The Time We Have Taken

by Steven Carroll

  Of course, they all knew the bits and pieces they produced would eventually come together as something or other, but it’s easy to forget that when you only get the bits to make. And, as she’s watching them all, she’s also remembering Vic, and that Ryan mate (who was really no mate at all), and all the rest of them talking about engines and rail and speed and the different touches they all brought to the art of engine driving, and she wonders if you find that in a factory.

  Mrs Webster passed through early in the evening, thanked Rita, then got out, as if the whole thing was just a bit too much like work. Strangers, the ones with the familiar faces and the ones without, step quietly and respectfully around the equipment they once kicked and cursed, and gaze with quiet curiosity on the assembled parts of their working lives as if seeing them for the first time. Amongst them, the tall, stooped figure of the local geography teacher the students call Lurch, and she smiles briefly at the aptness of the name, then the smile drops from her face as he turns, looking vaguely about the room (his wife at his elbow, supporting him), and Rita can see in his face that he’s not well. And she remembers what Michael told her, that Lurch had taken a little holiday, as they say, and wasn’t coming to school for a while. One look (Lurch is now being steered towards the door) and Rita suspects that he won’t be going to school again.

  There is low laughter as a small group of workers discover the staff photographs taken over the years, and the newspaper clippings, the sick books, accident reports, and all the little and big things that filled their days and weren’t much noticed at the time but which now feel like History.

  And all the time, as Webster’s people circle the room, as Michael takes his seat alone in the cinema, as the skeletal, consumptive frame of George Johnston who expired in his sleep earlier that morning is taken from the house in which he died, and as the life of the suburb goes on out there heedless of the significance of glass boxes and pedestals, Rita retains the memory of that small business notebook of Webster’s, the bit that’s not on display here tonight, the bit that’s not behind glass, and about which only she knows. For in that distant place of storage to which the removalists drove, there is an ordinary-looking cardboard box that would take some opening, even if anybody ever cared to.

  When it is all over and the old Games Room is shut up for the night (although the exhibition will continue to draw the suburb in for weeks after, some families returning two and three times), Mrs Webster invites Rita into the study for a drink to toast her success. They stand — Rita is not asked to sit (and from this she concludes that their drink will be a short one) — beneath a large portrait of Webster, and in a lull in conversation both gaze up at it.

  ‘What was he like?’

  The question is asked almost absentmindedly and is no sooner asked than withdrawn.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Mrs Webster can see that the question is spontaneous, unpremeditated, like a reflex. She does not take offence. She is touched even. For the question is fuelled by a certain wonder. ‘What was he like?’ being the polite, the discreet, version of what was he really like? Behind the public figure, the question asks, behind the cast-iron façade of Webster’s Engineering, what was Webster the factory really like? It is all implied in the sheer spontaneity of the question. Even more, for this innocent question is also asking ‘What was it like to live with History?’ What does History do when the gates are closed on everybody else out there (to whom History merely happens), when the doors are shut on the outside world, what does History do when it puts its feet up?

  ‘I’d never met anyone quite like him. I knew that from the first and I haven’t doubted it since. It was always going to be the journey of a lifetime. A once-in-a-lifetime adventure. Together. We shared everything.’

  And here Mrs Webster fixes Rita with a silent stare that says, ‘Nobody knew Webster like I did. We were two halves of the one life. The one adventure. You ask me what History does when it puts its feet up. I could tell you, because no one knew Webster better than I did, but forgive me if I don’t tell you. These are private matters. And these private things are all I have left now. You’ll excuse me if I keep them private.’

  Then, with a faint, sad smile, she turns to the portrait.

  ‘He was very loyal to the people he employed. Tremendously loyal. They were all…all a kind of family. If something happened to them, it happened to him. You understand?’

  Rita nods.

  ‘He was true. A true spirit.’ Here Mrs Webster dwells on the portrait in silence for a moment. ‘He had a spirit as true, as clear as those mid-winter mornings when the sun is out and everything is bright with promise. Untouched. And every day was the same. He was as true as that. It was a privilege just to be there.’

  Rita is silent. She has never heard anybody talk quite like this before. Never before heard a woman talk quite like this about her husband. It is not the answer she expected, if she expected anything. And she ought to be moved, as moved as Mrs Webster appears to be. But she is not. Rita doesn’t know anybody who talks like this, who talks the way books read. And although she is prepared to be moved by a book, she is not prepared to be moved by someone talking like a book. Then again, she has never met anybody quite like Mrs Webster before. Mrs Webster is what Rita calls rich. And perhaps, perhaps it might be as they say: that the rich are different. Different from the likes of Rita and Vic, and the whole street which she reluctantly acknowledges houses her kind of people. Mrs Webster is not the type of person Rita normally brushes with. Perhaps they are different. Not so much a different species but a different form, a different branch of the same species. And although they all bear the same family resemblances, they are different — with subtly different feelings, and ways of seeing the world that demand the kinds of words that ordinarily belong in books. She inwardly makes these allowances, but although she knows she ought to be moved by Mrs Webster’s words, she isn’t.

  For a moment she is even anxious that this may be apparent to Mrs Webster, that this may appear tactless. But she is relieved to see that Mrs Webster is still engrossed in the portrait, the same faint, sad smile that was on her lips now in her eyes as well. And at the same time Rita notes that Mrs Webster is, in fact, on the verge of tears; that she, Rita, was not moved by Mrs Webster’s words, but Mrs Webster was.

  When Mrs Webster finally shifts that sad gaze from the portrait to Rita, she looks at her as if not quite recognising her, as though she could be just anybody.

  It is, Rita is beginning to realise, the public face Mrs Webster keeps for public occasions. No doubt she has worn that face before when she has given speeches at community events, when she has spoken of her husband as if speaking of a statue or like someone who has completely forgotten whatever it was that existed before the statue came along. And she can understand why the public face is required for public occasions. But why now? Unless all those words that Rita ought to have been moved by, that have the sound of public words, words that belong in the books that record History’s lives, are all that’s left now.

  Then the public smile fades and a look of curiosity crosses Mrs Webster’s features. ‘Your husband…’ Here she pauses, waiting for Rita to supply his name because she has never asked of him before.

  ‘Vic.’

  ‘Vic,’ and she stops, almost smiling, as if (it seems to Rita) on the verge of pronouncing it wonderfully uncluttered. Or, perhaps that’s Vic himself talking. For, although he’s gone, Vic still lurks within her and talks through Rita when the occasion arises, and his distrust of types like Mrs Webster is always there more or less, depending on the day.

  ‘What was he like, your Vic?’

  ‘I don’t know. I realise that must sound pathetic after twenty years. But I’m not sure who he was. Not really. He just seemed to come and now he’s gone. And I can’t help but feel that either I never really tried hard enough to pick his brains in all that time, or he never let me.’

  Rita knows she is overstating things, and already suspects that the
re was an honesty between her and Vic that the Websters of this world never have, but Mrs Webster has driven her to overstatement. And to resolutely using words that don’t go in books. Suddenly the public smile is completely gone from Mrs Webster’s face and she returns the most minute of nods to Rita. A nod of reflexive agreement. Or was it? There is also something else in Mrs Webster’s eyes. You speak, she seems to say, as if the whole thing is behind you. As though it doesn’t touch you any more. And you almost get away with it.

  Rita finishes the last of her sherry as Mrs Webster downs her scotch in such a way, it seems to Rita, that suggests it will not be the last of the evening. They part at the front door, and with her coat buttoned to the chin and a scarf wrapped round her neck for good measure, Rita strolls, through moonlight and shadow, out along the wide driveway. The suburb, which inside these walls would be so easy to forget existed, lies still and silent, like houses gone under the sea.

  The garage. The shiny black snout of the thing parked inside. The look that silently said ‘Damn’. The closing of the double doors. The furtiveness of it. The Secrecy. The long, low beast that some say they saw slouching through the suburb in black majesty weeks before, the reports passed on from the chemist of a car speeding through the new frontier of cheap land and large houses in the middle of the night (reports which the street has now heard of), and that involuntary nod of agreement. Later that night, Rita brings all of this with her to the lounge room that was once too small to contain the silence of an unhappy family, but which is now large enough to contain hers. She imagines the doors of Mrs Webster’s garage opening onto the night in another part of the suburb, and she turns her head towards the railway lines and the road that leads from them up to Webster’s mansion as if half expecting to hear the faint, familiar call of the beast.

  It’s the feeling that Mrs Webster has discovered something, something special, that stays with Rita throughout a sleepless night. The house, the suburb all around her, is silent. No growl to break the silence, but she’s up to something all right. A rare letter from Vic sits on the bedside table. She’s read it twice, and, like all Vic’s letters, she detects no sign of sadness, loss or regret. They describe what he does, each day more or less the same as the one before and the one to come. But he likes it that way. He shops, he walks, he’s found a nice little pub (I’ll bet he has, she nods to herself in the dark) where each day he has a fish lunch, then a round of golf and off home to shower and dress for the club. The rapacious jaws of Progress are eating up ‘his’ little town, he says at the end, and it’s the only note of lament in all the letters he’s sent her. He was always happiest walking away, and now that he has walked away he is at last content. Of course, she knows he should never have married. Not the marrying kind. Always happiest by himself, with those strangers he calls friends for company. She doesn’t want him back, or any of the time they had, but some sense of regret that it hadn’t all worked out, that a miracle never came their way and they never got it right, some intimation that they hadn’t merely fulfilled a biological function (the subtleties and details of which they were oblivious), and that, in the end, twenty years hadn’t just been the coming together of two life forms to produce another, would be a comfort at moments such as these when the sleep won’t come and there’s no end to the night.

  When she wakes in the dark like this, and it is more often than not lately, her mind goes back and she wonders if she truly has the will to go forward, on her own. Or, if something in her broke back there when it all fell apart and she acquired the unmistakable look that men and women get when they have been left. A damaged look that others see or sense, but which very quickly becomes normal to those upon whom the look falls. Did this happen without her knowing, and did she stay in the house too long because she lacked the will to leave, until the house itself came to wear the same look?

  Then the first glimmer of light is there, visible at the venetians. There’s a bird out there somewhere. She could almost laugh. Nights do end, after all. There’s a bird out there somewhere and a finger of light touches the blinds.

  37.

  A Passing Visit

  When the cinema is shut and Michael returns to his room (while Rita is discovering the public and private faces of Mrs Webster), he sees the note that has been slipped under the door in his absence. He takes his coat off, drops the newspaper onto his desk and opens the envelope. She is desperately sorry. Work. Last-minute stuff. Had to fill in for someone. Impossibility of letting him know (no phone). Feels awful. Misses him dreadfully. Dropped by hoping to catch him. Call her in the morning. Madeleine.

  He folds the note and places it in the drawer where he keeps her letters (the same letters that he will, when she is gone from his life, drop into a battered metal bin one inevitably rainy rubbish day). Something not right, he muses. It’s crisp, plausible, says all the right things — but something’s not right. And he can’t put his finger on it. But it’s there all the same. Nicely written, though. And perhaps that’s it. It is ‘written’. Crafted in shorthand. As apart from being thrown on the page, as you do when you’re in a state. Perhaps it’s the ‘dreadfully’. Writers use words such as ‘dreadfully’. Certain writers use words such as that in their diaries and their memoirs, and that’s why diaries and memoirs always sound fake to Michael. Writers putting on airs use words such as that, not people who have had their nights thrown out. Something not right. Definitely. He shuts the drawer.

  When he has finished mulling over the note, he slips back into his coat (brown corduroy, which he bought with Madeleine, who insisted he buy it when she discovered he didn’t own one). Even though the evening is really getting on, he strolls downstairs and into the street, past the pub opposite, where the Italian drinkers sing like a heavenly choir in the evenings. But tonight there are no angelic notes to warm the cold winter air. The pub is shut. The night is still, and his footsteps (that will eventually lead to Madeleine’s place, and which are as soft as a burglar’s) blend with the mid-week quiet. Tomorrow is the last day of winter, and if he was to drag himself away from his thoughts he just might notice the scents in the air that herald the coming spring.

  Not long after, he is pacing up and down the footpath at the front of Madeleine’s. He’s been there for five, ten, even fifteen minutes for all he knows. From below he can see that Madeleine’s light is on. She’s in. Doing something. It is, he has been telling himself over and over again, a perfectly reasonable thing to do. To drop in. He got her note, and here he is. He is, he tells himself, passing by, but he has walked well out of his way to be here and at such a late hour. If he admits it, it is a contrived situation. And it is this contrivance that is troubling him and making him march up and down the footpath when he should just march on in. If he had just come from visiting a friend, become lost to the world contemplating all the things they’d talked about, wandered off into the night afterwards not noticing where he was and looked up to find himself in Madeleine’s street (she has recently moved into the upper floor of a house with her sister), he would simply have rung her bell without thinking. A surprise visit. But he has knowingly walked out of his way, not aimlessly strolled, and there is that undeniable element of calculation to his visit. Besides, she said call, not drop in. Without ever saying as much, Michael had concluded very early on, and has always assumed since, that Madeleine is not to be ‘dropped in’ on. Consequently, he never has. And, although it should feel perfectly natural, he is conscious of stepping outside the bounds — however tacitly agreed, or, indeed, imagined — of their ‘going out’.

  Two thoughts prevent him from ringing her bell: that this element of contrivance might show on his face and that he is not entirely sure of what he might find inside. The look of contrivance on his face will tell her that he is prying — that this is not a surprise visit, but simple snooping. And this simple snooping (to which he now feels himself reduced) will, he fears, from the moment he steps in the house, become a self-fulfilling exercise, conjuring up the very thing he drea
ds. It is, of course, ridiculous. But he is increasingly drawn to the ridiculous these days, and, even as he pronounces the thought ridiculous, he is aware of being in its thrall.

  It is then that the voice of his all-too-patient, all-too-indulgent common sense, its tolerance finally run out, snaps him to attention and he strides through the gate, raps on the front door, his knocks seeming to reverberate around the neighbourhood houses and the park opposite. He is, he rehearses once more, just passing.

  Inside he hears footfalls on the stairs. As her steps near, he feels the skin on his face tighten and his eyes widen and knows that his face will betray him when he casually lets her know that he was just passing.

  The door suddenly opens on the night and she is standing there, at first not recognising him in the dull light, then smiling.

  ‘Hi,’ he says quickly. ‘Do you mind?’

  With a quick shake of her head, still smiling, she takes his hand and draws him into the house, closing the door behind them.

  ‘I’m so sorry about tonight.’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘No, it’s not. I felt awful, but I couldn’t get away. And I wanted so dreadfully to be there.’

  She says the word with such conviction, such unaffected poetry, that he believes her utterly. It is not the giveaway word of the fancy writer trading in fake feelings, but her word. And, being her word, it is his too. It is all right. All is well, he tells himself, and he was a fool to be standing out there in the dark all that time. She is, after all, his Madeleine, and he is just dropping in. She doesn’t mind and he asks himself why he has never done this before. His face did not betray him, ridiculous words did not spring from his lips. He is inside and the only cause for wonder is that it took him so long. And, as she slips her hand from his, he resolves that that will never happen again.