by Graham Swift
As if we’re not in the same space. As if there’s a glass plate between us. She in the back seat, I her cabby. Where to, lady?
(Where to? Where to now?)
Or, the picked-up suspect in the back of the squad car; interrogation already beginning:
‘So you left the pram? So then you drove home …?’
(But we’ll know, soon enough, about squad cars and rides to the station.)
The lights of Shooter’s Hill, of Blackheath, Lewisham. A Friday evening in the suburbs. Heavy traffic in Lewisham High Street. Should I sound my horn, flash my lights? Make way, this is an emergency!
But why this haste? Why this wild car-dash? When a simple phone call. Why this need to return to the scene of the—
A quarter past five. We reach the multi-storey. Park on level three.
‘So this is where you left the car?’
It’s called reconstructing the crime. From last to first. It’s an analogy of the historical method; an analogy of how you discover how you’ve become what you are. If you’re lucky you might find out. If you’re lucky you might get back to where you can begin again. Revolution.
I turn off the engine.
‘Now give me the baby, Mary. We’re here now, Mary. I’ll take the baby now.’
As if I’m talking to another baby.
‘Mary, I’ll take—’
She hands it over, in a trance. But it’s still there really, still in her arms. Always will be.
I hold it. Incredibly, it goes on sleeping. It won’t know. All this will be its dream.
‘Now we’re going to go back to Safeways. To where you—’
We’re going to retrace our steps, to go back …
She walks with dazed confidence. (God’s waiting. He’ll explain. That other yarn I told you in the car – all nonsense.)
‘So you pushed the pram along here, from the lift?’
No prowling policemen. No distant hubbub.
So perhaps it never.
Or perhaps the scene has already shifted: A tearful woman sits in a police station. A constable offers unconsolatory tea. A phone-summoned husband arrives, wild-eyed. A pram awaits forensic inspection … Meanwhile the shoppers return to their shopping. Drama over. The wire trolleys fill …
We’ll arrive with our cock-and-bull story. Woman? What woman? What baby? We never—
I’m wrong. As we come out of the lift and turn the corner by Mothercare and the kiddies’ play centre: a knot of people visible outside Safeways. Police helmets. Security staff. Gaggles of onlookers watching from the entrances of W. H. Smith and Marks and Spencer.
So the drama’s not over. The Mother, perhaps, refusing to budge. From where she last— Though it’s an hour since. Still doesn’t believe. It can’t have really. Hoping for a miracle.
Which she’s going to get. Come on, Mary. Be brave, be brave. We’re going to restore— We’re going to return. Keep walking, Mary. Only a few paces. Back. To go forward.
Or—
Yes, I’ve thought of this too. She’ll tear Mary’s eyes out. The crowd will set upon us. I know about mobs (how, for example, in revolutionary Paris …) Spitting and scratching. Uproar. A Lewisham lynching.
But it doesn’t happen like that. It happens as if it’s all on a stage. The crowd parts. ‘Please, please – we’ve got the baby. The missing baby.’ The crowd hushes. The mother occupies the centre of the scene. I see her. She’s standing beside a policeman and a policewoman, both in attitudes of patient persuasion. She’s young. Still in her teens. She can’t be any age. A kid. Only a kid. A kid.
She turns. Red-rimmed, emptied eyes. She sees me; or rather, she sees the baby. And hears it (before this audience, it wakes up, suddenly bawls its part). She sees only the baby. She doesn’t see me, or Mary behind. She doesn’t see the crowd – blurred faces on a backcloth. She steps forward; she knows, without thinking, her role. She takes her child, not caring who I am, or how or what or where or why. Her face spills over. She starts to sob ecstatically words which only moments before were sobbed in agony: ‘My baby, my baby, my baby …’
And it’s then that Mary groans, snaps, topples out of her trance, falls into my arms. I totter, rock, an unaccustomed pillar of support.
(Mary, my darling, my angel, my strength—)
‘My name is Crick. My wife took the baby. Yes. My wife’s – not very well. We’ve brought it back now. So it’s all right now. Please, is that all?’
But it’s not all. As you know. Though it’s over, that’s not the end. ‘This way, sir, please – and Mrs Crick.’ They want to know how and where and why. They want to know what really— (Officers, I’m familiar with all this. You see, my job—) ‘Very well, sir, shall we make a start?’ But officers, there are different versions. (There always are; for example, 1789: bread riots, or the millennium.) There’s her first explanation (which is far-fetched) and then what she told me in the car. ‘Look, sir, shall we go back to the beginning?’ The beginning? But where’s that? How far back is that? Very well, I confess that my wife, with intention so to do, took a baby from an unminded pram. Very well (this far back?): I confess my responsibility, jointly with my wife, for the death of three people (that is – it’s not so simple – one of them was never born, and one of them – who knows if it was really a death …).
But what does it matter. She’s got her baby back. That’s the only thing that— And my wife, as you see, officers, is in no fit—
But not so fast, Mr History Teacher. You can’t change your tune. You can’t set yourself up to be a classroom sleuth and then want to skip the process when it’s your turn for investigation. Historia, or Inquiry (as in Natural History). You’re not saying all this was an accident, are you, sir? And none of this talk of miracles. We want an explanation …
And we want our story. Yes, we can’t do without stories. Even when the police have finished and legal proceedings have taken their course, the press-men want their stories … Read this. Stole a baby. Right outside Safeways. What kind of a woman—? Said God told her. Well, would you credit it? A psychiatrist testifies – yes, yes, but never mind the clever-talk. And her husband a schoolteacher. (Not for long he won’t be.) To think of our children—! He’ll lose his job (she’s lost her mind) … Hey, is there any more? A quarter-page photo of the relieved Mother and the innocent Babe. How I felt when … Hey, this is good stuff, this is a real-life drama. Let’s have more.
45
About the Pike
AND Dick, while I watch, clambers on to his bed and, reaching up to the precariously perched glass and mahogany case, containing the stuffed and mounted carcass of a twenty-one-pound pike, caught on Armistice Day by John Badcock, puts his hand through one of the side panels, which, since the signing of the Armistice, has lost its glass, and thus (even Dick’s large, bony hand passes with ease) into the gaping and befanged jaws of this same memorable specimen …
Alive and not alive. Dead yet unperished. A ghost … Those restless nights, when Dick and I slept in the same room, and even my mother’s stories …
Moonlight on the staring eyes, on the icicle teeth. Nov. 11th 1918.
Twice it had to be removed for giving me bad dreams. But it was Dick’s prize possession. (And a wedding gift.) ‘Only a fish, Tom. A dead fish.’
But they’re killers. Pike. Freshwater-wolves. They’ll tackle ducks, water rats, other pike. The teeth rake backwards towards the gullet, so what goes in, can’t— Killers.
And into the jaws of a killer, the hand of a—
But Dick’s no longer a creature to be feared. It’s some days now since I’ve locked my door against him. Since we’ve played our see-saw game of nerves: who’s more afraid of whom? Fear’s been dissolved by something else. Fear’s been washed away by local scandal, the after-ripples of which eddy and rebound around the communal gossip pool of Hockwell, and cannot fail to ruffle even Dick’s duck’s-back senses; since there’s a deep end to this gossip-pool, and Dick’s brother’s in it.
So the poo
r thing got taken to hospital. Very nearly— Septi-thingummy of the womb. Martha Clay! Martha Clay! That old— And her a convent girl. Bless us, what’s happening to the world. (A world war’s happening to it.) First Freddie Parr. And now her Dad’s shut her away for her pains. Or maybe it’s her as doesn’t want to show her face. And it was young Tom Crick, they say, would you believe …?
Yes, it’s common knowledge. But only I know about that night in Martha’s cottage. What I saw through the window. And that dawn. That dawn. I carried the pail, down to the Ouse. Because Martha said: ‘You gotta do it, bor. Only you. No one else. In the river, mind. An’ when you throws it, don’t you look. Nothin’ but bad luck if you looks.’ So I carried the pail across the mist-wrapped, dew-soaked meadows. Larks were trilling somewhere above the mist, but I was stumbling through a mist of tears. I climbed the river wall, descended to the water’s edge. I turned my head away. But then I looked. I howled. A farewell glance. A red spittle, floating, frothing, slowly sinking. Borne on the slow Ouse currents. Borne downstream. Borne all the way (but for the Ouse eels …) to the Wash. Where it all comes out.
He grips me by the arm. His grip wants to tell me something. His lashes fan his eyes. He says, ‘C-come with Dick. D-Dick show.’ He leads me up the stairs to his room.
And where’s Dad, on this dull and sullen yet revelatory Sunday morning? On his way, at this very moment, to Polt Fen Farm. To make due representations, to make reparations by word of mouth to Harold Metcalf. Though God knows what he’ll say to him, since he hasn’t found a way yet of having matters out with his son. His good-scholar son (not the other one). His pride-and-hope and so-full-of-promise younger son. Something stops his paternal wrath. He opens his mouth to speak but something sticks in his throat and turns his lips into a sad, mute circle. We all go wrong. It all goes wrong. All scooped into the net of trouble. So is it time then, time at last, to tell the whole story? For his son’s weeping confession, one of his own? He broods by the lock-gate. Rehearses a dialogue that never gets performed: So it was serious, after all. Dead serious. But if you, I mean, if she was— Why didn’t you just—? Not such a bad match – even starting it the hard way – you and Metcalf’s girl. Though old Metcalf would have had his piece to say. So why?… Trouble upon trouble. First Freddie. And now. But it’s a punishment, that’s what it is. A punishment for non-vigilance. For neglect of duty.
And so, with eyes alert (yet guilty) and adopting the posture of one not shirking his bounden duty, he sets off on a rickety bicycle to see Harold Metcalf. Who, being a farmer of lofty if unrealized ambitions, will not waste the opportunity to play the high and mighty squire, not to mention the outraged father, before Dad’s humbled and suppliant serf. He’ll return red-faced and dry-voiced, like a schoolboy from a summary caning.
‘But is she all right, Dad?’
‘Don’t know, Tom. Can’t say. He damned my – my appurtenance – for asking. Leastways, Tom, I sees you care.’
‘Dad, Dad I – I’m afraid there’s more.’
‘More, Tom? More?’
Because Dad doesn’t know yet …
He thrusts his hand into the mouth of the pike – which being dead and stuffed, does not snap shut its jaws, as once it must have done, with fatal results, on John Badcock’s bait, but leaves them obligingly open – and pulls out a key. A brass key. A stubby, important-looking key. He gets down off the bed and holds it out to me in his palm. He says nothing, but I know this is Dick’s confession: Yes – since you know anyway. I. Freddie.
But it’s not just that. Something has got hold of him. Something as inescapable and inexplicable as the sudden grip of love. His face is aquiver with un-Dick-like importunacy. He wants releasing. He’s got a key in his hand. For the first time in his life, the forgetful flux of Dick’s experience has congealed around him into imprisoning solidity. He’s as fixed as that pike on the wall. He’s made things happen; things have happened because of him. He can’t understand. He’s stuck in the past.
‘Y-you loved?’
‘Yes, Dick. Me too.’
But this is only the first, the easier question.
‘Wh-wh-wh-? Wh-whose?’
What shall I tell him? Which version will crush him least? What does one stunned and guilt-laden brother tell another?
‘It was your baby, Dick.’
A sudden, brief spasm, a fleeting battle between pride and remorse, crosses his face.
He looks at the key, still held in his palm. He doesn’t look at me. He looks hard at the key as if it’s the key to all the riddles of life.
‘Take.’
I take.
‘We go up now and open it. D-Dick want know.’
46
About my Grandfather’s Chest
HOW strange it becomes. How larger than life it becomes. These eighteenth-century dandies with their perukes and brocade. These whiskered Victorians with their whaleboned womenfolk. (These wild creatures – look, in the streets – with Phrygian caps and human heads on pike-staffs …) How extraordinary, how impossible, becomes the flat, mundane stuff of our lives. It needs looking into. How it gets … How it becomes … Children, the world is madder than you’d ever think.
Once I toyed, once I dabbled in history. Schoolboy stuff. Harmless stuff, textbook stuff. But it never got serious – my studies never really began – until one August afternoon, a prisoner myself of irreversibly historical events, I unlocked the past inside a black wooden chest…
It contains eleven bottles wrapped and padded with old sacking, ten of which are stoppered and full, one of which is empty and which, in the process of losing its stopper, has journeyed surreptitiously to the Hockwell footbridge, been used first to intoxicate then to bludgeon, travelled back again by river, been plucked out, examined; secreted in one bedroom, then conspicuously placed in another; then been carried back, with ponderous stealth, to its attic resting-place by the selfsame hand which first took it thence. Thus illustrating that all sins come home to roost, and thus qualifying itself to be regarded in any inquiry into the death of Freddie Parr (but Freddie Parr – don’t we know? – died by accident) as Exhibit Number One.
It contains four thick, well dog-eared notebooks, bound in blue-marbled paste-board, evidently bundled together at one time by a canvas strap which has since been untied. It contains an envelope (from which, to judge by its crumpled state, the contents have on some previous occasion or occasions been removed and replaced) on which is written, in the same thick, sloping hand which seems to fill the notebooks: ‘To the First-Born of Mrs Henry Crick’ …
Dick breathes his hee-haw breath over my shoulder. I ignore discreetly the empty bottle (Yes, we’ve seen that before, we know all about that; it’s only a murder weapon; it’s only the reason why we come to be stooped over this derelict chest). I take up one of the dusty, stoppered bottles. Dick’s breathing quickens. For one moment I think he thinks I’m about to raise it and, in an act of poetic, if brutal justice, crash it down on his skull. (So it’s true – he is more afraid …)
But his agitation has a different meaning.
‘D-don’t open. D-don’t drink—’
(But we know that too: a certain wintry scene, an ice-fringed river – six years ago. Yes, Dick – so you remember? There’s potent, there’s fiery stuff inside.)
I put back the bottle. I pick up the envelope. The notebooks will come later (midnight porings … the start of a quest … a bedtime story to cap them all …).
A questioning, almost deferential glance: ‘It’s for you, Dick. It’s addressed to you. Shall I—?’
Lash-fluttering consent: It’s all right, go ahead. You see, I can’t— Never could—
I take out the letter. There are three well-crammed pages. I read. Dick breathes. I don’t read aloud. There are words, whole sentences Dick couldn’t— I read while Dick watches. The attic timbers murmur. Even on a still and windless August morning something stirs their old, creaking bones. It takes perhaps ten minutes to read (much, much longer to dige
st) the letter. You can hear the slightest sounds – you can almost hear, from the direction of Polt Fen Farm, the distant tirades of Farmer Metcalf before the hapless supplications of Henry Crick. And when I’ve finished reading the letter the first thing I say is: ‘It’s from your grandfather, Dick.’
Though it’s not as simple as that.
‘It’s from your mother’s father.’
And the second thing I say – it spills out almost before I have decided to say it – is: ‘Dick, I’m sorry. I lied to you. It wasn’t your baby. It was my baby.’
He stares at me. Because it’s Dick’s stare it’s impossible to tell what he’s thinking. But a sticky dew starts to collect in the corners of his eyes. Though it’s not like tears. It’s like some strange, unknown secretion that has nothing to do with Dick. When it overflows on to his cheek he almost flinches in surprise.
‘Listen, Dick, listen very carefully. It was my baby. Mine and Mary’s.’ More of the strange liquid spills from his eyes. ‘But it’s nobody’s baby now, is it? Nobody’s.’
Attic-murmurs. Creaking assents.
‘Listen – it was a good thing it wasn’t your baby. Yes, a good thing. Because it says here – your, I mean, our grandfather says – he says that you shouldn’t have any babies. Because – you won’t need to. Dick, you know how babies get born?’
‘Lu-lu-lu—’
The tears have reached the corners of his mouth.
‘You know every baby has to have a Mummy and Daddy. Nobody gets born without a Mummy and Daddy. We both have – both had – a Mummy and Daddy. And they had Mummies and Daddies too. But – sometimes it’s not as simple as that. Sometimes when a person wants to be a Mummy or Daddy and they want someone to be a Mummy or Daddy with, they choose someone who’s already their own Mummy or Daddy. Or their own Mummy or Daddy chooses them. It’s not supposed to happen, Dick. It’s not – usual. Do you see?’
