by Graham Swift
It’s how I met your mum, Helen, long ago. I was Detective Constable Webb. But I was Saint bloody George riding to the rescue.
I said, “This lady would like a cup of coffee.” (“This lady”!) And I sat right down at her table. The nerve.
It was called Marco’s. It was new and it was just a little way from the County Courts. I might have gone to the caff in New Street where all the cops on court duty hung out. I might have gone to a pub. But I mooched about and ducked into Marco’s just as a shower was starting.
Eleven-thirty on a Friday morning and my weekend off was coming up, and the judge had called a sudden adjournment. My lucky day. And the sergeant said, when I called in, “I’d hop it if I were you. See you Monday.”
Sometimes fate is on your side.
You can sniff an atmosphere straight away, you know when something funny’s going on. Off duty? Maybe, maybe not. I sat at a table by the window. The shower had turned into a downpour. A waitress with a strange, hounded look seemed only too pleased to serve me. Three tables along, a big man (Marco?—I’ll never know) was standing, towering over a girl who was sitting facing me but not looking at me, looking hard at her hands, one of which held a just-lit cigarette. The big man was speaking—under his breath but as if he might suddenly bellow—and she was ignoring what he was saying. He jabbed a finger towards the door. She wore a raincoat—unbuttoned, dry—but looked like she didn’t mean to budge. He wore a grubby T-shirt, a tea towel tucked into his belt.
She took a drag on her cigarette, blew the smoke quickly and straight up, tilting up her chin.
And I got it all straight away. Ten out of ten for detection (and for that other thing that goes with it, sometimes: intuition). A waitress too. But she’d just been given her marching orders. For something she’d done, in the kitchen perhaps, just moments before—or hadn’t done. Something he’d done (the details would get filled in later), and she hadn’t complied. You have to put yourself in the scene.
There was a waitress’s apron hanging untidily from one of the hooks by the entrance to the kitchen, as if it had been flung there in a hurry. So: she’d been all ready to storm out. Stuff your job. But then the rain had started outside and she’d had a better, angrier, braver idea. She’d sat down at the table.
If she didn’t work here any more, she could be a customer, couldn’t she? She could order a coffee, couldn’t she? And he could damn well bring it.
Brave, angry girl. She looked straight ahead without even seeing me. Brave, angry, blonde girl.
He leant over her, his voice rising. His hands gripped the edge of the table as if he might tip it up. I don’t remember my decision, I don’t remember getting up, but one moment I was sitting at my table, the next I was standing by hers, saying, “What’s the trouble here?” And the next moment I was sitting down opposite her, but looking at him, and saying, “I think this lady would like a coffee …”
The nerve. But who knows what I’d have done without my fall-back, my invisible shield? The ID in my breast pocket and the word waiting ready, which, as it happens, I didn’t have to use: Police.
“… and I’d like to buy it for her.”
She looked at me. I could almost hear her think: Now what? What now? Who was this bloke from nowhere?
He glared. A moment’s stand-off. Then he turned (I’d done it!), whipping the tea towel from his belt, back to the kitchen. More words under his breath.
A sudden certainty inside me.
She looked at me. Studied me like something that had dropped from the sky. Outside the rain was pelting. April—Easter coming up. My move, but it was my audition too. A drag on her cigarette, the smoke straight up.
I said, “The thing to do, when he brings it, is not to drink it. Not to drink it and walk out.”
She said, “I was planning on that.”
He brought the coffee, but he wasn’t going to be nice about it. Half of it was in the saucer already, more after he’d plonked it down.
We got up together, scraping our chairs. “A shilling,” he said, folding his arms. She stubbed out her cigarette. I took a shilling from my pocket, slapped it down. A cheap round, a bargain. We edged past him while he stood like some tree. Then we were out of the door—and the rain was suddenly stopping, switching itself off like a tap. A gleam in the sky. As if that might have been part of a plan too.
• • •
I remember everything—everything, Helen. The way she grabbed my arm, straight away. The shine of the wet road. The films of oil, little coiling rainbows, in the gutter. The puddles she stepped round, the flecks on the backs of her ankles.
You don’t see things, Dad.
Later, I’d say, “Only women smoke like that—blowing the smoke straight up—women who are angry. Like a kettle on the boil.”
She looked at me. “You notice things.”
“It’s my job,” I said. It had to come out some time. “I’m a cop,” I said.
But she didn’t go off me, didn’t change her mind.
And she was a trainee teacher (and I hated teachers) though I didn’t know she was a trainee teacher yet.
“Plain clothes,” I said.
“Or no clothes at all,” she said.
Rain outside again. Its hiss. A kettle on the boil. I notice things.
In her room, on the first floor, stuck to the wardrobe door, was a poster, a photograph: a man in a singlet, a cigarette dangling from his wide mouth, a pistol in his hand, held up near his cheek. A bad guy, a good-looking bad guy. Every night she let him watch her undress.
I said, “Who’s he?”
She said, “That’s Jean-Paul Belmondo.”
I said, “Who’s he?”
I stayed all that weekend. Before I left she took the poster down.
It’s how I met your mum, Helen. What do you think of my chocolate roulade? There was this other man in the room, a French geezer with a gun.
A trainee teacher. I wouldn’t have guessed. Nakedness: it’s a good disguise. Her last year of training—working in her Easter break as a waitress. Though not any more. One day she’d be a headmistress, a whole school under her thumb. Now she was holding my balls in her hand, cupping them like a pair of eggs.
I’d never have guessed. But nor could I have detected in her the girl of just three years before, who’d walked out on her parents (that’s what she did, Helen), and been disowned by them.
It was months before she told me, the whole story. Perhaps she thought it would put me off. The thing is they’d been religious, the whole family—one of those strict peculiar lots. In her bedroom, in those days, there’d been a picture of Jesus.
But she’d rebelled (your mum, a rebel too). One day when she was seventeen she’d told them. She didn’t believe in it any more.
• • •
The nerve, the bravery. Even now I try to picture it, years after she walked out on me. Brave, tough-minded bitch. I still see her when she was seventeen and I never even knew her, taking that first brave step. As if she’s up on some high wire, about to put her foot forward. And God’s up there, even higher, glaring down.
A great walker-out.
But didn’t I know it—hadn’t I seen it, in Marco’s, that afternoon? She’d walked out on God. She was on the rebound, a long slow rebound, via Jean-Paul Belmondo, to me.
How do we choose? I should have been in court. If the judge, and the sergeant, hadn’t let me go free …
And in those early days I even liked court duty. Strange, when words weren’t my thing. Action, me. Having to get up there and be made to look dumb. Having your evidence pulled apart. Seeing them get off. But I used to think it was a kind of reinforcement nonetheless. It was what we were for. Those things that might be just words were part of the fabric round you there: justice, law.
1968. We got married early in ’69. I was up for detective-sergeant by then, she was a qualified teacher. Model citizens. But her parents didn’t show up (I think I was glad). My parents were there, of course.
Georgie, ma
rrying a teacher! And he’d always hated school!
They stood side by side, arm in arm, remembering their own wedding, I suppose.
A registry office. A civil ceremony—it had to be. But there was confetti and flowers. And photos, of course. And who else could have taken them?
He had to step out of the picture for a while.
“Smile.”
How do we choose? My dad had gone about things thoroughly—so the story went. As thoroughly as a policeman, combing the beach with his camera.
But up in that first-floor bed-sit that wet afternoon it came back to me, that passing, nudging phrase: “Mrs. Barrett’s place. Mrs. Barrett’s place in Broadstairs.”
Rain fell outside, all weekend it seemed. April showers, April rain. The swish of traffic sloshing through it. Buses passed, their top decks level with the window. Once—was it Saturday or Sunday morning?—she got up, quite naked, to peer through the crack in the curtains. A bus was coming and, just for the hell of it, she gave them a flash, whipping back the curtains, whipping them shut again. Her front view for them, her back view for me.
It’s how I met her, Helen. More roulade?
And now I think about it, I think Rachel never really gave up her god. Or, she gave him up but something that went with him, or her family’s version of him, stuck. I think the word is “righteousness.” That’s the right word. A sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. A cop. She’d never have guessed, never have imagined either. A cop. A knight to the rescue who turned out to be just a cop, but that was okay, that was all right.
She chose me, and I was always in court.
I should have seen it even there in Marco’s. The sticking to her ground, the coolness. Not just a girl with balls who’d told some bloke to take his grubby mitts off. So when she walked out on me twenty years later I shouldn’t have been surprised. My mitts were grubby now, so to speak. She was unchoosing me. Slipping her arm out of mine like a ship unties from its moorings. Sailing on.
Right and wrong. And I’d done wrong.
Never mind what Dyson did.
23
I turn, I walk away at last. It’s only the thick taste of hate that lets me. As if I need to go and puke.
Look what you did to her, look what you made her do.
Even as I walk I feel the tug, the pluck at my back.
But don’t be fooled. It’s only a grave. Don’t look round—a last glance, as at some abandoned victim. The roses like a blotch of blood.
Don’t be fooled by the words you think you hear, whispered, icy.
“Go on, walk. You can do that, can’t you? You’re free, you’re glad. But you haven’t got her yet, have you? Not exactly. Eight more years, if you’re lucky …”
Keep walking, close your ears.
But is that where he is in any case, in that grave behind you? Is that where the dead are, locked up in their graves—prisoners in their cells as well? Aren’t they the freest ones of all, watching us maybe, wherever we go, like perfect unseen detectives, when we think we come to stare at them?
“So you can’t ever walk away, not from me, can you? And you haven’t got her yet. Eight more years … You poor sad bastard.”
But I reach the line of trees and feel safe. Out of range, in the clear. Only a grave, only a slab of stone.
From the region of the crematorium, the sound of car doors shutting. One party leaving, another arriving—even in the time I’d been standing there.
And it’s only the old, old question, the common question. How long have we got? What’s our sentence? Eight, nine years …
My God, there was a time when a year yawned for ever, it was time you could waste. Now it works both ways: only eight years.
“When I come out, George, you won’t want me. I’ll be years older, you won’t want me.”
“It’s not like that, it doesn’t work like that.”
(It would work on his side, if it did.)
I breathe deep, the black taste subsiding—thank God for this crisp bright air. And now it’s past mid-morning, there’s even a faint hint of warmth when you lift your face to the sun, like warm water in a cold glass.
I walk on. Twenty to twelve. Time on my hands, even allowing for the drive to come. I find a litter bin and get rid of the balled-up wrapping paper. The cemetery is a grid of paths and plots that someone must have planned once, like you plan a town. But not far from the crematorium is a separate laid-out garden, a wall at one end, facing south—a terrace beneath, with benches. In summer the wall must be a mass of climbing plants. Even today it looks like it’s being granted a brief midday bask.
Women in the Tanning Centre, doing both sides. The sun in my empty office, touching my desk.
I sit on one of the benches, hands in coat pockets. A graveyard tramp. Beyond the flower beds, through more lines of trees, the ranks of graves. But they’re okay, seen at a distance, seen all together: harmless gravestones taking the sun. They’re almost reassuring, these well-behaved guests, given their space here in the land of the living.
Who on earth are they all?
24
But Helen didn’t clear out. Right or wrong. There she was, once a week: my daughter, my dinner date, my food sampler.
“What’s it tonight?”
“Wait and see.”
Chicken Marsala (though I use sherry). The secret is in the scrapings from the pan.
“Have some wine.”
I lit the candles. A little vase of flowers. I’d put on a good shirt. It’s not just the cooking, it’s the presentation, the whole thing.
When had Rachel and I last done this? When had we had the time?
I’d bring in the serving dish with a flourish. “Voilà!” (I can speak French.)
“Dad—this is really good.”
You can tell when someone’s pretending, only saying what you’d like to hear. She’d let the first bites linger in her mouth, give me marks out of ten. Below seven was rare.
But if Helen had become the woman in my life—if that was the unspoken fact—who was the man in Helen’s? A fair question. Another unspoken fact.
“You know … if one of these days you wanted to—bring someone. I’m sure I could manage for three.”
Clumsy maybe. Helen had her own life somewhere, what did it have to do with me? And why should I want to upset these precious weekly visits? A lifeline, simply: they kept me afloat. The mercy, the miracle that, after everything, she and I should be friends.
“If there is someone … at the moment.”
But it seemed she’d been waiting for the subject to come up.
She put down her knife and fork. A quick sharp breath, a slight wobble of her chin.
“Yes, there is someone. There is someone. She’s called Clare. We’ve been living together for over a year.”
What do you say when you hear such a thing? The truth is, when I heard it—she said it perfectly clearly—I didn’t feel anything much. No jolt, no shock, no lightning reaction, unsuspected inside me, leaping out. I was pretty numb in those days, maybe. But anyway, why should I be shocked? I was a policeman—I’d been a policeman. I’d seen some things.
I suppose what I felt was the great airy gap of my own ignorance. My blindness. “You don’t notice things.” This is your daughter Helen, who you hardly know.
And then what I thought, suddenly, rapidly rewinding years, was: it makes no difference (it hasn’t knocked me off my seat), yet it does. Because this is something that Helen has taken all this time to tell me, something she hasn’t been able to tell me, for fear of how I might react. So now if I don’t react, it will be like a disappointment, a humiliation to her, it will be like saying all those years of being my enemy were just a waste.
She’d like me to be a blustering, ranting dad.
I suppose what I thought was: my own daughter has been afraid of me, most of her life.
And now I was washed up, now I was no threat … Now I wasn’t a senior cop any more, or even a successful husband …
<
br /> Unless it was Rachel she’d been afraid of.
I don’t know how long I just looked at her.
“Sweetheart,” I said.
I don’t remember choosing the word. It came out of my mouth like a bird: “sweetheart.” A word I’d never used to Helen before.
There was a tear—no more than a glint in her eyes. Like that glint I see in clients’ eyes.
I must have smiled at her, because a smile spread over her face too. The tremble of her chin. How brave.
“I never knew,” I said.
“You do now,” she said.
I wouldn’t have taken her hand, wouldn’t have known if that was the thing to do, if she hadn’t pushed it first across the table.
And then (then and afterwards) I thought all the thoughts that you think. How long had she known? But was it like that? A point when you knew? Or just a long awful time of not knowing, of not knowing which side you were of a line?
“Well,” I said at last, “it doesn’t alter what I said. Bring her.”
She looked thoughtfully, seriously at me.
“I think maybe that’s not a good idea. Not now.”
“But—tell me about her.”
And now she became flustered, awkward—as if she was a boy and the question was from her mum.
“She’s … She’s … brilliant at interior design.” She couldn’t help one of her quick searching glances round the room. “We’re thinking of setting up—as interior designers, I mean. Of going into partnership—”
She laughed at the phrase she’d used. I laughed too.
I thought: so it was simple. Your big love was art. Big pictures in frames. But you’d settle for interior design: that was your big love now.
Maybe she could tell what I was thinking. She looked down at her plate.
All those years, I thought, all those years of not saying. And now, in a few moments, it was said. So it wasn’t about me being a policeman—though my being a policeman can’t have helped.
And later I thought, half guiltily, half excitedly, of Helen in bed with another woman. Clare. In much the same way, I suppose, as Helen must have thought of me and Rachel, her parents, in bed together.
