by Graham Swift
Two years from now I’ll be in uniform like him.
Stan Booth says, ‘Siddown!’ He strains at the oars.
Above the noise of the dredger – literally above it, for it issues out of the cloudy sky – comes another sound, throbbing, resonant, oppressive, but too familiar – or too little to do with present concerns – to make Dad or me or Stan Booth, sweating over the oars, raise our eyes. Only the two aircraftmen, drawn by their own choosing but with no going back (the dredger is getting close now) into this aquatic adventure, feel obliged to show their attachment to larger matters and to register their allegiance, already announced by their uniforms, to the skies.
‘Thar they go!’ (Joe? Nat?)
‘Yih-hoo! Give ’em hell, boys!’ (The other one.)
Conditions favourable, despite low cloud over the North Sea coast. An anti-cyclone, perhaps, pushing from the continent, already clearing the skies of Germany. Before the night is out, stars.
And, besides, this war doesn’t stop for Sundays. Doesn’t take a break for church-going or weekend recreation (or even for one little case of murder). There’s no let-up for the citizens of Hamburg and Berlin, who in honour of the Lord’s day are going to get hell.
They thunder past, screened by decorous cloud. Then the din of the dredger reasserts itself. Chung-gha-chung-gha! Louder now, because we’re getting near – less than a hundred yards.
And with the sound, a smell also. The smell of something hauled from primitive depths. The smell that haunts Dick’s bedroom.
He’s here. He knows his place. He knows his station. He keeps the ladder turning, the buckets scooping. The noise of the churning machinery drowns the fleeting aerial clamour of global strife. He hears no bombers, sees no bombers. And this smell of silt is the smell of sanctuary, is the smell of amnesia. He’s here, he’s now. Not there or then. No past, no future. He’s the mate of the Rosa II.
And he’s the saviour of the world …
Fifty, forty yards. The water is rumbling, juddering. Beneath the Rosa the giant snout of the bucket-ladder is biting, gnawing with its rotating teeth into the soft, defenceless belly of the river-bed. Thirty yards. Dad can’t restrain himself from another bout of hailing. Cupping his hands once more, he yells against the competition of the ladder. ‘Dick, we’re coming! We’re coming – to take you home, Dick! Home!’ Twenty yards. ‘Dick, we’ll—’
And then—
Then.
But memory can’t keep fixed and clear those final moments. Memory can’t even be sure whether what I saw, I saw first in anticipation before I actually saw it, as if I had witnessed it somewhere already – a memory before it occurred. Dick’s head and shoulders (for we’re close enough now to have to crane our necks to view the Rosa’s deck) appear above the dredger’s rail about three yards forward of the steadily spewing sludge-chute. For a second he stares at the approaching boat. For the same second I see what he must see: an overladen dinghy, three familiar faces and two inexplicable (inexplicable?) attendants in uniform. In uniform. He scurries forward of our intended point of contact with the dredger’s hull just downstream of the sludge-barge, so that we pass wide and abeam of him. Above the uproar comes the distinct chink of glass against metal.
Was it Nat, or Joe who spoke first? ‘Hey feller, take it easy!’ Or Stan Booth (wrenching head over shoulder): ‘Dick, Dick bor, blust you! Turn off the blusted ladder!’ Or was it Dad who shouted before either of these (to the further astonishment of our American visitors, not to say Stan Booth): ‘Dick, it’s all right! Dick. I’ll be your father …’
Was it really the case (but how could I have been sure, in that fading light, at that bobbing distance?) that his eyelids were quite motionless and that his gaze, luminous and intent, ceased at a certain point to be aimed at us, but turned to contemplate the rippling, furling, vibrant surface of the Ouse? Did he move first or did I shout first? And did I really shout aloud, or did the words only ring in my brain (and echo ever after)?
‘Dick – don’t do it!’
But we all saw, we all agreed – whisky-fuddled or sober – what happened next.
He turns. He lurches to the fo’c’sle, to the very prow of the Rosa (which is not, like many a prow, sharp and nobly arched, designed to cleave and affright the waves, but stubby, rounded and dented, and crowned by a derrick for hoisting the sling-lines of the bucket-ladder). He clambers on to the rail; stands, shoeless, upon it, disdaining the hand-hold of the adjacent derrick stanchions. Stretches to full height.
For a moment he perches, poises, teeters on the rail, the dull glow of the western sky behind him. And then he plunges. In a long, reaching, powerful arc. Sufficiently long and reaching to quite discount the later theory that he must have become entangled in the anchor-chain or the sling-lines; sufficiently reaching and powerful for us to observe his body, in its flight through the air, form a single, taut and seemingly limbless continuum, so that an expert on diving might have judged that here indeed was a natural, here indeed was a fish of a man.
And punctures the water, with scarcely a splash. And is gone.
Gone. Stan Booth digs in an oar to bring the dinghy around. We watch, wait for the up-bobbing head. Watch and start to distrust our eyes. Watch and drift down on the current (yes, the tide has turned, the ebb has begun); cross and recross an imaginary line projecting downstream from the Rosa’s bows. Shout into the watery gloom (even the aircraftmen from far-off Arizona give vent to repeated and strangely impassioned ‘Dick!’s, as if beseeching some old buddy). Shout; shout again. All, that is, except a sixteen-year-old boy who, sitting crammed beside his father in the stern of the dinghy, goes implacably silent. Because he knows (though he doesn’t say; he’ll never say: a secret he and Mary will share for ever): there’ll be no bobbing top-knot. There’ll come no answering, gurgling, rescue-me cry. He’s on his way. Obeying instinct. Returning. The Ouse flows to the sea …
Dad takes the oars from a fatigued Stan Booth. The dredger, unmanned, still determinedly dredges. We scan and scour the water (later, by the light of dawn, the laid-bare banks, the slimy piers of the road bridge). We row back against the current, tie up to the Rosa and climb aboard. No wet and shivering Dick (our last, thin hope) who has tricked us all and, swimming in a circle, clambered back on deck. Stan Booth shuts off at last the bucket-ladder engine. The sudden, dripping quiet strikes like a knell. ‘Someone best explain.’ We trip over empty bottles. Peer from the rails. Ribbons of mist. Obscurity. On the bank in the thickening dusk, in the will-o’-the-wisp dusk, abandoned but vigilant, a motor-cycle.
ALSO BY GRAHAM SWIFT
Making an Elephant
Tomorrow
The Light of Day
Last Orders
Ever After
Out of This World
Waterland
Learning to Swim
Shuttlecock
The Sweet-Shop Owner
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GRAHAM SWIFT was born in 1949 in London, where he still lives and works. He is the author of eight previous novels: The Sweet-Shop Owner; Shuttlecock, which received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Waterland, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won the Guardian Fiction Award, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour; Out of This World; Ever After, which won the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; Last Orders, which was awarded the Booker Prize; The Light of Day; and, most recently, Tomorrow. He is also the author of Learning to Swim, a collection of short stories, and Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry, and reflections on his life in writing. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.
ALSO BY GRAHAM SWIFT
THE LIGHT OF DAY
On the anniversary of a life-shattering event, George Webb, a former policeman turned private detective, revisits the catastrophes of his past and reaffirms the extraordinary direction of his future. Two years before, an assignment to follow a strayed husband and his mistress appeared simple enough, b
ut this routine job left George a transformed man. Suspenseful, moving, and hailed by critics as a detective story unlike any other, The Light of Day is a gripping tale of murder and redemption, as well as a bold exploration of love and self-discovery.
Fiction/Literature
LAST ORDERS
Four men—friends, most of them, for half a lifetime—gather in a London pub. They have taken it upon themselves to carry out the last orders of Jack Dodds, master butcher, and deliver his ashes to the sea. As they drive toward the fulfillment of their mission, their errand becomes an extraordinary journey into their collective and individual pasts. Braiding these men’s voices—and that of Jack’s mysteriously absent widow—into a choir of secret sorrow and resentment, passion and regret, Graham Swift creates a testament to a changing England and to enduring mortality.
Fiction/Literature
THE SWEET-SHOP OWNER
This flawlessly constructed and deeply compassionate novel is set during a single June day in the life of an outwardly unremarkable man whose inner world proves to be exceptionally resonant. As he tends to his customers, Willy Chapman, the sweet-shop owner, confronts the specters of his beautiful and distant wife and his clever, angry daughter, the history through which he has passed, and the great, unrequited passion that has tormented and redeemed him for forty years.
Fiction/Literature
EVER AFTER
Dazzling in its structure and shattering in its emotional force, Ever After spans two centuries and settings from the adulterous bedrooms of postwar Paris to contemporary entanglements in the groves of academe. It is the story of Bill Unwin, a man haunted by the death of his beautiful wife and a survivor himself of a recent brush with mortality. And although it touches on Darwin and dinosaurs, bees and bridge builders, the true subject of Ever After is nothing less than the eternal question, “Why should things matter?” as pondered by both Bill Unwin and his Victorian ancestor, whose private notebooks reveal a quest for truth that bears eerie—and ultimately heartbreaking—parallels to Unwin’s own.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-74026-1
OUT OF THIS WORLD
Out of This World interweaves the history of a blighted family with the tragic and ludicrous history of the twentieth century. Its alternating narrators are a father and daughter—each obsessed with the other and irrevocably estranged—surveying their losses and grievances on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Their voices are unforgettable, their hurts terribly moving, and their vision of our era, like Swift’s itself, shocking and terribly persuasive.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-74032-2
SHUTTLECOCK
Prentis, the narrator of this nightmarish masterpiece, catalogs “dead crimes” for a branch of the London Police Department and suspects that he is going crazy. His files keep vanishing. His boss subjects him to cryptic taunts. His family despises him. And as Prentis desperately tries to hold on to the scraps of his sanity, he uncovers a conspiracy of blackmail and betrayal that extends from his department and into the buried past of his father, a war hero codenamed “Shuttlecock”—and, lately, a resident of a hospital for the insane. At once a fiendishly devious mystery and a profound reckoning of the debts that bind sons to fathers, Shuttlecock is a brilliantly accomplished work of fiction.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-73933-3
LEARNING TO SWIM
And Other Stories
The men and women in these spare, almost Kafkaesque stories are engaged in struggles that are no less brutal because they are fought by proxy. The mismatched couple in the title story wages a covert, sexually charged battle for the allegiance of their hapless son. An aging doctor punishes a hypochondriacal patient for his wife’s adultery. A teenage refugee is swept up in the conflict between an oppressively sentimental father and his rebellious son. In Graham Swift’s taut prose, these quietly combative relationships become a microcosm for all human cruelty and need.
Fiction/Short Stories
WATERLAND
Set in the bleak Fen country of East Anglia and spanning some two hundred and forty years in the lives of its haunted narrator and his ancestors, Waterland is a book that takes in eels and incest, ale-making and madness, the heartless sweep of history, and a family romance as tormented as any in Greek tragedy.
Fiction/Literature
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Epigraph
About the Stars and the Sluice
About the End of History
About the Fens
Before the Headmaster
A Bruise upon a Bruise
An Empty Vessel
About Holes and Things
About the Story-telling Animal
About the Rise of the Atkinsons
About the Question Why
About Accidental Death
About the Change of Life
Histrionics
De la Révolution
About the Ouse
Longitude 0°
About the Lock-keeper
In Loco Parentis
About my Grandfather
The Explanation of Explanation
Aux Armes
About Coronation Ale
Quatorze Juillet
Child’s Play
Forget the Bastille
About the Eel
About Natural History
And Artificial History
Detective Work
About the Saviour of the World
A Teacher’s Testament
About Beauty and the Beast
Who Says?
Too Big
Unknown Country
About Nothing
Le Jour de Gloire
About the East Wind
Stupid
About Contemporary Nightmares
A Feeling in the Guts
About the Witch
Not So Final
Begin Again
About the Pike
About my Grandfather’s Chest
Goodnight
And Adieu
About Empire-building
The Whole Story
About Phlegm
About the Rosa II
Other Books by This Author
A Note About the Author
