Free The Child in Time by Ian McEwan Page B

curiosity and unease which brought him across this drenched plain when he could have been watching the men’s ten thousand metres. Julie could set about transforming herself, purposefully evolve some different understanding of life and her place within it. She would have been on long walks throughthe symmetrical pines, reassessing her past, their past, shuffling priorities, making arrangements for a new future; the walking boots he had given her one birthday would have been pounding the straight concrete road. Before he could unearth his own feelings, and without his being a witness to the process, she could metamorphose into a complete stranger, someone he would not know how to talk to. He did not want to get left behind, he did not want to lose his place in her story. She was not beyond confusion or irrationality, but she had an inviolably useful way of understanding and presenting her own morasses within the terms of a sentimental or spiritual education. With her, previous certainties were not jettisoned so much as encompassed, rather in the way, according to Thelma, scientific revolutions were said to redefine rather than discard all previous knowledge. What he frequently regarded in her as contradictory – But that’s not what you said last year! – she maintained was development – Because last year I hadn’t yet understood! She did not simply inhabit her inner life, she ran it, directed it, the terrain ahead was mapped out. The course of study was not to be left to blind chance, to what might simply come her way. The role of fate, on the other hand, she would not deny. The work, the responsibility, was to fulfil one’s destiny.
    Such faith in endless mutability, in re-making yourself as you came to understand more, or changed your version, he had come to see as an aspect of her femininity. Where once he had believed, or thought he ought to believe, that men and women were, beyond all the obvious physical differences, essentially the same, he now suspected that one of their many distinguishing features was precisely their attitudes to change. Past a certain age, men froze into place, they tended to believe that, even in adversity, they were somehow at one with their fates. They were who they thought they were. Despite what they said, men believed in what they did and they stuck at it. This was a weaknessand a strength. Whether they were scrambling out of trenches to be killed in their thousands, or doing the firing themselves, or putting the final touches to a cycle of symphonies, it only rarely occurred to them, or occurred only to the rare ones among them, that they might just as well be doing something else.
    To women this thought was a premise. It was a constant torment or comfort, no matter how successful they were in their own or other people’s eyes. It was also a weakness and a strength. Committed motherhood denied professional fulfilment. A professional life on men’s terms eroded maternal care. Attempting both was to risk annihilation through fatigue. It was not so easy to persist when you could not believe that you were entirely the thing that you did, when you thought you could find yourself, or find another part of yourself, expressed through some other endeavour. Consequently, they were not taken in so easily by jobs and hierarchies, uniforms and medals. Against the faith men had in the institutions they and not women had shaped, women upheld some other principle of selfhood in which being surpassed doing. Long ago men had noted something unruly in this. Women simply enclosed the space which men longed to penetrate. The men’s hostility was aroused.

    At last he reached the pines on the other side. He climbed a second aluminium gate which brought him, as his map had promised, on to a narrower concrete track bounded by barbed-wire fences curving through the green gloom. Afterwards, Stephen tried to recall what was on his mind as he walked the three hundred yards between the gate and a well-used