Out of This World

by Graham Swift

  Pouring out the wine and piling his plate high – barbounia! garithes! kalamarákia! – in that taverna by the waterfront under the stars in Poros. Touching me up under the table. Isn’t life grand, isn’t life just a peach? Omorfí i zoi!

  He couldn’t believe his luck – dizzy with luck upon luck – when I said, Yes. Yes.

  And now it disturbs me (it shames me) when I see it. That smile like a boy’s.

  He lets in a header from Paul. Mops his brow. Laughs.

  A perfect snapshot. Framed in the kitchen window. The laughing father, the laughing sons.

  An image, my dear Sophie, is something without knowledge or memory. Do we see the truth or tell it?

  And would that image through the window still be the same if those two happy boys knew what their mother knows (and will tell them), looking at them through the glass? And would it be the same image if the father, who knows what the mother knows, didn’t have the knack – I don’t know what it really is, a sort of generosity or a sort of stupidity – of ignoring what he knows and endorsing only the image?

  ‘Things Not to Miss in Beautiful Britain.’

  You can shoot with both. You can load and aim with both. With both you can find your target and the rest of the world goes black.

  First Tony the pony. Then Hadrian the horse. I used to ride round the paddock, then along the bridleway, over the heath. Can you imagine that? A real English heath. Crisp winter sunlight. Frost melting on the gorse and bracken. I haven’t ridden for years, but I love horses. Sometimes I think I should have been born in the age of horses. That’s what Grandad said, when I asked him more about the medal: It was worse for the horses. I didn’t understand. But I had this picture of a whole lost age of horses.

  Over the heath, down the dip, along by the wood. Don’t let anyone kid you, Doctor K, that there’s nothing sexual about little girls and horses. I first menstruated on a horse. So – she told me after Grandad’s seventieth: I was drunk and I said, ‘Snap!’ – did Carol Irving.

  I was Mrs Hyde. Grandad was Nicholas Hyde. Then one summer a stranger from the future came to visit. Harry. He was sun-tanned but he didn’t look as if he’d been on holiday. He watched me ride, but never came near – do you know something? I think he was scared of horses – and asked me about school, and sat talking with Grandad. He didn’t have his camera, but he had this portfolio, full of photos, with the rest of his things up in the bedroom. I wasn’t supposed to look. But I wanted to know about my father. And now I did.

  Another image for you. A pair of images. Overlaid upon each other. The sun flickering through the cedar tree and entering that bedroom at Hyfield. Harry’s things, like the belongings of some lodger. The man lying on the hot white sidewalk. They called it ‘that famous shot’. In Aftermaths all it says is ‘Oran, 1960’. The sound of Grandad’s and Harry’s voices from below. Face up, his arms outspread and ankles crossed, and from the back of his head that long, long dark stream, stretching, stretching as if it will never end, down the street. I didn’t know which was worse, that the world contained such things or that my father had taken that picture.

  Harry

  Miracles shouldn’t happen. Picture-books aren’t real. The fairy-tales all got discredited long ago, didn’t they? There shouldn’t be thatched cottages still, tucked away among green hills. You shouldn’t be able to advertise in the local papers for an assistant and fall in love with the very first candidate who comes along. I should have gone on, in fairness, to consider Applicant Two and Applicant Three, since all I wanted (honestly Michael, truly Peter) was a competent part-time assistant. But I found out that, after all, I was still human.

  Vacancy filled.

  As if I should have resorted to the lonely hearts columns, and discovered, at the first attempt, lo and behold, my heart was cured of its loneliness …

  ‘Supposing you had been Number Three?’

  ‘You mean you wouldn’t have chosen me?’

  ‘No, I mean supposing you had been Number Three and I had chosen Number Two.’

  ‘Then you would never have known me.’

  ‘I can’t imagine never having known you.’

  Three days a week. Paperwork. Film processing. Sometimes at the cottage by herself, while I was seeing clients or in the air. I used to think: She’s there, she’s there right now.

  Two, three weeks of playing it straight. Jenny, could you – ? Jenny, I’d like you to – This is how – Thank you, Jenny. Is it an infallible sign of love that it makes you feel again, even at sixty-three, like a clueless adolescent? A week of (not so subtle) inquiry. Her parents were divorced. She had a flat in Swindon where the family home had been and where she’d gone to art school. Boyfriends? No contenders at present. (‘Why should that be surprising?’) Another week of mutual suspicion that perhaps we knew each other’s game: she was an independent girl with a thing about older (much older) men, especially solitary men with shadowy pasts, especially burnt-out, rough-edged photo-journalists. I was the sort of man who at a certain age hired help-mates for ulterior purposes. But was damn slow about it.

  I took her one evening to the White Lion for dinner, because she had worked late. (Had I contrived – had she? – that it would be necessary to work late?) The landlord, in the saloon, poker-faced as he handed us the menus. And who should be sitting at a nearby table but Doctor and Mrs Warren (both nodding politely and both plainly inquisitive), tucking into roast duck?

  She said, ‘I hope I’m not damaging your reputation.’

  I said I didn’t know I had one to protect.

  She raised an eyebrow. More curious than sly.

  ‘But then village gossip is hardly going to bother you.’

  She looked at me as if this was an opening to tell her the whole story of my life.

  A photographer’s groupie? Such creatures existed, certainly, back in the news-chasing days. Though I never – Women, certainly. (Yes, Michael, if you want to know …) Women in strange rooms and strange beds, and non-beds, in I’ve forgotten how many strange places. Women with no names. Waking up in sticky dawns and trying to focus on where the room is and who the woman is. Shaking her awake, getting up and stubbing your toe on a half-drained bottle which skitters across the floor. You don’t expect to do this thing, to do this stuff, do you, and then go calmly to bed at night with a mug of cocoa and a good read? Bodily needs. For the nerves. But nothing more. Here’s your money, so you can go now, so I can forget you. Yes, good boom-boom, number-one long-time. Thank you. I’m bound up with this thing, hooked on it now, it’s rubbed off on me so much there’s nothing much left of me any more. Just the eyes. I’m not afraid out here, you see. I get afraid in Surrey lanes. I was brought up in the finest English traditions. Yes, I had a wife once. Take the money, please …

  The White Lion Inn. Oak beams and horse brasses. Jenny pressing a glass of red wine to her cheek.

  But she would have been too young. Only twelve or thirteen when I packed it in. Might never even have looked at a copy of Aftermaths or Decade, both of which, I suspect, are now acquiring rarity value.

  Her eyes go sharp and shrewd, soft and artless by turns. These days I don’t know if twenty-three is still young. Or if the young have any innocence any more.

  A week of thinking: So don’t be a fool, don’t be a damn fool. And then a week of quiet agony (surely mutual? surely mutually detectable?) because it seemed that I might – that we might – let something real slip away simply out of the fear that it might not be real. Then a week when the argument turned inside out and I said to myself: Don’t be a fool, don’t be a fool – how would you feel if she didn’t even come three days a week, to be under your roof? And the answer shot back: Empty, bereft.

  In the pub car park, when I pulled her towards me, she said, ‘My God, I thought you’d never –’

  I said (but this was later, in the dead of night: her car still parked on the road outside, the keys to her flat somewhere amongst the clothes on the floor): ‘How long has this been going on?�
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  ‘About six weeks.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘But who’s counting?’

  (An owl’s hoot in the distance. The whole world of her small body letting me in, letting me come in. Strange bits of my life spilling, now, out of my lips.)

  ‘This is crazy. I’m forty years older than you.’

  ‘Who’s counting?’

  Now look at Harry Beech. Former rover of the world, former witness to its traumas and terrors. He steps from the back door of a country cottage, dressed only in a dressing-gown and old slippers, to tip bits of bread and bacon rind on to the bird-table in the garden. He sniffs moist Sunday morning air. Inspects spring bulbs. As he stands at the bird-table he hears a knocking at a window, and turns and looks up at the bedroom. He sees a face, a sleepy, smiling, brown-haired, blue-eyed face. Framed in the window, it is like a living portrait. He stands, holding a bread-board, amazed by a single face. All the faces, all the faces, all the shouting, screaming, frightened, weeping, dying, dead faces. Nothing is more exquisite than a single human face. The face comes close to the window. Below the face are bare shoulders, bare breasts. The face blows him a kiss.

  Now look at Harry Beech, sitting at his kitchen table (while outside the birds of Wiltshire contend at the bird-table). He is writing a letter. Struggling with the words. (The first of its kind for ten years.)

  Dear Sophie. How can I tell you? How can I say this? Your father, who you haven’t seen for ten years and who is sixty-four years old, is going to get married. And she is almost half your age. And a third of his. And though we haven’t told anyone yet, and we haven’t fixed a day, I was wondering, we were wondering – I was hoping – If, after all this time – ? If – ?

  Sophie

  I can tell you exactly when Harry gave up photography. Just as exactly as I can tell you when it was I last saw him. They were almost one and the same.

  But why did he have to be there at all? Why when he was never around for the rest of the time did he have to show up for the grand occasions? Weddings. And funerals. Like when he led me to the altar to marry Joe. I didn’t want him there, didn’t want him throwing his shadow on it all. But I was surprised how well he carried it off. How good he looked. And just for a moment, as we entered the church and the organ started and, right on cue, he patted my hand that was hooked on to his arm, I thought – I couldn’t help myself – he is doing this for me, he is making the picture right for me. I am this white, nervous, beaming bride leaning on the arm of her father. And everything is as it should be.

  Shit! It was the same church. The same damned church. And we had to do the same thing – the father-and-daughter, the next-of-kin thing. I had to take his arm and we had to walk through the lych-gate, between the yew trees and holly bushes, up the path to the grave.

  There were so many cars parked in the sunshine in the lane by the church. So many black, chauffeur-driven cars. Except, of course, one. Ray would get driven, in a hearse all of his own, to Epsom crematorium.

  Three, four police cars. And further down the lane, at a discreet distance, the press and TV contingent. They were supposed not to move in till the service was over. But it didn’t stop them testing their equipment as the cortège glided past. Positioned like snipers, behind trees, hedges, on the roofs of their cars.

  I thought I would never get through that day. I thought I would not be able to hold my head on my shoulders, to put one foot in front of the other. But as we ran that first little gauntlet I looked at Harry on the seat beside me, and I knew I would make it. His head was turned away from the window. Fuck you, Harry. Don’t even you have the power to stop them? Your colleagues, your goddam accomplices! He was staring at the floor of the car. I knew from then on his helplessness would buoy me up. I knew I would make it because I could say to those eager pressmen at any time: Hey, you want a good story? I mean, another story, a spicy sub-story. It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s going to be called ‘What Became of Harry Beech?’. You want the inside facts? You want to know how Harry Beech was the true journalist, the real professional, right up to the very end? Want to know what I know?

  We had to walk through the lych-gate, Joe with Frank and Stella Irving behind us, following the coffin with its froth of flowers. So many wreaths, so many tributes. So many black cars glinting in the sun. And if half the language that was being used had actually taken solid shape, there’d have been muffled drums and plumes and rifle volleys.

  How does it happen? How do our little lives get turned into these big shows? Even when all that’s left of us is little pieces. How do they get made into public property?

  We had to walk back again, afterwards, down the same path, knowing that this time they were waiting in full ambush, clustered round the gate. Primed and loaded.

  I was clutching his arm. But, you see, nobody could tell it was really the other way round. He was clinging on to me, and under the pressure my flesh was hardening, giving nothing. I was thinking: This is simple. This isn’t real, I am simply not here. I am still in a white daze, I am still in the white, numb, noiseless daze that follows the blast of a bomb. When it clears, I’ll be on the terrace again, with Grandad pouring champagne and saying he’s getting out. I’m not here. I’m just watching this. But Harry’s here. No longer just watching. He thinks he’ll never get out of this churchyard.

  Come on, Harry. Why so reluctant? Remember my wedding day. These are your pals here. No? You can’t do it?

  Very well, very well. I’ll do it. If it helps. I’ll go soft, I’ll pretend I’m really leaning on you. I’ll pretend to be faint with grief (as if I should be faint with grief!). I’ll do it for you, and Frank and BMC and the whole, gawping British public. Since I can’t do anything for Grandad right now.

  It’s amazing, isn’t it, how you never know your own strength?

  I leant. I let my legs go a little weak. The papers said: ‘almost stumbled’. At the same time I lifted my hand to my face, because suddenly, like some fit of induced vomiting, I found I could cry. Simple.

  We were almost at the gate when he said, so softly, under his breath (to me? to them?), ‘No, please.’ And as if that were a signal, they all fired away. Zap! Zap! Zap!

  You should see the pictures, Doctor K. Look them up in back numbers. They’re great pictures. He with his arm round me and me with my leg bent and my hand to my face. You wouldn’t believe from those pictures that he was really clinging to me, or that something had finally snapped between us, and something had snapped inside him.

  Snap shots! Ha ha!

  And you wouldn’t believe that that wasn’t my grief – ‘The Grand-daughter’s Grief’. No, my grief wasn’t on show. I was just crying for the cameras.

  That was the moment, the precise moment. The end of Harry Beech, photographer.

  But it wasn’t the end of that long, dazed day. Or of our inane double act. We still had to stand staunchly together (the last of the Beeches!) at Hyfield, while the guests arrived with their rehearsed words and purified faces.

  At Hyfield. Where else? Where the débris had only just been cleared and the damage hastily covered or repaired. Fresh gravel on the drive. And where the objection that it was all in the most dubious taste was countered by the very boldness of the gesture. Defiance in the ruins. ‘Business as usual’. Echoes of former, testing times. As if the pocks in the walls and the scorch-marks on the lawn were only there to embellish the theme that had already been squeezed dry by the newpaper pieces and the TV clips. The old warrior. The one-armed hero. The true Brit.

  Frank said, Leave it all to me. To us. To BMC. And I didn’t have the voice to resist. I didn’t even whisper the word ‘private’. As new – as acting – Chairman: his duty. Robert had been the Company, hadn’t he? I let him gently insist that public outrage, as well as corporate solidarity, could hardly be ignored. So, yes, there would be ‘a few media people’ present. And police too. Some in plain clothes. Some of them (as if this would comfort me) armed. I let him say, on my behalf, into micro
phones, before flash-lights: ‘Mr Beech’s grand-daughter is too distressed to answer questions.’ (Funny, so was Harry Beech.) ‘However, we at BMC most strongly …’ I even let him feed them that tear-jerking bonus: my pregnancy. ‘Her last words to her grandfather.’

  That was the last time I thought of him as ‘Uncle Frank’. He was there, of course, circulating and officiating while Harry and I stood like dummies. You could see the exhaustion behind the attentiveness in his face. You should have been able to see fear too. Just a flicker, a shadow of fear. But it didn’t show. As if he were high on some rare potion of invincibility. As if, because they’d got Grandad, they could never get him, and this whole day were some kind of lavish propitiation of the gods for his future.

  Why not? It was a PR coup. BMC could do no wrong now, could it? And in any case, he had his prize. He must have known by then, without knowing what I knew, that Hyfield was his. On the Company. That even if Joe and I were to make a drastic change of plan, we would not want to live here. In this house where –

  I didn’t let him know I wasn’t really there. I didn’t tell him I hadn’t come out of the white daze. Death isn’t black, is it? It’s white. It’s the whitest, hottest, coldest, blindingest flash there is. I let him treat me as if he were still Uncle Frank, and I was little Sophie Beech who once used to perch on his shoulders. I let him take my arm and let his invincibility support me, just like Harry’s helplessness. Let him cut in like some ballroom interloper and steer me round the Board members and the company veterans called out of retirement for the day and the young high-fliers. This is Sophie. Our prize asset.