A cow munches on silver daisies at the far end of the paddock, the lights of the farm house burn, sleepy and warm, but the minutes are precious as they always are when there is urgency in the air. And there is urgency in the way this sixteen-year-old Jessie pulls her skirt up above her waist, and urgency in the way the fourteen-year-old Vic tugs at his belt and pulls his first pair of long trousers down to his knees. The lights of the hamlet burn orange and gold, but not for long. Life shuts down early in the hills around the town. And so there is urgency in the way she pulls him to her without kissing, for although they know what kisses are, it is agreed without speaking that there is no time for them. There is urgency too in the way he is dragged down upon her, with all the force of a strong young woman used to handling young animals far larger and stronger than this stringy fourteen-year-old with a shooting eye good enough to fill the house with rabbits and game every weekend. She’s not looking at the bright squares of orange and gold that define the farm house, but she knows they’re there and that the time is short, so she throws her arms out as they fall back together onto the field, a human star of arms and legs gazing up at the silvery sky. And in that cold night, with the dew already turning to frost around them, the heat of their bodies as they touch sucks his breath away, and it is all over, the end as urgent as the beginning.
That is it, one, possibly two seconds. And whatever the sound is that he releases, it is enough for her hand to rise instantly and almost slap his mouth shut, sealing the sound in. And Vic can feel that hand, he can feel it now in the early-afternoon quiet of the public bar, he feels Jessie’s warm hand almost stuck to his mouth. She keeps it there, her eyes wide, as she lies back, a quick flick, a nod of the head, indicating the low mounds of sleeping cattle behind them and the importance of not stirring them. For, if troubled, the sounds of their disturbance will rouse the house and both of them will be in for it. And so she keeps her hand across his mouth, long, long after the sound has been stifled. And it’s still there, even now, the wet warmth of Jessie’s hand.
With the same urgency she had pulled her dress up, she now pushes it down, watching the young Vic buckling his belt as she does. And when they rise, quickly looking about them, they turn their eyes briefly back to the patch of field where they have just been and notice for the first time that something looking like a four-limbed star has been pressed into the sodden grass. Into the silver field that would be white by morning, except for a damp star that would be there for all to see.
There is a smile on Vic’s face, a quiet, private smile in a public bar. Night turns to morning and he now observes his fourteen-year-old self, stomping across the same field with the farmer and his two sons the next day. They come to a sudden stop. The scene is still and silent. The old farmer is scratching his chin, his hat pushed back from his forehead, his eyes fixed, the eyes of the old Vic, the young Vic and the two sons following his deeply puzzled gaze. These are his paddocks; he is as attuned to them as is a rabbit or any of the wildlife that live in them. He can read in them the day’s and evening’s events, as easily as his sons read their serials or his wife her novels. But here is something he can’t explain. And this doesn’t happen, not on his land. And he continues staring at the cause of his concern as if it had dropped overnight from the sky, fallen into one of his paddocks. The field is white with a heavy, snow-like frost. And it is all around them, except for one place. A deep, star-shaped impression has been left in the ground. And as his forefinger and thumb rub the clean-shaven point of his chin, he turns to the other three, seeking an explanation or an opinion. For, and it is written in the eyes of the farmer and his sons, it is as though some extraordinary visitation has taken place in the night while they were sleeping and the cattle looked on. For a second, everyone is exchanging glances. The old man and his sons (who shrug their shoulders) and turn in unison to Vic as though the eyes of the sharpshooter might see something they can’t. And there is a moment as he gazes without responding upon the spot where the two of them had been the previous evening, upon that pattern in the grass, when he is certain that they have read his face and are now aware that he knows more than he says. But when he shrugs his shoulders just like the others, there is universal agreement that it is indeed a puzzling business. One that brings with it a vague, uncomfortable sense of intrusion. That some alien matter had stolen into their fields in the night and left its mark on their land, an act that had brought with it not only a sense of intrusion, but violation as well. Whatever has left this mark, there is the disturbing possibility that it is not one of them. It is not, the look on their faces suggests, the mark of a local. Not even a local animal.
Yet, even as Vic shrugs his shoulders, he is quietly, secretly amazed that it should all come so easily, so naturally, this business of saying one thing and knowing another; of going along with everyone, and not; of being at one with the group, while remaining apart.
It is then, while Vic is registering this sensation that is as new and grown-up as his long pants, that the old man looks back at the troubling impression and pronounces his verdict. One of the farm dogs, a fox come to rub its back on a choice piece of damp ground. Who knows what brings an animal out in the dark. That’s the best he can do, has anybody got anything better? And they all shrug again, then move on.
Vic and the youngest son go to the school in the town, where Vic lives in the boarding house at which his mother cleans. The old man and the eldest son to the duties of the farm. There they are, forever trudging out across that field. And just as memory opened and closed the doors of the farm house, it now opens the gate of the school, the door to his old classroom, and after school the door of the boarding house just down the street where Vic’s mother (if you follow the verandah around to the laundry) is washing white sheets in a steaming copper. And, if you’re lucky, she’ll give you a big smile as she looks up, for you’re her boy, the only thing she’s got in this world. And she’ll die for you. And she did. She died in small doses, slowly, working herself to death for her boy who now sits at the pub window staring back across the years at that big smile of hers, all eyes for her boy.
And out beyond the town, the pale winter sun has melted the frost. Jessie is carrying fresh milk to the van in the dirt drive. The star is gone and Jessie sees you, takes you in at a glance, but she’s giving nothing away. And neither will you.
Vic’s head is bowed, and he’s oblivious of the broken, muffled talk around him in the public bar, as he shakes his head ever so slightly to the unspoken question in Jessie’s sixteen-year-old eyes. He never gave anything away. He was as good as his word. Not even when he arrived at the farm one weekend, months later, and found Jessie gone from the house. Jessie gone, and everybody carrying on as though she’d never been there. Not a word about her, or where she might be. It was only later that he learnt she’d gone to the nuns. And the fourteen-year-old Vic thought nothing more of that. Except for those times, every now and then, when, for no apparent reason, he remembers the look in Jessie’s eyes. And with the look, he always hears again the soft, knowing talk of the town, saying that Jessie had gone to the nuns. Then a nod, as if to say we all know what that means.
The public bar is now noisy, lunchtime laughter explodes from the four corners of the room, and Jessie recedes from view. Melts like the silvery frost on that far-away paddock and evaporates like the starry impression they left behind in the ground one dewy night when the minutes were precious and urgency was in the air.
As it all evaporates, there is a sudden emptiness in Vic’s eyes. And it is then that he rises from his stool, his glass half full, and takes his empty eyes out into the full glare of the afternoon sun where no one will notice them.
28.
How Terribly Strange to be Seventy
A few days later, Michael is with Madeleine. There is a song playing. There is always a song playing. Madeleine is sitting by a window overlooking a rain-sodden communal garden, with that look on her face. Michael is sitting with his back against the wall, beside t
he stereo.
Neither of them is speaking. Nor have they for some time. In their poses and the attitudes they have struck, they might easily pass for one of those paintings depicting a nineteenth-century couple whiling away a wet Sunday afternoon. But then they would each be holding a book of verse, or she might be writing a letter while he carefully brushed the dust from a local fossil, and the silence in the room would be there because they were so immersed in their respective activities that they hadn’t thought to talk. But they have neither books nor letters nor fossils. They have nothing. They do not speak. The stereo speaks for them.
She does not move and he has no desire to disturb her. He knows that look and knows that behind it lies impatience with this little world she’s been dropped into. This little world is in her way. And everybody and everything in it are barriers between her and home — which is out there beyond the window and the sad communal garden of sodden shrubs. He knows the look and he chooses to say nothing. Besides, while she sits absorbed in speculations of home, he is free to observe her: the auburn hair folded across her shoulder, the elbow resting on the window, the nose in profile, the eyebrows that rise playfully when playfulness is in her. The girl with the kaleidoscopic eyes is a cameo, or a detail from a domestic scene in which he feels himself to be a peripheral part. Her face is turned away, the look is outward.
It is after days such as these (and they will become more and more numerous in the lead-up to her departure) that she will enter the books and poems that he reads. Or is it that he will impose her upon them? Turn characters into her and therefore catch her in the pages of his books like pressed flowers. In this way, Dorothea, trapped in the provincial confines of Middlemarch becomes Madeleine. Eliot’s crying girl, who weaves the sunlight in her hair, becomes Madeleine. And so on. It will not be a conscious process — just a way of holding on, or letting go. If she becomes books, becomes poems, she ceases to be the she who is leaving, and the books will become a repository for the emotions that he won’t know what to do with any more when she is gone. And imaginary characters will become the recipients of these feelings. Madeleine will have gone, but not the emotions she stirred. He will have nowhere to take them, except to these characters in books and poems. And they will, of course, accept the burden of this love of his that has nowhere else to go. It will become a way of reading that will bring characters alive in a way that they never were before, and in time, in the hollow years that will follow her departure, this facility will become so precious a lifeline that he will, in the end, not be sure which he prefers — the fact of Madeleine or the idea of Madeleine. And he will reach a point where he has become so attached to his lifeline that he will not know how to choose should she return some day, out of the blue (announcing her return on the telephone or in a letter).
But, for the moment, it is the fact of Madeleine that reclines, motionless against the window, watching the Sunday drizzle. They are silent. The music plays, the stereo speaks for them. And, as it does, this song begins to preoccupy Michael. It is a speculation on the strangeness of being seventy, and it assumes that the very idea of being seventy is somehow incomprehensible. But Michael is not so sure that it is so strange after all, and that is when he turns towards Madeleine.
‘Perhaps we’ll meet again when we’re seventy.’
Madeleine does not look round from the garden. She barely seems to hear, and, just when he has all but given up on receiving a reply, she speaks in a flat monotone consistent with the mood of the day.
‘How sad.’
‘All those wasted years,’ he says, idly.
But she turns from the window, all the cooped-up frustration of the afternoon in her eyes and the sudden dismissive tone of her voice.
‘No, that’s not it. That’s not what I meant.’
She stops talking as quickly as she started. Why don’t you understand, she is almost saying. Do I have to explain? And she shoots him a glance, as if to say (or so Michael thinks) I can imagine someone else there, right where you’re sitting. Someone who might understand, without being told. I can, the look says, see someone else where you are. Not their face, not their hair. Nothing like that. Just the possibility of someone else being there. A substitution that, in Madeleine’s mind, would have the power to transform the afternoon. Someone who would understand exactly what she means without need of speech. But not Michael.
He is surprised by the intensity of her response and her impatience with him, until he realises that she is denying him the assumption of all those years, denying him the right to all those years (even as wasted years, for to call them wasted is in some way tantamount to appropriating them). Somewhere in her impatience she has taken this idle remark of his to mean that he is saying she is making the wrong decision in leaving. Perhaps he is without knowing it. Perhaps Madeleine has discovered his intention before him. And, clearly, she is having none of it.
He is surprised, but he also has to admit — if only to himself, for Madeleine has resumed her pose and is once again watching the heavens drain themselves onto the garden — he has to admit she is right. It is not the point. The sadness inherent in the idea of two people parting in youth and not meeting again until they are seventy is not to be found in any sense of lost or wasted years. It is something else altogether, which neither of them can name at this particular point. And so he leaves it. They return to their respective silences. The song finishes, another begins.
29.
The Discovery of Speed (1)
She feels the cold tonight. Winter’s in the air. The keys rattle in her hand, jangling in the night as she steps out along the gravel path of the gardens to the garage. She looks up, and — the oddest thing — a child’s balloon floats high up above before drifting into one of the estate’s many trees and landing on a forked branch, where it sits, as if watching her.
A shiver runs through her as she pulls the door open, and moonlight falls across the curved snout of the car. Not for the first time this evening, she considers turning back and going to bed. But she is dressed for a drive and she wouldn’t be able to sleep now, anyway. And besides, this new addition to the household is, she imagines, happy to be let out. It’s been promised a run, and can’t be disappointed now.
Behind the wheel, she slips on the black leather gloves and notices a slight tremor in her hand as she reaches for the ignition, pausing for a moment before bringing the thing to life. It groans with the turning of the key, then settles immediately to a low, happy hum.
She points the car north, out towards the new frontier that lies just the other side of the recent housing developments. There are two main roads in the suburb, the one running east–west, the other (which becomes a country highway of sorts) running north–south. If she follows the road running north for long enough, she will eventually come to a point where, either side of her, the paved roads give way to dirt, and the houses give way to scotch thistle. When this happens, she will have reached the new frontier, where the suburbs stop and the open country begins, where that last line of backyard fences marks the outermost borders of settlement. She will be in the thistle country, where the fences run along the rim of the old river valley like medieval town walls against the darkness without. Where it is now fashionable to build large, double-storey houses on cheap land. Large houses that look more deserted than roomy. There she will find the straight stretch of paved road that calls itself a highway. A straight stretch of road along which one can accelerate into life, or into death.
Soon, and with little memory of the ride, she is idling by the side of the road, the paddocks of grass and thistle beside her, a long thin line of paved road stretching out into the night in front of her. There are no other headlights in sight. This excuse for a highway is hers.
Outside, and she winds down the window in order to feel the elements against her cheek, this place to which she has come (which, no doubt, in a few years’ time will be as thick with houses as it is now with thistle) has the kind of stillness and chilly quiet that is on
ly found in the country. The only sound is the low murmur of the engine.
Did Webster pause before releasing the power of the thing? Did he take a moment to consider the darkness of the road — the black void out there that is neither suburb nor country nor earth, nor anything to which one can put a name? For she feels that she could fly completely off the road and out into the night. And it is tempting.
Oh, it is so tempting. To penetrate the night, to go where Webster went — whether by accident or design, to catch some intimation of Webster himself, who drove out of this world and into another.
Mrs Webster feels a dreaded, longed-for, rolling wave lift her heart, and she knows she has reached that point where she no longer controls events. And, when the car takes off, the sound, the sudden explosion of acceleration, is already part of the world she has just left behind. Distant thunder. Somebody else’s thunder, in somebody else’s world. Not only is she not controlling events any more, they are also being experienced by someone other than Mrs Webster. There is a woman sitting at the wheel who, for all intents and purposes, resembles (in every detail) Mrs Webster, but from whom she feels sufficiently detached to observe — as if she were witnessing the event, not the driver in it. And throughout the next few minutes, when she will have accelerated into that part of the night where the minutes don’t exist because they’ve been obliterated by speed, she will remain a spectator to events and of herself.
It is only when she eventually slips back into the suburb, slips back into the network of streets that leads back to her house and registers the trembling in her hands and feet that the experience becomes felt, and she knows she was that woman out there on that excuse for a highway where you could just as easily accelerate into life as into death, depending on the driver and depending on the night.
The Time We Have Taken Page 13
