She took Charlie into the kitchen and prepared his breakfast. She turned on the radio and listened to the news and the beginning of the morning current-affairs programme. The world had not improved from yesterday; there was conflict and disagreement, selfishness, the varying types of hatred, and, to top it all, accelerating ecological disaster. People now talked about saving the planet and nobody batted an eyelid. Only a few years ago such language would have been deemed to be wildly alarmist, even risible. But now there was a real threat, and people spoke about it in the same tones as they spoke about the old, well-established threats of drought and floods and the like. Locusts … how friendly a threat they now seemed; but presumably the locusts themselves were suffering and found it difficult to plague people in quite the same way as they had in the past.
She looked at Charlie, whom she had placed in his high chair, ready for his breakfast of porridge and strips of bread on which she would spread runny boiled egg, his soldiers. Was this the first time, she wondered, that parents might think, with good reason, that the world would run out on their children; that it might not see out their natural span? She only had to think for a moment before she realised that it was not the first time; there had been many points at which people had thought that their world was ending, and some of these not very long ago. In the sixties and seventies many people thought just that as they watched two bristling superpowers staring one another down, fingers on the triggers of vast nuclear arsenals. One of Isabel’s aunts had told her about those days during the Cuban Missile Crisis when she had thought that nuclear war was inevitable. She had found herself feeling oddly calm, and had been determined to spend what she imagined were their last days in peace. “I sat and looked at pictures,” she said. “Photographs of college friends. Of our old family house in Mobile. Pictures of the world. I took out our old copies of National Geographic and paged through them, just looking at the world in all its variety; saying goodbye to it, I suppose.”
“And you weren’t frightened?” Isabel had asked.
“Oddly, no. I should have been, perhaps, but I wasn’t. I thought that it would be so quick, you see, and that we wouldn’t really have time to feel the pain. And if there’s no pain, then what is there to fear? I felt regret, yes, but no fear.”
Returning his mother’s stare, Charlie broke into a grin. “Solds,” he demanded.
She reassured him. The egg was ready for spreading on the fingers of bread. “Here. Soldiers. You see—patience is rewarded.”
She helped him with the food. There was no point in thinking about what sort of future Charlie would have, because there was nothing she could do to protect him from it. She could do her best, of course, not to add to the burden we placed on the earth, but she suspected that this would never be enough. Humanity, it seemed, was too irresolute, too greedy, to save itself from destruction.
Charlie opened his mouth to laugh, showering crumbs over his mother. She laughed too. Children had a way of reminding us of the immediate, and that, she felt, was exactly what she needed. She abandoned her morbid thoughts and concentrated on breakfast. Grub first, then ethics. Brecht? Which in her case meant breakfast first, then the Review of Applied Ethics.
Jamie came downstairs and into the kitchen. His hair was uncombed, tousled from the night, and he was still rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
“You could have stayed in bed,” she said.
Charlie looked up from his breakfast, shrieked with pleasure, and waved his arms about. It pleased Isabel to see her son’s love for his father, every bit as much as it pleased her to see Jamie’s love for Charlie.
“I’m de trop,” she said, offering Jamie the plate with its two remaining boiled-egg soldiers. “Here you go.”
Jamie took the plate. “He loves you just as much. It’s just that …”
“A boy loves his father,” said Isabel. “Naturally.”
Jamie bent down and kissed Charlie on the top of his head. The little boy gave another squeal of delight.
“You go and have a shower,” said Jamie. “I’ll take over.” He looked at the clock on the wall. He had nothing to do, he explained, until noon and would look after Charlie until then if Isabel wanted him to.
Isabel sighed. “I’ve got a whole pile of things on my desk. Grace said that she wanted to take him to the Botanical Gardens this afternoon. I could get my work out of the way …”
“You do that,” said Jamie. “Go on.”
She nodded. I could give up working, she thought. I could spend all my time with Charlie, which is what I would love to do. But would I be any happier? And would it make much difference to Charlie? She looked at her son, who was now tackling one of the soldiers given him by Jamie. Being a parent was such a gift, and everybody said that it was a fleeting one. So precious, those years, hang on to them, Isabel. That had been Cousin Mimi from Dallas. They had been talking about what it meant to have children, and Mimi had warned her of how quickly the childhood years went past—not for the child, but for the parent.
It was true. Already she found it hard to remember what Charlie was like as a tiny baby. Again, that was something that people had warned her about: Take photographs and look at them regularly, just to remind yourself. There was a popular song, was there not? She turned to Jamie; he knew about these things and could reel off the lines of the most obscure songs. How do you do it? I don’t know, I just do. I remember songs. I forget lots of other things—the capital of Paraguay, for example—but I remember songs.
She asked him, “Isn’t there a song about it?”
He looked up, and smiled. “About what? Boiled egg?”
“About how children grow up so quickly.”
He thought for a moment. “Fiddler on the Roof. I think the song’s called ‘Sunrise, Sunset.’ It asks how it all happened so quickly, how they grow up, become so tall, while nobody’s watching.”
She remembered. “It’s true, I think.”
Jamie shrugged. “I suppose so. But I don’t think we should worry about it. We’ve got years ahead of us. He’s not all that tall just yet, are you?” He pinched Charlie gently on the cheek and the little boy burst out laughing, as if sharing in some vastly amusing joke.
“The years shall run like rabbits,” she said, remembering what Auden had said, but refraining from telling Jamie, who sometimes sighed when she mentioned WHA.
“Like rabbits?”
Charlie chuckled. “Abbits,” he spluttered.
Hearing this, Isabel thought of its crossword potential. Cockney customs? Abbits. Senior members of monasteries? Abbits. Not the right thing to do? Bad abbits.
She smiled. “What’s the joke?” asked Jamie.
“The loss of a letter changes everything,” she said.
Jamie reflected. The years did run like rabbits, he supposed. Rabbits ran quickly, shot off, and then disappeared, which is what the years did. He dealt with a final piece of egg-smeared bread and then looked up to see that Isabel herself had disappeared …
… INTO HER STUDY. She had a number of letters to deal with, some opened, some still in their envelopes, lying accusingly on her desk. The postman tended to the apologetic, particularly in respect of large parcels, which he knew contained manuscripts or books for review—work, in other words. He had arrived very early that day and had said, “This one’s really heavy,” as he passed her a large padded envelope franked in Utah. He glanced at the customs declaration stuck on the front of the package. “A book,” he said. And then, rather quickly, “I’m sorry, we’re not meant to read anything but the address. It’s just that …”