by Graham Swift
I said, “He meant to do it, didn’t he?”
A bold, grown-up, not-to-be-evaded question.
“Yes, pal. I guess so.”
Later, it occurred to me that Sam might have been briefed to deal with this very point. But his brief, or his aptitude for it, only went so far. I was nine, he was twenty-four. Twenty-four seems now such a slender age—not so far from nine—but there was no doubt that during that time in Paris those fifteen years between Sam and me could be a wide gap to leap. Not so wide, it’s true, as the forty-six years between me and my father. Which gave Sam a distinct advantage in winning me over—along with the ability to slide into a boyish, big-brotherly familiarity quite beyond my father. But I always thought this was just a knack, an act for my benefit.
That morning, days after my father’s death, was the first time that it occurred to me, from the vantage of my own unlooked-for access of experience, that Sam really was, perhaps, just a kid. The fact that almost as big a gap of years existed between him and my mother as between him and me did not escape me. Once, on one of those tumultuous afternoons that seemed now to belong to another age, I had heard my mother simper, beyond closed, impassive doors, “Come on, Sammy, come to Mummy.…” I recalled it now, not recognising one of the least exceptional idioms of love. It was as though at the very point when Sam was most culpable, I both saw he was most innocent and discovered a new cause for enmity.
He took out a cigarette and I saw that his hand, his strong, young man’s hand, was shaking. He must have known I’d seen it.
“Why?” I said. The inevitable follow-up.
But “why” was not one of Sam’s words, the scrutiny of motives was not his strong point.
“I guess you’ll have to ask your mother that, pal.” He managed to light the cigarette and took a deep, steadying draw.
“I guess I’ll have to be looking after your mother now,” he added with a kind of feeble cheerfulness, as if the statement were half a question; as if he were watching his youth melt away.
I asked my mother. She was ready to be asked. I suppose there must have been some confabulation between them, a two-stage strategy. It was the moment, of course, for her to have broken down, wept, begged my forgiveness, confessed that her shamelessness had driven a man to his death. The things that happen in opera, they happen in life too. But she didn’t. She spoke calmly, almost dreamily.
“Perhaps there was something he knew that we shall never know.”
Which was, of course, a twisting round of the truth. It was we who had known something which he hadn’t known; or which he had known all along and could no longer pretend not to know. Her eyes hardened into a sort of warning whose meaning was clear: Don’t play the innocent, sweetie. If I’m to blame, then so are you. You were a party to this. You allowed it, didn’t you? You let it happen.
It was true: I might have gone to him at any time, like a true, a dutiful, a worthy son. Spilled the beans.
Then suddenly she smiled tenderly and took me in her arms. “Poor darling,” she said, as if I had fallen and grazed my knee; as if at the same time she thought this whole line of thinking was unnecessarily morbid. We were alive; my father was dead. She had taken Sam into her life. She had known what she was doing; she had made her choice. The fierceness, the frankness, of her will to live! She told me, many years later, with complete equanimity, how she had gone to see him in the mortuary. How his head was swathed in bandages, save his face. How they had even put a sticking-plaster over the hole in his temple. She had no squeamishness. No pity, no mercy. I think she even despised him for his death, which, for all its drastic convenience, was nonetheless cowardly, stupid, messy, extreme. She despised this man she had married, exploited, cheated—destroyed.
And it was true: if I had an allegiance, it was to her, not to him. The image of my father rose before me, as inscrutable, as open to interpretation as it was deserving of belated loyalty. He must have known for weeks about the two of them. And even if the penny had dropped only late in the day, did suicide truly answer the circumstances? A former soldier, a man of action. If a bullet was to be involved, it should surely have been placed neatly between Sam Ellison’s eyes.
A recurring dream—the very emblem of my addled adolescence: Sam with a fresh, damson-coloured hole (and no sticking-plaster) in his forehead.
But perhaps Sam and Mother were only the last, ill-timed straw. I underestimated the dimensions of the man, this man who had left my life. During those strange, transitional months, as we moved from Paris back to Berkshire, as Mother married Sam and I reached my tenth birthday, the awesome realisation offered itself to me that my father had tried but had simply not been able to sort out the world. People die when their world will no longer sustain them. Duty, ambition and even, now, his wife had let him down. He was fifty-five years old. I can see him feeling the cool weight of the pistol. The “honourable way out”; a soldier’s solution. When you are out on an adventure … Suddenly death, not the vivid, vaunted death of the battlefield, but the image of himself as a duped nonentity, stared him in the face—and he rushed to meet it.
Lift the axe! Put the pistol back! Carry me back to that world of boulevards and ballerinas. To that songful, mirthful, deceitful apartment. Carry me back even to the innocence of that moment of icy, naked shock—I had never felt it before—round which my mother, by the école gates, cast her cloaking embrace. There was a space in the world occupied by my father, which would never be occupied by him again. The spring sun falling on Parisian shutters, Parisian cobbles, was gentle, kindly, beyond reproach. It fell on the fur collar of my mother’s coat and picked out of its filaments little pinpoints of gold. All that day I seemed to see that the sunshine was made up of countless particles of irreducible, indestructible, eternal gold.
3
And when she died, when my mother died, I was rushed back to that moment over forty years ago.
The last time I visited her, which I instinctively knew would be the last time I would see her alive, was one exceptionally warm, radiant evening late last September. The curtains, a pale salmon colour, were drawn in her private room, which gave it a ruddy, subdued glow, but here and there a chink let in a shaft of more golden light, in which specks twirled and twinkled. In a hospital (I thought) there should be no specks. But always, in any beam of light, there are these tiny, sparkling shoals. And in a flash I was transported back to that April day in Paris, to the memory of those little flecks of fire in her fur collar, to the memory of my face crushed in that fur collar, its smell and her smell, and the shapely strength of her body beneath her coat, of which her body now was a sad, prostrated parody.
The windows were open behind the curtains and, as her wing of the hospital overlooked a park, there floated in the smell of cut grass, the occasional ricochet of playful voices and the gentle pok-pok of a tennis game in progress. It was as though she had expressly arranged the circumstances of her death so that they might seem the least fearsome, the least inimical to life.
She had already displayed, even as her days became numbered, her contempt for the fear of death and her disdain for those who fell prey to it—who lived their lives, as she put it, as if they deserved “a special pass.” It was an impressive and impressively timed demonstration. Never before had I heard her enlarge so much on her family, my forebears, about whom, so it would seem, a mixture of shame and scorn had hitherto kept her quiet. It was as if, now the end was near, she was driven reluctantly back to the other extremity of her life, to her origins and ancestry.
She had scoffed at Sam’s recent researches in this area, his absurd pedigree-hunting, but also humoured him, as she always humoured Sam, as you might indulge a child. But then Sam, for all his businessman’s bravado and native robustness, had a different attitude to death from my mother, as both she and I knew well from times gone by. If I had wanted to confirm it (and gain a little more cheap revenge), I need only have stepped out of that hospital room and along the corridor, as indeed I did later, to where
Sam was waiting (I was first, he was next), an expression on his face, despite the mellow warmth of that evening, as if he were sitting in a room made of ice.
I’m glad death took him quickly and unannounced and, as it were, in flagrante.
For all her vocal powers, for all her capacity to chatter, squeal and, sometimes, shriek, my mother was never an eager raconteuse. I think she regarded reminiscence and tale-telling as a kind of weakness, an avoidance of the central issue of life, which was to wring the most out of the present. I never received from her, any more than I did from my father—perhaps this is why I became such a bookworm—my due dose of bedtime stories. Yet at the very end I was suddenly treated to a final and, so it seemed, irrepressible bedtime story—me, this time, at the bedside—of her remembered sires. And though the story had its moral, though she seemed to summon these ghosts only to arraign them for their folly (rather than to say she would soon be joining them), I wish she hadn’t left it so late. I never knew they were such a colourful bunch.
There was, first of all, my grandfather on my mother’s side, George Rawlinson, who died before I was born and of whom I knew only that he had been a medical man and, guessing from my mother’s silence, that some misfortune best not talked about had befallen him. He was in fact a surgeon at Guy’s Hospital, before whom had once lain a brilliant career in the then still-infant neurological branch of his profession. A pioneer brain surgeon, no less.
Who has heard of George Rawlinson? Who has heard of the Rawlinson Forceps, to which George, vainly wooing posterity, gave his name and on whose subcranial purpose I would rather not dwell (though my mother did not shrink from describing it). My grandfather’s path to eminence had seemed altogether assured until one day in 1923, when either his sound judgement or his sure fingers failed him just once. In came a sick but restorable young man; out came a permanent vegetable—who just happened to be the darling son of a Lord. Result, by stages: scandal, divorce, penury.
Then there was George’s older brother, my great-uncle, Rupert Rawlinson: Major, formerly Colonel Rawlinson; “Ratty” Rawlinson, as he was apparently known to his intimates—“Uncle Ratty” as he was known to my mother. It was in some lesser-known campaign of the Great War—Macedonia? Mesopotamia?—that his military career, likewise seemingly destined for stardom, took its calamitous turn. The wrong decision at the wrong time, an order given or not given that should not or should have been given. An inglorious, unglorifiable blunder. Result: court martial, demotion, ignominy.
My great-uncle did his best to outlive this disgrace, at least in the strictly numerical sense, since he died aged eighty-one and was still lingering on shortly before I was born. Yet according to my mother—and I am repeating now what she told me, brazenly enough, when her own death-warrant had effectively been signed—it was craven fear of oblivion, the desire to cheat death by the vain quest for distinction, that was the root of the matter, as much with Ratty as with George.
You would have thought that two brothers following the not unrelated trades of soldier and surgeon would not have been so affected. Both would have had fairly naked experience of mortality. But this, my mother claimed, was just the point. They chose professions that brought them close to death, in the empty hope that this would guard them against it. My great-uncle, who was no coward by a soldier’s standards and seems to have suffered, on that fateful day, an excess of valour over sense, hoped that his officer’s sword and his shining record in the Sudan and elsewhere would confer on him both renown and a kind of personal invulnerability. Likewise, George, as he audaciously probed what some have held to be the very seat of the Soul, might have felt himself privileged above ordinary beings, and might have foreseen his fame outlasting his forceps.
With Rupert, she insisted, the real trouble only began one snowy morning in the winter of 1920, when, a sound but dishonoured sixty-five, he took a nasty tumble down the front steps, cracking his head badly on the way, and for a day or so lay in a parlous condition.
“The man panicked, sweetie. He went to pieces. He thought his hour had come, with his shame still fresh upon him.”
How she could have been so sure of this, I don’t know. She was only nine at the time. But then I was only nine when my father—
In any case, it was this incident, in her view, that exposed the true tenor of the man and turned him for the rest of his life into an incurable and exasperating eccentric. The immediate “panic” had taken a specific form. In the midst of his fever and ill-founded terror, Rupert was apparently heard repeatedly to remonstrate that his younger brother was not to come near him, was not going to poke about in his skull with his fiendish instruments. George not only did come near him but, with little more than a cursory examination and no recourse to incision, pronounced that Rupert was making a big fuss about nothing and would recover in a day or so. The second humiliation of Uncle Ratty’s life.
My great-uncle was revenged, of course, when George took his own irremediable tumble only three years later. But, not satisfied with this, Rupert, as the senior member of the family and chief possessor of its fortunes, proceeded to play a vindictive, teasing game with my grandfather and his children (my mother and her brother, James), taunting them in their reduced circumstances with the meanness of his hand-outs and his own obstructive longevity.
But by this time, it seems, he was no longer entirely in possession of his faculties. That knock on the head, perhaps—just to spite his brother—had had its effect after all. He now devoted his time to perfecting in himself the caricature of a cranky, retired army officer, exaggerating or inventing past honours, while time softened his disgrace; and, when this didn’t work, looking for borrowed glory in the family archives. In his last years, this antiquarian urge (I admit it: the spirit of Uncle Ratty lives in me, as it lived even, for a while, in Sam) took an all-consuming form. Namely to prove that since his name, Rawlinson, denoted “son of Rawling,” in turn a palpable corruption of “son of Rawley” or “Ralegh,” his lineage might be traced, with much labour and subterfuge, to the great Elizabethan worthy himself, he of the pointed beard, muddied cloak and imperishable fame …
And then, going back a generation on my grandmother’s side, there was the Devon branch of the family—the right region for Sir Walter if the wrong name—who had made and lost their fortune in local copper and tin, neither of which seemed to have been as steady a bet as plastic.…
And then (did Uncle Ratty feel moved to pause here, I wonder? Did he peruse the Notebooks? But what did he want with another scandal and a lot of wordy mumbo-jumbo, and another non-Rawlinson?) there was Matthew Pearce—my mother’s great-grandfather—of Burlford.
All this she told me in the early stages of her illness—not, if I have given that impression, on that final, gilded evening. By then she could not have said anything more, because she had lost the mechanism of speech. Those last visits were to a silent, staring woman, her throat and neck packed around with all kinds of surgical junk, so that she could still breathe, and all verbal communication restricted to what she could write with a marker-pen on a special, wipe-clean clipboard. I think the sudden bout of disclosures, if it expressed in her peculiar way her own readiness to accept death, was also a recognition of the anticipated fact: that before loss of life would come loss of voice; that if she had things to say, she had better speak away. Though when silence struck, I could not help wondering—I still wonder—whether she had quite got round to saying all she intended.
I blamed her, silently, and she knew this, for the timing of her death, coming so soon, or at least announcing itself so soon, after Ruth’s. Perhaps Ruth’s death had immunized me, so that I could face the distress of my mother’s with a sort of foggy, battered steadiness. But then she was seventy-eight. And, of course, this worked the other way round. I was witnessing in my mother the sort of horrors that Ruth had—avoided. My mother’s unrebelling submission to them was a kind of declaration that she was made of tougher stuff than Ruth, as she was made of tougher stuff than my
father. (Oh, she was tough, all right.) And I could not help thinking that her merciless appraisal of her family, her parables on mortal dread and the vanity of ambition, were her indirect way of delivering, at last, her jealous judgement on her daughter-in-law.
Why did she have to do it? To die then? To be so cruel? To block, to steal, Ruth’s afterlight? But then it struck me that perhaps all of this could be turned round yet another way again, and that, amazing as it was to conceive, there might have been in the cruelty a shred of unbelievable kindness: she was using her death to shake me out of my stupor of grief. (“Buck up, darling, it’s not the end of the world.”) There was a moment when my grasp of this possibility must have shown in my eyes; and her eyes had glittered back: you see, I am really a mother, after all, not such a selfish bitch—I give myself up for my son.…
It was an irony that went unmentioned that death came for her in the form of cancer of the throat, of the larynx. A punishment for having already, in one sense, forsaken her voice? You cannot help these thoughts. But I do not think she was cowed by superstition, any more than she was cowed by death.
Her voice! Her singing! Her ringing soprano. It is significant that in her lecture on the lure of fame she did not cite her own once budding musical career. But then she had abandoned it long ago: the point was made. And in any case, in her opinion, her singing voice was just a “gift,” she owed it no special duty; and the reason she always gave for her early dedication to it was simple economic necessity in the face of Uncle Ratty’s stinginess: “You have to use what you’ve got, darling—but only when you need to.” Was it her fault that some possessive music mistress had “discovered” her? Or that her ailing father, who had once thought of himself as a “gifted” surgeon, took some solace in his final days from his daughter’s accomplishment (the tableau is perfect: the humbled dissector of the brain; that ineffable virtuosity)?
