TIME-FLIES

‘There’s no one to ease my passage…or make me a cup of tea.’ Helen said, phoning from the bath. Her friends all protested. They were used to her mock melodrama and splashes.
Helen was a lady who lunched with a vengeance – sweet wines, Queen of Puddings – yet remained trim: a sharp-breasted blonde with only a hint of dye. She liked to keep busy, but worried she was wasting time. Colin had finally moved the last of his boxes out of the attic on Sunday and already she had taken up archery. She looked upon this new period of her life as midwinter spring. Almond trees turned pink in warm December, but then brown in the sudden frost.
The personals were full of coded messages about fireside chats and country walks, men who appreciated the finer things in life (i.e, bottle blondes and dirty weekends in Vienna as she’d learnt to her cost). In the Informer, though, was a cryptic message: TIME FLIES. YOU CAN’T. THEY FLY TOO FAST. FLY WITH ME. ‘Time-flies’? What on earth could they be?
After her second coffee, she realised that ‘time’ was a verb, a command to measure the wingbeats of flies with a stop-watch! She was wary of anyone who professed ‘GSOH’ or a love of the creative arts, but here, surely, was a sieze-the-day sensibility that matched her own. She immediately replied.

Mr Carradine had suggested they meet at the café in the park, which Helen thought an excellent omen. This park was criss-crossed with all the footprints of her past. She had ‘coo-cooed’ her first words in imitation of the wood pigeons in the beeches and spent childhood summers lying on the North Lawn under the catlapa tree, lulled by the long arms of the frisbee players. More colourful than a medieval manuscript the park’s animals were jumbled together: black rabbits foraged alongside peacocks and pelicans, a solitary tortoise grazing between palm trees and pampas grass looked up as she hurried past.
‘You must be Helen…’
Mr Carradine with pleasing formality didn’t offer his first name. He was tall and walked between the chairs with shoulders back. Black hair contrasted with almost-childish pale skin. They sat down. He bought coffee and cakes. He was both a good listener and honest about himself. He too had been through a painful break-up, and, if reticent over details, that only showed sensitivity to her and to himself. He told her of a shop on Museum Street, a side-line in Egyptian antiquities and scent bottles. She sensed door-opening possibilities.
‘You’re very much one for golden moments, aren’t you?’ he said at one point.
‘How clever of you!’

‘Have you ever read that poem by Edward Thomas…?’ And he began to recite it. ‘“ The glory of the beauty of the morning, …”’ Worried that she wouldn’t understand it or have anything interesting to say, Helen couldn’t concentrate. ‘“… How dreary-swift, with naught to travel to/ Is Time? I cannot bite the day to the core.’”
“I sometimes think I lack a core.’
But he wasn’t prepared to follow that up. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s walk.’

Footsteps seemed to follow them along the paths. ‘We’re being chased,’ Helen said. They turned and watched yellow leaves like smoked kippers skittering after them. Partly in sympathy, partly showing off, she began to dance. When he didn’t respond, she said, ‘My ex always used to say I had a little girl doppleganger...’
‘This is quite a place for doppelgangers – and memorial benches.’ Mr Carradine pointed to one. ‘Soon they’ll outnumber the living.’
‘Tell me about the dopplegangers…’
‘Last century, Lady Helen Rich met her double on Christmas morning. She died of smallpox soon after. Look, here come ours.’
Helen clung to Mr Carradine’s arm through the blue cashmere of his overcoat. The couple who approached appeared for a moment to be mirror images: the taller dark-haired man and the small blonde woman. They turned out to be adolescents, though, pierced with studs. Helen felt their vitality and watched their savage uncoordinated caresses. Mr Carradine seemed embarrassed, at which she smiled. He told her of the chiff-chaff and that the woods were good for firecrest.
‘You can get lost in here,’ he said.

He knew a lot about leaves, and explained that their crazy red colour in autumn was due to sugars fermenting beneath their surface. ‘It’s a bumper crop...’ She felt the blood warming her cheeks, and marvelled at Mr Carradine’s waxiness. He seemed impervious to fresh air, though wonderfully thin-skinned to her
‘I’m a product of English teatime,’ she said. She wanted to tell him you either set your watch by Greenwich Mean Time or English Teatime. English Teatime was a lake of pure time, there were no train whistles or time-tables just a stream of liquid time pouring from the teapot’s spout. She remembered lying on a lawn, mown in green stripes, wriggling her toes luxuriously in darned socks. She was between possibilities, the moment opened up like the fields stretching beyond the flower border.
‘Back then everything felt so…’
‘Afternoonish?’ Volunteered Mr Carradine.
‘That’s it! We laid our tea cups on the lawn like marble monuments. Stonehenge. And it was ancient grass. Not these bits of swiss roll off the back of a lorry.’
‘I suppose the light was different too.’
‘It went on and on into long evenings,’ Helen trailed off as she lifted her head up and watched sunlight striking golden-green high up in the canopy.
‘I don’t want you to think I’m too golden momenty,’ she said, ‘but this afternoon would be utterly perfect if only I didn’t keep seeing so many single magpies.’

They stood by Lord Holland’s statue.
‘Are you any good at Roman numerals?’ Mr Carradine said.
Why can’t you kiss me, Helen thought, and stop being so bloody instructive. She still smarted from the touch of his hand on her back where her blouse felt damp. In the nursery they had once had a jelly mould of a human hand, little clots of orange nerve-endings quivering in its gelatine fingers. She’d loved slicing the fingers off one by one and stretched out the meal as long as possible until finally her mother cleared away the tea things. Now the clamminess of the day and her expectations made her wonder whether her body was see-through. There was something gross and electric in Mr Carradine’s touch, shredded tangerine lighting up her transparent mass. But it was more than lust. She trembled when he moved closer.
The gap between them sucked with giddy sweetness, and he swooped down for a kiss. The puffed pressure of his lips, a blackbird’s lucidity from a tree – the continuous now stretched on forever. She swam in an endless present of sky and trees, a reservoir of liquid time. Until the seconds separated again – the clock face hardened.
‘But this is ridiculous,’ said Helen catching her breath, ‘I don’t even know your name…’
‘David,’ he said, ‘David Carradine.’
They kissed again with adolescent vitality, twisting and twining. She thought of his shop in Museum street with its Egyptian art and dark profile eyes painted on papyrus. The tinkling of their belts sounded like thousands of tiny scent bottles.
‘David…’ she said.
‘Don’t,’ he said and enfolded her in his soft blue coat.

The afternoon light had the special clarity of childhood. A silver-grey light which had once shone into her pram now lit up the tiny, low-growing clumps of yew abandoned in the Dutch garden like stray Pekinese. The wishbone arch of the tower and the balustraded brick wall, which threw back her laughter, formed a metaphysical puzzle that was just beyond understanding: it trembled in the haze.
‘Do you believe in God?’ Mr Carradine said.
‘No, but I’m superstitious…and you too.’ She pointed at Mr Carradine’s bracelet- an amulet against the evil eye.
‘Would you like it?’ He fastened it round her wrist.
He steered her away from the sun-dial where an early, hungover bee stumbled across the slate.
‘I feel so alive,’ but even as she said it she doubted that she did. ‘Hard to live in the moment…like a fly bumping into a window, but today,’ and here she squeezed his hand, ‘I’ve broken through.’
‘I like to think,’ he said, ‘that there only is the moment - a live-long minute.’
‘Oh look,’ said Helen, ‘there are our lovers…’
They were sitting on a bench by the high banks of lavender, except it wasn’t quite them. Perhaps it was their parents. The faces were similar but had filled out, the piercings were gone and the man’s hair had crept back over his forehead.

From the steps of the open-air theatre, a man’s baritone drifted through the trees and mingled with peacock cries. It’s not the opera season, thought Helen. Her legs felt stiff, and she was grateful for Mr Carradine’s guiding arm as he led her up the slope to the catalpa tree.
Whippets zoomed across the North Lawn where, in long-ago adolescence, Helen had first fallen in love. Since then it had sometimes been too painful to walk among the wooing couples. Desire-lines were seared across the grass where lovers had chosen the quickest route into the woods and turned the turf to mud. Today it was as green as a nursery rhyme. As if he sensed she was preoccupied, Mr Carradine made little clucking noises with his tongue.
She clutched him tighter as they passed the tar-stained catalpa tree: the trunk bleached white, like a reluctant tooth, it could not be drawn from the ground.
‘I used to live for intensity…’
Mr Carradine stifled a yawn.
‘Am I boring you? I am!’
‘Not at all. Some air’s trapped in my jaw.’
Mr Carradine rubbed his jaw and Helen felt for the first time he’d struck a wrong note.
‘I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t enjoy it,’ he said and stuck out his lower lip. ‘You’re like me. Some days we’re full to overflowing like teapots.’
He became playful. Catlike, he rubbed his face against the lavender border. Helen forgot her misgivings and joined in but there was a stiffness to her movements; her back ached when she stooped to sniff the lavender
‘I want to dance and be in it as fully as those whippets…’
‘Woof! Woof!’ He said and capered across the lawn.
‘Another now is then,’ said Helen quoting one of her teenage poems.
‘Another now is now,’ he replied with a mock bow.
A boy shouted. Mr Carradine leapt and twisted in the air like a terrier. Catching a frisbee, he aimed it perfectly at the brown legs of a sunbather. It skimmed her legs before soaring into the sky.

They were parallel to the picket gate that led between narrow walls to the high street. Helen remembered she had lots to do: there was a salmon to pick up for the archery club dinner and a visit to the picture framers. She didn’t want to leave but after the joy of the North Lawn she felt that the moment could not become any more golden.
‘Mr Carradine, David, it’s been such a lovely walk … we must do it again…’
His face had gone blank with disappointment. Couldn’t he understand that leaving now would leave it as bliss? Otherwise the intensity would ebb. Faint traffic sounds reached her as she stared on into Mr Carradine’s unfocussed brown eyes.
‘Look,’ said Mr Carradine, ‘I’ve not seen that before.’
A massive pair of scissors was mounted on a plinth by the railings. The bronze blades caught the sunlight and cast little golden coins in the ivy. Then he was kissing her again, such heavy kisses like drowsy flies under a laburnum, and her head was full of summer sounds: insect life and the drone of a distant lawnmower.

In the woods the sky was overcast, what Mr Carradine called ‘spectral’, though she preferred ‘pewter’. Spectral wasn’t a colour - more a feeling. There weren’t any leaves now and the ones that remained were soft as tissue, the papery flesh had come away leaving fishbone veins.
‘I can’t keep up, David… please slow down…David, wait!’ Helen hurried breathlessly behind and laddered her stocking on a bramble.
There seemed to be more and more memorial benches crouched on bended legs between the trees. The prams had all left and the dog-walkers were gone. She felt the chill in her bones, and trudged through mud. The wind was getting up and it shook the trees so hard that their shadows scuttled back and forth across the path. She caught up with Mr Carradine and threaded her arm through his but he didn’t respond – his face glowed with the unreality of a paper lantern.
Seasons swept in wide arcs above her head as if being brushed by a broom and the brush sought out the furthest scraps of sky.
They stood once more by Lord Holland’s statue, but Lord Holland was gone, his gleaming bronze head and mossy high-backed chair had been replaced by a dwarf in a wheelchair. The inscription read: Disability is your problem. Not mine. Get over it.
Mr Carradine kissed her on the forehead.
‘Goodbye, Helen,’ he said.

Helen rested on the bridge, feeling hot and exhausted. A long day, and she had greedily bitten into its core -- now tasted the bitterness of pips. Mr Carradine had left her without even a phone number but she felt full. One of those bone china teapots stewing scented twigs. She exhaled steam from her nostrils and the smell of his shaving cream. His kiss glowed, lips pressing down on the dark air.
Breathing heavily, she stared into the dark green water. Liver-spotted chestnut leaves drooped above it, and the reflection of a swamp cypress was red in the depths of winter. Such a pleasant young man, but he’d rushed off without even walking her to the nearest exit.
She pulled the advert out of her pocket. The paper was soft as well-worn fabric. She let it drop into the water where the moon lay still. She saw a face at the bottom of the pond. It was a face she didn’t recognise.
Helen looked over her shoulder for an old woman with wispy white hair.