Free The Child in Time by Ian McEwan

of signals and, foreshortened, click slowly out of sight round a curve. With that there settled a velvety, country silence against which other small sounds seemed precision-cut and polished: the brisk,departing steps of another passenger, complex birdsong and simpler human whistling. He remained on the footbridge, taking childish – or boyish – pleasure in the polished rails pointing away in both directions into the silence. As a child he had once stood on a larger bridge with his father waiting for a train to come through. Stephen had stared at the receding lines and had asked why they grew together as they got further away. His father looked down at him, eyes narrowed, mock-serious, and then squinted into the distance where question and answer converged. He always seemed to be standing to attention. He was holding Stephen’s hand, their fingers were interlaced. His father’s were stubby, with matted black hair across the knuckles. In games he used to move his fingers scissor-like, clamping Stephen’s until he danced with agony and delight at such irresponsible power. His father looked from the horizon to explain that trains got smaller and smaller as they moved away, and that to accommodate them the rails did the same. Otherwise there would be derailments. Shortly after that an express shook the bridge as it shot beneath their feet. Stephen marvelled then at the intricate relation of things, the knowingness of the inanimate, the deep symmetry which conspired to narrow the rail’s gauge precisely in keeping with the train’s diminishment; no matter how fast it rushed, the rails were always ready.
    He stood outside the station reading Julie’s instructions. The rain had broken into a fine mist and the handwriting was smudged, almost illegible. He followed the road out of the village along what she described as the old bus route. He passed a hypermarket with a crowded ten-acre car-park, and crossed a motorway by an elegantly curving concrete bridge. After half a mile he turned down a paved track which cut a straight line through forestry land. Now that he was in real, open country he was light-hearted. On both sides there were planted lines of conifers with their flashing parallax as one row ceded to the next, a pleasing effectwhich conveyed a false sense of speed. It was a geometrical forest uncomplicated by undergrowth or birdsong. The road gleamed white in the rain. Its single-mindedness pleased him, he wanted to run. Half a mile in there was a clearing in the plantation where a high barbed-wire fence ran round a nodding donkey. It was a grey beast languidly lifting its blunt, heavy head with a steady purr. There were others, spaced at regular intervals along the road. Outside one was an oil tanker making its collection from the reservoir tank. The driver was up in his cab with his feet on the dashboard, drinking beer from a tin can and reading a newspaper. He smiled and lifted his hand as Stephen passed and this cheered him further. He had forgotten how friendly people were in the country.
    As Julie had promised, the road came to an end after half an hour’s walking. The pine forest gave way abruptly to an unbounded prairie of wheat. Stephen rested against an aluminium five-barred gate. The only indication that the yellow field, which resembled a desert, was finite was a line on the horizon where the plantation resumed. Perhaps it was a mirage. The plain was cut neatly in two by an access track, a continuation of the paved road and equally straight. He set off, and within minutes found satisfaction in this new landscape. He was marching across a void. All sense of progress, and therefore all sense of time, disappeared. The trees on the far side did not come closer. This was an obsessive landscape – it thought only about wheat. The lack of hurry, the disappearance of any real sense of a destination, suited him.

    Julie had returned from her monastery in the Chilterns after six weeks. Stephen left Eaton Square,