by Graham Swift
Now and then, when I travel on the Tube, I get this feeling that something terrible and inevitable is going to happen. All those bodies crammed together, all those furtive faces searching each other. All this mystification. And I can’t help thinking of the populations of animals which live in burrows – rats, lemmings – which (I read somewhere) exist in far greater concentrations than any human population. When I get out at Clapham South, up into the air, past the newsstand and the florist’s, I breathe a deep breath of relief. Opposite the station is the common – criss-crossed and encircled by incessant chains of ill-tempered traffic – but it is the common. It’s spring. There are daffodils nodding near the bowling-green on my walk home; the sticky-buds are opening on the chestnuts, and there are catkins on the silver birches. There is no doubt what commons are for. They are proof that, huddled as we are in cities, we couldn’t live without trees and grass, at the expense of no matter what urban convenience. And this need crops up in many ways. Marian, for example, as I’ve already mentioned, keeps indoor plants. In the winter, when the garden is dead and colourless, our house still sprouts with leaves. And whenever I am in one of my moods, Marian talks to her plants. It’s true. Going round with her plastic watering-can, she has whole conversations with them.
Have I described my wife? She is thirty-two. She has sandy-blond hair, straight and light so that when the wind catches it, it blows, in a rather clichéd but, for all that, artless way across her face. She has a slender, supple and still provocative figure, even though she has been a mother for ten years. I am particularly grateful that she hasn’t slumped as some women do after they have had their children. You could say that my wife has her share of beauty. Why does that statement half catch me unawares? Her face is a little on the long side, but because her mouth is full and her eyes large (blue, with little chips of green in them), you wouldn’t notice this. She has a way of lowering her eyes and then raising them and suddenly opening them wide when someone speaks or when something claims her attention, as if she spends all her life far away, in a trance – which is not to say that she cannot be alert, even athletic. This blank, startled expression sometimes makes me feel (it is a strange thing to say, I admit) that she doesn’t know who I am. Before we were married and we had Martin and Peter she worked as a physiotherapist in a hospital. She likes pale colours, but I prefer her in dark ones. Her complexion is smooth, on the pale side, and is one of those complexions which never change very much with mood or emotion – which suggest passivity or concealment. But the thing I like most about Marian (excuse me again if this sounds odd) is her malleability, her pliancy; the feeling I get that I could mould and remodel her (she must have learnt a thing or two at that physiotherapy clinic), contort and distort her, parcel her up and stretch her into all kinds of shapes, but, just as you can work a piece of clay a thousand times but still have left the same piece of clay, she would still, at the end of it all, be Marian. Marian.
[4]
When Quinn called me in yesterday I should have taken my opportunity to confront him about the missing files. When he said, ‘We don’t want things to get mislaid, do we?’ and gave that knowing smile, that was surely a hint. I should have taken my cue and said, ‘Talking of mislaid files …’ What a cowardly man I am.
But let me tell you what passed between us before Quinn mentioned my promotion. We were discussing the report I had brought in, which merely required his approval before being sent off. I won’t bore you with details. When we discuss such things we talk in a sort of code (people, when you think about it, spend a lot of their time talking in code). Quinn sat in his black leather, brass-studded chair, I stood at his shoulder. A band of sunlight spread from the window, and I was tempted to say, ‘The cherry tree is looking nice, sir’ – the sort of chirpy, fatuous remark that is really unthinkable in our office. Quinn’s hair smelt very slightly of some sort of lotion. On the wall, behind his desk, above a black filing cabinet, is a photograph showing several lined-up army officers – one of which I assume to be Quinn, though I have never had the chance to look that closely – and dated April ’44. It’s about the only personal item in Quinn’s entire office. Quinn approved of my report and pushed it briskly to one side. He sniffed vigorously and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘Now what about C9? How are you getting on with that?’ (C9 is the reference number of a case I am currently working on; it’s not the real number, of course – I couldn’t tell you that.)
Now C9 happened to be one of those cases for which Quinn himself had given me instructions but in which certain of the file items proved to have virtually no connexion at all. For example, File B in the series contained information relating to X (now deceased), a former civil servant, sacked for alcoholic incompetence and later arrested for a number of petty frauds and sexual offences, who had made allegations against a certain Home Office official, Y – allegations subsequently investigated (without Y’s knowledge, either of the allegations or the investigation) and found to be false. X died of a heart attack while undergoing trial. File C in the series contained no reference to X or Y, but was a report on another Home Office official, Z, apparently unconnected, professionally or personally, with Y (or X), who had committed suicide (by stepping in front of an Underground train) shortly after the secret investigations on Y. This death was subsequently thoroughly investigated, with negative results as far as officialdom was concerned – but with great distress to the unfortunate widow, who had to reveal, under pressure, intimate details about her and her husband’s personal life: the mess of their marriage, his sexual incompetence, his cruelty to her, his attempting once to sleep with his nineteen-year-old daughter, an assault on his son with a garden knife, etc., etc. File D in the series was even remoter from X and Y, and File E was not on the shelves. As for the reasons for the C9 inquiry – some new evidence which had come retrospectively to light – Quinn was hanging on to this himself.
When Quinn asked me about C9 I think I looked at him for signs of madness.
‘I’m sorry, sir. I’m having some difficulty in connecting some of the items. If I could –’
I knew what was coming. When you are in Quinn’s office you are the luckless schoolboy hauled before the headmaster.
‘Good God, Prentis! How long have you had C9 – and how long have you been in this department? You realize I entrust you with these more important cases because you’re the senior assistant. You realize that, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. And you’ve made no headway?’
I know what he wanted me to say. He wanted me to say that there was a connexion between X and Z. The obvious thing. But if I said this I knew what his retort would be: ‘So there’s a connexion between X and Z. Proof? Lurid imagination, Prentis, lurid imagination. No good in this job.’
‘Perhaps – if I had a little more information to work on?’
(File E, for instance.)
Quinn cupped his hands behind his head and made his leather chair swivel slightly from side to side. He seemed to be waiting for something. He is one of those men who maintains his authority even though he may be sitting, in a nonchalant posture, and you are standing, close by him, looking down at him. He looked at me steadily, the light from the window reflected in his glasses. Some of the grey hairs round the fringes of his scalp are really a pure white. The scalp itself gleams like pink wax. And then, as often happens when I’m face to face with Quinn, I found myself hurriedly, and for no apparent reason, revising my impression of him. No, not mad – whatever Quinn is, he isn’t mad. And I had this sudden urge to say to him, in all sincerity: I don’t understand. Please tell me. You see, I don’t understand at all.
‘More information? Good heavens, limited information is why we’re here, Prentis. If we had all the information we wanted, we’d be gods, wouldn’t we?’
We know very little about Quinn personally in our office. It’s generally believed he’s a divorcee or an old bachelor. For some reason, as he looked at me I felt quite sure he could not b
e a father.
‘Very well. I’ll take over C9. If you’ll bring me all you have …’ He took his hands from behind his head and gave a resigned snort. ‘And you’d better make your final draft of this.’ He took the folder containing the original report we had been discussing, closed it and pushed it towards me across the desk.
‘Oh – before you go –’
And then it was that he became, in a single instant, amiable, confiding – and up came the subject of my promotion.
So unexpected was this turn of events that my first response was disbelief. Why should he have chosen this moment to raise my hopes, after having humbled me and effectively slandered my competence? Why should he have thrown me off balance if not for some hidden, ulterior motive? As he spoke of ‘off the record’ and ‘strictly between you and me’ I had an odd idea. Supposing he clearly read my suspicions about the office ‘system’? Supposing I was being tested? Could my promotion to Quinn’s position be conditional upon my speaking up, like a responsible and dutiful under-officer, and voicing my suspicions? Or could it be that this mention of promotion had no real basis at all (I am still wondering this), that it was just another of his little games to confuse and harass me?
When he tapped the file I had my chance. I could have said: ‘Sir, there’s something I feel I should …’ or: ‘Sir, I can’t help having noticed …’ But I didn’t. How was I to know that I wasn’t jumping to conclusions? And how was I to know that speaking up might not actually jeopardize my perfectly genuine promotion, and it was precisely for keeping quiet that it was being offered to me? Quinn was doubtless enjoying my dilemma.
‘I’m something of an old work-horse, Prentis,’ he said in a candid tone quite unlike him. ‘I’ve been sitting here for too long, stopping young blood from taking my place.’
He smiled. Dimples appeared in his cheeks.
I suppose what stopped me saying anything in the end was not my rather hasty speculations but simply the old, accustomed fact of Quinn’s authority. The headmaster and the schoolboy again. You may have your suspicions, your fears, you may even believe there is something, somewhere, terribly, drastically wrong, but because someone else is in charge, because there is a part of the system above you which you don’t know, you don’t question it, you even distrust your own doubts. It’s like the people in the Tube. They may be seething to rise up, to protest, to commit unspeakable acts against normality, but because someone has seen to it that there are Underground trains for them to be on and because some system makes sure that they keep shuttling and circling through the dark, and that is how it will be, today, tomorrow and the day after that – they don’t.
Quinn turned his face for a moment towards the window. He looked at the cherry tree. Then he turned back to me.
‘Something you want to say, Prentis?’
The old bastard.
‘No.’
What a weak, what a cowardly man I am.
[5]
And why did I want a pet hamster?
It was because of the hamster we kept in our class-room at primary school – in a green cage, beside the dank-smelling sink where we used to wash out paint brushes and jam jars. Every week two of us would be chosen as monitors to look after the hamster, to feed it and clean out its cage, and every Friday one lucky person would be selected to take the hamster home, to be its guardian over the weekend.
Our class-master was a man called Forster. Perhaps it was Forester, but that, maybe, is just fanciful association. One of the subjects Mr Forster used to teach us was Nature Study. From what I gather from Martin and Peter, Nature Study is not a subject they teach any more in primary schools – and that, I can’t help thinking, is a bad thing. Our school was in Wimbledon. There is quite a lot of Nature in Wimbledon, as London suburbs go; but I never really thought of Nature as something ordinary and familiar. Mr Forster’s twice-weekly lessons gave me an impression of Nature as a rare and mysterious commodity. I didn’t think of it as a principle, as a word, or even as a collection of multifarious items, like the pictures of buds and toadstools Mr Forster drew on the blackboard. I saw it as a stuff, which could be gathered, or mined like gold, if only you knew where to find it. Above all, it was something quite separate and distinct from me.
Our class-room was a dim, gloomy room with a view of a dim, walled-round asphalt playground. I don’t remember it too well, but I remember its smell: a mixture of chalk, floor-polish, water-colour paints and the various, spicy and ever-fascinating smells of my class-mates. In those days I registered other people not by their names and all the other identity tags but by smells and indefinable peculiarities. As if people were really only, somehow, indistinct outlets from which exuded scents, hints of some far-off source. I have forgotten the names of my class-mates, but I still remember their smells. There were certain girls who had a sharp ammoniac smell, and certain boys with a soft, dull smell, like that of much-used India rubber. Mr Forster had a reassuring, reliable smell, like the smell of wood, and just above his upper lip he had a strange and intriguing birth-mark, like some dark, fossilized fruit. As for myself, I believed I was odourless and nondescript – as if I were made from something that didn’t exist.
Then one day Mr Forster carried into the class-room this green cage with a wire-mesh front and something living inside it. And in producing the hamster before us, like a conjuror, he used the words – as if he were revealing to us a fragment of some precious lost treasure – ‘a part of nature’. It was these words, I swear it, and not any sentimental child’s craving for a ‘pet’, for a fluffy thing with legs, which sowed the seeds of my desire for a hamster of my own. How conscientiously I carried out my duties, when it came to my turn, as weekly monitor. How yearningly I waited for my moment, which was only to come once in the school year, to bear the hamster home on Friday afternoon. How jealously I longed to possess a part of nature.
But, when my parents at last yielded and took me one Saturday to the pet shop, what became of this reverence? Did I get up every morning to take out my little golden piece of nature, cherish, love and adore it? No. I turned into this sadist, this power-monger, this refiner of cruelties. What became of my love? For what else is love – don’t tell me it is anything less simple, less obvious – than being close to nature? What became even of my possessiveness? I remember that near the back door of our house in Wimbledon there was a little kitchen garden, a patch of walled-in earth in which my mother planted mint, sage, parsley and, for good measure, a clump of lavender (these plants, by the way, she used to talk to, just like Marian). On this patch of earth, one warm day, I once made the experiment of letting out my hamster from its cage. When it was placed on the ground it sniffed cautiously at first. Then instinct took hold of it. Making a sudden dash for the corner of the patch, it began tunnelling, at a staggering speed, into the earth. I made a move to pull it back by the hind legs. But I had been so taken by surprise, and it was digging so frantically that by the time I attempted this it was already too deep to be grasped. I could see its pink tail-stump and frenetic haunches disappearing beyond recovery. I recall quite distinctly what my feeling was at this moment. It was not fear that I might lose my precious hamster, as indeed might have happened. It was outrage, it was fury, that it had got itself into a position where I no longer had control over it. I started to claw blindly at the soil. In fact, I need not have worried. Instinct had returned, but without a clear sense of direction. The little thing had tunnelled into one of the corners of the patch, and after a short while it came up against the concrete foundations of the retaining walls. Here it huddled, enjoying a few moments of spurious liberty, before my digging hands discovered it. Needless to say, I punished it severely.
Now let me tell you something. We are all looking for a space where we can be free, where we cannot be reached, where we are masters. Let me tell you something else – about my hamster. Before I got it I was a pretty unruly child – the only child of my parents but more, very often, than they could cope with. I made their life h
ell at times – my father’s wallopings and my mother’s exasperated pleas proved it. Once I even bit my father’s hand and I swear my teeth touched the raw bone in his finger. At school Mr Forster – or Forester – was about the only teacher who could command my obedience. But after I had my hamster all this changed. I became a docile, dutiful, even an exemplary son. The ‘Conduct’ entries on my school reports underwent complete transformation. I remember it was that year that I actually volunteered to read the lesson in morning assembly – ‘Consider the lilies’ if I recall it correctly – and that I astonished my parents by little kindnesses such as making tea for them on Sunday mornings and offering to weed the garden. And all that changed again when my hamster – my golden hamster, my Sammy whom I remembered today with such pangs – died.
[6]
When we went to bed Marian raised again the issue of the television. It is not that she is argumentative (haven’t I already pointed out that my wife’s principal attraction is her pliancy?) or that she would care herself if we dispensed with the television. But she acts as a kind of automatic counter-weight to my relations with my sons. Sometimes I think she is scarcely aware of doing it. If she thinks I have been too hard on them, she doesn’t stop me at once, but she tries, later, to put some separate, compensatory restraint on me. She doesn’t take my sons’ side against me. She knows better than that. But something in her, almost independent of her, wants stubbornly to restore the balance, like water finding its level – and it’s not easy to ignore. Perhaps this is her subtle and discreet way out of a difficult and hazardous predicament – for if I ever found her deliberately siding with my sons, I know – and she knows – what I would do. I would hit her. But it isn’t like that. This something in her is almost involuntary, it is almost part of her pliancy.
