Swan River

by David Reynolds

  Old George, who didn’t like small talk unless it was about furniture, mentioned home rule for Ireland. The Thompsons were all liberals – admirers of Gladstone, despisers of Disraeli and Salisbury. Stanley had much to say and Sis could see that her father approved. By the time the Alices had cleared away the guinea fowl, which had followed the fish which had followed the soup, and Big Alice was placing the cheese on the table, Sis had relaxed and was talking as much as the men. Her father was smiling and nodding at Stanley’s suggestions for improving the lives of London’s poor, and Stanley was moving the conversation on to socialism, knowing that he was on broadly safe ground; Old George had reservations, as indeed had Sis, but the conversation remained a discussion without becoming an argument.

  When the fruit had been cleared and the port and cigars arrived, Sis, who would usually have left the room, glanced at her father and decided to stay. She felt at ease and talkative, and screeched with horror when Stanley, prompted by Ernest and with Old George’s and her own gracious permission, explained in some detail why it was likely that Jack the Ripper was a surgeon.

  At midnight, when a hansom cab called for Stanley, they were calmly discussing prostitution and the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act. Stanley was cheerily seen off at the door by every member of the household except Big Alice. Old George shook his hand heartily and told him he must come again very soon.

  Sis picked up her skirts to walk down the steps and saw Stanley into his cab, receiving a brief kiss on the lips. When she returned to the house, she smiled as she passed Little Alice in the hall carrying one more fully-laden tray. Pausing outside the drawing-room door, she heard her father’s voice, ‘…charming and clever. Perfect for Sis I am afraid.’

  The three men were sitting by the fire sipping port. Her father told her how much he liked Stanley, describing him as very intelligent, and handsome in the same way that Young George was handsome. Sis poured herself a small glass and sat on the arm of her father’s chair. She could see what he meant; there was a similarity of colouring and build. Ernest agreed, but Young George snorted and said, ‘Tommy-rot.’

  Later Sis went to say good night to her father. He held her face in his hands and said, ‘I told you I would like him.’ She couldn’t remember him telling her that, but didn’t care; her greatest wish had been that her father would like the man she loved. She kissed him on the nose and told him that she knew Stanley liked him too.

  Before she went to bed Sis wrote several pages in her journal, and then found that she was too excited to sleep.

  6

  Deborah’s Room

  On a Saturday in March, almost exactly two years after Uncle George had died, I played seven-a-side football at the recreation ground as I had regularly throughout that winter. There was a league, organised by someone’s father, a policeman, who was often our referee. Richard, Adam, Patrick, a friend of Patrick’s called Bobby and I were the regulars in Claremont Station, our team – named after the two streets between which we all lived. Bobby was our goalkeeper, and he was good – we were second out of eight in the league – but on this occasion he didn’t turn up. The game, against a team from the Baptist Sunday School, was delayed for twenty minutes while Patrick, our captain, went off to look for him.

  The sun was out, warming our backs as we kicked the ball around, waiting; it lit up the fields on the curving slopes of Glory Hill, a mile or two to the north. A tractor chugged slowly up and down, transforming a patch of yellow into brown, and a mixed herd of Jerseys and Guernseys, bursts of gold on a dark ground, moved lazily in a field marked by a pair of ancient oaks. Patrick returned with a stand-in goalkeeper, his brother Dennis.

  Dennis played wearing jeans and a flat cap, covered himself in mud and let in four goals in the first half; he hated football. Thankfully, Adam, who was small and fast, had scored a hat-trick and I had managed to convert a penalty. By half-time a persistent drizzle had set in, and I noticed that there was a spectator on the touchline, and then that it was my father; he was wearing his new simulated-sheepskin car coat and his old green-brown hat. I wasn’t totally surprised; he had a habit of turning up unexpectedly – and sometimes embarrassingly – at my school.

  Patrick put himself in goal for the second half and Dennis was sent out to the left wing where he jumped up and down with his hands in his pockets. Adam was moved from the left wing to the right, and Richard moved into Patrick’s crucial half-back position. I remained at centre forward, but with little hope of a pass coming in from the left.

  Early in the second half I got a strong shot on goal, but the keeper caught it against his midriff and swiftly rolled it out to his captain, an oversized fifteen-year-old with aggressively short hair. The boy set off at speed towards the halfway line. Through the drizzle I could see my father shouting and waving at Dennis, urging him to tackle him. Dennis rushed towards him, but skipped daintily sideways at the crucial moment. The captain of the Baptists charged on and cleverly rounded our left back. Patrick stormed out of goal towards him. As Patrick closed on him, the boy passed neatly to a player running in on his left who booted the ball into an open goal.

  Patrick moved his brother into the central, half-back position, and restored Adam and Richard to their normal positions on the wings. The idea was that, even if he couldn’t tackle anyone or pass the ball, Dennis should cause some distraction by running around in the middle of the pitch, while the rest of us tried to get an equaliser. The tactic worked. Our right back sent a long pass up to Richard who moved in towards goal, kicking the ball past me to Adam who was coming in fast from the left. Adam scored his fourth, volleying to the goalkeeper’s left.

  Five-all, and there was less than five minutes to play. From the kick-off the Baptists plunged themselves into attack, leaving only one full-back between me and their goalkeeper, but every time we cleared the ball it was kicked back into our penalty area. Everyone but me was back in defence, and I was in our half of the field.

  I thought we would be lucky to draw; there seemed little hope of us getting it into their half, and no chance whatever of us scoring. Then, Dennis, who had been fulfilling his brief by dancing crazily about in front of their players, was kicked on the shin by the Baptists’ captain. He fell over and we were awarded a free kick deep in our own half. We ran back up the field and – except for Dennis, who stood in the middle of the Baptists’ half gesticulating at the youth who had kicked him – packed into their penalty area as Patrick came out of goal to take the kick.

  The whistle blew and he hoofed it towards us. It was high in the air and one of the Baptists headed it straight back up the field. It hit Dennis in the chest and bounced in front of him. He looked up towards the rest of us, kicked the ball ahead of him and ran after it. I ran sideways across the front of the penalty area, shouting to him to pass, but he kept on running and managed to keep the ball at his feet. As a horde of Baptists charged at him, he ignored all our shouts and kicked the ball as hard as he could. It flew past my shoulder and seemed to have a curve on it. I looked round in time to see the keeper rushing across, arms flailing. The ball sailed past him and into the top right corner of the goal.

  The whistle blew for full-time. We bunched round Dennis, clapping him long and hard on the back. Patrick rubbed his brother’s hair and kept shouting, ‘He scored! The little bastard! He scored!’ Dennis grinned and shrugged and said, ‘No trouble. Any time. Easy.’ My father appeared among us and shook our hero, whom he had never met before, interminably by the hand and told him it was the best goal he had seen since a sixty-five-yard dribble by Vivian Woodward at White Hart Lane in 1908. The Baptists drooped away muttering.

  The sun came out again and my father joined us as we strolled back from the ground. He walked with Dennis and me, his hat to one side of his head, and told Dennis he would make a great footballer if he could master the sliding tackle, as perfected by the current Spurs centre half, Maurice Norman. When we got to the Marlow Donkey, the brown-painted pub by the railway station, my father went
in and bought everyone, including himself, a Coca-Cola and a bag of crisps, ferrying it all out on a tray because we boys weren’t allowed inside. We stood in the sun by the side of the road as he told all of us, individually, that we had the makings of great footballers.

  We finished our drinks and left. My father went off to call on Wing Commander Hayes – a close friend and the only man in town who knew more about budgerigars than he did. I walked towards home with Dennis and Patrick. It started to rain again. As we parted on the corner of Mill Road, Dennis said, ‘Great man, your dad.’

  As I walked the fifty yards home I thought about the Saturday football games – how I would miss them. They were already looking for another centre forward; my first day at the new school was just five weeks off.

  A little later I left the house and walked slowly around two corners into Institute Road. Warm yellow light came from the library windows, and the streetlights were flickering on as I reached the High Street and crossed towards the fluorescent glow behind the steamy plate glass of the Sugar Bowl Milk Bar. I could hear Little Richard screaming from the juke box. I knew that inside there was chrome, coffee and Coca-Cola, tight T-shirts, black leather and lipstick. The Sugar Bowl was a paradise in which I didn’t yet belong. I knew because I had entered it a few weeks earlier with Richard and Adam; we had been too tentative and too young by a year or two – no Brylcreem and nothing to say to girls with tight sweaters and lacquered hair; we had smoked and sipped Seven Up in a corner by the door, and were relieved when we returned to the street.

  My mother’s old shop was just closing, but Deborah’s father was still behind his counter in front of the Easter eggs. He was tall and wore rectangular glasses with brass rims and strips of black plastic above each lens. He looked down at me and smiled. ‘She’s upstairs, with her mother. Go on up.’ I pushed aside the curtain at the back of the shop and climbed the narrow stairs with their fitted, wall-to-wall carpet. The living room was the first-floor front.

  Deborah’s mother was stitching something on her sewing machine and Deborah was helping, holding the cloth straight as it came out from under the needle. They turned their heads towards me; neither of them could move her hands. Deborah looked at me and frowned. ‘Hello. Wasn’t expecting to see you.’

  Her mother’s mouth was full of pins; she tried to smile and managed to raise her eyebrows. I had known her almost as long as I could remember; she always seemed the same, cheerful and chatty, with lipstick, make-up and glossy, dark brown hair, permed into waves. She pulled out the pins, said something about the weather and left the room.

  ‘What’s up?’ Deborah was looking at me with her eyebrows lowered, a concerned expression that I knew well.

  I went on standing in the middle of the carpet and didn’t answer immediately. ‘Nothing…much.’ I wasn’t sure why I had come.

  She took my hand, pulling me towards the door. ‘I want to show you something.’

  We went to her room at the back of the house. It had been hers since she was born, and I had known it for almost ten years. She rearranged it from time to time – the wallpaper was now delicate and floral in shades of blue – but it always felt familiar, a small, light, low-ceilinged room with a bed in the corner beside the door. Deborah liked white. The bed had a white bedspread, the few pieces of furniture were painted white, and an off-white carpet covered most of the floor. The window looked out on the yard at the back of the shop, where the family car, an old black Austin A40, was surrounded by piles of empty cardboard boxes.

  Deborah flopped across the bed with her back against the wall. She looked up at me, grinning. ‘What’s different?’ She glanced quickly around the room.

  I sat on the white chair and stared at the wall behind her. There were three familiar pictures and at the end, next to the bookcase by the window, were several photographs of Elvis, cut from magazines and gummed at odd angles to a piece of white-painted hardboard; like all our parents, Deborah’s didn’t allow anything to be stuck to the walls with Sellotape. I had seen them all before.

  I turned around. Above her chest of drawers was a rectangular mirror with about a dozen photographs pushed between the frame and the glass. I got up and looked at them, but they were the same as the last time I’d looked; along with photographs of her family and other friends, there was one of us together by the river, taken by my father the previous summer. Towards the door was a print of Van Gogh’s sunflowers, which had been there as long as I could remember, and another piece of hardboard with pictures of men in white T-shirts pasted to it: James Dean and Marlon Brando – the man, unknown to us two years before and who my father had said resembled his father. I raised my hands in a shrug. Deborah giggled and pulled her legs up underneath her.

  I scanned the walls again, examined the books and ornaments on her shelves, and looked at the floor and the white ceiling. Then I saw it. Above the head of the bed, beside the door, in an upright frame, was a pencil drawing, about fifteen inches high and ten across. It showed a woman standing on her hands, her skirt falling in folds around her torso, her legs bent; with one foot she was brandishing a violin, with the other a bow. Underneath was written, in sloping capitals, ‘LA FRASCETTI’.

  ‘Brilliant!’ I clapped my hands, and leant forward for a closer look.

  Deborah got off the bed and stood beside me. ‘I did it for school. The teacher loves it. It’s going into a county competition. She told me to frame it.’

  ‘Brilliant!’ I said again. La Frascetti’s hair was hanging straight down around her face, almost touching the floor. Her knickers were striped vertically and reached to her waist. ‘That’s how I imagined her, but I couldn’t see how her legs would be.’ I bent closer again. ‘They must have been like that. How did you know?’

  ‘Look.’ She fetched a doll from the cupboard where she kept her clothes. It was old-fashioned and slim and jointed at the knees and elbows; she had had it for years. It was dressed in a short dress and had short dark hair. She held it upright by the feet, pushed its arms upwards, then turned it upside down on the table with its face towards us. I squatted down to look as Deborah bent its knees forwards and outwards. ‘I copied it from this.’ She picked up two hair clips and held them against the doll’s feet. ‘Violin and bow. See?’

  I stood up. ‘Brilliant. She must have held them like that. It’s the only way.’ I looked at the picture again. ‘Brilliant. Really brilliant.’

  She was standing by the table. ‘What did you want to say?’

  ‘Nothing really…just the boarding school thing.’

  She pushed her hair back behind her ear and looked serious. ‘It’s a challenge – a kind of test, I suppose.’

  ‘I’m going to miss the football team…and not just that, Richard, Adam, you…Dennis. I like Dennis.’

  She picked up the doll and twisted its limbs around. ‘There’ll be holidays and we can go on being friends.’ She picked up my hand and held it in both of hers. ‘Maybe I can come and visit you.’ She laughed and I noticed her gums.

  ‘You’d have to come with my mum and dad.’

  ‘That’d be OK.’

  She let go of my hand and sat down on the chair, then picked up my hand again. ‘You’ll be eighteen by the time you leave. I could come and see you by myself before then.’

  ‘God. I hadn’t thought of that.’ I sat down on the bed. Maybe I wouldn’t stay there that long. I twisted my hands together; I could feel the familiar tingle of apprehension.

  It had grown dark outside. I thought about the town: the lock, the Odeon, the library, the alleyway behind the shops that led to the park and the river. We had lived above the shop for six years. There had been no garden – just a concrete yard like Deborah’s, with a car and empty boxes; instead we used to walk down the alleyway to the park, play on the swings, roll down a bank and lie on the grass. When I was very young, my mother had sometimes taken me through a door set into the old brick wall that lined the alleyway. Inside was a garden, beautifully kept, filled with flowers. I
could remember the smell of primroses and the drops of water on their petals. There had been blue flowers with butterflies on them; my mother had shown me a peacock and a red admiral. And there was a wooden summerhouse, built of dark planks – but no other building in that garden. It was owned by a rich man who lived alone in a big house in the High Street. He rarely went out and I had never seen him, but my mother had somehow got his permission to take me into his garden. We called him ‘the miser’.

  Deborah stood up and walked to the window. ‘Let’s do something, tomorrow. Go up the river to Temple or Hurley. Have a picnic.’

  She had never said so, but I knew she liked the river, the birds and boats and locks, and the backdrop of hills and woods, as much as I did. ‘OK, as long as it isn’t raining.’ I stood up to go and peered again at La Frascetti. ‘It’s so good. You couldn’t do another one just like it…for me?’

  She smiled. ‘Maybe. I might.’ She raised her eyebrows and shrugged. ‘Might not come out right, another time.’

  The night was cold and damp. Particles of condensation floated in the air around the streetlights; the headlights of a lorry glowed down by the bridge. I walked past the shops. I was conscious of an unusual sadness, and wasn’t sure whether it was within my control, whether I could halt it voluntarily. I was looking at the shops as if I might never see them again: Coster’s, the tobacconist, with its exotic smells and bowls of pipe tobacco with handwritten labels; Maison George, where I had had my first proper haircut, sitting high up on a special cushion and marvelling at the back of my head repeated endlessly in a tunnel formed by two mirrors; Milward’s, the shoe shop where I had put my feet into a machine containing X-rays and seen my toes hazily silhouetted against an eerie green light inside new pairs of Clark’s sandals; W. H. Smith and Lloyds Bank, where some of the assistants and clerks recognised me and knew who my parents were. The Home and Colonial Stores, Woolworth’s, Keen’s the camera shop, Aldridge the greengrocer, Martin’s the electrical store, Platt’s Garage, the florist called Pinkney’s Nursery, the ironmonger around the corner whose name I couldn’t recall. It was said to be a market town, and to me much of its identity came from its shops and the people I saw, inside them and in the streets.