The Time We Have Taken (17 page)

T
wo weeks later, Michael is standing at the front of the local picture theatre with two tickets in his hand. There is a newspaper in his pocket and he has just read (hastily, for he has other things on his mind) a small notice in the paper telling him that George Johnston is dead. That he died early that morning in his sleep while he, Michael, slept soundly in another city. It is sad and it is annoying because he has only just met this Johnston. This Johnston who gave him the event of the right book at the right time, and turned familiar streets and houses and crappy milk bars into the unfamiliar stuff that is good enough for books.

At the moment, though, Michael is stuck with two tickets and behind him the queue is disappearing into
the cinema. He has been standing on the footpath with two tickets in his hand for a long time. Long enough for the queue to dwindle. Long enough to know that Madeleine won’t be coming. And as much as he scans the street and footpaths around him — still expecting her to materialise beside him, breathless with apology — he knows she won’t be coming. The usher draws his attention to the lateness of the hour and Michael turns reluctantly from the street, leaves the unclaimed ticket on the counter of the ticket booth (with Madeleine’s name), and enters the cinema.

The sixties ended and the seventies began, he would later reflect, the night he sat alone watching George Harrison tell Paul McCartney during the recording of
Let It Be
that he wouldn’t play at all, if he — McCartney — didn’t want him to. McCartney, fingers playing with his beard under the spotlights shining on what appears to be a vast warehouse, is trying to put into words the sound he wants to hear for a certain song. Harrison is shaking his head, both of them are scratching nervously at the strings of their guitars. Around them, the others are either shifting in their seats or gazing about them, quite possibly asking themselves if this cold, ugly warehouse is where their story ends. Playtime, Michael saw, was concluding, and the players of the day were tired of playing.

The decade they had all shared (the songs, the dance halls — each the possession of all) was over. The decade in which they’d all grown up, or died too soon, was ending up there on the screen. A new one had begun. And now it seemed inevitable that everybody would rise from where they were sitting, or turn if standing, and walk away to whatever was out there in those years that would constitute the rest of everybody’s lives. It is an intimation of what is to come, of Madeleine leaving, as he knows she soon will.

Everybody knew that sooner or later they would all be called upon to stand and wave goodbye to this time in which they had all grown up together. Everybody except McCartney, who is pouring words into Harrison’s deaf ears, as if, by virtue of his words and his will alone, he might yet hold on to this time they have all shared.

Michael watches from the dark stalls, thinking of Madeleine. His impulse, too, is to hold on and not let slip from them this thing they have, knowing full well that once it has been let slip and falls apart it will not come back together again. This, for Michael, is an immutable law, as heavy and incontrovertible as gravity: things once scattered never come back. When you rose and walked away, you rose and walked away for good. He wants to say this to Madeleine one day. And, although he feels like a child so often in her company, he is convinced that the
years have given him at least this much wisdom. And Michael suspects that, up there on the screen, only McCartney sees what he, Michael, does, that when things are let slip, when people rise and walk away, they do so forever.

Paul McCartney has stopped pouring words into the deaf ears of George Harrison, who, in mind and spirit, has long since risen and left, his body only remaining, hunched over the guitar that he will play or not play at all, if he — McCartney — doesn’t want him to. The others too have all but risen and left. They talk, in this wide, cold warehouse, but it is the kind of talk that is uttered when everything is over. And there are the cameras, everywhere, watching them. And when the cameras have done their work, when they have created the film that will make public these private moments, everybody will share the end of it all, just as they shared the beginning and the middle of it all, in a thousand dark cinemas where audiences will sit and see what the cameras saw.

The brittle smiles, the awkward sentences that end nowhere, the vacant seat beside him all become the one sorrow with a public and private face, one that is happening up there on the screen and right beside him. And the world grows that bit sadder during the ninety minutes that the film runs and the seat beside him remains vacant.

He does not know what happened to Madeleine this evening. Perhaps she was held back at work at the last minute, and, of course, could get no word to him for there is no phone in his house. Perhaps there’d been a mix-up and they’d got their nights wrong. Perhaps. When he finally emerges from the theatre, the first thing he sees is the unclaimed ticket, lying exactly where he left it.

On the street, he manoeuvres his way through the crowd. The footpaths are clean and shining, and the sky is clear. This is the way it happens. Before something can begin, something else must end. A band breaks up, a newly discovered favourite author dies. Ages come and go, orders of feeling rise and fall. Tonight she wasn’t there. Tonight he realised that he must prepare himself. That somehow, somewhere within him he must find a way of letting go as a preparation for that time when he will have no choice
but
to let go.

At the same time he wonders how long it will stay there, Madeleine’s unclaimed ticket, before someone sweeps it off the counter and into the wastepaper basket. And will this act be occasioned by a brief pause for thought? For an unclaimed ticket is a story, there to be read by those who choose, and in any way they choose. Or, not at all.

This is how it will end. Suddenly she won’t be there, and he will no longer see her, touch her, smell
the perfume that is hers and hers alone, or register the faint taste of wine upon her lips after coming from the evening service. This is how it will end, and that which had previously only beckoned — the idea of Madeleine — will be all that remains.

W
here have they all come from? All evening (the same evening Michael stands at the front of the cinema with Madeleine’s ticket in his hand), they’ve been coming, in their best suits. Faces shining under the lights from the close shave these people always give themselves before stepping out. All evening they’ve been coming, whole families of them, Webster’s people. For they are not simply stepping out. This is not simply a social event, party, wedding or funeral, and there is none of the false laughter and stiff talk that people unused to society always fall into. No, there is something taking place here for which Rita was not prepared.

The speeches have finished, everybody has been thanked for the work they’ve put in (the Historical Society, the adviser from the State Library who knew all about pedestals and glass boxes, and special mention to Rita), the exhibition is open, and Webster’s people are gazing upon the fragments of their lives, past and present. Bits of machinery, bits of lives, the spare parts they produced, here and there a wheelbarrow or a lawnmower illustrating the whole, the complete object, to which they contributed, are all on display in glass cabinets or perched on pedestals. Levers they once pulled, buttons they once pushed, are now either marked ‘Don’t Touch’ or are out of reach behind panes of clear, polished glass. The objects around which their working days had revolved were now History. Or something else. Something untouchable. Not theirs any more, but the property of those who know about these things. Those who know how to order and arrange the tools of other people’s days in such a way as to tell them what they were doing back then because no one really has the time to stand back and have a good look at things when they’re in the thick of production.

As Rita watches from a quiet spot at the back of the room she remade, she observes Webster’s people as they recognise machines they actually worked on, objects that they made and which they now look upon
with a kind of wonder because, in the end, it all made sense. And it occurs to Rita that perhaps they have never felt closer to their work than they do now, looking at things from a distance. And isn’t that always the pity of it, she’s musing, that you can’t have the days and the distance at the same time.

Of course, they all knew the bits and pieces they produced would eventually come together as something or other, but it’s easy to forget that when you only get the bits to make. And, as she’s watching them all, she’s also remembering Vic, and that Ryan mate (who was really no mate at all), and all the rest of them talking about engines and rail and speed and the different touches they all brought to the art of engine driving, and she wonders if you find that in a factory.

Mrs Webster passed through early in the evening, thanked Rita, then got out, as if the whole thing was just a bit too much like work. Strangers, the ones with the familiar faces and the ones without, step quietly and respectfully around the equipment they once kicked and cursed, and gaze with quiet curiosity on the assembled parts of their working lives as if seeing them for the first time. Amongst them, the tall, stooped figure of the local geography teacher the students call Lurch, and she smiles briefly at the aptness of the name, then the smile drops from her face as he turns, looking vaguely about the room (his wife at his elbow, supporting him), and Rita can see
in his face that he’s not well. And she remembers what Michael told her, that Lurch had taken a little holiday, as they say, and wasn’t coming to school for a while. One look (Lurch is now being steered towards the door) and Rita suspects that he won’t be going to school again.

There is low laughter as a small group of workers discover the staff photographs taken over the years, and the newspaper clippings, the sick books, accident reports, and all the little and big things that filled their days and weren’t much noticed at the time but which now feel like History.

And all the time, as Webster’s people circle the room, as Michael takes his seat alone in the cinema, as the skeletal, consumptive frame of George Johnston who expired in his sleep earlier that morning is taken from the house in which he died, and as the life of the suburb goes on out there heedless of the significance of glass boxes and pedestals, Rita retains the memory of that small business notebook of Webster’s, the bit that’s not on display here tonight, the bit that’s not behind glass, and about which only she knows. For in that distant place of storage to which the removalists drove, there is an ordinary-looking cardboard box that would take some opening, even if anybody ever cared to.

When it is all over and the old Games Room is shut up for the night (although the exhibition will continue
to draw the suburb in for weeks after, some families returning two and three times), Mrs Webster invites Rita into the study for a drink to toast her success. They stand — Rita is not asked to sit (and from this she concludes that their drink will be a short one) — beneath a large portrait of Webster, and in a lull in conversation both gaze up at it.

‘What was he like?’

The question is asked almost absentmindedly and is no sooner asked than withdrawn.

‘I’m sorry.’

Mrs Webster can see that the question is spontaneous, unpremeditated, like a reflex. She does not take offence. She is touched even. For the question is fuelled by a certain wonder. ‘What was he like?’ being the polite, the discreet, version of what was he
really
like? Behind the public figure, the question asks, behind the cast-iron façade of Webster’s Engineering, what was Webster the factory really like? It is all implied in the sheer spontaneity of the question. Even more, for this innocent question is also asking ‘What was it like to live with History?’ What does History do when the gates are closed on everybody else out there (to whom History merely happens), when the doors are shut on the outside world, what does History do when it puts its feet up?

‘I’d never met anyone quite like him. I knew that from the first and I haven’t doubted it since. It was
always going to be the journey of a lifetime. A once-in-a-lifetime adventure. Together. We shared everything.’

And here Mrs Webster fixes Rita with a silent stare that says, ‘Nobody knew Webster like I did. We were two halves of the one life. The one adventure. You ask me what History does when it puts its feet up. I could tell you, because no one knew Webster better than I did, but forgive me if I don’t tell you. These are private matters. And these private things are all I have left now. You’ll excuse me if I keep them private.’

Then, with a faint, sad smile, she turns to the portrait.

‘He was very loyal to the people he employed. Tremendously loyal. They were all…all a kind of family. If something happened to them, it happened to him. You understand?’

Rita nods.

‘He was true. A true spirit.’ Here Mrs Webster dwells on the portrait in silence for a moment. ‘He had a spirit as true, as clear as those mid-winter mornings when the sun is out and everything is bright with promise. Untouched. And every day was the same. He was as true as that. It was a privilege just to be there.’

Rita is silent. She has never heard anybody talk quite like this before. Never before heard a woman
talk quite like this about her husband. It is not the answer she expected, if she expected anything. And she ought to be moved, as moved as Mrs Webster appears to be. But she is not. Rita doesn’t know anybody who talks like this, who talks the way books read. And although she is prepared to be moved by a book, she is not prepared to be moved by someone talking like a book. Then again, she has never met anybody quite like Mrs Webster before. Mrs Webster is what Rita calls rich. And perhaps, perhaps it might be as they say: that the rich are different. Different from the likes of Rita and Vic, and the whole street which she reluctantly acknowledges houses her kind of people. Mrs Webster is not the type of person Rita normally brushes with. Perhaps they are different. Not so much a different species but a different form, a different branch of the same species. And although they all bear the same family resemblances, they are different — with subtly different feelings, and ways of seeing the world that demand the kinds of words that ordinarily belong in books. She inwardly makes these allowances, but although she knows she ought to be moved by Mrs Webster’s words, she isn’t.

For a moment she is even anxious that this may be apparent to Mrs Webster, that this may appear tactless. But she is relieved to see that Mrs Webster is still engrossed in the portrait, the same faint, sad smile that was on her lips now in her eyes as well.
And at the same time Rita notes that Mrs Webster is, in fact, on the verge of tears; that she, Rita, was not moved by Mrs Webster’s words, but Mrs Webster was.

When Mrs Webster finally shifts that sad gaze from the portrait to Rita, she looks at her as if not quite recognising her, as though she could be just anybody.

It is, Rita is beginning to realise, the public face Mrs Webster keeps for public occasions. No doubt she has worn that face before when she has given speeches at community events, when she has spoken of her husband as if speaking of a statue or like someone who has completely forgotten whatever it was that existed before the statue came along. And she can understand why the public face is required for public occasions. But why now? Unless all those words that Rita ought to have been moved by, that have the sound of public words, words that belong in the books that record History’s lives, are all that’s left now.

Then the public smile fades and a look of curiosity crosses Mrs Webster’s features. ‘Your husband…’ Here she pauses, waiting for Rita to supply his name because she has never asked of him before.

‘Vic.’

‘Vic,’ and she stops, almost smiling, as if (it seems to Rita) on the verge of pronouncing it wonderfully
uncluttered. Or, perhaps that’s Vic himself talking. For, although he’s gone, Vic still lurks within her and talks through Rita when the occasion arises, and his distrust of types like Mrs Webster is always there more or less, depending on the day.

‘What was he like, your Vic?’

‘I don’t know. I realise that must sound pathetic after twenty years. But I’m not sure who he was. Not really. He just seemed to come and now he’s gone. And I can’t help but feel that either I never really tried hard enough to pick his brains in all that time, or he never let me.’

Rita knows she is overstating things, and already suspects that there was an honesty between her and Vic that the Websters of this world never have, but Mrs Webster has driven her to overstatement. And to resolutely using words that don’t go in books. Suddenly the public smile is completely gone from Mrs Webster’s face and she returns the most minute of nods to Rita. A nod of reflexive agreement. Or was it? There is also something else in Mrs Webster’s eyes. You speak, she seems to say, as if the whole thing is behind you. As though it doesn’t touch you any more. And you almost get away with it.

Rita finishes the last of her sherry as Mrs Webster downs her scotch in such a way, it seems to Rita, that suggests it will not be the last of the evening. They part at the front door, and with her coat buttoned to
the chin and a scarf wrapped round her neck for good measure, Rita strolls, through moonlight and shadow, out along the wide driveway. The suburb, which inside these walls would be so easy to forget existed, lies still and silent, like houses gone under the sea.

The garage. The shiny black snout of the thing parked inside. The look that silently said ‘Damn’. The closing of the double doors. The furtiveness of it. The Secrecy. The long, low beast that some say they saw slouching through the suburb in black majesty weeks before, the reports passed on from the chemist of a car speeding through the new frontier of cheap land and large houses in the middle of the night (reports which the street has now heard of), and that involuntary nod of agreement. Later that night, Rita brings all of this with her to the lounge room that was once too small to contain the silence of an unhappy family, but which is now large enough to contain hers. She imagines the doors of Mrs Webster’s garage opening onto the night in another part of the suburb, and she turns her head towards the railway lines and the road that leads from them up to Webster’s mansion as if half expecting to hear the faint, familiar call of the beast.

It’s the feeling that Mrs Webster has discovered something, something special, that stays with Rita
throughout a sleepless night. The house, the suburb all around her, is silent. No growl to break the silence, but she’s up to something all right. A rare letter from Vic sits on the bedside table. She’s read it twice, and, like all Vic’s letters, she detects no sign of sadness, loss or regret. They describe what he does, each day more or less the same as the one before and the one to come. But he likes it that way. He shops, he walks, he’s found a nice little pub (I’ll bet he has, she nods to herself in the dark) where each day he has a fish lunch, then a round of golf and off home to shower and dress for the club. The rapacious jaws of Progress are eating up ‘his’ little town, he says at the end, and it’s the only note of lament in all the letters he’s sent her. He was always happiest walking away, and now that he has walked away he is at last content. Of course, she knows he should never have married. Not the marrying kind. Always happiest by himself, with those strangers he calls friends for company. She doesn’t want him back, or any of the time they had, but some sense of regret that it hadn’t all worked out, that a miracle never came their way and they never got it right, some intimation that they hadn’t merely fulfilled a biological function (the subtleties and details of which they were oblivious), and that, in the end, twenty years hadn’t just been the coming together of two life forms to produce another, would be a comfort at moments such as
these when the sleep won’t come and there’s no end to the night.

When she wakes in the dark like this, and it is more often than not lately, her mind goes back and she wonders if she truly has the will to go forward, on her own. Or, if something in her broke back there when it all fell apart and she acquired the unmistakable look that men and women get when they have been left. A damaged look that others see or sense, but which very quickly becomes normal to those upon whom the look falls. Did this happen without her knowing, and did she stay in the house too long because she lacked the will to leave, until the house itself came to wear the same look?