Timescape

of a time when the making of books was a signpost in an assumed march forward, a pressure on the future.

•  •  •

The crowd of fathers had a holiday air, chattering and laughing. A few kicked a soccer ball on the gray cobblestones. This was a lark, an event to raise money for the hobbling city government of Cambridge. An official had read about such a search in American cities, and last month London had staged one.

Into the sewers they descended, bright electric torches spiking through the murk. Beneath the scientific laboratories and industrial sites of town the stonework passages were large enough for a man to walk upright. Renfrew tugged the airmask tight against his face, smiling at Johnny through the transparent molded cup. Spring rains had swept clean; there was little stench. Their fellow hunters spilled past, buzzing with excitement.

Mercury was now exceedingly rare, commanding a thousand New Pounds per kilogram. In the gaudy mid- century times, commercial grade mercury had been poured down sinks and drains. It was cheaper then to throw out dirtied mercury and buy a fresh supply. The heaviest metal, it sought the lowest spots in the sewer system and pooled there. Even a liter recovered would justify the trouble.

They soon worked their way into the more narrow pipes, slipping away from the crowd. Their torches cast sparkling reflections from the wrinkled skin of the water caught in pools. “Hey, this way, Dad,” Johnny called. The acoustics of the tunnels gave each word a hollow center. Renfrew turned and abruptly slipped. He spilled into the scum of a standing pond, cursing. Johnny bent down. The torch’s cone caught a seam of tarnished quicksilver. Renfrew’s boot had snagged at a crack where two pipes butted unevenly. Mercury glowed as if alive beneath the filmed water. It gave off a warm, smudged glitter, a thin trapped snake worth a hundred guineas.

“A find! A find!” Johnny chanted. They sucked the metal into pressure bottles. Finding the luminous metal lifted their spirits; Renfrew laughed with gusty good humor. They walked on, discovering unexplored caves and dark secrets in the warrens, fanning the curving walls with yellow beams. Johnny discovered a high niche, scooped out and furnished with a moldy mattress. “Home of some layabout, I expect,” Renfrew murmured. They found candle stubs and frayed paperbacks. “Hey, this one’s from 1968, Dad,” Johnny said. It looked pornographic to Renfrew; he tossed it face down on the mattress. “Should be getting back,” he said.

They found an iron ladder, using the map provided. Johnny wriggled out, blinking in the late afternoon sunlight. They queued up to turn in their pint of the silvery stuff to the Hunt Facilitator. In line with current theory, Renfrew noted, social groupings were now facilitated, not led. Renfrew stood and watched Johnny talk and scuffle and go through the tentative approaching rituals with two other boys nearby in line. Already Johnny was getting beyond the age when parents deeply influenced him. From now on it was peer pressure and the universals: swacking the ball about in the approved manner; showing proper disdain for girls; establishing one’s buffer state role between the natural bullies and the naturally bullied; faking a certain coarse but necessarily vague familiarity with sex and the workings of those mysterious gummy organs, seldom seen but deeply sensed. Soon he would face the consuming problem of adolescence—how to have it off with some girl and thus pass through the flame into manhood, and yet avoid the traps that society laid in the way. Or perhaps this rather cynical view was outdated now. Maybe the wave of sexual freedom that had washed over earlier generations had made things easier. Somehow, though, Renfrew suspected otherwise. What was worse, he could think of nothing very straightforward he himself could hope to do about the matter. Perhaps relying on the intuition of the boy himself was the best path. So what guidance could he give Johnny? “See here, son, remember one thing—don’t take any advice.” He could see Johnny’s eyes widen and the boy reply, “But that’s silly, Daddy. If I take your advice, I’m doing the opposite of what you say.” Renfrew smiled. Paradoxes sprouted everywhere.

A small student band made a great noisy thing of the announced total, several kilograms in all. Boys cheered. A man nearby muttered, “Livin’ off a yes’day,” and Renfrew said drily, “Trapping right.” There was a feeling here of salvaging the lore and ore of the past, not making anything new. Like the country itself, he thought.

Bicycling home, Johnny wanted to stop and see the Bluebell Country Club, an unbearably cute name for an eighteenth-century stone cottage near the Cam. In it a Miss Bell kept a cat hotel, for owners who were away. Once Marjorie had adopted a disagreeable cat which Renfrew had finally lodged there permanently, not having the heart to simply throw the bugger in the Cam. Miss Bell’s rooms stank of cat piss and perpetual tubercular-class dampness. “No time,” Renfrew shouted to Johnny’s question and they pedaled on past the cat citadel. Afterward, Johnny was a bit slower than before, his face blank. Renfrew was at once sorry he had been gruff. He was having such moments more often lately, he realized. Perhaps in part his absence from home, working at the lab, made him acutely sensitive to lapsed closeness with Marjorie and the kids. Or perhaps there was a time in life when you realized dimly that you had become rather like your own parents, and that your reactions were not wholly original. The genes and environment had their own momentum.

Renfrew caught sight of an odd yellow cloud squatting on the horizon and remembered the summer afternoons he and Johnny had spent watching the cloud sculptors work above London. “Look there!” he called, pointing. Johnny dutifully gave the yellow cloud a glance. “Angels getting ready to piss,” Renfrew explained, “as m’old man used to say.” Bucked up by this bit of family history, they both smiled.

They stopped at a bakery in King’s Parade, Fitzbillies. Johnny became a starving English schoolboy bravely carrying on. Renfrew allowed as how he could have two, no more. The news-agent’s a door down proclaimed on a chalkboard the dreadful news that The Times Literary Supplement had gone belly-up, an incoming datum which Renfrew found only slightly less interesting than the banana production of Borneo. The headlines gave no clue as to whether financial strains had caused the foldup, or—what seemed more likely to Renfrew by a long measure—whether it was the dearth of worthwhile books.

•  •  •

Johnny banged into the house, provoking an answering cry from his sister. Renfrew followed, feeling a bit clapped out from the cycling, and strangely depressed. He sat in his living room for a moment trying for once to think of nothing whatever, and failing. Half the room seemed totally unfamiliar to him. Antique glass paperweight, suspiciously tarnished candlestick, frilly lampshade with flower on it, Gauguin reprint, whimsical striped china pig on the hearth, brass rubbing of a medieval lady, beige china cat ashtray with poetic quotation written in flowing script round the rim. Hardly a square centimeter hadn’t been made sodding nice. About the time these registered, the persistent small tinny voice of Marjorie’s marauding radio got through to him, on again about the Nicaragua thing. The Americans were again trying to get approval from the motley crew of neighboring governments for a sea-level canal. To compete with the Panamanian one would seem dead easy, considering it was jammed up half the year. Renfrew remembered a BBC interview on just this subject, in which the sod from Argentina or somewhere had gone on at the American ambassador about why the Americans were called the Americans and those south of the USA not. The logic gradually unfurled to include the assumption that since the USAians had appropriated the American name, they would thus appropriate any new canal The ambassador, not wise to the ways of the telly, had replied with a rational explanation. He noted that no South American nation included the word “America” in its name, and thus had no strong claim to it. The triviality of this point in the face of an avalanche of psychic energy from the Argentinian had put the ambassador far down in total points by the time the viewers phoned in their opinions of the discussion. Why, the ambassador fellow had scarcely smiled or mugged at the camera, or smacked a fist onto the table before him. How could he expect to have any media impact whatever?

He went in to find Marjorie rearranging the preserve jars for what appeared to be a third time. “Somehow, you know, it doesn’t look square,” she said to him with a distracted irritation. He sat at the kitchen table and poured himself some coffee, which, as expected, tasted rather like dog’s fur. It always did lately. “I’m sure it’s true,” he murmured. But then he studied her bustling form as she hoisted the cylinders of pale amber, and indeed, the shelves did seem at a tilt. He had made them on a precise radial line extending dead to the center of the planet, geometrically impeccable and absolutely rational and quite beside the point. Their home was warped and swayed by the times it had passed through. Science came to nought in these days. This kitchen was the true local reference frame, the Galilean invariant. Yes. Watching his wife turn and mix the jars, Prussian rigidities standing on slabs of pine, he saw that it was the shelves which stood aslant now; the walls were right.

CHAPTER ELEVEN