by Graham Swift
“I did it,” she said. “I picked up the knife and did it.”
Cut and dried. And Marsh, who’d be a “free man” in four weeks, didn’t have to go to town over it—except for that very reason. Your last case, the one you’ll never really wrap up.
I see him maybe once a month. We play golf. It’s what ex-policemen do. We’re not exactly friends but then we couldn’t exactly part company, go our separate ways—sitting there on either side of the table, just that small gap between us. Him with his time running down, me like some reject begging re-admission.
I left it up to him, but I made the offer. What to call it—a charitable, a protective impulse?
“We should have a drink some time maybe—when they’ve let you out. You’ve got my number. You don’t, by any chance, play golf …?”
Up to him. And—over three months later—he called. The impulse on his part? Anyone’s guess.
They let you out. You can get away now: a sunshine cruise, a cottage by the sea. All the time in the world. But it doesn’t work like that. Something nags, something grates under your skin. You wake up every morning as if something’s still unsolved.
He knows, of course. My twice-monthly visits. He even asks, like you ask after someone’s ailing wife, “How is she?” This woman he had the job of putting where she is.
He looks at me sometimes, still, as if I’m the sick one, the sad one, the crazy one. But then—I made the offer, he made the call.
“How is she?”
“She’s okay.”
(What do you say: “She’s fine”?)
We watch each other’s game. Trail each other up the fairway. I play with a certain edge (early training as a kid), if neither of us is exactly top-league. But sometimes—I think he knows—I let him win. He outranks me, after all, in a manner of speaking. (Though I’d have made Super.) But it’s not the golf really—that’s the thing about golf, for me, it’s not the golf. It’s the walk and the talk. It’s the way you can talk when you’re looking at something else, shielding your eyes to gauge a line, a distance, not staring face to face.
The whack of a decent drive, and the ball will sit and wait for you patiently, far away. The breeze in the silver birches, the scent of clipped grass. These moments when a golf course can seem like perfect safety.
Of course, when the moment seemed right, I offered him a job. An impulse, a serious proposition, I don’t know. Of course I thought of the business implications. A partnership—or I’d always be the boss? I thought of my own hours away from the job these days. My visiting days, my drop-offs and collections. And who knows where one day I might have to go? I thought, of course, of Rita.
All the time in the world. But what you find is that you’re at a loose end, something gnaws inside.
He thought about it, he seriously thought about it. A sort of shelter. A retired cop with a restless, searching look in his face. And maybe he reckoned there was a second deal, on top of the first. If he took the job, worked with me—for me—then he’d really get me to talk. He’d get the whole picture, the whole story at last.
But he said no, for the reasons I might have predicted, if in his own careful words. It wasn’t him really, not his sort of thing. Bugs under the bed. Spying. Catching husbands in the act. A look of sudden correctness, a schoolmaster’s look.
So: golf partners only. Keeping up the connection (the offer still technically stands). Sometimes I think I’m his minder, sometimes he must think he’s mine. And one day, he still thinks, he’ll get the whole picture.
“I did it,” she said. (What else could she say?) “Something came over me and I did it.”
It’s what they all say, in one form or another (I’ve heard them): the ones it takes by surprise, the ones who had no intention, no idea, no earthly inkling and are simply amazed at what they’ve done. Something came over me. As if it was them—they don’t deny it—but not them either. Someone else came along.
“I did it.” End of case, end of story. Marsh didn’t have to give me the third degree. As if I might have said, “But, actually, she’s right—someone else came along. You’re looking at him, you’re looking at your man.”
As if I might have waited outside, here, that night. The get-away man. Waiting for it to happen, knowing it was happening. At least I didn’t do that.
He came back, but he was already a ghost, a dead man. You can’t kill a ghost, can you? The blade goes right through.
He parked the Saab on the gravel. It was still there of course, just minutes later, getting in the way of the ambulance, the police cars. He didn’t drive it straight into the garage, in the usual routine fashion—a simple matter of activating the automatic door. But this wasn’t routine. As if he might have been not intending to stay, this was just some weird visit. Or, better interpretation: she’d been listening out and had already come to the door. She was already standing there.
So, on this of all occasions, was he going to mess around with garage doors? Not go straight to her arms?
But she didn’t come to the door. That’s been established. And ghosts don’t think of garage doors. She’d heard the sound, the crackle of the tyres. But she wanted to wait (I know this) for that other clinching sound: the key in the door. That thing returning husbands do. Just a key in the door but no one turns it like them. A key in a door, the key to a life.
So she waited. Those simple, irreversible moments. Suppose she had come to the door? Stood in the light while he stood there in the dark. Who knows?
She’s asking these same questions again tonight, asking them for ever, going over each second. She wanted him to find her in the warmth of the kitchen, to breathe the smell of what was cooking, a smell he’d surely recognize.
A raw November night. The tang, outside, of rotting leaves. He got out of the car, stepped across the gravel. His last steps, but he had no idea. They weren’t like his own steps anyway. What was he doing here? He’d left himself, left himself for dead, in that flat. As if he was already visiting his past, this life he’d once had. This house, this comfortable, enviable life. This wife he’d loved. She must still be here.
He moved towards the front door. There was a porch arrangement—the porch light was on—with an outer, unlocked door, then the front door proper. He might have stayed there for a while between the two doors, decompressing, adjusting, working his lungs like a diver, understanding that this was his last chance to be himself again. But Sarah says she heard the sound of the outer door—it would make a soft “clunk”—and then the sound of the key almost immediately. She took that lack of a gap as a good sign, a confirmation. The sound of the key.
She said her heart leapt. Her own words. Her “heart leapt.” That’s what she said. I don’t know what she said to Marsh. It’s just an expression of course, words aren’t things, things aren’t words. She was conscious of her own heart, literally, as if a key had turned in it too. Just an expression, and any doctor—like Bob Nash—will tell you the heart’s just a thing for pumping blood and not all the other things it gets made out to be. It can’t be broken or lost or unlocked. Or leap.
He opens the front door. He steps through into the hallway. The kitchen is to the left. A smell hits him, surrounds him all at once, as he steps towards the open kitchen door. A familiar and irresistible smell, but he can’t, for the life of him, place it, name it, it only makes him aware of how he’s not really there. He hears his wife’s voice. He steps into the kitchen. Yes, this is his house, this is his wife, but it all seems utterly impossible. She sees it in his eyes. The smile on her face goes out.
The room is like an embrace. The warmth, the smell. There’s a candle, lit, on the table in the corner. His wife is wearing a black dress, he half remembers it from some other time.
She’s taken off an apron. She’d been chopping something. When she heard the car on the drive she’d wiped her hands and taken off the apron and wondered whether to go to the door—but decided to wait for the key. The smile on her face—but it’s gone now�
�was partly a simple smile of relief. It’s been most of two hours since she received a phone call.
What’s the smell, what’s the smell? It comes from somewhere far off, from long ago. It should be doing its work, in spite of everything. It should be winding its way through his nostrils and his stomach to take hold of that other thing that’s close to the stomach. But it’s as though there’s nothing left of him inside, he’s drained away. She sees it.
He’d hoped, maybe, to be saved, brought back to life. The only reason why he’s here. A magic wand, a magic potion. What’s the smell? But he’s too far gone, it’s too late. She sees it.
And it’s not a magic wand his wife’s got in her hand.
She sees it. He knows it. He even knows now it’s not to be saved that he’s come.
Who moves towards who? They move towards each other. Neither holds back. I see it like one of those sequences of film played backwards, so the victim who’s been struck down seems to leap towards the blow. A trick. But this is how she told me (told me and not Marsh) it was.
It took two. Something came over him as well.
And, of course, at such a moment, without any practice, without any previous training (another thing Marsh would have to puzzle over), she would have found the spot, the very spot, the only spot that counted. Without even aiming, but without missing, or even striking a rib first. Something takes over. As if her hand was being surely pulled to its mark.
She did it. Took the knife. It happened. She couldn’t have known, he couldn’t have known. You never know. A five-year-old girl in my father’s studio, by a vase of flowers.
63
All the smiles he must have winkled out in his time …
She said it—smiling herself—as if that was what he’d left to be remembered by: stacks of smiles, a lifetime of smiles. It was his business of course, he was in the smile trade, and they weren’t real, half of those smiles, just the trick of the moment. His job, his challenge: to get the smile, no matter the mood, the resistance, the reluctance. And then there it would be, fixed in black and white, a glossy finish, as if it were true and for always: a smile.
But with her it really was the genuine and permanent article and nothing to do (though it’s how it all began, one summer in Broadstairs) with looking at a camera. He’d made her smile, she couldn’t deny it. Look, she was even smiling now.
A bench. Would I do it for her? His name, and then, when the time came, hers. It didn’t matter, it didn’t make any difference—what she knew now.
Of course I’d do it, she had my promise. And I saw to both things, the two tasks, not so long after each other as it turned out, while I was still in the Force.
You can go there now, to Chislehurst Common, and sit down, courtesy of Jane and Frank Webb and their son George, whose name you won’t see, who used to be a policeman.
It’s lasted well, over ten years now: a good teak bench, the lettering carved in two stages. Though, if and when the time comes, I mean to get it replaced. Exact replica, same spot.
All this I’ve told Sarah, of course. I’ve written it down, it makes a story: my homework.
But I’ve never told Sarah—I don’t know why, since it’s what really makes the story—that in my dad’s life and even at his death there was this other woman, another woman he must have loved, to speak her name even when he was dying.
I’ve never told Sarah, just as I never told Mum that I’d known all along.
I just told Sarah about the bench.
“Will you do it for me?”
It must have been only a fortnight or so after he died.
“Of course I’ll do it.”
“Thank you, George …”
And then she told me (I’d never known) how Dad got into cameras in the first place, into the photo trade, into being a beach photographer, snapping all those holiday girls.
It was in the army. The war was over by the time he got posted to Germany, but only just.
“Displaced persons,” she said.
They gave him a camera and told him how to use it. He had to take photos of displaced persons, to go in the records—yes, just like in the police. Displaced persons, no shortage of them.
“That was his job,” she said. “Displaced persons, hundreds of them. Someone had to do it. You couldn’t say: ‘Smile.’ ”
“Think of all the reasons,” Charlie Rose would say, “why people buy flowers …”
Well, one of them was Dad’s funeral. Another was Mum’s.
You can have flowers sent into the prison if you use the approved florist.
“Think of all the reasons, and you tell me …”
Just one of his lines, the lines he’d trot out for everyone, a needle in the groove. A big hefty man, with a life in flowers.
Another was: “Second best thing I ever did: open up a flower shop.” And he’d look at you sharply as if you’d just had your cue. But even if you didn’t jump to it, he’d say, “The first best thing? You want to know what the first best thing was?”
You had to run with it by now—beg not to be left in the dark.
“You’re looking at her,” he’d say. “You’re looking at her.”
And he’d cock his head to Katy Rose, his wife.
64
Rita said it couldn’t go on—this nonsense. She was telling me for my own good. My own good.
She wouldn’t mince words, she wouldn’t stand on ceremony. And she hadn’t: opening my door without a warning, without a knock, marching in like a dawn raid. So I thought yet again of that husband of years back, who I’d never seen, behind a closed door. Rita coming with her final word. As if I was on the receiving end now.
“Grow up, George. Get bloody real.”
Someone had to tell me. It couldn’t go on.
But it had gone on now, for a whole year. Since this was almost exactly a year ago: the morning after I first went—the first anniversary—to Putney Vale. I hadn’t said, but she knew. In her calendar too. I’d only said I was going out, I’d be out of the office for the rest of the morning. But she could have figured it out anyway. Might have watched me—then too—crossing the street to Jackson’s.
And she hadn’t said anything either, on the day itself.
Held her tongue, waited. Her own hard-put-to-it mark of respect. Maybe.
But now.
And, like a fool, I’d confessed, I’d told her, when I got back. As if she had the dirt on me anyway. As if she’d been there, watching—trailed me all the way to Putney Vale, caught me in the act.
It was a first offence, and this was just a caution—a stiff caution—but it had to stop.
“Flowers! For God’s sake. Flowers! Not just bloody visits. Flowers—on his grave for her!”
Though there were flowers in the vase that morning. Office flowers. Yellow chrysanths.
She must have decided on it, calculated: wait till the morning. A showdown, a face-to-face. If time itself, a whole year, hadn’t done the work—he needed telling. He needed a damn good shaking out of himself.
Her last chance maybe. And maybe his.
She must have summoned up her nerve, taken a breath, patted her skirt.
And, now I think about it, I know it wasn’t just all fire and fury. For my own good. Her face was all ablaze (she looked splendid) but there was this cooler, steadier light in her eye. I think she saw me just becoming sad—just a sad pathetic case. She didn’t want that, for my own sake she genuinely didn’t want that.
“Snap out of it, George.”
And she must have known it was all or nothing. The bravery! It could all backfire. All her guns again at once. If it didn’t work, if I didn’t snap out of it, what would be left? Sadness all round.
“Can’t you see? A year. How many more years? You don’t even know. Don’t you see? It’s a cold trail.”
That’s the phrase she used. A cold trail. It came out of her hot face. A professional phrase, a detective’s phrase. All the successful cases—all the missions accomplished and
fees duly received—and, of course, all the cold trails …
It’s just a phrase but I could see it like a thing. A long empty path, stony and bare.
“Sit down, Rita. Please. You don’t have to stand.”
But some things, she said, you had to say standing up. She was saying them. She’d only blame herself if she never said them.
Her hope, and her gamble—though once it had seemed like a safe enough bet: what man wouldn’t come to his senses eventually? What man was going to sign himself over to a murderess?
But it wasn’t working: the cautioning, the shaking. It wasn’t working, she could see it. And maybe it was bad timing after all, not good timing at all, the worst timing. The morning after. Standing and refusing to sit. As if, suddenly, she was on the mat and it was me who’d called her in—to give her a talking-to, a dressing down. Her marching orders, even.
All the other way round.
Fireworks, waterworks. The light in her eye becoming a sticky shine. But she was damned (I could see it) if she was going to go in that direction. Damned. She’d been there before, once, long ago—once too often, maybe. Legs firmly planted, head held high.
“Please, Rita—sit down.”
“If you can’t listen, George, if you can’t be told. It’s your bloody life. It’s your bed—some bloody bed—well, you lie in it.”
“Rita—”
Now all she could do was close her mouth, look tight-lipped at me, turn around, show me her arse—which at least wasn’t a locked-up arse, an arse behind bars. Now all she could do was say to herself that she’d had her say. Much good it had done.
She’d have to walk out, shut the door firmly. No slamming—sometimes you didn’t slam. There’d be an awful silence, a pause, on both sides, and she’d have to pray for the telephone to ring—“GW Investigations, good morning”—so we could click back into our roles again like robots.
And she’d have to hang on to her dignity somehow, adjust her position, get a grip on herself. A sad case …
