by Graham Swift
And I don’t believe that Martin is satisfied by the power theory either. For when he looks at me, though I am a more sufferable father than I was, there is still the same disrespect, the same edge of contempt, the same undeluded penetration in his eyes. He doesn’t see a man with power; he sees the same old weakling. The only difference is that I no longer conceal it. And this brings into Martin’s eyes – even into Martin’s eyes – the slightest hint of perplexity. For this is something he cannot understand. But I don’t attempt to enlighten him, or to iron out the differences which exist between us, which seem to me less and less a matter of attitude than of simple physiology.
About a fortnight or so after the official notice of my promotion I had the television reinstated in the living room. Call it an act of atonement towards my family. I didn’t want it back myself. I feared, for the sake of a gesture, a return to those days of non-communication with my sons and the spectacle of their young minds sopping up trivia. But this didn’t happen. The Bionic Man was still running, leaping, focusing his telescopic eyes on distant targets, overcoming all kinds of insuperable difficulties with effortless ease, just as he must have been, unwatched by us, all through the summer – and as he must do, for ever, electronically proofed against mortality. But I noticed Martin was no longer watching his hero’s antics with total enthralment. More than once, instead of gasping, he laughed – not a sympathetic laugh but a scoffing laugh, the sort of laugh which, if you interpret it carefully, means: I don’t need the tricks of this synthetic hero, I have my own hero – me.
And then one day – miracle of miracles – Martin was not watching the Bionic Man. He was out on the common – and not spying on his father coming home from the station, either. He was simply out there to mooch about, the way kids do when they reach a certain age, to look for what might turn up, and to advertise his ever more assertive presence. Now that he has moved to secondary school, an upheaval which hasn’t perturbed him in the least, he has gone in for this cult of self-promotion in a big way. He is constantly pushing himself to the fore (so Marian tells me, who seems to have a secret intuition for such things) amongst his fellow pupils; he has actually taken earnestly to the sports field; he is caught admiring himself in the bathroom mirror. In fact, he is undergoing – and coping blithely with – all those changes which normally occur to a boy two or three years older than himself.
And so when I think of Martin as he will be in only a few years’ – who knows, only a year’s – time, I think of a creature almost wholly alien to me and therefore beyond contention or ill-feeling. I see him as one of those cocksure, invincible, infallible youths, who will not have to swot to be bright at school, for whom puberty will be a doddle, for whom life will hold no traps, no fears.
But Peter – Peter who is still addicted to the Bionic Man – is another story.
No, if they think it is power, they are wrong. It is not power at all.
And if their new-found contentment somehow depends on their ignorance of what I am really up to in my job – doesn’t that prove the main point? Doesn’t that encourage me along the path Quinn opened up to me? All these little bits of poisoned paper I am slowly dropping into oblivion. What people don’t know, can’t hurt them.…
I still go to see Dad on Wednesdays and Sundays. He still sits on the wooden bench, gazing before him, as indestructible, in his silent impenetrability, as the Bionic Man himself. I have not yet put to him those fatal questions which at one and the same time might restore and destroy my father. Did you betray your fellow-agents? Did you really escape from the Château? Did you sleep with Z’s wife? In my mind these questions sound like the key-notes of some fresh interrogation, and Dad has already undergone one interrogation, already endured trials enough. And why should his own son appear to him in the role of interrogator – as the ghost of fat-cheeks, grey-hair and ‘le goret’, all rolled into one? Sometimes I see how easily this red-brick mental hospital, with its tranquil gardens, could turn, in the instant, from a place of refuge to a place of torture. And when I ask myself what my motive might be in putting those questions, I find myself wondering whether it would really be to see at last, after the restorative shock, a flash of recognition cross those eyes; or whether it would be to exult over the confession of some ignoble truth. And it seems to me that I care very little for the morals, the rights and wrongs of the case – whether Dad betrayed those three agents, whether he slept with another man’s wife. My feelings would not be immensely changed towards a father guilty of those acts. But what does interest me, intensely, exclusively – is whether Dad cracked. For, as with Martin, you see, it is perhaps a matter not of attitude but of physiology.
But I know I won’t ever ask those fatal questions. And I won’t make further inquiries of my own. All this was decided that evening at Quinn’s. Perhaps that means that Dad will never return from the land of silence. But then I sometimes think, with the knowledge I have but don’t show Dad, and the knowledge Dad perhaps has and believes I don’t, our relations could not be more finely tuned than they are. Every time we sit on that wooden bench, which has often seemed to me like some uneasily rocking see-saw, there are no longer those sensations of tilting and swaying – as if by some mutual, tacit arrangement, we have found the perfect balance.
And if the way I am talking suggests that, behind all my reticence, I really do believe that Dad did all those things that X accused him of, and that, indeed, is the reason for my reticence, then let me assure you that that question, too, hangs like a finely poised balance. For a long time I would still read Shuttlecock; I still pored over its pages, though I was no more certain of what I hoped to find there. And often I found myself asking: the smell of apple logs? the sentry urinating against the Château wall? the woman at Frécourt (in whom – was this my imagination? – there was some faint reflection of my mother)? – all these are too particular, too vivid and intimate to be inventions. And, again: would a man narrating a fictitious escape be at such pains to describe how he was naked?
And then one day (if you want to know, it was only last month, when suddenly buds were on the trees again and I remembered it was a year since Quinn first dropped that hint about my promotion) I stopped reading Dad’s book. I inquired no further. How much of a book is in the words and how much is behind or in between the lines? Perhaps it is best not to probe too deeply into those invisible regions, but to accept on trust what is there on the page as the best showing the author could make. And the same is true perhaps of this book (for it has grown into a book) which I have resumed now after a six months’ lapse, only to bring to its conclusion. Once you have read it, it may be better not to peer too hard beneath the surface of what it says – or (who knows if you may not be one of those happily left in peace of mind by my ‘work’ at the department?) what it doesn’t say.
[34]
‘Marian,’ I say (she is still talking to her plants), ‘do you believe in the pathetic fallacy? That it’s really a fallacy, I mean?’
[35]
And today – a Sunday – I forwent for the first time one of my visits to Dad. I said to Marian and the kids yesterday evening (for I knew it was going to be one of those hot, cloudless, high-summer Sundays that sometimes come even in early May): ‘Let’s go out for the day tomorrow. Let’s go to Camber Sands.’ And Marian looked at me, as much as to say: ‘But aren’t you going to see Dad?’ And the kids, as much as to say, ‘What about Grandpa Loony?’ But they did not say these things, and their expressions of surprise soon melted. They are a shrewd family.
Why Camber Sands? There are other parts of the coast which are shorter and easier drives from our part of London. Sentimental reasons. It was here that Marian and I used to come when Martin was scarcely beyond the crawling stage; and not just because in the soft sands of the dunes a small baby could come to very little harm, but because in the hollows of those same dunes it was possible for a young couple, with a little circumspection, to spread a blanket and make warm, airy outdoor love.
But it was here too – and it was only because of this that I was to return later with Marian – that I used to be taken as a boy, when we stayed for weekends with Uncle Nigel, a colleague of Dad’s in the engineering business, who had a country cottage near Rye. And what attracted me then about Camber was less its whispering billows of sand and wheeling black-headed gulls (for this was before Mr Forster and his Nature Study classes) but the relics of the war that still littered the region. Rusting tangles of metal to waylay landing-craft; huge, zigzagging rows of concrete teeth waiting to snap at German tanks; pill-boxes marking the dykes on Romney Marsh. All this was scenery from that awesome drama in which Dad had only recently been an actor (these were the late forties and early fifties). And looking out at the grey, flat English Channel, which in that part of the coast retreats to a sullen distance at low tide, I would have a vision of the war as a simple, romantic affair of opposing powers. I would think of watchers on the shore with telescopes; of the dim line of the horizon hiding on its further side massing, unknown forces. I dabbled amongst the rusty iron. Perhaps as I did so – who knows? – Mum and Dad made love, circumspectly, in the dunes. The tide would come in, slick, shallow and frothy – and the incoming tide, as every child knows, is an enemy invader.
And now, invaded and littered in another way – by caravan-sites and chalets, beach-side cafés and amusement arcades – Camber Sands still retains these old savours of love and war. Don’t ask me why, knowing that this spot must be even more spoilt, even more strewn with seaside junk since Marian and I last saw it, I should still determine on going there – I who have this hankering for untouched countryside and have often harangued and bored my family with conservationist lectures. Perhaps certain things are inside us and we don’t have to go searching for the appropriate setting in order to find them. Or if they aren’t inside us, then – perhaps we should admit it – they aren’t anywhere.
We packed a picnic bag, blankets, towels, swimming things, sun-tan oil, and set off early. I slipped into our car boot my cricket bat and a ball (for there is no finer cricket ground than the damp flat sands of Camber when the tide is out). But I would not push the point. Peter sat in the back seat with Marian. He was excited. In the rear-view mirror I saw his wide eyes keep darting to things outside the window, the way children’s eyes do when they are being taken to the seaside – as if they are crossing a continent. Martin sat in the front beside me, silent and aloof. He was eleven years old and was already affecting to be above such things as family trips to the sea.
Sure enough, Camber, even so early in the season, had fallen prey to the paraphernalia demanded by the holidaymaker and the tripper. Martin cocked up his head at this. He would gladly, perhaps, have spent all day in the cafés and amusement arcades, learning the arts of the seaside hustler. But we tramped a long way from our parked car, till we found a relatively secluded hollow among the dunes; and even on young go-getters in the making, the sun and the sea exert their pull. In a few minutes Martin, no less than Peter, had slipped into bathing trunks; and they were off, down the slopes of the dunes, running across the corrugated sands to confront that great brooding invader.
I watched them. The tide was out at its furthest point, so they had no small distance to cover. By the time they reached the water they would be just two more of several indistinguishable, limbed dots moving in the silvery margins where sea met land. Martin was already several yards ahead of his brother and clearly set on making no allowances for Peter’s shorter pace. He was bent on getting this primal seaside ritual over with as soon as possible, on accomplishing it with the maximum of athletic ease and the minimum of childish fuss. His stride was rhythmic and arrogant. Peter’s was still the furious, labouring dash of an infant, in which was plainly visible his despair of keeping up with his brother. Half way between the dunes and the sea their bodies lost tone; I could no longer discern Peter’s maroon, Martin’s blue trunks, and they were distinguishable only by their stature and gait. Two naked, fleeing creatures. And suddenly they were no longer running towards the sea, but running, being impelled, towards the future – another sea of sorts – and their bodies travelling over the sand were mapping the course of things to come. Martin, with never a look back. Peter, doomed always to chase that flying image of his brother, who would run better than him, swim better and, in all things, act more surely than him; doomed to pant after it but never to catch it up. Peter, who will feel in later years, much more than his brother ever will, the odd stab of nostalgia for the salt air and the dunes of Camber Sands; who already possesses the harassed, irresolute looks of his father, and who already has – for I saw it for the first time, as he struggled up again, over the lip of the dunes, a full minute after his brother, breathless and tense, a thread of seaweed stuck to his leg – the hard knot which his father has between the brows, which bespeaks a kind of cruelty.
Peter: ‘What are those rusty metal things over there, Dad?’
Dad: ‘Oh, they’re something left over from the war.’
(As Dad and Peter – Martin having slunk off, to the beach cafés perhaps, or to disturb loving couples in the dunes – walk out again – walk and not run – to the water’s edge, which has now drawn considerably nearer; and Dad thinks, almost for the first time, that day, of his own Dad.)
Peter: ‘Oh.’ (Unenlightened, unwilling to display ignorance by asking further questions, but just a little bit afraid, gripping his father’s hand, that the rusty metal things might still be dangerous. And all this suddenly and literally washed away by Dad’s visible recoil and audible gasp of cowardice at the icy temperature of the water which has just licked over his foot.)
But this was later. After lunch, after trips for ice-creams, after a deadly-earnest cricket match in which Martin suddenly revealed himself for a murderous fast bowler, and after – even while that first trip to the water’s edge, that first trip to the future and back, was taking place – Marian and I made love in the sand. We had to be quick, quick as sparrows – you never know when someone might appear over the crest of the dunes. Need for haste; but none for hinting or persuasion, nor for pointless sophistication. All those laborious bedroom antics, to return at last to burrowing in the sand. The beach-grass waved; the gulls floated, white fragments in the blue above. But this would have been Marian’s view. My view was filled with sand, a miniature dune-scape, a whole shifting and rippling Sahara that was forming and reforming round our blanket. I thought, it is the landscape of the desert, bleached and smooth-contoured, that most approximates to human flesh. If any landscape can be called naked, it is a landscape of dunes; and perhaps that is the true source of my nostalgia for Camber Sands. And then these same soft-gold hues and gentle contours made me think of the pale, furred creature who was the cause of my beginning these pages, and I remembered the magical words Mr Forster had spoken when I was a boy (Peter’s age): ‘a piece of nature’.
ALSO BY GRAHAM SWIFT
Making an Elephant
Tomorrow
The Light of Day
Last Orders
Ever After
Out of This World
Waterland
Learning to Swim
Shuttlecock
The Sweet-Shop Owner
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GRAHAM SWIFT was born in 1949 in London, where he still lives and works. He is the author of eight previous novels: The Sweet-Shop Owner; Shuttlecock, which received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Waterland, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize and won the Guardian Fiction Award, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, and the Italian Premio Grinzane Cavour; Out of This World; Ever After, which won the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger; Last Orders, which was awarded the Booker Prize; The Light of Day; and, most recently, Tomorrow. He is also the author of Learning to Swim, a collection of short stories, and Making an Elephant, a book of essays, portraits, poetry, and reflections on his life in writing. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages.
ALSO BY GRAHAM S
WIFT
THE LIGHT OF DAY
On the anniversary of a life-shattering event, George Webb, a former policeman turned private detective, revisits the catastrophes of his past and reaffirms the extraordinary direction of his future. Two years before, an assignment to follow a strayed husband and his mistress appeared simple enough, but this routine job left George a transformed man. Suspenseful, moving, and hailed by critics as a detective story unlike any other, The Light of Day is a gripping tale of murder and redemption, as well as a bold exploration of love and self-discovery.
Fiction/Literature
LAST ORDERS
Four men—friends, most of them, for half a lifetime—gather in a London pub. They have taken it upon themselves to carry out the last orders of Jack Dodds, master butcher, and deliver his ashes to the sea. As they drive toward the fulfillment of their mission, their errand becomes an extraordinary journey into their collective and individual pasts. Braiding these men’s voices—and that of Jack’s mysteriously absent widow—into a choir of secret sorrow and resentment, passion and regret, Graham Swift creates a testament to a changing England and to enduring mortality.
Fiction/Literature
THE SWEET-SHOP OWNER
This flawlessly constructed and deeply compassionate novel is set during a single June day in the life of an outwardly unremarkable man whose inner world proves to be exceptionally resonant. As he tends to his customers, Willy Chapman, the sweet-shop owner, confronts the specters of his beautiful and distant wife and his clever, angry daughter, the history through which he has passed, and the great, unrequited passion that has tormented and redeemed him for forty years.
