The Time We Have Taken (13 page)

T
he first job is to clear out the old room to make space. Mrs Webster calls it the Games Room. It is at the back of the house and has its own entrance. It is, she says, perfect.

At some stage, it seems, during the last meeting of this Centenary Suburb Committee, it was decided there should be a museum, a dedication to Webster’s Engineering. Not just the man, but the establishment itself. There would be photographs, documents, old desks and chairs, bits of machinery, scraps of metal, and displays of the bits and pieces that the factory produced. Workers, old and new, could come and view the history of their life’s labours. As he had so often said himself, the Websters of this world would be impossible without labour. They had, between them,
he had told his staff, created this thing that had been the centre of their working lives for most of their collective memory. Webster may well have brought this noise of his, this beast of production to the suburb, but he could never have done it alone. Ultimately, his gift, the beast of production, was a two-headed one. And so this museum would be a dedication to anyone who ever stepped inside the place, and everyone who still does.

This committee (and Michael tells Rita about it from time to time, how it is like stepping back into an old British comedy, and how he can only ever see them all as players from that old black-and-white world that gave them so many laughs when the laughs were needed), this committee seems to have money. Enough to put on a show like this. And so Rita stands at the doorway surveying the cluttered jumble of gaming tables and chairs and rolled-up rugs, all covered with successive layers of dust that would have taken decades to gather.

As much, Mrs Webster had told her earlier in the week, as much as she would love to look after the whole business herself, there just wasn’t time. Did she, Rita, understand? Besides, she went on, she might be too close to it all, and perhaps they would be better off with a clean pair of eyes, someone from outside the place, who had never stepped in, someone — she eventually suggested — like Rita. And as much as Rita declared that she couldn’t do it,
she eventually nodded and the job was hers. And it was a job; she would be paid. This committee had money indeed.

Immediately, they moved on to the practicalities of the task at hand, Mrs Webster’s tone and words, brisk and brief, the kind of tone people use when they’ve just hired someone. The kind of tone Rita herself has slipped into when she, too, has hired any of the many tradesmen, who, over the years, have transformed her house into what it is today. But there’s something else about Mrs Webster’s tone. And it tells Rita that for all her talk about being too close to everything, there was a distinct touch of just not caring any more. Not so much too close as just plain removed. Someone who was quite relieved to have the matter taken out of their hands. She’s a curious case. And she’s
always
Mrs Webster, too. Rita is always Rita, but there is no hint that Mrs Webster will ever melt into Val. And Rita doesn’t take it personally, because she knows from Michael that even the members of this committee call her Mrs Webster. Even the mayor. It’s as though it’s not a name any more, but a title. Conferred upon her by the suburb. A title she’s happy to receive. One that suits her purposes. One that allows her to walk the same streets of the suburb as everybody else, but (like some sort of homegrown nobility) to be removed from it at the same time.

So here is Rita, standing at the door of the Games Room that smells like it hasn’t been aired in years, mulling over the curious case of Mrs Webster and contemplating the job at hand. Behind her, parked on the gravel drive at the back of the estate, the removalist’s van sits under a low, suffocating sky that gives every impression of settling in for the season. And, as the two men join her in the doorway, she finds herself employing the same tone of voice that Mrs Webster used when she employed Rita. The billiard table is a monster of a thing and will have to be dismantled before it is removed. The whole room, she informs them, will have to be cleared before she can begin. Tables, chairs in varying states of disrepair, sideboards, mantelpieces, and boxes, boxes, stuffed with all the things that are eventually stuffed into boxes, which are then sealed and forgotten.

Throughout the morning and early afternoon (as Pussy Cat and Bunny Rabbit merge into one amid moans and howls of laughter, and while Michael and Madeleine sit in his room waiting for it all to be over), the room is slowly, laboriously, cleared. And, late in the day, Rita has a view of the room: its dimensions, shape, and the light — not much of it — that the windows let in. And, as she sits there, amid the stirred dust and relics of Webster’s life, she compiles a list of what must be done.

And it is while she is compiling this list that there is a sudden explosion in the room. She looks up, not fearful but puzzled to see that a number of boxes have fallen from the top of an old bookshelf and crashed onto the bare floorboards. A cloud of dust rises, particles swirling skywards in a shaft of light, spearing into the room through the trees outside. The balance that for so long has held this room together and kept it stable has been disturbed. And, as fanciful as it seems, it is as though the room, after all these years of silence, has something to say.

She puts her pen and paper down on the floor. The cardboard boxes are heavy, sealed with thick tape (as if whoever sealed them never intended them to be re-opened), but one of them has burst open upon impact. The others, which she can barely lift, she pushes against the wall. The contents of the broken box have spilled out onto the floor and she kneels, placing the collection of scattered items — the tools of office work, stamps, inkpads and official paper — one by one back into the box.

The small black business notebook amongst it all, for appointments and meetings, is for the year 1959. Her first impulse is to put the thing back in the box. Her second, upon reading the year, is to open it. This is not Rita’s way. She would be horrified at the thought of anybody reading her private papers. Everyone has a right to a private life, even when
they’re dead, and she respects the rights of others as she would expect hers to be respected. But she can feel, even as she pauses with the slim black volume in her hands, that she is giving herself licence to pry. She has, after all, been entrusted with the task of preparing the room for the exhibits. And although Rita is only meant to prepare the room, not to select the items (the local historians and someone from the city library will do that), she is, nonetheless, involved. And, as the gold numbering of the year draws her in and bids her read, she tells herself that the box fell for a reason.

She is wondering why the year 1959 should feel significant, when she remembers that Webster died (if it can be called dying), that Webster ‘left’ this world in the summer of 1960 and she realises that this notebook is the business record of his last year as Webster the factory.

They are everyday entries. Regulation matters. Contacts, delivery dates, meetings (with people whose names mean nothing to Rita and who may or may not be around any more), addresses, phone numbers and so on. At first the entries are detailed, the names and places written in full. But, as the year progresses, the entries become more and more basic, until towards the final pages they are punched in in a kind of shorthand. Names have simply become first letters, places abbreviations. They are the entries, Rita suspects at
first, of someone who is too busy to write things in full, someone who feels the pace of the year gathering and for whom the luxury of full sentences and complete names is no longer affordable. But as she flicks through the pages, these last official days of Webster the factory, a second suspicion occurs to her: that these just might be the entries of a man who simply doesn’t care any more.

And it is then that she flicks a page over and comes to the oddest thing. Not just full sentences but a whole paragraph of them. And not scribbled but carefully written down. But, however carefully they may be written, the words themselves make no sense. None at all.

What? It’s as though he had lost his wits, taken leave of his senses, and poured gibberish onto the page. The scribblings of someone who, after a lifetime of strict order and routine, had discovered, caved in to, the delights of gibberish and gobbledegook. It is only as she reads on that she realises she is reading poetry, that Webster may have written the words down carefully, but, for some reason, hadn’t bothered to arrange the words on the page the way the poet would have. For there is rhyme in there, and the
more she reads this little entry, the more she sees there is also reason. But he wrote it out like you would anything else. Perhaps he was just crammed for space on the page, for on this day, November 27, 1959, he had three meetings, the details of which took up most of the page. And jammed in between was this odd business.

Poetry? Webster? The man who, Mrs Webster had assured her often enough, had never read any of the books on his shelf. That they were there for decoration and that it was she, Mrs Webster, who was the reader of the house. An odd thing to find in a business notebook, this outbreak of…what do you call it? She pauses, drumming the page with her fingers before the word bursts from her…humanity. An odd thing, this outbreak of humanity. The handwriting, she notes, looks like Vic’s. It was the way they were taught, the Vics and Websters of the world — and all the other children they played with in all those distant playgrounds before they became what they did. And while she is thinking this she remembers that it was Vic’s habit to write bits of verse and poetry on the backs of envelopes and in
notepads, and then file them away in his wallet. But Webster the factory? It’s odd, even disturbing. And she can’t say why. And while she doesn’t know what it all means, because she never knew Webster, she has the distinct, unnerving feeling that something is wrong here. She’s been given a glimpse into something she was never intended to read. This, she tells herself in her mother’s voice, is what you get for prying. And if this is what the room has to say, then she doesn’t want to hear — and the room has no business blabbing.

What has disturbed her is the fact that she is now the recipient of knowledge. And she’d rather not be. For she now has to decide what to do with it. And, after quick and decisive thought, she decides to put the thing straight back in the box and seal it with the same thick tape — this time properly.

The only person who could possibly be interested in the contents of the notebook is Mrs Webster, but Rita, putting herself in Mrs Webster’s position, concludes that she would rather not know. Rita concludes, with utter certainty, that Mrs Webster would rather not know that the years of her marriage to Webster had been a waste of breath. If, indeed, that is the way to read it. And Rita, mentally arranging the jumble of words on the page as they ought to be, can see no other way. And the thought that her husband might very well have driven into
oblivion and been delighted to do so is not something a wife wants to hear. Nor does the suburb, which knows — and chooses to believe or not believe — that a most unfortunate accident took place. Nothing more mysterious than that. And it’s best kept that way.

With this all in mind, she places the notebook back into the box, along with the stamps and inkpads and the official paper. When the workmen are back, she points to the boxes and suggests they tape up the broken one, properly this time.

A few moments later, the boxes are all in the back of the removalist’s van. With everything else, they will be taken away, stored and forgotten.

It will take what’s left of the day and the next morning to clear the old Games Room, but already it is less cluttered, and Rita is beginning to see it as an exhibition space. And so she now turns her mind to the happy task of sweeping the dust and debris away and transforming the room.

H
ow was it they ever knew what to do? Vic may be staring out through the pub window at the comings and goings of the town (while Rita clears Webster’s Games Room), but he doesn’t see any of it. He is looking at a field from long ago, a sodden paddock, one that may or may not be still there if he was to go back and try to find it. This field is cold and damp with evening dew, but it doesn’t concern the young couple walking across it. The young woman is called Jessie. And he says it again, for the name has not been on his lips for many years now. She is sixteen. An old sixteen, as all sixteens were then. Perhaps this is why they knew what to do. They didn’t, but she did.

There is no reason for this, none that Vic can find, to explain why he should be back there. No spark, no
face in the crowd. No scent, no taste. But there it is again, this field he once shot rabbits in and which he dreamt of earlier in the summer, popping up again, clear enough to step into, a sudden rush of memory strong enough to turn day into night. So strong a memory that he is not looking out the pub window as he was just a few seconds before, but staring into a night of country darkness in which the moon is good. The field, the trees and the jagged fence posts are coated in a silvery film. The yellow squares of house lights that define the hamlet and the country intersection provide the only colour. The two young people on the damp field don’t notice the hamlet, but the old Vic, the one watching, looks over their shoulders to that distant clump of colour, distant but warm, and memory opens the door of the small wooden shack of a farm house where a family is gathered round the fire: the father smoking, the mother watching the flames from her chair, two boys reading on a rough mat. They seem not to notice that their daughter is missing, as is the young Vic, who lives throughout the week in the town nearby with his mother and with this family on weekends, Vic who is now like one of the family and whose rabbit (the rabbit he shot earlier that same morning) has just fed everybody. It is acknowledged that Vic is a good shot, the best shot of the whole bunch, and it is not uncommon for them to feed on rabbit during
these weekends that he comes to stay. But, for the moment, nobody seems to notice that he and their daughter are not there.

And just as memory opened the door of the house, memory now closes it again and once more he is gazing upon the two figures in the field, wondering how on earth they knew what it was that had to be done. And with this puzzle vaguely occupying his mind, he watches the condensation rise from their mouths as they settle into the thick grass beside the crumbled remains of a stone wall. There they were, there they are, and there they will always be. Breath rising from their bodies.

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.