The Time We Have Taken

by Steven Carroll

  And it is now, as they are leaving, that Michael and this man do, in fact, catch each other’s eyes. It is momentary, but Michael is sure — as they exit — that there was recognition in the stare. Recognition, and something more. And, as they stroll across the wide street outside, Michael is left contemplating if that flash of recognition was real or imagined, and, if so, just what that something more might have been.

  He turns the top corner of the page and life in Middlemarch snaps shut for the time. Even as he does, he hears the voice of Madeleine telling him not to do that, that the page feels it. Didn’t he know? Her little ways and expressions have entered his day-to-day living — don’t dog-ear the pages of books, TTFN at the bottom of a letter — and her very accent, for he constantly catches himself now slipping into her sing-song voice. And it is something that will never entirely leave him, so infectious is it.

  There is a slight, almost autumn, chill in the air as he crosses the road and walks back into the university. He was, of course, this man, talking about anybody. Just anybody. And Michael shrugs the incident off — if that’s what it is — as if shrugging off the sudden out-of-season chill settling over things. But it stays with him: the hint of a chill and the nagging image of Madeleine, cast as a latter-day Dorothea seeking the grand narratives of life in the works of someone else.

  In his room, later in the afternoon, he sits at his desk, looking out over the street from his balcony window and waiting for the hour to roll round when he will rise from his chair and meet Madeleine. Twilight has almost fallen and she will currently be making herself ready for the evening. Or she will be ready and simply filling in time, chatting to her sister. It is the hour before meeting Madeleine. An hour, that in years to come, will be synonymous with this time of day, the clutter of his desk, the cheap plastic mug from which he occasionally sips and the thrill that infuses all the objects around him with a sense of moment.

  He returns to his book. Life in Middlemarch turns another page, and once again he loses himself in the quiet rhythms of another time, another world. As he picks up the threads of the book, the threads of the afternoon return briefly (the easy words and easy smile of the practised raconteur surfacing again). Life turns another page. He forgets about it all. He is being silly. He is being worse than silly — he is being a child. He is, he knows, looking for things that aren’t there.

  11.

  The Search for a Key Term

  In the weeks that followed Peter van Rijn’s momentous drive to work and his subsequent visit to the mayor’s office, a committee was formed. The mayor, Harold Ford, Henry to his mates, who bears a striking resemblance to Mr Menzies (a resemblance he cultivates, and which, some suggest, alone gave him electoral success) had passed through five distinct phases during the ten minutes that Peter van Rijn had been in his office.

  At first it was simple annoyance at having his morning ritual of strong tea and tobacco disturbed (and the mayor is a man who sits, stands and walks inside a constant tobacco cloud, the pipe rarely from his mouth) for no apparent reason other than some aimless chit-chat about local history. Once the annoyance subsided, he experienced a moment of indifferent dismissiveness, which soon turned to sceptical interest. By the five-minute mark, his tea was cooling, and the mayor was warming to the idea that Peter van Rijn had given birth to that morning and which he had brought directly to the mayor’s attention. And, once he realised that there was something in this for all of them, he was a portrait of concentrated attention. Visions of fat government cheques and a whole suburb transformed into the very emblem of Progress passed across his mind; his suburb, his people, all brought together in mutual celebration, under the beaming gaze of the mayor whose vision had made it happen.

  This, the mayor realised as both men stood and shook hands, was his doorway into local history. And not just a routine mention — a gold name on a board along with everyone else — but a shining place at the very centre of the suburb’s story.

  Now, in this last week of February, with the schools back and the suburb having shrugged off its summer slumbers, a committee is meeting. It is meeting, for the first time, in the dining room of the Webster mansion. Mrs Webster, a member of the committee and one of the first names on the mayor’s lips, automatically offered the use of the dining room, which, in the days of Webster, rarely hosted a dinner.

  It is a large room. Light and relaxing (made even lighter and more relaxing by Rita’s changes). A place where the six committee members (the mayor, Mrs Webster, the vicar of St Matthew’s, the newly appointed priest at St Patrick’s, the local member of parliament and Peter van Rijn) can chat in an informal way; a place where the imagination might be set free, and where unusual, even inspired, ideas might be born.

  The immediate task of the committee is to establish a name for the event itself. The word ‘slogan’ is never uttered, but everybody understands that this is what they’re searching for. The suburb’s history, it is tacitly taken for granted, is a grand and dignified matter. To think in terms of a slogan would be to cheapen it. They are not, after all, selling soap powder, but celebrating a hundred years of settlement.

  The word that constantly recurs in the afternoon’s discussion is ‘Progress’. And, with it, terms such as production, prosperity and growth. But it is Progress that rolls so easily from the lips of the mayor, the ministers and the local member. Is not the suburb, they irresistibly conclude, the very picture of Progress: only twenty years ago a frontier community of stick houses and dirt tracks, now a wide, solid community of lawns and gardens and tree-lined streets? What was once a frontier outpost is now, indeed, the Toorak of the North that the estate agents of a hundred years ago had promised all their grandparents.

  As they talk, Mrs Webster is distracted by her gardens, which are a mass of colour and leafy abundance. Progress. She hears the word thrown into the pot of conversation yet again, but it is thrown in such a way as to suggest that nobody really knows what it means. Rather, it is spoken like some article of faith. Or like a phrase that enters everyday conversation, and for a season becomes everybody’s favourite phrase (a way for people such as the mayor or the local member to demonstrate that their thinking is up to the minute), without anybody ever really pausing to reflect on just what it might mean. And so it is no surprise when somebody suggests that Progress Suburb be the banner under which they organise the year’s activities. A long discussion follows, but, for reasons that no one will remember afterwards, it is not adopted. Instead the mayor suggests that one of the main streets in the suburb be renamed Progress Avenue, and everyone agrees.

  And so the search goes on for most of the afternoon, the sky clouds over, and one of those late-summer changes that brings with it a taste of the autumn to follow settles in. The day dulls, bringing an out-of-season chill (the same chill that settles on Michael as he walks from the pub to his room and the hour before meeting Madeleine), and just when it appears that everybody has been exhausted by the search, and are no longer capable of creative thought, Peter van Rijn — who has said little until now — quietly suggests Centenary Suburb. Simple, he says. But it tells everybody what they need to know, and is grand without being too grand. It has, he continues, a sense of history about it, a sense of debt as well as celebration. Although the mayor has never really liked van Rijn (he did, in fact, in an excess of youth, years before, throw a brick through the Dutchman’s shop window, scrawling the word ‘commie’ on the footpath in front of the shop — something about which he has always kept mum), but for the second time in a matter of weeks he finds himself nodding in enthusiastic agreement with him. So too is the whole table. And, in a flash, it is agreed. They will become Centenary Suburb. The search is over. The meeting finishes and everybody agrees that this calls for a drink, and everybody (except Peter van Rijn himself, who is a teetotaller) raises glasses of the whisky Mrs Webster has passed around and toasts the occasion.

  Centenary Suburb. It is hard for everyone to believe that it took all afternoon to think up two wo
rds. But they are the right two words, and when the vicar of St Matthew’s suggests that good words, like good whisky, take time, there is general nodding all around the table.

  And when they all leave the Webster mansion and step out into the street to go their separate ways, it is as though those two words have already transformed the suburb. The mayor is struck by a sense of its solidity and history that he has never appreciated before, and the two priests are discussing the farms that once existed where the houses and shops and garages of the suburb now stand, and Peter van Rijn is contemplating the frail wooden structure that first brought commerce to the community and thereby heralded the beginning of settlement. A shop, he reflects, brings with it the many gifts of production and the bonds of exchange. A shop does all that. It is the glue, the focal point of a group of people who have decided to settle in one place and call that place home. He gives no thought to the fact that others were there before them all and too called this place home; that earlier inhabitants, for millennia, walked the very ground that they have, just now, collectively decided to call Centenary Suburb. He simply does not think of it. When he thinks of the suburb before they all came to it he thinks only of open country and vacant land. As open and vacant as the blank page upon which their history will be written, for History begins with a blank page. As well as open country and vacant land. All of it untilled. Waiting only to be touched by the hands of History and Progress. Open country, moving irresistibly towards, yearning for that moment when the concentration of farms and houses is such that it can justify the existence of a shop and the history of the place can be said to have found its first chapter.

  He strolls to his Anglia and drives to the shop to catch whatever there may be of the late-afternoon trade. The mayor returns to his office, more content from the labour that it took to dream up two words than the whole of the week’s paperwork. The two priests part at St Patrick’s, the vicar of St Matthew’s continuing on to his parish, passing the grand old nineteenth-century building that once housed the Girls’ Home and is now occupied by some government office or other. Mrs Webster sits alone in her dining room, absentmindedly taking in the stale whisky smells.

  The day sparkles, as if in response to the birth that has just taken place in the committee room, to the phrase that will now define the year and the life of the suburb. The committee members go their separate ways, gazing at their world through the spectacles of the Key Term. All around them, all across the suburb, rich and profuse gardens of bright red, pink and yellow roses, geraniums and impatiens, hang over garden walls and fences; tennis courts and cricket fields echo with the gentle pock-pock of games past and present; the rattle of trains comes and goes; shop doors open and close; and each of the committee members takes it all into their lungs and limbs, this suburb of theirs, now transformed into a grand achievement by those two words.

  A grand tale, they are now a grand tale, calling — right down through the generations — for recognition. To the mayor, now easing into his chair, to Peter van Rijn, currently rearranging his shop window, to the two priests now back in their manses, their world has changed and they now look upon the perfectly functioning organism of the suburb with a new-found wonder. The straight line of History has led, and was always leading, to this day, and they are all lucky enough to be alive, right now, to greet the moment.

  Part Two

  Autumn

  12.

  Introducing Pussy Cat and

  Bunny Rabbit

  On evenings such as these, walking through a city park golden with autumn, he sees them as that rare thing — an old-fashioned couple in a radical age. Their old-worldliness is called innocence, and they take it with them wherever they go. At least that is the way he sees them on days such as these, when he can’t even conceive of her having shared herself with anybody else the way she does with him. He is hers, she is his. They are theirs: a conservative couple, strolling hand in hand, through the wrong world. Not that Madeleine would ever accept this if he were to tell her (and he keeps this observation to himself), for she is always making gentle fun of the fuddy-duddy old man’s shops he goes to for his fuddy-duddy old man’s trousers. Can’t he just wear jeans? Does it always have to be fuddy-duddy old corduroys? So, on evenings such as these, when he seeks ways to frame their innocence, he privately pictures them like this — of the Age, but not children of the Age. And as much as the children of the Age might find their innocence amusing (he is from time to time the source of jest and fun), they are, nonetheless, drawn to it. They are drawn to it as, perhaps, travellers might be, looking back one last time upon a town or place they will never inhabit again. And, on days such as these, Michael and Madeleine are that place, and the amused eyes of the Age that look back upon them linger just that bit longer than amusement requires.

  It is still early in the evening. Michael and Madeleine are walking through a city park. There is another couple beside them. They, this other couple, are children of the Age. They are fellow students, living in the same student house they have shared with Michael and a painter called Mulligan since their early student years. Mulligan lives downstairs; Michael and the couple with whom he and Madeleine are currently strolling all live upstairs. Michael scrutinises them, these children of the Age. They read the same books, smoke the same cigarettes, take the same drugs and may even think the same thoughts for all Michael knows. And, like most children of the Age, they undress each other regularly, go to bed often, and copulate. In fact, they copulate very loudly. Michael knows this because their room, at the back of the house, is opposite his and he hears the sounds of their copulation often. In the household they are known as Bunny Rabbit and Pussy Cat. Mulligan, who seems to have no other name but Mulligan, christened them.

  Bunny Rabbit’s hair is long and dark, and he has the kind of droopy, dark moustache that musicians in bands wear. He puts his long, thin legs into flared, blue jeans and casually throws what Michael intuitively knows are expensive cotton shirts over his bony torso. Michael never knew what a Brooks Brothers shirt was until he met Bunny Rabbit. Didn’t he know that Scott Fitzgerald wore Brooks Brothers shirts? No? Really? Well, now he would always know. Bunny Rabbit never consciously spoke down to Michael, and Michael never took offence. Bunny Rabbit spoke down to everyone. His father was, when it came to shirts, a sort of Gatsby. So when he goes home (rarely taking Pussy Cat, because Pussy Cat — like Michael — comes from the wrong side of life), he brings a shirt back with him because his father has a roomful.

  Pussy Cat is what the Age calls beautiful. Long, dark brown hair, bright brown eyes that resemble a fox more than a cat. Magnificent eyes that are constantly living in the wild. Her light, cheesecloth blouses are smoked in incense and she has the constant aroma of some exotic elsewhere about her. Michael has never met an actress, but she looks like one. In fact, she bears a striking resemblance to the heroine of a popular film of Romeo and Juliet who leans over balconies with provocative innocence and has entranced a whole generation of young Romeos such as Bunny Rabbit. Pussy Cat has that kind of beauty. If he wasn’t in love with Madeleine, Michael would fall in love with Pussy Cat, which would be a disaster because Pussy Cat only has eyes for her Bunny Rabbit. And Mulligan, too, for all his playful dismissiveness, concedes her beauty, even if it is couched in artistic terms such as bone structure and classical features. She is really Louise, Lou to everyone. He is Peter. Together they have adventures.

  They are children of the Age for all this, but also for the way they look upon Michael and Madeleine, who are just about to leave their company at a fork in the path. Pussy Cat and Bunny Rabbit bid them farewell with amusement in their eyes.

  ‘Can’t wait to get at it?’ says Bunny Rabbit, with a twinkle.

  Dark shadows fall across the golden lawn, the invisible evening life of the park — hunting, gathering, sleeping, fighting and copulating — goes on all around them. The four of them are standing still, Madeleine staring down at the cinder path, Michael up at the trees that are humming with the
sound of this secret life. He does not need to look at his friend to know what is in his eyes. And, while he idly scans the trees, he is asking himself why it is that his friend, and these children of the Age in general, should be so preoccupied with those who are not of the Age. On other days, his friends and their comments might bother him, but on days such as these when he sees himself and Madeleine as an old-fashioned couple out of joint with their time, actors on the wrong stage and in the wrong play and bringing with them the sensibilities of another age altogether, he is strangely unconcerned. Even superior. For, this sensibility that they bring with them, this innocence that does not yet copulate, they savour and explore in the same way that the children of the Age explore each other’s bodies. And, at such times, he would have them no other way. At such times, this unfashionable conservatism of theirs is a gift. It is an occasion — and one that will not come again — to discover and explore a way of being that the Age itself has discarded. Their gift is this chance to explore a lost sensibility, one that will only ever live on in isolated cases such as Michael and Madeleine. The Age has dispensed with it, and, having dispensed with it, can never have it back. If Pussy Cat and Bunny Rabbit embody an age of release, Michael and Madeleine speak of an age of restraint.

  And perhaps this is what moves Michael’s friends to play with them, the way the sophisticated inevitably play with the innocent. It is because the innocent stir in the sophisticated distant memories of other ways of being and feeling that the children of the Age — however much they may deny it — look upon them with longing disguised as amusement.

  And it is while Michael is contemplating all of this that Madeleine looks up from the cinder path in response to Bunny Rabbit’s playful question, her face dramatically half lit in the fading autumn sun. Every gesture — the slightly raised eyebrow, the flick of the fringe across her forehead, the pursed lips, the defiant stare (eyes proud, like a servant turning upon a master and discovering for the first time how well she wears the look) — is perfect. She is her own melodrama. And those proud, defiant eyes are turned directly towards Bunny Rabbit, and whatever it was he was saying he is not saying any more because nobody is listening. Everybody is watching Madeleine. It is a look that commands total attention. A look that will not settle for anything less. A look that is breathtaking in the way it refuses to even countenance the possibility of anybody looking elsewhere. In the political parlance of the day, it is a coup. Bunny Rabbit has been silenced, routed, and in a way that Michael has never seen Bunny Rabbit silenced before. And without a word being spoken. For Madeleine has drawn from within her a look that somehow makes everybody — Michael included — feel like children of a lesser age. Tatty. Plastic. No longer serious. She does this, Madeleine. Just when he thinks he knows her, she looks up with a defiance in her eyes that says ‘Enough!’ like she has just now, and he realises he doesn’t know her at all.