The Time We Have Taken (14 page)

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 the 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.

S
he 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 only 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.

As she parks the car in the garage, the silvery gardens shimmering all around her, she is wondering if Webster chose, or if he had simply reached that point where he no longer controlled events and choice was obliterated by speed.

‘
I
knew I shouldn’t have told you.’

Madeleine is not angry, but annoyed. And it is possibly this which disturbs him more than what she says. For this annoyance is as much as she can muster for now. Her anger, he concludes, she keeps for another time and someone else. He receives her annoyance. It is, like her gratitude, the best she can offer. There is, she implies with a shrug of the shoulders, insufficient reason for anger.

Madeleine has just made casual mention of what she did the night before. She went, she says, to a nice little Chinese restaurant in the city with some work friends and, she adds with a glint in her eyes, a doctor whom all the nurses regard as handsome though, as they say, ‘taken’. But a bit of a ‘hunk’ all
the same. He has never heard her use such words as ‘hunk’ before and it comes as quite a shock to Michael to hear the word so casually drop from her lips — a word whose company she has kept before, and not without a certain ease of manner. But the sound is all wrong, and the shock of it is not so much the shock that an obscene word or phrase from an unlikely source can produce, as the shock of inferior words or phrases from an unlikely source. Hunks, presumably, like the word itself, are beneath her. It is not a Madeleine word, at least not
his
Madeleine. But he is no sooner contemplating
his
Madeleine, than he is thinking of this
other
Madeleine who keeps the company of lesser words. And there is a light in her eyes when she speaks of him, a glint that is intended to be playfully teasing but which he now takes as excitement. And for a moment Michael cannot help but wonder just what sort of a roving eye his Madeleine has and how many men have caught it. He tries to ignore her playful teasing but glumness falls across his features. He has seen this look on his father’s face, a silly, childish brooding that his father was powerless to stop, and that Michael now feels likewise powerless to arrest. With the glumness, silence descends upon him. Glum silence. He is a child, like he always seems to be in her presence. And that is when she says it.

‘I knew I shouldn’t have told you.’

And it is said in the way that an older sister might speak to a younger brother. Implying that he annoys her at times such as these, the way a nagging little brother would, a nagging little brother you just want to be rid of. He is not yet, this comment implies, mature enough to be told such things. Not, at least, without behaving like a child and ruining a perfectly good evening and turning all glum on her.

And it’s true. He is one of those who bring their own dark clouds wherever they go. He keeps them on a string. They are always there, even on the brightest of days. It takes only a chance remark and he tugs their strings, drags them down, and blots out the sun.

Jealousy is not so much out of fashion as out of favour. And she sees this out-of-favour jealousy in his eyes immediately. It is written all over his features, for this dark cloud he has dragged down on a string from the heavens is the dark cloud of jealousy. But the source of her annoyance is not so much the fact that he feels jealousy; it is her obvious belief that he has no right to feel it. Jealousy is for the privileged few upon whom anger — and love — are bestowed. To assume jealousy is to assume possession of her. And underlying the assumption of possession is the assumption that she is his property — and this assumption of property is what makes jealousy unfashionable.

She sees in his glum jealousy the assumption of possession, and she rejects both his jealousy and his
presumption with her mere annoyance. She gives no hint — as they continue walking (and he desperately tries to wipe the schoolboy glumness from his features, but the more he tries the more it resists and settles in, threatening to remain there all evening) — she gives no hint of disliking the idea of a jealous response. But not from him. His is the jealousy of the eternal sixteen-year-old. The result is a disdain that is consistent with the Age — but not because of it.

As the minutes drag by, he realises that if he doesn’t soon wipe the glumness from his features she will also become bored with him — not simply annoyed — and so, to avoid compounding the error of his ways, he determines to wipe his hand across his face and smile.

‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’

‘I don’t know,’ she says, eyeing the wintry trees along the street, quite possibly too bored already to say much more.

‘To get to the other side,’ he grins. ‘Any turkey knows that.’

The trace of a smile lights her face and she takes his hand and warms it.

‘I wish you wouldn’t get like that.’

‘So do I.’

‘There’s no need to. Nothing to fear.’

‘It’s genetic. It’s come down to me through the years. I had no choice.’

‘You poor thing.’

‘I know. But, you see, it’s gone. All finished. A sun shower.’

They cross the road. The annoyance leaves her features, the fourth-form glumness departs his. They are now a happy young couple. Holding hands, chatting freely, because the young don’t have a care in the world.

But his voice is a fraction too loud, his laughter a fraction too ready. It is an effort, this carefree chat. For, although the schoolboy sullenness has left his features, the memory of an older man with the air about him of someone used to the company of women, the possible hunk in question, relaxed in their company and possessing the gift of setting them at ease, stays with him. Michael has only ever seen him twice, but it is a persistent memory. And while they laugh and chat in the carefree manner of the young, an image hovers in the back of his mind. This man’s eyes resting upon Madeleine just that bit too long at the ball, before departing. Is this what he saw, or what he now sees in his mind’s eye? It is all part of this unfashionable jealousy, but Michael can’t help asking himself if this man knows her in ways that he knows her. Does he know the smell of her — her perfume, the hint of red wine always on her lips after coming from evening mass? Are these things the possession of this other, older married man the
same way they are the possession of Michael? Does he know her smell and does he carry it with him on his clothes and his surgeon’s fingers that are so at ease with women and presumably do the talking for him when his lips have tired of speech?

And then a thought, more troubling than the possibility that they both might possess knowledge of Madeleine in equal shares, occurs to him: that he might also know her in ways that Michael doesn’t. That they might not possess knowledge of Madeleine in equal shares after all.

These thoughts — and he is as much troubled by the fact that he can even think them as by the thoughts themselves — lodge at the back of his mind as he strolls, hand in hand, with his Madeleine, making the light and carefree chat of the young.

They come, they go — these silly thoughts. As Michael and Madeleine cross the road and a small, inner-city picture theatre comes into view, as they cross the serpentine tram tracks of the university terminus where a green rattler is preparing for its return run back down into the city and over the territorial border of the river, it is not only his moodiness and her annoyance that have gone. Having exhausted itself for now, this unfashionable jealousy of his also retires from his conscious mind and slips out of sight into those realms where it can get on with its business, unseen and untroubled.

They enter the cinema and surrender to its welcome darkness, while, back in the suburb, Mrs Webster nervously jiggles the keys of a black sports car in her hand, her shoes crunching the gravel pathway that leads to the garage, every step taking her closer and closer to that point where she will no longer control events but events will control her on that excuse for a highway out there in the country darkness of the new suburban frontier.

Inside the cinema, Michael takes Madeleine’s hand and is uplifted by a reassuring squeeze, small but unmistakable, enough to send the balloon of glumness out into the night and far, far away.