by Graham Swift
We were not so different, perhaps, he and I. We came to the same place, he by the road of that early loss, I by the road of my own thoughts. Who is the more blameworthy? Yet, at the very end, he confounded me utterly. Bade me rummage in the depths of an old, locked cupboard, where I found the little old, leather-bound clasp Bible—I supposed I would never see it again—from which my mother used regularly to read to me and which I had thought, in the wilfulness of his bereavement all those years ago, he had thrown away. Then he confessed, if not in so many words, that he was always jealous of the faith that I had kept but which he in his innermost heart had lost. Jealous, furthermore, of the good Rector, in whom he thought I had found a father—since a spiritual father—preferable to him. Yet surely it was my father who, if anyone, found me my father-in-law and steered you and me (happy, ill-fated steersman-ship!) into wedlock. And if he supposed that I found thereby a sanctuary he could not provide, I did not refuse, in the end, the sad sanctuary of his own neglected hearth.
You are wondering, perhaps, how much his habit of the bottle hastened his death. I must tell you that for at least eighteen months before he died he touched not a drop, though I would not have begrudged him a dash of brandy in his milk, if it had eased the wretchedness of his illness. He died the devotee of temperance he was when my mother lived. All his confessions were soberly made. We said no prayers (how could we?), and what inward prayers he may have uttered I do not know. But my mother’s Bible, which now I keep, was beside him. Death is a strange breeder both of truth and of superstition.
It is late. Rain is falling, and there is scarcely a footstep in the street. Part of me feels—a fine confession for a man who has just turned fifty—like some small boy running away to sea, with as yet no better conception of the perils of the ocean than the comfortable sound of rain beating on a window-pane. My dear, dear Liz. How many voyagers, how many ocean-goers have sat up late in this town, penning letters to their loved ones?
Superstition? Yes, I must say that. There has been no counter-reversal, no retracting of retraction. I hold to my groundless ground. And yet as I sit here, a traveller about to submit himself to the deeps, my mother’s Bible is with me. It has a place in my trunk—I clutch it to me as a savage must clutch his talisman—while my notebooks do not.
Fifty years! What is fifty years? Life is short, we say. And we guess not (but I will not harp on my theme) how infinitesimally brief, how as nothing, as a “twinkling of the eye,” is the span of human life within the great duration of the aeons. Yet life is long too. We feel it so. We feel ourselves become part of the ages. I remember, when I was a small boy, my poor mother telling me of her own visits to this town when she herself was a girl. How she had been in Plymouth when it was red with the coats of Sir John Moore’s army bound for Spain, and how again she had gone with her father and mother to behold with her own eyes the fallen Emperor of the French, who was then a captive on the Bellerophon, anchored in the Sound, and daily drew out crowds in boats to observe him.
These things seemed to me to belong to some distant era, even to the realms of legend, and I confused in my mind Sir John Moore’s army with the gathered bands of the Israelites at Hebron, which must have been at the time the subject of my Scripture readings with my mother. As for the Emperor of the French—“Boney,” as he was called then—he seemed to me a figure entirely out of fable, out of commedia dell’arte or Punch and Judy. And this, perhaps, was how my mother conceived of him even as she beheld him, for she would insist—and I will never know if this were some nice embellishment on her part—that as she was rowed with my grandparents by the stern of the warship, the Emperor, in full view on the quarter-deck, raised his hat and smiled, expressly at her.
“How are the mighty fallen” was her gloss on this little digression. So we continued on our path through the Old Testament. How strange to think that three times as many years have now passed since she related these things as had elapsed then from the events which she recounted. And what an age it seems since I heard her voice and since I sat beside her at our parlour table with the Bible between us.
The time may come, my dear Liz—perhaps it has come for you already—when it will seem just as long ago, just such a thing of fable, that we ever married and shared life together. But come what may, dearest Liz, you may trust that, as I revere still in my memory my poor mother—who showed me the way to a world that can no longer be mine—so will you always be remembered by
Your loving
Matthew
6
I was born in December 1936, in the very week that a King of England gave up his crown in order to marry the woman he loved. Naturally, I knew nothing about this at the time and, of course, other events than the Abdication Crisis were then at large in the world. But I have always felt that the timing of my arrival imbued my life, for better or worse, with a sort of fairy-tale propensity. I have always had a soft spot (a naïve view, I know) for the throneless ex-king sitting it out on the Riviera. And I have often wondered whether my mother’s pangs with me on that December day were eased by that concurrent event which must have been viewed by many, rather than as a crisis, as a welcome intrusion of Romance, allowing them fondly to forget for a moment Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. All for Love. Or, the World Well Lost. “Let … the wide arch of the ranged empire fall!” (As indeed it began to do under poor, put-upon George VI.) All for love, yes. Amor vincit …
And Paris, fairy-tale city, might have endorsed the point. Paris, with its enchanted streets and eternal air of licensed felicity, might have taken me to its heart. Was there any other city in the world in which to live but Paris? (I thought this even aged nine.) I might have become one of those countless aspirants who have flocked to the city by the Seine and become great artists, great dreamers or great liars. I might have become, trained in the free school of my mother and Sam, a great boulevardier, a great philanderer. I might have lived the life of Riley. But my father died before I had even passed the gates of puberty. And what I became was—bookish.
Though this did not happen immediately. If the truth be known, when we returned to England I didn’t grieve for my dead father. I didn’t want to grieve for him. I didn’t want to think of him. I didn’t want to think of my father as the man who had fired a gun at his head. I grieved for my adorable ballet-girls, who by this stage had received honorary names—delicious, seductive French names, Yvette, Simone, Michelle—who, even then, were alive and literally kicking, stretching their beautiful limbs in the ballet school, utterly ignorant of my distant worship and entirely without need of it.
And this was not a good time for grief. Or rather, it was a very good time for grief, which made one little parcel of it unexceptional and negligible. People had got used in recent times to the fact that every so often, so it seemed, nature required a culling, and thus to mixing a little callousness with their sorrow. Perhaps it was only after my father’s demise that the war, which I had lived through but conceived of as some remote, rumbling, impenetrably grown-up affair, became real for me. It was about death: slaughter, bodies, casualty lists.
And if I did not grasp the general point, I had the specific reminder of Ed. Shot down, aged nineteen-and-a-half, over the blue Pacific. That photo of his grinning brother became Sam’s trump card. How could I take out my feelings on Sam, how could I unleash on him all the venom due an arrant usurper (a murderer in all but name), when he neatly reminded me that we were companions in the same grim business of bereavement?
And what was an “accident” with a pistol in a Paris office to the Battle of the Coral Sea? (“Yep, a lot of brave boys went down.…”—his sentence would end in a mimetic gulp.) And what was my father’s death to the deaths of the fathers of other boys (I met them, these high-grade orphans) who had died, as the saying went, “in action?” My father, soldier though he was, had died in circumstances which required from me either a considerable degree of risky inventiveness or a suspect, rumour-breeding silence.
And how could I deny—fo
r all his exploitation of it—Sam’s plight? You are twenty-one years old, happily exempted, for complex reasons of primogeniture and your father’s involvement in a new and militarily useful industry (“Perspex, pal—you heard about perspex?”) from armed service. But your younger brother, your little kid brother, Ed, joins up, learns to fly and is killed. It might have been you, you think: it should have been you. Whatever you do now will be over your brother’s dead, sea-shrouded body. You have to live for Ed now; to take on all Ed’s lost chances (and Ed was great with the girls; they just fell over him). To become a perpetual nineteen-year-old …
“Sure—it’s tough. I know. It hits you hard,” was the extent of his attempts to sound out the measure of my sorrow and show his willingness, if necessary, to console. I have to admit he handled with a degree of delicacy the problem of disguising his relief that I didn’t appear to be hopelessly distraught, while preparing for the onset of a possibly vicious delayed reaction. And there was, in any case, that air of frank confidingness (so unlike my father), that bluff disavowal—I’m sorry if I have no conscience, if I have no shame, but it’s not my fault—that thick-skinned, businessman’s charm.
But I knew just how thick-skinned he really was. I had seen him with his hand trembling—I would see him, twice again in my life, with his face as drained of vigour as it was on that day. I knew his weakness. His tactical strength was his strategic disadvantage. Even I could see that, with all its fraught implications, with all its dangerous blend of the expedient and the needful, Sam saw in me a bizarre substitute for Ed. (And you gotta have substitutes.) That he side-stepped the dread question of his surrogate paternity—not to say his entire adult responsibilities—by this appeal to the chummily fraternal.
And he was right to prepare for a delayed reaction. He underestimated, that’s all, the extent of the delay and the persistence of the reaction. It seems that I’m a slow burner, a long-term investor of emotions.
We returned, briefly, to Berkshire in April ’46, to follow my father’s coffin, then permanently in June to settle in his home. I had a strong sense now of its being “my father’s house” rather than “home,” though my mother rapidly began asserting her proprietorial rights. Furniture was replaced. Decorators appeared. There was plainly money on tap. The little gallery of framed photographs from above the sideboard, recording the “India days” (cane chairs; verandahs; turbans; polo sticks) disappeared one morning in the van of a man collecting for a jumble sale. I did not believe, any more than my mother, that the place should become a shrine to her husband’s memory, but I felt the injustice. And I felt, as the physical remnants of my father were whittled away, the accretion, as it were, of his ghostly stock. It was his house. He may not have earned his plot in the ethereal fields of fame, but he had left this solid enough memorial. It was the husk of his life.
I should have protested. I should have said, at least, about those photographs: take them from the dining-room, if you will, but let me keep them in my bedroom. But the hypocrite and the coward in me stopped my tongue.
They got married the following March. There was a decent interval in which she practised being a widow and Sam, to give him his credit, kept his relative distance, turning up only for plainly licentious weekends. It’s true, he had much to occupy him. He was sowing (also) the seeds of his little empire—spreading the bright new gospel of polymers. I still have a vision of him offering his New World marvels to a depressed and war-wrecked England. The picture merges with all those smiling GIs, in their jaunty jeeps, handing out gum and being kissed and garlanded in the ruins of liberated villages. This was not Sam’s experience, but he was built in the appropriate mould, and perhaps even imagined himself in the same blithely triumphal role.
Unlike many of his countrymen hustling their way round Europe in those days, Sam did not simply have a suitcase full of nylons, he had a father in Cleveland with a factory that made nylons and, young as he was, a sound working knowledge of industrial chemistry. Above all, he had an inborn flair for business. I think of Sam as a perpetual juvenile in all other respects, but in business he had powers beyond his years.
Of the origin of the flair, of Sam’s parentage, of “old man Ellison,” clearly one of America’s leading plastics pioneers, I know very little; only that he and Sam had had a falling out, the roots of which seemed to have been the old man’s egotism and Ed’s death. There was Ellison senior, the self-made tycoon, and there was Ed at the bottom of the ocean. And in between the two was Sam, the dutiful, filial protégé, the safe, underwritten, overshadowed, guilt-ridden schmuck. Sam had to go his own way or become the eternal stooge. The necessary scenes of confrontation and rebellion should have prepared him, you might think, for my own act of rebellion in flatly refusing (I could see it coming a mile off) his own bountiful offer of a life in plastic. He might have been mercifully inclined, even nostalgically respectful. Not a bit of it. There was not even what I took to be old Ellison’s final compromise: a sizeable pay-off and the injunction to get lost and get rich.
Like father, like son. I wonder. In going his own way, you could say Sam only did in reverse what his own father had done some decades before when he upped sticks and crossed the promise-laden Atlantic. Sam pitched his hopes in the opposite direction, in an old continent which history had nonetheless turned into a new wilderness, where opportunities abounded for the bold and the resourceful and where it was still possible, in such callings as plastics, to be a pioneer. Thus he partook of that post-war spirit of inverse colonialism which beguiled and affronted the exhausted folk of the old world—yet which, in Sam’s case, was to be reversed yet again, to melt in that grotesque dream of actual assimilation, actual assumption into the true, old world.
But the release from paternal oppression also gave the perpetual kid-at-heart within Sam its liberty. Thus it was that, with a view to a little holiday, a little sight-seeing before the serious business of life began (and with Ed’s robbed youth as well as his own to think of), Sam came to Paris.
It seems to me now that, but for my father’s extreme action, my mother might have been for Sam only a ship that passed in the night. He was too soft-centred a soul simply to run away from the mess, and he found himself caught. But this is only one interpretation, and it begs the question of who was the predator and who (or what) was the prey. There was the factor of my mother’s (i.e., my father’s) money, which would indubitably have come in handy for a young man pledged to an independent life, let alone to setting up his own business. However big the cut he received from old Ellison, Sam must have been running through it fast enough in Paris. My father died; Sam saw his opportunity. It would, of course, be interesting to know whether he saw his opportunity before my father died.
Then there was the factor (I cannot overlook this—I heard the squeals from the bedroom) of sheer carnal compulsion. They hit it off. I have to say it. Sam brought to a yielding ripeness the full fruits of my mother’s womanhood, poorly tended as perhaps they were by my father. Perhaps because of his obligation to function for two, Sam was on some sort of biological overdrive. But—I have to say this too—my mother could give as good as she took. And in all this she was not blind. Sam was the blind one, at least when his eyes (I only quote an expression he once used, with rare self-appraisal, of himself) were only in his balls. I think she took stock of her precarious seniority. She gave herself an interval of fleshly fulfillment, during which time she would set Sam up (the question still stands: how much was Ellison Plastics my mother’s work?), and thus enjoy, in her mellower years, with a little diplomatic flexibility (the biological overdrive was an ongoing thing), both the rewards and the control.
An image of Sam, indelible in the memory, from one of those weekends during our first months back in England. A sultry summer’s night; I get up to fetch a glass of water: Sam on the landing, stark naked, caught between bedroom and bathroom, and in a state of livid tumescence. He drops a hand in almost maidenly alarm. He says, “Oh, hi, Billy,” with a kind of strangulat
ed nonchalance, as if we have met on some street corner. Never thereafter is the encounter mentioned by either of us.
And he would have died, so it seems, “in action,” in mid-erection, even in mid—
Sam, Sam. Led by his prick to his perdition. Switched off but still plugged in. Mr Plastic. Mr Plastic?
Only when the image of my ballet girls faded did grief for my father emerge to take its place. Or rather, not grief itself (what did I know then about grief?), but a nagging, self-pitying, self-accusing emotion born of the guilt at not feeling grief (how could I sigh over young sylphs in tutus when my own father was dead?) and out of a mood of redundancy, which it occurred to me my father must have felt too. There were Sam and my mother testing the springs of a new double bed, and there was I, an adjunct, an accessory, a supernumerary. This had been my father’s position. I stood in his vacant place. And out of this ghostly identification I began to summon a father I had never really known: noble, virtuous, wronged.
I’d like to think I wasn’t as slow as I was in opening my account of vengeance; that at least by that day the India photos were removed, I had taken my first vow of retribution; and that if I took such a vow, it was as authentic and spontaneous as the pang that prompted it. But I’m not so sure. I’m not so sure if our passions seek out models of behaviour or if models of behaviour are the springs of our passions. It was a while before the first blow was struck.
When I was eleven I went to a new school. I expected to excel in French. Instead, I excelled in English; I took comfort in books. I’d like to think that the love of literature which fell into my life around this time, and which one day would embolden me to snub Sam’s patrimony of plastic, was a pure and genuine love, lighting my darkened and orphaned days. But I cannot be sure. I cannot be sure which came first: the love of literature, which ensured I would cherish the play; or the play, which guaranteed I would venerate literature. In any case, my English master, as you know, was Tubby Baxter: a thin and cadaverous man, naturally, thus having the air now and then of a haunted and death-obsessed Renaissance hero. And the play, which you might have guessed if I hadn’t already told you, was Hamlet.
