by Graham Swift
Here, in our exclusive asylum.
When I emerged from the hospital, a fully reconditioned if fragile specimen, a period of convalescence was ordained. What better convalescent home than the old College itself? With its immured peace, its quiet lawns and its long experience of catering to the frailties and follies of learning. It was the long vacation. The long vacation, indeed. I was considerately and spitefully relieved of my scant college duties. A mere charge to its budget. A mere token of a Fellow.
And so I sit in these college gardens, under the shade of an Indian bean tree (a fine, mature example), trying to recover my substance. The weather is warm and settled. All the tranquil delights of a lovingly tended garden in high summer greet my eyes. The gardeners give me a wide, respectful berth. It is not quite a case of the Bath chair and the plaid rug. I can make my own way here from my rooms. On my knees is an inverted wooden tray and on it this notepad.
The gardens lie separate from the college buildings, across the river and, happily, some distance from it. At this time of the year, in weather like this, the river is a mêlée of mismanaged punts, splashes and squeals, with all the gentle charm of a wet T-shirt competition. Even here, in my arbour, the occasional scream or cackle of laughter reaches me; and more adventurous tourists, taking the path from the bridge, through the avenue of limes, and stopping at the gap in the high hedge and the little gate with its discreet, white-on-black sign, “Fellows Only,” might even be able to observe me, across the lawn. Look, they must think, like visitors at a zoo, pausing by some cage of shy rarities, there is one of them. And no doubt, seeing me scribble at this notepad, they take me to be immersed in some unfathomable and abstruse research.
But aren’t I?
Why should I resent my situation? I am restored to life. The sun shines through a punkah of green, tender leaves. Life! Life! Does it matter, so long as you breathe, who the hell you are? Or where you are? Or what you remember? Or what you miss? Why should I hate the man—who is dead anyway, and whom I liked—who has provided me with all this? Who has taken away from me—good God, how life can change, how everything can change in the space of less than two years—all worldly cares? But I have not told you yet the nub of my hatred, the nub of my forty years’ vicarious habitation of Elsinore as my second home. There is nothing worse than Revenge Refuted. You see, I thought Sam killed my father. So to speak. But now I know he didn’t. My father killed my father. And this in more ways than one.
2
When I try to remember the glorious, the marvellous, the lost and luminous city of Paris, I find it hard to separate the city that exists in the mind, that existed even then, perhaps, mainly in my mind, from the actual city whose streets I once trod and which is now older by some forty years. I have never gone back. I never went there with Ruth—because of the memories—though I went to most places with Ruth, and all couples, they say, should go to Paris. Perhaps now I should return—now I am this free, this disengaged man, and now I know, in any case, that certain things were not as they once seemed.
We see what we choose to see, we see what we think we see. In Paris my mother first took me to the opera. A matinée of La Bohème—a Parisian tale. And there, in Act One, behind Rodolfo’s garret window, and again, in Act Four, as poor Mimi lay melodiously dying, was a painted vista of Paris rooftops just like any you could actually see, and perhaps still can, around Sacré Coeur or Montparnasse. It had never struck me before that Reality and Romance could so poignantly collude with each other; so that ever afterwards I saw Paris as a palpable network of “scenes,” down to the subtle lighting of a smoky-blue winter’s morning or the blush of a spring evening, the incarnation of something already imagined. It scarcely occurred to me—my imagination did not go in this simpler direction—that this same Paris which we came to in November 1945 had been occupied not so long ago by Hitler’s soldiery and that our very apartment in the Rue de Bellechasse, in the heart of the ministerial quarter, had perhaps been the temporary home—as it was our temporary home—of some official of the Reich.
My mother (whom I would definitely not, in the final analysis, call Romantic) must have been moved by the same ambiguous, uncanny reality as I, because I can recall her, only days after our arrival, saying in a rapturous if half-startled voice, “Look, darling, this is Paris, darling” (I knew it was Paris, we were in Paris, we were strolling down the Champs Élysées), “isn’t it divine?” And that word, through the refining filter of Paris, is all I need to conjure up my mother. My mother that was (death number two): as she flung the Armstrong-Siddeley through the flashing, leafy lanes of Berkshire (me, a gaping, gleeful, infant passenger beside her); as she licked from her lips the residue of some oozing cream cake (a sweet tooth which only slowly taxed her figure); as she held up to herself, like some flimsy, snatched-up dancing partner, a newly bought frock: “Divine, darling! Isn’t it just divine?”
I cannot summon my father so easily. I have no touchstone. Perhaps because of what happened. Perhaps because, in any case (sons need time—they truly need time—to get to know their fathers), he was always a distant and sombre figure, outshone, first to his delight, then to his consternation, by my mother’s heedless brightness. Yet I remember him once attempting to draw near—or so I think was his intention. It was in that same Paris apartment, on a cold, windy evening, with winter still at war with spring, the lights on outside and a fire burning hearteningly in the massive, grey marble fireplace. He was standing by the fire, one elbow on the mantelpiece, in full evening rig, waiting for my mother before they left for another of his official functions.
“The thing is,” he suddenly said, slowly, with an air of weighed wisdom and of speaking aloud some uncontainable thought, “when you are out on an adventure, you want to be at home by the fire, and when you are at home by the fire, you want to be out on an adventure.”
I wish I knew what it was I had said—if anything—that elicited that unusual pithiness. And I wish I had known then, while the fire flickered and the wind scraped at the window, what should have been the proper response. I was nine. There he was, in all his pride, fifty-five years old—some twenty years older than my mother, medals on chest, cigar lit, Scotch and soda—a large one—poured. Some question of mine? Or some impulse in his own mind that seemed to raise the whole, daunting phenomenon of his soldierly past and his mysterious present duties, his aura of belonging to a world of great, glorious (but peculiarly awkward) things?
He seemed surprised at his own words, as if he had not known they were stored inside him. He looked selfconsciously at his watch.
“Whatever can your mother be up to?”
Perhaps it was on that same evening—but this surely would have been sooner after our arrival—that I had asked him, point-blank, what were we doing, what was he doing, here in Paris? And he’d replied, with a sort of jocular, self-effacing gravity, “Oh—sorting out the world. You know, that sort of thing.”
Only once can I remember his attempting to show me the sights of Paris. We had scarcely set out—our first port of call was Napoleon’s tomb—when an icy shower caught us, the first of a series which would turn our jaunt into a stoical exercise. I could not help feeling how I would much rather have been with my mother. How she would have turned a change in the weather into a positive pleasure. Wrestling, laughing, with an umbrella. Scurrying into the aromatic warmth of a café and ordering, in an Anglo-French that was infinitely more convincing if no more proficient than his, “Un crème, un jus d’orange,” and, falling back into expressive English, “and two of those wicked little tarts!”
Seeing the sights of Paris with my mother! Shopping sprees with my mother in Paris! From her I learnt to see the world as a scintillating shopwindow, a confection, a display of tempting frippery. From her I learnt the delights of ogling and coveting and—by proxy and complicity—spending. I would go with her to spend money. To buy hats, necklaces, gloves, shoes, dresses, cakes. I would wait, perched on a velvet-backed chair, smiled at by the attentive vend
euse, while, behind drawn plush curtains, things slithered, rustled, snapped, to an accompaniment of sighs and hums. In the city of perfume we bought perfume. In the city of lingerie we pondered over lascivious creations of silk and lace. If they were meant expressly for his eyes, it only made his noble loftiness the more impressive; but I suspected—I knew—they were not. And in all this I was the adjudicator, the referee, the scapegoat. The oyster-grey or the rose-pink? “Oh, you decide, sweetie. No, you can’t? Bien, tous les deux, s’il vous plaît, Madame.” “Tous les deux, Madame? Ah oui, d’accord. Le petit est bon juge, n’est-ce pas?”
Coming out with her booty, she would hug me ardently, as if it were I who had enabled her so successfully to succumb. In the same way, prior to such purchases, when her eyes fell on anything particularly delicious and desirable in a window, she would squeeze me fiercely, conspiratorially, giving an Ooh! or an Aah! as if it were I alone who could tilt the balance between mere looking and rushing headlong into the shop. “But isn’t it just heavenly, darling?” I could have lived for, lived in that squeeze. Until I grew up and realised it was almost entirely selfish. She might as well have been hugging herself, or a handy cushion or spaniel.
Sorting out the world! He should have sorted out himself and his own jeopardized household. Did he know—but he must have done from the very beginning, he must have known what she was “up to”—that while he was busy sorting out the world and “talking with the Allies” (another cryptic phrase, which made me think of some gossipy, over-neighbourly family) and I was busy at the little école for foreigners they found for me, “Maman,” as I’d begun precociously to call her, was busy entertaining or being entertained by Uncle Sam, or plain Sam Ellison as he then was, who had his own recipe for sorting out the world, expressible in one single, vulgar word: plastics? In Maman’s defence, it could be said that she too was engaged with the Allies, Sam being American. And in Sam’s defence, it could be said that, fuelled as it was by rank commercialism, he too had a sense of mission.
“It’s the stuff that’s gonna mould the future. I mean, literally. Anything from a coffee cup to an artificial leg, to the sock that goes on it.”
“And then there’s plastic surgery.”
“No, that’s kinda different, sweetheart.”
(As my mother, an expert at lash-fluttering fausse-naïveté, well knew.)
He must have known. If I could sniff these matters out, even in their early, covert stages, then he— But then I was a virtual accomplice. When I emerged from my école in the afternoon to see Sam just dropping Maman off from a taxi, or made my own way home to find her in a distinct state of having hastily bathed and dressed, I would receive not guilty looks but one of her swift, smothering, implicating hugs—essentially no different from her shopping hugs. Thank you for letting me buy that dress—isn’t it gorgeous? Thank you for letting me fuck Sam—isn’t he divine? And, yes, that word had only to spring from her lips and I believed it to be so. I thought Sam—six feet of hard-muscled American avarice—was divine, and I thought crêpe suzette and tarte tatin were divine, and I thought oyster-grey silk cami-knickers were divine, and I thought my mother’s laughter, the sheer, vicious gaiety in her eyes, was divine.
“Do up my buttons, sweetie, would you? There’s an angel.”
A whole world existed in which men did up the backs of women’s dresses at four o’clock in the afternoon.
I can see it now, that apartment above the Rue de Bellechasse. Its ponderous furnishings, its tarnished chandeliers, its diplomatic decorum under perpetual threat from my mother’s chatter and laughter, from her gusty scurryings from room to room, and—but this was hardly a threat—from her magic snatches of song. I learnt never to ask, never to prompt, never to wait. Only to recognise the likely moments: in the evenings when the traffic outside began to toot in a distinctly perkier fashion; after one of her unspecified “lunch engagements”; in moments of lingering and meaningful déshabille. Lights coming on in the streets. Wafts of scent. The gurgle of bath water running and, above it, lilting, throbbing: “Dove so-ono i bei momeenti …”
And what world was he sorting out? Some new, rebuilt world which would one day be unveiled to the dazzlement and shame of such backsliders as Mother and me? Or some old, dream-world restored, in which implacable British sergeant-majors bawled for ever over far-flung parade grounds and men followed well-trodden paths to glory and knighthoods?
He was fifty-five. And I had the insight of an infant. But it seems, now, that I could have told him then: that world was gone. An axe had dropped on it.
And yet—Paris was still Paris. Even the Paris that a year ago had emerged from four years of occupation. The chestnuts kept their ranks; café tables spawned; a thousand mansarded roofs glinted in the autumn sunshine, without a bomb-site among them. By the following spring, Paris had the air of something simply resumed. It was only winter, not a world war, that had passed: shutters flung open; awnings lowered; bed linen hanging from upper windows; merchandise once more filling the shops, to be pillaged by my mother.
Paris. April in Paris. I had never seen Paris before, and yet even at nine years old I had this recurring sensation of encountering a vision made fact. If the trompe-l’œil Paris of La Bohème was an illusion, then on my journeys on foot between our apartment and the école, journeys which took a meandering form and had something to do, I suppose now, with a sense of having lost the right path with my parents, I daily disproved the illusion: Paris was the living, breathing rendition of itself.
“… di dolce-ezza e di piacer …?”
Somewhere on those wanderings to and from school, in the crisp, rimy breath of a January morning, I looked up from the pavement through a tall, lighted window and saw—a true vision. Three—four, five—ballerinas, dressed in leotards and tights, swathed in woollen leg-warmers, dipping, stretching, balancing, raising one leg, extending one arm in that curving way ballet-dancers do, while clinging with the other to a wall bar. I stood transfixed, entranced.
How many times did I pass that window again? How many times was the blind cruelly drawn? Once—but this must have been at a later time of day and I must have been by then a fully-fledged truant, flâneur, voyeur—I passed a café at the further end of the same street, and there, sitting at an outside table, even in that midwinter chill (warm and pink from exercise), were my ballerinas. But no longer poised, living sculptures. They were little chattering mesdemoiselles-about-town, crossing their legs, nestling their chins into their scarves, responding boldly to the badinage of the waiter, blowing at the steamy froth on their chocolats chauds. I drew close, feigning interest in an adjacent shop-front. Glowing faces. A sound of female glee. Two eyes, in particular, beneath a dark fringe, which momentarily turned on me. Two pink lips, a flicking tongue adorned with the flakes of a croissant.
A crude case of my mother’s shop-window lusts? But I knew it was more than that. What enthralled me was the pathos, the dignity, the ardour of rehearsal. The sublime fact that in a world so in need of being sorted out, young girls of sixteen and seventeen (but, of course, to me, then, they were Women) could devote themselves so strenuously to becoming sugar-plum fairies.
Lift the axe! I wish I could have taken him, gripped his hand, as he gripped mine, suddenly, on that wet, chilly day as we emerged from the gloom of Les Invalides, stood him before that secret window and said: There, it’s for that that you are sorting out the world. I wish he could have gripped my hand more firmly still, come closer to me out of his remoteness; told me, warned me.
Paris first bred in me the notion that the highest aim of civilization is the loving perfection of the useless: ballerinas, café chatter, Puccini operas, Elizabethan sonnets, silk underwear, parfumerie, patisserie, chandeliers, the magic hush when the lights go down in an auditorium …
“Mimi! Mimi! Mimi!”
… and Romantic Love.
She actually cried, she actually wept in the seat beside me, dabbing her eyes and clutching my hand, while her lips mimed the
arias.
Lift the axe! A Paris morning, in April. Perhaps that very morning I had peeped at my ballerinas. Morning turning to midday. Sunshine; pigeons; the smell of food. She is waiting beyond the gates of the école, though by now I am used to making my own way home. She is alone and somehow purposeful, fixed in her own space. She opens her arms and gives me an engulfing hug, as if I have returned from somewhere far away. But she is not smiling (or crying). She is composed and authoritative; the hug is like some solemn ceremony.
“Your daddy has had an accident, at his office.”
“An accident?”
“Your daddy has had an accident. And died.”
The second part of this statement, uttered unemphatically, almost perfunctorily, scarcely registered at first. Certain announcements take time to reach the brain.
“An accident with a gun.”
With a gun? With a gun? What was he doing, in his office, in Paris, in the seventh arrondissement, in the centre of civilization, with a gun? A sudden, racing fantasy, a whole alternative life for my father, who was now dead, bloomed in my head. He was a spy, an undercover agent, he was on some hush-hush mission. It explained his distance, his absences, his resonant words about “adventure.” He bore the constant burden of secrecy and danger. For a while the delusion was so strong that it turned into a pang of regret: I had discovered this source of excitement too late—I could never, now, have access to it.
And perhaps it was this sense of deprivation, rather than the simple fact that my father was dead, that made tears rush to my eyes.
“Yes, my darling, you cry. Cry. Cry.”
And, opening her arms again, stooping, but unweeping, she crushed me against that warm, ready bosom, where Sam, by now, must already have been crushed many times.
She never used the word “suicide.” Perhaps I would not have known what it meant. Perhaps I guessed and only wanted, as she did, to gloss over the fact. It was Sam, in any case, who confirmed my suspicions. He and I were alone in the apartment. She had become a busy woman. I knew nothing about inquest proceedings, let alone in foreign cities. This must have been before she and I went back, the first time, with the body, to Berkshire.
