Swan River

by David Reynolds

  She went into the kitchen and came back with two glasses and the remains of a bottle of red wine.

  ‘Is it OK for you to drink with the… you know?’

  ‘Yeah. There’s not much here anyway.’

  We drank and talked – about drawing, Chas, our parents, our old town. She said she’d love to see my mother again, and my father, and maybe go back to Marlow sometime. She seemed lively then, more like my old friend. When the wine was finished, she said there was no need for me to stay; Chas and the others would be back soon and she would be all right. I said that I’d stay until they arrived.

  She smiled. ‘Don’t you trust me? I don’t even know where you put my methadone.’

  ‘Of course I do.’ I wasn’t sure whether I did or not. ‘It’s next to the Marmite.’

  I asked whether she remembered our plan to go to Swan River, Manitoba.

  She did and she mentioned my grandfather and La Frascetti, though she had forgotten her name.

  I told her that her drawing was now hanging in my room at my father’s, how I had had it all through school, how Snape had polished the glass and

  that boys used to touch La Frascetti’s chest for good luck.

  She laughed and suggested we go to Swan River when I had my holiday from work in the summer.

  I was wondering how serious she was – and whether I, or she, could afford the trip – when we heard footsteps and voices in the hall. The rock group had returned, tired and grumbling about their audience. Peter was taking the van home and offered me a lift. Deborah wrote down the phone number and kissed my cheek.

  In the van I told Peter what had happened and how Deborah had said that she would follow the methadone treatment.

  ‘Well… let’s hope she sticks to it.’ He didn’t sound hopeful.

  * * * * *

  April was cool that year, but from the beginning of May the London air warmed slowly to a long climax of hot days and nights which lasted from the end of June until well into September. The King’s Road boutiques were filled with beads, kaftans, bells and colourful cotton scarves – for men to wear knotted around their necks. Pat wore all of the gear most of the time; Peter the Painter had a bell around his neck that made him sound like a cow on a Swiss mountainside, and happily endured the barracking of the older regulars in the Goat in Boots; I hid a tiny bell on a strip of leather under my shirt and a red cotton scarf, and pretended to be surprised when people heard its subtle tinkle. The scent of joss sticks and marijuana and the sounds of ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’ and ‘San Francisco – Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair’ pervaded Chelsea, Kensington and Notting Hill, and people were buying the magazine that I helped to stick together with Cow gum.

  Though I didn’t dress like an archetypal hippie, I embraced what they believed in and had the exhilarating feeling that the world was changing for the better, that I was part of something significant and was, myself, helping a little to bring it about.

  Drugs were a part of it. But to me, they weren’t important. I consumed other people’s from time to time, but the overreaction of the establishment – made known to all by the sentencing of Mick Jagger to prison for possessing four tablets of speed, bought legally in a chemist’s shop in Italy – reinforced the view that the authorities were oppressive and too cynical to believe in the possibility of peace, let alone universal love.

  It all seemed very straightforward to me, as it did to many of my peers:

  those who wanted to imprison Jagger were the allies of those who were so keen to destroy communism that they would kill and maim children in Vietnam and send their own sons to do it. As Martin put it in one of the cartoon strips I sat waiting for him to complete, they were imprisoned by their own tiny minds. Those people, we thought, couldn’t imagine a world where everyone loved everyone and there was no need for nationalism or wars. We could see that – and bring it about: by example, by having fun, and by defining everyone as our neighbour.

  Personally, I thought the new world should be organised on the principles of anarchism as described by Bertrand Russell in Roads to Freedom. That no one agreed with me on that detail didn’t reduce the excitement and energy that came from believing – for a short time, but for longer than just that summer – that somehow people would understand the bigger message and that the world would change.

  * * * * *

  Deborah and I met often for a while, and gradually I came to see her objectively for the first time. When I was younger, she had just been there, my supportive friend, who was funny and had a vivid imagination. Now I saw that she was exceptional – talented and clever – and had an unusual desire to explore and understand things, many of which I knew nothing about. She was interested in R.D. Laing and Marshall McLuhan, and lent me a book that I struggled to make sense of: Memories, Dreams, Reflections by Carl Jung. And she came closer than anyone to agreeing with me about anarchism – and was the only person who, on my recommendation, actually read Roads to Freedom.

  When I told my mother that I had found Deborah she immediately asked us both to dinner at her flat. She provided wine and the two of them talked animatedly about art. Later, when we were alone, my mother said she thought Deborah and I would make ‘a good pair’ – even though she was concerned about her thinness and the way she picked at her food. We were certainly good friends again but, even if Chas had not been around, I couldn’t imagine any other form of relationship.

  I took to dropping in at the flat in Earls Court and became friendly with Chas, and realised that, to a degree, he was her mentor as well as her lover. He looked at me with sad eyes and said how much he regretted making her aware of smack. He admired her talent and her intelligence and said he thought she was on some kind of quest, which he hoped she would resolve. Meanwhile she was vulnerable; he wanted to make her happy, but wasn’t sure how.

  I had seen no more signs of smack; when we arranged to meet, she always turned up, pale and smiling, in an afghan coat, with a red and black knitted bag on her shoulder. But then one night her head kept drooping and she fell asleep while I was talking to her in Finch’s; it was only half past eight. She seemed groggy when I woke her, and I walked her home. On another occasion, late at my flat, she asked me to lend her a pound for a taxi, and became angry, almost panic-stricken, when I didn’t respond instantly. Ruefully, Chas told me that she was back on smack. There seemed nothing I could do, except talk to her.

  Late one evening, she told me that she expected to kill herself within a year; she saw no point in life. She was frighteningly lucid and, though I argued for most of the night, I couldn’t convince her – or indeed myself – that there was a point. It seemed to be a matter of belief, rather than reason.

  She didn’t mention suicide again, and there were times when she was wholly the person I knew and used to rely on, but other times when it seemed that part of her was obliterated, replaced by panic or by the drug which made her seem as if she were sleepwalking. Unintentionally, imperceptibly, I began to see her less often.

  * * * * *

  On a warm night, late that summer, I went to a party in Battersea and stood holding a wineglass in a garden as darkness came on. A woman came towards me, peering into the gloom; she was holding a lighted cigarette. ‘That you, David?’ She had an Australian accent. It was Kate, Bonnie’s flatmate. We moved towards a light. Her skin was brown and her blonde hair had got blonder. As we talked, she said how sorry she was about what had happened with Bonnie.

  I raised my shoulders. ‘It’s in the past.’

  She told me that Bonnie had moved in with Bob, the American producer, and that, though they still worked in the same office, she had grown tired of Bonnie; she was too openly ambitious, and too frivolous at the same time. Kate raised her eyebrows and pulled down her mouth, and apologised for being bitchy.

  We got bored with the party and went for dinner at an Indian restaurant, where she talked about her boyfriend who only came to London once a month from Warwick where he was a graduate student. His n
ame was Johnny Holly.

  After that evening, we went out together often for many months. She loved music and dancing and our favourite places were the new psychedelic ones, UFO and Middle Earth, and sometimes, after midnight, we went to hear jazz at Ronnie Scott’s. I discovered that Bonnie’s Stan Getz and Dave Brubeck records were in fact Kate’s. ‘Bonnie had never heard of Stan Getz until she met me.’ With Kate, I felt free to confess that, until I met Bonnie, I hadn’t heard of him either.

  She was faithful to Johnny Holly and I tried to convince myself that I was content with that. But during the winter, when we had been close for some time, I found that I was in love with her. It was an obsession that had accrued gradually; I loved her company and her view of life – and I wanted more of her. I knew that I was in love because I just couldn’t stop myself taking the bold steps of saying so and writing letters telling her why and how wonderful she was. I dismissed what I had felt for Bonnie just a year earlier as a delusion. This was real love, not a sudden passion.

  But Kate couldn’t reciprocate; she loved Johnny Holly. She couldn’t give me back what I wanted to give her, and I couldn’t stop demanding it. A few weeks after I declared my love, I ended our friendship because it made me miserable. She told me I was mad.

  As they had done about a year before, Dave fed me pints of beer and Peter the Painter gave me advice. ‘What you felt for Kate really was love – not lust. I can see that, because you went out with her for months without thinking about lust, didn’t you?’

  I nodded feebly, wondering whether that was really true.

  24

  Treading Softly

  During those hot months of 1967 I visited my father from time to time, but always felt that I didn’t go often enough. He was grateful for my sporadic appearances and made a show of not putting pressure on me to see him more often which, of course, added to my feelings of guilt.

  On a Saturday afternoon in August, I suggested we drive to Marlow and perhaps walk by the river. I felt like being outside; the temperature was in the eighties and the sky was clear. By then, driving somewhere and taking a short, slow stroll was the best way to be outdoors with him; he had taken to walking with a stick – though he stressed that his stick didn’t have a rubber knob on the end, unlike those of real geriatrics.

  He liked the idea. ‘We could go to the lock and buy ice-creams, like we did when you were little.’

  Before we started I wound down all the Cresta’s windows, and my father handed me his tobacco tin and took his jacket off; he was wearing his hat, a white shirt and royal blue braces. We drove slowly along the A40 towards High Wycombe among the caravans and loaded roof racks of an endless stream of holidaymakers. As the fan blew the warm air from outside into our faces, my father cursed the caravan in front of us and all the other traffic and threw his hat over his shoulder on to the back seat.

  Rolling him a cigarette, I asked what he thought about anarchism, thinking he would broadly approve.

  ‘Anarchism! More right-wing than the bloody Tories.’ He pulled out in the hope of overtaking the caravan. ‘Traffic both ways. Curse it.’ He lifted his hands momentarily from the steering wheel.

  ‘I thought it was more left-wing than communism.’

  He pulled back in line with the caravan. ‘Well, it’s total laissez faire, isn’t it? And isn’t that a recipe for rich people doing what they like – devil take the hindmost?’

  ‘But, if everyone behaved decently – ’

  ‘The trouble is they won’t.’ He tapped his ash out of the window and glanced at me quickly; I must have looked disappointed. He smiled. ‘That’s the problem, Sunny Jim. The only thing that will interfere with the greed of the rich is giving power to the poor.’ He flicked the indicator; we were taking the side road from Holtspur to Bourne End. ‘Anarchism is all very well as a model, but it could only ever be achieved by changing human nature – completely and utterly.’

  He turned off the A40 and suddenly we could see for three or four miles, across the Thames to Winter Hill and the woods around Cookham. The sun was high above the trees across the river and my father flipped down the sun visor.

  We were soon sitting in stationary traffic in Bourne End, and I persisted in arguing that anarchism could work and that human nature – whatever that was – could change. My father was gently dismissive; possibly it could change a little, but only very slowly indeed, imperceptibly, as people became better educated. He had read Roads to Freedom soon after I gave it to him at Christmas, and pointed out that Bertrand Russell had written the book long ago, in 1918, and, even then, had thought that anarchism was an impractical dream.

  The traffic still didn’t move, and he cursed and wiped sweat from his forehead as a police car edged past, its siren wailing. He talked about Bakunin, whom he called the father of anarchism, and Rousseau who had advocated that everyone should live in the woods, like primitive tribesmen; eventually Rousseau had gone mad. He smiled. ‘You won’t go mad old chap, will you? You can’t save the world by yourself, you know.’

  I didn’t answer. I watched some children queuing to buy ice-creams and felt hot and irritated.

  He turned the engine off and pulled on the hand-brake. ‘I like that new magazine you’re working on, but – and I know I’ve said it before – I wish they’d stop telling people to take drugs. You aren’t taking any of those drugs are you? Pot, lysergic acid?’

  I lied to reassure him, as another police car squeezed past.

  He pointed at it and said he hoped they would hurry up and get the traffic moving. He nudged me in the ribs. ‘In an anarchic state, we would sit here for ever.’

  ‘No, everyone would get out of the way without needing the police to tell them.’

  He laughed. ‘And there’d be no traffic lights, and everyone would wave each other on out of sheer good nature, I suppose.’

  I couldn’t help smiling, but I was still worrying away at anarchism and the hippies and universal love. As the traffic started to move, I asked him why he didn’t have more faith in human nature. The answer seemed to involve original sin.

  We passed a motor bike lying on its side amid an array of flashing blue lights. Two men in white coats squatted beside a man on a stretcher at the side of the road. As we drove on, along the flat road to Marlow, a warm breeze came through the windows. A group of Friesians moved lazily in the shade of some trees towards the river, and the Marlow Donkey, the two-carriage train that shuttled between Marlow and Bourne End, chuffed by going the other way. I trailed my hand outside the window, cooling it in the wind. His mention of original sin was somehow demoralising; it made me wonder whether it was possible ever to have a new idea – whether it hadn’t all been thought already, hacked over interminably since Aristotle and Plato.

  As we came into Marlow, my father turned off the main road and deftly found his way through the familiar little streets. He stopped the car beside an old brick wall, a few yards from the gravel path that led to the lock. I wound the windows up while he stretched, picked up his stick and put his hat on. He gazed down the road at the cedar tree, the smooth lawn and the big, old house that had been Uncle George’s home. He waved his stick towards it, saluted with his left hand and muttered, ‘God bless you.’

  We bought ice-creams from the van at the end of the path. It had its bonnet open and its engine running. My father told the man inside how, when he had been an ice-cream man, he had been able to turn the engine off at every stop because the fridges were cooled by huge blocks of ice. The man nodded politely and turned away to serve some children.

  We licked at our 99s as we climbed to the crest of the curved wooden footbridge. There my father stopped to survey the river, the weir, the bridge and the church. He waved his stick. ‘One of my favourite views in all the world.’ It was a scene that he had painted and photographed several times. It also appeared on postcards and tea towels. He took a deep breath through his nose and let it out through his mouth. ‘Beautiful day for it, Sunny Jim.’ He hooked his stick o
ver the balustrade and put his arm on my shoulder. A line of pleasure boats was waiting to use the lock, and four or five swans were paddling by the bank near the yew tree in the graveyard. I put my arm lightly round his waist – and realised that I was taller than him, just a little; my eyes were level with the brim of his hat.

  We walked on and sat on a bench beside the lock. The ice-cream was dripping on to our fingers. Eight small boats filled the lock and we watched them rise gradually towards us, as water poured in through the sluices. A fat man in a peaked cap sat on a stool behind the wheel of a boat called Lorelei, and shouted self-importantly to a tired-looking girl with a rope in her hand. The lock-keeper smiled and looked on with his hands on his hips.

  I became aware that my father was looking in my direction, and saw that he was frowning – not at me, but at the ground by my feet, or at something he was thinking. He looked up at me with a curious smile. ‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? Yeats. I’ve been treading on your dreams. I’m sorry.’ He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘You are a clever boy. You must dream your dreams – and put them into practice if you can. Take no notice of what an old man thinks.’

  He must have seen something in my face. I felt sad, but tried not to show it. He was seventy-five and I was nearing nineteen. I gripped his arm near his shoulder; I could feel hard muscle – formed by the daily typing of his thoughts.

  * * * * *

  Later, after he had chatted to the lock-keeper and I had helped to push the heavy grey beams that opened the lock gates, we sat on the other side and he told me that he had, at last, found his father’s letters. He had gone through all his desk drawers, his two four-drawer filing cabinets and numerous cardboard boxes. They had been in the bottom drawer of the chest where he kept his clothes, in his bedroom. He thought they had probably been there since 1942, though the chest had been moved many times; he would have put them there after reading them, soon after his mother died.