The Child in Time Read Online Free PDF

murder her abductor. He had only to act on the correct impulse and show the photograph to the right person and he would be led to her. If there were more daylight hours, if he could resist the temptation which was growing each morning to keep hishead under the blankets, if he could walk faster, maintain his concentration, remember to glance behind now and then, waste less time eating sandwiches, trust his intuition, go up side streets, and move faster, cover more ground, run even, run …
    Parmenter was standing, faltering as he clipped his silver pen into the inside pocket of his jacket. As he made towards the door which Canham was holding open for him, the old man smiled a general farewell. The committee members shuffled their papers and began the customary, measured conversations which would see them out of the building. Stephen walked down the hot corridor with the academic who had been so convincingly voted down. His name was Morley. In his civilised, tentative manner he was explaining how the discredited alphabet systems of the past made his work all the harder. Stephen knew that soon he would be alone again. But even now he could not help drifting off, could not prevent himself reflecting that the situation had deteriorated to such an extent that he felt no particular emotion when he returned from his searching one late February afternoon and found Julie’s armchair empty. A note on the floor gave the name and phone number of a retreat in the Chilterns. There was no other message. He wandered about the flat, turning on lights, staring in at neglected rooms, little stage sets about to be struck.
    Finally he arrived back at Julie’s chair, loitered by it a moment, his hand resting lightly on its back as if calculating the odds of some dangerous act. At last he stirred himself, took two paces round the chair and sat down. He stared into the dark grate where spent matches lay at odd angles by a piece of tin foil; minutes went by, time in which to feel the chair’s bunched material yield Julie’s contours for his own, empty minutes like all the others. Then he slumped, he was still for the first time in weeks. He remained that way for hours, all through the night, sometimes dozing briefly, when awake never stirring or shiftinghis gaze from the grate. All the while, it seemed, there was something gathering in the silence about him, a slow surge of realisation mounting with a sleek, tidal force which did not break or explode dramatically but which bore him in the small hours to the first full flood of understanding of the true nature of his loss. Everything before had been fantasy, a routine and frenetic mimicry of sorrow. Just before dawn he began to cry, and it was from this moment in the semi-darkness that he was to date his time of mourning.

Two
    Make it clear to him that the clock cannot be argued with and that when it is time to leave for school, for Daddy to go to work, for Mummy to attend to her duties, then these changes are as incontestable as the tides.
    The Authorised Childcare Handbook , HMSO
    That Stephen Lewis had a lot of money and was famous among school children was the consequence of a clerical error, a moment’s inattention in the operation of the internal post at Gott’s which had brought a parcel of typescript on to the wrong desk. That Stephen no longer mentioned this error – it was many years old now – was partly due to the royalty cheques and advances which had flowed from Gott’s and his many foreign publishers ever since, and partly to the acceptance of fate which comes with one’s first ageing; in his mid-twenties it had seemed arbitrarily humorous that he should be a successful writer of children’s books for there were still many other things he might yet have become. These days he could not imagine being anything else.
    What else could he be? The old friends of his student days, the aesthetic and political experimenters, the visionary drug-takers, had all settled for even less. A