The Time We Have Taken (6 page)

M
ichael 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 other’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.

And it is now, as they are leaving, that Michael and this man do, in fact, catch each other’s eyes. It is momentary, but Michael is sure — as they exit — that there was recognition in the stare. Recognition, and something more. And, as they stroll across the wide street outside, Michael is left contemplating if that flash of recognition was real or imagined, and, if so, just what that something more might have been.

He turns the top corner of the page and life in
Middlemarch
snaps shut for the time. Even as he does, he hears the voice of Madeleine telling him not to do that, that the page feels it. Didn’t he know? Her little ways and expressions have entered his day-to-day living — don’t dog-ear the pages of books, TTFN at the bottom of a letter — and her very accent, for he constantly catches himself now slipping into her sing-song voice. And it is something that will never entirely leave him, so infectious is it.

There is a slight, almost autumn, chill in the air as he crosses the road and walks back into the university. He was, of course, this man, talking about anybody. Just anybody. And Michael shrugs the incident off — if that’s what it is — as if shrugging off the sudden out-of-season chill settling over things. But it stays with him: the hint of a chill and
the nagging image of Madeleine, cast as a latter-day Dorothea seeking the grand narratives of life in the works of someone else.

In his room, later in the afternoon, he sits at his desk, looking out over the street from his balcony window and waiting for the hour to roll round when he will rise from his chair and meet Madeleine. Twilight has almost fallen and she will currently be making herself ready for the evening. Or she will be ready and simply filling in time, chatting to her sister. It is the hour before meeting Madeleine. An hour, that in years to come, will be synonymous with this time of day, the clutter of his desk, the cheap plastic mug from which he occasionally sips and the thrill that infuses all the objects around him with a sense of moment.

He returns to his book. Life in
Middlemarch
turns another page, and once again he loses himself in the quiet rhythms of another time, another world. As he picks up the threads of the book, the threads of the afternoon return briefly (the easy words and easy smile of the practised raconteur surfacing again). Life turns another page. He forgets about it all. He is being silly. He is being worse than silly — he is being a child. He is, he knows, looking for things that aren’t there.

I
n the weeks that followed Peter van Rijn’s momentous drive to work and his subsequent visit to the mayor’s office, a committee was formed. The mayor, Harold Ford, Henry to his mates, who bears a striking resemblance to Mr Menzies (a resemblance he cultivates, and which, some suggest, alone gave him electoral success) had passed through five distinct phases during the ten minutes that Peter van Rijn had been in his office.

At first it was simple annoyance at having his morning ritual of strong tea and tobacco disturbed (and the mayor is a man who sits, stands and walks inside a constant tobacco cloud, the pipe rarely from his mouth) for no apparent reason other than some aimless chit-chat about local history. Once the
annoyance subsided, he experienced a moment of indifferent dismissiveness, which soon turned to sceptical interest. By the five-minute mark, his tea was cooling, and the mayor was warming to the idea that Peter van Rijn had given birth to that morning and which he had brought directly to the mayor’s attention. And, once he realised that there was something in this for all of them, he was a portrait of concentrated attention. Visions of fat government cheques and a whole suburb transformed into the very emblem of Progress passed across his mind; his suburb, his people, all brought together in mutual celebration, under the beaming gaze of the mayor whose vision had made it happen.

This, the mayor realised as both men stood and shook hands, was his doorway into local history. And not just a routine mention — a gold name on a board along with everyone else — but a shining place at the very centre of the suburb’s story.

Now, in this last week of February, with the schools back and the suburb having shrugged off its summer slumbers, a committee is meeting. It is meeting, for the first time, in the dining room of the Webster mansion. Mrs Webster, a member of the committee and one of the first names on the mayor’s lips, automatically offered the use of the dining room, which, in the days of Webster, rarely hosted a dinner.

It is a large room. Light and relaxing (made even
lighter and more relaxing by Rita’s changes). A place where the six committee members (the mayor, Mrs Webster, the vicar of St Matthew’s, the newly appointed priest at St Patrick’s, the local member of parliament and Peter van Rijn) can chat in an informal way; a place where the imagination might be set free, and where unusual, even inspired, ideas might be born.

The immediate task of the committee is to establish a name for the event itself. The word ‘slogan’ is never uttered, but everybody understands that this is what they’re searching for. The suburb’s history, it is tacitly taken for granted, is a grand and dignified matter. To think in terms of a slogan would be to cheapen it. They are not, after all, selling soap powder, but celebrating a hundred years of settlement.

The word that constantly recurs in the afternoon’s discussion is ‘Progress’. And, with it, terms such as production, prosperity and growth. But it is Progress that rolls so easily from the lips of the mayor, the ministers and the local member. Is not the suburb, they irresistibly conclude, the very picture of Progress: only twenty years ago a frontier community of stick houses and dirt tracks, now a wide, solid community of lawns and gardens and tree-lined streets? What was once a frontier outpost is now, indeed, the Toorak of the North that the estate agents of a hundred years ago had promised all their grandparents.

As they talk, Mrs Webster is distracted by her gardens, which are a mass of colour and leafy abundance. Progress. She hears the word thrown into the pot of conversation yet again, but it is thrown in such a way as to suggest that nobody really knows what it means. Rather, it is spoken like some article of faith. Or like a phrase that enters everyday conversation, and for a season becomes everybody’s favourite phrase (a way for people such as the mayor or the local member to demonstrate that their thinking is up to the minute), without anybody ever really pausing to reflect on just what it might mean. And so it is no surprise when somebody suggests that Progress Suburb be the banner under which they organise the year’s activities. A long discussion follows, but, for reasons that no one will remember afterwards, it is not adopted. Instead the mayor suggests that one of the main streets in the suburb be renamed Progress Avenue, and everyone agrees.

And so the search goes on for most of the afternoon, the sky clouds over, and one of those late-summer changes that brings with it a taste of the autumn to follow settles in. The day dulls, bringing an out-of-season chill (the same chill that settles on Michael as he walks from the pub to his room and the hour before meeting Madeleine), and just when it appears that everybody has been exhausted by the search, and are no longer capable of creative
thought, Peter van Rijn — who has said little until now — quietly suggests Centenary Suburb. Simple, he says. But it tells everybody what they need to know, and is grand without being too grand. It has, he continues, a sense of history about it, a sense of debt as well as celebration. Although the mayor has never really liked van Rijn (he did, in fact, in an excess of youth, years before, throw a brick through the Dutchman’s shop window, scrawling the word ‘commie’ on the footpath in front of the shop — something about which he has always kept mum), but for the second time in a matter of weeks he finds himself nodding in enthusiastic agreement with him. So too is the whole table. And, in a flash, it is agreed. They will become Centenary Suburb. The search is over. The meeting finishes and everybody agrees that this calls for a drink, and everybody (except Peter van Rijn himself, who is a teetotaller) raises glasses of the whisky Mrs Webster has passed around and toasts the occasion.

Centenary Suburb. It is hard for everyone to believe that it took all afternoon to think up two words. But they are the right two words, and when the vicar of St Matthew’s suggests that good words, like good whisky, take time, there is general nodding all around the table.

And when they all leave the Webster mansion and step out into the street to go their separate ways, it is
as though those two words have already transformed the suburb. The mayor is struck by a sense of its solidity and history that he has never appreciated before, and the two priests are discussing the farms that once existed where the houses and shops and garages of the suburb now stand, and Peter van Rijn is contemplating the frail wooden structure that first brought commerce to the community and thereby heralded the beginning of settlement. A shop, he reflects, brings with it the many gifts of production and the bonds of exchange. A shop does all that. It is the glue, the focal point of a group of people who have decided to settle in one place and call that place home. He gives no thought to the fact that others were there before them all and too called this place home; that earlier inhabitants, for millennia, walked the very ground that they have, just now, collectively decided to call Centenary Suburb. He simply does not think of it. When he thinks of the suburb before they all came to it he thinks only of open country and vacant land. As open and vacant as the blank page upon which their history will be written, for History begins with a blank page. As well as open country and vacant land. All of it untilled. Waiting only to be touched by the hands of History and Progress. Open country, moving irresistibly towards, yearning for that moment when the concentration of farms and houses is such that it can justify the
existence of a shop and the history of the place can be said to have found its first chapter.

He strolls to his Anglia and drives to the shop to catch whatever there may be of the late-afternoon trade. The mayor returns to his office, more content from the labour that it took to dream up two words than the whole of the week’s paperwork. The two priests part at St Patrick’s, the vicar of St Matthew’s continuing on to his parish, passing the grand old nineteenth-century building that once housed the Girls’ Home and is now occupied by some government office or other. Mrs Webster sits alone in her dining room, absentmindedly taking in the stale whisky smells.

The day sparkles, as if in response to the birth that has just taken place in the committee room, to the phrase that will now define the year and the life of the suburb. The committee members go their separate ways, gazing at their world through the spectacles of the Key Term. All around them, all across the suburb, rich and profuse gardens of bright red, pink and yellow roses, geraniums and impatiens, hang over garden walls and fences; tennis courts and cricket fields echo with the gentle
pock-pock
of games past and present; the rattle of trains comes and goes; shop doors open and close; and each of the committee members takes it all into their lungs and limbs, this suburb of theirs, now
transformed into a grand achievement by those two words.

A grand tale, they are now a grand tale, calling — right down through the generations — for recognition. To the mayor, now easing into his chair, to Peter van Rijn, currently rearranging his shop window, to the two priests now back in their manses, their world has changed and they now look upon the perfectly functioning organism of the suburb with a new-found wonder. The straight line of History has led, and was always leading, to this day, and they are all lucky enough to be alive, right now, to greet the moment.