England and Other Stories

by Graham Swift

  So that we would be introduced to each other.

  ‘I’m Holly.’

  ‘I’m Polly.’

  ‘Would you believe it? Hello, Polly. We’re to work together.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In these things! Have I come all the way from County Kildare just to wear green?’

  Both of us only twenty-three (junior clinical embryologists), but both of us qualified and trained for a job that some people say is the job of playing God.

  ‘Well I like that now! Are we not a pair of goddesses?’

  So that we would come together, so that it would happen. So that my life would at last begin.

  When I’m out with Holly in a bar, teasing men, I sometimes see the touch of red in her black hair—what she calls her ‘burn’. I see her tarty brashness, what they think is her being up for it. I hear her unstoppable voice. I think: Not my type, not my type at all.

  How wrong can you be?

  ‘Well now, Polly dear, there’s such a thing as the attraction of opposites.’

  When she first arrived here she used to say things about her Catholic upbringing that could make me blush. Or blush inside. That could make me think: Hold on, that’s wrong, that’s blasphemous. She said that she and her convent-school friends used to sing a plainsong rendering of the sexual act, in Latin. And she sang it for me—intoned it for me—in her purest priestly voice:

  Penem in vaginam intro-duxit.

  To which the response was, as from a choir of monks:

  Et semen e-mi-sit.

  With a long sustaining of the ‘mi’.

  It was hardly filth, and it was Latin. And it had me in stitches. The stitches maybe hid the blushes. But it was the very idea of it, I suppose, the idea of singing such a thing as if it were a prayer. It was the feeling of a wickedness unavailable to such as me. Me with my godless (but chaste) upbringing. My only shred of religion was that I’d worshipped once my biology teacher, Sandra Rhys.

  Which is only to say I felt jealous. Why should that be? Jealous of Holly and of her convent schooling and of her chorus of profaning schoolfriends.

  ‘I haven’t shocked you now, have I, Polly? In our line of business.’

  And how many jobs are there—tell me one other—in which just along a corridor men go into little rooms and, well, as Holly would say, they engage in private devotion and offer themselves up into little jars, and the jars are passed discreetly our way for us to examine closely.

  For a while we couldn’t mark the arrival of such a tribute without actually singing, softly, in unison, or wanting to sing:

  Et semen e-mi-sit . . .

  I was even jealous of her familiarity with Latin. If you’re a biologist you need to know a little, but for her it had really once been a sort of second secret language.

  ‘Introduxit’—from introducere, to lead into or towards. The introduction business.

  And it’s a serious one. We’re not God. We’re not playing either. Though sometimes you have to laugh. We’re the girls in the lab, the girls in the back room. It’s Dr Mortimer and his nurses who do the meeting and greeting and perform the intimate procedures, but we sometimes get to see the clients, to say hello to—Mr and Mrs Desperate. And Dr Mortimer, as he makes the introductions, will inevitably call us his behind-the-scenes angels, the ones who perform the real miracles. The smoothie. Or the buck passer, as Holly would say.

  You have to laugh.

  And we’ll sometimes see in the faces of Mr and Mrs Desperate the surprise, or sheer alarm, at knowing that their chances depend on such a pair of youngsters. Two girls in green. Or else see them thinking: Well it’s all right for them, it must be a lark for them, hardly out of school and with all their bits inside just as they should be, but not even thinking about it yet, not even caring about it. Though getting in plenty of practice, no doubt, on the preliminary activity.

  If only they knew, if only they knew the real cause of our clinical detachment.

  We don’t often think about it, but sometimes we do. We know that one day in a living room somewhere, because of something we’ve done in our clean white lab, and because the moment has come, Mr and Mrs Desperate will squeeze each other’s hand, and she will go to the bathroom where there’s the testing kit our clinic has provided. And he will wait, perhaps saying a small prayer. And a little while later they’ll squeeze hands again while they cry tears of joy. Or just cry.

  What is it that makes things happen?

  I thought, with all her mouth—a cherry-lipsticked gash of a mouth—and all the language spilling from it, she can’t be a virgin. But why should I have had that thought at all? She was twenty-three, and had crossed the sea. They grow up, don’t they, Catholics, with the Holy Virgin, they worship their Holy Virgin? Though hardly this one. But there wasn’t the mention or even the hint about her of any man. Despite all the mouth. Despite the way she could twist Dr Mortimer round her little finger. And that despite the fact that Dr Mortimer, good and caring gyno though he is, likes everyone to know that he does the charming round here.

  Is she a virgin? Why should I even have thought it? In our line of business.

  For the simplest plainest reason.

  She said, ‘Are you doing anything tonight?’ Not of itself a remarkable question. But she said it in a certain way, with a certain tilt. She said it even, I like to think now, with a little toss of her hair. Except she couldn’t have done that in her scrub cap. And of course she was a virgin. For the same reason and in the same sense that I was. It takes one to know another perhaps, but there’s still the attraction of opposites.

  The plain truth of it was that we ourselves were two Miss Desperates. There had never been, in all our years, for me or her, a ‘penem in vaginam’ situation. Oh the handiness of Latin. Though there had been some false introductions.

  It takes some less time, it takes some perhaps, poor souls, much longer, but it had taken each of us all our lives to discover and acknowledge, then to nurse and hide, in our different ways, our secret. Both wondering all along, like good little girls intent on being pure even till their wedding nights, if there might be someone, the right one, one day, with whom we could share it.

  Was there ever such a strange way, among our sperms and eggs—and, goodness knows, they have their difficulties—for the likes of us to come together?

  ‘Was there ever, Polly angel darling, such a sweet and charming thing?’

  That couple in the living room, with the tears running down their faces, they can’t have anything to do with the likes of us, can they? And yet they have everything to do with us. And we might as well have been, that night, that couple in the living room, tears of joy—this was how the test had gone—running down our faces. How magical, how all-confessing, how all-absolving, are the little words ‘Me too’. How all-embracing.

  We went for a drink in the Radcliffe Arms. Then we went for a Chinese in the Blue Pagoda. And then. And then. Like the beginnings of all things everywhere. She said the province of Northern Ireland with its bloody Union Jack had been shoved up against the Republic of Ireland for nearly a century. But it hadn’t taken us very long, had it?

  Not my type at all. Oh how I love her. And oh how happy I am to be with her, to wear green with her, two peas in a pod, to work with her among our sperms and eggs, to have found among them the one I am and the one I should be with, so far as I’m concerned, for ever.

  And if we should ever want to be what the likes of us can’t be, to have the thing the likes of us can’t have, then we’re in the right place, aren’t we? We know how it can be arranged, don’t we?

  We walked into the clinic that next morning as a couple. That’s to say, we made sure we didn’t walk in together, but a good half-minute apart. The nicety of lovers. It was Holly who went ahead. Naturally. And so bumped straight into Dr Mortimer, fresh from his silver BMW and his drive in from Wilmslow. How much did he see straight away? How much had he guessed already?

  But it’s common knowledge now anyway. I mea
n it’s common knowledge in this place. And truly this place is a place where there’s precious little to be coy and canny about, with pots of sperm being passed around all day.

  But Dr Mortimer looked at Holly and said, ‘You’re looking particularly glowing this morning, Holly. Is there something I don’t know?’

  And Holly said—because I was near enough by then to hear, near enough to see and to know how much I love her—‘Sure, if you’re not God around here, Dr Mortimer, if you’re not Our Lord Father Almighty. Don’t you know everything?’

  KEYS

  HE DROVE CLARE to the station. The traffic was unexpectedly heavy and they just made it in time. Their goodbyes were rushed and clumsy, but this spared him. He had no idea what to say. ‘Call me,’ he said. Then, ‘Quick!’ Then he said, ‘I love you.’ He hadn’t planned on saying it. It just happened. He watched her blink and scan his face even as she hurried.

  ‘Quick!’ he said again, and she turned, wheeling her small case into the station entrance. He loitered in the forecourt as her train arrived. He should be going with her, of course, but she’d brushed aside the need for this. They both knew he’d never got on with her brother, couldn’t stand him in fact. And now her brother was suddenly, perhaps dangerously, ill.

  It spared him. It would have been false. But as he watched her train pull out he felt a pang. He thought of her sitting there like some newly made orphan or refugee. She had to cross London then take another train from Euston, some four or five hours in all. Plenty of time to be alone with her thoughts, plenty of time before she’d have any reason to call. But he somehow knew she’d only call him if things looked not too bad. If they looked really bad she’d be immersed in it all and in her family and she’d forget him. He’d be peripheral. He was just a husband.

  Being an only child himself, who’d lost his parents years ago, he hated the stifling stuff of families, and sometimes couldn’t hide it. It didn’t sound good at all for Adam, and Adam was only forty-two.

  He asked himself why he’d never been able to bear him. There was nothing rational about it. Simply because he was Clare’s older brother? No, it was because he was weak. That was the truth. He hated weak men. He could spot them. And the truth about weak men was that they got ill, and even died.

  He remained parked for some time after the train disappeared, as if he were now waiting for someone to arrive. It was a leaden August afternoon and thick sparse spots of rain began to fall. He thought about his affair with Vicki. It hadn’t lasted long and it was the only time. He thought of how he’d hidden it from Clare—whether she’d had her inklings or not—and of how his hiding it from her had come to seem like a kindness, even a virtue.

  Then he drove back home, only to discover that, in the unusual circumstances, he’d forgotten his keys.

  He knew at once where they were, in the pocket of his zip-up jacket, slung over the back of his chair by his desk. He’d decided hastily not to wear it after all. Then, while he’d carried out Clare’s case and put it in the boot, Clare had locked the front door. And now of course he didn’t have the remedy that Clare, with her keys, could come to his rescue.

  Rain started to fall in earnest as he sat outside his own home, staring at it like some riddle.

  The normal thing in such a situation was to seek the help of a neighbour. He’d done it before. The houses were terraced. At the back of theirs was a window on the first floor with a broken catch. It had been possible that previous time to raise the lower sash from outside, then crawl in. Thanks to his negligence in getting the catch repaired, it might be possible to do the same again. But first he’d have to be let in by his next-door neighbour, explain himself, make embarrassed apologies, borrow a ladder and climb over the garden fence, somehow manhandling the ladder over too.

  And now it was August and both the Wheelers on one side and the Mitchells on the other were on holiday. Last time, it had been the Mitchells. He knew they had a ladder. But the Mitchells would be in their place in France.

  And the irony was that the window—the window that was by no means guaranteed to save him—was the window to his study and only a few feet from his abandoned jacket, with his keys in it, over the chair. Last time, he’d squirmed through the window, then found himself swimming on his desk.

  He could of course call a locksmith. He’d forgotten his keys, but he had his phone. How long would it take for a locksmith to arrive?

  At least he was sheltered from this rain in the car.

  For a moment he did nothing, immobilised by the fact of being excluded from his own home, his own life. There it was, but he simply couldn’t get to it. There was his desk, with his zip-up jacket over the chair, his drawing board where he’d resolved just to get on with the work he’d brought home from the office—having taken today, Friday, off—right through the weekend if need be while Clare was away.

  He had to revise all the drawings on the Neale Road project. It was the stupid developer’s fault, but it was a significant job and they had to swallow it. There was a bit of a panic and he’d said he’d see to it by Monday. He vaguely knew it wasn’t so tricky. The future residents of Neale Road would have a little less space than they might have done, that’s all. But they’d never know about it.

  He said he’d tackle it anyway over the weekend, and felt this piece of noble volunteering already scoring him points. Clare would have to put up with it, but he’d say he couldn’t wriggle out, and she was used to work coming home with him. Then the situation had changed dramatically. His weekend commitment became another, secondary reason why he couldn’t accompany her. It also became his own self-sacrificing task to counterbalance, at least a little, her more demanding mission.

  Except now he had this other problem.

  He realised that in confronting this minor catastrophe of being locked out, he’d for some minutes suspended all thought of his wife’s much more grievous situation—or her brother’s. He saw her again sitting on the train, the window streaked with rain, not thinking of him. Her keys in her handbag.

  The truth was he didn’t think Neale Road should take more than half a day, though he could make out it had taken longer. He saw himself handing in the results to Vicki on Monday and in doing so scoring personal points with her that he couldn’t precisely analyse. ‘There we are,’ he’d say, as if really saying in a certain victorious way (victorious—ha!), ‘No hard feelings.’

  He looked at the unremitting frontage of his own home, briefly seeing the immured but none-the-wiser residents of Neale Road.

  It was so strange: his life there, himself here, but the sensation was not entirely foreign, or unwelcome.

  The rain grew suddenly heavier, a real downpour. Then he saw a light go on, on the first floor, in number twenty, the Mitchells’ place—at 4.30 in the afternoon.

  He was surprised how rapidly he solved the mystery. It would be their cleaner. He was sure of it. She came once a week, on Fridays. The Mitchells were away, till Sunday, but they’d no doubt asked her to look in and do a few chores, water the plants and so on, before their return. He remembered now—but he’d hardly forgotten—coming home once from the office early and just as he was reaching for his keys (his keys!) seeing her emerge from the adjacent front door.

  She’d been visibly startled to see him standing there so close.

  ‘I’m John. I live here,’ he said reassuringly, then held up his keys by way of proof. She held up her own keys—or the set of keys the Mitchells had given her. For a moment they’d done a flustered mutual jingling with their two sets of keys, a hand dance, as if this was more effective than speech.

  ‘Olga,’ she eventually said. ‘I clean.’ She was blonde, indeterminately foreign, no more than twenty-five.

  She’d lowered her eyes automatically, at first, from his gaze. Now she suddenly gave him a quick direct stare, half smiling, half something else. He felt the feral punch of it, even as he knew his own stare was stripping away the thinnish dress she was wearing. This mutual jolt was something h
e hadn’t really felt (except with Vicki) since before he married Clare, though he’d felt it often enough back in those days, and he felt its submerged familiarity now.

  Olga. He’d always thought it was an ugly name, implying ugly women. Olga, Friday afternoons. Perhaps he’d noted it even then. So: that light going on next door—it was in the Mitchells’ bedroom—must be her. And Olga could be his legitimate means of getting into his house.

  She was perhaps stranded herself, he thought. This sudden torrential rain. No umbrella. We forget things. And if it was that same thinnish dress. And this same bucketing rain, he also thought, might make rather tricky, or at least postponable, the business with the ladder and the fence-hopping and the unsecured window.

  He got out and scrambled to the porch of number twenty. Even these few paces left him wet. He rang, then for good measure rattled on the letter box and rang again. It might be her policy not to answer the bell when doing the Mitchells’ cleaning. But, after a moment, more lights came on and she half opened the front door.

  ‘Remember me?’ he said. ‘John? And my keys? Well now I haven’t got any.’

  It was the same dress. A mix of washed-out pinks and greys. Maybe it was the only dress she did the cleaning in.

  ‘I’m locked out,’ he said, wondering if this was an expression a foreign woman with limited English would understand. He couldn’t hold up a missing key. Was she Russian, Polish, Romanian? It turned out she was Moldovan. He wasn’t quite sure where Moldova was.

  But she understood the situation and what he needed to do. She even met his apologetic laugh at the comedy of it all with a cautious laugh of her own. If this was all some ruse on his part, then it was peculiarly inventive.

  But it was she who made the first move. That is, the move to say that he—they—shouldn’t attempt his breaking-and-entering plan, or at least not straight away. With this rain he’d get soaked. And suppose the ladder slipped. It could be dangerous.