Waterland

by Graham Swift

  He doesn’t see. I’m talking gibberish.

  ‘It’s as though you, Dick, wanted to make a baby – with your own Mummy.’

  His lashes start their humming-bird act.

  ‘Lu—’

  ‘It’s not supposed to happen. Not – natural. But if it does and if a baby gets born, then that baby might be – unusual. And any babies that baby has when it grows up to be a Mummy or Daddy might be – unusual too. Dick, you’re a baby – I mean, you were a baby – like that. Your grandfather – my grandfather – was also your father.’

  He stares.

  ‘My father isn’t your father.’

  His chest starts to heave, to wheeze.

  ‘Though your mother was my mother.’

  The wheeze grows hoarser.

  ‘You and your mother had the same father.’

  And hoarser still.

  ‘Before your mother and my father …’

  But I’ve run out of variations. And Dick seems to be running out of air. In the dim light of the attic he is gasping for breath, as if suddenly finding himself in some element not his own.

  So he understands? Or understands, at least, what he’s already half-guessed. That he’s a bungle. Something that shouldn’t be. There’s been a mix-up somewhere and he’s the result.

  Suddenly he blurts out, as if it’s all his fault, as if he, being the effect, is to blame for the cause:

  ‘S-s-sorry, Tom. S-s-sorry.’

  ‘Listen. Calm down, Dick. Wait. This is what your gran – your father – wanted to say to you. You’re not to have babies. Because – because of what I just said. But it’s all right that you won’t have babies. You’re an – unusual person, Dick. You’re a special sort of person. It doesn’t matter that you can’t have babies. Because you’re going to be—’

  How can I put this into any other words? How can I preface, interpret, explain (your father was not only your grandfather, he must have been quite mad—):

  ‘Because, Dick, you’re going to be – you’re going to be – the Saviour of the World.’

  He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t utter a word all through that Sunday lunch-time (no one’s thought of food, no one’s got an appetite). When his Dad – when the man he used to call his Dad – returns, he avoids his eye, keeps a wary distance; beats a sudden retreat to the lean-to and a companionable motor-cycle.

  But his Dad (that is, the man who—) scarcely notices. Preoccupied: face still stinging from the verbal slaps of the Master of Polt Fen.

  And in any case, he’s not given to talking, is he, this son who isn’t a—? A dumb-dumb, isn’t he? A sieve-brain. And he’s had enough of pretending otherwise. Enough of having lessons.

  Better not to learn. Better never to know. But once you’ve…

  (A saviour, Dick? A saviour is someone who … The world? The world is – everything. An emergency? An emergency is – when things get—)

  But don’t shun him, Dick. Don’t shun your own— I mean— He’s the one who never wanted you to be educated. Your protector, your guardian. I’m the one who had to ask questions, who had to dig up the truth (my recipe for emergencies: explain your way out). He would have kept you, happily, in the dark. Must have hunted for that key too … Never thought that a dead fish …

  ‘Dad, there’s more …’

  Much more. How to begin?

  ‘Freddie Parr …’

  And supposing I’d followed his own example? Guarded his ignorance just as he’d guarded Dick’s. This trusting and forbearing man who though not the real father of his older son, is sometimes not unlike him (bovine in deed, slow in speech); who stares, open-mouthed, at this, his true and younger son – his brainy, gifted son – as if in non-recognition.

  ‘He knows, Dad. Dick knows …’

  A turn on the tow-path suggested. A turn on the tow-path urgently enjoined. (A turn! Twenty, thirty turns. But who’s counting?) On that old fretful yet therapeutic tow-path, on that old agitatory-placatory tow-path. Up, down. Up, down.

  So this is the day that he always knew would come. That he always hoped might never. (He’s prepared it perhaps a hundred times, taken the imaginary initiative: Tom, take a turn with me on the tow-path … But that was without unforeseen complications.) So this is how it turns out to be. Well, well then: let it rain, let it pour trouble …

  Smoothly sliding Leem. Late-summer level (sluice well-lowered). Colour: glaucous-green. Motionless willows. Cracks of milky light break the warm lead-roofing of the sky.

  Up and down. Father and son – father and only son – in close confabulation. What are they saying? When the son completes his ravelled résumé – in which he omits to mention four blue-bound notebooks safely stowed amongst his school-work in his bedroom, but freely offers to hand over a certain letter (response: ‘I don’t wanna see no letter, Tom. I never wanted to see inside that chest …’) – does the father fill the gaps (gaps! Chasms!) in the narrative with a tale of his own? How he and Helen Atkinson—? How he and the brewer’s daughter—? No. He seems to have lost his story-telling knack. He seems to remember nothing.

  Up and down. Now away from the cottage, now towards it, as if perpetually torn between setting out on a journey and returning home. Up and down, as if stalking some runaway decision. At each about-face the father flexes his knee. At each outward sortie the son cannot help looking across the glaucous-green Leem in the direction of Polt Fen. Even now, she’s there. And her recipe for emergencies …?

  Up and down. And as they walk, the other son – the son who’s not a son – skulks, listening, in the lean-to.

  Listening? Not wanting to listen? Spying? Not wanting to look? Thinking? (Thinking?) It’s all up. I’m denounced; they’ll turn me over.

  And they know he’s in there. Because just as this son-who’s-not-a-son takes advantage of the lean-to in order to hide from his non-father, so the non-father, escorted by his true-son, in dictating the turning-points of these tow-path promenades, studiously keeps his distance from the lean-to …

  Yet observe more closely. For with each successive ambulation, that critical turning-point at the cottage end of this two-way beat, though at first occurring some several yards from the lean-to, draws, slowly, warily, agonizingly nearer to it. The very process of turning becomes more laboured, more vexed, as if the subject of some dreadful test. Until the father, almost overbalancing under the sway of contrary efforts, allowing his face at the same time to become a mass of watery convulsions, leaves his true-son standing and rushes, hobbles, towards his non-son’s temporary refuge, crying all the while: ‘Dick – my poor Dick’ (yes, my Dick) ‘—Dick!’

  But Dick isn’t there.

  He’s in the kitchen. Or – so we deduce later – that’s where he must have been.

  For even as Dad, in his distraught state, scuttles into the cottage by the front door, true-son at his heels, Dick, who at some stage, while the backs of the tow-path walkers were turned, must have stolen into it (ah, the cunning, in extremis, of a potato-head), steals out again, by the back door, and returns to the lean-to. While father and son search each room for him, he ties across his back a familiar sack, redolent of its usual contents but now heavily, awkwardly but deliberately laden with something else. He wheels out his Velocette; mounts and starts it.

  All this, undetected. For it is not until father and son have ascended, with inevitable logic, to the attic and discovered the chest open and void save for a single, empty beer bottle, that they are informed by the noise of the starting motor-bike of their deception. They descend the attic stairs. Hearing the bike already rounding the cottage, they scurry into the true-son’s bedroom at the rear of the cottage, in time to see, from the window, Dick turn out of the cottage-track on to the Gildsey road, on his back a grotesque hump formed by ten bottles of beer inside a sack.

  It’s too late for shouting. Which doesn’t stop Dad, head thrust through the window (a window beneath which, amongst folders of school-work, lurk four blue notebooks), screaming a desperate and s
trident: ‘Di-i-i-ck!’ His face, even when this cry dies on the air, remains a twisted mask. He plainly believes that his son – that Dick is riding away for good. But I believe otherwise. I can temper his despair. I am about to say that Dick – for reasons too complex to explain with brevity – must be heading for Stott’s Drain.

  But from our vantage at the bedroom window we can see where the Stott’s Drain track joins the Gildsey road; and Dick rides straight by it. His fleeing, hump-backed form gets smaller and smaller.

  I see him now, I see him still, on the arrow-straight road, under an opaque sky, between the sombre beet fields. My— Riding, riding, his birthright on his back, the legacy of the Atkinsons on his back … For a moment it seems that he’s riding into, that he’s already in, some oblivious never-never composed for always and only of straight road, flat fields, of monotony, unchangingness, and the annihilating throb of a motor-bike engine. Then I say to Dad – whose head has sunk on to the windowsill: ‘I think he’s going to the dredger.’

  47

  Goodnight

  SHE doesn’t look up as I leave. She allows herself to be kissed and gently embraced, with neither reciprocation nor resistance, so that the touch of my lips on her temple, on the submissive crown of her head, is like a goodnight kiss to a child. She sits by a strange bed. She doesn’t lift an eye or a hand as I give a last look through the wire-strengthened glass of the ward doors. She doesn’t stare forlornly from behind protective bars as I walk across wet institutional asphalt towards the gates.

  The feeling of permanent departure is all within. The sense that it is not I who am leaving but really she who is receding, into the obscure and irrecoverable distance, while I stand, arms outstretched, is belied by my movement, her passivity. By the outwardly functional nature of my visit (to deposit my wife, along with certain personal articles, pending psychiatric treatment). It’s belied by the cheery prognosis offered by the ward sister (oh yes, visiting’s informal – any time between two and seven, within reason … and don’t worry, Mr Crick, your wife will be out soon …). By the reflections of pale sunlight (blue holes in a scudding March sky) gleaming off wet, slightly steaming asphalt.

  First it was a story – what our parents told us, at bedtime. Then it becomes real, then it becomes here and now. Then it becomes a story again. Second childhood. Goodnight kisses …

  She doesn’t grieve at my departure. She grieves for her baby. The baby they took away from her and won’t give back. The baby who, as everyone knows, was sent by God. Who will save us all.

  First there is nothing; then there is happening. And after the happening, only the telling of it. But sometimes the happening won’t stop and let itself be turned into memory. So she’s still in the midst of events (a supermarket adventure, something in her arms, a courtroom in which she calls God as a witness) which haven’t ceased. Which is why it’s impossible to get through. Which is why she can’t cross into the safe, sane realm of hindsight and answer the questions of the white-coated doctors: ‘Now tell us, Mrs Crick. You can tell us everything …’

  He walks across wet asphalt, bearing a suitcase, as if leaving on a journey. But the suitcase is empty, having disgorged a selection of his wife’s clothing along with various belongings (the rules are strict: no article which might be used to cause injury either to other patients and staff or to the patient’s own person). He made the choice. She wasn’t interested. A survival-kit of mementoes. A tortoise-shell hair-brush (could that be used to inflict injury?), bought – do you remember? – in a Gildsey jumble shop one icy winter. A leather writing-case. A small mother-of-pearl box (but this she chose, this she produced suddenly as if from nowhere – perhaps she hid it away that same cruel winter) containing a silver crucifix on a chain. Attached still to the lining of the lid, an inscription in the scrupulous hand of Harold Metcalf: ‘Upon your Confirmation, With All My Love to My Darling Mary, May 10th, 1941 …’

  He walks towards the exit-gates. His historian’s eye takes in, on a grass island amidst the asphalt, the stone statue of some founder or benefactor (leonine-featured, hand on frock-coated breast); notes, on the pink granite plinth, beneath dates and honorifics, the word which modern preference for plain ‘Hospital’ or, begrudgingly, ‘Mental Hospital’, cannot, in justice to this worthy’s memory, erase: ‘… Asylum’.

  He passes through the gates which (since it is informally permitted) he will repeatedly re-enter, in order to visit his wife, who’s yet not his wife; with whom, in the cloistered precincts of this asylum – that is, hospital – he will play his plaintive do-you-remember game. Do you remember, the train: Hockwell to Gildsey, Gildsey to Hockwell? Rust-red and inky-black? Do you remember beet fields? Poplar trees? A walk by the frozen Ouse …? Avoiding in these memory-jogging journeys so many no-go areas and emergency zones (you see, when it comes to it, your history teacher is afraid to tread the minefield of the past).

  While he offers this whispered and precarious nostalgia she stares out of the ward window.

  And perhaps amnesia’s best …

  Acquitted on grounds of extenuating circumstances (the voluntary return of the child to its parent) and of diminished responsibility (but we all know about these witness-box stunts, these get-you-off-lightly psychiatrists) on the charge of kidnapping, and thus spared a possible prison sentence, she sits, in this other prison, protesting still, to her white-coated interrogators, that God—

  In another age, in olden times, they might have called her holy (or else have burnt her as a witch). One who hears the voice of— One to whom— They might have allowed her the full scope of her mania: her anchorite’s cell, her ascetic’s liberties, her visions and ravings … Now she gets benefit of psychiatry.

  She stares before her, out of the tall ward window. She always sits in the same corner of the ward: her post, her station. The ward smells of crazy old women. Beyond the window, on fine days, other patients, in coats, exercise on the asphalt.

  She stares, vigilantly and knowingly (the common ruse of the inmate: it’s they who are mad, not me), at those frail, playground children.

  Her eyes are bright. They blink. Her arms hold nothing …

  He can’t sleep. His bed’s empty and marooned in a black sea. He’s afraid of the dark. And when he does sleep – what dreams! He’s alone in this sepulchral house with its spilling shelves of books and its period bric-à-brac (you and your Regency retreat – you and your historical props). Alone, save for a dog, which shrinks away from him, draws cautiously near again, shrinks away again – a vet’s wire brace only recently removed from its lower jaw. An injured retriever, with which amicable relations have to be re-established slowly, tentatively, never quite completely.

  ‘Here, Paddy. Here.’

  He sits up all night. Reads. Smokes. Works his way down a whisky bottle. Marks essays and piles of notes (the last harvestings of thirty-two years). Drunken red-ink scrawls: More care. Try harder. Good. Fair. Poor. To comfort himself he tells himself stories. He repeats the stories he’s told his class. Ah, the contrast of these hollow nights and his well-thronged days: classroom chatter, playground bedlam … But not long now before even they—

  On weekend mornings – before afternoon visits – in the gusty Lenten weather, he walks in Greenwich Park. With a still wary dog. Wolfe stands guard. Fresh sunshine falls on old splendour. The old palace, the old Naval College. Green grass and white stone. So pristine and clean. So lovingly preserved (and by act of law, and out of public expense). Though, according to Price …

  We all wander from the real world, we all come to our asylums.

  The March wind tears holes in racing cloud-sails. Blue sky blooms over longitude 0°.

  Mary. Lu-love. Lu-love.

  48

  And Adieu

  ‘AND finally it’s my sad duty to have to bid farewell to Mr Crick who—’

  Duty! Duty! Ah, that so well pitched, that so strategic word. Suggestive of the righteous judge, of the stern policeman. And we all know, don’t we, Mr Crick fail
ed in his duty.

  ‘—who after fourteen years as a pillar of the school—’

  Pillar!

  ‘—is leaving us this Easter – for personal reasons—’

  Poised on the edge of the dais, gripping the lonely bowsprit of the lectern, he seems to his entourage of assistant staff to be rising and falling, breasting a swell, a (vaguely stormy) sea of children.

  ‘Fourteen years I do not have to tell you is a long time. And that does not include the eight years before that during which Mr Crick taught at the school which was the predecessor of this one. Mr Crick has seen a good many of you come and go. The children he first taught now have children of their own. Some of your parents, it’s quite possible, may well remember being his pupils. So let us not dwell on this unhappy departure—’

  Unhappy!

  ‘—but – as Mr Crick, as our head of history, would no doubt have us do – look to the past and give due credit to his long and valued service. And let us reflect—’

  He’s going to make a speech, a sermon out of it. Murmurings from the back of the hall. He’s going to baste his victim (who sits at the back of the dais like a trussed-up chicken) with rhetoric.

  ‘—as Mr Crick would doubtless also have us do, on how time passes—’

  The elegiac note. Ah, how we age. (Invisible to that sea of children, invisible to Lewis himself, yet a familiar image, to his watching staff, of their stalwart chief: a pink patch of spreading baldness – amidst wiry greyness – bobbing before a lectern.)

  ‘—these school years of yours, which may seem long enough to you, are soon over, believe me. They’re precious. They’re vital. So don’t waste them, don’t spurn them. Build on them.’

  But apparently the sea – or a turbid, restless part of it – is not going to be pressed into solid labour. For from the midst of its furthest reaches – only now does Lewis, with a momentary pause, acknowledge the clamour that has all the time been gathering – rises a decided squall. A wavelike noise starts to strike the resonant air of the assembly hall and turns itself into a regular, obstinate beating: