Waterland

by Graham Swift

  They leave the White Rose Tea Room (tea untouched) in order to be free to kiss and twine arms. Their breaths form a mingled cloud. They cross Market Street, walk down Water Street. On the Ousebank they embrace. Heavy winter clothing muffles and mutes unfamiliar closeness. They kiss. It is not a kiss which revives drowned curiosity, which restores the girl who once lay in a ruined windmill. But nor is her kiss, so it seems to him, the kiss of a woman who still seeks Salvation.

  And so, by the icy Ouse, as they walk arm in arm between piles of cleared snow (watching spies, had there been any, might have scurried back to inform a relieved Farmer Metcalf and Henry Crick that all is well), it is decided. And it is there too, on the Ousebank, that the future history teacher’s wife says two things. Firstly (looking at the heaped snow): ‘There’ll be a bad thaw. Father can’t move his cattle. Those idiots at the Catchment Board will have a lot to answer for.’ And then (looking straight at him): ‘You know, don’t you, that short of a miracle we can’t have a child?’

  Once upon a time there was a future history teacher’s wife who wore a rust-red schoolgirl’s uniform and wore her deep-brown hair in a straight fringe, in the regulation fashion, under a schoolgirl’s beret or straw hat; but who – wearing little or nothing at all – invited the future history teacher to explore the intricacies of her incipient womanhood, to consider the mysteries of her menstrual cycle – and to offer reciprocal invitations. Who liked to find things out, to uncover secrets, but then ceased to be inquisitive. Whose life came to a kind of stop when she was only sixteen, though she had to go on living.

  Once, long ago, there was a future history teacher’s wife who, though she said to the future history teacher they should never meet again, married him three years later. And the future history teacher took her away with him, in 1947, from the Cambridgeshire Fens where they were both born, to London. Though not before in the spring of that year a great flood had drowned the larger part of those same native Fens. And not before this same flood, which caused Henry Crick to contract bronchopneumonia while he kept, tenaciously, vigilantly, in a half submerged cottage, to his post of lock-keeper, had brought about the death of the future history teacher’s father.

  But that is another story …

  They move to London. He becomes a teacher. And she, after some years as only a history teacher’s wife (seeing him off to school each morning – the inevitable ironies, the mother-son charades this prompted), finds work, for reasons never fully explained, in a local government office concerned with the care of the elderly.

  They settle in Greenwich, a suburb of London noted for its historical features: a Royal Observatory; a park where Henry VIII once hunted; a former palace turned Maritime Museum; not to mention the dry-docked Cutty Sark, bowsprit permanently pointing to the Isle of Dogs. He teaches at a Grammar School (resited and reincorporated as a comprehensive in 1966) in Charlton. She works at the municipal buildings in Lewisham.

  They acquire regular habits, spiced with unspectacular variations. Sunday walks in the park (the Observatory and back). Exchanges of hospitality with his teaching colleagues and her age-care associates. Joking comment is passed (do the couple accept it as joking?) at these sociable occasions about their respective professional spheres – he amongst schoolkids, she amongst the senile. (What has become of the middle bit of life?) A visit, approximately every six weeks, to her father (who won’t leave his farm, who won’t have any of this nursing-home nonsense) in Cambridgeshire. A meal in a restaurant every birthday and wedding anniversary. Trips to the theatre. Weekend excursions. Holidays: he, true to form, prefers historical associations; she is incurious.

  Not having a family – and inheriting, in 1969, part of the proceeds of the sale of a Fenland farm – they do not lack for money, indeed are almost embarrassingly comfortable: the ‘enviable Greenwich home’ (Regency, porticoed front door) of which much will be made in certain newspaper reports.

  They acquire regular habits and regular diversions. So much so that three decades pass as if without event, and it does not seem long before they are both in their fifties: he a Head of Department who refuses a headmaster’s desk; she having decided, for reasons no more explicit than those which made her begin, to give up her work with her Old Folk. And as they take their Sunday walks in the park (walks during which it might be observed that should they lean on one another, it is he who leans on her rather than she on him), they are joined by a third party – a golden retriever, called Paddy. It lopes and fawns about them and causes them now and then to smile and utter words of encouragement or command. A golden retriever bought by her for him on his fifty-second birthday, for which the official justification (a prod at his stomach) is the inducement to more exercise in sedentary middle age. But brief consideration of the fact that when the wife made her sudden decision to leave work it was during the onset of a late and troubled menopause, suggests a different explanation …

  They walk now, in chill January sunshine, Paddy padding behind them, along the path to the Observatory. Eyes blinking in the dazzling light; Sunday morning thick heads receiving frosty purgation. For this is the morning after a certain dinner party at the house of Lewis and Rebecca Scott.

  Lewis with a bottle ever at the ready; Mrs Scott a bustling, cerise-clad hostess; the Scott children (unable to sleep: all this adult chatter from below) suddenly paraded, exhibited in the dining-room in pyjamas and dressing-gowns, offering bashful smiles or performing impudent tricks, being whisked off again briskly to bed; the bizarre subject of nuclear shelters emerging through the coffee and brandy …

  And all of it, according to him – though she said, as they drove to the Scott home, he should curb his paranoia – a piece of sinister manipulation. A way of buttering him up. (When did Lewis last ask the Cricks to dinner?)

  He’d been getting the rumours (‘Drink up, Tom’): phasing out the History Department …

  Gloves and scarves. Silvered asphalt underfoot. Breaths forming vapour-trails. They walk in silence, the Scotts’ dinner fully dissected, each lost in misty thoughts. Paddy keeps a tactful distance.

  She speaks, stealing from him the words he was about to say to her.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Oh – I was thinking of one of my kids. Bit of a trouble-maker. Called Price.’

  He smiles, shrugging aside the subject.

  ‘Tell me about him.’

  So he tells her about Price. His classroom declaration: history is coming to an end. A schoolmaster’s makeshift theory: Price as would-be revolutionary. Like every active-minded young man, Price wants to change the world. Yet Price knows that all the old authentic revolutions are over. Old hat. Hence his paradoxical disruption of a lesson on the French Revolution. How can you have a revolution if history’s coming to an—? The frustrated revolutionary turns radical reactionary: Price doesn’t want to change the world, he wants to—

  ‘Save it?’ Her words anticipating his again.

  She takes his arm, squeezes it. (It’ll be the last time they’ll walk so closely, familiarly in the old park.)

  ‘But I don’t mean that. I meant tell me about him.’

  ‘Price? He’s sixteen. Curly-haired. Skinny. Sort of underfed and homeless-looking. But surly with it. Not that he hasn’t got a home. I asked him, “How are things at home?” He said, “They’re happy.” He wears this stuff – don’t ask me why – a sort of dirty-white greasepaint …’

  He rambles on, evidently needing to speak, about this teenage thorn in the flesh.

  ‘He’s actually quite clever. I think he blames me. For history. He’s – likeable … I think he’s frightened.’

  She listens, questions. Breath-smoke. Keen eyes. Frost-sharp air.

  ‘It’s not like you to let a student under your skin.’

  And it’s not like Mary to be curious.

  Once upon a time there was a future history teacher and a future history teacher’s wife for whom things went wrong, so – since you cannot dispose of the past, since things must
be – they had to make do.

  And he made do precisely by making a profession out of the past, out of this thing which cannot be eradicated, which accumulates and impinges – whose action, indeed, was imitated by the growing numbers of books which filled the first-floor room of the Greenwich house which the history teacher made his study, and spilled out on to landing and staircase. He made a living – a life’s work – out of the past, for which his justification was the children to whom he offered daily the lessons that the past affords. To them he presented the equivocal gift of history – burdensome yet instructive – to carry into their futures. And thus the history teacher – though his relation with his young charges echoes first the paternal, then the grandpaternal, though he sees in their faces (but does not admit it) less and less the image of the future, more and more that of something he is trying to retrieve, something he has lost – could always say (he acquires a penchant for paradox) that he looked back in order to look forward.

  But she made do (so he thought) with nothing. Not believing either in looking back or in looking forward, she learnt how to mark time. To withstand, behind all the stage-props of their marriage, the empty space of reality. So that whereas he could not do without his history classes and his schoolkids, she could readily dispense with her Old Folk – witness that voluntary, indeed adamant decision. And whereas he had to keep going back every day to school, there was always this grown-up woman to return to, who was stronger than him (he believed) at facing the way things must be – whom he needed indeed, when it came to it, more than he needed all the wisdom and solace of history.

  So that your history teacher’s wife, children, may be said to have been the inspiration of all that he taught you …

  Once upon a time there was a history teacher’s wife who, for quite specific and historical reasons, couldn’t have a child. Though her husband had lots: a river of children – new lives, fresh starts – flowed through his classroom. Who could have adopted a child (many times, in the early years, the husband warily – hopefully – raised the subject); though she never adopted a child, for the simple and intractable reason, so the husband supposed, that to adopt a child is not the real thing, and his wife was not a woman to resort to make-believe.

  Once there was a history teacher’s wife who, as if to prove that she could live without children, chose to work with old people, with those people who, since their lives have come to a virtual halt, have themselves become burdens, anxieties to their own children and consequently have to be taken off their hands and put in Homes. Who engages in this work for twenty-odd years. But in her fifty-third year – in the same year in which she purchases for her husband’s birthday a dog called Paddy – suddenly but deliberately stops work with her old people, leaving herself with no other occupation but to survey the flat and uniform terrain of thirty years of marriage, while he surveys his rows of teenagers.

  A history teacher’s wife who (so the history teacher thought) was realistic. Who did not need (since she had learnt her lessons) to go back to school. Who did not believe any more in miracles and fairy-tales, nor (having experimented in her younger days) in New Life and Salvation.

  But in her fifty-third year, in the year 1980, it begins to seem to the history teacher that this one-time schoolgirl who could not leave a secret unexplored is herself harbouring a secret. Why is she taciturn? (Yet keen-eyed.) What does she do with the time on her hands while he holds forth before his classes? Why is she so often out when he returns from school in the late afternoons? Is this a case (like Thomas Atkinson?) of doting solicitude leading to jealous imaginings? For Mrs Crick, you’ll have observed, children, even from those atrocious newspaper photographs, is a well-preserved woman.

  At length she confesses she has been talking to a priest. She confesses she has been to confession – something she has not done for nearly forty years. But she will not say more. She brings home books whose very titles (If Jesus Returned; God or The Bomb) appal him. He watches her read (while he marks exercise books). She reads with the earnest and receptive gaze that now and then, in luckier moments, will steal over his listening students. The history teacher says to himself – with a sense that she is drifting away from him, with a sense that some picture he has had of things has been turned upside down – my wife is becoming a child again. He wants to draw her back, to keep her safe. But on Sunday mornings and afternoons, customary times for their strolls in the Park, she begins – the first occasion is a week after their talk about Price – to insist on taking walks alone (he is left to the company of a dog): walks whose object, he strongly suspects, is to attend church.

  On the top of Greenwich Hill, in Greenwich Park, stands an Observatory, founded by Charles II to search the mysteries of the stars. By the Observatory, set in the asphalt, much bestridden and photographed by visiting sightseers, a metal plate marks the line of longitude 0°. Near longitude 0°, perched on a plinth, becloaked and tricorned, stands General Wolfe, in bronze, staring to the Thames. And beneath General Wolfe, imitating his vigilant pose, stands the history teacher, in coat and scarf, taking in for the umpteenth time the famous view. The Maritime Museum (relics of Cook and Nelson); the Naval College (painted ceiling depicting four English monarchs). History’s toy-cupboard. The pastime of past time. The history teacher himself, here in Greenwich at the head of unruly end-of-term outings. The river: a steel serpent coiling through clutter – derelict wharves and warehouses, decaying docks …

  From the top of Greenwich Hill it is possible not only to scan the inscrutable heavens but to peel back past panoramas (wind-jammers in the India Dock; royal barges, under Dutch-Master skies, bound for the Palace), to imagine these river approaches to London as the wild water-country they once were. Deptford, Millwall, Blackwall, Woolwich … And, away, out of sight to the east, the former marshes where, in 1980, they are building a flood barrier.

  He stands alone and contemplates the view. Every Sunday, weather permitting, by varying routes, to the Observatory and back. To longitude 0° and back. Pause on the hill-crest; admiration of the view; silent, simultaneous but separate musings; then he to her or she to him (a smile; a shiver at the cold): ‘Home?’ But now he stands alone, beneath the Hero of Quebec.

  He stands alone – save for a golden retriever which rubs and nuzzles at his legs and begs to be indulged in more stick-throwing games. Because his wife no longer comes on walks with him. She goes her own way. As if, he thinks, she is already (but her husband lives) a widow. Though widow’s not the right word. Widow suggests an old woman. And she is getting younger. She is leaving him. She reminds him of a woman in love …

  Low winter sun over Flamsteed’s Observatory. Fiery highlights on the roof of the Maritime Museum. The history teacher stands, surveys the outstretched view. Thinks of a student called Price. The only important thing … If the truth be known, he is frightened. If the truth be known, he doesn’t know what to think. He is telling himself stories. (How a girl and a boy once … How …) He dreads going home. Dreads, now, weekends, Sundays. Dark evenings.

  He turns. Stoops suddenly to ruffle vigorously the neck of the impatient Paddy, who, tail-wagging and panting, anticipates the return of his favourite game. He leaves the asphalt, strikes out on to the grass, overtaken by an ecstatic dog. In his gloved right hand he carries an already tooth-marked and saliva-dampened stick. ‘Here, Paddy! Here!’

  The history teacher throws the stick, watches the dog run – a blond flurry attached to a long winter shadow – pick up, return, demand more. He throws again. And again, and again, watching instinct at work. Pursue; pick up; return; pursue again.

  Retriever. Golden retriever.

  For two, three weekends he goes alone to the park; throws sticks for a dog. Then one Sunday she wants to come walking with him again. He is, restrainedly, overjoyed. They put on coats. Paddy comes too. There’s a feeling of newness. Her face, winter-rouged, is aglow with something. They turn at the Observatory. Survey the view. She wants to sit for a moment on a bench. February
twilight gathering (the park closes at dusk). Then suddenly she announces: ‘I’m going to have a baby. Because God’s said I will.’

  Children, don’t stop asking why. Don’t cease your Why Sir? Why Sir? Though it gets more difficult the more you ask it, though it gets more inexplicable, more painful, and the answer never seems to come any nearer, don’t try to escape this question Why.

  13

  Histrionics

  BECAUSE when I was your age and Jack Parr was asking Whywhywhy and my father was asking Whywhywhy, how sweet and redeeming sounded that neat and neutral phrase ‘Accidental Death’. How sweet and blessedly – fraudulently – normal seemed the view from the Wansham Road (blessed flat fields, blessed monotonous dykes) as I cycled, on that same day of Jack Parr’s miraculous survival, to meet Mary by the Lode. Because that neat phrase – it was official – meant that no one was guilty. If death was accidental then it couldn’t have been murder, could it, and if it couldn’t have been murder then my brother couldn’t have been— And if my brother wasn’t, then Mary and I weren’t— And that only left the little problem (but it was only a little problem, a not even visible problem, and when the time came, we’d sworn, we were going to go first to Mary’s father, then to mine …) of that little thing in Mary’s tummy.

  And so I said (I wasn’t late this time; I got there first, and Mary appeared minutes later, through the poplar spinney): ‘It’s all right. Haven’t you heard? Accidental death. So it’s all right. All right. Nothing’s changed.’

  And Mary looked at me – how can I convey that look which seemed to pile years upon her and strip them from me (and she still does it – or rather did it – my mother-wife who packed her husband off to school)? Mary looked at me and said: ‘It’s not all right. Because it wasn’t an accident. Everything’s changed.’