Besides What Is

by Anne Frost

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We arrive early at the museum, Jean and me. It’s a special event for patrons but my friend has somehow acquired two free tickets. Two, she has emphasised, in order that I might accompany her. She is wearing her aquamarine scarf; Jean always wears a scarf. Over the years I have seen their twirls and whirls grow wider until her ageing neck has disappeared completely, her head held up only by layers of silk. Sometimes I imagine what might be below, wonder if I were to take a sharp knife and slice through the material I would find her loose skin mummified into waves like sand after a receding tide. I don’t bother with scarves myself. I’m content to let people see what time has done to me.

The bespectacled man at the door greets us like friends and indicates an anteroom filled with uncomfortable-looking wooden chairs set out in rows before a low stage. He hopes we will enjoy the lecture.

“I didn’t know it was a lecture,” I say to Jean but she is already hurrying towards a front-row seat from where she can be guaranteed to hear the show. Above her, to one side of the stage, a small board proclaims the title of our evening’s entertainment, The Philosophy of Time: An Ancient Greek Perspective.

“Goodness,” I say to no one in particular.

The rest of the audience appears in dribs and drabs. Groups and couples who call proprietorially to other groups and couples. I know this, the being in a crowd but not part of it. I twist in my seat to observe them. The women hugging and air kissing with baby pink lips, the men shaking hands or touching each others’ shoulders briefly, apologetically. Occasionally a glance slides towards my face, searches, then slips away.

Jean is examining her ticket. “We’re entitled to a complimentary glass of wine,” she announces, “Sauvignon Blanc, please.”

Just as the hubbub reaches cocktail party peak, a middle-aged man and a young woman step onto the stage. The man introduces himself as the museum director, and the woman as our lecturer. We are in for a treat, he tells us.

It’s surprising that someone so young will be speaking about time, having experienced so little of it. When I was young I misunderstood such things, assumed that time roared forward in a straight line, like a river, from the mountains of the past to the delta of the future. But experience tells me that time is not like that at all. Rather, it ebbs and flows, all the while dislodging debris from beneath its surface. Time can be uncomfortable when you get to know it.

Our lecturer steps towards the lectern, adjusts the microphone to the correct level for her height. There are, it seems, some central questions in this subject. Does change exist? And if it does, is time a separate entity or merely a measurement of change? In the seat beside me, Jean snorts a response. She is not, by nature, a philosopher.

We live only in the present, the Greeks apparently pointed out. The past is in our memories, the future in our imagination. But surely not. If this is true why is my past clearer than my future? Perhaps my memory is improving as my imagination fades. But no, the past is in my imagination as much as is the future. More perhaps. Ebb and flow. Not. A. Line. I would like to share this with our lecturer. Explain that if time were linear it would be this morning that I would remember best. I would clearly recall what I ate for breakfast, what I heard on the radio. But it’s all a blank, gone. Instead, my sharpest, strongest recollection is of an entrance gate. A gateway, I would tell her.

A gap in a red brick wall edged with white stone, beyond it a courtyard, lead-panelled classroom windows. Above, a carved stone lion, face scraped flat by the elements. And, here, in front of the gateway, a family. Tight, stonelike, about to squeeze through into an alien world. In that moment I looked straight ahead, not touching him, my child. Robert had warned me not to mollycoddle the boy in front of the other pupils, had explained that this would encourage bullying. So I knew I was to be strong for both of them. Arms clamped to my sides, foolish eyes blinking into dams, inhaling the scent of my boy, the special aroma that returned as soon as I dried him from his evening bath. I remember I stretched out my hand just enough to feel his breath waft against my fingertips.

There were others, families who streamed past our tableau chattering excitedly about regrouping at Christmas then parted easily, mothers waving cheerily, fathers solemnly shaking their son’s hands. We watched, waited for a cue until rescued at last by someone, an older pupil, a young master, I couldn’t tell. He smiled in what he must have thought was a reassuring manner.

“I’ll take the boy from here,” he explained.

And in a blink, the forces of necessity, of expectation, swept our little group in different directions. Robert was, of course, right. It was for the best. We were securing our son’s future, he would receive an excellent education, learn to be a man.

“Mother will leave now,” the man instructed.

The lecturer is self-possessed, comfortable in her subject, but surely not much more than a student. She will start with Heraclitus, she explains, who believed that reality is characterised by unending change. A river might seem eternal but the water within it is perpetually being replaced. Another river, how interesting. And of course all things must change. When I was student age, although I was never actually a student, only an almost student. When I was that age, I was the same as now but also so very different. Hopeful, excited about the future. I was going to gain learning, share learning. Water flowing. Evaporating. I would like to tell her this, share with her that sometimes time, our past, offers up only a droplet, a glimpse. Here was a voice, belonging to the man who was once my son. Only his name remaining, the rest of him reshaped.

“You have no idea.”

We had been saying goodbye to Robert, as the vicar had euphemistically announced to the half-empty church. I imagined waving a handkerchief at a quayside, Robert looking down from a ship’s deck. Going where? He and I had attended church every Sunday, of course, although neither of us was religious. It’s what one does. So here I was, saying goodbye. I had let the service wash over me, reflecting instead on the way we begin our lives acquiring. Things. Statuses. And then, towards the end, lose them. One by one. We used to have money, Robert and I, but not now. It had somehow floated away like flotsam and jetsam. The embarrassed solicitor had explained this in her quiet office piled high with books and papers. There were, apparently, debts. I must sell the house she told me.

After the funeral, I stood on uneven ground watching a cheap coffin being lowered into a narrow gap. I didn’t belong with the ragtag group who claimed to have known my husband and they stood away from me. Giving me space, one of the wet-eyed solo women said as she edged past on impractical heels. Another euphemism. Perhaps that’s the way with such occasions. But as I watched, instead of grief, I felt something else. Surprise maybe. Goodness. No money and no longer a wife. I was, it seemed, unravelling.

Then, I saw him. My first thought was that he was so like Robert. And drunk. Or perhaps it was the other way around. I must have greeted him. Said something about not having known where to find him. But my memory, my imagination suggests otherwise. It offers a single sentence.

“You have no idea.”

His breath betrayed the sharp tang of whisky. My fingers twitched.

“That place,” he said, “you have no idea what it was like.”

They shuffled away then, the others. Gave us our space. But I could feel their interest. And the truth is he was wrong. I had had every idea. I knew it in the blank set of the walls and the cold eyes of the man who led my boy away. I understood completely what it was like.

“Your father always wanted the best for you,” I said.

Which was also true.

The lecturer explains that the final section of her talk will consider Parmenides. There’s the ting of a glass being knocked over, a rustle of acknowledgement that we are approaching the end. I swivel my eyes towards Jean, her head has fallen forward, her chin resting on an aquamarine knot. I try not to worry about possible snoring.

Parmenides it seems believed that the world is timeless, changeless. That nothing is or will be besides What Is. How interesting. But how sad it would be if there was only the now. If nothing changed, if people remained as they always were. For myself, I’ve changed a great deal. There was a time, in my past, when I was almost so many things. Adult, student. Free. I remember I was on the edge of so much.

Here, I sat with my parents in our dull front room breathing stale air.

“He’s quite the gentleman,” my father said before inhaling on the cigarette he held between thumb and forefinger, “he asked my permission.”

My father sat in his mock leather armchair, my mother and I at opposite ends of the sludge-brown sofa. We stared at our slippered feet, unpractised in important conversations. My mother had made tea in recognition of the occasion. Her cigarette rested on the edge of a saucer, ash trailing from its tip.

“It’s flattering,” she said.

She meant for someone like him to want to marry a daughter of theirs. They had begun to amuse me, my parents. They inhabited a world of short horizons, clichéd language. Feet stuck to the riverbed unaware of the secrets in the waters above. Assuming, because it didn’t occur to them to think otherwise, that I was trapped as well. They only saw that I was quiet, kept myself to myself. Which was all they wanted.

“She’s a good girl,” said my father.

I hadn’t bothered to tell them about the letter, the one snuggled into the back of my underwear drawer. You have been awarded a place to study… They wouldn’t understand what it said, let alone what it offered. Instead, I had been imagining what would come next. My brain and prospects would grow. I would listen to lectures. I would give lectures.

I feel sorry for her. The earnest young woman talking about time. She thinks she understands but she does not. In years to come, many years, she will see someone, a person of about the age she is now and the sea will move towards the shore as a feeling, an emotion. Time will, as people like to say, stand still. In that moment of connection deep, deep into the past, she will inhabit that feeling once again. Anticipation. The thrill of a life to come that she knows will be everything, everything she wants.

Back then, in my real or perhaps imagined past, my father turned to the grey nets separating our window from the people in the street beyond.

“Robert is well-off,” he said softly.

I remember taking a sip of tea, examining the tufts of mud brown carpet as my thoughts surged forward to my alternative future. I imagined the taste of champagne, the smells of bazaars, the confidence of a life with choices. In a moment, I saw what it could be, what I could be. Rising to the surface. I doubt my parents asked what I wanted. It was assumed. After all, they knew, they believed, that I was a dutiful daughter.

Suddenly the lecture is over. The museum director reappears, encourages us to applaud. He calls for questions, points to someone in the back row who quotes Aristotle. I would like to ask something, anything, to show I understand, to offer a connection, perhaps. But my brain doesn’t work as fast as it used to and the moment is lost. As the crowd dribbles past us to the bar, Jean stands unsteadily and reties her scarf into a tight choking knot. Silently she turns towards the exit and I slowly follow her retreating back.