The Child in Time by Ian McEwan

minor road. But it was to remain inaccessible, a time of mental white noise. He was aware perhaps of his wet clothes. He might have considered how he would set about drying them when he arrived.
    He was all the more vulnerable then to what happened when he emerged from the plantation and took in his new surroundings. He stood still, transfixed. A quick, breathy sigh escaped him. The road made a right-angled bend, and stretched away from him roughly along the line of the path. A small convoy of cars passed and seemed to make no sound. He knew this spot, knew it intimately, as if over a long period of time. The trees around him were unfolding, broadening, blossoming. One visit in the remote past would not account for this sense, almost a kind of ache, of familiarity, of coming to a place that knew him too, and seemed, in the silence that engulfed the passing cars, to expect him. What came to him was a particular day, a day he could taste. Here it was, just as it should be, the heavy, greenish air of a wet day in early summer, the misty, tranquil rain, the heavy drops which formed on and fell from the unblemished horse chestnut leaves, the sense of the trees being magnified, and purified by a rain so fine it displaced the air. It was on just such a day, he knew, that this place gained its importance.
    He stood still, afraid that movement would destroy the spaciousness, the towering calm he felt about him, the vague longing in him. He had never been here before, not as a child, not as an adult. But this certainty was confused by the knowledge that he had imagined it just like this. And he had no memory of imagining it at all. With this, he knew that if he stepped from the grass verge and looked to his left he would see a phone box and, opposite, a pub set back in a gravel car-park. He went forward quickly.
    He had to step out into the middle of the road before he could see round its curve. It was the way the compact, red-brick building fulfilled his expectations that gave him the first touch of fear. It was happening too quickly. How could he have expectations without memory? He was a hundred yards away with a three-quarters view of the façade. The well-kept building looked as it should. It wasa simple late-Victorian rectangular structure with a sloping red-tiled roof, and a back-addition which gave the whole the shape of the letter T. Out the back there was a derelict, once white caravan, now a potting shed. Some dishcloths were out to dry on a sagging line. At the front of the pub, to one side of the front porch, was a broken but usable wooden bench.
    It all conformed. Its familiarity mocked him. A high, free-standing white post supported a sign which announced with picture and words, The Bell. The name meant nothing to him. He stood for many minutes looking, tempted to turn back, come another time and explore more closely. But it was not just a place he was being offered, it was a particular day, this day. He could taste the gravel’s dustiness released by rain. He was aware that the gentle, soaking spray had produced around him another countryside of once common trees – elms, chestnuts, oaks, beeches – old giants lost to the cash-crop plantations, magnificent trees whose ascendancy over the landscape was restored, settled cumuli of foliage rolling unhindered towards the North Downs.
    Stephen stood on the edge of a minor road in Kent on a wet day in mid-June, attempting to connect the place and its day with a memory, a dream, a film, a forgotten childhood visit. He wanted a connection which might begin a process of explanation and allay his fear. But the call of the place, its knowingness, the longing it evinced, the rootless significance, all this made it seem quite certain, even before he could tell himself why, that the loudness – this was the word he fixed on – of this particular location had its origins outside his own existence.
    He waited for fifteen minutes, then he began to walk slowly in the direction of The