‘What’s that smell?’
‘Smell, smell, smell?’ He jerked his greying head back and forth.
‘Sarsaparilla.’ She sniffed suspiciously. ‘That’s what it is!’
‘Oh, it couldn’t be!’ His hysterical happiness stopped as quickly as if she’d switched him off. He seemed stunned, ill at ease, and suddenly very careful.
‘Where did you go this morning?’ she asked.
‘You know I was cleaning the attic.’
‘Mooning over a lot of trash. I didn’t hear a sound. Thought maybe you weren’t in the attic at all. What’s that?’ She pointed.
‘Well, now how did those get there?’ he asked the world.
He peered down at the pair of black spring-metal bicycle clips that bound his thin pants to his bony ankles.
‘Found them in the attic,’ he answered himself. ‘Remember when we got out on the gravel road in the early morning on our tandem bike, Cora, forty years ago, everything fresh and new?’
‘If you don’t finish that attic today, I’ll come up and toss everything out myself.’
‘Oh, no,’ he cried. ‘I have everything the way I want it!’
She looked at him coldly.
‘Cora,’ he said, eating his lunch, relaxing, beginning to enthuse again, ‘you know what attics are? They’re Time Machines, in which old, dim-witted men like me can travel back forty years to a time when it was summer all year round and children raided ice-wagons. Remember how it tasted? You held the ice in your handkerchief. It was like sucking the flavour of linen and snow at the same time.’
Cora fidgeted.
It’s not impossible, he thought, half closing his eyes, trying to see it and build it. Consider an attic. Its very atmosphere is Time. It deals in other years, the cocoons and chrysalises of another age. All the bureau drawers are little coffins where a thousand yesterdays lie in state. Oh, the attic’s a dark, friendly place, full of Time, and if you stand in the very centre of it, straight
and tall, squinting your eyes, and thinking and thinking, and smelling the Past, and putting out your hands to feel of Long Ago, why, it…
He stopped, realizing he had spoken some of this aloud. Cora was eating rapidly.
‘Well, wouldn’t it be interesting,’ he asked the parting in her hair, ‘if Time Travel could occur? And what more logical, proper place for it to happen than in an attic like ours, eh?’
‘It’s not always summer back in the old days,’ she said. ‘It’s just your crazy memory. You remember all the good things and forget the bad. It wasn’t always summer.’
‘Figuratively speaking, Cora, it was.’
‘Wasn’t’
‘What I mean is this,’ he said, whispering excitedly, bending forward to see the image he was tracing on the blank dining-room wall. ‘If you rode your unicycle carefully between the years, balancing, hands out, careful, careful, if you rode from year to year, spent a week in 1909, a day in 1900, a month or a fortnight somewhere else, 1905, 1898, you could stay with summer the rest of your life.’
‘Unicycle?’
‘You know, one of those tall chromium one-wheeled bikes, single-seater, the performers ride in vaudeville shows, juggling. Balance, true balance, it takes, not to fall off, to keep the bright objects flying in the air, beautiful, up and up, a light, a flash, a sparkle, a bomb of brilliant colours, red, yellow, blue, green, white, gold; all the Junes and Julys and Augusts that ever were, in the air, about you, at once, hardly touching your hands, flying, suspended, and you, smiling, among them. Balance, Cora, balance.’
‘Blah,’ she said, ‘blah, blah.’ And added, ‘blah!’
He climbed the long cold stairs to the attic, shivering.
There were nights in winter when he woke with porcelain in his bones, with cool chimes blowing in his ears, with frost piercing his nerves in a raw illumination like white cold fireworks exploding and showering down in flaming snows upon a silent land deep in his subconscious. He was cold, cold, cold, and it would take a score of endless summers, with their green torches and bronze suns to thaw him free of his wintry sheath. He was a great tasteless chunk of brittle ice, a snowman put to bed each night, full of confetti dreams, tumbles of crystal and flurry. And there lay winter outside for ever, a great leaden winepress smashing down its colourless lid of sky, squashing them all like so many grapes, mashing colour and sense and being from everyone, save the children who fled on skis and toboggans down mirrored hills which reflected the crushing iron shield that hung lower above town each day and every eternal night.
Mr Finch lifted the attic trapdoor. But here, here. A dust of summer sprang up about him. The attic dust simmered with heat left over from other seasons. Quietly, he shut the trapdoor down.
He began to smile.