The Time We Have Taken (7 page)

O
n evenings such as these, walking through a city park golden with autumn, he sees them as that rare thing — an old-fashioned couple in a radical age. Their old-worldliness is called innocence, and they take it with them wherever they go. At least that is the way he sees them on days such as these, when he can’t even conceive of her having shared herself with anybody else the way she does with him. He is hers, she is his. They are theirs: a conservative couple, strolling hand in hand, through the wrong world. Not that Madeleine would ever accept this if he were to tell her (and he keeps this observation to himself), for she is always making gentle fun of the fuddy-duddy
old man’s shops he goes to for his fuddy-duddy old man’s trousers. Can’t he just wear jeans? Does it always have to be fuddy-duddy old corduroys? So, on evenings such as these, when he seeks ways to frame their innocence, he privately pictures them like this — of the Age, but
not
children of the Age. And as much as the children of the Age might find their innocence amusing (he is from time to time the source of jest and fun), they are, nonetheless, drawn to it. They are drawn to it as, perhaps, travellers might be, looking back one last time upon a town or place they will never inhabit again. And, on days such as these, Michael and Madeleine are that place, and the amused eyes of the Age that look back upon them linger just that bit longer than amusement requires.

It is still early in the evening. Michael and Madeleine are walking through a city park. There is another couple beside them. They, this other couple, are children of the Age. They are fellow students, living in the same student house they have shared with Michael and a painter called Mulligan since their early student years. Mulligan lives downstairs; Michael and the couple with whom he and Madeleine are currently strolling all live upstairs. Michael scrutinises them, these children of the Age. They read the same books, smoke the same cigarettes, take the same drugs and may even think the same thoughts for all Michael
knows. And, like most children of the Age, they undress each other regularly, go to bed often, and copulate. In fact, they copulate very loudly. Michael knows this because their room, at the back of the house, is opposite his and he hears the sounds of their copulation often. In the household they are known as Bunny Rabbit and Pussy Cat. Mulligan, who seems to have no other name but Mulligan, christened them.

Bunny Rabbit’s hair is long and dark, and he has the kind of droopy, dark moustache that musicians in bands wear. He puts his long, thin legs into flared, blue jeans and casually throws what Michael intuitively knows are expensive cotton shirts over his bony torso. Michael never knew what a Brooks Brothers shirt was until he met Bunny Rabbit. Didn’t he know that Scott Fitzgerald wore Brooks Brothers shirts? No? Really? Well, now he would always know. Bunny Rabbit never consciously spoke down to Michael, and Michael never took offence. Bunny Rabbit spoke down to everyone. His father was, when it came to shirts, a sort of Gatsby. So when he goes home (rarely taking Pussy Cat, because Pussy Cat — like Michael — comes from the wrong side of life), he brings a shirt back with him because his father has a roomful.

Pussy Cat is what the Age calls beautiful. Long, dark brown hair, bright brown eyes that resemble a
fox more than a cat. Magnificent eyes that are constantly living in the wild. Her light, cheesecloth blouses are smoked in incense and she has the constant aroma of some exotic elsewhere about her. Michael has never met an actress, but she looks like one. In fact, she bears a striking resemblance to the heroine of a popular film of
Romeo and Juliet
who leans over balconies with provocative innocence and has entranced a whole generation of young Romeos such as Bunny Rabbit. Pussy Cat has that kind of beauty. If he wasn’t in love with Madeleine, Michael would fall in love with Pussy Cat, which would be a disaster because Pussy Cat only has eyes for her Bunny Rabbit. And Mulligan, too, for all his playful dismissiveness, concedes her beauty, even if it is couched in artistic terms such as bone structure and classical features. She is really Louise, Lou to everyone. He is Peter. Together they have adventures.

They are children of the Age for all this, but also for the way they look upon Michael and Madeleine, who are just about to leave their company at a fork in the path. Pussy Cat and Bunny Rabbit bid them farewell with amusement in their eyes.

‘Can’t wait to get at it?’ says Bunny Rabbit, with a twinkle.

Dark shadows fall across the golden lawn, the invisible evening life of the park — hunting, gathering, sleeping, fighting and copulating — goes
on all around them. The four of them are standing still, Madeleine staring down at the cinder path, Michael up at the trees that are humming with the sound of this secret life. He does not need to look at his friend to know what is in his eyes. And, while he idly scans the trees, he is asking himself why it is that his friend, and these children of the Age in general, should be so preoccupied with those who are not of the Age. On other days, his friends and their comments might bother him, but on days such as these when he sees himself and Madeleine as an old-fashioned couple out of joint with their time, actors on the wrong stage and in the wrong play and bringing with them the sensibilities of another age altogether, he is strangely unconcerned. Even superior. For, this sensibility that they bring with them, this innocence that does not yet copulate, they savour and explore in the same way that the children of the Age explore each other’s bodies. And, at such times, he would have them no other way. At such times, this unfashionable conservatism of theirs is a gift. It is an occasion — and one that will not come again — to discover and explore a way of being that the Age itself has discarded. Their gift is this chance to explore a lost sensibility, one that will only ever live on in isolated cases such as Michael and Madeleine. The Age has dispensed with it, and, having dispensed with it, can never have it back. If
Pussy Cat and Bunny Rabbit embody an age of release, Michael and Madeleine speak of an age of restraint.

And perhaps this is what moves Michael’s friends to play with them, the way the sophisticated inevitably play with the innocent. It is because the innocent stir in the sophisticated distant memories of other ways of being and feeling that the children of the Age — however much they may deny it — look upon them with longing disguised as amusement.

And it is while Michael is contemplating all of this that Madeleine looks up from the cinder path in response to Bunny Rabbit’s playful question, her face dramatically half lit in the fading autumn sun. Every gesture — the slightly raised eyebrow, the flick of the fringe across her forehead, the pursed lips, the defiant stare (eyes proud, like a servant turning upon a master and discovering for the first time how well she wears the look) — is perfect. She is her own melodrama. And those proud, defiant eyes are turned directly towards Bunny Rabbit, and whatever it was he was saying he is not saying any more because nobody is listening. Everybody is watching Madeleine. It is a look that commands total attention. A look that will not settle for anything less. A look that is breathtaking in the way it refuses to even countenance the possibility of anybody
looking elsewhere. In the political parlance of the day, it is a coup. Bunny Rabbit has been silenced, routed, and in a way that Michael has never seen Bunny Rabbit silenced before. And without a word being spoken. For Madeleine has drawn from within her a look that somehow makes everybody — Michael included — feel like children of a lesser age. Tatty. Plastic. No longer serious. She does this, Madeleine. Just when he thinks he knows her, she looks up with a defiance in her eyes that says ‘Enough!’ like she has just now, and he realises he doesn’t know her at all.

Madeleine possesses a beauty that is
not
of the Age. Not that it doesn’t call her beautiful, but it is not a beauty that the Age calls its own. Her beauty is distant, like old films. It is a beauty that the world might imagine touching, but only in the way that you can touch the celluloid — not the fact.

Then the look is gone, but its work is done. An eerie calm settles on the park. She has changed everything with a look. Bunny Rabbit and Pussy Cat no longer gaze upon her with playful amusement in their eyes but with a kind of marvel that wasn’t there before. Even trepidation, for they are almost wary of her as they quit the park and wave goodnight, leaving Michael and Madeleine alone. There was even, for a moment, the briefest of exchanges between Madeleine and Pussy Cat, a look that not only said
‘Well done’, but acknowledged some sort of understanding. Michael is left wondering just what it was that Pussy Cat was acknowledging in Madeleine that she had not seen until now. And he quickly concludes that what Pussy Cat saw in Madeleine was the kind of strength that comes from having sung songs of Experience, not Innocence. And his impulse, on evenings such as these, to see them as that rare thing, an old-fashioned couple in a radical age, looks silly.

M
idway through the next morning, as Madeleine goes about her duties at the hospital, and Bunny Rabbit and Pussy Cat either rise from or take to their bed, Michael is walking down the corridor of his old school. Even after a month of being back (and he never applied for his old school, but simply accepted his appointment as evidence of the invisible hand of Fate at work), there is still a distinct feeling of discomfort at walking through the door in front of him. The schoolboy Michael always waited outside that door marked ‘Staff Room’ all his schoolboy life. Michael the teacher enters. The years in between aren’t all that many, but they’re enough. Enough for the lifeblood of the corridors to have experienced a complete transfusion and now be populated with what
seem like intruders. Every now and then, on a bench here and there or a study that once served as a Senior Master’s office, he’ll see himself being detained for some minor misdemeanour, the nature of which has long since been forgotten by everyone concerned but which seemed so grave at the time.

It is one of those schools that the frontier suburbs got. Grey, flat, porous brick slapped onto match-stick frames. All of them flung up overnight. Built to fall down a generation later. In fact, in the years to come, when the generation that made the school a necessity has moved on and a new generation of young families follows the frontier further and yet further inland, the school will be bull-dozed and match-stick townhouses will spring up on the site in the place of a match-stick school.

Michael pauses before passing through the door, gazing down the corridor. The years in between aren’t all that much, but enough. Enough to have him musing on the difference between then and now. For there is a difference. A quality lacking in what he sees around him. He calls that quality Order, and everywhere, in the classrooms, corridors, playing fields and even in the streets surrounding the school, he sees the demise of the Order that characterised his years at the school. Something, long destined to cave in, was, in fact, in the process of caving in. And it wasn’t just the slapped-on grey bricks and match-stick frames of
the building itself that were falling apart; something else was.

And it is while Michael is contemplating what the decline of his old school might herald that he sees his old geography teacher turn the corner at the general office and into the A Block corridor; the tall, stooped, slow-moving figure of ‘Lurch’. With his hair still resolutely parted down the middle, a hint of greying sideburn being his only concession to the passage of time and the arrival of fashions other than those that fashioned him, he is a figure from another world. And he always was. Even then. He hasn’t changed, not much. But the corridor through which he moves has changed utterly. Whereas he once moved — and ‘moved’ is the word, it occurs to Michael, for Lurch never really walked, but progressed (like a warm or cold front, depending on the day) from one point to another — through these corridors in complete possession of them, he now wanders about them like a stranger. And with that vague, lost look in his eyes that strangers in a strange place have. The look that people have when the world around them moves on and they are left gazing about for signs of the Old Life to hang on to.

No student ever called him Lurch to his face back then (although word would undoubtedly have reached him, even though a character from an American television comedy would have meant
nothing to him), and the name has now fallen into disuse.

As he nears, Michael nods good morning, and Lurch looks at him at first wondering who on earth he is. Then there is recognition. The faintest hint of a smile, and Lurch is once again in possession of at least one small part of the corridor. And as he nods back it strikes Michael that he is one of those signs of the Old World that the Lurches of life, caught up in changing times, look for to hang on to, so that the world they find themselves inhabiting will not seem so strange after all.

There is even a touch of the old irony in the raised eyebrows and wrinkled forehead, as he tacitly shares his observations of the corridor with Michael. But it is communicated in such a way as to suggest that his trademark irony isn’t much called for these days. That, indeed, irony is wasted on days like these.

Michael leans his hand on the staff-room door, pushes it open, and watches as the tall, stooped figure enters the room, the stoop more pronounced than he remembered. Lurch, it seems to Michael, is a bit like an old vine that will, in the not-too-distant future, require the stake of a walking stick.

At his desk, Michael is thumbing through an English textbook that he used as a student when the headmaster taps him on the shoulder and drops a letter in front of him. It is, he says, slightly amused,
from something calling itself the Centenary Suburb Committee and they’re looking for someone who is young and who grew up in the suburb. With that the headmaster turns to leave, suggesting as he goes that there might be a bit of time off in this for the young Michael. Then he adds, correcting himself, a bit more time off, aware of the concessions the teacher in charge of the school’s timetable has made so that Michael might complete his studies.

Low clouds of cigarette smoke hang in the air, groups cluster about each other’s desks as if having been arranged that way by some resident Dutch master, and in the reflexive way of the herd that suggests this happens every day. And while he notes that he just might get to like these routines (for he has always been one for routines), he also senses that a bit of time off out there mightn’t be so bad. Even for this odd thing that calls itself the Centenary Suburb Committee.