about. Charles and the Prime Minister worked on it together. He was being fancied, I mean sexually fancied. He pretended not to notice he was making a killing. He was repelled, but he couldn’t help flirting. He wanted to get on, he couldn’t stop himself wanting that. He wrote the manual under his leader’s supervision, and he re-read your book. Everything got stirred up again, and he wanted to make his plans. He was desperate, he said. He was running out of time. He had to have this, he was pleading with me to make it happen for him, to let him be a little boy. And in the end, I agreed, I thought he should have it or he would go to pieces. Of course it suited me too, which was good, because the thing could not have worked if I had felt resentful. I wanted to get out of London, I was tired of teaching, I had my book to write and I love this house and the land around it.

  ‘We often talked about where this obsession came from, whether it was something in his past that had to be relived, or completed, or whether it was compensation for something he had missed out on. Charles never really wanted to delve. I think he was frightened of what he might find. Perhaps it was his mania protecting itself. You know his mother died when he was twelve, so you could say he associated pre-pubescence with her. And he had a photograph, a horrid little picture taken when he was eight. It shows him standing next to his father who was fairly important in the City, a dull man I remember, but tyrannical. In the photograph Charles looks like a scaled-down version of his father – the same suit and tie, the same self-important posture and grown-up expression. So perhaps he was denied a childhood. But other people lose their mothers in chil
dhood, or have fathers with awful ambitions, and manage to grow up without Charles’s sexual and emotional cravings. In all the talking we did, I don’t think we came anywhere near the root of the thing.

  ‘Anyway, we dropped everything and came here. For a while, during the hot weather, it was fine, it was more than that, it was an idyll. What to an outsider would have seemed ridiculous and fantastical, became quite ordinary between us. I was mother to a little boy who played in the woods all day and came home to eat and sleep. I’ve never known him so happy, so simple in his needs. He discovered he liked solitude. He learned the names of plants, though I never saw him with books. When he was back here he was quite simply merry, and affectionate. At nights he slept ten hours straight through. Before, he used to make do on four or five. You came, and that was a disappointment, but not a serious setback.

  ‘Then the weather turned, rather suddenly as it happened, and Charles began to fret about what was happening in London. He wanted us to take newspapers, and I refused. He tried to mend an old radio and got in a fury when he failed. Then he started on about how we were going to run out of money unless he went back to work, which was nonsense. Worst of all, he was getting letters from the Prime Minister inviting him to Downing Street, hinting that a place could be found for him in the Lords, a peerage that is, and a job in Government with even better jobs to come.

  ‘He was sitting up all night agonising, and he was still out in the woods during the day, trying to maintain his innocence. But it was getting harder all the time. He was in his tree-house in his short trousers wondering whether he should style himself Lord Eaton, and whether anyone else had taken the name. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to laugh, Stephen. It was tragic, but it was also thoroughly absurd. I’m not crying. I’m not going to cry. We talked a lot, of course. I suggested psychoanalysis among many other things, but he had the usual English aversion to that. When I told him I thought it was extraordinary for a man with such powerful conflicts as his to refuse any process of self-examination, he flew into a terrible rage, a grown-up tantrum. He actually lay on the floor and beat it with his fists.

  ‘After that he became increasingly depressed. He was trapped. If he went back to London, to the old life, he knew from experience that the old longings, the compulsions, would start to drag him down and he would be craving the simple and secure life he had made for himself here. And if he stayed here he would be agonising for ever about his growing irrelevance in what he was beginning to call the real world. My patience was wearing out. My work was suffering. I was exhausted with the whole business. After a great deal of thought, I decided he should return to politics. He had survived out there for years, and if he was going to be unhappy, it would be no more than the unhappiness of the child who could not have everything.

  ‘Once this was put to him and talked through, he sank even deeper, and then we rowed. That was this morning. He accused me of putting him out in the cold, cutting him off from the thing he wanted to be. I’m afraid I lost my temper. I told him I had tried to help him in every way I could. Now he would have to take responsibility for his own life. And that is exactly what he did. He wanted to hurt me by hurting himself, thoroughly depressive reasoning. He went out into the woods and sat down. He put himself out in the cold. As suicides go it was petulant and childish. And sorry as I’ll always be, I don’t think I’ll ever quite forgive him for it.’

  Thelma’s anger had caused her to stand. Stephen watched her walking up and down. Agitation had returned to the room.

  ‘If Charles wrote that childcare book,’ he said at last, ‘why was it so harsh? From what I’ve seen, it doesn’t look like the kind of thing someone who felt himself to be a child could write.’

  ‘I’ve read it right through,’ Thelma said. ‘It’s a perfect illustration of Charles’s problem. It was his fantasy life which drew him to the work, and it was his desire to please the boss which made him write it the way he did. That’s what he couldn’t square, and that’s why he fell apart. He could never bring his qualities as a child – and really Stephen you should have seen him, so funny and direct and gentle – he couldn’t bring any of this into his public life. Instead, it was all frenetic compensation for what he took to be an excess of vulnerability. All this striving and shouting, cornering markets, winning arguments to keep his weakness at bay. And quite honestly, when I think of my colleagues at work and the scientific establishment and the men who run it, and I think of science itself, how it’s been devised over the centuries, I have to say that Charles’s case was just an extreme form of a general problem.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s true,’ Stephen said.

  Now her anger was turned on him. ‘That’s what you say. But think back over the last year and all your unhappiness, all the floundering about, the catatonia, when right in front of you was – well, then you see the difference between saying a thing is true and knowing it to be so.’

  Stephen had risen from the chair. ‘What are you talking about?’ he demanded. ‘What was right in front of me?’

  She hesitated, and was about to answer when the brief silence disintegrated in the crashing ring of the telephone. Even before she had answered it, he realised that all evening he had been hearing unanswered telephones.

  She said, ‘Yes? … But he’s here, with me … Good … Yes, trust me … I will …’ She held the receiver towards him and cupped her free hand over the mouthpiece. She made it clear she was not diverted from answering his question. ‘Julie,’ she said. ‘Julie was in front of you. She wants to speak to you.’

  He took the phone and listened. Now Thelma was smiling broadly, and all the time her eyes, narrowed and tearful, were on him.

  Nine

  More than coal, more even than nuclear power, children are our greatest resource.

  The Authorised Childcare Handbook, HMSO

  It happened that a nightly train from Scotland swung eastwards through Norfolk and Suffolk on its way to London and stopped briefly at the local station at twenty past one in the morning. Stephen borrowed Thelma’s car, leaving the keys under the seat as arranged, and arrived on the platform a minute before the train was due in. He paid the guard for a sleeping compartment and arranged to be woken as soon as they arrived. He lay with his feet at the pillow end, and watched through the spyhole in the frosted glass the leading edge of the carriage’s shadow cut across a blur of cinders. From the next compartment came the muffled thumps of lovemaking. For over twenty minutes he wondered at its unvarying persistence, the awesome single-mindedness of passion. Could he ever be driven quite that way again himself? When the train began to slow for the next station the rhythm slackened too; he had been listening to something loose swaying against the partition wall.

  He fell asleep as they entered the outer suburbs and was woken abruptly by a loud knocking at his door. In his confusion he misinterpreted its urgency and hurried out too quickly with his bag on to the platform, the one he had left from the evening before. He stood swaying a little, remembering himself. But for porters loading mail and magazines on to a nearby train, the station was deserted. The floor had been hosed down. Still numb from his sleep, he set off to find a taxi. The rank was empty, and on the street outside the station there was no traffic at all. He walked towards St Paul’s with the collar of Charles’s donkey jacket turned up against a cold and gritty wind. He had been walking for half an hour before he was picked up by a taxi with its light out. The driver was going home across the river and agreed to take him to Victoria Station.

  Minutes later, Stephen slid back the glass panel and offered two hundred and fifty pounds to be taken to Kent.

  The driver immediately shook his head. ‘Nah, stuff that. No disrespect, but I need my kip.’

  ‘Three hundred then.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Two and a half thousand?’

  The cab came to a standstill and the driver turned in his seat.

  ‘I’d want to see it first.’

  Stephen showed him empty hands. �
�I wanted to know if you had a price.’

  The man laughed as he pulled away from the kerb. He was still smiling to himself when he accepted Stephen’s money at the end of the journey.

  Partly because of the nearby soup kitchens, this station was busier than the last. By the closed ticket office there was a cider and sherry party in progress, a quiet affair in view of the number of unsteady figures in greatcoats. Three black women, each operating a giant suction machine, were working their way steadily towards the group from different directions. Down the platforms dozens of men were involved in the desultory loading of trains. Occasionally a shout echoed languidly from the distant roof. From the departure board Stephen learned that the next stopping train along the Dover line left in three hours’ time at six forty-five.

  He walked behind a clattering cart laden with bundles of semi-pornographic magazines. When it stopped he went forward to ask the driver if there was a mail train leaving for Dover. The man shrugged and re-phrased the question for the benefit of the porters who were preparing to unload the cart. Two-twenty, they murmured in ragged sequence, an hour and a half ago. Stephen was about to walk away when one of the porters, a boy in his teens, spoke out with a train spotter’s intensity.

  ‘’S’only maintenance going down there now.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘You won’t get on him.’ All the same, he pointed to where the platform ramp sloped down into the night.