by Graham Swift
It is gone midnight. Marian is in bed. I sit in the living-room looking at these notes which I have smuggled home with me against all the rules, not even daring to look at them in the office. The window is open, an occasional breeze lifts the papers in front of me; and I remember Dad, sitting up late at Wimbledon, working on his book. Mother asleep in the big bedroom. Getting up once, in summer, to fetch a glass of water; pausing at the half-opened door, the desk lamp on inside, and seeing him suddenly start.
And now, when I turn to the other sheet – ‘Details of Subject’s Private Connexions outside the Home Office’ – which I have also requested, some last incidental entry makes the echo come loud and clear.
… Hon. Sec., The Putney Rotary.
Clubs: Oxford and Cambridge; Civil Service. Sports and Recreations: Golf. The Glade Golf Club, Wimbledon.
[18]
It is to the last two chapters of Shuttlecock that I return most frequently. It is not just that, even to the casual and disinterested reader, they must form the most exciting, the most dramatic pages of the book: Dad’s capture by the Gestapo; his imprisonment for eight days in the Château Martine, the Gestapo headquarters near the village of Combe-les-Dames; his escape; his flight through the forests of the Doubs valley; his awaking after a desperate night in hiding to discover, through the trees, not Germans, but advancing Americans, and his declaring himself (last, succinct scene of the book) to a Seventh Army lieutenant (‘a lawyer’s son from Connecticut, with impeccable politeness and a truck-load of canned meat’). No, it is not this air of grand denouement alone which compels me, but other qualities, more subtle, more tantalizing.…
For one thing, there are the gaps, the hazy areas in those eight days at the Château Martine. The Château is there all right, starting from the pages, its eighteenth-century elegance given over to twentieth-century brutality: the pitch-dark cells; the ornate staircases and passage-ways (on the way to interrogation sessions); the degrading musters in the courtyard; the smells, the rifleshots, the food (‘unspeakable swill’); the cries along corridors. Even the Château garden is there, for contrast (‘as unreal as some painting by Watteau or Claude’), glimpsed, again, through tall, casement windows, on those journeys to the interrogation room. But it is about the goings-on in that interrogation room, and other, sinister rooms, that Dad is silent, or circumspect. The picture clouds over: a few vague allusions, a hint of the inarticulable (‘Here description must be blurred’), a few chilly motifs.
All right, there are obvious reasons for this. The stress of circumstances which tested even Dad’s presence of mind, tenacity and powers of observation; which ten years later, late at night, in a room in Wimbledon, left gaping holes in the memory. Or the reverse? The memory not in the least impaired, still vivid-sharp; but the memory of something so terrible that it cannot be repeated, cannot be spoken or written of.
Did they torture you, Dad? Did they stretch you to the limit? And yet you write of things terrible enough – things which occurred only days before they dragged you out of that water tank and hauled you off to the Château – with relative composure.
… For with the German retreat through the eastern valleys the war entered a quite new, if, thankfully, brief-lived phase. Up to then we had lived in a world, superficially at least, at peace, disturbed and broken intermittently by incidents of violence, often savage it is true, but localized and in the majority of cases directly influenced by ourselves. With the waves of German troops, the tide of indiscriminate large-scale war, which had not been known for years, rolled into this corner of France. Not merely war on a large scale but war with all the desperation and last-reserve venom of an army in defeat. This was a period of burning villages, of corpses lining the streets and dangling from trees, of atrocities of all kinds. Whole areas of countryside which up till this time had seemed for us inviolable and friendly landmarks suddenly became ravaged, contaminated. Everywhere was the smell of blood, carnage, singed and rotting flesh.…
I have been trying to discover in these and other pages some clue to what happened in the Château Martine, some inkling of this experience beyond words. My own father tortured. Forced, perhaps, beyond the point of endurance. Why do I want to know this – like some interrogator myself? Because I will find out what Dad is really like?
But there is something else that draws me back to these last two chapters. Something harder to explain. These pages are more vivid, more real, more believable than any other part of the book. And yet, strangely enough, this is because the style of Dad’s writing becomes – how shall I put it? – more imaginative, more literary, more speculative. In the main body of the book – so I’ve explained – only the occasional brief passage of reflection, of emotion, breaks the brisk, adventure-book flow of the narrative. But in these final chapters it is as though the philosophic note is always there (that theme of war-in-peace and peace-in-war, for instance); and Dad’s words seem ever ready to take on a quieter, sadder, even eloquent tone – not at all the tone of the man who, quickly sizing the situation, stuck the knife into the guard’s back at Caen. It is there even in the description of those destructive retreating armies:
… All day long the columns poured through Dôle and Auxonne and on in the direction of Besançon and Vesoul. They left behind a wake of devastation. And yet it was impossible not to feel a degree of pity for these streams of weary, ill-kempt men who were no longer heroes or conquerors, ill-equipped and ill-transported, moving on, fleeing, like migrating animals obeying a mass instinct, up the river valleys, towards Mulhouse, the Rhine, and home.…
It is there in the very lines which follow those about the ‘contamination’ of the landscape:
… I remember there was a wood, a mile or so outside Ligny, a small wood of no great distinction – oaks, sweet chestnuts and hazels – but in which pheasants cackled and the sun fell on drifts of dead leaves. We must have skirted it, on bicycle or on foot, several hundred times, and unconsciously come to regard it as an emblem of things that would continue unchanged, regardless of the war. One day a group of five Maquisards were pinned down in this wood, and the Germans, in order to make sure of despatching them, poured mortar shell after mortar shell into it. I passed it soon afterwards: a smouldering, twisted array of stumps. Two of the five men I had known – and that week was to bring worse human tragedies; but I felt the loss of that wood like few human losses. The thing that most embodies the evil of war, is not, it seems to me, its human violence (for humans cause wars), but its wilful disregard for nature.…
And it is there on the penultimate page, before that awakening in the forest and the polite lieutenant from Connecticut:
… I made a hollow in the undergrowth, covering myself with leaves, and curled up in it. Some tall beech trees groaned in the wind above me. I was shivering, semi-delirious, hungry, had lost my sense of direction and did not know where I was. I remember thinking, before drifting into merciful sleep, Yes, I am no better than some burrowing animal.…
[19]
Another Wednesday. The evenings are getting longer. Under the cedar tree, on the bench, in the hospital grounds, I had this feeling of calm, of refuge. I was safe here. As the sun sets, the red bricks of the hospital walls start to glow; the windows gleam like copper. You do not have to put yourself at risk at all or endanger anything if you never make a move.
For a long time I sat beside Dad, as silent and as still as he was, and I thought: this could go on for ever. Sometimes I wonder what I am more afraid of: of Dad never breaking his silence, or of his suddenly speaking.
I don’t know why this weight lay on my tongue, which only a while before, on my drive down, had been itching with questions. It is easy to frame questions when you know there will be no answers. I wanted to say to him: what does the name Debreuil mean to you? Tell me about Z. Tell me. Yet what I wanted to ask, even more than this, was: What happened, Dad, in the Château Martine? Did they torture you? But I didn’t. I sat in silence several minutes more. It seemed to me we were lik
e two weights on a balance, a swaying see-saw, precariously poised. And then I said: ‘I have got some news, Dad. I am going to be promoted. Quinn told me. Have I told you about my boss Quinn?’
Sometimes Dad is so still and sits so rigidly, it seems that if I touched him with the tip of my finger and gave just a slight push, he would topple, slowly and ponderously, onto the grass.
When I left the hospital the calm feeling still hung around me, though it slowly wore off, so that as I drove through Sutton and Morden I started to look in the driving mirror to see if I was being followed (a new habit), and my tongue started to itch again to ask those questions I had meant to ask Dad. As I neared home it was itching even more, though not to ask questions – to shout at Marian and the kids.
You know those surprisingly long, light evenings in early summer, when lilacs bloom in gardens and even in such mundane and humdrum places as Sutton and Morden a breath of peace seems to hang in the air as if it were really hanging over some wide, virgin landscape. On the way home I took a detour towards Wimbledon. I drove up to the golf course and pulled up in the car-park by the club-house. It was the sort of lingering end to the day (long shadows, a faint breeze, a sweet scent to the turf) which golfers must love. The light was beginning to fade but I could see several figures still, in coloured sweaters and flapping trousers, out on the fairways. The lights were on in the club-house and the doors open. I could hear a babble of voices. Someone was talking loudly about the price of property. The car-park had been enlarged and an extension added to the club-house since the days I remembered. Several members were already leaving to go home, jingling car-keys with a satisfied air and shouting sarcasms to friends across the gravel. It didn’t seem that their plummy, somewhat hollow voices were the equivalent of the voices I had heard when I was a boy, but perhaps they were.
I went into the club-house. There were men with reddened faces and cigars sitting at the bar. They looked at me suspiciously. The barman looked at me suspiciously too. Against one of the walls was a glass-fronted cabinet containing silver cups and plates and, fixed to the wall, polished wooden boards recording the winners of annual tournaments and competitions. The names went back over thirty years. Amongst them, appearing in one instance (’55–’57), three times in succession, was Dad’s name. But there was no name with the initials A. L. Not a winner, I thought. I could say to the men with cigars, like some hard-talking detective, Which ones of you knew Prentis? Did anyone here know Z? (Why is it that the questions fail you when you most think they will lead somewhere?) The barman was still looking at me curiously. I said: ‘It’s all right, I’m looking for someone – not here,’ and turned to the door.
I loitered a little while at the edge of the car-park. Golf courses, like commons, try to marry wildness with civility. Dusk was falling. The sweatered figures were trailing in across the grass, like returning hunters, with their trolleys and bags. As the light faded the clumps of birches and hawthorns seemed to loom more definitely, and then only the little fluorescent marker-flags stood out, like sentinels, on the greens.
It kept ringing in my mind, as if, were I to turn round, they would all be standing there: ‘Arthur, Arthur.’
The figures drew near and I could hear their breathy, invigorated voices.
Wwwhack! Wwwhack!
[20]
Today Quinn said to me, ‘Hear you’ve been coming into work early, Prentis. That’s commendably diligent of you.’ A tiny, ironically indulgent smile. But his eyes gave a little rigid stare, as if to show he knew everything and was gloating in his knowledge; as if, even with one of those podgy, pink hands of his, he could pick me up, tie me in knots, crush me. He had come down for once from his eyrie, down his flight of steps, and was favouring us with a visit. He was going round, this little plump man, amongst his juniors, who are all bigger and stronger than he, and yet they were saying, as he handed out routine instructions, ‘Thank you sir. Yes sir.’
‘By the way, any more thoughts on C9?’
Today he wore a white carnation.
And tonight Marian said, ‘It’s not like you to bring home work from the office. What’s going on?’
All this week – in spite of what I promised Marian – I have been going in early to secure any mail addressed to me, and then at night, at home, staying up late, going over those details on Z, pondering and making notes, so that when I’ve at last gone to bed Marian has been asleep. We hardly exchange words. But tonight she was awake, her eyes peering at me over the covers. When I shrugged off her question and said, clambering into bed, ‘A special job I have to do,’ she looked hard and searchingly at me for a while, then twisted round and hunched up like something going into its shell. She lies with her knees drawn up, her body curled and her chin lowered into her throat so that, even though the weather is hot, she looks like someone huddling for warmth and protection.
Marian, I wish I knew.
[21]
Martin is still following me from the station. Despite the change in my time of returning from work. Every evening but one I have glimpsed his shock of fair hair amongst the trees on the common, and every evening when we sit together at supper, we pretend not to have seen each other. I don’t know what to do. It is his birthday in two weeks. He will be eleven. I am thinking of buying him a pet.
[22]
… Subject: X, Ronald Francis. Home Office, 1950–73. Dismissed: gross misconduct and on medical grounds (alcoholism).
Born, Highgate, London, March 2nd, 1920. Son of William Rycroft.…
And, after a catalogue of unremarkable data concerning family background, upbringing and education:
… Studied (Modern French Literature), Sorbonne, Paris, 1937–9. 1940–44, Officer, Royal Fusiliers. Served, North Africa, Sicily. Attached Special Operations, March 1944. Operating British agent, France (Franche-Comté), June-Oct. 1944. Prisoner of SS (Doubs), Sept. 1944. Liberated by Americans.…
[23]
Today I did it. I went to see Quinn. To have it out with him. I said: ‘Sir, I want to know what’s going on.’
Now it’s true I rarely go to see Quinn without his first summoning me. And yet today, when I had taken the initiative myself, when I had asked over the office intercom (what daring!) for permission to see him as soon as possible – ‘about a special matter’ – and he had replied, ‘Very well, in ten minutes,’ he was not in the least taken aback. When he buzzed for me and I entered, the work on his desk was pushed to one side, he was sitting with his hands clasped neatly before him (carnation in buttonhole), as if in some way he had long prepared for this visit of mine (perhaps, after all, it really was he who summoned me). As if he knew this was a big moment.
‘Well, Prentis, what can I do for you?’
Naturally, all this readiness threw me off my guard. I sat down at his bidding. I had rehearsed my opening in advance. It spilled out like some self-conscious statement made in court:
‘Sir, I must speak to you about something that’s been on my mind – concerning the department – for some time. What I have to say, if you’ll permit me, is merely a considered observation – nothing more – which I feel obliged to make by my position here in the office. It’s quite possible that I may be intruding into matters which shouldn’t concern me and which have a perfectly satisfactory official explanation. In which case, sir, I’d be grateful – I’d quite understand – if you’ll tell me when I’m venturing too far.’
Even as I spoke I thought: What studied, what ingratiating servility. Out with it! Accuse him face to face: You’ve been stealing office files.
‘Good heavens, Prentis, what an introduction. You’d better go on.’
The eyes expressed curiosity, but not alarm.
I thought: It’s not too late to change tack; to avoid wrecking my promotion prospects; to avoid Quinn’s wrath. I could hastily invent some other story which wouldn’t launch me into trouble.
He looked at me as I paused. But, strangely enough, it wasn’t fear of Quinn which made me hesitate at this
point. Somehow I knew I could bear his worst retribution. It was a recurrence of the opposite thing, the thing I had experienced before. What if in the face of my veiled accusations this inscrutable, imperious man should crumble? What if the consequence of my words should be to expose him, to jeopardize his own long and almost completed career, and that I should sit in power over him. Would I be able to bear that?
‘Sir, I can’t help having noticed – for some months now – that certain files in this office have been missing from their normal places. Not having had the use of these files has hampered work on a number of cases I’ve handled – which, if I may say so, have at the same time, even in terms of the available data, been disjointed and confusing. I know that documents and whole files can, in the normal course of things, be removed for reference – er – at a level higher than my own. But such items are usually returned after a short period and, in any case, a proper record is kept of their use. The files I am speaking of, sir – I believe’ (don’t cringe!) ‘I have alluded to them in conversations with you before – have never returned. If you wish, sir – I had made a list – ’
Nothing ruffled the plump face. A mistake! A catastrophic error of judgement! The eyes looked straight at me. He put a hand to one cheek, propping his elbow on the armrest of his leather chair, and gently rubbed his mouth with the knuckle of his little finger.
‘Let me get this clear, Prentis. What you are saying now isn’t just some passing misunderstanding. Is that right? What you are voicing is a strong, long-harboured suspicion?’
‘I –’
‘Well, is it?’
‘Yes sir.’
