Out of This World

by Graham Swift

  ‘He’s a ship-owner and he needs backers?’

  ‘Even ship-owners do not have everything. Let us say, though, it is a matter of friends in the right places. Not friends, you understand, like me – humble and ineffective. He has friends but they are not yet in a position to help him. He will help them, they will help him. Meanwhile, he has enemies. You understand? It is a matter also of timing. But then again it is a matter of personality. My friend is timid. Powerful but timid. For the same reason that he must wait for his friends to help him, he fears that this tourist boom we are all expecting may be – ‘nipped in the bud’. How can this be, eh Mr Carmichael? My country is poor, but we have our sunshine. Who can take that from us? But my friend is timid – a fact of advantage, I need not tell you, to those who do business with him. He needs backers for his backers. But let me explain to you this mystery …’

  When I rode round with Zoumboulakis like that I used to think, Is this really happening? Is this really me, Joe Carmichael? Driving around Athens, under the palm trees, past the white buildings, doing business with the friends of ship-owners? Any moment now I will be flicked back to Davenport Road and discover that it’s all only something on the television. All only a dream.

  But I have this formula with dreams, Mario. Never pinch yourself to check. If it’s good, why not take the trip? If it’s bad, why discover that you can no longer tell yourself: But it’s only a dream?

  How much did I really know and how much did I pretend to myself that I didn’t? And how much, anyway, did I believe? That agreement I signed with Zoumboulakis was so wrapped in conditions, so all in the future, that I thought it would never take effect. And yet the bonanza of discounts and concessions it offered to Argosy Tours was too good not to hold on option. And, besides, this wasn’t my country and my business was just tourism. And I was high – just floating – on sunshine and freedom. And love.

  ‘Joe, you make me laugh, Joe. Joe, you’re good to be with.’

  The last time he picked me up in that Lincoln was just a week after the coup. A brilliant day in late April, one of those warm, rich spring days with a southerly breeze, when it already seems like full summer. So that you felt it was all only some strange diversion – nothing essential had changed. The schools and public buildings were open again, and either because of this or because of the curfew at night or simply because of the weather, the streets seemed more crowded than ever. The cafés were full, the kiosks were as stacked as ever with foreign magazines, and, as Zoumboulakis himself pointed out, there was no short-age of coach parties, winding their way up to the Parthenon.

  He said Karatsivas (we were naming names now) was having a little midday reception and it was time that we met.

  He was different that day. More playful and familiar. As if, before, he had aped a certain English composure, but now he could show his true, loosened-up Greek self. When we drew up outside that huge place in Kifissiá, he buttoned his jacket and visibly stiffened, but with a hint of mischief, as if we were two boys on our first day in a new school. And, strangely enough, for this I actually felt fond of him for the first time.

  I don’t remember Karatsivas clearly. I recall a man with a high, domed forehead, grey sideburns and a cosmopolitan, faintly vexed manner. ‘Ah, Mr Carmichael. But you are so young! Our mutual venture has been blessed, so it seems. Your health, Mr Carmichael. To success. You can rely at all times, I assure you, on Mr Zoumboulakis.’ And that was all. He turned to another guest. I was even glad to feel like a minor item on his agenda.

  I don’t recall Karatsivas clearly, because though it was his party and his house, it seemed he was not quite at the centre of it, it was not quite what he would have planned. And what I do remember about that party is the soldiers. The soldiers at the front gates, the parked jeeps, the soldiers visible across the lawns, under the pines and eucalyptus beyond the wire fence, standing on guard with white helmets and rifles. And the soldiers, officers, in peaked caps and sharply pressed uniforms, who seemed to make up the majority of the guests – none of them high-ranking or dripping with braid, but all of them wearing an expression of saintly authority.

  Zoumboulakis steered me back to the car. He was drunk, but my head seemed stubbornly clear. ‘Now, Mr Joseph, now we have done our duty and paid our respects – to lunch! You are hungry? Vougliameni, I think? On a day like today.’

  We avoided the city centre and took the country road. A long drive to the east. I didn’t speak and he seemed prepared for this. He loosened his tie, gave a belch or two and turned his head to the window, tapping his knee and hissing a tune through his teeth. On the road out of Halandri we passed whole rows of stationary armoured cars, dusty from recent manoeuvres. Then as we drove along the green slopes of Hymettos, he started to rapturize about spring in Attica.

  ‘But your English spring is something too. You know, I was in your country for two years, in the war. In Chatham. I have seen your “Garden of England”. Your “toast-houses”.’

  He was waiting for me to pass comment, and like a true Englishman I had buttoned my lip. It was only as we came down into Vougliameni itself and saw the blue sea and the yachts, the awnings of the tavernas and the beach dotted with coloured umbrellas, that he gave up waiting.

  ‘Ah, Mr Carmichael, in your country you have your system – Winston Churchill, Buckingham Palace, Rule Britannia – but here we do it differently, eh? Bam-bam! Everybody change! Bam-bam! Everybody change again! Ha! Why so solemn, Mr Carmichael, why so quiet? You are ill? You have a pain somewhere? Why not enjoy yourself? No one is stopping you from enjoying yourself. Why look over the hill when the view this way is so beautiful? Kalí orexímas, Mr Carmichael, kalí thias-kedasímas! The sensible man enjoys himself. What is the desire of every man? What is the duty of every man? To enjoy himself!’

  Harry

  Dear Sophie. Someone has to be a witness, someone has to see. And tell? And tell? Tell me, Sophie, can it be a kindness not to tell what you see? And a blessing to be blind? And the best aid to human happiness that has ever been invented is a blanket made of soft, white lies?

  I never knew that Dad knew about Anna. But that night – the men on the moon and Anna up on Olympus – our minds must have crossed paths. I said, ‘There’s something I want to know.’ And after a long pause he said, ‘Anna?’ And I knew that he knew.

  We had turned down the sound on the TV. The moon-men bobbed in silence over the Sea of Tranquillity.

  He said, ‘Yes, I knew about Anna.’

  ‘But you didn’t tell me.’

  ‘I didn’t know if you knew.’

  ‘You were never going to tell me.’

  (Sixteen years!)

  ‘Would you have wanted me to? If you hadn’t known?’

  ‘The truth.’

  ‘The truth!’ He snorted, made a wry face and raised his whisky glass to his lips. Outside, it was getting light.

  He said, ‘You never told Sophie?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And how did you know?’

  ‘Because she told me. She – confessed. You know when she got the news about Uncle Spiro. The state she was in. It wasn’t just – Before she left she said, “I’ve got something to tell you.” She was crying. She said, “I’m pregnant.” ’

  But I knew before that. I knew that summer, in Cornwall. Do you remember that day – the day you almost drowned? I already knew then.

  I was sitting on the rug with Stella, half-way up the beach. She was getting out the things for our picnic and I was watching her emptying the bag, shooing away a fly. I never had any special feelings for Stella Irving. Just the usual jokey flirtation (jokey! Jesus!) that goes on when two couples are together. But that morning I could have reached across that rug and hugged her like my sister, because she looked so innocent, getting out those sandwiches and chicken legs, and I could see so clearly she didn’t have an inkling.

  You’d gone down to the water with Anna, and Frank had gone for some beers. It was hot. Blue sky, waves coming in lazily.
Anna used to say that when the weather was like that it reminded her of Greece. She was holding your hands and making you float up in the water and kick your legs and you were both laughing.

  Stella had a wide straw sun-hat. In a year’s time she would be a mother too: her own daughter. As she bent over the picnic things, the brim of the hat hid her face and I looked at her breasts in her wet swim-suit. But I thought, even if she were stark naked beside me and we were the only ones on this beach, I wouldn’t feel a scrap of lust for her. Just this need to hold her tight and say – God knows why – ‘Sorry.’

  She turned towards me and I looked away, and she said, ‘You’re quiet today, Harry.’ But just as she said it, I wasn’t quiet any more. I yelled, ‘Jesus Christ!’, or something like that, and jumped to my feet. Because I’d looked towards the water and I couldn’t see you any more. I couldn’t see you. I saw Anna, ten, fifteen yards out, with her head tilted back as if she were relishing the sensation of floating freely by herself. And then I saw the splash and thrash of your arms, some way to Anna’s left, maybe five yards out. I didn’t wait. I ran down the beach, plunged in and grabbed you.

  Maybe I’d got it wrong. Maybe, as Anna said, my eyes had tricked me. (My eyes!) She said you’d learnt to do it – to float by yourself and splash your arms – and in any case you could still touch bottom there with your feet. We stood round the picnic rug, and I just kept repeating, ‘She might have drowned! She might have drowned!’ I was holding you and you were crying. Frank came down the beach with a string bag full of bottles of beer and lemonade, and I saw the way he checked, recognizing a crisis: ‘What’s happened?’ Stella said, ‘Sophie got into trouble in the water. Harry’s just got her out.’ His look changed, almost relaxed. ‘Poor little Sophie,’ he said, putting down the bottles. ‘Poor little Sophie.’ Anna said, ‘She wasn’t drowning, everyone. She was trying to swim.’ Her face had this calm, sensible expression. Could she tell? Then she said to me, ‘She’s crying because you’re holding her so tight. If you’ve just saved her from drowning, there’s no need to suffocate her now.’ She said this lightly, laughingly, without anger. I thought: She doesn’t suspect. She picked up the beach towel and held it between her opened arms. ‘Come here, Sophie. Ela sti Mammásou. Daddy just thought –’ I thought: I could just hold on to you. Let her stand there like that with the towel and her arms emptily open. Then she’d know.

  Her hair was wet and streaming and she was making a kissing shape with her lips. It was a decision, you see. For her sake. You were still crying and I really didn’t want to let you go. But I handed you over. And as soon as I did, you stopped crying. Then I knew I’d have to pretend. Silly Daddy. Made a silly mistake. Frightened little Sophie. Thought she was drowning.

  But I really did think you were drowning. That’s what I saw: my daughter drowning.

  And it wasn’t a mistake, either – I really saw what I saw, though I tried hard enough to make it something I hadn’t seen, a trick of the eyes – when I went back to the hotel that previous afternoon.

  She had already gone back, to lie down. A headache. The day had turned cloudy and sullen. Then Frank said, looking restless, that if nobody minded, he’d go and chase a ball around the course for a bit. He said, ‘Be good, you two,’ and winked. And Stella said, ‘We’ve got our chaperone.’ Pointing at you. Then, just a few moments after Frank had gone, she said, ‘Damn! I left my book in the room.’ And I said, ‘That’s okay. I’ll get it. I’ll see how Anna is, anyway.’ I got up, brushing away the sand. I walked off, then stopped.

  ‘Key?’

  ‘Oh, they’ll let you take it from the desk, won’t they? Or you might still catch Frank.’

  I suppose I did catch Frank.

  Do you remember the zig-zagging path up the cliff? The wooden steps covered with sand? Slow going, with you. You’d want to be carried. Frank and I would toss a coin. The last bit through a tunnel of wind-curved trees. Then the hotel appearing, the flagpole on the lawn, and the view round the headland along the coast.

  Frank’s car was still in the car park. The big Rover. Our A40. We were like the poor relations in those days. Frank, the rising star of the Company. Me, the boss’s renegade son. Though on that holiday, I think, everyone wondered. Frank wondered. Anna wondered. Did I wonder?

  The key to Frank and Stella’s room wasn’t on its hook behind the desk. Nor was their door locked. Not even properly shut. I still think about that casual omission. Then, of all times, not only to have not locked the door, but to have left it crassly resting on its latch. Did it mean that there had been no prior arrangements – she really did have a headache, he really had come to fetch his golf clubs – and that, as they might have said in some absurd scene of contrition, they had ‘just got carried away’? Did that make it better, or worse? And supposing the door had been shut, and I had innocently knocked?

  I stood outside and raised my knuckle. It was only that soft moan from inside that made me realize the door was not tightly closed. A moan so familiar and private, yet coming from another room. Perhaps I should have turned then on my heel, trod softly, numbly, automatically, back along that passageway, like a discreet hotel servant. But I did that later.

  You have to see. I pushed the door an inch open with one finger. The head of the bed was hidden by the corner of a wardrobe. Was that luck of a kind? I didn’t want to see her face. You have to see, but some things you can’t look at. Her legs were round him. The curtains were drawn. Frank’s arse, absurdly white where his swimming trunks went, was bucking up and down.

  How long – a second? two seconds? – before I pulled the door softly to again? Should I have burst in? Action. Drama. Pieces flying everywhere. I thought: This is happening, before your eyes. Afterwards, you won’t believe it. Take the picture.

  Then I turned. Then I crept down the passage. Past other doors. Past our room. Our room? Number seven. Then I walked, like a sleep-walker, down the creaking staircase, holding the banister very tightly. Along the downstairs passage, past the lounge where they were serving cream teas, out on to the terrace where the sun was starting to break through again and the breeze was rattling the rope on the flagpole. And I was thinking all the time: This wasn’t me. I’d left me behind. I had left my heart in a hotel in Cornwall. In an English seaside hotel with chintz armchairs and cream teas and dinner gongs. Locked it up and walked away. In a room in a holiday hotel where the sea air blew in and you could hear the waves at night and in the morning you could see fishing boats chugging out after lobsters, and Anna had said with a laugh, the first time we came, it was like a hotel in Agatha Christie, and our daughter slept in a little adjoining room with a party-door, so love-making had to be well timed and circumspect.

  Past the flagpole. Down the zig-zagging steps. How long ago? How far away was this beach? There you were, kneeling by the rug, looking up. Stella being Mummy. I hadn’t thought what to say. How my face might look. But Stella had this repentant expression, as if she understood something.

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, Harry. It was here all the time. Right at the bottom of my bag.’ And she held up a book. A well-thumbed paperback. On its cover, a couple in torn safari jackets, locked in torrid embrace.

  ‘Did you see Frank?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And how’s Anna?’

  He said, ‘I never knew she was pregnant.’

  ‘Only six weeks. She was going – she told me this – to get rid of it. Then she got that telegram from Greece. There wasn’t any time. She hadn’t seen her uncle for seven years.’

  ‘And that was the first you knew about it?’

  ‘Yes. How did you know? She told you?’

  He eyed his glass.

  ‘No. Let’s just say I knew. Saw what I saw.’ We looked at each other. ‘You were away so much, don’t forget. Taking pictures.’

  I thought: You old bastard.

  ‘Yes, I was away. Which is how I knew it couldn’t have been me who made her pregnant.’

  ‘And as I recall, you
were even more eager, that winter, to get as far away as possible. The further, the better. The more dangerous, the better. You never thought of telling me?’

  ‘That’s immaterial now. Why didn’t you tell me?’

  He lowered his eyes. Raised them again.

  He said, ‘All the same, why did you never tell me?’

  ‘She was dead, wasn’t she?’

  He held his gaze on me. I didn’t say anything. Maybe he saw my thought – or, rather, that I didn’t have the thought he was looking for. Maybe he was looking for more than one thought.

  ‘Frank?’ he said.

  ‘I could put that same point to you too, couldn’t I? I never did a thing. What do you think he thinks – that nobody ever found out?’ I laughed. ‘Oh, I wanted to kill him. That’s all. I mean, spectacularly kill him. I still have this fantasy. Like to hear it? I’m in this plane. Just me, the plane, and one bomb for Frank. One bomb. I’m coming in low over Surrey. I’m homing in on Frank’s house. It’s a Sunday morning and he’s at home. He runs out on to his lawn, and first he thinks it’s a joke, then he throws up his hands in horror. I fire my guns, just to let him know it’s business. Then I swoop down and let the bomb go smack into him.’

  He wasn’t shocked by this. Nor did he smile. He said, with a poker face, ‘You know, I have to consider the security of my senior executives.’

  ‘Especially in your business.’

  ‘Especially in my business.’

  ‘Don’t worry. The revenge is already taken care of. He’s where I never wanted to be, isn’t he?’

  He said, ‘I know.’