by Graham Swift
I think I saw—and perhaps only I saw—just for a moment, the terror in her eyes, the hidden absence out of which the presence emerged. Then it was gone, she had overcome it, a little internal victory, and I was caught in the spell. And I knew then what I would always be and always want to be and need to be for the rest of my life: a perpetual stagehand waiting for the leading lady’s kiss; a lurker amidst lights and scenery; a shambling devotee of poets and performers; a humble thrall to this business of show-business.
Somewhere in this vision was already a scene in which, in some hotel suite stuffed with flowers and invitations, where Ruth held court to journalists and photographers, I would open the door from the bedroom, a preposterous figure in a dressing-gown, blink, pause, then withdraw again with a mumbled apology. But in that brief instant she would have turned to me with a smile and a look quite different from that reserved for her sycophantic retinue. And the retinue would have noticed and would think (much in the manner of some new acquaintances in this place): Can that really be—? Him?
A spotlight’s moonbeam. A shimmering creature in a clinging dress, hurriedly spirited up from somewhere, of midnight blue, hung with silver sequins and slit to mid-thigh. Smoke-furls. The piano’s tiptoe; the drum’s whisper. Her lashes flutter over the microphone, her lips part, noiselessly for a moment, as if inviting the audience to take delicious pity on her girlish trepidation.
Then: “I’m wild again, beguiled again …”
Pause: for the heavy-jowled patrons at the front tables to pull on their cigarettes, tap their cigars; for the old soak at the bar to bring his glass safely to his lips:
“… a simpering, whimpering child again …”
Who would not have been smitten? Who would not have been bewitched? And yet it was strange how this little world of smoochy melody and sugared lubricity seemed to make way specially, deferentially, for us, its hesitant protagonists. How Mandy and Diana, professional sirens, became as gooey and conniving as bridesmaids. As if everyone could see it even before we did. As if it weren’t supposed to happen, not the real thing, not in this dim-lit domain given over to the hint, the dream, the starry promise, but not the substance of love. But since it was happening—how sweet, how touching, how truly remarkable; and when were they going to get on with it?
When indeed?
Call it, also, stage fright. This stomach-fluttering period of waiting in the wings of love, this nervousness of lovers rehearsing the lines they will inevitably, redeemingly fluff. How strange to think, now, that there was a time when I did not know every inch of her body, every nook and niche and curve, when I had to imagine it—flaunted as it was, within proper limits, by her Blue Moon costumes. When there was as much a sweet shock of nakedness, of disclosure, to realise that this woman who could shine in the spotlight was the same woman who, backstage, would wrap round herself a simple fawn raincoat, run her fingers through her damp hair, light a cigarette or yawn with a sort of surprised intentness, one hand patting her lips the way boys make Red Indian noises. It was her, it was her, you see, never those roles she dressed in.
How strange to think there was a time when all those first times were yet to come. The first time we kissed (a mistimed, fumbling, near-bruising affair like a collision of birds in mid-air); the first time she shed her clothes for me; the first time my bare palms pressed her bare breasts; the first time … Then suddenly all these first times were passed through, like a dizzy mist; there was this woman who had stepped out of possibility into actuality, as if I had validated her existence. To put your arms round another. To say, be mine, be here, always be here. And then one day she was gone; where she had been there was air.
To think there was a time when I went back to my single, solitary, auto-erotic bed, on those summer nights which were already racing towards dawn, and hoped and feared and doubted and imagined, watched over by custodial and commiserative poets. And Mrs Nesbitt, my landlady, that old crow who hopped around below my eyrie, already had me down as a confirmed libertine. This “job” that brought me home, four nights a week, at three in the morning. At which hour, I suspect, she lay pruriently in wait, but never got her chance, hoping for a damning trail of scent, whispers and stifled giggles to ascend the stairs.
To think there was such a time when we hadn’t yet stepped into each other’s lives. When we never even knew each other. “I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I did, till we lov’d …?” These things are meant to be. Life has a thousand avenues, but these things (surely?) are meant to be. To think she too must have wondered: will this happen? Shall I, shan’t I? Will he, won’t he? It is a kind of stage fright. This rendering of yourself to another. This saying: here I am. And even at the height of her success (you won’t believe this) I would see her suddenly stricken with stage fright, enough to make her physically sick. That face (I try to remember it): so charged, so elusive (a thousand pictures failed to capture it). I never saw a face so brimming and in motion. So crystalline yet so liquid. So tender, so potent. A face that needed to be stilled. A cigarette helped. Better still, a kiss. Best of all, a part to play. A part to play. So fragile. So brave.
In the days before she was famous. Which was the greater fairy-tale?
I owe it all to a summer storm. The oldest ruse in the book of Romance. Dido and Aeneas. Ginger and Fred. Mr Silvester was a considerate, a courteous man. All that rough living that was now behind him had given him an exaggerated regard for the niceties of life. His club (or “establishment,” as he liked to call it) was a good, clean club; his girls were decent girls. One of the decencies he showed them in return was to pay for taxis to take them home in the early hours. My own means of transport was a rusting bike. While the Blue Moon Club warmed up, the cabaret commenced and all Soho went through its nightly paces, it waited, in sad but faithful exclusion, by the rear entrance, to take me home. But that night that the heavens opened (they opened! They poured down blessings!), it remained there, as on many a subsequent night, to rust even more.
Chucking it down at half-past two in the morning. I would get drenched (said Mandy and Diana). I would catch my death (said Miss Rita). Mr Silvester was shrewdly silent. And at last she said it. At last we stepped into each other’s limelight. And I dare swear that after we left, Miss Rita and the girls and even Mr Silvester and assorted unimpressible staff gave a little round of relieved applause. A midsummer night. No sylvan sorcery, no moonlit magic. But that night a wand was waved. I forgot I was Hamlet. I was a puckish soul. The world was no longer weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable, and for months I would not plot a single act of further reprisal against my wicked stepfather.
These things are meant to be. Jack shall have Jill; nought shall go ill. I might have lived thenceforward happily ever after. (But what does “ever” mean?) Her best line, her most unforgettable line, delivered with such casualness but with such depths of promise:
“Share my taxi?”
8
The little ironwork gate into this garden, which can only be opened by those honoured with a key, has a distinctive and now easily recognisable repertoire of sounds. There is first the exploratory scraping and clicking of the key in the lock—not a sound that carries far but one easily picked up by the ear if you are used to opening the gate yourself (the mechanism is temperamental and demands coaxing). Then there is the mixture of rattles and squeals with which the gate swings open; then, after a pause, the vibrant, percussive jingle with which it returns on its sprung hinge.
A tinkling bell, specially made for the purpose, would be no more effective in announcing someone’s coming. Thus I lift my head, I am prepared: though her arrival is not unexpected—she has visited me now, here under the bean tree, for several days in succession. Nonetheless, as the gate gives out its warning, I take these pages (I am writing this later—days later) from the tray on my knee and slip them into my briefcase. Then I take my notes on the Pearce manuscripts from the briefcase and pretend to be working on them.
She walks towards me across the law
n with that by now familiar gait and that soft and bulging straw basket in her hand. One of the disquieting thoughts that beset me in this curious post-mortal condition of mine is that everything might be beginning again. This is my second life, my reincarnation. Perhaps there is life and life again, always and for ever. Perhaps the world has been reinvented for me in its full potential. This is the Garden of Eden. And here comes Eve.
But no, she is not Eve. And nothing is going to happen, not this time around, even if Potter is far away at a conference in Chicago. She is more like one of those pitying and piteous women of medieval romance—yes, that is more her style. And this garden, with its locked gate which only the favoured may open, is like one of those semi-allegorical gardens into which the Lady of the Castle steals (unknown to her absent lord) to solace some wounded knight-errant (ha!). Which, with a good deal of twisting and stretching of the imagination, is not unlike our situation.
A brief history of the Potters, Michael and Katherine. Part fact and part surmise, just like my reconstruction of the life of Matthew Pearce. Just, if it comes to it, like my reassembly, here in this afterworld, of my own life. A brief history of the Potters—pieced together from hearsay and conjecture and from what Katherine herself, in circumstances rather different from these decorous meetings under the bean tree, has told me …
Picture a scene in the office of Michael Potter, university lecturer at the University of X, it doesn’t matter where. Year of our Lord, 1970. Potter is twenty-seven. Katherine is nineteen. And it is Katherine who has sought this not-so-common cross-disciplinary meeting between a lecturer in History and a second-year student in English. She would like some help with the background to her long essay: Arthurianism in Tennyson and his contemporaries. Potter has flipped through his diary (at the same time, let us suppose, discreetly appraising the young Katherine out of one corner of his eye) and said, “Okay. Say three o’clock, Thursday?” And he is the right man to have come to. This is his special field: Victorian idealism and Victorian doubt. One day he will write a book on the subject.
She duly knocks at three. She has not quite broken free of the brittle mould of a clever schoolgirl. One part of her is actually drawn to that moody, broody, neo-chivalric stuff that forms the topic of her essay—all that loss of faith, all that elegiac Romance; another believes that this is what you do, this is what is supposed to happen at modern universities: you throw yourself at clever young lecturers.
What would she have worn for this fateful tête-à-tête? The ubiquitous miniskirt of those days? No, one of those long, ankle-length, slim-waisted, high-necked dresses in some dark, velvety material, which were also, conversely, favoured then and actually evoked the graciously draped women of past ages. Potter would have noticed it (winter light fading beyond his office windows, his desktop and bookshelves in a state of beguiling disorder): the nostalgia for the nostalgia of nostalgia.
Darkness descends. The talk goes on longer than envisaged. No problem, no problem, says our doughty lecturer. He pours more coffee into the trusty coffee mugs. Then at length, the last cup of coffee having gone cold, Potter says, “A drink …? A bite to eat …?”
She seduced him? He seduced her? The latter surely, knowing what we know, now, of Potter. But this Potter of yore was not the Potter of now—this I have on the best authority. The Potter of those days was a serious, forceful, unstudiedly charming young lecturer, with something of a reputation, it’s true, as a campus heartthrob, but only just learning to take advantage of it. They seduced each other? They fell in love? Like Paolo and Francesca over the story of Lancelot? Why not?
Two years later they are married. And three years after that, rather later than anticipated, Potter publishes the book that was to have made his name. But this, alas, is not before—in fact, it is almost twelve months after—a certain C—— at the University of Y has published, to considerable attention and praise, a work on much the same subject and incorporating a good deal of the same material.
The trials of the academic life! How the true, chaste scholar is tested. Those years of study and research! Potter the star student, Potter the professor-to-be. It doesn’t matter if people tell him, as many do, that his book is actually better than C——’s, more thorough, more cogent, more perceptive (it’s true: it’s an invaluable aid to my researches—you see the trickiness of my situation). C—— stole the limelight, C—— got the credits. And if he, Potter, hadn’t been seduced by her, by Katherine, by marriage, domesticity, kids, he might have finished it earlier, might have got there first.
So it was she who seduced him? It’s funny how the memory blurs. And as for the kids—there were no kids. Only in the mind. Only the two miscarriages—memory doesn’t mix matters here. Then nothing.
And maybe it’s around this time—the time of the second miscarriage or the time of the publication of his abortive book—that Potter begins to wonder whether, in any case, this scholar’s life is really for him. This contemplative life. This life of the mind. When you are sitting at home by the fire …
It is a well-known fact that the Potter marriage is a façade, of which the relentless people-collecting and opportunity-seeking and throwing of dinner parties are compensatory symptoms. The marriage may have died, but the wake goes on—and how many perfectly thriving couples could generate such buzz and esprit? It is generally known and accepted that Potter’s academic and extra-academic adventurism has been at the expense of domestic harmony. In a word, that Potter screws around.
It is also generally known that Katherine Potter knows that Potter screws around, and somehow accepts or submits to the fact, is long-suffering and diplomatic about it, and has not taken up other options open to her. Such as screwing around herself. Though she is eight years younger than Potter and still undeniably attractive. Undeniably attractive. But I can be pretty sure—in fact, I can be certain—that Katherine Potter has never once in her life committed an act of adultery. Not once.
Time goes by. A new Potter emerges out of the fragile, if still intact, fabric of his marriage: radio and TV pundit, would-be celebrity, but also (the scholarly career has not been entirely forgotten) Fellow of this worthy College.
Then there appears on the scene a figure of dubious credentials if intriguing provenance: the Ellison Fellow. He is briefly courted by the Potters (among others), then dropped—the man has only a borrowed lustre. But then, following the death of his mother, he acquires a certain set of notebooks, hereafter referred to as the Pearce Notebooks. And, after a period of dwelling extensively on their contents, makes the mistake of showing them to Potter. And Potter makes the mistake of not making a copy.
Once again, but for different reasons, the Ellison Fellow is pursued. After some initial exchanges of surprising animosity (it seems that Potter feels that the Notebooks are best left with him, but the Ellison Fellow demands them back, makes three copies of his own and keeps them under lock and key), Potter is anxious to smooth relations. The invitations and blandishments begin again. Furthermore, by the personal example of his renewed friendliness, Potter is at pains to uphold the Ellison Fellow’s status, by now somewhat open to question, as a genuine and good Fellow. He is doing “serious work” after all, something really rather special. In short, having missed his chance simply to grab the Notebooks, Potter sets about trying to wheedle them into his possession.
Now, throughout this period, let it be noted, even during the interval of his relative ostracism, Katherine Potter has maintained an unbroken interest in the Ellison Fellow. It seems (you will find this hard to believe, even harder if you were to take one look at me now) that for her he has the stubborn attributes of a Romantic Figure. Which perhaps only means that Katherine Potter (despite everything) is a Romantic Soul. It is true, as previously observed, that he arrives in his new quarters with a certain aura of glamorous pathos, or rather, pathetic glamour, with a certain poetically construable personal baggage, positively Tennysonian in its freight of dolour. But this was at the beginning. And time— And surely,
in the end, as we all know, poetry is one thing and life is another. These big, sonorous, laden words, how inflated and archaic they sound, as if they could only belong to literature: heartache; sorrow; grief.
And as for the Ellison Fellow’s feelings towards Katherine Potter—to be honest, they involve a good deal of confusion. He reacts before Katherine Potter, in fact, as he has reacted before all new, strange (attractive) women who happen, since a certain event, to have crossed his path. He does not know how to deal with them. He is filled with dismay, a giddy sense of arbitrariness, an apprehension that the universe holds nothing sacred; all of which is only to be stilled by the imperative of loyal resistance.
He is not immune to the prickle of passing lust. But he deals defensively with it. He reacts either with disdainful dismissal (Not your type, definitely not your type) or with a rampant if covert seizure of lecherousness (Christ, what tits! What legs! What an arse!), which serves the same forestalling function by reducing its object to meat and its subject (he is past fifty, after all) to a pother of shame.
But none of this—so much as is apparent—deters Katherine Potter’s interest. Rather, it stimulates it. If someone is on their guard, then you know there is something to be guarded. Somewhere, if it is only within the hidden vaults of memory, there is treasure. You see, in this hotbed of sophistry and pedantry, Katherine Potter applies simple instinct and logic. She sees that if the Ellison Fellow is unhappy, it is because he was, once—happy.
And one night, when, thanks to the Pearce Notebooks, the invitations to the Potter home have been renewed, Katherine Potter touches the Ellison Fellow’s wrist with the fingertips of one hand and even runs the fingertips, just a little bit, brushing the hairs, up his forearm—a gesture that strikes him, among other things, as simultaneously impetuous and calculated, and certainly audacious, since there are several other people in the room at the time (though only one sees).
