The Child in Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

addresses, neatly typed and alphabetically ordered. The photographs – enlarged holiday snaps – he showed to anyone he could interest. The lists,compiled in the library from back numbers of local newspapers, were of parents whose children had died in the preceding six months. His theory, one of many, was that Kate had been stolen to replace a lost child. He knocked on doors and spoke to mothers who were first puzzled, then hostile. He visited child minders. He walked up and down the shopping streets with his photographs displayed. He loitered by the supermarket, and by the entrance to the chemist’s next door. He went further afield until his search area was three miles across. He anaesthetised himself with activity.
    He went everywhere alone, setting out each day shortly after the late winter dawn. The police had lost interest in the case after a week. Riots in a northern suburb, they said, were stretching their resources. And Julie stayed at home. She had special leave from the college. When he left in the morning she was sitting in the armchair in the bedroom, facing the cold fireplace. That was where he found her when he came back at night and turned on the lights.
    Initially there had been bustle of the bleakest kind: interviews with senior policemen, teams of constables, tracker dogs, some newspaper interest, more explanations, panicky grief. During that time Stephen and Julie had clung to one another, sharing dazed rhetorical questions, awake in bed all night, theorising hopefully one moment, despairing the next. But that was before time, the heartless accumulation of days, had clarified the absolute, bitter truth. Silence drifted in and thickened. Kate’s clothes and toys still lay about the flat, her bed was still unmade. Then, one afternoon, the clutter was gone. Stephen found the bed stripped and three bulging plastic sacks by the door in her bedroom. He was angry with Julie, disgusted by what he took to be a feminine self-destructiveness, a wilful defeatism. But he could not speak to her about it. There was no room for anger, no openings. They moved like figures in a quagmire, with no strength for confrontation. Suddenly their sorrowswere separate, insular, incommunicable. They went their different ways, he with his lists and daily trudging, she in her armchair, lost to deep, private grief. Now there was no mutual consolation, no touching, no love. Their old intimacy, their habitual assumption that they were on the same side, was dead. They remained huddled over their separate losses, and unspoken resentments began to grow.
    At the end of a day on the streets, when he turned for home, nothing pained Stephen more than the knowledge of his wife sitting in the dark, of how she would barely stir to acknowledge his return, and how he would have neither the good will nor the ingenuity to break through the silence. He suspected – and it turned out later he was correct – that she took his efforts to be a typically masculine evasion, an attempt to mask feelings behind displays of competence and organisation and physical effort. The loss had driven them to the extremes of their personalities. They had discovered a degree of mutual intolerance which sadness and shock made insurmountable. They could no longer bear to eat together. He ate standing up in sandwich bars, anxious not to lose time, reluctant to sit down and listen to his thoughts. As far as he knew she ate nothing at all. Early on he brought home bread and cheese which over the days quietly grew their separate moulds in the unvisited kitchen. A meal together would have implied a recognition and acceptance of their diminished family.
    It came to the point where Stephen could not bring himself to look at Julie. It was not only that he saw haggard traces of Kate or himself mirrored in her face. It was the inertia, the collapse of will, the near ecstatic suffering which disgusted him and threatened to undermine his efforts. He was going to find his daughter and