by Graham Swift
Matthew does not overdo his scene-painting, but his voice betrays a curious urgency, and he finds himself gratified, peculiarly enlightened, by the looks of astonishment and vague fear on his listeners’ faces. As the train of his description is greeted by the cheering crowds at Exeter, a train of thought passes through his mind that fills him—he cannot say how much it has to do with Miss Hunt’s look of appealing vulnerability—with a sudden gush of liberating relief. The fear of the new, he thinks, is as primitive, as superstitious, as the fear of the old. We fear what we do not know. To the vole, the hawk is a monster of tearing beak and talons; only a man sees its aerial grace and skill. How many things that are dreadful to man might not be, in the eyes of their Maker, comely and fitting?
He moves with sudden confidence (John is amused to note how his son’s spirits are reviving) and with the aim of reassuring his audience, to give a practical and lucid account of that masterpiece of engineering, the steam locomotive, with a brief commentary on the dependability of Mr Brunel’s Broad Gauge. Elizabeth thinks: he has a way, to be sure, of making the extraordinary seem perfectly acceptable—and such a dependable, broad-gauge kind of smile. But the Rector, who cannot get beyond seeing a steam engine as a sort of tamed dragon and forgets that he has initiated the whole subject, says, “Yes—yes, indeed. But tell me, is that Philpott fellow still peddling Divinity at Brasenose?”
“But Papa,” protests Elizabeth, “you interrupt Mr Pearce.”
Matthew notices the swiftness of this intercession on his behalf and the briefest flash of a look from her (acknowledged by a reflexive tightening of the corner of his mouth) which seems to say, “See, I do this for you.”
“I’m sure”—she redeems any brusqueness with a smile—“he has so much more to tell us.”
And Matthew is only too conscious at this moment that he does, indeed, have other things to tell—he has seen stranger and more awesome things, indubitably, than railway locomotives. The possibility comes rushing to him that she might be the very one—the only one—that he might tell them to. But responding to the awkwardness of the situation (she notes: he is not clumsy, he has natural tact), he saves the Rector’s embarrassment—“No, indeed, I go on at too much length”—and, turning the conversation with a deferential inquiry about Rector Hunt’s own Oxford days (aware with the corner of his eyes how the corner of hers is twinkling; aware of how her father, almost unconsciously, takes her hand and strokes her wrist), allows a cheerful exchange of reminiscence about Oxford, or rather about two different Oxfords, which each pretends, for the sake of good feeling, are the same.
“No, no, Dean Philpott must have retired before my going up.”
“Ah, quite so. There would have been, I suppose, that man Newman.…”
And Elizabeth listens. And the Rector, on the verge of a theological disquisition, brings himself up suddenly with the remark (his turn for apology) that he has quite forgot the time and must be on his way. Whereupon Elizabeth says, and everyone laughs: “Indeed, Papa, you have quite forgot the time, for you have quite forgot the clock!”
The way things begin. The auguries of happy-ever-afters. A clockmaker’s shop, where time ticks impartially away. Perhaps Matthew was aware that this first encounter with his wife-to-be had been engineered by his father and was the work of a witting or unwitting match-making by the two elder parties. But what did this matter, when he could be unswervingly sure that if he had met Elizabeth in some other circumstance, wholly free of behind-the-scenes manoeuvring and wholly subject to chance, he would have experienced the same thrilling emotion of a foregone conclusion?
Call it—heaven-sent.
A sober scrutiny might have judged that a man who had lost his mother when he was small, and remembered her most clearly as the woman who had read to him from the Bible, might well be drawn to a clergyman’s daughter; and that in that bumbling, kindly figure of Rector Hunt (the way his hand had touched hers) he saw something his own father could not offer. But this would have been to ignore the young man of only twenty-five, who, for all his, by now, increasing and debilitating proneness to thought, still possessed, in spite of himself, a healthy animal nature. He falls in love, heavily, thickly, thankfully (is there any other way?). He is still—thank God—open to experience. He sees himself, indeed, as “saved”—returned to the sweet, palpable goodness of the world.
He goes back into the workshop with his father and is strangely, tenderly struck by his familiar presence. The way his leather apron and his eye-glass seem to wait for him; the way the brass components on the bench have an almost sentient, obedient distinctness. Things fit, things have a purpose.
That evening, his steps light and every breath fresh and clear, Matthew strolls down from his father’s house to the knoll at the edge of town on which stand the ruins of the castle. Once, his mother used to take him on this same walk, and used to tell him, like some made-up tale to warn impudent young boys, how men, wicked men, had once been hanged in public right here on the castle green. The air is soft and aglow. A breeze caresses the peaceful curves of the landscape, and Matthew is prompted by that old urge, that old itch in the palm—as if he were capable, now, of such a giant reach. Perhaps he need never tell her—better never to tell her—about his “thoughts.” Let them be banished like demons.
“The little hills rejoice …” The land of the living.
He watches a buzzard hang over the hillside, then drop from its shelf of air. He looks eastwards across the valley, where the Tamar severs Cornwall from Devon, and is struck by the pleasing notion that, like the best lovers of old, he and Elizabeth dwell on different sides of a divide.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth, riding home to Burlford in the carriage with her father, displays a tendency to pensive, absorbed silence. Several times the Rector ventures to strike a conversation, but then, with perhaps a smile to himself, thinks better of it.
I invent all this. I don’t know that this is how it happened. It can’t have been like this simply because I imagine it so.
That night, in the White Hart, there would have been a bloom about his son’s features—more than could be ascribed to an evening’s stroll—which John Pearce would have been too shrewd not to see the cause of. Just as he was too shrewd to dwell, for the time being, on the Rector’s visit earlier that day. But, calling for another brandy and water, and knowing full well that Burlford was only three miles from Tavistock, he would have chosen his moment and said, “Now, about old Makepeace. What do you say?”
10
Romantic love. A made-up thing. A concoction of the poets. Jack shall have Jill. Amor vincit omnia.
Her last role was Cleopatra. Love triumphant and transcendent. Love beyond the grave: “I am again for Cydnus to meet Mark Antony.” This was at Stratford, two summers ago. Then the symptoms made their appearance, and it had to be announced that because of sudden illness she could no longer perform. Early the next year she was dead.…
But you could say I was always a stage-widower. A stage-cuckold. The old joke about the actress’s husband: he could never get his hands on his wife’s parts. I would watch my wife go away. I would watch her disappear and turn into—these other people. With my own eyes I witnessed the inconstancy. How many times did I watch Ruth fall into another man’s embrace? Play seductress and seducee? Run squealing, half naked, round strange bedrooms? How many times did I watch her—die? And it is true that, sitting in the darkness (proud, jealous, enthralled), I would have to concede that at such moments she didn’t belong to me, she belonged to her audiences. She was everybody’s. But the thing is, she would always come back to me. Me. I don’t know why, but she did. Always. A dullness for her brightness? A nobody for her somebody? When you are out on an adventure …
I see her at the end of the garden of our cottage in Sussex, which backed on to a field that dipped down to a wood, with the Downs rising beyond. Against that backdrop, she would pace to and fro by the low, bramble-smothered fence, a book or script in one hand, gesticulating to the
air, communing with invisible interlocutors, utterly bound up in herself, so that she would be unaware even of me, a privileged audience of one, watching from the window. Turning and turning again, wearing a path in the grass, now and then clawing a hand through her hair or hugging herself with both arms or offering up some half-conscious commentary on her progress—a “Now then, let’s see” or a “Fuck it! Who wrote this thing?!”—and all the time lighting cigarette after cigarette from the pack jammed in her cleavage, chucking the butts away at random (once starting a small fire in the brambles). It was at such times, rather than in the darkness of theatres, that the truth of something would come to me: that people are fuel. They are consumed. Some, for some reason, more quickly, more brightly, more readily than others. But they are burnt, used. Fuel, fire, ash.
I think she knew. I think she knew all along, even before the outward symptoms appeared. But didn’t want to spoil—not before she had to—that Cleopatra summer. What you don’t know can’t hurt you. One Sunday, that September, we drove out, with G—— (an actor), to a pub we knew, somewhere in the depths of Warwickshire. A day of sweet, cidery sunshine. G—— was in a strangely deferential, vaguely timid mood. If I told you who G—— was, you would guess that this was not his usual style. We sat outside. She wore dark glasses and nobody recognised her. I went to get the drinks, and when I emerged, G—— was kissing Ruth on the crown of the head. His own dark glasses—these incogniti—pushed up on to his brow, a hand on Ruth’s shoulder, his lips in her hair.
It wasn’t what you think. No, it wasn’t what you think. It was only the thought of the possibility. It could have been them, you see; it could have been Ruth and G—— all along, not Ruth and me. Them, not us. I stood there in the doorway with the drinks, like someone standing outside their life, like someone suddenly without a life. You see, it was a solemn, intense, decorous kiss. Like a kiss of farewell, like the kiss of a priest. Like the kiss you give to the small, hard head of a child, conscious of its vulnerability, the brittleness of the skull. And I knew then, by the chill inside me, despite that soft sunshine, by the feeling that my body was like an empty sack, that she was going to die.
And her first role was Girl Number Three.
It was after her father’s death, some fifteen years ago, that I gave up my career (my blooming career as a third-rate academic) to become her “manager.” All sorts of questionable motives might be ascribed to this—and perhaps were at the time. That I wished to be more at my wife’s side—in order, that is, to keep an eye on her. That I wanted to live off her earnings. In any case, it was a bogus job. Other people—agents, theatre and film people— “managed” Ruth. I was no more than a privileged secretary-cum-minder. Since my talents were limited, I sometimes hindered rather than helped proceedings. But I would still maintain that I did it out of a desire to protect her.
He died of a brain tumour. Or so they say. If you ask me, the doctors (naturally, I thought of my great-uncle George) were as baffled as we were. In the last stages he simply lost all power of identity. A mild-natured, obliging man, he slipped towards death with a stony, empty expression on his face, speechless and unhearing, not recognising his own wife or his own daughter and having no idea, so far as you could tell, who he was himself. It was as though the Bob Vaughan we knew dissolved away before some other grim, usurping, unappeasable being. Then he died.
Her mother is still alive. She married again several years ago. But I have lost touch since Ruth’s funeral and the bouts of strained communicativeness that follow a death. Now, of course, in my present woeful circumstances, I am beyond the pale. The fact is, we never got on; and neither were Ruth and her mother always the sweetest of friends. Without ever knowing it for certain, I have always imagined Joan Vaughan as the one who was against Ruth’s preposterous choice of career from the outset, waiting ever afterwards, notwithstanding all the evidence of success, to say, “I told you so.” While Bob was the classic, doting father of an only daughter, happy for his child to do whatever she wished. I picture Ruth as a young girl quarrelling with her mother, and Bob trying, rather ineffectually, to keep the peace.
I should pity Joan, who has lost a husband and a daughter, both before their time. But I don’t. She still harbours, I think, an image of Ruth as someone who might have done something solid and sensible with her life (whatever that may have been) and therefore have still been alive now; instead of this foolishness—see, it didn’t last long—this play-acting. Don’t try to be something you’re not.…
I should want to see Joan now, because only in the mother’s features might I still catch a glimpse, a living vestige, of the daughter. But that’s now how it works.
After her father’s death, Ruth’s acting took on this new dimension, this new depth and range. Everyone noticed it. But there was also—perhaps only I saw it—this new need of protection. This desire on my part to put my arms irremovably around her, as if I were holding her together, to beg for her a special immunity. Be there, always. I don’t know what makes some people exceptional—so that we say the world would be poorer without them. I don’t know why the distribution of love is so unfair. And it’s strange that I say I wished to hold her together, since it was she, after all, who held things together for me, who held my world together. I mean the world that had fallen apart (it did, you see) with my own father’s death.
You see, I protected her so she would protect me.
From Girl Number Three to the Queen of Egypt, from the Blue Moon Club to a palace by the Nile. A reviewer of those last performances wrote (without benefit of hindsight) that she evoked the “defiant incandescence of soon to be extinguished glory.” The formal obituaries referred to them as her “crowning achievement” and the “culmination of her career.” As if she had meant it that way. While the news columns dwelt on the “real-life drama”—“found dead,” “overdose of drugs”—and bandied about, without a trace of irony, it seemed, the phrase “tragic death.”
And no one, out of tact or impercipience, alluded to the simple fact that Cleopatra is a woman who, with serene and regal deliberateness, commits suicide.
“Finish, good lady, the bright day is done, and we are for the dark.”
I had to play this scene. I understood how hard it is to act. The lines were so awful, so unconvincing. I found myself uttering the hackneyed words “How long does she have?” To which, however, there was a perfectly actual, factual reply. I didn’t want to tell her. If you don’t say it, perhaps it won’t be true. If you don’t think about it, it will go away. But she simply faced me with the same question: “How long do I have?” She didn’t blink. I found I couldn’t lie. “Two or three months.” She came back with a little flurry of brightness—she was an actress, you see: “That much?” Then she gave a look, just like a little girl who’s been punished for getting beyond herself, for having big ideas about herself. I told you so, I told you so.
And there was, after all, this simple, banal explanation. She smoked. She had lung cancer. The common vice and common nemesis of nicotine. The gifted and famous are not exempt, you know. I should have told her to stop (I did), to cut it down. I should have said (but I didn’t know), if you don’t stop, you will die. But, but. The side effect of a certain way of life. Fuel, fire, ash. It might have been drugs, alcohol, screwing around and regular psychoanalysis. It was none of these. None. Just cigarettes. So many packs to learn a part. And the only time, she used to joke, she could do without, was when playing a non-smoking part (e.g., Cleopatra).
And besides, our bodies are ours—aren’t they? To do with as we like. And our lives. Our lives.
And right here in the Fellows’ Garden I furtively chuck my butts into the nearest flower bed.
I should blame it all, perhaps, on that conjectural ancestor of mine, the resourceful Sir Walter, who, among his countless other claims to fame, I believe, popularized the noxious New World weed. But just take him for an example. Smoked all his life like a chimney: died by the axe. There is no accounting. We have to d
ie of something: a lung cancer, a throat cancer, a brain tumour, a bullet in the head.
But not of love, never of love. Leave that for the sonneteers. “Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”
From the Queen of Egypt to a worried woman in a waiting room. From Cleopatra to a hospital case. From a thousand parts—tragic queen, frothy French farce flirt—to the only, unfeigned dénouement of her stricken body branded with the scars of an unsuccessful operation. So why all this acting stuff? Why all this poetry stuff? Why all this imagining it otherwise?
We gravitated towards the cottage, neglecting the London flat. We moved in things that were dear to us, such as the clock made in 1845 by John Pearce of Launceston. For me—I won’t deny it—this retreat from the publicity that was part of her life—this having Ruth to myself—was a kind of terrible boon. I think we did what most people would have done in the circumstances. We drew a circle around ourselves. We tried to carry on as if nothing were different. You could call this acting too, and one day, we knew, it would have to stop. But I ask myself: in those final weeks, were we happy? It’s not an absurd question. The human frame, it seems, has this stubborn capacity for existing in spite of the facts. We went for gentle walks in the brittle winter days. Put logs on the fire. We summoned memories while trying to pretend we were not summoning memories. Made plans—as if plans were feasible. Spent Christmas with Joan and her second husband, Roy—an exercise so mawkish, so awkward, so like a piece of treacly black comedy, that you were tricked into thinking none of it could be real.
