The Girl in a Swing
Page 1
The Qirl in a Swing, Richard Adams's fourth major
novel, is set, like Watership Down, in the Berkshire
countryside. Yet the story could hardly be more
different in content from his previous world-wide
bestsellers. This is the haunting and haunted tale,
set in the early 1970s, of a passionate love-affair,
overwhelmingly beautiful but at the same time
threatened by intimations of a frightening supernatural
dimension.
Alan Desland, living in the country town of
Newbury, has inherited his father's business in
antique and modern ceramics. An unlikely candidate
for the events that are to overtake him, Alan
appears a stable, prosperous and scholarly, if
slightly unworldly, young man. Only one hint of the
danger that lies ahead has been revealed: from
adolescence he has been the unwilling, and sometimes
unwitting, victim of occasional psychic
experiences, whether in dreams or in his daily life.
On a business visit to Copenhagen he meets
Kathe Geutner, a German girl of extraordinary
beauty. Their love is mutual and instantaneous. But
apart from the glowing and passionate intensity of
their pleasure in one another, what does Alan really
know of Kathe, of her life and origins? After their
marriage in Florida and return to England it is Kathe
who acquires for almost nothing at a local sale the
porcelain figure known as 'The Girl in a Swing' - a
ceramic rarity of the greatest value. Their happiness
should be complete - but it is not: as their life
together is invaded by a growing fear of what has
remained unspoken between them, the scene
gradually darkens. Omens of impending grief
follow upon one another, the Eumenides gather for
vengeance, the darkest shadows close in with the
awful inevitability of a Greek tragedy. It is a drama
which mounts in tension to a terrible and horrifying
climax.
(continued on back flap)
ISBN 07139 1345 2 $12.95
Adams, Richard George
The girl in a swing
RICHARD ADAMS
THE GIRL IN A SWING
ALLEN LANE
ALLEN LANE
Penguin Books Ltd
536 King's Road
London SW10 OUH
First published 1980
Copyright � Richard Adams, 1980
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise, without the prior permission
of the copyright owner.
ISBN 0 7139 1345 2
Set in Intertype Lectura
V Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press), Ltd. * "
Bungay, Suffolk
To Rosamond,
with love
PREFACE
THIS story is such a mixture that even upon reflection I
cannot be sure of unravelling the experienced from the
imagined. There seemed no point in giving Bradfield a pseudonym,
since it is widely known to be unique in having a
Greek theatre where plays are performed in the original
Greek. There also seemed little point in disguising the fact
that David Raeburn produced the Agamemnon of 1958. However,
he was not assisted by either Alan Desland or Kirsten,
since they, like Mr and Mrs Cook, Alan's housemaster and
the other Bradfieldians mentioned, are entirely fictitious.
Similarly, the localities in and near Copenhagen are real though
the 'Golden Pheasant' restaurant is not. Jarl and Jytte
Borgen are real and so is Per Simonsen, but Mr Hansen and
his office staff are fictitious. Both Tony Redwood and Mr
Steinberg are fictitious, but Lee Dubose happens to be real.
And so on.
Newbury, like many towns in England, has changed much
during recent times, but I have written of it con amore, as
I remember it, and hope I may be excused any minor anachronisms
such as, for example, mention of a building which
may in fact no longer be there. In my day there had been for
many years an old-established china business in Northbrook
Street, but I wish to emphasize that its proprietor - a lifelong
friend - and staff bear no resemblance whatever to Alan
Desland, Mrs Taswell and Deirdre, and certainly did not in
any way suggest the story to my mind.
So many people have helped me in one way or another
that they might almost be said to constitute a syndicate. I
thank them all most warmly, viz. my daughter Rosamond,
Robert Andrewes, Alan Barrett, Jarl and Jytte Borgen, Bob
Chambers, Barbara Griggs, John Guest, Reginald Haggar,
Helgi Jonsson, Bob Lamming, Don Lineback, John Mallet,
Janet Morgan, Per Simonsen and Claire Wrench.
Special thanks are due to my wife Elizabeth, for her invaluable
help on ceramics; and to my secretary, Janice
Kneale, whose patience and accuracy in typing and other
labours were of the greatest value.
NOTE
No phonetics, of course, convey the exact German inflexion, but
a reader who pronounces 'Kathe' to rhyme with the English word
'later' will be near enough.
Translations of the lines from German poems, etc., mentioned
by Alan and Kathe (together with a very brief note on the opening
of the Agamemnon) are given at the end of the book.
How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can dol
Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
Rivers and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside Till
I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown Up
in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
I
ALL day it has been windy - strange weather for late July the
wind swirling through the hedges like an invisible floodtide
among seaweed; tugging, compelling them in its own
direction, dragging them one way until the patches of elder
and privet sagged outward from the tougher stretches of
blackthorn on either side. It ripped the purple clematis from
its trellis and whirled away twigs and green leaves from the
oaks at the bottom of the shrubbery.
An hour ago it left the garden, but now, as evening falls,
I can see it still tussling along the ridge of the downs four
miles to southward. The beeches of Cottington's Clump stand
out plainly, swaying in turmoil against the pale sky, though
here not a breath remains to move a blade of grass: and
scarcely a sound; the blackbirds silent as the grasshoppers,
the crickets, within their thick, yellow-leaved holly-bush,
&
nbsp; not yet roused to their nightly chirping. Colours change in
twilight. The blooms of the giant dahlias - Black Monarch
and Anna Benedict - no longer glow dark-red, but loom
ashen-dusky, like great, lightless lanterns tied to their stakes.
The downs have come close - junipers, beeches and yews
so distinct that you might imagine you could toss a stone
onto the slope of Cottington's Hill. Yet this aspect, which
seems an illusion, is natural, a magnification brought about
by the rain-laden air. Rain will follow the wind, probably
before midnight; a steady, quenching rain on the hollyhocks
and lilies, the oaks and the acres of wheat and barley stretching
beyond the lane.
Kathe was sensitive as a dragon-fly to wind, sun and
weather. On a wet evening, having opened the French windows
to let in the sound and smell of the rain, she would
play the piano in a gentle, melancholy largo of response to
the pouring from grey clouds to the lawn and the glistening
branches: so that as I came home, up the length of the garden
lying easy under the summer downpour, I would recognize
at one and the same time the clamour of a thrush and
- it might be - a Chopin prelude. As I stepped in she would
break off, smiling, raise her hands from the keys and open her
arms in a magnificent gesture of warmth and welcome - the
attitude of Hera or Demeter; as though both to thank me
for the gift of all that lay around her and to invite - to
summon - me to receive it again in her embrace. Upon such
an evening our bodies, lying clasped together, would drift scarcely
even glide - to harbour, almost without propulsion
or guidance, down a gentle stream of pleasure, into and at
length out of the smooth current, grounding at last with the
faintest, mutual shuddering along their length; and then
would return the sound of the rain, the smell of the wet garden
outside, and on the nearby wall the moving shadows of
the leaves and the quick, here-and-gone gleam of a silver sunset.
How should I not weep?
Last night I dreamt that I woke to hear some strange,
barely audible sound from downstairs - a kind of thin tintinnabulation,
like those coloured-glass bird-scarers which in
my childhood were still sold for hanging up to glitter and
tinkle in the garden breeze. I thought I went downstairs to
the drawing-room. The doors of the china cabinets were
standing open, but all the figures were in their places - the
Bow Liberty and Matrimony, the Four Seasons of Neale
earthenware, the Reinicke girl on her cow; yes, and she herself
- the Girl in a Swing. It was from these that the sound
came, for they were weeping. Their tears were falling in tiny
crystals, flakes minute as grains of sand; and had covered,
as with snow, the dark-green cloth of the shelves on which
they stood. In these fragments their glaze and decoration had
dropped away. Already some were almost unrecognizable.
The collection was ruined. I fell on my knees, crying, like a
child, 'Come back! O please come back!' and woke to find
myself weeping in reality.
I knew, of course, that nothing could be amiss with the
collection, yet still I got up and went downstairs; perhaps to
10
prove to myself that there remained something for which I
cared enough to walk twenty yards in the middle of the
night. I took out the Copenhagen plate, with its underglaze
blue wave mark, and for a time sat looking at the gilt dentil
edge and Rosa Mundi spray, designed when Mozart was still
in his twenties and thirty years before Napoleon sent half a
million men to grief in the Russian snows. More fragile than
they, it had had no part in that huge disaster - and now it
had survived my own. At length, having sat for an hour and
watched the first light come into the sky, I went back to bed.
I suppose I cannot truthfully say that I have always loved
ceramics; yet even as a small boy I took an unconscious delight
and pleasure in going down to the shop; in its abundance
of pretty, bright-coloured objects, better than toys;
ladies and gentlemen and animals; its displays of cut-glass
and forty-two-piece dinner services - Susie Cooper or Wedgwood
Strawberry Hill - though in those days, of course, I
did not know their names. A Goss cow or Rockingham stag
could only have strayed, so I thought, from some wonderful
Noah's ark full of porcelain. Indeed, I remember once, since
I couldn't see it anywhere about, asking old Miss Lee where
the ark was kept.
'Oh, they don't need no ark. Master Alan,' she answered.
'The flood - that's over now, you see. And God promised
there won't be another, not no more there won't.'
'But -' Yet before I could point out that ordinary, wooden
animals still had their arks notwithstanding, Miss Lee, with
'Be a good boy, now, and remember don't go touchin' none
of 'em,' was off to serve some imperious, fur-coated customer.
The prohibition on touching - which I intuitively
sensed to be strict - excited rather than frustrated me, for it
showed that these must indeed be valuable things. I had
heard even grown-up people - customers - politely asked not
to touch them: and one day, at home, I saw my mother close
to tears after she had accidentally chipped the flowers on
the lid of a china box on her dressing-table. 'It can be
mended, dear, I'm sure it can,' she said, though I had not
asked her; and then set to work to gather every smallest
11
fragment into an envelope. I knew also, without being told,
that our living came from these precious, fragile wares.
The shop, too, was different from all other shops in its
clean, light smell - the smell of wooden packing-cases, shavings
and sawdust - in its quietness and clear daylight, and
the tiled floor across which the feet of Miss Lee and Miss
Flitter went tip-tap, tip-tap so surely and purposefully, to
produce some jug or teapot whose whereabouts they precisely
knew. 'If you'd just care to step this way, 'm, I think
we've got what you want down the passage.' For the passage
- no ordinary passage - was very much part of the shop;
frosted-paned, glass-roofed, five-tier-shelved along both
walls, with cups, saucers, plates, jugs, sauce-boats, teapots
and animals' drinking-bowls all in their places. A vine grew
all along its length, half-concealing the roof, and it ended in
a little fern-garden and a green door leading into the warehouse.
Dimly I remember an old-fashioned, mahogany and
glass-panelled cash desk, but this must have gone while I
was still no more than three or four years old.
I suppose that without thinking about it, I felt proud of
the Northbrook Street shop for its uniqueness, its cleanness
and myriad, faintly-glistening goods, which to me seemed
precious simply because of their fragility. Nevertheless, it
formed only a small part of all that made up my childhood. I
did not often go there, for we did not live 'over the shop',
but out at Wash Common, in those days a village more than
a mile south of Newbury, above the town and the Kennet
valley. The house - tile-roofed, gabled and half-timbered is
called 'Bull Banks' - a whim of the original owner, who
apparently knew and admired Beatrix Potter; not only, someone
once told me, for the quality of her writing, but also for
her early example of feminine independence against odds. I
have never had or wished to have any other home.
Lying awake on a warm, open-windowed night, I used to
hear the distant trains shunting in Newbury station below,
and the faint chiming of the town hall clock. In June the
smell of azaleas or night-scented stock would steal in and
away, here and gone. Sometimes a roaming mosquito might
come in handy as an excuse for a little attention after lights12
out. 'Mummy, there's a buzzy biter in my room!' Or one
could risk the onslaughts of the buzzy biters, get out of bed
and lean at the window-sill, looking out towards Cottington's
Clump on the skyline; or hope for a sight of an owl gliding
silently over the midsummer haycocks in the wilderness beyond
the lawn. In August the harvest moon would rise
enormous on the left, its misty, Gloucester-cheese red slowly
gaining to silver as it cleared the oak trees and lit the acres
of sheaves in the great field on the further side of the lane.
On green March evenings thrushes would shout from the
tops of the silver birches along the edge of the lawn. My
father would apostrophize them. 'Yes, I can hear you, and a
nasty, vulgar bawling it is! Give me a good blackbird any
day.' The big, half-wild garden was full of birds, to which
he paid attention all the year round. In summer he would sit
in a deck-chair on the lawn, the newspaper a mere pretence
on his knee, his real purpose and pleasure being to watch and
listen. 'There's a willow-warbler somewhere down there', he
would say, pointing, when I came to tell him tea was ready.
'I can't see the chap, but I can hear him." And then he would
teach me to recognize the characteristic dying fall of the
song. He never used binoculars, but sometimes, putting on
his glasses, would get up and make a cautious approach for
a closer sight of a nuthatch, perhaps, or it might be a treecreeper
in the pines beyond the rhododendrons. 'You have to
be able to recognize a bird by its behaviour, my boy. As often
as not you can't get a proper look at the beggar, because he's
against the light, you see.' Although it infuriated him to see
a bullfinch pulling buds off the prunus tree, he would not
interfere with it.
My sister - three years older - and I hung up bones for the
tits and put out old bread and bacon-rinds for the starlings
and wagtails running on the rain-pooled lawn. Once, a lesser
spotted woodpecker flew full-tilt into a glass pane at one
end of the verandah and died a minute later in my father's
hand. I have never seen one since. During the five years I
spent at school at Bradfield I would usually, towards the end
of March, receive a postcard from him saying simply, 'I have
heard the chiff-chaff.'
13
They say - at least, Thomas Hughes says, and various
people have been saying it ever since - that if you don't
want to be knocked about at a public school you have to be
able to stick up for yourself, but I can't say I found it so,
particularly. During my time at Bradfield both headmasters
(for at the end of my second year there was a change) were
humane men, setting little store by severity, and from them,
on the whole, both staff and boys took their tone. But anyway
boys have, I think, a kind of natural respect for consistency
of behaviour and the faculty of self-adjustment. Certainly
an aggressive or self-opinionated boy will need to be
able either to stick up for himself or else to endure others'
dislike or contempt. But one who makes no particular claims
and whom others perceive to be content to comply with convention
and live his own inoffensive life, is usually, in my experience,
taken at his own valuation and left in peace, with
no need to resort to any self-defence except that of his
natural dignity. At any rate, it was so with me. I passed a
quiet, uneventful five years, and although I made one or two
friends, felt no particular desire to keep up with them after I
left. They clearly felt the same of me. I see now that I lacked