The Child in Time by Ian McEwan Page B

to her half, and talked earnestly, while her drink remained untouched. She was listening solemnly, plucking at the sleeve of her print dress, adjusting with unconscious precision the pretty clasp which kept hertrim, straight hair clear of her face. They touched hands and made determined, weak smiles; then the hands came apart and they spoke at once. The matter – for it was clearly one single subject – was not yet resolved.
    As far as Stephen could see, there were no other customers. The barman, a broad, slow man, had his back turned and was fiddling with something on a shelf. The obvious thing was to enter, buy a drink and take a closer look. The idea was unattractive. Stephen kept his hand on to the wall, which was warm and reassuring to the touch. Quite suddenly, with the transforming rapidity of a catastrophe, everything was changed. His legs weakened, a chill spread downwards through his stomach. He was looking into the eyes of the woman, and he knew who she was. She had glanced up in his direction. The man was talking, making an insistent point, while the woman continued to stare. Her face showed no curiosity or shock; she simply returned Stephen’s gaze as she listened to her partner. She nodded vaguely, glanced away to reply, and then looked again towards Stephen. But she could not see him. There was nothing to suggest she had registered him in any way at all. She was not ignoring him, she was looking through him at the trees across the road. She was not looking at all, she was listening. Absurdly, he raised his hand and made an awkward gesture, something between a wave and a salute. There was no response from the young woman who he knew, beyond question, was his mother. She could not see him. She was listening to his father speak – how he recognised that way his father had of making a point with an open hand – and could not see her son. A cold, infant despondency sank through him, a bitter sense of exclusion and longing.
    Perhaps he was crying as he backed away from the window, perhaps he was wailing like a baby waking in the night; to an observer he may have appeared silent and resigned. The air he moved through was dark and wet, hewas light, made of nothing. He did not see himself walk back along the road. He fell back down, dropped helplessly through a void, was swept dumbly through invisible curves and rose above the trees, saw the horizon below him even as he was hurled through sinuous tunnels of undergrowth, dank, muscular sluices. His eyes grew large and round and lidless with desperate, protesting innocence, his knees rose under him and touched his chin, his fingers were scaly flippers, gills beat time, urgent, hopeless strokes through the salty ocean that engulfed the treetops and surged between their roots; and for all the crying, calling sounds he thought were his own, he formed a single thought: he had nowhere to go, no moment which could embody him, he was not expected, no destination or time could be named; for while he moved forward violently, he was immobile, he was hurtling round a fixed point. And this thought unwrapped a sadness which was not his own. It was centuries, millennia old. It swept through him and countless others like the wind through a field of grass. Nothing was his own, not his strokes or his movement, not the calling sounds, not even the sadness, nothing was nothing’s own.

    When Stephen opened his eyes he was lying on a bed, Julie’s bed, under an eiderdown, clasping against his chest a tepid hot-water bottle. Across the little room, most of whose space was taken by the bed, was an open door to the bathroom from which rolled a cloud of steam, yellowish in the electric light, and the thunder of running water. He closed his eyes. This bed was a wedding gift from friends he had not seen in years. He tried to remember their names, but they were gone. In it, or on it, his marriage had begun and, six years later, ended. He recognised a musical creak when he moved his legs, he