Out of This World

by Graham Swift

  How many lives can you see at a glance in New York, without seeing a single life? Supposing every window were a life – a little bright box of life.

  A man is six feet tall (okay, you’re not – but you can handle that) and the Citicorp building is nine hundred feet. There’s got to be something wrong there. Or else something splendid, something sublime.

  Just stand back and take in the view. You think this is one brute of a city, but it’s also magic, it’s amazement to the eye. Distance lends enchantment. Is that the name of the game? The trick of it? To rise above it all. To get a little vantage, a little perspective, a little elevation. To perch at some perfect window (say, the twenty-second floor, somewhere around 59th and Park) with your perfectly chilled Martini, and reduce it all to a vision.

  Am I a hypocrite? I think little boys shouldn’t play with toy guns, but I think Leonidas, holding the pass with his Spartans, was a fine, brave thing. And once I read Homer because I was told Homer was the greatest. But what else was Homer singing about so deathlessly than these guys with spears sending other guys down to Hades?

  Distance lends enchantment. And time heals. That’s the other big sop, the other big lie. Let some years go by. Oh, five, ten years. Then rub your finger over the place where the old wound was. See? Hardly feel a thing.

  You know, the boys came in from school the other day and Paul says, ‘Mom, can you tell me something? Is the world getting bigger or smaller?’ Just like that. I didn’t know if it was some joke with a trick answer, or something their teacher had thrown out at them, or something going round the schoolyard, or else some serious, anxious inquiry. I said, ‘I don’t think I know that. But I guess you must be getting bigger, though!’ And I put my arms round him, and I felt him wriggle like mad, the way they both do these days, to get free.

  So tell me, Doctor K. What do I do? Do I answer his letter? Do I go to see him? Or do I stay here with you?

  Harry

  Last night Jenny and I watched on the news the Task Force steaming its way towards the South Atlantic. Those by now familiar shots of troops jogging round the decks of a requisitioned liner and helicopters waltzing over the waves have lost their vague air of comedy. As if, though it could all still be called off at any moment (what do they say in the States, Sophie – it will happen? It won’t?), the imperceptible point has already been passed when the pressure of feeling that has all along been, secretly, wanting it to happen, willing it to happen, has outweighed the pressure of feeling that says: But this is preposterous.

  A show-case war. An exhibition war. A last little war for old time’s sake. Sending the ships and the men to some far-off corner of the globe, while the nation waits and guesses. Save that this time, along with the ships and the men, goes a small battalion of camera crews and newsmen, and, despite what they say about the difficulties, at that range, of satellite transmission, it is going to be the TV event of the year.

  And it’s strange to think that I could be there. True, I’m sixty-four, but I’m a fit man, my eye’s still good. (And I feel young, absurdly young.) They would give me a flak-jacket and a helmet. They would pay me the slightly begrudging respect due to some worthy veteran. But (thank God!) no editor or one-time crony has phoned me up actually to suggest it. How about it, Harry? And what have you been doing for these last ten years anyway? What do you say? For old time’s sake?

  For old time’s sake! Those scenes at Portsmouth! That pantomime! That performance! How everyone played their parts. The troops lining the rails. The bands, the cheers, the ships’ hooters, the women waving and weeping. It wasn’t even a re-run, with twentieth-century props, of grand Victorian send-offs for illustrious imperial expeditions. It was the Trojan War all over again. Someone had raped our precious Falkland Isles, so the ships must sail. And somewhere, in a sacred grove, behind the harbour, before the bands could strike up and the ships slip their cables, someone had discreetly cut the throat of a modern-day Iphigeneia.

  Iphigeneia! Iphigeneia! Of all those old Greek myths that my Uncle Edward once made his special province, it is that one that sticks with me. The blue bay at Aulis, flecked with white-caps. The ships beached, pinned down by the wind, the troops grumbling and mutinous. And Iphigeneia on the altar.

  It’s so easy to imagine how it might have happened otherwise. How Agamemnon might have said, No thanks – nothing is worth that. How he might have embraced his daughter and said to his men, Okay, enough, let’s go home. The wind would have held. The Trojan War would have been cancelled. Instead of sailing to a ten-year blood-bath, the men might have enjoyed a heaven-sent interlude. A seaside break. Beach games, cooled by that onshore breeze. Like those paratroopers parading on the sun-decks of the Canberra: a holiday cruise after all.

  She wants me to take real photos again. But she wants me to take only beautiful pictures. The sun burnishing the wind-bent grass on a Wiltshire hillside. Her own face. On those nights when we first went to bed together it was as though there were certain things which, in spite of herself, she had to broach. As if there were ghosts she thought she would quickly exorcize, but she found them more stubborn than she supposed. When you are sixty-four you cannot pretend that you have no past. She would kiss the scar on my cheek, cautiously at first and then lingeringly, running her lip, the tip of her tongue along it, as if she had found some new, unexpected erogenous zone. She would say: ‘Tell me about …’ and ‘What was it like …’ And even: ‘Did you ever – just a little bit – enjoy it?’ Then she asked (ten years ago she was only thirteen): ‘And why did you stop?’

  No Trojan War. No Homer. No ten-year siege. No wooden horse. No Hector, Achilles, Andromache, Hecuba. No story. No action. No news. (On news-stands throughout Hellas, words to make an old hack weep: ‘Trojan Task Force Recalled’.)

  I used to believe once that ours was the age in which we would say farewell to myths and legends, when they would fall off us like useless plumage and we would see ourselves clearly only as what we are. I thought the camera was the key to this process. But I think the world cannot bear to be only what it is. The world always wants another world, a shadow, an echo, a model of itself. I think of Uncle Edward, the bright hope of New College, who marched off to war in 1915, his head full of the words and deeds of the Greeks and Romans and the myths with which they had filled their own heads. Who knows if that other world in his head made it harder or easier for him to bear (for just that short, long while) what he found?

  When I was a boy I was taught by the same ageing classics master who had taught my uncle. Mr Vere. ‘Percy’ Vere. The schoolboy game was to count the number of times (surprisingly many) he had scrupulously to avoid saying ‘persevere’. We were urged to ‘persist’, to ‘soldier on’. I think I was aware that he saw in me some potential reincarnation of his former glorious protégé. If I ‘stuck to it’, he would say, as we struggled with Aeschylus, I would ‘enter another world’. ‘Agamemnon, the opening chorus: the old men of Argos describe the scene at Aulis. Beech, would you start us off?’ But I disappointed him. And my uncle’s memory. And as for entering another world, I found I could do that more easily by stepping into the Rex, the Empire or the Rialto cinemas. Where, though it’s conceivable I may have taken a more than average interest in the camera-work, I used also to imagine, like any adolescent schoolboy in similar circumstances, that Harlow or Lombard might step down from the screen to place themselves in positions of intimate proximity to me, or alternatively that I might be wafted up to take over the invincible roles of Gary Cooper or Douglas Fairbanks Junior.

  I think the cinema replaced the vision of Greece and Rome. The era of classical education did not die, quite, with my uncle at the Battle of Loos, but it perished during the rise of the talking picture. Once, privileged generations were brought up to emulate a world no one could see. Now everyone had a world to emulate, floating before them.

  You emerge from the cinema (it is called, perhaps, the Odeon or the Doric and is done up with fake Greek columns). Just for a while you posse
ss an aura, a power, a stature. Your feet lift a little from the ground. It is a place for erotic training: the darkness, the clinches on the screen – what more instruction do you need? And how did you learn to walk, to stare, to stroke your jaw, to light your cigarette or toss it aside, in just that way? You learnt it from the movies.

  In those days a newsreel was always a standard feature of the programme. Dressed up with inane music and plum-voiced commentaries, it was nonetheless a reminder that there was a real world as well as the faked one in which people moved with Hollywood stylization. Now, they no longer show newsreels in cinemas, but the movies you see aspire to the ‘actuality’ of the newsreel, while TV can never have enough ‘real life’ footage. So that it’s no longer easy to distinguish the real from the fake, or the world on the screen from the world off it.

  In Vietnam it was common: ‘I don’t like this movie. Get me out of this movie. Someone, for Chrissakes, cut this SCENE!’

  And it goes without saying that a task force of cameras should accompany the Task Force to the Falklands. As if without them it could not take place.

  When did it happen? That imperceptible inversion. As if the camera no longer recorded but conferred reality. As if the world were the lost property of the camera. As if the world wanted to be claimed and possessed by the camera. To translate itself, as if afraid it might otherwise vanish, into the new myth of its own authentic-synthetic photographic memory.

  As if it were a kind of comfort that every random, crazy thing that gets done should be monitored by some all-seeing, unfeeling, inhuman eye.

  Not to be watched. Isn’t that a greater fear than the fear of being watched?

  In the earliest portrait photographs everyone is posing. Un-selfconsciously striking Sunday-best, rhetorical attitudes, as if they do not yet know what a camera is – they think of it as some swayable human audience and they have a sense of themselves as belonging to some proud theatre. Then at some forlorn time posing got discredited. It started to seem embarrassing, artificial. And the cry of the photographer became that insistent, exasperated and paradoxical demand: ‘Act naturally please.’

  How did this happen? And when? In 1918? In 1945? And what does that mean: to act naturally?

  He nods his helmeted head. Agamemnon, leader of men. Does (naturally) what a man has to do. Says yes to war, myth, action, news, classical literature, the death of his daughter. Acts unnaturally.

  I know it’s absurd, I know it’s unreal. Up here, in the Cessna, while she sits below the control tower, listening to Derek’s yarns, it’s as if there’s some invisible cord between us, like those model aeroplanes and their remote-control operators up on Epsom Downs. I know it’s a dream, it’s impossible, and one part of me was always ready for it suddenly to finish. Except now there’s something which can’t be undone. That first time in the plane, it wasn’t air-sickness. She told me that same day. She must have struggled to sound neutral, and my silence must have been blatant and cruel as murder. The mother not the child. (Prepare the words: ‘I think it would be better if –’) Then I saw that her face was awash with tears. ‘I want you to marry me,’ she said. That’s when it got deeper than deep, and beyond a dream.

  I know it’s absurd. If I didn’t know her better, I might say she was too young to know better, and if I knew myself better, I might say I was too old not to know better.

  But I don’t want to lose her. I don’t want to lose her.

  Sophie

  So, my darlings, we will go to England. We will get the plane, just you and me, to England. To see your grandfather.

  What is it like? It’s where you come from in a way, it’s where you were, but of course you won’t remember it. And maybe it’s no longer the way I remember it. Or rather, the way I remember it is like it never was.

  England is green and cool and damp and old and crooked. Look at the map. England is like a little hunched-up old lady at the seaside, her back turned towards the rest of Europe, dipping her toe into the Atlantic Ocean and pulling up her skirts round her shrivelled body. She is sitting down because she is no longer steady on her legs. Someone has thrown in her direction a two-tone beach-ball called Ireland and she is screwing up her face in displeasure.

  You wouldn’t believe that she was once a big, plump, bossy Empress. And you wouldn’t believe that even now, in 1982, there is a fleet of ships sailing off to fight, on behalf of this little old lady, for some even tinier islands on the other side of the world.

  England is small. When we get there everything will seem as if it was built on a different scale, the houses, the streets, the cars. And you’ll see all those things you’ve only seen so far in pictures – castles, Beefeaters, funny red buses. So it will seem that England is really only a toy country. But you mustn’t believe that. That things are just toys.

  We’ll get the plane, my angels. You’ll have to look after your mother, like two grown-up young men. It’s a big journey for me, you see – perhaps even bigger for me than for you. Going back can be the hardest journey. And perhaps, if I haven’t done so before then, that’s when I’ll tell you, up in the plane, high over the ocean. I’ll say: Once, in England …

  He said, yes of course I should go. Take the boys too. Yes, it was the right, the proper, the best thing to do. He was smiling, as if he were truly happy for me. I showed him the letter. And I said, I want to go. He said, No, he wouldn’t come himself. It would be right at his busy time of the year, and he got enough trips to England, on business, didn’t he? And, in any case, it was right that just – He kept smiling. He always knew how to smile. He said he’d fix up our flights. Half price. And then I asked him, but what did he think, actually think – about Harry getting married again. And he said he thought it was crazy. Just plain crazy.

  And then he said: ‘You mean the world to me.’

  Harry

  Peter says there is always a mark. Though it may not be easy to detect. No matter how much time elapses. Once the soil has been moved. Once men have interfered with the earth: it never reverts, there is always a mark.

  An out-of-work actor, in jeans and old sweater. A hopeful Aladdin, putting his trust in the magic lamp of the camera. He is infatuated with the life and death of people he will never know, buried for over three thousand years beneath the ground. He gives me elementary briefings in prehistory. Almost certainly, the Bronze Age Britons had trading links with Mycenaean Greece. If Homer’s heroes ever really lived, they would have lived at the time the Bronze Age flourished in Britain.

  But we are unlucky with 880390 to 960370. No spectral field systems loom into vision. He is undiscouraged. Another time. When the grass is higher, after a heavier rainfall, in a different light. It is a canny business, this hunting of the Bronze Age, like tracking some inordinately shy animal. He tells Michael to make one more circuit and tells me to keep snapping (because it can happen sometimes: the eye can’t see ghosts but the camera can).

  And yet there will be something to celebrate. When we’re back at the airfield. When we’ve landed and we’re all together in Derek’s den. Our little agreement. ‘Listen everyone, Jenny and I have got something to tell you.’

  We fly over the Wylye valley, across the southern fringe of the Plain to the Avon, then north towards Pewsey. Over our right shoulders, the spire of Salisbury Cathedral.

  I know this landscape is a lie. Skin deep. Hedgerowed, church-towered, village-strewn England. Rub the map and civilization as we know it disappears. The Bronze Age emerges. And Peter would be the first to point out that these vistas which we like to think of as virgin, naked countryside, the bare bosoms of hills and little pubic clumps of woodland, are all – if it has taken millennia – man-made.

  And rub the map again – ever so lightly this time – and a less benign illusion dissolves itself. Half of Wiltshire and Dorset, good lumps of Hampshire and Berkshire are military property. M.O.D. Keep Out. Not countryside any more – camouflage. When I first took up aerial photography I was amazed at the number of mysterious instal
lations, hidden at ground level and unmarked on Ordnance Survey maps, which, quite apart from the more or less advertised air bases and training areas, could be seen from the air. As if, wheeling overhead in a Cessna with a camera, you ran the risk of being taken for a spy.

  When I told Peter about these bird’s-eye revelations, he nodded, unsurprised, as if his own experience of archaeological espionage had led to the same discovery. He said, ‘But it’s nothing new. Look at a map of Bronze Age Britain, and what would stand out most prominently? Camps, forts, defence works. What was the great invention of the Bronze Age? The technology of warfare. The sword. That went out only in the last century. Strictly speaking, we’re still living in the Iron Age …’

  We forgot the men on the moon. We came in from the terrace. He poured more whisky and he said, ‘And I was the lucky one. The lucky one! I never asked to be head of BMC. You know that, don’t you? You’ve worked it all out, haven’t you? You know that I wished I’d been killed instead of Richard and Edward, don’t you?’

  One morning in March, Sophie, which must have been a very noisy and confused morning, in 1918, my father was standing in a trench in northern Picardy, when a grenade landed just a few paces away from him. This was near the town of Albert, ten miles north of the Somme, but at that time it must have seemed like nowhere on earth. The grenade, which landed some five yards from my father, happened also to land less than a foot from his commanding officer, who was lying at the time, unconscious and immobilized from a previous explosion, on the floor of the trench. My father ran to the grenade, picked it up, turned to throw it clear, and, as he did so, it exploded and blew off his arm.