Out of This World

by Graham Swift

  ‘Or how about this? We’re all sitting, the four of us, out on the lawn at Hyfield. Mum’s wearing a blue dress. She has big, dark, wide eyes. (Do I have big, dark, wide eyes?) She says things to me in Greek and I can understand them. “Élado poulákimou, chrysoulamou.” “Come here, my little bird, my little golden one.” She’s talking to Grandad and Harry’s sitting there, just listening. I can see that Mum and Grandad are fond of each other and that this somehow brings Harry and Grandad together. They’re drinking something out of a big glass jug with bits of fruit floating in it. They all laugh and I laugh too.

  ‘Holidays. That’s what I remember. We went down to Cornwall – two, three years running. Last time with the Irvings. A hotel on a cliff. Steps down to a beach. (Jokes about the Beeches on the beach!) I was supposed to have nearly drowned there once, but I don’t remember. Just Harry rushing suddenly into the water, and shouting at Mum who was swimming, further out, and grabbing me and carrying me up the beach. He held me so tight. Then Mum and Uncle Frank and Auntie Stella came clustering round and he held me so tight, as if he didn’t want to let me go, even when Mum wanted to take me, and I cried. But I don’t remember nearly drowning.

  ‘I remember. I remember when the world was just sun and sand and sea and salt air. I remember when the world didn’t exist except where I was. I remember all of us playing games with a beach-ball, and thinking the world was like a coloured beach-ball, you could catch it in your arms. And Uncle Frank putting me on his shoulders to carry me. And I remember Harry taking photos of me. Just holiday snaps. My hair blowing. Giggling, licking ice-cream. He used to take that kind of photo too. It’s hard to think of him taking photos like that.’

  Harry

  When you put something on record, when you make a simulacrum of it, you have already partly decided you will lose it.

  When I am not with Jenny, when she is away for only one night visiting her mother in Bristol, I play the game of trying to imagine exactly how she looks. I never can. When I see her, she is always so much better than the picture in my head. But I don’t know if this is good or bad. If it’s good that reality outshines the image, or if the fact that I can’t imagine her means that I don’t know her.

  I used to say once, on those few occasions when I was persuaded to make public statements, that photography should be about what you cannot see. What you cannot see because it is far away and only the eye of the camera will take you there. Or what you cannot see because it happens so suddenly or so cruelly there is no time or even desire to see it, and only the camera can show you what it is like while it is still happening.

  She wants me to take ‘real photographs’ again. We climb up the hill behind the cottage, the wind is riffling and polishing the grass, and she says, pointing at the downs and the clouds and the shafts of sunlight probing through them, ‘You could start right here.’ And I say, ‘Why?’ And she says (as if I don’t have eyes), ‘Because it’s beautiful.’ And I say, ‘So, if it’s beautiful, why photograph it? If you have the reality, who needs the picture?’

  She looks at me, the breeze catching her hair, and I know what she’s thinking. That I have never taken a photograph of her.

  Joe writes to me about every six months. I haven’t seen Sophie for ten years; I’ve never seen my grandsons, Tim and Paul. But twice a year or so Joe writes these cryptic, diligent reports. In his last letter he said Sophie had had some ‘trouble’. But I was not to worry. It was okay. She was going to an analyst. I wonder: ‘going to an analyst’? Problem solved or problem continuing? Or whether it’s just some kind of announcement of status. Like saying: And now we have our own speed-boat.

  I’m not to worry. He wouldn’t tell me if I should. His letters are imbued with confident good cheer.

  I don’t think he tells Sophie he writes to me. I don’t reply and I don’t think he expects me to. I haven’t worked out his tenacious mixture of motives. He is sorry for me? He wants to sting my conscience? He hopes by this process of rationed, honourable communication to hold me at bay, so I will never suddenly intrude on whatever life they have made for themselves over there? Or that if some belated reunion should occur, he will be seen, like some fairy godfather, to have worked quietly, patiently for it to happen?

  Is he a good man? I don’t know. I used to call him ‘the holiday merchant’.

  And what – or who – did I want for Sophie anyway? That she should have gone to university in ’66 and become a true, hip child of those high, heady times? And suffered the discomfort and the dilemma of being both the daughter of her father and the grand-daughter of her grandfather. I can see now why she never hurried back from that trip to Greece, eager to join the liberated generation that was just turning Harry Beech into one of its minor idols.

  She went to Greece to find her mother. To-find Anna. But she didn’t find her mother. She found Joe. Joe and Argosy Tours. And she married him in ’67.

  That summer I’d got my sun-tan in the Sinai Desert, snapping young Israeli soldiers, whooping and singing, racing armoured cars over undefended sand, not believing war could be so easy. But I was there that September, in that same Surrey church, to give my daughter away. (Give her away?)

  She linked her bride’s arm in mine. I squeezed it. And it was strange how, in spite of ourselves, in spite of our first forced, let’s-pretend smiles, the occasion conspired to make it seem that we had always been that close. As if it were our reunion.

  A high street photographer, unctuous, fussy, bow-tied, took the pictures, never looking me once in the eye, and my heart went out to him.

  I thought of how Anna and I were married, frugally if gladly, in that makeshift chapel in Nuremberg, and how later she regretted never having had the full, white, dressed-up English performance. The church porch, the bells, the tables laid on the lawn at Hyfield. She would have liked that, for Uncle Spiro’s sake. Sent him the photos to gratify his old, Anglophile feelings.

  In my morning suit and grey tie I must have looked dressed for the wrong part. Dad looked like the old soldier who might suddenly start to weep. Joe looked like the original lucky man.

  And whatever Joe thought of me, whatever Sophie had told him about me, he must have blessed his luck that Sophie was the grand-daughter of Robert Beech. In ’71 Dad put money into Argosy Tours. I know that. Just when Argosy Tours was starting to look like a shaky investment. A separate and discreet transaction, so you could never have said it was BMC money shoring up people’s escapes to the sun. And not enough to stop the crash three years later. But enough to buy Joe time to make other arrangements and get out before things looked messy.

  Not that there wasn’t, suddenly, a far worse mess. A quite different mess. But even then some hidden part of him must have been counting his luck. He had fixed by then that job in New York. He had nobly declined, more than once, Irving’s offer of a job at BMC. Unentangled. It was even luck that he wasn’t there that morning at Hyfield. Though he kept repeating obstinately afterwards: I should have been there, I should have been there. As if there were some desperate magic he might have employed to prevent it all. Whereas his whole dazed demeanour was actually saying something else: I don’t want to be here. I’m not really here, am I, Harry?

  I see him coming out of that hospital ward where Sophie is lying groggy with shock and sedation, and his own look of shock hardens for an instant into one of absolute and infantile hate. As if I were to blame, I’d caused it all, I was the Jonah who’d put the ship smack on the rocks.

  How much did she say?

  And I see him the next night at the same hospital, when they let her go. My God, how I envied him that arm round her waist. She looked right through me, she looked at me as if she didn’t know me. But he’d recovered by then. Had a role by then. There was that little glint of unextinguished luck in his eye. Sophie is okay. And the baby’s okay. And if I can just hang on for however long this nightmare takes to fade, I really won’t be here any more, we’ll all be far away, in another continent, on the other side of the
Atlantic.

  Now he sits in a New York office, offering credulous Americans the charms of cosy old England. While I sit in a Wiltshire cottage which might be a picture from one of his brochures come to life.

  Eight years ago I actually spoke to him. His voice came piping down the telephone from a London hotel. Till then his letters had been sent care of UPI, and I don’t know how he got my number. He was over on business, by himself. Perhaps we could –? I made some excuse. I couldn’t have borne his bright, lucky face. Wouldn’t have known how to compose my own when he told me how the twins were growing. I said, Give them all my love, would you?

  That was the summer Argosy Tours finally went under. And it occurred to me afterwards that, even though he’d left Argosy three years before, that might have been his ‘business’. It was also the summer the Turks invaded Cyprus and the Junta fell in Greece. And if we’d met I might have asked him a question I’d always meant to ask him.

  (No, Harry. You think everything’s got to be connected? It just happened at that time. The whole tourist thing hit Greece at that time. There was competition. There was an oil crisis. Mind you, Cyprus was a risk …)

  I might even have been there myself. In Cyprus. One more time. Taking shots for UPI of Turkish troops commandeering hotels and foreign-owned villas, and of that other contingent that hadn’t been there in ’57, in ’64 – the baffled, stranded, indignant tourists.

  But I had stopped all that. No news work, no photo work of any kind (the offers came, then petered out). I was making other arrangements. I was facing up to life in a picture-book cottage. Breathing country air. Meeting new neighbours. Like Doctor Warren. Yes, that’s all, just some sleeping pills. Isn’t it strange, Doctor, I can’t sleep, here, where it’s all so peaceful?

  I might have travelled. I mean: just travelled. Been a tourist too. (Hang it, Harry, we all need a holiday some time.) Might have gone to Greece, like Sophie (but eight years later), to find Anna. But I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t believe that Anna is up there on Olympus, watching Jenny and me descend a breezy hill in Wiltshire. No one knows about Anna.

  I was trying to sleep, and have sweet dreams. I was trying to piece together my nerves and wondering how people ever contrive that impossible trick called Where I Live. I was lying awake haunted by the noise of owls and foxes. I would go for long, determined walks and watch the silver clouds gliding over green hills, rooks flapping over gnarled trees, and say to myself: I don’t believe this. I would come back to the cottage, open the front gate, walk through the picture-book façade and crawl into the tent of myself.

  Sophie

  But there are certain things that you’ll never remember, aren’t there, Doctor K? All you know is that they must have happened. Like trying to remember the point at which you fell asleep. I don’t remember when I first realized that Mum was never coming back. But maybe it wasn’t a realization, just a knowledge that seeped into my mind. Like the knowledge that Harry was never going to be at home much any more, he was never really going to be my father again. He’d done some deal – that’s how it seemed – struck some bargain with Grandad about being my father. He hadn’t found Mum and brought her home, but he still kept going away – out of guilt maybe. So perhaps if I’d said to him, It’s all right, Harry – it’s all right, Dad – you don’t have to be guilty about Mum, I know she’s dead really, he might have come back to stay for good. But by this time I’d grown to like having Grandad as my father, and I’d grown to realize – and the feeling was mutual – that I was the most precious thing he had.

  Like I was never really afraid of his arm. I mean, his artificial arm. It was something different, something special about Grandad. I wasn’t afraid to touch it, to hold his cold, hard hand. And because I’d never known him without it, for a long time it never even occurred to me that once he must have had two real arms. He must have been waiting for the question to come, rehearsing the answer. Grandad, what happened to your arm? What he said was: Oh, I swapped it for a medal. Then he showed me the medal. It seemed such a drab little thing, a bit of dull metal and dull red ribbon, to swap for a whole arm. I didn’t know then it was a Victoria Cross, or what you had to do to get a Victoria Cross.

  This was up in the study, surrounded by Uncle Edward’s, I mean, Great-uncle Edward’s books. He got the medal out of a little hinged box from one of the drawers of his desk. Then he showed me a photograph and said, Guess who this is? And the strangest thing about the photograph wasn’t that it was Grandad, taken years and years before, or that in it he had two arms – there it was, his real right arm, holding up a cigarette. The strangest thing was the face. The face was alive. Compared to the face of the Grandad I knew, that I was looking at right then, the face in the photograph was alive.

  I don’t remember him ever telling me what he did. I mean, what he did at his office in London. Or what they did at ‘the factories’. Do you think he was always waiting to tell me that too? The right moment. Hoping perhaps he might never have to tell me, that I need never know. Just like me and the twins. All I knew was that every weekday he’d put on this smart suit and Ray would drive him up to town. Because in those days there wasn’t a trace of BMC at Hyfield itself. It was only much later, after Joe and I got married and got our place in Richmond, that he started to turn it into a sort of company headquarters. That’s what the papers called it: ‘Family home of the Beeches and unofficial headquarters of BMC’.

  Harry used to call it ‘the arsenal’.

  But even if I’d known – even when I did know – why should it have made any difference, why should I have given a damn? You judge by what you see, don’t you? And you see what’s closest first.

  It must have seeped slowly into my mind too, so slowly you could almost ignore it, you could almost pretend you didn’t really know it. I can’t remember ever saying to myself, sitting on the terrace or under the apple trees in the orchard or looking out of the window as the rain fell on the lawn: Don’t be fooled by all this, don’t be taken in, remember what all this is made of.

  But I remember, perfectly clearly, as if it were yesterday, that June morning when Grandad said, ‘Come with me.’ I remember the clean white shirt he was wearing with the dark green tie and the dog-tooth check trousers – they were not his ‘office’ clothes, even if this was, technically, an ‘office’ day. I remember the dew on the lawn and the sun just peering above the elms (it was not yet eight o’clock) and the air shivery yet gentle, as if Grandad had arranged, too, the promise of a perfect summer’s day. I remember his slow yet jaunty, teasing step. I remember the spiders’ webs glinting under the eaves of the stable, and every tuft of moss between the cobbles of the stable yard, and Ray standing there, waiting for us. And I remember the smell as we approached the stable door – a real stable door now, newly painted, not just the entrance to a store-shed. An unmistakable smell, a brown, warm, living smell.

  Grandad opened, gently, the upper flap of the door and said, ‘Now look inside.’ But you didn’t need to. Because there, nudging forward to poke its head out, so the sunlight caught its wet nostrils and its chocolate eyes and the tuft of mane falling between them, was a pony.

  Ray came a little closer and Grandad stood very still. Perhaps they were afraid I might be afraid. But I put out my hand, and it seemed to want to be stroked. It cocked its head to one side and I felt its rough lip against my bare arm. Then Grandad said, ‘Happy Birthday, my angel.’ And Ray said, ‘Happy Birthday, Miss Sophie.’

  I was ten years old. Ten years old exactly. I don’t know where Harry was then, but he wasn’t there for his daughter’s birthday, and I didn’t believe Grandad when he said the pony was from both of them, from Harry as well.

  Ray, who must have been carefully briefed, slipped a halter over the pony’s neck and gave the end to me. I led it round the yard, and Grandad said we had made good friends. I was all choked up with excitement. Then he said, if I could tear myself away, we would come back in a little while, but first he had something else to
show me. We put the pony back in the stable and went back to the house. And there on the dining-room floor – Mrs Keane must have been briefed too – was a new saddle, bridle, girth, stirrups, cap, boots …

  I remember the smell of the new leather, the sun on the blue and red carpet. And feeling Grandad’s hand on my head as I knelt down to look at this hoard of gifts, and looking up and seeing him smile, and thinking, for some reason: He is as happy as I am, he is exactly as happy as I am.

  On the table, laid for breakfast, was a huge vase of roses, and by my place was a little pile of envelopes. The top envelope was pale blue with strange stamps on it, and Grandad said I should open it first. Inside the envelope was a card and also a letter. It’s funny, I don’t remember what that letter said at all.

  Then Mrs Keane brought in the breakfast, and Grandad said that after breakfast, which I couldn’t eat fast enough, we would go and see how good I was at riding. Then he would take me somewhere nice for lunch. But I must be careful not to eat too much because at four o’clock, of course, there was my tea party, all my friends from school were coming and Uncle Frank and Auntie Stella and their little daughter Carol. If it was fine, which it looked like being, Mrs Keane and Ray would put tables outside, and, of course, everyone would want to see my pony. But in the meantime shouldn’t we think up a name for him.