The Time We Have Taken

by Steven Carroll

  Days in which a completely ordinary gesture, denoting care or affection, a corny love song and a casual sentence become synonymous with a moment and are forever after the key that opens it up for recall. Nothing happens, and everything happens. An ordinary act transforms the familiar into the unfamiliar, and memories are born.

  And this is what Madeleine will become. Not a story, but a string of memories and scenes. Not even a picture, but parts of a picture. Details of days that may have passed barely noticed at the time, but which lodge and stick and stay clear in Michael’s mind through the years that come after when she is no longer there.

  Later, that evening, he is walking beside her. She is carrying in her handbag his favourite book. A favourite book, Michael muses quietly, as if he were addressing Madeleine (which he is not, for he speaks better in his mind than he does in fact), is a very private object. Others may read this book, he continues in silent address, but not the way you do. A favourite book becomes yours when it enters your life. You are the one for whom it was written and, in being read by you, the book meets its other half and becomes effectively whole. It is, therefore, difficult to share a favourite book. There is risk. The act of sharing comes with an implied question. So, when the book passes from one hand to another, this act of sharing can be as fraught as a declaration of love. Sometimes they amount to the same thing.

  Madeleine says she is famous for her long strides. She walks like a young woman going places, in the kind of short skirt that is the fashion of the day. Michael doesn’t know how young women walked a hundred years ago, but he finds it difficult to imagine that they walked like Madeleine. Or Maddy. Her sister calls her Maddy. Her parents. Her friends. Everybody does. Except Michael. So far, the abbreviated form of her name does not come naturally. Not as naturally as those long strides for which she maintains she is famous and which take her across an unattended service station and down into the student streets of an inner-city student suburb. The book is in her handbag, the strap of which hangs across her shoulder and swings back and forth as she walks. It is not a great book, not one that is even looked upon as being serious enough to belong to anybody’s list of great books. Not anybody with judgment, that is. And, as a student, now teacher of literature, Michael is meant to have judgment. But he suspends it for this book. From the first to the subsequent readings of it (and they have been many), Michael has never asked himself if this is a good or even a great book. It is simply his book, and questions of its goodness or greatness do not arise. And the author, Mr W Somerset Maugham, is not one of those authors who is even studied, not the way authors of great renown are read and studied by students of literature such as Michael. The word ‘entertainment’ occurs to him as he follows Madeleine’s long strides over the watery asphalt of the late-night petrol station, past the solid nineteenth-century building that houses the bank, to the lights and the crossing that will lead them to the shops and cafés and pizza houses of the main street. Mr Maugham, as his lecturers would call him, writes amusements and entertainments of a certain kind, ‘gentleman’s literature’, and Michael is almost on the point of apologising for the book — as he always seems to do whenever he mentions it to anybody — when she speaks. She likes it, she says. It is not a great book, he quickly adds, and she shakes her head saying that it does not matter. She reads more than the students he knows and already he trusts her judgment more than theirs. What does it matter that no one thinks it a serious book? And she slows those long strides and stares at him candidly. An acknowledgment that the book was not really the point. And they both know what the point is, don’t they? In giving her a favourite book, a question had been asked. She reaches into her bag, passes it back to him, and he places it in his coat pocket. She does it carefully, to show that she cares for the book. And, with this demonstration of care, the question he asked in giving it to her has been answered.

  ‘Tell me about where you come from.’

  ‘Liverpool. Well,’ she corrects herself, ‘a small town just out of Liverpool.’

  She stops there. He waits.

  ‘And?’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell. You wouldn’t know it.’

  ‘There’s always something to tell.’

  ‘The Beatles played at our local hall. My friends went. I missed it.’

  ‘I wish I could say that.’

  ‘It’s got a nice park, and a lovely little station. But I don’t miss it. Not much.’

  ‘I’d like to see it.’

  ‘Aren’t you funny,’ she says. It is one of her favourite expressions.

  They stop outside a small café and contemplate the list of pizzas pasted to the inside of the window. Over the next few weeks, she and her sister will talk more to Michael about this place from which they come. And it will become apparent that although they say they don’t miss it, they do. And the idea of this place from which Madeleine has come will enter his mind. It will enter, and it will stay there and a deeply private mythology will be born. The place from which she comes is being written in his mind, and over the following months he will unconsciously construct all the other moving and non-moving parts that constitute this place he has never seen but which one day he will, many years later, when the Liverpool of his mind and the real thing meet.

  But, for now, a favourite book has been exchanged. A question has been asked, and an answer received. They stare into the pizza shop window, contemplating a cheap dinner for two. For Michael, part of that deeply thrilling world of the ordinary.

  9.

  The Story of Old Dresses

  Rita returns home from the Webster house mid-afternoon, her transformation of Mrs Webster’s dining room (new curtains, new carpet) now complete. It is too late to start something new and too early to put her feet up. It’s a dead part of the afternoon; she can neither sit nor stand, and because of this oddly unsettling effect she finds herself pacing from room to room until she finishes up in the bedroom at the front of the house.

  As she turns her head from side to side, looking about the room and wondering what on earth she’s doing here, the wardrobe speaks. The wardrobe says, ‘Open me.’ So she does. And there they are. Her dresses. A lifetime of dresses. And, as she runs her fingers across them, they sway on their hangers as if dancing to the sweetness of long-silent melodies.

  Then, one by one, she takes them from the wardrobe, these dresses of hers that were always just a bit too good for the street, and which she wore in spite of it. These European dresses, like the fancy French windows at the front of the house, always spoke of other places, of the great world beyond the suburb, and so the street always took them as an insult. Well, stuff the street! Rita is not a woman who uses rough language, but she is not above telling the street to get stuffed when both sufficient cause and impulse come to her. Just as she is not above silently pronouncing the young girls of the suburb, with their mini-skirts and their tight blouses, tarts. As she takes the dresses from the wardrobe, those long-silent melodies, the songs that are forever attached to each of them, begin to echo in her ears and songs she thought she’d forgotten are retrieved by the dresses.

  Somehow, and she can’t remember doing this (not consciously), the dresses are arranged in order, consistent with the years in which they were worn. They are a story, chapters leading into each other. And it’s a story that begins with the yellow-and-black summer affair, with the bright flowers and the one dark, bold strap, that she wore for the first time a thousand years ago to an engagement party at Bedser’s at the bottom of the street. And suddenly, she’s hearing one of those finger-clicking, jazzy numbers that always annoyed the hell out of Vic, about, what? Love, of course. They were all about love, which is probably why they annoyed the hell out of him. Only, in this song (which is now full and rich in her ears), love is a sort of figure. Not a person, not a man or woman — but a thing, all the same. And it’s waiting, just around the corner. And Rita can’t decide whether to be excited by it, or frightened, or sad. It’s unsettling, that’s what it is. Becau
se she can’t decide if this love thing waiting just around the corner is going to embrace her and caress her the way love should, or mug her. And the smooth-shaven, finger-snapping singer has a glint in his eyes like he knows something that only he and the song know, but his glinting pair of eyes are also telling her she’s welcome to come and find out all the same. It could be fun and it could be scary. Then the orchestra takes over. And she remembers what it was to be mugged by love and Vic’s that thing around the corner. Her mother is saying don’t marry him, her sisters are saying don’t marry him, everybody is saying don’t marry him — and, of course, she marries him.

  And as the song plays, round and round in her head, she’s seized by the impulse to step back into that time when love mugged her and she took a chance. To step back into that time when love was a bit rough with the broad, because love knew no other way. And the dress says, yes, yes, you can. And she says, no, no, I can’t. And she says it again and again. But the dress doesn’t give up, and — in this dead patch of the afternoon while the suburb is dozing — she’s peeling off the comfortable, loose summer frock she’s wearing and taking a chance.

  There’s the faint whiff of moth balls and old times as she raises the thing above her head and begins to lower it. And her heart’s going like mad and she doesn’t know why because she’s just trying on an old dress, but it is anyway, because there seems to be something urgent in the act that she wasn’t aware of before she started. Something at stake, and she doesn’t know what. But, somehow, having started, she can’t bear to fail. And so, as she lowers it over her head (as she would have effortlessly and unselfconsciously fifteen years before), she is aware of every part of the process, the awkwardness of trying on an old dress. And although it takes a bit more time than it would once have done, soon enough she’s in it. And she’s not too sure about sitting down and standing up too fast, but she’s back inside the skin of the young wife. And she pauses, examining the sensations that come with it. And with this skin come all the nights and the parties that she once wore it to and she’s suddenly stepping into neighbours’ houses long gone, with plates and beers. Then they all come back in a rush and a blur, a night or two in particular, such as Bedser’s. Especially Bedser’s. The engagement of that daughter of his, what was her name? And for a moment she’s carefree and happy as she walks down their street in this new dress of hers under a summer sky glowing with a touch of eternity, as though the night itself would go on forever, and everybody standing under it. And she passes from happy to sad to just plain flat (as if she’s just been run over by one of those great, snorting engines Vic drove) as she remembers that the night did end, and, like they all seemed to then, it ended badly. But did it always happen like that? Did they all start good and end badly? There must have been good ones in there. Must have been, only she’s pressed to remember them just now. Or maybe it’s just that the bad were so many, the shadow they cast so tall and wide, that they blot out the good. And the image that now prevails is that of a winter night, the table set, Rita and the boy that Michael was, waiting. And Vic not home. Not yet fallen in the back door in that way of his that always sounded like the briquettes had just been delivered.

  And she’s no sooner back in the skin of the young wife than she wants to be out of it again. She eyes herself in the wardrobe mirror, and, although she’d never let the street see her like this, she’s happy enough with what her eyes tell her. Or is it what she tells them to tell her? Then she’s pulling the dress off and happily reclaiming the garments of middle age.

  There they are, from one end of the bed to the other, her dresses from all the years. And as she steps back, taking in the spectacle (which is also something of a history of recent fashion), she reads her story in the neatly arranged chapters of her dresses. And while it was good to know that she could slip back into the skin of the young wife, it wasn’t really that good to be under old skin again. Even the skin of youth.

  And as she’s staring at them, reading chapter by chapter the story of her life, and the house and the whole suburb for that matter, she knows that the material of each dress is skin she has long since shed.

  Slowly, she removes them from the hangers, her dresses, and folds them one on top of the other, year upon year upon year. And when she’s arrived at the present she closes the wardrobe. The dresses fit neatly into a suitcase. Outside, the afternoon is quietly slipping towards twilight, and the sounds of children playing the last of the day’s games and young families (the names of many she’s not yet familiar with) rise from the street. In the morning she’ll drop the suitcase off at the local opportunity shop in the Old Wheat Road. And perhaps, in time, a young wife will come along and slip into the skin that Rita once wore.

  10.

  Life Turns Another Page

  Michael doesn’t like pubs. He is not someone who is often to be seen in them. But this afternoon, while Rita is reading the story of her old dresses, he prefers the quiet of this public bar near the university and the hospital where Madeleine is now on duty to that of the constant hum and stale drowsy air of the university library. It is the final week of February and the plane trees and elms that line the wide street outside will soon be turning gold and crimson. Michael has only been teaching at his old school since term started, but the kindly maths master, who compiles the school timetable, has already arranged Michael’s load so that he has two afternoons a week off to finish his degree. And so, and it almost feels a luxury, he has spent the afternoon reading. Traffic and trams move easily through sunshine and shadow. Life in Middlemarch turns another page. The public bar is quiet, except for a small group nearby.

  The afternoon, in fact, has passed as though being played out to the time signature of another, less hurried, age. Slowness falls upon him. Nothing — neither his raising of the glass, the turning of a page, nor the motion of the bartender as he clears the counter — is hurried. Everything moves at a pace that would have been alien to the adolescent Michael whose measure of meaning was determined by the speed it took a cricket ball to pass from one end of a pitch to the other. Now, it is moments such as these and slowness that he is learning to value — whenever he feels it fall upon him — as much as he once valued speed.

  And so it is with a sense of curious surprise that he finds himself looking up from the book and listening to the conversation of the small group of drinkers near him. A man is speaking. Not loudly, not with any great emotion. But there is something in the combination of the appearance of the man and what he is saying — in confidence to his friends — that has caught Michael’s attention, lifted him from the fictional world he has inhabited most of this free afternoon, and back into this one. At first he doesn’t know why his attention has been caught by strangers whose concerns mean nothing to him. But he is listening, and intently. And, as he ponders why this should be, he realises that the speaker is not a stranger and that he has seen him before, at the ball to which Madeleine had taken him — the older man to whom he was not introduced, either because he was someone of no consequence or somebody of consequence enough not to be introduced. It is now only four weeks since that ball, but already it has become the night upon which a before-and-after was established; the night that created the line between his life before Madeleine and his life after Madeleine.

  He speaks quietly, this man, his audience a small group of younger men, some wearing the medical intern’s uniform of the white dustcoat. But although he speaks quietly, even confidentially, he holds their attention completely, like a lecturer discoursing on a favourite subject. But it is not medicine or anything connected with it. Michael can see that. It is a bar-room performance, and Michael (who has paid no conscious attention to the address) can imagine that anecdote and innuendo are the key components of his act. And Michael can see, simply from his manner, that this man has delivered just such a talk on many occasions before. Michael is now thankful for never having been introduced. If he had, he would now almost certainly feel compelled to speak to him should they catch each ot
her’s eyes. And that would be unfortunate, for Michael knows, without even having met him, that he doesn’t like this man.

  And it is while Michael is giving thanks for this that the man turns his attention to those sitting beside him and, in so doing, turns in Michael’s direction so that his words become clearer.

  ‘Everyone,’ he says, the hint of a smile behind his eyes, ‘thinks she’s as pure as a country field.’

  He has the air of authority, this man. And whether he is speaking on the subject of women or grave and elevated themes, everybody listens with a sort of rapt belief. He has, Michael can clearly see, that kind of power over people. Madeleine spoke once of a man at the hospital, a resident genius (a vague reference, no names, but Michael, rightly or wrongly, immediately suspected who she was talking about). And she did not dwell on his looks or his manners or the incidentals of his life. No, she dwelt on his work, the importance of his research and the sheer wonder of what he did. She spoke briefly of him, but spoke almost in awe of somebody involved in one of life’s mighty projects, a grand narrative currently lacking in her life, and which, by implication, she would never find with the likes of Michael.

  ‘A country field.’ He smiles once more. ‘But not beyond ploughing.’

  The small group strains forward, but he leaves it there, with a quiet nod. Then he rises, a tap on his wrist-watch indicating that playtime is over and the more serious matters of life and death await them.