Waterland

by Graham Swift

  The Duke’s Head. Mock red velvet. Mock Tudor oak framing mock Georgian coach-lamps. Amidst the period anomalies, electronic growls, TV-game bleepings. How we advance … how we still need our babies’ rattles …

  And how our momentarily commiserative and compliant Price has regained his old confrontationary zeal. Only took a single Bloody Mary. He gulps at a second. (Whatever happened to beer and merriment?)

  ‘And who says if we are around that we’ll want to have children – the way things are going? Who says there’s going to be any world to bring them into?’

  (But if nobody has children there won’t be any world anyway …)

  ‘Who says we’ll want to bring children into whatever world there is?’

  He looks at me, this founding president of the Holocaust Club, this angry, frightened, and denunciatory kid.

  (Yes, yes, it’s our fault, Price. The old ones. We haven’t been vigilant. We’ve let the world slip away. Should have saved it.)

  ‘Supposing you could have children now, sir, just supposing … would you?’

  And forgets. And remembers again at once. And flushes; looks confused, guilty, aghast. Wipes a smear of tomato juice from his lip.

  A fruit machine vomits. The space invaders close in.

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t—’

  34

  Too Big

  BUT it’s all right, you see, because once I had a child. No, I’m talking literally. I’m not talking about now, I’m talking about the year 1943 (now would you have said that was a particularly rosy year for civilization?). And perhaps I’d better rephrase things: Once Mary had a child. Her menstrual cycle, of which she was so proud and so unsecretive, stopped cycling. She missed a period, and then, bit by bit, things started to happen inside her, just as they’re supposed to. And, at sixteen, in the year 1943, amongst all those not-so-much-older-than-me soldiers, sailors and airmen who were hastily sowing their seed and putting something by for posterity during this time of universal crisis, I too faced the prospect of precipitate paternity.

  Or would have done. Had not Dick asked, over the kitchen table, a certain question … Because how did I know, hearing it all from Mary, just how far those lessons were going every Wednesday and Saturday evening …?

  He wants to give her another eel. Another gift from him to her. He keeps on asking, his skin scrubbed and his hair glistening, when would she like another eel? So that Mary is obliged at length to say that there are other things besides eels … But then – since they’re speaking of eels (and Dick is there to learn) – has Dick never wondered why there is never any shortage of eels, how you can keep pulling them out of rivers by the trapful but there are always more the next time? In other words, where do all the little eels come from?

  At which Dick pricks up his ears. And Mary begins to explain. But quickly realizes she’s picked a bad example; because once she gets beyond saying there are Mummy and Daddy eels (though how do you tell which is which?), she gets into deep water. Because the truth is no one knows exactly how— She comes up against that zoological enigma which so confounded the learned men of old.

  And thus I, in due course, make the acquaintance (browsings, on Mary’s prompting, in the Gildsey Reference Library) of the intrepid Johannes Schmidt …

  So Mary decides she’d better not beat about the bush. She starts to talk about Holes and Things.

  But Dick doesn’t want a biology lesson. What he wants is Lu-lu-love. He wants the Wonderful Thing. Because he asked his Dad. And his Dad never said anything about Holes and Things. And Mary says, but they’re all part (it’s getting confusing) of the Wonderful Thing. And Dick says what’s wonderful about putting something in a hole? And Mary says wouldn’t he like to try and see? Now if he were to show her his …

  And the result of all this is that, after much difficult coaxing – for Dick won’t consent at first to such a bizarre operation, and even when he feels an undeniable fire kindling between his legs he’s inclined, as once before, to leap into the nearest water to put it out – the result of all this is that it proves Too Big.

  Or that’s Mary’s story. Because first of all Mary’s version went like this: We never actually – I just wanted to—

  So Mary says that Dick shouldn’t worry – that he’s too big. It’s not his fault and it’s not a disaster. For has it never occurred to him that perhaps it’s she who’s Too Small? And perhaps one day – now he knows all about it, now he’s fully versed in the matter – he’ll find someone else who’s – just right for him.

  But, far from reassuring him, far from setting him on the right track and bringing to a close at last this course of instruction, this conjures up before Dick unsuspected complexities. For can it be that this so private business can be done with more than one? This Wonderful Thing – so random and inconstant? Can it be that others—? That Mary—?

  So she doesn’t want him. He’s defective, he’s no good.

  His eyelashes start to whir. His fingers start to clench. He protests, in garbled and stumbling language, to his apparently cooling sweetheart; a protest which couched in plain words might amount to some such uncompromising statement as: Now let’s get this clear, you’re the only one I love. And since you’re the only one I love, then make me a baby. Because that’s what love’s for, isn’t it? Dad says so. And that’s what I want. And let’s have none of this cock-and-bull nonsense about having to put things into holes.

  And, just for good measure, with his big, bewildered hands, he shakes her hard by the shoulders …

  And what can Mary say? That she can’t give him love (let alone a baby)? Because love is what she’s giving right now to his little brother? He’s the only one she— Not only love (though she can’t be sure just yet) but a baby too. So she says, Yes, all right, she’ll make him a baby. She’s scared by that shaking. He shakes her again. Yes, yes, of course, she didn’t mean to. They’ll love each other, yes, and have a baby …

  A tall order. She’ll have to pretend there’s such a thing as immaculate conception (and perhaps there is: it seems to work for eels). But then there’ll be no real danger, because it really is too big, there’s no way that that – that that thing. And sooner or later, Dick’ll just have to realize, he’ll just have to accept the fact that no baby’s going to appear.

  So every time now that Dick goes awooing, even if he can’t put his Thing inside, he puts his loving arms round Mary and tries hard to have a baby. He puts his loving hands on Mary’s tummy, which, according to Mary, is the place where babies first make their presence known. And after all those shakings (though his free hand sometimes wanders, disconcertingly, towards Mary’s shoulder, towards Mary’s neck), he’s as gentle and as trusting as a lamb, waiting for his baby to come.

  And a baby does come …

  Or that’s Mary’s story. Because how did I know, how could I be a hundred per cent sure that when Mary said Dick’s was too big, it really was too big? And that Mary hadn’t proved to herself that it wasn’t Too Big, in fact was just right, at the very beginning of our little educational experiment?

  And suppose it – the baby that is, this baby you couldn’t yet see or touch, which was just a funny feeling inside Mary – was mine, what was Mary going to say to Dick? Because you can’t hide a thing like a baby, even from a numbskull. And what would Dick do—? And given that all along there’s this margin of doubt, given that all along it might be – it just might be – really Dick’s, then, for God’s sake, what should I do?

  But Mary swears, she crosses her heart and hopes to die, that it isn’t Dick’s. And down by the Hockwell Lode we still cling and cleave and sigh. So we’ve made a little one. And it’s on the way. But we love each other, don’t we? Yes we love each other. And love takes its course, doesn’t it? It means we’ll have to tell the world, that’s all, and face the music. And then get married. It happens all the time. It’s an old, old story …

  Yes, he’s persuaded, he’s convinced, he’s emboldened; and, let’s admit it, your history t
eacher’s even a teeny bit proud of what (that’s assuming—) he can do.

  But sooner or later, because soon it’ll start to show – and never mind about telling the world – someone’s got to speak to someone.

  And we know who spoke first and to whom. We know what she said. We know she steered a straight course between these two amorous brothers to a convenient third party, named Parr. And we know that she.did it to protect me.

  We know what Dick did. He went out and got Freddie drunk, then pushed him in the river, after first knocking him on the head with a bottle.

  And we know what little Tom, whose initiative in this whole affair is so conspicuous by its absence, did. He watched; weighed evidence. Put facts together. Saw a new bruise on an old bruise. Fished a bottle— Ah yes, he’s hooked by now, it’s got serious, this historical method, this explanation-hunting. It’s a way of getting at the truth – or, as you would have it, Price, a way of coming up with just another story, a way of giving reality the slip.

  But it’s no longer story-time in the land of the Leem. Reality’s already imposed itself in the form of a sodden corpse. And it’s going to get more pressing, more palpable still…

  And let’s not get the impression that our little keen-eyed sleuth, our junior investigator into questions of cause and effect, is being cool, calm and scientific. We know he’s not. He’s scared. He locks his door against his brother. He’s got a nasty feeling in his guts.

  And we know what he does, in spite of the evidence he himself has gathered (traitor to his own method), on that day when the Gildsey Coroner’s Court records that happy word ‘Accident’ and, rushing off to tell the glad tidings, he encounters a Mary whose notion of cause and effect proves less pliable than his.

  Throws a tantrum (tears up grass). Gets – and wants to be – beside himself.

  Now why can’t everything happen by accident? No history. No guilt, no blame. Just accidents. Accidents …

  But Mary isn’t planning on any self-escapology. She’s sitting, still as stone, by the old windmill, and quite inside herself. So inside herself, she might never emerge again. And inside Mary who’s sitting so inside herself, another little being is sitting there too.

  And then from out of these doubly internal and locked-up regions Mary says: ‘I know what I’m going to do.’

  35

  Unknown Country

  SO ONE day, after teaching the French Revolution, I come home to find that my wife’s committed a revolutionary – a miraculous – act…

  I turn the key in the lock. I hear what sounds like a baby’s cry. I think: our golden retriever, Paddy, has some whine-inducing dog-malady. But I hear it again. I enter the living-room. And there she is, sitting on the sofa, at half-past four on a Friday afternoon, waiting for me to arrive, with a child in her arms.

  ‘I told you. Look, I told you, didn’t I? There! I said I was going to have one.’

  And she’s not wearing the looks of a villainous child-thief, she’s not wearing the looks of a vicious criminal. She’s wearing the looks of a young mother who’s never been a mother before. Her face has shed a succession of masks (menopausal wife, ex-age-care officer, history teacher’s life-long, long-suffering mate); she’s all innocence and maidenhood. A Madonna – and child.

  ‘Christ Almighty—!’

  Now tread carefully, history teacher. Maybe this isn’t your province. Maybe this is where history dissolves, chronology goes backwards. That’s your wife over there; you know, Mary, the one you thought you knew. But maybe this is unknown country.

  ‘Mary, what on earth—?’

  ‘I told you—’

  ‘How—?’

  There’s no denying it, she’s serene, she’s seraphic. Fifty-two years old. She’s beautiful.

  ‘Look. Come and look.’

  ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘From God. I got it from God.’

  ‘Mary, are you all right?’

  ‘Look.’

  Your history teacher stands in the doorway, presenting, before this bizarre Nativity, the posture of an awestruck shepherd (outside, in the night, his flock of pupils are dispersed, having learnt about the dawn of a new age). In his right hand – in place of a crook – his front door key; in his left hand – in place of a lantern – his worn and battered teacher’s briefcase, humble emblem of his trade.

  He steps forward. Approaches the sofa. But he does not stoop before the blanket-wrapped bundle (a pink, puckered face, tiny groping hands), kneel down, place palms together and let his eyes fill with wondering reverence.

  His eyes fill with disbelief. The baby howls. But it’s real.

  ‘Mary, you’d better explain.’

  ‘You’ve made him cry.’

  ‘Where did you—?’

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘That— That’s utter nonsense.’

  ‘There, there. Ssh now …’

  A girl with a doll.

  ‘You’ve got to tell me. You’ve taken that baby from somewhere—’

  ‘Don’t frighten him.’

  She looks at her husband with wide-open, dreaming eyes.

  Then an astonishing scene ensues, confounding all affinities with a mock Adoration. Worthy, rather, the attention of the NSPCC. The husband makes a grab at the baby. The wife clutches it – now bawling frenziedly – to her breast. Thwarted, the husband starts to shake his wife. The rocking motion has the inadvertent effect of quietening the baby; but now the wife starts to scream.

  ‘You’ve got to explain.’

  But this is no way of getting explanations – shaking them out by force.

  The husband’s hands move again to the baby. He pulls. The wife stops screaming, pulls back.

  ‘Give it to me!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s someone else’s. You must have stolen it.’

  ‘No. He’s mine. Ours.’

  Observe your history teacher in action. Yes – for all his droning on, for all his talk-and-chalk – in spontaneous action. Observe him locked in elemental violence. Witness, for contrast, the fastidious surroundings which offset this central whirlwind: a room still preserving its late Regency features, tastefully furnished over a period of thirty years with items to match: old porcelain, leather bindings, Cruickshank prints. A veritable museum. Witness the Chelsea vase on the Sheraton table which, jostled by the sofa which in turn is jostled by the motions of this desperate tug-of-war, topples from its perch and disintegrates on the floor. Observe too the golden retriever, roused from its favourite napping place in a corner of the kitchen, which enters and adds the din of its barking to the racket of screams, baby-hollers and tinkling antiques.

  ‘And the bruises, Mr Crick – to the baby’s arms and upper body?’

  ‘They were made in my attempts to take the baby from my wife. My intention being to return it at once to whomever it was taken from.’

  ‘From which we may conclude that your wife resisted these attempts – and thus too, such an intention …?’

  The wife pulls. The husband pulls. Baby blankets unravel. The dog barks, wanting to join the game. The wife’s face contorts – like the baby’s. As the husband pulls he cannot suppress the sensation that he is pulling away part of his wife. He is tearing the life out of her.

  And perhaps he is. For, yielding the baby at last to his stronger grip, the wife collapses, slumps on to the sofa, buries her face in the seat cushion, sobs, turns her head, reaches out with one arm, wails: ‘He’s my baby! He’s my baby …’

  At which the husband, cast now in the role not of an amazed shepherd but of a ruthless Herod, is driven to think: And supposing, and just supposing …

  He holds the baby. He places on its forehead an unthinking, an instinctive soothing hand. Sssh-ssh. He holds the baby but he wants to hold his wife. He can’t hold the baby and hold his wife too. But if he relinquishes the baby in order to hold his wife, his wife may seize the baby.

  He steps forward. He deposits the baby on the lowered flap of a rosewo
od bureau, out of reach of both wife and snapping dog. He sits on the sofa, raises his wife, clasps her, starts to say extraordinary things:

  ‘You’re my baby. You’re my baby …’

  Can you imagine your learned and sagacious Cricky mouthing such stuff? But look closer – your Cricky’s crying.

  He rocks her, this baby of his, this former protectress of his perpetuated schooldays.

  ‘Mary, explain—’

  The golden retriever, left out of things, nuzzles its head on the sofa; yaps, growls. Your history teacher gives it a sharp, a sudden, a ferocious kick.

  ‘How? Why? Why?’

  ‘God told me. God …’

  But God doesn’t talk any more. Didn’t you know that, Mary? He stopped talking long ago. He doesn’t even watch any more, up there in the sky. We’ve grown up now, and we don’t need him any more, our Father in Heaven. We can fend for ourselves. He’s left us alone to make what we will of the world. In Greenwich, in the midst of a vast city, where once they built an observatory precisely to stare back at God, you can’t even see at night, above the aurora of the street-lamps, God’s suspended stars.

  God’s for simple, backward people in God-forsaken places.

  ‘Mary, whose baby is it?’

  ‘I’ve told you.’

  ‘Where did it come from?’

  (Still rocking, while broken china litters the floor, while on the mantelpiece a carriage clock strikes half-past four, while a dog whimpers with a cracked jaw and a baby wails and wriggles precariously on an escritoire.)

  ‘He told me …’

  ‘Mary.’

  ‘All right, all right. I got him from Safeways. I got him from Safeways in Lewisham.’

  36

  About Nothing

  DON’T apologize, Price. Though perhaps we’d better drink up and go. It doesn’t help, after all, does it, this drunkenness? I know what you feel. Yes, the end of the world’s on the cards again – maybe this time it’s for real. But the feeling’s not new. Saxon hermits felt it. They felt it when they built the pyramids to try to prove it wasn’t true. My father felt it in the mud at Ypres. My grandfather felt it and drowned it with suicidal beer. Mary felt it … It’s the old, old feeling, that everything might amount to nothing.