England and Other Stories

by Graham Swift

  But no, of course not! He clasped Lisa, almost wanting to wake her, afraid of his thought.

  Of course not! He was alive and happy, intensely alive and happy. Then he had the thought that though he’d drafted his last testament it was not in any real sense a testament, it was not even his testament. It was only a testament about the minor matter of his possessions and what should become of them when he was no more. But it was not the real testament of his life, its stuff, its story. It was not a testament at all to how he was feeling now.

  How strange that people solemnly drew up and signed these crucial documents that were really about their non-existence, and didn’t draw up anything—there wasn’t even a word for such a thing—that testified to their existence.

  Then he realised that in all his time of knowing her he’d never written a love letter to this woman, Lisa, who was sleeping in his arms. Though he loved her completely, more than words could say—which was perhaps the simple reason why he’d never written such a thing. Love letters were classically composed to woo and to win, they were a means of getting what you didn’t have. What didn’t he have? Perhaps they were just silly wordy exercises anyway. He hardly wrote letters at all, let alone love letters, he hardly wrote anything. He wouldn’t be any good at it.

  And yet. And yet the need to write his wife a love letter assailed him. Not just a random letter that might, in theory, be one among many, but the letter, the letter that would declare to her once and for all how much he loved her and why. So it would be there always for her, as enduring as a will. The testament of his love, and thus of his life. The testament of how his heart had been full one rainy night in May when he was twenty-five. He would not need to write any other.

  So overpowering was this thought that eventually he disengaged his arms gently from Lisa and got out of bed. He put on his bathrobe and went into the kitchen. There was the lingering smell of toasted cheese and there was the unfinished bottle of wine. They possessed no good-quality notepaper, unless Lisa had a private stash, but there was a box of A4 by the computer in the spare room and he went in and took a couple of sheets and found a blue roller-ball pen. He’d never had a fountain pen or used real ink, but he felt quite sure that this thing had to be handwritten, it would not be the thing it should be otherwise. He’d noticed that Mr Reeves had a very handsome fountain pen. Black and gold. No doubt a gift from Sylvia.

  He returned to the kitchen, poured a little wine and very quickly wrote, so it seemed like a direct release of the thickness in his chest:

  My darling Lisa,

  One day you walked into my life and I never thought something so wonderful could ever happen to me. You are the love of my life . . .

  The words came so quickly and readily that, not being a writer of any kind, he was surprised by his sudden ability. They were so right and complete and he didn’t want to alter any of them. Though they were just the beginning.

  But no more words came. Or it seemed that there were a number of directions he might take, in each of which certain words might follow, but he didn’t know which one to choose, and didn’t want, by choosing, to exclude the others. He wanted to go in all directions, he wanted a totality. He wanted to set down every single thing he loved about his wife, every moment he’d loved sharing with her—which was almost every moment—including of course every moment of this day that had passed: the walk across the common, the rain, her red blouse, her black skirt, the small slithery sounds she made sitting in a solicitor’s office, which of course were the sounds any woman might make shifting position in a tight skirt, but the important thing was that she was making them. She was making them even as she made her will, or rather as they made their wills, which were really only wills to each other.

  But he realised that if he went into such detail the letter would need many pages. Perhaps it would be better simply to say, ‘I love everything about you. I love all of you. I love every moment spent with you.’ But these phrases, on the other hand, though true, seemed bland. They might be said of anyone by anyone.

  Then again, if he embarked on the route of detail, the letter could hardly all be written now. It would need to be a thing of stages—stages!—reflecting their continuing life together and incorporating all the new things he found to commemorate. That would mean that it would be all right if he wrote no more now, he could pick it up later. And he’d written the most important thing, the beginning. But then if he picked it up later, it might become an immense labour—if truly a labour of love—a labour of years. There’d be the question: When would he stop, when would he bring it to its conclusion and deliver it?

  A love letter was useless unless it was delivered.

  He’d hardly begun and already he saw these snags and complications, these reasons why this passionate undertaking might fail. And he couldn’t even think of the next thing to say. Then the words that he’d said to himself silently in his head, even as he held Lisa in his arms, rushed to him, as the very words he should write to her now and the best way of continuing:

  I never thought something so wonderful could happen to me. You are the love of my life. Remember this always. Whatever comes, remember this . . .

  Adding those words, in this way, made his chest tighten again and his eyes go prickly. And he wondered if that in itself was enough. It was entirely true to his feelings and to this moment. He should just put the date on it and sign it in some way and give it to Lisa the next morning. Yes, that was all he needed to do.

  But though emotion was almost choking him, it suddenly seemed out of place—so big, if brief, a statement looking back at him from a kitchen table, with the smell of toasted cheese all around him. Suppose the mood tomorrow morning was quite different, suppose he faltered. Then again, that ‘whatever comes’ seemed ominous, it seemed like tempting fate, it seemed when you followed it through even to be about catastrophe and death. It shouldn’t be there at all perhaps. And yet it seemed the essence of the thing. ‘Whatever comes, remember this.’ That was the essence.

  Then he reflected that the essence of love letters was that they were about separation. It was why they were needed in the first place. They were about yearning and longing and distance. But he wasn’t separated from Lisa—unless being the other side of a wall counted as separation. He could be with her whenever he liked, as close to her as possible, he’d made love to her twice today. Though as he’d written those additional words, ‘whatever comes’, he’d had the strange sensation of being a long way away from her, like a man in exile or on the eve of battle. It was what had brought the tears to his eyes.

  In any case there it was. It was written. And what was he supposed to do with it? Just keep it? Keep it, but slip it in with the copy of his will—the ‘executed’ copy—so that after his death Lisa would read it? Read what he’d written on the night after they’d made their wills. Is that what he intended?

  And how did he know he would die first? He’d simply had that thought so it would enable Lisa to read the letter. But how did he know she wouldn’t die first? And he didn’t want to think about either of them dying, he didn’t want to think of dying at all. And even supposing Lisa read these words—these very words on this bit of paper!—after his death, wouldn’t they in one undeniable and inescapable sense be too late? Though wouldn’t that moment, after his death, be in another sense precisely the right moment?

  Love letters are written out of separation.

  He didn’t know what to do. He’d written a love letter and it had only brought on this paralysis. But he couldn’t cancel what he’d written. He folded the sheet of A4 and, returning to the spare room, found an envelope, on which he wrote Lisa’s name, simply her name: Lisa. Without sealing the envelope, he put the letter in a safe and fairly secret place. There were no really secret places in the flat and he would have been glad to declare that he and Lisa had no secrets. Had the opportunity arisen, he might have done so to Mr Reeves. But now—it was almost like some misdeed—there was this secret.

  But he c
ouldn’t cancel it. Some things you can’t cancel, they stare back at you. There was nothing experimental or feeble or lacking about those words. His heart had spilled over in them.

  He went back to bed. He fitted himself against Lisa’s body. She’d turned now onto her other side, away from his side of the bed, but she was fast asleep. He kissed the nape of her neck. He wanted to cradle her and protect her. Thoughts came to him that he might add to the letter, if he added to it. But the letter was surely already complete.

  His penis stiffened, contentedly and undemandingly, against his wife. She knew nothing about it, or about his midnight session with pen and paper. He thought again about Mr Reeves and about last wills and testaments. Pen. Penis. It was funny to think about the word penis and the word testament in the same breath, as it were. Words were strange things. He thought about the word testicle.

  The rain was still gurgling outside and whether it stopped before he fell asleep or he fell asleep first he didn’t remember.

  The truth is he did nothing with the letter the next morning. He might have propped it conspicuously, after sealing the envelope, on the kitchen table, but he didn’t want to disturb the tender atmosphere that still lingered from yesterday, even though that same tenderness gave him his licence. Wouldn’t the letter only endorse it? He felt a little cowardly, though why? For what he’d put in writing?

  He looked adoringly, perhaps even rather pleadingly, at Lisa, as if she might have helped him in his dilemma. She looked slightly puzzled, but she also looked happy. She was hardly going to say, ‘Go on, give me the letter.’

  His line of thought to himself was still that the letter wasn’t finished. Yes, he’d add to it later. It would be premature, at this point, to hand it over. Though he also knew there was no better point. And the moment was passing.

  It was a Saturday morning. Outside, the rain had stopped, but a misty breath hung in the air, and over them hung still the curiously palpable, anointing fact that they were people who’d made their wills.

  The truth is he could neither keep nor deliver, nor destroy, nor even resume the letter. It was simply there. Though he did keep it, by default. His hesitation over delivering it, a thing at first of just minutes and hours, became a prolonged, perennial reality, a thing of years, like his excuse that he’d continue it.

  And one day, one bad day, he did, nearly, destroy it. It was a long time later, but the letter was still there, still as it was on that wet night in May, still in the envelope with the single word ‘Lisa’ on it, but now like a piece of history.

  And his will, now, would certainly need altering. But not yet. Not yet. He thought of destroying the letter. It had suddenly and almost accusingly come into his mind—that letter! But the thought of destroying a love letter seemed almost as melodramatic and sentimental as writing one.

  How did you destroy a love letter? The only way was to burn it. The smell of Welsh rarebit reinvaded his nostrils. You found some ceremonial-looking dish and set light to the letter and watched it burn. Though the real way to burn a love letter was to fling it into a blazing fire and for good measure thrust a poker through it. And to do this you should really be sitting at a hearthside, rain at the window, in a long finely quilted silk dressing gown . . .

  Then his chest filled and his eyes melted just as they’d done when he first penned the letter.

  The truth is they separated. Then they needed lawyers, in duplicate, to decide on the settlement and on how the two children would be provided for. And, in due course, to draw up new wills. He didn’t destroy the letter, and he didn’t send it on finally to its intended recipient, as some last-ditch attempt to resolve matters and bring back the past, or even as some desperate act of guilt-inducement, of warped revenge. This would have betrayed its original impulse, and how hopeless anyway either gesture would have been. She might have thought it was all a fabrication, that he hadn’t really written the letter on the 10th of May all those years ago—if so, why the hell hadn’t he delivered it?—that he’d concocted it only yesterday. It was another, rather glaring, example of his general instability.

  He didn’t destroy it, he kept it. But not in the way he’d waveringly and wonderingly kept it for so many years. He kept it now only for himself. Who else was going to look at it?

  Occasionally, he took it out and read it. He knew the words, of course, by heart, but it was important now and then, even on every 10th of May, to see them sitting on the paper. And when he looked at them it was like looking at his own face in the mirror, but not at a face that would obligingly and comfortingly replicate whatever he might do—wrinkle his nose, bare his teeth. It was a face that had found the separate power to smirk back at him when he wasn’t smirking himself, and to have an expression in its eyes, which his own eyes could never have mustered, that said, ‘You fool, you poor sad fool.’

  THE BEST DAYS

  SEAN AND ANDY found themselves standing to one side of the steps up to the church, on the edge of the broad sweep of driveway. Now it seemed all right to do so, Sean took a pack of cigarettes from his jacket, took one out, then offered the pack in his usual abrupt way to Andy. They’d been together at Holmgate School just six years ago, then together at Wainwright’s till it closed.

  The hearse and a couple of following limousines had driven off, leaving the lingering, spreading spillage of a surprisingly large congregation—a ‘good turnout’, as their former headmaster, Clive Davenport, had been apt to say about various other occasions. He was now in the hearse on his way to be cremated.

  ‘She looks a right little whore,’ Andy said.

  Sean said nothing. Then he said, breathing out smoke, ‘How many whores have you seen lately?’

  They were referring to Karen Shield, who’d been at Holmgate with them, in the same year. Neither had seen her for some time, but she was recognisable and certainly noticeable.

  It was a grey mild blustery afternoon in April and it had rained recently. There’d been a general standing solemnly and silently as the hearse departed, then one or two people had waved. Someone had called out, ‘Bye, Daffy!’ and the atmosphere had broken. The new atmosphere was almost like gaiety. Everyone was freshly aware of being alive in the world and not dead in it and that they’d been involved in something dutiful but oddly animating. There were now many more waves, of recognition, much milling, hand-shaking, smiling and embracing and a good deal of sudden laughter. No one seemed to want to leave immediately.

  As if to share the mood, the sun broke through a gap in the clouds and made the surface of the driveway gleam. To one side of the church, the big cedar, stirred by the breeze and with a sudden sparkle, shrugged off its burden of drops.

  The news about Clive Davenport—felled by a heart attack only three years after retiring—had circulated quickly, along with tributes to the fact that he’d been head of Holmgate almost since it had opened. This accounted for the impressive gathering, which in turn had reassured many members of it who’d been uncertain about coming in the first place. Several generations of former staff and pupils were involved. Some present had few fond memories of Holmgate and had even once wished old Daffy dead, but the passage of time and the needs of the occasion had instilled an infectious makeshift nostalgia. Perhaps Daffy hadn’t been such a bad headmaster. Perhaps life itself at Holmgate hadn’t been so bad. Life after Holmgate hadn’t always been so great.

  Many had turned up simply to see who else would be there and how they were looking now. It was a way of satisfying that curiosity without having to sign up to any grim ‘reunion’. But undoubtedly another motive for attending was having nothing better to do on a Thursday afternoon. It was unemployment.

  St Luke’s, a big stone barn of a place, stood on a hillside, within a railed enclosure large enough to feel like a small public park. Below, a good portion of the town was visible, its rooftops wetly glinting. You could even make out, appropriately enough, the playing fields at Holmgate.

  ‘Has she seen us?’ Andy said. ‘Has she recognised us?
’

  ‘Doesn’t look like it,’ Sean said. ‘Not yet.’

  Though in fact, inside the church, when he’d craned his head round, Sean had received a definite look of recognition, though it hadn’t come from the woman (woman was now the word) Andy was speaking of. For a fraction of a second he’d wondered who it had come from.

  ‘Well, shall we say hello?’ Andy said, taking a drag. He had the stance he’d many times adopted, pint glass in hand, in bars on Friday nights. When Andy said ‘right little whore’ he didn’t necessarily mean it as a term of abuse or of rejection.

  ‘If you want,’ Sean said, but made no move.

  Andy had the bravado, Sean had the actual command, it was how it had always been. But—despite the description just given her—their record with Karen Shield at Holmgate was much the same. Neither had got very far.

  Andy said, ‘Christ, is that her mother? Talking of whores.’

  Sean said softly, ‘Andy!’ It was almost, strangely, a rebuke, as if he might have added, ‘You’re in church.’ Except they weren’t any more. And he could see Andy’s point.

  They were both dressed in cheap suits—their ‘interview suits’. Many around them were similarly dressed, but there were also definite outbreaks, especially among the women, of something showy, even provocative. It was as if many of the former pupils of Mr Davenport, in wishing to pay their respects, wanted also to demonstrate that they weren’t at school any more, they hadn’t turned into obedient little adults. Or else they wanted to prove to their peers, not seen for years, that they were still alive and kicking, they hadn’t turned drab and sad.

  Misery and grief had anyway driven off in the two family cars behind the hearse.