Timescape (3 page)

but held back, uncertain as to whether she wanted to do anything for this woman or not.

"Morning, Miss. Could you lend me a bit o' milk, do you think? I'm all out o' milk and the kids 'aven't 'ad their breakfast yet." Her manner was confident but somehow not cordial.

Marjorie narrowed her eyes. "Where are you from?" she asked.

"I've just moved into the old farm down the road. Just a little milk, lady." The woman moved closer to her, holding out the pitcher.

The old farm–but that's derelict, Marjorie thought. They must be squatters. Her uneasiness increased.

"Why do you come here? The shops are open at this time of day. There's a farm along the road, you know, Where you can buy milk."

"Come on, lady, you wouldn't make me walk miles while the little ones are waiting, would you? I'll let you 'ave it back. Don't you believe me?"

No, Marjorie thought. Why hadn't the woman gone to one of her own kind? There were some little Council houses just a few yards beyond her grounds.

"I'm sorry," she said firmly, "but I haven't got any to spare."

They confronted each other for a moment. Then the woman turned towards the shrubbery.

" 'Ere, Rog," she called. A tall, gaunt man emerged from the rhododendrons, tugging a small boy by the hand. With an effort Marjorie kept herself from showing any alarm. She stood stiffly, her head' a little back, trying to look in control of the situation. The man shuffled over to stand next to the woman. Marjorie's nostrils flared slightly as she caught a sour odor of sweat and smoke. He was wearing an assortment of clothes that must have come from many different sources, a cloth cap, a long striped college scarf, woolen gloves with all the fingers unraveled, a pair of jaunty blue espadrilles with one sole flapping, trousers that were several inches too short and too wide, and, incongruously, a lavishly embroidered waistcoat under a dusty old vinyl jacket. He was probably about Marjorie's age but looked at least ten years older. His face was leathery, his eyes deep set, and he had several days' growth of stubble on his chin. She was aware of the contrast she made with them, standing there plump and well-fed, her short hair fluffy from washing, her skin protected by creams and lotions, in what she called her "old" gardening clothes, a soft blue wool skirt, a handknit sweater, and a sheepskin jacket.

"You expect us to believe you don't 'ave no milk in the 'ouse, lady?" the man growled.

"I didn't say that." Marjorie's voice was clipped. "I have enough for my own family but no more. There are plenty of other houses down there you could try, but I suggest you go into the village and buy some. It's only half a mile. I'm sorry I can't help you."

"Like 'ell you are. You just don't want to. Stuck up, like all you rich types. You want to keep it all for yerselves. Look at what you've got–a great big 'ouse just for you, I bet. You dunno 'ow 'ard life is for us. I 'aven't 'ad a job for four years, an' nowhere to live, while you 'ad it soft–"

"Rog," the woman said warningly. She laid a restraining hand on his arm. He shook it off and moved a step closer to Marjorie. She held her ground and anger surged in her. What right did they have to come here and shout at her, damn it, in her own garden?

"I've already told you I only have enough for my own family. These are hard times for everyone," she said coldly. But I would never go begging, she thought. No moral backbone, these people.

The man moved closer. Instinctively she stepped back, maintaining the space between them.

"Hard times for everyone," he said, mimicking her accent. "Just too bad, ain't it? Too bad for everyone else, just so long you 'ave a nice 'ouse and food and maybe a car too and telly."

His eyes were raking the house, taking in the garage, the TV antenna on the roof, the windows. Thank God the windows were locked, she thought, and the front door.

"Look, I can't help you. Will you please go?" She turned and started to walk back round the house. The man kept pace with her, the woman and child following silently.

"Yes, that's right, just turn your back on us and go on into your big

'ouse. You won't get rid of us that easy. The day is comin' when you'll 'ave to get down off that bloody 'igh–"

"I'll thank you to–"

" 'At's it, Rog! Your kind 'ave 'ad it all their way. There'll be a revolution and then you'll be beggin' for 'elp. And you think you'll get it? Not bloody likely!"

Marjorie increased her pace until it was almost a trot, trying to shake him off before she reached the kitchen door She was fumbling in her pocket for the key when he came up close behind her. Afraid that he would touch her, she whirled around and faced him.

"Get out of here. Go. Don't come bothering me. Go to the authorities, Get off my land!"

The man fell back a step. She seized the bucket of chicken feed, not wanting to leave anything out that he might steal. The key turned easily, thank God, and she slammed the door just as he came up on the step. She snapped the lock home.

He shouted through the door: "You bleedin' stuck-up tart. Don't fucking care if we starve, do you?"

Marjorie began to shake all over, but she shouted back, "I'm going to call the police if you don't leave at once!"

She walked through the house, eying the windows. They would be so easy to break. She felt vulnerable, trapped in her own house. Her breathing was very fast and shallow now. She felt nauseated. The man was still shouting outside, his language becoming more and more obscene.

The phone was on the hall table. She picked it up and held it to her ear.

Nothing. She pressed the receiver bar up and down a few times. Nothing.

Damn, damn, damn. What a time for it to go out. It happened often, of course. But not now, please, she prayed. She shook the phone. Still silence.

She was completely cut off. What if the man broke in? Her mind raced over potential weapons, the poker, the kitchen knives– Oh God, no, better not start any violence, there were two of them and the man looked a nasty customer No, she would go out the back. Through the French windows in the living room. Run to the village for help.

She couldn't hear him shouting any longer, but was afraid to show herself at the window to see if he were still there. She tried the phone again. Still nothing. She slammed it down. She focused her attention on the doors and windows, listening for sounds of a break-in. Then the knocking started again at the front door. It was a relief to know where he was and that he was still outside. She waited, gripping the edge of the hall table. Go away, damn you, she willed him. The knocking repeated.

After a pause, steps crunched on the gravel. Was he going away at last?

Then there was a knock at the kitchen door. Oh Christ! How could she get rid of him?

"Marjorie! Hello, Marjorie, are you there?" A voice hailed her.

Relief flooded her and she felt close to tears. She was too limp to move.

"Marjorie! Where are you?" The voice was moving away. She straightened up and went to the kitchen door and opened it. Her friend Heather was moving off towards the garden shed. "Heather!" she called.

"I'm here."

Heather turned and came back to her. "Whatever's the matter? You look awful," she said.

Marjorie stepped outside and looked around. "Has he gone?" she asked.

"There was a dreadful man here."

"A shabby-looking man with a woman and child? They were just leaving when I came. What happened?"

"He wanted to borrow some milk." She started to laugh, a little hysterically. It sounded so ordinary. "Then he got rude and started shouting. They're squatters. Moved into that empty farm down the road last night." She sank into a kitchen chair. "God, that was scary, Heather."

"I believe it. You look quite shaken. Not like you, Marjorie. I thought you could handle anything, even fierce and dangerous squatters." She had adopted a bantering tone and Marjorie responded to it.

"Well, I could, of course. I was going to bash him over the head with the poker and then stick him with a kitchen knife, if he broke in."

She was laughing, but it wasn't funny. Had she actually thought of doing that?

FALL, 1962

He had to find a way to get rid of the damned noise in the experiment, Gordon thought moodily, picking up his scuffed briefcase. The damned stuff wouldn't go away. If he couldn't find the difficulty and correct it, then the whole experiment ended up sucking wind.

The palm tree still stopped him every time. Each morning, after Gordon Bernstein had slammed the yellow front door of the bungalow a little too loudly, he turned and looked at the palm tree and stopped. The pause was a moment of recognition. He was really here, in California. Not a movie set; the real thing. The palm tree silhouette thrust spearing fronds into a cloudless sky, silently exotic. This matter-of-fact plant was far more impressive than the strangely blank freeways or the unrelentingly balmy weather.

Most evenings, Gordon sat up late with Penny, reading and listening to folk records. Things were exactly like his years at Columbia. He kept the same habits, and very nearly forgot that half a block away was Windansea Beach with its rolling surf. When he left his windows open, the rumble of the waves seemed like the traffic noise on 2nd Avenue, a distant blur of other people's lives that he had always successfully avoided, there in his apartment. So it came as a small shock each morning when he ventured out, jiggling his car keys nervously, mind mumbling away to itself, and the palm tree yanked him back into this new reality.

Weekends, it was easier to remember that this was California. Then he would wake to see Penny's long blond hair fanned out over the pillow beside him. During the week she had early classes and left while he was still asleep. She moved so lightly and quietly that she never disturbed him.

Each morning, it was as though she had never been there. She left nothing lying around. There wasn't even a dent in the bed where she had slept.

Gordon slipped the tinkling keys into his pocket and walked along a bottlebrush hedge and out into the broad boulevards of La Jolla. This, too, was still a little strange to him. The streets had ample room to park his '58

Chevy and leave immense stretches of concrete for the two center lanes.

The streets were as big as the building lots; they seemed to define the landscape, like vast recreation grounds for the dominant species, automobiles. Compared to 2nd Avenue, which was more like a ventilating shaft between slabs of brown brick, this was extravagant excess. In New York, Gordon had always braced himself when he went down the steps, knowing that when he pushed open the front door of wired glass there would be dozens of people within sight. They would be briskly moving along, a churn of lives. He could always count on that press of flesh around him. Here, nothing. Nautilus Street was a flat white plain baking in the morning sun, unpeopled. He climbed into his Chevy and the roar of starting the engine cracked the silence, seeming to conjure up in his rear view mirror a long low Chrysler which came over the rise a block away and went by, making a swishing noise.

On the way to the campus he drove with one hand and spun the radio dial with the other, rummaging through the discordant blocks of sound that passed for pop music out here. He preferred folk music, really, but had an odd affection for some old Buddy Holly songs and lately had found himself humming them in the shower. Every day it's a-gittin closer... Well, that'll be the day ... He found a high-pitched Beach Boys number and let the dial rest. The tenor warblings about sand and sun described perfectly the travelogue views that swept by outside. He coasted down La Jolla Boulevard and watched the distant small dots that were riding in on a slowly broadening fan of white surf. Kids, unaccountably not in school, even though classes had started two weeks ago.

He swooped down the hillside and into a pack of slowed cars, mostly big black Lincolns and Cadillacs. He eased down on the brake and noticed new buildings on Mount Soledad. The earth was scraped raw and terraced, trucks climbing over the mined soil like insects. Gordon smiled tautly, knowing that even if he unsnarled the experiment, and produced a brilliant result, and got tenure, and therefore made a higher salary, he still could not afford the cedar and glass homes that would slant out from that hillside. Not unless he took on a lot of consulting on the side and rose quickly at the University to boot, perhaps wangling his way into a part-time deanship to boost the monthly check. But that was unlikely as hell.

He grimaced behind his thick black beard, shifted the Chevy's gears as the Beach Boys faded into a
Dirt's out, Tide's in
jingle, and the car surged through traffic with a rich, throaty growl, toward the University of California at La Jolla.

Gordon tapped absentmindedly on the dewar of liquid nitrogen, trying to think how to say what he wanted, and dimly realized that he just couldn't like Albert Cooper. The guy seemed pleasant enough: sandy-haired, a slow talker who sometimes slurred his words, obviously well muscled from his hobbies of scuba diving and tennis. But Cooper's taciturn calm blunted Gordon's momentum, time and again. His smiling, easygoing manner seemed to reflect some distant, bemused tolerance of Gordon, and Gordon found himself bristling.

"Look, Al," he said, turning rapidly away from the steaming nozzle of the dewar. "You've been with me well over a year, right?"

"Check."

"You were doing pretty well with Professor Lakin, I joined the department, Lakin was too busy, so you shifted over to me. And I took you on." Gordon rocked back on his heels, wedged his hands into his back pockets. "Because Lakin said you were good."

"Sure."

"And now you've been plugging away on this indium antimonide experiment for–what?–a year and a half easy."

"Right," Cooper said somewhat quizzically.

"I think it's time you canned the bullshit."

Cooper gave no visible reaction. "Ummmm. I don't ... uh ... know what you mean."

"I come in here this morning. I ask you about the job I gave you. You tell me you went over every amplifier, every Varian component, the works."