Read Online The Time We Have Taken by Steven Carroll - Free Book Online
Authors: Steven Carroll
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removes them from the hangers, her dresses, and folds them one on top of the other, year upon year upon year. And when she’s arrived at the present she closes the wardrobe. The dresses fit neatly into a suitcase. Outside, the afternoon is quietly slipping towards twilight, and the sounds of children playing the last of the day’s games and young families (the names of many she’s not yet familiar with) rise from the street. In the morning she’ll drop the suitcase off at the local opportunity shop in the Old Wheat Road. And perhaps, in time, a young wife will come along and slip into the skin that Rita once wore.
10.
Life Turns Another 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 theafternoon 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 strangerswhose 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
10.
Life Turns Another 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 theafternoon 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 strangerswhose 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
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