Waterland

by Graham Swift

  As if he might be saying, ‘And forget everything, forget everything …’

  There’s something Dick knows that perhaps he shouldn’t. There’s something Dick’s come by Dad would rather he hadn’t.

  And so there is. Because after Dad leaves – after first checking once more that little Tom is sound asleep – Dick puts something, something that rattles metallically, something that must have been clenched all along in one of his over-large hands, on his bedside cabinet.

  A brass key.

  I wait for the rhythm of Dick’s snores to return. I creep out of bed and in the shivery darkness feel that mysterious object on the bedside cabinet. A key. Yes, a key. I return to my bed. I lie awake. No more sleep for me that night. I listen to the wind. I hear carried on its blasts and thus rendered somehow crazy and random like the sound of a bell flying through the air, the chimes of Hockwell church. The thinnest of gauzy lights penetrates the room from under the door. So the light is on, across the passage, where Dad sits with Mother. I imagine I hear – but surely it is some trick of this deranging wind – the sound of subdued human sobs.

  Ah, wild, pitiless wind, blowing through the small hours of the twenty-fifth of January, 1937. In such a wind St Gunnhilda would have crouched in her wattle cell, hearing the roaring of the Devil. In such a wind old Jacob Crick would have cowered in one of his windmills (its sails removed, tail-pole lashed to the ground), expecting at any moment the whole creaking edifice to be blown to kingdom come …

  Dawn breaks on the morning of January the twenty-fifth. Dick – who just as unfailingly as he sleeps soundly at night is unfailingly aroused by the first glimmering of day – wakes. His clenched eyes part. They stare at a brass key. So it wasn’t a dream; it really happened. Then they stare at me, awake in the other bed, staring also at the key and at Dick staring at the key. And no sooner does Dick’s stare catch mine than a hand shoots out from beneath the bedclothes, grabs the key and plucks it out of sight – as if the very swiftness of this action will make it seem that it never occurred and no key had ever been there in the first place.

  Now, if Dick had never caught me staring so intently at the key perhaps he would never have come to the conclusion – or given away so plainly that he had done so – that this key must be a special key.

  But I don’t mean to leave things here. I get out of bed. As if to defend his territory, Dick gets out of bed too. The key is either wrapped inside his fist or lodged in some fold of pillow or sheet. His eyes flutter. I am about to say – in a voice neither too importunate nor too mildly disinterested – ‘Dick, what’s that key?’

  But I don’t. Because it’s at this precise moment that Dad opens the door and, since he finds us both out of bed and close enough to each other to come within the span of his arms, gathers us in that crushing, never-to-be-forgotten embrace which can only be described as maternal; and with a face already anointed and now turning rapidly again to liquid, says, ‘Children,’ (yes, he called us that) ‘your mother’s gone. She’s gone. Gone.’

  Gone.

  And so too – because despite this rending announcement everything around us is strangely steady and still: the Leem is calm, the sky beyond the windows is smooth, clear, sea-shell pink – has the wind.

  So we buried Mother in Hockwell churchyard. And Dad began to grow flowers in a corner of the vegetable patch to place upon her grave. Though, flowers or no flowers, scarcely a day passed by during those following months when he did not visit that patch of bumpy grass behind the church and loiter there, abandoning his lock-keeper’s duty for a duty that he clearly regarded as more consuming and imperative. Sometimes I went with him, watched him at a distance, this strange man who was also my father. And during these sorrowful excursions of Dad’s, Dick – excused now more or less permanently from school on account of both his classroom ineptitude and the recent loss sustained by his family – learnt, as he’d begun to do when Mother first took to her bed, to take command of the lock. To acquire (no one told him, it came by instinct) the knacks and know-how of the waterside; to deal with lighters and barges; to maintain that precarious yet vital relationship between river and sluice. And thus it was during this period – this period not only of graveside meditations but of moonlit eel-fishing and sleepless moochings on the tow-path – that the already thin spectre of Dick’s education faded and vanished altogether; that headmaster Allsop concluded and Henry Crick agreed, that if there was little brain there was no lack of serviceable brawn. And that there arose between Dad and Dick, now that they shared the same labours, a kind of special bond; but a bond, which if you observed closely, was built not so much on trust and co-operation as on the desire of the former to keep a close and careful watch on the latter.

  Thus, urged by both natural inclination and his father’s attentions, Dick grew up to be a true descendant (so one might have said) of his dogged, water-taming, land-preserving Crick ancestors.

  Save that Dick—

  But all this is to leap ahead – and to pass over the immediate effects of that terrible January dawn.

  Now Dad, it is to be noted, while he clasped us so fervently in his arms, did not utter the word ‘dead’. The word he used was ‘gone’. And throughout the succeeding days, despite Doctor Bright’s arrival to complete the death certificate, despite Mother’s transference from bed to coffin and, with due accompanying ritual, to her grave, he never let pass his lips either the word ‘dead’ or the word ‘death.’

  And while there is much to be commended in the use of that euphemism ‘Gone’ before two sons, one too young perhaps and the other too doltish to understand, there is also much to be questioned. For ‘Gone’, in such circumstances, is a far more elusive word. To little Tom, whose whole life might have been different if his father had told him what his infant heart was already braced to accept – that his own Mum was dead, no more, finished, extinct – this word ‘Gone’ carried the suggestion of some conscious, if perverse decision on his mother’s part, as if she had not ceased absolutely to exist but was somewhere very far away, inaccessible, invisible, yet still there.

  ‘Gone’, in other words, echoed with mystery. Whilst ‘dead’ is a blunt and natural phenomenon. ‘Gone’ – awesome and open-ended – required explanation. It made your infant history teacher’s mind – which was getting on quite well with ‘What’ and ‘How’ first throb to the gong-beat of Whywhywhy. (And we know what that led to.) It made him set out, in ways of which he was scarcely conscious and over which he had scarcely any control, to find again, at least to revive in some new form (ah, bashful, yearning railway journeys …) the image of his departed Mummy.

  And thus little Tom’s reaction to his Mother’s death, for all its protracted after-effects, was perhaps no different in essence from the crude response of his brother, which had it ever been voiced – amidst all his blinking bafflement – might have amounted to: ‘Well, if she’s gone, when is she coming back?’

  And as for Dad: had he used that word ‘Gone’ merely out of consideration for his children? For if he really believed himself that Mother was no more and not somewhere where communication, if ever so distant, were still possible, what was he doing making those repeated trips to the graveyard and standing there, with his lips moving as if he were talking to someone; and telling us, furthermore, about a far-off place called heaven?

  And so all three surviving occupants of the Atkinson Lock cottage were perhaps united in a common belief: that Mother who was dead wasn’t really dead at all, that from some hidden vantage point she still watched over them and held the cottage under her protection.

  Ah, Fenland superstition. The dead are dead, aren’t they? The past is done with, isn’t it?

  But sometimes there are ways of unlocking that sealed-up domain, of exposing to the corrosive air its secret contents. And Dick had a key.

  Which he hid. For when, after making that fateful if ill-judged announcement, Dad led us both across the upstairs passage – because he wouldn’t deny or spare us this fin
al privilege – to take our last look at Mother, little Tom fell into such a fit of wailing and blubbering – which did nothing to help Dad’s own steadily welling tears – that he quite forgot about that hastily snatched-from-view key. And before grief allowed him to remember it, Dick plainly took steps to conceal it. For – while Dad is in mournful conference with Doctor Bright and Dick carries out more ice-chipping on the lock-gates – Tom conducts a distraught yet rigorous search of Dick’s bed and its surroundings. He feels for lumps in the pillow and among the blankets; lifts the mattress; scans every inch of floor beneath the bed; explores the frugal contents (several cocoa tins, the skull of a water rat) of Dick’s rickety bedside cabinet; checks cupboards and drawers.

  No key.

  Yet one day – to be precise, five days after Mother’s death and only two after her interment in Hockwell churchyard, by which time that word ‘Gone’, which on the occasion of that final view of Mother perhaps held for Dick no tearful implications (Gone? But she’s right there. She’s only decided to lie still for a while) had begun to exert its power – I hear Dick mount the attic stairs. I hear Dick and I hear the wind. For it’s come back. But it’s not the wind that’s making those creaks. From the foot of the main staircase I hear those tell-tale sounds which I am destined to hear years later from behind a locked and barricaded door. Dick descends. I mount the main stairs, feigning a casual need to go to our bedroom. Dick’s hands are empty. But his eyelids are twitching, less, it seems, at coming face to face with me (even eyelids have their nuances) than on account of some inward puzzlement or disappointment.

  And one day, after school, ascending again to our bedroom, who should I discover within it but Dad, who starts guiltily at my entrance, as if caught in some stealthy act, as if he were looking for something, and to cover his confusion yet no doubt with another purpose too, says: ‘I was thinking. Perhaps it’s time you had a bedroom of your own. Perhaps it’s time we moved you into the back room.’

  And then (by now Mother’s been gone nearly three weeks and still hasn’t come back) Dick makes another ascent to the attic. He should be dutifully exercising his newly acquired office of deputy lock-keeper. For Dad has left once more to walk through Hockwell village (where curtains will be plucked and people will observe: There he goes, there goes poor Henry Crick again) to his rendezvous in the churchyard. But scarcely is he out of sight than Dick leaves his post of trust and, with an air of resolution rare for Dick, enters the cottage and climbs the stairs.

  I skulk meanwhile in the kitchen, my hands daubed with flour. For if Dick can step into Dad’s lock-keeper shoes, I put about me Mother’s apron. On this chill Saturday afternoon I am endeavouring to make scones as Mother once made them. I am engaged in culinary necromancy. With the aid of that swaddling apron, with the aid of the mixing bowl which she once held in the crook of her elbow, with the aid of the wooden spoon which she once— I am trying to conjure, to absorb into myself, the spirit of my dead Mummy. So that when Dad returns, pinched with cold from all that standing around in the graveyard, he will bite into his warm scone and—

  But I have tried this remedy before. My kitchen travesties have only brought pain to my father’s heart. And stomach. While he smiles at me thinly for the tenderness of the gesture, my leaden and hapless scones have stuck in his already lump-laden throat …

  And there’ll be no scones today, in any case, like Mother made or not. Because Dick comes down the stairs and catching me, all ears, in the kitchen doorway, grips me by the shoulders and jostles me along the hallway to the front door. The cold air of the tow-path strikes my oven-toasted face.

  ‘You do,’ says Dick, flinging out a hand to indicate the lock. ‘You do. I go.’

  By which I gather that Dick is delegating in turn the power delegated to him. He wants me to mind the lock – me with my flour-covered hands – while he apparently has business of his own.

  ‘Yes, Dick,’ I say, ‘all right.’ More with the intention of not appearing to question this curious command than of obeying it. For there’s something undoubtedly fraught about Dick’s voice, and, moreover, there’s something – something bulging and hard – hidden under his navy blue sweater, held there by a cradling hand. I see what it is when, while I pretend to be busy in the kitchen, removing Mother’s apron, he quickly transfers it, first to the little hall table and then, after donning his coat, to his coat pocket.

  A bottle. A bottle, of all things. Brown glass …

  Buttoning his coat with his left hand, thrusting his right into the already loaded pocket so that its cargo can no longer be spotted, he steps out on to the tow-path and turns, without a further word, in a downstream direction.

  I emerge too on to the tow-path and watch him stride away along the southern bank of the river, with the slightly hunched and encumbered gait of someone walking with something much on his mind – which is not Dick’s way of walking at all.

  A backward glance. I adopt an air of vaguely vexed responsibility.

  But my concern is not with my dubiously conferred – and, for a ten-year-old with a fetish for his mother’s apron, unlikely – assignment.

  That afternoon (raw, misty: an unmelted frost) the Atkinson Lock cottage lay deserted. Neither lock-keeper nor lock-keeper’s sons were in occupation – though each, in his own way, was intently occupied. If the lightermen of the Gildsey Coal Company had chosen that time to require admittance through the lock, they would have had to assist themselves. And if Mrs Henry Crick did indeed still linger in some unseen way about her former home – though how could she have been in three places at once: in the cottage, in the churchyard, and in that bottle Dick was carrying? – she would have smelt, with spiritual nostrils to match those of a certain fire-sniffing forebear, the smell (for I forgot one little thing) of over-baking, nearly burning scones.

  What hope for stealth in a flat land? What hope for detective work in the featureless Fens? What hope even for a four-foot high, ten-year-old detective in this level country where all is conspicuous and nothing is hidden from God?… Were it not for the fact that drained land sinks and the rivers get raised; and this means high banks.

  For while Dick walks, with that walk that is not his usual walk, along the crest of the southern bank of the Leem, who walks simultaneously on the northern side? Though not along its crest but, concealed, on its landward side – having first crossed the river by the lock and sluice and, by means of a little hasty sprinting, drawn level with his brother. Who scrambles every so often up the hoary northern slope of this northern bank, pokes a furtive head above the ridge to check on the other’s progress, then scrambles, slips back down again? Who, when his brother on the southern side halts at a certain watery junction, namely the mouth of Stott’s Drain, halts also on his side; not only halts, but in perhaps the very spot where six years later Mary Metcalf will make her own observations of this same brother, clambers to just beneath the summit of that northern-facing slope and lies chest down, sniper fashion, on the frost-sugared grass – a position scarcely wise for a boy only recently recovered from a bout of flu? But so warmed is he from running and scrambling and by the heat of curiosity, and so scornful, anyway, of any discomfort the world can muster after the loss of a mother, that he feels neither cold nor damp.

  Dicks stares at the water. Stares around him at the wintry landscape as if to confirm that he’s quite alone. Then he takes the bottle out of his coat pocket and stares at that too.

  Across the river, while ice melts beneath him, his brother thinks: So Mother’s secret legacy to Dick is nothing more than a few old bottles … So that chest up in the attic is no more than a fancy beer-crate.

  No more? Dick unscrews the stopper from the bottle; lifts the bottle to his lips. Never in his life, so far as I know, has Dick drunk a bottle of beer. Even an ordinary bottle of beer …

  He swallows; wipes his mouth. Squats down on the bank. Stares hard at the river. Swallows again; drains with a sudden voracity the whole bottle. Stares. Tries suddenly to get up,
but squats down again. Tries again; falls; staggers at last to his feet. Breaks suddenly into a wild laugh, then into wailing, wordless, unmelodious song. Does a sort of dance, a slow and clumsy waltz with himself; laughs again; hoots, cackles. And then, simultaneously cutting short his dance, stops hooting and cackling, sinks to his knees, puts a hand to his belly; feels his arms, his legs, his head to see if they are still there. His eyelids have never whirred so fast. A look of disbelief – of guilt, terror – crosses his face. A look not unlike the look he will give on a certain day by the Hockwell Lode, when something inside his woollen bathing trunks starts to stir unsuspectedly. He sits, but can’t stay still, as if he’d never guessed quite what dangerous stuff he was made of, and he has to get away from it. But the only way to get away from it is to leap out of his own skin. He bobs and bounces, wriggles and rolls his eyes (across the river, his younger brother can hardly keep still either, and his eyes pop too in amazement). Then he realizes he’s still clutching the bottle. It’s not him at all; it’s the stuff inside the bottle. But how could his mother—? As a last, parting gift—? And with a confused and anguished cry – as if, for all his terror, he is throwing away some potential parcel of bliss, some part of his own unconsummated flesh – he hurls the bottle in a lofty, arcing trajectory into the river. Where, floating, tilting, slowly replacing its former potent contents with plain river-water, it sinks …

  And that’s why Dick never touched again a drop of anything out of a bottle, including Freddie Parr’s proffered tots of purloined whisky. And why, perhaps, though he still possessed the key, he never opened again that extraordinary chest, till he realized how its contents might help him.

  Minus the bottle, Dick still reels and staggers, still can’t decide whether to sit or stand, to move this way or that. Against a background of toneless beet fields, against the mistily receding perspective of Stott’s Drain, against the grey neutrality of the winter sky, he makes a bizarre, an engrossing picture … But, careful, little detective. Perhaps you’ve seen enough. Time to make your secret get-away. Time to slip back to the cottage, before either Dad or Dick returns, so that neither will suspect—