England and Other Stories

by Graham Swift

  ‘Friends,’ he said, as if the word was strange. ‘I had friends when I was a kid. I mean a little kid. We hung around together, all the time. We were in and out of each other’s homes, each other’s lives. We never thought twice about it. That’s having friends.’

  I snipped away. ‘Well that’s true enough,’ I said.

  And how many times do I say that to a customer? ‘That’s true enough.’ It’s what you say. Whatever they say.

  ‘The friends we make when we’re young,’ I said, ‘they’re the ones that stick, they’re the ones that matter.’

  That wasn’t quite what he’d said, or meant, and I knew it. It wasn’t quite what I meant either. I saw what he’d meant. I snipped away and looked at his hair, but I saw my friends, in Cyprus. In Ayios Nikolaos. All my nine-year-old, ten-year-old friends. I saw myself with them.

  Maybe he knew that I hadn’t meant what I’d said. I’d said something everyone says, or likes to think.

  He said, ‘It’s not the same, is it? Meeting people, seeing people, talking to them. It’s not the same as having friends.’

  I moved the angle of his head. ‘That’s too hard,’ I said, ‘too hard.’ I felt something coming, something almost like anger. I pushed it back. I almost stopped snipping. ‘You’re asking too much,’ I said. ‘All due respect—to your mother. All due respect to your feelings. If you have people to see and talk to, then you have friends. If you have people, you have life.’

  It was late, it was dark. It was the nearest I could get to a little philosophy. It’s what some people expect, sometimes, from a barber. A little philosophy. Especially a barber who’s turned sixty himself and who’s boss of his own shop (me and three juniors) and whose hair is crinkly grey. And I’m Greek too (or Cypriot) and we invented philosophy.

  ‘People,’ I said. ‘People are life.’

  But what I thought was: You didn’t have to come and get your hair cut, did you, after your mum had just died? His hair wasn’t so long, it didn’t need a cut.

  I put the scissors and comb in my top pocket and switched on the clippers so we couldn’t speak.

  People think if you’re a barber then you have people, you have talk all the time, your whole day. The things you must hear, the stories, the things you must learn from all those people.

  But the truth is I like to get away from people. I like it when it’s the end of the day. That’s why sometimes I’m different, I say things, with the last one. I get enough of people. And people are mainly just heads of hair, some of them not such nice heads of hair.

  I thought: He wants it neat and tidy for the funeral.

  My mother and father died years ago, in Cyprus. I hadn’t seen them anyway for quite a time. I hadn’t been back. As a matter of fact, my wife died too, just three years ago—my English wife, Irene. But we’d split up, we’d been split up for years. She drank all the time. She drank and she swore all the time.

  Did I tell all my customers, when she died, when we split up? Did I gabble away to my customers? Did I close the shop?

  I have two grown-up boys who are both in computers and are embarrassed by their father who’s just been a barber all his life.

  I’m glad when I get home and can be alone.

  Maybe he heard all this in my voice. Or he saw it in my face, in the mirror. There’s always a moment when you stand behind them, with your fingers either side of their head, holding it straight, and you both stare at the mirror as if for a photograph. As if the head you have in your hands might be something you’ve just made.

  ‘People are life,’ I said.

  But he could see, in the mirror, that I was thinking: Don’t come to me at the end of the day for wise words or comfort, or friendship, if that’s what you want. What do you expect? That when I shut the shop in just a moment I’m going to say, ‘Why don’t you and I go for a drink? Why don’t we get to know each other better?’

  I’m glad when I get home and can take a beer from the fridge.

  One of those heavy but soft types who look as if they’ve been well fed by their mothers and will end up feeding them. A regular, it’s true. How many years? Always wanting me, the boss, to do him, none of the juniors. The years flash by if you count them in haircuts. I didn’t know his name. That’s not so strange, of course. No appointment system. No need to know their names—unless they tell you—or what they do for a living.

  It’s how the English are, I learnt this.

  They all know my name. It’s over the window. Vangeli. And they know what I do. But how many times do any of them ask, ‘So how did you get to be a barber?’

  I tell them, if they ask, I give them the story. I say I was born holding a comb and scissors . . .

  The truth is it was something I could do. It didn’t need a brain. Then I did my army service. They made me cut the whole camp’s hair. There I met some people! There I got some talk! I gave them all the same shaved-rat’s face. Then I came to this country and ran around for a while with a crazy bunch who’d made the journey before me. Then I settled down to be a barber.

  And now I was the same age, give or take, as this man whose head was in my hands. And yes, in however many years it was, I’d seen his hair grow thinner and greyer, more pink showing through. But of course never said.

  There’s a joke in the barber’s trade: ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’

  When my wife died and I went to see her, I mean in the chapel of rest, she was covered right up to her chin in a cloth. All I saw was a head. You can’t get away from some things.

  I went back to snipping. Outside people were hurrying home. Lucas, one of my juniors—it’s what I call them, ‘juniors’—was sweeping the floor.

  Your turn to speak, I thought. But he didn’t. For a second or so I thought: He’s just glad of the touch of my fingers, through his hair, on his scalp, the flick of my comb. The smell of shampoo and talc, like the smell of being a baby again.

  Vangeli. It means ‘angel of good news’, but I don’t like to explain this to people, because of the jokes. I don’t like to explain that Irene, my wife’s name, is really a Greek name too. It means ‘peace’.

  Peace!

  There’s another moment when you reach for the hand mirror and hold it up to the back of their heads. And once again you have to look, both of you, straight into the big mirror, as if you’re a pair who go together. It’s the moment when it’s almost over. Then there’s the moment when you pull away the cloth and brush them down and they stand up and you give them the paper towel, then they wipe their necks, put on their jackets and pay. You give them back any change, if they don’t tell you to keep it.

  Then there’s the moment when they turn, and you—or at least I always do it—give them a little pat, a little pat that turns into a squeeze, just half a second, on one shoulder. It means thank you, thank you for the tip, but it also means: there, that’s you done, that’s you all fresh and ready. Now go and live your life.

  HAEMATOLOGY

  Roehampton, Surrey

  House of Eliab Harvey

  7th February, 1649

  Colonel Edward Francis

  The Council of Officers

  Westminster

  My dear cousin,

  Well, Ned (if I may still so call you and if you will deign to hear from me), we have lived through extraordinary times. Were there ever such times as these? And now I must cede to you that you are of the winning party and may lord it over me who was the close attendant of kings, nay of our late—of our very late—king. Or would you have me name him, if I have it right, ‘tyrant, traitor, murderer’? Would you daub me with the same charges, for having been so privy to His Majesty—but must I not call him that?—for having ministered to his agues, fevers and coughs? Would you have me place my own head upon the block for having been such a bodily accomplice to tyranny? Then it would be seen, would it not, if my argument of the blood’s motion held true? Physician, prove thyself!

  But was it not proven when that royal blood—may we even call it
that?—spurted forth but a week ago at Whitehall? And is it not proven when any man’s head or limb is severed from his body, as has been the lot of many men—nay, of women and children—in these late times? A king is but a man like any other. Has it needed seven years of war and a trial by Parliament to determine the matter, when any such as I might have attested to it? Anatomy is no respecter. I have dissected criminals and examined kings. Does it need any special statute to claim the one might be the other?

  That, Ned, was my grounding and my ground, long before those of your party set out to curb the King’s powers, then overthrow him. There are tyrannies and tyrannies, and treacheries and treacheries. There are some even now of my party—I mean among the party of physicians—who would not blench or lament to see my old head removed from my body, to see me cut down for having raised my standard against King Galen. There are many kinds of majesty and rebellion. We were but boys, Ned, when the Armada closed upon our shores, but would we not have rallied round our monarch? Rally, I say! We were more than half the age we have now when Ralegh’s head was severed from his body. Did we not then both feel not a little of the sharpness of the axe that smote him? There were many of your party for whom that day, I dare say, marked a severance. It was their beginning, their pretext. So it was with you. It was the beginning, I dare say, of our own severance.

  Yet did we not feel also, if we are truthful, that there is a motion, a fluctuation—may not I use such terms?—in the fortunes of men, an ebb and flow, a rise and fall, beyond all issue of government or justice; and that it is into these unrestrained tides—we knew it by then—we enter as we enter the world? We set our little skiffs upon them, as Ralegh set many a fine vessel upon the waters of his ambition. Should I have stepped in, Ned, to bid my former master James withhold his warrant upon so worthy a head? I was but his physician, not his counsellor, and had been hardly a year in his service. And Ralegh went to his death bravely and nobly, as did, but these seven days past, my other late master Charles.

  Is that what we must call him now, only Charles? Is that the ordinance? As you and I may still call each other—or so I trust—but Ned and Will, boys who once played at knucklebones and did battle with the wooden swords of our rulers at Canterbury. And quaked in our shoes, no doubt, at the wrath of our masters, or spoke impudence about them, behind our hands, when their gowned backs were turned. They were only our schoolmasters, but it was all our world. Such tyranny, such subjection. Such fledgling revolt. Such nursing of our destinies. And it was the King’s School, mark you. Though it was still the reign, long to continue, of, as we would call her, even in our prayers, Our Sovereign Lady Elizabeth.

  What times, Ned, what times. ‘That one might read the book of fate and see the revolution of the times’—do I have it correctly? Is it not King Henry IV, deposer himself of kings? But it was you who attended the playhouses and, if I know you as I knew you in your youth, no doubt other houses as well, while I attended my lectures at Padua. You who are now of God’s militia, while I, to pass the hours, read more of the poets than I read of the Bible. Is that to speak treason?

  That, surely, was our first parting, though we would write much to each other. You were for the law, I was for physic. You were for the Middle Temple, I was for Padua. Was it not indeed the seed of all our future differences and of future offices we would hold as then undiscovered to us? Yet that common seed, that common stirring of the blood—quite so!—was ambition. Should we deny it? I was for anatomy, you, with your lawyer’s trenchancy, were for the bones of human contention. It was always in you, Ned, though it was your profession then to fight but with words. You had the mark of a swordsman. One day you might draw a true sword. I had only a scalpel. Even with your wooden ruler you were more often than not, as I recall, the victor. Now I must own again that you, and those of your kind, are my victor. Nay, my ruler! Truly I live now under your rule.

  How does it go, Ned? ‘If this were seen, the happiest youth, viewing his progress through, what perils past, what crosses to ensue.’ I am an old man. I read by a winter fire. But I freely admit I was ambitious too. My cause was the advancement of learning, but it was also the advancement of myself. Did I marry my late wife because I wished her to be my wife or because I wished to be the husband of the daughter of the late Queen’s physician? It opened more doors than my laurels from Padua. Yet how I miss her, my dear Liz. My late Liz. Late! It is the only word now for us, now we have passed our three score and ten. All is late. Though you may think, if God (and your physician) grant you health, that you are now but in your earliness, your newness. Do we not have a new world? Is this not the seventh day of its creation?

  Ambition, Ned, it was our common spurring in our separate courses. Shall we confess it? And shall we confess that for a while, for a good long while, my ambition outrode and was better stabled than yours? Now shall we see where the ambition of your master Cromwell—but I must call him master too—will take him and how it may serve and accommodate yours.

  What times, what times. It is now I who must sit aside, withdraw and retire, taking shelter as I do in my brother’s house. It is I who must content myself with my books and studies, I who once accompanied kings. Yet I want no more. You will perhaps smirk to know that my studies remain upon the reproduction of our kind and of the animals at large. What food for mirth and raillery have I given my enemies and detractors—who are still many and persistent—that I, an old man both wifeless and childless, should dwell upon such stuff. How they must snigger at me as we once sniggered behind the backs of our schoolmasters.

  Yet I would know, Ned, perhaps before I die, how we are born, how we are shaped for the world. Leave that, some will still cry, to the doctors of divinity, tread not upon that holy ground. So are we not alike there? Do you not discern it from your present elevation? We both came moulded with the rebellious, some might say heretical, disposition to trespass upon sacred soil. In the interests, to be sure, of truth and justice. And of ambition?

  I was no prostrate worshipper in the church of kingship, no more than you, but my interests, or shall I say the interests of learning, made me seek their best protection. Is it not at least food for thought for you that our late king, tyrant, traitor and murderer, who clung so much to his own divine prerogative, was yet the patron of so much that assailed the sacrosanct? And is it not also food for thought for you that those of your party who once so boldly and blasphemously rose up against him are now entrenched in their own sanctimonies? Do I blaspheme now? Will you arraign me?

  The bones of human contention! Why did I hold back for some dozen years the publication of my findings, my De Motu Cordis? Because I lacked courage, I confess it, because—I should say this!—I was weak of heart. Because I knew it would bring down upon me the learned heavens, if not other powers-that-be. It would bring me enemies. And lose me valued practice. And so it did, and still does. There is heresy and heresy, there is dogma and dogma.

  How well I remember, Ned, when we last spoke together. It was some eight years past. It was at your table. There were the bonds of our kinship and of our friendship and of host and guest, yet I felt a broil simmering. There was the whiff of smoke. You said there was a time approaching when every man would have to make his stand. Of whose party was he? I said may not a man make a stand, and a stout one, of being of no party? You said that was no stand at all. Or rather, as I recall, you said it was not the stand of a man but of a tree. Would I be a tree and not a man?

  It was late August and your windows were flung open upon the view of your orchard, a whole regiment of trees, hung with blushing apples. ‘No, Ned,’ I said, ‘I am not a tree, but let trees still decide the matter. I too have an orchard. Let us not quarrel over whose apples are the sweeter, though over lesser things men have sometimes come to blows, but here is the true quarrel: if you or any man or any man’s party were to invade my orchard, cut down my trees and trample my land, why then I would be of the opposing party. There would be my allegiance.’

  You would not ta
ke this for an answer (nor in all honesty did I think it quite sufficient). You said, ‘Well there you have spoken wisely, Will, since the King already cuts and tramples through the orchard that is his kingdom, claiming it as his right to do so and that it is no man’s land but his own. Is not then your allegiance decided?’ There was a smile upon your lips, but there was a smouldering in your eyes. You poured another cup of ale. You said, ‘There will come a time, Will, there will come a time.’ I should perhaps have said nothing, but I said, ‘Then let us hope that time does not come tomorrow, or the day after. And let us hope that when it comes we do not fall out upon our cousinship, no matter which party we choose.’ I said, ‘I am a doctor, Ned, I must minister to all parties.’

  But you would not take that for an answer either, or your eyes would not. I had not seen them burn so before. You plainly deemed, but did not say, that for certain causes even a doctor must throw aside his phials, as a lawyer must throw aside his books of law, and buckle on armour. How little I or you knew, Ned, that one day soldiers of your party would enter my chamber and ransack its contents, casting hither and thither my precious notes, papers and experiments. There was my orchard for you, there was my party confirmed.

  But, not to skirt about the nub of the matter, how could I say that my party was already chosen for me? As you knew it was. How could I, who was physician to the King, who knew the King’s very body as no other man knew it, be of any party but the King’s? It was scarcely a case of cause or principle. But how, equally, could I have said that I noted that fire in your eyes? I noted it as a physician notes symptoms. It was the fire of your cause, I grant you, but it was the fire also of envy. It was the fire of an ambition not yet rewarded, and overtaken by another’s eminence. And such was the fire—I can say this, now you enjoy your own eminence—that lit the eyes of many of your ranks, cause or no cause.

  Orchards! Kingdoms! How could I have said, without seeming to speak like my master the King in his worst haughtiness, that my party was of bigger things? It is a small entity, the heart, it is a small allowance, the blood of any creature, yet to every creature it is the All of life. I was born, you know this, Ned, in Folkestone, which looks across to the Continent. How could I have said that I was of the Continent’s party, I was of the world’s party? England is but a small country, albeit my own. Why did I journey to Padua? How could I have said that I was of Fabricius’s party, nay of Galileo’s, whose noble hand I have clasped? Knowledge is vaster than kingdoms and, while kingdoms come and go, is the only true arbiter of the times. How could I have said this to you, a lawyer and counsellor to members of Parliament (did you not have, even then, your modicum of eminence?), without adding fuel to that fire? I can scarcely claim the licence of old age to speak it now.