He was still in bed but it was a different bed, and everything was different. There was so much light. He knew at once that it was early morning sunlight, still pale, striking the dormer window with a great level shaft—the glass was a white blaze of it, and the apple-green colour-washed walls of the attic bedroom reflected it like a shimmering sea. It was another sun shining upon another world, pouring down the light of Eden. There was little to see in the room—a chest of drawers, painted a yellow ochre, with white porcelain knobs; a ramshackle one-legged table heaped with a boy’s junk; an upholstered rocking-chair, spilling its stuffing; some school paintings fastened with drawing-pins—but everything there replied to his idlest glance with a precision of form and colour, as if they belonged to a painter of genius. The muslin curtains trembled in a breeze that brought with it an awakening world of sounds and scents. The time had an incredible richness and promise; he returned to it after years of existence that was nothing better than an old blurred film with rusty and fading voices on its sound track; he might have gone to sleep in some frowsty moving-picture theatre and wakened in the great gold morning of the living world.
His elbow felt the hard edge of a book, and he saw that it was a story by Harold Avery, one of the favourite authors of his boyhood. He knew now where he was, of course; in the attic bedroom in the house in Atworth Terrace, a new house into which they had removed when he was—what?—eleven or twelve? He waited a moment, and then everything became quite clear, as if the consciousness of this younger self were like a book that now he could read. Yes, he was twelve, and this must be the early summer of 1910. Most mornings he slept late and had to be shouted at, almost pulled out of bed, to be in time for school. But this was not one of those mornings; it was Saturday, and he had wakened early, long before breakfast would be ready, because something special was going to happen. Some sort of excursion, wasn’t it? He found himself jumping out of bed, the flannelette nightshirt still hot and entangling, to stare out of the window, making sure it really was a fine morning.
There was Atworth Terrace, still only half-built, looking rather raw in this searching light, still with the triangular stacks of builders’ timber on which he and his chums played by the hour, often climbing down inside, into a sort of lattice-work cave, for a hiding place. Across the main road at the end of the terrace was the wilderness of the Atworth Estate, with its Amazonian jungle of overgrown rhododendrons, its three ruined summer-houses in which—bang! bang! bang!—they had played tremendous ‘last stands’ against Zulus and Red Indians, its reedy lake where he had been allowed to share a raft with the Waterson and Bedford boys, all older than he was, and all to be killed, mostly on one July morning, in the First World War. The Ravenstreet who stared out of the window through a boy’s eyes, who could live in the boy’s mind but could add to it forty-odd years more experience of this life, now realised sharply, with a poignancy that stabbed the heart, that he was now looking at a world that had not yet given its name to a war, that saw no blood on its hands and was not yet haunted by the faces that turned into mud and bones, and so had an almost Eden-like innocence. He was aware of this not only at that moment but throughout the hours that followed, so that it seemed to him that the very sunlight was different, not merely because it came to him through a boy’s eye but also because it was not yet clouded by the horror and guilt we tried to forget. He could still feel the weight of our new Iron Age on his spirit, but he knew he had brought this with him, that neither this boy nor anybody he would meet on this morning would know anything of it. At least—if this multi-dimensional idea of things should be true—all they would know would be a faint shadowing, a cold breath, just beyond the reach of sense and reason, an unseen dark frame that yet threw into relief these last golden days, these nights that never conjured up accusing ghosts.
Meanwhile, his boyhood self, whose sense of the sheer goodness and promise of the morning he could experience and enjoy, was impatiently pottering around in his attic bedroom, now trying another page or two of Harold Avery, now thumbing through collections of cigarette cards, now returning to the window to see Atworth Terrace come to life, with the newspaper boys slipping from door to door and the milk carts jangling round the corner. The breeze occasionally lifted little clouds of dust from the main road, where already a few covered wagons, not as impressive as when they were lighted at dusk, went lumbering and creaking toward the distant warehouses around Market Square. Every detail of what could be seen from that dormer window claimed old acquaintance, yet the whole scene was as strange as a prospect of Peru.
He found himself washing rather perfunctorily and then hurrying back from the bathroom, only half dry and with his eyes still smarting from the strong carbolic soap, to pull on a flannel shirt, short trousers held in place by a striped cricket belt fastened with brass serpents, and long wool stockings that had coloured tops to turn down. His boots had lace-holes halfway up and then those shiny little hook things, several of them bent too far over and a few missing. Dressed now, he felt wonderfully compact, well co-ordinated, bursting with energy. He went clattering downstairs, to the kitchen, through brightening golden air, the gold of this lost sunlight, lost innocence.
In the kitchen, which was small, painted blue, and always smelt of gas, two people sat at the table. The man looked a rather old forty-five, for he was already going grey; he wore his hair rather long and had a luxuriant moustache; he was dressed in flannel trousers, a shirt without a collar, and an old stained housecoat; he had an anxious and perhaps vaguely petulant look, as if he had been vaguely disappointed by what life had offered him, after expecting too much of it. The woman was younger, fresher, rosier, with a smiling dark glance; her black hair was still in iron curlers, and she was wearing a flannel wrap of a dirtyish pink shade. They were a rather stuffy pair, old-fashioned and provincial, not successful nor even very sensible people, but with an appealing air of innocence about them. And of course they were his parents, seen for once not as fond institutional beings but, for the first time, as persons. And of all the drama, bewilderment, sorcery, of his experience in ‘time alive’, this glimpse was the most potent, the most memorable, perhaps the experience most dangerous to routine ideas. As he heard himself muttering the kind of remarks made by impatient boys when their parents are being fussy, preparing for an expedition but not yet in a holiday mood, the time-traveller, older and far more experienced than they were, felt his heart go out to them, with a sympathy, a helpless affection, that was almost anguish. If he could have assumed command of this younger self, this muttering impatient boy, he would have astonished and delighted these two by the affectionate warmth of his response; but he had no such command, had no power to change anything (though the Magicians were certain this was possible, at least to some few), could only experience the living time and not even begin to recreate it. Yet possibly, he felt, the warmth and depth of his feeling, now a new factor in this scene, were not entirely futile. Afterwards he was assured by Wayland that his intuitive feeling here had not misled him; for if the past had not been extinguished but was existing, alive, responsive, then strong feeling about it was not useless. We had in fact to think of ourselves linked forward and backward along these circular or spiral time tracks, still in communication, through our deepest feelings, with every part of our lives; and this, Wayland argued, was the great responsibility we shirked by pretending that we moved forward in time with everything destroyed behind us, living a mere sketchy charade of life. And certainly this strange encounter with parents who were at this point much younger and far less knowledgeable than he was, this sudden and quite shattering glimpse of them as persons, brought Ravenstreet closer than anything else did, chiefly through wonder and compassion and a sort of confused creative hopefulness, to an understanding of what this ‘time alive’ might mean.
Here in the kitchen all was clear, and humming and burning with life. Through the open door—for they never closed it on warm mornings—he could see the steady blaze of this May time, a section of the small flo
wer-bed that as yet showed more sticks and string and labels than it did flowers, the newly-plastered garden wall that seemed to glitter with specks of silver in the sunlight. He was eating his breakfast cereal out of the blue-and-white bowl that had a Dutch windmill on it; and his cocoa was waiting for him in the gilt-rimmed mug that had a pinkish picture of a sailing-ship on the side; there was a green tin of golden syrup and alongside it the bowl of honey that looked like a little yellow beehive; and above his mother’s head he could see on the shelf the tea-caddy that had a dark brown Chinese junk painted on it, the biscuit tin like a miniature treasure chest, the mysterious little boxes of spices that had fascinated him when he was younger. A greengrocer out with his cart was calling down the back street. His father was drinking coffee out of his extra-large black-and-white cup, smoking a thin pipe with a silver band on it, and frowning at the cricket scores in the Daily News. His mother, not eating and drinking much, was talking away, with a lot of sudden smiles and funny little face-pullings, in her happy going-somewhere style, teasing him about the other people who would be with them in the wagonette to Tuxvey Cross and the grand lunch that had already been ordered at The Bell there.
Every sensation, from the feel of the flannel shirt round his thin shoulders to his impression of the blue radiance beyond the open door, was clear and sharp. But the talk and the boy’s reactions to it were dreamily vague, unless of course the boy felt something deeply. There was some teasing chatter now about possible playmates for Charlie on the expedition, perhaps for a bit of French cricket or rounders after lunch; Mr. Stanbury’s boy, Hugh, was mentioned; Mrs. Flockton might be bringing her daughter, Alice; and Charlie, with the gloom of boys for whom parents are trying to make cheerful arrangements, pointed out that Hugh Stanbury was only ten and always had something wrong with him, that Alice Flockton was fourteen and big and bouncing for her age and capable of wrecking an afternoon in ten minutes. What the boy did not add was that all Alice Flocktons and the like were dust and ashes to him because ever since March he had had a devouring but bodiless passion for Edith Metson, a pale fair being, hardly belonging to this world at all, who had performed a Skirt Dance at the Union Club Young People’s Social and had then vanished into some region of beauty and mystery, though in fact she only lived quarter of a mile down the main road and had a father who kept a Leather Goods shop in Market Square. Charlie’s father often mentioned Joe Metson, famous at the Union Club for his snooker; but the two families were not on visiting terms, and the pale fair Edith, who was fifteen at least, remained a mysterious remote being, a princess in a tower, a Snow Queen. And because the boy, his imagination captured, felt this deeply, Ravenstreet felt it too, so that the romantic image of Edith Metson was in fact less vague and dreamy than the talk round the kitchen table about the excursion, a private wagonette trip arranged by the Ravenstreets and a few friends. A wagonette, the boy knew, was very grand, not like the cleaned-up coal carts that were used for children’s outings, when you were taken about two miles for mugs of tea and buns and for races that nobody ever knew who had won.
The wagonette was waiting for them, magnificently yellow and scarlet in the sun, just outside the livery stables in what remained of an old square down the main road, a drowsy place of crumbling brickwork and sycamore and chestnut leaves and ancient idlers smoking clay pipes. The men wore town suits and high stiff collars, but crowned them, rather rakishly, with Panama or straw hats. The ladies were trying out the fashionable large hats and the new narrow skirts, and they all had an upholstered look, as if they were pieces of furniture and had no real bodies. Mr. Linder was there—the glorious Mr. Linder, Charlie’s favourite among his parents’ friends—the great comic of Christmas parties, the immortal clown—there he was, jolly and fat, with his bulbous nose and unreal ginger moustache, wearing a pink shirt and a light green trilby that might have belonged to an actor. So was Mr. Linder’s friend and chief butt, Mr. Walbush, the wholesale tobacconist, thin and solemn, pale-faced and darkly-bearded, who looked exotic and villainous but was really an anxious and rather simple sort of man, another kind of clown perhaps. And of course Mrs. Linder and Mrs. Walbush, who were the exact opposite of their husbands, being mournful and jolly respectively, as if a balance had to be kept. And Mr. Dallas was there, the estate agent and auctioneer, who was enormously fat and loud-voiced and very generous, always wanting to pay for everything, as if he were the richest man in the world, which at one time was little Charlie Ravenstreet’s guess about him. And Mr. Dallas was saying that Mrs. Flockton and Alice would not be with them, but he hoped that two other people, not here yet, would take their places. Little Hugh Stanbury had arrived with his parents; he was a miserable small boy and he had already been sick that morning; his parents were not too bad, in a melancholy way, but you felt they would have been disappointed if they had had a healthy son. Mr. Dallas and Mr. Linder, like ringmaster and clown, had now begun bossing the party, which was all right for Charlie Ravenstreet, because they had already told him he could sit with the driver. He climbed up to make sure of his place, though the others were still standing about, waiting for the two who were coming instead of the Flocktons. From his high perch, under a canopy of chestnut leaves and blossom, he waited patiently, wearing the anxious grin of boyhood, for them to climb in and be off. Why bother about these other silly people? Oh, come on! And indeed, as if his invisible tuggings at them were taking effect, they mastered their sluggish adult inertia and began to take their places behind him. It looked as if he would have the driver to himself.
Then, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, like all miracles, it happened. She was there—Edith Metson—in a flutter of white and palest pink, her golden face shaded by a wide straw hat, the Snow Queen back from Lapland, the princess down from the tower—Edith Metson! And with her, smiling broadly, smoking a cigar, was a large sunburnt man, wearing with careless ease and grandeur some sort of outlandish tropical suit, clearly a formidable male from the outlying Metson region of beauty and mystery, impossible to fit into any narrow pattern of shops and commerce and rate-paying, newly returned, you might guess, from snatching the Golden Fleece or outwitting the Cyclops. And this tremendous chap, who was in fact Edith Metson’s Uncle Bob and a ship’s engineer on leave, demanded at once that he and his niece should sit up in front with Charlie and the driver; and he put himself next to Charlie, to whom he apologised jovially, in a cloud of fragrant cigar smoke, for the amount of room he needed, keeping an arm round the pale bewitching princess on his other side. But there she was, not more than a yard away, and if he leaned forward, Charlie caught the magical profile he had tried so hard to remember—and once she smiled at him. And off they went, the horses at a smart trot, clickety-clickety up the old dusty main road; a few thin clouds sailing high in the blue, the lilac and laburnum spilling their blossom in the breeze, in the great golden morning of the world.
It was then that the revisiting elderly Ravenstreet, like a man long in the desert feeling the rain on his outstretched hands, knew again an experience he had long forgotten, one that all children and probably most women know but that men forget, a sense and feeling compounded of cosy security, gratitude and wonder, just because nearly everybody they want to be there is there, all enormously and magically themselves and securely set in the same atmosphere; a sense and a feeling into which there enters an obscure conviction of immortality; as if somewhere at the root of it there might be knowledge, buried deep in the heart, that nobody blessed by this atmosphere of well-being and affection, lit with such wonder and delight, could possibly go away for ever, die and turn to dust, be lost in the dark spaces of the universe; as if there stirred in our homeless minds some faint memory of the fields of paradise. And Ravenstreet, recapturing this experience just as he tasted again the morning’s long-lost sights and smells, wondered if he might be merely recovering one of childhood’s illusions or returning to a wisdom mislaid in the scramble of passing time, becoming aware of a profounder insight into the nature of our life
and being.
Then for a while he was neither the man of fifty-five nor the boy of twelve, was no longer perched up on the wagonette nor yet aware of his bed in Broxley Manor; he was removed from place and time. He seemed to have broken through into eternity, not everlastingness but the level of being not governed by passing time; and he felt like a man sitting high up and alone in some vast solemn theatre, catching a glimpse on some multidimensional screen far below of a whirling panorama of his lives. As such a man might do, he suddenly stared hard, immediately slowing up the whirl of people and scenes, bringing them nearer, giving every detail a more exact form, more colour, individual sound, smell. . . .
And there he was again, wedged between the driver and Edith Metson’s Uncle Bob, with the road going cloppety-cloppety-cloppety-clop below, the horses’ rumps glistening and steaming, well out of the town now and the hedges gay with hawthorn. The driver was talking, Uncle Bob was talking, everybody was talking. The hills rose nobly into the blue air. Men working in the fields turned and waved; little lanes winked invitations; whitewashed farm buildings, barns in the shade, bright strips of garden, ponds flashing between dark trees, mysterious copses, glittering streams, thickets where birds darted and cried, some great house smouldering remotely beyond wrought iron gates and an avenue of poplars, brick-faced lads on cart-horses, rosy rich children on ponies, a sleepy village or two, all went dancing past; and everything seen, heard, caught only in some evanescent fragrance, was bulging and shining with promise, infinitely inviting, crammed with beautiful and mysterious possibilities, more than enough for a hundred long lives. This too was a feeling he had long forgotten, this feeling of the unimaginable promise of things, of enchanting possibilities branching out everywhere, of Iliads and roaring sagas and the gleaming elaboration of a thousand and one Arabian Nights waiting to open out for him at the turn of the road, the flickering entrance to a wood, behind any door they passed. And again he wondered. Was this another illusion of boyhood recaptured? Or was he waking out of the long sad sleep of middle-age, not hurrying away from reality but discovering it again, in some gleam or two of wisdom?
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