England and Other Stories

by Graham Swift

  HALF A LOAF

  HALF A LOAF. Not even that.

  She has gone again. She’s stayed the night and she’s gone again. But part of ‘my time’, as I think of it—I don’t ever dare think of it as ‘our time’—is the time it takes for her to walk from the front step to the street corner, no more than a minute, the time in which I watch her, getting smaller, from the angle of the bay window. She never looks back. Perhaps she guesses that I watch her. I’ve never told her. To tell her would be to give her ammunition—for my eventual destruction. It’s coming one day. Of course it is.

  Don’t give her ammunition. But then if you make out you’re calm, you’re equable, you will only give her the excuse she needs.

  Her name is Tanya. Even to watch her walking away is something. And it’s a kind of training—but I don’t dwell on that. You’ve drunk the glass, I tell myself, till it’s filled next time, but there’s still this last drop. Don’t waste it.

  I stand at the window. It’s a quiet street. She crosses it at a long, oblique, efficient angle, between the parked cars, then at the main road she disappears, but I stand perhaps for a minute more, as if I can see through walls. Just to imagine her walking along a pavement, descending into the Tube is something. Just to imagine her being in the world is something, and may be all I’ll have one day, any day now.

  She disappears, but I don’t move. In my head already is a picture of a woman in a red coat, sitting in a Tube train. She’s the woman you notice as soon as you get in, and you can’t keep your eyes off her. This is true for all the men in the carriage, but I don’t think of the other men. She sits as if she’s entirely unaware of this swamp of attention, as if she’d be surprised, embarrassed if you put even the possibility to her. She sits as if she’s also completely, nonchalantly aware of it, as if it goes with being alive. I want to reach out and touch her, but not as a young man would. I want to put my hand on the crown of her head and say, ‘Stay as you are, always. May no harm ever come to you.’ How absurd, when she has the power to destroy me.

  Half a loaf? But isn’t this life, the whole of it? Shouldn’t I be thanking, praising heaven?

  My mother used to say, ‘All good things come to an end.’ Perhaps all mothers say it. As if the worst harm she foresaw for me was the tragedy of good stuff not being constantly on tap. Lucky little brat. But she must have seen the look of abject misery on my face whenever some seaside holiday or just some happy sunny day approached its end.

  There it is, there it isn’t. Now you see it, now you don’t. But now I know it’s not as simple as that. Thank heaven.

  My father was a churchman, a man of God. In the war he was an RAF padre. It wasn’t a get-out card, he flew on missions too. But when others broke down, he couldn’t. He had to be their comfort. He never talked about it much, but once he said, ‘Believe me, Eric, a lot of praying went on, and it had nothing to do with me.’

  When I grew up, because of my father, I used to think a lot of good things were bad things—or rather I secretly thought a lot of bad things were good. At any rate I thought: One day God will punish me, he’ll surely punish me. And he’ll surely punish me for not believing in him.

  But he never did punish me. And meanwhile my mother dispensed her regular balm: ‘All good things come to an end.’ I sometimes wondered if she too really believed in God.

  But look at me now, looking at someone who’s no longer there, and rehearsing a silent prayer: Please, God, let there be another time, another week. And what would my dead father think if—as God is supposed to do—he could see my every action and could see me, as I may do very soon, go up to the bedroom to touch the still-wrinkled, faintly warm sheets. To pick up a pillow and press it to my face.

  I’m an osteopath. It’s my business to lay hands on people, to manipulate them, both men and women. But never, ever. Until now. There are walks of life—university lecturers, osteopaths—that must arouse the particular fears of wives, but my wife, Anthea, never had reason, nor, having Anthea, did I. I’m not unaware—this is only alertness, not vanity—that there are certain female patients, perhaps male ones too, who come to me not exactly for their back problems. But I’m saved by the clock, by the session. Time’s up—till the next time. And of course it’s in my power to say (all good things) there won’t be any next time.

  But my wife died. Nearly three years ago. It was neurological. My field can border on the neurological, but I’m not a neurologist and there was nothing I could do for her. Nor, as it turned out, anything that neurologists could do for her either.

  I wanted to die. I won’t pretend. I wanted to die even before she died—to be spared the fact of her death. I prayed. And after her death I wanted to die, and prayed that I might, even more.

  My life was over, I went through the motions. One, two years. To steady myself, I thought of my parents, I thought of them getting through the war. All bad things. No one ever says that. My father died fifteen years ago, and my mother barely six months afterwards. There were medical reasons, but I think she died simply of my father’s death. And I wanted something similar for myself. I waited for it, willed it to happen, but I’m of sound health.

  I came close to making it happen, but I’m also a coward.

  Then there was Tanya. Or put it another way: I had a mental breakdown. Certainly a professional breakdown.

  Lower-back pain. There’s so much of it about. I bless her lower-back pain. I bless her lower back. I bless the fact that in one so young it was something readily curable, and I could cure it. I could be her magician. Her magician!

  ‘There,’ I said, ‘that seems to have done it.’

  And then suddenly there were tears running down my face because of the sheer delight on her face at having been so simply, quickly cured—there’d even been a little click—and at having been spared, or so I’d vouched, only more pain and interminable waiting on the NHS.

  And because she was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen and in a moment, if I wasn’t careful, I might say so. And because I was having a mental breakdown . . .

  And because if Anthea was watching me, as God is supposed to watch, I thought she might not wish to punish me, or even reproach me. She might even be thinking: About time, Eric, about time something like this happened. I’m even glad for you that it’s happening. Go on, Eric, seize what you can.

  The truth is I didn’t even think this. I’m sure that I heard Anthea actually saying in my ear, ‘Now I won’t have to worry, Eric, and grieve for you so much. But for God’s sake stop blubbering, stop making a complete spectacle of yourself. It’s life, it’s happening. And you’re not a complete spectacle, you’re still a good-looking man. I’m frankly surprised, Eric—but I’m glad too—that nothing like this ever happened when I was alive. But you’re a free man now. I’m dead, you’re not. Go on, don’t be a bloody coward.’

  All this as if she were at my shoulder, while in fact cowardly tears were rolling down my face and a partially unclad woman of extraordinary health and beauty and less than half my age was still perched on my couch, and I was saying, ‘I’m sorry, I’m terribly sorry. I was thinking of my wife—my late wife. I’m most terribly sorry. But your problem is cured. You really don’t have to see me again, but—but would you, could you do me the honour’ (and where did I get that phrase from?) ‘of having dinner with me tonight?’

  I didn’t delude myself that she really thought—in spite of that click—that I was Mr Magic. With a face full of tears? Perhaps for some women charm, if I have any, is well mixed with a little vulnerability. But this was hardly vulnerability, or a little of it.

  Was it naked bribery? A performance I’d somehow mustered? I don’t care. Was I about to say (some men must do this sort of thing all the time), ‘If you’ll have dinner with me I’ll forget the fee’? Or was I, before she could answer, about to cut my own legs from under me by saying, ‘I’m most frightfully sorry, but please forget all this, forget it ever happened’?

  The fact is she said w
ith a simple, quick, uncomplicated smile, ‘I’d be happy to.’ The fact is she took the box of Kleenex that I keep ready for the occasional upset patient (I’m not unfamiliar with the psychosomatic) and held a bunch of them out to me. ‘Here,’ she said.

  The fact is we had dinner that evening at Zeppo’s, the very place where I used to go with Anthea and where I still had the thought: Anthea is willing me on, this is all under her aegis. And it was Anthea who’d surely warned me in the hours beforehand: Don’t go for somewhere you think is her kind of place, a young place, don’t be an idiot. Stick to what you know.

  And the plain fact is that she—that is, Tanya—left my bedroom (my bedroom!) early the following morning, to return home, then to go to work. It was not yet seven. Breakfast wasn’t wanted. And I thought: Of course—she’s leaving, she’s going, that’s that. But as she made her exit, urging me not to get up, I asked the ridiculous and doomed question, ‘Will I see you again?’ And she said, with that same uncloudy voice, ‘Why not?’

  I never thought to see it. A pale young body slipping through the dimness of my bedroom, like some creature glimpsed in a forest.

  And of course I got up. Of course I went down, in my dressing gown, and stood, as I’m standing now, at the window. If only to tell myself that this was my home and this had really happened.

  Half a loaf? So it has continued now for nearly two months. I’m not blind. I’m not, actually, foolish. It can’t last. Two months is already beyond any due allowance—whatever that might be. Is it pity? Charity? Amusement? Curiosity? I don’t mind. I don’t ask. So long as she comes. She has the power to destroy me at any moment, and maybe that in itself is the reason why she comes: the thrill of having another human soul dangling from her fingertips—a thrill that in one so young (she’s twenty-six) isn’t hampered by conscience, but a thrill that can only be consummated once, then it’s gone. One day she will open her fingers. There! Like the click of a bone in her back.

  I don’t dare believe that she comes because of something I give her. What could that possibly be? Something that she takes from me and can’t find elsewhere, and is worth at least one stray, but now almost routine, night out of seven? I know she has a boyfriend—a regular boyfriend. His name is Nathan. I don’t ask, I don’t picture. But she talks about him freely and unprompted, which makes me think she must talk in the same way to him about me. There have been no repercussions, no phone calls, no dramas. I don’t know how it works with Nathan, this piece of her life with me, a man over twice her age. Maybe he thinks: If that’s the deal . . . don’t rock the boat. I’d think the same perhaps, if I were him. Maybe he thinks: Half a loaf. Or, in his case, just the one slice that’s missing.

  Tanya.

  Only she knows. Or perhaps she doesn’t. She looks at me sometimes with a clear, clean gaze as if she wouldn’t know how to question, to examine anything. She looks at objects in my house, pictures on the wall, as if she wouldn’t know how such things, such collections are assembled. I long ago began to accept, though I was young once, that the young are a mystery, a different species. But people are a mystery, period. You can understand, even correct their bone structure—everyone comes with a skeleton—but where does that begin to get you?

  It can’t be because she’s still grateful for her back. Her back! It will be the last thing, standing like this one day, I’ll see of her.

  I don’t talk to her about Anthea. I don’t tell her the stories behind those objects she so vacantly inspects. I’m like my father not talking about the war. You don’t want to know. She doesn’t ask.

  And so I don’t tell her this very strangest thing, that’s been true now for nearly two months (and how would it help me to tell it?): that when she’s present, so too is my wife. That it’s only been since all this began that I’ve felt my wife come back to me, after three years, as if (it sometimes really seems like this) she’d never gone.

  It’s all right, Eric, it’s all right that this is happening. I feel her at my shoulder right now, by the window. I hear her even saying, ‘I hope she comes back.’

  Half a loaf? But surely it’s the whole thing, it’s everything. And I wouldn’t mind if it were only a crust. I’d be as joyous, as terrified, as grateful. Some men in my bereft situation might eventually resort to prostitutes, doing so perhaps with much agony and shame, and wanting less to perform or have performed upon them certain acts than to have the simple proximity of warm female flesh. They come perhaps to some sad weekly addictive arrangement.

  It’s not like that with me, though I can see it has a semblance. I don’t pay her, I don’t offer her anything, except dinner. Nonetheless, if it were needed—a crust!—I’d empty my wallet every time.

  From where I stand right now I can see the brass plate on the white stucco by the front porch (Anthea used to say it made us look like an embassy) that tells me who I am and what I do. I sometimes make bad things come to an end. It’s sometimes been my professional pleasure and privilege to watch people leave me, who I’ll never see again, who suddenly feel alive again ‘in their very bones’.

  She sits in a Tube train, no longer having to sit with care because of the pain in her back. But that’s a thing of the past now, she can’t even remember perhaps what it was like. Twenty-six is less than half my age, but not so young that she can afford to follow any strange, diverting path indefinitely. Not so young that, wanting to end it, she might lack the courage or heartlessness to do so.

  I know it will end, of course it will end. The day will come. And when it comes I know one other terrible thing for certain. This sense that Anthea is with me and is glad for me, even egging me on, this sense that I’m wrapped in her generosity and that she no longer has to mourn for me, locked out here in the cold zone of life—that too will be gone. I won’t feel her presence, won’t hear her voice in my ear. I’ll be just another lost, dutiful man going once a week to mutter words to a stone and getting no words back.

  SAVING GRACE

  DR SHAH HAD never ceased to tell the story. ‘I’m as British as you are,’ he might begin. ‘I was born in Battersea.’ Or, more challengingly: ‘My mother is as white as you. You don’t believe me?’

  In his early days in medicine, even though by then the National Health had become awash (it was his own word) with black and brown faces, it was not uncommon for patients to cut up rough at being treated by an Asian, or an Asian-looking, doctor. Such a thing could still happen, but now his seniority, his reputation as a top consultant and his winning smile usually banished any trouble. But the story was still there, the chapter and verse of it, or just his satisfaction at relating it once again.

  He tended to tell it these days, since it really required time and leisure, during follow-up sessions when the patient might be well on the mend, and in the half-hour slot there’d be little else to discuss. He’d even come to regard it as simply his way of bidding patients farewell. A final prescription. Though it had nothing to do in any clinical sense with cardiology.

  ‘No, I’ve never been to India. Perhaps I never shall. But my father was born in India . . .’

  It had lost none of its force, especially now his father was dead and he and his mother were sharing their mourning. Less than a year ago he’d embraced his father, so far as that was possible given his pitiful condition, for the last time. He’d held him close and had the fleeting bizarre thought that he was also holding India. He’d said to his mother, ‘They’re making him comfortable, making him ready, he won’t feel any pain.’

  His father wasn’t his patient, but of course Dr Shah knew about such things. For a moment he’d quite forgotten that his mother (it was very much part of the story) had once long ago been a nurse.

  As a medical man he should have been protected against grief, but he wasn’t surprised by how much now it overtook him, by how much he still felt, even after several months, the non-medical mystery of his father’s absence.

  ‘My father was born in India,’ he’d say, ‘in Poona, in 1925. All this will se
em like ancient history, I’m sure. In those days of course the British ruled. We ruled.’ Dr Shah would smile his smile. ‘He was born into one of those families who revered the British. He had an education that was better than that of many boys born at the same time in Birmingham or Bradford. Or Battersea. And spoke better English too.’

  The smile would only widen.

  ‘Yes, I know, there were many Indians who didn’t revere the British. Quite the opposite. But when the war broke out in 1939 there was no question that my father, when he came of age, would sign up with the Indian Army to fight for the British in their war. There were many Indians who felt differently. There were many Indians who wanted to fight against the British. But of course I had no say in these things, I wasn’t even around. My father’s name was Ranjit. As you know, that’s my name too.

  ‘So one day he found himself on a troopship bound for Italy, which was where most of the Indian soldiers who came to Europe went. The fact is I might have been Italian, I might be telling you this in Naples or Rome. Think of that.

  ‘But because of some mishap of war—they had to switch ships—my father’s unit ended up in England, in the spring of 1944, and it was decided that instead of shipping them all the way back to Italy they should be trained up for the invasion of France.’

  Dr Shah would seem to wait a moment, as if to let his story catch up with him.

  ‘England. A camp in Dorset to be precise, not far from Sturminster Newton. The truth is my father couldn’t believe his luck. He’d grown up worshipping everything English. He spoke English, good English, not Italian. And there he was in the English countryside, in spring—thatched cottages, primroses, bluebells, everything he’d only read about in books. He even got himself a bicycle and whizzed round the lanes.’

  Dr Shah would give a sympathetic shrug.