by Graham Swift
28
And Artificial History
AND what does he do, faced with this scene, which began with skylarking and ended with confusion: an uncontrollably giggling Mary; an eel taking wriggling flight (away from these crazy humans) through the grass?
Your teacher notes, in true historically observant fashion, the look that Dick directs (after first looking at the eel) at Mary. A long and searching look you wouldn’t expect from a potato-head. A stern, baffled and questioning look which makes Mary stop all of a sudden her giggling, as if at some command, and look back, just as intently, at Dick. He notes how Dick looks at Mary and then how Mary looks at Dick; and he notes how Freddie Parr catches both these looks which Dick and Mary give each other.
And in all this looking at others’ looks he too has a look of his own, a look which he can’t describe, not having been in a position to see it, but most probably a forlorn, a rebuffed look, bearing on top of it only the thinnest veneer of bravery. Because your history teacher (though he’s never told her) is in love, it’s a fact, with Mary Metcalf. And that’s what made him (he can’t speak for the others), when he and Freddie and Peter Baine and Terry Coe cautiously lowered their swimming-trunks, droop so plaintively. A common response, referred to by the best sexologists …
There’s something about this scene. It’s tense with the present tense. It’s fraught with the here and now, it’s laden with this stuff – is there a name for it? It affects your history teacher in the pit of the stomach. It gives him a feeling in his guts, which, assailed by Freddie’s whisky and a mouthful or two of Lode-water, crawl and twist inside him even as the eel coils and slithers towards the safety of the Lode. It’s too much for your history teacher’s unpractised objectivity, or for his short-lived pubescent boldness.
He escapes to his story-books.
Because he can still do that. Jump from the one realm to the other, as if they shut each other out. He hasn’t begun yet to put the two together. To live an amphibious life. He hasn’t begun to ask yet where the stories end and reality begins. But he will, he will.
In the late summer of 1940, while Hitler sets up shop in Paris and makes invasion plans, while over southern skies history inscribes itself in white scrolls and provides ample material for the legends of the future, he rummages amongst the books his mother left behind her – many of which belonged to that book-loving pair, Dora and Louisa Atkinson, and embarks upon the two volumes of Hereward the Wake (a now valuable first edition still in his possession) which Louisa gave to Dora in 1866. While the inhabitants of London and other large cities are forced to take refuge within the solid fabric of air-raid shelters and underground stations, he takes refuge in the fanciful fabric of Kingsley’s yarn, in which, in misty Fenland settings (which match his misty, love-sick state of mind), history merges with fiction, fact gets blurred with fable …
How the wild-fowl cried, ‘The Wake is come again’ … how Hereward, in his magic armour, slew Sir Frederick Warrenne at Lynn … how, disguised as a potter, he spied on William the Conqueror … how he fired the Fens and roasted the Normans … how he loved and married the Lady Torfrida … how his marriage turned sour …
But meanwhile that scene on the Lode bank which, like other scenes yet to come, lodges in your history teacher’s memory to be exhumed at later dates. Mary, in navy blue knickers which she has shared briefly with an eel; a live fish in a woman’s lap; Dick; Freddie Parr; their stares, with his own, forming an invisible cats’ cradle. A bottle hurled into the muddy Lode; Dick on the wooden bridge; Freddie in the water …
Now who says history doesn’t go in circles?
29
Detective Work
SO I TOOK the bottle which I’d hidden in my room and put it where Dick would see it.
Because it’s strong stuff, this curiosity. It gets the better even of fear, it gets the better of our better judgement. And even though I could have chucked that bottle in the river and been done with it, there’s no keeping down that old detective spirit; and I couldn’t hold at bay for ever that question: What are you going to do?
I put the bottle in Dick’s room, on his bedside-table. And then – because though curiosity can get the better of fear, it doesn’t stop you being scared – I went to my own room along the landing, shut the door, locked it, put a chair against it, sat and waited.
Six p.m. Bulletin time. Down below Dad tunes in, punctually as ever, to his crackling communiqués. But he must think that my evening retreat to my bedroom is a good sign (so the lad’s getting over this bad business, settling down again to his books), for he takes care not to turn up the volume unduly. And this consideration on his part, this muting of the war in favour of my scholarliness, only enables me to hear more clearly what in any case my ears are straining for: the wasp-buzz of Dick’s approaching motor-bike down the Gildsey road.
And when Dick at length climbs the stairs – followed by an injunction from Dad which couldn’t be more ineptly obliging to his brother: ‘Now don’t disturb Tom – he’s studying’ – what does he do?
For a long time – nothing. He opens his door, enters. Clomp of his feet across the floorboards. Then he closes the door (abruptly? decisively?). Then silence. Only the ‘chunk-chunk’ of Dad’s spade in the vegetable patch, where, bulletin over, he’s lifting another row of potatoes.
And what does your history teacher do? He presses his ear closer to the key-hole of his own door; attempts to repulse the assaults of his heartbeat; to interpret silence.
A tell-tale silence? An incriminating silence? A guilty silence?
If Dick can be touched by guilt. Because supposing he enters the room, sees the bottle, yet it sets off no sirens of significance? He sees a bottle, a bottle which once he threw into the river, with which he once— But he doesn’t ask HowWhyWho? Supposing Dick’s immune to guilt? To fear, doubt, remorse? To the whole mutinous crew of emotions.
But he’s not immune to love …
And the silence doesn’t last indefinitely. It’s broken by more – less casual – footfalls and the sound of Dick’s door-latch being raised. And now there’s no restraining, despite that locked door he’s pressed against, your history teacher’s heartbeat; there’s no stopping his heart leaping right into his mouth. Because it hasn’t failed to occur to him that Dick’s strong, and this same, handy, possibly murderous bottle might do for another what it has already done for one.
But this raising of Dick’s door-latch – it isn’t the way a door-latch gets raised with a view to breaking down another door, in a state of homicidal rage. It’s the work of a gentle, a stealthy, if still ponderous giant. It makes a sound – a click, a rasp – not meant to be heard. And a sound not meant to be heard is a much more tell-tale affair than plain silence. Furthermore, it’s followed by more circumspect and would-be inaudible sounds, the noise of heavy-footed Dick tiptoeing, creeping, along our upstairs landing, yet not in the direction of the main staircase but in the direction of the little, narrow, winding flight of steps, guarded by its own door, which leads to our attic. And here Dick’s stealth continues to advertise itself – for, even with the lightest of treads and even with the little door closed behind you, it is impossible to climb those old and dried-out wooden steps without a give-away medley of creaks, cracks and whines. Yet Dick climbs, and is gone perhaps a full minute (almost complete silence) before he descends, once more with painful caution, and sets off in reverse the same chorus of protests.
Poor Dick. He doesn’t realize that it’s stealth that incriminates, where not to attempt it wouldn’t. He doesn’t know that cunning can’t be achieved by the motions of cunning, by a pantomime of cunning, any more than love can be—
Nor does he know that I’ve heard these hugger-mugger sounds, these furtive footfalls, these creakings of the attic stairs once before. But then, indeed, they were better concealed – drowned by the groans and shrieks of an east wind, blowing as it blows every winter, mercilessly across the unsheltered Fens.
But that winter,
more mercilessly than ever …
And now he creeps back along the landing; and I tense myself once again behind my door, because I can’t be sure— But he opens, still with elaborate care, his own door, enters and a few moments later emerges – this time with a manifest intention to make noises, because his footsteps thump with extra firmness on the way to the main stairs and as he descends he starts up (after the clumsy stealth, the clumsy nonchalance) a wheezing, wavering attempt at a whistle.
He descends. I wait. A brief appeal from Dad for assistance in the vegetable patch announces Dick’s emergence from the cottage. I unlock my door. Remove the chair from in front of it. Step along the landing to Dick’s room. A shipwreck of bed-linen. Little huddles of silt-smelling clothes. On the wall, above the bed, in a glass case, a stuffed pike, once weighing twenty-one pounds, caught on, of all days, November the eleventh, 1918, by John Badcock, former incumbent of the Atkinson Lock.
No bottle.
I return to the landing. Repeat – but without his laboured pussy-footing – Dick’s foray to the attic. And there, amongst the musty smells and dusty lumber, the cast-out mattresses and sarcophagal packing-cases, is what I know to have been the object of his sortie. A chest. A black-lacquered, smaller than average, battered but sturdy wooden chest. On its lid it bears in faded but just discernible gold lettering, the initials E. R. A. And it bears also – black channels in the film of grey dust that covers it – the marks of recent fingerings. Marks, which though recent, can be seen to a discriminating eye, to an eye possessed by the detective spirit, not all to have been made at the same time. For across some of the channels the lightest, the faintest refilming of dust has occurred. And just as a bruise can appear beneath a bruise, so here there are marks upon marks.
It’s just seven days since Freddie floated down the river.
I crouch and attempt to raise the lid. Locked firm. I ponder. A black wooden chest with tarnished brass fittings, which once belonged to my grandfather and then to my mother. And then, one winter, my mother died. But before she died, she gave the key – to my brother. A black wooden chest which has stood, as long as I can remember, up here in the attic beneath the dormer window, but of whose contents I know nothing, save that amongst them are—
I start, leap to my feet (almost crash my head on the low and sloping ceiling-beams). Dick’s coming. He’s coming up the stairs. Dick, whose charade of cunning has out-cunninged mine, has laid this trap. He’s coming up the stairs to the attic, where there’s only one narrow exit—
But it’s only a freak twinge in that old woodwork. Only a stray remnant of that wind …
I retrace my steps. Close the door to the attic steps. Return to my room. Lock the door. Think.
So my brother is a murderer. So what Mary said was true. And now Dick knows that I know he’s a— So now it’s a question of who’s more afraid of who.
I go to the window and look down at the vegetable patch. Runner beans are in scarlet bloom. Dick and Dad are stooped over the potato plants, their heads nearly touching, so it seems that they are bent together in some confidence, some conspiracy from which I’m excluded. Dick looks up. Looks up at my window. Sees me looking down. Our gazes are linked by a taut rope of fear. His lashes dance.
Who is my brother? What’s he made from?
I must find that key.
30
About the Saviour of the World
BUT after the Grand ’51 Ale and the Prince Consort Ale and the Empress of India and the Golden and Diamond Jubilee Ales, not to mention the notorious Coronation Ale of 1911, no Armistice Ale flowed in the Fenlands in November, 1918. The River Leem flowed, into the Ouse, past the Atkinson Lock, past the Hockwell Lode, where later Freddie Parr would pick up an eel … But no Victory Ale flowed to refresh the patriotic citizens of Gildsey and its low-lying hinterland. Because, for one thing, there was no brewery to make it; and for another, a large part of the beer-drinking population was no more.
Perhaps they might have forgiven Ernest Atkinson. Perhaps they might have been prepared to excuse his warning diatribe from the town hall rostrum and his even more outrageous experiment in prophetical admonition in that summer of 1911. Perhaps they might have declared themselves chastened. But they did not want, now it was, after all, all over, to sit down to a history lesson. And another thing made them not want to forgive Ernest Atkinson; and that was – his daughter.
Though – let’s be clear – the people of Gildsey had no cause in that same prodigious year of 1911 when Ernest departed from them, not only under the literal smoke clouds from his own brewery, but under the darker pall of scandal, scorn, rumour and allegation, to concern themselves particularly with Helen Atkinson – then an innocent and overawed child of fifteen. But in 1914, when she is eighteen, the matter is different. For while a majority of the populace – especially now this long-expected war has at last begun – is prepared to continue to revile the former brewer, a fair portion – notably the young, male, soon-to-be arms-bearing, cannon-daring portion – is in love with his daughter. And though Helen is seldom seen, living as she does with her father in that gloomy retreat at Kessling and never emerging save in his company, this in no way alters the picture. For young knights, as we know, need their damsels – especially the beleaguered, inaccessible ones in forbidden towers. And it is all still at the dreamy, chivalrous, make-believe stage, this war born in the August haze.
Shall we add to the list of indulgences – superstition, tale-telling, despondency, the bottle – to which these stick-in-the-mud Fen-dwellers are prone, another: Beauty? Especially the kind that can be invested with inspiring, exalting qualities. And need we point out how Beauty has already exerted its bewitching power both on this now tarnished Atkinson family and (by virtue of portraits with black dresses and the like) on the town which it, in turn, has for a good long century influenced?
But Helen, this last of the brewer’s daughters, is surely in no danger of suffering the fate of that former beauty, the first brewer’s daughter, and being turned into a local deity. Because, firstly, she is in possession of her mind, which for fifty years of her life, Sarah Atkinson was not. And, secondly, she belongs not to Gildsey and its credulous citizens, but to her father. And, though in 1914 the town would have liked to woo back this budding daughter, with her unloved father (unloved save by her) she remains.
Yet, for its own satisfaction, the town has to find some way of explaining that incongruous, twofold sequestration. It has to find a way of reconciling those two seemingly incompatible faces: the father’s lugubrious, old-before-its-time countenance, with its sudden unsettling smiles and flashes of dark fire; the daughter’s virgin limpidity. So it invents the easy myth that Helen, far from being swayed by filial motives, was compelled against her wishes to live with her father, indeed was forcibly imprisoned by him, away from the bright and beckoning world (bright and beckoning – in 1914), in that ogre’s castle of his at Kessling.
A myth … Yet in every myth there is a grain of truth …
But what does Ernest say? We haven’t heard his side of the story (we haven’t heard Helen’s either, but that will come out later, a little slowly and reluctantly perhaps). Does Ernest deserve this villain’s part? Did he deserve those malicious barbs which followed him into his retreat? For what is the evidence? That he spoke out against the coming Chaos? That he spoke out against empire-building and flag-waving? And when words didn’t work he used action, and the action seemed itself like the invoking of chaos? Yet the chaos wasn’t his fault. Because he knew how to use that revelatory ale of his. He could drink it without its turning him into a madman. Quite the opposite: it soothed his inward melancholy and warmed and lightened his spirits. And as for that imputation that he himself had set fire to the brewery, in order to get the insurance money … The people had set fire to the brewery – just as the ale had inflamed their senses. And as for the insurance money, which indeed came his way – though it wasn’t as much as was rumoured and a large part of it was eaten up by p
ayments of compensation and the costly process of winding up his business – it was used in the end to endow a convalescent home for war victims, the site for which was none other than his own once-sumptuous family estate, Kessling Hall. This Kessling Hall Home (Ernest Atkinson did not wish his name to be in any way commemorated in the foundation) became in due course the East Cambridgeshire Hospital; and today, rebuilt, expanded, with only a small portion of the original Hall still standing and used for administrative purposes, it is one of the principal psychiatric institutions of East Anglia.
But this is to jump ahead. Kessling Hall was not converted to its new purpose – and Helen Atkinson did not decide to become one of its first contingent of nurses – till 1918. And Ernest and Helen did not move into the former Lodge – a kind of miniature version of the larger house with its own small plot of enveloping trees – till the autumn of that year. So that for a good four years Ernest lived, with his daughter, the life of a determined recluse in the old hall, gradually abandoning and shutting up its rooms, letting the outbuildings fall into disrepair, gradually reducing the small retinue of servants till in 1918 there was none, save Helen herself who became housekeeper, cook – and nurse – all rolled into one.
Only once in those four years between 1914 and 1918, if we exclude those various, discreet trips to settle his affairs, did Ernest Atkinson make any public appearance in the town his grandsires had once ruled. And that, of all occasions, was in the spring of 1915 at a parade and inspection of the Royal Cambridgeshire Militia – at the Gildsey performance, that is to say, of the local travelling recruiting circus. Ernest, by some administrative bungle, quite defeating the local powers of veto, received an invitation to join the token muster of military staff and civilian bigwigs on the stand where the salute would be taken; and for some sly reason best known to himself, did not ignore it. Perhaps he saw the chance to raise again his old cry of protest, perhaps he came to scowl in silence. At any rate, in the event, he kept a low profile. Which was not difficult, with his daughter beside him.
