The Gap of Time

by Jeanette Winterson

A sign of the times. But the times has so many signs that if we read them all we’d die of heartbreak. The hatch is safe and

What is memory anyway but a painful dispute with the past? I

I discover that grief means living with someone who is not there. Where are you?

What would his life have been back then, now? And her life? That night, storm and rain and the moon like a mandala when the clouds parted, it was the moon that made him know. The baby had lain like the visible corner of a folded map. Traced inside her, faded now, were parents she would never know and a life that had vanished. Alternative routes she wouldn’t take. People she would never meet. The would-be-that-wouldn’t-be. Because her mother or her father, or both, had left the map of her folded on the table and left the room. It was a map of discovery. There were no more North Poles or Atlantic Oceans or Americas. The moon had been visited. And the bottom of the sea. But she was setting out with the blank sheet and compass of herself. Unpathed waters. Undreamed shores.

“That is my other life,” said Perdita. “I’m adopted.” “Oh…I’m sorry—forgive me, I didn’t…” “There’s nothing to be sorry about. I’m adopted. So what?” “Would you ever want to find your real parents?” “In what sense would they be my parents? I mean, is a parent the person who provides you with the raw materials of life or the person who raises you? I love Shep. He’s the one who’s my father.”

Sometimes it doesn’t matter that there was any time before this time. Sometimes it doesn’t matter that it’s night or day or now or then. Sometimes where you are is enough. It’s not that time stops or that it hasn’t started. This is time. You are here. This caught moment opening into a lifetime. —

Pure poetry

Xeno continued, “No one can predict the hand they are dealt, but because there are fifty-two cards in the pack you can soon work out what other people are playing. If you pay attention. So pay attention.” “Let me explain how you play in real life,” said Shep, “separate to all this philosophising—I got enough of that in the DeLorean.”

And the night unwound as those days and nights do—those days and nights that hijack time. Those days and nights that hold up the car on its way home and gun down the driver and the passengers and leave the wreckage in the rain.

Free will depends on being stronger than the moment that traps you.

Xeno leaned on the edge of the desk. “Zel, if I could change it…” “It’s not in the past,” said Perdita. “You can’t change what you did. You can change what you do.”

They walk through Chinatown and Covent Garden and across the Aldwych down to Waterloo Bridge and stand in the middle looking west and east, and there’s Big Ben telling clock time, and down below there’s the Thames flowing liquid time, and in the small space they occupy their own time is real. Not the past, not the future, this now.

“Did you say Perdita?” said Leo. “Her name’s Miranda.” “I’m Perdita,” said Perdita. — And the story fell out stone by stone, shining and held, the way time is held in a diamond, the way the light is held in each stone. And stones speak, and what was silent opens its mouth to tell a story and the story is set in stone to break the stone. What happened happened. But. The past is a grenade that explodes when thrown.

Pauline knew Leo better than anyone but she couldn’t call what would happen next. Would he smash the moment into pieces or let it open into time? Perdita went and stood by Shep and took his hand. Leo looked at her. He looked at all the years he hadn’t had. At his refusal. And he saw his chance. Leo held out his hand, stepping towards Shep. “Thank you,” said Leo. “I wish we’d met a long time ago.” Shep took his hand. Pauline tried to stand and flopped back.

Up ahead, Leo said to Pauline, “Do you know where MiMi is?” “You never asked me that before.” “I was afraid you knew the answer.” Pauline said, “Time has been standing still for eighteen years and now you want everything to happen at once.” “I want MiMi to know about Perdita.” The taxis pulled up outside the big brick house set back from the road. “This is a fine house,” said Shep. “This area used to be a dump,” said Pauline. “Jews from the camps came here after the war. My grandparents had friends here—walk on the street, you could hear violins and accordions, mouth organs, mandolins. It was all music and all rooms for rent. This was a rooming house when I bought it—I had a tenant in the basement for ten years. She kept a donkey in the garden. Come in, come in.”

Leo stood up, went into the aisle. From somewhere in the theatre Xeno came and stood beside him. He put his arm round Leo. Leo was crying now, long tears of rain. That which is lost is found. —

It’s a play about a foundling. And I am. It’s a play about forgiveness and a world of possible futures—and how forgiveness and the future are tied together in both directions. Time is reversible. —

Towards the end of his working life he became interested in forgiveness—or rather, he became interested again in forgiveness—because it’s there in the character of Helena against the selfish, spoilt Bertram’s pornographic narcissism in All’s Well That Ends Well, and it’s there in Isabella against the lustful savagery of Measure for Measure. And it’s there in Portia, the poet of mercy against the killing debt of a pound of flesh. It’s not that Shylock is a Jew—it’s that he’s not enough of a Jew. The Old Testament is predicated on wiping the slate clean: forgiving the debt. The past must not mortgage the future. Supremely,