The Time We Have Taken

by Steven Carroll

  Rita rings the doorbell, and from the moment the front door opens and sunshine fans the doorway, she notices. Mrs Webster is different. Not obviously or dramatically so. But it’s there, this difference. And Rita sees it, although she is not sure in what manner or in what gesture this difference reveals itself. But it is immediately apparent, and, as they talk about the Games Room and the appropriate colours for the exhibition, Rita is distracted by this air of difference and the need to locate its source, place a finger upon it. But it is difficult. She only knows that there is a question mark above Mrs Webster’s head.

  Mrs Webster is always respectful in her manner, and enthusiastic in the way she engages Rita in conversation. But although they are talking the way they normally would, Rita splashing a palette of possibilities before her, something isn’t there. And Rita’s not sure just what it is for some time, until she finally realises it’s the enthusiasm that’s missing. Mrs Webster is talking like a woman who would really rather not be talking at all. And it’s not just the nature of the words that she does muster; it’s that strange calm that surrounds her in the silences between sentences — the calm of someone who’s not really there. She may be in the room, right in front of you, yet somewhere else altogether.

  It is a question that will preoccupy Rita throughout the remainder of the conversation, but which she will forget about upon returning to the old Games Room and experiencing a surge of excitement lift her like a wave, the way, she imagines, some of the old painters must have been lifted when shown a blank wall and told to fill it.

  Rita is left alone to contemplate her task. But the question returns to her when she takes a break later and strolls around the gardens. She has never done so before, but her employment at the place tells her that she now has the licence to amble through those parts of the estate she previously felt she couldn’t. And as she wanders about (convinced that she has the place to herself, that Mrs Webster is at work), thinking about the job at hand and vaguely contemplating the strange but absurdly real possibility of getting lost in these gardens, she comes to a halt in a far corner of the grounds. The estate, as the suburb calls it, is still. Except for a sudden, disruptive movement at the edge of her vision. Perhaps if the scene had not been so still she would not have noticed. As she turns she gives an involuntary gasp, surprised by the figure of Mrs Webster, no more than a cricket pitch away, about to close the double doors of the shed — or garage. And, as Rita takes in the figure of Mrs Webster, she also takes in the shining, black snout of the thing parked inside.

  When Mrs Webster realises she has been spotted, she behaves, for a split second, like someone who would prefer not to be noticed, indeed, like someone intent on pretending she hasn’t been noticed. This is followed by the slightest shrug of annoyance, a glance that might well have been accompanied by an inaudible ‘Damn’. Then a smile and the slamming of the garage door.

  ‘Out for a stroll?’

  Rita nods.

  ‘It’s a good day for it.’

  And with that she walks off to the famous old Bentley parked in the driveway.

  Over the next few weeks a report will be passed on from the chemist (who lives in a new, spacious suburb to the north where it is now fashionable to build large, double-storey houses on cheap land) to Rita of a car in the night, travelling at great speed along that narrow strip of bitumen that calls itself a highway. The frontier might have shifted, but the suburb is still the suburb, and nothing stays secret for long.

  The portrait Mrs Webster stands beneath that evening in the study — part of her still cursing Rita’s prying suburban eyes, convinced now that she could never be a friend — this portrait, she concludes, could have been painted any time in the last hundred years and could really be a portrait of just about anybody. It is, in fact, a portrait of Webster, commissioned at the peak of his productivity. Four factories, over a thousand workers, and the brand of his name, Webster’s Engineering, written in cast-iron over the doorways of his plants, a constant reminder to all who entered or passed by that Webster the factory was in residence and that their lives, no matter how tangentially, were touched by his.

  Yet, for all this, it could be a portrait of just about anybody. Oh yes, she confesses to the empty room, it looks like Webster all right; the fired eyes are there, the self-made brow and the head of hair of a man with years of productive life left in him (the wisps of grey notwithstanding). But it was a portrait of anybody, all the same. The kind of portrait that hangs in council chambers, boardrooms, town halls and the dining rooms of houses such as this all over the country. The artist could be the same, the subject the same. The individual subject is, more or less, unimportant. Irrelevant. For these portraits are never portraits of individuals (no matter how much the times might prize the idea of the individual); they are portraits of Progress. And the people who make Progress. But they are not portraits of people. They are portraits of the same, the one thing — portraits of the belief that drives the pistons, that drive the machines, that drive the Age. The incidentals, those individual agents of Progress, change from sitting to sitting, as do the commissioned artists, but the portrait remains the same. Short, squat, tall, thin, bald, thick with hair, young, old, at the peak of their industrial powers or with a sunset glaze across their eyes — it doesn’t matter. The individual sitters are only there because somebody has to be, and the signature at the bottom of the canvas may as well be one artist as another. The subject is always Progress, in its many and changing suits, its many attitudes, in its many faces — be they bald, round or lean.

  And it is this, above all, that Mrs Webster notices as she studies the image. And the more she stares at the thing, the less she feels herself to be in the presence of Webster. The Webster she first saw on a tennis court not far from the suburb when she was a young woman. Webster in his mid-twenties. The Webster who won his matches not so much out of talent, but through sheer will. It was the serve she noticed: direct, uncompromising, and fuelled by a cast-iron belief in the inevitability of a triumphal outcome. He ground opponents down with his will, and got what he wanted the same way. And she now has to concede the definite possibility that she may well have chosen Webster while watching him play tennis. This man will have whatever he sets his mind on. It is a sentiment that was never, to the best of her recollections, uttered, but it is a sentiment that she unquestionably felt and which may well have determined the course of her life.

  And it also occurs to her at the same time that she may well not have chosen the man himself, but what he embodied. Did she merely choose, Mrs Webster is seriously asking herself as she stands beneath the portrait, did she choose the Spirit of the Age and was Webster simply the name it went by when she met it? Another day, another place, and she may well have met the Spirit of the Age in one of its many other guises — short, squat, tall or lean.

  There is, she knows, no point standing beneath the portrait demanding Why? Why? Why of it. Webster the man isn’t there, and he never was.

  The attributes that had been conferred upon him by the Age — the vision to see factories on plains of thistle, a steady hand that could just as easily operate a machine as calculate profit and loss, and a cast-iron faith in the Spirit of the Age as unbreakable as his cast-iron name above the factory door — became the attributes by which the suburb and everybody eventually knew him. And through which he knew himself: Webster the factory.

  But somewhere along the way, she imagines in the emptiness of the wide dining room, something odd happened. That cast-iron faith either snapped one morning or afternoon, or just gradually rusted away, and that agglomeration of attributes that was Webster fell apart. And, somewhere along the way he became a man without attributes. And when that happened, she once more imagines (the whisky in her glass gone, and the thought of another passing through her mind simultaneous to her contemplations of Webster’s portrait), when the attributes had all fallen away and he stood without them, he must also have discovered for the first time that there was nothing left that
he could happily call himself — nothing, at least, that he could put his finger on. Nothing ready to hand that he could point to and say, ‘That is Webster.’ Webster, it must have seemed to him, independent of the Age that fell upon him with all its attributes, didn’t exist. And she realises also that this must have puzzled him deeply. At first. And later, this deeply puzzling fact of life would have become something more than puzzling, and the quietly astonished remains of Webster might well have turned to something to occupy his mind or obliterate it.

  But she never noticed any of this. Nor did he ever inform her or let on. He gave her, in the end, nothing more than he gave everybody else. And this, until now, was her most disturbing discovery. But another was now dawning upon her. Is it possible, she asks herself (at first not even sure if she wants to give the thought the air of being uttered, if only to herself), is it just possible that Webster had never informed her of all that had quietly astonished him because he had also made the deeply disturbing discovery that she too was another of his attributes? That the marriage was the mirror image of his world of production and exchange, and they were no more a portrait of a modern marriage than the painting on the wall above was a portrait of Webster? And a man who, for whatever reasons (if reasons even need be sought), has shed all those qualities that he acquired through being born into an age that saw History as a soon-to-be-concluded journey to Perfection does not tell a discarded attribute that she is no longer required; that the accumulation of qualities and attributes that had combined to be Him, Her and Them had fallen apart, like machinery that had finally given up the ghost. And as for the question ‘Who was he?’ — well, she concludes, gazing about the wide room that will keep her confidences, that question was answered, after all, years before by the suburb. He was Webster the factory.

  35.

  Let It Be

  Two weeks later, Michael is standing at the front of the local picture theatre with two tickets in his hand. There is a newspaper in his pocket and he has just read (hastily, for he has other things on his mind) a small notice in the paper telling him that George Johnston is dead. That he died early that morning in his sleep while he, Michael, slept soundly in another city. It is sad and it is annoying because he has only just met this Johnston. This Johnston who gave him the event of the right book at the right time, and turned familiar streets and houses and crappy milk bars into the unfamiliar stuff that is good enough for books.

  At the moment, though, Michael is stuck with two tickets and behind him the queue is disappearing into the cinema. He has been standing on the footpath with two tickets in his hand for a long time. Long enough for the queue to dwindle. Long enough to know that Madeleine won’t be coming. And as much as he scans the street and footpaths around him — still expecting her to materialise beside him, breathless with apology — he knows she won’t be coming. The usher draws his attention to the lateness of the hour and Michael turns reluctantly from the street, leaves the unclaimed ticket on the counter of the ticket booth (with Madeleine’s name), and enters the cinema.

  The sixties ended and the seventies began, he would later reflect, the night he sat alone watching George Harrison tell Paul McCartney during the recording of Let It Be that he wouldn’t play at all, if he — McCartney — didn’t want him to. McCartney, fingers playing with his beard under the spotlights shining on what appears to be a vast warehouse, is trying to put into words the sound he wants to hear for a certain song. Harrison is shaking his head, both of them are scratching nervously at the strings of their guitars. Around them, the others are either shifting in their seats or gazing about them, quite possibly asking themselves if this cold, ugly warehouse is where their story ends. Playtime, Michael saw, was concluding, and the players of the day were tired of playing.

  The decade they had all shared (the songs, the dance halls — each the possession of all) was over. The decade in which they’d all grown up, or died too soon, was ending up there on the screen. A new one had begun. And now it seemed inevitable that everybody would rise from where they were sitting, or turn if standing, and walk away to whatever was out there in those years that would constitute the rest of everybody’s lives. It is an intimation of what is to come, of Madeleine leaving, as he knows she soon will.

  Everybody knew that sooner or later they would all be called upon to stand and wave goodbye to this time in which they had all grown up together. Everybody except McCartney, who is pouring words into Harrison’s deaf ears, as if, by virtue of his words and his will alone, he might yet hold on to this time they have all shared.

  Michael watches from the dark stalls, thinking of Madeleine. His impulse, too, is to hold on and not let slip from them this thing they have, knowing full well that once it has been let slip and falls apart it will not come back together again. This, for Michael, is an immutable law, as heavy and incontrovertible as gravity: things once scattered never come back. When you rose and walked away, you rose and walked away for good. He wants to say this to Madeleine one day. And, although he feels like a child so often in her company, he is convinced that the years have given him at least this much wisdom. And Michael suspects that, up there on the screen, only McCartney sees what he, Michael, does, that when things are let slip, when people rise and walk away, they do so forever.

  Paul McCartney has stopped pouring words into the deaf ears of George Harrison, who, in mind and spirit, has long since risen and left, his body only remaining, hunched over the guitar that he will play or not play at all, if he — McCartney — doesn’t want him to. The others too have all but risen and left. They talk, in this wide, cold warehouse, but it is the kind of talk that is uttered when everything is over. And there are the cameras, everywhere, watching them. And when the cameras have done their work, when they have created the film that will make public these private moments, everybody will share the end of it all, just as they shared the beginning and the middle of it all, in a thousand dark cinemas where audiences will sit and see what the cameras saw.

  The brittle smiles, the awkward sentences that end nowhere, the vacant seat beside him all become the one sorrow with a public and private face, one that is happening up there on the screen and right beside him. And the world grows that bit sadder during the ninety minutes that the film runs and the seat beside him remains vacant.

  He does not know what happened to Madeleine this evening. Perhaps she was held back at work at the last minute, and, of course, could get no word to him for there is no phone in his house. Perhaps there’d been a mix-up and they’d got their nights wrong. Perhaps. When he finally emerges from the theatre, the first thing he sees is the unclaimed ticket, lying exactly where he left it.

  On the street, he manoeuvres his way through the crowd. The footpaths are clean and shining, and the sky is clear. This is the way it happens. Before something can begin, something else must end. A band breaks up, a newly discovered favourite author dies. Ages come and go, orders of feeling rise and fall. Tonight she wasn’t there. Tonight he realised that he must prepare himself. That somehow, somewhere within him he must find a way of letting go as a preparation for that time when he will have no choice but to let go.

  At the same time he wonders how long it will stay there, Madeleine’s unclaimed ticket, before someone sweeps it off the counter and into the wastepaper basket. And will this act be occasioned by a brief pause for thought? For an unclaimed ticket is a story, there to be read by those who choose, and in any way they choose. Or, not at all.

  This is how it will end. Suddenly she won’t be there, and he will no longer see her, touch her, smell the perfume that is hers and hers alone, or register the faint taste of wine upon her lips after coming from the evening service. This is how it will end, and that which had previously only beckoned — the idea of Madeleine — will be all that remains.

  36.

  Rita Observes Webster’s People

  Where have they all come from? All evening (the same evening Michael stands at the front of the cinema with Madeleine’s ticket
in his hand), they’ve been coming, in their best suits. Faces shining under the lights from the close shave these people always give themselves before stepping out. All evening they’ve been coming, whole families of them, Webster’s people. For they are not simply stepping out. This is not simply a social event, party, wedding or funeral, and there is none of the false laughter and stiff talk that people unused to society always fall into. No, there is something taking place here for which Rita was not prepared.

  The speeches have finished, everybody has been thanked for the work they’ve put in (the Historical Society, the adviser from the State Library who knew all about pedestals and glass boxes, and special mention to Rita), the exhibition is open, and Webster’s people are gazing upon the fragments of their lives, past and present. Bits of machinery, bits of lives, the spare parts they produced, here and there a wheelbarrow or a lawnmower illustrating the whole, the complete object, to which they contributed, are all on display in glass cabinets or perched on pedestals. Levers they once pulled, buttons they once pushed, are now either marked ‘Don’t Touch’ or are out of reach behind panes of clear, polished glass. The objects around which their working days had revolved were now History. Or something else. Something untouchable. Not theirs any more, but the property of those who know about these things. Those who know how to order and arrange the tools of other people’s days in such a way as to tell them what they were doing back then because no one really has the time to stand back and have a good look at things when they’re in the thick of production.

  As Rita watches from a quiet spot at the back of the room she remade, she observes Webster’s people as they recognise machines they actually worked on, objects that they made and which they now look upon with a kind of wonder because, in the end, it all made sense. And it occurs to Rita that perhaps they have never felt closer to their work than they do now, looking at things from a distance. And isn’t that always the pity of it, she’s musing, that you can’t have the days and the distance at the same time.