by Graham Swift
Would I be writing all this down now, trying to clarify matters in words, if I had acted on any of these assumptions? No. The question of Quinn’s retirement only added to my existing confusion. Sometimes – usually in that brief, green breathing-space on my way home, between the Underground station and our house – I would reflect that, in the possibility of exposing single-handedly some malpractice in the office, lay the opportunity of bringing into my life a faint note of daring, decision – integrity. But then, supposing my gamble failed? And I wanted that promotion. I wanted to come home one day and say to Marian and the kids: I’ve got a better job, an important job, I’ll be better now. (Look what I actually did when Quinn broke the news.) And then it would strike me that there were really two promotions I wanted. For, quite apart from prospects at work, I wanted to step into Dad’s shoes. Now his mind was gone, now Dad was no more: I wanted what he had had. To be even with him. And then there was Quinn. Now and then in the office, when I came into contact with him, I would seethe inwardly with a mixture of hatred, envy and a desire for certainty. I wanted his job. I wanted to sit in his leather chair. I wanted to look down, like him, through his glass panel, at the underlings I had once worked beside. And yet it seemed (and I still feel this now) that what I wanted was not so much the promotion itself, but to be in a position where I would know; where I would no longer be the victim, the dupe, no longer be in the dark.
And when all is said – does this sound strange? – I didn’t want to hurt Quinn. I didn’t want any action of mine to topple him, to break him.
One Sunday when all this was preying on my mind, I went to see Dad – and my patience ran out. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘let’s stop playing shall we?’ My voice was raised. We were sitting on the bench under the cedar within earshot of other people – but in that place my shouts would probably have been taken for the babblings of just another lunatic. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I said. ‘Why don’t you tell me? Why don’t you speak?’ As if Dad were deliberately deceiving me. ‘What’s it all about?’ Then I suddenly yelled: ‘I hate you!’ All the time he looked straight before him, his face never flickered, and little midges were jigging in the air under the cedar. And I realized I was talking to Dad as if I were talking to Quinn.
[11]
Marian and I make love, on average, three or four times a week. It is rare for her to make excuses; to say that she has the proverbial headache or that she has forgotten her doo-dah as she did recently – and as she attempted again last night, after discovering that I really had returned the television to the shop. She has learnt by now to submit to my demands. There have sometimes passed whole weeks, hectic and fatiguing weeks, in which every night we have striven to cap the passion of the night before. The reason for this intensity is not really mutual ardour, or any excess of appetite on my part – and perhaps passion is the wrong word. It has more to do with my constant dissatisfaction.
You see – (but now I’m going to speak about very intimate things, very private things – never mind, I let myself in for it when I began these pages) – it’s a long time since I’ve experienced with Marian that thing called ‘ecstasy’ or ‘fulfilment’. Believe me, it’s that that I’m looking for – not some mere superficial thrill – when we labour away in the dark, or, more often, with the lights on so we can see what we’re doing when we twist ourselves into some untried, contortionate position. Often, I have spent whole afternoons at the office, ostensibly busy with my paper-work, in reality anticipating, planning in meticulous detail our activities of the night. And when I started to buy certain ‘manuals’, to get Marian to send off for certain articles from catalogues, to visit the sex shops in Charing Cross Road and Leicester Square, all this paraphernalia wasn’t an end in itself, believe me, it was all in the hope of achieving some ultimate thing that always seemed elusive.
Making love ought to be the most natural thing, oughtn’t it? This week, in the full flush of spring, I have been watching the sparrows copulating on our guttering – a mere hop and then it’s over – and the ducks – more rapacious – on the common. It is so simple. Nature prompts them when the season comes, and – I don’t mind admitting it – I often envy their easy contentment, not to be constantly at it, the whole year through. They don’t need any fetishist tricks to urge them on or any shame to restrain them. And sometimes that is just how I see it with Marian and me: a little careless, unadorned instant, like the sparrows; a little flutter of wings and hearts: at one with nature. Perhaps it was like that once, long ago. For Marian and me. For all of us. But now we have to go through the most elaborate charades, the most strenuous performances to receive enlightenment. Because that is the goal, don’t mistake me – enlightenment. All nature’s creatures join to express nature’s purpose. Somewhere in their mounting and mating, rutting and butting is the very secret of nature itself. And when, night after night, I conduct my sexual experiments with Marian, for ever modifying the formula, it’s with the yearning that one day it won’t just be sex, but enlightenment.
Marian sometimes says I’m hurting her; or ‘Can’t we do it another way?’ or ‘Couldn’t we stop now – wait till the morning?’ And sometimes it’s less my physical insistence that wears her than my demands for things she’s quite unable to supply. For example, sometimes I wish Marian had bigger breasts. Her breasts, I may say, are petite and compact, and perfectly lovely in their way. But sometimes I want her to have big, blouse-bursting tits like Maureen’s in the typing pool. Once, so rumour has it, Eric got Maureen into the stationery cupboard and induced her, as part of some bet, to let him see what they were like. And I’m not sure that things stopped at that. Marian can’t be expected to satisfy my fantasies about a girl she hasn’t even seen. But I demand it nonetheless (without mentioning Maureen of course), and I have even given Marian (who worries about her waistline) a complex about the size of her bust.
All in all, I’m surprised how little she resists. (Her wonderful pliancy.) She’s afraid, of course, of what might happen if she did. But then one reason why I think she complies is that she shares the adventure. Yes, adventure – why not use that word? It’s not a misplaced one for what Marian and I get up to in our bedroom. I read somewhere once in a magazine – it was one of Marian’s magazines – that sexual adventure is the only form of adventure left to us in our age. It compensates for all the excitement and initiative we’ve lost in other ways. The only true revolution now is sexual revolution, and that is why everything – look around – is becoming increasingly, visibly oriented to sex. Well, if sex is the only true revolution, I don’t see why Marian and I shouldn’t play our part. I’m not extremist, after all – I’m not a promiscuous man – I’m just an ordinary rebel. Though, sometimes – quite often, of late, to tell you the truth – I have these reactionary moods. Sometimes, coming home on the Tube to Marian, stimulated by the adverts and the proximity of knots of office girls, I wonder: if it’s all so visible and acceptable, and the magazines tell you to do it – what’s so rebellious about it?
All right, so you’ve gathered it by now. My sex-life is really a preposterous, an obsessive, a pathetic affair. A sham, a mockery. Systematically and cold-bloodedly, like a torturer bent on breaking his victim, I am turning my wife into a whore. This same woman who goes, dutifully, to collect our kids from school; who takes them for walks in the sunshine along the Thames. (By the way, Martin gave her the four pounds but she never spent it; and when she came back she said, in Martin’s presence: ‘There’s the money you gave to Martin to give to me.’ Conspirators!)
Tell me, can a man do wrong with his own wife? And are there really crimes, rights and wrongs, in those areas of our lives – you know what I mean – where we are like lost explorers, and right and wrong, with the rest of civilization, have been left behind at the base camp? All my relentless demands on Marian, don’t they all mean, underneath, that I want Marian, that Marian is very dear to me? I’ve never wanted another woman since we married – that’s the honest truth. (All right,
bits of other women.) And isn’t it possible that this whole voluntary confession (I never dreamed I would be setting down things like this) is inspired by some upsurge of guilt where guilt should not apply, and that I over-sensitively exaggerate what I suppose to be the shamefulness of my proclivities? What is healthy and normal in this sphere, after all?
Actually, to cut all this shilly-shally, what really fills me with dread is something else. It is the thought that, one day, by some mischance, Martin and Peter might stumble upon me and Marian in some posture impossible to explain, even to a boy who has an inkling (and I’m sure Martin has more than that) of what Mummies and Daddies do after bed-time. And that in an instant whatever trust, whatever shred of faith they had in their father will vanish. What would they say – princes brought up in the security of the castle, suddenly discovering the dungeons? What would I say – groping for the blankets? ‘Now children, all this is normal.’
No. Please.
And it’s an odd thing that I’ve brought the children in at this point. Because all this assault-course sex with Marian, all this feverish searching for erotic illumination – it only began with the kids being born. Or, rather, not with them being born exactly – because do you know what I felt when each of them came into the world? I felt: life is very simple and complete. And there was a time even when the boys were small, when Marian and I used to make love, quite spontaneously, in the open air – in fields, amid ferns, in secluded parts of beaches – when we went out at weekends. Martin nestling close by, asleep in the carry-cot. No, it wasn’t with their being born but with their growing up – with the idea that they will one day be men like me. The older they get, the more persistent, the more desperate I become with Marian. When will their growing, I wonder, outstrip my libido? Or will I have found, before then, what it is I’m seeking?
One day when I go to see Dad I will say to him: Is it wrong, the way I treat Marian? You and Mum were always the fine, confident couple. If you were such a hero, did you always have good, healthy relations with your wife? Even bed-time ones? Tell me, Dad. Enlighten me.
[12]
It is now several days since I returned the television to the shop. They all resent me for it – can see that – but apart from one barbed remark from Marian when they came back from their afternoon at Richmond (‘I suppose you think that was clever. Happy now?’), there have been no demonstrations. They’re shrewd enough, I imagine, not to give me the opportunity to crow – ‘No idle threats from me, you see,’ or something of the kind. By Monday the whole matter seemed to have died down, though the week began sullenly enough and Martin, in particular, kept giving me little hard, vengeful frowns.
But today (Friday) – though it really began yesterday – something has happened. Something I can’t help taking very seriously.
The weather has kept up all the week. It seems we are in for a remarkable summer. I have come home, sticky from the Tube and enervated from work, but with enough vigour to muster, on my arrival, a mocking heartiness. ‘Well, who’s for a game of cricket on the common?’ Now the television has gone it seems only proper to take the initiative over healthier, alternative activities. But, as is to be expected, my proposal meets with wilful non-enthusiasm. ‘Suit yourselves then.’ In order to endorse my position, I have often thought of going out alone, not to play cricket, of course, but for solitary strolls across the common. I might even have a self-righteous pint or two at the pub. But in fact, as you know now, I have been more occupied by something else which both the absence of the television and, indirectly, the warm weather have made more feasible. Every evening this week, before and after supper, I have been taking the copy of Shuttlecock from the shelf in the living-room, setting up a deck-chair in the garden and in stubborn indifference to my family, following Dad across occupied France.
Until yesterday, that is, when I came home to find that the copy of the book was gone.
Now I did not act in haste. I checked in my memory that I had actually returned it to the shelf the previous night; I looked elsewhere in the living-room; I made sure it had not been put with the other copy in the bedroom; I asked Marian if she knew its whereabouts; I paused to size the situation. Only then did I jump to conclusions. Martin, Martin. A reprisal.
‘Martin,’ (with feigned casualness), ‘have you seen my book?’
‘What book?’
‘You know. Grandpa’s book.’
‘Haven’t seen it.’
‘Martin, tell me what you have done with it.’
‘Nothing. I haven’t done anything.’
His face had an expression of grim tenacity, which was confession enough.
‘Martin, don’t play tricks with me. Tell me where it is.’
‘How should I know.’
‘Where?!!’
And then anger got the better of me. If my subsequent course of action seems excessive, remember that it was the signed copy (‘your loving Father’) that was missing. Had it been the other copy – you must believe me – I would not have felt half my rage.
With my left hand I seized Martin’s right arm and twisted it behind his back in a sort of imperfect half-nelson. I raised my right hand into a position to strike him across the face.
‘Now! Are you going to tell me?’
We were standing in the living-room. As the shouting began, Marian appeared in the doorway, and out of the corner of my eye I noticed that Peter, who had been in the garden and who may or may not have been in on the theft of the book, had come to the french windows and was watching apprehensively to see how his brother would shape up. Given my superior strength and the way the sympathies of the family stood, everything favoured Martin being the hero of the moment.
‘I’m going to count to three.’
It struck me momentarily that this confrontation, in all its crudity, was really little different from the sort of set-tos that are commonplace in school playgrounds. This being the case, Martin probably had the advantage in immediate experience; for, despite their unadventurousness at home, I often noticed (it used to puzzle me) that both he and Peter returned from school with cuts and bruises that suggested scraps on the asphalt.
‘One – ’
I jerked his left arm and lifted my right hand a little further. Martin gasped and turned his head to one side. His little face became grimmer still.
Marian stepped forward. ‘If you hurt him, I’ll – ’
‘You’ll what?’
She put a hand out to stop mine. I raised mine still further. I wondered briefly whether to strike Martin or Marian. Martin’s eyes were screwed up, waiting for the blow. I have to admit that everything was blurred and strange. I had a vision of how families fall apart, of how terrible crimes get committed in ordinary circumstances
‘All right,’ I said, dropping Martin’s arm. ‘I don’t have to hit you.’
Instantly, Martin opened his eyes and turned in innocent appeal to Marian. ‘I don’t know anything about it, Mum.’ So well acted.
‘We’ll see about that,’ I said. I pushed past the two of them into the hall and bounded up the stairs to the boys’ bedroom. I looked under Martin’s bed and under Peter’s bed. Opened their clothes drawers. I checked their own bookshelves, taking in the titles: Pioneers of Space; The Martian Menace: Miracles of the Laser. On the wall was an absurd picture of Telly Savalas sucking a lollipop; a faded chart showing details of all the Apollo moonflights. I pulled open the doors to the cupboard in which were stored the accumulated toys of half a decade, and out spilled a tangled mass of gadgetry – ray-guns, limbless action-men, scale models of rockets and lunar modules, a broken pocket-calculator, ribbons of shiny cassette-tape: a cybernetical junkyard. Nothing simple and down-to-earth – like a cricket bat. And no copy of Dad’s book.
I was beginning to consider that I might be wrong in my suspicions, but it was too late to call off the performance.
I went down to the living-room.
‘Well,’ I said reflectively, like an inquisitor considering that
direct violence may not be the best ploy. ‘There are other ways of getting it out of you.’
I looked quickly at Marian.
‘Are you hungry, Martin?’
I should explain that every weekday the boys have a large tea at about four-thirty, after they come in from school. Until recently this used to be their last main meal of the day and Marian and I used to have a separate supper at about seven. In recent months, however, with the boys staying up later and later (because of that damned television) and demanding ‘pre-bedtime snacks’, we have shifted towards their eating regularly with us. They are growing boys with massive appetites. The upshot is that they now have both a large tea when they come in and a large supper a couple of hours later.
