Swan River

by David Reynolds

  ‘I didn’t know you could buy this in a shop. Fantastic – ’ He had gone before I finished speaking.

  Still grinning, he came back with a bottle of cherry brandy, tore the paper seal, pulled out the cork, plonked it on the table and suggested I pour some on. For a moment I thought that he was joking, but he laughed and said, ‘Go on. It’ll taste good.’

  Throughout my childhood there had always been a bottle of cherry brandy in a cupboard in the kitchen – possibly the same bottle – and my father had allowed himself a small glass at Christmas and New Year. The only other alcohol in the house had been a bottle of sherry which was occasionally offered to visitors and from which my mother had a glass about once a month before lunch on a Sunday.

  This was a new bottle of cherry brandy. He splashed some on to his Arctic Roll and passed me the bottle. ‘Go on.’

  I watched the red liquid running over his ice cream and seeping into the surrounding sponge cake. I poured a little on to my slice and then a little more. It was good and I told him so.

  ‘I may not have any capital – your mother owned the house, you probably know – but I’ve got a salary, lots of commission and I don’t have to support her any more – so we can spend a bit and enjoy ourselves.’ He started to cut two more slices of Arctic Roll.

  ‘But you don’t want to go on working for ever.’ He had recently had his seventy-second birthday.

  ‘I’m all right. I enjoy it… But I’ll stop one day.’

  Later we sat by the fire with cups of instant coffee. He turned the television on, and off again – there was a party political broadcast on behalf of the Conservative party on both channels.

  He smiled at me as he rolled a cigarette and said, ‘So how do you feel now about free will and determinism?’

  I sipped my coffee and wondered what was on television next. It was a subject he brought up from time to time. I had once made him very angry by suggesting that it wasn’t worth discussing; whatever the answer, people just went on living. He had shouted then – about freedom and responsibility. Did I not care whether the likes of Hitler and Mussolini, and Heath, ‘the acid bath murderer’, were accountable for their crimes – because they weren’t, if everything was determined? Since then I had tried to take the matter more seriously, but I hoped this was going to be a chat rather than a lecture with readings from the Encylopaedia Britannica.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve thought about it lately?’

  I smiled and shook my head. ‘No. No time for that kind of thing, Dad.’

  ‘Too worried about girls, I suppose.’ He laughed and lit his cigarette. Then he put it in an ashtray and stood up. ‘Let’s have a glass of cherry brandy. What do you think?’ He started walking towards the kitchen.

  ‘Okay. If you’re sure.’

  He seemed very happy – and I wondered whether he intended to get drunk. I had rarely seen him drink and had never seen him drunk. I had heard from my mother about him being drunk on some occasion before I was born. It hadn’t sounded very pleasant, not because he was violent but because he was sick all over the place and lay in bed groaning as he recovered.

  He came back with two small glasses of cherry brandy, sat down, raised his glass and said, ‘Your health.’

  I raised mine and repeated the toast. I sipped the cherry brandy, the first time I had tasted it undiluted by ice-cream. It was sweet and fiery. I took a larger gulp and swilled it round my mouth. My tongue and the inside of my cheeks burned.

  ‘You realise that you owe your existence to a rabbit.’ He was looking at me and smiling; I could see the deep creases at the sides of his eyes. I was startled and stared back blankly. He relit his cigarette. ‘I don’t mean anything to do with Darwin.’ He went on smiling. ‘I mean the rabbit that sat in the middle of the road, on a night when I took your mother for a drive… thirty years ago now.’

  I saw the connection: the Progressive Societies’ summer school, midsummer night, 1933. ‘I think I know what you mean… I read your book. Remember?’ I sipped at the cherry brandy and wondered at the way his mind worked.

  He leaned forward. There was going to be a lecture, but it looked like being an unusual one. ‘That rabbit caused you to be born. And, in a way that rabbit established that there is free will and determinism.’

  I leaned back in my chair cupping my glass in both hands.

  ‘Did the rabbit sit in the middle of the road, cleaning his whiskers, of his own free will? Or did the chemicals and the synapses in his brain determine that he sit there? Or did a higher power, God, for example – another form of determinism – make him sit there? And was it pure chance that I drove down the road with your mother at the moment that the rabbit chose, or perhaps was programmed, to sit in the middle of it?’ He tapped the low table between us with his forefinger. ‘I had no control over the matter of the rabbit being there – from my point of view that was determined – call it my fate. But, I think I exercised my free will when I decided not to run the rabbit over.’

  I started to smile. I found this very funny, but I wasn’t sure if I was meant to.

  He returned my smile, but went on. ‘I could have run the rabbit over. Your mother would have been horrified – and you wouldn’t exist. The question is: did I stop the car because I am chemically programmed not to run over rabbits – no, man is a hunter-gatherer, but that’s not the point – or because I chose not to run it over? Newtonian physics and the enlightenment philosophers – Bacon, Locke and so on – would say that my decision can be explained by science, somehow, ultimately. I used to believe that – I was brought up to believe it and that if we could understand how science works we could make a better world – but I’ve begun to question it lately – look at the atom bomb.’ He quickly poked the fire and pulled on his cigarette. ‘Think about it this way: I had nothing to gain by either running over the rabbit or not running it over – except that your mother would have disapproved if I had deliberately killed it, but then, if I had been alone, I would have made the same decision. Accrediting all actions to science and chemicals suggests that what follows an action can, theoretically, be predicted; I couldn’t predict that I was going to fall in love with your mother fifteen minutes later, and she with me. An action determined by chemicals has to have a predictable result. I’m inclined to think that I decided – of my own free will – not to run the rabbit over, and that no scientist, or omnipotent God, could have predicted the result. Therefore, there is free will.’ He sat back with a contented smile and asked whether I agreed with what he had just said – whether it made sense.

  I told him it did, and I meant it. I liked to think that I and everyone else had free will – even if, but for him, I would never have thought about it. And I liked it when he spoke quickly and clearly about what he thought were important matters. I had a suspicion that some professional philosopher would refute what he had just said, but I didn’t care. I loved him, and what he had said made sense to me.

  He stretched and seemed pleased, and then talked about what he had, in fact, gained from using his free will to stop the car to oblige the rabbit: me and my mother; he dropped his voice and stared into the fire when he mentioned her. And I wondered whether his interest in free will and the rabbit had arisen, because what had begun that night in 1933 had now ended.

  Later he talked about the sixteen years and the ‘trillions and billions of sperm’ that it had taken to conceive me. I didn’t like thinking about his sperm and wondered if he was getting a little drunk. And, though I didn’t want to, I couldn’t help contemplating the places where his sperm had fetched up and the five children it had helped to create – I had seen photographs of his first two wives.

  ‘Now that was chemically explainable, determined you might say. Your mother’s womb – ’

  I managed to stop him by saying that I knew all about that – and turned the conversation on to Spurs and the dreadful news that Dave Mackay had broken his leg at Old Trafford the previous Saturday. As we speculated about who could possi
bly replace him, a man both of us admired and spoke of as though he were a friend, I began to feel tired – and wondered whether cherry brandy was very alcoholic.

  * * * * *

  I woke early and opened the curtains. There was a mist hovering above an expanse of lawn. Fifty yards away a line of leafless trees, with a spattering of rooks’ nests, rose behind dull green bushes. I could hear the clacking of my father’s typewriter. I turned on the fire and put on my dressing gown.

  Beside the window there was a set of bookshelves, about six feet high and three feet wide, one of many similar structures that had been dotted around our old house, built hurriedly by my father from unplaned wood. It was filled with books, but I had only glanced at it the night before.

  Two shelves contained my old books, an assortment that included Treasure Island, Eagle and Tiger annuals, The Catcher in the Rye, The Carpetbaggers, Peyton Place and some Agatha Christies. On the other shelves were books that belonged to my father, although it seemed that he had put them there with me in mind. He had once written a list for me of what he considered to be ‘essential reading for anyone who wishes to call themselves educated’. It named about thirty books, most of which seemed to be on the shelves in front of me – including a six-volume Everyman edition of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, three volumes of War and Peace and Prescott’s Conquest of Peru.

  The top shelf was full of paperbacks, mostly orange and white striped Penguins, with a few green ones – Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Raymond Chandler – at one end. On the bottom shelf, next to several light blue cloth-bound volumes by Daniel Defoe, was a row of books with beige cloth spines. Though I had seen only a few of them before, I knew that they were my grandmother Sis’s diaries.

  I pulled out the Tiger Annual for 1957 and read the cartoon strip that had been my favourite six years earlier, ‘Dodger Caine and the Amazing Hoop-la Wheeze’. It was disappointing – an absurd story with clearcut heroes and villains – and I wondered why I had been so entranced by it; perhaps because it was set in a boys’ boarding school, a location that at the time had seemed exotic and exciting. I tried the ‘Rockfist Rogan’ strip; the pictures – of handsome British fighter pilots and angry-looking Germans – were still good to look at, but the story was silly.

  I put the Annual back and ran my finger along the spines of my grandmother’s diaries, counting them; there were sixteen. I pulled out the one at the right-hand end to check the year; it was 1901. Next to it was 1900 and at the other end of the row was 1886. My father had put them in order. I had read the first four. I picked the fifth one, 1890, opened it and soon remembered that I had read some of this one as well, but not all of it. I wanted to read more, but I wanted to concentrate, not just skim through. Perhaps when I came back in January I would take time and read.

  13

  Two Turkeys

  On Christmas Eve, swaddled in overcoats, scarves and gloves, my father and I drove up the A4 – which my father called ‘the Bath Road’ – towards Buckinghamshire. The sky was a clear light blue, snow was forecast and the heater in the A35 struggled to keep the windscreen clear of our condensed breath. As we sat in a queue of slow-moving traffic on the edge of Marlborough, my father asked me whether I had thought any more about original sin.

  ‘No. Not really, Dad.’ I had never liked the sound of original sin. It was a peculiar expression for what seemed to mean taking a dim view of babies, although from previous discussions and readings out loud from The Encyclopaedia Britannica I knew that it meant more than that.

  ‘Well I have.’ He wiped condensation from the window beside him and passed me the damp duster. ‘Give the back window a wipe. There’s a good chap.’ I stood on my seat and stretched across to the back. ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that it is an optimistic, rather than a pessimistic, doctrine, because it carries within it the notion of the perfectibility of man. I think that is what St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas were getting at…’ – the back of the seat was digging into my stomach, and however hard I tried I couldn’t reach the corners of the window – ‘not to mention Plato.’ I twisted round and sat back in the seat. He looked at me as he inched the car forward. ‘Could you give that a wipe?’ He gestured at the window beside me.

  ‘I’m actually beginning to think that Voltaire was wrong. He called St Augustine a debauched African, you know. He could have been right about that… but I think he may have been wrong to insist that children are born sweet and innocent. Obviously, original sin isn’t inherited from Adam and Eve’ – he blew his nose loudly and thoroughly – ‘but it could be inherited from your parents. What do you think?’ He turned and looked at me. The car was stationary. A small girl was looking at us from the back window of a black Ford V8. ‘I mean… take that little girl. Do you think she’s sinful?’

  ‘How would I know?’

  He turned sharply. ‘I’m just using her as a symbol… blast it! For all children.’ He slapped his hands down on the steering wheel.

  I tried to think of something intelligent to say. I thought about the time when Deborah’s father had found us in the bathroom looking at each other’s privates. We were four years old. That wasn’t sinful; my father had said it was natural curiosity. Then I remembered sticking the needle in Jessop’s bottom. ‘I think… probably… all humans are capable of bad behaviour… even babies… and therefore, yes, that little girl is sinful – though that seems a rather strong way to put it.’

  ‘That’s what I think, though for years I agreed with Voltaire… and Rousseau… until I started thinking about it again, recently. The good thing is…’ He passed me his tobacco tin. ‘Roll us one will you? …that that ought to mean that everyone has the potential to improve from birth onwards. With the right nurturing and education, that little girl could become a saint.’

  ‘And with the wrong nurturing she could become a Nazi I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, but not necessarily. She might have something within herself, from her genes – perhaps a gene from a saintly ancestor – that would make her rebel against her Nazi parents.’ He peered through the windscreen at the little girl and waved at her. She stuck her tongue out. I finished rolling and handed him the cigarette. ‘There you are! Sinful! But hopefully not a Nazi.’ He waved again. The little girl turned away and spoke to someone. A woman in a headscarf appeared beside her in the window and frowned at us.

  ‘She looks like a Nazi.’

  He picked up the duster and wiped the windscreen. ‘She looks like Mrs Larkins to me – Peggy Mount, you know?’ He dabbed again at the damp glass. ‘Don’t you think? Can you see properly?’ He handed me the duster.

  The woman was still looking in our direction. She did look like Peggy Mount. ‘Well… it could be.’

  ‘I think it is… Do you want to get her autograph?’

  ‘No Dad.’

  ‘I bet she wouldn’t mind. She’s probably very nice, in real life.’

  ‘I’m not going to get out of the car and go and ask that woman if she’s Peggy Mount…’ I started to laugh to myself at the thought. ‘She might not be…’ I was giggling and my voice was becoming uncontrollably high-pitched. ‘What would happen then?’ He turned towards me. He was laughing silently too. ‘You go and ask her.’ I pushed him on the arm.

  ‘Nothing would happen. She’d just say, “I’m not Peggy Mount, but thank you for asking.”’ He made an involuntary farting noise with his lips. His face broke into a broad smile and his eyes turned down at the corners – he looked as though he might be going to cry. He leaned forward with his face on the steering wheel, stretched out his arm, pushed me and squeaked, ‘I’m not going to go…’ He was holding his stomach and didn’t seem able to speak. ‘There might be a man in the front. I could get punched.’ For a few seconds his whole body shook and, again, he couldn’t speak. ‘On the nose.’ He rocked up and down in his seat and started howling. ‘Oh dear! Oh God! Peggy Mount!’ He pulled out his handkerchief. There were tears on his cheeks. ‘Suppose it wasn’t her…’ I
was stuck firm in silent giggling – my stomach ached and no sound would come out. Laughter was coming from him in huge rhythmic whoops. Peggy Mount and the small girl were six feet away, frowning at us. My face was covered in sweat. I put my head on the windscreen and wound down the window. My father was saying, ‘But you wouldn’t…get punched. Go on!… Go and see if that’s Peggy Mount. Mr Mount wouldn’t punch a child.’

  I felt sick and stuck my head out of the window. At last the ability to make sounds returned. ‘I’m not a child…’ I pulled my head in and lay back wiping my face on my sleeve. ‘I’m a rebellious teenager. They’d hit me before you.’

  Peggy Mount turned away as the V8 suddenly moved forward. My father started the engine and said, ‘Where do you think Peggy’s going for Christmas?’ He picked up his cigarette from the floor. I was too exhausted to answer. The small girl went on staring at us, all the way to Newbury.

  * * * * *

  Ann is my father’s daughter from his second marriage – the one whose mother and baby sister had died within a week of each other, and whom my mother and father had discussed in front of a rabbit on midsummer night 1933, a few minutes before they decided to get married. She was twenty when I was born.

  My father also had two children from his first marriage, both of whom had children who were a little older than me. Ann had a husband, a son who was six years younger than me and two aunts, sisters of her dead mother, both of whom had husbands and children. Most of these people were crammed into Ann’s house for Christmas.

  On Christmas morning I found Ann alone in her kitchen and asked her what she knew about my mother’s nervous breakdown during the war – Ann had been a teenager then, living with my parents and going to a local school. She remembered: my mother had been taken away in a car; it hadn’t been serious. It had likely been caused by the way my father treated her; for one thing he had undermined my mother’s attempts to get close to her, Ann, but there were other things – she hinted that he had been interested in another woman.