England and Other Stories

by Graham Swift

All over for nearly twenty years, but it hadn’t been so long since they’d told her, or rather since her mum had told her, as if it was something to be whispered between women about the man in the next room. But it must have been agreed between them. You tell her, Gracie.

  ‘Your daddy was gassed at Wipers.’

  And what was that supposed to mean? She said the word gassed as if it was a bad word that shouldn’t be repeated. She said it in the way she’d hear people later say the word cancer. And she said Wipers as if it was a real name you might find on a map.

  And how, at nine or ten or whenever it was, should she, Daisy Leigh, have known otherwise? All she knew was that her daddy had a ‘chest’, a ‘funny chest’, it went with him just as surely as he wore trousers. And he was still, so far as she was concerned, her same daddy with his same funny chest.

  But the fact that she’d been told this thing like a secret not to be passed on had something to do, though she couldn’t have said what, with her becoming the sort of girl who didn’t mind too much if her skirt blew up and who got to be called flighty, not Daisy. It was a bit like the word Wipers.

  Then along came another war anyway to take your mind off the old one, to wipe it away. Just come home, Larry. Just come home to your Flighty. She might be in or out of her nightie.

  And now Larry was sleeping—or not sleeping—in the next room, but it was just like one of those black nights when he might never have come home. What did it mean? Tomorrow there was going to be a police investigation. He was going, voluntarily, to the police station, to ‘clear all this up’. He was going voluntarily. No one was being arrested. So there was still this night, it could wait till the morning. And what was he going to do anyway, run off somewhere? At seventy-two?

  He was going to the police station, voluntarily, to help with inquiries. He was cooperating. But then? All hell let loose, she was sure of that. All hell, either way, whatever the outcome, whatever the decision. Never mind the voluntarily. All hell, she was sure, if this wasn’t hell already.

  Which was what they’d all said when they didn’t want to say—or couldn’t think of how to say—anything. All hell. You don’t want to know.

  But there was still this night, this black interval, and she wished it could be truly lastingly black. She wished when she opened her eyes—what was the point of shutting them if it didn’t make things go away?—there’d not be that glow, from the streetlights, round the edge of the curtains. My God, she wished she had blackout curtains. She saw them again as if it were yesterday, the dusty black brutal things they’d had to get used to, instead of the swirls of flowers or the Regency stripes. The curtains in her old bedroom in Camberwell had daisies. Of course.

  What did it mean? Voluntarily. ‘Clear all this up.’

  And what did this mean, right now, him being in the other room? That he didn’t want to be near her, touching her, let alone talking to her? Or that he thought that she wouldn’t want him there, not now, next to her? That she wouldn’t want to be touching him or, my God, for him to be touching her?

  She told herself it was his confession, his way of saying it. She told herself it was just the disgrace, the sheer disgrace at the very idea of it, the very suggestion. Imagine. Either way, he was contaminated, not to be touched. Either way it was all hell.

  And how could you ever tell anyway when things themselves went right back into blackness? It was what Addy herself had said, it was her trump card.

  ‘We’re talking here, Mum, about earliest memories. No, not even that. We’re talking about when you shouldn’t have any memories at all. But you have them, don’t you, if they’re strong enough, if they’re bad enough? You just suppress them, don’t you, submerge them? You pretend to forget.’

  Suppress? Submerge? It had gone through her head to say, ‘You’re not in one of your classes now, my girl, you’re not in front of a blackboard.’ And she’d seen for a moment (something she’d never ever actually seen) her daughter facing rows of young faces. Why had Addy chosen to be a teacher? The thought of her becoming one had once vaguely scared her. She’d seen herself back at school, a target for her own teachers.

  Pretend to forget?

  What could you say about that time where memory vanishes into darkness? You could say nothing. Or you could say anything, you could say what the hell you liked, it was anyone’s guess, and no one could prove you wrong.

  My girl. Addy—little Addy—was forty-eight.

  ‘You tell me what your earliest memories are, Mum. Go on, try it on me.’

  She actually said that, to her own mother, as if she was accusing her, or as if she was saying, ‘Come on, join me.’

  And now here she was doing it, at three in the morning, trying to go back in her memory as far as possible, to where memory slips down a black hole. And she couldn’t tell if it was because she was searching for something—and why the hell should she be?—or because she just wanted to slip, herself, down that black hole and never come out again . . .

  She could remember being held against her father’s chest, when she was small enough for most of her to fit against it. She had a blue cotton dress, it was her first dress. She could remember him hugging her to his chest and her hugging him back. What was wrong with that? She could remember having her ear against her father’s chest and hearing the strange sounds it made, like rocks or pebbles shifting inside a cave—a cave by the sea with waves washing into it. She could remember it being as though he was letting her listen to the sounds, just her specially. What was wrong with that?

  She could remember being in the paddling pool in the children’s playground in Ruskin Park, though she couldn’t say how old she’d have been, and a man had popped out from behind a big tree with his trousers undone and all his stuff showing. He’d done it very quickly and cleverly, just as she’d looked up and when no one else was looking, because she’d turned round and everyone was looking the other way. And when she’d looked back the man had gone as if he’d never been there. But she could remember his stuff showing, his red bobbing thing. She couldn’t have invented that. She could remember thinking what was wrong with him, what sort of—disfigurement—was that? Though she didn’t know then the word disfigurement.

  Anyway she’d got over it and never said a word. And it wasn’t her daddy.

  Her face was wet. Addy was making her do this. The bitch.

  And if it had been all right to hug her father still, her father who’d been gassed, and for him to hug her since he was still her same daddy, then it was all right to hug Larry now, no matter what, to hold him and hug him against her own sad chest, against her own flat breasts, and say, ‘It’s all right, Larry, I’m here. You’re still the same Larry.’

  Except he wouldn’t let her. He’d gone to the spare room. What did it mean? It could mean that he thought that she must think that he’d really—

  The bitch, the evil bitch. She was making them lie like this in separate rooms, both in their own separate blackness.

  And he was lying, for God’s sake, in Addy’s old room. It wasn’t, at least, in her old single bed. That had gone ages ago, it had been the spare room for ages with a new double bed from Debenham’s. But it was the bed where Addy and Brian had slept enough times when they’d visited, and they’d visited enough times in nearly twenty years. Brian had said once it had ‘tickled’ him to sleep in Addy’s old room. He’d said that. And then they’d brought their kids, Mark and Judy, first one then the other, in their carry-cots, to sleep with them in that same room.

  And if all this, now, was true, then how could they have done that, come here, kept visiting, with their kids too? Though it had been a while, it was true, since any of them had visited, and the kids weren’t kids any more. She should have said, perhaps, like some interfering mother, ‘Is everything okay?’

  Which was just the point Addy was making. Years went by and people never talked, did they? She, Adele Hughes, born Baker, hadn’t talked for over forty years, but she was talking now. She’d kept it to her
self, she’d ‘struggled’, but now she had to ‘speak out’. And she was talking face to face, notice, she wasn’t flinching. She was looking at her own mother, hard in the eye, as if her own mother might have known all along what all this was about and covered it up. And she wouldn’t be the only one to speak out, would she, not by a long way? The world knew that by now. It was others speaking out that had given her the courage.

  Courage?

  She said she’d been ‘traumatised’. All her life she’d struggled. But it had to stop now. She had to have her ‘release’. At forty-eight? And had she talked to Brian first about it all? ‘Tickled’. Had she had him sleeping in another bed?

  Or was he doing that anyway?

  She said that when she was very small, almost too far back for memory—there she went again—Larry, her own father, had done things to her, had interfered with her. He’d molested her. He’d traumatised her.

  ‘He what? He did what? Where? When? What?’

  She’d exploded into questions—which seemed to be all she had now. She was lying in this bed, under a rubble of questions.

  ‘You better have some facts, my girl! You better know what the hell you’re talking about!’

  It had surprised her, the fierceness and quickness of her answer. She hadn’t been lost for words exactly, or for a way to say them. She’d spoken in a certain voice and with a certain look. She knew she had a certain look, because Addy had actually stepped back. She’d flinched—for all her being unflinching. And whatever else that look was saying, it was saying, ‘I’m not your mother any more, my girl. I’ve just become your deadly enemy.’

  And whatever Addy had thought that talking to her mum would achieve—she’d wanted comforting? To be told she had guts?—she knew now she’d been seriously mistaken. And anyway she’d crossed a line for ever and there was no going back. But she must have thought of that—she should have thought of that—long before she opened her mouth.

  Then her own mouth had opened again and she’d said to her own daughter, her own child of forty-eight years, ‘You lying evil bitch.’

  He was stationed in Yorkshire. Flight Sergeant Baker, wireless-op Baker. As it turned out they were from barely a mile apart, he was from Streatham, but he was stationed in Yorkshire. It might as well have been another country. He said on the phone, ‘I’m safer here than where you are, I have it cushy here.’ But she knew it was a lie, or a daytime truth and a night-time lie, since any night he could be killed. That was the truth, that was the deal now. It wasn’t hanky-panky any more in the back of the stalls, though there was some of that, it began with that, but it went beyond.

  Night-time, bedtime. How everything was turned round. How could she sleep when he might be over Hamburg or Berlin? But she never knew where, or even if, he’d be flying that night—so she might be scaring herself stiff for nothing. She’d actually preferred it when she had to be in the shelter. At least she could think: Well he’s dropping bombs on them. She didn’t care about Germans at all. That was their hell.

  But the nights when she just lay in bed were terrible. They were like this night now. She didn’t even know where in Yorkshire, just Yorkshire. ‘Believe me, Flighty, you wouldn’t know where, even if I told you.’ But because she didn’t know anything, which nights or where, Yorkshire itself became like the place, the word for all things terrible. Yorkshire terriers. Like the word for terror itself.

  That’s where he was now. Or she was.

  And that’s where you came from, my girl.

  He never talked either. He shut up and got on with it too. The fact is he came back, he always came back, but she never knew, nor did he, that that was how it would be, till it was all over. He came back and he never talked. ‘I’d rather talk about this, Flighty.’ His hand you know where. In the Air Force they called it Lack of Moral Fibre if you didn’t shut up and get on with it. Larry never had Lack of Moral Fibre.

  He had nightmares, of course, for a long time afterwards—so yes he talked, even screamed a bit, in his sleep. But that was something she could deal with simply, easily, gladly. ‘You were dreaming, Larry, only dreaming. Look, you’re here beside me, you’re alive, these are my breasts. Put your head in my breasts.’

  If only she could say that now. ‘You’re here, Larry, you’re not in Yorkshire.’

  And then, in 1947, Adele was born. Little sweet Adele. And wasn’t that the universal cure? Everyone was doing it. Little babies galore. And didn’t that help to wipe things away?

  And if Addy had been waiting all this time to talk—if there were any reason to—then she might have waited till the two of them were dead. If she’d waited anyway till she was forty-eight. Or she might have waited till they’d lost their marbles, gone doolally, so they wouldn’t know a thing anyway. Same difference.

  But to say it now when they were seventy-two and seventy-one, though still going strong, in their ‘sunset years’ and trying to make the most of them. Having passed their Golden and hoping to make it to their Diamond (what was flighty about that?). Not to mention to the year 2000, to a new millennium. Think of that, Larry, we’ve lived through a millennium.

  But Addy had actually given that as her reason. If she’d waited till they were dead, till he was dead, then there wouldn’t have been any justice, would there?

  Justice?

  She actually said it was the thought of them reaching the end of their lives that had ‘forced her’ to it, the thought of them being dead and the thing just disappearing into the past, then her having no ‘redress’ and just having to carry on living with it till she was dead herself.

  She actually said that. All her life she’d protected them, but enough was enough.

  Protected them?

  Well, she’d made the sun set now sure enough. There was only this night, which she wished would go on for ever.

  No matter how tightly she closed her eyes, she couldn’t make it black enough. To want night, to want blackness! Yet to be made to feel at the same time that you had to shine some nasty poking torch into it, like a policeman at a murky window. And there could be no stopping it, could there, no end to it, once you got into that area where memory itself stopped and no one could say what was true or false? Beneath everything a great web of—disfigurement. It must be there because no one talked about it.

  How she’d dreaded it, once, sunset—the thought of the sun setting over Yorkshire. Now she wanted only darkness. She couldn’t say what Larry wanted.

  She saw herself on a bicycle, arms outspread. She saw again her little room in Camberwell, bands of light from the street. Her daisy curtains. Her father’s cough across the landing.

  Though she’d never felt it before and never imagined she might feel it, she felt it now like some black swelling creature inside her. The wish not to have been born. Or was it the wish not to have given birth? She felt it, decades on, but as if it were happening all over again, the exact, insistent, living feeling of carrying Adele inside her. Though was this Adele? At four months, at six months, at eight, at—

  Then she woke up and felt sure she’d been screaming, screaming out loud. She felt sure she’d screamed—so loud that Larry, in the next room, must have heard, even if he’d been sleeping. Yes, he was in the next room, but it was only the next room, so he must have heard, a scream like that. And she wanted this to end it, she wanted it to be the thing that would make him snap out of it and leap up and come back to her and hold her and soothe her and crush her against his chest and say, ‘It’s all right, Flighty, you were only dreaming.’

  HOLLY AND POLLY

  HOLLY LIKES TO say—and Holly likes to say everything—that we’re in the introduction business. We can’t make anything happen, but we can bring the parties together. She’ll say this to men in bars when they home in on us. It’s a wonderful thing to watch a pair of them edge our way and to see the light in their eyes before they get the full picture.

  ‘So, don’t tell us,’ one of them says, ‘the two of you work in a dating agency?’


  ‘No, but you’re close,’ Holly says. ‘Sure, getting the date right can be an important part of it.’

  ‘You wouldn’t be Irish by any chance?’

  ‘By every chance. But that’s not what you’re guessing.’

  Isn’t it a wonderful thing—isn’t it the most wonderful thing—how things come together in this world, how they can even be meant for each other? But you can’t tell, you can’t guess it in advance.

  ‘So—you’ve got one more guess. Yes, we work together. It’s not an office. And it’s not a dating agency. You two wouldn’t be after a date now, would you? Without the agency?’

  ‘We’re thinking,’ the other one says. ‘Don’t talk, we’re thinking.’

  Then the first one says, ‘No, you’ll have to tell us. We give up, you’ll have to say. I’m Matt, this is Jamie.’

  ‘I’m Holly and this is Polly. Yes, we know. But look now, we’re doing what Polly and me do all day, we’re making introductions. We’re clinical embryologists. Have you heard of those people? We spend all day looking at sperms. We’re experts on the little fellers. We pick out the good ones, the best from the rest, and then we introduce them to eggs. We say to them, “There now, say hello, youse two, and on you get with it.”’

  And then the lights go off, or they go brighter. A turn-off or a turn-on. They might want to get mucky. And Holly can do mucky.

  And they haven’t even seen the full picture.

  You can’t make it happen. You can bring the parties together. But tell me, please, how does that happen? How does it happen that there was Holly Nolan, raised in a convent (though you might not think it) somewhere in Ireland and there was me, Polly Miller, meek and mild, but raised in a comprehensive in Bolton, both of us fired by the same thing (‘Sure, isn’t it the only subject now, the science of life?’), both of us getting, in different places, our B.Sc.’s and our certificates, so that she should cross the sea (it not being a field that Ireland’s big in) and we should meet in a brand-new clinic, in a clean white room with clean white counters and white expensive instruments, like two specimens ourselves in some sort of clinical trial, both of us in the pea-green scrubs we were provided with.