Timescape

CHAPTER TEN

JOHN RENFREW SPENT SATURDAY MORNING PUTTING up new shelving on the long wall in their kitchen. Marjorie had been after him for months to do it. Her bland asides about where the planes of wood should go “when you get around to it” had slowly accreted into a pressing weight, an agreed duty, unavoidable. The markets were open only a few days each week—“to avoid fluctuations in supply” was the common explanation, rendered on the nightly news—and with the power cuts, refrigerating was impossible. Marjorie had turned to putting up vegetables and was amassing a throng of thick-lipped jars. They waited in cardboard boxes for the promised shelving.

Renfrew assembled his tools systematically, with as much care as he took in the laboratory. Their house was old and leaned slightly, as though blown by an unfelt wind. Renfrew found that his plumb line, nailed to the wainscotting, weaved a full three inches out from the scuffed molding. The floor sagged with an easy fatigue, like a well-used mattress. He stepped back from the tilting walls, squinted, and saw that the lines of his home were askew. You put down the money on a place, he reflected, and you get a maze of jambs and beams and cornices, all pushed slightly out of true by history. A bit of settling in that corner, a diagonal misaimed there. He had a sudden memory of when he had been a boy, looking up from a stone floor at his father, who squinted at the plaster ceiling as if to judge whether the roof would fall.

As he studied the problem his own children caromed through the house. Their feet thumped on the margins of polished wood that framed the thin rugs. They reached the front door and ricocheted outside in a game of tag. He realized that to them he probably had that same earnest wrenched look of his father, face skewed in concentration.

He arrayed his tools and began to work. The piles of lumber on the back porch gradually dwindled as he cut them into a suitable lattice. To fit the thin planks at the roof he had to make oblique cuts with a rip saw. The wood splintered under his lunging thrusts, but kept to line. Johnny appeared, tired of tag with his older sister. Renfrew set him to work fetching tools as they were needed. Through the window a tinny radio announced that Argentina had joined the nuclear club. “What’s a nuclear club, Daddy?” Johnny asked, eyes big. “People who can drop bombs.” Johnny fingered a wood file, frowning at the fine lines that rubbed his thumb. “Can I join?” Renfrew paused, licked his lips, peered into a sky of carbon blue. “Only fools get to join,” he said, and set back to work.

The radio detailed a Brazilian rejection of preferential trade agreements, which would have established a Greater American Zone with the US. There were reports that the Americans had tied the favor of cheaper imports to their aid on the southern Atlantic bloom problem. “A bloom, Daddy? How can the ocean do like a flower?” Renfrew said gruffly, “A different kind of bloom.” He hoisted boards under his arm and took them inside.

He was sanding down the ripped edges when Marjorie came in from the garden for inspection. She had mercifully taken the battery-operated radio into the garden with her. “Why’s it jut out at the base?” she asked by way of greeting. She put the radio on the kitchen table. It seemed to go with her everywhere these days, Renfrew noted, as though she could not bear to be alone with a bit of quiet.

“The shelves are straight. It’s the walls that are tilted.”

“They look odd. Are you sure… ?”

“Have a go.” He handed her his carpenter’s level. She put it gingerly on a rough-cut board. The bubble bobbed precisely into the place between the two defining lines. “See? Dead level.”

“Well, I suppose,” Marjorie reluctantly conceded.

“Worry not, your jars aren’t going to topple off.” He put several jars on a shelf. This ritual act completed the job. The boxy frame stood out, functional pine against aged oak paneling. Johnny stroked the sheets of wood tentatively, as though awed that he had had a hand in making this wood lattice.

“Think I’ll be off to the lab for a bit,” Renfrew said, collecting his rip saw and chisels.

“Steady on, there’s more fathering needs doing. You’re to take Johnny on the mercury hunt.”

“Oh hell, I forgot. Look, I’d thought—”

“You’d put in an afternoon tinkering,” Marjorie finished for him with mild reproof. “Fraid not.”

“Well look, I’ll just go round to pick up some notes, then, on Markham’s work.”

“Best make it on the way with Johnny. Can’t you leave off for a weekend, though? I thought you had settled things yesterday.”

“We worked out a message with Peterson. Ocean stuff, for the most part. We’re letting pass the lot on mass fermentation of sugar cane for fuel.”

“What’s wrong with that? Burning alcohol is cleaner than that wretched petrol they’re selling now.”

Renfrew scrubbed his hands in the washbasin. “True enough. The snag is that the Brazilians cut back so much of their jungle for the sugar cane fields. That lowers the number of plants which can absorb carbon dioxide from the air. Trace that effect round a bit and it explains the shifts in the world climate, greenhouse effect and rainfall and so on.”

“The Council decided that?”

“No, no, research teams worldwide did. The Council simply make policy to offset problems. The UN mandate, extraordinary powers, and all that.”

“Your Mr. Peterson must be a very influential man.”

Renfrew shrugged. “He says it’s pure luck the United Kingdom has a strong voice. The only reason we do is that we’ve still got research teams working on highly visible problems. Otherwise, we’d have a seat appropriate to Nigeria or the Viet Union or some other swacking nobody.”

“What you’re doing is—what did you say, ‘visible,’ isn’t it?”

Renfrew chuckled. “No, it’s bloody transparent. Peterson’s deflected some help my way, but he’s doing it as sort of a personal lark, I’ll wager.”

“That’s very nice of him.”

“Nice?” Renfrew dried his hands, meditating. “He’s interested intellectually, I can tell that, though he’s no soft of intellectual in my book. It’s a fair trade, I’d say. He’s getting some amusement from it, and I’m getting his pound notes.”

“But he must think you’ll succeed.”

“Must he? Maybe. I’m not sure I do myself.”

Marjorie seemed shocked. “Then why do it?”

“It’s good physics. I don’t know if we can alter the past. No one does. Physics is in chaos about this thing. If there weren’t a virtually complete shutdown of research, chaps would be swarming over the problem. I’ve got a chance here to do the definitive experiments, unit’s the reason. Science, luv.”

Marjorie frowned at this but said nothing. Renfrew surveyed his handiwork. She began busily ranking jars on the shelves. Each had a rubber collar and metal sealing clamps. Inside swam vague blobs of vegetables. Renfrew found the sight distinctly unappetizing.

Marjorie abruptly turned from her work, her face knitted with concern, and said, “You’re deceiving him, aren’t you?”

“Na, luv, I’m—what’s the phrase?—keeping his expectations high.”

“He expects—”

“Look, Peterson’s interested in the problem. I’m not responsible for guessing his true motivations. Christ, you’ll have him on the couch babbling about his early childhood next.”

“I’ve never met the man,” she said stiffly “Right, see, this conversation has no basis.”

“It’s you we’re properly talking about. You—”

“Hold on. The thing you don’t realize, Marj old lass, is that nobody really knows anything about these experiments. You can’t accuse me of false adverts yet. And for that matter, Peterson seemed as concerned as I was with the interference we’re getting, so maybe I misread him.”

“Someone’s interfering?”

“No, no, something is. A lot of incoming noise. I’ll filter it out, though. I planned to work on that very point this afternoon.”

Marjorie said firmly, “The mercury hunt.”

She clicked on the radio, which blared to a jingle, “Your ho-ney is mo-ney, in the new job-sharing plant That’s right, a couple splitting one job can help the current—”

Renfrew switched it off. “Be good to get out of the house,” he said pointedly.

He pedaled up to the Cav with Johnny. They passed farm buildings taken over by squatters and Renfrew grimaced to himself. He had gone round to several, trying to find the couple who had frightened Marjorie. They’d given him a surly look and a rude off-wi’-ya. The constable was no help either.

As he passed the slumped walls of a barn Renfrew smelled the sour tang of coal smoke. Someone inside was burning the outlawed low-quality grade, but there was no bluish plume for the constable to trace. That was fairly typical. They’d spend good money on a device to suppress the visible emission, then quickly make up the cost in cheap fuel. Renfrew had heard otherwise respectable people bragging about doing precisely that, like children getting away with some delicious vice their parents had forbidden. They were the sort who threw their bottles and tins into great ruddy heaps down the woods, too, rather than trouble to recycle. He sometimes thought that the only people who obeyed the regs were the dwindling middle classes.

At the Cav, Johnny wandered the shadowy corridors while Renfrew picked up some notes. Johnny prevailed on him to take a quick ride up to the Institute for Astronomy, just across the Madingley Road. The boy had played there often and now that it was closed seldom saw it. There were big potholes in the Madingley where the tanks had come in to quell the riot in ’96. Renfrew tipped into one and got a stain of mud on his trouser leg. They pedaled by the long low office building of the Institute, with its outsized yawning windows, a once popular American style from an oil-rich era. They pumped up to the main building, a nineteenth-century pile of tan sandstone with its antiquated astronomical dome atop floors housing the library, offices, and the star chart bays. They glided by the little 36-incher dome on the way and then past the machine shop sheds, where the windows had been starred by the occasional passing sod. Their tires spat gravel as they wheeled up the long driveway. The bright white casements of the windows framed a black interior. Renfrew was turning in the circular drive to go back down the slope to Madingley when the big front doors lurched open. A short man peered out. He was wearing a formal suit with waistcoat and regimental tie, well knotted. He was sixtyish and studied them over bifocals. “You’re not the constable,” the man said in reedy surprise.

Renfrew, thinking this point obvious, stopped but said nothing. “Mr. Frost!” Johnny cried. “Remember me?”

Frost frowned, then brightened. “Johnny, yes, haven’t seen you for years. You came to our Observer’s Night regular as the stars.”

“Until you stopped giving them,” the boy accused.

“The Institute closed,” Frost said apologetically, bending over at the waist to bring his face to Johnny’s level. “There was no money.”

“You’re still here.”

“So I am. Our electricity is cut off, however, and you can’t have the public in where they could fall in the dark.”

Renfrew broke in with, “I’m John Renfrew, by the way—Johnny’s dad.”

“Yes. I thought you might be the constable. I sent word this morning,” Frost said, pointing at a nearby window. The frame was smashed. “They simply kicked it in.”

“They get anything?”

“A great lot. I tried to have those replaced, back when we put in the wire mesh on the corridor inside. I told them the library was an open invitation. But would they listen to me, the mere curator? No, silly, of course not.”

“Did they take the telescope?” Johnny asked.

“No, that’s worthless, very nearly. They nicked the books.”

“Then I can still look through the telescope?”

“What books?” Renfrew could not imagine that academic references were of much value now.

“The collector’s items, of course,” Frost said with the proper pride of a curator. “Took a second edition Kepler, a second Copernicus, the original of the seventeenth-century astrometrical atlas—the lot, really. They were specialists, they were. Skipped the newer tomes. They also knew the fifth editions from the third, without taking them out of their protective sleeves. Not so easily done, when you’re working in a dead hurry and with a pocket torch.”

Renfrew was impressed, not the least because this was the first time he had ever heard anyone use the word “tomes” in conversation. “Why were they in a hurry?”

“Because they knew I would return. I had gone out at dusk for my evening constitutional, to the war cemetery and back.”

“You live here?”

“When the Institute closed I had nowhere to go.” Frost drew himself up primly. “There are several of us. Old astronomers, mostly, turned out by their colleges. They live down the other building—it’s warmer in winter. These bricks hold the chill. I tell you, there was a time when the colleges cared for their old Fellows. When Boyle founded the Institute we had everything. Now it’s into the dustbin with the lot, never mind the past, it’s the current crisis that matters and—”

“I say, that’s the constable coming there.” Renfrew pointed, seizing on the distant figure on a bicycle to cut off the stream of academic lament. He had heard much the same lines so often over the last few years that they had ceased to have any effect aside from boredom. The arrival of the constable, puffing and drawn, led Frost to produce the one volume the thieves hadn’t made off with, a late edition Kepler. Renfrew studied the book for a moment while Frost went on to the constable, demanding a general alert to catch the thieves on the roads if possible. The pages were dry and brittle, crackling as Renfrew turned them. From long exposure to the new methods of making books he had forgotten how a line of type could raise an impression on the other side of the page, as if the press of history was behind each word. The heavily leaded letters were broad and the ink a deep black. The ample margins, the precise celestial drawings, the heft of the volume in his hands, all seemed to speak 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.